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Richard Dadd’s Master-Stroke By Nicholas Tromans March 14, 2012 Nicholas Tromans, author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, takes a look at Dadd's most famous painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Richard Dadd was a young British painter of huge promise who fell into mental illness while touring the Mediterranean in the early 1840s. He spent over forty years in lunatic asylums, dying at Broadmoor in 1886, but never gave up his calling, producing mesmerisingly detailed watercolours and oil paintings of which The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is now the most well known. The picture’s history encapsulates the peculiar rise and, if not fall then the suspension, of its maker’s reputation, and indeed begs the question of what happens to any long-dead forgotten genius after they’ve been rediscovered. Among the symptoms of Dadd’s illness — which sounds today like a form of schizophrenia — were delusions of persecution and the receipt of messages from the Ancient Egyptian deity Osiris. Dadd was commanded to kill his father (or the demon who it appeared to him had taken his place) and did so with efficiency in the summer of 1843, not long after returning from his tour. After an equally well planned escape to France, the artist was eventually admitted to the Criminal Lunatic department of Bethlem Hospital in Lambeth (now the Imperial War Museum) and it was here that he painted the Fairy Feller. According to the inscription on the back of the canvas it took him nine years to complete, although Dadd qualifies this claim with “quasi” (“sort of”) which may mean he only worked at it on and off between 1855 and 1864. It is an exhaustingly complex image, with a substantial cast of characters, none of whom are doing much with the exception of the “feller” himself who is about to hew a hazelnut in half in order to provide the diminutive queen of the fairies, Mab, with a new chariot. Dadd’s starting point was evidently Mercutio’s teasing speech in Romeo and Juliet in which he imagines in excruciating detail the nightly wanderings of Mab as she seeds dreams in sleepers’ heads, nocturnal visions in which suppressed ambitions and desires reveal themselves. Dadd’s inscription further informs us that the picture was painted for the Steward of Bethlem, George Henry Haydon, and in a long poem (or at least rhymed catalogue) which the artist wrote in 1865, he gives a kind of cast-list as well as offering an account of how the picture came to be painted. It was apparently Haydon who suggested some “verse about the fairies” as a “point from which to throw” — presumably the Mercutio speech which may have been intended by the Bethlem official as a means of encouraging Dadd to revisit his early life before illness had struck, when he had made his reputation as a painter of Shakespearean fairy subjects. Victorian psychiatrists were in any case fond of writing on the “cases” described by the Bard, and Charles Lamb observed how, despite the extravagant imaginative leaps of his fairy scenes, Shakespeare himself presented a kind of inverse monomania, maintaining the thread of sanity even through the most outlandish journeys of the mind. Having received the commission for a new fairy painting from Haydon, however, Dadd says inspiration failed to materialise. He took the idea of spiritual inspiration very literally, seeing indeed the work of spirits in all human endeavour. Individuals and entire cultures may aspire to noble achievements, but the help or hindrance of the spirit world was what counted and its genii were not inclined to submit themselves to human service for long. “What’s the use of attempting the enlightenment?” asked Dadd in some notes written in the 1850s. “What a number of times the destroying angel has triumphed over the different nations of the earth — sucking them up & knocking them down”. And equally for an artist seeking to pin down their genius and compel it to answer: “What a clever angel the genius of painting must be to escape from all these hot pursuits . . . but once free, not all the arts of any old fellow I suppose can lure back the pretty bird to its own disgrace and bondage.” Dadd’s theory of art was thus thoroughly pessimistic. The public were a waste of time, and “one might fancy pictures are like monks secluded from and very little noticed by the world so that after all what matters about its quality except to the few, the initiated”. This might at least allow that Haydon may have been a worthwhile patron, but as for the artist himself, “what more slavish than painting, what more hopeless?” So when seeking to make a beginning of the Fairy Feller, Dadd’s only strategy upon realising that “Fancy was not to be evoked / From her etherial realms” was to accept his passive role, to entirely empty his mind: “I thought on nought — a shift / As good perhaps as thinking hard.” Finally the method succeeded: “Indefinite, almost unseen, / Lay vacant entities of chance” and gradually the “Design and composition” evolved “Without intent”. Dadd’s description of the painting, which he styled Elimination of a Picture and its Subject, thus has a curious sense of disavowal about it, as if saying who is in it is all he can do, their significance being beyond his explanation. When Dadd comes to note the head of a man wearing a conical red cap, poking out of the landscape in the top-left of the picture, he tells us that “Of the / Chinese Small Foot Societee, He’s a small member. But / if Confucius sent him Now I can’t remember.” The characters of the Fairy Feller are mainly arranged in pairs and clusters. A group of men watch the feller intently while over the lead actor’s head is the Patriarch with epic beard, along the elongated brim of whose crown cavort a troupe of dancers apparently in Spanish costume, and indeed Dadd observes that “One is / dressed like to Duvernay”, that is Pauline Duvernay, a flamenco dancer famous on the stages of 1830s London. On either side of the Patriarch are pairs of maids and gallants, all showing an exaggeratedly gendered leg. Above the Patriarch are Oberon and Titania — rival monarchs to Mab who waits for her new chariot just below them to the left. She is, as Mercutio had described her, microscopic and yet painted by Dadd with an entirely convincing series of miniaturised impressionist touches. In the upper-left of the painting strange creatures summon further witnesses to the great moment of the splitting of the nut, and then Dadd offers — in the sequence of seven figures along the top of the picture — a version of the counting rhyme whereby boys allowed fate to choose them a profession, or girls a husband: soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, ploughboy, apothecary, thief. If the Fairy Feller were a work intended for critical interpretation, which it probably was not, then we might talk of the suspended action with which the seed was to be split; the deferred moment of sex; the mutual isolation of the groups of figures suggesting the impossibility of generating a family or a community; and we might connect these themes to Dadd’s awareness of his own position as a long-stay patient in London’s high-security lunatic asylum where, “shut out from nature’s game” and “banished from nature’s book of life, because some angel in the strife had got the worser fate”, his lot was “in a paradise of fools [to] contented live.” But Dadd knew, given the workings of spirits, angels and fate, that autobiography was a vain fiction, and we should be wary of assuming that his most famous picture must somehow be his personal testament. The Fairy Feller became Dadd’s most famous work because, in 1963, it entered the Tate collection where it was soon a popular favourite. It was presented to the Gallery by the then elderly poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had himself been given it by his mother-in-law, the daughter of the vastly wealthy connoisseur Alfred Morrison whose encyclopaedic collections included several Dadds. Sassoon had a special interest in the artist, having befriended, in the trenches, three brothers who were the grandsons of Richard Dadd’s elder brother. The Fairy Feller was presented to the Tate “by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War”, a dedication which always still accompanies the painting today. Sassoon of course had yet further personal reason for taking an interest in Dadd, having himself been a patient at Craiglockhart outside Edinburgh which functioned during the War as a hospital for shell-shocked officers. The arrival of the Fairy Feller at the Tate, allowing Dadd a substantial audience for the first time since the 1840s, could not have been timed better if Sassoon had planned it (which he hadn’t: he donated the picture to a public collection having taken fright at the underhand tactics of an art dealer keen to relieve him of it). This was the period during which a new intellectual consensus was fomenting against the inherited system of nineteenth-century asylums, a consensus embracing everyone from the radical historian of psychiatry Michel Foucault to Enoch Powell, then British Secretary of State for Health. Dadd, having been more or less (if never completely) forgotten since the onset of his illness, now appeared something of a hero — a brave survivor of a vicious system which (so went the new story) locked away all those with whom the Victorians could not cope, which was to say many. Dadd appeared as the dark unconscious which underlay mainstream Victorian painting with its floppy maidens (Dadd contrarily had a penchant for sturdy women) and limp-wristed draughtsmanship (Dadd’s taught line was admired by some critics even when the world at large had forgotten him). The notorious magazine of Sixties counter-culture, Oz, ran a spread on the artist in 1971 and in 1974 Freddie Mercury used text from the Elimination poem for lyrics to a song titled the Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke which appeared on Queen’s second album. But also in 1974 there appeared the results of a more sober, academic approach to Dadd. Patricia Allderidge took up the new post of archivist to the ancient Bethlem Hospital in the late 1960s and was able to recover much of Dadd’s forgotten biography and oeuvre, publishing her findings in the still indispensible catalogue to an exhibition devoted to the artist at the Tate. At this point, in retrospect, it seems the romanticised “anti-psychiatry” Dadd on one hand, and on the other the history of Dadd written from within the hospital itself, effectively cancelled one another out. At least, only the slightest amount of new research was published on the artist for decades after 1974. There seemed nowhere he might confidently be placed in the history of either art or psychiatry. So: how to deal with a long-dead forgotten genius once they’ve been rediscovered? If the talent in question never fitted in when alive, there’s little chance a permanent plinth in the pantheon of their field will be found for them even once posterity has handed them their posthumous prize. Once the ghost is raised from obscurity, where can we lay it down again? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 14, 2012

Nicholas Tromans

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:34.856563

selma-lagerlof-surface-and-depth

Selma Lagerlöf Surface and Depth By Jenny Watson January 11, 2012 In 2011 many countries around the world welcomed The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the other works of the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf into the public domain. Jenny Watson looks at the importance of Lagerlöf's oeuvre and the complex depths beneath her seemingly simple tales and public persona. In 1909, an ageing “spinster,” with a marked limp, stood in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. That woman was Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and the first Swede to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She stood in front of a large audience, which included the King and Queen of Sweden, and delivered her Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, a speech which to many epitomized who she was, a charming and humble sagotant, a quaint, sweet storyteller aunt, who received her inspiration from Wermland and in particular, her father. Lagerlöf opened her speech by explaining that she had been nervous coming up to Stockholm to receive the prize, that her previous trips to Stockholm had been to do something “difficult,” such as take examinations or try to find a publisher for her work, never to be celebrated. Moreover, in the past few months she had lived in solitude and had become shy. She dispelled her anxiety, though, by thinking of those who would be happy for her. This was when she had thought of her father and wished that he were still alive to see the moment. Almost imperceptibly, Lagerlöf glides into storytelling, creating a scene in which she imagines visiting her father in Paradise and telling him she is in debt and needs his help. It eventually becomes clear that this debt is what she owes to those who have contributed to and supported her as a writer: the vagabonds who gave her stories to tell through their actions, the Swedish language and those who taught it to her, the great authors of Sweden, her readers and most of all the Academy which has placed its trust in her. In true Lagerlöf fashion, she humbly deflected the recognition she deserved for the Nobel Prize, and at the same time ― through a charming story ― demonstrated her storytelling sagotant abilities and her devotion to her father. In a less flattering light, the contemporary Swedish writer, P.O. Enquist, has interpreted Lagerlöf’s speech as a reflection of Lagerlöf’s co-dependence on an alcoholic father. No doubt, Lagerlöf’s father was an alcoholic, something on which Lagerlöf did not concentrate in her later fictional memoirs (Mårbacka and A Child’s Memories). Nor did she concentrate on the fact that her father was completely against her furthering her education; and in direct defiance of his wishes, she did so anyway. Instead, she highlighted the father who sang songs, brought laughter to the family and had dreams for the family home, Mårbacka. Does this indicate repression and co-dependence, as Enquist argues? Perhaps. More likely, however, and better supported by her life and works, is that Lagerlöf was a multi-faceted woman who understood the difference between surface and content. Lagerlöf entered the world of writing with few female role models, a strong desire to make her mark on the world and the recognition that it would be men who would make or break her career. And she was correct. Lagerlöf’s first literary attempts were at the age of fifteen, but her breakthrough came in the late 1880s when she finally gained the courage to write the work she wanted to, Gösta Berlings Saga (1891) ― an epic novel that contradicted the Naturalist tendencies of the time. In 1890 she sent the first five chapters to Idun magazine’s literary contest and won. Following this recognition, the full manuscript was published by Fritiof Hellberg in Stockholm. Although the work was well received by her fellow Wermlander, Gustaf Fröding (also a distant relative to Lagerlöf), most literary critics who took notice were not so enthusiastic, claiming that the narration was “strange,” the style “unnatural,” and the structure “rather loose.” These aspects, however, were exactly what the internationally renowned literary critic, Georg Brandes, would praise in 1893, when he reviewed the book for the first time. He found the presentation of material “original,” and praised the “narrative’s rhythmically fluid, often quite simply lyric style.” With these words and the following attention from other critics, Lagerlöf’s career was launched. Interestingly, Lagerlöf had originally named her work “Gösta Berling,” but the publisher of the first edition, in order to strengthen the title, added saga, which means a story in terms of an Icelandic saga or a fairy tale. Critics quickly jumped on the fairy tale definition. This, along with Brandes’ random thoughts about the author while he critiqued her first novel — that is, that Lagerlöf was no doubt a “maiden lady” whose “warm, living imagination is like a child’s” — led to the image of Lagerlöf as a naïve, kind spinster who told simple stories from her homeland. Lagerlöf did not fight the image of herself, mainly because her audience liked it and it increased her popularity. Many of the works she wrote in her lifetime — on the surface — appeared to support this image; to name a few: The Queen of Kungahälla and Other Sketches from a Swedish Homestead (1899), Jersualem I (1901), Herr Arnes Hoard (1903), The Girl from the Marshcroft (1908), They Soul Shall Bear Witness (1912), and The Ring Trilogy (1925-1928). However, it is perhaps her most internationally famous work, The Wonderful Adventure of Nils, published in 1906-7, that cemented the image, both at home and abroad. Lagerlöf was commissioned by the National Teachers Association in 1902 to write a geography reader for the Swedish public schools. She spent three years learning about the landscape, animals and plant life, industry and folk life of Sweden and then interwove these facts into the story of Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is punished for his bad behavior by the farm tomte. He is shrunken to a small size. In this form, he is able to talk and understand the animals around him and he ends up flying across Sweden on the back of a goose. During the trip, the reader learns about each province and the geography of Sweden. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was an instantaneous success, not only in the public schools and Sweden, but across the world. Indeed, still today it is probably her most famous work. Nils Holgersson appears on the back of the Swedish 20 crown note (Lagerlöf is on the front), and from Germany to Russia to Japan, Nils Holgersson can be found in bookstores (and on TV). Yet, Lagerlöf was in no way a simple sagotant from Sweden ― not in her works and not in her life. Lagerlöf did not only tell stories of Sweden. For example, The Miracles of Antichrist (1897) was a novel set in Italy, centering on the moral conflict between Socialism and Christianity; Jerusalem II (1902) takes place in Palestine; and The Outcast (1918) was a pacifist novel in reaction to World War I. On the surface, most of Lagerlöf’s works can be read at face value and they are indeed enjoyable. However, even as can be seen in her public school reader, there are numerous layers beneath the surface―layers which are thought out and constructed (e.g. the pedagogy behind Nils Holgersson). Lagerlöf’s novels and stories explore human psychology ―the psychological layers of murder, love, jealousy, war, greed, religion. Her work, Herr Arnes Hoard, is a good example of such a story-- a ghost story which is thrilling to read, but which, if one understands the ghost as human conscience, is an in depth study of guilt and love. Lagerlöf’s life had a similar dynamic between surface and depth. On the surface (as she herself portrayed in her autobiographical fiction, Mårbacka I and II (1922, 1930) and The Diary of Selma Lagerlöf (1932), she was a simple girl from Wermland, a devoted and subservient daughter, a woman who became a spinster due to her limp, and a storyteller indebted to her country. Yet, beneath the surface, she was an exceptionally well-read woman who clearly drew from the classic literature of the Western world. She was a woman of strong will―defying her father who did not want her to continue her education and a strong voice in the woman’s movement in Sweden. Although she was a spinster in the “traditional” sense, she was involved with at least one woman, Valborg Olander, if not more. Finally, although she was clearly indebted to her country for many stories, she did not simply retell them. She created new masterpieces in the Swedish language, in-depth studies of human nature and psychology. She created literature worthy of the Nobel Prize. And even upon receiving the Nobel Prize, she continued the image of herself. Lagerlöf spun stories, whether they were about others or herself — incredible stories, with fascinating depths. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 11, 2012

Jenny Watson

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:35.236459

the-first-olympic-protest

The First Olympic Protest By Rebecca Jenkins July 25, 2012 Rebecca Jenkins looks back to when London first hosted the Olympic Games and how a mix up with flags gave birth to the first Olympic protest. Just over 100 years ago London hosted its first Olympic Games — the Fourth Olympiad of 1908. It was a fledgling version of what we have today — only 2023 athletes competed, approximately the same number that will contest the Athletic events in 2012. Of course, the Olympic Games were rather different then — there was no torch relay, or spectacular opening ceremony with a stadium transformed by pageants of England’s green and pleasant land. In 1908 the tug-of-war was a medal winning contest, as were massed gymnastic displays (very popular with the northern European nations with military conscription) and marathon runners were not encouraged to re-hydrate, so the winning time wouldn’t have even qualified a modern athlete for the Olympic team today. It is well know that in 1908 the marathon was run for the first time at the modern Olympic distance of 26 miles, 385 yards. But what is often overlooked is that these Edwardian games were the first to have an opening ceremony revolving around a parade of nations; in short, the first London Olympics witnessed the birth of Team GB. It has been said that whereas the Germans excavated Ancient Olympia and the French reanimated its spirit, the Edwardian sons of the British Empire set out to organise it. In the first Games of the modern Olympics, any one — or perhaps more accurately, any sporting man (Baron de Coubertin, the “father” of the Olympic movement, did not approve of women performing in public sporting contests) — who had the private means to turn up at the venue could put himself down to compete. Faced with an increasing interest in the Games, the small group of gentlemen who set out to organise the London Olympics of 1908 decided it would be more efficient only to accept contestants registered through national teams selected through national Olympic associations. This administrative decision was re-enforced by an opening ceremony in which the athletic teams paraded into the stadium dressed in athletic or national costume, four abreast behind “their respective representatives, [bearing] the flag and entablature of their country.” The eye of the Olympic spectator was moved irrevocably from the individual athelete to the flag they wore on their chest. And flags, as the Edwardian organising committee soon discovered, cause conflict. In 1908 the US Olympic Committee sent their largest team so far to the Olympic Games: 122 men (no women), in team costume with the stars and stripes on their breast. The managers of Team US 1908 were determined that they were going to sweep England off the athletic map. The ground they chose was track and field and their modern gladiators were dominated by Irish American track and field stars from New York. Even before the Games began, the press were reporting spats between the American managers and the British Olympic Association over the rules governing pole vaulting. (The British organisers had sent out their rules in advance, assuming no one would complain. After all, as the Daily Mail wrote: “We have carried our dress clothes and our games throughout the world.”) It was, perhaps unfortunate, therefore, that in the rush to prepare the White City stadium for King’s arrival to open the Games on the afternoon of Monday, July 13th, 1908, the national flags run up the poles included those of Japan and China (neither of whom would send representatives to the Olympics games for some years yet), but omitted those of Sweden and the United States of America. The Crown Prince of Sweden, president of the Swedish Amateur Athletic Association had been a key supporter of the Olympics since their revival. He and the Swedish Government had — unlike the British government — provided substantial subsidies to send the third largest national team to London for the 1908 Games. And, Prince Gustavus, an honoured guest of the British King and Queen, was among the royal party in the royal box. The Prince was polite in front of his royal hosts about the omission of his national flag. The American Committee however suspected a deliberate insult. They produced their own Stars and Stripes and had it run up the pole. The Swedes had to make do with the single flag carried before their team in the parade. The parade climaxed with the massed ranks of athletes behind their flagbearers facing the royal box. With a fanfare from the trumpeters of the Life Guards, the flag were dipped to salute King Edward VII; every flag, that is, except the Stars and Stripes held by the Californian law student and shot putter, Ralph Rose. The British press at the time over-looked the incident, but the Irish paper in New York, The Gaelic American, picked up Rose’s gesture and made much of it. When an American sports journalist revived the story in the 1950s, it told of Ralph Rose being “taken aside” the night before the opening ceremony by a core of Irish American athletes determined to make a stand against the British tyrant who oppressed the Irish. ‘This flag dips to no earthly king’, the young democrat was supposed to have said as he held his flag high. Historians dispute whether the words were actually said by Rose or were a later embellishment to the story, but the fact remains that after 1908 the national Olympic team was here to stay and 1908 US team had made the first Olympic political protest. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 25, 2012

Rebecca Jenkins

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:35.801153

conan-doyles-olympic-crusade

Conan Doyle’s Olympic Crusade By Peter Lovesey August 9, 2012 When an exhausted Dorando Pietri was helped across the finishing line in the 1908 Olympics marathon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was there to write about it for the Daily Mail. Peter Lovesey explores how the drama and excitement of this event led Conan Doyle to become intimately involved with the development of the modern Olympics as we know it. There have been many exciting Olympic contests, but the 1908 race which came to be known as Dorando’s marathon has passed into legend as the most heart-rending. The image of the exhausted Italian runner being assisted across the finish line and so disqualified appears in almost every history of the Games. This was an extraordinary event. Queen Alexandra was so touched by the harrowing scenes in the stadium that she presented a special cup to Dorando Pietri. Irving Berlin wrote a song called Dorando. The King had a horse named after the runner. And a craze for marathon-running was born. But now let us dispose of a canard. For years there has been a story that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was one of the officials who assisted Dorando at the finish of the 1908 Olympic marathon and so made the disqualification inevitable. He has even been identified as a portly figure in a straw boater pictured in the background of one of the most famous of all Olympic photographs. Sadly for the romantics, the story isn’t true. The two officials at either side of the athlete are Jack Andrew, the Clerk of the Course, holding the megaphone, and Dr Michael Bulger, the chief medical officer. The man in the background (and seen beside the stricken Pietri in other photos) is probably another of the medical team. Conan Doyle was seated in the stands. His report in the Daily Mail (25 July, 1908) makes this clear. Then again he collapsed, kind hands saving him from a heavy fall. He was within a few yards of my seat. Amid stooping figures and grasping hands I caught a glimpse of the haggard, yellow face, the glazed, expressionless eyes, the lank black hair streaked across the brow. Conan Doyle had been commissioned by Lord Northcliffe to write a special report of the race. “I do not often do journalistic work,” he recalled in his memoirs, “but on the occasion of the Olympic Games of 1908 I was tempted, chiefly by the offer of an excellent seat, to do the Marathon Race for the ‘Daily Mail’.” The almost melodramatic scenes affected him deeply. “It is horrible, and yet fascinating, this struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame.” Nothing like it had been seen to that time, though similar scenes would occur at marathon finishes in the future. With remarkable foresight, Conan Doyle finished his report with the words, “The Italian’s great performance can never be effaced from our records of sport, be the decision of the judges what it may.” It has been suggested that the cup presented next day by Queen Alexandra was Conan Doyle’s idea, but this is another distortion of the truth. In fact, Conan Doyle’s contribution was financial; he got up a fund to raise money for Dorando Pietri. A letter published beside his report in the Daily Mail stated: I am sure that no petty personal recompense can in the least console Dorando for the national loss which follows from his disqualification. Yet I am certain that many who saw his splendid effort in the Stadium, an effort which ran him within an inch of his life, would like to feel that he carries away some souvenir from his admirers in England. I should be very glad to contribute five pounds to such a fund if any of the authorities at the Stadium would consent to organise it. Nobody seemed to bother that Dorando’s amateur status might be sullied. The appeal raised the substantial sum of £308. Readers of the paper were informed that the money would be used to enable the gallant runner to start up as a baker in his own village. If the villagers were relying on him for bread, they must have been disappointed. He turned professional and cashed in on the marathon craze triggered by his race. For much of the next year he was in the United States, only returning to Italy in May, 1909. His travels lasted until 1912. For Conan Doyle, that hot afternoon in the White City Stadium was an epiphany that convinced him of the international significance of the Olympic movement. As an all-round sportsman, he was quite an Olympian himself. Between 1900 and 1907, he played cricket for the MCC, was a useful slow bowler and once took the wicket of the finest batsman of the century, W.G.Grace. He was a founder of Portsmouth Football Club (1884) playing in goal and as a defender until he was forty-four; had a golf handicap of ten; and in 1913 got to the third round of the British amateur billiards championship. His knowledge of boxing, particularly the prize-ring, is evident in his writing, particularly Rodney Stone and The Croxley Master. And he is often credited with popularising skiing during the years he spent in Switzerland. A plaque celebrating his part in the history of Swiss skiing can be seen at Davos. In 1910 he accepted the presidency of the English Amateur Field Events Association. Britain’s preoccupation with the more glamorous track events had left the nation far behind the USA and the Nordic countries in jumping and throwing. Britain’s showing in the Stockholm Olympic Games in 1912, a mere two individual gold medals and five in team sports, came as a shock to a nation that had dominated in the previous century. To quote F.A.M.Webster, “a perfect wave of popular indignation swept over the country, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle . . . had his attention drawn to the position.’ Conan Doyle’s own account tells us that in the early summer of 1912 Lord Northcliffe sent him a telegram “which let me in for about as much trouble as any communication which I have ever received.” Northcliffe (who in 1908 had raised nearly £12,000 to bail out the London Olympic Games) said Conan Doyle was the one man in Great Britain who could rally round the discordant parties and achieve a united effort to restore the nation’s Olympic status. Conan Doyle was a strong patriot. It is often assumed he received his knighthood because of his literary success, but Sherlock Holmes had nothing to do with it. The honour was given mainly in recognition of the writer’s much-translated booklet, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, a British response to international criticisms of the nation’s role in the Boer War. He began by writing to The Times (18 July, 1912) suggesting that in future Britain should send a British Empire team, for “there could not be a finer object lesson of the unity of the Empire than such a team all striving for the victory of the same flag.” Twelve days later came a fuller proposal with recognition that “liberal funds” were needed to form, equip and train such a team. Annual or bi-annual games should be held on the Olympic model, to accustom athletes to the metric distances and to “abnormal events” such as the discus and javelin. The Olympic Games should take priority over such traditional British competitons as Bisley, Wimbledon and Henley. His proposals on training were ahead of their time: “The team should be brought together into special training quarters for as long a period as possible before the Games, with the best advice always available to help them.” The response was unhelpful. Some of Northcliffe’s own papers attacked the principle of investing money in amateur sport. Conan Doyle was not a man to be silenced. In another letter to The Times (8 August, 1912), he appealed to all concerned to “let bygones be bygones, and centre our efforts upon the future.” Never one to shirk controversy, he pointed out that the British Olympic Council of about 50 members was too large for executive purposes. Instead, he proposed “a nucleus of four or five from the present Olympic Association, with as many more co-opted from outside.” Only then, he felt, would they be in shape to appeal to the public for funds. By March, 1913, the new Olympic Financial Committee was in place and he was a member. The others were the chairman, J.E.K.Studd, the cricketer and founder of the London Polytechnic; H.W.Forster, MP, a future Governor-General of Australia, and first-class cricketer; Edgar Mackay, the motor-boat pioneer; Bernard J.T.Bosanquet, a test match cricketer now best remembered for inventing the “googly”; Arthur E.D.Anderson, an Olympian from 1912; Arthur Robertson, another Olympic athlete; Theodore Cook, the Olympic fencer; Percy Fisher, representing the AAA; and J.C.Hurd, representing the swimmers. Unfortunately for the fund-raisers, the state of the money market during the Balkan War made this, in Conan Doyle’s words to the Daily Express (24 May, 1913), “a very inopportune time to go to the public for funds”. The project was put on ice. In July, the Daily Express demanded to know when the appeal would be launched. “An ill-timed appeal for funds would be disastrous . . . The money market is still unfavourable,” replied Conan Doyle (4 July, 1913). Then he made an unfortunate decision to go on holiday and missed a crucial meeting. In his absence, the committee launched the appeal, not for ten thousand pounds, as Conan Doyle had planned, but a hundred thousand. “I was horrified,” he wrote in Memories and Adventures, “The sum was absurd, and at once brought upon us from all sides the charge of developing professionalism . . . My position was very difficult. If I protested now, it would go far to ruin the appeal.” Immediately there was a backlash. Frederic Harrison, head of the Positivist movement in Britain, wrote (rather negatively) to The Times (26 August, 1913), “The whole affair stinks of gate money and professional pot hunting . . . The craze to collect Olympic dust bids fair to be another case of ‘gate’ — professionalism — years of specialist coaching. I should myself prefer to see Britain decline to enter, as not liking the terms and devices on which the show is run.” Conan Doyle’s response (The Times, 27 August, 1913) was a cogently argued letter pointing out the scale of the scheme and the practical requirements of improving national standards of physical education. He concludes: If Mr Harrison’s contention was that we should never have gone in for the Olympic Games at all, he might find many to agree with him. But, things being as they are, I would ask him to consider the courses open to us. One is to retire in the face of defeat and to leave the Colonies to put the Union Jack at the top where they can. As a good sportsman I am sure Mr Frederic Harrison could not tolerate that. A second is to continue with our present haphazard half-hearted methods, and to see ourselves sink lower and lower from that third place which we now occupy. There was a real risk that the critics would torpedo the scheme and necessitate Britain’s withdrawal from the next Olympics. In the same issue of The Times came a letter from Nowell Smith, the Headmaster of Sherborne. He had spoken to many lovers of sport, he claimed, and “We are just ordinary, though, I fear, rather old-fashioned, Britons, and we think these modern pseudo-Olympic Games are ‘rot’ and the newspaper advertisements of them and the £100,000 fund for buying victories in them, positively degrading.” The controversy raged for weeks. The Times devoted a leading article to the subject of veiled professionalism in the Olympics, pointing out that even the most amateur of sports, such as the University Boat Race, or schoolboy cricket, were funded to some degree. More subversively, the humorous magazine, Punch, published a piece strongly hostile to the Olympic Games. Conan Doyle met the crucial question head on in The Times (13 September, 1913): “I should like to ask one question and receive a definite reply from all those persons, including Mr Punch, who are making our Olympic task more difficult. It is this:- ‘Are you prepared to stand down from the Berlin Games altogether?’” He persuaded his chairman, J.E.K.Studd, that the right way to handle this crisis was to invite the critics to a London hotel to debate the issue of Britain’s participation. It was a turning point. Studd and Conan Doyle each spoke at length and with honesty. Time, they argued, was against them. The subscriptions were slow (by October 18th only £9,500 was collected). But withdrawal from the Games would cast Britain in the role of bad losers. They admitted that the target sum of £100,000 was an “outside figure”. Studd, speaking for himself alone, said he had only accepted the chairmanship in the hope that “if successful, the work of the committee will enable Great Britain to retire from future Olympic contests without loss of dignity or prestige should she desire to do so.” Conan Doyle disagreed with this view, and said so. As he wrote in a foreword at about the same time, “No department of national life stands alone, and such a climb down in sport as would be involved by a retirement from the Olympic Games would have an enervating effect in every field of activity.” Such straight talking was rare. The press agreed that the project deserved their support, but the damage had been done. At the end of November, 1913, Conan Doyle admitted, “The public seem apathetic on the question. . . . Unless prompt and generous help comes to us, the Committee will have dissolved, and the organisation, which has been laboriously built up during the last year, will have gone to pieces. The next few weeks will decide the matter.” Of course, the matter was decided by events outside the control of sportsmen and writers. When the First World War was over, and Britain’s participation in the 1920 Olympics was debated, Conan Doyle was no longer at the forefront. He was devoting his energies to another cause — spiritualism. Sadly, the fund-raising experience had embittered him. “This matter was spread over a year of my life, and was the most barren thing that I ever touched, for nothing came of it, and I cannot trace that I ever received one word of thanks from any human being. I was on my guard against Northcliffe telegrams after that.” But in a modest way, there had been results. An “Olympic sports meeting”, over metric distances and including those “abnormal” field events, the discus and javelin, was held at the Crystal Palace track in 1913. And in February, 1914, Britain’s first paid national coach, Walter Knox (a well-known professional with experience in Canada and the USA) was appointed on a salary of £400 from the Olympic fund. The AAA expanded its Championships to two days and added the 440yds hurdles, triple jump, discus and javelin to its programme. Some important principles had been established. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 9, 2012

Peter Lovese

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:36.192293

peter-the-wild-boy

Peter The Wild Boy By Lucy Worsley November 7, 2011 Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and author of Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court, on the strange case of the feral child found in the woods in northern Germany and brought to live in the court of George I. On the evening of 7 April 1726, George I’s courtiers crammed themselves into the drawing room at St James’s Palace. The room buzzed with their trivial chatter about balls and masquerades, everything seemed just as usual. But a sensational event would make this particular palace party the most memorable in years. The doors opened to reveal a brace of footmen, bearing between them a grinning, bushy-haired boy. He was perhaps twelve years old. There was something decidedly odd about this youth. For a start, he seemed not the least ‘embarrassed at finding himself in the midst of such a fashionable assembly’. Once lowered to the floor, he scuttled about using his arms, like a chimp, and scampered right up to the king. The courtiers were scandalised by his audacious lack of ceremony. This was their first encounter with Peter, the curious ‘Wild Boy’. Green-eyed, with strong teeth, he had ‘a roving look’ in his eyes. He often giggled, and lacked the solemn and stately demeanour of the other courtiers. Strangest of all, he could not speak. Everyone shared his delight when he heard a watch striking the hour for the first time, and Peter’s comical ways provided much amusement. But he also sparked off engrossing philosophical debates. His very existence raised the fascinating question of what it really meant to be human. Peter’s unlikely journey to court began in the German forest of Hertswold. In 1725, local forest folk had come across a feral child, ‘naked and wild’. He’d been living all alone in the woods, eating nuts and acorns. There was a general assumption that the Wild Boy was ‘rescued’ from the wilderness, but the more detailed accounts of his capture reveal that he was actually hunted down. He took refuge up a tree, which had to be felled before he could be caught. His captors didn’t know quite what to do with him, so they thrust him into the local ‘House of Correction’. But news of Peter and his bizarre, speechless condition reached the nearby palace of Herrenhausen, the summer home of the German-born George I. The king ordered Peter to be brought from the prison to the palace, made him a member of his household, and took him back to London. Now the Wild Boy became a kind of court pet. Soon after his arrival, he was taken to Kensington Palace to sit for William Kent, the painter who was decorating the King’s Grand Staircase there with portraits of the king’s favourite servants. Peter’s painting still remains there today. The courtiers were entranced by Peter, and a mania for the Wild Boy took off outside the palace gates as well. Londoners crowded to see the waxwork of Peter which appeared in Mrs Salmon’s celebrated gallery in the Strand. Writers hailed him as ‘the most wonderful wonder’, and ‘one of the greatest curiosities of the world since the time of Adam’. Throughout the centuries, feral children like Peter have aroused feelings of mingled pity and fear. More seriously, Peter fascinated the intellectuals then exploring the questions raised by the Enlightenment. Philosophers were beginning to assert the primacy of reason over superstition. They even debated the very definition of a human being, and whether or not people had souls. Peter proved to be a stimulating test case. If he possessed no speech, did he therefore possess no soul? Was he really just an animal? Or was he an admirable and ‘noble savage’, who’d lived a life untainted by society? Jonathan Swift remarked that the subject of the Wild Boy had been ‘half our talk this fortnight’, and Daniel Defoe thought he was the most interesting thing in the world. The Wild Boy became wonderful fodder for the city’s satirists. The few accurate facts about his life were soon forgotten or distorted in a deluge of pamphlets now printed about him. Ostensibly about Peter himself, their writers were really using him to mock the court, the courtiers, and even the whole silly race of men. The Wild Boy’s lack of worldly knowledge exposed the shallow foundations upon which fashionable society was built. London’s satirists invented more and more ludicrous transgressions that Peter was said to have committed: he licked people’s hands in greeting; he wore a hat in the king’s presence; he’d stolen the Lord Chamberlain’s staff. Daniel Defoe joined in with his own wild cadenza of speculation. It would be a terrible indictment of the present age, Defoe argued, if the Wild Boy had actively chosen his previous way of life, to ‘converse with the quadrupeds of the forest, and retire from human society’. He was really suggesting that Peter was in fact the only truly sensible person alive. Back at the palace, the Wild Boy soon began to show signs of distress. The first time he saw someone removing stockings, he was ‘in great pain’, thinking the man was peeling the very skin from his leg. The courtiers had enormous trouble in getting Peter into a new green suit. As well as the daily struggle over his clothes, Peter could not be made ‘to lie down on a bed, but sits and sleeps in a corner of the room’. These details of a little boy bewildered pierce the heart. Peter’s tight court coat, cut much more restrictively than a modern jacket, prevented him from ‘crawling or scrambling about’, and he learned to walk. Eighteenth-century court garments were designed to make the wearer stand with shoulders lowered, chest puffed, and toes turned-out. They began to do their work upon the Wild Boy’s posture. Eventually he grew used to his fine clothes. He also learned to pick pockets, from the most innocent of motives: ‘if he finds nuts or fruits, he is very glad of them’. This was charming and amusing. But when Peter stepped over the invisible line that defined acceptable behaviour, he was beaten on the legs with a ‘broad leather strap to keep him in awe’. George I, exasperated by Peter’s wild ways, put him under the care of the medical doctor John Arbuthnot to be taught to speak ‘and made a sociable creature’. Dr Arbuthnot is another of the figures depicted in William Kent’s staircase paintings at Kensington Palace. He gave Peter daily lessons, but progress was slow as the Wild Boy had ‘a natural tendency to get away if not held by his coat’. Peter did indeed learn to ‘utter after his tutor words of one syllable’. But he would never really engage with other people through language. Dr Arbuthnot had Peter baptised nevertheless, just in case he did have a soul. Even with the advantage of hindsight, it’s not exactly clear what Peter’s condition was. It is likely that he was autistic, and it’s been argued that he had Pitt-Hopkins syndrome. This condition would explain his learning difficulties and the remarkable Cupid’s-bow shape to his upper lip. Perhaps Peter was abandoned in the woods in the first place by a mother who considered him damaged or defective. Eventually the courtiers grew bored with him, and Peter was sent to live in retirement on Broadway Farm near Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. There he lived a long and quiet life, remaining ‘exceedingly timid and gentle in his nature’, fond of gin, and of onions. He liked to watch a fire burn, and loved ‘to be out on a starry night’. In autumn he would still show ‘a strange fondness for stealing away into the woods’ to feed upon acorns. Peter constantly visited by the curious, including the novelist Maria Edgeworth, who commented that in old age he looked just like a bust of Socrates. He was in some measure loved by the farming families who looked after him. After the sudden death of his last carer, Farmer Brill, Peter ‘refused food, pined away, and died in a few days’. It was 22 February 1785. I have visited his grave in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Northchurch, near Berkhamsted, which is often laid with flowers by an unknown person. When I asked a member of the congregation if she knew who places the bouquets, I was moved by her answer. ‘We’ve no idea who leaves the flowers’, she said, ‘but it must be someone who thinks that Peter should be remembered’. And so he should be. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 7, 2011

Lucy Worsle

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:36.831185

the-polyglot-of-bologna

The Polyglot of Bologna By Michael Erard June 26, 2012 Michael Erard takes a look at The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti, a book exploring the extraordinary talent of the 19th century Italian cardinal who was reported to be able to speak over seventy languages. Without a doubt, the most important book in English devoted to Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849), the polyglot of Bologna, is The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti, written by an Irish priest, Charles William Russell, and published in 1858. When I first began research on hyperpolyglots, I knew I was going to have to spend considerable time with Russell’s book, which contains a wealth of information about Mezzofanti, his time, and his language abilities, not to mention other famous language learners. I had discovered the book by chance in the collection of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The only way to get the required time to hunt through its treasures was to get some sort of research funding, I thought. Soon I discovered that the book, because it is in the public domain, had been scanned and republished in hardcopy, and was also available for free online. Before I say something about what makes Russell’s book so valuable for the hyperpolyglot hunter, let me say a bit about what a “hyperpolyglot” is. A hyperpolyglot is someone who knows six or more languages, according to Richard Hudson, a linguist at University College London. Some have criticized the word as an ugly string of syllables — the word “polyglot” trips off no tongues — but it’s useful for distinguishing ordinary multilingualism from the massive accumulation and use of languages that Mezzofanti and others displayed. For a long time, the hyperpolyglot was a sort of language learner whom many people had anecdotes about but who had never been investigated seriously. Is hyperpolyglottery a new kind of multilingualism, feeding off a globalized world of cheap communications? Is it a personal eccentricity, this passion or obsession for languages? Is it driven by a certain type of brain that remembers well, loves patterns, and finds pleasure in repetition? It’s all these things, to varying degrees, but to get my hands around the phenomenon, I was going to have to hunt for hyperpolyglots and start with Mezzofanti. Russell begins by devoting nearly a quarter of the book to describing a menagerie of polyglot scholars, monarchs, missionaries, explorers, and warriors who knew many languages. That’s the “introductory memoir of eminent linguists, ancient and modern,” of the book’s subtitle. Methodically Russell lists them by region or nation. Most came from European countries, though Mithridates makes an appearance. Most are also men, though he devotes a section to women, including a Russian Princess Dashkoff, Cleopatra, and someone named Elizabeth Smith, who had taught herself French, Italian, Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, and Hebrew. Part of the chapter discusses infant prodigies and unschooled polyglots, such as the British traveler Tom Coryat (1577-1617), who walked all over Europe and Eastern Mediterranean countries, accumulating Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and probably a dozen other languages he had no use for at home. He walked two thousand miles in the same pair of shoes, which he hung on the wall at his hometown church as an offering. Russell’s book is full of singular details like this, or the one in his capsule portrait of the American, Elihu Burritt (1810-1879), who “rose early in the winter mornings, and, while the mistress of the house was preparing breakfast by lamplight, he would stand by the mantel-piece with his Hebrew Bible on the shelf, and his lexicon in his hand, thus studying while he ate.” Dropping in mundane details don’t humanize as much they amplify the miraculous nature of the personage. It’s a stylistic trope from the hagiography that Russell borrowed. In the same way, he sets Mezzofanti’s monumentalism against the gifts of all those lesser saints. “Cardinal Mezzofanti will be found to stand so immeasurably above even the highest of these names, . . . that, at least for the purposes of comparison with him, its minor celebrities can possess little claim for consideration,” he wrote. Over and over, he states that his goal is to assess the claims made for Mezzofanti’s language abilities and to measure, once and for all, the cardinal’s abilities. He resists the urge to recount anecdotes about him (though a few are too good to resist, such as the time that Lord Byron and Mezzofanti had a swearing match; after Byron’s stock was exhausted, Mezzofanti asked, “Is that all?”), opting instead to collate first-hand reports from native speakers who witnessed Mezzofanti using languages. It’s as if Russell wanted to singlehandedly rescue him from the cabinet of curiosities where he had been abandoned by science. (Even though Mezzofanti lived at the height of phrenology in Europe, his skull was apparently never an object of fascination, not while he was alive, anyway.) Russell scours the literature and solicits accounts from Mezzofanti’s contemporaries. Collecting them, he concludes that Mezzofanti spoke 72 languages to varying degrees. Russell’s biography is also important as a counterpoint to three shorter, sharper papers delivered by Thomas Watts, who was said to know 50 languages himself, before London’s Philological Society in 1852, 1854, and 1860. His 1852 paper was the first time various accounts of Mezzofanti had been collected in English, the earliest from 1806. Over the next decade or so, Russell and Watts wrote about the other’s work with alternating praise and exasperation. While Russell’s biography “is not a blind and unreasoning admiration,” Watts writes, it “may still be suspected of being drawn with too courtly a pencil.” He then proceeds to take Russell to task for over-counting Mezzofanti’s languages, which he puts at “60 or 61.” Later Russell agreed with that figure, if one subtracted languages in which Mezzofanti had only a basic knowledge of the grammar and some vocabulary. Unlike Watts, Russell had met Mezzofanti in Rome several times, the first time in 1841. At 67 years old, the cardinal was not feeble though diminutive, his shoulders slightly rounded; he had a full head of “almost luxuriant” gray hair. One day after a meeting in the Vatican, Russell heard Mezzofanti converse, “with every appearance of fluency and ease,” in seven languages: Romaic, Greek, German, Hungarian, French, Spanish, and English. Two years later, on another trip, he witnessed Mezzofanti’s performance at the annual gathering of students from all over the world at the Propaganda of the Faith. They got up and recited poems in 42 languages, many of which had apparently been looked at by Mezzofanti. (In the Mezzofanti archives in the Archiginnasio Public Library in Bologna, I found a great number of these poems written in Mezzofanti’s hand.) But the real performance came after, when students gathered around him and engaged him in their languages. Mobbed Mezzofanti spoke this language, then that, Chinese, Peguan, Russian, and others, “hardly ever hesitating, or ever confounding a word or interchanging a construction,” in a “linguistic fusilade.” Russell added, “I cannot, at this distance of time, say what was the exact number of the group which stood around him, nor can I assert that they all spoke different languages; but making every deduction, the number of speakers cannot have been less than ten or twelve; and I do not think that he once hesitated for a sentence or even for a word!” One hundred and fifty years later, the modern hyperpolyglot hunter has more tools for understanding Mezzofanti’s abilities than either Russell or Watts did. Yet we’re not much further than they were in focusing on a number of languages as the most salient way to characterize these sorts of language talents. Digging into the neurological questions — what sorts of brains do these people have, and are they different from other brains, and if so, how — it’s important to stay connected to the subjective experience of being someone like Mezzofanti. He wrote little about himself, but this poem, in English, which I found in the Archiginnasio, suggests that the modesty attributed to him (even as cardinal, he didn’t allow anyone to kiss his ring, as is customary) was not just another performance, and that the man himself wished to be on the periphery, not the center of attention. Why do you ask my name?Why will you have it hereWhere many names appearillustrious, known to Fame.But since you are so kind,I write it, and remind =what World offers is vainOh let us Heaven gain! The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 26, 2012

Michael Erard

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:37.308604

seeing-joyce

Seeing Joyce By Frank Delaney June 12, 2012 The "Bloomsday" of 2012 - 108 years after Leopold Bloom took his legendary walk around Dublin on the 16th June 1904 - was the first since the works of James Joyce entered the public domain. Frank Delaney asks whether we should perhaps now stop trying to read Joyce and instead make visits to him as to a gallery. In 1931, Stanislaus Joyce wrote to his older brother, James, a letter that echoed with many voices. I cannot read your work in progress. The vague support you get from certain French and American critics I set down to pure snobbery . . . What is the meaning of that rout of drunken words? . . . You want to show that you are a superclever superman with a superstyle. It wasn’t the younger sibling’s first complaint, nor even the most bitter; as brother of the more famous Jim he had spoken out far more abusively at earlier, similarly “obscure” moments in the Joycean career. Nor was Stanny’s the only such complaint; in fact such allegations and dismissals would become more or less general. This time, the “work in progress” became Finnegans Wake (1939), a book that has defeated most of its would-be readers wholly and all partially, but that same frustrated opprobrium had begun with Ulysses (1922) and in due time would discolour everything that Joyce wrote. To accept the general impeachment of James Joyce is never to know vast delight. The majority has ruled for a long time — Joyce is “difficult,” Prince of the Unintelligibles, out-Steining Gertrude and that’s that, no further argument. If, out of sensitivity, out of respect, you find yourself reluctant to blame the artist himself, you could, if you wished, turn on the academics. Sneer at them, “Well, they certainly took Joyce at his word when he said ‘My work will keep the professors busy for three hundred years’.” Indeed. Hammer them further; didn’t they then make him exclusive, intensify his arcane reputation, isolate him from the common reader because they were hunting down all those recondite doctorates in his thickets? And, as every dog and Derrida knows, the more obscure the thesis the more summa the cum laude. However, why yield to either frustration or cynicism, especially in the face of such great art? Since Joyce believed that his writing both synthesized and transcended other disciplines, specifically painting and music, why not look for him somewhere over there? Indeed, why not wonder whether Joyce only needs a little pathfinding, a little extra scrutiny? There’s a lot to be gained when you (sort of) set a thief to catch a thief. An artist from one discipline can refresh how we see a fellow-artist from another. Shaw on Rheingold; “Let us not forget that godhood means to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and manhood strength and integrity.” Henry James remarked upon Sir Christopher Wren’s “insincere recesses and niches” at St. Paul’s. James Joyce attracted painters. Brancusi painted a portrait of the artist as an older man — one slender whorl and some thin tangential lines (prompting Joyce’s father to say, “Well — Jim has changed a bit since I saw him”). Matisse provided stunning illustrations for an edition of Ulysses (though by taking his inspiration from Homer he annoyed Joyce — who probably didn’t stop to think about Matisse’s language skills). And there was one other artist, admittedly minor, who, for those seeking to understand Joyce, made the greatest of all differences. In 1918, an English painter, Frank Budgen (1882-1971), met James Joyce at a party in Zurich. Both were aged 36 and within their first conversation Joyce responded to Budgen’s natural sensitivity and felt safe with him. Rare compliment, he then showed Budgen his work in progress of the day — the first three chapters of Ulysses, four years before the book would appear in print. If there can be a natural kinship between painters and writers, Budgen, the perfect reader, proved it. To Joyce’s “difficult” material he brought his own sense of how any artist must render life. In a memoir, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934), he described the great modernist’s prose from his own artistic vantage: “It is like an impressionist painting. The shadows are full of colour; the whole is built up out of nuances instead of being constructed in broad masses; things are seen as immersed in a luminous fluid; colour supplies the modeling and the total effect is arrived at through a countless number of small touches.” Seen thus, Joyce’s work changes for ever. No longer do we have to read what multiple critics called “tormented prose.” The myriad disdainers, whose negatives ranged from “vulgar” and “foul” to “psychic disintegration” — they fail. As Budgen saw him, Joyce’s higher purpose gleams like dawn. Through Budgen’s lens, not only may we now excuse Joyce the dense layers of reference, often six deep in the use or placement of a single word, we may relish them. Instead of fighting him phrase by phrase, we can trust him image by image as we see one art relating to another — literature rendered as painting. It’s like stumbling into a field of diamonds — hard, brilliant flashes of light everywhere. In short, Frank Budgen alters James Joyce’s state by making him a writer whom we see rather than merely read. That Joyce was ever thus can be discerned early. The first paragraph of his first generally published work, ‘The Sisters’, in Dubliners (1914) contains this sentence, a painting in itself: “If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse.” Every story in the collection offers similar illustrative prose; “When she got outside the streets were shining with rain and she was glad of her old brown raincloak” (Clay). The head of a man who has fallen lies in “a dark medal of blood” (Grace). Or, straight from Renoir, “She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair.” It’s possible to pass off the many bright phrases in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) as “Show: Don’t Tell,” the creative writing school ideal. The impressionism doesn’t truly kick in until Ulysses; thereafter it dominates and does so in ways both brilliantly technical and artistically profound — and occasionally parodic. For example, in a technique vital to painting, the shift between light and shadow, Stephen Dedalus, under the sunny daylight of the most famous June morning in literature, walks along Sandymount Strand — with his eyes closed. Once the image is in place, literature then takes the meaning up, up and away — “walking into eternity,” thinks Stephen. And yet, when the book was published in February 1922, and was at the moment the most famous book in the world, that same ‘Proteus’ chapter, with its now-notorious “ineluctable modality of the visible,” was the downfall of so many would-be readers. Why didn’t they ask Budgen? Take the first of his three crucial remarks: “It is like an impressionist painting. The shadows are full of colour; the whole is built up out of nuances instead of being constructed in broad masses.” Use that observation to interrogate a later chapter in Ulysses, ‘The Wandering Rocks’. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch has been taken, Hamlet has been dissected within the Library and another landscape with figures is about to be painted. We’ve already had strong hints of this kind of canvas; Stephen steps away from a crowded bathing-place; a funeral proceeds across town; Mr. Bloom peregrinates among people and streets towards his lunch. Now, in ‘Wandering Rocks’, we are about to view the city as L.S. Lowry and his stick-figures. Or the Breughels or Averkamp, those Low Countries scenes of teeming villages. Or a Renoir afternoon. Within the first few hundred words, we observe a grave and serious priest, who gives a blessing to a one-legged sailor, meets and greets the wife of an M.P., and chats to three little schoolboys. Across the canvas strides a dancing teacher in “silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots.” Next we see Mrs. McGuinness, “stately, silver-haired,” with “a fine carriage . . . like Mary, Queen of Scots.” And on it goes; more schoolboys, “satchelled” this time; shopkeepers; a police constable; “two unlabouring men” lounging against the window of a pub; “a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw” — the book at this moment almost ceases to have characters; rather they become members of a painted day. In 1920, for Carlo Linati, the Italian translator of his play Exiles (1918), Joyce produced The Linati Schema, a breakdown of the chapter’s nineteen segments, in which many characters recur. He listed the chapter’s concerns as “Objects, Places, Forces, Ulysses,” called the “technic” of the chapter a “shifting labyrinth between two shores,” and defined the “organ” of the piece “as “blood.” All through the ‘Wandering Rocks’ chapter the corpuscles of Dublin’s lifeblood pulse along the veins and arteries of the city. In general, Joyce threw down many deliberate, almost sadistic challenges, not least to the “formal,” that is to say, sequential use of language. But if Ulysses is Impressionism, it can’t drag you back to its old ways. As such, it passes all Budgen’s tests, not least “the whole is built up out of nuances instead of being constructed in broad masses.” Few characters in most chapters receive great dramatic roles, and yet they all tell the story of the sixteenth of June 1904 in Dublin. Yeats wasn’t meaning to condescend when he referred to the book’s content as “the vulgarity of a single Dublin day” — he also meant vulgus, the crowd. Twenty years before Joyce was born, the American painter, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), wrote to a friend, “In a big picture you can see what o’clock it is, afternoon or morning, if it’s hot or cold, winter or summer, and what kind of people are there, and what they are doing, an why they are doing it.” Eakins, not an impressionist, rather a near-complete and Rembrandt-ish realist, might have been writing about all of Dubliners, a great deal of A Portrait of the Artist and many if not most of the eighteen chapters in Ulysses. When Joyce published his two largest works, critical attention went to the monologue intérieur in Ulysses and the dream-capturing of Finnegans Wake. The former settled down as his book of the day, the latter his book of the night. All that dismay at Ulysses gave way to the desperation at “the Wake.” This was truly beyond everything. Yet Finnegans Wake takes care of the rest of Budgen’s observations. The book behaves differently — same painter, different technique; yet again “the whole is built up out of nuances instead of being constructed in broad masses.” Budgen may have thought that he was referring to Ulysses, but the Wake was already under way when he wrote his invaluable memoir. And that novel (if such it is) is truest of all to the third part of Budgen’s opinion — “things are seen as immersed in a luminous fluid.” This is where Budgen nails it. There is simply no point in trying to read Finnegans Wake by any conventional methods. Indeed, doing so would dishonor Joyce and his intention to capture the spirit’s nocturnal mechanisms, as Ulysses had the diurnal. Best to take that phrase of Budgen’s at its face value and immerse oneself in the book’s fluid. When you read in the old way, even with conscious sound, the Wake (as Ulysses does) changes before your eyes. It becomes a dreamlike book of the dead, whose power inside Joyce’s spirit was so great that he had no choice but to use a dismembered language. Joyce was putting these sentences down on the page long before he knew of the world’s newest and widest-used language: call Finnegans Wake a binary code of literature. But again, and at the risking of banging the drum too loud and too often, read it not as language; read it as, say, a gift of tongues or as music or as that benighted creature, the “prose poem.” And then as painting — and this time add Abstract to the Impressionists. It’s not just the sounds of the words; it’s the shapes. Here are some examples of the text, plucked at random (Faber, 1975). The opening paragraph: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay . . .” can be a sweep of colour from the south of France. And who have we here — Jackson Pollock? “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner- ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur- nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.” Let’s have one more, the briefest of glimpses, a corner of a canvas and yet touchingly complete: “My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence.” Taken together, this admittedly minuscule sample of three quotations is at least a sinew in Budgen’s argument. Finally, poetry is the magnifying glass of literature’s art. Yeats called it “hammering my thoughts into unity.” Though he wrote so few, James Joyce’s verses distil his painterly claim. Read Pomes Penyeach (1927), his collection of “penny apples” (he couldn’t resist punning on pommes) and you can see his brushstrokes. “He travels after a winter sun,/Urging the cattle along a cold red road”. Or, “A birdless heaven, seadusk, one lone star/Piercing the west”. And, hell, he’s almost pre-Raphaelite! “A waste of waters ruthlessly/Sways and uplifts its weedy mane”. In the Carpaccio Room at the Venice Accademia, several gigantic canvases add up to nothing short of a massive literary work. Carpaccio could have called the collection, “Venetian Life and Other Stories.” Apply the same principles to Joyce and there aren’t rooms enough, nor galleries. In the end it may all come down to the practical. Commentators have argued for Love as the one dominant element in everything Joyce wrote. There has even been a thought that if all the typos and misssteps in Ulysses could ever have been corrected, the central word in the text would be “love,” and intentionally so. Perhaps — but Light trumps it. Page by page almost, we are never too far from the sun or the moon or the candle or the lamp or the air itself as a light source. And with good reason. Throughout his life, Joyce suffered from poor and often painful eyesight. His eyes aged faster than he did and by his mid-forties he had endured multiple surgical procedures. In today’s terms, he’d probably qualify as legally blind. Did intensifying glaucoma impel him to his pen-dancing, pointillist-ism? Deformity, too, has its place in art. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 12, 2012

Frank Delane

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:37.834506

robert-southeys-dreams-revisited

Robert Southey’s Dreams Revisited By W.A. Speck December 5, 2011 As well as being poet laureate for 30 years and a prolific writer of letters, Robert Southey was an avid recorder of his dreams. W.A. Speck, author of Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, explores the poet's dream diary and the importance of dreams in his work. Robert Southey (1774 – 1843), the poet laureate, biographer, historian and, in Byron’s words, ‘entire man of letters’ used a note book to record many of his dreams. A celebrated line in his verse was ‘my days among the dead are past’, referring to the works by authors who had died, many of them centuries ago, which lined the walls of Greta Hall, Southey’s home in Keswick. An analysis of his dreams demonstrates that his nights were passed among them too, since a disproportionate number of those which he recorded dealt with the dead. Deceased relatives and friends frequently visited him in them. He also encountered dead authors, as in the dream he had on 7 January 1805. ‘I was supping at Garrick’s house, and seated at his left hand, at the top of the table; my memory had made up his face accurately; he got upon the table, and spoke an epilogue of his own writing in the character of a cook –maid, and promised, at Mrs Garrick’s desire, to recite a serious poem afterwards, that I might hear him’. In another dream he was ‘at Swift’s house in Dublin, where he was living with two sisters’. And in another he met Matthew Lewis, the author of a sensational Gothic novel, The Monk. ‘Monk Lewis’ had been a contemporary of Southey’s at Westminster school, though he confessed that he never ‘had any affection for the man.’ This, however, did not prevent him contributing to a volume edited by Lewis, Tales of Wonder. Southey’s contribution consisted of six poems, all of which contained Gothic elements, including dreams. Thus ‘Bishop Bruno’ wakes from a recurrent dream that he had rung his own death knell, only to discover that it was prophetic. ‘Lord William’ drowns young Edmund, his deceased elder brother’s son, to claim the house of Erlingford, only to find that In vain at midnight’s silent hourSleep closed the murderer’s eyesIn every dream the murderer sawYoung Edmund’s form arise. ‘The Pious Painter’ was renowned for his realistic portrayals of the Devil What the Painter so earnestly thought on by dayHe sometimes would dream of by night. Southey himself strongly believed that waking thoughts led on to dreams. It led him to organise his days so that he did not work on one topic all day but switched from one to another, from composing poems to reviewing books to writing letters. This routine was not only economical in its use of time but was ‘also essential to the preservation of my health; for, by long experience, I know that whenever my attention is devoted to one object my sleep is disturbed by perplexing dreams concerning it. The remedy is easy; I do one thing in the morning, another in the evening — I never dream of either’. This routine was not foolproof, however, for his dream book records that what had occupied his mind during the day often inspired dreams that same night. The entry for 4 December 1821, for instance, describes a dream in which ‘Palmerin of England gave me Arcalaus, the enchanter, in the shape of an egg, the enchanter having taken that form, and bade me deliver it to Urganda. Urganda took the egg, and said her husband should eat it for his supper’. Southey then added to his account that his daughter ‘Isabel had been reading Amadis and Palmerin, and talking to me a great deal about both; hence this jumbled dream.’ Southey did not record all his dreams in the book by any means, he selected only those which he considered to be significant. As we have seen his poetry also alluded to dreamers and dreaming. The best source, however, for his reflections on his dreams is his 7000 or so extant letters. Unfortunately few of these have been published in reliable scholarly editions, most being scattered throughout repositories in Britain and North America. However, under the general editorship of Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer these are now being published electronically as The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. When the edition is complete it will be possible to trawl through it, for being on line the letters can be searched, for example for dreams. A search for ‘dream’, ‘dreamer’ and ‘dreaming’ brought up several passages in Southey’s correspondence in which dreams are mentioned. Some show the same morbid interest in death and ghosts that his dream book documents. Thus on 20 October 1793 he wrote to Horace Walpole Bedford: I’ll betake me to bed & look sharp for a dream.      God of dreams hear my prayer       To my pillow repairIndulge my petition tonight      Around my wild brain      Send thy fanciful trainAnd give me a dream I may write And later: . . . bid thy sprightly phantoms rareRound my sleeping head repair.Let me see in church yard gloomThe ghost slow rising from the tombSlow & stern his pale hand waveAnd bid me follow to the grave. Three weeks later, in mid November, he wrote to Horace’s brother, his old school friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford: ‘I am going to bed . . . to dream of you & heaven & happiness unless the demon of dismal dreams pops up under my pillow & harrows up my heart with some of his chimeras — oh if life were all one agreeable dream — or rather if death were — would there be a crime in taking laudanum as an opiate? Good night.’ The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 5, 2011

W.A. Speck

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:38.331074

lost-libraries

Lost Libraries By Claire Preston February 20, 2012 In the latter half of the 17th century the English polymath Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of 'remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living'. Claire Preston explores Browne's extraordinary catalogue amid the wider context of a Renaissance preoccupation with lost intellectual treasures. In an age of data retrieval, when just about anything ever printed can be seen online and is eternally preserved there, and when modern anxiety is fuelled by too much information, we would do well to remember that the loss of books and artefacts was catastrophic until very recently in human history. The great library of the Ptolemies at Alexandria was burnt by the Romans in the first century AD, a legendary collection of ancient wisdom whose loss haunted Renaissance scholarship. European savants of the 15th and 16th centuries were, in the midst of their astonishing revival of classical writing, all too aware of what was irrecoverable and even unknown to them. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was such a scholar. His vast expertise in areas as diverse as embryology, anatomy, ornithology, ancient history and literature, etymology, local archaeology, and pharmacy, and his participation in the Baconian programme to rescue learning from the misapprehensions and erasures that had accumulated since the fall of man, made him especially sensitive to such losses. Musaeum Clausum, a small tract both playful and melancholy, seems to coalesce early-modern feelings about the unavailability of precious intellectual treasure. Musaeum Clausum (the hidden library) is a fake catalogue of a collection that contained books, pictures, and artefacts. Such collections (and their elaborate indices) were a common phenomenon from about 1500 to 1700 and after. Gentlemen and the nobility collected as a matter of polite engagement with knowledge and as a way of displaying wealth and learning; savants made arrays of plants, animals, and minerals as museums or ‘thesauruses’ of the natural world to record and organise their findings; imperial and monarchical collections were princely in their glamour, rarity, and sheer expenditure: these might contain natural-historical specimens but also trinkets and souvenirs from far-flung places, curiosities of nature and art, and historically significant items. For example, taxidermically preserved basilisks shared room with a thorn from Christ’s crown and feathered headdresses and weapons belonging to native American tribes. Browne takes these traditions of assemblage and makes a catalogue of marvellous things that have disappeared. The catalogue of Browne’s lost museum speaks of fragmentation, scattering, and loss, but also of eccentricity and comedy. Among its documents are letters and works by Aristotle, Ovid, and Cicero, and an account of Hannibal’s expedition through Alps ‘far more particular than that of Livy’ that purports to tell what sort of vinegar he used to split the stones in his way. Perhaps the most significant item among these is Seneca’s epistles to St Paul, a correspondence which, if it existed, would answer the yearning of Christian Stoics. The pictures in this collection either display tremendous technical skill or depict remarkable events. One picture is a ‘large submarine piece’ showing the bottom of the Mediterranean and the seagrass growing there; another describes a moonlight battle between the Florentines and the Turks; others are snow or ice ‘pieces’ that show a remarkable and alien landscape populated by exotic arctic animals; still others show the great fire of Constantinople, the siege of Vienna, the sack of Fundi, and the Treaty of Cologne, as well as portraits, caricatures, and even the dogs of Sultan Achmet. The curiosities are probably the most peculiar and random group in the collection, everything from an ostrich’s egg engraved with a scene from the battle of Alcazar, to a moist stone that cures fevers, to a ring found in the belly of a fish (reputed to be the ring of the Doge of Venice with which he annually weds the sea), the mummified body of one Father Crispin of Toulouse, and ‘Batrachomyomachia, or the Homerican battle between frogs and mice, neatly described upon the chizel bone of a large pike’s jaw’. ※※Indexed under…Eggof ostrich engraved with scene from battle of Alcazar Browne’s is one of many examples of this form, the fake catalogue. Donne wrote one; Rabelais included one in Gargantua and Pantagruel. More typically such works were outright spoofs of learned curiosity, send-ups of random assemblages that John Evelyn judged to be no more than ‘indigested chaos’. But Browne, although he recognises the absurdity of some of his own items and is obviously trying for comic effect with certain ones, is probably more interested in a philosophy of antiquities, of the past and of existing knowledge as resurrected and preserved from the ravages of time and forgetfulness. Browne’s aim, like that of the early-modern Baconians, was reparation and restoration of truth, and Musaeum Clausum reads like a wistful evocation of what might have existed in a legendary collection like the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Perhaps the most powerful rendition of that wistfulness is not in specific works or memorials of the great, but rather in the pitiful remains of Father Crispin, ‘buried long ago in the vaults of the Cordeliers at Toulouse, where the skins of the dead so dry and parch up without corruption that their persons may be known very long after, with this inscription, Ecce iterum Crispinus [behold Crispin again]’. The otherwise anonymous Father Crispin, an unremarkable monk whose name is his only chronicle, is immortalised by the strange atmosphere of the vault rather than for any accomplishment or quality; his survival as a physiognomy that can be ‘known very long after’ is merely a scientific phenomenon, not an intended memorial to an individual. The imperious inscription pathetically asks us with its commanding injunction to behold anew that which was never remarkable or memorable in the first place. Browne’s favourite theme, here and elsewhere, is the randomness of recollection, and Father Crispin, a random survival of the past, is preserved only to be lost again with the collection that contains him. Twenty years earlier Browne had written the astonishing Urne-Buriall, a discussion of mortuary customs. There he asked why it should be that we have record of the epitaph of Hadrian’s horse but not of Hadrian himself, or whether the best men are even remembered ‘or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?’ That abiding sense of so much forgotten, so little still recalled, animated Browne and other early-modern savants who were conducting a salvage operation for intellectual recovery. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 20, 2012

Claire Preston

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:38.799073

navigating-durers-woodcuts-for-the-ship-of-fools

Navigating Dürer’s Woodcuts for The Ship of Fools By Rangsook Yoon October 25, 2011 At the start of his career, as a young man in his twenties, Albrecht Dürer created a series of woodcuts to illustrate Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools of 1494. Dürer scholar Rangsook Yoon explores the significance of these early pieces and how in their subtlety of allegory they show promise of his masterpieces to come. The celebrated Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) spent part of his journeyman years, from 1492 to 1494, in Basel, working as a woodcut designer for some of the most eminent publishers of his time, including Johann Bergmann von Olpe, Johannes Amerbach, and Nicolaus Kessler. Basel, along with Strasbourg, Augsburg and Nuremberg, was a prosperous commercial town and a leading artistic and publishing center in the North of the Alps. Dürer’s journeyman experience here was crucial in his formation as a woodcut designer deeply engaged in the early publishing industry. The most important woodcut project that he was involved with during this time was the design of an extensive illustration cycle to accompany The Ship of Fools, the satirical verses composed in German by Sebastian Brant (1457-1521) and published by Bergmann von Olpe in 1494. This collection of moralizing stories was an instant best-seller; so much so that in that same year, five separate pirated editions appeared in Strasbourg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Reutingen. No doubt, its numerous whimsical woodcuts depicting various types of foolish and sinful human behavior contributed to its great success, as these illustrations were copied in all subsequent editions until the late sixteenth century. Nowadays, in general, about two-thirds of the 114 illustrations (counting 9 repeating ones) in the 1494 edition are attributed to the young Dürer, while the rest, which are found inferior in design and cutting, are ascribed to anonymous masters, such as the so-called Master of the Haintz Narr (named after the namesake scene in The Ship of Fools). A more conservative view, expressed by the art historian Erwin Panofsky in 1945, attributes only one-third of the illustrations to Dürer. Overall, the woodcuts Dürer made during his journeyman years are not as impressive as those he created later as an independent master in Nuremberg. For example, hatching lines used for modeling consist here only of simple parallel lines, and the contour lines during this early period are depicted crudely and overly thick without much variation. The artist presumably simplified his illustrations so as to accommodate the limited skills of block-cutters (Formschneider) who were in charge of cutting the woodblocks he designed. Nevertheless, Dürer’s woodcuts in The Ship of Fools already reveal seeds of his stylistic elements and motifs found later in his career. They also betray a greater understanding of the book’s narrative and allegorical content, suggesting that he worked closely with Brant, possibly responding directly to the author’s demands and instructions. Dürer’s intimate knowledge of Brant’s text can best be illustrated by examining the original title page designed by the Nuremberg artist, The Fools on a Cart and a Boatload of Fools. This woodcut of Dürer’s occupies almost the entire title page and consists of two scenes that are vertically arranged. The upper compartment shows figures in fools’ caps — shaped like donkey’s ears and adorned with bells — riding a cart pulled by horses and being guided by fools. This uppermost register also has the book’s title, “The Ship of Fools” (“Das Narren Schiff”), carved on the same woodblock as the image. In the lower section, three boats of yelling and singing rowdy fools set out for their destination, “The Land of Fools” (“Ad Narragoniam”), as indicated in the caption. Attentive viewers may find it odd that two different allegorical subjects, both the multiple ships of fools and a single cart of fools, are juxtaposed in this original title cut of 1494. It differs greatly from the better-known title cuts of later years, all of which utilize the image of only a large ship of fools, thus visualizing the book’s title verbatim. This seemingly dissonant title cut of 1494, however, confirms that Dürer was indeed well aware of the structure and themes of Brant’s original German text at the time of its conception and original publication. Despite the book’s title, in Brant’s original text, the idea of a ‘ship’ is not central, but rather, incidental. As noteworthy as the ship is, it is only one amongst a number of diverse motifs including a cart, a dance, a wheel of fortune, a net, a mirror, and a bagpipe. The ship motif became the book’s foremost leitmotif only when, while being translated into Latin, Jacob Locher, Brant’s pupil, extensively rearranged and revised Brant’s text to give it a semblance of unity, which was found lacking in Brant’s original. This Latin edition, translated and edited by Locher and first published by Bergmann von Olpe in 1497, became the standard version of The Ship of Fools’ text that was repeatedly copied in all following editions and translations. Given all, at the time of the book’s first publication, Dürer’s title cut, with both the cart and multiple ships, advertise the book’s full content more adequately than its short, unilateral title. It complements the title words in communicating the book’s complex, multi-structural narrative elements to the reading public, and further, it mirrors the general structure of the book. The Ship of Fools, which consists of 112 chapters, is roughly dividable into two parts. In contrast to the first half of the book (that is, the first 61 chapters), where the metaphor of a ship plays a small role except in chapter 48 (“A Journeyman’s Ship”), the ship motif is disproportionately greater in the second half: the prologue (since it was written last) and chapters 103 (“Of the Antichrist”), 91 (“Of Prattling in Church”), 108 (“The Schluraffen Ship”), and 109 (“ Contempt of Misfortune”). We gather that Brant gradually realized its symbolic importance in the process of his writing. The significance of the ship in the second part is even more apparent when one examines the text illustrations. Even when the ship is only briefly mentioned, or even not mentioned at all, it is still visually depicted, sometimes as a tiny object floating on a lake (or a sea) in the background, and sometimes far more conspicuously. This can bee seen in chapters 68 (“Not Taking a Joke”), 72 (“Of Coarse Fools”), 75 (“Of Bad Marksmen”), 80 (“Foolish News”), and 81 (“Of Cooks and Waiters”). The motif of a cart of fools is treated as a principal theme only twice in the book, once in chapter 47 (“On the Road of Salvation”) and another time in chapter 91 (“Of Prattling in Church”), where both the cart and the ship are addressed simultaneously. Less emphatically, the cart motif is mentioned once again in chapter 53 (“Of Envy and Hatred”). However, Dürer’s depiction of the cart, along with ships, on the title page serve well as metaphors for land- and sea-going vehicles carrying the fools, thus conveying the universality of all the fools described by the text. With the editorial changes made to Brant’s text by Locher, who utilized ‘the ship of fools’ as the leitmotif throughout, not only in the first Latin edition of 1497 but also in all subsequent publications (both authorized and pirated), the book no longer reproduced or imitated the original title page design by Dürer. Instead, after 1497, a different woodcut, rendering only a large ship laden with fools and attributed to the Master of the Haintz Narr, repeatedly served as the title cut prototype. In 1494, the Master of the Haintz Narr’s woodcut originally appeared as the frontispiece on the verso of the title page, and also can be found as an illustration accompanying chapter 108, “The Schluraffen Ship.” As the concept of the ship became the most significant motif of the book, this woodcut became the most fitting image for the title cut, as it visualizes the two principal ideas of the book and its title — namely, both a ship and fools. However, it is Dürer’s original title cut for the 1494 edition which represents the book’s original structure and thematic concerns much more faithfully and allegorically. Throughout his career as a successful independent master in Nuremberg, Dürer continued to create woodcuts that were meant to accompany texts. He provided numerous humanist friends and Nuremberg publishers with woodcuts to illustrate their new publications. Best known works, of course, are his own illustrated books, such as the Apocalypse (1498; the second edition in 1511), the Large Passion (1511), the Life of the Virgin Mary (1511), and the Small Passion (1511). Here, the primary features are the woodcuts themselves, rather than texts, and significantly, he self-published them by hiring printers. Dürer’s later productions of such high caliber, innovation, and audacity cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration his invaluable journeyman experience in the large publishing companies and his participation in executing extensive illustration cycles such as The Ship of Fools in Basel. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 25, 2011

Rangsook Yoon

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:39.266452

the-tragedy-of-fate-and-the-tragedy-of-culture-heinrich-von-kleists-the-schroffenstein-family

The Tragedy of Fate and the Tragedy of Culture Heinrich von Kleist’s The Schroffenstein Family By Steven Howe November 21, 2011 On 21st November 1811, on a lake's edge near Potsdam, a 34-year-old Kleist shot himself dead in a suicide pact with his terminally ill lover. He left behind him just under a decade of intense literary output which has established him as one of the most important writers of the German romantic period. On the bicentenary of his death, Kleist scholar Steven Howe explores the importance of his first dramatic work and how in it can be seen the themes of his later masterpieces. Heinrich von Kleist is without doubt one of the most challenging figures in German literary history. In a career lasting a little under a decade, from 1802 through to his premature death in 1811, he produced a remarkable body of creative work that radically called into question the prevailing intellectual, aesthetic and ethical orthodoxies of the age. Today, Kleist is perhaps most familiar, certainly to British audiences, as the dramatist behind the violently tragic Penthesilea and the brilliantly enigmatic The Prince of Homburg, and as the author of a series of daring and dramatic short stories, including Michael Kohlhaas, The Marquise of O . . ., and The Earthquake in Chile. Altogether less well-known, however (notwithstanding Eric Bentley’s adaptation in German Requiem), is his first major literary production, the five act play The Schroffenstein Family, published in 1803. Aside from a brief premiere at the National Theatre in Graz in January 1804, the drama found little immediate resonance, and it has traditionally been regarded as belonging to the second class of the author’s imaginative work. Kleist, for his part, also seems to have attached little value to the piece, referring to it in a letter to his sister, Ulrike, as a ‘wretched botched job’. That the drama suffers from the defects one might expect of the first work of a young poet is a point that few would demur: the language is overwrought, the plot convoluted, and the entire exposition lacks the refined touch which Kleist was later to perfect. That being said, the play nonetheless contains a number of scenes and episodes which provide an early glimpse of the author’s promise and genius, and introduces several of the most significant themes and features which were to subsequently become a hallmark of his poetics. The action of the drama revolves around the conflict between the rival houses of Rossitz and Warwand, and the fate of two star-crossed lovers, Ottokar and Agnes. The imaginative debt to Romeo and Juliet is plain to see, and Kleist hews closely to the model of Shakespeare’s tragedy, though with one significant variation — the two feuding houses are here different branches of the same family. The origins of the conflict extend from a testamentary contract, according to which the property of either house should fall to the other branch if the line of descent is broken. This breeds an atmosphere of mistrust, as both houses suspect one another of pursuing its demise, and particularly that of its heirs. When the younger son of Count Rupert, head of the Rossitz branch of the family, dies in unexplained circumstances, his suspicions thus fall directly on his counterpart, Count Sylvester, and the drama opens with him compelling his immediate family to swear an oath of bloody and absolute vengeance against the entire house of Warwand. The tragic trajectory of the play is set by the issue that Ottokar, the elder son of Rupert, partakes in this oath-swearing, unaware that the girl with whom he has fallen in love, Agnes, is the daughter of Sylvester. Once alerted to the fact, he is convinced by Agnes of her father’s innocence in the matter of the child’s death and attempts to negotiate a reconciliation between the warring counts. His efforts are thwarted, however, by Rupert’s burning hatred for Sylvester and his untameable lust for revenge. Upon learning of his son’s clandestine affair, Rupert resolves to murder Agnes, and when the two lovers secretly meet at a mountain cave, he and his vassal, Santing, accost them. In an attempt to deceive his father and protect his beloved, Ottokar exchanges clothes with Agnes; failing to note the switch in the darkness, Rupert stabs his own son to death, whereupon the presently arriving Sylvester follows suit by murdering Agnes in the mistaken belief that she is Ottokar. Ironically — or perhaps appropriately — it falls to the blind grandfather, Sylvius, to recognise the true identities of the two victims and reveal the double filicide. At the play’s end, an old widow, Ursula, discloses the true state of affairs, namely that Rupert’s son’s death was accidental — he drowned in a forest brook. With the misunderstanding resolved, a despairing reconciliation follows, and the drama closes with the mad-driven bastard son of the Rossitz house, Johann, addressing Ursula as master and personification of fate. That the mechanisms of fate and chance do serve as an important motor for the action of the drama is very much an accepted commonplace in interpretive criticism. In his personal letters, Kleist reveals a fascination with the unknowable powers of contingency and coincidence that intrude upon and shape the life of the individual, and such concerns penetrate to the core of many of his literary works: time and again, he confronts his characters with situations over which they have no control and to which they must then react. In Schroffenstein, chance happenings are heaped upon one another in such a way as to both blunt much of the originality of the constellation, and to strain reader credulity after the fashion of the Gothic tale — it is not without reason that Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk has been cited as a possible source of inspiration. The outcome is a demonstration of the operations of fate and contingency which, viewed in a narrow sense, seems at times laboured and contrived. The design of the inquiry is, however — in a further parallel to Romeo and Juliet — overlaid with a deeper disquisition on the limitations of human awareness. Ursula’s laconic words to Rupert and Sylvester, ‘If you kill one another, it is an error’, acquire, in this context, special relevance, pointing as they do towards the movement of error and the instances of misunderstanding that drive the action to its tragic close. Here one can detect the influence of Kleist’s encounter with Kantian philosophy, which appears to have shattered his faith in the possibilities of absolute truth and knowledge. The fallibility of perception emerges, as a consequence, as a dominant theme and subject of reflection in Kleist’s work, and remains so across his entire literary corpus. In Schroffenstein, this manifests itself through the frequent recurrence of error and confusion, bred by the characters’ inability to communicate and their attendant susceptibility to misreading reality. Typically, Kleist drives the issue towards aesthetic extremes, crafting an enveloping atmosphere of illusion, deceit and suspicion within the extended family which, in turn, calls forth gruesome acts of vengeance and retributive violence. In this regard, the drama can perhaps be seen as the most Jacobean and Sturm und Drang-like of Kleist’s works — as a grizzly, though at times darkly comedic, exploration of the workings of fate and the human capacity for misunderstanding, and of their effects in unleashing man’s violent potentialities. It would be misleading, however, to suggest that the tragedy be approached solely through the lens of metaphysical and epistemological concerns. For the very issue of error that stands at the heart of the drama raises the question of interpretation, and with it that of the extent to which cultural and social codes give shape to the individual’s understandings and perceptions. In particular, the text displays how the nature of the conflict between the two houses fosters a socially-conditioned prejudice that colours and impairs judgement, and which speaks to a deeper cultural critique embedded within the drama. The major point of reference and orientation here is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, both put into question the Enlightenment faith in human progress and delivered a searing assault on the conditions of modernity. The opening scene of the play already bears the mark of Rousseau’s sway: when Rupert’s wife, Eustache, refers to her natural feminine tenderness in response to his calls for her to swear the oath of vengeance, he objects, ‘Nothing more of nature. It is but a sweet, delightful fairytale from childhood’. What follows does so under the sign of Rousseau’s condemnation of man’s fall from natural goodness into socio-moral decay: the terms of the inheritance contract, for instance, as both agent and symbol of the conflict between Rupert and Sylvester, casts into relief the lure of wealth and property, the original idée fixe, which Rousseau identifies as a root cause of modern inequality and conditions of violence. In its presentation of the trials of the lovers, meanwhile, the text also plays on the anthropology of identity laid down in the Discourse, in which the dilemma of man’s ruinous modernity is diagnosed in terms of the tensions between subject and world. In this instance, that dilemma is telescoped through the relationship between love and society, with Ottokar in particular forced to struggle with the contrast between the demands of his father and his feelings for Agnes. In such a way, the text also points to a modern view of identity as an active positioning of the self in relation to cultural discourses — a theme to which Kleist was to frequently return, perhaps most notably in his portrayal of the cross-cultural relationships between Gustav and Toni in The Betrothal in St. Domingo, and between Achilles and Penthesilea in the drama of the latter name. These fundamental tensions between nature and culture, between individual and society, serve as a central axis for the greater part of Kleist’s literary oeuvre, and it is perhaps in this sense, above all, that Schroffenstein can be seen to point the way towards his later — and greater — dramatic achievements. On the one hand, his works dwell on the onslaught of fate that upsets the secure ideals of enlightenment rationalism; on the other, however, this aspect is only ever a corollary to a deeper sense of the cultural rift between subject and world, and the attendant instabilities of agency and identity. Behind this lies the experience of the French Revolution and the turmoil it left in its wake, as existing hierarchies of power and status collapsed, and Europe was plunged into a period of instability and conflict. Against this backdrop, Kleist, like so many of his Romantic contemporaries, critically explores the paradigms of eighteenth-century humanist discourse, taking up the tensions and paradoxes embedded therein and exhibiting them in the full light of his imagination. In particular, it is the complex relationship between nature and culture to which he time and again returns, with most of his texts turning upon an exploration of the psychological and moral conflicts between the individual and his or her environment. Frequently, such struggles escalate to a sudden unleashing of the self, to acts of violent rebellion or assimilation. It is this readiness to plumb the extreme depths of human psychology and conduct under conditions of stress that lends Kleist’s work its peculiar modernism, and which ensures that even now, some two hundred years on from his death, he retains the ability to excite, engage and trouble his readers. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 21, 2011

Steven Howe

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:39.751383

an-unlikely-lunch-when-maupassant-met-swinburne

An Unlikely Lunch When Maupassant met Swinburne By Julian Barnes January 24, 2012 Julian Barnes on when a young Guy de Maupassant was invited to lunch at the holiday cottage of Algernon Swinburne. A flayed human hand, pornography, the serving of monkey meat, and inordinate amounts of alcohol, all made for a truly strange Anglo-French encounter. In the first half of the 19th century, the British began to discover Normandy. Previously, the point of entry into France for most travellers had been Calais, which felt safely half-English, and where even the beggars importuned new arrivals in their own language. Those prepared to make the longer crossing to Dieppe were rewarded with a greater sense of strangeness: typified by the women in red-and-blue regional costume, clacking sabots and high white coifs that made them look like a cross between chefs and nuns. Hazlitt, passing through in 1824, noted that such headdresses were “much the same as those which the Spectator laughed out of countenance a hundred years ago in England”; and he concluded more generally that “In France one lives in the imagination of the past”. For the tourist, this meant antiquities and picturesque ruins within easy reach. The coastline was a further attraction: for those addicted to the new health-kick of sea-bathing, to the gentler pleasures of gambling (the casino at Dieppe opened in 1822), or to painting and sketching. Gradually, the journey from London became quicker — a combination of the London to Brighton railway and the new steam-packets brought the time down to a mere 11 hours by the 1840s. For centuries Dieppe’s main relationship with Britain had consisted of suffering occasional bombardment from the Royal Navy; now there were not just summer tourists, but year-round residents. There was even a quartier des Anglais (on the hill between the Paris road and the chateau), served by an Anglican chaplain and a British consul. And since the French more or less simultaneously decided to make Dieppe a sophisticated destination, the town flourished. British artists had started coming here as soon as the Napoleonic wars were over. John Sell Cotman delighted in the luminous quality of the Dieppe light (it is an unpatriotic truth that looking north from Dieppe is more visually complex than looking south from Brighton); Turner came several times in the 1820s; Richard Parkes Bonington in the 1830s. We tend to associate the Normandy coastline — Etretat, Pourville, Varengeville, Fécamp — with Monet and the impressionists; but (as with Cézanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire) previous generations of painters had preceded them. Boudin, who later taught Monet the principles, and the necessity, of pleinairisme, painted in Dieppe, as did Corot and Daubigny; while Delacroix came here in 1850 and 1852. His diary contains an unflattering depiction of the English colony, whose invitation he had accepted out of boredom. He went to the salon of a certain Mrs Sheppard, and the next day rebuked himself: “What a fool you are, getting a sore throat from talking to idiots, arguing with petticoated silliness for a whole evening, with everyone going on about God, and ‘the justice of the world’ and ‘good and evil’, and ‘progress’!” Now that the Channel tunnel has restored most traffic to the more northerly crossing, and the ferry service from Newhaven runs at unfriendly hours, Dieppe has sunk back into being largely French again. Serious war damage makes it harder to recreate in the mind the century — from 1815 to 1914 — during which the town became so fashionable. By the 1850s it had “the smartest and most popular plage in France”; the casino was rebuilt at regular intervals, each time more extravagantly; the British laid out what was only the fourth golf course in France, while the Paris crowd came down for steeplechasing at the new racetrack. The Prince of Wales kept a mistress and perhaps an illegitimate child in Dieppe; Lord Salisbury, while prime minister, built himself a chalet outside the town and maintained that, thanks to the telegraph station at Beachy Head, he was in better contact with London than if he had been on a Scottish grouse moor. Simona Pakenham, who chronicled Dieppe’s Anglo-French entente in 60 Miles from England (1967), commented tartly that “The English colony was generally indifferent to any form of culture”. But the French needed the arts as the British needed sports. So Liszt played at the Bains Chauds; Meyebeer came; Rossini composed an operetta for the theatre. By the end of the 19th century, the casino summer band was recognised as the best in the country, since it was filled by Parisian orchestral players on holiday. In 1907, one of its violists was promoted to conductor, and surprised everyone by directing all Beethoven’s symphonies from memory: this was Pierre Monteux, who six years later conducted the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Not all the British visitors were philistines. The town was Sickert’s second home for several decades; and the British feature strongly in the impressive (and highly cosmopolitan) list of belle époque visitors to the town. These include Monet, Pissarro, Whistler, Degas, Renoir, Beardsley, Conder, Fritz Thurlaw (the Norwegian painter), Henry Harland (the editor of The Yellow Book), William Rothenstein, Proust, Saint-Saens, Fauré, Debussy, Maeterlinck, Puvis de Chavannes, Percy Grainger, Adelina Patti, George and Gerald du Maurier, Ernest Dowson, George Moore, Max Beerbohm, Annie Besant, Marie Tempest, John Barrymore and Gladys Cooper. The night boat of May 20 1897 brought Oscar Wilde, freshly sprung from Reading jail and carrying the manuscript of De Profundis. It is a small but interesting footnote to the history of the Dieppe ferry terminal that the two most noteworthy events there both involved pseudonyms. In 1848 Louis-Philippe, the last king of France, heading for exile in England, was hustled aboard a packet of the General Steam and Navigational Company bearing a passport in the suspiciously ordinary name of William Smith. Half a century later, Wilde came ashore, cloaked in the look-at-me alias of Sebastian Melmoth. The British brought trade, money and work to Dieppe; they laid the railway, and built the town’s station with English bricks. Neither race was or is as hospitable as they like to imagine themselves, but a working cordiality existed between the French and the British. The portrait painter and socialite Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942) operated for many years as a one-man diplomatic service, summering in Dieppe and wintering in London: his studio, just beneath the walls of the castle, was used by Degas, Whistler, Sargent, Boldini, Sickert, Conder, Beardsley and Helleu. “My dear friend,” Henry James said to Blanche, “Your Dieppe is a reduced Florence, every type of character for a novelist seems to gather there” — not that the Great Dieppe Novel was ever written. Such Anglo-French conviviality was helped by a willingness to speak one another’s language. Sickert was regarded as “un vrai Dieppois”, even managing the local fisherfolk’s patois; Wilde and Dowson both spoke and wrote excellent French. So did an English poet whose passing residence along the coast in 1868 led to one of the stranger Anglo-French literary encounters, one that echoed on for decades, in France at least. It also encapsulated the way the French preferred to see the British — and perhaps still do. Etretat, some 50 miles west of Dieppe, has become a high point of pilgrimage for the artistic faithful, who gather above its white cliffs — especially the one that curves down into a great chalk flying-buttress — to compare eroded reality with visual memories of Monet’s pictures. By 1868 the impressionists had not yet arrived: Etretat was a fishing town that also attracted a certain number of tourists and summer residents. Among their number that year were the 18-year-old Guy de Maupassant and his mother (the family chateau of Miromesnil, where Guy had been born, was a few miles outside Dieppe). The water and its attendant pursuits — swimming, boating, rowing — were to become a thematic constant in Maupassant’s life and work; so it’s appropriate that the water was what provoked the encounter between this muscular, boastfully heterosexual French prose writer and a petite homosexual English poet: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne, then aged 31, was staying outside the town in a low thatched cottage belonging to his friend George Powell. The people of Etretat had Frenchly decided that Powell was a milord — even if one modestly concealing his real identity under his mother’s maiden name. (In fact, Powell was his real name, and he was uncoroneted. He was brought up on the family estate at Nanteos, near Aberystwyth, went to Eton and Oxford, and died at 40.) Maupassant later wrote that Powell’s “solitary and bizarre” way of life had astonished the local bourgeois and mariners who were “little used to British fantasies and eccentricities”; he himself was to be afforded a closer look at what such Britishness consisted of. One September morning, Swinburne went swimming from the beach at Etretat and got into difficulties. According to Powell, treacherous undercurrents had carried the poet out to sea “through a rocky archway” (that very cliff formation Monet later celebrated). Ten minutes later Powell heard shouts from the clifftop that a man was drowning. He ran to the water’s edge, and after a few minutes received the news that Swinburne had been safely picked up by a fishing smack heading for nearby Yport. The poet, writing to his mother (and doubtless downplaying the event), described “a real sea adventure” in which he had been swept two miles out: “Luckily I was all right but very tired, and the result was that I made immense friends with all the fishermen and sailors about — who are quite the nicest people I ever knew.” Maupassant, who was somewhere near the scene, claimed that the poet had been “dead drunk” (despite it being ten o’clock in the morning); also, that he himself had gone out in one of the rescue boats; alternatively, that he had at the very least waded into the water and got soaked to the waist. Whatever the specifics of the near-drowning and the rescue, Maupassant received an invitation to lunch the next day from the grateful Powell. According to Swinburne (again writing to his mother), the place where they lived was an idyllic retreat: “Powell has got the sweetest little farmhouse fitted up with music, books, drawings, etc . . . and of course he pokes me into the nicest room . . . There is a wild little garden all uphill, and avenues of trees about. The sea is splendid, and the cliffs very like the Isle of Wight — two arches of rock each side of the bay, and one needle only, exactly like half the Freshwater pair.” Maupassant described his visit to the cottage on three separate occasions: orally to Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt in February 1875, an account that Goncourt transcribed into his Journal; in a newspaper article of November 1882 for Le Gaulois (“L’Anglais d’Etretat”)1; and in his introduction to the French translation of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1891. Though the versions overlap and at times contradict one another, the main story line would have been enough to send the honest burghers of the Isle of Wight scaring up the libel lawyers. Maupassant noted “an inscription over the door which I didn’t read on that first occasion” — though if he had, he would have known more what to expect. There were pictures everywhere, some “splendid”, others more like “the imaginings of a lunatic”. Powell was short and fat, Swinburne short and thin, “with a pointed face, a hydrocephalous forehead, pigeon-chested, agitated by a trembling which affected his glass with St Vitus’ dance, and talking incessantly like a madman.” Here and there were laid out displays of bones; while a flayed human hand, supposedly that of a parricide, was the bohemian equivalent of a talking point. A large pet monkey was noisily present, being “titillated” by Powell, and trying to shove Maupassant’s head into his glass whenever he took a drink. Lunch included what the Frenchman assumed to be some kind of fish; though when he asked its name, his host “replied with a peculiar smile that it was meat, and I could not get any more out of him.” The fact that spirits rather than wine were served with lunch also struck the young Frenchman as peculiar — though perhaps was not all that surprising. Many of the British who were attracted to France at this time (not just artists and writers, but bankrupts, runaway fraudsters and bogus priests, mixed up with respectable folk seeking to make a pension stretch further than it did in England) were struck by the cheapness of French spirits — which also, of course, made them drunker quicker. After lunch the two Englishmen brought out some gigantic portfolios and showed young Guy — perhaps in a misguided attempt to groom him — pornographic photographs taken in Germany, all of male subjects. “I remember one of an English soldier masturbating on a pane of glass.” Powell was by this time very drunk, and kept sucking the fingers of the flayed hand (which was apparently used as a paperweight). A young servant came in, and the portfolio was swiftly closed. In these exotic and ghoulish surroundings, the conversation proceeded at the highest cultural level. Swinburne, who had published his first series of Poems and Ballads two years previously, and was already notorious in his own country, displayed “an immense fund of learning”. He translated some of his poems into French for Maupassant’s benefit, and enthused about Victor Hugo (whose entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica he was subsequently to write). Powell for his part had been to Iceland and brought back a store of old songs and legends which he had translated. The two men struck Maupassant as “singularly original, remarkable and bizarre”, a pair of hallucinatory visionaries in the tradition of Poe and ETA Hoffmann. “If genius,” he concluded, “is, as people say, a kind of delirium of the higher intelligence, then Algernon Charles Swinburne is assuredly a genius.” Maupassant accepted a second invitation to lunch a few days later. This passed more peacefully, since the intrusive monkey was now dead, hanged from a tree by the young servant. Powell had ordered a huge block of granite for its tomb. At the end of the meal the two visionaries gave the Frenchman some liquor which nearly knocked him out; taking fright, he fled back to his hotel. Even so, he made one last visit, in the course of which he drew attention to the inscription above their door. It read: Chaumière de Dolmancé (Dolmancé’s Cottage). Maupassant asked the Englishmen if they knew who Dolmancé was (the hero and homosexual corrupter of Sade’s La Philosophie dans le Boudoir). They said that indeed they did. “Then that is the sign of the house?” Maupassant asked. “If you like,” they replied, “with terrifying expressions on their faces.” The Frenchman again fled, avoiding Swinburne and Powell thereafter. The account in the Goncourt Journal, as translated and edited by Robert Baldick (OUP, 1962), breaks off at this point. Perhaps for reasons of space, but more likely for reasons of taste in that only just post-Chatterley era, the rest of the French text was excised. In it, Maupassant continued: Yes, they lived there together, satisfying themselves with monkeys or with young servant lads of fourteen or fifteen, sent out to Powell from England every three months or so: little servant boys of exquisite cleanness and freshness. The monkey that slept in Powell’s bed and shat in it every night was hanged by the servant boy, partly out of jealousy but also out of annoyance at having to change the sheets all the time. The house was full of strange noises and the shadows of sadism; one night, Powell was seen and heard firing a revolver in the garden at a black man. Those two were real Sadeian heroes, who wouldn’t have held back even from crime. Then this house, so full of living mystery, was suddenly silent, suddenly empty. Powell just disappeared, and no one knew how he had got away. No carriage was ever called for him, and no one had met him on the roads. This is a rather novelistic ending, perhaps unsurprising given that Maupassant had had seven years to work up the story, and that it was being both told, and written down, by a fiction writer. At other times he ended the story differently. The 1882 account concludes with Maupassant going back to the Sadeian cottage a couple of years later, discovering that its contents were being sold off, and buying, as a souvenir of the two Englishmen, the parricide’s flayed hand. The block of granite had by now been raised into the monkey’s sepulchre, and the incident with the revolver is given fuller explanation. It was the young servant who was black, and it was he who was being shot at by an enraged Powell for having hanged the monkey. “Afterwards, the lad wandered around for days without food or a roof over his head, and then reappeared and began to sell barley-sugar in the streets of Etretat. He was finally expelled from the district after having very nearly strangled a customer who complained about his goods.” Maupassant’s later versions also elaborate on the suspicious protein the Englishmen served. In his 1882 account, he strongly suspects that it might have been monkey, not least because it was said to be common knowledge in Etretat that “this Englishman [Powell] ate only monkey — boiled, roasted, sautéed, or in a confit”. By the time of the 1891 account, Maupassant claims he had knowingly eaten spit-roasted monkey — indeed, the joint had been ordered in his honour from a purveyor of exotic meats in Le Havre. However, “The mere smell of the dish as I entered the house made me feel queasy, and the dreadful taste of the animal permanently removed all subsequent desire ever again to repeat such a meal.” This gastronomic queasiness did not imply any broader moral or social revulsion; quite the contrary. Maupassant, doubtless hoping to provoke readers of Le Gaulois, concluded his 1882 account thus: “The world would be a lot jollier if one came across ménages like that one a little more often.” He certainly played up the theme of the innocent young Frenchman (even if one already alive to Sadeian reference) falling into a nest of genial English perverts intent on displaying national characteristics. Goncourt deliberately drew on Maupassant’s description of Swinburne and Powell when writing his novel La Faustin (1882), in which an 18th-century English sadist called George Selwyn not only displays many of Swinburne’s mannerisms, but also happens to retire to a cottage on the coast called Chaumière de Dolmancé. However, all of Maupassant’s versions, despite their dwelling on perversity, are underpinned by deep admiration for the duo: for their literary and artistic passion, their rejection of bourgeois living, their recklessness and bravado. The French have traditionally regarded biography as a rather low form, being either mere gossip, or at best a reductive process, one that tethers the work to the life, rather than recognising the extent to which the work flies free of it. The Anglo-Saxon tradition is more tethering and more moralising; the biographer’s overt or tacit intention too often being, as John Updike has put it, to “reduce celebrities to a set of antics and ailments to which we can feel superior”. Whereas it never occurred to Maupassant to feel superior, or think that Swinburne’s extravagant life in any way invalidated, diminished or necessarily coloured his work. This is partly a matter of Flaubertian aesthetics; partly the consequence of how the French saw, and to some extent still see, the British. They think of us as polite, unspontaneous beings trained to such control and self-control that sometimes the lid has to blow off, both in art and life. Hence our personal eccentricities and a line of artistic non-conformity. Contemporary British writers are still being fitted into this historic schema. I remember once trying to keep a straight face when a French journalist, seeking to place me in my proper English context, proposed that my key literary ancestors were Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll and Monty Python. Of course I enthusiastically agreed. Maupassant never doubted that Swinburne was a genius. “He is a poet of exalted and frenzied lyricism, who is not in the least interested in the humble, decent reality which contemporary French artists obstinately and patiently seek; rather he strives to depict dreams and subtle thoughts which are sometimes ingenious and grand, sometimes inflated, but even so magnificent.” And it was the same when other British writers and artists of the time came up for French description and judgment. The French expected them to behave in peculiar ways, but declined to allow amusement or shock at their habits to affect aesthetic judgment. Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote of Sickert living in Dieppe for “thirty years, married, divorced, remarried, widower, or about to remarry”, moving between smart society and the obscure lodgings he shared with a red-haired fishmongress, and doing crazy things such as cutting off his hair to surprise a small girl; and in all those 30 years nobody ever saw him paint. None of this stopped the French accepting him as a true Dieppois and a true artist: “He was to be the painter of Dieppe. No other artist so perfectly felt and expressed the character of the town, whose Canaletto he has become.” Degas’s judgment on Wilde, after the 28-year-old Oscar had visited the painter’s Paris studio, was: “He behaves as if he’s playing Lord Byron in some suburban theatre.” Goncourt called Wilde un puffiste (a braggart, a blagger), and thought even his homosexuality wasn’t particular to himself, but imitative, if not plagiaristic: he had copied it from Verlaine, and also from Swinburne. The diarist Jules Renard wrote cuttingly, “He has at least the originality of being an Englishman” — the French never quite got hold of Wilde’s Irish connection. But while they saw him as a false human being, they judged him a true poet. The British who disembarked at Dieppe the century before last were often surprised by the cheerful affability of the people they encountered. When Hazlitt was staying in Dieppe, “A man and woman came and sang ‘God Save the King’ before the windows of the Hotel, as if the French had so much loyalty at present that they can spare us some of it.” (Hazlitt correctly noted that a reciprocal gesture beneath the windows of a Brighton or Dover hotel would be highly improbable.) A year after the incident at Etretat, Swinburne returned to stay with Powell at the Chaumière de Dolmancé once again. In the town, he was “rather astounded at finding myself rushed at, seized by the arms and legs, hoisted and cheered, and carried all down the street with shouts of welcome, by the fisher folk and sailors who knew me again at once”. Powell said to him, “Why, don’t you know you’re their hero?” — a status Swinburne thought unmerited by the mere act of not quite drowning. The poet memorialised his time on the Normandy coast in two ways. For the rest of his life he kept the “outsize garments” (outsize because he was so tiny) in which the rescuing fishermen had dressed him. And in his 1883 collection, A Century of Roundels, he published a poem called “Past Days”: Above the sea and sea-washed town we dwelt,We twain together, two brief summers, freeFrom heed of hours as light as clouds that meltAbove the sea. The poem is partly a lament — for the dead Powell, and for passing time; also an idyll recreating “the days we had together” among “The Norman downs with bright grey waves for belt” and the “bright small seaward towns”. It is singularly lacking in references to monkey meat or Sadeian practices. Despite Swinburne’s considerable reputation in France, it seems that he and Maupassant never again met. What Maupassant, or his heirs, did with the flayed human hand is not recorded. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 24, 2012

Julian Barnes

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:40.237242

the-krakatoa-sunsets

The Krakatoa Sunsets By Richard Hamblyn May 28, 2012 When a volcano erupted on a small island in Indonesia in 1883, the evening skies of the world glowed for months with strange colours. Richard Hamblyn explores a little-known series of letters that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins sent in to the journal Nature describing the phenomenon - letters that would constitute the majority of the small handful of writings published while he was alive. During the winter of 1883 the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins descended into one of his periodic depressions, “a wretched state of weakness and weariness, I can’t tell why,” he wrote, “always drowsy and incapable of reading or thinking to any effect.” It was partly boredom: Hopkins was ungainfully employed at a Catholic boarding school in Lancashire, where much of his time was spent steering his pupils through their university entrance exams. The thought that he was wasting his time and talents weighed heavily upon him during the long, brooding walks he took through the “sweet landscape” of Ribblesdale, “thy lovely dale”, as he described it in one of the handful of poems he managed to compose that winter. He was about to turn forty and felt trapped. Such was his state of mind when the Krakatoa sunsets began. The tiny volcanic island of Krakatoa (located halfway between Java and Sumatra) had staged a spectacular eruption at the end of August 1883, jettisoning billions of tonnes of ash and debris deep into the earth’s upper atmosphere. Nearly 40,000 people had been killed by a series of mountainous waves thrown out by the force of the explosion: the Javan port of Anjer had been almost completely destroyed, along with more than a hundred coastal towns and villages. “All gone. Plenty lives lost”, as a telegram sent from Serang reported, and for weeks afterwards the bodies of the drowned continued to wash up along the shoreline. Meanwhile, the vast volcanic ash-cloud had spread into a semi-opaque band that threaded slowly westward around the equator, forming memorable sunsets and afterglows across the earth’s lower latitudes. A few weeks later, the stratospheric veil moved outwards from the tropics to the poles, and by late October 1883 most of the world, including Britain, was being subjected to lurid evening displays, caused by the scattering of incoming light by the meandering volcanic haze. Throughout November and December, the skies flared through virulent shades of green, blue, copper and magenta, “more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets,” wrote Hopkins; “the glow is intense; that is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire.” In common with most other observers at the time, Hopkins had no idea what was causing the phenomenon, but he grew fascinated by the daily atmospheric displays, tracking their changing appearances over the course of that unsettled winter. At the end of December he collated his observations into a remarkable 2,000-word document, which he sent to the leading science journal, Nature. The article, published in January 1884, was a masterpiece of reportage, a heightened prose poem that mixed rhapsodic literary experimentation with a high degree of meteorological rigour: Above the green in turn appeared a red glow, broader and burlier in make; it was softly brindled, and in the ribs or bars the colour was rosier, in the channels where the blue of the sky shone through it was a mallow colour. Above this was a vague lilac. The red was first noticed 45º above the horizon, and spokes or beams could be seen in it, compared by one beholder to a man’s open hand. By 4.45 the red had driven out the green, and, fusing with the remains of the orange, reached the horizon. By that time the east, which had a rose tinge, became of a duller red, compared to sand; according to my observation, the ground of the sky in the east was green or else tawny, and the crimson only in the clouds. A great sheet of heavy dark cloud, with a reefed or puckered make, drew off the west in the course of the pageant: the edge of this and the smaller pellets of cloud that filed across the bright field of the sundown caught a livid green. At 5 the red in the west was fainter, at 5.20 it became notably rosier and livelier; but it was never of a pure rose. A faint dusky blush was left as late as 5.30, or later. While these changes were going on in the sky, the landscape of Ribblesdale glowed with a frowning brown. (from G. M. Hopkins, “The Remarkable Sunsets”, Nature 29 (3 January 1884), pp. 222-23) Hopkins was a gifted empirical observer with a near-forensic interest in the search for written equivalents to the complexity of the natural world. Such interest in the language of precision was shared by many scientists at the time, science, like poetry, being an inherently descriptive enterprise. Anyone who reads the official Royal Society report on the Krakatoa sunsets (published in 1888) will find flights of poetic prose to rival those of Hopkins, who described such language as “the current language heightened and unlike itself,” a dynamic written form that was particularly suited to the expression of what he called “inscape”: the distinctive unity of all natural phenomena that gives everything in nature its characterising beauty and uniqueness. The force of being that holds these dynamic identities together he termed “instress”, instress being the essential energy that enables an observer to recognise the inscape of another being. These post-Romantic notions formed a kind of personal poetic creed, a logocentric natural theology that was rooted in the work of Duns Scotus, the medieval Christian philosopher. For Hopkins, inscape and instress lay at the heart of his religious and poetic practice, as well as being vital means of apprehending the natural world. In a journal entry for 22 April 1871, for instance, he records “such a lovely damasking in the sky as today I never felt before. The blue was charged with simple instress, the higher, zenith sky earnest and frowning, lower more light and sweet.” Note that he felt the damasking as well as saw it, and note, too, his calibrated descriptions of the banded blues of the sky, the higher “earnest and frowning”, the lower “more light and sweet.” His journals are full of such poetic quantifications, which he used as notes towards a quintet of articles that he published in the journal Nature, all on meteorological subjects. The first two, published in November 1882 and November 1883, were letters describing anti-crepuscular rays (cloud-shadows that appear in the evening sky opposite the sun), while the following three were all on the subject of the Krakatoa sunsets, which had evidently furnished the melancholy Hopkins with a much-needed source of distraction. He was not alone in his interest; all over the world, writers, artists and scientists responded to the drama of the volcanic skies. The poets Algernon Swinburne, Robert Bridges and Alfred Tennyson (then poet laureate), wrote lengthy descriptive strophes prompted by the unearthly twilights, although, as the historian Richard Altick pointed out, “the only good poetry that resulted from the celestial displays is found in Hopkins’ prose” (Richard D. Altick, “Four Victorian Poets and an Exploding Island”, Victorian Studies 3 (March 1960), p. 258). This is a fair assessment, though I do have a sneaking fondness for Tennyson’s blank-verse approximation of the cadences of Victorian popular science: Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peakBeen hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe?For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve . . . The wrathful sunset glared . . . (“St. Telemachus”, pub. 1892) Visual artists also found themselves extending their colour ranges in awed emulation of the skies. Painter William Ascroft spent many evenings making pastel sky-sketches from the banks of the Thames at Chelsea, noting his frustration that he “could only secure in a kind of chromatic shorthand the heart of the effect, as so much of the beauty of afterglow consisted in concentration.” He exhibited more than five hundred of these highly-coloured pastels in the galleries of the Science Museum, in the repository of which they remain to this day, little known and rarely seen. In Oslo, by contrast, the sunsets helped inspire one of the world’s best-known paintings: Edvard Munch was walking with some friends one evening as the sun descended through the haze: “it was as if a flaming sword of blood slashed open the vault of heaven,” he recalled; “the atmosphere turned to blood — with glaring tongues of fire — the hills became deep blue — the fjord shaded into cold blue — among the yellow and red colours — that garish blood-red — on the road — and the railing — my companions’ faces became yellow-white — I felt something like a great scream — and truly I heard a great scream.” His painting The Scream (1893), of which he made several versions, is an enduring (and much stolen) expressionist masterpiece, a vision of human desolation writhing beneath an apocalyptic sky, as “a great unending scream pierces through nature.” As it happens, the final eruption of Krakatoa on 27 August 1883 was the loudest sound ever recorded, travelling almost 5,000 km, and heard over nearly a tenth of the earth’s surface: a great scream indeed. As for Hopkins, the publication of his Krakatoa essay coincided with the welcome offer of a professorship in classics at University College Dublin. He left Lancashire for Ireland in February 1884, relieved to have made his escape. It didn’t last. Homesick, lonely and overworked, Hopkins succumbed to his worst depression yet, his misery traced in the so-called “terrible” sonnets of 1885 (“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”). He died of typhoid fever in June 1889 (aged 44), and was buried in an unmarked grave. Only his close friend Robert Bridges was aware of his greatness as a poet, and the bulk of his work remained unpublished until 1918. In fact, apart from a handful of minor poems that had appeared in obscure periodicals, the five Nature articles were the only works that Hopkins published in his lifetime. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 28, 2012

Richard Hamblyn

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:40.706542

painting-the-new-world

Painting the New World By Benjamin Breen April 24, 2012 In 1585 the Englishman John White, governor of one of the very first North American colonies, made a series of exquisite watercolour sketches of the native Algonkin people alongside whom the settlers would try to live. Benjamin Breen explores the significance of the sketches and their link to the mystery of what became known as the "Lost Colony". As lucklesse to many, as sinister to myselfe. Such was the Elizabethan colonist John White's gloomy assessment of his tenure as the first governor of Britain’s fledgling colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. As White lived out his final days on an Irish plantation in 1593, he struggled to come to terms with his ambivalent legacy in the “Newfound Worlde.” Just eight years earlier, White had set out for North America as part of an expedition led by a fiery-tempered courtier named Sir Richard Grenville. This voyage was not without its challenges – White recalled laconically that in a battle with Spanish mariners he was “wounded twise in the head, once with a sword, and another time with a pike, and hurt also in the side of the buttoke with a shot.” Yet in this time White also witnessed natural marvels, helped build a new colony, and even celebrated the birth of his now-famous granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first child of English/Christian parentage to be born on American soil. Ultimately, however, White’s ambitions ended in catastrophe, with the mysterious disappearance of the ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children who comprised the Roanoke colony – a group that included his daughter and granddaughter. In the centuries since White’s death, his story has diverged in an interesting way. Generations of schoolchildren raised in the United States can probably recall reading about the “Lost Colony” at Roanoke in textbooks. In these simplified accounts, White and his fellow colonists typically figure as doomed but visionary pioneers in a larger narrative of British-American exceptionalism. Among professional historians, White is equally famous, but for rather different reasons. In recent histories of colonial British America, it is John White the artist, rather than John White the colonial governor, who takes center stage. This is because White was a watercolor painter of extraordinary talent whose works number among the most remarkable depictions of early modern indigenous Americans ever created. To be sure, many other European contemporaries of White offered up visual depictions of native Americans. Readers of André Thevet’s early account of Brazil Les singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1557), for instance, could expect to be treated to renderings of Tupí Indians harvesting fruit, singing songs (complete with musical notation recorded by Thevet) and even munching casually on barbequed human thighs and buttocks. Yet White’s illustrations stood out among those of his peers. Rather than working via woodblock printing or engraving, White produced paintings in vivid watercolors. This allowed him to achieve a level of lifelike detail which printed illustrations couldn’t hope to match. One of the most striking examples of White’s eye for detail is found in his tender depiction of an Algonquian Indian mother with her daughter. In 1585, one of White’s companions in Virginia, a natural philosopher and inventor named Thomas Hariot, remarked that the indigenous children he encountered in America “greatlye delighted with puppets and babes which are broughte oute of England.” White’s painting actually offers a direct visual proof of this observation: in the hands of the woman’s child, one can spot a tiny female doll wearing Elizabethan dress. As the historian Joyce Chaplin notes in her book Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003), this image was later recreated by the Dutch printmaker Theodore de Bry, who used White’s watercolors to create engravings for Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). De Bry’s depiction shows the Indian girl holding not only “an English doll in Elizabethan clothing,” but “an armillary sphere,” which served as “an instructional and decorative representation of the globe and heavens” (Chaplin 36). White also had a remarkable ability for “zooming out” from a scene to create an imagined isometric perspective. His painting of an Algonquian village stands out as one of the most detailed depictions of indigenous American village life to survive from the sixteenth century. As the detail of the dancing circle in the lower right of this image suggests, White seems to have had a particular interest in Algonquian religious ceremonies. Another painting by White along similar lines gives a precious glimpse of pre-contact American Indian religious practice and daily life: What, then, was White’s final legacy? In a narrative first printed in Richard Hakluyt's Voyages, White described his return to Virginia in 1590 in search of the colonists he had left at Roanoke (he had returned to England three years earlier in efforts to obtain “supplies, and other necessities”). His account evokes the haunted landscape of a ghost story, and its eerie details have made it part of American folklore ever since. On the 17th of August, White recalled, three ships under his command reached Roanoke, where they “found no man, nor signe of any that had been there lately.” The next evening, one of White's sailors spied “a fire through the woods” and the men “sounded a Trumpet, but no answer could we heare.” The light of the next daybreak revealed that this was “nothing but the grasse, and some rotten trees burning.” Finally, however, White found evidence of the colonists’ wherabouts. In a tree, he discovered “three faire Roman Letters carved C. R. O.”: this was a pre-arranged maker which White understood “to signifie the place where I should find them”: Croatan. White's suspicion was confirmed with the discovery of a scene that is now almost mythical: We found no signe of distresse; then we went to a place where they were left in sundry houses, but we found them all taken downe, and the place strongly inclosed with a high Palizado [i.e. a palisade of wooden stakes], very Fortlike; and in one of the chiefe Posts carved in fayre capitall Letters C R O A T A N, without any signe of distresse, and many barres of Iron . . . and such like heavie things throwne here and there, overgrowne with grass and weeds . . . Interestingly, White’s account here connects his two identities as governor and painter. He remarks that his men “found diverse Chests which had been hidden and digged up againe” surrounding the palisade. Among these chests, White was surprised to find objects which he knew “to be my owne”: “books” and “pictures” he had created in the years before, now “scattered up and downe . . . [and] spoyled.” In the end, White was unable to follow up on these strange clues: storms forced the expedition’s ships to turn back before reaching Croatan, and he returned to Britain with the mystery unresolved. The ultimate fate of the Roanoke colonists continues to be debated. Some have conjectured that White’s fellow colonists may have opted to join a local Algonquian Indian tribe and adapt themselves to the very different (and rather more effective) Amerindian methods of contending with the harsh American landscape. It is unlikely that we’ll ever know what happened – but if White’s daughter and granddaughter really did become incorporated into an Indian tribe, it would have made a strange sort of sense. Few sixteenth century Europeans looked upon indigenous Americans with anything other than a jaundiced and prejudiced eye. Yet White’s sensitive and humane portrayals of daily life among the Algonquians tell a different story, and suggest that his own stance toward the native peoples he encountered in the New World was rather more complex. In White’s sensitive depiction of the Algonquian woman and her child holding a European doll, perhaps we can discern a foreshadowing of the hybrid Euro-American fate of his own daughter and grandchild. The intertwined tales of the failed colony White governed, the family he raised, and the artworks he created offer one of the earliest examples of the mingling of cultures that would define the history of the Americas in the centuries to come. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 24, 2012

enjamin Breen

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:41.243094

the-assassination-of-the-prime-minister-spencer-perceval

The Assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval By David C. Hanrahan May 8, 2012 Only once has a British Prime Minister been assassinated. Two hundred years ago, on the 11th May 1812, John Bellingham shot dead the Rt. Hon. Spencer Perceval as he entered the House of Commons. David C. Hanrahan tells the story. On Monday 11 May, 1812, an unremarkable, anonymous man, just over forty years of age, made his way to the Houses of Parliament. The man had become a frequent visitor there over the previous few weeks, sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons and carefully examining the various members of the government through his opera glasses. At 5.00 p.m. on this particular day he walked into the lobby that led to the House of Commons and sat near the fireplace. No-one could have known that he was carrying, concealed on his person, two loaded pistols. As it was a fine evening Mr. Spencer Perceval, the Tory First Lord of the Treasury, or Prime Minister, had decided to dispense with his carriage and walk from No. 10, Downing Street, to the Houses of Parliament. He arrived there around 5.15pm, entered the building and walked down the corridor towards the lobby entrance to the House of Commons. He handed his coat to the officer positioned outside the doors to the lobby. As Mr. Perceval entered the lobby a number of people were gathered around in conversation as was the usual practice. Most turned to look at him as he came through the doorway. No-one noticed as the quiet man stood up from beside the fire place, removing a pistol from his inner pocket as he did so. Neither did anyone notice as the man walked calmly towards the Prime Minister. When he was close enough, without saying a word, the man fired his pistol directly at Mr. Perceval’s chest. The Prime Minister staggered forward before falling to the ground, calling out as he did so words that witnesses later recalled in different ways as: “I am murdered!” or ‘Murder, Murder’ or ‘Oh God!’ or ‘Oh my God!’ Amid the confusion, a number of people raised Mr. Perceval from the ground and carried him into the nearby Speaker’s apartments. They placed him in a sitting position on a table, supporting him on either side. Most ominously, the Prime Minister had not uttered a single word since falling on the floor of the lobby, and the only noises to have emanated from him since had been a few pathetic sobs. After a short time Mr. Smith MP, on failing to find any perceptible sign of a pulse, announced his terrible conclusion to the group of stunned onlookers that the Prime Minister was dead. Before long Mr. William Lynn, a surgeon situated at No. 15 Great George Street, arrived on the scene and confirmed that Mr. Smith was indeed correct. The surgeon noted the blood all over the deceased Prime Minister’s coat and white waistcoat. His examination of the body revealed a wound on the left side of the chest over the fourth rib. It was obvious that a rather large pistol ball had entered there. Mr. Lynn probed an instrument into the wound and found that it went downwards and inwards towards the heart. The wound was more than three inches deep. The Prime Minister, who was not yet fifty years of age, left behind a widow, Jane, and twelve children. In the shock of what had happened, the assassin was almost forgotten. The man had not attempted to escape as he might well have done amid the confusion. Instead, he had returned quietly to his seat beside the fireplace. The identity of the man was revealed as John Bellingham, not a violent radical but a businessman from Liverpool. The details of his story soon began to emerge. As a result of a dispute with some Russian Businessmen, Bellingham had been imprisoned in Russia in 1804 accused of owing a debt. He had been held in various prisons there for the next 5 years. Throughout all of this time he had pleaded with the British authorities for assistance in fighting his cause for justice. He believed that they had not given his case sufficient attention. Bellingham was finally released from gaol and returned to England in 1809 a very bitter man. He felt deep resentment against the British authorities and immediately set about seeking financial compensation from them for his suffering and loss of business. Once again, however, Bellingham felt that he was being ignored. He petitioned the Foreign Secretary, the Treasury, the Privy Council, the Prime Minister, even the Prince Regent, but all to no avail. No one was willing to hear his case for compensation. Finally, he came to the insane decision that the only way for him to get a hearing in court was to shoot the Prime Minister. On the Friday following the assassination of the Prime Minister, John Bellingham did indeed get his day in court, but only to answer a charge of murder. His trial took place in a packed court room at the Old Bailey, presided over by Sir James Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. The tall, thin Bellingham came before the court wearing dark nankeen trousers, a yellow waistcoat with black stripes and a brown greatcoat. The members of his defence team first attempted to get the trial postponed on the grounds that they had not been given sufficient time to prepare for the case. Mr. Peter Alley, Bellingham’s chief counsel, told the court that he had only been given the case the day before and that he had never even met Mr. Bellingham until that very day. He asserted that given adequate time, in particular to find medical experts and witnesses in Liverpool who knew Mr. Bellingham personally, he was confident he could prove his client to be insane. The Attorney General, Sir Vicary Gibbs, on behalf of the prosecution, argued vehemently against any such postponement. Ultimately Mr. Allen’s request was unsuccessful and the trial proceeded. The Attorney General set about dismantling the reason Bellingham had given as justification for his heinous act by arguing that the Government had been aware of what had happened to him in Russia, had examined his claims and had rejected them. He also rejected any notion that Bellingham was insane. He said that Bellingham had been well able to conduct his business and had been trusted by other to conduct theirs without any hint of insanity on his behalf. When his time came to speak, Bellingham continued to base his defence upon what had happened to him in Russia: his unjust arrest for a debt he did not owe and the failure of the British Government to assist at that time and since. Before outlining the details of his experience in Russia, he stated that he was pleased the judge had not accepted his counsel’s arguments alleging his insanity. He made it clear that although he believed what he had done to be necessary and justified, he bore Mr. Perceval or his family no personal malice: Gentlemen, as to the lamentable catastrophe for which I am now on my trial before this court, if I am the man that I am supposed to be, to go and deliberately shoot Mr. Perceval without malice, I should consider myself a monster, and not fit to live in this world or the next. The learned Attorney General has candidly stated to you, that till this fatal time of this catastrophe, which I heartily regret, no man more so, not even one of the family of Mr. Perceval, I had no personal or premeditated malice towards that gentleman; the unfortunate lot had fallen upon him as the leading member of that administration which had repeatedly refused me any reparation for the unparalleled injuries I had sustained in Russia for eight years with the cognizance and sanction of the minister of the country at the court of St. Petersburg. Bellingham was clear about where he felt the blame lay for Spencer Perceval’s death: A refusal of justice was the sole cause of this fatal catastrophe; his Majesty’s ministers have now to reflect upon their conduct for what has happened. . . . Mr. Perceval has unfortunately fallen the victim of my desperate resolution. No man, I am sure, laments the calamitous event more than I do. In the end, of course, his arguments for justification had no influence upon a judge and jury shocked by his horrific murder of the Prime Minister. The Lord Chief Justice even became openly emotional and began to cry at one point during his statement to the jury: Gentlemen of the jury, you are now to try an indictment which charges the prisoner at the bar with the wilful murder . . . of Mr. Spencer Perceval, . . . who was murdered with a pistol loaded with a bullet; . . . a man so dear, and so revered as that of Mr. Spencer Perceval, I find it difficult to suppress my feelings. He dismissed any idea that Bellingham might have been insane at the time of committing the crime: . . . there was no proof adduced to show that his understanding was so deranged, as not to enable him to know that murder was a crime. On the contrary, the testimony adduced in his defence, has most distinctly proved, from a description of his general demeanour, that he was in every respect a full and competent judge of all his actions. In such circumstances it is no surprise that John Bellingham was found guilty of Spencer Perceval’s murder by a jury that took only fourteen minutes to reach a verdict. On the following Monday he was executed and his body sent for dissection to St. Bartholomew’s hospital. He is remembered in history as the only assassin ever of a British Prime Minister. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 8, 2012

David C. Hanrahan

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:41.736914

the-memoirs-of-joseph-grimaldi

The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi By Andrew McConnell Stott November 14, 2011 Andrew McConnell Stott, author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, introduces the life and memoirs of the most famous and celebrated of English clowns. Few biographers have proved so reluctant, but when the raw materials that would become The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi reached Charles Dickens’ desk in the autumn of 1837, he was far from impressed. “I have thought the matter over, and looked it over, too,” he told his publisher, Richard Bentley, “it is very badly done, and so redolent of twaddle that I fear I cannot take it up on any conditions.” What he saw had begun life as a sprawling manuscript of some 400 “childlike and simple” pages written by the pantomime clown, Joseph Grimaldi, in the course of his long retirement from the stage. When a publisher proved hard to find, Grimaldi contracted with a theatrical journalist, Thomas Egerton Wilks to help him revise the entire manuscript, but died before it was completed. Wilks sold the unfinished project on to Bentley, who considered Dickens perfect for the job — not only had he idolized Grimaldi as a child, fondly recalling trips to Covent Garden “to behold the splendour of Christmas Pantomimes and the humour of Joe,” but his own Sketches By Boz (1836) had been widely commended for displaying “the spirit of Grimaldi.” Having finally relented, Dickens saw it off in a matter of weeks, subjecting it to “a double and most comprehensive process of abridgement,” resetting the narrative from the first person to the third, and not even bothering to write it down, preferring to dictate it to his father, who could be found “in exulted enjoyment of the office of amanuensis.” Despite all its evident haste, The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi remains unmistakably “Dickensian,” recalling passages from Nicholas Nickleby, Hard Times and others. Without doubt, his most important decision was to place the biographical details of Grimaldi’s life within a strict economy of pleasure and pain that draws stark contrasts between the tinsel of the stage and the shabby reality of his many hardships. Laughter and misery becomes the balance-beam on which Grimaldi’s existence is constantly weighed as every career triumph is paid for with a proportionate personal agony, and every moment of joy countered by grief. In presenting Grimaldi’s life in this way, Dickens was cementing much of what was popularly perceived during Grimaldi’s own lifetime. Born into a theatrical family in 1778, “Joe” was a superstar of Regency theatre who rose to national prominence in 1806 playing Clown in the pantomime of Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg. His unique comic gifts had been honed since making his first appearance onstage at the age of two, tutored by his father, Giuseppe, a cruel and eccentric dancing master known throughout London’s close-knit theatrical community as the “Signor.” The Signor had fathered several children by different women — most of them young dancers indentured as his apprentices — but as his first boy, it was Joe on whom his future hopes were settled. The Signor’s methods of instruction were gruelling, as were the regular beatings and medieval punishments he inflicted on those that failed to meet his expectations, which included locking children into stocks, or throwing them into a cage and hoisting it into the flytower to leave them dangling precariously over the stage. Home life was little better, as the Signor was horribly morbid, living in perpetual fear of death, and especially of being buried alive. When he finally died in 1788, his will directed that his eldest daughter cut his head from his corpse just to be certain. The Signor’s passing was a liberation, yet at age nine, Joe was suddenly the family’s principal breadwinner, and he spent the remainder of his childhood running between performances at Sadler’s Wells and Drury Lane theatres and appearing as a supernumerary in various pageants, spectacles, and crowd scenes, only graduating to pantomimes in his twenties. Regency pantomimes were markedly different from the entertainments that we know today, and were comprised of an opening that was usually based on a fairy tale, and a second, much longer performance, called the “harlequinade.” The openings usually involved a pair of star-crossed lovers forbidden to marry by a tyrannical parent, miming the action in their “big heads” — huge, caricatured papier mache masks — until they were magically transformed into the lead characters of the harlequinade, four figures instantly recognizable to every man woman and child in Regency Britain — the mercurial, acrobatic Harlequin; his gauzy, dove-like lover Columbine; and their enemies the elderly “libidinous, miserly Dotard,” Pantaloon, and his titular manservant, the “incorrigible emblem of gross sensuality,” Clown. What followed was a series of frenetic scenes in which Harlequin and Columbine were pursued through a series of lavish sets that could be magically transformed with a whack from Harlequin’s magic bat, which, primed with a pinch of gunpowder, was the original “slapstick.” The humour was crude and physical, but with its emphasis on transformation and the unexpected, it was the perfect entertainment for the age of revolutions. Aside from his comic talents and fine singing voice, Grimaldi was an innovator, widely acknowledged as the father of modern “slap and motley.” It was Grimaldi who overhauled the Clown’s appearance from the rustic booby that had remained more-or-less unaltered since the sixteenth century, to the heavily made-up and colourfully-attired clowns that we are familiar with today. The new make-up left not a centimetre of skin exposed — not even in the nostrils or inside of the lips — and, as such, it implied a much stricter division between the man and the mask, an impenetrability that acted as a kind of invitation to speculate about what they might have concealed. Was there, perhaps, a division in Grimaldi himself? Rumours to this effect arose during the initial success of Mother Goose: the King of Clowns, it was reported, was subject to debilitating bouts of offstage depression, reports he himself chose to confirm with a punning quip, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night.” A series of anecdotes followed that prefigured Dickens’ biographical portrait in black-and-white, the most famous of which dates from the 1820s and involves a visit to the surgeon, John Abertheny. Grimaldi, hoping to find a cure for his depression, asks Abertheny for advice, and unaware of his client’s identity, the surgeon prescribes the diversions of “relaxation and amusement”: “But where shall I find what you require?” said the patient. “In genial companionship,” was the reply; “perhaps sometimes at the theatre; — go and see Grimaldi.” “Alas!” replied the patient, “that is of no avail to me; I am Grimaldi.” Clowning also made extraordinary physical demands, and as early as 1813, The Times was already expressing misgivings about the sustainability of his performances: “It is absolutely surprising,” it wrote, “that any human head or hide can resist the rough trials which he volunteers. Serious tumbles from serious heights, innumerable kicks, and incessant beatings, come on him as matters of common occurrence, and leave him every night fresh and free for the next night’s flagellation.” Sure enough, Joe’s health worsened with each passing season until reaching a point where he had to be carried to his dressing room and revived after each performance. Laughter demands an exorbitant prince. “Poor Joe!” wrote the author William Robson, “it was like the boys and frogs; it was sport to us, but death to you.” Grimaldi was 45 when he gave his last regular performance. This was young — his father had continued well into his seventies — but by 1823, he was suffering so badly from arthritis and various digestive complaints that it was impossible to continue. He would reappear two years later at a pair of gala performances to celebrate his career, but made his contributions seated in a chair. With the retirement of its greatest exponent, pantomime quickly entered a period of decline, as the slapstick antics of the harlequinade were replaced with bloated stage effects and meaningless scenery. As Grimaldi approached the end of his life, his battered old body became a symbol for the exhaustion of Regency popular culture, and by extension, the lost youth of Dickens’ generation. Dickens had already conveyed as much in “The Stroller’s Tale,” one of the first instalments of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1835). Here, “Dismal Jemmy,” himself a down-at-heel actor, recalls the time he comes across a fellow performer, a “enfeebled by dissipation and emaciated by disease.” It is night and the theatre is dark. “I was dressed to leave the house,” Jemmy recalls, and was crossing the stage on my way out, when he tapped me on the shoulder. Never shall I forget the repulsive sight that met my eye when I turned round. He was dressed for the pantomime, in all the absurdity a clown’s costume. The spectral figures in the Dance of Death, the most frightful shapes that the ablest painter ever portrayed on canvas, never presented an appearance half so ghastly. His bloated body and shrunken legs — their deformity enhanced a hundred fold by the fantastic dress — the glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which the face was besmeared: the grotesquely-ornamented head, trembling with paralysis, and the long skinny hands, rubbed with white chalk — all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance of which no description could convey an adequate idea, and which, to this day, I shudder to think of. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 14, 2011

Andrew McConnell Stott

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:42.256769

remembering-scott

Remembering Scott By Max Jones March 29, 2012 A century on from his dramatic death on the way back from the South Pole, the memory of the explorer Captain Scott and his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition is stronger than ever. Max Jones explores the role that the iconic visual record has played in keeping the legend alive. Why are some historical figures remembered, while others are forgotten? Major-General Henry Havelock was the toast of the nation in 1857. One of the British heroes of the ‘Indian Mutiny’, Havelock died after the relief of the city of Lucknow. Such was the fame of the devout Christian soldier, parliament approved the erection of his statue in Trafalgar Square, which still stands today. A decade ago, however, Mayor Ken Livingstone complained that most Londoners had no idea who Havelock was. The memory of Captain Scott, who died in Antarctica one hundred years ago, has fared much better than Havelock’s. The centenary of Scott’s last expedition has generated a wave of books, events, radio broadcasts and television documentaries over the last two years, including BBC 2’s The Secrets of Scott’s Hut fronted by modern celebrity-explorer Ben Fogle, a major new exhibition at the Natural History Museum, and a national memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Scott’s exploits in the uninhabited continent of Antarctica are free of the troubling associations which surround many other imperial heroes. Should the statue of a man known primarily for subjugating India still stand in the centre of a city where over one in ten of the inhabitants have roots in South Asia? As with so many aspects of our imperial past, Britons have found it easier to ignore and forget rather than confront such difficult questions. In part, of course, Scott is remembered today because his last expedition is such a great story: the drama of the race with Norwegian Roald Amundsen; the heart-breaking arrival at the South Pole a month too late; the agonising suspense of the return march; the tragic end only 11 miles from a supply depot which would have saved them. Yet a great story alone offers no guarantee of remembrance. Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition and his incredible boat journey to South Georgia were surprisingly neglected in Britain until the end of the 1990s. Elsewhere1, I have emphasised the significance of Scott’s own words to his continued remembrance. The ‘Message to the Public’ Scott wrote at the back of his journal remains one of the ultimate expressions of bravery in the face of death. Scott’s journals are on permanent display as one of the ‘Treasures of the British Library’. The centenary celebrations would have been far less extensive if a search party had not found the journals in November 1912. But visual iconography has also proved essential to sustaining Scott’s story. His decision-making has been widely criticised, most savagely in Roland Huntford’s classic debunking biography Scott and Amundsen (London, 1979). Scott deserves great credit, though, for his appointment of Herbert Ponting as the expedition’s self-styled ‘camera artist’. Ponting’s early life remains obscure, but we know he abandoned his family to pursue a full-time career in photography. He later observed that he wouldn’t even recognise his own son if he walked past him on the street. Ponting exposed around 25,000 feet of film and 2,000 photographic negatives in the Antarctic. Rarely, if ever, has an expedition been documented so thoroughly and so beautifully. Publishers and film-makers today can be confident of the availability of rich visual resources for any new Scott project, with striking photographs of the central characters, wild life and Antarctic environment. Ponting frequently juxtaposed awe-inspiring natural features with tiny human figures, presenting the Antarctic as a medieval fortress besieged by brave polar knights. In 1914, Ponting mounted a hugely successful series of illustrated lectures about the expedition at the Philharmonic Hall, performing in front of 100,000 people in only two months. The lectures proved so successful, King George V invited him to give a special performance at Buckingham Palace. Ponting had the misfortune, however, of purchasing the complete rights to the expedition’s film record from the Gaumont Company just before the outbreak of the First World War. Ponting would spend much of the next two decades attempting to exploit his Antarctic work, but never matched the success of the Philharmonic Hall lectures. Although his work continues to shape visual representations of Antarctica, Ponting did not take the most famous photograph of Scott’s last expedition. The explorers themselves exposed ten plates at the South Pole. In one they appear to slouch around Amundsen’s tent like rock stars on an album cover. Henry Bowers pulled the cord which took the most iconic image of the Antarctic disaster. This photograph remains the most frequently reproduced: five grim faces marked by hardships endured and the certain knowledge of hardships to come, the forlorn union jack a reminder of their defeat. The survival of this remarkable photograph helps explain the enduring appeal of Scott’s story. In 2000 Hello Magazine published two special editions celebrating ‘The 20th Century in Pictures’, ‘An Heirloom to Treasure’. Scott, Bowers, Evans, Oates and Wilson stared out from the front cover. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 29, 2012

Max Jones

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:42.729603

the-unsinkable-myth

The Unsinkable Myth By Richard Howells April 11, 2012 This week sees the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, one of the deadliest peacetime disasters at sea. Richard Howells, author of The Myth of the Titanic, explores the various legends surrounding the world's most famous ship. There can be no one, surely, reading this article who has not already heard of the Titanic. And there can be no one among them, equally certainly, who does not already know how the story of the Titanic ends. This is, when we think about it, really quite remarkable. There is no one alive today who actually remembers the Titanic: all the survivors are dead. For the rest of us, there is very little possibility that the disaster has directly affected us, personally or historically. And yet . . . as we mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking on April 15th 1912, the world is full of it. We hear the repeated exhortation: “remember the Titanic” even though not one of us literally can. And yet . . . ask people and they will tell you not just about the iceberg, but probably also about the lifeboats, “women and children first”, and the band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the ship finally sank with the loss of some 1,500 lives. The captain, of course, went down with his ship. But most of all they will tell you about the “unsinkable ship”, the biggest and finest ever built, the last word in luxury that sank, seemingly inevitably, on its first and only voyage. They said that “God himself could not sink this ship”, but on “her” maiden voyage “she” was duly ripped asunder. There are two remarkable things about this. First that a 100 year old story continues to be told and re-told. Second that many of the component stories are simply not true. And fore-most amongst these is the big one: that prior to its departure from Southampton, the Titanic was feted by all as the “unsinkable ship”. It wasn’t. So how do we explain all this? The answer is that 100 years on, the sinking of the Titanic has long-since passed from history and into myth. In the common parlance, a myth is a falsehood –or at very least an enduring popular misconception. But intellectually, a myth is much more complex and revelatory than that. A myth is more accurately a story (or an amalgam of stories) that may (or may not) be historically true but which contains a series of cultural truths embedded in narrative form. In this way it may (like a fable or a parable) not be “true” in the literal sense, but we can still say “there is a lot of truth in that story.” More than that, the content of the story tends both to flatter the teller and –crucially- to serve to make sense of a seemingly random universe. This is precisely the case with the Titanic. When we study myths from an anthropological perspective and proceed to turn that scholarly gaze upon ourselves, we can see our changing and different selves reflected therein. Myths are not limited to distant, past, exotic or “primitive” peoples, and the Titanic is just such an evolving, modern myth that we continue to tell about ourselves. It is also a migratory narrative that is re-articulated in an expanding variety of media forms from print to postcards, books, music, television, merchandising and computer games. No medium, however, exemplifies this better than the feature film. Films of the Titanic typically make great claims for their accuracy but in reality part very quickly from the historical record. The infamous “Nazi” Titanic film of 1943, for example, had the audacity to invent and place a German officer on board, who proceeded to give dire warnings to the British crew about the reckless inefficiency of it all. Inevitably, it was he who spotted the iceberg first and lived to give damning evidence at the official inquiry –but not before he had gallantly rescued a small child from her watery bed. Hollywood’s first “Titanic” feature (1953) showcased an entirely fictitious American family in pursuit of solid, mid-Western values, while Britain’s “A Night to Remember” (1958) is about class as much as it is about seamanship. Lew Grade’s “Raise the Titanic” (1980) is a totally fanciful Cold War parable; James Cameron’s multi-award winning “Titanic” of 1997, on the other hand, made great claims for its historical authenticity but centred upon a totally invented core of characters –none of whom (it must be repeated) ever existed. We are left, however, with the warm glow of personal fulfilment, cross-class possibilities, the pleasure of being poor and –most of all- true love beyond price. And if, finally, we cross into television, Julian Fellowes’ 100th anniversary “Titanic” mini-series is a well-shaken cocktail of actual and imaginary characters who interact as if nothing impossible were in fact taking place. The resulting concoction, of course, bears the distinct flavour of Britain not in 1912 but in 2012. When we study popular cultural representations of the Titanic in whatever medium in close-up, we see the values of the culture, era, and society that made them in vivid reflection. A study of the Titanic in British popular culture from 1912 to the start of the First World War, for example, reveals distinctly late-Edwardian understandings of race, religion, class and gender, crowned by the captain’s much celebrated (but historically unverified) last order to his crew: “Be British!” These historical snapshots are of immense value to the cultural sociologist, while to the semiotician they demonstrate once again the inherently flexible relationship between the signifier and the signified: The Titanic sinks consistently in the popular imagination, but the values that go down with it remain many and varied according to the particular perspectives of the tellers of the tale in both time and space. Individual examples are individually revealing, but structural anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss remind us that in order to get a make a thorough analysis of a myth we need to understand it as a composite of all its component versions. So, in addition to the particular and ‘local’ variations we need to stand back and take stock of the overwhelming, universal themes. Consistent among all versions of the myth of the Titanic is the notion of the vessel as the “unsinkable” ship which sank on “her” maiden voyage. No version of the myth is complete without this fundamental ingredient, and it is an ingredient which will be more than familiar to students of classical mythology as a reworking of the Hellenic themes of Hubris and Nemesis. In Greek mythology, Hubris is pride –usually that of man over-reaching himself in the face of the Gods. This is especially the case when man seeks to overcome nature which is the Gods’ rightful domain. So, we see the mortal Prometheus stealing the secret of fire from Zeus, and Icarus escaping the bonds of earth by flying with wings of wax. Inevitably and swiftly, Hubris results, for the Gods are vengeful. Prometheus has his liver pecked out by an eagle on a daily basis, while Icarus flies too near the sun: his wings melt and he falls to his death in the sea. We can imagine, then, the mythic consequences of building a ship which “God himself” could not sink. Naming it “Titanic” was only adding to the Hubris, and so the “ill-fated” liner duly finds its Nemesis at the hands of on iceberg on its first and only voyage. The reported size and luxury of the ship only adds to the moral power and significance of the tale. But here is the vital point that is missed in pretty well every re-telling of the myth of the Titanic: nobody really called the Titanic “unsinkable” until after the ship had sunk. The Titanic’s alleged unsinkability was essentially a post-hoc, popular cultural invention to provide a moral –a meaning- to a terrible but ultimately random event. In this way, the historical Titanic became mythical within days of its sinking. The facts, even to this day, play second fiddle to the culturally preferred version. To substantiate this point, we must remember that the Titanic was in fact the second of three almost identical “sister” ships constructed by the White Star Line. The eldest was the Olympic, which preceded the Titanic into service on just the same route and with precisely the same safety features as her second-string sister. But the Olympic did not sink, and so was never dubbed “unsinkable.” The Titanic, on the other hand, went down and so the myth got to work, offering an “explanation” for the disaster –and explanation that would have made perfect sense to our Classical and cultural forebears. One hundred years on, therefore, our continued fascination with the Titanic reminds us that myth –unlike the actual Titanic –is alive and well today. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 11, 2012

Richard Howells

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:43.205605

the-mysteries-of-nature-and-art

The Mysteries of Nature and Art By Julie Gardham November 28, 2011 Julie Gardham, Senior Assistant Librarian at University of Glasgow's Special Collections Department, takes a look at the book that was said to have spurred a young Isaac Newton onto the scientific path, The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate. Courteous reader, this ensuing treatise hath lien by mee a long time, penned, but in a confused and undigested manner, as I gathered it, practised, or found it out by industry and experience. So begins the preface to The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate, one of the most charming of seventeenth-century illustrated technical compendiums. Describing mechanical contrivances that are a mix of the useful and bizarre, this work tackles the subjects of water works, fire works, drawing and painting, and miscellaneous experiments — the last of which Bate terms ‘extravagants’ because they are ‘confusedly intermixed’. Technical manuals were produced prolifically in the seventeenth century, reflecting progress in technological growth. This was a time of fundamental transition, with a spirit of initiative and invention that resulted in significant advances in science. Innovations and developments in areas such as mechanics, astronomy and chemistry were to pave the way for the industrial revolution. Dissemination of new ideas via printed treatises was crucial to the efforts of inventors and technicians. Bate’s work is resolutely practical in nature. Originally printed in 1634, according to the title-page its ‘treatises’ were ‘partly collected, and partly of the authors peculiar practice and invention’; as stated in the preface, Bate wrote it based on ‘industry and experience’. A small, economical and easily portable book, it was popular enough to warrant the publication of an expanded second edition only a year after the first. A further augmented edition was produced in 1654. While containing more illustrations, this last edition is poorly printed and is not nearly so attractive as its predecessors. The first section on water-works describes various ingenious machines that convey and force water. There is, for example, an engine ‘to force water up to a high place’; this pump, we are informed, is ‘very usefull for to quench fire amongst buildings’. Other devices include weather glasses, water clocks, fountains, siphons, pumps, waterwheels, and watermills. Of the various water clocks described, my favourite has to be the one which utilizes a rather jolly grinning skeleton who marks the hours from a moving platform, reminding us all of our eventual doom. Bate was evidently always on the look out for new ideas. The expanded second edition of his book contains many additions to the water-works section, including the description of the model of a water mill that he copied after seeing it at London bridge in 1633. He explains that it utilizes the ebb and flow of the River Thames, thereby conveying the water ‘above two miles in compasse, for the use and service of that city’ and praises it as ‘seeming very good’. These waterworks were well known; they were only demolished when London bridge was rebuilt in 1822. But while many of Bate’s examples are undoubtedly practical, there are also several rather more outlandish machines designed solely for ‘recreation and delight’. Thus, we find ‘experiments’ for ‘producing sounds by ayre and water’. These rather delightful devices include one ‘whereby severall voyces of birds cherping may be heard’ and another ‘whereby the figure of a man standing on a basis shall be made to sound a trumpet’. A further elaborate machine is a depiction of Hercules ‘shooting at a dragon, who as soon as he hath shot, hisseth at him’. Many of these were designed expressly to decorate and enhance gardens, perhaps demonstrating that an obsession for complicated water features is not as modern a phenomenon as we think. The second part treats of fireworks ‘for tryumph and recreation’. Its title-page is illustrated with a woodcut depicting a ‘green man’ wielding a fire club. With obscure and mythical origins, green men dressed in foliage and garlands traditionally led processions of fireworkers from medieval times. The customary greeting amongst the firework fraternity is still ‘stay green’. Originally developed in China, fireworks have been used to mark celebrations and spectacles for hundreds of years. Bate begins with an introduction to the basic principles of the nature of elements and instructions in choosing ingredients, such as saltpetre, brimstone, coals and gunpowder. Detailed directions and guidance on the composition of various kinds of fireworks follow. It is surprising to see how many devices still in use today were familiar to Bate, including crackers, rockets and ‘fire wheels’. Some, however, can only be described as ambitious; even Bate admits that his flying dragon is ‘somewhat troublesome to compose’. Bate next discusses art. He covers drawing in general, as well as techniques for ‘washing’ maps and other pictures with water colour, limning, painting in oil, painting on glass, and engraving. There is much interesting advice on choosing the correct equipment, with recipes for mixing and creating colours. Several pages are devoted to wood engraving; in the second edition, Bate comments that engraving is ‘farre more tedious and difficult than the working in brasse’. The artist who actually produced the woodcuts for the Mysteries — which add so much to the book’s charm, no matter how troublesome the job — is not named. The final part of Bate’s work is a miscellany of recipes and ‘secrets’, both technical and medical. These ‘extravagants’ incorporate ‘severall Experiments, as well serviceable as delightfull’. A mixture of odd information is found here. There are several methods of catching fish, including a technique for burning a light under water so that apparently ‘all the fishes neere unto it will resort about it, as amazed at so glorious a sight, and so you may take them with a cast net or other’. Bizarre ways of catching birds are also given, amongst them one ‘to make birds drunk, so that you may take them with your hands’. Additionally, there is instruction in how to melt metal, how to make ice that will melt in fire but not dissolve in water, how to make cement and marble, and how to make invisible ink. Finally, there are some recipes for treating a wide range of ailments, from balms for sciatica and ointments for burns and toothaches, to medicine for ‘the biting of a mad dogge’. It is reassuring to note that Bate endorses his treatment ‘for to heale a red face that hath many pimples’ as being ‘proved’. Frustratingly, nothing is known about the author of this highly entertaining compendium. His portrait (which appears only in the second edition) is supplied, but he offers no biographical information about himself. The three editions I have had the pleasure of examining all come from the collection of John Ferguson, who was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow from 1874 to 1915. He tartly remarks that this portrait ‘represents Bate, who, doubtless, was a decent law-abiding citizen, as a person for whom no villainy would be too great to perpetrate’. Predominantly a collector of alchemical works, Ferguson was also very interested in books relating to the history of inventions and ‘books of secrets’. Such texts are not studied as part of the modern science curriculum, but Professor Ferguson staunchly defended his belief in their importance, explaining that ‘the history of practical invention and of technical progress is one which might well engage the attention of students of anthropology and antiquities, as it throws light on many points connected with the growth of social life and civilization’. He also succinctly defines the arcane terminology for such works as books of ‘secrets’, saying: ‘the arts must be acquired by practice, and they are extended and improved by practice. Every one who exercises them comes to have special power and certain ways of doing things, which may enable him to surpass others who are similarly engaged. These are his “secrets”, which very often he cannot, or will not, reveal to others’. While some of the knowledge imparted in Bate’s Mysteries may seem to us crude, if not downright eccentric, it is important to remember that manuals such as these did play an important role in the dissemination of scientific information. Ferguson actually recommends this text as a ‘book of genuine receipts’, its contents being ‘quite sensible and practical’. He praises Bate for describing apparatus that he had actually tried and found would work — unlike some of his contemporaries ‘who often gathered nothing else but mere nonsense’. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 28, 2011

Julie Gardham

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:43.704456

almost-as-good-as-presley-caruso-the-pop-idol

Almost as Good as Presley Caruso the Pop Idol By John Potter February 13, 2012 When he died in 1921 the singer Enrico Caruso left behind him approximately 290 commercially released recordings, and a significant mark upon on the opera world including more than 800 appearances at the New York Met. John Potter, singer and author of Tenor: History of a Voice, explores Caruso's popular appeal and how he straddled the divide between 'pop' and 'classical'. ‘. . . Then someone sat me down last night and I heard Caruso sing / He’s almost as good as Presley . . .’Ben Watt (Everything But The Girl), from ‘The Night I heard Caruso Sing’, Idlewild. Every generation seems to reinvent the tenor as something closer to a pop star than an opera star. The Three Tenors were among the late 20th century’s great musical marketing successes, and the brightest star that they acknowledged in the tenor firmament was cinema heart throb Mario Lanza. Lanza himself claimed Enrico Caruso as his greatest influence and famously played him on screen, reminding a wider audience that there was nothing incompatible with classical tenors and genuine popularity, whatever they were singing. Although many fine divas stamped their mark on early recording, it was the tenor voice of Caruso which was the defining voice of the early twentieth century. His reputation was due to the fact that people could not only hear him in their own homes, but that his success could actually be measured in record sales; he was the first global superstar of the gramophone era. Such celebrity wasn’t new in what we think of as classical music, however, it was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for opera singers (such as Adelina Patti or Giuditta Pasta) to meet with the kind of reception we associate with pop stars. The fact is, there was no equivalent of today’s mass popular music — and nothing like today’s classical (in the sense of unpopular) either. Popular entertainment took a huge variety of forms from conjuring to celebrity whistling but singing was in the end just singing, and the best singers were opera singers largely because they had the best tunes. They all shared a basic level of vocality: even a vaudeville personality had to have voice enough to carry right to the back of a theatre: crooning and the intimate nuances enabled by the microphone were still in the future when Caruso died in 1921. Three years earlier he was at the height of his fame. His many triumphs in 1918 included a Carnegie Hall debut (at one of several hugely successful find raising galas) and recording the patriotic song ‘Over There’ which would become the best selling recording by an opera singer for generations to come, putting him alongside Al Jolson as one of the century’s most successful recording artists to date. ‘Over There’ was certainly not an opera aria, and although Caruso was practically resident at the Metropolitan Opera for seventeen years his best selling records were actually lighter music such as Neapolitan songs and ‘Italian airs’. It was his voice that his public wanted, and they’d buy into whatever he chose to record. That same year Al Jolson did a recital of his own songs with the 50 strong Boston Symphony Orchestra, having a month or two earlier followed Caruso on stage at a marathon concert in New York sponsored by the Army Tank Corps Welfare League in aid of returning soldiers. It was the first time Jolson uttered his famous catch phrase ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’, a response to Caruso’s rousing performance of Italian war songs culminating in a rendering of ‘Over There’ which had brought the house down. The two singers, both European émigrés who had conquered America, were then probably the most successful singers on earth. Although Jolson the entertainer and Caruso the opera singer inhabited different musical worlds, there were clearly circumstances where their respective arts could appeal to similar audiences and even happen at the same venue. Both singers’ biographers tend to be rather reticent on the connections between these two great stars, but we know that they appreciated each other’s place in the scheme of things, and even each other’s singing. After their performances for the Tank Corps, Caruso invited Jolson back to his hotel room, and is said to have suggested they sing together at the Met. He may have been joking of course, and Jolson knew he wasn’t himself an opera singer, but the fact that he could make himself heard over a 50 piece orchestra shows that Jolson would have had no problem with the vast acoustic space of the world’s most famous opera theatre. Jolson and Caruso duetting on the opera stage is not as improbable as it might seem (had they been able to agree on what to sing): two months later the erstwhile vaudeville artiste Rosa Ponselle made her Met debut opposite Caruso himself in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. Vaudeville singers at the Met? Caruso able to duet with someone who called himself a jazz singer? How could such things possibly happen? Before amplification divided singers into those who were proper singers and those who might not be, all singers had to make themselves heard at the back of the hall, whether they were opera singers, vaudeville entertainers or blues shouters. That’s why so many ‘popular’ singers recording at the beginning of the 20th century sound so stilted and stylised — to project their voices a long way they had to sing with their larynxes lower than in normal speech. That maximised their acoustic efficiency and as a by-product gave them the richer sound that we now associate with classical singers. If they were singing in English it also generated the deeper vowels associated with Received Pronunciation (the non-regional accent sometimes called BBC English). Caruso and Jolson, faced with having to fill a vaudeville theatre or an opera house with sound, inevitably adopted a similar technique: there was no other way to sing in large theatres or halls, so they had much more in common vocally than, say, Placido Domingo and Sting. Many people would have bought both singers’ records and may not have been very conscious of the different genres that they were later seen to represent. The idea of music being categorised as ‘popular’ or ‘classical’ would have meant very little to the man on the famous Clapham omnibus. Caruso didn’t see a big difference between a Puccini aria and a Neapolitan folk song — they were both ‘popular’ and likely to appear beside each other in recital programmes. Verdi and Puccini knew, as composers for generations before them had known, that the secret of a successful opera was to hit the punters with a stand-alone stonking good tune every now and again, a format which supported a huge sheet music industry and the burgeoning record business. For every person who heard an opera at the Met or Covent Garden, there was a potentially infinite number of record buyers or people who would sing the arias round the piano at home, alongside the ‘popular’ songs of entertainers such as Al Jolson. Jolson was aware that opera was of sufficiently high status to make it worth satirising, as in his hilarious (at the time) Pagliacci sketch. He knows exactly how opera singing works (he was the son of a cantor, who hoped for greater things from his absurdly ambitious offspring) but he surely understood that he could really only play one role: that of Al Jolson. Caruso was a huge success in many (carefully chosen) roles but his more serious repertoire didn’t give him many opportunities to shine simply as an entertainer. But that didn’t stop him equalling Jolson in popularity. It wasn’t just patriotic songs and Italian lollipops: the big tunes that came out of the realistic plots and less cluttered singing of verismo opera were enormously successful too. In the first quarter of the 20th century (roughly between the first recordings and the first radio broadcasts) the worlds of what we now think of as the classical and popular were still tantalisingly close, with the difference between singers of the calibre of Caruso and Jolson often just one of repertoire and a certain sort of public engagement. As the century progressed they would become increasingly polarised: composers, divorced from private patronage but often indirectly supported by the state, could indulge in the luxury of writing music that very few people wanted to hear, while the microphone rendered over-blown natural vocal projection unnecessary for those excited by the possibilities of a more subtle vocal delivery. Opera singers retained their stylised vocality with its inevitable loudness, growing in status but contracting in reach with each generation. The mass audience that had been there for Rossini and Verdi preferred the immediate emotional hit provided by crooners, a direct mouth-to-ear experience which they could enjoy with friends at home rather than brave the stratified world of the opera house; ‘classical’ came to mean the opposite of ‘popular’. Caruso would know nothing of this: he would continue to sing from beyond the grave, but increasingly on the wrong side of the growing divisions between the two genres. The 21st century is beginning to see (and hear) things differently, though, and many of us now take a broader view of Caruso’s art and achievement. ‘Over There’ has even been plundered for a TV commercial (which I’m sure Caruso would have enjoyed), but Ben Watt comparing the great tenor with Elvis Presley is a sign of more enlightened times. The digital age gives us unfettered access to the whole of music, unfiltered by snobbery and tradition, and perhaps Caruso can be released from the stale old classical ghetto: in his time he was indeed as good as Elvis. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 13, 2012

John Potter

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:44.139763

on-benjamins-public-oeuvre

On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre) By Anca Pusca October 31, 2011 On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin took his own life in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects on the relevance of Benjamin's oeuvre in a digital age, and the implications of his work becoming freely available online. Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish intellectual of kaleidoscopic abilities and interests — literary critic, philosopher, translator, essayist, radio presenter — has always fascinated academics and intellectuals. His dense academic prose, his unique reading of Marxism, his fascination with Jewish mysticism, but more importantly, his ability to capture some of the major transformations of the early 19th century Europe in a series of literal and temporal frames that distilled the very material which gave it consistency — iron, concrete, shopping arcades, new technologies such as photography and film, ideological propaganda — into words, earned Benjamin a cult-like following which continues today. Artists, philosophers, theorists from every discipline, continue to offer different readings and meanings to his work, which remains strikingly relevant to social and political transformations today. If Benjamin’s public is mainly of an academic nature today, that was certainly not the case at the time of his writing. With his habilitation rejected by the University of Frankfurt, Benjamin was forced to survive outside of academia, and hence to write accordingly: most of his work appears in fragments — essays, short stories, journal entries, letters, newspaper and journal articles, radio broadcasts — which mainly appeared in the public domain through his journalistic and radio work, with the exception of a few pieces intended for publication by the Institute for Social Research led by Horkheimer and Adorno. This significantly affected not only his writing style — making most of it much more accessible to a larger public — but also his thoughts on the role of language and text. The fragmentary nature of his work, initially a result of financial and practical constraints, later became a trademark of Benjamin’s methodology, particularly obvious in his unfinished magnus opus, the Arcades Project. Conceived as a catalogue of thoughts and images on 19th century Paris as the emblematic modern city, the Arcades Project brings incredible innovation not only stylistically — through the fragmentary nature of the text, which could be read and accessed in non-linear fashion — but also intellectually, by breaking the traditional frame of text which rests upon a necessary temporal and linguistic progression, and effectively establishing a new architecture which relies less on words and more on the images and material that those words conjure. Benjamin effectively reconstructs different Parisian frames, capturing them not unlike a photographer captures a scene. Each of these frames, as fragments of text, contains its own temporality, existing both in relation to but also independent from the others. By embedding the relevance of each frame into a temporality that emerges directly from the material it depicts — for example, by depicting the old Parisian arcades in ruin as a new type of architecture emerges — Benjamin creates a unique dialectic in which the present can never exist as independent from either the past or the future. The return of Benjamin’s work back to its original wider audience, the public domain, at this particular point in time, creates a series of new possibilities that Benjamin himself could not have envisioned. Internet technology and the ability to collect, categorize and re-arrange Benjamin’s fragments in an electronic publication form could perhaps provide Benjamin with a post-humos solution to his struggle to organize the Arcades Project in a manner that would both appease publishers and maintain its innovative framework. One can already imagine the possibilities of a new interactive electronic Arcades Project in which Benjamin’s fragments could easily be navigated through the click of a button, the text appearing as a digital image, a material fragment much closer to Benjamin’s original intentionality. Benjamin’s obsession with sorting, filing, keeping tabs on his work, making copies of manuscripts to leave with different friends, carrying a copy of the unfinished manuscript of the Arcades Project with him to his death, as he attempted to escape Nazi-occupied France, shows his determination to protect his work, his hope for eventual publication for future audiences. This is an incredible opportunity to pay Benjamin the ultimate compliment, by finding and bringing together all the fragments of his work, many of which still lie undiscovered and untranslated, and bringing them together into the public domain, free from the constraints of the publishers on which Benjamin depended so desperately during his life. The publication of his writings on technology, online, particularly his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility’, but also his other writings on media, could not be more appropriate and relevant at this particular point in time. His essay on the ‘Work of Art’ has been used by many of today’s artists and theorists to understand the impact of digital technologies, as a form of reproductive technology, on art, culture and political mobilization. His arguments about the prioritization of the act of seeing, the increased speed through which information/the image in processed when reproduced by mechanical means, but also, the extent to which the technically reproduceable image is now completely removed from the actuality, and intentionality of the scene where it was initially created, remain strangely relevant today. The inability of perception to detect ‘authenticity’ — to connect the image with the original setting in which it was taken — had, according to Benjamin, important repercussions for how mass culture was re-imagined and potentially manipulated by different ideologies. Through technology, the image no longer stayed in the domain of ‘art’, but rather moved into the domain of ‘politics’. If film, the cutting edge technology at the time, served according to Benjamin: ‘to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily’, one can easily apply a similar logic to different internet technologies today. Benjamin was however both admirative and weary of the technology of film, for the so-called ‘film capital’ could be used both in the interest of and against the masses. As we are increasingly learning today, same goes for ‘internet and social media capital.’ So many of Benjamin’s writings continue to carry important implications for the wider public today. It is perhaps high time that we remove the ‘aura’ around Benjamin’s figure — an aura built around limited accessibility to and tight control of his work — and return Benjamin and his oeuvre to his public. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 31, 2011

Anca Pusca

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:44.802336

what-makes-franz-liszt-still-important

What Makes Franz Liszt Still Important? By Leon Botstein October 17, 2011 This week sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt. Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, explores what we can still learn from the life and music of Liszt. Marking anniversaries of the birth and death of historic figures, particularly in music, is somewhat akin to commemorating annually the date of death of family members. It is never quite clear whether we are struggling to remember those to whom we were once close as we pursue our lives without them, all in an effort to assuage the guilt that comes with the natural tendency to forget, or whether we are indulging in a form of nostalgia, shaped in part by using the selective memory of the past to make claims about what our present and future lives ought to be but have seemingly little chance of becoming. And as we commemorate we rarely penetrate beneath the surface of received opinion, revising a set of inherited judgments. In our concert life these anniversaries become easy excuses to justify a comfortable and unexamined account of what history has bequeathed as “great” music. Marking the 100th or 200th anniversary rarely leads to a change in the concert repertory. We belabor the obvious. One might consider the Gustav Mahler centenary in 1960 as an exception since it took place at the beginning of a Mahler revival. But the two-year extended Mahler remembrances that are justified by the 100th anniversary of his death (2011) and the 150th of his birth (2010) have functioned to ossify a sentimental historical portrait and further enshrine the central place Mahler’s music has in the orchestral repertory. The case of Franz Liszt, who was born in 1811 and died in 1886, is more complex. Celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth ought to have been an opportunity to revisit a figure who helped define Romanticism, the role of the piano on the stage and in the home, and, most importantly, how music functions for most of the literate public. Yet our attention to him remains largely muted and ambivalent. Only a few of his works are still in the standard orchestral repertory — the piano concertos and one tone poem Les Preludes. Pianists bring out a few select works in recital, mostly to display the virtuosity they demand. This is in stark contrast to Chopin, his contemporary, whom Liszt championed. The choral and organ music are never performed. If one compares this to Liszt’s output, not only for the piano, (which is gargantuan in scope), one cannot help but be struck by the obscurity that most of his music has fallen into. The last effort in a major city to revive Liszt’s music took place in New York in the 1970s under the leadership of Pierre Boulez. If we choose to remember Liszt more than in passing, it is as the legendary and charismatic personality he was, with all its complexities — his notorious love life, his turn to religion, his relationship with Richard Wagner and Wagner’s second wife, Liszt’s daughter Cosima. There never has been a better subject in music history for a Hollywood movie. He was classical music’s most successful, colorful, and long-lived superstar; he acquired and retained more groupies than any one before or since. We may also choose to recall that he was likely the greatest and most facile pianist that ever lived and perhaps the most influential teacher of the instrument. Liszt’s pupils and their pupils dominated the musical landscape for generations. He defined the personality of the concert pianist, even though, ironically, Liszt gave up concertizing relatively early in his career. Perhaps we also acknowledge Liszt’s uncommon generosity to and support for his contemporary composers, from Chopin and Wagner to Grieg and Saint-Saëns, as well as his influence on a younger generation, including Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Jean Sibelius. As the bicentenary comes to a close without much ado, what have we missed? What indeed might we still learn and profit from taking a deeper and more comprehensive look at Liszt and his career? First, Liszt ought to remind us that our approach to music should not be dependent on some construct of nationality that helps prop up the popularity of a composer. Reputations in classical music after Beethoven seem increasingly dependent on nationalist enthusiasms. We seek Hungarians to perform Bartók, Russians Tchaikovsky, the English Elgar, the French Debussy, and Americans Copland and Ives. Liszt defies this easy categorization. He was at one and the same time crucial to what we now regard as quintessentially Hungarian, German, and French. His reach as an artist and composer transcended national categories and reminds us of the limitations of nationalist appropriations and stereotypes. Second, Liszt’s art bridged all genres. At the heart of his music for the piano was improvisation, an art sadly lost in what we now term classical music. Few, if any classical musicians can do it. Notation in his piano music sought to mirror an art that was spontaneous and tied to a moment of performance. His elaborations and fantasies for the piano based on the operatic works of others suggest many ways of freely adapting and altering music we like and wish to remember. The same can said for his transcriptions of works by Bach and Beethoven, where music written for one medium is translated into another. Liszt’s piano versions of the Beethoven symphonies (Beethoven was a composer Liszt venerated and spent a lifetime advocating) were particular favorites of that brilliant eccentric, Glenn Gould. We musicians would be well served by following Liszt’s example by liberating ourselves from some delusive ideology of faithfulness to historic texts, adapting old and new music into the framework of our own new music, and altering it to reach a generation of listeners accustomed to new sounds and a novel acoustic environment. Liszt did that using the piano, and by so doing he helped create an enthusiastic audience of spectators. Third, Liszt pioneered in rendering music an art form connected to literature, painting, and narration. His notion that instrumental music can and should evoke character, landscape, plot, emotion, and ideas (for example in his tone poem Die Ideale, based on Schiller) laid the groundwork for what we now take for granted as the musical semantics and rhetoric we encounter in music for film and television. The magic in Liszt was that just music alone sufficed to spur the audience’s imagination. Playing Liszt and listening to his work reminds us of the power of music to tell and augment a story and evoke and embellish a memory. This is particularly the case with respect to the connection between spirituality and religion and music, as Liszt’s late orchestral work From the Cradle to the Grave and his massive oratorio Christus make clear. Fourth, Liszt was a tireless innovator, never content to repeat himself. Without Liszt’s experiments in the uses of harmony and sonority and the shape of musical form (for example, the stress on single melodies and motives and therefore imaginative repetition in works of considerable duration) much of late Romanticism and Modernism, particularly that associated with Wagner, would be unthinkable. He harbored few prejudices and was, to the end of his days, receptive to the work of younger composers and enthusiastic about new ideas — as his generous treatment of Russian composers amply suggests. We live in too segmented an environment, where the classical and the popular are still segregated, except for occasional all too facile efforts at so-called crossover works and events. Originality was just one of the goals Liszt pursued. He borrowed happily from others and sought to integrate diverse influences into a synthetic and syncretic expressive musical art form. That expansive tendency helped lend him early on in his career as a composer the ill deserved reputation of being all too facile and superficial. Fifth, consistent with his adherence to improvisation and transcription, he defined interpretation as a creative act, even when performing a Beethoven sonata, as close to a “sacred” text as exists in the 19th-century piano literature. He added and subtracted, inserted transitions, and refashioned the meaning of historic masterpieces. Perhaps the best known is his adaptation of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy into a work for piano and orchestra. A more protean, gifted, generous, and versatile figure in music’s history can hardly be imagined, one who sought to keep the past alive and to link tradition with the contemporary. From Liszt we can learn that mere imitation and endless repetition of the same will not do and will condemn an art form to a form of living death. Virtuoso par excellence that he was, he despised mere athleticism in music — the single-minded obsession with speed, accuracy, circuslike tricks, and above all, arbitrary affectation in the rendering of music, attributes that have come to define our contemporary concert life. He demanded that performance and composition be kept together and define the performing musician. And yet he reveled in the theater of performance, with lightness and irony. However, in order to gain the full measure of Liszt’s achievement and to benefit from his example far more of his music needs to be heard on the concert stage. Two great symphonic works, the Dante and Faust symphonies—although they have made periodic comebacks—need to be a regular part of the repertory. The same applies to the many orchestral tone poems, from Orpheus to Tasso. And the great choral music (the Missa solennis and the 13th Psalm, for example) should return to active life and take their place alongside the Mozart Requiem and Handel’s Messiah. Last but not least, there is the endless treasure trove of piano music well beyond the Transcendental Etudes. Liszt was the first composer-performer to find ways, as a pianist and conductor, to reach a wide public, to make music accessible and enjoyable to more than a self-styled elite of connoisseurs. He did so by connecting music to the public’s wider interests, in poetry and prose, in politics, in history, and in art and religion. He wrote on music, including a biography of Chopin. He ran a court theater in Weimar where he gave the first performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Schumann’s Genoveva. He laid the foundations of Hungary’s modern musical life by founding Budapest’s conservatory. He used his fame and artistry on behalf of political and humanitarian causes. What we can and must learn from Liszt is precisely what it means to be a musician, and to be, as a musician, at the center of a community’s political and cultural life, and to do so fearlessly, courageously, and generously. He set an example of what it requires to be, truly, a citizen of the world as a composer and performer, as one who broke rules and conventions to chart new paths. That was the message contained in Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 centenary appreciation of Liszt. The very same exhortation needs repeating a century later. The difference is that in 1911 Liszt the composer had become largely derided. Today he is no longer controversial, just neglected. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 17, 2011

Leon Botstein

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:45.129231

moonblight-and-six-feet-of-romance-dan-carter-beards-foray-into-fiction

Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance Dan Carter Beard’s Foray into Fiction By Abigail Walthausen June 11, 2014 An esoteric disease which reveals things in their true light; three pairs of disembodied feet galavanting about the countryside - Abigail Walthausen explores the brief but strange literary career of Daniel Carter Beard, illustrator for Mark Twain and a founding father of the Boy Scouts of America. Although Daniel Carter Beard is best known as one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, he was also a well-known illustrator and a literary man. The latter is evident in a definite flair for titling apparent at all points in his career, from the alliterative titles of his illustrated woodcrafts manuals (among them Shelters Shacks and Shanties, Bugs Butterflies and Beetles, and Signs, Symbols and Signals) to his ominous autobiographical Hardly a Man is Now Alive. But the most memorable monikers amongst his books come from a pair of novellas that he wrote early in his career and promptly tried to forget: Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance. These novellas, published in 1892, were written during a period in Beard’s life when he was enduring backlash for the illustrations he had done for Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He was blacklisted by magazines and publishers alike not just because of his association with the controversial anti-church, anti-industrialist, anti-imperialist content of Twain’s work, but because in many instances Beard’s illustrations for the novel were more inflammatory than the text itself. Although Twain was pleased with Beard’s work, saying, “Dan Beard is the only man who can correctly illustrate my writings for he not only illustrates the text, but he also illustrates my thoughts,” the illustrations often diverged from the story’s literal plot and sometimes even from its explicit message. In several of his most notable revisions, Beard inserted the faces of contemporary figures into his work. As a great follower of Henry George’s politics, Beard also worked in a number of illustrations that use Georgist language to promote the “single tax” theory. In both cases, Beard was working to ensure that Twain’s anachronisms would be read as explicit critiques of 19th century society, a mission he would continue in his work on Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance. In Moonblight, a labor movement novel, Beard develops the politics that he began in his Yankee illustrations. The story’s nameless protagonist is an owner of a mining company who discovers a medieval manuscript while staying the night at a tavern in the room of a stranger. The book details the condition of “moonblight,” an esoteric disease which allows people to “see things as they really are.” After said fascination has set in, crews of coal miners with blackened faces become antebellum slaves before our protagonist’s eyes. When he attends a meeting of mine-owners he sees that their faces take on the likenesses of a fox, a wolf, and a rattlesnake. Later, “when a question of agreeing upon a form of lease that would evade the eviction laws for the protection of the miners was broached,” the narrator becomes disgusted and sees “not an assemblage of gentlemen, but a lot of parasitic insects, covering the body of a miner, and sucking his blood.” But all lessons do not come from his altered vision;, mentors are just as important in demonstrating not just social injustice and treachery, but the explicit doctrine of Henry George. Sam, a barkeeper, insists that all landless men like himself are slaves, and that the solution to this problem for each man alike is to “Jes charge him fer der rent of der land he uses.” Professor Follium, a geologist, dilates on the rights of man to land ownership as he explains: A baby is born. It has ears: that means it was intended to hear. It has a mouth to receive nourishment: that means that nourishment is provided for it. It has neither wings nor fins, but feet: that means that it must walk, and is a land animal, and must have land to walk on. All these things will teach you that it has an inherent right to light, air, water, and food; to procure the latter it has hands to transform the products of the earth to a suitable form by labor. I have already said that Nature has provided untold wealth for the babe, yet we will not allow it to use its hands, unless it does so for us. Despite incredible similarities in the way that Beard illustrated A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Moonblight, his writing inverts a number of paradigms and motifs from Yankee. In case readers were not entirely sure that Twain was criticising the 19th century and not just the 6th, Beard reverses the time travel and brings Medieval superstition into the 19th century in order to educate a naive industrialist. In both books, the moon has uncanny power over people: while Twain’s Hank uses it to wrest power from the masses that populate his adopted medieval life, Beard’s narrator channels the moon to show universal human truths. He muses, “Freedom is health: slavery is disease. . . The old white-faced moon saw this — saw the disease grow until it proved almost fatal; and the silver light from the sky shone over many a bloody field where Labor laid on the altar of Freedom thousands of her sons.” Just as so many of Beard’s pen and ink images are surrounded in curls of smoke, the literary scenes he creates are often hazes and conflations of images — things obscured or transformed by altered states of mind and magic. His illustrations in Yankee and Moonblight alike are closer to Renaissance emblems that they are to narrative illustrations. Although the intent of Beard’s illustrations for Twain was often overtly political and didactic, his illustrations of his own work added the subtlety that his own writing lacked. If Beard’s stories were simplistic, lacking Twain’s type of moral ambiguity, his drawings added a dimension of sensitivity to the issues he handled so awkwardly. Although Moonblight is a more polemical expansion of Yankee, Six Feet of Romance, which shares the volume, is a puzzling companion -- it is not at face value political at all. Although its title suggests (perhaps only accidentally) a story that is shaded with morbidity and perverse sex, it is instead a story that is ultimately about nostalgia. Nostalgia, for Twain, was political in its own sense. Twain set his Yankee down among the knights of the round table as a reaction to Walter Scott’s glorification of chivalry, an attitude Twain held responsible for the long persistence of slave culture in the south. Beard was more amenable to the sentiment. As Six Feet of Romance opens, the narrator is sitting among a collection of salvaged household items, relics that inspire him to unironically reflect on times gone by: My antique frying-pans, toasters, and waffle-irons all have very long handles; the andirons of the same date rear their massive brass heads several feet above their strong wrought-iron cross-bars. How plainly these things tell us of the great log fires that roared in their ample fireplaces in the brave old days of our great grandsires! His attention fixates on a favorite item, an old foot stove, so intently that his surroundings became “misty and indistinct, and finally disappear.” In the suddenly unfamiliar haze of his New York Studio, a hand appears and then a pair of feet in dainty period dress. When the mysterious hand reaches into the foot stove and absconds with its coal cup, our narrator is forced out of his comfortable chair and must pursue not just this pair of disembodied feet, but two more pairs representing men of aristocratic and common origins (we can tell from their shoes). All six feet, followed by Beard, mysteriously leave New York and go for a romp in the countryside. Ultimately, the man in the scruffier boots prevails over the aristocrat in a duel and the woman of the dainty red shoes walks off with him, leaving the foot stove behind. When the narrator comes back to reality in his studio, we wonder what the point of this reverie was. Is it that his alter ego, the boots hanging alongside the buckskin pants, was on the right side of history? That the true America is with the rough and tumble Sons of Daniel Boone? There is a shade of that, but more than anything, the piece is a whimsical flight by a highly visual man. Nostalgia, he posits, holds none of the harm that Twain seems to see in it — it is a gorgeous way to daydream. The valiant and hopeful heroes of Beard’s own fiction were not only unpopular; they did not even elicit the controversy of his politicized Twain illustrations. It is hard to know what Daniel Carter Beard thought of his own work — he leaves all mention of Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance out of his autobiography. This omission leads us to assume that it was an experiment he was unhappy with, one that happened at a difficult period when his reputation kept magazine work scarce and prospects limited. Although the novellas were no success, this ongoing dialogue with Twain was important to the formation of the voice he used in his “crusade for American boyhood.” The achievements that I have discussed so far, illustrating for Twain and founding the Boy Scouts of America, actually only account for the final 30 pages of Beard’s 360 page autobiography, Hardly a Man is Now Alive. The rest of the book demonstrates a strong link between his affection for Twain and his inventions in scouting. The remaining 330 pages are devoted to Beard’s childhood and young adult years with a great emphasis on coincidence and the forces that brought him into (and out of) a great many scrapes and near disasters. Even when describing his adulthood, he tells stories of mischief. While he was working as a surveyor, he says he “took delight in always putting into [his] records mention of real occupancy, genteel or disreputable.” He describes with pride a small menagerie he kept in his Queens backyard that included a Javanese pygmy musk deer. During one stay at a hotel, he alerts the management of the infestation with an “impromptu natural history collection of cimex lectularia” that he makes by stringing the insects on a piece of thread and leaving the garland with his complaint at the front desk. If Beard’s life story has a thesis, it is not so much that he helped American youth by establishing scouting, it is that he was himself the quintessential American youth, that well into adulthood Beard was a doppelgänger to Huckleberry Finn and his mischievous model and creator, young Mark Twain. About the author he writes: Beyond a doubt, in his youth he was more of a real boy than any other boy between Canada and Belize. If the boy Sam Clemens thought of more things, did more things, got into more scrapes than any other lad, if he were endowed with a greater capacity of mischief, it was because of his more highly developed imagination. With that imagination he developed a broad charity for others. Although it is clear that Beard was interested in youth work throughout his career (much of his earliest work appeared in youth magazines like St. Nicholas), there is one story he tells in multiple books to explain his initial call to scouting. As he is walking through New York on a cold winter’s day, he sees boys at the foot of a statue of Benjamin Franklin. In some versions of this emblematic moment the children are newsboys sleeping there, and in some they are urchins playing dice games. Both stories are of a Hank Morgan or a Huck Finn — the self-sufficient scout and the mischievous rascal. Beard’s intense and extended engagement with Twain was an important step towards developing the tone of Boy Scouts: the relationship nourished his visions for the ideal boy, the connection between man and land, and the place of nostalgia and tradition in American culture. These novellas serve as a bridge between the straightforward pedagogical texts like The Handy Book and the narrative and ceremony of the Boy Scouts of America. The experiments with Twain-style irreverence and with politcal illustrations established an interesting channel for Beard to transform Robert Baden-Powell’s chivalric brand of scouting into something more uniquely American. Especially as a member of the BSA’s founding committee, Beard was adamant that members must look inward, to the US, for inspiration and that scouts must not be modeled on narratives of “King Arthur, Richard the Lionhearted, Saladin of Saracens, or Robinhood.” He could easily summarize this list by saying: avoid all those sacred cows that lie within the satire of Twain. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 11, 2014

Abigail Walthausen

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:46.128488

olaus-magnus-sea-serpent

Olaus Magnus’ Sea Serpent By Joseph Nigg February 5, 2014 The terrifying Great Norway Serpent, or Sea Orm, is the most famous of the many influential sea monsters depicted and described by 16th-century ecclesiastic, cartographer, and historian Olaus Magnus. Joseph Nigg explores the iconic and literary legacy of the controversial serpent from its beginnings in the medieval imagination to modern cryptozoology. In his comprehensive study, The Great Sea-Serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise (1892), Dutch zoologist Antoon Cornelius Oudemans lists more than three hundred references to the notorious sea monster in his chronological “Literature on the Subject”. The first ten of those, 1555-1665, cite Olaus Magnus’ sea serpent: editions of Olaus’ Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (“History of the Northern Peoples”) and natural histories of Conrad Gesner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Edward Topsell, and John Jonston. The list establishes Olaus’ serpentine monster as the major ancestral source of sea serpent lore from the sixteenth century to widespread sightings of such creatures in Oudemans’ own time. It is the basis for illustration and discussion of the creature in marine studies and popular fantasy up to the present, five hundred years after Olaus created it. While Oudemans cites natural histories in which copies or variations of Gesner’s famous woodcut of Olaus’ sea serpent appear, his list does not refer to the monster’s iconic source: the 1539 Carta Marina. Oudemans had not seen the map. After it went out of circulation by the 1580s, it was lost for three centuries until a copy was discovered in the Munich state library in 1886, shortly before publication of The Great Sea-Serpent. A second copy surfaced in 1962 and is now in the Uppsala University Library. The wall map, measuring about 5 feet (1.5m) wide and 4 feet (1.2m) high, was the largest, most accurate, and most detailed map of Scandinavia––or of any European region––at that time. A Catholic priest exiled with his Archbishop of Uppsala brother, Johannes, from their native Sweden after it converted to Lutheranism, Olaus began compiling the nationalistic map in Poland in 1527. Created to show the rest of Europe the rich history, culture, and natural wonders of the North prior to the Reformation, the map was printed in Venice twelve years later. The northern seas of the marine and terrestrial map teem with fantastic sea monsters either drawn or approved by Olaus. The most dramatic of those, off the busy coast of Norway, below the dreaded Maelström, is the great serpent, coiling around a ship’s mast and lunging with bared teeth at a sailor on the deck. Like the map’s other sea beasts, the serpent is not just a cartographical decoration to fill space, as in Jonathan Swift’s “elephants in wont of towns.” It is meant to represent a real animal, one that Nordic sailors and fishermen vividly described to Olaus on his travels around Scandinavia. The Latin legend accompanying the image indicates the monster is 300 feet (91.4m) in length. According to the map’s key, on the other hand, it is “A worm 200 feet long wrapping itself around a big ship and destroying it.” A variation of the influential Carta Marina sea serpent appears on Sebastian Münster’s sea monster chart, Monstra Marina & Terrestria (1544 and after), but fame of Olaus’ iconic figure spread through nascent marine biology with Conrad Gesner’s reversed woodcut of it in the 1558 volume of his monumental Historiae Animalium. Nonetheless, Gesner, now regarded as the Father of Modern Zoology, distanced himself from all the Carta Marina sea beasts he presented by disclaiming that Olaus himself was responsible for the accuracy of their pictures and descriptions. Edward Topsell copied the Gesner woodcut in his 1608 History of Serpents. Ulisse Aldrovandi’s naturalistic version of Gesner’s serpent, without ship or sailors, graced the pages of John Jonston’s book of fishes and was reproduced into the eighteenth century as “Serpens Marinus Mari Noruegico familiaris Aldr.” Seminal lore of the Carta Marina monster opens a chapter in Olaus’ History of the Northern Peoples (1555), the first entry in Oudeman’s list of works on the sea serpent. Olaus began the voluminous map commentary upon completion of the Carta Marina. Nearly every sea beast pictured on the map is documented in the History’s sensational, climactic Book 21, on sea monsters. Vignettes based on the Carta Marina typically accompany the texts. Olaus’ account of the Great Norway Serpent, in Chapter 43, is frequently quoted in works Oudemans cites and in later studies. The following passage, often modernized by later writers, is from the History’s first English translation: A Compendious History of the Goths, Swedes & Vandals and Other Northern Nations (1658): They who in Works of Navigation, on the Coasts of Norway, employ themselves in fishing or Merchandise, do all agree in this strange story, that there is a Serpent there which is of a vast magnitude, namely 200 foot long, and more –– over 20 feet thick; and is wont to live in Rocks and Caves toward the Sea-coast about Berge: which will go alone from his holes in a clear night, in Summer, and devour Calves, Lambs, and Hogs, or else he goes into the Sea to feed on Polypus [octopus], Locusts [lobsters], and all sorts of Sea-Crabs. He hath commonly hair hanging from his neck a Cubit long, and sharp Scales, and is black, and he hath flaming shining eyes. This Snake disquiets the Shippers, and he puts up his head on high like a pillar, and catcheth away men, and he devours them; and this hapneth not, but it signifies some wonderful change of the Kingdom near at hand; namely that the Princes shall die, or be banished; or some Tumultuous Wars shall presently follow. Olaus proceeds to describe another sea serpent, one sighted near the town called Moos in 1522. That beast “lifts himself high above the Waters and rouls himself round like a sphere.” Scandinavians believed that its appearance presaged the banishment of King Christian II and subsequent political upheaval in the Northern countries. Dutch fishmonger Adriaen Coenen, following the History and heavily influenced by Gesner, illustrated and described both sea serpents in his private manuscript, The Whale Book (1585), much of which has only recently been printed in facsimile. Scholiast Olaus continues his chapter with discussion of classical and medieval writings on terrestrial snakes and marine serpents. Olaus’ account of the Sea Orm, largely accepted into the early seventeenth century, is challenged a century later by Erich Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen. Pontoppidan devotes Chapter 8 of the second volume (1753) of his Natural History of Norway to reports of sea monsters and other strange animals of the deep. Initially skeptical of sea-serpent tales, the bishop was ultimately convinced of their existence by “full and sufficient evidence from creditable and experienced fishermen, and sailors, in Norway, who can testify that they have annually seen them.” While he respectfully cites Olaus’ History in earlier pages of his volumes, his assessment of the book’s credibility when it comes to sea monsters is a different matter. Writing during the Enlightenment, Pontoppidan condescendingly––and rather hypocritically––charges that in writing about the sea serpent, Olaus “mixes truth and fable together, according to the relations of others; but this was excusable in that dark age when that author wrote.” He adds, though, that, “Notwithstanding all this, we in the present more enlighten’d age are much obliged to him, for his industry, and judicious observations.” He then quotes Olaus’ discredited description of the Great Norway Serpent. Pontoppidan also believed in the Kraken (giant squid), which he regarded as the largest creature in the ocean. He calls Olaus’ “credulous” account of an immense whale mistaken for an island “a notoriously fabulous and ridiculous romance”––even though he himself describes the Kraken’s eating habits in terms of medieval bestiaries’ allegorical whale (Satan), whose sweet breath draws small fish (sinners) into its mouth. The Bishop of Bergen’s own authority was fading by the time Sir Walter Scott mistakenly conflates him with Olaus Magnus, whose nominal title of Archbishop of Uppsala passed on to him after Johannes’ death. In Note 6 of The Pirate (1821), Scott writes: . . . the wondrous tales told by Pontoppidan, the Archbishop of Upsal, still find believers in the Northern Archipelago. It is in vain, they are cancelled in the later editions of Guthrie’s Grammar, of which instructive work they used to form the chapter far most attractive to juvenile readers. What Scott is referring to here is William Guthrie’s Norway chapter in A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World (published in multiple editions following the death of the author in 1770). Guthrie extols the “wonderful animals which, according to some modern accounts, inhabit the Norwegian seas.” Among those creatures is the “sea-snake, . . . one of the most remarkable and perhaps the best attested.” Bishop Hans Egede’s famous 1734 encounter with “a large and frightful sea-monster” and other sightings qualify as “modern.” Olaus’ fabled sixteenth-century monster does not. It goes without mention. Scott concludes his note by debunking the sea-serpent story of a respected mariner he knew: the sighted beast, a hundred feet (30.4m) in length, with “the wild mane and fiery eyes which old writers ascribe to the monster,” was most likely a “good Norway log” in the misty waters. One of the “old writers” in question was most certainly Olaus, whose serpent description Scott had earlier included in a quoted footnote to “The Mermaid” in the third volume of his 1803 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. In later editions of his collection, Scott added, “A sort of sea-snake immense enough to have given rise to this tradition, was thrown ashore upon one of the Orkney Isles in 1808.” Despite Walter Scott’s revision of accepted lore, Atlantic sightings of animals regarded as sea serpents multiplied throughout the nineteenth century, as Oudemans’ list so extensively attests. The most notable scientific attempt to identify actual marine animals with the sea serpent was Henry Lee’s now-classic Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), produced in association with the International Fisheries Exhibition in London. By that time, Pontoppidan’s veracity had diminished even more than it had in Scott’s day. In introducing the Scottish historians of the sea serpent, Lee writes, “Here, I suppose, I ought to indulge in the usual flippant sneer at Bishop Pontoppidan.” He nonetheless regards nineteenth-century scholarly scorn for the prelate as undeserved because Pontoppidan recorded only recent reports of the creature after centuries of accounts. Lee then quotes Olaus’ recounting of the two Norway serpents. He acknowledges that the History is “full of wild improbabilities and odd superstitions” because it was written in a medieval age, but he found it to be “most amusing and interesting” and praises it for its “wonderful insight of the habits and customs of the northern nations in his day.” Given his zoological approach, Lee concludes that Olaus’ serpent was actually based on tales of gigantic calamari. Writing shortly after publication of Sea Monsters Unmasked, Oudemans rebuts Lee’s identification of Olaus’ serpent. The Dutch author concedes that Olaus’ description of the monster devouring livestock on the coast of Bergen was fabulous. And even though he considers its scales in the History facsimile “badly drawn,” he believes the artist intended to depict an actual large snake. Oudemans ends his exhaustive tome by contending that most of the 187 “sea serpents” reported were pinnipeds, enormous seals or sea lions. Oudemans’ identification of marine animals mistaken for “sea serpents” is only one of an extensive list that includes whales, squid, sharks, porpoises, eels, and oarfish. As Oudemans’ serpents recede farther and farther from scientific inquiry into cryptozoology’s search for “hidden” animals, the tradition initiated largely by Olaus’ sea serpent on the Carta Marina continues, right up to our time. Within a single week in October 2013, the discovery of two dead oarfish on the California coast spread throughout the global media. Reports hailed the rarely seen deep-water fish as “sea serpents,” their species likely responsible for legendary sightings throughout history. Articles and bloggers speculating on what drove the 14- to 18-foot (4.2-5.4m)-long animals to shore cited folkloric portents of earthquakes and tsunamis. Growing to about 26 feet, giant oarfish with red crests are the longest of bony fish. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 5, 2014

Joseph Nigg

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:46.494346

darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy

Darkness Over All John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy By Mike Jay April 2, 2014 Conspiracy theories of a secretive power elite seeking global domination have long held a place in the modern imagination. Mike Jay explores the idea’s beginnings in the writings of John Robison, a Scottish scientist who maintained that the French revolution was the work of a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati. At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-established reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics; he had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of ‘darkness over all’. The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days, and within a year it had been republished many times, not only in Edinburgh but in London, Dublin and New York. Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and what had driven its bloody and tumultuous progress? From his vantage point in Edinburgh he had, along with millions of others, followed with horror the reports of France dismembering its monarchy, dispossessing its church and transforming its downtrodden and brutalised population into the most ruthless fighting force Europe had ever seen — and now, under the rising star of the young general Napoleon Bonaparte, attempting to export the carnage and destruction to its surrounding monarchies, not least Britain itself. But Robison believed that he alone had identified the hidden hand responsible for the apparently senseless eruption of terror and war that now appeared to be consuming the world. Many had located the roots of the revolution in the ideas of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot and Condorcet, who had exalted reason and progress over authority and tradition; but none of these mostly aristocratic philosophes had advocated a revolution of the masses, and indeed several of them had ended their lives on the guillotine. In the early 1790s it had been possible to believe that the power-hungry lawyers and journalists of the Jacobin Club had whipped up the Paris mob into their destructive frenzy for their own ends, but by 1794 Danton, Robespierre and the rest of the Jacobin leaders had followed their victims to the guillotine: how could they have been the puppet-masters when they had had their own strings so brutally cut? What Robison was proposing in the meticulously documented pages of Proofs of a Conspiracy was that all these agents of revolution had been pawns in a much bigger game, with ambitions that were only just beginning to make themselves visible. The French Revolution, like all convulsive world events before and since, had been full of conspiracies, bred by the speed of events, the panic of those caught up in them and the limited information available to them as they unfolded. In Britain, enemies of the revolution such as Edmund Burke had claimed from the beginning that ‘already confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming in several countries’, and by 1797 most believed — and with good reason — that secret societies in Ireland were plotting with Napoleon to overthrow the British government and invade the mainland. The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within the buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single protagonist, a single ideology and a single overarching plot that crystallised the chaos into an epic struggle between good and evil, whose outcome would define the future of world politics. Robison’s vast conspiracy needed an imposing figurehead, a role for which Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, seemed on the surface to be an unpromising candidate. Obsessive and domineering, Weishaupt had from the beginning found difficulty in attracting members to his secret society, where they were expected to adopt mystical pseudonyms chosen by him, jump through the hoops of his strict initiatic grades — Novice and Minerval, Illuminatus Minor and Major, Dirigens and Magus — and take up subservient roles in his grandiose but unfocused crusade for world domination. After 1784, when the Order had been exposed and banned by the Elector of Bavaria, Weishaupt had exiled himself to Gotha in central Germany, since when he appeared to have done little beyond producing a series of morose and self-justifying memoirs of his adventures. Yet there was much in the career of the Illuminati that offered, to Robison at least, a view of a far more expansive and sinister scheme. Weishaupt’s messianic sense of his own mission and the Order’s extravagant structures hinted at a far larger organisation than that which had been exposed, and its suppression had generated a furore quite out of proportion to the danger it represented. It had become a lightning-rod for the deep anxieties of church and monarchy about the agenda of reason and progress that was being seeded across Europe by the confident vanguard of philosophers and scientists. The Illuminati furore had generated hundreds of screeds, polemics, handbills and scandal sheets, all competing to file the most damning charges of godless infamy. It was these sources that Robison had spent years perusing intently for anecdotes and allegations to mould into the proofs of the conspiracy that he now presented. To the dispassionate observer, Weishaupt and his Illuminati might have offered an eloquent metaphor for the forces that were reconfiguring Europe, but for Robison they had become the literal cause: the centre, thus far invisible, of the web of events that had consumed the world. Robison may have been a distant spectator of the Illuminati furore, but he was no dispassionate observer. While Proofs of a Conspiracy came as a surprise (and in most cases an embarrassment) to his friends and scientific colleagues, there were many reasons why the Illuminati had presented itself to him in this form. His discovery resolved long-standing suspicions and conflicts in both his private and professional life, and chimed in particular with his own curious adventures in freemasonry. By 1797 Robison’s character had taken a grave and saturnine turn, far removed from the cheerful and convivial temperament of his youth. In 1785 he had begun to suffer from a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin: it seemed to emanate from beneath his testicles, but its precise origin baffled the most distinguished doctors of Edinburgh and London. Racked with pain and frequently bed-ridden, by the late 1790s he had become a withdrawn and isolated figure; he was using opium frequently, a regime which according to some of his acquaintances made him vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia. As the successive crises of the French Revolution shook Britain, the panic was particularly intense in Scotland, where ministers and judges whipped up constant rumours of fifth columnists and secret Jacobin cells. Tormented, heavily medicated and assailed by terrifying news from the outside world, Robison had all too many dark threads to weave into the plot that came to consume him. Politics had also thrown a long shadow across his professional life. The physical sciences were in the grip of another French revolution, led by Antoine Lavoisier. During the 1780s Lavoisier had overthrown the chemistry of the previous century with his discovery of oxygen, from which he had been able to establish new theories of combustion and to begin the process of reducing all material substances to a basic table of elements. Lavoisier’s revolution had split British chemistry: some recognised that his technically brilliant experiments had transformed the science of matter, but for others his new and foreign terminology was, like the French metric system and the revolutionary Year Zero, an arrogant attempt to wipe away the accumulated wisdom of the ages and to eliminate the role of God. The old system of chemistry, with its mysterious forms of energy and its languages of essences and principles, had readily contained the idea of a life-force and the mysterious breath of the divine; but in Lavoisier’s cold new world, matter was reduced to inert building-blocks manipulated by the measurable forces of pressure and temperature. Robison had never accepted the French theories, and by 1797 had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminatist plot. For him, Lavoisier — along with Britain’s most famous experimental chemist, the dissenting minister Joseph Priestley — was a master Illuminist, working in concert with infiltrated Masonic lodges to spread the doctrine of materialism that would underlie the new atheist world order. Madame Lavoisier’s famous salons, at which the leading Continental philosophes met, were now revealed by Robison to have been the venues for sacreligious rites where the hostess, dressed in the ceremonial robes of an occult priestess, ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry. Implausible though this image might seem, it was of a piece with other proofs that Robison had assembled in his book — for example, the anonymous German pamphlet that claimed that, at the great philosopher Baron d’Holbach’s salons, the brains of living children bought from poor parents were dissected in an attempt to isolate their life-force. The Illuminati had infiltrated Robison’s professional life, but his most personal connection with their conspiracy came through freemasonry itself. He had been a member of the Scottish Rite for decades without ever regarding its lodges as more than ‘a pretext for passing an hour or two in a fort of decent conviviality, not altogether void of some rational occupation’; but his career had frequently taken him abroad, where he had been shocked to discover that not all masonic orders were so innocent. In 1770 he had spent a year at Catherine’s court in St. Petersburg, learning Russian and lecturing on navigation; during the course of his travels he had met with other masons and visited lodges in France, Belguim, Germany and Russia. What he saw had shocked him: by comparison with the Scottish Rite, the Continental lodges were ‘schools of irreligion and licentiousness’. Their members seemed to him consumed by ‘zeal and fanaticism’, their religious views ‘much disturbed by the mystical whims of J. Behmen [Jacob Boehme] and Swedenborg — by the fanatical and knavish doctrines of the modern Rosycrucians — by Magicians — Magnetisers — Exorcists, &c.’. Now, thirty years later, as he recalled the occultism and freethinking to which he had been briefly but unforgettably exposed, he had no doubt as to the source of the destruction that had engulfed the Continent. Although Proofs of a Conspiracy became a handsome bestseller, the Illuminati conspiracy never gripped the imagination of the British political class as it did in mainland Europe. Once the crisis of the French revolution was past, some conservative voices would attribute this to superior British common sense, but in truth Britain at that time had more serious threats and conspiracies to contend with. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, a far more incendiary and radicalising work than any of the Bavarian Illuminati’s ‘secret texts’, had sold over two hundred thousand copies in its cheap sixpenny edition, a number that far exceeded what until that point had been considered the entire book-buying public. With the British fleet convulsed by mutinies and the government struggling to contain mass protests and riots, it was hardly surprising that the doings of a long-disbanded Bavarian lodge seemed less than a pressing concern. Robison’s book, however, had a profound and enduring impact in the United States of America. Here, the polarised forces of revolution and reaction that had swept Europe were playing out in a form that threatened to split the Founding Fathers and destroy their fledgling Constitution. While the likes of Thomas Jefferson saw themselves as cousins of a French republic that had thrown off the shackles of monarchy and with whom they traded amid British naval blockades, other founders such as Alexander Hamilton, whose Federalist party favoured a powerful state geared towards protecting the interests of its wealthy citizens, feared the infiltration of the radical ideals of the French revolution. In an overheated political milieu where accusations of treason were hurled from both sides, Proofs of a Conspiracy was seized on eagerly by the Federalists as evidence of the hidden agenda that lurked behind fine-sounding slogans such as democracy, the abolition of slavery and the rights of man. Robison’s words were repeated endlessly in New England pulpits and pamphlets through 1798 and 1799, and Jefferson was publicly accused of being a member of Weishaupt’s Order. But such charges were never substantiated; the ‘Illuminati Scare’ petered out and the Federalists lost power, never to regain it. Yet the episode had touched a nerve deep within the American political mindset, and it has been woven into many subsequent paranoias and panics. Robison’s ideas would continue to be rediscovered and reinvented, and to influence modern politics in curious ways. The doyenne of modern conspiracy theory, Nesta Webster, swallowed his theory whole but then came to believe the Illuminati were a smokescreen: the true conspirators were the ‘Jewish peril’ whose agenda had, she believed, been accurately exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although Webster later consigned herself to the margins by joining the British Union of Fascists, her support at the time was more broadly based, and she even won admiring citations in the journalism of Winston Churchill. ‘The conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt’, Churchill wrote for the Sunday Herald in 1920; ‘as a modern historian Mrs. Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role in the French revolution’. Many on the isolationist right continue to believe Robison’s theory to this day: the official John Birch Society line, for example, remains that Weishaupt’s Illuminati ‘was the ancestor of the Communist movement and the model for modern subversive conspiratorial movements’. After Robison’s death following a final medical crisis in 1805 his Edinburgh colleague, the pioneering geologist John Playfair, wrote a respectful memoir that focused on his scientific achievements but was unable to avoid mention of the work for which he was best remembered. ‘The alarm excited by the French revolution’, Playfair suggested tactfully, ‘produced in Mr. Robison a degree of credulity which was not natural to him’. It was a credulity, he stressed, that had been shared by many who were unable to believe that the revolution had been a genuine mass movement reacting to the oppression of a tyrannical regime; they had clung to their belief that it must have been orchestrated by a small cell of fanatics, and that the lack of evidence for any such conspiracy was itself evidence for the conspirators’ cunning in concealing their operations from public view. There was much plain sense in Playfair’s analysis, and it could equally be applied to many who subsequently came to believe in Robison’s theories, and who continue to believe them today. But if the shock of the modern world erupting into existence before his eyes had unbalanced Robison’s judgement, it had also given him a vivid, even visionary perspective on the new dangers that might result from wresting politics away from church and monarchy and placing it in the hands of the people. Forged in the same crucible as every modern political ideology from conservatism to nihilism, anarchy to military dictatorship, the Illuminati conspiracy has become a modern myth: not merely in the dismissive sense that its factual basis evaporates under scrutiny, but as a shapeshifting narrative capable of adapting its meaning to accommodate new and unforeseen scenarios. Since the 1970s, it has been gleefully satirised as a baroque folly of conservative thought by counterculture figures from Robert Anton Wilson onwards, yet this has only increased its fame and mystique: Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons demonstrates that today’s readers will still lap up Robison’s unreconstructed version of the story in their millions. In popular culture and old-time religion, satire and nationalist politics, the Illuminati conspiracy still resonates with its warning that the light of reason has its shadows, and even the most enlightened democracy can be manipulated by hidden hands. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 2, 2014

Mike Ja

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:47.031281

julia-margaret-cameron-in-ceylon-idylls-of-freshwater-vs-idylls-of-rathoongodde

Julia Margaret Cameron in Ceylon Idylls of Freshwater vs. Idylls of Rathoongodde By Eugenia Herbert July 9, 2014 Leaving her close-knit artistic community on the Isle of Wight at the age of sixty to join her husband on the coffee plantations of Ceylon was not an easy move for the celebrated British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Eugenia Herbert explores the story behind the move and how the new environment was to impact Cameron's art. The Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is currently undergoing a revival with a recent exhibition of her work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She has long evoked interest not only because of her distinctive style but also because of her eccentric personality, her dominant — very dominant — role in a circle that in many ways prefigured the Bloomsbury of her grandniece, Virginia Woolf. But there was another strand in her life that was quintessentially Victorian: the imperial. She was daughter, wife and mother of Empire. To top it off, four of her five sisters married “Anglo-Indians” — civil or military officials serving in India. Her own embrace of this legacy, however, was equivocal at best; she went to Ceylon not by choice but by necessity in the twilight of her life. When she at last settled there, she had been immersed in photography for only just over a decade and was at last coming into her own as a very visible, if sometimes controversial, practitioner of the art. What is poignant are the ways that Ceylon affected not only the shape of her life, but also that of her art. It happened like this. The progenitor of the clan, James Pattle, was part of the British establishment in India, the latest in a long line of officials in the East India Company. While James rose to a high rank, he was notorious as a drunkard and a liar. His wife, Adeline, was a French aristocrat, the daughter of the Chevalier de l’Etang, who had been exiled to the French outpost of Pondicherry, allegedly for being too close to the young Marie Antoinette. After a spell fighting the British for control of the continent, he had little difficulty in changing sides; in fact it was just as well he was far off in India when the French Revolution broke out. Adeline’s mother was the daughter of French-Swiss missionaries who had been in Pondicherry for several generations. Fortified with this impeccable imperial pedigree, Julia Margaret was born in Calcutta in 1815 at a time when the British East India Company was still at its zenith. She was the second of seven surviving daughters. Like most colonial children she was sent back to Europe for her education with several of her sisters. In their case, most of the time was spent with their maternal grandmother roaming around Paris and Versailles. In contrast to the miseries detailed in Kipling’s “Baa Baa, Blacksheep”, the girls seem to have had a pleasantly relaxed (not to say, haphazard) education and to have suffered little from the separation from the parental fold. They were finally reunited with their parents in England for a brief period during James’s only home leave. When Julia Margaret returned to Calcutta the age of eighteen after an absence of fifteen years, it was assumed she would focus her attentions on finding a suitable husband. This indeed she did, albeit in no particular haste. She met Charles Hay Cameron in Cape Town in 1836 where both were convalescing from illness. A Scot of aristocratic lineage but modest means, Cameron was twenty years her senior. He was collaborating with Macaulay on Indian legal and educational reform, and eventually succeeded Macaulay as legal member of the Council of India. They were married in Calcutta and spent the next twelve years there. Though a marriage of extreme opposites, it seems to have been a happy one. Four of their six children were born in India. The family left India for good in 1848. There were probably several factors in their decision to abandon the ample salary and privilege Charles’ position offered. Julia Margaret always hated separations and dreaded sending her children off to school in England as was the universal custom; by then, too, her much loved sisters were also settling down in England. Furthermore, her husband’s health was precarious. Once in England Julia Margaret’s natural gregariousness found an infinite outlet in a large circle of friends. Indeed, both in London, and later in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, she attracted an assortment of painters and writers to complement her absorbing family life. Over what would otherwise have been a very happy life, however, hung the ever-present cloud of financial uncertainty, indeed distress. Charles never had a job the rest of his life, although he doggedly held out hopes of appointment as an official in one of Britain’s colonies — he would have loved to return to Ceylon as governor — but his poor health was against him. As a classic Victorian valetudinarian he spent most of his days clad in a “dressing-gown of pale blue with black velvet buttons and a heavy gold chain”, receiving visitors in his bedroom or walking about the garden reciting Homer and Virgil, his long white locks giving him the air of an Old Testament prophet. What kept them afloat were generous — very generous — “loans” from family members and above all from Charles’ old friend Lord Overstone, one of the richest men in England. And all along, there was an elephant in the room: Ceylon. Charles had first succumbed to the charm of the Eden-like island when he went out as co-chairman of the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission, appointed in 1829 to propose much needed reforms to the administration of Ceylon. As a jurist, Cameron’s mandate was to formulate a uniform code of justice for the island, to bring order out of the chaos of competing and poorly implemented systems of law: Roman Dutch, British, and Kandyan. This he did, inspired largely by the utilitarian theories of his friends Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Ceylon had become a British possession in 1796, mostly for strategic reasons — it boasted the finest harbor on the Bay of Bengal. When British hegemony in South Asia was solidified after the Napoleonic Wars, its strategic importance was downgraded and the government was faced with the dilemma of what to do with a territory that was a veritable palimpsest of foreign rule since the sixteenth century: Portuguese, Dutch, the British East India Company, the Presidency of Madras, and finally its incarnation as the first Crown Colony. Hitherto Europeans had been unsuccessful in attempts to control the interior of the island, but with the British conquest of the Kandyan Kingdom in 1815, their rule embraced not only the littoral but also its less hospitable hinterland with quite different social and legal structures. The year Cameron spent in Ceylon — 1830-31 — was never forgotten. Indeed, he would have much preferred to settle there for good with his family rather than return to England (they stopped off in Ceylon on the way “home”), and he clung to this dream for the rest of his life. He had gotten in on the ground floor of the coffee mania that swept the island in the early 1840s, buying up large tracts of land at bargain prices to which he added over the years until he may well have been the largest single plantation owner in the colony. One tract became known as Cameron’s Land. Coffee, he felt confident, would support his large family and set up his five sons as they grew to maturity. It is something of a mystery that this never happened. To be sure, coffee was vulnerable to all the dangers besetting monoculture on a grand scale. Some were domestic: extremes of weather, blights and rodent infestations, poor management and ignorance, absentee landlords (which were the rule rather than the exception) demanding quick returns; others were global: competition from other producers such as the East Indies, periodic depression in England and Europe. Coffee consumption in England had risen every bit as fast as tea in the nineteenth century, but when times were hard it was adulterated with chicory and other cheaper ingredients. Then there was the constant problem of an adequate labor force. Most of the field workers were recruited from the impoverished peasantry of southern India and crossed by sea to Colombo or to the northern part of the island via the Palk Straits, which was wider than the English Channel and even rougher. From there they had to make the rest of the long journey to the highland plantations by foot, often weakened by hunger and disease; many died on the way. Getting Ceylon coffee to market was itself a nightmare since the best regions for coffee growing were also the most remote — it had taken Charles eight hours by pony to go from his estate at Rathoongodde to the largest town, Kandy. Road building proceeded in fits and starts, depending on the health of government coffers. Until the railroad reached Kandy in 1867, coffee had to be hauled by bullock carts, far slower than ponies, over roads that were often little more than tracks. The bullocks themselves were in short supply since Ceylonese grasses were notoriously poor. It cost twice as much to transport the coffee the hundred miles or so from the Central Highlands to Colombo as it did to ship it half way around the world to England. In spite of everything, the 1850s and 60s were boom years, a “Golden Age” of Ceylon coffee — in the early 1860s the island briefly led the world in coffee exports. Even into the mid-70s expansion of cultivation and high prices abroad minimized the initial impact of the fungus that would soon destroy the industry. It is hard to fathom why all this was not reflected in the Camerons’ finances. In fact, things had come to a head already in 1864 when even the patient Lord Overstone agreed with their son-in-law Charles Norman that the estate of Rathoongodde should be sold as the precondition for any more loans. Cameron stalled, however, even though by then he admitted to being virtually “penniless”; instead, he sent his son to manage the plantation. Perhaps Julia Margaret was indulging in some wishful thinking when she declared soon that under Ewen’s direction the estate was turning a profit of £1,000-£1,500 a year in contrast to the thousands of pounds of debt run up by the agents previously charged with administering it: only a few years later they were desperately pleading once more with Overstone for more loans — and this at a time when coffee prices were climbing to new heights. But it was not just speculative fever and the sacra aurae fames that inspired Cameron to invest in ever more land in Ceylon and to insist on holding onto it through good years and bad. “[H]is reigning passion for his Ceylon properties,” Julia Margaret wrote an old friend in 1860, “has held him in sway + weakened his love for England for the last 20 years.” He truly loved the island and especially the wild landscape of the interior highlands ideal for coffee growing. Whatever his allegiance to the rather mechanistic doctrines of his fellow Utilitarians, he was a romantic at heart. Victoria Olsen, author of a splendid biography of Julia Margaret Cameron, quotes a moving letter to his wife when he paid a visit to his plantations in 1850. The bungalow he had had built at Rathoongodde was like a “Swiss cottage,” he wrote, then took her on a tour of its setting: If you follow the path which winds round the grassy hill on the right you come in about 200 yards to a deep ravine down which flows a lovely mountain stream which I have christened the Julia oga. . ..When it crosses the path it forms a beautiful cascade falling in two white and foaming sheets of water, over the smooth face of a huge and solid mass of granite rock. At the bottom of the cascade it forms a pool about five feet deep, always cool and clear as crystal. . . . You see nothing on either side but the steep and wooded banks of the ravine with ferns and wild flowers in profusion. . . . The side of the valley so rising in front of you [sic], is covered, for about two thirds of its height, with fine coffee, then comes a belt of forest, above that the bright blue sky or the floating clouds. The paths through coffee and forest went on for miles, with the “glorious prospects of mountains and valleys . . . before you. It would be nothing less than an eternal shame to you,” he added pointedly, “to be the owner of such a place and not to come and see it.” Life was so much cheaper than in England that even with the expense of their passages, they would come out ahead, he argued, if the family settled there for a spell. He was sure, too, that his health would be far better on the island. But Julia Margaret resisted the idea of removing to Ceylon just as strenuously as Charles resisted selling Rathoongodde. She might name their refurbished home Dimbola Lodge after the valley in Ceylon where one of their estates was located, but her Dimbola was in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, next door to the Tennysons, and there she intended to remain. The standoff continued until 1875 by which time Charles was 80 and Julia Margaret 60. Then at last, she resigned herself to settling in Ceylon. Her change of heart was due not only to their chronic penury but also to the fact that four of their five sons were already established there (her only daughter had died a few years before). Her circle of family and friends in England had gradually been diminished by death, and it was all the more important to her to be united with her sons and husband for whatever time was left to her. Given her views on the perils of the island (her husband had almost died on a visit there 1859-60), she made sure to bring along two coffins (and a cow). Charles perked up immediately at the prospect. He had always insisted that “Ceylon is the cure for all things,” and so it proved. Like Lazarus he rose from his bed and mingled with friends and neighbors for the first time in twelve years. When the celebrated botanical painter Marianne North visited them in Ceylon, she marveled to find him “perfectly upright. He read all day long, taking walks round and round the verandah at Kalutara with a long staff in his hand, perfectly happy, and ready to enjoy any joke or enter into any talk which went on around him.” To her pleasure he would quote poetry and read aloud to her while she was painting. At other times he rode around on his pony. Even Julia Margaret acknowledged the tropical beauty all about her. “The glorious beauty of the scenery — the primitive simplicity of the inhabitants & the charms of the climate all make me love Ceylon more and more,” she wrote to her old friend Sir John Herschel. She divided her time between Kalutara on the southwest coast, the home of her son Hardinge who was a colonial official, and the family estates in the Highlands. Nevertheless, the coffins did not go to waste (though there is no information about the cow): Julia Margaret died in 1879, Charles the following year. Plantation workers from the Rathoongodde estate carried the bodies the last difficult track to the churchyard in Bogawantalawa, a fervent believer buried alongside a fervent non-believer. What does all this tell us about Julia Margaret Cameron the photographer? The contrast with her husband highlights all the more her own character and its embodiment in her work. Ceylon — and particularly the highlands of his beloved Rathoongodde — appealed to Charles’s love of nature, the wilder the better. Isolation not only did not bother him, it actually seems to have attracted him. His was a love of the classics, hers a love of the most contemporary artists and men of letters whom she scooped up in her personal embrace. He did not need, as Julia Margaret did, to be constantly surrounded by people — especially people she could boss around and at the same time shower with impetuous generosity. Her photography is intensely people-oriented. For her, beauty lay first and foremost in the human form, a form indeed with a face. She once declared: “The history of the human face is a book we don’t tire of if we can get its grand truths and learn them by heart.” Her contemporaries found it next to impossible to refuse her when she demanded to photograph them — G. F Watts, Darwin, Carlyle, Tennyson, Herschel, a galaxy of famous men. She favored pensive, even melancholy poses with an emphasis on contrasts of light and shadow. Given her own inclination for exotic attire, it is not surprising that she garbed her female subjects, as Olsen notes, in almost Oriental extravagance. For her representations of religious subjects or characters from literary works such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, she would virtually shanghai her models on the grounds of beauty alone. It was commonly believed, reported Thomas Wentworth Higginson, that she “selected her housemaids for their profiles, that she might use them for saints and madonnas in her photographic groups.” Even children did not escape her clutches when it suited her agenda. What is almost entirely missing from her oeuvre, however, is any interest in landscape for itself. She might portray a female figure holding a flower or framed by a deeply-shadowed backdrop of leaves and blossoms, but they were not the focus themselves, not even in photographs such as The Gardener’s Daughter or The Rosebud Garden of Girls. Ceylon was ill adapted to this repertoire. Madonnas and literary figures seemed out of place. There were few famous men — the governor, Sir William Gregory, rebuffed her attempts to photograph him. Fortunately the celebrated botanical painter, Marianne North, paid the Camerons a visit at Kalutara. “In a fever of excitement” at having a European model, Julia Margaret made a number of photographs of her, four of which survive. In defiance of the climate, she dressed North up “in flowing draperies of cashmere wool [such as Cameron herself was wearing], let down my hair, and made me stand with spiky cocoa-nut branches running into my head, the noonday sun’s rays dodging my eyes between the leaves as the slight breeze moved them, and told me to look perfectly natural (with the thermometer standing at 96°).” She was trying with indifferent success to replicate the portraits for which she was famous: North reading a book and gazing into the distance, North standing against a backdrop of trees (the prickly cocoa-nuts), and so forth. But one photograph is quite different from her usual style. The painter is standing at her easel to the left on the thatched verandah at Kalutara; to the right is a figure — a “native” — stripped to the waist, wearing a dhoti, and holding an earthen vase over his shoulder; the vista opening up beyond the house is virtually unreadable. North found the setting entrancing: “Their house stood on a small hill, jutting out into the great river which ran into the sea a quarter of a mile below the house. It was surrounded by cocoa-nuts, casuarinas, mangoes, and breadfruit trees; tame rabbits, squirrels, and mainah-birds ran in and out without the slightest fear, while a beautiful tame stag guarded the entrance; monkeys with gray whiskers, and all sorts of fowls, were outside.” Her painting, Bombay Pedlars on Mrs Cameron’s Verandah shows a group of figures, the peddlers, sitting cross-legged in the foreground surrounded by luxuriant tropical foliage with the water behind them. The house by the “great river” might well have reminded Julia of her home at Garden Reach overlooking the Hooghly River in Calcutta, but she seems to have been interested only in the painter painting the scene, not the scene itself. If she made no photographs of Kalutara and its relatively tame environs, she also made none of the far wilder scenery that her husband loved so much (and which Marianne North painted on at least one occasion) — no woods and mountains and cascades, not even Adam’s Peak rising dramatically to the south of their plantations in the highlands. Nor did she choose to photograph indigenous art in any form in spite of the array of Buddhist and Hindu temples on display all around her. The only concession to Ceylon was a modest collection of individual or group portraits of maidservants and plantation workers, posed rather unnaturally outdoors and often at a distance from the photographer, and clothed to emphasize their exoticism. North notes that in one case she took such a fancy to the “superb” back of a young man that she insisted her son hire him as gardener, “though she had no garden and he did not know even the meaning of the word.” Nevertheless all of her Ceylon models are nameless — the titles seem to have been added later: Girl, Ceylon; A group of Kalutara peasants; and the like. Most critics have dismissed these as of more ethnographic rather than artistic interest. There are two photographs so unlike anything she had ever done in either country and so similar to a host of pictures taken around the same time by other photographers that one questions their attribution. The photographs lack both the strong contrasts and the focus on the human face typical of her work. One shows large, indistinct groups of “natives” gathered in a forest clearing. A white diagonal extends into the left foreground — possibly tea chests? The other is a muster of plantation workers in descending height from men to women to children, their dress far from exotic and apparently revealing their status in the hierarchy from overseer to lowly field hand. The background is bleak rather than muted or decorative: a vast expanse of smoldering tree trunks and debris, with mountains vaguely delineated in the distance — the scene is typical of many other pictures of the clear-cutting and burning of whole forests to make way for coffee and, about this time, tea. Why pass up the sublime landscapes of Rathoongodde in favor of nature despoiled? Could these photographs in fact have been taken by one of her sons, Hardinge Hay or Henry Herschel (who later set up as a professional photographer in London)? Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic vision was not that of Samuel Bourne or Felice Beato or W.L.H. Skeen. She had no desire to portray the imperial world as they did, ranging throughout India and Ceylon in search of the picturesque and the exotic. Anglo-Indian by birth, her tastes and ambitions were nevertheless circumscribed by the mid-Victorian world of England, the fleeting idyll that was Freshwater. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 9, 2014

Eugenia Herbert

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:47.597128

inside-the-empty-house-sherlock-holmes-for-king-and-country

Inside the Empty House Sherlock Holmes, For King and Country By Andrew Glazzard January 8, 2014 As a new series of BBC’s Sherlock revives the great detective after his apparent death, Andrew Glazzard investigates the domestic and imperial subterfuge beneath the surface of Sherlock Holmes’s 1903 return to Baker Street in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Empty House’. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga has enjoyed -- or in some cases suffered — countless reinventions since its original publication from 1887 to 1927. The BBC’s current television version starring Benedict Cumberbatch is perhaps one of the most successful, not least as its scriptwriters combine a deep knowledge of the original with a flair for departing wittily from it: the show’s strategy of allusion, transformation, and up-to-dateness gives it both freshness and familiarity. The new series begins with ‘The Empty Hearse’, its title alluding playfully to Conan Doyle’s 1903 story ‘The Empty House’ in which Holmes returns from apparent death at the hands of Professor Moriarty in Switzerland. Conan Doyle’s saga is particularly suited to this kind of treatment: the fan-critics who call themselves “Sherlockians” pore over the details of Dr John Watson’s narratives (known in the trade as “the Canon”), looking for clues, contradictions, and anomalies; they construct often conspiratorial alternative explanations of events, uncover Conan Doyle’s (or Watson’s) apparent errors, and cross-reference the stories with encyclopaedic scholarship. So, while Conan Doyle is often seen as a fairly transparent writer, eschewing complexity, technical innovation, and challenges to orthodox ideology in favour of elegant myth-making, the industriousness of the Sherlockians shows that the simplicity of these stories is often deceptive: in a story such as ‘The Empty House’, a great deal of important information is left unsaid or hinted at. Recovering those subtexts through careful reading and a knowledge of what else was going on at the time can help to show Holmes and his creator in a new light. ‘The Empty House’ weaves together two narratives, a murder mystery and the story of Holmes’s return to London, three years after his apparent death in Switzerland in 1891. Reunited with his old friend and chronicler Dr Watson, Holmes recounts the story of his escape at the Reichenbach Falls followed by an extraordinary and exotic odyssey: I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. These three sentences contain a wealth of allusions to imperial exploration and conquest. ‘Sigerson’ is perhaps an allusion to the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, whose groundbreaking explorations of Central Asia and the Tibetan plateau — his findings first published in a British and American edition in 1903 — had begun to excite interest and admiration. But it was another explorer of Tibet who was really making the headlines, and which alerts us to the imperialist sub-text of the story. By 1903, Francis Younghusband’s “expedition” to Tibet was in full swing. He entered the country in December 1903 with a force of 10,000 and reached Lhasa in August 1904: it was an invasion in all but name, the final episode in what Kipling dubbed “the Great Game” in which Britain and Russia fought a cold war for control of the Asian lands that lay between their two empires. Holmes’s presence in Lhasa in the 1890s disguised as Sigerson was more likely to be read as groundwork for Younghusband’s invasion than disinterested exploration or an extreme method of lying low. A “Great Game” explanation may lie behind Holmes’s time in Persia, another object of intense Anglo-Russian competition: Russia’s increasing economic involvement with the Shah’s regime at the turn of the century was viewed with alarm in Whitehall and Calcutta as a threat to the frontiers of British India. Mecca, the next port of call, would have required Holmes (who presumably had not converted to Islam) to adopt one of his famous disguises, as the British explorer and diplomat Sir Richard Burton had done during his expedition in 1853. And Holmes’s talent for disguise would most certainly have been required at his next destination: as he makes clear, Khartoum (or more strictly the neighbouring city of Omdurman) was in the 1890s under the control of ‘Abdallahi, the Khalifa, successor to Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi. The Khalifa and his state in the Sudan, the Mahdiyya, held a similar position in the late-Victorian consciousness as the Taliban and Al Qaida do today. The Mahdiyya’s forces had been responsible for some of Britain’s most disastrous military defeats of the 1880s, leading eventually to the martyrdom of General Charles Gordon, whose portrait, we are told in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, hangs in 221b Baker Street. In 1897 Conan Doyle was accredited as a journalist for the Westminster Gazette to accompany Herbert Kitchener’s expedition into the Sudan to wipe out the Mahdiyya, although his journalism was not much of a success as he was instructed by Kitchener personally to go home. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle’s dispatches for his newspaper reveal an enthusiastic support for Kitchener’s project which climaxed in 1898 with the Battle of Omdurman, in which 10,000 of the Khalifa’s forces were killed in a matter of hours by the British and Egyptian armies (which themselves suffered a mere 47 fatalities). In ‘The Empty House’, then, Conan Doyle writes of the period before Omdurman but with the knowledge of its outcome. Holmes’s casual reference to communicating with the Foreign Office only seems to confirm what has already been signaled: he has spent the three years after his escape at Reichenbach not merely hiding from Moriarty’s henchmen, but working clandestinely for the British Empire. * Holmes returns to London to solve the murder of the Hon. Ronald Adair, a ‘locked room mystery’ in which a young aristocrat is found shot dead in his upstairs sitting room, locked from the inside, at 427 Park Lane. The window is open but there are no signs that anyone could have entered through it; there is no weapon, but on the table next to Adair are piles of gold and silver coins, some banknotes, and a sheet of paper bearing names and numbers. We are told that Adair spent most of his time playing cards in various London clubs, and the names on the paper are of fellow card players. We are also told that his engagement to his fiancée has just been broken off, and that he and his friend Colonel Sebastian Moran had recently won a large sum at cards from Godfrey Milner and Lord Balmoral. Holmes’s prior knowledge appears to solve the mystery. He knows that Col. Moran is in fact one of Professor Moriarty’s henchmen and “the second most dangerous man in London”. He traps Moran by placing a wax dummy (moved at intervals by Mrs Hudson) in the window of his rooms in Baker Street; he, Watson and Inspector Lestrade look on as Moran takes his position in an empty house with a line of sight to the window, aims his German-made air-rifle adapted to take soft-nosed bullets, and shoots the wax dummy. Lestrade arrests Moran as the murderer of Ronald Adair. The identity of Adair’s murderer signals another aspect of the story’s imperial sub-text. Col. Moran has entered the worlds of elite leisure (high-class gambling) and elite crime (Moriarty’s gang) from a background in Her Majesty’s Indian Army where he was, Holmes reveals, “the best heavy-game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced”, famous for stalking tigers in the jungle: Holmes calls him an “old shikari” — an Urdu word for hunter. Like Watson, he has served in Afghanistan (unlike Watson, with such distinction as to be mentioned in despatches), and he has empire in the blood: his father was a former British Minister to Persia. Watson is astonished by this renegade’s background as an “honourable soldier”, prompting Holmes to speculate that Moran’s “sudden turn” to evil is the result of some inherited genetic marker. There are many intriguing subtexts in this mystery — anxiety about the implications of Germany’s technological preeminence, fashionable theories of degeneration — but the one to concern us here is Moran’s immaculate army record. This story is in part an enquiry into how and why initially decent men of empire might become bad apples. Some clues within the text suggest that Conan Doyle had an actual case in mind. Asked by Watson for Moran’s motive in killing Adair, Holmes’s answer hinges on speculation that Moran was cheating at cards and that this had been discovered by Adair: “Very likely he had spoken to [Moran] privately, and had threatened to expose him unless he voluntarily resigned his membership of the club, and promised not to play cards again.” Rather than give such an undertaking, Holmes hypothesizes, Moran murdered Adair. Here the story appears to be alluding to one of the biggest aristocratic scandals of the previous decade. What was known as “the Baccarat Scandal” or “the Tranby Croft affair” had obsessed the Victorian newspaper-reading public when it came to the High Court in 1891. A Lieutenant-Colonel in the Scots Guards, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, had been accused of cheating at baccarat — a variation of pontoon or vingt-et-un with a banker, two players, and two groups of observers betting on whose hand is closest to nine — by his hosts and some fellow former army officers during an aristocratic party at Tranby Croft in Yorkshire in September 1890. Gordon-Cumming, a baronet and major Scottish landowner who had fought with great distinction in the Zulu War, and the Egyptian and Sudanese Campaigns (including at the battle of Abu Klea in 1884 as part of the doomed mission to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum), and who was an admired hunter of Indian tigers, sued his accusers for slander and lost. What elevated this from the ordinary was the identity of the banker during two evenings of baccarat and who had to take the stand in the witness box at the High Court: Albert Edward, Prince of Wales who, after his mother’s death in 1901, became King Edward VII and Emperor of India. Edward was well-known for his indiscretions — not for nothing did Henry James christen him “Edward the Caresser” — but being called as a witness meant that that he enjoyed the dubious distinction of the first heir to the throne to do so under sub poena since the man who became Henry V was prosecuted in 1411. This scandal was, therefore, one of Edward’s most serious, revealing him as an habitual player of an illegal game. It could have been worse for Edward: the parties to the case and their legal representatives agreed not to mention in court the inconvenient fact that Edward travelled around the country with his own set of baccarat tokens. The Victorian press, cramming the packed court, examined every detail of the case. Gordon-Cumming’s words and actions on two evenings in 1890 became national news, including the question of whether a sheet of paper on which he recorded the progress of each hand had facilitated his cheating or was evidence to support his innocence. But the key events came after some of the other players observed Gordon-Cumming apparently (and in the rules of the game illegally) raising or lowering his stakes in accordance with the turn of the cards. Gordon-Cumming was confronted, but denied cheating: the matter was passed to the most senior guest present. Edward’s judgment was that the whole thing should be brushed under the carpet, but to preserve everyone’s sense of justice, Gordon-Cumming would be required to sign a statement vowing never to play cards again. Edward hoped that the matter would end there, but months afterwards, rumours began to circulate, and Gordon-Cumming felt he had no option but to sue. After his defeat, he was ostracized by Edward and the royal courtiers, so he married an heiress and retired to his gloomy estate at Gordonstoun in Scotland. The popular verdict, though, appears to have been that he was an innocent man unjustly slandered, and more recent enquiries suggest that the accusation of cheating was revenge from fellow-guests fed up at his success in seducing their wives. Another hint of the Tranby Croft Scandal lies in the name of Moran and Adair’s card-playing associate, Lord Balmoral. No commoner would be allowed to take a title from the Royal Family’s castle in Aberdeenshire. Edward VII would have been much in most people’s minds as he had only been crowned King-Emperor in August 1902, but particularly in Conan Doyle’s: the author had been placed next to Edward at a dinner a few weeks before, and was knighted by Edward in October. Conan Doyle liked Edward, and predicted that his reign would be far more successful than his many critics had suggested. Lt. Col. Gordon-Cumming, the war-hero and big-game hunter who (allegedly) cheated at cards and was forced to sign a statement following his exposure, seems a likely candidate for Col. Moran who kills rather than sues his accusers. At this point, the problem of the corruption of honourable empire men would seem to be solved: they are bad apples who, in the end, get found out and punished. Another possible allusion, however, complicates matters. Ronald Adair’s mysterious sheet of paper recalls Gordon-Cumming’s which was the focus of so much attention in court, inviting us to consider whether there is something of Gordon-Cumming in Adair as well. And there are other suggestions that Adair — who also has empire in the blood, as his father was a former governor of an Australian colony -- is not the innocent victim of Holmes’s convenient explanation. Indeed, Holmes’s explanation is not only preposterous but also inadequate in explaining the many tantalizing details at the scene of the crime and in Adair’s personal history. Why did his fiancée break off their engagement? Why did Adair lock the sitting-room door (a detail to which our attention is drawn but which is left hanging)? Most importantly, perhaps, Adair is (like Edward VII) an habitual gambler, “playing continually”, and for money: this idle, moneyed, gambling-addicted bachelor is not the stuff of which empires are made. Holmes’s inability to come up with a credible motive for the murder of Adair forces us to conclude that his partnership with Moran was a partnership in crime that had gone sour. What then do we make of Holmes’s apparent determination to cover things up? At Tranby Croft Edward had acted as judge and jury, effectively condemning Lt. Col. Gordon-Cumming so that aristocratic codes of form could be preserved and the secrets of the high-life could remain concealed. In exonerating Adair, and pinning all the blame on Col. Moran, Holmes constructs a convenient fiction to preserve the myth that honourable men remain honourable in all but the most rare and exceptional cases. Holmes, the clandestine imperial warrior, had come home to shore up an aristocracy (and in real-life a royalty) that was vulnerable to allegations of impropriety. No wonder that we learn in ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’ that Holmes was offered — and unlike his creator refused — a knighthood in June 1902 “for services which may perhaps some day be described.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 8, 2014

Andrew Glazzard

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:48.121843

1592-coining-columbus

1592 Coining Columbus By Michiel van Groesen April 16, 2014 For many, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas is inextricably linked to a particular image: a small group of confident men on a tropical beach formally announcing their presence to the dumbfounded Amerindians. Michiel van Groesen explores the origins of this Eurocentric iconography and ascribes its persistence to the editorial strategy of the publisher who invented the initial design, a full century after Columbus' encounter. Theodore de Bry, born in the Prince-Bishopric of Liege in 1528, lived and worked in Strasbourg, Antwerp, and London before he ultimately settled in Frankfurt, the centre of the European book trade. Trained as a goldsmith, he had successfully re-invented himself as a graphic artist in the 1570s and 1580s. In the final decade of the sixteenth century he would crown this transformation by introducing the technique of including copper engravings into printed books to Germany, thus creating a niche in the market for his lavishly illustrated coffee table books. His most monumental series of publications was the so-called ‘De Bry collection of voyages’. Initiated in 1590, it would run until 1634, and comprise twenty-five folio volumes of European travel accounts to America, Africa, and Asia. Theodore and his two sons translated these narratives into German and Latin (occasionally modifying the texts), and added illustrations if the original versions did not contain any images, or if they did not meet their high artistic standards. Both the thirteen-volume America-series and the twelve-volume India Orientalis-series became luxurious collectors’ items almost overnight, and have remained so to this day. De Bry opened his America-series with the famous watercolour drawings by John White and Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues which Richard Hakluyt had given him for this purpose during his time in London. But when he had to find material on his own, he quickly turned to Columbus. De Bry devoted Volume IV of the America-series, published in 1594, to the account of the Milanese traveller Girolamo Benzoni who recounted the Genoese explorer’s first voyage of 1492. One of the tailor-made engravings De Bry designed in his workshop in Frankfurt, predictably, captured the moment Columbus first set foot in the New World (pictured below). The illustration is centered around the encounter between Columbus, backed by two other servants of the Spanish monarchy, and a group of Native Americans. The way De Bry depicted both groups emphasizes the contrast between the Europeans and the Indians. On one side Columbus, immaculately dressed after a long oceanic crossing, is supported by two men who are heavily armed. It is clear that they are in control, both of the situation and of themselves. Their erect, confident poses are — metaphorically — still a world away from the unorderly manner in which the Amerindians of Hispaniola present themselves. They are naked, and appear to be unsure of what the encounter will bring. In an attempt to give the Spaniards what they desire, the Indians offer Columbus their precious metals, conveniently cast in traditional European shapes to ensure a good understanding. The background of the engraving substantiates that what De Bry is showing us here is essentially a shift in power, something of which European readers in the late sixteenth century were all too aware. Columbus’ impressive ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, refer to both this prologue to the moment De Bry captured, and the fundamental inequalities of the intercultural relationship that lie ahead. While more Spaniards disembark to take possession of the island, the natives flee after apparently having first approached the ships. The power shift is made abundantly clear by the planting of the cross on the left-hand side of the composition. One of the Spanish soldiers has even put his gun to one side to help establish Christianity in the New World — a powerful symbolic gesture that appears to be a precursor to Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima in August 1945. The planting of the cross was particularly meaningful for Theodore de Bry. According to his own testimony, De Bry, a Calvinist, had been forced to leave his native Liege because of religious persecution. In Frankfurt, too, Calvinists were tolerated only because of their commercial importance to the city. It led De Bry to develop an ingenious strategy for his collection of voyages that would be acceptable across the Old World, for readers of every confessional background. Whereas the Latin translations he made were intended for a Catholic readership, his seemingly identical German editions reveal Protestant sympathies. When comparing the two versions one sees differences in words, sentences, paragraphs, and occasionally even entire accounts. Making alternative engravings, however, was too costly for De Bry’s editorial strategy of confessional differentiation. Different illustrations for different readerships, moreover, would not enhance the authority of his flagship publication that was crucial to the commercial well-being of his publishing house. So for his engravings, De Bry’s method was to enhance the contrast between civilized Christian travellers and the uncivilized heathen peoples of the non-European world, thus creating an iconography that could be appreciated in all corners of the divided continent. Hence, for reasons entirely unrelated to his own adventures, Columbus was depicted in this fashion one-hundred years later. Yet De Bry’s image, rather than a belated conclusion to Columbus’ expedition, is only the beginning of the story. The De Bry collection was the single most influential European set of images to summarize what has traditionally been called ‘the Age of Discovery’. Altogether it contained up to 600 high-quality copper engravings, around 40% of which were invented from scratch by the De Bry family in Frankfurt. The combination of these beautiful designs, printed at the hub of early modern European book culture by a highly skilful engraver from the Low Countries, and the increasing importance of colonial affairs for the European balance of power throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, meant that the De Bry images — especially those of America for which there had been no previous iconographic tradition — were copied time and again. Copies and derivations appeared in various contexts with every conceivable newly-attached meaning (and they still do today, mostly as book covers for studies on a myriad of different topics). For Columbus, in retrospect, we can establish that he was finally canonized — visually — in 1592 by Theodore de Bry. The image has since been changed in order to meet new stylistic conventions, but several elements have proved extremely persistent. In 1732, the Amsterdam-based Huguenot writer Bernard Picart, for his book entitled Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous les Peuples du Monde, created a very similar illustration of Columbus’ landfall, which, if anything, only enhanced the contrast already insisted on by De Bry (pictured above). Picart’s Columbus, surrounded by a more reassuring number of troops this time, was once again in obvious command of the situation. His own men clearly venerated him for his achievements, perhaps indicating to the Native Americans the identity of their leader. The standard with the coat of arms of the Spanish monarchy is a new addition, possibly a step too far for a Protestant like Theodore de Bry in an age of widely shared anti-Spanish sentiment, but a convenient means for Picart to emphasize the increasing importance of national sovereignty. Meanwhile the offering of gold, an intrinsic aspect of the sixteenth-century Leyenda Negra of Spanish greed, is gone. The Amerindians Columbus encounters here appear even more awe-struck than their indigenous predecessors in the De Bry engraving. The Indians in the foreground were probably given a darker complexion in order to put the encounter behind them in a fuller light, but the fact that skin colour became a yardstick to measure civility in the eighteenth century could have been an additional incentive. Finally, and intriguingly, even though Picart’s agenda was one of religious toleration, the raising of the cross retained its place in the design. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Amsterdam draughtsman Reinier Vinkeles was another artist to use the template Theodore de Bry had created almost two centuries earlier. In 1788, Vinkeles made an etching of Columbus’ arrival in the New World that discarded Picart’s addition of additional Spaniards, and reinstated Columbus as the singular hero of the expedition, much like De Bry had done before him (pictured below). The sword still conveyed the reassuring message that the Europeans were in control, despite the turbulent developments in North America immediately prior to Vinkeles’ composition. The perspective of Vinkeles’ image is identical to that of De Bry, with ships in the distant background and sloops with additional colonists approaching the shore. Behind Columbus, the cross is planted in a way that faithfully resembles the De Bry composition, watched with curious interest by the Native Americans who display the similar mixture of fear and respect that characterized De Bry’s naked Indians. Vinkeles, like Picart before him, did not depict the giving of New World gold and silver, but instead appears to have embellished the image by adding a crowned head among the Amerindians (with arguably the most fearful complexion of the entire group). Once again, although this time deliberately, the skin colour of the Amerindians has been modified to underline the racial differences between both groups. The nineteenth and twentienth centuries produced many more designs that were directly or indirectly derived from the De Bry engraving, as anyone who does a Google search on ‘Columbus’ and ‘1492’ can establish. They are all different, but very few of them are new. All insist on the juxtapositions between technology and handicraft, civility and innocence, religion and ignorance, and, most importantly, power and dependence. Some of these ‘modern’ representations of the arrival of the first European fleet in America are bound to make most twenty-first century viewers cringe, especially when we contemplate that some of them were (and still are?) used in primary schools in the United States and elsewhere to celebrate the historic birth of a ‘new’ (all too often implying ‘better’) world. Theodore de Bry’s design already harbours these uncomfortable notions of an irreversible shift in power. One could argue that it assisted in facilitating the demographic and humanitarian disaster that followed. That, of course, is something historians will never be able to ascertain. Perhaps, if nothing else, at least this wonderful engraving can help us to reflect on how detrimental the routine of simple ethnographic copying-and-pasting can be. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 16, 2014

Michiel van Groesen

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:48.613781

o-excellent-air-bag-humphry-davy-and-nitrous-oxide

“O, Excellent Air Bag” Humphry Davy and Nitrous Oxide By Mike Jay August 6, 2014 The summer of 1799 saw a new fad take hold in one remarkable circle of British society: the inhalation of "Laughing Gas". The overseer and pioneer of these experiments was a young Humphry Davy, future President of the Royal Society. Mike Jay explores how Davy's extreme and near-fatal regime of self-experimentation with the gas not only marked a new era in the history of science but a turn toward the philosophical and literary romanticism of the century to come. See also our book Oh Excellent Air Bag: Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920, with an introduction by Mike Jay. On Boxing Day of 1799 the twenty-year-old chemist Humphry Davy — later to become Sir Humphry, inventor of the miners’ lamp, President of the Royal Society and domineering genius of British science — stripped to the waist, placed a thermometer under his armpit and stepped into a sealed box specially designed by the engineer James Watt for the inhalation of gases, into which he requested the physician Dr. Robert Kinglake to release twenty quarts of nitrous oxide every five minutes for as long as he could retain consciousness. The experiment was taking place in the lamp-lit laboratory of the Pneumatic Institution, an ambitious and controversial medical project where the young Davy had been taken on as laboratory assistant. It had opened the previous March in Hotwells, a run-down spa at the foot of the Avon Gorge outside Bristol. Originally developed to rival nearby Bath, Hotwells had dwindled to a downmarket cluster of cheap clinics and miracle-cure outfits offering hydrotherapy or mesmerism to those in the desperate last stages of consumption; but the Pneumatic Institution was a new arrival with revolutionary ambitions. Its founder, the brilliant and maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes, believed that the new gases with which he and his assistant were experimenting had the power to put the treatment of this most lethal of diseases onto a proper scientific footing for the first time, and in the process to transform the art of medicine. In the centre of the laboratory, Davy had set up a chemical reaction: nitrate of ammoniac bubbled in a heated retort, and the escaping gas was being collected in a hydraulic bellows before seeping through water into a reservoir tank from which the sealed box was filled. After an hour and a quarter, by which time he estimated that his system was fully saturated, Davy stepped out of the box and proceeded to inhale a further twenty quarts of the gas from a series of oiled green silk bags. While seated in the box breathing deeply, Davy had felt the effects that had become familiar from his many previous experiments since he had first inhaled the gas earlier that year. The first signature was its curiously benign sweet taste, followed by a gentle pressure in the head as he continued to inhale. Within thirty seconds the sensation of soft, probing pressure had extended to his chest, and the tips of his fingers and toes. This was accompanied by a vibrant burst of pleasure, and a gradual change in the world around him. Objects became brighter and clearer, and the space in the cramped box seemed to expand and take on unfamiliar dimensions. Now, under the influence of the largest dose of nitrous oxide anyone had ever taken, these effects were intensified to levels he could not have imagined. His hearing became fantastically acute, allowing him to distinguish every sound in the room and seemingly from far beyond: a vast and distant hum, perhaps the vibration of the universe itself. In his field of vision, the objects around him were teasing themselves apart into shining packets of light and energy. He was rising effortlessly into new worlds whose existence he had never suspected. Somehow, the whole experience was irresistibly funny: he had ‘a great disposition to laugh’, as all his senses competed to exercise their new-found freedom to its limit. Now the gas took Davy to a dimension he had not previously visited. Objects became dazzling in their intensity, sounds were amplified into a cacophony that echoed through infinite space, the thrillings in his limbs seemed to effervesce and overflow; and then, suddenly, he ‘lost all connection with external things’, and entered a self-enveloping realm of the senses. Words, images and ideas jumbled together ‘in such a manner, as to produce perceptions totally novel’: he was no longer in the laboratory, but ‘in a world of newly connected and modified ideas’, where he could theorise without limits and make new discoveries at will. After an eternity he was brought back to earth by the sensation of Dr. Kinglake removing the breathing-tube from his mouth; the outside world seeped back into his ‘semi-delirious trance’ and, as the energy returned to his limbs, he began to pace around the room. Yet a part of him was still present in the dimension of mind that had swallowed him whole, and he struggled for the words to capture it. He ‘stalked majestically’ towards Kinglake ‘with the most intense and prophetic manner’, and attempted to shape the insight that had possessed him. ‘Nothing exists but thoughts!’, he blurted. ‘The world is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!’ Davy’s Boxing Day experiment was the culmination of a freewheeling programme of consciousness expansion into which he had co-opted some of the most remarkable figures of his day. Within days of his first self-experiment in April he had offered the gas to his friend Robert Southey, the future Poet Laureate, whose reaction was as effusive as Davy’s own: ‘the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas’. Southey’s ecstatic report to his brother Tom set the tone for the explorations that were to follow: O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gasoeus oxyd! O, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. O, Tom! I am going for more this evening; it makes one strong and so happy, so gloriously happy! O, excellent air-bag!※※Indexed under…Experienceof nitrous oxide inhalation In the early summer of 1799 the nitrous oxide trials began in earnest. In the evenings, after the Pneumatic Institution had closed, the nitrate of ammoniac reaction would begin to bubble in its upstairs drawing room as Davy and Beddoes’ circle — doctors and patients, chemists, playwrights, surgeons and poets — experimented on themselves and each other. Davy was master of ceremonies and also, by his own account, inhaling the gas himself three or four times a day. The laboratory became a philosophical theatre in which the boundaries between experimenter and subject, spectator and performer were blurred to fascinating effect, and the experiment took on a life of its own. Although the trials commenced within a medical framework, they came to focus increasingly on questions of metaphysics and, in particular, language. Davy was struck by the poverty of the ‘language of feeling’ available to his subjects, and the awkwardness of their attempts to put their experiences into words. The standard medical question ‘how do you feel?’ took on imponderable, existential dimensions. The subjects were not mentally impaired by the gas, but overstimulated beyond the reach of words themselves: as Davy himself put it, ‘I have sometimes experienced from nitrous oxide, sensations similar to no others, and they have consequently been indescribable’. James Thompson, one of the volunteers, captured the magnitude of the task precisely: ‘We must either invent new terms to express these new and peculiar sensations, or attach new ideas to old ones, before we can communicate intelligibly with each other on the operation of this extraordinary gas.’ Davy instituted a loose reporting protocol, asking every volunteer to produce a short written description of their experience. Some subjects produced answers that were oblique but highly imaginative: one of the clinic patients answered ‘how do you feel?’ with ‘I feel like the sound of a harp’. Musical analogies emerged repeatedly, attempting to catch the aural effect of ringing harmonics that often accompanies the rush of nitrous oxide intoxication. Beddoes, emerging from a deep immersion, once shouted out the single word ‘Tones!’. This resonated with images that were emerging in the poetic writings of Southey and his friend Coleridge: the Aeolian wind-harp, for example, which draws its harmonies directly from Nature herself. Davy also took enthusiastically to experimenting on his own. On full moon nights in particular, he would wander down the Avon Gorge with a bulging green silk air-bag and notebook, inhaling the gas under the stars and scribbling snatches of poetry and philosophical insight. One one occasion he made himself conspicuous by passing out and, on recovery, was obliged to ‘make a bystander acquainted with the pleasure I experienced by laughing and stomping’. He noted an element of compulsion in his use, confessing that ‘the desire to breathe the gas is awakened in me by the sight of a person breathing, or even by that of an air-bag or air-holder’. He began to push his experiments into more dangerous territory. He tried the gas in combination with different stimulants, drinking a bottle of wine methodically in eight minutes flat and then inhaling so much gas he passed out for two hours. He also experimented with nitric oxide, which turned to nitric acid in his mouth, burning his tongue and palate, and with ‘hydrocarbonate’ — hydrogen and carbon dioxide — which left him comatose, the air-bag fortunately falling from his lips. On recovering, he ‘faintly articulated: ‘I do not think I shall die’’. By the end of the summer, the energy of the trials was dissipating: for most of the volunteers, the novelty of the experience wore off after a few sessions. Davy’s experiments became increasingly solitary, partially focused on resolving technical questions such as how much gas was absorbed into the bloodstream and whether it should be classified as a stimulant or a sedative, but also searching for a framework — scientific, poetic or philosophical — to account for its effects. In this he was assisted by the arrival of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who returned to Bristol in October from an extended visit to Germany. Coleridge and Davy’s friendship would evolve and endure through the many phases of their future careers; but it began with a green silk bag of nitrous oxide. As Coleridge inhaled and felt its warmth diffusing through his body, he did not reach for extravagant metaphors but stated precisely that the sensation resembled ‘that which I remember once to have experienced after returning from the snow into a warm room’. In a subsequent trial he ‘was more violently acted upon’ and confessed that ‘towards the last I could not avoid, nor felt any wish to avoid, beating the ground with my feet; and after the mouthpiece was removed, I remained for a few seconds motionless, in great ecstacy.’ Coleridge was captivated by the young chemist: ‘Every subject in Davy’s mind’, he wrote, ‘has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like turf under his feet.’. Davy was equally swept up in his new friend’s expansive vision, which he felt had the power to transform science as well as poetry. Coleridge had returned from Germany in thrall to the new idealistic turn in its philosophy: the theories of Immanuel Kant and the emerging ‘Naturphilosophie’, according to which the human mind was the ultimate source of our reality, and the material world only an illusion projected by it. The dissociative effects of nitrous oxide, in which consciousness seemed to escape and transcend the physical body, made compelling sense of this insight; and Davy’s climactic revelation that ‘nothing exists but thoughts’ would echo it through the century to come. Despite their chaotic melange of hedonism, heroism, poetry and philosophy, Davy’s report on the trials, when it emerged, made a coherent and powerful case for their scientific worth. After his climactic Boxing Day experiment, he began writing at top speed and by Easter of 1800 had produced a 580-page monograph on the new gas and its effects. Under the businesslike title Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide, or dephlogisticated nitrous air, and its Respiration, he described the synthesis of the gas, its effect on animals and animal tissue and, in an unprecedented final section, the descriptions of the subjective effects of nitrous oxide intoxication on himself and two dozen further subjects, including Beddoes, Coleridge and Southey. Davy’s report combined two mutually unintelligible languages — organic chemistry and subjective experience — to create a groundbreaking hybrid, a poetic science that could encompass both the chemical causes of the experience and its philosophical consequences. By the end of 1800 his reputation had spread through Britain’s scientific community and beyond, and he was already preparing to leave Bristol for a post at the Royal Institution, at the centre of the London network of power and privilege through which he rose to prominence with breathtaking speed. His dazzling lectures there would make him the public face of science for the coming generation, and the nitrous oxide experiments would become an emblem of the heroic commitment to discovery that it would demand of its practitioners in the new century. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 6, 2014

Mike Ja

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:49.120176

in-the-image-of-god-john-comenius-and-the-first-children-s-picture-book

In the Image of God John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book By Charles McNamara May 14, 2014 In the mid 17th-century John Comenius published what many consider to be the first picture book dedicated to the education of young children, Orbis Sensualium Pictus - or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures, as it was rendered in English. Charles McNamara explores how, contrary to Comenius' assertions, the book can be seen to be as much about the invisible world as the visible. John Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures) is, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the first children’s picture book.” Originally published in 1658 in Latin and German, the Orbis — with its 150 pictures showing everyday activities like brewing beer, tending gardens, and slaughtering animals — is immediately familiar as an ancestor of today’s children’s literature. This approach centered on the visual was a breakthrough in education for the young, as was the decision to teach the vernacular in addition to Latin. Unlike treatises on education and grammatical handbooks, it is aimed directly at the young and attempts to engage on their level. The Orbis was hugely popular. At one point it was the most used textbook in Europe for elementary education, and according to one account it was translated into “most European and some of the Oriental languages.” Its author John Comenius, a Czech by birth, was also well-known throughout Europe and worked in several countries as a school reformer. His portrait was painted by Rembrandt, and according to an 1887 edition of the Orbis, Comenius was even “once solicited to become President of Harvard College.” (Although he never came to Harvard, one can still find his name engraved on the western frieze of Teachers College at Columbia University.) Even if he is less celebrated today by name, his innovative ideas about education are still influential. In his Didactica Magna, for example, he advocates for equal educational opportunities for all: boys and girls, rich and poor, urban and rural. Despite his progressive aims and lasting educational influence, Comenius does not come off as a thoroughly modern schoolmaster. When we turn to the first page of the Orbis, we find an opening sentence that would seem peculiar in today’s children’s books: “Come, boy, learn to be wise.” We see above the text a teacher and student in dialogue, the former holding up his finger and sporting a cane and large hat, the latter listening in an emotional state somewhere between awe and anxiety. The student asks, “What doth this mean, to be wise?” His teacher answers, “To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly all that are necessary.” The first chapter of the Orbis looks to the third of these goals in what reads like an early version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Children learn how “to speak out rightly” by imitating animal noises. These two pages are a trove of Latin onomatopoetic verbs and peculiar renderings of animal sounds: cats cry out “nau nau” instead of “meow meow,” and we learn that “the Duck quacketh” (anas tetrinnit), “the Hare squeaketh” (lapus vagit), and “the Crow crieth” (cornix cornicatur). This introduction to animal noises is familiar territory for modern educational toys, as any trip to Toys R’ Us confirms. The teacher explains that first the student must learn “the plain sounds . . . which living creatures know how to make, and thy tongue knoweth how to imitate.” After mastering these noises, the student and teacher “will go into the World, and we will view all things.” ※※Indexed under…Soundsof animals in Latin But after learning how to quack and how to squeak, the children do not “go into the World,” and they do not actually view anything either. Instead, the Orbis abruptly shifts to the philosophical and the invisible, perhaps hoping that a firm grasp of ducks and mice is sufficient for understanding the divine. Chapter 2 presents children with a crash course in theological metaphysics, where they learn that God is “in his Essence Spiritual, and One. In his personality, Three.” They learn that He is “A Light inaccessible; and yet all in all. Every where and no where.” Even if the Orbis is devoted to showing the world visually, its discussion of God is abstract and opaque. And the illustration for this chapter is nothing like the bearded old man we see on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is instead a complex diagram, faceless and geometric. So much for the goal of showing “The World of Things Obvious to the Senses.” Comenius reveals the rationale for this lesson at its end, where he calls God “the Creator, so the Governor and Preserver of all things, which we call the World (Mundum).” Only after introducing God can the author describe His creations: “The World” (Mundus), “The Heaven” (Caelum), the four elements, plants, and animals. In fact, the Orbis loosely mimics the order of creation found at the beginning of Genesis. Comenius expands upon the sparse Biblical narrative with colorful examples of fauna. We learn about a staggering variety of exotic animals: there are six chapters on birds (“Water-Fowl” (Aves Aquaticae), “Ravenous Birds” (Aves Rapaces), among others) and a chapter on “Flying Vermin” (Insecta Volantia), including mentions of the “Gad-Bee” (Oestrum) and the “Glow-worm” (Cicindela). After thirty-five chapters on theology, elements, plants, and animals, Comenius finally introduces man. He again opts for the Biblical account and addresses Adam and Eve before more immediate topics like “The Outward Parts of a Man,” where we learn that women have “two Dugs, with Nipples” and that below the stomach we find “the Groyn and the privities.” The anatomical terminology is vast, including words for each finger and for a number of bones in the body. But amid instruction on the corporeal and familiar, Comenius again injects the abstract and invisible into his picture book with Chapter 43, a discussion of “The Soul of Man.” A dotted outline of a human, opening his arms as if to welcome the students’ gaze, stands at the top of the page. Despite this illustration, Comenius’ discussion of the soul is not dumbed down for children. He lays out the categories of souls for his young students: the “Vegetative” soul of plants, the “Sensitive” soul of animals, and the “Rational” soul of man. Other chapters address more mundane topics. Comenius discusses deformed people (“the blubber-lipped” and “the steeple-crowned” among others) and a variety of basic commercial practices including but not limited to honey-making, beer-brewing, bread-baking, shoe-cobbling, and box-making. The later chapters of the book concentrate on the activities of learned elites, fitting for our student who has passed from the earliest stages of imitating animal noises through lessons on the human soul. Comenius includes chapters on music, philosophy, astronomy, and a number of virtues like temperance and fortitude. And a student who has progressed so far in his studies perhaps has earned a little free time, so the Orbis introduces him to tennis, dice games, and fencing. To parallel his first chapter on God and the Trinity, Comenius concludes the Orbis with an extensive discussion of theology and religion, beginning in Chapter 144. Comenius’ allegiances are clear: he devotes one page of text to “Gentilism,” about one page to Judaism, but over two full pages to Christianity. (He also includes a half-page on “Mahometism.”) Appropriately, Comenius’ final topic is The Last Judgment, where “the last day . . . shall raise up the Dead with the sound of a Trumpet” and when “the Godly & Elect, shall enter into life eternal into the place of Bliss.” It seems that as much as the student must learn how God created the world, he must also learn how God will end it. The final page, mirroring the first, again shows the teacher speaking and the young student listening attentively. But in his second appearance, the student says nothing: we might say Comenius’ lesson was not a matter of dialogue and discussion but of assiduous memorization. The teacher, too, seems to have changed his approach. He tells the student, “thou hast seen in short, all things that can be shewed,” but he recommends that the student also “read other good Books diligently” so that he may become “learned, wise, and godly.” Perhaps, then, Comenius’ project was a clever ruse all along. Recognizing that his students would never learn theology from looking at trees and birds, he wrote the Orbis, his own “good Book” where children could learn their metaphysics and Biblical basics. Even if the first page of the book urges the student to become “wise” and promises to “shew thee all,” the final page concedes that such wisdom does not come from mere sights and sounds. Comenius, in fact, finishes the book with an admonition not to go out into the world at all. A student should instead learn to “fear God, and call upon him, that he may bestow upon thee the Spirit of Wisdom.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 14, 2014

Charles McNamara

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:49.596431

the-tale-of-beatrix-potter

The Tale of Beatrix Potter By Frank Delaney July 23, 2014 This year, the works of one of the most successful and universal writers of all time came into the public domain in many countries around the world. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck - in all, thirty-three books bearing the name “Beatrix Potter” have sold close to 200 million copies. Frank Delaney enquires into the more complex woman behind the safe and warm-hearted stories. Her appeal is so powerful that museums hold her in permanent exhibition — and some of them even commemorate her solely. Hollywood has trawled through her life, if somewhat on tiptoe. The great and the good have acknowledged her influence and the affection she inspires. Pottery, apparel, wallpaper — all kinds of domestic accoutrements bear her quaint, unthreatening drawings; her inescapably fluffy image has driven a licensing industry that has been worth millions. Yet Beatrix Potter was a sharp-edged, and reclusive woman, serious and complex, and her “nursery” reputation does her scant justice; she was much more than a “mere” children’s writer. Which, however, is where and how her famed “product” began — with the famous letter from Beatrix aged 27 to Noel Moore, aged 6, the little son of her final governess; Sep 4th 93My dear Noel, I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were — Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail — and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree. . . She called it a “picture letter.” In among the words she had sketched each character in the tale, with Peter unquestionably the perkiest: he’s the only one standing upright. As adults’ novelists do, she had taken him from life — Peter Rabbit was based on a Belgian buck, she’d given him the name “Peter Piper” and described him thus: “Whatever the shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet.” The daughter of Manchester Unitarians rich out of the cotton trade, Helen Beatrix Potter, born Saturday, 28 July 1866, grew up in a fully-serviced Kensington house. Notwithstanding the butlers, governesses, grooms, nurses and maids she suffered early that writer’s boon, the angst of loneliness. A cold, uninterested mother raised the child at arm’s length, and the warmest early companionship came from pets — lizards, guinea-pigs, newts, birds, mice, bats and rabbits, cats and dogs. And since the coldness of the household bred no sentimentality, Beatrix was happy in time to put down any little creature who fell ill, skin it, and boil the carcass to extract the skeleton for drawing. Does this — let’s call it “objectivity” rather than “ruthlessness” — does it explain why she gave her stories such raw edges? Benjamin Bunny received a whipping from his father. Amid the “barking, baying, growls and howls, squealing and groans,” did the collie-dog and the foxhound puppies, Jemima Puddle-Duck’s rescuers, actually eat “the foxy-whiskered gentleman” of whom “nothing more was ever seen?” And what about The Tale of Two Bad Mice, vandals who wreck a doll’s house? Legion readers may still find Beatrix Potter rosy and twee: she had no such compromising intent. We can trace her talent. The gorgeous paintings bubbled up from clear springs (let’s not any more diminish them with the word “illustration:” just look again at the owl in Squirrel Nutkin). To begin with, the dysmaternal mother fobbed off the nursery with picture books: Hans Andersen; the brothers Grimm; an illustrated bible — the usual suspects. But the lonely child savoured the drawings more than the text; for instance, when she got around to Alice in Wonderland, Beatrix, of her own later admission, became much more compelled by the pictures of Sir John Tenniel than the whimsies of Lewis Carroll. By the age of seven, she herself was already drawing with individual line, tone and competence. As prime material she made life drawings of her pets. She commented on her hedgehog model, the real Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, “So long as she can go to sleep on my knee she is delighted; but if she is propped up for half an hour she first begins to yawn pathetically, and then she does bite. Nevertheless, she is a dear person.” Her dear creatures opened a portal into the widest and most powerful arena of all — the natural world. In the year she was born, her Potter grandfather purchased a 300-acre Capability Brown estate at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. How enchanting to a child with a sketch-pad and burgeoning powers of observation; “The oaks moaning and swaying close to the bedroom windows in winter. . . trees in every hedgerow. . . in summer the distant landscapes are intensely blue. . .” Annual family trips to the Lake District and Scotland clinched the deal. She recorded “the night-jar’s eerie cry, the hooting of the owls, the bat [that] flitted around the house the roe-deer’s bark. . .” Back in London, she used the solitude of the playroom to recollect in tranquility the cool woods of summer, and in a very short time the universe of wild nature, whence, after all, her pets had originated, became the permanent home of her spirit. Another influence grew alongside. Her father, a barrister and club gentleman, had always longed to paint but could scarcely draw a straight line. So he indulged, as did many excited Victorians, in the new art form of photography; he bought all the latest equipment, and hired a servant to hawk it about for him. Naturally he photographed his family without ceasing, and no matter what her age or pose, his daughter always looks as serious as a century. He also rendered her an even greater service than keeping her record. His friend, the painter John Everett Millais, deputed Rupert Potter to photograph landscapes that Millais could use as backgrounds in canvases. He also asked him to take, for reference, “likenesses” of the more important sitters (Gladstone, for example), to save them having to sit so often and long. On some of these forays Beatrix went along with her father. She met Millais in his studio, he perceived her talent and interest, and he bared to her the very soul of working in oils — how to mix paint. The creatures, the countryside and its enchanting details, the smell of the palette — by and large, this jigsaw of childhood experiences pieces together Beatrix Potter’s early adult portrait. That same leaning toward science that she practised in dissections and anatomical drawings, also led her into botany; look at the rich and accurate flora alongside her rabbits and pigs and foxes. Several years ago, an Irish agricultural scientist, Fionnbhar O’Riordain, alerted me to the game of finding where mushrooms appear in Beatrix Potter, because she had served a self-taught but distinguished apprenticeship to mycology. He described her botanical work as “brilliant,” and authenticated his faith in her by making slides of her drawings. At 31 years of age, she had submitted a scientific paper to the respected Linnean Society in London. The Society’s practice was to have its papers read aloud by other than the authors, even if it were Darwin. One April night in 1897, “Miss H.B. Potter’s paper, On the Germination of Spores of Agaricineae [Mushrooms],” was presented to the Society by a principal of Kew Gardens. Later, in her development of her research, she mounted arguments connecting spores to lichens. Dismissed at the time, she had the pleasure of eventual vindications, and by 1901 she had produced almost 300 water-colours of mushrooms, fungii, the world of spores. Through her donation they now reside in the Armitt Museum in Cumbria. Being, though, a dilettante, however serious and well-founded, was never going to settle her. She had always had earnings in mind, had been drawing greeting cards for art publishers — to earn money for microscopes and slides, for perhaps a printing press, and unquestionably for ways of escape. Pressed by Noel Moore’s mother (once a governess always a teacher), Beatrix now turned to the “picture letters.” For The Tale of Peter Rabbit she created extra drawings, added the mouse with the “large pea in her mouth,” the white cat “staring at some goldfish,” and printed Peter as a Christmas gift in 1901. The warmth of its reception from friends and family astounded her, so she then made an edition for sale, price one shilling, plus tuppence postage. All who received it enthused; Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle had “a good opinion of the story and the words.” This modest repute reached a publisher, Frederick Warne in London, who said he would take it on provided that Miss Potter’s drawings could be in colour. She refused: “I did not colour the whole book for two reasons: the great expense of good colour printing; and also the rather uninteresting colour of a good many of the subjects which are most of them rabbit-brown and green.” Her practical sense supervened. She provided colour, worked with the publishers on proofs and emendations — and then a great deal more. As The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published on 2 October 1902, she already had in the hopper The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (look out for mushrooms) and The Tailor of Gloucester (her own all-time favourite). She was 36 years old, and so began the universal author. In the intensity of the publishing experience over the next two years, she and her editor, the youngest Mr. Warne, began to take notice of one another; Norman was tall, thin and kind, with a benign mustache. The relationship flowered and in July 1905 — she was 39 — an engagement materialised, but marriage plans could not be discussed with any openness because to the Potters Norman Warne counted as “trade.” The two families agreed to keep it secret: there had been precedent: Beatrix’s brother was married eleven years before his parents were informed. A few days after this new happiness, however, Norman fell ill. Beatrix had just left for Wales to summer with her parents, where within three weeks she was to hear that, on the 25th of August, Norman Warne had died of pernicious anemia. To contain — and hide — her grief, Beatrix quit London and went to Cumbria, where she had already been arranging to buy a small farm, Hill Top, near Sawrey, in the fells. It was to have been the summer home of Mr and Mrs Norman Warne, and despite all the poignancy, she yet completed the purchase. At Hill Top she gave birth to a host of later characters; Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle-Duck and Samuel Whiskers and Pigling Bland, because even with — or perhaps because of — a heart breaking off at the edges, and even though writing into the void left by her loving, admiring editor at Warne, she continued to produce. In time, having already devised a Peter Rabbit doll, and a board game, she would develop further merchandise and help make herself a rich woman. She steeped herself in her new northern world; she made herself a significant figure in these steep fells that climb so close to the floor of Heaven. Farming took her into its deep embrace, and she became a champion of causes — Herdwick sheep, for instance, a local breed, had been dying out; she founded a breeders’ association to bring them back. She also began to buy tranches of this beloved land, assembling in time as much as four thousand acres, which she left to the National Trust. In 1913, eight years after Norman Warne’s death, she married the country solicitor who had been conveyancing the fells for her. His name was William Heelis, at 42 five years younger than Beatrix; “Dreadfully shy,” she said of him, “but I am sure he will be more comfortable married. . . he is in every way satisfactory, well known in the district and respected.” As with Norman Warne her parents objected again, and as with Norman Warne her new swain was also tall, thin and kind, with a benign mustache. In Ambleside, I met an old man who had known Beatrix Potter, and who told me the “tramp story.” One rainy winter’s day, dressed as she liked to, in the opposite of high fashion, Beatrix encountered a tramp on a high road near Hill Top. He assumed her to be of his tribe, and greeted her with, “Brave hard weather for the likes of thee’n me, missus.” She had done the thing she’d always wanted — merged with her countryside. Some years ago, when I was presenting Radio Four’s Poetry Please, a listener left a message at the BBC with a question for James Fenton as to the meaning of one of his poems. I telephoned Mr. Fenton and he answered, “Don’t ask the poet, ask the poem.” Therefore — go thou and do likewise with Beatrix Potter, and you will find — to take some examples — a self-containment brought on by nursery loneliness; see the inner space in her work: note the predominance of interiors. Her gallantly perfect language demonstrates the unwavering control with which she presented herself; “In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets — when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta — there lived a tailor in Gloucester.” (In respectful observance of her constant mission to explain let’s note that “paduasoy” comes from peau de soie, literally “skin of silk,” and is a French medieval grosgrain fabric.) Hail her superb drawing of flora and fauna; note, however, that she had lesser skill drawing humans. But she rendered landscape with the true love of someone who understands the way the countryside stretches out under the sun, and who will one day want some for herself. In the work after 1905 you will find exquisite views of the Lake District. In 1940, she was asked by a publisher “to tell again how Peter Rabbit came to be written.” Having first mentioned that Noel Moore, the Peter Rabbit boy, had grown up lame, and was now “an air warden in a bombed London parish,” Beatrix, not writing books any more — “My eyes are too weak” — offered, in effect, a thumbnail autobiography. “I do not remember a time,” she answered, “when I did not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside; that pleasant, unchanging world of realism and romance, which in our northern clime is stiffened by hard weather, a tough ancestry, and the strength that comes from the hills.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 23, 2014

Frank Delane

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:50.107076

elizabeth-bislands-race-around-the-world

Elizabeth Bisland’s Race Around the World By Matthew Goodman October 16, 2013 Matthew Goodman explores the life and writings of Elizabeth Bisland, an American journalist propelled into the limelight when she set out in 1889 - head-to-head with fellow journalist Nellie Bly - on a journey to beat Phileas Fogg's fictitious 80-day circumnavigation of the globe. On the morning of November 14, 1889, John Brisben Walker, the wealthy publisher of the monthly magazine The Cosmopolitan, boarded a New Jersey ferry bound for New York City. Like many other New Yorkers, he was carrying a copy of The World, the most widely read and influential newspaper of its time. A front-page story announced that Nellie Bly, The World’s star investigative reporter, was about to undertake the most sensational adventure of her career: an attempt to go around the world faster than anyone ever had before. Sixteen years earlier, in his popular novel, Jules Verne had imagined that such a trip could be accomplished in eighty days; Nellie Bly hoped to do it in seventy-five. Immediately John Brisben Walker recognized the publicity value of such a scheme, and at once an idea suggested itself: The Cosmopolitan would sponsor its own competitor in the around-the-world race, traveling in the opposite direction. Of course, the magazine’s circumnavigator would have to leave immediately, and would have to be, like Bly, a young woman –the public, after all, would never warm to the idea of a man racing against a woman. But who should it be? Arriving at the offices of The Cosmopolitan that morning, Walker sent a message to the home of Elizabeth Bisland, the magazine’s literary editor. It was urgent, he indicated; she should come at once. Each month for The Cosmopolitan Elizabeth Bisland wrote a review of recently published books entitled “In the Library.” She was a reader with refined tastes and wide-ranging interests; the subjects covered in her first few columns included Tolstoy’s social gospel, the fourteenth-century tales of Don Juan Manuel, the collected poems of Emma Lazarus, and a two-volume history of the Vikings by the Norwegian author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyeson. Born into a Louisiana plantation family ruined by the Civil War, Bisland had moved to New Orleans and then, a few years later, to New York, where she contributed to a variety of magazines and was regularly referred to as the most beautiful woman in metropolitan journalism. At the time of her race around the world Elizabeth Bisland was twenty-eight years old. She was tall, with an elegant, almost imperious bearing that made her appear even taller; she had large dark eyes and luminous pale skin and spoke in a low, gentle voice. She reveled in gracious hospitality and smart conversation, both of which were regularly on display in the literary salon that she hosted in her small apartment, where members of New York’s creative set gathered to discuss the artistic issues of the day. Bisland’s particular combination of beauty, charm, and erudition seems to have been nothing short of bewitching. One of her admirers, the writer Lafcadio Hearn, called her “a sort of goddess,” and likened her conversation to hashish, leaving him disoriented for hours afterwards. Another said, about talking with her, that he felt as if he were playing with “a beautiful dangerous leopard,” which he loved for not biting him. Bisland herself was well aware that feminine beauty was useful but fleeting (“After the period of sex-attraction has passed,” she once wrote, “women have no power in America”), and she took pride in the fact that she had arrived in New York with only fifty dollars in her pocket, and that the thousands of dollars now in her bank account had come by virtue of her own pen. Capable of working for eighteen hours at a stretch, she wrote book reviews, essays, feature articles, and poetry in the classical vein. She was a believer, more than anything, in the joys of literature, which she had first experienced as a girl in ancient, tattered volumes of Shakespeare and Cervantes that she found in the ruined library of her family’s plantation house. (She had taught herself French while she churned butter, so that she might read Rousseau’s Confessions in the original.) She cared nothing for fame, and indeed found the prospect of it distasteful. So when she arrived at the offices of The Cosmopolitan, and John Brisben Walker proposed that she race Nellie Bly around the world, Elizabeth Bisland told him no. ※※Indexed under…ButterLearning Rousseau while churning She had guests coming for dinner the next day, she explained, and besides, she had nothing to wear for such a long journey. The real reason, though, as she would later acknowledge, was that she immediately recognized the notoriety that such a race would bring, “and to this notoriety I most earnestly objected.” John Brisben Walker, however, had already made one fortune in alfalfa and another in iron and was in the process of making a third, in magazine publishing. He was not easily dissuaded, and six hours later Bisland found herself on a New York Central Line train bound for San Francisco. Elizabeth Bisland would write seven articles about her race around the world for The Cosmopolitan, which in 1890 were collected and published by Harper & Brothers as a book entitled In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World. Her account began: If, on the thirteenth of November, 1889, some amateur prophet had foretold that I should spend Christmas Day of that year on the Indian Ocean, I hope I should not by any open and insulting incredulity have added new burdens to the trials of a hard-working soothsayer — I hope I should, with the gentleness due a severe case of aberrated predictiveness, have merely called his attention to that passage in the Koran in which it is written, “The Lord loveth a cheerful liar” — and bid him go in peace. Yet I did spend the 25th day of December steaming through the waters that wash the shores of the Indian Empire, and did do other things equally preposterous, of which I would not have believed myself capable if forewarned of them. I can only claim in excuse that these vagaries were unpremeditated, for the prophets neglected their opportunity and I received no augury. Bisland was a published poet, and throughout the trip she wrote of her experiences in a highly lyrical, impressionistic style, paying special attention to the ever-changing scapes of land and sea. “In the night a hoar frost had fallen,” she wrote one morning, “that was to snow as sleep is to death; and the pale reaped fields, the sere meadows, and silent uplands were transfigured by the first gleam of day.” She delighted in sitting on the top deck of a steamship and watching the ocean for hours on end. “Sapphires would be pale and cold beside this sea,” she wrote on her trip across the Pacific — “palpitating with wave shadows deep as violets, yet not purple, and with no touch of any color to mar its perfect hue. It flames with unspeakable, many-faceted splendor, under a sky that is wan by contrast with its profundity of tint, and the very foam that curles away from our wake is blue as the blue shadows in snow.” Prior to the around-the-world trip Bisland had never been out of the country before, and during it she discovered a love of travel that would stay with her the rest of her life. This was perhaps best exemplified in a late-night carriage trip she took to the Tanks of Yemen, a remarkable system of ancient stone cisterns. “Our footsteps and our voices echo in hollow whispers from the empty Tanks and the mysterious shadows of the hills,” Bisland wrote, “though we walk lightly and speak softly, awed by the vast calm radiance of the African night. . . . The world grows dreamlike and unreal in the white silence.” That was what the trip had given her, she would reflect later: the vividness of a new world, where one was for the first time, as Tennyson had written, Lord of the senses five. “It was well,” she told herself when it was all over, “to have thus once really lived.” It’s instructive to note that in her book Bisland always described her undertaking for The Cosmopolitan as a “trip” or a “journey,” and never — not even once — as a “race.” Still, she was a loyal employee and she threw herself into the competition with vigor. Near the end of the trip, cold and sleepless and hungry, Bisland hurtled by train and ferry through France, England, Wales, and Ireland to catch the steamship that was her last chance to beat Bly, only to have to cross a storm-tossed North Atlantic in the worst weather that had been seen in many years. In the end, Elizabeth Bisland succeeded in beating Phileas Fogg’s eighty-day mark, completing the trip in seventy-six days — which would have been the fastest trip ever made around the world but for the fact that Nellie Bly had arrived four days earlier. She arrived home — as she had feared — famous. The race between Bly and Bisland was closely covered by newspapers across the United States, and heavy wagering on the outcome was reported in the country’s gambling houses. As early as the first week of the race, in San Francisco, Bisland was aghast at the steady stream of visitors who sent up cards to her hotel room with urgent messages scrawled on them, but who, she noted in In Seven Stages, had only “a desire to look at me — presumably as a sort of inexpensive freak show.” Unlike Nellie Bly, who upon her return to New York immediately set out on a forty-city lecture tour, Bisland did all she could to avoid the glare of publicity. She gave no lectures, endorsed no products, and did not comment publicly on the trip after the day of her return. Indeed, at the very moment when the American public’s interest in her was at its height, Bisland chose to leave the United States, setting sail for Great Britain, where she lived for the following year. In London’s literary society she met, among others, Herbert Spencer; the popular novelist Rhoda Broughton (the two women would collaborate on a short novel entitled A Widower Indeed); and Rudyard Kipling, who was as smitten with her as the men in New York had been. “I guess you’ll have enough men censer-swinging under your nose to prevent your waving the thurible too markedly under mine,” he wrote in a letter to her. “All the same and until you go after something else new I am grateful.” Upon her return to New York Bisland married the corporate attorney Charles Wetmore, and together the two designed and built an estate on Long Island. Applegarth, as they called it, was in the Tudor style, made of brick, half-timbering, and stucco, with leaded windows and doorways framed in limestone. The stone fireplace in the drawing room was modeled on one belonging to Queen Elizabeth I, whom Bisland had long admired as having “rejected the whole theory of feminine subordination.” Living at Applegarth Bisland would be highly productive as a writer: Between 1903 and 1910 she edited and wrote the introduction to the two-volume Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, and wrote the highly regarded autobiographical novel A Candle of Understanding as well as several essay collections in which she celebrated the pleasures of literature and forcefully decried the domination of women by men. “The oldest of all empires is that of man; no royal house is so ancient as his,” she wrote in an essay entitled “The Abdication of Man.” “The Emperors of Japan are parvenus of the vulgarest modernity in comparison, and the claims of long descent of every sovereign in Europe shrivel into absurdity beside the magnificent antiquity of this potentate.” Bisland was a working writer right up until the very end of her life. In 1927, at the age of sixty-five, she published her final essay collection, entitled The Truth About Men and Other Matters. In it she considered relations between the sexes (in the title essay she observed, “The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them — or wished to see them. . . . No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life”), country living, travels in Japan; much of the book, though, was about growing gracefully old. In an essay called “Toward Sunset” Bisland observed, “That old age may be agreeable to others and tolerable to itself no other equipment is so necessary as a vigorous sense of humour.” But old age itself, she was quick to point out, “is not an amusing episode.” Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible. . . . one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry. Elizabeth Bisland died on January 6, 1929, at the age of sixty-seven. Today, all of her books are out of print, but she deserves to be better remembered than she is — for the gorgeousness of her prose, of course, and the clear-sightedness of her perspective on the condition of women, but also as someone who chose to turn away from the culture of celebrity just as it was dawning. Bisland never breached the promise she made to herself at the end of the race around the world: to conduct the rest of her life in such a way that no journalist would ever again see fit to put her name in a headline. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 16, 2013

Matthew Goodman

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:50.604565

lost-in-translation-proust-and-scott-moncrieff

Lost in Translation Proust and Scott Moncrieff By William C. Carter November 13, 2013 Scott Moncrieff's English translation of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is widely hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. His rendering of the title as Remembrance of Things Past is not, however, considered a high point. William C. Carter explores the two men's correspondence on this somewhat sticky issue and how the Shakespearean title missed the mark regarding Proust's theory of memory. Although Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu is considered by many journalists and writers to be the best translation of any foreign work into the English language, his choice of Remembrance of Things Past as the general title alarmed the seriously ill Proust and misled generations of readers as to the novelist’s true intent. It wasn’t until 1992 that the title was finally changed to In Search of Lost Time. “Remembrance of Things Past” is a beautiful line from William Shakespeare’s sonnet 30, but it conveys an idea that is really the opposite of Proust’s own. When Scott Moncrieff chose this title, he did not know, of course, where Proust was going with the story and did not correctly interpret the title, which might indeed be taken to indicate a rather passive attempt by an elderly person to recollect days gone by. Proust’s theory of memory rejects the notion that we can simply sit and quietly resurrect the past in its true vividness through what he called voluntary memory. When we attempt to do this, we find that it doesn’t work very well. We remember very little and often only in a haphazard and rather bland way. On the other hand, Proust’s title should be taken to suggest a different approach: the Narrator’s search (recherche means both search and research in French) is an active, arduous quest in which the past must be rediscovered—largely through what Proust called involuntary memory, as demonstrated in the famous madeleine scene—then analyzed and understood, and finally, if your ambition is to preserve it in writing, transposed and recreated in a book. As we will see, Proust lived long enough to see the title Remembrance of Things Past and, while he objected to it, did not take measures to change it. A native of Scotland, Scott Moncrieff had served as a captain in the Scottish Borderers during World War I. Before reading A la recherche du temps perdu, he had already made a name for himself as the translator of major French works, such as La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) and Stendhal’s two masterful novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma). After the Great War Scott Moncrieff had served as secretary to Lord Northcliffe, in addition to being an editor at The London Times. In January 1920, a thirty-year-old Scott Moncrieff resigned his post at the Times in order to devote himself entirely to translating À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust was completely unaware of his good fortune in having such a translator; his misgivings were founded in large part by a letter from Sydney Schiff, a British novelist and translator who wrote under the pseudonym of Stephen Hudson. He and his wife Violet, who both knew French, had been among the first in Britain to discover and love Swann’s Way and had subsequently struck up a friendship with Proust. In London, on September 9, 1922, Schiff read this announcement in The Athenaeum: Messers Chatto & Windus, as publishers, and Mr. Scott Moncrieff, as author, have almost ready the first installment of M. Marcel Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ in the English translation. The title of this initial volume is Swann’s Way. Schiff, who had long thought he was the only Englishman capable of translating À la recherche du temps perdu, objected to Scott Moncrieff’s titles. As incredible as it seems, Schiff did not realize the overall title came from Shakespeare’s sonnet, whose opening lines read: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past. . . .” In his letter to Proust, Schiff lamented the loss of the French title’s double meaning — time wasted and lost, with its “melancholy nuance, etc.” But even more surprising, was Schiff’s total misreading of his native language; he translated Swann’s Way for Proust as “A la manière de Swann,” (In the Manner of Swann), as though that were its only possible meaning. (Schiff would later make amends and become a good friend of Scott Moncrieff’s.) Naturally, Proust, who knew something about the art of translation from his own translations of works by John Ruskin, became alarmed on reading Schiff’s reaction and his rendering of Scott Moncrieff’s titles. Proust wrote to Schiff, saying he certainly did not intend to “let Du côté de chez Swann appear under the title you gave me. I knew nothing about this translation.” Of course, Proust did know — or should have known — about Scott Moncrieff’s translation, since his publisher Gallimard had offered to let him inspect it months earlier and the novelist had declined. Proust, whose health worsened again, waited nearly a week before writing to Gallimard. Now, he said, in addition to “falling with every step,” his speech troubles had returned. He then conveyed Schiff’s concerns about the translation to Gallimard. The author could not accept the title that meant “In the manner of Swann.” That was “intolerable.” He reminded Gallimard that Du côté de chez Swann and Le Côté de Guermantes indicated the two separate walks at Combray. The English title was “nonsense;” surely it must be an error. Proust concluded: “I value my work too much to allow an Englishman to demolish it.” Gallimard replied that such a distortion of Proust’s titles was indeed out of the question and he would do everything in his power to prevent it. Gallimard soon received the advance copies of Swann’s Way in English. He had also retrieved from the files Proust’s contract with the English publisher and his own letter to Proust offering to let him inspect Scott Moncrieff’s translation. And Gallimard had some encouraging news: he had spoken to Victor M. Llona, his agent for America and England, “who knew English admirably well” and who assured him that Swann’s Way was not at all bad for the title; it was in fact “quite good.” In October, Proust, who was not to live long enough to appreciate the excellence of Scott Moncrieff’s work, exchanged letters with his translator: “I was very flattered and touched by the trouble you took to translate my Swann.” Because of his terrible health, Proust said that it was a miracle he could thank Scott Moncrieff. Although he had not read the entire volume, the author did have “one or two criticisms.” The first was to explain that the general title did not mean at all Remembrance of Things Past. Proust regretted the omission of “Lost Time,” which “is found again at the end of the work: Time Regained. As for Swann’s Way that can mean Du côté de chez Swann, but also Swann’s manner. By adding to you would have made it all right.” Proust’s suggested correction to this last title seems to confirm the content of his next sentence in which he admitted having forgotten all his English. Scott Moncrieff’s reply, written on Savile Club letterhead, was modest and brief: My dear Sir, I beg that you will allow me to thank you for your very gratifying letter in English as my knowledge of French — as you have shown me, with regard to your titles — is too imperfect, too stunted a growth for me to weave from it the chapelet that I would fain offer you. Are you still suffering — which I am very sorry to hear, and wish that my real sympathy could bring you some relief — I am making my reply to your critiques on another sheet, and by the aid of a machine which I hope you do not abominate: it is the machine on which Swann and one-third of the Jeunes Filles have been translated. Thus you can throw away this sheet unread, or keep it, or inflict it upon M. Gallimard. Charles Scott Moncrieff. Proust or someone discarded the sheet or lost it. Thus we do not know how the translator justified his choice of the general title that Schiff and Proust were the first, but far from the last, to criticize. Proust was already ill with the chest cold that would kill him in just over two months. He died on November 18, 1922. Scott Moncrieff died in 1930, at age forty, leaving untranslated the final volume Le Temps Retrouvé. His task would be completed by Sydney Schiff, writing as Stephen Hudson. Schiff dedicated his translation: “To the memory of my friend CHARLES SCOTT MONCRIEFF, Marcel Proust’s incomparable translator.” Le Temps Retrouvé had two other English translators: Andreas Mayor and Frederick A. Blossom. Proust’s debt to Scott Moncrieff is enormous, as is that of all readers who first discovered this vast novel in English translation. In a 1939 letter to his daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave his opinion: “Scott Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself.” Harold Bloom observes that Scott Moncrieff made it possible for In Search of Lost Time to become “widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 13, 2013

William C. Carter

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:51.365553

the-serious-and-the-smirk-the-smile-in-portraiture

The Serious and the Smirk The Smile in Portraiture By Nicholas Jeeves September 18, 2013 Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner's photographs of Abraham Lincoln. Today when someone points a camera at us, we smile. This is the cultural and social reflex of our time, and such are our expectations of a picture portrait. But in the long history of portraiture the open smile has been largely, as it were, frowned upon. In Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) the portrait painter Miss La Creevy ponders the problem: . . . People are so dissatisfied and unreasonable, that, nine times out of ten, there’s no pleasure in painting them. Sometimes they say, “Oh, how very serious you have made me look, Miss La Creevy!” and at others, “La, Miss La Creevy, how very smirking!”. . . In fact, there are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk; and we always use the serious for professional people (except actors sometimes), and the smirk for private ladies and gentlemen who don’t care so much about looking clever. A walk around any art gallery will reveal that the image of the open smile has, for a very long time, been deeply unfashionable. Miss La Creevy’s equivocal ‘smirks’ do however make more frequent appearances: a smirk may offer artists an opportunity for ambiguity that the open smile cannot. Such a subtle and complex facial expression may convey almost anything — piqued interest, condescension, flirtation, wistfulness, boredom, discomfort, contentment, or mild embarrassment. This equivocation allows the artist to offer us a lasting emotional engagement with the image. An open smile, however, is unequivocal, a signal moment of unselfconsciousness. Such is the field upon which the mouth in portraiture has been debated: an ongoing conflict between the serious and the smirk. The most famous and enduring portrait in the world functions around this very conflict. Millions of words have been devoted to the Mona Lisa and her smirk — more generously known as her ‘enigmatic smile’ — and so today it’s difficult to write about her without sensing that you’re at the back of a very long and noisy queue that stretches all the way back to 16th century Florence. But to write about the smile in portraiture without mentioning her is perverse, for the effect of the Mona Lisa has always been in its inherent ability to demand further examination. Leonardo impels us to do this using a combination of skilful sfumato (the effect of blurriness, or smokiness) and his profound understanding of human desire. It is a kind of magic: when you first glimpse her, she appears to be issuing a wanton invitation, so alive is the smile. But when you look again, and the sfumato clears in focus, she seems to have changed her mind about you. This is interactive stuff, and paradoxical: the effect of the painting only occurs in dialogue, yet she is only really there when you’re not really looking. The Mona Lisa is thus, in many ways, designed to frustrate — and frustrate she did. The hubbub around her smile really got going in the 19th century, when unfettered critical devotion to Renaissance art was at an all-time high. One critic and historian in particular, Jules Michelet, enjoyed, or at least endured, a very personal moment with her. In Volume VII of his Histoire de France (1855) he wrote, ‘This canvas attracts me, calls me, invades me. I go to it in spite of myself, like the bird to the serpent.’ Artfully concealed under the guise of Romantic criticism, this was in fact an expression of the new cult of the Mona Lisa, and over the years historians would attempt to outdo each other with their devotion to her charms. Michelet’s son-in-law Alfred Dumesnil, also a critic, went even further in his L’art Italien, as if locking antlers with his in-law: ‘The smile is full of attraction, but it is the treacherous attraction of a sick soul that renders sickness. This so soft a look, but avid like the sea, devours.’ In England, John Ruskin asserted that it was a merely a ‘caricature’, to which a young Oxford don named Walter Pater responded in his Renaissance: ‘All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there. . . the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. . .’ Things came to a head in 1919 when the French artist Marcel Duchamp triumphantly created his version, augmenting the smile with a fancy moustache and titling it L.H.O.O.Q., which only exacerbated things in rascally Dadaist fashion. (L.H.O.O.Q. translates phonetically as ‘she has a hot arse’, but also relates to an idiomatic expression of ‘fire down below’.) For Jules Michelet she may have been the object of romantic love: for Duchamp, she was the object of spirited masturbation. It remains a commonly held belief that for hundreds of years people didn’t smile in pictures because their teeth were generally awful. This is not really true — bad teeth were so common that this was not seen as necessarily taking away from someone’s attractiveness. Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria’s whig prime minister, was often described as being devastatingly good-looking, and having a ‘strikingly handsome face and figure’ despite the fact that he had a number of prominent teeth missing as a result of hunting accidents. It was only in later life, when he acquired a set of flapping false teeth, that his image was compromised. His fear of them falling out when he spoke led to a stop-start delivery of his speeches, causing Disraeli to openly poke fun at him in parliament. Nonetheless, both painters and sitters did have a number of good reasons for being disinclined to encourage the smile. The primary reason is as obvious as it is overlooked: it is hard to do. In the few examples we have of broad smiles in formal portraiture, the effect is often not particularly pleasing, and this is something we can easily experience today. When a camera is produced and we are asked to smile, we perform gamely. But should the process take too long, it takes only a fraction of a moment for our smiles to turn into uncomfortable grimaces. What was voluntary a moment ago immediately becomes intolerable. A smile is like a blush — it is a response, not an expression per se, and so it can neither be easily maintained nor easily recorded. Smiling also has a large number of discrete cultural and historical significances, few of them in line with our modern perceptions of it being a physical signal of warmth, enjoyment, or indeed of happiness. By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment — some of whom we’ll visit later. Showing the teeth was for the upper classes a more-or-less formal breach of etiquette. St. Jean-Baptiste De La Salle, in The Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility of 1703, wrote: There are some people who raise their upper lip so high. . . that their teeth are almost entirely visible. This is entirely contradictory to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them. Thus the critical point: should a painter have persuaded his sitter to smile, and chosen to paint it, it would immediately radicalise the portrait, precisely because it was so unusual and so undesirable. Suddenly the picture would be ‘about’ the open smile, and this is almost never what an artist, or a paying subject, wanted. In this sense, a portrait was never so much a record of a person, but a formalised ideal. The ambition was not to capture a moment, but a moral certainty. Politicians were particularly sensitive to this. For a more modern, photographic example of the principle, we may consider Abraham Lincoln. Here was a man better known than most, in his day, for his sense of humour, there being a number of well-known stories about him regularly drawing hoots of laughter from those in his company. While there are some informal images of him looking distinctly avuncular, a wit doesn’t abolish slavery without tough critical opposition, and in his best-known image, the ‘Gettysburg portrait’, he takes on the gravest expression imaginable. So powerful are these images that this is how he is generally remembered today. Mark Twain, a contemporary of Lincoln’s, was firm on the matter in a a letter to the Sacramento Daily Union: A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever. As far back as the late 1460s, Sicily’s Antonello da Messina was surely considering all this when he painted what we now know as Portrait of a Man (one of many Antonello portraits of unknown sitters). Antonello painted quite a few portraits with smiles, and the subject seemed to interest him. We might even infer that it was the very challenge of painting a smile in a new tradition that motivated him, being a pioneer by nature. As you might expect from any portrait of the period, there is little doubt that the sitter is a gentleman. Antonello doesn’t go quite so far as to show the teeth, but does goes give him long dimples on his cheeks and laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. The teeth, we feel, are but a moment away. Unfortunately, this has the effect of making him look less, rather than more, human. The tension between the static nature of painting and the awkward animation of the smile confuses us, so much so that we find a facial expression that is unnervingly unreadable. It is ugly in a way that is hard to describe — it is just repulsively ‘other’ — though some people still think it beautiful, and the unknown Man himself must at least have been satisfied. Better-known artists also attempted it. Caravaggio’s Triumphant Eros of 1602 was designed as a meditation on adolescent beauty, and as such is not strictly portraiture. But so wild and voracious was the boy’s smile that it was typically read at the time as a celebration of tumescent homosexual passion. In the picture, all the instruments of civilised society have been turned over in the face of all-consuming love — but his wicked smile speaks of lust. It may seem extraordinary to us today, in these unforgiving times, that the open smile was perceived as being the most pointedly shocking aspect of the picture despite Eros’ childishly displayed sex. Caravaggio, a rebel and sociopath to his core, revelled in the scandal. In more modern times, John Singer Sargent, in his 1890 study for Miss Eleanor Brooks, draws his subject with a smile that manages to be both truly warm and civilised. Despite this, he later dropped it in favour of a more composed expression in the final work, clearly dissatisfied with the result. As he himself put it, ‘A portrait is a picture of a person with something wrong with the mouth.’ Again, we need to speculate a little as to what might have gone through his mind, but such a choice would lead us to believe that even a painter of his capability found it hard, in the end, to reconcile the smile with his reputation. These artists from very different centuries have all grappled with the open smile, but each of them has failed to inspire in the viewer a consistent reading. It seems that, paradoxically, the less readable the smile, the more we feel we are able to read into it. As with magic tricks, we seem to be moved more by wonder than with explanation. To see the smile at its biggest and best, we have to leave the upper classes and instead visit our attentions on those lower in the social order. 17th century Dutch painters were fascinated with recording the fullness of life, and deliberately sought out the smiles found within it. Here there are almost no end of artists to choose from, and in consequence ‘Dutchness’ in painting, and in life, was often a society shorthand for licentiousness. Jan Steen, Franz Hals, and Judith Leyster were all followers of this style, all painted broad smiles, and all were said to be good company, there being no attempt at separation between the artist, the viewer, and the subject. With the artists as complicit as they were explicit, it was a mutual love affair that put them firmly at the centre of contemporary life. Possibly the most accomplished of these is Gerrit van Honthorst. Having seen Caravaggio’s work in Italy, van Honthorst was so taken with him that he made every effort to channel his style, particularly with his mastery of chiaroscuro. But it was not an obvious choice to make. Caravaggio was a contentious figure — infamous during his own lifetime, he was virtually forgotten on his death. (It was only in the early 20th century that his influence on painting was fully appreciated — at which point he was either celebrated as the father of modern painting, or denounced as its murderer.) But van Honthorst was in love. He immediately saw in Caravaggio something real and worthwhile, and sped back to Utrecht to record his own amplified scenes of late-night eating, drinking and music-making in rich detail. A terrific example of the life and low-life that he sought to represent is The Laughing Violinist of 1624. Since the Renaissance, any reference to music in painting was usually interpreted as a symbol of love. Van Honthorst, again inspired by Caravaggio, wanted to go much further, with sexual overtones so explicit as to break new ground. And so his laughing violinist not only has a lewd expression and almost audible laugh, but is making a universally understood hand gesture. What is quite brilliant about the painting is that, on its own, it crashes through the boundaries of contemporary taste with sheer skill (just as Caravaggio’s paintings did). But when it is hung, as intended, immediately to the right of his portrait Girl Counting Money, it becomes clear who the jeer is aimed at. It is an explicit dialogue, just as Leonardo made with the Mona Lisa, but without the pretence of subtlety. Van Honthorst cracks the issue of the open smile by ensuring that we see it as it exists — not as an expression, but as a reaction. The Dutch, likely relieved to see the back of the strict Calvinist regime of the 16th century, celebrated their everyday lives and experiences with art that was made to be inclusive. Such a relaxed attitude never really caught on in countries where a more protective attitude to class prevailed. England’s William Hogarth was very interested in the smile and its impact on beauty. In his Analysis of Beauty he approved of the lines that ‘form a pleasing smile about the corners of the mouth,’ but loathed a face in extreme contour, considering it ‘a silly or disagreeable look,’ so he saved it for the poor, the corrupt, the drunk, but without the affection of his Dutch near-contemporaries. By 1877 the photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge had solved the problem of fleeting movement with his series of photographs entitled The Horse In Motion. As we know from artists’ previous attempts to paint running horses, the horse’s movement was impossible to capture accurately in paint. Thanks to Muybridge’s pictures, almost overnight all the painted horses became transformed from awkward caricature into great galloping beasts. And before you could say ‘cheese’ photographers found themselves able to capture another fleeting thing: the true smile. Nowadays each of us is recorded across hundreds, or thousands of images, and many of us are smiling broadly. Collected, they represent us accurately in all our moods and modes, so we no longer have to worry about being defined by one picture. Indeed, unlike Abraham Lincoln, modern US presidents try to ensure that a number of images are available that will capture the gamut of their emotional range, from troubled solemnity to enthusiastic joy. The same goes for the royal families, recorded in either carefree, knockabout moments, or in stately focus. In the 21st century these figures must be all things to all people, and all occasions. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 18, 2013

Nicholas Jeeves

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:51.873914

the-founding-fathers-v-the-climate-change-skeptics

The Founding Fathers v. The Climate Change Skeptics By Raphael Calel February 19, 2014 When claims from Europe accused British America of being inferior on account of its colder weather, Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers responded with patriotic zeal that their settlement was actually causing the climate to warm. Raphael Calel explores how, in contrast to today's common association of the U.S. with climate change skepticism, it was a very different story in the 18th century. The United States has in recent years become a stronghold for climate change skepticism, especially since the country’s declaration in 2001 that it would not participate in the Kyoto Protocol. Nevertheless, though it is a well-documented fact, it might surprise you to learn that, a far cry from the United States’ recent ambivalence with respect to the modern scientific theory of man-made climate change, the country’s founders were keen observers of climatic trends and might even be counted among the first climate change advocates. From the start, the project to colonize North America had proceeded on the understanding that climate followed latitude; so dependent was climate on the angle of the sun to the earth’s surface, it was believed, that the word ‘climate’ was defined in terms of parallels of latitude. New England was expected to be as mild as England, and Virginia as hot as Italy and Spain. Surprised by harsh conditions in the New World, however, a great number of the early settlers did not outlast their first winter in the colonies. Many of the survivors returned to Europe, and in fact, the majority of 17th-century colonies in North America were abandoned. A view formed in Europe that the New World was inferior to the Old. In particular, medical lore still held that climate lay behind the characteristic balance of the Hippocratic humors — it explained why Spaniards were temperamental and Englishmen reserved — and it was believed that the climate of the colonies caused physical and mental degeneration. Swedish explorer Pehr Kalm, who had travelled to North America on a mission from Carl Linnaeus, observed in his travel diary that the climate of the New World caused life — plants and animals, including humans — to possess less stamina, stature, and longevity than in Europe. The respected French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, explained in his encyclopaedia of natural history that “all animals of the New World were much smaller than those of the Old. This great diminution in size, whatever maybe the cause, is a primary kind of degeneration.” He speculated that the difference in climate might be the cause: It may not be impossible, then, without inverting the order of nature, that all the animals of the new world originated from the same stock as those of the old; that having been afterwards separated by immense seas or impassable lands, they, in course of time, underwent all the effects of a climate which was new to them, and which must also have had its qualities changed by the very causes which produced its separation; and that they, in consequence, became not only inferior in size, but different in nature. Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw believed that “The Europeans who pass into America degenerate, as do the animals; a proof that the climate is unfavorable to the improvement of either man or animal.” Scientific and artistic genius, according to a prominent theory put forth by the French intellectual Jean-Baptiste Dubos, only flourished in suitable climates — climate accounted for the marvels of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Italian Renaissance, and, thanks to rising temperatures on the European continent that Dubos thought he observed, the Enlightenment. French writer Guillaume Raynal agreed, and made a point of saying that “America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science.” In the New World, refuting such theories became a matter of patriotism. In the rousing conclusion to one of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote: Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority, and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America–that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Building on the theories of John Evelyn, John Woodward, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and David Hume — who all believed that the clearing and cultivation of land in Europe accounted for the temperate climate that had enabled the Enlightenment — the colonists set about arguing that their settlement was causing a gradual increase in temperatures and improvement of the flora and fauna of North America. Hugh Williamson, American politician and a signatory of the Constitutional Convention, believed that “within the last forty or fifty years there has been a very great observable change of climate, that our winters are not so intensely cold, nor our summers so disagreeably warm as they have been,” a fact he attributed to the clearing of forests. “The change of climate which has taken place in North America, has been a matter of constant observation and experience,” wrote Harvard professor Samuel Williams. Benjamin Franklin wrote of the “common Opinion, that the Winters in America are grown milder.” Measurements were as yet inadequate to the task of proving this, he said, but he found the proposed mechanism (i.e. clearing and cultivation) sufficiently persuasive that, even if the winters were not milder already, he could not “but think that in time they may be so.” Benjamin Rush, physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence, speculated that, if cultivation kept pace with clearing of new lands, climate change might even reduce the incidence of fevers and disease. Thomas Jefferson was especially eager to rebut Buffon and the proponents of the theory of climatic degeneracy. He expended substantial efforts to this effect in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), with page after page of animal measurements showing that the American animals were not inferior to their European counterparts. He also had help from James Madison, who shared his own measurements with Jefferson, urging him to use them in his arguments against Buffon. Their impassioned advocacy would occasionally lead them astray, though. Samuel Williams claimed that winter temperatures in Boston and eastern Massachusetts had risen by 10-12˚F in the previous century and a half, a climatic transformation too rapid to be believed perhaps. Jefferson, convinced that the American climate could sustain large animals too, insisted to a friend that “The Indians of America say [the Mammoth] still exists very far North in our continent.” Anxious to disprove claims of degeneracy, he wrote a letter to the American Philosophical Society in which he openly speculated that elephants, lions, giant ground sloths, and mammoths still lived in the interior of the continent. Later, believing he was on the verge of proving the skeptical Europeans wrong, he wrote a letter to the French naturalist Bernard Germain de Lacépède boasting that “we are now actually sending off a small party to explore the Missouri to it’s source,” referring to Lewis’ and Clark’s expedition. “It is not improbable that this voyage of discovery will procure us further information of the Mammoth, & of the Megatherium,” Jefferson continued, concluding “that there are symptoms of [the Megalonyx’s] late and present existence.” The Founders did not settle for mere advocacy, though. Keen to present as strong a case for climate change as possible, and moderated by their scientific temperament perhaps, they wanted more and better evidence. To decide the issue of lions and mammoths, Jefferson instructed Lewis and Clark to pay special attention to “the animals of the country generally, & especially those not known in the U.S. the remains and accounts of any which may [be] deemed rare or extinct.” Although they didn’t find mammoths, they discovered many animals and plants previously unknown to science. On the question of whether the winters were getting milder, Franklin wrote to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, encouraging him to make “a regular and steady Course of Observations on a Number of Winters in the different Parts of the Country you mention, to obtain full Satisfaction on the Point.” Madison made regular observations at his estate, which he assiduously entered into his meteorological journals. Jefferson, too, kept meticulous records, and encouraged his friends and colleagues to submit their measurements to the American Philosophical Society, “and the work should be repeated once or twice in a century, to show the effect of clearing and culture towards the changes of climate.” Jefferson himself made significant contributions to the development of modern meteorology. In 1778, for instance, Jefferson and the Reverend James Madison, president of The College of William & Mary and cousin of the fourth President of the United States, made the first simultaneous meteorological measurements. Jefferson promoted methodological standardization and expansion of geographical coverage, and was an early proponent of establishing a national meteorological service. One need hardly belabor the point that the early climate change advocates were wrong. Modern climate reconstructions show there was a brief warming period in New England during the late 1700s, but Jefferson’s and Williams’ measurements predate any actual man-made climate change. Their theories were pre-scientific in the specific sense that they predate a scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect. It is true that the French scientist Edme Mariotte had, as early as 1681, noticed the greenhouse effect, but it was not until the 1760s and 1770s that the first systematic measurements were made, and it would still be another century before anyone imagined that human activities might influence atmospheric composition to such an extent that the climate might be modified by this mechanism. Their pre-scientific theories also led them to believe that a changing climate would necessarily be beneficial, whereas today we are much more aware of the dangers of climate change. Yet one should not belittle the efforts of these early climate change advocates. Fighting back against the European ‘degeneracy theory’ was necessitated by pride as much as a concern that these ideas might negatively affect immigration and trade from Europe. Their search for evidence, moreover, resulted in substantial contributions to zoology, and was instrumental to the foundation of modern meteorology and climatology. One might speculate, even, that a belief in degeneracy contributed to England’s refusal to afford its North American colonial subjects representation in parliament, and so helped spark the American revolution. In this case, one might construe the Founders’ climate change advocacy partly as an attempt to facilitate a peaceful resolution of their grievances with the Crown. Indeed, so politically important was their advocacy efforts thought at the time that Senator Sam Mitchell of New York, in his eulogy at Thomas Jefferson’s funeral, raised them to the same level as the American revolution itself. It is an interesting historical footnote that, during a visit to London, Benjamin Franklin met and became friends with Horace Benedict de Saussure, the Swiss scientist credited with the first systematic measurements of the greenhouse effect. Franklin exchanged letters with Saussure, and encouraged his experiments on electricity. So impressed by Saussure’s work was Jefferson that he would later write to George Washington to suggest recruiting Saussure to a professorship at the University of Virginia, which was then under construction. Far from a stronghold of climate change skepticism, as the United States is sometimes seen today, the country’s founders were vocal proponents of early theories of man-made climate change. They wrote extensively in favor of the theory that settlement was improving the continent’s climate, and their efforts helped to lay the foundation of modern meteorology. Much of the climate change skepticism of the day, on the other hand, was based on the second- and third-hand accounts of travelers, and the skeptics rarely made efforts to further develop the science. In addition, one cannot ignore its political convenience for many in Europe; for instance, Cornelius de Pauw was even hired by the King of Prussia to discourage Prussian citizens from emigrating or investing their capital in the New World. Even if the parallels between the past and present are too obvious to spell out, they can be of some use to us today. While modern climate change advocates and skeptics have become experts at pointing to each other’s errors, we are usually the last to notice our own faults. An episode in our history that bears such strong resemblance to our present provides a rare opportunity to examine ourselves as if through the eyes of another. Today’s climate change advocates may recognize in themselves some of the overzealousness of the Founding Fathers, and therefore better guard against potential fallacies. Skeptics may recognize in themselves the often anti-scientific spirit of the degeneracy-theorists, and hopefully make greater efforts to engage constructively in the scientific enterprise today. One can hope, at least. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 19, 2014

Raphael Calel

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:52.404294

john-l-sullivan-fights-america

John L. Sullivan Fights America By Christopher Klein April 30, 2014 In 1883, the Irish-American heavy-weight boxing champion John L. Sullivan embarked on an unprecedented coast-to-coast tour of the United States offering a prize to any person who could endure four rounds with him in the ring. Christopher Klein tells of this remarkable journey and how the railroads and the rise of the popular press proved instrumental in forging Sullivan into America's first sports superstar. A dense ocean of humanity lapped up to the doorstep of John L. Sullivan’s gilded liquor palace. Heads craned and tilted as hordes of Bostonians attempted to steal a passing glance of their hometown hero through the open doorway. Inside, a ceaseless flow of well-wishers offered their farewells to America’s reigning heavyweight boxing champion. Sullivan’s dark, piercing eyes gleamed with the reflections of the flickering gaslights. His clean-shaven chin glistened like polished granite, although darkness hid in the recesses of a deep dimple and in the shadow of his glorious handlebar mustache. Sullivan’s pristine skin, full set of even teeth, and straight nose belied his profession and visibly testified to the inability of foes to lay a licking on him. Muscular without being muscle-bound, the “Boston Strong Boy” was constructed like a pugilistic product of the Industrial Age, a “wonderful engine of destruction” manifest in flesh and blood. After imbibing the adulation inside his saloon on the evening of September 26, 1883, the hard-hitting, hard-drinking Sullivan waded through the throng of fawning fans outside and stepped into a waiting carriage that sprinted him away to a waiting train. The man who had captured the heavyweight championship nineteen months prior had departed on many journeys before, but no man had ever set out on such an ambitious adventure as the one he was about to undertake. For the next eight months, Sullivan would circle the United States with a troupe of the world’s top professional fighters. In nearly 150 locales, John L. would spar with his fellow pugilists but also present a sensational novelty act worthy of his contemporary, the showman P.T. Barnum. The reigning heavyweight champion would offer as much as $1,000 ($24,000 in today’s dollars when chained to the Consumer Price Index) to any man who could enter the ring with him and simply remain standing after four three-minute rounds. The “Great John L.” was challenging America to a fight. Sullivan’s transcontinental “knocking out” tour was gloriously American in its audacity and concept. Its democratic appeal was undeniable: Any amateur could take a shot at glory by taking a punch from the best fighter in the world. Furthermore, the challenge, given its implicit braggadocio that defeating John L. in four rounds was a universal improbability, was an extraordinary statement of supreme self-confidence from a twenty-four-year-old who supposedly bellowed his own declaration of independence: “My name is John L. Sullivan, and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch alive!” The “knocking out” tour opened in Baltimore on September 28 before thirty-five hundred eager fight fans who filled Kernan’s Theatre. No audience member challenged Sullivan on opening night, but a “flutter of excitement” palpitated through the boxing “fancy” when the champion donned gloves to spar with the constellation of boxing’s brightest stars who comprised the “Great John L. Sullivan Combination.” After opening night, it was on to Virginia and Pennsylvania. The locales started to blur by — Harrisburg, Scranton, Lancaster. John L. finally encountered his first challenger in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Local slugger James McCoy looked like the consummate tough guy. Tattoos of snakes, flowers, and a wide-mouthed dragon plastered his broad chest. The 160-pounder’s looks proved deceiving, however. After McCoy opened with a weak blow, the champion needed only a right and a left. The fight was over in mere seconds. “I never thought any man could hit as hard as he does,” McCoy said afterward. “But I can say what few men can, that I fought with the champion of the world.” And that’s precisely why the “knocking out” tour generated unprecedented publicity in newspapers around the country, both for Sullivan and the entire sport of boxing. Not only was the best fighter in the world bringing the sport to the masses, he was letting the masses get in the ring with him! Youngstown. Steubenville. Terre Haute. In Chicago, the crowds were so thick that the combination pulled in nearly $20,000 in two nights. In St. Paul, Minnesota, Sullivan finally faced an opponent who could match him pound for pound. As soon as time was called, Sullivan stretched out his arm, and six-foot-tall railroad engineer Morris Hefey, who weighed 195 pounds, “fell on the stage as if struck by an axe.” The challenger rose, but as soon as he was within arm’s reach of the champion, he was down again. The fight took thirty seconds. “If you want to know what it is to be struck by lightning,” the challenger said afterward, “just face Sullivan one second.” McGregor. Dubuque. Clinton. In Davenport, blacksmith Mike Sheehan, the “strongest man in Iowa,” told his family that he was going to face off with the champion. Sheehan’s frantic wife visited Sullivan before the fight and beseeched him not to fight her husband, but not for the reason the champion suspected. “We’ve got five small children, and I don’t want them to have a murderer for a father. If you get into a fight with him, he’ll surely kill you,” she warned the champion. John L. took his chances, entered the ring, and started with a smash to the nose of the stunned challenger. Sheehan’s surprise turned to rage. He charged at Sullivan. A big clout on the jaw by the champion sent his foe spinning to the back of the stage, and the challenger decided he had taken enough punishment. Sullivan sent Sheehan away with $100 for being game. Muscatine. Omaha. Topeka. As the combination rattled into Colorado at Christmastime, their train ascended the Rocky Mountains. Sullivan’s unprecedented transcontinental tour and his traverse of the West would not have been possible without one of the technological marvels of the age—the railroad. Only fourteen years had slipped by since the driving of the Golden Spike married the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific and bonded the nation’s railway system together. In the decade between 1870 and 1880, railway mileage in the United States almost doubled from nearly fifty thousand to over eighty-seven thousand. In the West, however, mileage more than tripled. The railroads were powerful symbols of the industrial might of Gilded Age America. “The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail’s pace; The Republic thunders past with the rush of the express,” wrote steel magnate Andrew Carnegie of the raw energy that stoked the United States in the 1880s. That same rough fire of youth burned inside Sullivan and propelled him like a “living locomotive going at full speed.” In fact, perhaps no American has so embodied his times like John L. The United States was the fastest-growing country in the world. Its population would soon eclipse that of Great Britain, and it was on its way to becoming the world’s leading industrial superpower. The country pulsated with the infusion of new immigrants, new industry, and new inventions—telephones, electric lights—that were transforming daily life. Both Sullivan, son of Irish immigrants, and the upstart United States in the 1880s were young and virile, proud and cocky, crude and pugnacious. A boxer always represents power in its most visceral sense, and John L. symbolized an ascendant America that was flexing its economic muscles on the world stage. The champion exuded a rough masculinity that appealed to the growing numbers who feared that life in an increasingly urbanized United States was becoming less rugged, more sedentary. And at a time when the increasingly popular theory of social Darwinism emphasized the survival of the fittest, there was no place in America where that could be so clearly demonstrated than inside a boxing ring. The legendary spirit of the fighting Irish that was made flesh in Sullivan transformed him into a hero for the sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle who had felt emasculated in the wake of the Great Hunger. To Irish Americans who had believed themselves powerless for centuries under the thumb of the British, slighted in their new homeland, and traumatized by the horrific famine of the 1840s, here came one of their own who exuded strength, who didn’t lack confidence, and who didn’t suffer from a lack of pride. His self-belief was an elixir for a people who had suffered from malignant shame. Working-class Irish Americans thought of the champion as one of them, just another Irish bloke scrapping to earn a living with his hands, and on the “knocking out” tour, Sullivan traveled to the outposts where the Irish labored in twelve-, fourteen-, and sixteen-hour shifts: mining towns and lumber camps along railroad lines that were built by calloused Celtic hands. As soon as the “Sullivan’s Sluggers” arrived in the mining boomtowns of the Rockies, the outlaw element of the Wild West seemingly infected the fighters. Reports of drunkenness and brawling appeared with increasing frequency in newspapers and made for great copy. On Christmas Day in Denver, Sullivan almost killed a fellow fighter while playing around with a double-barreled shotgun he was told was unloaded. Two days later in Leadville, a drunken Sullivan swaggered—and staggered—through his performance and backstage hurled a lighted kerosene lamp at another fighter following an argument. In Victoria, British Columbia, he was in “a state of beastly intoxication” and refused to stand for a toast to the health of the city’s namesake, Queen Victoria, explaining that he “hadn’t been brought up to seeing Irishmen drinking to the health of English monarchs.” The combination reached the Pacific Ocean in early 1884. After visiting Los Angeles, the fighters turned back toward the East with Sullivan leaving a trail of broken bottles and fighters littered across America. Tucson. Tombstone. Waco. When Sullivan arrived in Galveston, Texas, he faced perhaps his toughest foe, an imposing cotton baler named Al Marx who was considered the champion of Texas. The challenger wanted to send an early statement, and just after shaking hands, he nailed Sullivan in the jaw. The Texas giant gained confidence after landing several hard blows on Sullivan in the first two rounds, and he was convinced John L. had met his match. Sullivan had spent the day drinking, but when he came out in the third round, the “cowboy pugilist” noticed a change in the champion’s eyes. John L. glared “like a wild animal.” Then Sullivan launched an “uppercut that lifted the giant almost off the floor” that was followed by a left smash to the jaw. Marx sank “down like a bag of oats.” Sullivan lifted him up and then cracked him over the footlights and into the orchestra pit, which broke two chairs, three violins, and a bass drum. As the Texan lay unconscious, the tour’s financial manager reached into the gate receipts to scrounge for $24 to pay for the destroyed drum. Mobile. Savannah. Chattanooga. In Memphis, bricklayer William Fleming took the stage with the champion. At the opening signal, Sullivan charged. He feinted with his left and struck a blow on the lower part of Fleming’s left jaw that knocked him unconscious for fifteen minutes. Total time of the bout: two seconds. Fleming was lifted over the ropes and helped out of the building to his home. When he came to, he asked, “When do me and Sullivan go on?” “You’ve been on,” he was told. “Did I lick him?” the oblivious bricklayer asked. On May 23, 1884, “Sullivan’s Sluggers” pulled into Toledo, Ohio. Nearly eight months after they had started in Baltimore, the combination had reached their final stop on an epic barnstorm through twenty-six of the country’s thirty-eight states as well as the territories of Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. In spite of Sullivan’s drunken exploits, the tour had been a success, and somehow, through all the debauchery, everyone in the combination made it through without any permanent damage. According to some accounts, thirty-nine men had stepped into the ring seeking to go four rounds with the champion. Thirty-nine men failed. Accounts of the financial receipts from the tour vary, but Sullivan likely pocketed tens of thousands of dollars, and his earnings probably approached or surpassed the $50,000 annual salary earned by President Chester A. Arthur. While the exact size of his financial windfall may not be known, it’s certain that Sullivan earned an incredible level of superstardom by traversing the continent. The “Boston Strong Boy” proved to be a drawing card around America due to both his prowess in the ring and his personal magnetism. Americans paid money not just to see John L. Sullivan box, but just to see John L. Sullivan. On Sullivan’s tour stop in St. Louis, five thousand people paid just to see him pitch five lackluster innings in an exhibition game for baseball’s St. Louis Browns. Thanks to the “knocking out” tour, Sullivan became the most famous athlete in the United States—and one of the most famous Americans in any walk of life. Through railroads and newspapers, Sullivan was able to reach hundreds of thousands of people across America, something that wasn’t possible just years before. He became an American celebrity of the highest order as well as the first sports superstar, and his fame would endure even after he lost the heavyweight championship to “Gentleman Jim” Corbett in 1892. The American publicity machine was beginning to crank, and John L. knew how to pull the levers. He rarely turned down a request for an interview, and he was good copy. His boozing, womanizing, and chronic police-blotter presence were godsends to big-city newspapers engaged in heated circulation wars. John L., like generations of athletes to follow, thought that the spotlight pointed at him by the press burned too harshly at times. “My excesses have always been exaggerated,” he said. “I am almost as much in the public eye as the President of the United States.” John L. had it wrong, however. He lived a life much more in the public eye than the president. The American people literally wanted a piece of John L. Women purchased his shorn hair from his barber for a dollar to snap into their lockets. Vaudeville songs and marching tunes were written in his honor. “Let me shake the hand that shook the hand of Sullivan” quickly became a cultural catchphrase, and wherever John L. traveled, an outstretched arm always reached in his direction. Sullivan later pointed to the transcontinental “knocking out” tour as the seminal moment in his lofty career. “I have always believed what popularity I have today is due to that triumphal tour,” he said after his fighting days were done. It was a logistical endeavour, however, that wouldn’t have even been technologically possible a decade before. Newly constructed railroad lines allowed Sullivan to cover enormous swathes of America, from frontier settlements to major metropolitan areas, in short order. He could be in Rawlins, Wyoming, one night and nearly three hundred miles away in Salt Lake City the next. The ability to traverse hundreds of miles on a single overnight train made it possible for legions of his fans to view him in the flesh, to be personally awed by his ring prowess and seduced by his charisma. Sullivan became one of the most “seen” men in the world. Certainly, more eyes gazed upon him than even the president of the United States, and the audiences he drew around the country rivaled those of Barnum and “Buffalo Bill.” It was the simultaneous communications revolution, however, that allowed Sullivan to connect with exponentially more Americans than just those who saw him in person. The subterranean printing presses that rumbled beneath the streets of the country’s big cities were in the process of shaking up American culture. Print barons such as Joseph Pulitzer and Charles A. Dana noted the success of tabloids such as The National Police Gazette in pioneering sports coverage, and they followed suit by hiring sporting editors and developing their own sports sections. Some of the big cities that Sullivan visited supported a half-dozen daily newspapers or more, and John L. spawned page-one headlines wherever he traveled. Thanks to brand-new telegraph lines, blow-by-blow accounts of his fights and news of his out-of-the-ring exploits could be transmitted rapidly around the country, which meant that oceans of ink were spilled on him every day. With every story about Sullivan that coursed through the tentacles of America’s telegraph lines, his fame and celebrity deepened. The intense press coverage and fan interest surrounding the “knocking out” tour provided a mere glimpse of the future. With a transportation and communications network stitching the country together and a burgeoning mass media, the modern sports age had begun, and in John L. Sullivan it had found its first athletic god. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 30, 2014

Christopher Klein

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:52.785678

time-and-place-eric-ravilious-1903-1942

Time and Place Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) By Frank Delaney November 27, 2013 In many countries around the world the works of Eric Ravilious have come out of copyright this year – he died when his aircraft went missing off Iceland while he was making war paintings. An artist in multiple disciplines, his greater legacy dwells in water-colours. Frank Delaney re-visits the work of this understated, yet significant figure. In the early nineteen-eighties, for a commission about the sense of place in John Betjeman’s poetry, I worked with a photographer named James Ravilious. He lived in Devon, where he set forth every day to capture the profound countryside around him. His are the kind of photographs that Chaucer might have taken, monochrome and immortal. Distant windswept combes; gnarled trees; the square towers of village churches; beasts closer to the primitive earth than God — his work invites a leaning towards the word “timeless.” But James’s photographs are not timeless, and that was the first point of him — they are of their time and their time only; they are, indeed, what may be called, in the deepest sense, record. Second point: to the sense of Time add sense of Place — because neither could these photographs have been taken in any other country; put the words “English” and “quintessence” together and you get the idea. This unique confluence was, I now think, genetic; James was the son of the similarly unmistakable Eric Ravilious. Only Art controls Time. It can freeze it, pin its moment, accelerate it, ignore it, invent and re-invent it, spin it over, under, sideways, down. Consequently (imagination being truer than fact), our artists have become our best recorders of all our worlds. Time and Place are conjoined and frozen in the fullness of their reportage; we see how it was There and Then — in the house in Delft, where Vermeer’s girl reads her letter, or in the early twentieth-century Byleorussian village which Chagall showed from his most credible point of view, of the couple flying above it. The most touching are particular to their time and their place. Eric Ravilious likewise recorded England in that watchful, changeful moment between the world wars. He served both masters — his own time, in his own England. Indeed, he confirms Englishness in Art, where the power so often comes from restraint; the real stuff is beneath the surface. Given an already substantial body of work in his thirty-nine years — hundreds of wood engravings, close to 100 water colours alongside multiple other outputs — we can only imagine what he might have gone on to produce had the gods of war not been so hungry. Throughout, his own character emerges — composed, unhysterical, clear and unfettered. We can all quote Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry in the Lyrical Ballads as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ but we overlook a more interesting note in the same Preface; ‘. . . The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.’ In the super-perceptive Ravilious there are no “gross and violent stimulants,” and without blinking he put up a surfeit, almost, of “beauty and dignity” — and yet he never sacrificed his own stern and often lonely edge. And he is so individual, so recognizable at first glance, so much his own man, because, though delighting in the Surrealists and the Chinese, he made his point without playing for any team. Not the Fauvists, not the Cubists nor the Dadaists nor the neo-Impressionists, he was also too subtle for the harsher, uber-Modernist school of his German contemporaries. Look, though, at his 1935 water-colour Train Going Over a Bridge at Night — he knew about those other fellows, and the wind that blew from their direction ruffled his hair, but he wasn’t like them. He was 33 when he painted it, and so mature. ‘Rav’ to many who knew him, ‘Boy’ to his pals who adored him and his cheerful ways, was born in Acton in 1903, the youngest of four births, one of whom had died in infancy. His parenting by a mercurial, bible-minded father and a more tranquil mother birthed the emotional range that can give an artist a useful swing. In his father’s early trade there’s an influence there for the taking — a drapery shop. It’s easy to see the modest sheens of Edwardian fabrics in Ravilious’s work. Indeed, once you know of his childhood among the swatches of cloth, it’s astonishing to note how often his use of stippling and cross-hatching echoes domestic patterns, e.g., The Bedstead, 1938. When Papa Ravilious’s fierce biblical vision failed to hold his finances steady, the family moved to Eastbourne. One of the French novelists (I think it was Mauriac) said, “the door slams shut on a writer at the age of twelve.” There’s enough evidence to suggest that Eric Ravilious saw much of what he would paint by then, not least the flat planes of the English Channel, and its cliffs and lighthouses, as in the 1939 piece, Beachy Head. In general, the trace elements in his geology shine up at us. At Eastbourne Grammar School when he was eleven, he made a drawing of his egg in its eggcup. The teacher gave him 8 out of 10. It merited a higher mark — that was a moment when his ability to create and hold an original line became apparent. Twenty years later, Wedgwood had him commissioned — vases, teacups, plates, the 1937 Coronation Mug of George VI and the gorgeous Boat Race Bowl. In 1919, aged sixteen, he gained a scholarship to the Eastbourne College of Art. Three years later he had another, to the relatively new and as yet unsung Royal College of Art. One day, through the door of his Chelsea classroom, walked the man who would help teach Eric Ravilious up into maturity, the much feistier, more damaged and brilliant Paul Nash. Not everybody, always and ever, worked in oils (Ravilious said it was like painting with toothpaste), but aren’t they essential when you’re reaching for sheer force? Maybe not: Nash had been invalided out of World War I, and although his body healed, his attitude bore scars that he believed we should all know about. And he displayed them — in scathing water-colours as lush and violent as rain forests. Nash saw Ravilious early and liked him, liked his range, his refusal to be trammelled by one medium. The similarities between the two would eventually be more suggested than striking. In Ravilious you can see some Nash, but it’s the intent without, so to speak, the cocaine, the energy without the driving pain. Nash introduced his likeable student to the Society of Wood Engravers, a place where one could show one’s work. This exposure — and Nash’s good word — got Ravilious early commissions for book plates, one of the great minor art forms of the period. Wood engraving has its own mystery: think of the language. Ravilious’s tools included a “scorper,” a “spitsticker,” a “graver” — a scorper is a small gouging-tool for hollowing and chasing wood — they use it to make bowls (from “scalper” or “scauper,” a surgeon’s scraping lance); a spitsticker is a tapering kind of triangular scalper, again for routing, and a “graver” (more obviously) carves or scrapes the wood; archers used it, and antique dentists scaled teeth with it. Ancient instruments — timeless results. His engraving output became a major part of his artistic and economic life. Ravilious seems to have grasped the single outstanding quality of the form; eternal and universal, it closes the gaps between cultures and centuries. The work he delivered, whether for the little private presses — or the larger commercial publishers — who just wanted to produce glorious books — could as easily have frontispieced Boccaccio or Malory. The 1933 work for the Golden Cockerel Press Prospectus shows Ravilious in full engraving form. And the money helped, though he did take a job as a part-time art teacher back at Eastbourne; “He had the eager curiosity of a young boy, and a most refreshing cool judgement. He was never our art master but rather the most stimulating and hard-working member of a group. He was a cheerful though absorbed person, and rather reserved in spite of appearing friendly. . . he was so unassuming and never tried to dominate us or show off.” While one of his students was observing him thus, another student married him, Tirzah Garwood. Long-shaped and grave, she had walked straight out of a Modigliani painting — and she too loved engraving. They wed in London on the 5th of July, 1930 and went to Cornwall on honeymoon with Charles, i.e., Tirzah’s dog. By now Rav was fairly motoring, with commissions for engravings, illustrations, murals, theatre designs, and recognition from those who knew people. With the presence of a wife, and thus a thoughtful and like-minded companion, he began to paint more and more. He painted Tirzah in multiple ways; she’s riding bicycles, walking village streets, playing the piano and memorably as one of the Two Women Sitting in a Garden, 1933. No major formal portrait of Tirzah by her husband exists that I’ve been able to find. Other than angled ciphers and dark, anonymous makeweights on a landscape, human beings never provided Ravilious with a major subject. It was England who sat for him, in diverse poses, for a decade and more, and in his portraits of her, painted with deep and lasting love, reside his best work, such as Wiltshire Landscape, 1937. Ravilious’s choice of media must surely have delayed his fuller appreciation — he has been dismissed too often and too long as “minor.” It was understandable: with oils as king, wood engravings amounted to, at best, bookplates or colophons, and water-colours remained the premise of ladies in garden clubs; ceramics reached no farther than the domestic or memorial. It’s a shallow view. If technical requirement and skill arbitrated stature, Ravilious and the others along that bench — Reynolds Stone, John Piper, the Nash brothers — should in all justice be called “New” Masters. Wood engraving is powerfully demanding; ceramics too; and water-colours require the damndest fiddling and risk prevention. Ravilious, for instance, discovered that he could firm up control of the paint if he dampened the back of the paper. And his choice was shrewd unto his particular gifts; because he worked at great speed water colours gave him an advantage over oils — he could tear up a picture that wasn’t going his way. But — aren’t water colours “mild”? Not capable of being political? If you think that, why are Ravilious’s landscapes so empty of people? Could it be that he was also a chronicler of the flight from the land that denuded the English countryside — because livings were no longer to be made as of old? And yet his England goes back to darker Englands, such as the great chalk horse hillsides that he painted more than once. James Ravilious, my delightful one-time colleague, died in 1999, at the age of 60 — not as prematurely as his father but his death still makes me wince and turn aside in sadness. Working with him was a pleasure — and doubly so now, because without having known him I might never have come close to the joy of his father’s work, who perished off Iceland when James was only three years old. Retrospection decides how an artist can or ever will be considered. Writers, for instance, tend to stay in the shadows for a generation after death. Only when they climb out will the work be assessed and accurate reputation decided. One of the pleasing little miracles of this process is that, when all is said and done, the artist, in whatever medium, seems to settle in the most fitting place. With Eric Ravilious now in the public domain, we can all stand back, fold our arms and look long and pleased at this gracious and talented artist. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 27, 2013

Frank Delane

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:53.315169

picturing-pyrotechnics

Picturing Pyrotechnics By Simon Werrett June 25, 2014 Simon Werrett explores how artists through the ages have responded to the challenge of representing firework displays, from the highly politicised and allegorical renderings of the early modern period to Whistler's impressionistic Nocturne in Black and Gold. Such were the pleasing triumphs of the skyFor James his late nocturnal victory:The pledge of his almighty Patron’s love,The fireworks which His angels made above.I saw myself the lambent easy lightGild the brown horror and dispel the night.(John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, 1687) In the early modern period, throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, elaborate fireworks displays were often put on by European courts, governments, and cities to celebrate a whole host of events: religious festivals, coronations, royal weddings and birthdays, triumphs, treaties, and the bringing in of the new year. These events were celebrations and opportunities for revelry but also an opportunity for those in power to show their might, and for this end fireworks were crucial, serving to manifest power by appearing to discipline the most dangerous of the elements and to transform nature itself. Contemporaries often commented that fireworks turned night into day and — being benign version of military pyrotechnics — transformed war into peace, or “marte” into “arte”. As well as this general demonstration of power, displays also typically featured symbolic or allegorical decorations and scenery which were intended to present a more specific message to audiences. The figure of a lion might represent a powerful king, or the slaying of a dragon might signal the conquest of the king’s enemies. As such, it was important to states to make sure that everyone understood the message of fireworks, and so artists were commissioned to engrave large prints of displays for distribution to relevant audiences. Fireworks prints became something of a genre in their own right, and were made by artists across Europe for several hundred years. They are interesting because of the diverse ways they represented very fleeting episodes, playing with time, space, and visual techniques to commemorate pyrotechnic dramas. It might be imagined that fireworks prints are pictures made after the event looking back, but this was not the case. It was typical for fireworks prints to actually be made before an event, so they do not depict a scene witnessed at all. They were not a record of history but rather an anticipation of its being remembered. The remembering of fireworks served many different purposes. In Russia, for example, large fireworks engravings were published along with explanations of their allegorical content in pamphlets that were distributed to courtly audiences during a display. These engravings were schematic, designed to make clear the iconography of the performance which was described and explained in the text. An event was turned into a storia, a narrative or history. One such engraving shows a fireworks temple designed by the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences professor of eloquence, Jacob von Stählin, and executed by the artillery officer Petr Ivanovich Melissino for the anniversary of the coronation of Empress Catherine II in June 1763. The accompanying description explained how the display centred on the Island of Pallas represented in fireworks, which carried a temple, in front of which Pallas sat on a dark cloud casting out bolts of lightning. Subsequent decorations appeared, including palm trees, garlands, and the figure of the goddess Minerva holding a cornucopia. These decorations were all meant to signal the wisdom and power of the Empress Catherine and the happiness of the empire under her reign. Prints were also included in festival books in western Europe. Images were typically large, printed on paper, or sometimes silk, and distributed either at the display or as gifts to diplomats and other courts subsequently. Prints were not intended to capture the reality of a performance, like a photograph, but to serve as well-ordered representations of official events. Fireworks prints acted as a front-stage, sanitizing the messiness of the real event to leave only an idealized account. In fact many fireworks failed — displays often witnessed accidents, sometimes quite horrible, and there were frequently mistakes. An etching by Dumont le Romain of a firework shown on the Seine in Paris on 21 January 1730, depicted a display staged on behalf of Philip V of Spain to celebrate the birth of Louis XV’s son Louis. To show Spain and France’s mutual regard, the display included two eighty-foot high Pyrenean mountains, across which a rainbow spread to show the two countries’ unity before a great sun rose up symbolizing the dauphin’s birth. All this was captured admirably by Dumont le Romain, but the performance apparently never took place, at least according to a report from an English observer (who perhaps isn’t to be trusted either). This tells us, the Rising sun was omitted for Want of Time; and the Rainbow, when made, was too unwieldy and unmanageable; and therefore could not appear; nor the Goddess Iris. . . these should have been describ’d as designed only, and not executed. In the eighteenth century, these official images were joined by a growing number of commodified fireworks prints, cheaply produced, smaller, and, in the case of vue d’optique prints, designed for consumption in the home. In the latter colour and pattern begin to become more important than any desire to record or commemorate an event. Here aesthetics begin to be disassociated from content, a form of abstraction which fireworks, with their explosions and patterns, were well-suited to. Simultaneously, other images sought out more reality in fireworks art, in journalistic illustrations and satires. Official prints appeared in 1749 advertising the splendid classical temple erected in Green Park as a stage for setting off fireworks to celebrate the peace of Aix la Chapelle. But The Times newspaper showed what really happened on the night, when a wing of the temple accidentally caught fire and burned to the ground. Such an image, countering the court and government’s vision of events, would have been unthinkable in France or Russia at this time. It anticipates the uses of art later in the century to promote more urgent issues such as the abolition of slavery. In all cases, pictures of fireworks were always conventionalized images using a wide repertoire of visual techniques to create the impression of a pyrotechnic performance. The art historian Kevin Salatino has explored many of these conventions in his book Incendiary Art (1997) published by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. They ranged from a host of techniques for depicting fire to the bold and apparently random colors used to brighten up perspective views. It should be said that fireworks prints were also very unconventional — they rarely followed a pattern in their overall design, and different artists emphasized different elements of displays — the pyrotechnics, the labour, the architecture, the audience, often with a politics lying behind those decisions. In Russia, for example, images of fireworks very rarely depicted any of the artillerists who set them off, perhaps because the artists who made the images were in competition with them for credit in realizing displays. Despite the great variety evident in fireworks prints, artists always seem to have sought to reveal fireworks to their audience in some way, making accessible an otherwise fleeting and obscure experience. One convention in this regard, as Salatino mentions, is that the engravings rarely showed smoke, or made it into a backdrop for more prominent fiery effects. An exception is A representation of the Fire-Workes in St James’s Square on the joyfull occasion of his Majesties Glorious success in taking of Namur Sept 9 1695, in which the engraver Bernard Lens II shows smoke billowing from barrels of gunpowder. Indeed, displays in the early modern period certainly were smoky, and one diarist wrote of how smoke completely obscured a displays from the audience’s view. But it was more common for a print to show no smoke, or to make it nothing more than a minor decorative feature of the composition. Painters interested in the sublime, however, might make smoke part of the sublimity of the scene they wished to capture, as in Paul Sandby’s 1769 painting, Windsor Castle from Datchet Lane on a rejoicing night. To capture smoke might imply the representation of a moment in time in a display, and fireworks images dealt variously with the issue of representing time visually. Most commonly, artists and engravers created a single image capturing a significant moment in a pyrotechnic performance. An image of fireworks on the Seine in front of the Louvre in 1628 by Morel, celebrating the siege of La Rochelle, showed the moment when Perseus (Louis XIII) attacked a Sea Monster (representing Protestantism) to save Andromeda (Catholicism) tied to a rock (La Rochelle). The same approach was used later in the eighteenth century, when fireworks might be staged in several acts. One act might be chosen to be represented in a print, or a significant moment in each depicted. Only rarely did artists try to capture the passage of time in displays, with a few notable exceptions. For a festival book in honour of the election of Ferdinand III as Holy Roman Emperor in February 1637 in Rome, Claude Lorrain produced a sequence of thirteen images showing fireworks in which each image showed a different stage of the display. One artificial edifice burned down or exploded to reveal another inside before finally revealing a statue of the King of the Romans. Lorrain’s choice to do this probably reflected the nature of the performance itself, staged as a series of revelations. This was quite a common feature of fireworks displays, but it was not common to use serial images to record them. The early modern artists who made fireworks prints used many different techniques to capture the passing of time, the explosive effects of pyrotechnics, and the complex iconography of fireworks displays. Their work presents a remarkable ingenuity in developing so many different solutions to difficult problems of representation. This was in part owing to the peculiar demands of the fireworks print, made before the event, and depicting something which destroyed itself in a matter of minutes or even seconds. But it was also owing to the great skill of artists in imagining fireworks in an image, a skill which remained even after the grand symbolic fireworks of royal courts declined in the nineteenth century. James McNeill Whistler, for example, in his Nocturne in Black and Gold (1875), developed a very different solution to the problem of capturing fireworks in an image. In the age of photography, he seems to have captured, as in a photograph, a single instant in a fireworks display, envisioned while it is taking place. He does not reproduce the appearance of a photograph, but recalls its temporality. Neither was he interested in the meaning of the fireworks. There is no symbolic content here to explain, and the smoke stands all around the image instead of being parted to reveal the fireworks more clearly. There was no demand on Whistler to commemorate the state or the king, and his image is really a commemoration of the firework itself — its colours, textures, and dynamic movements. No wonder then that fireworks came to be seen as exemplary of abstraction in the twentieth century. The critic Theodore Adorno reckoned fireworks were the “other of the empirical world” being “a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.” This might have been true for Whistler and fireworks in Adorno’s time, but it was precisely to capture meaning and manifest it dramatically that fireworks had been used and recorded in images for several centuries previously. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 25, 2014

Simon Werrett

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:53.852858

the-lost-world-of-the-london-coffeehouse

The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse By Matthew Green August 7, 2013 In contrast to today's rather mundane spawn of coffeehouse chains, the London of the 17th and 18th century was home to an eclectic and thriving coffee drinking scene. Matthew Green explores the halcyon days of the London coffeehouse, a haven for caffeine-fueled debate and innovation which helped to shape the modern world. From the tar-caked wharves of Wapping to the gorgeous lamp-lit squares of St James’s and Mayfair, visitors to eighteenth-century London were amazed by an efflorescence of coffeehouses. “In London, there are a great number of coffeehouses”, wrote the Swiss noble César de Saussure in 1726, “. . . workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms to read the latest news.” Nothing was funnier, he smirked, than seeing shoeblacks and other riffraff poring over papers and discussing the latest political affairs. Scottish spy turned travel writer John Macky was similarly captivated in 1714. Sauntering into some of London’s most prestigious establishments in St James’s, Covent Garden and Cornhill, he marvelled at how strangers, whatever their social background or political allegiances, were always welcomed into lively convivial company. They were right to be amazed: early eighteenth-century London boasted more coffeehouses than any other city in the western world, save Constantinople. London’s coffee craze began in 1652 when Pasqua Rosée, the Greek servant of a coffee-loving British Levant merchant, opened London’s first coffeehouse (or rather, coffee shack) against the stone wall of St Michael’s churchyard in a labyrinth of alleys off Cornhill. Coffee was a smash hit; within a couple of years, Pasqua was selling over 600 dishes of coffee a day to the horror of the local tavern keepers. For anyone who’s ever tried seventeenth-century style coffee, this can come as something of a shock — unless, that is, you like your brew “black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love”, as an old Turkish proverb recommends, and shot through with grit. It’s not just that our tastebuds have grown more discerning accustomed as we are to silky-smooth Flat Whites; contemporaries found it disgusting too. One early sampler likened it to a “syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes” while others were reminded of oil, ink, soot, mud, damp and shit. Nonetheless, people loved how the “bitter Mohammedan gruel”, as The London Spy described it in 1701, kindled conversations, fired debates, sparked ideas and, as Pasqua himself pointed out in his handbill The Virtue of the Coffee Drink (1652), made one “fit for business” — his stall was a stone’s throw from that great entrepôt of international commerce, the Royal Exchange. Remember — until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly — or very — drunk all of the time. Drink London’s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer (“small beer”). The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry, and auctioneering: all burst into life in 17th-century coffeehouses — in Jonathan’s, Lloyd’s, and Garraway’s — spawning the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain’s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America. The meteoric success of Pasqua’s shack triggered a coffeehouse boom. By 1656, there was a second coffeehouse at the sign of the rainbow on Fleet Street; by 1663, 82 had sprung up within the crumbling Roman walls, and a cluster further west like Will’s in Covent Garden, a fashionable literary resort where Samuel Pepys found his old college chum John Dryden presiding over “very pleasant and witty discourse” in 1664 and wished he could stay longer — but he had to pick up his wife, who most certainly would not have been welcome. No respectable women would have been seen dead in a coffeehouse. It wasn’t long before wives became frustrated at the amount of time their husbands were idling away “deposing princes, settling the bounds of kingdoms, and balancing the power of Europe with great justice and impartiality”, as Richard Steele put it in the Tatler, all from the comfort of a fireside bench. In 1674, years of simmering resentment erupted into the volcano of fury that was the Women’s Petition Against Coffee. The fair sex lambasted the “Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE” which, as they saw it, had reduced their virile industrious men into effeminate, babbling, French layabouts. Retaliation was swift and acerbic in the form of the vulgar Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee, which claimed it was “base adulterate wine” and “muddy ale” that made men impotent. Coffee, in fact, was the Viagra of the day, making “the erection more vigorous, the ejaculation more full, add[ing] a spiritual ascendency to the sperm”. There were no more Women’s Petitions after that but the coffeehouses found themselves in more dangerous waters when Charles II, a longtime critic, tried to torpedo them by royal proclamation in 1675. Traditionally, informed political debate had been the preserve of the social elite. But in the coffeehouse it was anyone’s business — that is, anyone who could afford the measly one-penny entrance fee. For the poor and those living on subsistence wages, they were out of reach. But they were affordable for anyone with surplus wealth — the 35 to 40 per cent of London’s 287,500-strong male population who qualified as ‘middle class’ in 1700 — and sometimes reckless or extravagant spenders further down the social pyramid. Charles suspected the coffeehouses were hotbeds of sedition and scandal but in the face of widespread opposition — articulated most forcefully in the coffeehouses themselves — the King was forced to cave in and recognise that as much as he disliked them, coffeehouses were now an intrinsic feature of urban life. By the dawn of the eighteenth century, contemporaries were counting between 1,000 and 8,000 coffeehouses in the capital even if a street survey conducted in 1734 (which excluded unlicensed premises) counted only 551. Even so, Europe had never seen anything like it. Protestant Amsterdam, a rival hub of international trade, could only muster 32 coffeehouses by 1700 and the cluster of coffeehouses in St Mark’s Square in Venice were forbidden from seating more than five customers (presumably to stifle the coalescence of public opinion) whereas North’s, in Cheapside, could happily seat 90 people. The character of a coffeehouse was influenced by its location within the hotchpotch of villages, cities, squares, and suburbs that comprised eighteenth-century London, which in turn determined the type of person you’d meet inside. “Some coffee-houses are a resort for learned scholars and for wits,” wrote César de Saussure, “others are the resort of dandies or of politicians, or again of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.” Flick through any of the old coffeehouse histories in the public domain and you’ll soon get a flavour of the kaleidoscopic diversity of London’s early coffeehouses. The walls of Don Saltero’s Chelsea coffeehouse were festooned with taxidermy monsters including crocodiles, turtles and rattlesnakes, which local gentlemen scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Hans Sloane liked to discuss over coffee; at White’s on St James’s Street, famously depicted by Hogarth, rakes would gamble away entire estates and place bets on how long customers had to live, a practice that would eventually grow into the life insurance industry; at Lunt’s in Clerkenwell Green, patrons could sip coffee, have a haircut and enjoy a fiery lecture on the abolition of slavery given by its barber-proprietor John Gale Jones; at John Hogarth’s Latin Coffeehouse, also in Clerkenwell, patrons were encouraged to converse in the Latin tongue at all times (it didn’t last long); at Moll King’s brothel-coffeehouse, depicted by Hogarth, libertines could sober up and peruse a directory of harlots, before being led to the requisite brothel nearby. There was even a floating coffeehouse, the Folly of the Thames, moored outside Somerset House where fops and rakes danced the night away on her rain-spattered deck. Despite this colourful diversity, early coffeehouses all followed the same blueprint, maximising the interaction between customers and forging a creative, convivial environment. They emerged as smoky candlelit forums for commercial transactions, spirited debate, and the exchange of information, ideas, and lies. This small body-colour drawing shows an anonymous (and so, it’s safe to assume, fairly typical) coffeehouse from around 1700. Looking at the cartoonish image, decorated in the same innocent style as contemporary decorated fans, it’s hard to reconcile it with Voltaire’s rebuke of a City coffeehouse in the 1720s as “dirty, ill-furnished, ill-served, and ill-lighted” nor particularly London Spy author Ned Ward’s (admittedly scurrilous) evocation of a soot-coated den of iniquity with jagged floorboards and papered-over windows populated by “a parcel of muddling muck-worms . . . some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco.” But, the establishments in the West End and Exchange Alley excepted, coffeehouses were generally spartan, wooden and no-nonsense. As the image shows, customers sat around long communal tables strewn with every type of media imaginable listening in to each other’s conversations, interjecting whenever they pleased, and reflecting upon the newspapers. Talking to strangers, an alien concept in most coffee shops today, was actively encouraged. Dudley Ryder, a young law student from Hackney and shameless social climber, kept a diary in 1715-16, in which he routinely recalled marching into a coffeehouse, sitting down next to a stranger, and discussing the latest news. Private boxes and booths did begin to appear from the late 1740s but before that it was nigh-on impossible to hold a genuinely private conversation in a coffeehouse (and still pretty tricky afterwards, as attested to by the later coffeehouse print below). To the left, we see a little Cupid-like boy in a flowing periwig pouring a dish of coffee à la mode — that is, from a great height — which would fuel some coffeehouse discussion or other. Much of the conversation centred upon news: There’s nothing done in all the worldFrom Monarch to the Mouse,But every day or night ‘tis hurled Into the Coffee-House chirped a pamphlet from 1672. As each new customer went in, they’d be assailed by cries of “What news have you?” or more formally, “Your servant, sir, what news from Tripoli?” or, if you were in the Latin Coffeehouse, “Quid Novi!” That coffeehouses functioned as post-boxes for many customers reinforced this news-gathering function. Unexpectedly wide-ranging discussions could be twined from a single conversational thread as when, at John’s coffeehouse in 1715, news about the execution of a rebel Jacobite Lord (as recorded by Dudley Ryder) transmogrified into a discourse on “the ease of death by beheading” with one participant telling of an experiment he’d conducted slicing a viper in two and watching in amazement as both ends slithered off in different directions. Was this, as some of the company conjectured, proof of the existence of two consciousnesses? If the vast corpus of 17th-century pamphlet literature is anything to go by then early coffeehouses were socially inclusive spaces where lords sat cheek-by-jowl with fishmongers and where butchers trumped baronets in philosophical debates. “Pre-eminence of place none here should mind,” proclaimed the Rules and Orders of the Coffee-House (1674), “but take the next fit seat he can find” — which would seem to chime with John Macky’s description of noblemen and “private gentlemen” mingling together in the Covent Garden coffeehouses “and talking with the same Freedom, as if they had left their Quality and Degrees of Distance at Home.” Perhaps. But propagandist apologias and wondrous claims of travel-writers aside, more compelling evidence suggests that far from co-existing in perfect harmony on the fireside bench, people in coffeehouses sat in relentless judgement of one another. At the Bedford Coffeehouse in Covent Garden hung a “theatrical thermometer” with temperatures ranging from “excellent” to “execrable”, registering the company’s verdicts on the latest plays and performances, tormenting playwrights and actors on a weekly basis; at Waghorn’s and the Parliament Coffee House in Westminster, politicians were shamed for making tedious or ineffectual speeches and at the Grecian, scientists were judged for the experiments they performed (including, on one occasion, dissecting a dolphin). If some of these verdicts were grounded in rational judgement, others were forged in naked class prejudice. Visiting Young Slaughter’s coffeehouse in 1767, rake William Hickey was horrified by the presence of “half a dozen respectable old men”, pronouncing them “a set of stupid, formal, ancient prigs, horrid periwig bores, every way unfit to herd with such bloods as us”. But the coffeehouse’s formula of maximised sociability, critical judgement, and relative sobriety proved a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Coffeehouses encouraged political debate, which paved the way for the expansion of the electorate in the 19th century. The City coffeehouses spawned capitalist innovations that shaped the modern world. Other coffeehouses sparked journalistic innovation. Nowhere was this more apparent than at Button’s coffeehouse, a stone’s throw from Covent Garden piazza on Russell Street. It was opened in 1712 by the essayist and playwright Joseph Addison, partly as a refuge from his quarrelsome marriage, but it soon grew into a forum for literary debate where the stars of literary London — Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot and others — would assemble each evening, casting their superb literary judgements on new plays, poems, novels, and manuscripts, making and breaking literary reputations in the process. Planted on the western side of the coffeehouse was a marble lion’s head with a gaping mouth, razor-sharp jaws, and “whiskers admired by all that see them”. Probably the world’s most surreal medium of literary communication, he was a playful British slant on a chilling Venetian tradition. As Addison explained in the Guardian, several marble lions “with mouths gaping in a most enormous manner” defended the doge’s palace in Venice. But whereas those lions swallowed accusations of treason that “cut off heads, hang, draw, and quarter, or end in the ruin of the person who becomes his prey”, Mr Addison’s was as harmless as a pussycat and a servant of the public. The public was invited to feed him with letters, limericks, and stories. The very best of the lion’s digest was published in a special weekly edition of the original Guardian, then a single-sheet journal costing one-and-a-half pence, edited inside the coffeehouse by Addison. When the lion “roared so loud as to be heard all over the British nation” via the Guardian, writing by unknown authors was beamed far beyond the confines of Button’s making the public — rather than a narrow clique of wits — the ultimate arbiters of literary merit. Public responses were sometimes posted back to the lion in a loop of feedback and amplification, mimicking the function of blogs and newspaper websites today (but much more civil). If you’re thinking of visiting Button’s today, brace yourself: it’s a Starbucks, one of over 300 clones across the city. The lion has been replaced by the “Starbucks community notice board” and there is no trace of the literary, convivial atmosphere of Button’s. Addison would be appalled. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 7, 2013

Matthew Green

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:54.369744

proving-it-the-american-provers-union-documents-certain-ill-effects

Proving it The American Provers’ Union Documents Certain Ill Effects By Alicia Puglionesi September 4, 2013 What would induce physicians to ingest mercury to the point of vomiting and to painstakingly note down the effects of imbibing large amounts of cannabis tincture? Alicia Puglionesi explores the history of "proving", the practice of auto-experimentation which forms the cornerstone of homeopathic medicine. Among the many novelties unleashed upon the world by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, perhaps the most striking is the spectacle of dignified nineteenth-century physicians carefully imbibing graduated amounts of cannabis and attempting to record its effects upon their mental and physical states. Just as you wouldn’t feed dinner guests a dish that you hadn’t sampled, Hahnemann argued, doctors had no right to prescribe their patients remedies that they had not themselves tried. Unfortunately, due to impairment in the record-keeping department, the physicians were “compelled to publish these provings in disjointed symptoms” rather than their usual orderly categories. These hapless explorers of new therapeutic realms belonged to the American Provers’ Union, a group that aimed to attain medical knowledge through firsthand experience. Their records reveal a dimension of medical thinking that has largely disappeared from modern practice: attention to the subjective sensations that link body and mind, physiology and personhood. Built into their quest was a righteous disregard for the considerable hazards of auto-experimentation. Samuel Hahnemann trained as a physician in late-eighteenth-century Leipzig and Vienna. After three years of medical practice, however, Hahnemann decided to get out of the business and took work translating scientific books (he reportedly mastered Arabic, Chaldaic, and Hebrew as well as the standard Romance languages). In his later writings, Hahnemann characterized his disillusionment with mainstream medicine as a result of the ineffective and often damaging remedies called for in Western therapeutics, particularly the violence of bloodletting, purging, and other “heroic” treatments in vogue around the turn of the nineteenth century. Many patients were vocally displeased with the disorder unleashed by drugs, like mercury, today regarded as highly toxic, while doctors felt impotent to effect actual cures. Around the time that Hahnemann put down his bloodletting lancet, discontent among patients and practitioners was beginning to manifest in the form of “heterodox” sects that defined themselves against the orthodoxy of medical schools and elite medical practice. Hahnemann was in many ways a product of this ferment: while translating a medical text that mentioned cinchona bark, a New World plant used to treat malaria, he decided to resolve his doubts about its effectiveness by testing the substance on himself. He observed that cinchona produced effects on his healthy body that mimicked the effects of malaria on a sick body, leading him to theorize that successful remedies worked by treating like with like, fighting disease symptoms with substances that produce those same symptoms in the healthy. Hahnemann’s theory, which he termed “homeopathy,” directly contradicted the accepted model of treating a symptom with drugs that had opposite effects. The medical establishment immediately went on the attack, but the controversy itself attracted interest from practitioners discontented with the current rather violent state of therapeutics. In 1811, Hahnemann returned to Leipzig to teach his new system of medicine. In order to apply the theory of treating like with like, he had to determine the homeopathic properties of every drug in the standard pharmacopeia. The scale of this project was immense: healthy volunteers would have to sample thousands of substances at varying concentrations over the course of many weeks. Standardized research subjects did not exist, nor would the concept have served any function in the discourse of early-nineteenth century medicine; even mainstream physicians understood therapeutics to be highly individualized, contingent upon constitution, environment, and behavior. This work of trying medicines on healthy people, which Hahnemann termed “proving,” was intensely subjective. The men recruited to systematically imbibe and record were called “provers,” and Hahnemann chose them individually from among his able-bodied colleagues with the guarantee that “All were persons capable of carrying out observations, and of absolute honesty of purpose, so that I could vouch for them, and I do.”1 Provers had to regard their own minds and bodies with scientific detachment, even as foreign substances wreaked havoc. By 1814 Hahnemann had formed the Union for Proving Remedies, devoted to the “holy purpose of seeking new and indispensable discoveries for the welfare of suffering humanity.”2 This high-flying rhetoric suffused the proving literature; provers aided medical progress by “giving [their] time, even sacrificing [their] health.” They were held to a rigorous dosage schedule and submitted to regular interviews with Hahnemann. Self-observation, he argued, produced not only better remedies, but also better physicians and scientists: “the best opportunity for exercising our sense of observation and to perfect it, is by proving medicines ourselves.”3 Hahnemann’s followers brought his model of proving to the United States in the 1830s and 40s. One of these followers was Constantine Hering, a German physician who converted to homeopathy during research for an article intended to debunk Hahemann. He fled to eastern Pennsylvania’s German immigrant community after his colleagues at the University of Wurzburg condemned him for his unorthodox turn. There, he established the Allentown Academy, a homeopathic school, and published the first American homeopathic domestic health guide; he would go on to found the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1848. Hering was also instrumental in organizing a new version of Hahnemann’s Provers’ Union, promoting the same rigorous, systematic project of self-observation among American homeopaths. The American Provers’ Union emerged from a meeting at Hering’s Pennsylvania home in August of 1853. Its organization was quite ambitious: the eleven founding physicians appointed correspondents for every region from New York to Bavaria to Madagascar, so that the American provers could keep abreast of international developments. In a curious imperial metaphor, the Union’s founders describe medical knowledge as “an immense empire which is our dominion,” with the practice of proving analogous to “exploring expeditions” by which homeopaths would annex “territory after territory . . . and state after state.”4 The concept of a union was particularly important for a medical sect as embattled as the homeopaths: they wanted to present a united front against critics, but were often internally divided by petty disputes over dosage and characteristics of drugs. The Union would resolve such “reproachable animosities . . . without our injuring each other and the common cause.”5 Some homeopaths, the founding provers complained, were too absorbed in making money from lucrative practices to contribute their time to proving, while proving generated the knowledge capital upon which successful practice depended. The Union asked only for one proving per member per year — a modest service and a reminder of the common cause that homeopaths had entered into by rejecting conventional medical theory. To prove, one first had to know oneself. Hering expected provers to take notes for two weeks before they began consuming their assigned remedy, so they might learn to distinguish “usual, habitual, and frequently appearing morbid symptoms, from the unusual, strange, or new symptoms.” Dosage guidelines for provers were similarly subjective: “The object of the prover is to be affected by the drug, without being poisoned, or his health seriously endangered.” Arriving at this sweet spot was largely a matter of prior experience and analogies drawn from other, similar substances. Although a successful proving required only one properly-calibrated dose, proper calibration could take many attempts. The founding provers warned against increasing one’s dosage steadily for more than a week, as “many symptoms may be caused by the drug but remain latent for a while, and then show themselves in a very inconvenient way.”6 Three years after it formed, the American Provers’ Union issued its first official provings for “ferrum metallicum” (iron), and “mercurius iodatus ruber” (mercury iodide), noting with some disappointment that only ninety-seven physicians of the “many thousands” in the United States had agreed to ingest these substances experimentally. Published provings follow a peculiar format, presenting a digest of symptoms organized by categories such as location in the body, time of day, periodicity, types of sensation, and physical activity. Despite the homeopaths’ emphasis on constitution and individualized response, it isn’t possible to track the set of symptoms experienced by any single prover. Traces of individuals weave in and out of the cascading descriptions:7 “The most abiding symptom was a nervous hysterical feeling . . .” “Feels as if a dark curtain was let down over her eyes . . .” “A throbbing pain . . . whenever he moved suddenly . . .” Sometimes the time of day or periodic recurrence are noted: “. . . dullness in the head (8 A.M.), gradually subsiding towards night”; “Awoke at 3 A.M. with severe stitches, as from a pen-knife . . . rendering her unable to go to sleep again”; “Feverish at 3 P.M.” We see provers having difficulty with everyday activities: “Unable to see the stitches in sewing . . .”; food “tastes like rotten eggs”; “great restlessness . . . cannot study or go through the daily duties”; “While writing, no power over the pen . . . the letters run into each other.” Understanding the practice of proving requires us to set aside modern notions of toxicity; it’s impossible to know the purity and concentration of substances that provers consumed, and inadvisable to search out equivalences in today’s medical literature. Provers were trained to note the smallest minutiae of their physical and mental states, so it should not shock us greatly to find pains surfacing in every part of the body: “Slight pain in the small of the back”; “Shoulder sore to the touch”; “Slight headache all day . . .” That said, one can only shudder at symptoms like “violent pressure in stomach” and “burning and acid eructation” that suggest ulceration of the stomach lining by elemental iron. The impulse to map these symptoms onto current biomedical understandings must ultimately yield to their strangeness. Under the category of “Female Organs,” we learn that a dose of ferrum metallicum gave one subject “Less dryness in vagina on commencing coitus, and more enjoyment of it.” Under the category “Feet,” we learn that the prover “Has to take off boots.” And more literary observations — “In the open air, tears.” We could concoct a rational physiological explanation, but we could just as easily let these experiences speak for the more expansive world in which they occurred — the “immense empire” of the human organism, with its uncharted territories and secret byways linking distant parts in furtive conspiracy. The last frontier of the immense empire was surely dreams. These, seamlessly incorporated into the provers’ symptomatology between “Sleep” and “Waking”: “Unpleasant dreams of friends and relatives, deceased 25 years since”; “. . . dreamed a great deal of meeting with old schoolmates . . .”; “. . . much disturbed by dreams of old friends”; “Sleep disturbed by many confused dreams.” Based on these observations, the proving concludes with remarks from Constantine Hering suggesting that ferrum metallicum may be more useful than previously thought in the treatment of bronchitis, catarrh, and certain skin diseases. The proving of mercury iodide, published in the same volume, looks similar to ferrous metallicum with the addition of much unwelcome drooling. This text represented a great accomplishment for American homeopaths, who could claim an important contribution to their profession’s understanding of standard materia medica. Due, however, to the dearth of participants frequently remarked by Hering and his compatriots, it took another three years for the Union to complete its next published proving. Another plausible reason for the delay is that the Provers’ Union was testing cannabis indica, a variety of pot known today for producing an even-keel “mellow” sensation rather than a hallucinatory or ecstatic high. Provers reported “disinclination to physical labor,” “excessive sleepiness,” “sound sleep with melancholy dreams.” Hashish being widely recognized for its dubious moral effects, moral symptoms received special consideration, and included “great anguish and despair,” “tendency to blaspheme,” and “laugh[ing] immoderately.” As always, there were some bad trips: “[he] fancies, upon opening his bedroom door, that he sees numberless diabolical imps . . . he thinks he will suffocate . . . suddenly, one of the imps begins playing on a hand-organ . . .” Other hazards: “Constantly theorizing”; bloodshot eyes; “ravenous hunger, which is not decreased by eating enormously,” “excessive venereal appetite with frequent erections during the day.”8 Although, of course, the cannabis was taken as a tincture, and its concentration is unknown, some provers seem to have indulged more than others. A Dr. Neidhard took fifteen drops of the tincture in total, while Dr. Wolfe took “30 to 1000 drops every day,” from May 25 to October 1, “when he had taken it all.” This proved to be the final and rather shambling proving of Hering’s Provers’ Union. For reasons which went unrecorded, the group disbanded, with some efforts made in subsequent years to revive the project. For the most part the homeopathic materia medica survives unchanged from its early-nineteenth-century form. The problem of replication in today’s biomedical sciences bears a family resemblance to the Provers’ Union’s fate: there is little incentive for laboratories to spend their resources attempting to falsify a widely-accepted finding. For nineteen-century homeopaths, however, firsthand experience was supposed to be more valuable than received knowledge, and professional consensus was, by design, always in flux. In a remarkable passage of the Provers’ Union’s charter document, Hering and his compatriots stated that the theory of homeopathy would “receive either new support every year, or will have to be abandoned” depending on the outcome of their investigations.9 Today’s drugs are developed based on an entirely different understanding of the body, disease, and scientific method. A physician who tried them all would not fare well, and a physician who tried only the fun ones would be a drug abuser, rather than a martyr for the “welfare of suffering humanity.” Everything that a physician needs to know about drug effects is distilled through controlled trials and the regulatory approval process, bowing, as Hahnemann and Hering refused to do, to the practical necessities of a massive and ever-growing pharmacopoeia. How nice would it be, though, to speak with a doctor who had carefully observed the effects of a drug upon his or her own body, who could tell you about the anxiety, nausea, stiffness of limbs — the precise conditions of mind and body that you may pass through in hope of a cure. “Our acquaintance with drugs and their effects, is like our acquaintance with men,” Hering and company wrote in 1853. “We are intimate with a few, we like the company of several men, we are glad to see a great many others now and then . . . there are a great many degrees of intimacy, according to the events of our life. . . It is the same with our instruments of healing, our medicines.”10 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 4, 2013

Alicia Puglionesi

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:54.753986

a-dangerous-man-in-the-pantheon

A Dangerous Man in the Pantheon By Philipp Blom October 2, 2013 This October marks 300 years since the birth of French Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot. Although perhaps best known for co-founding the Encylopédie, Philipp Blom argues for the importance of Diderot's philosophical writings and how they offer a pertinent alternative to the Enlightenment cult of reason spearheaded by his better remembered contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau. It was about time. Three hundred years after his birth Denis Diderot is in line for receiving the highest honour France has to bestow on one of her own. President Francois Hollande announced his intention to have the encyclopedist’s remains transferred to the Panthéon in Paris or, as the French language so deliciously puts it, to have him pantheonisé. The Panthéon is sacred ground in Paris—not because it was built as a place to worship the Almighty, but because the French Revolutionaries turned it into a site for the burial and commemoration of, as the façade proclaims, the grands hommes of the nation. Rising high above the Quartier Latin and illuminated at night by fiery orange lights, the building with its imposing cupola stands also as the memory of the French republic, cast in stone. The building was constructed originally as the church of Saint Geneviève after Louis XV had sworn to honor the saint should he recover from a grave illness. Because of the exorbitant costs of financing the monarch’s will and whim, construction was finished only in 1791. Meanwhile, the Revolution swept over the country. The church was designated a mausoleum for the nation’s great men, the first of which, the count of Mirabeau, was admitted in 1791, only to be excluded three years later, when political allegiances had changed. History also is subject to changing administrations. Since then the Panthéon has been the theatre of many ideological battles, the center of consecration of the French sense of self and its many permutations. Félix Éboué, a member of the colonial administration, became the first black Frenchman to enter into the hallowed ground, in 1949; the first woman, Marie Curie, in 1995. The tomb listing reads like the greatest hits of French intellectual history—Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, André Maulraux, Émile Zola. The most famous philosophers interred in the crypt are two stars of Enlightenment thought: Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who were thus honored already during the eighteenth century—despite the fact that the former spent his adult life in exile and the latter was not even French. Tourists often pose for photographs in front of their sarcophagi. Now it may be Diderot’s turn to receive this secular consecration. This proposed honour that would not only have delighted the passionate unbeliever Diderot who thought of posterity of ‘heaven for atheists’. It is also richly deserved. Diderot, after all, was not only editor of the great Encyclopédie and of several highly influential novels, philosophical works, plays and hundreds of amusing letters, he was also the star of the philosophical salon of Baron Thierry d’Holbach — himself a prolific author — which in its heyday arguably became the intellectual epicenter of Europe. But things aren’t quite as easy. First of all, Diderot has been denied this honour multiple times, most recently in 1913. He was, still is, thought of as an intellectual troublemaker, someone all too fond of Eros and erotic passion, an implacable enemy of the Church, an incorrigible skeptic when it comes to power and the right of individuals to decide over others. These difficulties could perhaps be overcome in our tolerant and republican age. After all Voltaire, who has preceded him in the sacred site of French national memory, was also not a friend of the Church. Another difficulty may prove even more intractable, and more indicative of Diderot’s difficult posthumous life. Strictly speaking, we know where Diderot’s bones are. They are in the ossuary of the église Saint-Roch on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, directly under the altar, just a mile or so away from their destined final resting place. Holbach, incidentally, is there too, as are a number of other notable Frenchmen. The problem is that we may know where they are, but not which of the bones down there belonged to the philosopher. During the French revolution the ossuary was vandalized by over-zealous revolutionaries, and the tragic episode of the Paris Commune in 1871 saw a repetition of this posthumous violence. At present the ossuary is closed and it is difficult to know in which state it really is, but it would hardly be appropriate for the body of a convinced materialist if the bones on the sarcophagus bearing his name would in fact be a composite skeleton made up of various denizens of his former place of burial. Perhaps a DNA analysis would solve this problem, but it would hardly be a straight forward task. In their own day Diderot and his philosophical brothers in arms were revered and reviled in equal measure, much visited and written about. D’Holbach’s famous salon could assemble on a single evening luminaries such as Diderot, David Hume, the economist and anti-colonialist Guillaume Raynal, the novelist Lawrence Sterne, Edward Gibbon, Cesare Beccaria, the Italian legal reformer and opponent of the death penalty. The salon was not a philosophical school with rigid teachings but an ongoing conversation between scientists and poets, atheists and believers, philosophers and practitioners. Called “the personal enemy of God”, d’Holbach invited priests and other critics to his table and even kept a chaplain at his summer house, to say mass for his conventionally minded mother in law. The radical Enlighteners were well connected but more importantly, their frighteningly uncompromising writings were read and discussed throughout the Western world; The System of Nature, d’Holbach’s materialist masterwork was on the Catholic Index and had to be printed and distributed in secret. It still sold more than a hundred thousand copies during the second half of the eighteenth century. Condemned by the Church and hated by the Court, d’Holbach and Diderot were beacons of free thinking and directly inspired the America’s Founding Fathers. Franklin is likely to have participated at the dinners and ensuing discussions; Jefferson, whose personal library still testifies to his interests, read and admired Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Raynal, as well as their intellectual predecessors. For the Declaration of Independence, he transformed the Lockean formulation for the pursuit of life, health, liberty, and property into the more properly Epicurean and Diderotean “pursuit of Happiness.” And yet the radical enlighteners have been pushed into the margins of memory and the footnotes of the history of thought. The Enlightenment is, in our common school understanding at least, the history of a cult of reason whose high priests were Immanuel Kant and Voltaire, not the huge intellectual revolution of Diderot and his friends. Their relative obscurity is not an unsolvable mystery if one compares their thinking to that of Voltaire and Rousseau, who criticized absolutist excess but not the authoritarian rule of the few over the many; they attacked the Church but sung the praises of the “highest being”; their views were solidly deist and authoritarian and lent themselves to justifying the power of a new, post-Revolutionary politics. Robespierre made Rousseau the patron saint of the new state, heaped him with praise and had a bust of him carved from a stone taken from the Bastille. D’Holbach and Diderot had a very different vision of human nature. Enthusiastic followers of their century’s tidal wave of new scientific discoveries, they concluded that nature was evolved, not created; that it was all material and had no place for immortal souls; that it consisted of nothing but matter and that we are animals within it, a universe empty of sense and without God. In the oppressively clerical environment of their day this last point took a good deal of their attention. In sharp polemics they attacked Christianity and religious faith in general, arguing that it was nothing but a primitive fiction designed to keep the poor in their place, a conspiracy of magistrates and priests. Diderot saw the truest and the highest goal of human nature not in reason, but in lust. Humanity’s existence is driven by Eros, by the search for pleasure. This sensualist approach had an important metaphysical consequence: in a world without sin, a world in which no wrathful God has condemned all lust and demands suffering from his creatures on this earth in order to soften the blow of eternal punishment, the goal of life becomes the best possible realization of pleasure, the education of desire in accordance with natural laws. In a society without transcendental interference, this chance, the chance of the pursuit of happiness, must be given to all. These views were anathema to just about everyone who sought to maintain or gain power, from the aristocracy to Revolutionary dictators such as Maximilien de Robespierre and Napoleon, all the way up to the Catholic Restoration that followed. “Men will not be free until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest,” wrote Diderot—not the kind of message to appeal to the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Laissez-faire capitalism allowed a self-proclaimed Christian middle class to profit from the misery of the working poor, at home and in the colonies. They could not argue for their position with Diderot, who became ever more scathing about the justification of power, privilege, slavery, and colonial expansion. It was Voltaire’s moderate Enlightenment that offered them the necessary vocabulary and allowed them to see themselves as the guardians of civilization, Enlightenment and religious values, put above the ignorant masses by divine providence. The radical Enlighteners had understood and condemned this emergent power structure, as a ‘conspiracy of priests and magistrates’. Their thought was evolutionist long before Charles Darwin; they defended the rights of slaves before William Wilberforce and of women before Mary Wollstonecraft. They wanted to see individual fulfillment in a morality built around lust and social justice in a society built on pleasure and free choice, not on pain and oppression. Their potent ideas were unsurprisingly intoxicating discoveries for latter-day revolutionaries; among d’Holbach and Diderot’s ardent readers were Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Censorship, condemnations, and the threat of arrest had been a fact of life for Diderot, but he could not anticipate the cruel or unusual punishment that they might suffer after their deaths. The twisting of facts and relationships began as Voltaire and Rousseau were ceremonially laid to rest in the Panthéon and eulogized as the noblest minds of humanity. Forgotten were Voltaire’s political cabals, his role as creditor to the very potentates he apparently attacked, his highly ambivalent stance to the aristocrats who kept him rich and famous and his cynical stance to religion as opium for the masses. Forgotten were Rousseau’s tantrums and his betrayal of friends, his advocacy of dictatorship. Two sarcophagi and countless busts and embossed books broadcast their grandeur and unimpeachable probity. At the same time Diderot and d’Holbach have been denounced as immoral, ridiculed as talentless, kept out of some school syllabi; their bones moldered in an anonymous heap, their books were printed only sporadically and in small editions. When spoken of, Diderot was softened into an eccentrically Gallic novelist and editor of a long-outdated encyclopedia and d’Holbach was relegated to the status of a dim and boring precursor of Marxist theory. The salon and its guests were quickly forgotten: the Parisian house where for twenty-five years Europe’s most brilliant minds—‘Sheiks of the Rue Royale’ Hume called them—met and debated still bears no plaque or visible recognition of any kind. The grand narrative of a rationalist Enlightenment that freed humanity from superstition only to subjugate it once again, this time to the dictates of reason and rationalization, suited the interests and self-image of an economy driven by entrepreneurship and fuelled by a cult of efficiency and cheap labor. Our own time dominated by the fiction of the market that needs to be obeyed and placated like an ancient deity and a society optimized for maximum consumption are a direct consequence of the Enlightenment cult of reason without the Diderotian emphasis on empathy. We have inherited the truncated history and repeated it to one another, tacitly encouraging a narrowness of thought that bears little resemblance to one of the freewheeling exchanges over candlelight at d’Holbach’s salon. The existence of a second, more radical Enlightenment tradition is not denied completely, but two centuries of historical bias have done their work, slowly but surely. This will not change if Diderot’s bones, or some of them, really make it to their new and honorific final resting place. There is already a memorial dedicated to him in the Panthéon — as the editor of the Encyclopédie, the image he got stuck with as his philosophical work was marginalized and finally all but forgotten. But while his role in this magnificent mammoth work was important for the eighteenth century, it is Diderot the philosopher who can still speak to us today. His advocacy of a passionate life, of social solidarity and empathy as the foundations of morality, his interest in science as the basis of all knowledge and in art as and Eros as ways of creating meaning have lost nothing of their freshness, or their necessity. The real potential of the Enlightenment, he says time and again, is not the absolute rule of reason, but the rehabilitation of passion as the basis of a life well lived. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 2, 2013

Philipp Blom

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:55.220481

frederik-ruysch-the-artist-of-death

Frederik Ruysch The Artist of Death By Luuc Kooijmans March 5, 2014 Luuc Kooijmans explores the work of Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, known for his remarkable ‘still life’ displays which blurred the boundary between scientific preservation and vanitas art. When visiting Frederik Ruysch in Amsterdam in 1697, tsar Peter the Great kissed one of the specimens from his anatomical museum, and afterwards bought the entire collection. Three hundred years later, the Dutch crown prince, Willem Alexander, when visiting St Petersburg, was withheld from seeing Ruysch’s work. Diplomats had decided the prince had to be spared the sight of the ‘macabre, deformed foetuses’ that Ruysch had preserved. If he had heard this, Frederik Ruysch would have turned in his grave. Not that he would have been surprised to hear that his preparations had survived three centuries, for he would have expected nothing less. Nor would he have been astonished to find a prince taking an interest in his work. But he would have been dismayed to hear his specimens described as macabre, since it was precisely the beauty of his preparations that earned Ruysch long-lasting fame. For centuries, friend and foe alike have agreed that he should be credited, above all, with making anatomy an acceptable pursuit. At the beginning of Honoré de Balzac’s novel La Peau de Chagrin, the young protagonist is wandering around Paris, planning to put an end to his life, when he decides to go into a curiosity shop. There he encounters what Balzac describes as an ‘enchanting creature’, the embalmed body of a child, which reminds him of his happy boyhood. This ‘sleeping’ child turns out to be a remnant of the collection of Frederik Ruysch, who had been dead for exactly a century when Balzac wrote the novel. The Italian author Giacomo Leopardi did not find the preparations horrifying either. In his ‘Dialogue of Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies’, Ruysch is awakened at midnight by his cadavers, who have come to life in his studio and are singing in chorus. Ruysch, watching through a crack in the door, exclaims, ‘Good heavens! Who on earth taught music to these dead people, who are crowing like roosters in the middle of the night? I’m in a cold sweat and almost more dead than they are. I didn’t realize that just because I saved them from decay they would come back to life.’ He then enters his studio and says, ‘Children, what kind of game are you playing? Have you forgotten that you’re dead? What’s this racket all about? Has the tsar’s visit gone to your head?’ One of the dead tells Ruysch that they can speak for a quarter of an hour, so he asks them for a brief description of what they felt when they were at death’s door. They assure him that dying is like falling asleep, like a dissolving of consciousness, and not at all painful. They declare that death, the fate of all living things, has brought them peace. For them, life is but a memory, and although they are not happy, at least they are free of old sorrows and fears. Ruysch’s main trick was heating white wax, and injecting it into blood vessels in liquid form. Once it cooled and set he would have a dissectable preparation. By staining the wax red he managed to give bodies and organs a lifelike tint. The result was amazing. He used his preparations in teaching surgeons and midwives, but there was so much interest in them that he set up an exhibition. It was the first time that people could properly see human internal organs. The exhibition soon became a major attraction. The museum was more than simply a collection of anatomical evidence. Those who entered were immediately confronted with a tomb containing various skeletons and skeletal remains. Among them was the skull of a newborn baby placed in a box, next to a sign with the motto: ‘no head, however strong, escapes cruel death’. The tomb also contained the skeleton of a boy of three, holding the skeleton of a parrot, which had been placed there as an allusion to the saying ‘time flies’. Although the admonitory captions were very much in the established tradition of anatomical presentation, the museum was quite unique in that Ruysch had made an effort to give it an attractive design. Amidst the little skeletons in the tomb, for instance, was the embalmed body of a foetus of seven months. Its quite natural colour already made the sight a little less unpleasant, but Ruysch had beautified the child in other ways as well, by putting a bouquet in its hand and crown of flowers on its head. The flowers, too, had been preserved so that they would keep their petals and their bright colour. Visitors were confronted with the skeletons of a child of four with a toy in its hands, a five-year-old holding a silk thread with an embalmed heart dangling from it, and a girl drying her eyes with a pocket handkerchief. Decorations, memento mori images and vanitas symbols put the horror of death in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul. After death it no longer served its purpose — only an anatomist could still make it useful to the living. Of course, the real goal of the anatomist was not to amaze his audience, even though that ambition, too, could be justified, particularly by arguing that it would impress the viewer with the wondrousness of God’s creation. But the ultimate objective of anatomy was to increase man’s knowledge of the structure and workings of the human body. Ruysch had developed his skills to be able to make structures visible which would otherwise have remained invisible. Towards the end of the 17th century, after thirty years of practice, Ruysch, assisted by his son, managed to perfect his preparation method, which, as he said, now made ‘the tiniest parts of the human body clear to the eye’. Key to the process was the injection of a substance that would not congeal until it had penetrated the tiniest of blood vessels. Liquid wax went a fair way towards this objective, but not as far as Ruysch wanted. So he had constantly been looking for a better substitute. Once he had that, he made many new anatomical discoveries, and he could make preparations that differed little in appearance from living tissue. Most of them now were stored in glass jars and bottles, in a remarkably clear liquid he called liquor balsamicus, a liquid that preserved their lifelike colour and elasticity. Whereas they used to become hard and stiff, and lost their colour, now they were kept bright and supple. When Ruysch first made his results public, his technique was considered akin to sorcery. Some people simply refused to believe their eyes. Ruysch was accused of using trickery to make his preparations more attractive. He was often criticized for the way he presented his anatomical material. What was the point of all that embellishment, he was asked, and he countered by demanding to know why people spent so much money burying bodies that were already worm-eaten. His reasons were clear: ‘First of all, I do it to allay the distaste of people who are naturally inclined to be dismayed by the sight of corpses’, he said, but (and this was why he didn’t want to be accused of cheap tricks) he also saw a clear connection between the appearance of his preparations and their scientific validity, for he claimed the ability to restore a body to the state it was in before death. That his corpses seemed to be asleep was not just amazing, it was also significant. Because his new technique enabled him to work more efficiently and to make better and more beautiful preparations he decided to reorganize his museum, and in doing so, he concentrated more than ever on the presentation. The collection was placed in a number of cabinets that filled three rooms. As before, the arrangement was not systematic: Ruysch turned every cabinet, which he called a thesaurus, a storehouse of knowledge, into an individual work of art, consisting of different kinds of preparations in unique combinations. The centrepiece of every cabinet was an anatomical still life placed on a bed of bladder-, kidney- and gall-stones, from the midst of which rose ‘trees’ of dried blood vessels filled with a red wax-like substance. Among these stood tiny foetal skeletons. They still delivered their grave message to the visitor, but by now they did it with a sense of humour. ※※Indexed under…Treesfashioned from dried blood vesels Such a combination of seriousness and humour fits in with a long-standing tradition. Sixteenth-century publications abounded in illustrations of skeletons using bones as drumsticks. In a way, Ruysch’s compositions were subtle, three-dimensional versions of those anatomical illustrations showing skeletons in dramatic poses placed in curious settings. Numerous publications on anatomy — the famous atlas of Vesalius, for example — contained pictures of skeletons portrayed as gravediggers, or hanged criminals. But to present skeletons as characters in a tableau non vivant was highly unusual, and an indication of the extent to which Ruysch had distanced himself from his material. In one of his compositions a skeleton says: ‘even after death I’m still attractive!’ Although the collection reflected his search for answers to scientific questions, and could be used to answer such questions — at least when Ruysch could find the preparation he was looking for — it was largely an end in itself. Ruysch did not order his work according to specifically formulated problems. Instead, he confined himself to describing his collection and recording the observations his injections had enabled him to make. He maintained that he was merely gratifying the desire to observe the miracles of God Almighty, but in fact his motivation was twofold: not only did he exalt the human anatomy as a wondrous product of creation, but he presented himself as a veritable artist of death. His display of his anatomical virtuosity contained the veiled message that he — and he alone — was able to defy death to the extent that he could make a corpse look like a living body. He always emphasized the natural form, colour and flexibility of his prepared bodies, which differed from live ones only in their lack of movement. He was convinced that his art had given him knowledge — and therefore a special status — that others would never be able to attain. This explains his reluctance to divulge his working methods, for it was only by maintaining strict secrecy that he could remain the sole intermediary between the living and the dead. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 5, 2014

Luuc Kooijmans

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:55.557491

encounter-at-the-crossroads-of-europe-the-fellowship-of-zweig-and-verhaeren

Encounter at the Crossroads of Europe - the Fellowship of Zweig and Verhaeren By Will Stone December 11, 2013 Stefan Zweig, whose works passed into the public domain this year in many countries around the world, was one of the most famous writers of the 1920s and 30s. Will Stone explores the importance of the Austrian's early friendship with the oft overlooked Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. ‘Friendship stands highest on the forehead of humanity. . .’ Keats I While still at school, Stefan Zweig had tried his hand at translating a number of French and Belgian poets, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Baudelaire, but also another name almost unknown to us today, Emile Verhaeren. Something about the elemental nature and incendiary vision housed in the rugged and unorthodox language of the Flemish born Verhaeren resonated with the youthful Zweig, jarring somehow with the comfortable, ordered cultural advancement of his existence, where the restless wanderings of later life were calmly incubating. Zweig’s own work in these early days seemed about to follow a very different course. As is well known, Zweig came from a privileged Jewish bourgeois background in Vienna, the intellectually buoyant yet self regarding metropolis at the heart of the sprawling Hapsburg kingdom, where the young Zweig was liberally steeped in art, literature and music from an early age. In Vienna, Zweig maintained good relations with his parents after completing his schooling, but immersed himself completely in the Viennese café lifestyle of a writer, a period in which he learned the importance of personal freedom through wide ranging dialogue with diverse artists and literary figures. This formation period was where Zweig’s undying thirst for wider travel and experience of the foreign was seeded. But as the century turned, Zweig was absorbed with his coming of age literary achievement, the publication of a first collection of poems at the tender age of twenty-one. Silberne Saiten (Silver Strings) was well-received and unlike most first efforts by a newcomer, found favour amongst Vienna’s critics, even one Rainer Maria Rilke responded gratefully to his copy, by sending Zweig a dedicated book. Yet these ‘smooth, able verses’ yielding to accustomed versification were as Zweig soon realized too much of a borrowing, a reconstituted product of a time and place, or more aptly of a time that had now passed, but was still hanging on in the Viennese literary salons, like incense in a nave, a stale fragrance which the gathering wind of modernity was soon to brutally disperse. Although this book brought Zweig’s name into the limelight for the first time, it served as a temporary shackle, which he sought to remove at the earliest opportunity. When Zweig left for Berlin and university in 1902, he left Vienna as the most prominent of the younger writers, an overnight success, but in essence he had not yet even begun. In Berlin, apart from his studies and bohemian indulgences, Zweig sought a more expansive freedom in literary terms, and caught the bug of translation. He began to explore further afield, even translating poets such as Keats and Yeats and producing with other translators a collection of Verlaine’s poetry to which he added a critically acclaimed introduction. But all the time he was moving closer to Belgium, drawn by the rich crop of its home grown artists and writers who seemed to integrate their works in fresh and creatively productive ways. So in the summer break of 1902, long anticipating a visit to the ‘little land between the languages’, Zweig made his move. Verhaeren had come onto his radar while still at school, when he found a copy of the poet’s first Rubenesque collection Les Flamandes (1883) and instinctively attempted a clutch of translations. He had even written to Verhaeren in 1898 to secure permission to publish them in a journal. Now, he was determined to meet the man himself, though it was the novelist Camille Lemmonier, to whom Zweig had recently dedicated an essay, whom he first located in Brussels. Zweig had sent a postcard in rather shaky French to Verhaeren suggesting a meeting, but it was unclear when Zweig arrived in the Belgian capital if this rendezvous would come to pass. On arrival it seemed that Verhaeren was away and Zweig’s hopes were dashed, but by a fateful stroke, Lemmonier then invited him to meet the sculptor Charles van der Stappen, and Verhaeren just so happened to be in the sculptor’s studio sitting for a bust. Zweig’s memories of that first crucial encounter with the older man are pertinent. For the first time I felt the grasp of his vigorous hand, for the first time met his clear kindly glance. He arrived as he always did, brimming over with enthusiasm and the experiences of the day . . . It seemed as though he projected his whole being towards you . . . he knew as yet nothing of me, yet already he was full of gratitude for my inclination, already he offered me his trust just because he heard I was close to his work. In spite of myself, all shyness faded before the stormy onset of his being. I felt myself free as never before, in the face of this unknown, open man. His gaze, strong, steely and clear, unlocked the heart.1 The vital importance of Zweig’s meeting with Verhaeren in relation to his ensuing career as a writer, emissary of humanism and key proponent for the higher ideal of a Europe of cultural unity, cannot be underestimated. The contrast between Verhaeren’s openness, curiosity, vitality, not to mention the explicit visionary credentials he held, and the self conscious dandified Viennese poetry circles Zweig had moved within was extreme. It was if Zweig himself had suddenly been released from a reserve of pampered elites into the rawness and unpredictability of the wild and could finally breathe real air, taste real food and appreciate the creative potential of risk and unpredictability. In Verhaeren’s verses he saw bold new vistas opening up which seemed to strike a necessary chord with the rapidly transforming epoch, as the fabled ‘golden age of security’, guarded by the Hapsburg realm unceremoniously gave way to something far more restless, ominous and uncertain. The time demanded a new poet to express its infinite variegations and Verhaeren was evidently the best man for the job according to Zweig, the only one who was prepared to face the new century eyes wide open, a poet who had proved himself wholly authentic and not tainted by any school or movement, who was implicitly true to himself and those around him, a man who wilfully absorbed everything lucidly and without compromise, whatever the cost to his mind and health. Zweig’s almost priest like dedication to Verhaeren was long standing and never wavered. Of the most important men of example in his life, Verhaeren was the most significant. Following Zweig’s crisis after the upheaval of the First World War, Romain Rolland assumed this role, but this was an altogether different entente cordiale for which there is no room here. The third key master, was the great essay writer Michel de Montaigne, who appeared from the wings as a timely ghost at the close of Zweig’s life, in order to philosophically assist with Zweig’s departure from the world at what was judged the right moment for him. Montaigne closes Zweig’s story, addressing him personally from across five centuries. More than Balzac, Tolstoy or any of the others ‘greats’, it is Montaigne who comes to his aid at the eleventh hour, Montaigne who manages to complete the circle of the men of example. Montaigne shows a desperate and morbidly depressed Zweig, hounded from one country to another, and convinced Europe has finally destroyed itself, an ethical way out of the mental inferno through his essay of vivid historical examples, ‘A Custom of the Isle of Cea’. Zweig’s literary output is prodigious and notably varied. As well as proving himself a gifted short story writer with Amok and Buchmendel amongst others, and an accomplished novelist with Beware of Pity, Zweig was also the great portraitist of major artists, historical figures, legendary writers and explorers, his books being read in greater numbers than any other German language writer through the 1920’s. But these were never dry academic studies or even biographies per se, but more lyrically borne psychological plumbings around the nature of the subject, the archaeological digging for spiritual affiliations which guaranteed the subject their boarding pass to Zweig’s European ark on the Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg. Zweig, always modest about his own achievements and ultimate legacy as a writer, despite his popularity, seemed compelled to serve, possessing an insatiable need for masters, or fraternal figures to whom he could signal, those writerly kin greater than himself, who set the standard to be judged by, monumental figures like Tolstoy, Balzac, Dostoyevsky. . . and those figures in history who related to his own predicament in the greater predicament of Europe, such as Erasmus and again Montaigne. All these long dead artists and those still living, were for him crucial sources of personal reassurance at moments of doubt and weakness, examples of nobleness in endeavor, personal sacrifice to art, a reliable crew of patient toilers and visionary explorers. Zweig wanted to collect them all, experience them to the core, and penetrate their secrets, not to ‘consume’ them so to speak, to line them and gloat as a collector of figurines, but to celebrate the spiritual thread of each, which when woven together constituted the unique European consciousness of which he was a guardian. Not only did Zweig excel as a determined collector of manuscripts, scores, letters and memorabilia of Europe’s finest creators, but he collected them in his head as compass points, a series of safe harbours to which he could moor up to sit out the storm, where he could replenish his supplies of fraternity and find the spiritual hospitality he craved. It was Verhaeren, the living man, Nietzsche’s ‘Good European’ who personified this greatness for Zweig, the older Belgian poet whom Zweig encountered on the cusp of the former’s maturing renown, a renown which Zweig himself was personally committed to deepening and upholding. Over the coming years, Zweig’s close friendship with Verhaeren was consolidated and he was customarily invited to spend part of the summer with the poet and his painter wife Marthe Massin at their idyllic country cottage at Caillou-qui-Bique in southern Belgium. In the decade before the First World War, Zweig took it upon himself to firmly establish Verhaeren’s reputation in Germany, where hitherto Verhaeren’s exposure had been weak. He himself embarked on a marathon translation of a selection of Verhaeren’s poems and through his by now impressive contacts, managed to secure a prominent publisher, so that Verhaeren’s work, backed up by carefully organized reading tours of major cities, began to spread rapidly through Germany. Verhaeren benefited greatly from the German ‘surge’, in terms of his European profile overall, and all through Zweig’s diligent efforts. Zweig became the ambassador for Verhaeren’s voice and made sure it reached the leading literary circles of the continent, so that by the time of the Belgian poet’s untimely death in 1916, it would be true to say his influence had spread as far as Moscow, with the likes of Blok and Mayakovsky taking an interest and furthermore Verhaeren was in demand on the lecture circuit, for his exuberant delivery, the torch bearer of a new kind of poetry which, like Walt Whitman in America sought to engage with nature at an elemental level. Whitman’s famous ‘Look for me under your boot soles’, would seem equally apt for Verhaeren, the terrain being Flanders, though the Belgian poet, as Zweig realized, and expounded with fervent persuasion in his biography Emile Verhaeren (1910) had gone much further than Whitman, probing into the destructive excesses and social implications of industrial change and the decimated rural landscapes which were its legacy. For example in his major work Les Villes tentaculaires (1895) Verhaeren optimistically envisages some potential metaphysical transcendence for mankind out of the crucible of power engendered by the frenzied activity of the new urban multitudes and the delirious energy of the blast furnaces. II But everything changed with the war. Optimism and idealism were the first casualties, ignominiously swept away, never to return. Ironically, and fatefully as ever, Zweig was on his way from Ostend to visit Verhaeren at Caillou in the late summer of 1914, just as Europe’s borders started to freeze. Only weeks before, Zweig had met the Insel editor Kippenberg, along with Rilke, Rolland and Bazalgette in a café in Paris to discuss the prospect of a Verhaeren ‘Collected Works’, a series of volumes comprising all his poetry to be published in 1916 as a surprise gift to the poet they all admired so deeply. Zweig himself would take on La Multiple Splendeur (1907) and each was allotted his task to find suitable translators. The project was stillborn. Seemingly out of nowhere, nationalist hatred had engulfed Europe and such noble schemes became but a forgotten trifle of literary history. The friends were forced back to their respective native lands and detained there for the next four years through the great ensuing international convulsions, their high-minded fellowship for European artistic integration temporarily disbanded. At the end of August 1914, Zweig himself, having hung on to see which way the axe would fall, was hurrying at the last minute from Ostend, due to meet Verhaeren for his annual sojourn at Caillou. He was forced to turn back as mobilization engulfed the area, taking the last train from Brussels across the border into Germany, or risk being detained as an enemy alien, a fate he was absurdly to incur later in Britain in 1939. The two men were never to see each other again, nor were they even to communicate. As former friends were suddenly confronted with the prospect of being national enemies, tensions and uncharacteristic behavior threatened once solid and seemingly unshakeable bonds. Almost overnight the old Europe of freedom of movement and tolerance was annihilated and would only return post 1918 as a disabled version, mortally infected with fresh unrest mutating out of the old. Verhaeren, who had always been a profound admirer of German art and had travelled to Germany as a younger man on lengthy visits for the express purpose of becoming better acquainted with its art, he who had latterly known German acclamation at the hands of Zweig, now sank into bitter hatred of the foe, after the Teutonic fury unleashed throughout his beloved Belgium. The destruction of Namur, the obliteration of medieval Ypres, the gratuitous murder of civilians, the sacking of Louvain and willful burning of its priceless antiquarian library by German troops, seemingly ordered to lay waste to Belgium, pushed Verhaeren over the edge into a blind hatred of the Prussian ‘barbarians’. The result was La Belgique Sanglante (Belgium bleeding) an ill-starred though understandable ranting diatribe against everything German, a book which became little more than a propaganda coup for the allies. Now wincing to read, it served at the time to enhance Verhaeren’s new figurehead status as Belgian national poet allied to the king. This ‘official’ position he never really wanted, but was saddled with and the rhetoric and pomp which attaches itself to such positions may to some extent may explain in part the velocity of his post war decline. Zweig, himself the ‘confused’ victim of an initial hot headed rush of national pride, (something he attempts to gloss over in Die Welt von Gestern (1942)) was shocked by Verhaeren’s seeming personality change, this sudden explosion of hate being the complete antithesis of all he had stood for. The rude shock of world war had ripped through the ideal. Normally noble-minded men were scurrying for cover into patriotism, following the nihilistic onslaught of undiscriminating death and destruction. Romain Rolland stood alone in Switzerland, trying to gather the dispersed pacifists about him. Zweig put out feelers to Verhaeren, hoping to rekindle the flame, but draconian censorship did not help and the line stayed dead. Eventually as the war dragged on into a perverse contest of attrition, the red mist began to lift and Verhaeren reclaimed his lucid self. He sought to weaken his previously entrenched stance vis a vis the Germans, but somehow the line of communication with his most faithful servant Zweig was never repaired and Verhaeren died tragically in November 1916, accidentally crushed by a train in Rouen station after giving a patriotic speech to Belgian exiles. The true nature of the loss of Verhaeren, the cruel severing of this fellowship by the war, was vividly expressed in Zweig’s moving personal tribute Errinerungen an Emile Verhaeren, published in Vienna in 1917. Here Zweig tries to cauterize the open wound left by Verhaeren’s passing and the final silence between them that was never assuaged. How much Zweig longs for a different ending, in his lamentation you sense so keenly the sense of something unfinished in the emptiness left behind. And yet by indulging in such painful reverie, and acknowledging the death, Zweig unconsciously summons the ghost of his friend, whose replenishing spirit enters into him with ever more vital insistence. A dark day, I still remember it now and will never forget. I took out all his letter, his many, many letters, all of them there in front of me so as to read them again, to be alone with them, to bring to a close what was now finally ended, for I now knew I would never receive another. But there was something in me which refused to say goodbye to something that lived in me like the incarnated proof of my own existence, of my faith on this earth. And the more I told myself that he was dead, the more I felt him breathing his life through me and even these words with which I am taking leave of him are only making him still more alive, for only the admission of a great loss attest to the true possession of that which is ephemeral. And only the unforgettable dead remain truly alive for us!2 Today, the importance of Verhaeren as an example to younger writers of his epoch, now famous figures of the canon, his stature as ‘maitre’, is, like his poetic legacy, unacknowledged in Britain and other Anglophone countries. Verhaeren is at the moment of writing all but invisible, as if he never existed, an unforeseen casualty of history and yet in his time he was admired and loved with an almost religious devotion, not only by Zweig but many others, notably Rilke, who in Paris, sustained himself on Verhaeren’s expressive life affirming poems, visited him regularly in his St Cloud house. How is it that a man of such calibre, vision and influence can fall into such devastating obscurity? How can it be that a name once spoken with admiration and awed respect, a name well known to English translators, critics and poetry readers in the first decades of the twentieth century, can now not even raise a glimmer of recognition? Such are the fallacious paths of the historical labyrinth we find ourselves in. Zweig and Verhaeren are irrevocably interlocked, their destinies grafted onto one another. But fame or the absence of it is in the end a peripheral matter; it is only the inner creative destiny of each and where it is touched by the influence of the other that counts. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 11, 2013

Will Stone

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:56.089184

the-naturalist-and-the-neurologist-on-charles-darwin-and-james-crichton-browne

The Naturalist and the Neurologist On Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne By Stassa Edwards May 28, 2014 Stassa Edwards explores Charles Darwin's photography collection, which includes almost forty portraits of mental patients given to him by the neurologist James Crichton-Browne. The study of these photographs, and the related correspondence between the two men, would prove instrumental in the development of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin's book on the evolution of emotions. It’s a curious thing to think of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) sitting alone, closely studying photographic portraits of the afflicted and insane. But in the late 1860s, that’s exactly what he began doing: he sifted through portraits of kleptomaniacs, nymphomaniacs, sufferers of severe self-importance, hysteria, and general mania. The portraits, nearly forty of them, were a sort of gift from neurologist James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938), who, as director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield, was a notable figure in neuropsychiatric photography. Crichton-Browne’s photographs, all half-length portraits, attempted to capture the afflictions of his patients; to record the facial expressions of all sorts of manias for the purposes of scientific observation and diagnosis. The results were a strange kind of family album: a group of now-anonymous patients committed to Crichton-Browne’s care stares blankly into the camera’s lens; their expressions are fixed, their faces twisted into a record of their extreme emotional afflictions. Darwin’s meditations on the photographs—guided by Crichton-Browne’s own observations—had a profound impact on the naturalist’s thinking about the physical manifestations of natural selection. The two men exchanged letters for nearly six years, trading books and photographs and sharing observations on the anatomy of blushing, the physiology of expression, and the mechanics of hair bristling. Most importantly, the men shared an almost zealous faith in photography’s ability to correct the imperfect observations made by the human eye. Though Crichton-Browne and Darwin’s epistolary exchange covered far ranging ground, it seems that Darwin initially contacted the neurologist with a single need. “Sometime ago I went into several shops in London to try to buy photographs of the insane, but failed,” Darwin wrote in a letter dated June 8, 1869. Like his father, Dr. William Browne—a “medical commissioner in lunacy” and college chum of the famed naturalist—Crichton-Browne was a bit of a medical iconoclast. He advocated for the “moral” treatment of the insane: no restraints, but diversional and occupational therapy with medication as necessary. Crichton-Browne allowed the residents of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum to imbibe on their favorite beer, he organized dances for their entertainment, and he took their photographs. The photographs served two purposes: first, to shock the lunatic out of her affliction by confronting her with her grotesque appearance, and second, to catalog the true look of different kinds of manias and spur specialized care for individual disorders. Crichton-Browne eagerly responded to Darwin’s request, providing a handful of photographs but promising more. His portraits joined Darwin’s already expanding collection of photographs, an idiosyncratic collection that the scientist had procured rather haphazardly. Darwin had begun wandering London’s many photography shops as early as 1866, searching out photographs that captured facial expressions. He was hardly discriminating and his collection was far from highbrow: cross-dressed actors, smiling sculptures, stereoscopic prints, amusing collages of dogs and crying babies. It’s the stuff of the nineteenth-century photography market, entertaining curiosities meant to litter the overstuffed chairs of the Victorian drawing room. Darwin’s weird and wonderful photography collection was acquired not for parlor games but for the study of human and animal facial expressions. His observations were initially intended as a chapter in his groundbreaking book The Descent of Man (1871). But he found himself so enthralled by the subject that he skipped the chapter and expanded his thoughts into the 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals — widely considered the first English-language scientific text to use photographs. Expression is the most accessible of Darwin’s books. Far from a dry scientific text, it’s rich with colorful anecdotes drawn from theater, painting and, of course, photography. In it, he argues that man’s emotional expressions—his smiles, snarls, and frowns — are the result of natural selection. If facial communication stems from natural selection, then man must share it with other mammals. “With mankind some expressions, such as bristling the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that furious rage, can hardly be understood,” he wrote, “except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.” Like all of Darwin’s arguments, it was a radical departure from conventional wisdom — in this case, the leading theory that facial muscles were a divine gift to humans alone, a manifestation of their higher order thinking. Darwin’s research for Expression was frustrated by a serious problem: the collection of empirical evidence. Actual facial expressions proved difficult for him to scrutinize at any length; their ephemeral nature frustrated his positivist commitment to observation. In the text, he outlined the many problems that arose from observations of the fallible human eye: The fleeting nature of some expressions (the changes in the features being often extremely slight); our sympathy being easily aroused when we behold any strong emotion, and our attention thus distracted; our imagination deceiving us, from knowing in a vague manner what to expect, though certainly few of us know what the exact changes in the countenance are; and lastly, even our long familiarity with the subject—from all these causes combined, the observation of Expression is by no means easy. Photography seemed to be a concrete solution to Darwin’s troubles: a relatively new and neutral technology that he perceived as a simple record, unaffected by demands of aesthetics and artistic interpretation. Photographs also enabled continuous observation of fleeting expressions. He could now observe the discreet flexure of facial muscles, free of “strongly excited sympathy” or “imagination” (both abominable sources of scientific error). But while photography offered a solution to Darwin’s ills, it introduced another problem, a problem of authenticity. Many of the photographs he found captured what he considered “fake” emotions—emotions that were often enacted rather than felt; strained, no doubt, by long exposure times. This led to inevitable errors of anatomy; a cross-dressed German actor might smile, but he was flexing the wrong muscles to be truly happy. Darwin found photographs of the insane to be the quickest remedy to this problem. The mentally ill, as Victorian mores held, were emotionally uninhibited and unconstrained. Unable to conform to social norms, the insane were hardly concerned with the suppression of emotion required by the cultured and the sane. To Darwin, Crichton-Browne’s photographs represented something more useful than marketable trinkets. The raw emotion of the inmates at West Riding Lunatic Asylum was primitive, more authentic, and certainly closer to man’s evolutionary ancestors. Crichton-Browne’s project, his interest in capturing the true look of mania, proved a valuable discovery for Darwin. Darwin found in Crichton-Browne a fellow scientist sympathetic to his theories and ready to expound on his observations. The correspondence between the two men is colorful, replete with vignettes from Crichton-Browne’s blushing sister-in-law to the “observed hilarity” of women “labouring under erotomania, nymphomania, or any disorder of the sexual propensities” (Letter from JCB to CD, February, 16 1871). Though Crichton-Browne refers to very few of his photographs specifically, his letters flesh out the otherwise vacant personalities captured by his camera. In a single letter, he describes the “hilarity” of sexually perverse women; the “remarkable lachrymal secretion” of “melancholics, who sit rocking themselves rhythmically backwards and forwards”; and “a stereotyped smile” of “many idiots and imbeciles who are constantly smiling and laughing, who are `pleas[ed] with a rattle, tickled by a straw.’” The naturalist was eager to solicit Crichton-Browne’s observations on the mechanisms of expression as well as his opinions on the most recent literature on the subject. Darwin forwarded his large volume of Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne’s 1862 book, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions. Duchenne, a physician at the famous Parisian asylum Salpêtrière, had discovered that by using electric probes, he could cause isolated groups of muscles to contract and artificially induce facial expressions in his subjects. Lavishly illustrated with numerous photographic plates demonstrating Duchenne’s grotesque-looking experiments, Mécanisme, was invaluable to Darwin’s research. He and Crichton-Browne exchanged the volume many times throughout their correspondence; Darwin’s copy of the book — now housed at the Darwin Archives at Cambridge University — is filled with their questions and annotations, scribbled in its margins. Darwin seemed to have been most interested in discreet effects of mania on the body. Crichton-Browne, no casual witness of emotional extremities, wrote detailed descriptions of his patients’ attacks, listing every fiber of musculature that flexed in the action. In a March 15, 1870, letter, Crichton-Brown describes a woman from Huddersfield who: Believes that her head is burnt & that there is not a drop of blood in her body. She has an agonized expression. There is marked elevation of the outter [sic] third of the left eyebrow, the skin of the forehead over it being gathered into a multitude of minute wrinkles; the corresponding part of the right eyebrow depressed & overhanging. The corrugatores superciliorum, powerfully contracted. The eyeballs much exposed, the upper eyelids having an abrupt angular arch rather to the inside of their central points; a rounded kite-shaped fullness over the upper lid: angles of the mouth pulled down; constant restless movements, rubbing & wringing of the hands, with twisting of the body from side to side, the neck being held rigid as if apprehensions were entertained as to any movement of the head. Crichton-Browne also responded to Darwin’s specific inquiries about the causes of blushing. “[Y]our theory as to the association of blushing and mental confusion is correct,” he wrote to Darwin in April 1871: I have read your remarks on blushing to my sister in-law, one of the best or worst blushers I ever encountered— a young lady very sanguine & sensitive and she pronounces them strictly correct. She says that when blushing she often stammers and does not know what she is saying. I suggestd [sic] to her that this was due to a feeling of increased awkwardness knowing that her blushing was observed—but she says, No because she has felt quite as stupid when blushing at a thought in her own room. I can make this young lady blush at any moment by looking at her intently. A good portion of their correspondence is dedicated to the effects of emotional distress on the hair. Darwin was particularly interested in establishing a link between the bristling hair of unsettled lower primates and humans. In Expression he compared raised hairs on anthropoid apes and on the nape of a canine neck — both of which occurred only when the animals were agitated. Convinced of the truthfulness of the old adage “hair raising,” Darwin plied Crichton-Browne for his own reflections. On June 1, 1869, Crichton-Browne wrote: With reference to the erection of the hair in acute melancholia & hypochondriasis. There is in both these conditions, a persistent state of painful emotion (either terror or anxiety) varied by paroxysms of more intense suffering. It is in these paroxysms that the bristling of the hair is most frequently noticed . . . It is attributable . . . partly to the sub-acute emotional perturbation . . . which creates a tendency to certain actions & modes of action, & which is operative I am satisfied even upon the hairs. The wife of a medical man, with whom, a patient of mine a lady suffering from acute melancholia, (characterized by convictions of unpardonable sin, fear of death for herself her husband & her children), said to me the other day, without the faintest suggestion on my part,— “I think Mrs. H. is going to begin to improve because her hair is beginning to get smoother. I always notice that our patients” (a considerable number of lunatics have resided with the speaker) “begin to get better whenever their hair ceases to be rough & untidy & unmanageable” This is a curious empirical observation. Their exchange on the subject of bristling hair continued for nearly a year. On June 6, 1870, Crichton-Browne sent Darwin a photograph of a “female patient . . . in whom the bristling of the hair was well seen. The woman was in a tranquil mood when the portrait was taken. When she was agitated—the ascendant emotion being horror—the hair stood out like wire.” The accompanying photograph of a placid-faced woman with possibly ethnic hair was the only one of Crichton-Browne’s portraits to appear in Expression, though it was reproduced as a wood engraving. It is, perhaps, a bit surprising that despite Darwin’s direct solicitation of both Crichton-Browne’s photographs and observations that only one of his portraits was reproduced in Expression. But despite the limited use of Crichton-Browne’s photographs, Darwin found his insights invaluable. Darwin wrote the neurologist in March of 1871 and suggested to him that he should be credited as co-author of Expression. Crichton-Browne politely declined. It’s likely that the patients of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum diverged too much from the universality of expression that Darwin wished to demonstrate. Though a monomaniac’s expression might be useful for close study, it is hardly typical. Darwin’s commitment to typicality — the scientific median — was often at odds with Crichton-Browne’s interest in the abnormality of affliction. In addition to his asylum portraits, the neurologist had forwarded Darwin photographs of a family of “imbeciles” committed to an asylum in Scotland, photographs of grotesquely disfigured patients, and a photograph of a child that the neurologist described as a “Yorkshire cretin.” Darwin seemed to have little use for these photographs; many he returned to Crichton-Browne, but others were placed in an envelope the naturalist had indelicately labelled “Idiots—of no use.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 28, 2014

Stassa Edwards

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:57.305336

writing-his-life-through-the-other-the-anthropology-of-malinowski

Writing his Life through the Other The Anthropology of Malinowski By Michael W. Young January 22, 2014 Last year saw the works of Bronislaw Malinowski - father of modern anthropology - enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Michael W. Young explores the personal crisis plaguing the Polish-born anthropologist at the end of his first major stint of ethnographic immersion in the Trobriand Islands, a period of self-doubt glimpsed through entries in his diary - the most infamous, most nakedly honest document in the annals of social anthropology. ‘Truly I lack real character.’ [Nie jestem naprawdę prawdziwym charakterm]. With these words, written on 18 July 1918, Polish-born Bronislaw Malinowski abruptly ended the intimate diary that he kept during his final stint of fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of eastern New Guinea. This diary, along with several others, was discovered in his Yale University office after his death. Written in Polish, it is clear that he had not intended it for publication. Against his daughters’ wishes, however, and to the dismay of many colleagues who had heard rumours of its controversial contents, his widow published a translation under the title A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (Routledge 1967). It would become the most infamous, most nakedly honest document in the annals of social anthropology. With its moral struggles, its Dostoevskian moods, its Conradian allusions, its Freudian subtext of mother-love and frustrated sexual desire, its misanthropic and racist outbursts, the Diary abundantly revealed some unpleasant aspects of Malinowski’s character. In unmasking his personal weaknesses and prejudices it appeared to give the lie to his professional image as an empathetic fieldworker whose methodological slogan was ‘participant observation’. In short, its publication created a minor scandal and helped precipitate the crisis of anthropological conscience that anticipated the postmodern turn in the discipline. The damage to Malinowski’s reputation was only fully restored after the passing of his pupils’ generation with a dawning realization that the Diary was an iconic text that pointed the way towards a more self-aware and reflexive anthropology. Malinowski was one of the most colourful and charismatic social scientists of the twentieth century. A founding father of British social anthropology between the two world wars, his quasi-mythical status has fascinated his disciplinary descendants who continue to measure themselves against his achievements. Marching under a self-styled theoretical banner of Functionalism, Malinowski revolutionized fieldwork methods, cultivated an innovative style of ethnographic writing, and mounted polemical assaults on a wide array of academic disputes and public issues. By the time of his death, aged 58, in the United States in 1942 he was a controversial international celebrity, a cosmopolitan humanist who dedicated his final years to the ideological battle against Nazi totalitarianism. It is for his corpus of ethnographic writings on the Trobriand Islanders, however, that Malinowski is revered and best remembered. Most of his books remain in print and continue to be taught, critiqued, and studied as exemplars of anthropological modernism. His best ethnographic writing is a stylistic confection of vivid description, reflexive anecdote, methodological prescription and theoretical aside. Malinowski broke with convention by abandoning the positivist pretence of aloof scientific objectivity by inserting a witnessing self into his narrative. The ‘Ethnographer’ of his books is a somewhat outlandish character (‘a Savage Pole’ in one guise) who never allows his reader to forget that not only was he present at the scene as a participant observer, but that he is also the one, in a fully contextualized first-person sense, who is doing the writing. Malinowski’s ethnographic persona — curious, patient, empathetic yet ironic — was given a tentative outing in his first ethnographic report, The Natives of Mailu (1915) and reached full maturity in Baloma (1916), a monograph-length essay on Trobriand religion. The intrusion of Malinowski’s authorial self blurred the distinction between Romantic travelogue and ethnographic monograph. In Ethnography, ‘the writer is his own chronicler,’ he reminds us, and scolds those whose works offer ‘wholesale generalizations’ without informing the reader ‘by what actual experiences the writers have reached their conclusion’. Malinowski’s first and most celebrated Trobriand monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), is a richly-illustrated account of the ceremonial exchange of manufactured shell valuables through which the Trobriands are linked to other island groups of eastern New Guinea. A colourful scientific travelogue, Argonauts takes its readers on a canoe-borne voyage around the so-called Kula Ring of islands. The author’s “Introduction” (which has been dubbed the Book of Genesis of the fieldworker’s Bible) contains twenty-five of the most influential pages in the history of social anthropology. Malinowski’s intention was to raise ethnographic fieldwork to a professional art. The essential rule, he emphasized, was to study the ‘tribal culture in all its aspects’, making no distinction ‘between what is commonplace, drab or ordinary’ and what may seem novel, astonishing or sensational. The ethnographer’s main task is to observe and describe customs in their everyday social contexts and to elicit people’s explanations for their own behaviour. The ultimate aim of social or cultural anthropology is to convert knowledge of other modes of life into wisdom: Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself — yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically. In grasping the essential outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding, due even to savages, we cannot but help widening our own. As an Enlightenment project, the Science of Man must lead to ‘tolerance and generosity, based on the understanding of other men’s point of view’. And Malinowski famously defined the ‘final goal’ of the Ethnographer: ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world’. Following Argonauts, he published Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), a short but path-breaking book which described how ‘law and order’ was maintained in the Trobriands through various sanctions, including the threat of sorcery. His insights into the working of ‘the principle of reciprocity’ in everyday exchanges and his pioneering use of the case method laid the foundations of legal anthropology. Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) contested Freudian dogma concerning the universality of the Oedipus complex. Malinowski proposed that the matrilineal configuration of the Trobriand family cast a boy’s mother’s brother rather than his father in the role of resented authority figure, and his sister rather than his mother as the object of a boy’s incestuous desire. Although Freudians did not take kindly to this interpretation, Malinowski triggered a debate which continues to this day. The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) is a long and detailed ethnography of Trobriand family life: courtship, marriage, divorce and death, pregnancy and childbirth. Malinowski’s explicit descriptions of sexual behaviour — including as depicted in folklore and fantasy — only narrowly escaped censorship, and for several years the cellophane-wrapped volume was hidden under bookshop counters. While avoiding pornography, it mounted a subversive assault on late Victorian prudery; in the changing mores of the time it had a liberating appeal along with the writings of Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence. Needless to say, it was a pioneering study of human sexuality and of the social and cultural factors which shape it. Malinowski’s last classic work on the Trobriand Islands, Coral Gardens and their Magic (two volumes, 1935) dealt exhaustively with horticultural practices and their ritual embellishments, with the politics and mythological basis of land tenure, and with the enchanting poetics of magic. The second volume was an important theoretical contribution to anthropological linguistics, but it was ahead of its time and the linguistic profession in America greeted it coolly for its unfashionable concern with semantics. Malinowski believed it was the best work he had produced and he dedicated it to his ailing wife who had assisted him throughout his early writing career. Sadly, Elsie died just weeks before its publication. Coral Gardens had cost him the most time, effort and expense, and although Malinowski regarded it as his personal favourite, he suspected it was cursed. Widely and quite favourably reviewed, it nevertheless sold fewer copies than any of his other books. In addition to his Trobriand monographs, Malinowski’s oeuvre includes several other full-length works in English, influential enough in their time but esteemed rather less today. The Family among the Australian Aborigines (1913) was a library thesis for which (together with the Mailu report) he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of London. At the time of death he had four books in preparation, all of which were published posthumously: Freedom and Civilization (1944); A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (1944); The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945), and (with Julio de la Fuente) The Economics of a Mexican Market System (1982). Malinowski’s numerous published pamphlets, lecture series, essays and articles — both academic and popular — need not be mentioned here, nor is there need to list the Trobriand books he had planned and set aside or the unfinished anthropology textbook he had promised to more than one publisher. Suffice to say that had he lived longer he would surely have produced more notable works to add further lustre to an already illustrious publishing career. Let us return to that fateful day in the Trobriand Islands, 18 July 1918, when Malinowski penned his last diary entry. What could he have meant by his self-castigation? From a later perspective, he would have had every reason to feel pleased with himself. His foundational fieldwork was almost complete, the groundwork of his subsequent career laid. He would soon leave New Guinea and return to Australia with his ethnographic riches (‘laden with materials as a camel,’ as he put it in his dairy); he would marry his fiancée Elsie Masson; and when the war in Europe was over he would return to England to establish his brilliant career at the London School of Economics as a scholar, author, teacher, pundit, and founder of a modernist school of anthropology. Why, then, did he bemoan his lack of character? Any attempt to answer this question must take his own methodological cue and review the ‘context of situation’ in which found himself when he wrote that final entry. Five weeks earlier news had reached him, after an interval of several months, of the death in distant Cracow of his beloved mother. He was wracked by grief and guilt; he fell into ‘a state of metaphysical instability’ in which he felt ‘cut adrift’ from all life around him. A few weeks later he received another blow in the form of a letter from Nina Stirling, his erstwhile sweetheart and muse in Adelaide, whom he had been stringing along for more than a year, having lacked the moral courage to tell her that he was now in love with Elsie Masson, the woman he proposed to marry. Inevitably, Nina had discovered his deception and wrote to terminate their ‘friendship’. His ‘damnable lack of character’ had been exposed. ‘I feel an absolute brute & unworthy of anyone’s friendship, not to speak of love,’ he wrote to Elsie. Both young women were daughters of eminent scientists with knighthoods, and Malinowski had managed the love triangle so badly that he feared the scandal would ruin his career. His remorse over Nina compounded his remorse over his mother. He regressed. ‘At night, sad, plaintive dreams, like childhood feelings. . . . Everything permeated with Mother.’ The final diary entry as a whole — little more than a page — is a meditation on loss and death. It is populated with memories of his Polish childhood, of his school teachers in Cracow and his relatives in Warsaw, above all of his mother, and his betrayal of their last evening together in London by seeking the company of a mistress. His own extinction seemed possible now: ‘to go to Mother, to join her in nothingness’. Yet at moments he felt it was only the death of something within him: ‘my ambitions and appetites have a strong hold on me and tie me to life. I shall experience joy and happiness (?) and success and satisfaction in my work,’ he wrote. The last thoughts he recorded were of his childhood, his mother and his father (who had died when he was a boy and who is mentioned nowhere else in the diary). And he remembered others who had ‘vanished’ from his life: his former mistress Annie (now living in South Africa), his best friend Staś Witkiewicz (back in war-torn Warsaw), and his spurned girlfriend Nina (at home in Adelaide). It was the conclusion of an experiment in self-creation that had failed: ‘Truly I lack real character.’ What did Malinowski mean by character? In a recent letter to Elsie Masson he told her why he believed keeping a diary was so ‘absolutely indispensable’ to him. It required of him a daily inspection of his conscience and his character, the better to monitor his moods and control his moral lapses: ‘I think “character” might be defined as “persistence of the same real self in one person”,’ he wrote. Keeping a diary had been an intermittent, decade-long experiment in self-analysis that he had begun in the Canary Islands and was now bringing to an end. He wrote his diary to ransack the contents of his mind, to consolidate his character, to remind himself daily who he wanted to be: an efficient, healthy, single-minded, integrated person. But the diary portrays a man who is utterly fragmented and divided, a hostage to his impulses and passing moods. The pathos of this portrait is redeemed by the author’s unremitting honesty. He has no secrets from himself, and he eventually comes to accept that his quest for a single identity is hopeless, rendered all the more impossible after Freud’s revelations. His closing sentence, then, is a moral judgment upon himself that can be explicated in these terms: ‘I have failed to integrate myself, to create a unitary self with a solid, dependable core. I am an assortment of conflicting needs, a multitude of opposing selves, an aggregation of wants and desires, some sordid, some sublime, but none constant or true. After all, I am only human.’ The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 22, 2014

Michael W. Young

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:57.663896

human-forms-in-nature-ernst-haeckel-s-trip-to-south-asia-and-its-aftermath

Human Forms in Nature Ernst Haeckel’s Trip to South Asia and Its Aftermath By Bernd Brunner September 13, 2017 An early promoter and populariser of Darwin's evolutionary theory, the German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel was a hugely influential figure of the late 19th century. Bernd Brunner looks at how a trip to Sri Lanka sowed the seeds for not only Haeckel's majestic illustrations from his Art Forms in Nature, for which he is perhaps best known today, but also his disturbing ideas on race and eugenics. Ernst Haeckel and his sixteen steamer trunks arrived at the harbor of Colombo “in the glorious light of a cloudless tropical morning” on November 21, 1881, after a four-week journey via Trieste, Suez, Aden, and Bombay. The zoologist had high hopes: during the coming four months in Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — he planned to get to know flora and fauna in “that highest and most marvellous variety of form” which existed on the island. Haeckel’s enthusiasm was understandable: he was literally entering the promised land of his naturalist dreams. Admittedly, Ceylon at that time was not defined by dream beaches, a devastating tsunami, or decades of conflict between the country’s Sinhalese and the Tamil inhabitants — all topics we commonly associate with Sri Lanka today. In Haeckel’s era, the teardrop-shaped island nation off India’s southeastern coast embodied the concept of “the tropics”. It was a place of paradisiacal plenty bursting with things that were unfamiliar and often brilliantly colored: animals, plants, fruit, spices, and even gemstones. The realm of riches seemed like a dream world from another time. It was also a land of extremes, where the heat and humidity provided fertile conditions for a host of dangers — little-understood diseases that could quickly turn life-threatening, plagues of insects, predatory animals stalking through the thick vegetation, sharks swimming offshore, and torrential downpours. As he later recalled in his book A Visit to Ceylon, Haeckel planned to trade “the restraint of our artificial social life” for an existence “in the midst of the simple children of nature . . . forming some conception of that visionary primeval paradise into which the human race was born.” After all, he believed that humanity had originated near Ceylon on the hypothetical continent of “Lemuria” in the Indian Ocean. This conviction certainly influenced his decision to travel to Ceylon — along with the fact that his role models, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, never made it to that corner of the world. For Haeckel, at the time forty-seven years old and the most important champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution on the European continent, the journey to Ceylon represented the fulfillment of a long-held but initially vague desire that took concrete shape over many years. “As an eight-year-old boy, I loved no book more than Robinson Crusoe,” he once recalled, “and a lonely life in nature on a distant island played a large part in many of my childhood fantasies.” It’s clear that he caught his tropical fever early, and that it intensified over decades. But his journey was also motivated by immediate scientific concerns. Five years earlier, Britain’s Challenger expedition had ended. Despite its global aspirations, this trailblazing contribution to marine research neglected the Indian Ocean. Haeckel did not take part in the voyage, but he was later commissioned to study and classify the Radiata specimens — such as jellyfish and starfish — that had been collected. Haeckel wanted to add several chapters to the resulting report. In the end, he had a range of reasons for traveling to Ceylon: a longing for adventure he had nourished since childhood, scientific ambition, and — when we keep the illustrations he would later create in mind — artistic ambition as well. Once Haeckel reached Ceylon, however, it was the island’s rich gardening culture that first drew his attention. “Often I have fancied myself in some beautiful wild spot with tall trees on all sides, wreathed and overgrown with creepers”, he wrote. “But a hut shrouded under the branches of a bread-fruit-tree, a dog or a pig trotting out of the brushwood, children at play and hiding under the caladium leaves, have betrayed the fact that I was in a native (Sinhalese) garden.” The ecology of these practical gardens, known as gewattas, has only been investigated closely in recent decades. The seemingly chaotic mixture of trees, bushes, vines, and herbaceous underbrush is actually a symbiotic system in which each element has a place and fulfills a purpose. Cultivated using low inputs of labor and fertilizers, they are amazingly productive, especially when the full range of their bounty is considered: from firewood to food and spices. Sri Lanka is home to a surprisingly diverse array of environments: from dense tropical rainforests to coral reefs, from tidelands to savannahs, from mangrove forests to sand dunes. Haeckel set to work familiarizing himself with almost everything they contained. He was especially impressed by the palms, those “princes among plants”. In the hills whose lower stretches were covered with meadows and rice fields, he discovered thick brushland where the trees “have grown up without any kind of order, and in such wild confusion — so tangled with creepers and climbers, with parasitic ferns, orchids and other hangers-on, every gap closed with a compact network of bush and brake — that it is quite impossible to unravel the knot and distinguish the closely matted stems.” According to Haeckel, simply taking a few steps into this tangled growth was a dangerous undertaking. He recalled being attacked by mosquitos, bitten by ants, and plagued by all the nettles and thorns deployed by the plants to “bar the way into their mysterious labyrinth”. It was here that Haeckel first glimpsed the magnificent Gloriosa superba, “the poisonous climbing lily of Ceylon, with its golden-red crown”. Large black apes and swarms of green parrots surrounded him, and he killed “an enormous lizard above six feet long (the singular Hydrosaurus salvator)” — a creature resembling a crocodile — with a shot to the head. He also encountered the talipot tree or “century palm”, with its tall trunk like a slender marble column. The talipot blooms just once, usually between the ages of fifty and eighty, when a pyramidal bush composed of millions of yellowish-white flowers emerges from its crown. When Haeckel spent four days at the botanical garden of Peradeniya — located near the center of the island, on the outskirts of the former royal city of Kandy — he recognized the place as “an admirable natural forcing-house” and considered it the heart of the horticultural paradise that was Ceylon. But while the garden was and is a remarkable place, Haeckel’s most surprising experience on the island took place outside its confines. Setting up a zoological laboratory in Weligama, on the island’s southern tip, Haeckel set off to explore the nearby waters. Some of these excursions were short trips to cull specimens from the ocean’s surface, but at times he also sailed out for up to four hours in a traditional boat. Once he arrived at his destination — a point forty or fifty nautical miles from the shore (south, towards “Lemuria”) — he busily collected jellyfish and larvae. His supply of specimen bottles was quickly exhausted. But despite the wealth of sea life he found, his study of the specimens strengthened his conviction that the life forms existing in the earth’s various oceans resembled one another much more closely than the land creatures from continent to continent. Haeckel set aside the last month of his stay to explore the island’s high-altitude regions. His goal was to visit “the wildest parts of the primaeval forest” beyond the reach of human civilization. One spring morning he climbed through thick forests and past rushing streams and waterfalls to the top of the eight-thousand-meter Pidurutalagala, the highest point on the island. There were surprises in store, including five-foot-long sky-blue earthworms, the brilliantly colored woodcock, and a type of ash-gray monkey. On the Horton Plains, a primarily jungle-covered area that is now a national park, fresh piles of dung signaled that wild elephants were nearby. During the days that followed, Haeckel and his companions traveled through the tangled brush along so-called elephant trails. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — they never actually encountered an elephant herd. Although plants and animals were the main objects of Haeckel’s interest during his journey, descriptions of the local people recur throughout A Visit to Ceylon, creating a kind of leitmotif. Even though his gaze upon nature was perhaps never purely apolitical, it is here in his reflections on the human population that we encounter a side to Haeckel much more challenging, if not to say disturbing, to today’s readers. During a stopover in India, Haeckel was already taking note of the naked brown bodies “of the members of the poorest class”, who were clad in nothing but “a loin-cloth or apron-like swimming-drawers”. “Thus the naked figures of the Hindoos”, he wrote, “give a strange and strong impression of their being real savages, though, in point of fact, they are descended from the same ‘Mediterranean’, or Aryan, stock as the various races of Europe.” In Ceylon he became aware of the complex mixture of the population. In addition to the Buddhist Sinhalese and the Hindu Tamils — the largest groups — the island was home to Indo-Arabs, Malays, Chinese, Africans, and Englishmen, along with descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch settlers, who were known as “Burgers”, and the indigenous people, the Veddas. He mentioned the latter briefly — and almost in passing: The Veddahs, or Vellahs, are commonly regarded as being the dispersed remnants of this race (hindoo); a few wild hordes still linger in the remotest parts of the interior and in the most primitive state. But, according to others, the Veddahs are, on the contrary, debased and degenerate descendants of the Cinghalese, outcasts that have reverted to savagery, like the Rodiyas. Some of these ethnic groups lived together creating what Haeckel saw as “very interesting problems to the anthropologist who should try to classify them.” He claimed that he detected a “singularly slender and feminine character of the limbs” in the older Sinhalese men, which set them apart from the much shorter Tamils. In general, Haeckel resisted classifying the Tamils among the “lower races of man”, although his justification for this generosity of spirit was purely an aesthetic one. His hikes through the tea plantations on the high plateaus provided plenty of opportunities to admire what he perceived as the Tamils’ unspoiled physical perfection. According to Haeckel, a sculptor would do far better to study the true beauty and proportion of the human form among these naturally developed models, than in the life-schools of European academies, where some model, found with difficulty among the degenerate sons of civilization and forced into some unwonted attitude, is but a poor substitute for the genuine child of nature. On the other hand, Haeckel dismissively claimed that the “finely cut mouth” and “very dark, inspired-looking eyes” of the typical Tamil were deceptive, “promising much more than the brain within fulfills.” Wherever he was able to give his own preferences free rein, he indulged his weakness for classical Greek clichés. For example, he gave one of his four servants in Weligama the name Socrates. The lower-caste boy who opened coconuts for him each morning and fanned him with palm branches was dubbed Ganymede — after the youth who had the honor of serving the Olympian gods. We may ask ourselves why Haeckel did not use the boy’s real name, Gamameda. Wouldn’t it have been a matter of respect? Could he not see his young servant for who he “really” was? Or does today’s reader attribute too much weight to this question? That said, Haeckel can be credited with having formed closer relations with natives than with the European colonials — though this may in part have just been due to the fact that there were not many of the latter around. Haeckel returned to Europe in March 1882, taking thirty crates with him. He later claimed that his triumphant arrival back in Europe could “only be compared with that of a soldier returning after a victorious campaign.” Although this first voyage to tropical lands did not lead to any research breakthroughs as such, his contact with its flora and people surely inspired Haeckel in the two main branches of activity for which he is known today. On the one hand, in the botanical and zoological bounty of Ceylon we can see the seed for the work by which he is perhaps best remembered, the splendid Art Forms in Nature, which he began publishing in 1899. The book’s complex, ornamental lithographs and halftone prints bridge art and science and continue to exert a particular fascination. Glowing with color, they brought the exotic and the remote to libraries around the world and were the culmination of decades of work for Haeckel. On the other hand is Haeckel’s work relating to race and eugenics, a side to his output certainly less palatable to a modern audience. Indeed, no matter how colorful and lively the descriptions of Haeckel’s travels may be, a shadow lies over A Visit to Ceylon. Haeckel’s legacy is not simply an appreciation for the beauty of nature. In light of the views that he later propagated — either in his writings or at his popular lectures — his travelogue seems tame and nearly innocent. But the complex constellation of attitudes that he developed over time and embodied does not fit easily into current categories of left and right and deserves a closer look. In political terms he was what may be called a liberal nationalist. At the same time, he made isolated anti-Semitic statements. Even more disturbingly, he was also a proponent of racial inequality and believed that the races he understood as “inferior” were dying out in response to their contact with the more “civilized” races. The hardening of his views on the hierarchy of races that took place during the last two decades of the nineteenth century must be understood in this broader context. It was a period when the sciences were undergoing intense development and specialization. Haeckel was not working in a vacuum: racial anthropology was a popular area of inquiry and had a number of champions. The tremendous economic success of certain societies due to industrialization and colonialism provided scientists with a seemingly convincing argument for claiming the superiority of the “favoured races in the struggle for life” (Darwin) and cementing it in the public consciousness. At the same time, these circumstances do not absolve Haeckel of his personal responsibility. He was a man of his time, but he also bears a measure of blame. After all, he was far more than just a cog in the machine. As an extremely popular author — his The History of Creation was translated into all the major European languages — he played an active role in helping concepts regarding the inferiority of certain “races” to spread and have an impact. In his view, “cultural value” determines the value of human life itself: he saw an unbridgeable chasm between the “thinking soul of the cultured man and the unthinking brutish soul of the savage, natural man” — a soul he compared to that of a dog. In his lecture on the origins of humankind at the Fourth International Zoological Congress, held in Cambridge in 1898, he discussed the Veddas as “Ceylon’s dwarf-like indigenous people”, who in his view were one step beyond humanoid apes. He even claimed that the distance between advanced European peoples and “savages” was greater than that between the latter and apes. His views later found an enthusiastic following among scientists who expounded racial theories to support National Socialist ideology. Equally troublesome is his stance on eugenics, which is light years removed from any ethically defensible standard today. His beliefs in this area transgress the purely descriptive limits of evolutionary theory to embrace the philosophy of the social Darwinists. Yet he did not merely echo their literal, limiting interpretation of the notion of “survival of the fittest” but took this chain of reasoning a fatal step further. Haeckel repeatedly cited the ancient Spartans in his defense of the killing of disabled infants, whom he considered to be of little or no value. Eugenics and euthanasia were embraced by many secular social reformers at the time, including some socialists. However, most of these thinkers advocated reproductive control for those they considered “inferior”, not their murder. But Haeckel did support killing, and he had a clear idea about where to draw the line between who was “worthy of living” and who was not. After his death, others followed who were no longer content with mere intellectual games. Adolf Hitler later claimed that it was actually more humane to kill disabled individuals than to allow them to live. To kill the disabled was seen as morally good, even though it overturned Judeo-Christian attitudes which protected the disabled. Haeckel’s works were widely read in the early twentieth century, and many eugenicists, racists, and anti-Semites absorbed the ideas they contained. Close to two decades after his trip, in 1900, Haeckel set off for the tropics once again. Art Forms in Nature had just been published. This time, Ceylon was just a stop along a much longer route. Haeckel’s real destination was Southeast Asia: Java and Sumatra. It was unavoidable that this voyage lacked the excitement of his first trip, and it was no longer motivated by scientific ambitions. His observations in the resulting account of his travels read like the dutiful report of a researcher who, while he still had some capacity for wonder, was very set in his ways. His thoughts gravitated to humanoid apes and ape-like humans, leaving him little time for strolls through the coral gardens. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 13, 2017

ernd Brunner

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:58.665139

george-washington-a-descendant-of-odin

George Washington A Descendant of Odin? By Yvonne Seale February 8, 2017 Yvonne Seale on a bizarre and fanciful piece of genealogical scholarship and what it tells us about identity in late 19th-century America. George Washington: first President of the United States, father of his country, crosser of the Delaware, and descendant of Odin. This, at least, was the claim put forward by the late nineteenth-century genealogist Albert Welles. In the floridly titled, four-hundred-page tome The Pedigree and History of the Washington Family Derived from Odin, the Founder of Scandinavia. B.C. 70, Involving a Period of Eighteen Centuries, and Including Fifty-Five Generations, Down to General George Washington, First President of the United States (1879), Welles created a family tree for Washington of truly mythical proportions, and one which shows just how useful nineteenth-century Americans found the Middle Ages to be when it came to shaping their understandings of their country’s origins. Welles stopped short of claiming that Washington was of semi-divine ancestry — likely because of his own devout Christianity. He therefore took his cue from the thirteenth-century Icelandic author and fellow Christian, Snorri Sturluson, who had proposed that Odin and the other Norse gods of his ancestors should be understood merely as venerated, mythologized versions of particularly successful war leaders. This meant that Odin was not the god of healing and death and the foremost of the Æsir, or Norse pantheon. He was instead a flesh-and-blood man who had lived almost two thousand years ago, ruling over a Turkic people in central Asia called the Aesir. Over time, Odin’s conquests took him further and further west until he finally settled in Scandinavia and declared himself king of all its peoples in the early first century BCE. Welles sniffed that previous historians had not come to this very obvious conclusion because they — unlike him — were “unable to separate the real from the mythological history”. Yet Welles was keen to engage in some myth-making of his own, stressing the similarities between the Odin he conjured up and George Washington. Though separated by eighteen centuries — and though no one knows what even a human Odin might have looked like — Welles writes that both men were of “wild, massive, manly” stock. If Odin, the first king of a united Scandinavia, were “the Mars as well as the Mohammed” of the region, then surely the first president of the United States had to hold a similarly elevated position. From Odin, Welles traced thirty-two generations of descent down to about the year 1000 which encompassed figures both historical and legendary. In doing so, he gave George Washington further links — which even allowing for their fictional status were sometimes highly tenuous or collateral — to people like the Viking king Ragnar Lodbrok, or the brothers Hengist and Horsa who purportedly led the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in the fifth century. Welles also claimed that Washington was related to the eleventh-century Icelandic explorers Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, who sailed across the Atlantic to Greenland and Vinland, the coastal region of eastern America which was briefly colonized by the Vikings. There, Thorfinn and Gudrid had a son, Snorri — the first known child of European parentage to be born in the Americas, long before Martín de Argüelles or Virginia Dare in the sixteenth century. Ragnar, Hengist, Horsa, Thorfinn, Gudrid, Snorri: these are all tangential figures in Welles’ imagined Washington family tree. But by taking the time to include brief biographies of them, and by linking them to George Washington, Welles was in a sense extending Euro-American history back into the far past. Rather than a nation which could trace its origins back only a hundred years or so from the time of Welles’ writing, or a continent whose colonization could be traced back to the voyages of an Italian Catholic, Anglo-American Protestants were cast as heirs to a long northern European tradition of exploration, conquest, and colonization. Even America’s grand democratic experiment had a medieval Scandinavian ancestry, in Welles’ eyes. He conceded that the Washingtons of the fifteenth century may have taken opposite sides during the Wars of the Roses, but wrote that he attached “no credence to reports of the Cavalier sentiments of the Washington family”. In other words, it was impossible that any ancestor of George Washington could have harbored royalist as opposed to republican sympathies during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, because no member of the extended Washington clan could ever display a love of “power without principle”. The Washingtons were, after all, almost entirely of Germanic descent — untainted by the continental European influences of Norman blood — and throughout the centuries, “Saxon opposition to the Norman rule in England took the form of liberalism”. Albert Welles wrote in an America whose aesthetic and moral sensibilities were informed to a great extent by medievalism. The Gothic-revival churches which were springing up across America were thought to be representative of an authentic “Teutonic” style, modified by civilizing Protestant influence. Mass-market consumer products married nineteenth-century inventions with often wildly inauthentic “Gothic” flourishes. In 1876, Henry Brooks Adams — a grandson and great-grandson of American presidents — published the first academic history of medieval Europe to be produced in the United States. Architecture, home decor, textbooks, and lecture series: they all promoted the idea of the European Middle Ages as a time of white racial purity and valor. George Washington himself seems not to have been unduly interested in the intricacies of his own lineage beyond his immediate family, writing in a letter that “this [his family tree] is a subject to which I confess I have paid very little attention”.1 It does not seem that he spent much time contemplating who his ancestors in the Middle Ages might have been. And yet he made copious use of a very medieval symbol: the Washington family coat of arms, which dates back to at least the fourteenth century. He emblazoned it on his personal seals, silverware, bookplates, the interior of his home at Mount Vernon — in 1790, Washington even had it added to the doors of his personal carriage.2 Yet despite this evidence of pre-existing popular interest in such mythologizing, American-style medievalism, The Pedigree and History was overwhelmingly dismissed by Welles’ contemporaries, often in very forthright terms. In a letter to the editor published in a July 1889 issue of The Nation magazine, the genealogist W.H. Whitmore declared that “it is only fair to suppose that Mr. Welles was not in a sound state of mind” when he put pen to paper. The book was a “rank and stupid forgery”, “a mere rambling collection of useless notes.” In fact, it took until the early twentieth century for Welles’ work to gain any traction at all — and then it was because it suited quite a different set of political needs. The short-lived Northern Review: A Cultural Magazine for the Northwest was published in Minneapolis during the First World War. Unsurprisingly, given the ethnic heritage of a large proportion of Minnesota’s population, the magazine took a distinctly pro-German stance about the conflict. In promotional material about the magazine, Germans and Scandinavians were called “Teutonic twin brothers” whose settlement in the Midwest had “made the desert to blossom”. A 1918 issue of the magazine reprinted a summary of The Pedigree and History under the title “Washington: A Scandinavian”. How could he be anything else, the anonymous epilogue to the summary concluded: George Washington’s ancestry was additional proof that his character was clearly that “of the ancient Vikings of the North”. He too believed in the values of independence, liberty, and patriotism and was possessed of a “powerful frame”. The thrust of the article was clear: the peoples of the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia shared a common ancestry and a set of values which should prevent them from going to war with one another. A similar kind of article cropped up in a 1925 issue of the Nordmanns-forbundet (Norsemen’s federation) magazine.3 The goal of this Oslo-published magazine was to encourage cultural and linguistic unity among the Norwegian diaspora, something which was felt to be increasingly necessary amid the heightened nativist environment of the United States in the post-war years. The article’s Norwegian-born American author, Simon Johnson, took Washington’s purported Scandinavian ancestry as fact. In doing so, Johnson was attempting to promote the idea of Scandinavians — and so Norwegian immigrants — as “true” Americans, something which wasn’t always accepted by other white Americans of nativist inclinations. As for the originator of all of these claims, Albert Welles himself is a rather shadowy figure. He was born in Palmyra, New York in about 1818 to George Wells and Mary Babcock, both natives of Connecticut (the second E in his surname seems to have been a later affectation). In 1844, he married Catherine Beckwith; they swiftly had a daughter, Katharine (b. 1845) and moved to New York City. In his writings, Welles was keen to present himself as a man of letters and leisure, but census information shows that he had a far more prosaic occupation: insurance agent. He was a man of some ambition: in 1860, he founded the American College of Heraldry and Genealogical Registry, housed in the New York Society Library. Speaking to the group’s members in 1879, Welles stated that “[t]his institution promises to become one of the most important and popular in the country. It is destined to become the great depository of Family Registers and Family History.” The ACH briefly published a genealogical magazine with the aim of nationwide circulation, The Chronotype: An American Memorial of Persons and Events (W.H. Whitmore’s verdict on this endeavor was “the mere ravings of a would-be genealogist, full of errors and contradictions.”) Life membership could be obtained for the sum of $50, and members’ family trees were to be entered into the “Domesday Book of New York”. Welles’ hopes for the institution were proved false — the ACH didn’t outlast his death in the early 1880s — but during its brief existence it boasted honorary members including such well-known figures as Senator Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State William Seward, and the romantic poet William Cullen Bryant. As one might imagine, Albert Welles was also interested in his own family’s history. He published History of the Welles Family in England and Normandy (1876), which was riddled with about as many errors as was The Pedigree and History, though he made no claim to quasi-divine heritage. Instead, Welles constructed a family tree — almost entirely inaccurately — that gave him connections to a grab-bag of medieval nobility, including Sir Lionel de Welles, a combatant in the War of the Roses and step-father of Lady Margaret Beaufort; the princely house of Orange; several bishops; and assorted signatories of Magna Carta. Welles could therefore take comfort in the fact that like his hero George Washington, like all proper Americans, he was descended from a medieval lineage full of manly valor and civic virtue. Shortly after Albert Welles’ death in 1883, his books, papers, and correspondence were auctioned off, including “thousands of manuscript genealogies of American families, and quite a large number in book form, expensively gotten up, with portraits, coats of arms and crests” — perhaps even including the notes from which Welles had concocted George Washington’s family tree.4 A newspaper account of the auction noted that the true value of all of these goods could be estimated from a single example — a genealogy drawn up on behalf of one William Augustus Martin of New York, showing that he and all the other American Martins were descended from the seventh-century Pope Martin I. “Who would not be a Martin?” the reporter wrote wryly — just as surely, in the mind of Albert Welles, who could envision an America founded by anyone other than a descendant of Odin? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 8, 2017

Yvonne Seale

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:59.154362

rescuing-england-the-rhetoric-of-imperialism-and-the-salvation-army

Rescuing England The Rhetoric of Imperialism and the Salvation Army By Ellen J. Stockstill August 16, 2017 Ellen J. Stockstill on how William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, placed the ideas and language of colonialism at the very heart of his vision for improving the lives of Victorian England's poor. The first sight to greet the reader upon opening William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), his book on poverty in Victorian England, is a striking and elaborately detailed “chart”. The sprawling image, a lithograph which folds out of the book like a small poster, is part graphic representation and part statistical record — both an illustration of the country’s plight and Booth’s model for salvation. At the bottom of the image, the artist depicts “3,000,000 in the sea” drowning under the weight of a wide range of sins and states of depravity, flailing amidst waves labelled “drunkenness”, “slavery”, “rape”, “infanticide”, “prostitution”, “murder”, “illegitimacy”, “divorce”, “wife desertion”, “suicide”, “betting”, “homelessness” and, somewhat curiously, “sweating”. From the rocks either side Salvation Army Officers help people from the water and usher them towards the “City Colony”, where they will have opportunities at “rescue homes”, “bakeries”, and “cheap food depots”; where they will find permanent work, and live in homes for “married people”, “girls”, “inebriates”, “single women”, “children”, and “the homeless”. From here clear pathways guide the way to the peaceful, green, and spacious “Farm Colony”, and then still farther on to the more distant “Colony Across the Sea”, with routes shown to British colonies, the United States, and “all parts of the world”. Flanking this utopian image of social reform stand columns bearing numerical data about “prostitutes” (over 30,000 in London, 100,000 in Great Britain); “criminals” (32,000 in prison); “drink” (“There are half a million drunkards in Great Britain”) and “drink traffic” (120,000 “Licensed Drinks Shops”); “destitution” (993,000); “the poor” (100,000 homeless); and “misery” (190,000 in workhouses). The bases of these columns inform viewers that 2,297 people died from suicide and 2,157 were found dead the previous year. On the plinths below are carved a litany of sins, from “reviling” and “fornication” to “lying” and “avarice”. This depiction of communal blight and remediation traces a move from oppression to liberation not only in the shift away from sin but also in the shift from dark enclosure to bright, wide open space. In many ways, it mimics Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement and other works of Christian art that juxtapose the struggling bodies of the damned with the heavenly bodies of the saved and the glory of such an ascension. This salvific movement is echoed too in the structure of the book: Part I is entitled “The Darkness” and Part II “Deliverance”. It is a movement that speaks also of the colonial model — the drowning souls are plucked from the sea so that they can enjoy a better life in a colonized space specially designed to educate, reform, employ, and civilize them. A quarter of a century earlier, in 1865, William Booth (1829–1912), together with his wife Catherine Mumford Booth (1829–1890), founded the Christian Mission in Whitechapel — an organization that would later become the Salvation Army. Harold Begbie, who wrote a 1920 biography of William Booth, said that “at the beginning of his career in London, it is quite clear, William Booth had one remedy, and only one remedy, for the distresses of mankind, and that the Gospel.” According to Begbie, Booth did, however, later acknowledge “how economic conditions can so oppress and bear upon the soul that its natural functions of love, worship, and aspiration may be almost completely inhibited.” Although Booth ultimately came to promote a combination of religious teaching with sweeping social reform as the way to save England’s poor, he still prioritized the saving of souls as key to his “Army’s” work. This emphasis on salvation from social ills such as poverty and addiction is nowhere better encapsulated than in his 1890 bestseller. Although largely written by William T. Stead (1849–1912), the newspaper editor responsible for the controversial “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” investigations into child prostitution, In Darkest England and the Way Out was published under Booth’s name alone. And the idea at the heart of the work — this unusual image of an England in need of “colonizing” — is also very much his. By portraying England as a place full of violence, sexual deviancy, and addiction, Booth equates it with Africa, which at this time was seen by many of his compatriots as a place of darkness in need of salvation. This image of Africa as “the dark continent”, and indeed the title of Booth’s book itself, draws on explorer H. M. Stanley’s highly popular and melodramatic account of his doomed trip through Africa published earlier that year, In Darkest Africa. Booth explicitly pairs his text with Stanley’s, describing an “African Parallel” and encouraging his audience to apply their entrenched views of African people and culture to the poor of England. After quoting Stanley’s descriptions of the landscape and people of the Congo at length, Booth presents his position: “It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved itself deep on the heart of civilisation. But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England?” He highlights similarities between the two places, arguing that while Africa “is all trees, trees, trees”, impenetrable and dark, London “is all vice and poverty and crime”, and while “ivory raiders . . . brutally traffic in the unfortunate denizens of the forest glades . . . publicans . . . flourish on the weakness of our poor.” He continues, conjuring emotional images to connect the two distant lands: Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley’s pages of the slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpse-like, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilisation. Darkest Africa and England, according to Booth, “are alike” in “monotonous darkness . . . malaria . . . gloom” and “dwarfish de-humanized inhabitants.” Booth, an astute rhetorician, admits that his “African parallel” has limits, but he asks readers to examine their interests and biases in supporting the work of imperialism overseas: An analogy is as good as a suggestion; it becomes wearisome when it is pressed too far. But before leaving it, think for a moment how close the parallel is, and how strange it is that so much interest should be excited by a narrative of human squalor and human heroism in a distant continent, while greater squalor and heroism not less magnificent may be observed at our very doors. In these lines, Booth seeks to unite differing attitudes to poverty under an overarching imperial ideology that his readers, he assumes, have already accepted as rational and worthy of support. His vision for a better England is folded into an already established energizing myth of empire that maintains the ability, and even the duty, of the British to reform and civilize “degenerate” subjects. The message is clear: there is a need for missionary work in the very capital of the empire itself. Evangelical fervor and ardent desire for reform here meet the rhetoric of imperialism. Of course, colonialism in Booth’s ideas was not limited merely to the realm of metaphor or rhetoric: the British colonial project provided the very mechanism by which these ideas were to be realized. Having established England as a site of darkness, Booth puts forward his “scheme” for “Deliverance” to the light — a project that links moral and religious reformation with worthwhile employment in carefully constructed colonies at home and abroad. His interdependent model was meant to provide “work for all” through a “scheme” that “divides itself into three sections, each of which is indispensable for the success of the whole.” Booth calls this three-part scheme a “patriarchal family” and describes how each part leads into the next, creating a funnel of sorts that ultimately moves across the sea: The Scheme, in its entirety, may aptly be compared to A Great Machine, foundationed in the lowest slums and purlieus of our great towns and cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and destitute of all classes; receiving thieves, harlots, paupers, drunkards, prodigals, all alike, on the simple conditions of their being willing to work and to conform to discipline. Drawing up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth; teaching them methods by which alike the bread that perishes and that which endures to Everlasting Life can be won. Forwarding them from the City to the Country, and there continuing the process of regeneration, and then pouring them forth on to the virgin soils that await their coming in other lands, keeping hold of them with a strong government, and yet making them free men and women; and so laying the foundations, perchance, of another Empire to swell to vast proportions in later times. Why not? Booth’s closing question in the passage, “Why not?”, subtly reveals confidence, not only in progressive reforms, but also in the imperial project. If one can take advantage of other spaces as places for new opportunity, why not? Thus the imperial power of the British Empire proves central to providing the “way out” of “Darkest England”. The frontispiece and text of In Darkest England and the Way Out, of course, assume that mass areas of the world are blank spaces that the British are entitled to occupy and use for their own purposes. Booth writes, “All who have given attention to the subject are agreed that in our Colonies in South Africa, Canada, Western Australia and elsewhere, there are millions of acres of useful land to be obtained almost for the asking.” Booth cites South Africa as an ideal space to set up an emigration funnel with the Salvation Army because it “presents to us great advantages for the moment. There is any amount of land suitable for our purpose which can be obtained, we think, without difficulty.” His assessment of the landscape involves analysis of the amount of land and how easily it could be “obtained”; he does not detail how the land would be acquired or how colonists would interact with current inhabitants. Booth’s assessment also ignores other colonial powers like the Dutch who would challenge British expansion in South Africa. He assumes that the British are fit to rule over any native population and that they would be more justified than other nations in doing so. Booth’s scheme of In Darkest England and the Way Out also assumes that established British colonies offer a continuation of British life. He emphasizes the compatibility of life between England and her colonies by describing how boundaries have collapsed in an era of technological advancement: “The world has grown much smaller since the electric telegraph was discovered and side by side with the shrinkage of this planet under the influence of steam and electricity there has come a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of community of interest and of nationality on the part of the English-speaking people throughout the world.” Here technology and language have made it possible to travel and communicate more effectively between distant regions, and Booth claims that it is “absurd to speak of the Colonies as if they were a foreign land. They are simply pieces of Britain distributed about the world, enabling the Britisher to have access to the richest parts of the earth.” A few pages later, he describes his ideal emigration process “as the unmooring of a little piece of England, and towing it across the sea to find a safe anchorage in a sunnier clime.” The presentation of these destinations (with different climates, cultures, and people) as little Britains allows Booth to position colonies as approachable sites full of opportunity. While other tales of exploration and adventure might make a British audience understand the colony as an exotic space, Booth hopes to make his audience see the colony as welcoming and familiar — familiar enough to seem survivable, but different enough to seem like a place where a person can begin anew. It may not be too surprising to hear that Booth’s model for England’s salvation never fully came into being as it exists on the colorful lithograph that begins In Darkest England, with its ambitious promise to ensure “work for all”. His book was, however, incredibly popular, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and Booth’s ideas persisted, with the Salvation Army going on to facilitate the voluntary emigration of thousands. For several decades after Booth’s book was published, the Salvation Army, according to their website, “was the United Kingdom’s largest voluntary migration society, helping around 250,000 people to emigrate from the British Isles to the British Empire Dominions”. For many years it had a department devoted to emigration, and it did establish some farm colonies, including three in the United States in Colorado, Ohio, and California, through the American branch of the organization. While much of the material detailing the Salvation Army’s global mission vanished when its international headquarters was destroyed in the Blitz, some surviving artefacts indicate how the spirit of Booth’s colony scheme for England’s poor was followed. Such artefacts include copies of The Social Gazette, a weekly periodical that for three years at the beginning of the twentieth century featured a column called “Our Emigration Advice Bureau”, which counseled those who intended to emigrate; and Salvation Army Year Books that detail the workings of the organization’s Emigration Department from 1906 to 1981. The idea that impoverished people living in urban centers could find opportunity in British colonies was not a notion held only by religious organizations like the Salvation Army. Many secular reformers and politicians also believed emigration to be a viable way to alleviate poverty, made possible by British imperial power that privileged white settlers over native residents. Indeed, as British imperial ideology embraced the notion of the civilizing mission, which emphasized colonizing as a process of reform and redemption, Christian missionaries could not help but be linked with a secular imperial project in terms of rhetoric. They shared a lexicon, even if at times they did not share faith or the same kind of concern over the colonized person’s soul. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 16, 2017

Ellen J. Stockstill

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:59.665725

voltaire-and-the-buddha

Voltaire and the Buddha By Donald S. Lopez, Jr. March 8, 2017 Donald S. Lopez, Jr. looks at Voltaire's early reflections on Buddhism and how, in his desire to separate the Buddha's teachings from the trappings of religion, the French Enlightenment thinker prefigured an approach now familiar in the West. After Ignatius Loyola formed the Society of Jesus in 1539, he required that his missionaries send back detailed letters describing their activities and the peoples and places they encountered. In France, over the course of the eighteenth century, these were gathered together and published as Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, thirty-four volumes of which appeared between 1702 and 1776. The Jesuit accounts of far-flung lands were widely read during the Enlightenment, serving, for example, as important sources for Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s seminal Encyclopédie. The contents of the letters were various, but the Jesuits’ mission being what it was, it is perhaps not surprising that religion figured prominently, with many accounts of what would one day be called Buddhism. Well into the nineteenth century, Europeans divided the population of the world into four nations, based on their religion: Christians, Jews, Muslims (often called Mahometans), and Idolaters. For centuries, Buddhists fell into this last category. The process of their elevation to having an “ism” of their own is too long to tell here. However, one chapter in that story would be about those Jesuits, the intrepid travelers who set out from Europe to spread the Gospel across Asia. St Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, first imagining a kinship with Buddhists; later he would condemn them. In China, Matteo Ricci first dressed as a Buddhist monk before adopting the guise of a Confucian scholar, writing works in Chinese condemning the “religion of Fo” (fo is the Chinese word for Buddha). Early reports on the Buddhism of Thailand came from delegations sent to the court of Siam by Louis XIV, delegations that included Jesuit priests. The term “Buddhism” would not appear in English until the early nineteenth century. The Jesuits who wrote the reports and the scholars who read them did not recognize that the religions they encountered in China, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand were somehow the same. Each had its own indigenous term for “Buddha” and each had its own artistic conventions for representing him. His portrayal as an idol and as a purveyor of idolatry did not change substantially over the course of the eighteenth century but much more information about him and his teachings began to accumulate. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert was certainly the most famous of the compendia of knowledge of the Enlightenment, but it was not the only one. Inspired by it, in 1764 Voltaire published his own, which he called Dictionnaire philosophique. Like so many of his works, it was hailed by some and condemned by others. In it, he criticized the Roman Catholic Church and offered negative portrayals of Judaism and Islam. He also criticized Buddhism (although he did not use the term), but he praised the Buddha, seeking, as others would do in the centuries that followed, to separate the teacher from what would be represented as his teachings. Indeed, he devoted an entry in his dictionary to the Buddha, referring to him by the French rendering of one of his Thai epithets, Sammonocodom, that is, the śramaṇa (mendicant) Gautama. He begins, “I recall that Sammonocodom, the god of the Siamese, was born from a young virgin and was raised on a flower.” He goes on to list, not without irony, other famous cases of miraculous birth from other cultures. Immediately seeking to separate the man from the myth, he observes that, “The religion of the Siamese proves to us that never did a lawmaker teach bad morals,” noting that the rules that the Buddha made for his monks are just as severe as those of St. Benedict. Voltaire goes on to provide a somewhat idiosyncratic but not inaccurate list of these rules. It includes, “Avoid songs, dances, assemblies, everything that might soften the soul,” “Do not have gold or silver,” “Speak only of justice and work only for justice,” “Sleep little, eat little, keep only one robe,” Never mock,” and “Meditate in private, and reflect often on the fragility of human affairs.” This leads him to lament that in all religions “such a holy and necessary morality” has been sullied by all manner of ridiculous and risible stories. “Why is there not a single religion whose precepts do not come from a sage and whose dogmas are not of a madman?” He lays the blame for this at the feet of the disciples, who fear that their founder will not be respected if he is not somehow divine. The consequences of this deception, however, are dire. Reasonable people are attracted to the precepts of the founder but are repelled by the doctrines invented by the disciples. As a result, they inevitably come to reject the original precepts. “So they shake the yoke, since it had been put on badly; they no longer believe in God, because they see well that Sammonocodom is not god.” In the latter half of the entry on the Buddha, Voltaire demonstrates that he has read the reports of the French Jesuits closely. He enters into a discussion of a relatively arcane story in the life of the Buddha, reported by several members of the French delegation to Thailand, including the Jesuit Guy Tachard (1651-1712). In traditional accounts of the life of the Buddha, he has an evil cousin named Devadatta. When the Buddha grows old, Devadatta, himself a monk, urges the Buddha to retire and turn leadership of the order of monks over to him. When the Buddha refuses, Devadatta tries to assassinate him on three different occasions. The weight of these sins is so great that he is swallowed by the earth, descending to the most horrific of the several Buddhist hells, where he is impaled on three iron spikes, one from his head to his feet, one through his chest, and one through his shoulders. When Buddhist monks at the Siamese court saw the crucifixes around the necks of the French Jesuits, they assumed that it was Devadatta, that the foreign priests worshipped the Buddha’s nemesis. Several members of the French delegation reported that this dashed any hopes of conversion. When they tried to explain that this was not Devadatta but God, the Buddhist monks doubted that someone as powerful as God could succumb to such a punishment. Voltaire reports all of this, describing Devadatta (whom he calls Thevatat) as “a badly behaved rascal,” although he mistakes the sequence of events, imagining the Devadatta was crucified on earth and then went to hell. What is noteworthy, however, is that rather than seeing the great irony in the Jesuits’ despair, as this famous apparent atheist might be expected to do, he comes to their defense, noting that Jesus, the true God, had given Pontius Pilate the power to crucify him. Thus, if God can be crucified, his brother certainly can; Voltaire notes that St. Jacques, the brother of Jesus, was stoned. In the case of Devadatta, he could have been hanged rather than crucified, and his punishment may have been unjust. If he was executed for a crime he did not commit, he might have gone to heaven rather than hell. Voltaire concludes, “All of this is extremely delicate.” Voltaire’s assent here to the theology of the crucifixion would seem at odds with his often rude remarks about Christianity. However, what is perhaps of greater interest is Voltaire’s prescience in his comments about the Buddha. It would not be until well into the nineteenth century that European scholars, all sons of the Enlightenment, sought to turn the founders of religions from gods into men, to separate their precepts from church doctrine. For Jesus and the Buddha, this transformation entailed not debasement but exaltation. One thinks immediately of David Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu (1835), Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien (1844), and Hermann Oldenberg’s Buddha: Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (1881). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the European portrayal of Buddhism underwent a profound metamorphosis: from a form of idolatry practiced by pagans, to a religion, and a world religion, finally to something beyond the category of religion. Today, scholars of Buddhism are often asked: Is Buddhism a religion, a philosophy, or a way of life? Such a question is impossible without the work of disciples of a different Enlightenment, who believed that the founder could somehow be separated from the faith. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 8, 2017

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:59.984780

the-long-forgotten-walk-of-david-ingram

The Long, Forgotten Walk of David Ingram By John Toohey June 28, 2017 If three shipwrecked English sailors really did travel by foot from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1569 then it would certainly count as one of the most remarkable walks undertaken in recorded history. Although the account's more fantastical elements, such as the sighting of elephants, have spurred many to consign it to the fiction department, John Toohey argues for a second look. In the autumn of 1569 the Gargaryne, a French trader, was moored off Cape Breton in present day Nova Scotia when its captain M. Champaign was alerted to a commotion outside.1 Three English men sitting in a native canoe were asking to be let on board. Their names were David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, and they told him a story that began in Mexico the year before. In September 1568, they’d been involved in the battle of San Juan de Ulúa (present day Veracruz, Mexico), between a fleet of English privateers, led by John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and Spanish forces under Francisco Luján. After Hawkins’ ship, the Minion, was damaged, he sailed across the Gulf of Mexico where he put the crew on shore. European settlements along the Atlantic coast were sparse and some of the men decided to walk back to San Juan while others including Ingram, Brown, and Twyde intended to follow the coast north in search of English communities. After some died and others returned south, the three remaining sailors, after more than a year wandering up the eastern coast of North America, reached the fishing village at Cape Breton, Canada, unintentionally becoming, if the story is to be believed, the first Europeans to cross North America. There are two ways to approach the story of Ingram and his shipmates’ journey. If you believe the account that Sir George Peckham recorded years later then it marks the end of a strange and little known story in North American history. If you have doubts, it becomes the beginning of another that is even stranger in the ways it invokes the visions of empire in Elizabethan England and how they played out in North America. Ingram existed. We can say that because several people independently stated they met him and they had no reason to make that up, but we know nothing else about the man save he was born in Barking, Essex. If he was typical of Elizabethan sailors however we can make some assumptions. He was probably illiterate.2 This meant that when he later gave his story to Peckham he didn’t write it down but answered Peckham’s questions, all of which had a specific purpose Ingram may not have been wise to. He was religious; most likely protestant, and this meant that his contacts with indigenous people were filtered through a mindset that most probably didn’t allow for their belief systems while his own was wracked with peculiar superstitions. Compared to many Elizabethans he was also widely travelled. He would have likely seen the Atlantic coasts of Europe and the Mediterranean, and the African and American coasts. But if his ship anchored in the harbour at Constantinople this didn’t mean he disembarked and went into the city. International negotiations were delicate and it was often safer to keep the crew on board. He only experienced some places from a distance, and he had very little to compare what he saw in North America to what he’d seen elsewhere, which helps explain some of his more fantastic claims. Drake and Hawkins’ fleet of five ships was moored in the harbor of San Juan de Ulúa when Luján attacked, by surprise according to some reports, though given Drake and Hawkins were privateers they could hardly have complained that was unfair.3 The Minion badly damaged, Hawkins retreated across the Gulf of Mexico before running aground at a point on the west coast of present day Florida and ordering the crew off. This was where Ingram’s account began, or more accurately, the account that he gave nearly twenty years later to Peckham and Queen Elizabeth’s secretary Francis Walsingham. Both men were heavily invested in the case for England colonizing North America. As such they were only interested in the physical descriptions, the topography, the people, and the flora and fauna that Ingram encountered. The emotional experiences of three sailors entering an unknown world were irrelevant. The sections quoted below are from the best surviving version of Ingram’s account, the opening chapter to Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, published in 1856.4 Written in the third person, once Ingram and his two friends are introduced their presence is fairly low key. We pick it up a couple of paragraphs in, after Ingram, Brown, and Twyde have been introduced and the circumstances under which they found themselves in Florida explained. The first kings that they came before dwelte in a countrye called Gizicka who caused them to be stripped naked and woundering greatlie at the whiteness of their skin let them dparte (without) further harm. In 1539, Hernando de Soto had explored the Florida region and encountered people living on the Withlacoochee River he called Guazoco.5 If these were the same people Ingram met then contact with Europeans had taken place within living memory. They may not have been surprised at the whiteness of the Europeans’ skin, but also, that might not have been why they stripped them naked. Ingram was no cultural anthropologist; Walsingham and Peckham even less so. Nevertheless, the statement gives us a location and a germ of credibility to Ingram’s story.6 Ingram describes the societies he meets as kings, short for kingdoms, and in his travels through the south east especially, he repeatedly refers to the wealth of the people and the cities they inhabit. The Gizicka typically wear “Rubyes, beinge sixe inches longe and twoe ynches broade.” The rulers are carried about in a “Sumptuous Chayer (chair) of Sylver or Christall.” A constant problem with his account is that the credible and the fantastic often inhabit the same sentence. A crystal sedan chair sounds like something out of a fairytale but because copper, silver, and gold were worked in pre-Columbian America this statement needs only a slight shift in perspective to be plausible, although it isn’t clear what he meant by rubies, especially of that size. More important is his constant reference to cities, a term that in the sixteenth century equated with civilization and advanced technologies. Midway through the account, Ingram says he and his companions seldom stayed anywhere more than three nights. An exception was the city of Balma, “a ritche cyttie a mile and a half long” where they stopped about a week. Other cities he named were Ochala, Bega and Gunda; A small towne and a ryver boathe of that name, and this is the most northerlie pte that this Ex was att. They have in every house scoupes, buckettes and dyvers other vesselles of massive sylver. From the period of colonization beginning in the early seventeenth century until very recently, the argument that the indigenous inhabitants of North America lived in cities was considered suspect, at best. We now know from work being carried out at Cahokia and other sites that into the fourteenth century there were settlements the size of many in Europe.7 It seems pedantic then to question whether when Ingram spoke of cities he really meant towns or even villages. What he is actually describing as he travels northwards is a network of established communities with sophisticated social structures. Unfortunately, Ingram couldn’t provide locations. Was Gunda on the Mississippi or one of its tributaries, or, when he says it was the most northerly, does he mean present day Canada? The three sailors were in regular contact with the local people, though Ingram only describes their communications briefly. One of his more contentious descriptions reads: . . . they doe honor for there god a devell (which) they call Collochio, who speakethe unto them sometimes in the liknes of a blacke dogge, and sometimes in the liknes of a blacke calfe. And some doe honor the sonne, the mone and the stares . . . he and his twoe fellowes . . . wente into a poore man’s house and there they did see the saide Collochio, or devell (with) very great eyes like a blacke calfe. Upon the sighte therof, Browne said “There is the Devell!” and theruppon he blessed him selfe, In the name of the Fathe! and of the Sonne and of the Holy Ghoste and Twide saide verye vehementlie, ‘I defye thee and all thy works!’ and presently the Collochio shranke awaye in a stealinge manner, furth of all the doors, and was sene noe more unto them. In the 1830s George Catlin painted the Mandan, Pawnee, and other people living along the Missouri River in Missouri and (present day) North Dakota. In some of his paintings men are wearing buffalo heads. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination again to think that the three sailors witnessed a religious ceremony, or that they would think the performers were dressed as devils. The account frequently reads as though Ingram is answering questions rather than telling the story in his own term. There is no chronological narrative, rather descriptions of the people, the flora and fauna are set out in discrete sections. It is impossible in parts to tell whether he is talking about the south soon after they land, the mid-Atlantic, or the northern regions. When he says that, “there is a clowde somtyme of the yeare sene in the ayer (which) comonlye turnethe to great tempests”, he is talking about tornadoes, which he was more likely to have seen in what is present day Kentucky than Florida or Maine, though tornadoes can strike across the US and in any month. He also talks about a beast twice the size of a horse, with tusks, that was a “natural enimyes to the horse”. The interesting detail here is not the beast — Ingram describes several unlikely creatures — but that it apparently preys on horses. Standard histories of the horse in North America posit its return, after becoming extinct in the area between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, as beginning with Cortes in Mexico in 1519. There are alternative Indigenous histories that say it was a domesticated animal before the arrival of Europeans. Ingram appears to be saying he saw horses north of Florida, which could support the Indigenous histories or equally indicate how rapidly the horse population spread once it turned feral.8 When Ingram claims to have seen a bird, “thrice as big as eagle, very bewtyfull to behoulde . . . (with) a creste or tufte of feathers of sundrye colours on the toppe of the heade”, he could feasibly be describing a condor, a bird Lewis and Clark later observed on the Columbia River. One of his most infamous claims however beggars belief. “He did alsoe see in that countrye boath Eliphantes and ounces.” Ounces are lynxes, sometimes bobcats or pumas, but there is nothing ambiguous about his use of the word elephants. Because he may never have seen one in the flesh and knew only that they were big animals, it sounds possible that he assumed a distant bison was an elephant, except that elsewhere he clearly identifies bison. More likely he made it up, either to please Peckham, to affirm an idea Peckham had put in his head, or because in the years since the journey Ingram had forgotten details and tried to compensate. Whatever the case, the sentence sits there in the middle of the text as grist for anyone who wants to claim the whole journey was an invention. Ingram and his friends expected that they would inevitably reach European settlements along the coast. It is easy for us to forget that although England’s first formal attempts at colonization were still more than a decade away, its privateers had been making regular unofficial visits. For most of the century French and Spanish fleets had been frequently turning up on the coast, which had appeared on maps since the 1530s in recognizable form to us today. The three men probably imagined they would be out of contact with Europeans for a few weeks, not a year. However, eventually, After long travayle the foresaid David Ingram (with) his two companions Browne and Twyde came to the head of a ryvar called (left blank) . . . 60 leagues west from Cape Britton where they understode by the people of that countrye, of the aryvall of a Christian. This was M. Champaign and the crew of the of the Gargayne. Peckham and Walsingham interviewed Ingram in 1582, some thirteen years after he made his journey. Their account appeared in the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1589, but not the second, which came out in 1598. Hakluyt removed it because he thought it wasn’t credible, though he didn’t give his reasons as to why he now thought that. They probably had little to do with Ingram’s more fantastic descriptions of elephants and other strange creatures. Though the coast had been charted the inland remained mysterious and even if Hakluyt did think some of Ingram’s claims were fanciful he had no way of disproving them. A more likely explanation is that by the time of the second edition Hakluyt’s campaign for the colonization of North America had hardened. With the French colonizing the north and the Spanish the south, England’s plans took on a sense of urgency as it risked being squeezed out. Hakluyt was very much a pragmatic advocate for colonization; much more interested in arguing from facts than speculation. The first edition had also included sections from John Mandeville’s very fanciful Travels (1356) but if once he had been willing to accept any account, now he had no time to waste with claims that couldn’t be established. The word of an ordinary, uneducated sailor like Ingram was not to be trusted, not because he would make things up so much as he couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. For Hakluyt, trying to construct a rational case for imperial expansion, there were enough people with strange ideas surrounding Queen Elizabeth without adding an itinerant sailor. One in particular, John Dee, had some of the most eccentric ideas about colonization and he had been very keen to meet Ingram back in 1582. Dee is best known today as an Elizabethan astrologer, the man who invented a language for communicating with angels and who was convinced by his assistant as to the merits of wife-swapping. Wise man or fool, it is often hard to know which one you are dealing with in Dee’s writings and it is often overlooked that during the 1570s he was part of Elizabeth’s innermost circle, and constructing the intellectual framework for colonizing North America. Dee is also considered the first to use the term “British Empire”.9 If Hakluyt regarded the colonization of North America as fundamental to the expansion of power, Dee sought the moral and justification through Elizabeth’s genealogy. He had traced a line from Elizabeth through her father Henry VIII to King Arthur, a proposed lineage that gave her an unquestioned right to rule the New World. As Elizabethan expansion developed pace, two legends, supposedly ancient but suspiciously difficult to trace, took hold. One was that King Arthur had sailed across to America and conquered it. The other was that the Welsh Prince Madoc, sailed to America in the twelfth century and lived there some years. Depending upon the sources, Arthur had been a Welsh king. The case could be made therefore that, as a descendant of Arthur and through Madoc, Elizabeth had rights to North America.10 On November 1, 1582, Ingram travelled in the company of a Mr Clement to Mortlake to have an audience with Dee.11 Though Dee kept a diary and noted the visit he didn’t record the conversation. We can be sure, however, that one thing he was very interested in was whether Ingram had heard any Welsh in his conversations with the inhabitants. A few words would have been enough. Hakluyt’s decision to remove Ingram’s story from the second edition would ultimately lead to it being largely deleted from the historical record. When it was occasionally recovered, his statements such as seeing elephants ensured it was as often as not dismissed. There are, however, enough plausible statements scattered among the inventions in Ingram’s narrative to make the case that the three men did actually cross North America in 1569. What matters today is not whether they were the first Europeans to do this but what value can be found in Ingram’s account. The immediate impact has gone unrecorded but if we accept that the journey took place, Ingram left one of the earliest accounts of indigenous societies along the north Atlantic corridor. Most notable are his repeated assertions of large, settled communities, similar perhaps to Hochelaga that Jacques Cartier described at present day Montreal in 1535. If these communities did exist in the 1560s but not in the seventeenth century when French and English explorers began charting the interior, it is likely to be further evidence (if needed) of the devastation European diseases wreaked. This would not be the first case in which towns were described that would in a short time disappear. In the 1540s the Spanish conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, described extensive communities along the Amazon.12 By the time Pedro Texeira travelled up the Amazon in the 1630s, the part that Orellana had described as heavily populated was largely deserted. The assumption was that Orellana had invented details to encourage settlement (not uncommon). Recent aerial and archaeological surveys, however, have revealed a long hidden network of roads and field systems where Orellana said he saw so many people.13 Ingram could have seen something very similar along the tributaries of the Mississippi. Ingram did leave one lasting legacy: There is alsoe another kynde of fowle in that Countrye (which) hantethe the (rivers) near unto the islandes, they are of the shape and (deleted) of a goose, but their wynges (have) callowe feathers and cannot flye . . . They have white heads, and therefore the Countrye men call them penguins. Etymologies of the word “penguin” indicate it was first used to describe the auks of the northern hemisphere and not the penguins of the south. Anxious to please, perhaps, Ingram was the first on record to claim its origin was a word used by Indigenous North Americans that sounded similar to the Welsh for “white head” (pen gwyn). The now extinct great auk could be immediately identified by the white spot on its head.14 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 28, 2017

John Toohe

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:00.527201

inventing-the-recording

Inventing the Recording By Eva Moreda Rodríguez July 12, 2017 Eva Moreda Rodríguez on the formative years of the recording industry, focusing on the culture surrounding the gabinetes fonográficos of fin-de-siècle Spain. To the question “When were recordings invented?”, we might be tempted to answer “1877” — the year when Thomas A. Edison was first able to record and playback sound with a phonograph. But what if we think of recordings not as mere carriers of sound, but as commodities that can be bought and sold, as artefacts capable of capturing and embodying values and emotions; of defining a generation, a country or a social class? The story then becomes one that unfolds over three decades and is full of many layers and ramifications. Without Edison’s technological innovations, recordings would have certainly never existed — but hammering out the concept of recording were also a myriad of other inventors, musicians, producers, and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Most of them were enthusiastic about being part of a global revolution, but they worked in close connection with their milieu too, shaping recording technologies and their uses to relate to the needs, dreams, and desires of the audiences they knew. The tenor Florencio Constantino was one of these now-forgotten pioneering individuals. Born in 1868 in Ortuella, a mining village miles from the Bilbao estuary in the Basque Country, Constantino was one of the first musicians in history to develop a recording career worth the name. In fact, his life and career interlock with the early history of recorded music in fascinating ways. He was part of a generation of Spaniards who discovered recorded sound in their teenage and early adult years, found himself in high demand as a recording artist in local studios in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century, and went on to record internationally as multinationals decimated Spain’s indigenous industry. Edison initially believed that the phonograph would be most in demand in offices and companies: recorded sound, he thought, would make business communication easier by doing away with the ambiguities of written language. However, the Improved Phonograph and Perfected Phonograph, both of which he launched in 1888, took recording technologies in a different direction. Audiences turned out not to be interested in the phonograph because of its practical uses, but because it entertained them: the first phonograph parlor opened in San Francisco in 1889, and was soon followed by thousands others all over the United States. In Constantino’s native Spain — more rural, less industrialised — phonographs were instead paraded around cities and towns and temporarily installed in civic centres, schools, hotels, and churches. For a modest fee, locals from all social classes were able to acquaint themselves with the latest discoveries of science. Some of the names and endeavours of these Spanish phonography pioneers have found their way to us today through advertisements and reports in local newspapers. Many of them were agents of Edison’s or funfair impresarios, and we know of a cornet player and entertainer by the name of Lorenzo Colís who in the summer of 1894 toured a phonograph around the Basque Country and La Rioja, and visited the Ortuella area. It was not the thrill of listening to internationally famous performers and speakers that drew audiences to these phonographic sessions. Accounts suggest that phonograph operators were most successful when they recorded local musicians and speakers in front of the audience and then immediately played back the impressed cylinder. It was this, the act of recognising familiar voices, that ultimately astonished audiences and persuaded them that the phonograph could reproduce reality as it was. A writer for the Madrid newspaper La correspondencia de España wrote after attending a phonographic session in November 1892 that: “We were truly surprised to hear several pieces that the phonograph reproduced with incredible accuracy and purity. . . . Not even a single note or chord is lost. Even the most delicate fioriture are repeated.” And yet, if we were to listen to some of the surviving examples from this era, we would probably find it hard to believe that anyone could have mistaken what is in them with live sound, even accounting for deterioration of the cylinder. While it is true that some such claims simply echoed Edison’s publicity (or transcribed it to the letter), one can imagine that an unfamiliar audience, shocked by the experience of hearing recorded sound for the first time, would be willing to forgive shrillness, blurriness, and lack of definition, and accept what they heard as an accurate representation of reality. Moreover, most audiences would not be particularly interested in hearing a particular recording again and again after they had established that it was, indeed, true to reality. In any case, most would not have been able to do so unless a phonograph was in residence in their town: phonographs were expensive and difficult to manipulate at the time, hardly appropriate as a home appliance. Although some recordings from that era have survived to the present day, most were intended to be as ephemeral as the sound they recorded: played back in phonographic sessions but seldom treasured in households or collections. The phonograph became a domestic appliance with the successive launches of the Spring Motor Phonograph, the Edison Home Phonograph, and the Edison Standard Phonograph between 1896 and 1898. With this came the need for a constant supply of professionally produced, well-crafted recordings that could lure upper- and middle-class phonograph owners back to the shops again and again. The recording as a commodity was born — but it still had to be embedded with values and meanings potential buyers could relate to; values and meanings that resonated with ideas they might have had about themselves, but also connected them to the powerful narrative of the global revolution brought over by recording technologies. In Constantino’s native Spain, the task was undertaken by some forty gabinetes fonográficos (phonography studios) scattered across the country — a Spanish phenomenon in some respects, relatively independent of Edison’s commercial enterprises in more industrially developed countries. The gabinetes sold phonographs imported from the United States, but the wax cylinders were recorded and produced by the gabinetes themselves. The gabinetes not only produced the first recordings to be made in Spain, they also produced the first Spanish recordings — that is, recordings shaped by the culture they were part of. This is immediately obvious in the choice of repertoire. Theatrical culture thrived in turn-of-the-century Spanish cities: the upper and established middle classes flocked to opera houses; the working and lower middle classes, to zarzuela theatres and café cantantes where flamenco was performed — although the latter two still managed to attract a few members of the wealthier social classes who longed for authenticity. Soon, opera, zarzuela, and flamenco were filling the gabinetes’ catalogues. Not all cylinders were equal though: recording opera for Hugens y Acosta, Constantino was one of the few singers able to command 30 pesetas per aria in 1899, shortly after returning to Spain from Latin America to debut at the Teatro Real. A well-established zarzuela soprano would normally command between 10 and 15 pesetas, while flamenco recordings could be bought for as little as 3 pesetas. A glimpse at Madrid’s urban geography also suggests that the nascent recording industry and theatrical culture interlocked in more profound ways. Several gabinetes opened in the surroundings of opera and zarzuela theatres. One of them, Viuda de Aramburo, was a mere few yards from the Teatro de la Comedia; it originally sold scientific and technical equipment and started marketing its own wax cylinders in 1898. We know from El cardo, a phonography magazine published in Madrid between 1899 and 1900, that Viuda de Aramburo employed a rather astute apprentice, and so it is not out of the realm of possibility that the young man, having observed theatre-goers walk past his shop, figured out that they might welcome the opportunity to buy recordings of their favorite zarzuela arias as a sonic memento of what, by all accounts, was a lively and highly entertaining experience encompassing music, acting, and dancing. Álvaro Ureña — a soldier who left the army to dedicate himself to science and technology — might have followed a similar reasoning when he opened his luxurious gabinete fonográfico in 1897 in the prestigious Barquillo street in the centre of Madrid, not far away from the Teatro de la Alhambra. Ureña’s and other gabinetes were luxurious indeed; their recordings were only affordable to the upper and middle classes. Gabinete owners, however, made sure to emphasise, sometimes in the same breath, that they were as committed to disseminating the latest discoveries of science and technology as they were to providing a sumptuous experience to their customers. Of Ureña’s gabinete, the newspaper La correspondencia militar wrote that: “There cannot be more luxury, art and wealth in this establishment. Large rooms, and elegant electric lamps hanging from the ceiling; the golden and bronze-coloured filigree interlocks artistically and contrasts with the power of the very modern voltaic arcs; phonographs of all sorts are laid out very tastefully around the place.” In turn-of-the-century Spain, buying a wax cylinder meant identifying as a member of an emerging middle class who was no longer interested in indulging in luxury for luxury’s sake, but was committed to the country’s economic and social advancement through the dissemination of science and technology. Many owners of gabinetes were themselves part of this emerging middle class, such as electrician Julián Solá in Madrid, and opticians José Corrons in Barcelona, Obdulio Bravo-Villasante in Madrid, and Pablo Lacaze in Zaragoza. In the era of the gabinetes, though, wax cylinders still differed from modern recordings in one crucial aspect: they could not be duplicated in a reliable and effective way. Most surviving recordings from that time are one-offs. If a gabinete was faced with an unprecedented demand for, say, recordings of “La donna è mobile” by Constantino, the only way to satisfy customers would be to hire Constantino to record several takes of the aria, all different from each other. It was unrealistic for the Spanish industry to rely on a few outstanding or well-known performers to meet the demand, and so, alongside with Constantino, a multiplicity of lesser known, jobbing singers ventured into the recording industry with a modicum of success. Some singers of the era, in fact, are only known to us in connection with the recording industry. Their names are Amparo Cardenal, Luisa Alarcón, and Francisco Cervera; there is no evidence that they ever graced a professional stage, and they might have even been talented amateurs who found an opportunity of making money out of their singing thanks to the gabinetes. The gabinetes, on the other hand, turned technological limitation into a virtue and some of their owners routinely proclaimed that they were artisans rather than mass producers, carefully crafting each cylinder and making Spanish recordings superior to those coming from any other country in the world. The gabinetes’ enthusiasm and commitment, though, did not help them survive when the gramophone, which recorded on reproducible discs, took hold in Spain after Compagnie Française du Gramophone opened a Spanish branch in 1903. They resisted for a couple of years, but by 1905 many had closed down and the rest were operating as subsidiaries of the Compagnie or other multinationals such as Pathé and Odéon. Constantino, who had by then embarked on an international career in Eastern Europe and America, recorded zarzuela arias for the Barcelona branch of Pathé in 1903, followed by G&T in Berlin, Edison Records in Italy, Pathé and Odéon in Paris, and Victor and Columbia in the United States. Many of his colleagues who had thrived during the era of the gabinetes found themselves unable to compete against better or more established singers and went back to the stage. Constantino died in poverty in Mexico City in 1919 after a series of artistic fiascos. Seven years later, the invention of electrical recording revolutionised the industry again; one of the many technological advances in the capturing of sound that would occur throughout the twentieth century and on into the present. Despite these changes, the recording itself has — with its ability to travel the world, shape culture, and connect the listener to a community of performers and other listeners — still kept to this day most of the defining traits it acquired thanks to Constantino and his contemporaries. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 12, 2017

Eva Moreda Rodríguez

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:01.082239

a-queer-taste-for-macaroni

A Queer Taste for Macaroni By Dominic Janes February 22, 2017 With his enormous hair, painted face, and dainty attire, the so-called "macaroni" was a common sight upon the streets and ridiculing prints of 1770s London. Dominic Janes explores how with this new figure — and the scandalous sodomy trials with which the stereotype became entwined — a widespread discussion of same-sex desire first entered the public realm, long before the days of Oscar Wilde. It has sometimes been thought that the figure of the homosexual man only emerged to widespread visibility at the end of the nineteenth century with the sensational revelations that attended the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. It is true that the term “homosexual” was not invented until the mid-nineteenth century, and indeed was not widely used in Britain until around the time of World War II. But, of course, that does not mean that in previous centuries same-sex desire was unknown and its practitioners unremarked. That this was particularly the case for the eighteenth century is something that can be seen from the art and visual culture of the time. Georgian Britain’s vibrant tradition of satire — played out in the prints and pamphlets of the day, and some of it downright crude — enjoyed an important role in political life. Compared with many other European countries, there was a surprising degree of latitude in Britain to be rude in public about prominent figures. All this was celebrated as representing the liberties of the free-born Briton. Mockery mostly relied upon popular perceptions of deviance not only from political but also from cultural norms of behaviour, and men who allegedly aped the tastes and mannerisms of women came in for particular abuse. It has long been argued that such figures — known as fops, beaux, and dandies, among other terms — were mocked because of a hostility to effeminacy. While this no doubt has some truth to it, one particular term newly coined in the 1760s, “macaroni”, also became associated with sodomy. The dandified man of fashion was no stranger to rumours of vice. As “Ferdinand Twigem” wrote in The Macaroni: A Satire (1773), “what pigmy monsters teem / what crowds of beaus effeminate are seen”, who first blush at their acts of dissipation but afterward give way to all indulgence. Earlier in the century it had been the aggressively masculine “rake” who was associated with vices such as excessive drinking, gambling, and whoring. Effeminate “fops” in the Restoration and earlier Georgian periods were vapid, enervated men who were likened to weak and feeble women. Both the rake and the fop were characterised by their repeated attempts to gain the confidences of respectable women but were mocked for being, respectively, over- and under-achieving in their endeavours. Susan Staves is one scholar who has been notably keen to assert that the allegedly effeminate fop was not some sort of proto-homosexual but rather a kind of “new man”: “the so-called effeminacy of these old fops was an early if imperfect attempt at the refinement, civility, and sensitivity most of us would now say are desirable masculine virtues”.1 A queer quality had, however, crept into some uses of the word “fop” by the mid-eighteenth century, particularly when employed in association with the term “macaroni”. Yale University houses an excellent collection of the furniture, objets d’art, books, and prints once owned by the prominent connoisseur, writer, and politician Horace Walpole, the son of the man generally referred to as Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole. Horace, who was not a married man, presented himself as something of an old-school fop and it was he who first recorded the existence of a “Maccaroni club” in 1764 which consisted of “all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses”.2 This trait of being “travelled”, or of at least adopting certain Continental affectations, was particularly salient for the identity of the macaroni, and indeed lies behind the slightly peculiar label itself. Whilst British patriots rejoiced in roast beef, some of those recently returned from the Grand Tour flaunted their newly acquired tastes for Italian cuisine — with a supposed penchant for macaroni pasta in particular.3 As with food, so it was with the wardrobe — a certain flair for Continental fashion being an essential aspect of macaroni life, and one mocked in hundreds of satirical prints. One such print, A Macaroni Dressing Room, published in 1772, shows a group of affected, fashion-obsessed men. At the centre of the print an individual wearing facial beauty patches has his wig attended to by a flamboyant hairdresser and his black assistant. Another man practices fencing and a third plays with a pet cockatoo. The implication was not merely that they had fallen prey to the supposed vanity that was held to characterise women of fashion, but also that they were in thrall to French-derived notions of the elite lifestyle. Dandyism, therefore, was equated with a treasonous flirtation with the nation’s luxury-obsessed enemy across the Channel. Furthermore, so scholar Peter McNeil argues, this flair for outlandish styles can be coded in terms not simply of effeminacy but also of sexual preference: “by the 1760s when the macaroni emerged, such attention to fashion was read as evidence of a lack of interest in women, or as potentially unattractive to women”.4 The macaronis in their dressing room were, from this point of view, dressing up for the benefit of each other, and so snubbing the ladies. Indeed, permeating all these late eighteenth-century notions of the macaroni is the idea that strange cuisine and dress were not the only unconventional customs these travelled young men brought back from abroad. Italy, in particular, was associated by the Protestant British with perversity because of the influence of an unmarried Roman Catholic priesthood which, it was thought, expended its sexual energies on cuckoldry and sodomy. The further implication was that British aristocrats might also bring a taste for such vices back with them from their travels. The early 1770s saw a series of scandals in fashionable circles of London society that further wedded the term of macaroni to a queer inclination and truly placed the figure of the homosexual man into the public realm. Perhaps the most prominent of these events concerned a certain Captain Robert Jones who, in July 1772, was convicted at the Old Bailey for sodomizing a thirteen-year-old boy and was sentenced to hang. In October, however, he obtained a royal pardon on the condition that he left the country after new evidence suggested that the boy’s testimony may have been unreliable. The pardon was greeted with accusations of an establishment cover-up since Jones was well known in the fashionable world (being noted for having popularised skating and fireworks). The tone of the abuse that was directed towards Jones is clear from sources such as a letter that was published in the Public Ledger on August 5. The letter alleged that “this MILITARY MACCARONI” was “too much engaged in every scene of idle Dissipation and wanton Extravagance.” Sodomy, it was insinuated, was not just the secret vice of an individual but a defining characteristic of a recent type of dandy. Such men were warned: “therefore, ye Beaux, ye sweet-scented, simpering He-She things, deign to learn wisdom from the death of a Brother”.5 These events were recalled in an undated diary entry made in late March or early April 1778 by a certain Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821): In the Year 1772 one Captain Jones was convicted of Crimes against Nature, and sentenced to die: He was a Gentleman famous for his Invention in the Art of making Fireworks, and adapting Subjects fit to be represented in that Genre; & had already entertained the Town with two particular Devices which were exhibited at Marylebone Gardens & greatly admired: viz: the Forge of Vulcan in the Cave of Mount Etna, & the calling Eurydice out of Hell — If he is pardoned says Stevens, He may shew off the Destruction of Sodom and Gommorrah; it will have an admirable Effect.6 Piozzi was a friend of the encyclopaedist Samuel Johnson and a member of his literary circle. After her first husband, the brewing magnate Henry Thrale, died in 1781, she was left independently wealthy and three years later wed the Italian musician and composer Gabriel Piozzi. She was prolific in her letter writing, and in 1776 began to keep a diary in which she commented on, amongst other things, people she knew or thought might be sodomites or “Sapphists” (i.e., lesbians). She wrote, for instance, the following on March 29, 1794, after talking with a friend about men such as Horace Mann, who had been a close friend of the aforementioned Horace Walpole: Mrs Greatheed & I call those Fellows Finger-twirlers; — meaning a decent word for Sodomites: old Sir Horace Mann & Mr James the Painter had such an odd way of twirling their Fingers in Discourse; — & I see Suetonius tells the same thing of one of the Roman Emperors “nec sine molli quadam digitorum gesticulatione [with eloquent movements of his fingers].”7 The public furore around the disgrace of Captain Jones appears to have seen the linkage of two previous stereotypes: the libidinous rake who would prey on both the wealthy and vulnerable of both sexes, and the effeminate fop whose nature was akin to that of a woman. These two stereotypes have informed popular perceptions of male same-sex desire through to the present day. In the nineteenth century a new medicalised conception of the homosexual person as a psychological deviant established a quasi-scientific basis for thinking about such individuals, but this did not replace older notions which were based on combined transgressions of gender and sexuality. These ideas underpinned public understanding of the most sensational sodomy trials of the Victorian period — those of Oscar Wilde in 1895. He too was seen both as perversely effeminate in his fashionable posing and, at the same time, as aggressively predatory towards male youths. But as shown by the case of Captain Jones, and the figure of the macaroni with which he was aligned, there was a complex history of queer dandyism long before Oscar and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas became the most notorious sodomites in Victorian Britain. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 22, 2017

Dominic Janes

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:01.621777

astral-travels-with-jack-london

Astral Travels with Jack London By Benjamin Breen November 22, 2016 On the centenary of Jack London's death, Benjamin Breen looks at the writer's last book to be published in his lifetime, The Star Rover — a strange tale about solitary confinement and interstellar reincarnation, which speaks to us of the dreams and struggles of the man himself. Twenty times a day, a catamaran sets out from the Northern California town of Larkspur. The vessel traces a graceful arc southward toward the San Francisco Ferry building, passing outcroppings of red boulders, low hills of golden grass, and the occasional houseboat. Before long the skyline of San Francisco appears, pearly white and silver towers surmounting the permanent bank of fog that shrouds the Golden Gate. The tourists who throng at starboard to take in the view rarely notice that another landmark looms directly behind them. San Quentin. The prison’s environs are disarmingly beautiful. The building itself, of course, is as stern as one would expect a maximum-security penitentiary to be — all stained concrete walls and grim, cathedral-like buttresses. But the landscape is enchanting. At night, with crickets humming in the hills and mist-shrouded stars glowing above San Francisco, the juxtaposition feels dreamlike, hallucinatory. It is here, in this prison amid paradise, that the action of Jack London’s The Star Rover plays out. London’s sole foray into the realm of science fiction and fantasy is simultaneously a hard-bitten, minimalist monologue about life in solitary confinement and an exuberant tour of the universe. The book’s narrator, Darrell Standing, moves disarmingly from the agony of his confinement in a straitjacket to his travel amidst the stars equipped with a glass wand that allows him to access an infinity of past lives, including a fourth-century hermit, a shipwrecked seal hunter, a medieval swordsman, and a confidant of Pontius Pilate. It is a novel about sensory deprivation in a shared reality, and sensory overload in a private one. This is a deeply eclectic book. It borrows liberally from the forebears of the fantasy genre: fairy stories, Norse legend, Greek myths. But it also manages to include feuding UC Berkeley scientists, “dope fiends”, Neolithic hunter-gatherers, kimchi, and a journalistic exposé of the modern prison system. The bizarre multiplicity is precisely the point. London’s narrative does many things, but it always seems to circle back to the question of how the worlds encompassed within a single consciousness can interfere with the shared reality of modern society. As we hurtle towards a near future of immersive virtual reality and unceasing digital connectedness, The Star Rover has much to tell us. The novel’s evocation of confinement sprang from a painful first-hand experience. London grew up impoverished and fatherless, and he lived rough as a teenager. During the winter of 1894 he served thirty days in the Erie County Penitentiary in Buffalo, jailed for the crime of vagrancy at the age of eighteen. The grimness of this wintry prison stint stuck with London. “Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen”, he wrote in his memoir The Road (1907): I say “unprintable”; and in justice I must also say indescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them. London’s experiences of prison and riding the rails in the fallout of the Panic of 1893 radicalized him. He joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1896 and began giving fiery speeches in Oakland parks. By the time he began The Star Rover — which originally entered the world as a magazine serial in February 1914 — London drifted away from Socialist politics. Yet the narrative retains a vein of gritty realism that recalls the work of his friend Upton Sinclair. The central character Darrell Standing’s confinement in “the jacket” was inspired by London’s interviews with Ed Morrell, a former Old West outlaw who had suffered a brutal period of confinement in San Quentin. Amidst his star roving, Darrell Standing also finds time to reflect on the evils of the Philippine-American War: “It was laughable to behold Science prostituting all the might of its achievement and the wit of its inventors to the violent introducing of foreign substances into the bodies of black folk.” London was wrapping up the writing of The Star Rover when the First World War began. Although he couldn’t have anticipated the looming cataclysm of August 1914, London’s personal life had been in a shambles since the previous summer. That August, his beloved country estate, Wolf House, had burnt to the ground under mysterious circumstances. In the same year, he penned Jack Barleycorn, an autobiographical novel about what London, a severe alcoholic, called “the clear white light of alcohol”. Olivia Laing, in her fabulous book The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, observes that alcoholic novelists often circle around their disease in their fiction, never quite acknowledging the extent of their own denial. London’s self-described “alcoholic memoir” manages, somehow, to dance around its central subject, never fully acknowledging the substance abuse that would kill him at age forty. “Read John Barleycorn and you will soon enough discover what ails him”, wrote one of London’s acquaintances. “The tragedy is that he does not even seem to know how far gone he is.” Yet London, at some level, did know it. His writings in this period reveal a keenly intelligent man attempting to work through the metaphysics of his own addictions. We see this in John Barleycorn’s personification of alcohol intoxication as a dialogue with a nebulous force that London calls “the White Logic”. We see it in the same book’s references to “Hasheesh Land . . . the land of enormous extensions of time and space”, and in the odd detail of Darrell Standing using needles to escape his prison cell in The Star Rover (London had become an IV morphine user by this time). And we see it in the central motive force of The Star Rover, which is propelled not by drugs or drink but another form of altered consciousness — the hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation. The book, in short, centers on that famous concept of another drug-taking adventurer-writer, Arthur Rimbaud: “the systematic derangement of all the senses”. It is tempting to speculate about the degree to which London also found inspiration in the various occult currents running through the bohemian circles of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1910s. It was a time and place in which members of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis might meet the first wave of American Buddhists, or a young Gertrude Stein cross paths with John Muir. The Star Rover certainly channels the cosmopolitanism of the Bay Area in this pre-War era. Standing’s astral projection borrows from the aesthetics of post-Victorian occultists, just as his astral travels reflect London’s fascination with the lands across the Pacific. In one passage, Standing tries to use his bizarrely detailed knowledge of kimchi (“the best kimchi is made by the women of Wosan”) to convince his fellow inmates that he has tapped into a previous life as a shipwrecked sailor in Korea “who through, various births and deaths, bequeathed his experiences to me, Darrell Standing.” There is something here of the eighteen-year-old Jack London’s desire to be what he called “a brain merchant”. Reading as much as nineteen hours a day (by his own perhaps unreliable count), London studied for his entrance exams at UC Berkeley with an urgency that almost suggested an erasure of the self, a desire to mentally inhabit other lives through books. Standing goes a step further: with his astral projection, he becomes these other lives, and the reader can follow him. This desire to gain access to worlds beyond the self carried over from London’s obsessive self-education to his uncontrollable drinking. As London put it in 1913, there are two type of alcoholics: the first are those who drink to numb consciousness, abandoning reality in favor of “pink elephants” (the first use of the term in print, it would appear). The second seek a drunken brain and not a drunken body — an escape into creativity rather than oblivion. London reckoned himself among the latter camp, and we might read The Star Rover as an extended exploration of London’s own attempts to harness sensory derangement to creative ends. Darrell Standing also likens his hallucinatory visions of astral projection to what “men enjoy in drug dreams, and deliriums”. This, too, was a form of escape that London knew well. His most recent biographer, Alex Kershaw, describes London’s drug chest — filled with “strychnine, strontium sulphate, aconite, belladonna, morphine” and opium — as “the most important object in his life”. Yet despite its themes of captivity, addiction, and murder, The Star Rover is also a celebration of the power of storytelling to overcome personal misery. Standing’s fantasies are an escape from reality, but, London seems to argue, a healthy escape. “Incessantly to remember”, narrates Standing, “means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the problem of forgetting”. To record everything, to forget nothing — Standing’s malady is familiar to us because it is ours as well. Perhaps the joyous and unrestrained creativity of The Star Rover suggests a solution. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 22, 2016

enjamin Breen

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:02.476198

stuffed-ox-dummy-tree-artificial-rock-deception-in-the-work-of-richard-and-cherry-kearton

Stuffed Ox, Dummy Tree, Artificial Rock Deception in the Work of Richard and Cherry Kearton By John Bevis May 17, 2017 John Bevis explores the various feats of cunning and subterfuge undertaken by the Kearton brothers — among the very first professional wildlife photographers — in their pioneering attempts to get ever closer to their subjects. Although to use deception in any action is detestable, nevertheless in waging war it is praiseworthy and brings fame: he who conquers the enemy by deception is praised as much as he who conquers them by force.—  Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy To excel in deception is not a very laudable accomplishment, but the heinousness of the crime may, perhaps, be softened in the eyes of the moralist by a knowledge of the fact that in this case the duplicity employed has been as entirely harmless to the deceived as it has been profitable to the deceiver.— Richard Kearton, Wild Nature’s Ways It might stretch credulity for Richard Kearton, a benign man in a benign profession, to be labelled “the Machiavelli of bird photography”. But the fact is that he and his brother, Cherry, adapted a number of the tactics of dell’arte della guerra in their search for ways of going undercover into “Birdland” to secure untainted images of wildlife at home. Between the years 1897 and 1903, their experiments included variations on such quasi-military techniques as the smoke screen, in which surprise through deception is achieved by camouflage; the feigned retreat, when a false sense of security leads the foe into ambush; the Trojan horse, famously gaining admittance to a restricted area under false pretences; and further ploys under the catch-all heading of misinformation. Richard and Cherry Kearton were foremost among the small coterie of British nature photographers working before the end of the nineteenth century. They took the first ever photograph of a bird’s nest with eggs, in April 1892, and three years later (with British Birds’ Nests: How, Where and When to Find and Identify Them) published the first nature book illustrated throughout with photographs. But their next project — photographing the birds themselves — would be fraught with difficulties. Richard Kearton noted that birds were so disturbed by human presence, the “great eye” of the camera lens, and the click of the shutter, that it was nearly impossible to obtain natural studies. Sound trauma was addressed with the aural smokescreen of the almost-silent window-blind shutter, while it was found that a false situational familiarity with any residual noise could be created by releasing the shutter repeatedly until the bird ignored it. The harder task of concealing the human form came with the commission of matching suits and caps of reversible material, brown one side and meadow green the other. This deployment of camouflage clothing was ahead of the curve: khaki uniform, recently introduced for troops stationed in British India, would not become standard issue on the home front until 1902. To hide their faces, the Keartons employed the first of many items from their wonderful props cupboard: visors chiselled out from ash-tree stubs, inscrutable as Noh masks. The first device for concealing both camera and photographer was the “Artificial rubbish heap” (1897-1903). This was constructed from an old umbrella whose ribs were extended with bamboo and covered with linen; photographer and gear went underneath, while on top were piled whatever straw, leaves, sticks, or dirt were to hand. It could be positioned on the ground, on a rick, or better still on a wheeled farm cart, which could be set up some distance from the nest or perch and moved gradually closer before being put to use. The heap’s versatility made it one of the Keartons’ most successful interventions, with good photos obtained of wheatear and sandpiper in the Dales, and wren on the Surrey downs. A number of experiments were made in 1902 with site-specific fixed hides, built in situ and utilising — like miniature Arts and Crafts houses — locally-sourced materials. They were deployed particularly on open and featureless terrain where there was little natural cover, and relied for their effect on camouflage by homogeneity. They had the appeal of the secret “dens” of boyhood literature, boltholes where thrilling adventures might be plotted. The “Heather house” came first, conceived to solve the problem of photographing a merlin at its nest on Nateby Fell, Cumbria. Heather was thatched over a homemade hiding tent, a canvas skirt on a conical frame of iron rods, set up within twelve feet of the nest. The merlin, suspicions aroused, “flopped about in heather all round for about twenty minutes, then she went on to nest”, allowing Richard Kearton a chance to get his pictures. Two hides were built of turf (not lawn turf but slabs of moorland peat). The first, the “Sod house”, was constructed as with building blocks: horseshoe-shaped walls were completed with a roof supported by “the dilapidated remains of a neighbouring sheep-fold gate”. Access was through a doorway on the side farthest from the nest, while the camera was set up inside a hole punched in the facing wall. The subject matter here was a golden plover’s nest above Swaledale, and the Keartons were persuaded that the hide could be built as close as five feet from the nest. Four plates were secured, at a cost of kneeling for two and a half hours “with water dripping steadily down the back of my neck from the roof sods”. Similarly, a “Turf hovel” was built to photograph the Arctic skua with nest, eggs, and young on heather uplands in the Hebrides. They dug out a pit for the accommodation of Richard’s feet and legs, built a frame of tent irons above it, and covered the whole in “great strips of turf”. The following day the weather closed in, but despite the darkness, the waving of bent grass and heather, and the constant head movements of the bird, of the ten “more or less haphazard” exposures he made, a couple turned out “good beyond all expectation”. On the Hebridean foreshore, Richard hit upon the idea of building a rough stone house to photograph oystercatchers at nest. Boulders were hefted “a great distance on my back” to shape walls to the “sod house” footprint, while driftwood made a makeshift roof and doorway. He got his shots at a cost of “three hours of cramped misery”, with a “bitter wind whistling through every chink in the dry walls”. Undaunted, he followed up “Oyster-catcher house” with a similar “Ringed plover villa”. Among the useful tactics borrowed from warfare was the feigned retreat. The Keartons had learned that if the bird saw the photographer enter his hide and not emerge, she would remain alarmed. To deceive the bird into the placidity only exhibited in human absence, an assistant would accompany the photographer to the hide, “tuck him in” and ostentatiously walk away, taking with him the taint of humankind. It was, however, with variations of the Trojan horse that the Keartons really made their mark. In 1898 came the “Artificial tree-trunk”, anticipating by nearly twenty years the observation trees, made of angle iron and camouflaged with bark, that were used by the British and French on the Western Front. The Kearton tree was a pantomime prop-like contraption whose wigwam frame of bamboo uprights was dressed with mesh and covered with fabric camouflaged with paint, moss, and lichen. The photographer stood to attention inside, pressed against his camera, whose tripod legs could be only partially spread. It may have lacked versatility, but when it came to photographing a bird perched six feet above ground level, in woodland, the dummy tree trunk was hard to beat. The most outlandish — and, paradoxically, photogenic — of the mimetic hides was created for the Keartons in 1900 by society taxidermist Rowland Ward of Piccadilly. This was the “stuffed ox”, a hide realistically shaped over a padded frame, whose interior was just sufficiently capacious for both camera, mounted in the brisket and focussing through a hole in the hide, and photographer, bent into an excruciatingly uncomfortable posture. The ox was tried first on a skylark’s nest with young, and then beside a dew pond, where it “distinguished itself by completely deceiving every species of creature that came to drink”. The stuffed ox enjoyed a brilliant but brief working life, being retired damaged at the end of the 1900 season after being blown over with Cherry inside. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentin cow Two further hides were commissioned from another taxidermist, Charles Thorpe of Croydon. The “Stuffed sheep”, intended to blend in on the fells of Cumbria, was a hide for the camera alone, operated remotely. Once the camera was positioned on a rock in front of the nest, the carapace of the sheep (which had been set up sitting down) was placed over it, the chest wool being tied back so that it would not wave in front of the lens. Richard Kearton tethered his hiding tent at a vantage point overlooking the nest, and operated the shutter release via a fifty-foot length of pneumatic tubing. A few satisfactory shots were made when the sheep was tested out in Potts Valley, although the remote control introduced an element of luck into the timing. The following year Richard Kearton returned to Potts Valley with a lightweight “Artificial rock”, a flat-pack of four walls and a roof, large enough to accommodate photographer and camera, and painted limestone grey. It was left overnight mounted on an existing large boulder, and moved in the morning behind a crag close to a dipper’s nest. The dippers took no alarm and Richard was able to secure some good shots. For a nearby curlew’s nest, the rock was placed sixty yards from the nest and moved closer over the course of a week, until within sixteen feet of nest and eggs. The bird was so deceived that photographing her became a thing of “monotonous ease”, so Richard took to mewing like a cat to provoke the bird into different postures and behaviour. When Cherry Kearton first visited East Africa in 1909, he was again confronted by the problem of bringing the camera within range of the subject—in this case, herds of mammals that would “bound away in terror when I walked within two hundred yards of them”. One possible solution crossed his mind: “instead of a dummy sheep, I thought I might have a dummy zebra”. Luckily, he shared his thoughts with some local hunters, who anticipated what might happen when the immovable object of a stuffed zebra was met by the irresistible force of lion, cheetah, or bullet. Kearton retired, perhaps to consult the small-print of his travel insurance, and the matter was quietly dropped. Subsequent investigations persuaded the Keartons that mimetic or autochthonous structures were redundant, the imperative being to create something not that the bird would actively register as familiar, but that its reflexes could safely ignore. So in place of the portable rubbish heap and ox, a small tent, similar to what is used today, would suffice, while the fixed hides, the turf and stone houses, have their modern counterpart in the wooden chalets with viewing shutters familiar from nature reserves. As a postscript, in the mid-1930s, Cherry Kearton bought some land in Firs Road, Kenley. The Tudoresque villa he built on the plot, “The Jungle”, was designed with long, low windows opening onto a varied garden habitat, so that Kearton could continue birdwatching from indoors. It was the last, and most opulent, of the site-specific Kearton bird hides. Sadly it lasted little longer than the others, being destroyed by a bomb during the Battle of Britain, a few weeks before Cherry Kearton’s death in September 1940. But perhaps the most subliminal of the Keartons’ deceptions was the psychological manipulation of the audiences who read their books and attended their numerous lectures. By showcasing the effortful hides and by emphasising the robust and stubborn constitution needed to operate them, the Keartons were setting a marker on their own exclusive access to “real” nature. In this scenario, the audience became civilians and the Keartons a paramilitary commando unit operating behind the lines, their photographs and observations the hard-won spoils of war. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 17, 2017

John Bevis

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:03.233503

woodcuts-and-witches

Woodcuts and Witches By Jon Crabb May 4, 2017 Jon Crabb on the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone — complete with cauldron and cats — so familiar today. The publishing revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an explosion of printed material, democratising information and pushing it into the hands and sight of more people than ever before. A large single sheet of cheap paper could be printed with a proclamation, adorned with a woodcut, and sent out among the masses. These broadsides were sold for a penny on street corners, pasted on ale house walls, and stuck up on market posts. In 1592, the playwright and stationer Henry Chettle described how ballads “infected London the eie of England”, then travelled through the country via ballad-mongers, who could “spred more pamphlets by the State forbidden than all the Booksellers in London”.1 There was a hunger (then as now) for tales of sex and scandal, and, for the first time, a network of illustrators, printers, and distributors were able to glut this desire. The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton referred to ballads as “fashions, fictions, felonies, fooleries”.2 Cheap print was the medium of the masses, and the crude woodcuts were the visual language of early modern England. This revolution in publishing coincided with what has been termed “the European witch craze”: a moral panic and collective psychosis that spread through Europe and Scandinavia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The seed of this hysteria was planted in 1484 when two Dominican Inquisitors appealed to Pope Innocent VIII for permission to launch a witch hunt, and he responded by issuing a papal bull authorising their efforts. Two years later they published their treatise, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches), which, for the first time, elevated witchcraft to the crime of heresy and justified its extermination with papal authority. Leaning heavily on the supposed papal endorsement, the Malleus Maleficarum painted a terrifying picture of witchcraft and preached the absolute necessity of vanquishing this largely unrecognised evil. Apparently, witches were everywhere. Torture was recommended for extracting confessions, the death penalty was revealed as the only remedy against sorcery, and burning at the stake was proposed as a suitable method of execution. With one fell swoop, the persecution of witches was begun and an entire methodology was established. The book was a bestseller and strongly influenced the obsession with witchcraft for two hundred years, spreading slowly through continental Europe and then the Scandinavian countries, which became particularly obsessed with the subject. In Britain, the witch craze hit later, but it was rewarded with numerous pamphlets and ballads devoted to salacious details of devilish mischief. One of the earliest and most notorious British witchcraft pamphlets was published in 1579: A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Deuell, Mother Margaret, Fower Notorious Witches. Stile was a sixty-five-year-old widow and beggar accused of bewitching an innkeeper. The pamphlet describes her association with three other old women known as Mother Margaret, Mother Dutten, and Mother Devell, as well as a man named Father Rosimunde, who could transform himself “into the shape and likenesse of any beaste whatsoever he will”. Woodcuts show these old women and several animal familiars, which they reportedly fed on their own blood. The folkloric image of the crone was established through these images and repeated in similar pamphlets over the next century. These witches were usually bitter old women who lived on their own and kept cats or other animals as pets. The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, Daughters of Joan Flower neere Beuer Castle (1619) and A Most Certain, Strange and True Discovery of a Witch (1643) are particularly famous examples that reinforced this archetype. Latent sexism and fear of those who lived on the fringe of society doubtless motivated much of this persecution. The latter pamphlet manages to mix sexism with scorn by doubting that women are even capable of performing the same sorcery that certain men have achieved: Many are in a belief, that this silly sex of women by no means attaine to that so vile and damned a practice of sorcery and Witch-craft, in regard of their illiteratenesse and want of learning, which many men have by great learning done, Adam by temptation toucht and tasted the deceiving apple, so some high learnd & read by the same temptation that deceived him hath bin so insnared to contract with the Divel; as for example, in the instancing a few, as English Bacon of Oxford, Vandermast of Holland, Bungay of Germany, Fostus of the same, Franciscus the English Monke of Bury, Doctor Slackleach and divers others which were too tedious to relate of, but how weake women should attain unto it many are incredible of the same, and many too are opposite in opinion against the same, that giving a possibility to their doubtings, that the malice, and inveterate malice of a woman entirely devoted to her revengefull wrath frequenting desolate and desart places, and giving way unto their wished temptation, may have converse with that world roaring lion. In 1589, King James VI of Scotland sailed to Copenhagen to marry Princess Anne of Denmark. The return journey was troubled by bad weather, and during their voyage to Scotland terrible storms forced the ship to seek shelter in Norway. The voyage was finally completed safely, but all involved were suitably rattled. In a stunning series of events, Danish courtiers subsequently accused women of sabotaging the journey using magic, prompting witchcraft trials first in Denmark and later, when James decided to follow suit, in North Berwick, Scotland. Several Scottish nobles were implicated, and the seething jealousies and suspicions of two Royal houses bubbled into further accusations on both sides of the North Sea. King James grew paranoid that his life was in danger from witches, personally examined those on trial, and caused over a hundred people to be arrested. A 1591 pamphlet, Newes from Scotland, Declaring the Damnable Life of Doctor Fian, a Notable Sorcerer, who was Burned at Edenbrough in Januarie Last, 1591, chronicled the sensational trials and featured two illustrations with a number of interesting details. The primary woodcut condenses several episodes from the story into a single image. The witches were accused of sending devils to stir up waves, and in the top left of the image, demons are seen swimming around James’ ship. In the top right, women are portrayed toiling around a cauldron, suggestive of sorcery, as they watch the fire burn and cauldron bubble. Interestingly, this particular illustration was actually a stock image that appeared in other pamphlets divorced of any nefarious magical implications; woodcuts were often repurposed for different stories either on their own or incorporated into larger images. The Doctor Fian of the title was a local schoolmaster accused of leading the coven, and in this image he is portrayed as a clerk for the devil, who preaches from a pulpit. Fian suffered extreme torture, including having his feet crushed by an iron boot, before being burned alive at a stake. Newes from Scotland is one of the only surviving illustrations of Scottish witchcraft from this period but had lasting significance as an influence on “the Scottish play”, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which includes several references to the North Berwick trials and saw its first performance during a visit by Queen Anne’s brother, the king of Denmark, in 1606. This episode in King James’ life was a profound one and inspired a deep interest in sorcery and witchcraft, some of which he absorbed through his young Danish wife and the Scandinavian court, which had already witnessed considerable hysteria around the phenomenon of witches. The monarch’s interest in the dark arts even gave birth, in 1597, to his very own work on the dangers of black magic, Daemonologie, which included Newes from Scotland as an addendum. Six years later the Scottish and English crowns were unified for the first time, and James VI was declared King James I of England and Ireland. Although he grew more lenient and sceptical later in his reign, James took his interest in magic with him to the English courts and was so surprised by England’s permissive legislation on the subject that he had the law changed. Death was now the penalty, even for a “good” witch. As a result, famous soothsayers and “cunning folk” were prosecuted by an increasingly suspicious and vengeful population. Matthew Hopkins, the notorious and self-styled “Witch-Finder Generall” behind the deaths of at least three hundred women, cited James’ Daemonologie as a primary influence on his own work. Arguably, a bad storm off the coast of Scotland was responsible for inspiring the deaths of hundreds of people and an entire paradigm shift in the perception of British “cunning folk”. An exact number of witches killed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is hard to arrive at, but, according to court records, there were about three thousand executions in Britain, most of them in Scotland. Across the whole of Europe the figure is likely to be in the tens of thousands and includes men as well as women. Although this number is shocking enough, the attempts by some neopagans to characterise the period as “The Burning Times” — a holocaust of several million women — appear to be a well-meaning but misguided exaggeration. Some of the more significant cases of the period were immortalised in plays, novels, and longer books. And the woodcuts that illustrate these works have been largely responsible for the cultural archetype of the “witch” now so familiar to us: pointed hats, broomsticks, cauldrons, cats. The same woodcut would often be used multiple times in different sources, and with each new appearance, the trope repeated and solidified into a recognisable iconography. Eventually some of the best stories and images were collected into popular reference works, such as The Kingdom of Darkness: Or, the History of Dæmons, Specters, Witches, Apparitions, Possessions, Disturbances, and Other . . . Supernatural Delusions . . . and Malicious Impostures of the Devil . . . Collected from Authentick Records . . . With Pictures of Several Memorable Accidents, by R.B. (1688). Most of the really iconic images found on the internet today come from just one collection, The History of Witches and Wizards: Giving a True Account of All Their Tryals in England, Scotland, Sweedland, France, and New England . . . Collected . . . By W. P. (1720). Here we find witches and demons dancing together, wax poppets baptised by the devil, spirits leaping from a circle of flames, and a feast at the witches’ sabbath. This is an energetic and dynamic portrayal of witchcraft, much more tantalising than old women with chips on their shoulders. Whether the authors intended it or not, they managed to make witchcraft seem rather exciting and attractive. The stories are easy, compelling reads and the images feature young men and women doing extraordinary things. There is also a clear undercurrent of eroticism running through both books. There are numerous mentions of carnal acts, lusty satyrs, undressings, drunken feasts, love spells, and devilish, handsome men appearing to innocent, young maids. After the initial witchcraft pamphlets in the late sixteenth century, the publications became increasingly stylised in the seventeenth. As King James grew more and more sceptical about the reality of witches, his kingdom slowly grew more and more paranoid. It took decades for the hysteria to subside. While the early pamphlets were based on relatively sober court records, later pamphlets took more time to describe the accused’s terrible tortures, or the wondrous miracles they had performed. By the time popular histories of witchcraft were published, sensationalism ruled and the woodcuts became more striking. In a period racked with plague, civil war, and poverty, there must have been a certain sympathy for the devil. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 4, 2017

Jon Crabb

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:03.786879

american-freedom-sinclair-lewis-and-the-open-road

American Freedom Sinclair Lewis and the Open Road By Steven Michels March 22, 2017 Some three decades before Kerouac and friends hit the road, Sinclair Lewis published Free Air, one of the very first novels about an automobile-powered road trip across the United States. Steven Michels looks at the particular vision of freedom espoused in the tale, one echoed throughout Lewis' oeuvre. Sinclair Lewis is experiencing a renaissance of late — but not for a reason he would have liked. His 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, depicts an authoritarian American president, whose rise and rhetoric very much resemble the current commander in chief. Criticized at the time for making American fascism sound too European, Lewis’ prescience is remarkable. Eschewing the conservative fear of moral and cultural relativism, the libertarian fear of a regulatory state, and the progressive fear of economic elites and corporations, Lewis follows Plato in pointing to democracy itself as the cause for the slide to tyranny. It Can’t Happen Here, like The Republic, shows how someone elected to satisfy the severe passions of the mass can quickly run afoul of legal norms and institutions. Lewis’ most affirmative vision of what he means by freedom is found in his novel Free Air, which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the spring of 1919, the year before Main Street and Babbitt made him a household name. Free Air is the story of two young people, Milt and Claire. Milt is a small-town mechanic and garage owner, and Claire is from Long Island and in the middle of a coast-to-coast trip to Seattle with her father. Like many Northeasterners, Claire believes that the rest of the country is filled with folks who are good but simple. Milt knows better. He had been plotting an escape from its dreary doldrums, but is enthralled with Claire when she comes through town, and he ends up following her and her father on their journey west. Claire quickly falls for the heartiness of the outdoors, even though she sees Milt more like a brother than a romantic partner. “There is an America!” Claire cheers by her tent, after she and Milt forgo her usual hotel. “I’m glad I’ve found it!” Once they get to their destination, however, they discover that everyone is obsessed with “the View” and ranks houses accordingly. What’s worse is that everyone builds and buys from the assumption that houses ought to resemble the East Coast as much as possible. Milt and Claire were looking for something unique and interesting, but instead find a stale sameness and imitation. The book ends with the couple heading back on an open-ended road trip. It might be, Lewis suggests, the only place where they are unburdened by society and its conventions enough to be together. Free Air is not kind to the petty and conniving rural dwellers, but Lewis’ most devastating take on small-town life appears in Main Street. Lewis, a product of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, rails against the idea that these remote burgs are the source of all that is good. Rather, they infect their residents with “the village virus”, symptomized by a firm ignorance, self-satisfaction, and general intolerance of anyone who doesn’t look or think like they do. Will Kennicott loves weekend driving, but he never gets too far out of town. All the roads he takes lead him back to Gopher Prairie. That’s not to say that Lewis touts cities as unqualifiedly good. What is gained by their cosmopolitan sensibility, culture, and good food is lost in a lack of intimacy and familiarity. There is a reason Claire and her exhausted father had left the East Coast. It’s easy and hard in different ways. “We need to know men like that in this pink-frosting playing at living we have in the cities”, she says to an aristocratic suitor, in defense of Milt’s working-class father. The Innocents, the novel Lewis wrote before Free Air, follows the long-married Applebys as they leave New York City to open a tea room in the quiet country. It’s a rare soul that can reside in a city and not be corrupted by it. This is not just about travel; for Lewis, it is about positive freedom and control. He never presents train travel as especially desirable, constrained as it is to tracks, and his early love of planes is directed at those who can fly them. Americans are rightful captains and pilots, not passengers or spectators. He would have agreed with Thomas Wolfe, who, in You Can’t Go Home Again, posited: “Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.” It is only when Wolfe’s protagonist George Webber arrives at a destination, that he feels a sense of homelessness. The expansive country and its prairie makes motion the most natural and comfortable condition. Business travel provides both an opportunity and a threat. On the one hand, people who travel for work go through small towns and bring with them information and a perspective about the world outside. Milt is much improved by his time with them. Yet as “missionaries of business”, theirs is a hollow gospel. Business also provides opportunities for independence. Una Golden, Lewis’ protagonist in The Job, moves from a small town in Pennsylvania to New York and uses her business acumen to make a decent life for herself, which for a woman at the time was no small feat. Yet George F. Babbitt and his clique travel to cheat on their wives and expand their bourgeois lifestyle. Lewis loves America for its individualist philosophy and its pioneer spirit. For him, progress is more about exploring than putting down roots and putting up buildings. Growth is a matter of psychology, not economics. The eponymous anti-hero of Our Mr. Wrenn has to go off to Europe to gain some perspective on his workaday routine. “Adventure, like fear of adventure, consisted in going one step at a time, keeping at it, forming the habit . . .” Lewis instructs. He operates from a grand and romantic vision of what our expansive territory has made possible, and he worries that we have squandered too much of our good fortune. Lewis lived his nomadic philosophy — moving from Minnesota to New Haven for school, through New York City, D.C., and with stints in Europe, never in one location for very long and often returning to the same place. “It’s always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are”, Lewis writes in The Innocents. His perception of and even his fondness for his native land grew during the time he lived in Europe. “No American, if he can help it, dies in his birthplace”, he wrote. Of course, that did not prevent him from being buried in his hometown. Among Lewis’ gifts are his willingness to probe the essential tension at the heart of American moral and social life. It’s a land of boundless opportunity and fierce competition; it’s also a land of individualism that too easily bends toward conformity. Who else could have said: “Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country”? Lewis understands both sides of American exceptionalism. How much better would the country be if it had more of that kind of patriotism. In some respects, Lewis’ extreme form of freedom could be said to resemble what you find in Rousseau’s “state of nature”, where individuals are untethered by property or people. But Lewis never advocated solitude and he was too much a fan of progress. Two of his early books, Hike and the Aeroplane and The Trail of the Hawk, take the new technology of aviation as their themes. Lewis saw air travel as a modern form of daring, and he held out great hope for what it could do for the American psyche. There are, however, some interesting parallels between Lewis and the road’s other great prophet, Jack Kerouac. Lewis would certainly approve of Kerouac’s discipline and stream-of-consciousness method. Kerouac is said to have written On the Road in three weeks on a 1200-foot scroll of teletype paper. Lewis, after doing his research, could write 3000-5000 words a day. For Lewis, however, writing was more about self-improvement than self-expression. He wanted a kind of noble and pioneering freedom and would judge other modes accordingly. He would see Kerouac as a hedonist. Nor did Lewis tout the virtues of alcohol or drugs. He reflects on “the torture of being bored by the two-frequent presence of his own self”, in Cass Timberlane, one of Lewis’ more mature characters. It was the reason Lewis drank, even though he recognized it as a temporary cure. He was, by many accounts, a problem drinker. Self-doubt is a prerequisite for improvement, but it too has its risks. Sometimes the greatest obstacles to freedom are not other people, but ourselves. Most importantly, Lewis’ moralism was utterly conventional. Although one of the more prominent subtexts of his novels is the extent to which moralists are all hypocrites, he is equally bothered by anyone who operates without a compass of any kind. For instance, there is a rawness and physicality in Kerouac that Lewis would likely have found off-putting. Kerouac’s sex scenes are tame by today’s standards, but they were risqué enough at the time to have been edited by his publisher. Lewis’ sex scenes are ridiculous. Sometimes it’s not even clear what has happened — what might be called coitus obscurus. Lewis’ greatest gifts as a novelist were his abilities of perception and mimicry. For the first part of his life, Lewis wanted to be in theater and would regularly delight others with his character portraits and impressions. As a political writer, his greatest asset was his ability to present what he observed without the filter of his own ideology. He was not an activist and not terribly political. It didn’t exactly make him a great citizen, but it made a superior novelist. He had a reporter’s sensibilities, which is why he made a newspaper man, Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of It Can’t Happen Here, his most political novel. It’s not a stretch to say that he is among the best writers on democratic freedom. More than anyone, Lewis understands its aims and its limitations for both individuals and the country. For him, freedom is playful but serious, directionless but purposeful, and essential to knowing true happiness. Lewis sees that kind of freedom as America’s greatest virtue and best export. It would be tragic if we were to somehow lose it. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 22, 2017

Steven Michels

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:04.306556

master-of-disaster-ignatius-donnelly

Master of Disaster, Ignatius Donnelly By Carl Abbott September 27, 2017 The destruction of Atlantis, cataclysmic comets, and a Manhattan tower made entirely from concrete and corpse — Carl Abbott on the life and work of a Minnesotan writer, and failed politician, with a mind primed for catastrophe. The magnificent civilization of Atlantis shattered and plunged beneath the sea in February 1882. Or, to be more precise, the eccentric American Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the first book of a trio that would highlight a series of imaginary catastrophes. The book — a rehash of Atlantis speculation supported with flood myths from around the globe — was an instant success and has continued to draw readers over the decades. Newspaper reviews were laudatory: Harper and Brothers issued seven printings in the first year, and W. E. Gladstone took time out from pondering the Irish Question to write Donnelly a four-page fan letter. It was easy to imagine the worst in 1882. President James Garfield had been assassinated only months earlier — the second president shot to death in sixteen years. The economy was dropping into a new recession even as it struggled to emerge from the dark years of the 1870s. Farmers in Donnelly’s state of Minnesota were especially hard hit. In September, thirty thousand New York workers marched in the nation’s first Labor Day parade, remembering the violent railroad strike of five years earlier. Atlantis might have seemed to offer relief from the turmoil. Its densely packed pages of pseudoscience and mythology recounted the supposed golden age of the lost continent and world-spanning civilization first mentioned by Plato. But the subtext was the fragility of a golden age. When Atlantis sank beneath the waves in a global cataclysm, a powerful and nearly perfect society perished. For Donnelly, Atlantis was a model and mirror for the United States, where urbanization, industrialization, and the accumulation of vast wealth were a social deluge destroying the nation’s own golden age of the agrarian frontier. It was personal. That mythicized American frontier had promised much to Donnelly and delivered less. He began as an enthusiast who tried to make it as a farmer, land developer, and politician in a nation that seemed to offer unlimited opportunity but was riven by social and economic conflicts. He was also a prickly character. He started out as a lawyer in Philadelphia, but quarrels with clients and family propelled him to Minnesota in 1858, just as it was being admitted as a state. He plunged into land speculation and politics. Nininger City, an undeveloped townsite seventeen miles from St Paul needed only his promotional talents to become a major river port and make Donnelly a rich man, or so he hoped. Alas, few residents came. Readers of Charles Dickens might think of Martin Chuzzlewit’s ill-fated visit to Eden, another Mississippi Valley “city” that never matched its press notices. Undeterred, Donnelly got in with the new Republican Party and was elected Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota at age twenty-eight: he then served as US Congressman for three terms from 1863–68. Not a man to hold his tongue, however, he split with Republicans because they were becoming conservative, returned to his lonely mansion at Nininger, ran an anti-monopoly newspaper, and tried out a series of third parties and splinter factions, which failed to propel him to the offices he thought he deserved. Twenty years of personal frustration turned his thoughts toward catastrophe. Reporting on the Dakota War of 1862, in which Sioux tribes struck back at encroaching settlers in western Minnesota, he had seemed to revel in the horrors of war. For a St Paul newspaper he described refugees from the town of New Ulm: “There were mothers there who wept over children slaughtered before their eyes, strong men . . . who had escaped into the grass with the death shrieks of parents, brothers, and sisters, ringing in their ears.” Those death shrieks were just the start for a writer who came to specialize in cataclysms that could rend entire cities, ravage entire civilizations, or destroy entire continents. As his ambitions and plans repeatedly fell short — his agrarian golden age failed to materialize — he took up his pen to explore increasingly extreme visions of apocalypse. First came “factual” accounts of two very different prehistoric disasters — Atlantis (1882), followed by Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883) — and then, seven years later, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1890), a futuristic novel that major publishers rejected as dangerously revolutionary. The description of disaster in Atlantis was relatively low-keyed. Donnelly did not bother to recreate the catastrophe in his own words because he could cite deluge myths and legends from all over the world. An event, which in a few hours destroyed, amid horrible convulsions, an entire country, with all its vast population — that population the ancestors of the great races of both continents, and they themselves the custodians of the civilization of their age — could not fail to impress with terrible force the minds of men, and to project its gloomy shadow over all human history. And hence, whether we turn to the Hebrews, the Aryans, the Phœnicians, the Greeks, the Cushites, or the inhabitants of America, we find everywhere traditions of the Deluge; and we shall see that all these traditions point unmistakably to the destruction of Atlantis. In Ragnarok Donnelly went extraterrestrial. The book shows a cataclysmic mind at work, with its core assumption that change comes via revolution, upheaval, and calamity. In Atlantis he had riffed on a well-known story. Now he invented his very own cataclysm. Louis Agassiz, Charles Lyell, and other geologists had been replacing a catastrophe-driven history of Earth with gradual processes, but Ignatius Donnelly was having none of that. Churning out four-hundred-fifty pages in seven weeks (rewriting was not his thing), he described a supposed cosmic disaster in which a comet grazed Earth, showering it with “the Drift”, his name for the layer of sand, gravel, and soil that lies over our planet’s bedrock. Atlantis had been a financial success, throwing off enough income to encourage more writing. Ragnarok was a different story. It started off well, but sales crashed after a few weeks and its author grew frustrated with New York’s literary and scientific establishments (his publisher failed to push the second book; scientists ignored or ridiculed the cometary catastrophe). E. L. Youmans, the editor of Popular Science Monthly and the nation’s most influential science journalist, called Ragnarok “absurd” (although it may have influenced the similarly crackpot thesis of Immanuel Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision in 1950). It didn’t help that this man of the prairies not only found the New York literary establishment unhelpful but thought New York itself an unpleasant place, calling out its “endless roar and hurry” and “seething whirlpool of struggling humanity”. Donnelly tried to fight back, damning the arbiters of American science as pedantic schoolmasters who parroted the orthodoxy of European experts rather than look to new creative ideas. “Neither will an American Scientist accept any American thought until it has the brand of foreign approval”, he lamented in his diary. A third book that claimed to find cryptograms by Francis Bacon hidden within Shakespeare’s Henry IV met another chilly reception (“mountebank” was one reviewer’s judgment on the author). “My book is a failure, and my political prospects are dark”, he grieved in July 1888. A few months later he let his manic side loose: he ran for governor of Minnesota but dropped out part way through the campaign, lost an election to the state legislature that was supposed to be a sure thing, and put his name forth as a sadly hopeless candidate for US Senate. The day after his senatorial bid failed, Donnelly began work on his second bestseller. He had ended Ragnarok with a tacked-on assault on the evils of capitalism and its tacit belief that “heaven is only a larger Wall Street, where the millionaires occupy the front benches”. Caesar’s Column, which appeared in April 1890 from an obscure Chicago publisher after New York houses wouldn’t touch it, took the ills of capitalism head-on. It sold an impressive sixty thousand copies in nine months, gained three English editions, and was translated into German, Swedish, and Norwegian. Caesar’s Column imagined a dystopian United States of 1980 plunged into chaos by the class divisions that so deeply worried contemporary Americans and Europeans. The Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 was fresh in mind when Donnelly sat down to write. So was the upheaval of the Paris Commune, which had already inspired reformer Charles Loring Brace to warn about The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872): “Let the law but lift its hand from them for a season, or let the civilizing influences of American life fail to reach them, and if the opportunity offered, we should see an explosion from this class which might leave this city in ashes and blood.” Donnelly turned Brace’s fears into fiction. Caesar’s Column was proto–science fiction rather than pseudoscience. It follows the standard utopian/dystopian trope of a visitor from afar who records his experiences and observations. In this case the visitor is Gabriel Weltstein, a wool merchant from the peaceful white society of Uganda who travels to New York by airship and writes a series of letters home. He finds a technologically advanced city with subways under glass, televised newspapers, and unlimited electricity tapped from the aurora borealis. He also finds a city deeply riven by class divides. Through accident, he falls under the guidance of Max Pelton, one of the members of the Brotherhood of Destruction, who shows him the immense inequality engendered by the oligarchy that rules the United States. Jack London, writing a few years later and with a grasp of socialist theory, would posit a sophisticated resistance movement in The Iron Heel (1908), with a clear ideology and roots in organized labor — even if it falls short of its goals. Donnelly’s revolutionaries are a degraded lumpenproletariat, visceral rather than intellectual, a mob bent on destruction. Caesar Lomellini, the leader of the Brotherhood, is half Italian and half African American, telling ethnic markers that connoted animal instinct rather than reason in contemporary racist thought. His revolution destroys the oligarchs but sheds rivers of blood and plunges the city of ten million into fiery chaos. Faced with the problem of disposing of tens of thousands of bodies, Lomellini has an inspiration: “Burn em up,” said Caesar. “We can’t,” said the man; “we would have to burn up the city to destroy them in that way; there are too many of them; and it would be an immense task to bury them.” “Heap em all up in one big pile,” said Caesar. “That wouldn’t do — the smell they would make in decaying would be unbearable, to say nothing of the sickness they would create.” Caesar was standing unsteadily, looking at us with lackluster eyes. Suddenly an idea seemed to dawn in his monstrous head — an idea as monstrous and uncouth as the head itself. His eyes lighted up. “I have it!” he shouted. “By G-d, I have it! Make a pyramid of them, and pour cement over them, and let it stand forever as a monument of this day’s glorious work! Hoorrah!” As New York plunges into the fires of revolutionary destruction, Weltstein escapes in an airship to the highlands of Uganda, where white men and women have another opportunity to build a simpler and more equitable society — Donnelly’s effort to reimagine the hopeful white settlement of early Minnesota. Caesar’s Column was the high point of Donnelly’s career. He continued to write for another decade, turning to parables and political tracts that found few readers. He ran for vice president in 1900 on a ticket splintered from the waning Populist Party — getting one vote out of every three hundred. With his facile pen and taste for the extreme, a reincarnated Ignatius Donnelly would flourish today as an internet blogger. He would be quick to spin calamities into conspiracies and tweet dire predictions about national collapse and global chaos. Perhaps fortunately for us, he remains stuck in the nineteenth century, a man who had to make do with pen, paper, and his own imagination of disaster. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 27, 2017

Carl Abbott

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:04.804864

let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-the-computational-imagination

“Let us Calculate!” Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination By Jonathan Gray November 10, 2016 Three hundred years after the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and seven hundred years after the death of Ramon Llull, Jonathan Gray looks at how their early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” speak to our own age of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Each epoch dreams the one to follow”, wrote the historian Jules Michelet. The passage was later used by the philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin in relation to his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, which explores the genesis of life under late capitalism through a forensic examination of the “dreamworlds” of nineteenth-century Paris.1 In tracing the emergence of the guiding ideals and visions of our own digital age, we may cast our eyes back a little earlier still: to the dreams of seventeenth-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. There was a resurgence of interest in Leibniz’s role in the history of computation after workmen fixing a leaking roof discovered a mysterious machine discarded in the corner of an attic at the University of Göttingen in 1879. With its cylinders of polished brass and oaken handles, the artefact was identified as one of a number of early mechanical calculating devices that Leibniz invented in the late seventeenth century. Supported by a network of professors, preachers, and friends — and developed with the technical assistance of a series of itinerant and precariously employed clockmakers, mechanics, artisans, and even a butler — Leibniz’s instrument aspired to provide less function than even the most basic of today’s calculators. Through an intricate system of different sized wheels, the hand-crank operated device modestly expanded the repertoire of possible operations to include multiplication and division as well as addition and subtraction.2 Three centuries before Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” received a standing ovation in 1968, Leibniz’s machine faltered through live demonstrations in London and Paris.3 Costing a small fortune to construct, it suffered from a series of financial setbacks and technical issues. The Royal Society invited Leibniz to come back once it was fully operational. There is even speculation that — despite Leibniz’s rhetoric spanning an impressive volume of letters and publications — the machine never actually worked as intended.4 Nevertheless, the instrument exercised a powerful grip on the imagination of later technicians. Leibniz’s machine became part of textbooks and industry narratives about the development of computation. It was retrospectively integrated into the way that practitioners envisaged the history of their work. IBM acquired a functioning replica for their “antiques attic” collection. Scientist and inventor Stephen Wolfram credits Leibniz with anticipating contemporary projects by “imagining a whole architecture for how knowledge would . . . be made computational”.5 Norbert Wiener calls him the “patron saint” of cybernetics.6 Another recent writer describes him as the “godfather of the modern algorithm”.7 While Leibniz made groundbreaking contributions towards the modern binary number system as well as integral and differential calculus,8 his role in the history of computing amounts to more than the sum of his scientific and technological accomplishments. He also advanced what we might consider a kind of “computational imaginary” — reflecting on the analytical and generative possibilities of rendering the world computable. Leibniz’s interest in this area can be traced back to his 1666 Dissertatio De Arte Combinatoria — an extended version of his doctoral dissertation in which he explores what was known as the “art of combinations” (or “combinatorial art”), a method which would enable its practitioners to generate novel ideas and inventions, as well as to analyse and decompose complex and difficult ideas into more simple elements. Describing it as the “mother of all inventions” which would lead to “the discovery of all things”, he sought to demonstrate the widespread applicability of this art to advance human endeavour in areas as diverse as law and logic, music and medicine, physics and politics. Leibniz’s broader vision of the power of logical calculation was inspired by many thinkers — from the logical works of Aristotle and Ramus to Thomas Hobbes’ proposal to equate reasoning with computation. But Leibniz’s curiosity around the art of combinations per se was sparked by a group called the “Herborn Encyclopaedists” through whom he became acquainted with the works of Ramon Llull, a Majorcan philosopher, logician, and mystical thinker who is thought to have died seven centuries ago, in 1316.9 Llull’s Ars magna (or “ultimate general art”) from 1308 outlines a form of analysis and argumentation based on working with different permutations of a small number of fundamental attributes. Llull sought to create a universal tool for helping to convert people to the Christian faith through logical argumentation. He proposed eighteen fundamental general principles (“Goodness, Greatness, Eternity, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, Glory, Difference, Concordance, Contrariety, Beginning, Middle, End, Majority, Equality, and Minority”), accompanied by a set of definitions, rules, and figures in order to guide the process of argumentation, which is organised around different permutations of the principles. The art was to be used to generate and address questions such as “Is eternal goodness concordant?”, “What does the difference of eternal concordance consist of?”, or “Can goodness be great without concordance?”. Llull held that this art could be used to “banish all erroneous opinions” and to arrive at “true intellectual certitude removed from any doubt”. He drew in turn on the medieval Arabic zairja, an algorithmic process of “letter magic” for calculating truth on the basis of a finite number of elements. Its practitioners would give advice or make predictions on the basis of interpretations of strings of letters resulting from a calculation.10 Llull’s experimentation channelled this procedural conception of reasoning, and was drawn upon by the intellectual milieu in which Leibniz developed his early ideas. While critical towards the details of Llull’s proposed categories and procedures, Leibniz was taken with his overarching vision of the combinatorial art. He drew two key aspirations from Llull’s work: the idea of fundamental conceptual elements, and the idea of a method through which to combine and calculate with them. The former would enable us to reformulate more complex ideas in terms of simpler ones (for “everything which exists or which can be thought”, Leibniz wrote, “must be compounded of parts”).11 The latter would enable us to reason with these elements precisely and without error, as well as generate new insights and ideas. Just as all words in a language could be represented by the comparatively small number of letters in an alphabet, so the whole world of nature and thought could be considered in terms of a number of fundamental elements — an “alphabet of human thought”. By reformulating arguments and ideas in terms of a characteristica universalis, or universal language, all could be rendered computable. The combinatorial art would not only facilitate such analysis, but would also provide means to compose new ideas, entities, inventions, and worlds. Leibniz spared no modesty in promoting the art and the various initiatives associated with it for which he hoped to raise funds from prospective patrons. He presented his project as being the world’s most powerful instrument, an end to all argument, one of humanity’s most wonderful inventions (fulfilling a timeless dream shared by everyone from the Pythagoreans to the Cartesians); the ultimate source of answers to some of the world’s most complex and difficult theological, moral, legal, or scientific questions; and a foolproof means to converting people to Christianity and propagating the faith, amongst other things. In support of his project he argued that “no man who is not a prophet or a prince can ever undertake anything of greater good to mankind or more fitting for the divine glory”, and that “nothing could be proposed that would be more important for the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith”.12 In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote: The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.13 Ultimately he hoped that a perspicuous thought language of “pure” concepts, combined with formalised processes and methods akin to those used in mathematics, would lead to the mechanisation and automation of reason itself. By means of new artificial languages and methods, our ordinary and imperfect ways of reasoning with words and ideas would give way to a formal, symbolic, rule-governed science — conceived of as a computational process. Disputes, conflict, and grievances arising from ill-formed opinions, emotional hunches, biases, prejudices, and misunderstandings would give way to consensus, peace, and progress. Jonathan Swift’s satirical classic Gulliver’s Travels (1726) parodied the mechanical conception of invention advanced by Llull and Leibniz. In the fictional city of Lagado, the protagonist encounters a device known as “the engine”, which is intended by its inventor to enable anyone to “write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”: He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.” The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.14 The mechanical, combinatorial approach to cultural creation that Swift treated as an absurd caricature became a productive experimental technique for later writers, artists, and musicians — from the permutational works of American composer John Cage, to the generative poetic experiments of the French literary group Oulipo, to more recent procedural approaches of digital and software art.15 Moreover, the mechanization and externalization of reasoning processes exhibited by machine learning technologies and algorithms has not only become socially and culturally productive, but economically lucrative for today’s silicon empires. There are few contenders in the history of philosophy to rival the optimism that Leibniz had for his project as a kind of panacea. Many of the ideas of his youth never left him. In a 1714 letter, two years before his death, he laments that he was unable to make more progress: I should venture to add that if I had been less distracted, or if I were younger or had talented young men to help me, I should still hope to create a kind of spécieuse générale, in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus. At the same time this could be a kind of universal language or writing, though infinitely different from all such languages which have thus far been proposed, for the characters and the words themselves would give directions to reason, and the errors (except those of fact) would be only mistakes in calculation.16 As ever more aspects of earthly life are rendered quantifiable, harvested into clouds, funneled into algorithmic engines — leading to what has been called “planetary-scale computation” — these dreams of the vast creative and emancipatory possibilities of procedural reasoning processes endure.17 The initial trickles of Llull’s and Leibniz’s arcane combinatorial fantasies have gradually given way to ubiquitous computational technologies, practices, and ideals which are interwoven into the fabric of our worlds — the broader consequences of which are still unfolding around us. The objects of their embryonic faith have become the living a priori of the digital age — providing the conditions of possibility for our experience and our reflection, our genres of deliberation, our forms of sociality, and our institutions of judgement — regardless of whether or not the machines operate in the ways that we imagine. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 10, 2016

Jonathan Gra

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:05.338227

defoe-and-the-distance-to-utopia

Defoe and the Distance to Utopia By J. H. Pearl January 25, 2017 In the wake of recent political shifts and the dystopian flavour they carry for many, Jason Pearl looks to the works of Daniel Defoe and the lessons they can teach us about bringing utopia home. How do you get to utopia? You don’t, of course. It’s unreachably distant. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) are set in what were then uncharted waters, far enough away to have escaped both the attention and interference of the rest of the world. That’s what makes these islands, for a moment, plausible: no one can deny their existence with positive knowledge. And that’s how they stay perfect: no one’s colonized them, traded with them, influenced them in any way. Distance and difference were understood as directly relational: the greater the distance, the greater the difference. And utopias are radically different. Granted, in some cases, the distance is temporal: we call these “euchronias”. The point is we’ll never get there, never live long enough, never see fiction turned to fact. Today’s readers demur. Too far-fetched, they complain, rejecting the distance. Others see utopias as prescriptive, rigidly so, even fascistic. People think of head-in-the-clouds dreamers or dogmatic philosopher kings, though Fredric Jameson argues, persuasively, that utopias give us not blueprints but open-ended possibilities. At any rate, we now prefer dystopias: The Road, The Hunger Games, and countless others, many adapted as films. Such scenarios seem not distant but close, potentially imminent, and fans of the cult movie Idiocracy have already noted, with horror, the accuracy of its predictions: our vulgar entertainment; the corporatization of everything; the dumbing down — and worse — of the highest office in the land. Dystopias speak to us because they’re practically adjacent. But there are exceptions to the rule of utopian distance. In the early history of the novel, writers from Aphra Behn to Jonathan Swift tried to bring utopia nearer, tried to bring it back home to England. This was a time of rambling adventure fiction: pseudo-true stories of merchants, pirates, captives, and castaways, all scattered to the four winds. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for instance, Gulliver goes to Barbados and New Holland (modern Australia) but also the Country of the Houyhnhnms, a utopian land of naturally virtuous horses. It’s at once a satire on tall tales and a very serious philosophical provocation. But Swift doesn’t stop there. Gulliver comes home and recreates Houyhnhnm society in miniature, shunning humans for the company of the horses in his stable. It is a plot pattern that recurs throughout the period, most notably in the novels of Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719). When we think of Crusoe, we remember his island, but at the end of the novel he too returns to England, bringing the ideal of peaceful stoicism with him. In Defoe’s Captain Singleton, published a year later, the eponymous pirate comes back home with new notions of equality and communal property. Indeed, as Defoe teaches us, the highest ideals can be merged with everyday life, and we can relocate utopia, make it practicable, rescale it to manageable proportions. What’s distance, anyway, when ships connect the earth’s farthest corners? In Defoe’s first novel, considered by some to be literature’s first novel, Crusoe grows up in York wanting to see the world, believing fulfilment lies far from England. He gets enslaved by Barbary pirates; he grows tobacco in Brazil; at the end, he treks across the Pyrenees. But he always wants more, and an ill-fated voyage for slaves runs into a storm and strands him on his famous island. At first, Crusoe bewails his loneliness, but then he sets to work, retrieving supplies from the wreck, building a shelter and all manner of furniture, growing crops, drying grapes, penning goats, even trying to his hand at beer making. For many pages, nothing happens but work, work, work — and still it’s engrossing. You read it, sitting at the library or curled up on a couch, aware of your own solitude, too, thinking through what you’d do and how you’d fare in that situation. The work redeems him, but what satisfies Crusoe most is the stable rhythm of life on the island, its meditative peacefulness, its safety from the vicissitudes of life everywhere else. The distance to utopia — or rather its distance from the rest of the world — turns out to be the defining characteristic. But the idyll can’t last, not in the Caribbean, where native islanders plied the waters in longboats, where, since Columbus, multitudes of Europeans sailed in and planted flags wherever they could. Exactly halfway through the novel, Crusoe finds a footprint that’s not his — a major shock that provokes a spell of existential panic. And we’re jolted too. It’s like realizing someone’s spying on you. Crusoe flies to his shelter, now his “castle”, and retrenches. He sees a party of so-called “savages”, then saves one of its victims, who he names Friday (it happened to be a Friday). The two get on, thanks to Friday’s deference, but more natives arrive, then pirates. Crusoe becomes a governor ruling English, Spanish, and indigenous subjects, and throughout much of the sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published later in 1719, they’re almost always fighting — against either each other or marauding tribes from nearby islands. Finally, the smoke clears, and the island, once a sanctuary, is left a corpse-strewn battlefield. Crusoe sails away and keeps traveling, from Madagascar to China to Siberia, along the way committing a string of brutal acts against ethnic and cultural others — deeply disturbing to modern readers. You’ve got to cut out a lot to make these books suitable for kids. But the return home isn’t a total loss. In the seldom-read Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720), there’s a chapter entitled “Of Solitude”, where Defoe reclaims the experience of seclusion inside, of all places, the London Stock Exchange, one of the beating hearts of modern globalization. “Man under a vow of perpetual silence,” he writes, “if but rigorously observed, would be even in the Exchange of London as perfectly retired from the world as a hermit in his cell or a solitaire in the deserts of Arabia.” Utopia becomes a withdrawal inward, a monkish asceticism, a life severed from worldly attachments. True, such quietism precludes this as an answer to larger social problems. More than that, the ideal of isolation seems at odds with fulfilling connections to friends and family. But Defoe concedes the value of friendship, extolling “the company of religious good men” — devotion to God being his highest ideal. What’s remarkable is the refusal to let go of the epiphany of the first volume, the insistence that all of us might find room for solitude even in otherwise dense and busy cities. The ideals of Captain Singleton are very different. Here, Defoe unfurls a similar narrative pattern: utopia found; utopia debunked; utopia recreated on a smaller scale in England. But this is a novel about piracy in which the pirates — villains in the prior novel — are now cast as heroes. Crusoe’s utopia is solitary; Singleton’s is social. One trait of early pirate culture, often overlooked in the colorful (now campy) mythology that followed, was the formation of parallel societies notable for egalitarianism. Pirates voted for their captains and shared their spoils equally. They accepted identity differences for the greater good of all, welcoming women and African slaves, condoning disparate religions and queer sexualities. They developed their own cultures, their own pidgin languages, and even established colonies in remote outposts, for instance Madagascar, where Henry Avery was believed to have founded a colony called Libertalia. Never mind the Disney ride turned into a blockbuster movie franchise. Pirates were, in the popular phrase, “enemies of all mankind”, and their ships couldn’t have been more unlike the strictly normative and hierarchical merchant and naval vessels that vastly outnumbered them. Pirate societies, therefore, were radically separate, different, oppositional — distant. Avery makes a cameo in the novel, and Singleton and his crew agree to a just agreement. Everyone promises to “live and die together”, to “kill no food but what we would distribute in public”, to be “guided by the majority”, to “appoint a captain among us . . . during pleasure”, everyone taking a turn, and to “obey him without reserve on pain of death”, though “the captain was not to act in any particular thing without the advice of the rest, and by the majority.” They pool both their labor and treasure, and, in imitation of Avery, they hatch a plan to retire on Madagascar, a firmer footing for their waterborne utopia. But stability eludes them, and the tight-knit group cracks from pressures within and without. Ship politics shift constantly with mutinies and divisions, killings and defections, and the periodic addition of conquered prisoners and willing recruits. And that’s how it worked in real life, too. Only a handful of pirates got to enjoy their riches in peace. It’s rumored Avery died penniless, unable to afford his own coffin. Singleton and his crew get hunted by Europeans and repelled by native islanders, all while Singleton himself hordes a private cache. Eventually, he absconds with his confidant, William, a Quaker surgeon. They disguise themselves as Persians, then Armenians, then Greeks, trading their ill-gotten gains into a fortune before finally returning to England, despite the danger of being hanged. Crusoe internalizes utopia; Singleton shares it with others. He’s faithful to William, who is much more an equal than Friday ever is. William, by contrast, becomes a crypto-lover, described as “my guide, my pilot, my governor, my everything.” There’s a marriage of convenience between Singleton and William’s widowed sister, and the three live together, enjoying a domestic arrangement reminiscent of the ideals aboard the pirate ship. They swear a new oath of secrecy and loyalty, promising never to reveal themselves and to live out their days as a family — a very different sort of family from that formed at the end of a courtship novel. The ideal spreads outward, starting with Singleton’s conscience, then encompassing William, then his sister, then others when Singleton ponders giving his money to “charitable uses, as a debt due to mankind,” reasoning, “It was due to the community, and I ought to distribute it for the general good.” Utopia, a place, becomes a practice. And finally, the narrative goes blank, ending at a moment of unadventurous peacefulness, pushing us too away from the secret. What’s remarkable here is the relocation of hitherto far-fetched ideals. In More’s Utopia, Raphael Hythloday merely recounts his travels to an unreceptive court. In Bacon’s New Atlantis, the narrator never even makes it home — the text was left unfinished. These utopias stay distant, too remote for everyday imitation. Defoe’s utopias are practicable anywhere, anytime. Of course, we still have to try. Do nothing and we get dystopias. Extrapolated from the present, they project a future that might seem inevitable, pulling us forward as if by tractor beam. For Margaret Atwood, this is literature that deals with “things that really could happen”. The great power of utopias is to disrupt our surrender to orthodoxy, freeing us to understand the status quo as contingent, not predetermined, as changeable, not inevitable. And by smuggling utopia home, Defoe unsettles our notion of the totality of state power, the power to which his utopias are opposed. Perhaps the seeds of utopia are within us already. Drawing on Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas argues, “The essential element in utopia is . . . desire — the desire for a better way of being.” By this light, utopia becomes only natural human longing. What we need these days is a new literature to express this longing and give it shape and detail. All the better if it can show us alternatives close at hand. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 25, 2017

J. H. Pearl

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:05.704322

gustav-wunderwalds-paintings-of-weimar-berlin

Gustav Wunderwald’s Paintings of Weimar Berlin By Mark Hobbs May 31, 2017 The Berlin of the 1920s is often associated with a certain image of excess and decadence, but it was a quite different side of the city — the sobriety and desolation of its industrial and working-class districts — which came to obsess the painter Gustav Wunderwald. Mark Hobbs explores. Berlin in June 1945 was not at all a pleasant place to be. As the dust settled on what was left of the city, blown to smithereens and now occupied by Russian and Allied forces, the landscape painter Gustav Wunderwald died from water poisoning in a hospital in the western suburb of Charlottenburg. He was sixty-three years old. In the seventy years or so that have passed since his death, the city that Wunderwald painted over and again during the years of the Weimar Republic has been divided, rebuilt, reunified, and revived. And yet, despite the waves of history that have beat relentlessly, remorselessly against Berlin, were he alive today, Wunderwald would still recognise many aspects of the city that he painted during the late twenties. And now, with the lapsing of copyright on his paintings in many parts of the world, digital copies of these paintings are becoming more widely available, making it easier to view his work, and to better appreciate an artist who deserves wider recognition. Born in Kalk, an industrial suburb on the outskirts of Cologne, Wunderwald experienced first-hand the modern, industrialised city from a young age. Showing early signs of a proficiency in painting, he undertook a two-year apprenticeship under the guidance of the painter Wilhelm Kuhn. Wunderwald quickly found his niche in theatrical and stage set design, taking a job as a scenery painter in Gotha in 1899. For the next thirteen years, his skills led him through a succession of jobs in a variety of cities. After a year in Gotha, he spent four years in Berlin (1900–1904) working at the studio of Georg Hartig and Company, where he specialised in theatrical set painting. From Berlin, Wunderwald moved to Stockholm, and then onwards to Düsseldorf, Innsbruck, and Freiberg over the course of the next eight years, before moving back to Berlin in 1912 to work as a stage designer at the German Opera House. In 1915, Wunderwald was conscripted into the German army. Training in Königsberg was followed by despatch to Macedonia, as part of a replacement battalion for the German Army’s 43rd Infantry. Wunderwald was fortunate in that the Macedonian Front was a stable one, which saw little of the bloodshed that characterised both the Western and Eastern Fronts. Wunderwald even had time to paint pictures of the Macedonian landscape and towns that he saw, giving him the opportunity to hone his distinctive palette of dark colours. In the wake of Germany’s defeat in 1918 he returned to Berlin, where he sought to establish himself as an independent artist, using his Charlottenburg apartment as a studio. Some eight years later, in 1926, Wunderwald’s persistence paid off when he came to the attention of Berlin gallery owner Karl Nierendorf and the prominent art critic Paul Westheim. Later that year, seven of Wunderwald’s paintings appeared in an exhibition entitled Das Gesicht von Berlin (The Face of Berlin) at Nierendorf’s gallery. To coincide with the exhibition, Westheim wrote a lead article on Wunderwald in his own art journal Das Kunstblatt, reproducing several works by the artist.1 For a few brief years, Wunderwald’s urban landscapes attracted attention in high places. Among those who brought his works were Gustav Böß, then mayor of Berlin, and the screenwriter Hans Kyser, writer of the script for F. W. Murnau’s 1926 filmic adaptation of Faust. Wunderwald continued to paint and exhibit until 1934, but without doubt his most prolific phase, and the period in which he produced his very best works, was between 1926 and 1929, when he repeatedly painted scenes from Berlin’s industrial areas. He worked as a film colourist for the German film conglomerate Ufa from 1934 until his death in 1945. Wunderwald’s oeuvre consists chiefly of landscapes, many of which depict Berlin and its surroundings. The grey streets of the city’s working-class areas, to the north of the city centre, are just as often depicted as the cleaner, airier streets of the city’s affluent west end. Rural landscapes also figure, including views of Berlin’s lakes and the countryside around the Havel river. Despite the variety of scenes, it is for his depictions of Berlin’s working-class areas that Wunderwald is best known, largely thanks to Westheim’s article in Das Kunstblatt, in which he praised the artist’s “unromantic and objective [sachlich] approach” to the “bare and unprepossessingly rough world” of Berlin’s industrial neighbourhoods. Subsequent art historical writings have continued to associate Wunderwald with the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) style of painting that emerged during the Weimar Republic, in which urban landscapes — with their typology of tenements, smokestacks, gasometers, and railway lines — were a dominant genre.2 Wunderwald’s paintings of Berlin’s working-class neighbourhoods have an enigmatic quality about them. They employ a sooty palette of warm browns and greys, and have a stillness and architectural solidity to them that can perhaps be accounted for by the artist’s prior experience as a painter of theatrical scenery. One could well image scenes such as Fabrik von Loewe & Co. or Brücke über die Ackerstraße as backdrops to theatrical adaptations of Weimar-era novels like Alfred Döblin’s Berliner Alexanderplatz, Hans Fallada’s Little Man What Now?, or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Amidst the tenement blocks, factories, smokestacks, and advertising hoardings, Wunderwald found no shortage of subjects to paint. In a letter to a friend, written in the winter of 1926, he wrote: “Sometimes I stagger back as if drunk from my wandering through Berlin; there are so many impressions that I have no idea which way to go.”3 Wunderwald, describing his search for inspiring scenes to paint on the streets of the city, was not the first and by no means the last individual to find themselves overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Berlin. His description of feeling drunk through sensory overload brings to mind fellow Berliner and sociologist Georg Simmel’s description of the “intensification of nervous stimulation” that the modern city-dweller encountered on the streets of the metropolis.4 Most urban inhabitants, argued Simmel, adopted a blasé attitude in order to protect themselves from the excess of sights, sounds, and movement encountered in the urban public sphere. By contrast, some individuals — like Wunderwald — consciously chose to immerse themselves in the tumult of the big city, wandering around its streets in a state of rapture, just as Baudelaire had done in Paris half a century earlier. Wunderwald was not the only person wandering the streets of Berlin in search of inspiration during the late 1920s. Writers like Siegfried Kracauer, Franz Hessel, and Joseph Roth were also on the prowl, attracted to the city’s relentless pace of change, and in search of subjects worthy of writing about in the newspaper feuilletons. These flâneurs, like Wunderwald, wandered back and forth through the streets of Berlin’s urban landscape, obsessing over the ways in which the scenes that they encountered had endured and changed. In late 1932, the writer Siegfried Kracauer recounted his surprise and sadness upon finding out that a favourite café on the Kurfürstendamm had shut down. Kracauer’s first inclination that something is wrong comes when he tries to open the door, only to find it locked. Startled, he peers through the window and sees that the interior is empty. Surely, thinks Kracauer, it must have been cleared out overnight, as the premises had been lit up just the previous evening. “Or”, he asks, questioning his ability to adequately recollect the passage of time, “am I deluding myself?” Walter Benjamin also acutely felt the shock of change upon the streets of Berlin. He explored them in his text A Berlin Chronicle, which he claimed was not so much an autobiographical account of his childhood, than an account of the experience of place, “of a space, of moments and discontinuities.”5 Berlin was — and still is — a city of “moments and discontinuities”. In 1910, the architectural critic Karl Scheffler wrote of Berlin as “always becoming, never being”.6 Scheffler’s phrase, oft-quoted thanks to its enduring relevance, referred to the city’s rapid growth throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. When the city became the capital of a unified Germany in 1871, it was already well on the way to becoming one of the new nation’s most important industrial centres, thanks to its burgeoning railway construction industry. From 1890 onwards the city’s rapid growth was further bolstered by a new electrical engineering industry, spearheaded by Emil Rathenau and his Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft (AEG). Between 1871 and 1910 Berlin’s population jumped from 824,000 to over two million inhabitants.7 A large proportion of the new inhabitants were immigrants from the surrounding provinces, who moved to Berlin in search of work in industrial districts such as Wedding, Moabit, and Prenzlauer Berg, districts characterised by long streets of densely populated tenements and factories. The city that Scheffler wrote of was that very same encountered by Wunderwald during his first stay in Berlin between 1900 and 1904, and this sense of constant flux is key to developing a better understanding of Wunderwald’s portraits of the city. Thanks to his frequent tendency to specify the places he painted in the titles he gave to his works, and with the aid of the city’s digitised address books, it is possible to look at the paintings he produced of the city in the twenties and figure out what the same scenes looked like years earlier, when he first saw them (if he did at all). What’s clear from such an exercise is that in many cases significant changes had taken place in the scenes that he painted. This is best illustrated in a 1927 painting by Wunderwald of Travemünder Straße, in the north Berlin neighbourhood of Gesundbrunnen. Travemünder Straße was a relatively new street, having been constructed in 1906; that is, after Wunderwald had departed Berlin for the first time. In order to lay out the new street, Berlin’s municipal authorities partially demolished one of the city’s most ostentatiously decorated tenements, built in the 1890s and known as the Luisenhaus, the rear of which can be seen at the right of the painting. In spite of the wholesale destruction of the city during the Second World War, it is still possible to visit some of the streets that Wunderwald painted in the 1920s, and recognise the scenes he depicted. Any tour would have to include a trip to the northern district of Wedding, to see the monumental iron railway bridge that weighs heavily over Ackerstraße, the busy street intersection of Müllerstraße and Seestraße, and factory buildings and tenements on Lindowerstraße. Given how much has survived and how much has changed — moments and discontinuities — I like to think that Wunderwald would be happy to wander about present-day Berlin, a city that remains in a perpetual state of flux, just as it was in his own day. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 31, 2017

Mark Hobbs

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:06.725685

richard-hakluyt-and-early-english-travel

Richard Hakluyt and Early English Travel By Nandini Das October 26, 2016 The Principal Navigations, Richard Hakluyt's great championing of Elizabethan colonial exploration, remains one of the most important collections of English travel writing ever published. As well as the escapades of famed names such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, Nandini Das looks at how the book preserves many stories of lesser known figures that surely would have been otherwise lost. In June 1586, William Harborne, the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court at Istanbul, wrote a letter. It was a tricky matter that he was trying to negotiate — the release of a few Englishmen taken prisoner by the Ottomans. The person who would decide the fate of the prisoners was Uluç Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor (or Beglerbeg of Algiers), himself a European Christian renegade, a Calabrian who had risen from the rank of an Ottoman oar slave to become the hero of the Battle of Lepanto and the Ottoman High Admiral. Harborne’s efforts to free the English prisoners had already made him deeply unpopular with the Beglerbeg, but Harborne was not writing to him. His letter was addressed instead to the Beglerbeg’s Eunuch and Treasurer, Assan Aga, and he wrote as one Englishman to another. Referring to the Biblical story of Joseph and his brothers in Egypt, “I trust you be ordained another Joseph”, he writes, “to folow his example in true pietie, in such sort that notwithsta[n]ding your body be subject to Turkish thraldom, yet your vertuous mind free fro[m] those vices”. In return, he would be assured of the favour of Elizabeth I and the gratitude of Harborne and his countrymen, “wherby both my selfe & others in that place having found you in all good offices faithfully affectionated, may in like case performe the like towards you, when & where you may have occasion to use me”. We do not know whether the prisoners received their freedom. Neither do we know what happened to Assan Aga, the recipient of that letter. He is only seen again, looking back at the viewer in full Turkish costume, in a chance portrait made two years later (ca. 1588) in a German traveller’s notebook. But thirteen years after Harborne wrote his letter, an English book would preserve at least a trace of who he was and who he used to be. Within its pages, a whole history of adventure, captivity, and transformation of a young man from Bristol, Samson Rowlie, son of Francis Rowlie, is condensed in a single terse headnote: “To Assan Aga, Eunuch & Treasurer to Hassan Bassa king of Alger, which Assan Aga was the sonne of Fran. Rowlie of Bristow merchant, taken in the Swalow.” Harborne’s letter to the English renegade working behind the scenes of Ottoman government comes to us within the pages of what is perhaps the greatest collection of travel writing ever to be put together in any language, with a title as sonorous as the ambition behind it: The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Over Land to the Most Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of These 1500 Years: Divided into Three Several Parts According to the Positions of the Regions Whereunto They Were Directed; the First Containing the Personall Travels of the English unto Indæa, Syria, Arabia . . . the Second, Comprehending the Worthy Discoveries of the English Towards the North and Northeast by Sea, as of Lapland . . . the Third and Last, Including the English Valiant Attempts in Searching Almost all the Corners of the Vaste and New World of America . . . Whereunto is Added the Last Most Renowned English Navigation Round About the Whole Globe of the Earth. In years that followed, The Principal Navigations would become, in many ways, a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial ambitions, but it also serves as a unique record of figures and voices, of lives and experiences like that of Samson Rowlie, that could so easily otherwise have been lost. It seems appropriate to celebrate it this year, the 400th anniversary of the death of the man who compiled it almost single-handedly, and in the process helped to lay the foundations of a moderately-sized island nation’s rather disproportional global influence and presence in the furthest corners of the world. Richard Hakluyt (1553–November 23, 1616), the orphaned second son of a Welsh family that had settled in Hertfordshire a few generations ago and supported in his studies through the benevolence of the state and guild scholarships, was introduced to the wonders of geography as a young boy through the chance glimpse of “an universal Mappe” lying on the desk of his older cousin and guardian. Later, Hakluyt would tell the story of how that impromptu lesson in the new advances in geography had ended with the Bible; his cousin and namesake, Richard Hakluyt Senior, had called upon the verses of Psalm 107, that speak of those who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” It was a claim that would have rung true for Hakluyt, growing up at a time when the expansion of European influence and trade across the world was well under way. Elsewhere in Europe, a roll-call of great names that would become familiar to schoolchildren in ages to come had been accumulating for some time, from Marco Polo’s late thirteenth-century expeditions to China, to Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India and the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World in the late fifteenth century, but those figures and narratives were merely indicative of a significantly wider surge of global awareness within Europe. English participation in that great surge, however, as an older and wiser Hakluyt would come to realise, was piecemeal, under-funded, and disorganised. English seafaring expertise was not in short supply; if the exploits of Hakluyt’s contemporaries like Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Humphrey Gilbert himself were not enough to prove their credentials, the English victory over the Spanish Armada campaign of 1588 — albeit with significant assistance from bad weather and bad tactics on the part of the Spanish — was testimony enough. But the Armada also illuminated the problems that plagued English seafaring and its future. The English fleet was an extemporary mixture of vessels, with the navy reinforced by hired and volunteer merchantmen and boats that were often better furnished and victualled than the notoriously ill-furnished royal ships. It was manned by sailors driven by very different incentives (from untried noblemen to privateers, merchant-adventurers, and fishermen volunteers), and led by men constantly fighting a losing battle against a seriously cash-strapped Exchequer and state support that either came too late or was absent altogether. The Principal Navigations was driven by Hakluyt’s acknowledgement of that neglect. In his dedicatory letter to Elizabeth I’s Principal Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, he tells the story of how, during his only trip abroad to the French court in 1583–88 to serve as chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador, he had “both heard in speech, and read in books other nations miraculously extolled for their discoveries and notable enterprises by sea, but the English of all others for their sluggish security, and continuall neglect of the like attempts [. . .] either ignominiously reported, or exceedingly condemned.” Yet there were “few or none” who were able or willing to respond to that insult, and no one cared “to recommend to the world, the industrious labors, and painefull travels of our country men”. Hakluyt’s response, first in the folio volume of three parts in 1589 and then in the hugely expanded three monumental volumes of the second edition in 1598–1600, was meant above all to be a commemoration of those men. “For, which of the kings of this land before her Majesty, had theyr banners ever seene in the Caspian sea?” he asks rhetorically in that letter to Walsingham. Which of them hath ever dealt with the Emperor of Persia as her Majesty hath done, and obtained for her merchants large and loving privileges? who ever saw before this regiment, an English Ligier in the stately porch of the Grand Signor at Constantinople? who ever found English Consuls and Agents at Tripolis in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at Balsara, and which is more, who ever heard of an Englishman at Goa before now? what English shippes did heretofore ever anker in the mighty river of Plate? passe and repasse the unpassable (in former opinion) straight of Magellan, range along the coast of Chili, Peru, and all the backside of Nova Hispania, further than any Christian ever passed, travers the mighty bredth of the South sea, land upon the Luzones in despight of the enemy, enter into alliance, amity, and traffike with the princes of the Moluccaes, and the Isle of Java, double the famous Cape of Bona Speranza, arive at the Isle of Santa Helena, and last of al returne home most richly laden with the commodities of China, as the subjects of this now flourishing monarchy have done? Hakluyt’s paean of praise is quite an effective preview of the treasures in store within the pages of his volume, but what made The Principal Navigations both unusual and path-breaking was not just its immense range or its focus (Hakluyt promised in his introductory letter to the reader that he would “meddle in this worke with the Navigations onely of our owne nation”) — it was its approach. When Hakluyt came to compile his collection, he had, essentially, two models to follow. The first of these were the books published by writers like the German geographer Sebastian Münster, who had built their reputations by compiling what Hakluyt rather waspishly dismissed in The Principal Navigations as “wearie volumes . . . of universall Cosmographie”. These were magisterial geographical descriptions of the world seen through the heuristic lens of Christian doctrine, which mixed classical and medieval authorities, often fairly indiscriminately, with snippets of data gathered from contemporary travel. The second was offered by European scholars like Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, or the English Richard Eden. These were men whom Hakluyt admired, who depended far more on current first-hand accounts (although often through translation and summary) than on the second-hand redactions of the old cosmographies. But they focused mostly on non-English sources. Beyond these texts in print, however, thousands of documents circulated in private correspondence at home and abroad, and in the papers of the English trading companies: a store of both foreign and English voices, fleeting, scattered, incomplete, immensely vulnerable to both time and human carelessness. These are the voices that The Principal Navigations preserves. Hakluyt’s advertised aim, as he declares in his preface, was to allow “those men which were the paynefull and personall travellers [to] reape that good opinion, and just commendation which they have deserved, and further that every man might answere for himselfe, justifie his reports, and stand accountable for his owne doings, [he had] referred every voyage to [its] Author, which both in person hath performed, and in writing hath left the same”. “Whatsoever testimonie I have found in any author of authoritie appertaining to my argument, either stranger or naturall”, he notes, “I have recorded the same word for word, with his particular name and page of booke where it is extant.” Among the pages of The Principal Navigations, therefore, we find texts like Thomas Stevens’ letter to his father. In the correspondence, Stevens — an English Catholic who escaped to Rome to train as a Jesuit priest, and became the first Englishman in 1579 to reach Goa — described what lay in store for sailors in the tricky passage around the Cape of Good Hope: “Their gums waxe great and swell, and they are faine to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the bodies becommeth sore, and so benummed, that they cannot stirre hand nor foot, and so they die of weaknesse, others fall into fluxes and agues, and die thereby.” A decade later, in his account of a journey to Benin in 1588 in search of the lucrative pepper trade, Anthony Ingram describes how after a long journey and despite collecting 64 serons (one seron is roughly 6–7 lbs) of pepper and 28 elephants’ teeth, they struggle to get the goods to the ship because the men are so weakened by “the disease of the fever”. There are wonders: Dionyse Settle’s first person account of Martin Frobisher’s 1577 voyage to northeastern Canada records a glimpse of icebergs and a dead narwhal, whose single tusk, “of length two yards lacking two inches,” made the sailors conclude that they had seen a “sea unicorn”. There is the tedium of travel and tragedy: Stephen (or István) Parmenius’ letter to Hakluyt himself, dated August 1583, records his disappointment on arrival at St John’s Harbour as a member of the crew on Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to Newfoundland. “The trees for the most part are Pynes”, Parmenius wrote, and “all the grasse here is long, and tall, and little differeth from ours.” There were no wonders, not even a single mermaid — even though they were supposed to be around (Theodore de Bry’s America would depict them at St John’s Harbour a few years later). And the “island which your men call Penguin because of the multitude of birdes of the same name”? Well, grumbled Parmenius, “wee neither sawe any birds, nor drew neere to the land, the winds serving for our course directed to another place”. He was referring, of course, to the Great Auk — unrelated to the penguin, although it was the first bird to be called penguin — which was to become extinct by the 1840s due to overenthusiastic hunting by early explorers. When they had stocked up on supplies “in this place”, Parmenius hoped, “we purpose by the helpe of God to passe towards the South”, to the greater things “that are reported of those Countreys, which we go to discover.” But Hakluyt would have known the end of that particular story. Bookish, earnest young Parmenius was lost at sea just weeks after writing his letter, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself. Only two of the five ships had returned, carrying their own reports and those of the lost men. Hakluyt organised such documents alongside more formal, historical accounts and reports, chronologically and in three parts according to region (so the first document is an account of King Arthur’s supposed conquest of Iceland in C.E. 517, and the last is Hakluyt’s own translation of a report on Spanish navigation that was provided by a captured Spanish pilot Pedro Diaz, dated February 1586). He also divided them according to type, under two separate headings: the “Voyages” themselves, and official documents, information, and correspondence connected with those voyages, the “Ambassages, Treatises, Priviledges, Letters and observations” that often supplement, interrogate, and occasionally contradict the stories told in the narratives that accompany them. His first edition in 1589 ran to over eight hundred densely-packed folio pages. By 1600, the second edition had grown even bigger, running to over 1,760,000 words in three folio volumes and about two thousand pages. And this was not all. At the same time as he was collecting this huge expanse of material, others published their own accounts and translations with Hakluyt’s encouragement: Thomas Hariot, who wrote about his influence in The Briefe and True report of the new found land of Virginia (1590) and John Pory, who claimed that Hakluyt was “the onely man that mooued [him] to translate” John Leo Africanus’ History of Africa, were two among many. Hakluyt’s own translations included, among others, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’ enormously influential treatise, the Mare liberum (The Free Sea or The Freedom of the Seas), which argued that no nation could impose restrictions on seafaring trade since the sea did not belong to any single nation. His reports on trade opportunities and commodities, navigation conditions, and local inhabitants were commissioned by London’s growing trading companies like the Virginia Company and the East India Company, while The Principal Navigations became one of those books that their ships were recommended to carry as essential reading. By the time of his death, Hakluyt’s work and advocacy of Protestant English settlements and colonies in the New World, both in writing and as an advisor to the state and the trading companies, had become the cornerstone of English colonial and imperial plans and established the legacy of English explorations in general. Hakluyt died on November 23, 1616. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, although the exact location of the burial site is now lost. At the height of the British Empire, Victorian scholars like the historian J. A. Froude understandably celebrated his work as the great “prose epic of the modern English nation”, and the eponymous Hakluyt Society was established with the aim to follow his example in publishing accounts of travel and exploration, an aim it continues to pursue to this day. In recent years, however, both The Principal Navigations and Hakluyt himself have started to demand our attention yet again, but perhaps not for quite the same reasons. Hakluyt’s legacy was not just a nationalistic celebration of English imperial ambitions. The Principal Navigations memorialises not just the successes of English travels, the great figures and great wonders, but also the elusive traces of those who disappeared, the disappointment of the non-event, the tedium of travel, and the absence of wonder. Beyond the great figures of Raleigh, Frobisher, and Gilbert, beyond the pioneering circumnavigations of Drake and Cavendish, Hakluyt’s collection stands testimony to the ordinary traveller and the individual experience of travel — fragile, unexpected, and so often hostage to fortune. From shadowy figures like Samson Rowlie, “taken in the Swallow” and transformed into Assan Aga, the Ottoman eunuch treasurer, to voices like that of young Parmenius of Buda, who had hoped to write a new Latin epic, did not get to see the penguins, and sunk with a ship called The Delight, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations bears witness to the lives of hundreds of travellers, without whom the story of “English” travels and voyages would be much the poorer. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 26, 2016

Nandini Das

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:07.224077

decoding-the-morse-the-history-of-16th-century-narcoleptic-walruses

Decoding the Morse The History of 16th-Century Narcoleptic Walruses By Natalie Lawrence June 14, 2017 Amongst the assorted curiosities described in Olaus Magnus' 1555 tome on Nordic life was the morse — a hirsute, fearsome walrus-like beast, that was said to snooze upon cliffs while hanging by its teeth. Natalie Lawrence explores the career of this chimerical wonder, shaped by both scholarly images of a fabulous North and the grisly corporeality of the trade in walrus skins, teeth, and bone. To the far north, on the coast of Norway, there lives a mighty creature, as big as an elephant, called the walrus or morse, perhaps so named for its sharp bite; for if it glimpses a man on the seashore and can catch him, it jumps on him swiftly, rends him with its teeth, and kills him in an instant. A woodcut of a four-footed, boar-tusked, thickly whiskered creature clinging to a cliff-face accompanied this description of the rosmaro or morse in Olaus Magnus’ Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (A History of the Northern Peoples, 1555). The Swedish ecclesiastic had never himself seen such a fearsome beast, but as part of an exercise in the marketing of marvels, the accounts of other respected scholars were, if anything, of rather more value. They certainly allowed Magnus to create a more fantastical product, which could only suit his aims better. The de Gentibus built on Magnus’ lavish Carta Marina (1539), one of the first and most spectacular maps of the North to be published. Across the land masses are depicted the strange peoples, unusual creatures, and odd land formations Magnus described in his text: hunters spearing bear-like seals on the ice floes and women milking reindeer, whilst fires belch from the cavernous pits of “Islandia” and fierce tribes war with each other across the ice. The seas are filled with ferocious sea beasts disporting themselves, sending great waterspouts into the air, writhing around ships, and playfully mauling one another. These images were largely the fantastical products of generations of scholarly minds. Magnus wanted to present the North as an impenetrable region of wonders and marvels — flesh-eating Scricfinns, magicians, vast whirlpools, and flaming volcanoes — at the very edge of the known world. Importantly, he wanted to portray wonders that were resonant to an audience in Catholic southern Europe. He needed support from the church against the threat of Protestantism that encroached from vocal Protestant clerics. Bringing his neglected corner of the world to the attention of the Catholic powers in the South was Magnus’ way of demonstrating that it was a part of God’s realm worth protecting. To do so, he used practical, local information, but, ironically, also based much of his description on classical scholarship and southern European perceptions of the North. He was reigniting images of the “septentrional lands” rather than generating them: selling mythologies back to the traditions that had created them. The morse was one such arctic wonder. Magnus went on to relate how: Using their tusks, these animals clamber right up to the cliff-tops, as if they were going up a ladder, in order to crop the sweet, dew-moistened grass, and then roll back down into the sea again, unless, in the meantime, they have been overcome with a heavy drowsiness and fall asleep as they cling to the rocks. Hunters would sneak up on the napping behemoths, tie ropes around their tails, and, from a safe distance, wake the animals with a hail of stones. The startled morses, flinging themselves into the ocean to escape, were stripped of their valuable skins, and, weakened by loss of blood, became easy prey for the hunters. Magnus acquired this image from a long lineage of clifftop snoozers. The Catholic bishop Albertus Magnus had described in his De Animalibus (1250) “hairy whales” with “the longest tusks” by which they “hang from the rocks of cliffs when they sleep”. In order to catch them: a fisherman, coming close, separates as much of its skin as he can from the blubber near its tail. He passes a strong rope through the part he has loosened and he then ties the ropes to rings fixed into a mountain or to very strong stakes or trees. Aroused, the fish, as it tries to escape, draws off its skin from its tail down along its back and head and leaves it behind . . . it is captured in a weakened state, either swimming bloodless in the water or lying half-alive on the shore . . . In the early sixteenth century, a Polish diplomat, Maciej z Miechowa, had described the “mors” that climbed cliffs with its long teeth1 and the Scottish historian Hector Boece had described “an grete fische” in the “Orknays” that was bound by the tail while asleep, and died from its wounds while struggling to free itself.2 The walrus was a relatively unfamiliar creature in sixteenth-century Europe, despite the fact that walrus parts had been circulating for hundreds of years through trade with Greenland, Iceland, and Russia. The medieval Lewis chessmen, featuring shocked-looking bishops and terrified pawn soldiers gnawing at their shields, were made from walrus tusk during the twelfth century. This trade was reflected in the European names for the walrus. The name, morse, was borrowed from the Russian and Lapp name morsz, whilst the Scandinavians and Dutch used Rosmarus and Walrusch, probably derived from the Old Norse hvalross (hairy whale). One illustrious piece of walrus to make its way south in the sixteenth century was a head sent to Pope Leo X in 1521 by Bishop Walkendorf of Trondheim. On its journey, it was painted by an artist in an effigy on the wall of Strasbourg town hall, accompanied by a poem: In Norway they call me “walrus”,But I am “cetus dentatus”.My wife is called Balaena.I am well known in the Eastern SeaI make mighty thunder in the sea . . .To battle and fight is nothing to me,One finds many thousands of my comrades . . .. . . Had I lived my life to the fullI would not have devoted it to whales.The bishop of Nidrosia had me stabbed on the shoreThe Pope Leo had my head sentTo Rome where many men saw me. This doleful lament from a slain whale-husband is a rare personification of an animal about which few people in Europe were very certain. In the same year, perhaps this very same walrus head was subject of a sketch by Albrecht Dürer, who at the time was travelling the Netherlands making and selling prints and drawings. Tusked amphibious beasts, that may or may not have been based on walruses, existed in various sixteenth-century scholarly works. Some of these harked back to classical authorities: Pliny had described a “sea-elephant”, with which the Arctic beast sometimes became identified. Disentangling circumstantial similarity and actual representation is not easy. The elephant-like “morsus” represented on the 1516 world map of Martin Waldseemüller, was most probably the result of such confusing names and a mainland trade of mammoth teeth through Russia. Once Europeans began hunting walruses in the Arctic themselves in the late sixteenth century, however, undeniably walrus-like creatures began to appear in natural histories. This wasn’t a simple process of “discovery” of walruses. Nobody except the hunters who killed walruses on the Arctic ice saw living walruses: carcasses were immediately channelled through the marketplaces of northern European shores into apothecary shops, curiosity cabinets, and natural histories. Walrus hides were carted off to the tanners and the ivory and bone sent for carving into combs and knife handles, or ground up. The blubber was rendered into soaps, lamp fuel, or cooking oil. Tusks and penis bones were sometimes gilded, carved, and polished for luxury sales to curiosity collectors. Apothecaries placed ground-up walrus tusk for sale alongside other exotic and costly medicinal substances: walrus ivory was often billed as possessing similar qualities to “unicorn horn”, a traditional panacea against all poisons. “Unicorn horn” could itself, in reality, be any of a number of powdered, osseous things, from narwhal or walrus tusks to elephant bone. As long as the apothecary was of good repute, nobody would be any the wiser. They certainly weren’t going to be protected from poison, whatever species the powder contained. Walruses were physically and metaphorically dismantled and reassembled; they were cut up into transportable parts by hunters and put back together in various guises by scholars who constructed their very own walrus-creatures from walrus artifacts and older textual accounts. These quasi-mythical images had lives of their own. Magnus’ image of narcoleptic cliff hangers was particularly long-lived. Parts of walrus images were also broken up and scattered into other depictions. Imposing, walrus-like tusks or bristly manes were featured by many cartographic denizens of treacherous oceans. Elements of the morse were used in depictions of monstrous sea-beasts such as the “sea-pig”, “sea-boar”, “sea-wolf” and “sea-lion” in various books of monstrosity. There were, in fact, a number of first-hand accounts from hunters published in this period describing the slaying of hundreds of “see-horses” on the Arctic ice, heroic battles with enraged and red-eyed creatures in the waters, followed by the heavy work of flensing (skinning) and dismantling the slain beasts. But very few scholars seemed interested in these kinds of images of what a walrus was, preferring the monsters depicted in more authoritative, erudite accounts. One of the most important was by the prolific Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner, in his Historiae Animalium (Vol. IV, 1558). Gessner worked to weave all the material he could find on anything remotely walrusy to construct the most complete account of this creature, including Magnus’ description. Gessner cast a sceptical eye over his sources: he was less than certain of the accuracy of Magnus’ fantastical account, while the finned and four-limbed image from the Strasbourg town hall image was clearly an extrapolation, having been produced from a severed head. The walrus existed only as a scattered set of body parts and imagery, insufficient material for Gessner to determine the creature’s nature, even had he wanted to. Which he probably didn’t. Just like Magnus’ northern wonders, monsters that retained an air of intangible mystery sold rather well to the markets of curious punters. Gessner’s account was exhaustive, but did not provide a definitive “walrus”. It was only in 1612 that a whole, living walrus was brought to mainland Europe. A walrus pup arrived in Amsterdam, along with the stuffed skin of its mother, on a Dutch hunting ship. It was described by Dr Everhard Vorstius of Leiden University, as a “sea-beast . . . much like a seal” with holes for ears and a bristly beard. This small animal “roared like a boar” and was placed in a barrel of water to relax. He was fed porridge oats, at which he sucked slowly and grunted as he ate. Vorstius finished with the ominous mention that the walrus’ fat was rather “toothsome”. This porridge-slurping pup was co-opted into the roster of morse images in later descriptions, but sat awkwardly with the fierce-toothed behemoths. It certainly did not replace them: they were far too powerful and too resonant with traditional preconceptions of what the Arctic must be like. The walrus remained a nebulous beast from an intangible and wonder-filled North, long after Magnus purported to reveal its secrets. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 14, 2017

Natalie Lawrence

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:07.715781

w-b-o-shaughnessy-and-the-introduction-of-cannabis-to-modern-western-medicine

W. B. O’Shaughnessy and the Introduction of Cannabis to Modern Western Medicine By Sujaan Mukherjee April 19, 2017 Cataleptic trances, enormous appetites, and giggling fits aside, W. B. O'Shaughnessy's investigations at a Calcutta hospital into the potential of medical marijuana — the first such trials in modern medicine — were largely positive. Sujaan Mukherjee explores the intricacies of this pioneering research and what it can tell us more generally about the production of knowledge in colonial science. In 1833, a twenty-four-year-old Edinburgh graduate arrived in India, an assistant surgeon in the East India Company. He had failed to acquire a license under the London College of Physicians and Surgeons, but had already established himself as an exciting young medical researcher, authoring an important paper on cholera following an outbreak in Europe. This man was William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, an Irish physician who would — over the next few years working in India — make significant contributions to the history of research in electricity, telegraphy, pottery, and, his primary discipline, medicine. The colonial peripheries had no shortage of impressive polymaths, but what sets O’Shaughnessy apart is the manner in which, while conducting research in his many areas of interest, he not only tapped into elaborate local knowledge networks and structures, but also rigorously documented them, thoroughly crediting his sources both bibliographic and human. O’Shaughnessy also stands out on account of what was, arguably, his most significant contribution to medicine: the claim that cannabis could be used as a medicinal drug. As an intoxicant cannabis was fairly common in India, as O’Shaughnessy noted, but he demonstrated its potential use in a medical context, particularly as an anaesthetic. The papers on his experiments with the plant were published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in late 1839 — and were also read in front of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta in October of that year. In them we find detailed records of his prescient experiments and a fine example of his unique style of research. His first series of cannabis experiments were conducted on an unfortunate menagerie of animals (fish, vultures, and storks, amongst others, ) and also, perhaps not without controversy today, a few children — all subjected to various preparations and extracts of Cannabis indica. The first experiment, for instance, involved administering “ten grains of Nipalese [sic] Churrus, dissolved in spirit” to a “middling sized dog”. O’Shaughnessy’s breathless notes read: “In about half an hour he became stupid and sleepy, dozing at intervals, starting up, wagging his tail as if extremely contented, he ate some food greedily, on being called to he staggered to and fro, and his face assumed a look of utter and helpless drunkenness.”1 O’Shaughnessy then tried variants of these initial treatments on a number of maladies. He describes the effect on four patients suffering from rheumatism, on a case of hydrophobia, and on cholera and tetanus victims before issuing a warning about the delirium that may be occasioned by inappropriate dosage. Some of the reports wouldn’t be out of place as descriptions of a merry stoner’s night in (minus the video games). One rheumatism sufferer, to whom “half a grain of Hemp resin was given in a little spirit . . . became talkative and musical, told several stories, and sang songs to a circle of highly delighted auditors, ate the dinner of two persons . . ., sought also for other luxuries I can scarcely venture to allude to, and finally fell soundly asleep, and so continued till the following morning ”. Perhaps not unsurprisingly the next day the patient, “begged hard for a repetition of the medicine”.2 Elsewhere O’Shaughnessy describes a somewhat surreal episode in which a rheumatism patient administered with cannabis enters a state of “catalepsy”, whereupon his rigid limbs could be moved only with the help of medical staff, who could place them in “every imaginable attitude” where they would remain “no matter how contrary to the natural influence of gravity” — all while the patient remained completely “insensible”. The commotion of events ended up rousing a second patient, similarly dosed, who became “vastly amused at the statuelike attitudes” he witnessed, and then proceeded, after a sudden “loud peal of laughter” to exclaim that “four spirits were springing with his bed into the air”. After a subsequent “uncontrollable” fit of the giggles this second patient then took up the strange condition of the first, his arms and legs “remain[ing] in any desired position”. Despite the slightly chaotic scenes, within a day or so both patients were much relieved of their rheumatism, and in three days completely cured.3 Interestingly, it is while recording a failed treatment of hydrophobia that O’Shaughnessy notes one of the fundamental arguments for this medicine: even if it failed at curing the actual root of the illness, “at least one advantage was gained from the use of the remedy — the awful malady was stripped of its horrors”. If the illness was terminal, at least cannabis could enable the physician to “strew the path to the tomb with flowers”.4 The argument is not unfamiliar today, and indeed, in a prescient echo of more recent advocates of cannabis’ legalisation, O’Shaughnessy also downplays the drug’s supposed negative effects compared to certain other popular legal narcotics. He writes, “As to the evil sequelae so unanimously dwelt on by all writers, these did not appear to me so numerous, so immediate, or so formidable, as many which may be clearly traced to over-indulgence in other powerful stimulants or narcotics, viz. alcohol, opium, or tobacco.”5 The interest of O’Shaughnessy’s medical students was also clearly piqued. He reports that several ended up experimenting on themselves and describes in detail one particular auto-experiment by a “retiring lad of excellent habits” which, twenty minutes after ingestion, led to the “most amusing effects I ever witnessed”. I found him enacting the part of a Raja giving orders to his courtiers; he could recognize none of his fellow students or acquaintances; all to his mind seemed as altered as his own condition; he spoke of many years having passed since his student’s days; described his teachers and friends with a piquancy which a dramatist would envy; detailed the adventures of an imaginary series of years, his travels, his attainment of wealth and power. He entered on discussions on religious, scientific, and political topics, with astonishing eloquence, and disclosed an extent of knowledge, reading, and a ready apposite wit, which those who knew him best were altogether unprepared for. For three hours and upwards he maintained the character he at first assumed, and with a degree of ease and dignity perfectly becoming his high situation. A scene more interesting it would be difficult to imagine. It terminated nearly as rapidly as it commenced, and no headache, sickness, or other unpleasant symptom followed the innocent excess. 6 In and amongst these colourful accounts, O’Shaughnessy’s paper is peppered with references to other instances in which his fellow medical men had employed the administration of cannabis to alleviate patients’ symptoms. The list includes his cousin Richard O’Shaughnessy, Dr Bain of the Police Hospital, Mr O’Brien of the Native Medical Hospital, and not least, James Esdaile (another Edinburgh student, best known for his experiments with mesmerism at the Hooghly Imambarah College, which he recorded in his 1851 book Mesmerism in India). The historian Shrimoy Roy Chaudhury feels that it was the “conquest of pain in surgery” that granted British medicine historical credibility in India.7 Hemp played a key role in this. And veterinary science got involved as well — among notable experimenters in this field was the firm Hughes and Templar, who claimed to have cured three out of “five cases of horses suffering from tetanus” with the hemp resin.8 Before setting out the details of his experiments, O’Shaughnessy offers a background to the drug in four sections: its botanical character, popular uses, historical details, and medicinal properties. But he does all this with a little help from his friends: some regular and some, as that other great “generalist” Sherlock Holmes would call them, irregular. The network, as the following series of annotations to O’Shaughnessy’s article will demonstrate, is an incredibly wide and diverse one. For the historical and statistical data he thanks the following: “the distinguished traveller the Syed Keramut Ali, Mootawulee [guardian] of the Hooghly Imambarrah”, “Hakim Mirza Abdul Razes of Teheran”, Pandit Madhusudan Gupta, “the celebrated Kamalakantha Vidyalanka, the Pandit [sic] of the Asiatic Society”, and Mr DaCosta.9 Syed Keramut Ali, former Great Game “Newswriter” under Arthur Conolly in Kandahar, helped O’Shaughnessy with Persian references and a few manuscripts. Additional translation help may have also come from “Mr Da Costa”, who is presumably Lewis Da Costa, a polyglot and a prolific translator serving as assistant Persian translator to the Government of India in the 1840s. O’Shaughnessy wished also to appeal to Hindu authorities and the most obvious names listed in this regard are Madhusudan Gupta — celebrated as the first Indian to dissect a cadaver (though recent histories have questioned this claim) — and Kamalakantha Vidyalanka, who was appointed teacher of rhetoric at the Sanksrit College and became part of the British judicial system as a pundit. Vidyalanka appears to have had no direct link with medicine but provided O’Shaughnessy with a number of obscure Sanskrit references to the use of hemp, including a prohibition for Brahmins in particular found in the texts of Manu. While reaching out to his scholarly friends on the one hand, O’Shaughnessy also sought advice from the deputy superintendent of police, Mr McCann, on official surveys regarding the consumption of “gunjah”. But if he wanted to know about the daily lives of his consumers, he needed someone “irregular”. For such purposes he tapped into the experience of one Ameer, “the proprietor of a celebrated place of resort for Hemp devotees in Calcutta, and who is considered the best artist in his profession.” For understandable reasons, that is all we ever learn regarding the identity of Ameer.10 It is perhaps thanks to Ameer, that O’Shaughnessy’s report is so able to display an exceptionally close knowledge of the uses of the various extracts. While Sidhee, Subjee and Bang (“used with water as a drink”) is “chiefly used by the Mahomedans of the better classes”, Sidhee (“ground, mixed with black pepper, and a quart of cold water”) is the “favourite beverage of the Hindus who practice this vice”. Gunjah, on the other hand, is “used for smoking alone”, and one rupee weight mixed with dried tobacco “suffices for three persons”, although you find “four or five persons usually join in the debauch”. The demography is curious, especially in the case of Majoon, (a hemp confection which is “a compound of sugar, butter, flour, milk, and Sidhee or Bang”) which is consumed by all classes, “including the lower Portuguese or ‘Kala Feringhees,’ and especially their females”.11 For interested parties, let it be known O’Shaughnessy has provided ample details to try out your own nineteenth-century recipes. He distinguishes between each type of extract and offers specific descriptions of how they are prepared, although the one which he recommends in greatest detail is meant for medicinal use only. Inadvertently he also maps the availability of the finest quality of each kind — sourcing his churrus as he did from Nepal, thanks to Dr A. Campbell of the Bengal Medical Service, a man with the dubious distinction of changing the course of Darjeeling’s history when as superintendent he oversaw a huge population rise between 1839 and 1849. The first part of the article also offers a rare glimpse into the contemporary consumption habits — an account that differs in tone and content from the usual official surveys. If we discard the binary model often used to understand the exchange of knowledge (scientific, legal, or otherwise) between the colonial centres and peripheries, and turn to the idea of networks (as the historian Kapil Raj, for instance, has done), we realise that the networks that produce knowledge are much more complex than they appear at first glance. In W. B. O’Shaughnessy we have someone who is rigorous in noting down all the different sources of information that he taps into, and we realise that, upon closer inspection, even the nodes of a network give way to many other interconnected webs. In the thirty-one-page Report on the Investigation of Cases of Real and Supposed Poisoning (1841), found in the National Library of India (Kolkata), we see our doctor sitting in the centre of another web of intrigue. After a call-out, people sent O’Shaughnessy items ranging from “the remains of a chapattee, which is said to have been the cause of death of Dasi Bania” to “a stomach . . . and the small intestines with the contents thereof, all stated to have been removed from the body of a man” found dead in the Native Hospital. O’Shaughnessy, who was Chemical Examiner to the government, received mails from persons in different posts in the British government from all over Bengal. He would send back his reports with details of his chemical analysis, opining whether there may have been foul play. He often struggled with forms of poison (often with the common bish which is available at any Calcutta market) that were not yet recognised by Western medicine. O’Shaughnessy’s language seems to anticipate at times the medico-forensic phrasings of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson. He begins Case 12 thus: These are by far the most interesting cases which I have ever met with. The respectability of the individuals implicated; the extraordinary period which elapsed during which the bodies were exposed, without coffins, to the destroying influences of the heat and rains of Bengal; the curious changes which the poison underwent . . . constitute an array of circumstances scarcely surpassed in medico-legal interest by any but those of the celebrated Laffarge trial.12 This was not his first encounter with the science of criminal activity. In 1830, a young O’Shaughnessy arrived in London, struggling to find permanent employment. Soon after, urged by the editor of the Lancet, he published an article on “Poisoned Confectionary”, the result of an extensive study. Along with a Dr Green, he purchased “at several shops, different specimens of coloured confectionary, and of colourless articles wrapped in stained paper.” Each colour was analysed rigorously. The yellow, for instance, was understood to be a result of adulterating the candies with either “gamboges, massicot, Naples yellow, the chromate of lead, or vegetable lakes.”13 A report on the study was published in an 1831 issue of The Medico-chirurgical Review and Journal of Practical Medicine, in which the writer remarks: “Dr. O’Shaughnessy is evidently a clever chemist, and his industry appears equal to his talent in the department of human knowledge”.14 The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal published in the span of a few months two other experiments performed by O’Shaughnessy. In 1839 he reports on his use of the Galvanic battery for the “successful destruction of the wreck of the Equitable at Fultah Reach”, where the Sydney-bound ship “leaden with wheat, rice, rum, &c.,” had touched on the sand below and turned over “in six to seven fathoms of water”.15 The first one, however, anticipates his later work on telegraphy — a form of communication that would be taken seriously only after 1847, with Lord Dalhousie’s appointment as Governor General.16 At the Botanical Gardens in Shibpur (he already had cordial relations with the persons in charge, such as Nathaniel Wallich), he experimented with the first telegraph circuit. After laying the cables, the two ends starting and ending where he positioned himself, he used to a pair of modified watches “of the cheapest kind”. (This is before his visit to England where he learnt of the Morse.) “Round the second hand was placed a card dial laid off with three concentric circles divided each into twenty parts.” He omitted “vowels and superfluous letters” (reminiscent of today’s SMS truncations), and using this he successfully sent across messages. Each signal took about three minutes to transmit, and both watches were “then allowed to run to No. 1 or zero, and stopped”.17 Diagram of the telegraph system, featured in O’Shaughnessy’s “Memoranda relative to experiments on the communication of Telegraphic Signals by induced electricity” in Journal Of The Asiatic Society Of Bengal (1839) — Source. It is in his work on the telegraph system — and particularly his role in rebuilding it after it was largely destroyed in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 — that we can see more clearly the dubious nexus between such scientific projects and the endeavours of colonialism, a connection made more explicit at moments of political crisis. As far as O’Shaughnessy’s contribution to medicine is concerned, its correlation with colonial power is perhaps not as obvious. Yet it does contribute, even if unintentionally to the larger discourse of knowledge/power, relating to what Shiv Visvanathan and Ashis Nandy call the “industrial grid”. Western medicine, through sheer claim of objectivity, marginalised traditional, and subsequently termed, “folk medicine”, while at the same time deriving its legitimacy on foreign soil from references to indigenous texts and social practices, through Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic scholars and local practitioners. In this regard O’Shaughnessy was no exception. Rather than thinking only of centres (individual or institutional) of knowledge production in the colonies, we’d do better then to focus more on the complexity of networks and exchanges — the go-betweens, as Kapil Raj calls them — that played such a key role in the production of the colonial sciences. It is here, in light of such an approach, that the detailed notes left behind by William Brooke O’Shaughnessy prove so invaluable, offering a rare and honest glimpse into how such networks functioned. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 19, 2017

Sujaan Mukherjee

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:08.241886

lofty-only-in-sound-crossed-wires-and-community-in-19th-century-dreams

Lofty Only in Sound Crossed Wires and Community in 19th-Century Dreams By Alicia Puglionesi April 5, 2017 Alicia Puglionesi explores a curious case of supposed dream telepathy at the end of the US Civil War, in which old ideas about the prophetic nature of dreaming collided with loss, longing, and new possibilities of communication at a distance. In the predawn of July 21, 1865, a young man in Cambridge, Massachusetts, woke from a deep sleep with a strange phrase on his lips. “What they dare to dream of dare to die for”, he recalled saying to himself, before slipping back into unconsciousness, wondering dimly “whether [the words] really expressed a lofty thought, or were lofty only in sound.” Later that day, the man, who gave his name as Mr. W., was surprised to hear the line delivered from a podium by the famous poet James Russell Lowell at a Harvard commemoration ceremony for students killed in the Civil War. Lowell’s version replaced “die for” with “do” in order to fit the rhyme scheme, a discrepancy which left Mr W. pondering “whether I liked his sentiment or mine the most”.1 Decades later Mr. W. still recalled the coincidence vividly enough to submit his account to Harvard psychologist William James, “hoping that these reminisces may be amusing to your society” — that is, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), a group devoted to collecting and studying supernormal mental phenomena. Self-deprecation aside, Mr W. clearly saw more than mere amusement in this incident that he continued to ponder for so many years. Had a force more powerful than random chance actually transmitted Lowell’s as-of-yet unknown verse to Mr W. while he slept? Dreams so often feel trivial and momentous at the same time. They hold the promise of revelation if only one could pin down a face, a location — like the common dream of words on a page that dissolve just before their meaning registers. The history of dream interpretation is almost as slippery as dreams themselves; the practice spans cultures, but manifests in highly specific forms, shaped by particular ways of understanding the relationship between mind and world. In religious texts, dreams usually predict the future, like Jacob’s ladder or Pharaoh’s dream of famine in the book of Genesis. In their revelatory capacity, they can unite believers with the divine and connect members of faith communities. In other settings dreams can shed light upon past events, and even have legal standing, as in the famous “Greenbrier ghost” case of 1897, where a murdered woman appeared in her mother’s dreams to out her former husband as the killer.2 A major transition occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when religious, spiritual, and symbolic modes of dream interpretation were challenged by rationalist accounts that explained dreaming as a product of mental mechanisms. British philosopher David Hartley, in his 1749 Observations on Man, listed three mechanistic causes of dreaming that would become standard: “First, the impressions and ideas lately received, and particularly those of the preceding day. Secondly, the state of the body, particularly of the stomach and brain.” The third source of dream content was “association”, a law by which sensations and responses became emblazoned in the brain, which many Enlightenment thinkers proposed as the basis of learning and memory. During sleep, Hartley claimed, the mental law of association continued to operate, but without any sensory input and without the rudder of reason steering it. Thus unmoored, the brain “carried on from one thing to another” at the mercy of bodily fluctuations.3 The work of natural philosophers like Hartley signaled a concerted Enlightenment effort to debunk centuries of mysticism around dreams: American iconoclast Thomas Paine proclaimed in an 1807 essay that biblical prophecies were merely “riotous assemblage[s] of mis-shapen images and ranting ideas”, exploited by power-hungry priests to delude the people.4 His case never quite won out over the old mystical mode — instead, the two commingled, with natural and supernatural, medical and moral interpretations of dreams feeding into each other throughout the nineteenth century. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), when Scrooge announced to Marley’s ghost, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese”, he echoed Hartley and the medical authorities of his day.5 However, Dickens played it both ways, since Scrooge’s astral travels were also very real. Dickens demanded that Scrooge, and the reader, open their hearts to spiritual riches beyond the material realm of mere mustard and money. Dickens believed that dreams could tell us something meaningful, even if the message was mediated by physiology, and the broader public seemed to agree. Fortune-telling guides could assert a divine origin while also noting that “dreams which persons have in the beginning of the night, especially if they eat heavy or solid suppers, are not so much to be depended on.”6 Knowledge of physiology’s impact on the mind made it all the more fascinating to parse out where one ended and the other began. Anecdotes like Mr W’s flooded the American Society for Psychical Research throughout the 1880s and 1890s; they circulated in magazines, newspapers, and journals, where letter writers were just as keen as ever to discuss nocturnal visions. More than in times past, they were likely to take note of bodily states, and to speak of the mind as in some ways mechanical: an “intellectual apparatus”, a clock, engine, or camera. The new scientific psychology did not conquer older understandings of dreaming, but it helped to reshape the language of dreamers. The amusement Mr W felt about scooping the great poet James Russell Lowell was mixed with a genuine conviction that he received the line telepathically during a liminal state of consciousness. Psychologists speculated that thoughts had a basis in invisible vibrations or waves that acted upon the brain; if these waves did not respect the boundaries of the individual skull, they might communicate from one mind to another. In nineteenth-century theories of mind, sleep was a prime time for mental permeability, when the barriers of reason and attention dissolved. Lowell himself inadvertently supported such a model of mental permeability with his account of the poem’s origins. In the days leading up to the commemoration ceremony, he said he was “hopelessly dumb”, stricken with writer’s block. Composing an ode to the Civil War dead in the summer of 1865 was an intimidating task even for a poet of Lowell’s stature. The Confederate army surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse only three months before, and Lincoln’s assassination deepened the nation’s misery just as relief was in sight. An estimated 750,000 soldiers, more than 2 percent of the American population, perished on the battlefield or in the ruins. Lowell’s mind was strained to its limits by the difficult task at hand, but also by the general despair of a country awash in its own blood. It would not surprise psychical researchers who studied such states that the Ode manifested “in a flash of sudden inspiration” that felt to Lowell like an outside force working through his pen. “It all came with a rush,” Lowell recalled, “literally making me lean and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it.”7 The visceral impact of his effort — he claimed that he lost ten pounds — was intertwined with the psychic element, nerves frayed by the intensity of the message they conducted. Lowell reported writing most of the piece between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on the night before the ceremony,8 supporting neatly the idea that Mr W.’s strange experience occurred at the peak of Lowell’s emotional labor. Perhaps the spirit of the Ode was literally in the air, like electricity, magnetism, and the other invisible forces captured by nineteenth century physics. If so, the invisible force wringing Lowell’s nerves bore a distinctively national imprint. As a poet, he was selected to channel the passions of his less-articulate fellow citizens in the wake of a devastating war. Even if the night of July 21 was not quite as revelatory as his account makes it out to be, he told the story of the Ode’s creation the way he did to make his channeling function explicit. It would make sense to contemporary readers that the psychic energies of a nation might overwhelm a medium’s capacity and ricochet to other, lesser receptacles; for instance, the innocent Mr W. sleeping nearby in Cambridge. Based on personal details provided in his letter, we can identify Mr W. as Charles Pickard Ware, an English teacher known for publishing a collection of American slave songs in the 1870s.9 Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, who presented Ware’s story in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, diagnosed a case of “most beautiful pseudo-presentiment”. He thought that Ware’s unconscious mind, whipped into a heightened emotional state during Lowell’s delivery of the “Commemoration Ode”, simply conjured a false memory of the previous night’s dream.10 Royce set out to debunk Ware’s suggestion of telepathy with a psychological argument about how the mind works. “Pseudo-presentiments”, he explained, could be “created or reinforced by dreams” that occurred after the supposedly foreseen event. “By an instantaneous and irresistible hallucination of memory”, the agitated mind projects the dream into the past “so as to make it seem prophetic, or at least telepathic.”11 Royce placed this case on a continuum of susceptible mental states ranging from the temporary unreason of sleep to the elation of poetry to paranoiac delusions, all of which could produce astonishing experiences like Ware’s. It’s unlikely that Ware was asking to be compared to a paranoid asylum patient when he sent his recollections to the ASPR. Though he didn’t name what happened to him, he strongly insinuated that a form of telepathy or clairvoyance was at work — a real, rather than a deluded, communion. This was certainly at odds with Royce’s pathological framing, yet the two sides of the debate both claimed a methodology rhetorically aligned with the spirit of modern science. Both tried to elaborate a set of law-like, rational processes that eliminated the need for any supernatural agency. Advocates of telepathy saw thought as a material or energetic substance that could travel unconsciously between minds, similar to the behavior of electricity or magnetism. Royce took the position increasingly shared by psychologists in the later nineteenth century; they agreed that thoughts emerged from some wave- or electricity-like process acting on brain cells, but they restricted this process to the individual’s brain. Supernormal experiences arose from errors in our skull-encapsulated machinery, not from outside signals. Despite skepticism from some scientists, people took the idea of spontaneous, unconscious mental transmission quite seriously, as a possibility and as a danger, in an age when powerful ideas crisscrossed the nation through new and mysterious channels. From mass print to the telegraph to the railroad, burgeoning communication systems collapsed time and space through increasingly rapid connections. They brought unprecedented economic growth, creating new forms of investment and trading that depended as much on information flow as they did on the movement of commodities. Such precipitous connectedness also posed a threat to the socioeconomic order: it allowed laborers to organize, abolitionists and suffragists to rally. Dangerous ideas could spread uncontrollably, and many worried that hardware might not limit their range.12 The line between technology and telepathy blurred, with medical men like William Carpenter explaining the nervous system as a telegraph and extending its reach beyond the individual body; he believed that “nerve-force”, as a form of electricity, could “exert itself from a distance, so as to bring the Brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with that of another.”13 This popular analogy turned the country into a literal body politic that could succumb to hysteria or mass frenzies originating with a single disturbed citizen. Much of the American medical and scientific work on this topic appeared in the 1870s, which meant that its authors shared a common point of reference for mass psychic upheaval: the Civil War. For instance, Philadelphia physician and novelist Silas Weir Mitchell wrote about mental permeability and contagion in a decidedly negative light: if people could see each others’ true thoughts, “the whole fabric of civilization would crumble”, one of his characters warned.14 During the war, Mitchell served in the Turner’s Lane army hospital, where he studied the lingering effects of nerve injuries through intimate conversations with men who had actually seen civil society crumble around them and who had fought in its ruins. In his subsequent decades of practice, Mitchell urgently counseled patients and the public on shoring up their nervous power to defend against the intrusion of alien psychic forces. Though he denounced psychic mediums as frauds, Mitchell wrote so incessantly about mental barriers and scenarios of penetration that his concern about volatile powers of mind is unmistakeable. Perhaps, like Walt Whitman, another Civil War medic, Mitchell was plagued by “dreams’ projections”, sentenced each night to “thread my way through the hospitals”.15 What war reporter Ambrose Bierce called a “spiritual darkness”,16 unleashed over four years of brutal killing and halted only with fragile documents, left a generation wary of the violence lurking below the surface of American life. Others, however, saw great potential in harnessing the mental forces that stirred men from remote villages to take up arms. During the war, dreams had joined people to a common cause in very tangible ways. They appeared, of course, in political speeches and poems — Whitman again, with his imperiled “dream of humanity, the vaunted Union”.17 Dreams and premonitions forged a meaningful connection between civilians, soldiers, and the distant leaders whose choices determined their fate — especially Abraham Lincoln, who traversed the dreamscape of Civil War America as restlessly as he stalked the White House's corridors. But dreams also pervaded private letters, journals, and newspaper reports of more intimate encounters. People felt linked with imperilled loved ones through moments of clairvoyance, premonition, or dream communion. For instance, on a July night in 1863, Sarah Oates saw a vision of her son John, wounded and dying.18 Her dream extended even to his burial, giving her a chance to be virtually present as the young man was lowered into an unmarked grave. The grave was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles away. Two days later, the letter arrived telling of John’s fatal injury, but Sarah had already gone into mourning. Countless families treasured and circulated such stories; they acted as a virtual salve, helping bend violent death on the battlefield towards the nineteenth-century ideal of a “good death” which occurred at home surrounded by loved ones. Psychic manifestations of familial love in times of crisis suggested that these invisible bonds might transcend even a war of brother against brother. By stretching love and intimacy across vast distances, and by troubling the presumed boundaries of the self, the act of dreaming remained more than a physiological function of the brain during sleep. From its earliest links with prognostication, dreaming connoted an expectant gaze towards the future, a hope (or promise, or fear) for the waking world. The Enlightenment’s dismissal of divine prophecy changed the register in which dreams spoke to the collective destiny of families, communities, and nations. Dreams became a metaphor, but one still linked to interiority and revelation. In the satirical device of illustrating a politician’s nightmare, we see a Thomas Paine-like jab at the persistence of superstition. Yet the cartoonist who lampooned Abraham Lincoln as a trembling dreamer worked within the tradition of casting the president as a sort of secular prophet. Only a few years before the start of the Civil War, artist Louis Maurer produced a decidedly unironic image of George Washington dreaming of liberty and justice in the midst of his generation’s war for national independence — not an idle wish, but the hoped-for outcome of waking struggles shared by mighty generals and humble soldiers. Representations of enslaved African Americans showed them suffering the torments of this dream’s constant denial. Equals in mental mechanism must be equals in their capacity to imagine a better life, and thus, in theory, equals in democratic politics. Pitched warfare over this very claim had barely ended when Charles Ware woke abruptly, before sunrise, on a friend’s couch in Cambridge, where he’d traveled to attend a memorial service for his former classmates. “What they dare to dream of dare to die for” arrived, like a telegram, instantaneously and preformed, piercing his slumber. At the time, Ware was still young and harbored literary aspirations. Though he never succeeded as poet, perhaps his moment of communion with the renowned James Russell Lowell affirmed a private sense that Ware, too, had access to a higher plane of inspiration. The less we think of Ware as gifted or inspired, however, the more his experience appeals to a broader notion of dreaming as a perhaps too-democratic pathway for shared sentiment and action. The violent upheaval of war seemed to demonstrate that the stirrings of individual hearts were highly contagious. The line in question, “And what they dare to dream of, dare to do”, refers to the collective political dream that led Harvard’s undergraduates into battle. Whether people decided to classify such dreams as symbols, portents, or mechanical blips, they took on an indisputable, concrete reality for many nineteenth-century Americans, and their power to manifest in catastrophic ways gave skeptics pause. Anecdotes of dream communion represent a kind of “dream work” distinct from the later Freudian sense of the term: dreams “worked” in the narrative context of people’s lives to account for sometimes-mysterious shared experiences. At the same time, much of the reading public followed current psychology and viewed dreaming as a physiological activity of the brain — the result of electrical or etheric impressions moving along telegraph-like circuits.19 This left ambiguity as to where the boundaries of the unconscious fell — was it restricted to the individual mind, or part of a larger psychic economy? Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” appeared to leap the divide between two strangers, confounding distinctions of authorship. Despite scientific efforts to rationalize and individualize dreaming, it retained its old portentousness in an hour when the need to unify diverse citizens was an overbearing anxiety. Whether through science or art, dreams proved difficult to regulate for practical aims. Lowell could testify to this challenge. While one line of his poem made a profound impression on Charles Pickard Ware, the full version was a flop with his audience at Harvard, and nobody bothered to reprint it in the newspapers. Despite a profusion of theories, neither poets nor psychologists seemed any closer to mastering the laws of dreaming, inspiration, and sympathy. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 5, 2017

Alicia Puglionesi

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:08.924926

harry-clarkes-looking-glass

Harry Clarke’s Looking Glass By Kelly Sullivan October 12, 2016 With their intricate line and often ghoulish tone, the works of Irish artist Harry Clarke are amongst the most striking in the history of illustration and stained glass design. Kelly Sullivan explores how, unknown to many at the time, Clarke took to including his own face in many of his pictures. The Irish stained glass artist and illustrator Harry Clarke was prolific, producing, in his short life, over a hundred stained glass windows. But beyond Ireland, it was his illustrations that brought him international renown, particularly in the United States where printers flooded the market with pirated editions of the six illustrated books he produced between 1915 and 1931. His illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, published by George G. Harrap, London, in 1919 and reissued in 1923, was his most popular work, a macabre exploration of the human psyche. The cover to the second updated edition of 1923 shows a bearded figure pulling aside a stage curtain as if to welcome readers into the disturbing world of Poe’s — and Clarke’s — imagination. The stage itself appears empty but for a small door cut into the flat green wall in the background. Through the door, we see a miniature figure raising a mitre into the air. Clarke’s dust-jacket image is at once a symbolist invocation of horror, with its border of decaying carcasses, distorted figures, and larval growths, and also a deliberate reference to one of the most intriguing and enigmatic self-portraits in modern art history, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Although Clarke does not portray himself on the cover of Poe, nor in the gruesome illustration for “The Case of M. Valdemar” which similarly alludes to Las Meninas, both images — with their significant perspectival gaze back to a small open door framing a silhouetted figure — signal Clarke’s abiding interest in hiding his own face in his works, and his recognition of the long history of self-representation in Western art. In Las Meninas, Velázquez brings to center stage the newfound importance of the artist in the world of high society and culture. His painting, ostensibly a portrait of Infanta Margaret Theresa, playfully portrays the King and Queen — who would occupy the position of the viewer — in a mirror on the back wall. Yet key to the work is the tiny silhouette of the Queen’s chamberlain, a man reputed to be related to the artist, framed in a lighted doorway. This striking figure draws our attention to the artist himself, poised similarly at the left of the composition with his hand ready to put brush to canvas. Like the doubled royal portrait of both infant daughter and her parents, the painter doubles himself in this visual echo. ※※Indexed under…Silhouettesin doorways Clarke’s cover image replicates the composition of Velázquez’s painting, but removes all the figures with the exception of the curtain-opening master of ceremonies — a figure in the position of the painter’s self-portrait — and the silhouette. Although Clarke’s bearded figure bears no resemblance to the artist himself, the structural allusion to Las Meninas serves as an invitation to recognize the many self-portraits Clarke did leave in stained glass, in illustrations, and in parodic caricatures sketched for friends. Through it, Clarke also signals his descent from a long line of artists drawn to the self-portrait, from medieval scribes who included their own figures in illuminated manuscripts, to Clarke’s drawing instructor at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, William Orpen, a well-known painter specialising in self-portraits, whose 1907 A Bloomsbury Family (an image Clarke likely saw in exhibition in Dublin) can be seen to also deliberately reference Las Meninas. In his first completed book, the illustrated Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1916), Clarke includes some of his most recognizable self-portraits. Before the stories even begin, we are faced with an image of Clarke, in the garb of a Harlequin figure, emerging as if stepping onto stage next to the “list of illustrations” — a playful reminder to recognize the artist behind the book. In “Great Claus and Little Claus”, as the figure of Little Claus, the artist shows himself with his characteristic combed hair, again wearing the checkered pants of a Harlequin. Great Claus is reportedly his friend Vincent Wood. Clarke hides himself in the curtain framing the second drawing, distracting us from the more grotesque scene played out behind: Great Claus has just thrown a hatchet into the forehead of Little Claus’ grandmother (who happened to have been dead already). Already in this early self-portrait, Clarke associates himself with one of the comically gruesome elements of the work. As Little Claus, he outsmarts his neighbor, grows his fortune, and avoids an untimely death on several occasions — but he kills three men in the process. The color illustrations to this early work reproduced badly, but a robber holding aloft a medieval battle axe in his illustration for “The Snow Queen” seems to have Clarke’s features, and sports a grubby five o’clock shadow. Clarke presents himself as similarly bedraggled in the undated Self-Portrait as a Drunken Saint, a playful sketch in which he appears winged and haloed, with his iconic cigarette and unruly spike of hair at the back of his head. Yet for all its lightheartedness, this portrait hints at just how much pressure he must have felt to keep up with ecclesiastical stained glass commissions as well as book illustrations and orders for commercial clients. He worked seemingly endlessly, and suffered from poor health, a combination of which ultimately led to his early death in 1931, at only forty-one. In another undated caricature, this time as a monk working in a decaying medieval garret, Clarke shows himself designing a stained glass window, with another window hanging over his desk. Clarke’s caricature looks remarkably like the work of Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century Benedictine monk known for his illuminated manuscripts, particularly his depiction of Plato watching Socrates write, the frontispiece to Prognostica Socratis basilei, a fortune-telling book held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Clarke would have been familiar with Paris’ work through his careful study of medieval art, and he likely knew Paris favored including self-portraits hidden in his illuminated manuscripts. Some of Clarke’s most interesting drawings were made as gifts for friends, and so went unpublished (or, in some cases, were deemed too offensive by his publishers and pulled from books). In The Mad Mulrannies (an illustration to J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World) given to Thomas Bodkin in 1917, Clarke includes a portrait of his friend Séan Keating whose easily distinguishable features adorn characters in many illustrations and at least one or two stained glass windows. The faces and figures of the Mulrannies seem to pile up endlessly, but Keating turns his head as if to address the figure next to him — a self-portrait of the artist, dressed in what might be the chasuble of a priest, and with his arms crossed in a symbolic manner. In one of Clarke’s most striking self-portraits, the 1914 Mephisto (produced a full decade before he would illustrate Goethe’s Faust), he depicts himself as Mephistopheles, a glass of absinthe held enticingly in his hand. This early portrait, with its bold use of a solid color wash in a fevered absinthe tint, draws a line of evolution through the similarly color-washed cover of Tales of Mystery and Imagination, to the vivid green of the end papers of his illustrated Faust by Goethe, published by Harrap in 1925. Clarke’s earlier Mephisto hinted at his sense of personal connection to this story of temptation, evil, and damnation. Now, as if to further emphasize the association of himself with suffering, he depicts himself as Faust, the man who bargains with Mephistopheles. In his dummy mockup for Faust, Clarke’s portraits are all the more revealing of his own features; a sketch for the headpiece of the table of contents offers a tender, realistic portrayal of his own eyes seeking out the viewer. This self-portrait sketch becomes all the more notable in light of the pervasive images of eyes used to create a sense of surveillance in the Faust illustrations, as in the image of a bespectacled Clarke-as-Faust, or the scene in which he attempts to free Margaret from her dungeon. When Faust and Mephistopheles travel on horseback, it is the steeds who glance back at Clarke’s caricature-like portrait. Some of the most tortured illustrations in Faust are the tail pieces and small designs used to close chapters: in these, Clarke shows faces gnawed by rats, layers of bodies skewered on a sword, and he concludes with his own face in the unrelenting grip of Mephistopheles.1 Clarke believed Faust to be his best book, but reported in a letter to a friend that his publisher felt the illustrations were “full of stench and steaming horrors”. Clarke defended his work in another letter, saying it was “terribly, terribly sincere . . . ’tis horrid, I know — in fact, I had to laugh at my creations or I would have become morbid.” Surely the inclusion of self-portraits helped him — and help us — to get the joke.2 In a more surprising blend of the saintly with the sinful, Clarke didn’t limit self-portraits to book illustrations — his face also makes its way into his religious stained glass work. As one of the leading artists of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, Clarke’s windows (and those his studio continued to produce in his style up until the 1970s) are instantly recognizable. His oftentimes strange vision became part of the established visual idiom of a newly independent Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. Ireland had no indigenous stained glass work, but Clarke’s careful study of medieval aesthetics and techniques led critics to think of him as the inheritor of a broader European tradition. He traveled to see medieval glass in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Rouen, Amiens, and elsewhere. The playfulness and horror of the Gothic grotesque no doubt captured his imagination, and he brings a Gothic-influenced depiction of suffering, trauma, and death — often combined with a jesting playfulness — to his own glasswork. His self-portraits figure in his stained glass from the very start. In his first major commission, the Honan Hostel Chapel windows, he portrays himself amongst a group of plague victims ostracized from St. Gobnait’s community in St. Gobnait (1916). His distorted face, with one eyeball destroyed by plague, is almost unrecognizable, but he hints at his likeness with his initials (and the window’s date) on the figure’s green cape. Clarke appears again in the small Our Lady of the Sorrows window completed in 1917, this time hidden near the top. In the companion window, Saint Joseph, he once more finds Seán Keating’s distinctive features irresistible, and gives them to St. Finbarr, featured in the lower panel depicting Joseph’s death. These two windows hang at eye level — unlike most of the stained glass he created for churches — perhaps in hope that certain visitors would recognize him and his friend. If Clarke’s interest in medieval stained glass techniques and the Gothic grotesque seems to mark his work as retrogressive, his self-portraits provide insight into a particularly modern means of composing. Clarke was fond of photography, and even records in his work diary a day spent “mucking [about] & taking photos”.3 On some occasions, he used photographs to set up models for difficult scenes in his windows, a practice he may have borrowed from Seán Keating who often did the same.4 For the 1920 Crucifixion in St. Michael’s Church in Terenure, Dublin, Clarke had trouble accurately depicting the angle of the crucified Christ’s body in the massive window positioned high in the wall; he asked his brother Walter to take his picture as he posed as Christ with his hands tied, and he designed the window from the prints. So Clarke’s Terenure Crucifixion, modeled off his own body, becomes a self-portrait — of a sort. By the mid-1920s, Clarke was making some of his most accomplished stained glass, works peppered by his self-portraits hidden in and amongst the action. In his circa 1923 The Widow’s Son, one of two remarkable lights made for the Catholic Church in Balbriggan, County Dublin, one of the disciples almost hidden behind Jesus’ left shoulder, and wearing a spotted purple scarf, seems to have Clarke’s long nose and full, pouting mouth. In the 1924 Dempsey Memorial Lancet Window of St Maculind, made for St. MacCullin’s Church, Lusk, just eleven kilometers down the road, Clarke portrays himself among the sick parishioners gathered around the Irish St. Maculind for healing. Also present in this circle of faces meticulously arranged in a vesica piscis is the memento mori of a half-decomposed figure nearly all skull. Harry Clarke has been praised as one of the greatest inheritors of the medieval glass tradition. Something of the grotesque humor in the suffering figures of Gothic glass must have appealed to Clarke’s sensibilities, particularly in the later years of his life when he knew he was dying from tuberculosis. By 1930, when work was picking up for the studios with the first commissions from the United States completed, Clarke had to spend more and more time in a sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland. Back in Ireland, an important commission came from a church in Newport, County Mayo, and Clarke designed and oversaw as much of the Last Judgment as he was able to do. Nevertheless, he died before the window was fully complete, and it was up to the skilled workmen in his studios to finish it from his drawings and color schemes. Thus Clarke’s last self-portrait is a kind of posthumous one: in the Last Judgment’s lower right corner, we see Clarke himself — portrayed upside down in a sickly green — descending to hell amongst the tortured souls and grotesque creatures he so often envisioned. The legacy of poor health that plagued Clarke throughout his life must have had a profound effect on his work, evidenced not least of all through his inclination toward self-portraiture. Although he left few private letters and offered little insight into his personal life, a note in his 1914 work diary indicates that thoughts of illness might have been a source of anguish — and perhaps of inspiration — even then. Scribbled and then circled amidst a list of business acquaintance addresses, Clarke writes out the final lines of J. M. Synge’s last (unpublished) poem, asking, “What will they write / of my poor passage to the stall of night?” It is, however, in fact a misquote, with the original reading “What year will they write”.5 Was Clarke perhaps deliberately misquoting Synge, whom he admired, and who, like him, died early after fighting illness and writing for many years under the conviction of his coming death? Synge’s poem indicates his anxiety about the final date of his impending death in 1909, but Clarke’s misquotation seems to hint at a concern, instead, about an artist’s reputation. Although Harry Clarke found renown as a stained glass artist in Ireland, and his illustrations reached an international audience in the 1920s and after, he remains obscure, a legacy he may have anticipated and tried to counteract through active allusion to the long tradition of self-portraiture in art. As one of the leading figures of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, Clarke’s images helped shape the Irish Free State’s visual idiom in the 1920s and beyond, but his long-term reputation as an artist seems to have been hindered by the fact he worked primarily in the medium of stained glass. If his troubled, and often troubling, windows, illustrations, and self-portraits provided a coherent outlook for an Ireland in the coming times, it appears to have been a dark vision, one in keeping with the apocalyptic futures so many modernists foresaw in the 1930s, the decade he only just glimpsed. Like many other artists working in this time, his work reflects the shaping forces of early-twentieth-century modernism: of military, technological, scientific, and intellectual shifts that turned artists and writers toward an examination of interiority and psychology. Clarke didn’t have to leave Dublin to experience the extremes of early-twentieth-century modern life: in 1916 in Dublin, the Easter Rising brought urban warfare directly to the city’s streets, and the subsequent War of Independence and Irish Civil War kept the British colony and later Irish Free State in a constant state of violent conflict.6 Perhaps more profoundly, Clarke witnessed first-hand extreme poverty, urban decay, and disease; the aristocratic Georgian mansions that lined the streets of north inner-city Dublin near to where Clarke had his studios represented the worst housing conditions of any city in the United Kingdom.7 His 1922 illustration, The Last Hour of the Night, directly responds to these conditions in the capital city, with a Nosferatu-inspired figure prowling through the shambles of Georgian tenements, and the monuments of colonial Dublin still burning after the battles of the War of Independence and Civil War, a personification of the Gothic afterlife of postcolonial rule.8 Clarke’s scene vividly portrays the connection between his medieval-inspired imagination and interest in the grotesque, and the political and social events of the early twentieth century that shaped his work. His self-portraits offer another response to these same shaping forces, indicating to us just how much his personal vision, and his experience of modern Dublin, influenced the stained glass and illustrations he made. Yet for all the modernist unease in evidence in his work, his self-portraits also provide moments of humor and even self-preservation. We can see his portraits as the artistic measure of the times — dark, foreboding, “full of steaming horrors” — but also as invitations to laugh with him at his creations, so none of us grows too morbid. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 12, 2016

Kelly Sullivan

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:09.485761

out-from-behind-this-mask

Out From Behind This Mask By D. Graham Burnett July 27, 2017 A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids — D. Graham Burnett on meditations conjured by a visit to the death masks of the Laurence Hutton Collection. The Laurence Hutton Collection consists of 103 unique objects in 76 boxes stored in the Rare Books Department of Princeton University’s Firestone Library (Call Number CO770). Most of the cartons contain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plaster “death masks” — castings made from molds formed directly on the face of notable deceased individuals shortly after their expiration (there are also, in the collection, several “life masks”; a few castings of the skulls of famous persons; a small number of bronzes and carved busts; and three casts ostensibly taken from human hands — including the writing hand of Goethe, his right). Assembled by the American littérateur and essayist Laurence Hutton (1843–1904), the bequest is said to comprise the largest collation of funerary plasters in the United States. An ancient funerary custom, casting from the face remained a significant memorial practice in Europe and America into the early twentieth century, but the tradition declined rapidly after the 1860s when photography rose to prominence as the primary technology of commemoration. The heyday of the messy business of death mask casting (the face of the fresh corpse had to be liberally smeared with tallow to prevent adhesion of the mold) correlates with the rise of a modern culture of celebrity across the watershed of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries -- people wanted memorial tokens of “great men” (and women too) in a new era of mass culture. But there was more: the same period saw peak enthusiasm for physiognomy, the science that endeavored to discern human character in the physical manifestation of facial features like the nose and the forehead. In this sense, funeral casting was entangled with impulses both moral and forensic: the angle of Schiller’s brow might have something to teach us about genius, so it needed to be preserved and distributed; at the same time, “scientifically speaking”, it was not clear that all the signs of genius could yet be clearly read in a forehead, so the collection of lots of evidentiary material was propaedeutic to a truly empirical understanding of the human visage. Enthusiasm for all this faded across the second half of the nineteenth century. The story of Hutton’s own collection provides good evidence for the changing mood: he sourced his first acquisitions from a dustbin in lower Manhattan circa 1865 — they had been discarded by the widow of a gentleman, recently deceased; her gesture (she asked the servants to throw out “the nasty, ghastly things”) accorded with a broader shift in mortuary sensibility in the era. But young master Hutton, something of an eccentric, found himself beguiled by the placid visages of Burns, Washington, Sheridan, and Lord Brougham staring up, ghostlike, from the ashcan, and he loaded them into a wheelbarrow, whence they emerged as the nucleus of his collection — or, perhaps better, the first little seeds of his quiet mania for the impression of death’s soft seal upon unbreathing lips. The collection is affecting. After several hours perusing the still, white shapes in a windowless study center in the basement of Firestone Library, one emerges as from a kind of reading-room Sheol to find that every living face now discloses something of the form it will someday take when slackened and supine. The effect would seem to proceed from a kind of reversal or unwinding of the representational logic from which the masks themselves derive their power — death masks are uncanny not simply because they look like a dead person (though they generally do), but more because they were made from a dead person. This outstrips what the semioticians call “iconicity” (icons are the signs that work because they resemble what they seek to signify) and entangles us in queasy and potent dynamics of participation and immediacy — dynamics of actual continuity. The dynamics of residue. Such forms of continuity and contact always have about them a shiver of real intimacy, even of contamination. Some of the power of death masks clearly proceeds from their preserving a kind of “cold chain” of direct touch to the dead. And this may account for something of the way they seem to convey their placid pallor to the living. After a time, one comes to see through them. Hutton himself was not insensible of such matters. In one of his many essays on the collection, he wrote of an episode in which several actual hairs of the deceased could be discerned on a death mask, as if the plaster had some strange life within it. The explanation was more prosaic: Inadequately lubricated, a hair here and there had come to be fixed in the plaster from which the mold was made. Then, when the mask itself was formed in that mold, the latter yielded its plucked bristle back to the precise locus (on the death mask) from which it had been pulled (on the human). What sort of artifact is this? What is the nature of the historicity of such a hair? What role can it be said to play in the economy of representation? In a historical moment enthralled by new forms of ethereal dematerialization and frictionless access (to the past, to texts, to commodities, to information, to each other), we are, I think, in need of a theory for such a bristle. * One reaches, perhaps, for Roland Barthes’ notion of the “punctum” from Camera Lucida, the French author’s great meditation on photography and death. A punctum is the point in a photograph that wings woundingly at the viewer from out of the mere “subject” of the image — it is that which whistles out from what the photograph “manifests” (what it manifests to “studium”, which Barthes defines as that familiar condition of self-possessed attention to an image). Here is what Barthes says: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” It is the part of a photograph that intimately implicates the viewer — though not simply any old form of implication will do. The punctum specifically implicates mortality. We might say that the punctum is the moment we discover a kind of death-navel (in ourselves, in the photographic image), since the punctum is the still-not-wholly-healed scar of an invisible umbilicus linking each of us to fatality, our un-mother. And what then of a beard bristle such as Hutton describes? Barthes is interested in photographs. The analytic of the punctum belongs to photography as form, as a specific technology of image making — one that works in time in particular ways, one that memorializes photographically. But the bristle is not a photographic proposition. It comes from another place, and interrupts another representational system. What, then, is a thingly punctum? A reified punctum? A punctum that escapes the logic of representation to participate in the corporal economy of the relic? One answer: A reminder of the extent to which we rely on the logic of representation to hold death at bay. This seems particularly significant to consider in the context of death masks, which discharge this function of representation very imperfectly. * There is, for me, a proper Barthesian punctum in the photograph above, which depicts the death mask cast of Walt Whitman in the Hutton Collection. No, it is not the fact that the sculptor (the young Philadelphia artist Samuel Murray, assisted by his mentor Thomas Eakins) chose to elaborate the traditional frontal “mask” into a full sculptural head — though this is uncanny. Nor is it the wonderful frankness of the beard, which has been permitted to show as limp and wet (as it would have been, soused with animal grease), rather than tooled to appear suitably leonine or Mosaical — though this too gives the work a stark immediacy. No. The punctum for me lies in the bard’s closed eyes, and the sense of what lies behind those plaster lids — for the living Walt Whitman actually saw Hutton’s collection of death masks with his own living eyes. Which is to say, the plaster cast of Whitman’s eyes can be understood as a figure for something like the consciousness of the collection itself: it is locus in the collection of a representation of the collection; it is the site where the collection maintains its self-(un?)awareness. We might go so far as to say that these cast eyelids should be understood as the death mask of Hutton’s collection as a whole, which, no longer displayed in his handsome townhouse halls, has come to be, rather, entombed in the sepulchral catacombs of an underground library. And that’s not all. Shortly before he died, Whitman took a long look at an engraved portrait of himself made by the English illustrator and pamphleteer William J. Linton — an image published in a late edition of The Leaves of Grass, where it was tipped in on coated paper opposite the great death poem “The Wound-Dresser” (which it therefore kissed forever within each copy of the closed book). The poet’s meditation upon this figure of himself occasioned yet another poem, one of his last, entitled “Out from Behind This Mask”, subtitled “To Confront a Portrait”. The first stanza will serve as ventriloquy and epitaph, annunciation and last word: OUT from behind this bending rough-cut mask,These lights and shades, this drama of the whole,This common curtain of the face contain’d in me for me, in youfor you, in each for each,(Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears — O heaven!The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!)This glaze of God’s serenest purest sky,This film of Satan’s seething pit,This heart’s geography’s map, this limitless small continent, thissoundless sea;Out from the convolutions of this globe,This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter, Venus,Mars,This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only universe,Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapt;)These burin’d eyes, flashing to you to pass to future time,To launch and spin through space revolving sideling, from theseto emanate,To you whoe’er you are — a look. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 27, 2017

D. Graham Burnett

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:10.035492

race-and-the-white-elephant-war-of-1884

Race and the White Elephant War of 1884 By Ross Bullen October 11, 2017 Feuding impresarios, a white-but-not-white-enough elephant, and racist ads for soap — Ross Bullen on how a bizarre episode in circus history became an unlikely forum for discussing 19th-century theories of race, and inadvertently laid bare the ideological constructions at their heart. The Lydian Monarch had been sighted from Fire Island and was expected in Jersey City that evening. Everybody in New York City was already buzzing about what was on board. It was March 28, 1884, and P. T. Barnum, the circus proprietor and showman, after great effort and expense, had brought the first “sacred white elephant” to America. An earlier attempt to buy a white elephant from Siam (Thailand) had ended in failure, but now Barnum’s agent, J. B. Gaylord, had successfully purchased an elephant named “Toung Taloung” — or “Gem of the Sky” — from King Thibaw of Burma. From Rangoon, Toung Taloung was brought by ship through the Suez Canal, and arrived in Liverpool, England on January 14. After several weeks at the London Zoological Gardens where it became something of a sensation in both the British and American press, the white elephant, its handlers, and Barnum’s agents eventually sailed for New York on March 8. When the Lydian Monarch arrived twenty days later, Barnum and his entourage rushed to New Jersey to meet Toung Taloung. The following day, in a story titled “The Sacred Beast Here”, the New York Times offered a dramatic account of Barnum’s first encounter with his prized white elephant. “Of course we have all learned by this time,” Barnum told his retinue, “that there is no such thing as a really pure white elephant. This is a sacred animal, a technical white elephant, and as white as God makes ’em. A man can paint them white, but this is not one of that kind.” Although readers who had followed the coverage of Toung Taloung’s reception in London would indeed have learned that white elephants are not literally white, Barnum’s matter-of-fact statement belied the controversy that the color of white elephants had already engendered in the popular imagination. In 1884, Toung Taloung was the catalyst for a broader public debate about race and authenticity. A few months after Toung Taloung arrived in New York, Frank Vincent Jr., author of the popular 1874 travelogue The Land of the White Elephant: Sights and Scenes in South-Eastern Asia, used explicitly racialized terminology to explain the color of white elephants to readers of the Manhattan. In an article titled “White Elephants”, Vincent writes, It should always be remembered that the term white, as applied to elephants, must be received with qualification. In fact, the grains of salt must be numerous, for the white elephant is white only by contrast with those that are decidedly dark. A mulatto, for instance, is not absolutely white, but he is white compared with a full-blooded negro. The so-called white elephant is an occasional departure from the ordinary beast. For Vincent, both the white elephant and biracial people share a kind of “qualified” whiteness that serves to distinguish them from “full-blooded” black bodies (Vincent refers to regular elephants as “black”), but stops short of aligning them with the kind of privileged white identity that Vincent himself possessed. In his article Vincent constantly explains white elephants to his readers in terms of race, from noting the labor performed by “black” elephants and speculating about why whiteness is “worshipped” in Siam, to claiming that “[w]hen you possess an elephant whose color is that of a negro’s palm you possess a white elephant.” Vincent’s descriptions reflect a truism that can be found throughout nineteenth-century writing on white elephants: although these animals are not literally white, they are approximately the same color as white people. For example, the author of “The Sacred Beast Here” writes that Toung Taloung “has a large pink splash on his forehead, which extends over his eyes and half-way down his trunk. His ears, which are of a peculiar triangle shape, are edged with the same flesh-colored pink, and mottled in large spots, and his breast and shoulders are likewise spotted. The under side of his trunk is also flesh-colored.” (The “flesh” referred to here, of course, being the flesh of the presumed white author.) In The Land of the White Elephant, Vincent makes a similar observation, noting that the body of “the so-called ‘white’ elephant” has “the peculiar flesh-coloured appearance termed ‘white.’” Vincent’s description reflects a broad cultural consensus that the epidermal signifiers of white identity must be carefully circumscribed so that they only have meaning and value when observed in white persons. When such physical characteristics are evident in a non-human form like an elephant, or in a human body that is considered to be biracial, these privileged markers become “qualified” or “so-called”. Further complicating the relationship between human whiteness and white elephants is the fact that the English term “white elephant” is an inadequate and misleading translation of the Thai phrase for these animals. The Thai word for elephant is chang, and a white elephant is a chang pheuak. According to Rita Ringis, “chang pheuak . . . literally means ‘albino (or strange-coloured) elephant’, the usual word for the colour ‘white’ being different entirely.” Like virtually every other American or European who wrote about Siam and white elephants in the nineteenth century, Vincent was open about the fact that “white elephant” was a poor translation of chang pheuak. And yet he still describes these animals as “so-called ‘white’ elephant[s]”, glossing over what he admits is a semantic problem in order to cast creatures like Toung Taloung as racial imposters who — like a light-skinned African American — might try to pass as white in order to access the closely guarded privileges of white identity. If the white elephant is viewed as an imposter because of its improper claim on whiteness, this conception of the animal as a kind of fraud is also supported by the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “white elephant” as both “a rare albino variety of elephant which is highly venerated in some Asian countries”, and “A burdensome or costly possession (from the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand) were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance). Also, an object, scheme, etc., considered to be without use or value.” Although this story of the Siamese king and his ruined courtier does provide a compelling explanation for why “white elephant” can mean “an object, scheme, etc., considered to be without use or value”, it is nevertheless a complete fabrication. Indeed, if read together, the OED’s two definitions for “white elephant” present a paradox: If white elephants are “rare” and “highly venerated”, why would the king of Siam give one away to punish a subordinate? Unsurprisingly, there is no recorded instance of this practice in Thai history. Nevertheless, this figurative definition of “white elephant” as a kind of fatal gift has had a lasting influence on the English language. It can be detected today in phenomena like “white elephant sales” or “white elephant gift exchanges”, but in the 1880s, “white elephant” was a common expression for any kind of useless or burdensome object. The story of Barnum and Toung Taloung illustrates the significant fascination with white elephants in nineteenth-century America. The controversy surrounding the reception of this animal was ironic since Barnum, who had made a fortune passing off frauds and imitations as genuine articles, now possessed a real curiosity but was afraid that nobody would accept it as authentic. Moreover, since Barnum supposedly paid a considerable sum to purchase Toung Taloung (in his autobiography he claims to have spent $250,000 — about $5.5 million in today’s money — although this is almost certainly an inflated figure) and the elephant was only a moderately successful attraction, we can also note the irony of Toung Taloung’s transformation from a literal to a figurative white elephant. Toung Taloung became a flashpoint for broader cultural debates about racial identity. One of the most curious effects of this debate was the tacit admission, in newspaper articles and a series of soap advertisements, that whiteness and white privilege were socially constructed. If a white elephant had a merely tenuous grasp on its white identity, couldn’t something similar happen to white people? In order to best understand how the story of Barnum’s elephant intersected with broader ideas about race, it is necessary to consider two other elephants who were introduced to the American public in 1884: Forepaugh’s “Light of Asia” and Barnum’s own “The White Fraud”. Both of these animals were regular “black” elephants that had been painted white by their owners. Although Forepaugh’s elephant, originally named “Tiny”, was designed to be a whiter rival to Toung Taloung, and Barnum’s animal was created as a parody of Forepaugh’s obvious forgery, both “white” elephants demonstrated the considerable cultural anxiety about the malleability of whiteness as a racial category. Eight days before Barnum welcomed Toung Taloung in Jersey City, the steamer City of Chester arrived in New York with Forepaugh’s white elephant on board. From the moment Light of Asia appeared in America there were doubts about its authenticity. In the two days after Light of Asia’s arrival, the New York Times published at least three articles that treated both the elephant’s skin color — and the story of its acquisition from Siam — with a great deal of suspicion. All of these articles note that Light of Asia’s color — a uniform white evenly distributed over its entire body — did not match any existing description of a Siamese white elephant, and spend some time speculating how Forepaugh must have dyed this animal (whether by using paint or some kind of chemical process). An editorial titled “A Very Seasick Elephant” quotes at length a “gentleman . . . whose travels in Asia have fitted him for expressing an opinion on the genuineness of this elephant.” This elephant expert (possibly Frank Vincent Jr.) explains that Light of Asia’s white toes do not indicate that it is a genuine white elephant since this characteristic is “very often found in elephants of the ordinary kind, without any pretension whatever to ‘white blood.’” Whiteness, in this context, cannot be evaluated solely by physical characteristics. Rather, whiteness is dictated by “white blood”. A white elephant must not be judged by its appearance alone. In fact, its physical appearance — its toes, in this instance — could actually belie its true “black” identity. While the Times reported that a panel of New York City white elephant experts had certified Toung Taloung as a genuine chang pheuak, there was far less agreement about Forepaugh’s elephant. At least one of the experts who authenticated Toung Taloung, David Ker, made a point of writing to the Times to express his doubts about Light of Asia’s genuineness, while an editorial published in that paper the same day strongly implied that Forepaugh’s animal had been painted white. In the weeks following Toung Taloung’s arrival in the United States, the white elephant war between Barnum and Forepaugh intensified. On April 19, Barnum’s retinue headed from New York to Philadelphia where Forepaugh and Light of Asia were already waiting. Barnum’s star attractions were Toung Taloung, of course, and a regular elephant, named “Tip”, which had been dyed white and was now called “The White Fraud”. Forepaugh was far from amused with Barnum’s latest stunt. He responded to Barnum’s arrival in his hometown with a pamphlet — titled “Too White For Barnum?” — that claimed both Toung Taloung and The White Fraud were imposters and that Light of Asia was “the first and only Sacred White Elephant that has ever been landed on the shores of the New World.” As the title of this pamphlet suggests, Forepaugh used the considerable public confusion about the color of white elephants to his advantage, calling into question Toung Taloung’s authenticity because it was not as literally white as Light of Asia. Whiteness, in the white elephant war, was a fluid category that was unavoidably caught up in discourses of deception, transformation, and authenticity. In November of 1884 Light of Asia died, prompting the following tongue-in-cheek obituary in Barnum’s 1889 autobiography: “The owner of this imposition soon announced that it had suddenly died. It was simply un-dyed!” While both Barnum and Forepaugh soon moved on to other ventures, the episode of Toung Taloung, Light of Asia, and The White Fraud proved to be a catalyst for broader discussion of whiteness in the United States. Public speculation about the kind of skin-dyeing technology Barnum and Forepaugh might have used to color Light of Asia and The White Fraud quickly gravitated toward discussions of how such technology might affect African Americans. A remarkable article in the New York Times titled “An Interesting Experiment”, published the same day that Barnum displayed The White Fraud in Philadelphia, is worth quoting in its entirety: Mr. Barnum’s plan of making an elephant white by artificial means in order to contrast it with the dark and genuine white elephant is an ingenious one, but it is of less interest to elephants than it is to another class of our population. The inventor of the process of bleaching elephants claims that it can be applied without the slightest injury to colored people, and that it furnishes a complete answer to Job’s famous inquiry as to the possibility of whitening an Ethiopian. The experiment now making with the elephant is watched by the entire population of Thompson-street with the utmost interest, and if it succeeds the colored man will be as rare among us as the sacred white elephant himself. The bleaching process, as now conducted, will not make the complexion of the colored man identical with that of the white man. The cleansed Ethiopian will be of a dazzling whiteness, rivaling that of the snow. The purest blonde of Madison-avenue will appear dark by the side of the beauties of Thompson-street, and what was once the white race will suddenly become the colored race. It will be a curious sensation for white people to find themselves treated with contempt on account of their color by the bleached colored people. All the laws and regulations still existing which are aimed at the colored people will then apply to the Caucasian race. We shall have to pass a new Civil Rights bill to secure admission to hotels and sleeping cars, and we may even hear ourselves contemptuously described as “niggers,” should the bleached colored people condescend to adopt white methods of expression. To avoid such an embarrassing situation it is to be hoped that the bleacher of Mr. Barnum’s elephant will find some way of accurately imitating the Caucasian complexion. In that case the ex-colored man will be distinguished from the original white man only by the quality of his hair. Probably a method of straightening Ethiopian hair and repressing the exuberance of Ethiopian lips will soon follow the grand discovery of bleaching Ethiopian skin, and in that case all distinctions between the two races will at once disappear, and the negro question will vanish from our politics, never to reappear. Although the author of “An Interesting Experiment” has adopted an obviously satirical tone, it is nevertheless intriguing to note the candor with which they acknowledge that white supremacy and the “negro question” are contingent on social conventions. By imagining a reversal of social prejudices, the author is implying that whiteness is an absolute social value: the whiter the better. While the scenario described in “An Interesting Experiment” is fanciful, it nevertheless speaks to real social anxieties about race in the 1880s. We have already seen how Vincent described the color of white elephants in terms of the complexion of biracial people. The Times story builds on this analogy; in her analysis of “An Interesting Experiment”, critic Sarah Amato writes that it “makes . . . explicit that the exhibition of Toung Taloung was a forum to discuss theories of race . . . . In post-[R]econstruction America, in the context of the debate about the political future of the union, which was bound up in race relations, the significance of bleaching an elephant was all the more resonant.” Perhaps the most striking episode in the white elephant war was an advertising campaign launched by Pears’ Soap in March 1884. Although the ad was first published in a British periodical (the Graphic), after Toung Taloung arrived in the United States it was reprinted in American periodicals like Puck, Harper’s Weekly, and Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine. The full-page ad features an elephant and its trainer, a bearded, dark-skinned man. The man is standing on a tall wooden crate, such that he is able to easily touch the top of the elephant’s head. A bucket is resting on top of the elephant, and with his left hand the man holds a cloth that he has been using to scrub the elephant’s skin, transforming it — in the context of the illustration’s monotone range — from black to white. In his right hand, extended toward the viewer, he holds a bar of soap. The text at the bottom of the ad reads, “THE REAL SECRET OF THE WHITE ELEPHANT — PEARS’ SOAP. Matchless for the Complexion.” The ad leaves open the question of whether Pears’ Soap has revealed the “real” white elephant underneath a layer of black dirt or has simply whitewashed a regular elephant to make it appear white, thereby replicating the debate about the white elephant that had played out in London’s newspapers, and anticipating the back-and-forth of Barnum and Forepaugh’s white elephant war in April 1884. The Pears’ Soap ad strongly implies, in Amato’s words, “that human whiteness is an ephemeral condition that can be regenerated by the commodity.” For Karl Marx, in Capital: Volume One, the fetishized commodity has a secret, namely that its exchange value is a reflection of human labor rather than one of its inherent properties. The white elephant also has a secret, an open secret, acknowledged and satirized by both Pears’ Soap and the author of “An Interesting Experiment”: namely, that whiteness is a social construct, the limits of which must be carefully circumscribed and regulated in order to maintain the power of white privilege. If the benefits of whiteness can be extended to anyone (African Americans) or anything (an elephant), then it would lose its value for the white elite. Just as “An Interesting Experiment” drew on a racialized elephant to articulate white anxieties about African Americans, so too did the “Real Secret of the White Elephant” image inform a later Pears’ Soap ad that transferred the relationship between soap and whiteness from an elephant to a human figure. First published in the Graphic on December 25, 1884, this well-known ad depicts a white child bathing a black child in a small tub. Like the “Real Secret of the White Elephant” image, this ad was also reprinted in the United States. In the first panel, the black boy is sitting in the tub while the white boy stands over him holding a bar of soap. In the second panel, the black boy is seated outside the tub, while the white boy is holding a mirror in front of the black boy’s face. Although the black boy’s head is still black, the rest of his body has been turned white, thereby creating a visual parallel between this figure and the white elephant in the earlier ad. The surprised look on the black boy’s face suggests that he is pleased with this transformation, although it is significant that he has not been completely whitewashed — while the ad suggests that whiteness is pliable, it stops short of suggesting that Pears’ Soap, or anything else for that matter, can completely eradicate racial difference. To the extent that this ad takes up “Job’s famous inquiry as to the possibility of whitening an Ethiopian”, it reflects the ideas voiced in “An Interesting Experiment” that connect the controversy surrounding Toung Taloung with African American racialization. Like “An Interesting Experiment”, the whitewashing ad is surprisingly candid about the fact that whiteness is a social construction, or at least it proposes the possibility that “black” and “white” are not always rigid and unchangeable racial categories. However, the humorous tone of both “An Interesting Experiment” and the ad, and the limited effectiveness of Pears’ Soap in whitewashing both the white elephant and the black boy, suggest that despite the apparent malleability of whiteness, it is nevertheless a tightly controlled social privilege that cannot be extended to others. If, on a figurative level, a white elephant is a possession that, to cite Marcel Mauss in his famous study The Gift, “comes with a burden attached”, then when Toung Taloung stepped off the Lydian Monarch it was accompanied by a host of stereotypes that spoke to anxieties that lay at the heart of American culture. When considered alongside Light of Asia, The White Fraud, and the white elephant war, the arrival of Toung Taloung in the United States was not simply another episode in Barnum’s long history of passing off frauds on the American public. Rather, it marked a curious historical juncture where anxieties about race were represented in a figure, the white elephant, which had long been viewed as an apt metaphor for waste and deception. White elephants were big news in 1884. Although the Americans who lined up to see Barnum’s and Forepaugh’s animals thought they were paying to see exotic attractions, truthfully they were witnessing their own ideas about whiteness played out in a public forum, replete with all the paradoxes and prejudices that accompany theories about the “real secret” of race. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 11, 2017

Ross Bullen

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:10.619500

piracy-at-the-old-bailey

Piracy at the Old Bailey By Ben Merriman October 1, 2014 Ben Merriman presents a selection of piracy cases from the proceedings of London's Old Bailey. Although a few live up to the swashbuckling heists of stereotype, many reveal the surprisingly everyday nature of the maritime crimes brought before the court, including cases involving an argument over chickens and the stealing of a captain's hats. For centuries, the Old Bailey was the city of London’s main criminal court. Printed accounts of some 200,000 trials — the Proceedings — were published from 1674 to 1913. The Proceedings describe ordinary people in mostly ordinary legal trouble: three-fourths of the defendants were in the dock for theft, and on the whole the trials deal with mundane affairs. However, the Old Bailey also held jurisdiction over many cases of maritime piracy. These cases stand out from the many trials dealing with occurrences in and around London. * The Dove was at anchor off the port of Leghorn when EDWARD JOHNSON stabbed Captain Benjamin Hawes with a small blade, puncturing the Captain’s heart. The Captain’s apprentice, Walker, discovered Hawes dead in his cabin. He ran up to the deck to inform the first mate, only to find the mate and crew preparing to sail immediately, for they were all part of a plot to seize the ship. Walker jumped overboard and swam to a group of nearby vessels, whose crews stormed the Dove before it could sail away. The crew had conspired to make off with the ship because it belonged to Jews, from whom it was no sin to steal. * GEORGE GEERY took to the sea at an early age, and being a man of bad reputation, assumed the surname Wood, after a dead friend who was widely renowned for honesty. Geery, alias Wood, made sail on the Black Prince, which plundered ships throughout the Atlantic until it ran aground on Hispaniola during a storm. There the crew obtained false passports and sailed to Portugal, where Geery deserted with a confederate. He did not hang for his service on the Black Prince, but for a later transgression: illegally boarding the Derge Sustures and stealing several of the captain’s hats. * * The steamship Lion sailed from London to the port of Harlingen, in the Netherlands. As the ship was preparing to return to England, Captain Henry William Neville saw a number of fowls being brought on board. On inquiring, Captain Neville learned that the fowls had been bought by first engineer JOHN JENNINGS SMITH, who planned to take them back to England at no charge. When the Captain informed Smith that he would need to pay the usual shipping rate for his fowls, Smith shouted to the rest of the crew to stop the fires and halt preparations to sail, which they did readily. Neither the first mate, the company shipping agent, a gentleman of the city of Harlingen, nor the British consul could prevail upon Smith and his eight co-conspirators to return to the ship, which returned to London three days later with a replacement crew. At trial, however, it came to the attention of the court that the first mate had not filed proper contracts before the Lion sailed; the nine were therefore not mariners in the eyes of the law, and were immediately acquitted. * The St. John Pink had left Padras laden with grain. Soon after setting out two of the apprentices heard a commotion in the night: Captain Benjamin Hartley was being attacked by his crew. After his blunderbuss misfired, RICHARD COYLE, a mariner, attempted to throw the Captain from the ship, but Hartley held to the lanyards. Coyle then beat the Captain, dangling from the side, with a small shovel, which proved ineffective. JOHN RICHARDSON, a carpenter, struck the Captain in the head with an axe, after which the Captain fell into the sea and died. The ship, now under the command of Coyle, sailed for Malta, but did not land, for the apprentices would not agree to unite under the mutineers. Later the St. John Pink neared Foviano, where Coyle, wearing the dead Captain’s uniform, sought to buy liquor. Nobody would sell. That night the apprentices, who had been imprisoned below, escaped. They took a boat ashore to alert the local authorities. Coyle fled the St. John Pink in a long boat, but was apprehended in Tunisia. At trial he produced witnesses to attest to his character, but one scarcely remembered him, and the other recalled that Coyle had once drilled holes through the side of a ship. * The Jane lay off the coast of Mexico when WILLIAM McCLIVE and LEVI THOMAS stole one of the boats, and with it a good deal of clothing, a silver watch, and other items. Though they did not dispute that they had taken the boat, they noted, by way of mitigation, that they had been very drunk at the time. * * The Experiment, a fishing smack, began to leak and was forced to make port at Scarborough, where it was caulked and refloated. ISAAC COOPER, commanding the ship in the owner’s stead, then landed the ship at New Dieppe and sold off its equipment, along with all of the fish that had been caught on the journey. He kept this money for himself. Cooper continued to sail about until the Experiment was overtaken by a steamship some weeks later. The crew of the larger ship seized the Experiment and its officers, and took them all home. * Captain WILLIAM LAWRENCE wanted money. After being discharged from the Royal Navy with only a fraction of the wages owed to him, he fitted out the Lark as a privateer and assumed command. However, his crew could never apprehend valid prizes, only neutral Swedish and Dutch ships. Finally becoming frustrated, the Lark attacked and boarded the Enighadt, a Dutch ship sailing for London. Lawrence, with two other officers, stole textiles worth 1,000 pounds, as well as the personal wealth of the passengers. Though Lawrence disputed certain particulars, he admitted that he was a pirate and deserved to die. * JOHN MACKAREL was indicted for river piracy, but on the appointed day of his trial the prosecutor failed to appear in court. The charges were dismissed. * The naturalized Maltese JOHN TUNE was the Captain of the privateer Young Eagle, which illegally took a neutral ship, the Guilaume, as it sailed for Bilbao. For two years a woman, presenting herself as his wife, visited him while he awaited trial and execution, but it was at last revealed that his legal wife had died from the shock of his indictment; his visitor was, very likely, a prostitute. The Ordinary of Newgate Prison noted that Tune was a great complainer, and, the Ordinary suspected, a secret Catholic. * The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 1, 2014

en Merriman

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:11.576300

tribal-life-in-old-lyme-canadas-colorblind-chronicler-and-his-connecticut-exile

Tribal Life in Old Lyme Canada’s Colorblind Chronicler and his Connecticut Exile By Abigail Walthausen September 2, 2015 Abigail Walthausen explores the life and work of Arthur Heming, the Canadian painter who — having been diagnosed with colourblindness as a child — worked for most of his life in a distinctive palette of black, yellow, and white. For most of his life, Arthur Heming, “painter of the great white north”, painted in a monochrome scheme of black, white, and yellow tones, choosing this style at least nominally because of an early diagnosis of color blindness. These possibly self-imposed restrictions lasted inexplicably until the age of sixty, when a full, nearly technicolor palette suddenly splashed across his canvases. Thematically, he worked with scenes whose colors were appropriately blanched: winter hunting and trapping expeditions that he took for the Hudson Bay Company and alongside people of the First Nations. His narrow focus in painting mirrored his work as a traveler, novelist, and illustrator, and the commercial nature of his output certainly influenced the mixed reception he received in the art market. In Canada he existed as an outsider of both the trapping communities he traveled with in the north and of his peers in the fine art world. His best work is transcendent, calling to mind the rich velvety grayscale of Gerhard Richter’s realistic paintings, while his weakest work is the sort of mystic wolf lore that later became the vernacular of furry bedspreads and black crewneck sweatshirts. Heming was conflicted about both his place in his homeland and his status as an artist. This is perhaps why he was so eager to find an adopted home for many consecutive summers in a distinctively non-arctic landscape, a farming community on the Long Island Sound, Old Lyme Connecticut. While the Florence Griswold artist colony in Old Lyme Connecticut is generally touted as the “birthplace of American Impressionism”, Heming left a few distinctively Canadian marks on the communal dining room. First, there is his contribution to the collection of panels painted by artists who resided there; his, which depicts a lone canoe flying over rapids as seen from above, stands out from the rest because of its stark black and white color scheme and the narrow focus of its detail. Rather than a miniature painting of the pastoral Connecticut landscape, his seems like a snapshot of a larger, wilder, uncontainable narrative. Both Heming’s work and his image are featured in Henry Rankin Poore’s 1905 frieze-like painting Fox Chase. All of the colony’s frequent residents appear in this painting as caricatures of their roles in the community. Childe Hassam is depicted shirtless and playing a prank, while Mathilda Brown, the sole female painter in the group, is filled with ladylike shock. Heming himself is depicted as a proper Canadian mountie, standing above the action. So while Heming’s painting sticks out like a sore thumb, his own caricature blends quite nicely into the scene depicted. He is both part of the community and an observer. While many of the other artists in the mural are either painting en plein air or interacting with one another, there is no evidence that Heming did any painting at all while at the colony. Instead, he worked on his writing, both to create narratives around the paintings he had done on his travels and to record the life of the vibrant communities he had traveled and lived among. At the colony he wrote Spirit Lake, a book he began after illustrating many of the wilderness adventure stories of others, whose expertise he often found lacking. In all three of his wilderness novels, Spirit Lake (1907), Drama of the Forests (1921), and The Living Forest (1925), Heming delves with great detail into the relationships between people and animals on trapping expeditions. In spite of its title, Drama of the Forests is quite drama-free. While some hunting scenes involve action, he spends far more time giving detailed descriptions of the variety of animals he encountered in the north. There are the playful otters, the rabbits, whose fresh, untanned pelts make the best socks for trekking, and the mystical beaver, whose dams keep the soil nutrients from being swept away to those “highwaymen”, the major rivers, and out to sea. Nor does the “drama” exist with the people he encounters. He believed quite strongly that guns had no place in the Northern territories. Both in his art and in his writing, the danger is mutual when humans and animals come together in the hunt. When he describes a mother and daughter killing a bear mid-stream, he writes “Their hearts were fired with the spirit of the chase, and — though their only weapons were their skinning knives — they felt no fear”. Conversely, when he comes across a visitor to the northland, he is dismayed by his weaponry. I encountered a prospector who wanted to cross Portland Canal from Alaska to Canada, and as I was rowing over, I offered to take him across. When, however, he turned to pick up his pack I caught sight of something that fairly made me burst out laughing; for it was as funny a sight as though I had witnessed it on Piccadilly or Broadway. At first I thought he was a movie actor who, in some unaccountable way, had strayed from Los Angeles and become lost in the northern wilderness before he had had time to remove his ridiculous “make-up”; but a moment later he proved beyond doubt that he was not an actor, for he blushed scarlet when he observed that I was focussing a regular Mutt-and-Jeff dotted-line stare at a revolver that hung from his belt, and he faltered: ”But . . . Why the mirth?” Much more than the titular drama, Heming appreciated mirth, humor, and softness in humanity. In his writing, he relishes the small misunderstandings that happen when European and native cultures collide. He describes a botched correspondence between a Toronto eye doctor and a native man whom he met on an expedition, whose wife suffered from an eye injury: After much study, however, he decided that the old Indian had signed his name as “Chief Squirrel” so thus the doctor addressed his reply. A couple of weeks later . . . however, he realized he had made a mistake in giving the red man such a name, for another glance at the outside of the envelope not only proved that the Indian was indignant, but that he also possessed a sense of humour, for “Chief Squirrel” had, in return, addressed the noted oculist as “Doctor Chipmunk.” He describes with equal tenderness and humor the dry goods stock at a Hudson Bay trading post: At one post I visited years ago — that of Abitibi — they had a rather progressive addition in the way of a millinery department. It was contained in a large lidless packing case against the side of which stood a long steering paddle for the clerk’s use in stirring about the varied assortment of white women’s ancient headgear, should a fastidious Indian woman request to see more than the uppermost layer. Heming himself stuck to the “uppermost layer” in his writing: just as much as he avoided modern weapons, he avoided modern conflict as well. He had no interest in exploring exploitative practices between the Hudson Bay Comapny and trappers or racial conflict, though he took on a voice that was neither traditionally colonial nor progressive. Heming, it is clear, was very concerned with simplifying and humorizing the complexities between people wherever he was. Although he never wrote about his experiences in Toronto, London, New York, or Paris, he lavished attention on the community of Old Lyme, writing two books about the summers he spent there between 1902 and 1909. He believed himself to be recording in an anthropological sense, and this showed in the fact that his approach to descriptions of people and their habits was much the same when he visited Old Lyme as when he wrote about trapping expeditions. In his unpublished volume about the colony, “The Lady in the Lion’s Den”, he reverses the idea of the exotic when he writes “we are always hearing, or rather reading, about Americans in that God-forsaken region, but never about a man from Hudson Bay exploring the wilds of New York City or the villages of New England”. His love of humor comes up again and again in his Miss Florence and the Artists of Old Lyme: he describes awkward romances between residents, the scattered housekeeping of the hostess, and the pranks he claims himself to have played on Woodrow Wilson during his visit (apparently substituting wood wool, a byproduct of the logging industry used for packing, for Wilson’s much-loved shredded wheat breakfast cereal). Why was Heming able to find such an affinity for subject matter so far from his own intense wilderness paintings and narratives? Although he wrote and painted a land that many considered “wild”, essentially his subject matter was not a barren landscape, but the communities and traditions that he found while traveling through “the great white north”. Despite overlapping styles and subject matter, this tendency placed him worlds away from the contemporary artistic trends of his homeland. The painters known as the Group of Seven dominated the art scene of Heming’s day, and unlike Heming, they were much more interested in portraying an uninhabited northern landscape. Artists like Lawren Harris and Tom Thompson took expeditions to many of the same Northern regions, but they did not study the lifestyles of survival there. They saw grand empty expanses and saw them as symbols of purification and redemption in the modern world and hope for the relatively new Canadian nation. Harris believed that because of the northern wilds, newly independent Canadians were better equipped than continental Europeans to lighten the “heavy psychic blanket” of modern society. In much the same way that Heming found the interaction of human and animal life to be the great appeal of nature, the artists of Old Lyme were conscious dissenters from the romantic tradition of the Hudson Valley painters who were committed to showing nature in its sublime, untouched beauty. The American Impressionists who populated Florence Griswold’s community were much more interested in an American heritage populated by farmhouses, villagers, and livestock (several residents at the community specialized in painting cows). Both Heming and the Canadian Group of Seven had a great affinity for the work of the transcendentalists as well as surprisingly similar motifs in their attempts to spiritualize nature. In fact, as painters like Harris moved further into theosophy and abstraction, the work resembled Heming’s clean lines and monochrome more and more. But though Heming did render his natural settings with streamlined and perfected imagery, the great simplicity with which he imbued nature was much more inspired by the arts and crafts philosophy of seeking the greater truths in design. After some early disappointment in art school wherein he decided he was “deficient in sense of decoration”, Heming sought out the arts and crafts school, going to England to study with Frank Brangywn, a painter who had worked under William Morris. Unlike the Group of Seven, who wanted to claim the Canadian wilderness as a symbol for Canadian patriotism by erasing all life there, keeping it a blank canvas, Heming wanted to claim that idealized land by making both landscape and life decorative — in a sense, by preserving it in black and white. A trait of personal sensitivity may also have been a great driving force in his colorblindness. At Old Lyme, his position as a mentee of Frank DuMond kept his illustration work from diminishing his worth among peers the way it had done amongst the Group of Seven in Canada. It is clear that he wished to make himself as jovial, simple, and decorative as those things that he described in paint and pen. While the book Miss Florence and the Artists of Old Lyme demonstrates a great love and affection for the colony around him, “The Lady in the Lion’s Den” begins on a very different note. Heming fictionalizes himself as “Gilmour Gilmartin”, and the entire first chapter of the story is devoted to the anticipation that characters at the colony have for the arrival of this “Hudson Bay man”. In one description, a New York artist speaks about a lecture he once saw “Gilmartin” deliver: It was an amusing yet interesting performance. His maiden speech I believe, and he was bashful and shy as a little girl; and so rattled that when the chairman finished his introductory remarks, Gilmartin, clapping his hands wildly, joined the crowd in applauding his own introduction. Needless to say that brought down the house, for the audience, it seemed, imagined they had discovered a second Mark Twain. He clearly saw a cultivated naivete as a great part of his own personal appeal and humor. At one point, the two artists recount “Gilmartin’s” first railroad trip, wherein he was not only awed, but faced a fundamental (albeit chivalrous) misunderstanding of the way the railroad worked: . . . He concluded in a flash that the only way to save the train from total wreck was to use the weight of his body in balancing it, just as he used his body from side to side, as the train rushed around endless curves, and when daylight appeared, he landed it safely at the station in North Bay — just as he had landed many a precious cargo of furs when shooting his canoe through ‘white-waters’”. Heming’s love of decorative and simplified imagery may have steered him away from taking any artistic risks with color early in his career. His colorblindness may even have been a shield against the frequent accusations by critics and the Group of Seven alike that his work was too commercial, cartoonish, and even American. Towards the end of his life and without much explanation, Heming threw off the limitations of his possibly assumed colorblindness. The paintings of his final decade are vivid, nearly technicolor. At this late stage in life, Heming did receive recognition from a major Canadian museum, the Royal Ontario Museum; however, the recognition came through the wrong channels. This full-color trapping series was not acquired by the fine arts branch of the museum which displayed the works of the elite Group of Seven but by the natural history branch. Even there, the paintings were not fully welcomed. Two museum directors butted heads about the paintings — one arguing that the depictions of nature were subjective and unscientific, the other that they would be a useful part of the trend to activate and contextualize nature scenes for the general museum audience. In 1962, though, the issue became moot when the series was moved to the most appropriate of the ROM’s collections, the Canadiana Collection. Heming did not live to see this resolution nor did he have a chance to weigh in on the final home for his work. However, art museums had never been the preferred goal for his paintings: years before his death he had put much effort towards selling his work into the private holdings of the Hudson Bay Company. This unsuccessful attempt speaks to his vision of himself as first and foremost a contributor to the history of Canadian wilderness exploration. Ultimately, the fact that his last series of paintings spent so much time in limbo before resting in a place where they were welcomed seems a fitting parallel to Heming’s life — a life spent in uneasy navigation through Toronto, New York, Old Lyme, and the Great White North. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 2, 2015

Abigail Walthausen

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:12.093297

when-chocolate-was-medicine-colmenero-wadsworth-and-dufour

When Chocolate was Medicine Colmenero, Wadsworth, and Dufour By Christine Jones January 28, 2015 Chocolate has not always been the common confectionary we experience today. When it first arrived from the Americas into Europe in the 17th century it was a rare and mysterious substance, thought more of as a drug than as a food. Christine Jones traces the history and literature of its reception. In the seventeenth century, Europeans who had not traveled overseas tasted coffee, hot chocolate, and tea for the very first time. For this brand new clientele, the brews of foreign beans and leaves carried within them the wonder and danger of far-away lands. They were classified at first not as food, but as drugs — pleasant-tasting, with recommended dosages prescribed by pharmacists and physicians, and dangerous when self-administered. As they warmed to the use and abuse of hot beverages, Europeans frequently experienced moral and physical confusion brought on by frothy pungency, unpredictable effects, and even (rumor had it) fatality. Madame de Sévigné, marquise and diarist of court life, famously cautioned her daughter about chocolate in a letter when its effects still inspired awe tinged with fear: “And what do we make of chocolate? Are you not afraid that it will burn your blood? Could it be that these miraculous effects mask some kind of inferno [in the body]?”1 These mischievously potent drugs were met with widespread curiosity and concern. In response, a written tradition of treatises was born over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Physicians and tradesmen who claimed knowledge of fields from pharmacology to etiquette proclaimed the many health benefits of hot drinks or issued impassioned warnings about their abuse. The resulting textual tradition documents how the tonics were depicted during the first century of their hotly debated place among Europe’s delicacies. Chocolate was the first of the three to enter the pharmaceutical annals in Europe via a medical essay published in Madrid in 1631: Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma. Colmenero’s short treatise dates from the era when Spain was the main importer of chocolate. Spain had occupied the Aztec territories since the time of Cortés in the 1540s — the first Spanish-language description of chocolate dates from the 1552 — whereas the British and French were only beginning to establish a colonial presence in the Caribbean and South America during the 1620s and 30s. Having acquired a degree in medicine and served a Jesuit mission in the colonies, Colmenero was as close as one could come to a European expert on the pharmaceutical qualities of the cacao bean. Classified as medical literature in libraries today, Colmenero’s work introduced chocolate to Europe as a drug by appealing to the science of the humors, or essential bodily fluids. “Humoralism”, a theory of health and illness inherited from Hippocrates and Galen, was still influential in 1630. It held that the body was composed of four essential liquids: black bile, blood, yellow bile, and phlegm. Each humor echoed one of the four elements of nature—earth, air, fire, and water—and exhibited particular properties that changed the body’s disposition: black bile was cold and dry, blood was hot and wet, yellow bile felt hot and dry, and phlegm made the body cold and wet. Balanced together, they maintained the healthy functioning of an organism. When the balance among them tipped and one occurred in excess, it produced symptoms of what we now call “disease” in the body. While common European pharmaceuticals had long been classified as essentially cooling or heating, cacao presented both hot and cold characteristics. Later treatises faced the same conundrum regarding coffee. Depending on how it was administered/ingested, hot chocolate’s curative effects also crisscrossed the humoral categories in unexpected ways. On the surface, its combinations of effects did not make intuitive sense to Europeans, and in practice, threatened to wreak havoc among the self-medicated, à la Madame de Sévigné. By applying the dominant theory of the body to chocolate’s uncommon powers — was it sorcery, magic, alchemy? — Colmenero endeavored to make its mystery at least debatable in terms readily accessible across the countries of Western Europe. Because Colmenero was a doctor and surgeon who was said to have traveled to the West Indies, his Tratado was received as medical lore and remained an important reference throughout the early history of writing on hot beverages. It also supplied the very first recipe2 for hot chocolate on the Continent (featured below) to the delight of the less learned who encountered his expertise in a mug. Both England and France imported Colmenero’s wisdom along with the cacao beans they sourced from the American colonies and each country exploited it as a powerful marketing tool. The very first translation of the Tratado was published in English by army captain James Wadsworth, whose travels to Spain had introduced him to the wonders of the cacao beverage: A Curious Treatise of The Nature and Quality of Chocolate. Written in Spanish by Antonio Colmenero, Doctor in Physicke and Chirurgery. And put into English by Don Diego de Vades-forte (1640). Wadsworth published it under the feisty pseudonym Don Diego de Vades-forte, which may well be a metaphor for the drink: vādēs forte is Latin for “you will go” and “strong one.” Whatever the source of the name, the Latin offers the modern reader a good sense of the reputation with which chocolate entered British culture. That said, aside from an equally feisty introduction, Vades-forte/Wadsworth claims none of the writing or the knowledge therein as his own. By rendering Colmenero’s expertise under a pseudonym that gave him credibility as a translator of Spanish, Wadsworth preserved the exotic flavor of the drink he offered his countrymen. His translation was popular enough to be republished in 1652 under a title that speaks more clearly to the British colonial experience in America: Chocolate: Or, an Indian Drinke, by the Wise and Moderate Use Whereof, Health is Preserved, Sicknesse Diverted, and Cured, Especially the Plague of the Guts. It was this later edition that became the standard translation for referencing Colmenero in subsequent English-language treatises. While the treatise itself takes up foreign knowledge, Wadsworth’s original introductions directly address their new audience in familiar terms. His introduction to the 1652 edition pitches the drink as a cure-all for British consumers, promising help to “every Individuall Man and Woman, Learn’d, or Unlearn’d, Honest, or Dishonest”, who could afford chocolate’s “reasonable rates”. The benefits of ingesting chocolate swirl inventively around the promises of bodily repair and vigor: The vertues thereof are no lesse various, then Admirable. For, besides that it preserves Health, and makes such as drink it often, Fat, and Corpulent, faire and Amiable, it vehemently Incites to Venus, and causeth Conception in women, hastens and facilitates their Delivery: It is an excellent help to Digestion, it cures Consumptions, and the Cough of the Lungs, the New Disease, or Plague of the Guts, and other Fluxes, the Green Sicknesse, Jaundise, and all manner of Inflamations, Opilations, and Obstructions. It quite takes away the Morphew [discolored skin], Cleanseth the Teeth, and sweetneth the Breath, Provokes Urine, Cures the Stone, and strangury [urinary infection], Expells Poison, and preserves from all infectious Diseases. But I shall not assume to enumerate all the vertues of this Confection: for that were Impossible, every day producing New and Admirable effects in such as drinke it (sig. A4r). As much as Wadsworth’s translation anchored its knowledge in Colmenero’s first-hand medical testimony, the litany of diseases that make the case for taking the chocolate cure in the preface speak directly to threats to the body in England around 1650. In a century of dirty cities, plagues (which peaked in 1665), and terrible infant mortality rates, the medical need for chocolate must have seemed acute. Chocolate’s seemingly endless applications provided a brilliant marketing strategy for anyone who stood to benefit from the trade. At the same time, creating a British dependence on the drug served to justify the country’s colonial presence in the Caribbean, something scholars of the transatlantic conquest have not failed to point out.3 Not surprisingly with a drug from an “exotic” colonial territory known for its natural ways and steamy climate, sexual arousal — inciting to Venus — tops the list of ways in which chocolate from the West Indies would fortify the British subject. Colmenero fed Wadsworth the compelling argument about increased rates of conception and ease of birth, but the latter poetically combined that news with the promise that drinking a lot of hot chocolate will make anyone “faire and amiable”, a precondition, it seems, to chocolate’s working its magical generative effects on the womb. If pleasure and parenthood were not enough, it tackles everything from coughing to bad teeth. In short, chocolate would prove stronger, claims the introduction, than any hazard or resistant lover life might throw a Londoner’s way. By the time the French came around to capitalizing on the chocolate drug two decades later, exoticism and fashionability were more important branding criteria for chocolate than its medical application. Circa 1670, self-described French merchant-tradesman Philippe Sylvestre Dufour published Usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate (1671). Dufour, “from the oven”, may be another witty pseudonym (some speculate for physician and archeologist Jacob Spon, whom others claim was Dufour’s friend), as the drinks were served hot. What we do know is that the author claims in his introduction to work as a pharmacist whose “commercial ties make him more knowledgeable than a learned man could ever be through intellectual contemplation.” Certainly he read avidly enough to discover a collection of international writers who had pontificated on the merits of coffee, hot chocolate, and tea. Claiming to translate them all himself, he took the unprecedented step of binding them together into one volume. He placed a poorly-known 1643 French translation of Colmenero by René Moreau alongside articles on coffee and tea derived from writings by a number of French and Dutch diplomats, as well as Jesuit missionaries. The Usage thus gathered the world’s hot beverages under a single title. What’s more, the physical binding of the drugs in one volume echoed “the strong connection these drinks have to one another”, a main theme in the new introduction for the 1685 edition. Both in their preparation by boiling and in their physiological effects, drugs from three different corners of the earth behave in a strikingly similar fashion. That disparate world cultures make similar use of steeped tonics in medicine and ritual gave Dufour enough insight to deduce that they indeed form a pharmacological category unto themselves. Raw materials from Arabia, America, and Asia thus entered the French medical literature as a new drug group. Dufour did not have the language of caffeine, but grasped that their common denominator is an ability to stimulate and fortify. Beyond this shrewd scientific insight into the behavior of coffee, chocolate, and tea, the collected works also force the idea of cultural comparison. Dufour shows that these widely dispersed lands with vastly different climates, flora, fauna, peoples, and languages, nevertheless share the cultural practice of boiling stimulants for medicinal purposes. From its binding to its title, Usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate, Dufour’s treatise uproots the drinks from their native lands and showcases their relationship. As his title orders the beverages, it offers a basic chronology of the caffeine trades as they developed in France during the seventeenth century: Arabia, then Asia, and finally the Americas. If the idea of a small world seems obvious now, it was not then. Since the Age of Discovery, it had been commonplace to depict the world as a wide rectangle with each of the Four Continents at an angle: Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Early visual traditions represented peoples of these lands racially, painted with different colored skin, or allegorically, flanked with elephants, hunting bows, and parasols. A frontispiece added to Dufour’s 1685 edition (pictured below) participates in the visual tradition of the continents but does not follow the same logic of depicting difference. Instead, it follows the logic of the treatise: to relate the global areas associated with coffee, tea, and chocolate through their similar habits. Accordingly, the frontispiece pictures men who are racialized and dressed to evoke the Middle East, Asia, and Mesoamerica sitting in a room around a table enjoying a drink together. The world suddenly looked quite small. The Middle Eastern figure, in Ottoman dress, wears a decorated turban and beard; the Chinese figure balances in lotus position under a conical hat, and the Mexican (as Dufour identifies him), stands in mid-stride with a bow, wearing only feathers and gold. Each of them holds a visibly steaming beverage and is flanked by the specific vessel of his drink tradition. The ceramic teapot sits at the focal point of the image, while the coffee and chocolate pots are on the floor at the feet of their drinkers. China looks guarded, as though keeping his cards (his tea) close to his chest and separated from the viewer by a table. The Middle East — Dufour identifies coffee with Turkey, Yemen, and Egypt — raises his cup to the event. The figure of the Americas appears to be walking in armed with an Aztec bow but has left the arrows at home. Posed around a small, round table in close proximity, the world’s corners look comfortable, as though it is not at all odd that they should be enjoying a drink together. Of the statements made by this beverage summit of world empires, one is that the globe is vast and varied, but all its people seek good health and enjoyment; that is, they are as similar as coffee, tea, and chocolate. But the presence of the dynamic Mexican figure, a culture newly “discovered” to Europe about 175 years before, makes an even stronger commentary. HHe looks young and simple in both pose and dress, but he shares the hot beverage habit of the older Ottoman and the dapper Mandarin. In fact, he drinks out of the largest, most ornate cup and looks the most exposed to the viewer in body and pose. His presence there and desirable serving ware make him the equal of his older imperial neighbors, a surprisingly generous suggestion in 1685. Yet, in his open posture he also extends an invitation to come join him for a drink that is not so apparent in the allegories of the others. If so, he heralds a time when aggressive trade with the Middle East and Asia would be brutally complemented by large-scale exploitation of the lands of the former Mesoamerican empires. Beckoning to the reader to take the chocolate cure makes him uniquely vulnerable among this group, an idea borne out by both British and French colonial history in the Americas. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 28, 2015

Christine Jones

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:12.612545

dr-mitchill-and-the-mathematical-tetrodon

Dr Mitchill and the Mathematical Tetrodon By Dr Kevin Dann September 16, 2015 One of the early Republic's great polymaths, New Yorker Samuel L. Mitchill was a man with a finger in many a pie, including medicine, science, natural history, and politics. Dr Kevin Dann argues that Mitchill's peculiar brand of curiosity can best be seen in his study of fish and the attention he gives one seemingly unassuming specimen. On the streets of lower Manhattan in the early nineteenth century, the “Nestor of American science,” Dr Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764–1831) was the commonest of sights, going about in his blue coat, buff-colored vest, and buckled shoes. Though a conspicuously local figure, Dr Mitchill was equally cosmopolitan. After the British occupied New York City, he had left his medical practice to study at the University of Edinburgh, where he rubbed elbows with such notables as Sir James Mackintosh, who would become the preeminent Scottish jurist; physician and anatomist Caspar Wistar; and Thomas Addis Emmet, Irish revolutionary and later American lawyer and politician. He was also a colleague of the leading philosophes of London and Paris. Perambulating the streets of Gotham, Dr Mitchill’s voracious curiosity treated his native city as inquisitively as if he were on a pioneering scientific expedition abroad. “Pioneering” is in no way too provocative a word for Dr Mitchill, whose entire biography seemed to play out along the frontier of science and technology. An early advocate of the new Lavoisierian system of chemistry, his 1797 mineralogical survey of New York included an analysis of the Saratoga mineral waters. Sir Humphry Davy’s conception that acids were substances that contained replaceable hydrogen was aided by Dr Mitchill’s research on septic acid. He exchanged observations and speculations upon American climate, geology, paleontology, and ethnology with Thomas Jefferson; brought out the first American edition of Cuvier’s Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1818); and then improved it considerably for his American audience by his detailed narrative of the bedrock landscapes of “Fredonia” (the alternative name he proposed, and long cherished, for the United States of America), especially the New York City region. With Priestley he penetrated phlogiston, that mysterious substance transcending the alchemists’ four classical elements; with Jefferson and Peale, he probed the “American incognitum” — the mastodon. In the words of a late-nineteenth-century biographer: He wrote largely to Percival on noxious agents. He cheered Fulton when dejected; encouraged Livingston in appropriation; awakened new zeal in Wilson the ornithologist, when the Governor, Tompkins, had nigh paralyzed him by his frigid and unfeeling reception; and, with Pintard and Colden, was a zealous promoter of that system of internal improvement which has stamped immortality on the name of Clinton. Through no other single person could one receive such a capacious window upon the intellectual landscape of early-nineteenth-century Gotham; indeed, Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History (1809) was inspired largely as a satirical response to Mitchill’s straight-laced and rather soporific history, Picture of New-York (1807). Dr Mitchill’s curiosity knew no bounds, so that two hundred years later, if one follows him in his inquiries, one gets the most extravagant and inviting picture of the rapidly changing city. Everywhere and always he was concerned with life, and so the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan become enlarged and enriched through his eyes. In 1826, in a discourse to his fellow Lyceum of Natural History members about the scientific accomplishments of his old friend Thomas Jefferson, Dr Mitchill — who in 1817 had traveled to Chester, in Orange County, to disinter the teeth, bones, and tusks of a mastodon — took special note of Jefferson’s own interest in the incognitum, a key element in his patriotic effort to refute Count Buffon’s proclamations of American “degeneracy”. Sharing Jefferson’s acute republicanism and cosmopolitan erudition, Dr Mitchill’s zoology was also loftily political and expertly informed but always tinged with homespun wisdom. In his report on the Chester mastodon, when he noted that the “dexter prong” (the right-hand tusk) was more heavily worn than the “sinistral” (left-hand side), he took it to be a “manifest indication of preference for what the drivers of animals call the off-side limbs”. He was constantly alert to the peculiar sagacity of his neighbors. The taxonomic range of Dr Mitchill’s scientific investigations may have rivaled Barnum, but of all the strange creatures that caught his perspicacious eye, the piscatorial tribe was paramount. From his quarters on Barclay Street, a block from City Hall and the Park, he would make frequent strolls to the Fulton Fish Market — sometimes accompanied by students from Columbia College or the College of Physicians and Surgeons — to see what the local nets had lately brought up from pelagic parts both far and near. Having grown up in “Plandome” (North Hempstead, Long Island), he was well-acquainted with the fish of Long Island Sound, and for all his exotic interests, the humbly vernacular fishes about the North River, East River, and their confluence just off the Battery were at the epicenter of his ichthyology. Along with the routine anatomical descriptions that make up the main body of his “The Fishes of New York, Described and Arranged”, published in Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York, Volume 1 (1815) (1815), nearly every one of the 166 species described offers some small literary or historical gem. Of Sparus ovis, the sheepshead, he declared: Nothing, in the opinion of a New Yorker, can exceed boiled sheep’s head served up at a sumptuous dinner. . . This noble fish . . . the feats of hooking and pulling him in, furnish abundant materials for the most pleasing and hyperbolical stories. Dr Mitchill imagined some future day when the fish would be brought to New York “in perfection”; for now, he regretted, “the sheep’s head too often corrupts for want of ice.” Centronotus, the crab-eater — the last entry in his “Fishes of New York” and the only species for which he felt obliged to invent a new taxon — also merited high culinary praise: “This fish was boiled and served up at my table; on which occasion, my family, servants and all, had but one opinion — that it was one of the best we had ever eaten”. In Dr Mitchill’s day a vast repository of natural history still lay in local folklore, and he was keen to record it. In earlier days the custom was to bait one’s hooks for Tautog, or Blackfish, in early April, when the dogwood came into blossom; now that the dogwood was nearly gone from lower Manhattan’s streets and yards, the American chestnut tree served as phenological prognosticator, and Dr Mitchill duly noted a common rhyme among fishermen: When chestnut leaves are big as thumb-nail,Then bite blackfish without fail,But when chestnut leaves are big as a span,Then catch black-fish, if you can. Children too were ready sources for Dr Mitchill. Writing about the different species of sturgeon, he included the bit of arcana that local boys found the gristle taken from sharp-nosed sturgeon was much less elastic than that of the blunt-nosed, and so a ball made from it did not bounce so well. As a longtime intimate of Robert Fulton (Dr Mitchill was among the passengers on the Clermont’s maiden voyage in 1807), one should not be surprised to find that the steam wizard supplied him with ichthyological specimens. Fulton had caught an Orange file-fish (Balistes aurantiacus) on August 1, 1814, and promptly passed it on to Dr Mitchill, who then asked his brother-in-law, Staten Island physician (as well as pioneering agricultural reformer and co-founder of the New York Institute for the Blind — all of these men seem to have been prodigious polymaths!) Samuel Akerly, to draw the fish. In Dr Mitchill’s day — as it still often is in our own — natural science was in its essence a pursuit of sensuous Beauty, masquerading as a heroic quest for Truth. Even the lowliest of fishes revealed the beauty of Creation to Samuel Latham Mitchill, and in glancing back at his encounter with a lowly local fish, we can witness his response to that beauty, framed by the meeting of the local with the cosmopolitan. He examined his single specimen of the Mathematical Tetrodon, Tetrodon mathematicus, on June 29, 1814. The War of 1812 was still going on; a month before, the Treaty of Paris had been signed, and Napoleon had been exiled to Elba the same day. The two-dozen cannons installed at the West Battery Fort (today’s Castle Clinton) were still trained out onto the waters from which the Tetrodon and most of Dr Mitchill’s other specimens had come. It seems rather an unassuming fish, standing there as it does on the same Plate VI with such lovelies as the phantasmagorical Spot-striped Diodon; its congener Hairy Diodon — which looks for all the world like some Ed Koren rendering of a small Upper East Side dog; and the diminutive but arresting Spinous Dory. One must turn to Dr Mitchill’s species account to find why the little pufferfish becomes a much more luminous member of both his taxonomy and lexicon: Lateral line departing from the ring encompassing the eye, like a tangent; ascending in a superb curve toward the back; sweeping boldly down from the olive of the back through the satin of the side; and then running direct to the tail; putting one in mind of the ecliptic cutting the equator. . . Another line from the eye-circle to the transverse line, and parallel to the lateral line, making a sort of parallelogram. He seems here to be some kind of piscatorial William Blake, seeing a World in the external markings of a humble fish, as if he were holding the infinity promised by mathematics in the mucus-covered palm of his hand. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 16, 2015

Dr Kevin Dann

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:13.089156

scurvy-and-the-terra-incognita

Scurvy and the Terra Incognita By Jonathan Lamb May 6, 2015 One remarkable symptom of scurvy, that constant bane of the Age of Discovery, was the acute and morbid heightening of the senses. Jonathan Lamb explores how this unusual effect of sailing into uncharted territory echoed a different kind of voyage, one undertaken by the Empiricists through their experiments in enhancing the senses artificially. When the archangel Michael in Milton’s Paradise Lost explains to Adam that his sin cannot be purged in Paradise, but must be worked off over time in the world at large, he opens a door to discovery that is at once promising and depressing. On the one hand there is the whole earth to traverse and to exploit, and on the other Adam is reminded that he is about to infect it with the taint of mortality. Two sides of discovery are exhibited, then: the prospect of a purer knowledge waiting to be found (the route to ultimate redemption), and the awareness of a degenerate constitution (“a distemper gross to aire as gross”) revealed to Adam as a terrestrial future filled with “th’effects which thy original crime hath wrought”. The scientists who ushered in the last era of maritime exploration were charmed by the promise of discovery. Robert Hooke wrote, “And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way . . . by tasting too those fruits of Natural Knowledge, that were never yet forbidden”.1 But no matter how many devices Hooke and his colleagues invented to advance this project, there was a distemper infecting all attempts to put it into practice. Scurvy. Caused by a genetic mutation that prevents humans from synthesising vitamin C, scurvy was inevitable in long voyages of discovery where fresh food was hard to get, causing the body to grossly disintegrate and perish. The disease ensured that the sinister ambiguity of discovery, so cheerfully overlooked in Hooke’s program of restoration, remained intact. If sin came into the world via knowledge and discovery could it really leave the same way? Scurvy seems to indicate, like God, that it can’t; and yet there is another way in which it suggests, like Hooke, the opposite. One of its more remarkable symptoms was a morbid receptivity to sense impressions, one aligned with the preternatural sensitivity scientists were trying to excite artificially. If scurvy is construed as physical manifestation of sin — a consequence of the postlapsarian body, the offspring of illicit knowledge — it has its own interest in the processes of empirical cognition. Sudden sounds, such as the report of a musket or a cannon, were well known to kill scorbutic sailors. Even pleasant stimuli such as a drink of fresh water, or a long-awaited taste of fruit, could provoke a seizure and put an end to their lives. In his Omoo, Melville recalls how once the Trades scarce filled our swooning sails; the air was languid with the aroma of a thousand strange, flowering shrubs. Upon inhaling it, one of the sick who had recently shown symptoms of scurvy, cried out in pain, and was carried below. This is no unusual effect in such cases.2 When, badly afflicted with scurvy, Bernardin de St Pierre landed on Mauritius, he was disgusted by the trees, which smelt of excrement, and flowers such as the veloutier were alluring only at a distance for the odour “quite close is perfectly loathesome”.3 Sometimes the sensation passed the frontier from pain to pleasure or vice versa. Here is Anders Sparrman, a scorbutic naturalist on the Resolution who was hunting ducks when at last he landed in New Zealand: “The blood from these warm birds which were dying in my hands, running over my fingers, excited me to a degree I had never previously experienced. . . This filled me with amazement, but the next moment I felt frightened”.4 ※※Indexed under…Odourof trees transformed by scurvy The scorbutic eye was particularly engaged, so much so that vision seemed to envelop the viewer and turn the orb of the individual organ inside out, as in this description by Pedro Fernandez de Queirós of a festival he organized after he and his scorbutic crew reached Vanuatu: There were seen amongst the green branches so many plumes of feathers and sashes, so many pikes, halberds, javelins, bright sword-blades, spears, lances, and on the breasts so many crosses, and so much gold, and so many colours and silken dresses, and many eyes could not contain what sprung from the heart, and they shed tears of joy.5 Spectacular novelties such as coral grew more wonderful for Matthew Flinders as scurvy heightened the impression, turning dangerous animate rock into fascinating antiscorbutics: “We had wheat sheaves, mushrooms, stags horns, cabbage leaves, and a variety of other forms, glowing under water with vivid tints of every shade betwixt green, purple, brown, and white”.6 Pleasure and disgust could be aroused by the selfsame phenomenon: Johann Reinhold Forster was fascinated by the effects of phosphorescence although he believed it was caused by rotting animalcules. One hundred fifty years later years later, Robert Louis Stevenson was to have the same mixed reactions to coral. The sea snakes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner excite similar extremes of wretchedness and rapture. In the previous century scientists had attempted various prostheses for the sense-organs designed to make the work of discovery more exact: telegraph wires to transport the voice to distant ears, hygroscopes for detecting effluvia leaking from the earth, and of course improved microscopes and telescopes designed to bring the infinitely small and the infinitely distant into distinct focus. Hooke’s reactions to the colours and shapes of microscopic specimens were sometimes quite as ecstatic as Sparrman’s, Flinders’ and De Queirós’, but at the same time he was able to make accurate drawings of them that had never been seen before. In this pursuit he explained how the senses were “wonderfully benefitted . . . and guided to an easie and more exact Performance of their Offices”.7 If other people were using ships, huge machines designed to bring the unknown into the purview of the five senses, Hooke was using his own portable contrivances to arrive at what he explicitly referred to as a discovery of “new Worlds and Terra-Incognita’s”.8 His machines were the forerunners of those that accompanied Cook’s supercargoes: Kendal’s and Arnold’s chronometers, Knight’s azimuth compass, and Bird’s astronomical quadrant. Support for Hooke was by no means unanimous. Margaret Cavendish said his instruments could never penetrate the surface of things and find out the secrets of their constitution; they only disarranged the distances, textures, and angles that made them usual or comely, revealing instead the immodesties, moles, and hairs that cause the maids of honour in Brobdingnag to appear so repulsive to Gulliver. Were we to see things a thousand times more clearly or hear things magnified at the same rate, our lives would be made intolerable, Locke argued: there would be no rest, no power of discrimination. Such a witness would live “in a quite different World from other People. Nothing would appear the same to him, and others”.9 For Hooke, temporary alienation from the familiar world was the whole point. If a terra incognita was to be disclosed, then one had to act in the spirit of foreignness: “An Observer should endeavor to look upon such Experiments and Observations that are more common, and to which he has been more accustom’d, as if they were the greatest Rarity, and to imagine himself a Person of some other Country or Calling, that he never heard of, or seen the like before”.10 Scurvy, you might say, helped the observer into this estranged position. By opting for the advantages of normal sense impressions, Locke and Cavendish were defending not just the proportionality and communicability of sensations, but also a very specific notion of how they are received and exchanged as ideas. Along with Descartes and Hobbes, Locke agreed that the sensory organ, while being stimulated by an object in the real world, did not take a print of it or in any way incorporate its properties. He said, “There is nothing like our Ideas in the Bodies themselves”.11 The smell of a flower is an event in the sensorium, created purely by the pulsations passing between the olfactory nerve and the brain. Cavendish did not go as far as that, but she resisted the Epicurean doctrine of films and effigies as streams of matter launched from the surface of the object at the eye, ear, or nose. Using the analogy of the mirror, she said, “It is not the real body of the object which the glass presents, but the glass only figures or patterns out the picture presented in and by the glass”.12 With this account of representation she denied Lucretius, the arch-empiricist, the indisputable evidence of impressions or any collaboration between them in the production of knowledge, for he had argued that no organ can thwart the receptivity of another. He asked, “Can th’eare, the sight denie?/ Shall th’eare, or tast, the feeling sense oppose?/ Or shall the eie, dispute against the nose?”.13 Cavendish retorted, “The nose knows not what the eyes see”.14 For his part, Hooke was convinced of the contrary, for it was only with the help of a microscope that the true roughness of a surface could be felt, a coalition of the prosthetized eye and the imaginary finger: “The roughness and smoothness of a Body is made much more sensible by the help of a Microscope, than by the most tender and delicate Hand”.15 Walter Charleton, the greatest authority on scurvy and nutrition in the seventeenth century, noticed that under the pressure of great stimuli the eye will engross the functions of other senses, resulting in the kind of imminent synaesthesia Addison vouched for in his essays of the pleasures of imagination when he observed that an appetent eye experiences sight as a “more delicate and diffusive Kind of Touch”.16 Coleridge was fascinated by this phenomenon. He called it the double touch (“touch . . . co-present with vision, yet not coalescing”) and wondered “whether the Skin be not a Terra Incognita in Medicine”.17 From the beginning of this debate, the issue of enlarged sensations had calqued upon questions of disease. If you could smell too much like Bernardin de St Pierre and Melville’s sailor, or have your eyes dazzle with the colours of serpents, like the Ancient Mariner, then life was not only lived in a foreign place, that place was a hospital. Supposing that it might be possible to sense too much, and out of that superfluity for one organ to seize on the function of another, Francis Hutcheson had concluded such a condition to be inconsistent with providential mercy (“Senses incapable of bearing the surrounding Objects without Pain; Eyes pained with the Light; a Palate offended with the Fruits of the Earth; a Skin as tender as the Coats of the Eye”).18 But of course what he had done was to reject as improbable the very scenes of scorbutic distress widely reported in contemporary journals. In his Essay on Man Pope similarly excludes a list of morbid susceptibilities as exorbitant to the divine plan, concluding with the figment of a man so tender he shrieks at the smell of a flower, as Melville’s sailor was actually heard to do: Say what the use, were finer optics given,T’inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven?Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er,To smart and agonise at every pore?Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,Die of a rose in aromatic pain? Approaching the matter of acute sensation from a different angle, Robert Boyle saw a very useful connexion between disease and extraordinary powers of perception. In his essays on effluvia, he mentions several examples, some of an innate susceptibility (the lady who swoons at the smell of roses) and some of a valuable acquisition of sensibility after an illness. A man who recovered from bubonic plague found himself able to smell an infected person before any signs of the pestilence had appeared; another who suffered inflammation of the eyes and afterwards could distinguish colours in the dark; a physician who fell sick of a fever and discovered he could now overhear whispered speech at a great distance.19 Boyle’s explanation for these accidental improvements of the subtlety of the senses stems from his belief that effluvia do not bounce off the body, but pierce it and, by affecting its sensory equipment, alter the organs of the body that influence subsequent reactions to their environment. So from a blind and involuntary susceptibility, the body’s organs may advance to an alertness that is active and what Bacon would call ejaculative or emittent. From this superlative awareness of effluvia, Boyle supposes such a degree of potential discrimination that the size, shape, motion, and colour of effluvia themselves might become perceptible. So by means of the variations in the internal constitution of the living engine (as Boyle calls the body) he aims at the discovery of an invisible world of particles, just as Hooke with his machines goes in search of a terra incognita in the bottom of a microscope, or Coleridge beneath the porous surface of the skin. Is scurvy such a disease, capable of prostrating the body and then redeeming it with enhanced perceptions? Walter Charleton and Thomas Willis, Boyle’s contemporaries and authors of books on scurvy, offered some account of how this might happen. For both men the healthy state of the sensitive soul resembled Boyle’s idea of the action and reaction of effluvia. Willis called it dilation or irradiation, Charleton named it corroboration. It occurs when something powerfully imagined actually takes place: We imagine the Drinking of excellent Wine, with a certain Pleasure, then we indulge it; the Imagination of its Pleasure is again sharpened by the taste, and then by a reflected Appetite drinking is repeated. So as it were in a Circle, the Throat or Appetite provokes the Sensation, and the Sensation causes the Appetite to be sharpened, and iterated.20 This corroboration of an image by the addition of a sensation is to be compared with the fixations of the scorbutic imagination observed by Thomas Trotter: The cravings of appetite, not only amuse their waking hours with thoughts on green fields, and streams of pure water; but in their dreams they are tantalized by the favourite idea; and on waking the mortifying disappointment is expressed with the utmost regret, with groans, and weeping, altogether childish.21 But then when the desideratum is materialized, what a remarkable shift from miserable privation to intense pleasure! “The patient in the inveterate stage of the disease seems to gather strength even from the sight of fruit: the spirits are exhilarated by the taste itself, and the juice is swallowed, with emotions of the most voluptuous luxury”.22 John Mitchel, an Irish political prisoner en route for Tasmania aboard a scorbutic transport, wished never to forget the “brutal rapture” with which he devoured six oranges when the ship landed in Pernambuco. There is a gentler example of corroboration when the parched Ancient Mariner wakes from a dream of drinking to find his thirst quenched by the rain falling on his bare skin: “Sure I had drunken in my dreams,/ And still my body drank”. If we bear this in mind when reviewing one of the great junctions in the history of scurvy and science, Humphry Davy’s tests on nitrous oxide at the Pneumatic Institute in 1799, an unmistakable resemblance seems to take place between the excitements of a scorbutic seaman and the sensations induced by laughing gas in Davy’s fingers, eyes, and ears. He made and inhaled the gas in order to test a theory that “azote oxyd,” as it was called by Samuel Mitchill (whose theory it was), acted as the source of all contagious diseases, including scurvy. While finding that he did not succumb to scurvy or any other malady, Davy did find himself changed in ways a scorbutic sailor or a Royal Scientist might recognize: I imagined that I had increased sensibility of touch: my fingers were pained by anything rough . . . I was certainly more irritable, and felt more acutely from trifling circumstances . . . My visible impressions were dazzling and apparently magnified . . . when I have breathed it amidst noise, the sense of hearing has been painfully affected even by moderate intensity of sound.23 At the limit of sensory irritation, Davy had discovered that there was no difference between suffering the impression of an object and imagining it. Like Condillac’s statue, he could not tell the difference between passivity and activity, “between a cause within, and a cause without”.24 At this pitch both were the same, and the consequence was remarkable, explained by Mike Jay as follows: “[Davy’s] culminating experiment had proved, as nothing ever had before, that an altered sensory and mental frame had the power to generate an entirely different universe”.25 Was this universe Boyle’s invisible world? Hooke’s terra incognita? The corroborative assignation with fresh fruit on a desert island? Probably not, for it was experienced, as Coleridge himself was aware from his experiments with opium and laughing gas, with all sense of “outness” lost: and then, as he says, “What a horrid disease every moment would become”.26 Scurvy was a terrible affliction but was not that kind of distemper. It maintained some link with the real, for no matter how foreign and extravagant it might appear in a dream, it was an authentic message from the body to the imagination, to which the imagination and the will did their best to respond. Erasmus Darwin called reveries and delusions resulting in total disobedience to external stimuli “diseases of volition”, and we can conclude that scurvy was not of that genus because its morbid sensory alertness preserved (no matter how obliquely) some kind of faith with the empiricist principles that shadowed its history. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 6, 2015

Jonathan Lamb

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:13.614116

the-eternal-guffaw-john-leech-and-the-comic-history-of-rome

The Eternal Guffaw John Leech and The Comic History of Rome By Caroline Wazer February 25, 2015 At the beginning of the 1850s, two stalwarts from the heart of London-based satirical magazine Punch, Gilbert Abbott à Beckett and John Leech, cast their mocking eye a little further back in time and published The Comic History of Rome. Caroline Wazer explores how it is not in the text but rather in Leech's delightfully anachronistic illustrations that the book's true subversion lies, offering as they do a critique of Victorian society itself. Drawn by caricaturist John Leech, the illustrations of Gilbert Abbott à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome are a Victorian fever dream of ancient Rome. Senators pair their togas with top hats, generals wear muttonchops under their helmets, and priests styled as snake charmers draw gullible crowds with the help of coal-powered rotating billboards. The blending of past and present in Leech’s illustrations is on one level a simple visual joke that reinforces the humor of the text, dragging the glories of Roman history down to the level of the contemporary London street. A closer look at the context of the book, however, reveals a series of interesting tensions beneath the surface humor. Leech and à Beckett first worked together on the staff of Punch, the satirical London periodical. First published in 1841, Punch quickly gained a reputation for capturing — and mocking — the cultural zeitgeist of Victorian London, from pompous politicians to the unwashed masses. Henry Silver, a Punch contributor, wrote in his diary in 1864 that Leech “sneers at the Working Man, as usual.” A staunch Tory, Leech frequently came into conflict with the more progressive members of the early Punch staff about the content of the magazine. His cartoons often portrayed the urban poor as stupid and the wealthy as frivolous. À Beckett, on the other hand, was a member of the progressive-minded Reform Club and earned a reputation for understanding and generosity when he served as Poor Law commissioner in 1849. By the time they collaborated on A Comic History of England in 1846, Leech and à Beckett had each already dabbled in the genre of satirical didactic literature. Leech had illustrated Percival Leigh’s The Comic Latin Grammar and The Comic English Grammar (both published in 1840), both of which were in-jokey publications for the elite schoolboy set. À Beckett, drawing on his legal education, published The Comic Blackstone in 1844. Brought out in monthly installments, A Comic History of England was a moderate success, and in 1851 the pair reunited for The Comic History of Rome. While neither Leech nor à Beckett had attended university, both received a classical primary education. Amid the growth of both capitalism and urbanism in the Victorian period, such an education was increasingly important as a cultural shibboleth, distinguishing elite men from strivers when money alone was no longer enough to do so. Around the time of the birth of Punch, however, there arose a complicating factor to the use of familiarity with the classical past: the at-home educational publication. A result of cheap printing and increasing literacy, these publications — sort of the “For Dummies” books of their day — allowed anyone with a few pennies in his pocket access to knowledge previously kept locked up in elite schools. The Punch staff initially took an eye-rolling stance at this democratization — and cheapening — of history and learned culture. One issue from 1843 included a satirical feature titled “History at One View,” which arranged major events according to the month in which they occurred without regard to year, producing a nonsensical historical hodgepodge. The feature proclaimed itself to be “arranged expressly with an eye to the Society for the Confusion of Useful Knowledge,” in a jab at the real and very earnest Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Other targets of ridicule included bad schoolboy Latin and popular retellings of Greek and Roman mythology. Punch soon stopped wrangling with the new climate of learning, at least in print. Some of the staff found this sneering attitude distasteful. As writer Douglas William Jerrold put it in an 1846 letter to his friend Charles Dickens, “The world will get tired (at least, I hope so) of this eternal guffaw at all things. After all, life has something serious in it. It cannot be all a comic history of humanity.” À Beckett’s preface to The Comic History of Rome begins with a disclaimer. Despite the casual language and jocular tone, “this work has been prompted by a very serious desire to instruct those who, though willing to acquire information, seek in doing so as much amusement as possible.” Men like Jerrold who doubted the value of comic histories were “grievously mistaken who have imagined that in this. . . the object has been to treat History as a mere farce, or to laugh at Truth.” For his part, à Beckett mostly lived up to his word. He breezes through Roman history like a professor emeritus at a cocktail party, displaying both a gently dry sense of humor and a deep familiarity with the content and tricky nature of the ancient sources. He closes the first chapter as follows: Before closing this portion of the narrative of the History of Rome, it is necessary to warn the reader against believing too much of it. The current legends are, indeed, Legenda, or things to be read, because everybody is in the habit of repeating them; but the student must guard himself against placing credence in the old remark, that ‘what everybody says must be true,’ for here is a direct instance of what everybody says being decidedly otherwise. The life and reign of Romulus, are to be taken not simply cum grano salis — with a grain of salt — but with an entire cellar of that condiment, which is so useful in correcting the evil consequences of swallowing too much of anything. Leech’s images sometimes stick close to the text, as in the full-color plate that portrays the legend of Romulus and Remus as a Mother Goose-esque fairy tale. Often, however, Leech used his illustrations to draw explicit and sometimes cutting connections with modern Victorian life. The subject matter of the text, which covered Roman history through the fall of the Republic, certainly lent itself to comparisons with mid-nineteenth century London. Especially in the latter part of the period covered, Rome saw a booming poor urban population, the growth of a snobby urban intelligentsia, and the development of what many saw as overtly demagogical politics — in other words, the same things that Leech regularly skewered in the pages of Punch. The subject of Roman history allowed Leech to make some satirical references too obscure or too reactionary for Punch’s pages. A color plate portraying a 5th century BC popular uprising against the patrician Appius Claudius Crassus following his abduction of the plebeian Verginia resembles nothing so much as a scene from the French Reign of Terror, complete with ragged street urchins and a stout cat-wielding proletarian wearing a Phrygian cap. More frequently, however, Leech used the Roman setting simply to poke fun at familiar urban characters, particularly the working classes. In the images below, Leech portrays the revered Greco-Roman healing god Aesculapius as a crotchety old apothecary, and a Carthaginian soldier as a timid municipal policeman. Another favorite target was the rich man who, whether out of desire for power or cultural cachet, overinvolved himself with the poor. In one illustration, Tiberius Gracchus, a populist Roman reformer, becomes a top hat-wearing, baby-cheek-pinching demagogue, seedily winning popular favor by charming poor women. In another, Leech depicted a gladiator and his owner as a brutish modern-day boxer (note the gloves) and his foppish patron (note the dangling cigarette). Back at Punch, Leech had developed a reputation for overwhelming the text with the approachability and humor of his illustrations. William Makepeace Thackeray, who frequently contributed to the magazine, once wrote that “John Leech is Punch.” A similar statement could be made about The Comic History of Rome, despite à Beckett’s earnest assertion that the book was not meant to make light of history. By projecting his satirical view of the present back onto ancient Rome, Leech injected a certain nastiness into The Comic History of Rome that echoed and reinforced his nasty view of the present. It is easy enough to imagine a curious but uneducated middle-class Londoner enjoying à Beckett’s avuncular jokes, but what would he make of Leech’s illustrations? Possibly he would be offended, but possibly — conditioned by Punch and similar publications — he would take part in Leech’s eternal guffaw at society. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 25, 2015

Caroline Wazer

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:14.820449

the-nightwalker-and-the-nocturnal-picaresque

The Nightwalker and the Nocturnal Picaresque By Matthew Beaumont June 3, 2015 The introduction of street lighting to 17th-century London saw an explosion of nocturnal activity in the capital, most of it centring around the selling of sex. Matthew Beaumont explores how some writers, with the intention of condemning these nefarious goings-on, took to the city's streets after dark, and in the process gave birth to a peculiar new literary genre. At the end of the seventeenth century a new literary genre or subgenre emerged in England, one that might be characterized as the nocturnal picaresque. Its authors, who were moralists or satirists or social tourists, or all of these at the same time, and who were almost invariably male, purported to recount their episodic adventures as pedestrians patrolling the streets of the metropolis at night. These narratives, which often provided detailed portraits of particular places, especially ones with corrupt reputations, also paid close attention to the precise times when more or less nefarious activities unfolded in the streets. As distinct from diaries, they were noctuaries (in his Dictionary of the English Language [1755], Samuel Johnson defined a “noctuary” simply as “an account of what passes at night”).1 These apparently unmediated, more or less diaristic accounts of what happened during the course of the night on the street embodied either a tragic or a comic parable of the city, depending on whether their authors intended to celebrate its nightlife or condemn it as satanic. The nocturnal picaresque, composed more often in prose than in verse, was a distinctively modern, metropolitan form that, with several other literary genres that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comprised a response to the dramatic social and architectural transformations of the metropolis after the Great Fire of 1666. This was the epoch when both the West End, which the aristocracy colonized, and the suburbs to the south and east of the City, where the poor were exiled, expanded exponentially. By 1700, when its population reached approximately 550,000, London had outstripped Paris to become the largest city in Europe. Its concentration of imperial trade, industry, and government made it the most advanced and most energetic metropolitan centre in the world. Leo Hollis has even speculated that “the true ‘English Revolution’ was seen not in the 1640s, or in 1688, but in the 1690s”, when the expansion and recomposition of London “shattered the traditional urban space into enclaves and modern neighbourhoods” and “the city at large became a fluid mixture of anonymous and closely knit communities formed by new relationships dependent on work, status, religion and gender”.2 These social and topographical changes, especially this segregation, reshaped people’s psychogeographical relationship to the metropolis and its proliferating, increasingly complex forms. A number of different types of publication mapped and explored London after the Fire. These included guidebooks, street directories, topographical surveys, urban instruction manuals and antiquarian tour-books. They also included anti-pastoral poems, or “urban georgics”, such as Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower” (1710) and John Gay’s Trivia (1716). And, most prominently, pioneering instances of the novel, as practiced in particular by Daniel Defoe — “probably the first writer to grasp the exotic possibilities of city life with its unpredictable energies tempting the urban adventurer into ever new situations.”3 The nocturnal picaresque, which provided a moral map of the metropolitan night, was related to all these genres. But it was above all a type of “ramble or spy narrative”, a form that structured its account of the daily life of the city in terms of the adventures its narrator experienced in the course of a pedestrian stroll through its precincts.4 The ramble narrative claimed to record these scenes, which were at once sensational and typical of everyday life in the metropolis, as if they had momentarily occurred, at a particular time of day, in precisely located streets. Like the ramble narrative, the nocturnal picaresque was rendered possible by the fact that, in spite of its rapidly rising population, which leapt by at least 200,000 in the first half of the eighteenth century, London was still not too immense to be circumambulated. The anonymous author of The Ambulator; Or, the Stranger’s Companion in a Tour Round London (1774) measured the metropolis, which included Westminster and Southwark as well as the City itself, as being five miles from east to west and three miles from north to south.5 It was still a pedestrian’s city, in spite of the rising levels of horse-drawn traffic. The nocturnal picaresque was also rendered possible by the constantly flickering play of light and dark characteristic of the metropolis at night in the era of public street lighting initiated in the mid-1680s. For this technology, inconsistent and intermittent as the oil-burning street lamps were, provided the ideal theatrical conditions for staging the city’s social contradictions. The sooty, smutty industrial smoke that thickened and blackened the air in the day — especially in the City, where bakers, brewers, glassmakers, potters, and blacksmiths burned quantities of coal in the labyrinthine back streets — intensified these conditions at night. The pioneering example of the nocturnal picaresque was John Dunton’s The Night-Walker: Or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women, with the Conferences Held with Them, which appeared in 1696, roughly a decade after public lighting was first introduced in London. An author and bookseller who insisted that “Life is a continued Ramble”, Dunton had founded the Athenian Mercury, Britain’s first successful periodical, in 1691.6 A committed Anglican whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been ministers in the Church of England, Dunton published Proposals for a National Reformation of Manners in 1694 as part of a moral crusade led by Queen Mary. The Night-Walker, another periodical, which declared on the title page of its October 1696 issue that it was “To be publish’d Monthly, ’till a Discovery be made of all the chief Prostitutes in England, from the Pensionary Miss, down to the Common Strumpet”, was a supplementary contribution to Mary II’s campaign, albeit one whose crusading ambition was somewhat compromised by its scurrilous content.7 It folded in 1697 after eight issues — though not, presumably, because it had successfully recorded the identity of every prostitute in London. The Night-Walker comprised a series of tracts against whoring and whore-mongering among the metropolitan nobility. It was inspired in part by anxieties about the degeneration of aristocratic bloodlines: Some of you value your selves as being the Representatives of Ancient and Noble Families; but by the Methods which you take, you will deprive your Posterity of those Pretensions, for you give your Ladies occasion to repay you in your own Coin. As the Dedication in its first issue indicates, it reserved especially vituperative feelings for clergymen, judges, and other hypocritical members of the upper class who, though “mighty Pretenders to impartial Justice, and zealous Asserters of Liberty and Property”, had debauched “poor Maids” and exposed both them and the “spurious Issue” they have had by them to “Poverty, Reproach and Punishment”. The Night-Walker detailed Dunton’s attempts to pursue these upright representatives of Society, and the “Suburb Strumpet[s]” with whom they consorted, through the streets of London, which he bemoaned as “a second Sodom”.8 The periodical’s title thus referred both to the activities of the prostitutes and their clients — and to Dunton’s identity as a noctambulant. Dunton’s modus operandi entailed rambling in places like Chancery Lane, Cheapside, Farringdon, Fleet Street, Holborn, St James’s Park or the Strand, generally between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. He pursued this vocation throughout the winter of 1696-97. In addition to the streets, he visited coffee houses, music houses, playhouses, and pleasure gardens in pursuit of his victims. He liked to take his cue from the coded invitations of prostitutes, as when they pretended to stumble into him or drop their handkerchiefs on the pavement. In order to be morally and socially effective, as he saw it, Dunton masqueraded as the corrupt and sinful individuals whose behaviour he was determined to expose. So on his first night’s noctambulation, for example, traversing Pall Mall, he propositioned prostitutes, sequestered them in a convenient tavern, and only then, after several glasses, lectured them on their licentiousness. This approach, predictably, did not appeal to all his readers, and in the periodical’s fourth issue, in December 1696, he was compelled to respond to critics of the enterprise who complained that he acted “first the part of a Devil to tempt and then the part of a Parson to Preach”. In response, he insisted that “The Night-Walker cannot any other way prove the Crime upon each Person with whom he Confers but to sound their Inclinations”.9 Dunton is a splendid embodiment of the contradictory but symbiotic relationship between puritanical impulses and satanic ones in the nocturnal city. The moral kicks he got from the streets at night cannot be extricated from his sexual kicks. In him the night-watcher and the nightwalker were in an uncomfortably close relationship. As the historian Joachim Schlör remarks of the “missionaries” who patrolled the nineteenth-century city at night, “they too ‘penetrate’ into the nocturnal city, they too seek the extraordinary experience, they too participate in the cycle of chance encounters, they too see how far they can go.”10 Middle- and upper-middle-class men such as Dunton were, of course, far freer in their movements at night than women. In the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, “the suspicion of prostitution fell upon women who were about at night unaccompanied and without justification”.11 Picaresque accounts of the streets at night in the eighteenth century are therefore predicated on a male subject, one that is physically mobile and, more often than not, both patrician in his attitude to the poor and patriarchal in his attitude to women. The partial exception to this rule, which in the end it probably reinforces, is The Midnight-Ramble: Or, the Adventures of Two Noble Females: Being a True and Impartial Account of their Late Excursion through the Streets of London and Westminster (1754). For this intriguing fiction, published by an anonymous author who is presumably male, features two gleeful female protagonists that explore the streets of London at night in disguise. The narrative opens with an account of the reasons for the heroine’s social (and perhaps sexual) frustration. Lady Betty, a virtuous young woman, has been married off to Dorimant, a dissolute nobleman who spends “his Evenings in riotous Mirth and Debauchery at the Taverns; and most commonly passe[s] the Remainder of the Night, in the Arms of some Courtezan at a Bagnio.” She befriends Mrs Sprightly, the wife of Dorimant’s best friend Ned, and the two women resolve to disguise themselves as monks in order to monitor their husbands’ nocturnal activities in the city. In prosecuting this plan, they commission their milliner, Mrs Flim, whose name signals that she is adept at idle deception, to bring them “ordinary Silk Gowns, close Capuchins, and black Hats”. And, having taken care “to exhilerate their Spirits with a Bottle of excellent Champain”, the three of them set off in pursuit of the men. After spying on their husbands at the playhouse, the three women are frustrated in their attempt to follow them by coach to a tavern at Temple Bar because there are so few vehicles on the street. Instead, though it is past 10 p.m., they determine “upon following their Chace on Foot, at all Hazards”.12 At a spot between Somerset House and the so-called New Church on the Strand (St. Mary le Strand), they meet “four Street-Walkers, that had been long used to tramp those Quarters”. These prostitutes assume that, because of “the Oddness of our Ladies Disguise”, Lady Betty and Mrs Sprightly are “some Strangers of their own Occupation, that were come thither to trespass upon their Walks”. So they jostle and curse their rivals. At this point, Mrs Flim intervenes, vociferating with them “in their own Stile of Language”. For her pains, she is punched in the face and has her false teeth pushed “directly down her Throat”. The three women promptly call for the Watch, and “a decrepid old Fellow, with his Staff and Lanthorn” appears. But this “Midnight Perambulator” is “in Fee with the Street-Walkers”, and, in any case, he too assumes that the women are prostitutes competing for this lucrative spot. An even more violent dispute is only averted when three “rakish Bucks” who have been drinking in a nearby tavern ascertain that Lady Betty and her companions are not of common rank and draw their swords against the prostitutes. Once the streetwalkers have fled, and since it is a wet night, these men invite the women into the tavern to drink wine and get warm, which they half-reluctantly do.13 Later, at Temple Bar, Mrs Flim happens to see Dorimant and Sprightly climbing into a coach bound for Covent Garden with two conspicuous courtesans. The three respectable women, who already seem morally and socially compromised, consequently decide to track it at a distance. They lose sight of it because the coach they have commandeered clips a post and end up walking to Covent Garden instead. By the time they reach this centre of eighteenth-century London’s nightlife — Vic Gatrell has identified it as “the first of the world’s bohemias” — the men have disappeared.14 They therefore decide to return to their houses, “once more, obliged to go on foot”. “However”, the author adds, “as the Moon was by this Time rose pretty high, they had Light sufficient to conduct them to their Habitations”.15 It is a reminder that nighttime illumination was, at best, limited even in the eighteenth-century West End. As they amble home, a foreign gentleman hears their footsteps and takes them for prostitutes returning from the bagnio. He accompanies them “for some Streets Length”, though for scarcely innocent or benign reasons, and the result is that, when they run into a constable, he too assumes that they are “three of the bettermost sort of Street-Walkers”. This constable, who announces that it is “his Duty to keep the Streets clear of People, that had no real Business in them”, threatens to put them in the Roundhouse for the remainder of the night. But the street-smart Mrs Flim bribes him. Finally, resuming their journey home by coach, they pass a couple of men “pretty much in Liquor, staggering along Arm in Arm together”.16 It is Dorimant and Sprightly. The two men stop the coach, climb into it, and immediately start kissing the two women, whom they have failed to recognise as their wives. They realise their embarrassing error once the coach has deposited them all at the same address. The pamphlet’s official intention, as its stentorious conclusion indicates, is to serve as “a Warning to the Female Sex, not to trust themselves abroad on any Frolicks, in this lewd and wicked Town, at unseasonable Hours”. But, until this moment, the tale’s moral assignment seems gloriously irrelevant. The women’s adventures are so mischievous, and they prove so successful, that it seems unlikely that the effect on them of “these Adventures of the Night”, as the author disingenuously professes to hope, will be to “prevent their undertaking any more Midnight Rambles, lest they should meet with worse Disasters than they experienced in this.” To the contrary, by the end of the tale, Betty and Mrs Sprightly, like the dubious Mrs Flim from the start, might be said to be “perfectly acquainted with the Streets” and to know “the Ways of the Town”.17 Certainly, the Monthly Review remained unconvinced by the pamphlet’s official moral: it observed in nervous tones that “probably this pretended piece of secret history is altogether fabulous” and righteously dismissed it as “a low, ill-written tale, bearing the usual marks of a catch penny job”.18 This response is a clear indication that, in spite of The Midnight-Ramble’s claims to rectitude, its account of cross-dressing female aristocrats who spend the night slumming it in the streets is a little bit bent. The Midnight-Ramble’s alternative subtitle, given on the first page of the narrative, is “The Adventures of Two Noble Night-Walkers”. The juxtaposition of the adjective “noble” and the noun “night-walker” is surely designed to transmit an almost inadmissible frisson to the reader. This is, after all, the period when, in the popular imagination as well as in the discourse of Bridewell and other penal institutions, the term “night-walker” became increasingly associated not so much with images of maleficent men as with those of “prostitutes moving along dark streets, gathering on corners, loitering in alleys, touting trade”.19 The phrase “noble night-walkers” in the subtitle of The Midnight-Ramble might distinguish its aristocratic protagonists from all the common kinds of streetwalker — from the “Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, She-friends, Kind Women, and others of the Linnen-lifting Tribe” listed in a 1691 broadside against Bartholemew Fair.20 But it makes them seem morally unreliable at best. It is telling that the “noble females” in the tale are not once mistaken for monks, in spite of their costumes, but on at least three occasions are mistaken for prostitutes. In their disguises, they are highly ambiguous figures, at once masculine and feminine, aristocratic and common, virtuous and perfidious. According to a predictable formula, the author of The Midnight-Ramble thus has it both ways: he contrives a daring fantasy of female independence and, at the last minute, presses it into the service of a patriarchal doctrine. As in the “Evening Rambles” described in Dunton’s Night-Walker and other nocturnal picaresques, hedonistic and moralistic impulses cannot be dissociated in The Midnight-Ramble. Perhaps the importance of the Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism, as the latter materialized in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, meant that these impulses were necessarily complicit. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 3, 2015

Matthew Beaumont

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:15.332085

when-the-birds-and-the-bees-were-not-enough-aristotle-s-masterpiece

When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough Aristotle’s Masterpiece By Mary Fissell August 19, 2015 Mary Fissell on how a wildly popular sex manual — first published in 17th-century London and reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions — both taught and titillated through the early modern period and beyond. John Cannon, a teenaged agricultural laborer, bought a book called Aristotle’s Masterpiece for a shilling in 1700. He usually read chapbooks like Fortunatus and Dr Faustus, but he bought the Masterpiece in order to “pry into the Secrets of Nature especially of the female sex” — to find out about sex. What he learned was so intriguing that he took to spying on the family maidservant when she went to the privy; he bored a few holes in the wall so he “could plainly see” the parts discussed in the book.1 The book that Cannon read so eagerly was neither by Aristotle nor usually considered a masterpiece. It is, however, one of the best-selling books ever produced in English on sex and making babies. First published in London in 1684, it went through hundreds of editions in England and America. It was still for sale, largely unchanged, into the 1930s and beyond. References to the work pop up in the historical record like some kind of Zelig figure, often on the margins of unexpected moments. The huge numbers of editions and the frequency of references to it suggest that this book provided a kind of sex education to the masses long before the concept of sex education was invented. Such popularity makes us question assumptions about how people in the pre-modern world learned about sex. Often we suppose that rural people like John Cannon did not need to consult books to learn about sex; they lived “closer to nature”, and could abstract what they saw in the barnyard to the bedroom. The most common euphemism for sexual knowledge, “the birds and the bees”, was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1825, at the very moment at which England’s population became more urban than rural for the first time. But Cannon’s experiences, and those of a host of other readers, show us that for centuries English and American readers turned to this cheap book eager for information that was not, in fact, easily inferred from the natural world. The book itself was pasted together in 1684, a mash-up of earlier works on midwifery and natural philosophy.2 It was an almost immediate bestseller. While John How, its first publisher, obediently registered the work with the Stationers’ Company, the book soon slipped the traces of any form of regulation; it was pirated in its very first year of publication. It was produced in multiple versions by a host of printers and publishers, only some of whom were willing to put their names on the title pages of the works. (For the most popular version, see a 1728 edition here). By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were more editions of the Masterpiece than all other popular works on reproduction combined. It continued to sell steadily until the 1870s in North America, when its publication was curtailed by the Comstock Acts. In Britain, it was still being reprinted into the 1930s. Perhaps the work was attributed to Aristotle in an attempt to provide a cloak of learned authority, but more likely the name was an allusion to Aristotle’s popular-culture reputation as a sex expert. This unlikely role derived from an earlier pseudo-Aristotle text, Aristotle’s Problems, first published in English in 1595.3 The work contains some of the most explicit discussions of the mechanics of sex and reproduction available in English at the time, in an easy-to-read question and answer format, including “What is carnal copulation?” and “How are hermaphrodites begotten?”. Within a decade, the name Aristotle was used as a joking reference to sexual knowledge in plays performed upon the London stage. To many a browser upon a bookstall, the name Aristotle in the title meant — nudge nudge wink wink — a book about sex. And it wasn’t just the title. The work was almost always accompanied by a frontispiece image of a near-naked woman, implicitly promising the reader titillating information. The most popular version of the book contained a racy poem, ostensibly provided for a husband to read to his bride to get her to bed, with lines like, “Now my infranchis’d Hand on every Side, Shall o’er thy naked polish’d Ivry Slide”. Like much else here, the poem isn’t an original, but rather re-arranged lines from an earlier work by Thomas Carew. The book valorizes sexual pleasure, for both women and men, explaining that mutual delight is needed for conception. Each chapter is summed up in brief verses, Thus Man’s most noble Parts describ’d we see; (For such the Parts of Generation be;)And they that carefully survey’t, will find,Each Part is fitted for the Use design’d:The Purest Blood we find, if well we heed,Is in the Testicles turn’d into Seed; and so on, assuring readers that the design was intended to excite “the more delight” in the “amorous combatants”.4 Such rhyming doggerel was reminiscent of teaching strategies in early modern primary education. Undoubtedly, the racy poem, the woodcut of the near-naked woman, and the promise of sexual knowledge must have appealed to many a teenaged male reader like John Cannon. But the book also provided a solid framework of contemporary knowledge about the basics of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant health, detailing topics such as the signs of pregnancy, how to tell false labor from true, the various positions the baby might present in, etc. Not surprisingly, since it was plagiarized from another midwifery book, this information was largely unexceptional. The book’s prose style promised readers that medical knowledge was not difficult. For example, in discussing barrenness (what we’d call infertility) the text assured the reader that if the fault were a malformation of the male partner, “this is plain and easily discern’d, that it needs must be obvious to both Parties”. By the early eighteenth century, the most common version of the text also included dozens of recipes for household remedies and a guide to physiognomy. From this perspective, the book was a distant ancestor of those such as What to Expect when You’re Expecting that crowd the shelves of today’s bookstores. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British radical Francis Place read the Masterpiece whilst a schoolboy. In his memoirs, he explains that reading about the mechanics of conception made him doubt the Biblical account of the conception of Jesus.5 Like John Cannon, Place was an eager consumer of sexual knowledge; he used to go to London’s secondhand bookstalls and page through medical works, looking for anatomical pictures that he found exciting, until shooed away by irate booksellers. But the Masterpiece was not just read by teenaged boys. In a copy of the first edition held by the University of Pennsylvania, there is a series of inscriptions that tells a different tale.6 First is what appears to be a courtship vow, a promise between a George Hoare and Elizabeth Vincent, living in rural Somerset. Evidently they pledged themselves to each other in 1684, the year the Masterpiece was first published. The vow wasn’t written down, however, until December 12, 1685, with each partner promising, “I do wish that I may never prosper if I be the cause of breaking of it”. A few years later, on June 29, 1687, they pledged again on the next page of the book, and this time the vow seems to have been accompanied by a gift of pieces of silver, probably from George to Elizabeth. Such courtship gifts were not uncommon guarantors of fidelity. Nine years after their first promise, George and Elizabeth were wed on Boxing Day in the small village of Dowlish Wake; ten months later their son William was baptized in the same parish. For this couple, the book, with its implicit promise of marital sexual pleasure, became the tangible form of their commitment to each other. For others, the book functioned more like a family bible. In the back of the very same copy in which George and Elizabeth had inscribed their promises, one Sarah Fackerall recorded the births of her children: William (1805); sadly, another William (1806); John (1808); Ann (1809); and Charlot (1812). Sarah noted that the book had been given to her by her aunt, who lived in Curry Rivel, a mere ten miles from Dowlish Wake. Fackerell was not the only person to use a book about making babies to record a family’s births. In 1832, Edward Wiett went to court in Tennessee to try to get a pension connected with his military service in the Revolutionary War. He had lost his discharge papers and therefore needed to prove his age. As the court noted, “he has a record of his age in a book called Aristotles Masterpiece”, suggesting that his family also recorded births in their copy of the book.7 Evidently the court was persuaded, for he was paid a pension until 1843. The book continued to garner readers, both well-known historical figures and unknowns. In 1761, a sailor used his copy of the book to record a series of purchases from the purser: a jacket, two caps, breeches, and a pair of shoes, totalling to £1.3.6. And a copy now held by the British Library proclaims that it was owned by none other than William Bligh, the captain at the center of the mutiny on HMS Bounty. In 1872, the widow Belle Gordon pleaded with an Indiana court for custody of her daughters, but the girls’ guardian claimed that she was not of good moral character, evidenced by her ownership of a book on birth control and a copy of the Masterpiece.8 By the later nineteenth century, the book seems to have moved downmarket, but it still attracted a range of readers. Often it included crude chromolithographs, with images of babies in the womb colored bright red (see image below). In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom looks at a copy of the Masterpiece on a Dublin bookstall, and describes images of “infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows”. Molly Bloom already had her own copy, which she called “Aristocrat’s Masterpiece”.9 A fourteen-year-old Manchester girl, Mary Bertenshaw, first encountered the Masterpiece while working in a cap and hat factory during the First World War. Her friend Gladys brought in a copy, which Mary described as a “secret book”. She and her workmates pored over the book at lunchtime in fits of giggles, until one day their boss caught them reading, much to their shame. Afterwards, they “felt dubious” about men and assiduously avoided walking anywhere near to what they knew to be the local venereal disease clinic. Historians have claimed that working-class girls like these demonstrated their virtue by remaining conspicuously ignorant of the facts of life.10 This story suggests that girls were certainly eager for knowledge, even if they might pretend innocence. A year later, Mary’s mother fell pregnant again. Mary recalled that she visualized the growing fetus inside her mother’s body from what she remembered of the Masterpiece illustrations. So for Mary Bertenshaw, the Masterpiece functioned in multiple ways: as a kind of entertainment; then a source of shame; and finally a source of biological knowledge.11 It wasn’t just city girls like Mary who reached for the book. When the noted Shakespeare scholar A. L. Rowse went up to Oxford in the early 1920s, he never mentioned to his mother that he was studying Aristotle, because, as he explained, the name Aristotle “would have meant to my mother, as secretly to Victorian women, his book on child-bearing: unmentionable”. But Rowse knew that the book was tucked away in her chest of drawers back in his home in rural Cornwall.12 The work remained an iconic symbol of sexual knowledge for generations. In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), when a Customs Officer, his office walls “lined with contraband pornography”, inspects Adam Fenwick-Symes’ books to make sure he is not bringing any forbidden works into the country, he does so with the help of a printed list, headed by “Aristotle, Works Of (Illustrated)”.13 In the mid-1950s, copies of the Masterpiece were for sale in a Charing Cross Road bookshop, piled high next to Marie Stopes’ Married Love (1918).14 In the 1970s, an East Anglian agricultural worker told an oral history interviewer that she knew about reproductive matters from what she called “Harry Tottle’s little book”.15 Although little-known today, Aristotle’s Masterpiece was the go-to book for generations of British and American readers, male and female, who wanted to know about sex and making babies. Long after medical theories about reproduction and childbirth had changed, the book continued to promise readers access to hidden secrets and titillating details, a promise whose luster seems to have remained bright until almost yesterday. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 19, 2015

Mary Fissell

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:15.686208

the-poet-the-physician-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire

The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire By Andrew McConnell Stott October 16, 2014 From that famed night of ghost-stories in a Lake Geneva villa in 1816, as well as Frankenstein's monster, there arose that other great figure of 19th-century gothic fiction - the vampire - a creation of Lord Byron's personal physician John Polidori. Andrew McConnell Stott explores how a fractious relationship between Polidori and his poet employer lies behind the tale, with Byron himself providing a model for the blood-sucking aristocratic figure of the legend we are familiar with today. A vampire is a thirsty thing, spreading metaphors like antigens through its victim’s blood. It is a rare situation that is not revealingly defamiliarized by the introduction of a vampiric motif, whether it be migration and industrial change in Dracula, adolescent sexuality in Twilight, or racism in True Blood. Beyond undead life and the knack of becoming a bat, the vampire’s true power is its ability to induce intense paranoia about the nature of social relations to ask, “who are the real bloodsuckers?” This is certainly the case with the first fully realized vampire story in English, John William Polidori’s 1819 story, “The Vampyre.” It is Polidori’s text that establishes the vampire as we know it via a reimagining of the feral mud-caked creatures of southeastern European legend as the elegant and magnetic denizens of cosmopolitan assemblies and polite drawing rooms. “The Vampyre” is a product of 1816, the “year without summer,” in which Lord Byron left England in the wake of a disintegrating marriage and rumours of incest, sodomy and madness, to travel to the banks of Lake Geneva and there loiter with Percy and Mary Shelley (then still Mary Godwin). Polidori served as Byron’s travelling physician, and played an active role in the summer’s tensions and rivalries, as well as participating in the famous night of ghost stories that produced Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Like Frankenstein, “The Vampyre” draws extensively on the mood at Byron’s Villa Diodati. But whereas Mary Shelley incorporated the orchestral thunderstorms that illuminated the lake and the sublime mountain scenery that served as a backdrop to Victor Frankenstein’s struggles, Polidori’s text is woven from the invisible dynamics of the Byron-Shelley circle, and especially the humiliations he suffered at Byron’s hand. John Polidori (1795-1821) was born in Soho, the eldest son of an English mother and an Italian writer, translator, and literary jack-of-all-trades. Raised to great precocity in a multi-lingual and hyper-literate home, he was sent to board at the Catholic Ampleforth College at the age of eight. Then just a remote and drafty lodge housing twelve boys and twenty-four Benedictine monks, Ampleforth provided instruction in history, languages, and the minutiae of Catholic devotion. Given this intense and closeted environment, it is no wonder that John should dream of entering the priesthood, but his father had chosen a different path for his son, pulling him from school at the age of fifteen to attend the university of Edinburgh to study medicine. Medical education in the early nineteenth century was largely based around the study of “antiphlogistics”– learning how to master the various ways of ridding the body of noxious substances in the quickest way possible — and so John became skilled in blood-letting, vomiting, enemas, blistering, and plunge-baths. But Polidori hated medicine. A restless loner, he rejected his classmates as “automatons,” while he himself dreamt of achieving glory, first on the battlefield fighting on behalf of Italy as it sought to repel the invading armies of Napoleon, and then through a growing attachment to literature. Thanks to the success Byron had achieved with the publication of his poem Childe Harold in 1812, it was only natural that young men in the early nineteenth century should conceive of poetry as not only a creative outlet, but as an avenue to fame, riches and sexual plenty. Under the long-distance mentorship of William Taylor of Norwich, a once notable, but now near-derelict essayist who was attracted to John’s remarkable good looks, Polidori began to dabble in literature. His father, who knew the more likely privations of a literary life, ordered him to stick to his studies, and John obeyed, fulfilling a family dynamic that remained unchanged throughout his life — bowing to his father’s wishes while inwardly caviling at the restraints they placed upon him. Where most students wrote dissertations on the circulation of the blood or assorted fevers, John concluded his education by writing a dissertation on the uncanny phenomenon of sleep-walking that was heavily influenced by the French encyclopedists, before returning to London a newly-minted doctor at the tender age of twenty. Unfortunately, in order to practice in the capital it was necessary to be at least twenty six years old. It was while contemplating this stalling impediment that John was offered the job of physician to Lord Byron. John’s father, who had once been the secretary to the vain and splenetic Italian tragedian, Vittorio Alfieri, ordered him not to take the position, while across town, Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse counseled the poet against employing the vain young man with the funny name. Neither warning was sufficient, and together Byron and Polidori left for the Continent on St. George’s Day, 1816. Their relationship got off to an uneasy start in Dover as they awaited a convivial tide. Over dinner, John had invited Byron to read from a play he had written, and Byron obliged, but in the company of garrulous friends who had come to see him off, found it impossible to resist the urge to make them laugh one last time. Polidori, an outsider, an employee, was forced to sit and listen as Byron lampooned his sophomoric efforts and reduced the table to fits of giggles. Furious, John stormed off to pace the streets of Dover. Away from Byron’s friends, things improved a little, with John writing to his sister from Brussels to say that “I am with him on the footing of an equal.” The democratic idyll did not last long, however, with Byron quickly losing patience with his doctor’s bouts of travel sickness, and John resenting his employer’s undemocratic arrogance. “Pray, what is there excepting writing that I cannot do better than you?” John asked Byron while stopped at an inn overlooking the Rhine. “There were three things, answered Byron, calmly. ‘First,’ he said, ‘I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door — Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point — and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.’” These feelings of resentment only grew, as John felt increasingly overshadowed in the famous man’s company, with those they met instantly gravitating towards celebrity while he remained “like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible.” At the same time, the doctor’s petulance provoked Byron, whose wit was often cruel and rarely let an opportunity pass to mock his employee or put him in his place. In time, John began to feel that his own sense of self was being drained by his proximity to the poet. Increasingly, he sought to distance himself and in mid-June, made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. It was no great leap for Polidori to believe that Byron was sucking the life from him, just as others had accused Byron of possessing a charismatic power that eclipsed their own identities. Amelia Opie, one of the many women Byron had charmed, described him as having “such a voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it,” a mesmeric quality that critics also found in his verse, which had, according to the critic Thomas Jones de Powis, “the facility of . . . bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or subjection.” But the most overt example of Byron as the devourer of souls was a novel John read over the course of the summer — Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron and Lamb had enjoyed a brief and transgressive affair until he, somewhat rattled by the vivid expanse of her erotic imagination, had called it off. The novel is a thinly veiled portrait of the relationship set in a lonely castle during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, that interweaves breathless Gothic fiction with the wayward love of Calantha for the Irish rebel Lord Glenarvon. Glenarvon is a brooding anti-hero who dresses as a monk, stalks ruined priories, and howls like a wolf at the moon. His face glowers “as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature,” possessing the ability to enslave her. “Weep,” he cries, binding her ever tighter to him, “I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforward you will shed no more.” Calantha is powerless. “My love is death.” That Polidori took inspiration from Lamb is revealed in the name he gives his villain — Lord Ruthven, one of Glenarvon’s various ancestral titles. Polidori’s Ruthven also inhabits Glenarvon’s aristocratic milieu as a member of the bon ton. He is a pale and fascinating nobleman who appears in London “more remarkable for his singularities, than for his rank,” and who incites awe amongst the ranks of fashionable ladies by virtue of his melancholy air and “reputation of a winning tongue.” In “The Vampyre,” Ruthven befriends a young gentleman named Aubrey, whom he invites to accompany him on a journey to Greece. Once there, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful peasant girl who recounts the legend of the vampire but is brutally murdered soon after. Aubrey comes to suspect Ruthven, but the mysterious aristocrat is shot by bandits before the truth can be revealed. As Ruthven lays dying, he manages to extract a promise from the young man, asking him not to announce his death in England for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, and Ruthven literally dies laughing. After a long and meandering journey home, the sad and raddled Aubrey is finally able to return to society, where he is horrified to discover Ruthven alive and well. “Remember your oath,” whispers the man who has died in his arms, thus driving Aubrey so far from his wits that he succumbs to a protracted illness. In the meantime, Aubrey’s sister is engaged to be married, and though he has yet to meet the groom, it slowly dawns on him that it must be Ruthven. Impatient for his oath to expire and growing weaker by the day, he finally sends his assistants to her rescue only to discover they are too late: “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” Knowing the context of Polidori’s story, it is hard not to read “The Vampyre” as an allegory of the doctor’s relationship with Byron, a text that is seamed with the mocking laughter of a man possessed of the power to debilitate through the force of personality alone. Furthermore, it rewrites the well-known story of Byron’s success since the publication of Childe Harold, wherein a young nobleman goes abroad and returns filled with capacious understanding of himself and the world, by showing that his melancholy air is a deceit, a mendacious con perpetuated on a gullible claque of fools for the purpose of their exploitation. As a meditation on the degeneracy of a society that has encouraged the excesses of celebrity to such an extent that it has been allowed to dwarf the higher values and enable the abuse of the virtuous and the innocent, it damns absolutely the superficial lure of fame. Rather than providing a creative outlet for Polidori, the publication of “The Vampyre” only served to compound his humiliation. Although the text was similarly prompted by the ghost story competition that inspired Mary Shelley so ably, John only completed his story for the pleasure of a friend outside of the Byron-Shelley circle. The manuscript lay forgotten for three years until finally coming into the hands of the disreputable journalist Henry Colburn, who published it in his New Monthly Magazine under the title “The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.” The response was predictably lively. Goethe proclaimed it Byron’s greatest ever work, and popular hardback editions went through numerous reprintings, leaving Polidori scrambling to assert his rights as its author in the face of accusations that he was either a plagiarist or misusing Byron’s name to further his own reputation. John tried to take control by preparing his own edition, but the public was not interested, and disgusted with the literary life, he attempted to rejoin Ampleforth and train as a monk. Still “The Vampyre” plagued him as his application was denied because of “certain publications which I have seen,” wrote the Prior, “and of which I must tell [you] as a friend, I wish you had not been the author.” Polidori enrolled to study law using his mother’s maiden name, but, finding no appetite for it, fell into gambling. With the shadow of Byron making everything he did seem paltry and derivative, and the weight of rejection impressing itself on him like a judgment on his being, John Polidori took his own life at the age of twenty five by drinking a beaker of cyanide. “Poor Polidori,” wrote Byron when he heard the news, “it seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act. He had entertained too sanguine hopes of literary fame.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 16, 2014

Andrew McConnell Stott

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:16.159652

machiavelli-comedian

Machiavelli, Comedian By Christopher S. Celenza August 5, 2015 Most familiar today as the godfather of Realpolitik and as the eponym for all things cunning and devious, the Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli also had a lighter side, writing as he did a number of comedies. Christopher S. Celenza looks at perhaps the best known of these plays, Mandragola, and explores what it can teach us about the man and his world. “Comedian”, admittedly, isn’t the first word you associate with Machiavelli. And “funny” is not a word normally applied to Lucretius. And yet, through some strange alchemy of time, circumstance, and the rhythms of Renaissance life, those seemingly discordant elements came together in a remarkable way. You could argue that Machiavelli’s entire worldview was comic, but comic in a peculiar way: ironic, wry, a little melancholy, punctuated by an earthy vulgarity that, these days, would get him thrown off a university faculty in a minute. More than this, the central premises of what was funny have changed so significantly that it invites us to think about how comedy works and when it’s time to say that a comedy, however venerable, just isn’t funny anymore. Take his play, Mandragola, or, in English, “The Mandrake Root.” The odd title (and it would have been odd in Machiavelli’s day, too) has to do with fertility. The plant appears in the Bible, in contexts where carnal knowledge is in question, like when Leah, one of Jacob’s two wives, wants to convince him to lie with her (Gen. 30:14-16), or when, in the Song of Songs, a woman sings a song of her own seductiveness “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me . . . The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits . . . .” (Song of Songs, 7:10-13). If the lasting biblical associations of the plant had to do with love, the herb also had magical and spell-like connotations. It could be thought to induce a great and powerful sleep, and in some accounts was even thought to cry out when pulled from the earth. Machiavelli’s title enfolded many of these meanings. The play concerns a young man, Callimaco, who though Florentine in origin spent much of his youth in France. From clues in the play we learn he is about thirty years old and that the action is set in the year 1504. At a gathering of friends, all male of course, a debate breaks out over who has the more beautiful women, France or Italy. Though the debaters give the palm to French women, one of his Florentine friends says he has a relative, Lucrezia, whose beauty is unequalled anywhere. Callimaco becomes curious to the point of leaving France and going to Florence. There his curiosity escalates to passion, as he is all but driven mad by love after finally laying eyes on Lucrezia. As it happens Lucrezia is married to a slow-witted lawyer named Messer Nicia. They have been trying unsuccessfully to have children. Ligurio – a matchmaker and, not coincidentally, a friend of Callimaco – suggests that the couple’s troubles may allow Callimaco to get close to Lucrezia. At first, Ligurio suggests that the couple go to the baths, known to improve fertility. Callimaco says he will go, so that he can see Lucrezia and because di cosa nasce cosa – “one thing begets another”. He is ready to trust his instincts and improvise as need be to find a way to be with Lucrezia. But then another plan is hatched. This one involves an elaborate scheme whereby Callimaco, posing as a doctor, convinces dull-witted Nicia to have Lucrezia take a special potion to help her conceive. The catch? The first person to make love with Lucrezia after she takes this potion will die. But thereafter, she will be fertile, children will follow, and all will be well, so the concocted story goes. Nicia agrees to this “solution”. Lucrezia’s mother agrees to help, as does a corruptible friar named fra Timoteo, and of course Lucrezia is never to know of the fatal consequences of her one-time, absolutely necessary, extra-marital coition. And who lines up to play the role of that sacrificial, lovemaking lamb? Callimaco (in costume), with Ligurio’s eager help. Ligurio tells Callimaco how to break the news of all this to Lucrezia: Explain the trick to her, show her the love you bring her, tell her how much you love her and how she can be your lover with no dishonor and how she can be your enemy, but with a great loss of her honor. Once she spends the night with you, she won’t want it to be the last. Everything goes according to plan. Lucrezia, having had Callimaco with her for a night and realizing that her honor would be lost if she blew the whistle, as it were, agrees to take Callimaco as a lover in the expectation that, when Nicia (older as he is) eventually passes away, she and Callimaco will marry. Poor old Nicia is fooled into accepting “doctor” Callimaco as a close family friend, and the play closes with Lucrezia being “introduced” to this wonder-working doctor. And here is where things get complicated. Because the truth is that what is being described in the play is, essentially, a kind of date rape. I had never been quite comfortable with the text for precisely this reason. True, there have been some feminist scholars who have argued that it was Lucrezia’s choice to go forward, so that it is really she who has “agency”. But we know what the story is: Callimaco and Ligurio found a way to get pure, naïve Lucrezia into bed, laughing all the way. This comedy, as well as Machiavelli’s other comedic works, possesses in many ways a formal unity with the rest of his (better known) oeuvre. All formed part of what we can call the “comedy of life”, in which life’s randomness, unpredictability (di cosa nasce cosa), and indecipherability take pride of place. Machiavelli himself had suffered outrageous slings of fortune. He went from being a respected public official who participated in over forty diplomatic missions for Florence (from 1498–1512) to coming under unwarranted suspicion for conspiracy, suffering jail time, and being forced into house arrest. The circumstances of his life taught him all he needed to know about life’s unpredictability. But there was more to the story. Some time around the year 1498, when a relatively young Machiavelli had not yet entered public life definitively, he took the time to hand copy two texts into a manuscript (that today resides in the Vatican Library). The texts were: Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things and Terence’s Eunuch. It is a strange juxtaposition, at least on the surface. Lucretius had become popular in the fifteenth century after Poggio Bracciolini discovered a full version of On the Nature of Things during the Council of Constance. The first-century BCE thinker had written a meditative poem in six books. Its overriding theme was Epicureanism, and the excellence of its Latin entranced Renaissance thinkers always on the alert for stylistic models. As an Epicurean, Lucretius adopted “atomism” as a basis of his natural philosophy. He believed, that is, that all things were made of particles. When the formal unity of any given thing ended — when a tree died, say, or when a human being passed away – the constituent particles then dispersed into the void, to combine and recombine endlessly into other things. This process was totally natural: “. . . nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters and runs the universe herself without the aid of gods”. And though gods exist, they live in their own realm, utterly unconcerned with human affairs: “. . .All their wants are supplied by nature, and nothing at any time cankers their peace of mind”. Human beings are on their own, and if there is a purpose behind human life it is not obvious: randomness is all. Lucretius is a lot of things. One thing he is not, is funny. But Terence is, at least by the standards of pre-modern Florence. In fact Renaissance thinkers liked Terence quite a bit, both as a model of how to write Latin as people spoke it day-to-day and as a model for comedy. Convoluted plots, love stories, witty servants, love causing “madness” in youth: these things and more served as basic elements of comedy in the ancient world, as they did in the Renaissance. As to the Eunuch itself, it set fashionably in Athens, where a young man, Phaedria, is madly in love with a foreign-born courtesan and is given hard-nosed advice on love by his wily servant. Sub-plot after sub-plot emerges, and other love struck characters come into play. These include Phaedria’s brother posing as a eunuch who uses his feigned status to be alone with a woman with whom he is madly in love and on whom he then forces himself. He runs away but then is forced to come back, whereupon he declares his love for the woman he raped, and they wind up together. We do not really know why Machiavelli copied those texts by Lucretius and Terence, one after the other, joining them in a single manuscript. We have only the artifact itself. And of course it would be unwise to make too much of the fact. But the juxtaposition is noteworthy, inviting us as it does to look at what the two ancient texts shared and how they may have contributed to Machiavelli’s views on the “comedy of life”. Returning to Mandragola, we can ask: is it funny? The best I can come up with is . . . sort of. If it were performed and set well, the many comic asides could make an audience laugh. In their parody of pious religiosity, Timoteo’s attempts to convince Lucrezia to go through with what she believes will be a deadly act of extra-marital sex are funny. And the various times fra Timoteo is portrayed as less than pious can engender a wry smile. Example: LIGURIO TO CALLIMACO: Your friar will want something beyond prayers.CALLIMACO: What?LIGURIO: Money. But then there is that other thing: not only the date rape, but also the sense that Machiavelli and his male cohort had never once sat down and had a real, person to person conversation with a woman. Take fra Timoteo’s monologue in Act 3, scene 9, where he is musing out loud on the plan. The real reason he thinks it will work: “. . . in the end all women are pretty slow” (tutte le donne hanno alla fine poco cervello). It is like watching a comic slapstick film from the 1940s, laughing at all the perfectly executed pratfalls, and then coming up against that one cringe-inducing scene of a racial caricature, say, or anything else that for its time and place was acceptable but today is so out of bounds that it tends to taint the whole enterprise. Even Lucrezia’s decision to sleep with Callimaco is related indirectly. We learn of it only through Callimaco’s boastful recounting the day after to his friend Ligurio. Lucrezia is a device, not a person. In the end the value of Machiavelli’s comedies resides not so much in their original purpose – to make people laugh – but in what they can teach us about him and his world. It is striking that despite the manifold differences between Machiavelli’s surroundings and ours, there are such similarities between his environment and that of ancient Rome. A comedy like Terence’s Eunuch not only spoke to Machiavelli and his cohort, it also served as a source of imitative inspiration. That fact reminds us that, despite the many times we can find traces of ourselves in Machiavelli’s work – of the Realpolitik that he helped create, say, or the tendency to observe human motivation shorn of traditional morality – he was also living in a world gone by. It was a place where it was assumed that women simply were not part of the conversation, where the post-enlightenment notion of universal human rights (imperfectly realized as those have been) was only a dim adumbration, and where a lot of what might have made one laugh was differently situated. None of this is to praise or blame Machiavelli or his ancient Roman sources for what seem to us today like failings. Comedy serves as a kind of retrospective indicator of blind spots. It is our fate not to know what posterity will make of our own age’s comic strivings. But wouldn’t one like to be a fly on the wall in five hundred years? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 5, 2015

Christopher S. Celenza

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:16.631130

cat-pianos-sound-houses-and-other-imaginary-musical-instruments

Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments By Thomas Patteson and Deirdre Loughridge July 15, 2015 Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, curators of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, explore the wonderful history of made-up musical contraptions, including a piano comprised of yelping cats and Francis Bacon's 17th-century vision of experimental sound manipulation. And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions.Francis Bacon Numerous museums are dedicated to musical instruments. In Berlin and Brussels, Paris and Phoenix, one can wander rooms lined with musical artifacts from many times and places. Strolling through these rooms, one might admire the exquisite craftsmanship of a Stradivarius violin or the opulent artistry of a French harpsichord. One might linger over forgotten curiosities like the tromba marina or abortive experiments like Adolphe Sax’s seven-bell horn. One’s path might follow changes in the instrumentarium from Renaissance woods and metals to modern plastics and electronics, and the experience might lead one to wonder at the diversity of species born from the physics of vibrating strings, air columns, and resonating bodies. Missing from such collections, however, is the peculiar class of what we like to call “fictophones”: imaginary musical instruments. Though these instruments, due to some measure of impracticality and impossibility, did not take sounding form, they were nonetheless put forth in the various means available to conjure objects in our minds: in writings, drawings, sometimes even in detailed schematics. One might suppose that imaginary musical instruments, deprived of physical reality, have no place in the cultural histories and heritages that a museum of musical instruments aims to illuminate and preserve. Yet in their own strange ways, imaginary musical instruments exist. What’s more, they have not merely shadowed or paralleled musical life; they have formed a vital part of it, participating in ways that show the fragility of the distinction between imaginary and real. No less than instruments you hold in your hand, imaginary instruments act as interfaces between mind and world, limning the edges of what we may think and do. Take, for starters, Francis Bacon’s “sound-houses”. Bacon described these spaces for manipulating sound in his New Atlantis (1626), a utopian work in which a European traveller, lost at sea, happens upon a society living on the mythical island of Bensalem. The “sound-houses” represent the acoustic branch of Bensalem’s state-sponsored research program, which seeks both to produce knowledge of how nature works, and to translate that knowledge into real-world applications for human benefit. In the following passage, the director of Bensalem’s scientific endeavors explains to his foreign guest: We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We also have divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances. Bacon’s sound-houses are hypothetical, an exercise in imagining what could be. Many readers today find them prophetic, and it is tempting to read the line about “divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown” as if its author had a foreknowledge of synthesizers and tape. But to read the sound-houses in this way displaces them from their own time, and from the experiments with pipes, bells, and string instruments from which Bacon extrapolated. By reducing their role to one of prediction, furthermore, it sets the imaginary at a powerless remove from the real. Rather than prophetic, Bacon’s sound-houses are emblematic of the power of imaginary instruments to act upon the world — of the magnet-like force they exert, attracting (or repelling) certain modes of thought and action. One of the first to explore the musical possibilities of electronic instruments, Daphne Oram, was familiar with Bacon’s New Atlantis. In 1958, she posted the passage about sound-houses on the door of the Radiophonic Workshop, the newly founded department within the BBC dedicated to electronic music, which she helped establish. At this early moment in electronic music, it was far from clear what techniques and sounds would prove valuable, what aspects of past musical practice would translate. Oram’s invocation of Bacon’s sound-houses suggests that such moments create openings for the imaginary to flood in — not just from the creative minds of individuals, but from a collective storehouse of fantasies. Imaginary instruments help ideas circulate together with the desire for (or fear of) their realization. As Bacon himself observed, “instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions.” Bacon’s sound-houses illustrate one era’s technological imaginary becoming a later one’s reality — the course of things we’d likely expect. But the process can run the other way around as well. The tubo cochleato, for example, was described by Athanasius Kircher in his treatise on acoustics, Phonurgia nova (1673), as a device for amplifying the voice. Kircher’s student Filippo Bonanni also discussed the device in his book, Gabinetto armonico pieno d’istromenti sonori indicati e spiegati (Musical cabinet full of sounding instruments, shown and explained, 1722), where it appears among musical instruments both of common European use and from other parts of the world. As Bonanni explained, the tubo cochleato would amplify the voice much more than a straight tube; the evidence came from nature, from the fact that the ears of hares and other timid animals were formed in the spiral shape. But since it was extremely difficult for man to make a spiral so perfect as nature, it was near impossible to construct the tubo cochleato, and no one in Bonanni’s day used the device. ※※Indexed under…Spiralform of imagined musical instrument In fact, the tubo cochleato was purely speculative. But only in light of later theories of sound propagation would the design appear fundamentally flawed, the concept out of line with basic physics in addition to human craftsmanship. For Kircher and Bonanni, the instrument was real. Kircher’s reality, indeed, included many things we would consider fantastic (dragons, for instance, as John Glassie has discussed). As a measure of the gap between our reality and Kircher’s, the tubo cochleato (like the dragon) attests to the power of research and experiment to debunk the fabulous. At the same time — perhaps more disconcertingly — Bonanni’s book reveals the power of images and texts to define the real through a blend of speculative and empirical elements. Similarly hovering between the speculative and empirical is the curious device known as the cat piano. The earliest known image of a set of cats arrayed as sound-producing elements to be activated by the fingers dates to the late sixteenth century, that is, over a hundred years before the invention of the piano, at a time when it would more properly be called a cat harpsichord or clavichord. The image comes from an emblem book, Johann Theodor de Bry’s Emblemata saecularia mira et iucunda uarietate saeculi huius mores ita exprimentia ut sodalitatum symbolis. . . (1596), and shows a motley ensemble of animals and confused musicians. A subtitle to the scene, “There is no music sweeter to Midas’s ears”, alludes to the Phrygian King whose punishment for preferring Pan’s pipe to Apollo’s lyre was to have his ears turned into those of a donkey. ※※Indexed under…Catsas musical instrument From a comical image of cacophony, the cat piano underwent a series of unexpected functional transformations. By the 1650s it was a legendary music therapy: supposedly, an Italian prince was cured of his melancholy by the device when he found its meowing cats, triggered by driving spikes through their tails, irresistibly funny. The early-nineteenth-century medical theorist Johann Christian Reil offered a different account of the cat piano’s therapeutic powers. In his treatise on psychological cures for the mentally disturbed, Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (1803), he presented the cat piano as a hypothetical fix for dreamers unable to focus attention on the external world. As he vividly explained, the cats would be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument — when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals — must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness. In yet another thought-experiment with the instrument, the eighteenth-century Parisian Louis-Bertrand Castel invoked it to prove his contention that what mattered in music was the combination of sounds, not sounds in their own right. The fact that one could make music from the individually ugly plaints of pained cats proved that “sounds on their own possess no beauty, and that all the beauties of music come not from sound, but from the melodic sequence and the harmonic combination of these sounds, multiplied and varied in proportion.” The absurdity of a cat piano has no doubt contributed to its appeal across the centuries. But the license granted in the space of the imaginary points to illicit aspects of the real. The cat piano unearths an uncomfortable connection between music and abuse, between the artistic control of sound and the heartless treatment of sounding bodies. Both artistic control and heartless treatment are abetted by the keyboard interface, which gives players access to numerous pitches but only at a remove from their sources. That keyboards facilitate cruelty is a notion hardly evident in the history of realized instruments (a rare hint is found on an eighteenth-century spinet inscribed, “intactum sileo percute dulce cano”: “untouched, I am silent; strike me, I sing sweetly”). But it is front and center in the history of imaginary instruments. Jules Verne demonstrated the connection by substituting humans for cats: in his short story “M. Ré-dièze et Mlle Mi-bémol” (“Mister Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat”, 1893) a musician outfits an organ with a special register of children’s voices. From the perspective of the child assigned to the pitch D-sharp (or re sharp, in solfége), we learn the appalling truth: ※※Indexed under…SilenceSpoiled desire for then an air-current inflates my chest, a current skillfully controlled, which carries the Ray sharp out of my lips. I want to be silent, but I cannot. I am nothing but an instrument in the organist’s hands. His touch upon the keyboard is like a valve opening in my heart. The keyboard finds yet more sadistic form as a species of organ in the film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). Called the “Torturetron”, the instrument sends spikes into people’s sides so as to add their moans to the tones of its more conventional ranks of pipes. Verne’s organ and the Torturetron exemplify the capacity of imaginary instruments to serve as “cautions” — cautions we would do well to heed in this age when so much of what we do takes place through keyboards and other interfaces that remove us from the carrying-out of our commands. The note of warning is one imaginary instruments have sounded with growing regularity since the nineteenth century, as the wonders of new technologies have stoked fears about their consequences for humanity. Amidst the rise of industrial machinery, for example, the French caricaturist J. J. Grandville envisioned a fantastic “steam concert” of intelligent, steam-powered instruments. The program, described in his book Un autre monde (1844), features such pieces as L’explosion, mélodie pour 200 trombones (The explosion: A melody for 200 trombones) and La locomotive, symphonie à basse pression, de la orce de trois cents chevaux (The locomotive: A low pressure symphony with 200 horsepower) and Le moi et le non-moi, symphonie philosophique en ut (The self and the non-self: Philosophical symphony in C). At once fascinating and disturbing, Grandville’s anthropomorphic instruments express a fundamental ambivalence about the development of increasingly powerful and autonomous technologies. “Ask any good Frenchman . . . what he understands by progress”, Charles Baudelaire observed in 1855, “he will tell you that it is steam, electricity, and gas lighting.” Today, one might say that what we understand by progress is digital networks, mind-machine interfaces, and biotechnologies. These have been prime stimuli to twentieth- and twenty-first-century inventors of imaginary instruments such as Pat Cadigan, who detailed brain-sockets for music video production in the cyberpunk novel Synners (1991), and Richard Powers, whose Orfeo (2014) envisioned music encoded in DNA. Grandville, Cadigan, and Powers illustrate not only a cautionary strand in imaginary instrument design, but also a distinct temporal orientation: each places his or her inventions in the not-too-distant future. In the history of imaginary musical instruments, the emergence of a futuristic orientation can be dated quite precisely. The turning point occurs with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel L’An 2440 (The year 2440), published in 1771. The utopian premise of the novel is reminiscent of Bacon’s New Atlantis. Here too, an outsider encounters a society where experimental research is undertaken for the benefit of mankind; in the field of acoustics, a device made of springs is capable of imitating all manner of sounds, and is used to dissuade the King from going to war by letting him hear the horrors and grief it would cause. But where Bacon’s sound-houses were found in a contemporaneous foreign land, Mercier’s springs exist in their author’s home city seven hundred years in the future (Paris in 2440). The novel, generally considered the first significant example of fiction set in the future, promptly inspired other futurological visions, such as the fantastic image of a twenty-fifth-century postal balloon shown below, which would deliver mail via the air and have a pipe organ built into its bow. The imagination is often figured as a site of infinite possibility, free to create without regard to material limitations. But touring the museum of imaginary musical instruments suggests that there are in fact certain grooves that form over time to channel the course of fantasy. Futuristic imaginary instruments flow along one such groove. The future orientation of the imagination directs its energies to the technologies synonymous with “progress” in the present — an effect that starts to show its peculiar limitations when one looks back at projections like the hot air balloon of 2440. This particular channel for technological fantasy was not always so deep. Before the eighteenth century, imaginary instruments typically appeared either in a contemporaneous foreign land (like Bacon’s sound-houses) or in the past, as devices that existed but had been lost (like the tubo cochleato). The museum of imaginary musical instruments thus illuminates not only the intersection of reality and fantasy, but also the unknown history of the imagination. It reveals numerous paths of inventive thought not taken — paths covered up by years of “progress”, but which, when cleared off, might yet lead us back to something new. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 15, 2015

Thomas Patteson and Deirdre Loughridge

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:16.974536

illustrations-of-madness-james-tilly-matthews-and-the-air-loom

Illustrations of Madness James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom By Mike Jay November 12, 2014 Mike Jay recounts the tragic story of James Tilly Matthews, a former peace activist of the Napoleonic Wars who was confined to London's notorious Bedlam asylum in 1797 for believing that his mind was under the control of the “Air Loom” — a terrifying machine whose mesmeric rays and mysterious gases were brainwashing politicians and plunging Europe into revolution, terror, and war. In 1810 John Haslam, a London apothecary, published the first ever book-length description of a mad person’s delusions. Until this point most medical case histories of what we now refer to as mental illness had amounted to a line or two at most, and more often just a single word such as “frenzied” or “melancholy”. But the opinions of James Tilly Matthews resisted any such summary. He described a previously unimagined world of futuristic machines, “magnetic spies” and mass brainwashing, woven into a bizarre but undeniably well-informed narrative of the high politics behind the Napoleonic Wars. Haslam titled his book Illustrations of Madness, and it was full of lessons for the nascent profession of “mad-doctoring”, later to be known as psychiatry. But it was also written to settle a personal score. Haslam was the apothecary at the Royal Bethlem Hospital — in popular slang, Bedlam — where James Tilly Matthews had for the previous decade been confined as an incurable lunatic. Not everyone, however, believed that Matthews was mad. Haslam’s diagnosis had been contested by other doctors, and the governors of Bethlem had distanced themselves from it. He wrote his book in retaliation against his superiors; but as it turned out, his patient would have the last word. Although Haslam has been relegated to a footnote in the history of psychiatry, his account of Matthews’ inner world is still cited as the first fully described case of what we now call paranoid schizophrenia, and in particular of an “influencing machine”: the belief, or delusion, that a covertly operated device is acting at a distance to control the subject’s mind and body. For everyone who has since had messages beamed at them by the CIA, MI5, Masonic lodges or UFOs, via dental fillings, mysterious implants, TV sets or surveillance satellites, James Tilly Matthews is patient zero. Over the ten years they had spent together in Bedlam, Matthews revealed his secret world to Haslam in exhaustive detail. Around the corner from Bedlam, in a dank basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting him with a machine called an “Air Loom”. Matthews had even drawn a technical diagram of the device, which Haslam included in his book with a sarcastic commentary that invited the reader to laugh at its absurdity: a literal “illustration of madness”. But Matthews’ drawing has a more unnerving effect than Haslam allows. Levers, barrels, batteries, brass retorts and cylinders are rendered with the cool conviction of an engineer’s blueprint. It is the first ever published work of art by an asylum inmate, but it would hardly have looked out of place in the scientific journals or enyclopaedias of its day. The Air Loom worked, as its name suggests, by weaving “airs”, or gases, into a “warp of magnetic fluid” which was then directed at its victim. Matthews’ explanation of its powers combined the cutting-edge technologies of pneumatic chemistry and the electric battery with the controversial science of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. The finer detail becomes increasingly strange. It was fuelled by combinations of “fetid effluvia”, including “spermatic-animal-seminal rays”, “putrid human breath”, and “gaz from the anus of the horse”, and its magnetic warp assailed Matthews’ brain in a catalogue of forms known as “event-workings”. These included “brain-saying” and “dream-working”, by which thoughts were forced into his brain against his will, and a terrifying array of physical tortures from “knee nailing”, “vital tearing“ and “fibre ripping” to “apoplexy-working with the nutmeg grater” and the dreaded “lobster-cracking”, where the air around his chest was constricted until he was unable to breathe. To facilitate their control over him, the gang had implanted a magnet into his brain. He was tormented constantly by hallucinations, physical agonies, fits of laughter or being forced to parrot whatever words they chose to feed into his head. No wonder some people thought he was mad. The machine’s operators were a gang of undercover Jacobin terrorists, who Matthews described with haunting precision. Their leader, Bill the King, was a coarse-faced and ruthless puppetmaster who “has never been known to smile”; his second-in-command, Jack the Schoolmaster, took careful notes on the Air Loom’s operations, pushing his wig back with his forefinger as he wrote. The operator was a sinister, pockmarked lady known only as the “Glove Woman”. The public face of the gang was a sharp-featured woman named Augusta, superficially charming but “exceedingly spiteful and malignant” when crossed, who roamed London’s west end as an undercover agent. The operation directed at Matthews was only part of a larger story. There were more Air Looms and their gangs concealed across London, and their unseen influence extended all the way up to the Prime Minister, William Pitt, whose mind was firmly under their control. Their agents lurked in streets, theatres and coffee-houses, where they tricked the unsuspecting into inhaling magnetic fluids. If the gang were recognised in public, they would grasp magnetised batons that clouded the perception of anyone in the vicinity. The object of their intrigues was to poison the minds of politicians on both sides of the Channel, and thereby keep Britain and revolutionary France locked into their ruinous war. Matthews’ beliefs had their roots in his implausible but true story. A political activist and peace campaigner, he had become involved during the French revolution in clandestine efforts to head off the looming war between France and England. Shuttling between London and Paris, he had remarkable success in persuading the moderate faction of the French government to commit to a peace plan, and he had met several times with Pitt and Lord Liverpool, his secretary of war, to propose an alliance with them against the Jacobins and the Paris mob. But the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793 set Britain and France on an inexorable course to war, and Matthews was eventually arrested in Paris by the Committee of Public Safety on suspicion of being an English spy. He remained under arrest during the height of the Terror, in constant fear of the guillotine. When he was released three years later, he limped home to England and accused Pitt and Liverpool of abandoning a loyal patriot. His letters were ignored, and his accusations became more florid: Pitt’s government were secretly in league with the Jacobins, and prolonging the war for their own corrupt ends. Finally he confronted his betrayers in the public gallery of the House of Commons on 30 December 1796, loudly accusing Lord Liverpool of treason. He was arrested, judged to be of unsound mind and sent to Bedlam. All Matthews’ convoluted tales of espionage and conspiracy were considered by Haslam merely as a symptom of his madness, and dealt with accordingly. His treatment of lunatics, as described in his earlier book Observations on Insanity (1798), stressed the need to “obtain an ascendancy” over the patient, a process comparable to training a dog or breaking in a horse. To debate with lunatics about their beliefs was to enter a “perplexity of metaphysical mazes”. Matthews in turn refused to acknowledge Haslam’s authority, maintaining that he was merely a stooge of the Home Secretary, yet another bit-player in the international conspiracy to silence him. Confined and neglected, Matthews’ persecutory fantasies intensified. But his family refused to accept that he was mad. To them he still appeared his lucid, intelligent and gentle self: it was tragic but understandable that his traumatic experiences had left him with some cranky political views. Haslam’s theory of insanity, however, allowed for no such generosity. As he put it in Illustrations of Madness, “Madness being the opposite to reason and good sense, as light is to darkness, straight is to crooked &c., it appears wonderful that two opposite opinions could be entertained on the subject”. Matthews was mad: no-one who believed they were controlled by an Air Loom could be otherwise, and “there are already too many maniacs allowed to enjoy a dangerous liberty”. He banned Matthews’ wife from visiting him in Bethlem. Matthews’ family persisted with their case that he was sane, and offered to guarantee his good behaviour if he were released. Finally, in 1809, they were permitted to engage two physicians named Henry Clutterbuck and George Birkbeck to examine Matthews independently. Both concluded that he was in his right mind, and that his alleged symptoms of madness — hostility to authority and insistence that he was being conspired against — could equally be seen as the responses of a sane man unjustly confined. On the basis of this testimony Matthews’ family served Bethlem with a writ of Habeas Corpus, forcing the governors to state their legal reasons for holding him. Haslam wrote a lengthy affidavit on Matthews’ case, detailing his delusions and claiming that he had made violent threats against the life of George III. In the end, however, the case turned on a short letter from the Home Secretary recommending “that you do continue to detain in your hosp[ital] as a fit and proper subject James Tilly Matthews a lunatic who is at present under your charge”. The Bethlem governors justified Matthews’ detention on the basis that he was “in the Hospital by the order and with the knowledge of Government”, and the writ of Habeas Corpus was rejected. Matthews, it seemed, was not a lunatic but a political prisoner, just as he had always maintained. Having his medical opinion dismissed in this way spurred Haslam to publish a full account of the case. Illustrations of Madness opened with a withering attack on Clutterbuck and Birkbeck: “how they failed to detect his insanity is inexplicable”. He paraded Matthews’ delusions like a ringmaster in the circus of lunacy, advertising on the title page ‘a singular case of insanity, and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion’, and tantalising the reader with the prospect of “a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking and lengthening the brain”. All this was “embellished with a curious plate” — Matthews’ drawing of the Air Loom — and accompanied by excerpts from Matthews’ own notes on the “mischievous and complicated science” that lay behind it. Although Illustrations of Madness was an extended argument for his permanent detention, Matthews managed to turn its publication to his advantage. His drawing of the Air Loom was admired by visiting doctors, and he began to teach himself draughtsmanship and engraving. The following year he submitted architectural plans for a new Bethlem hospital which so impressed the governors that they awarded him a prize of £30. In 1814 his family succeeded in transferring him to a more congenial private asylum, Fox’s London House in Hackney. Dr. Samuel Fox, the proprietor, regarded him as entirely sane, and he was soon helping out with book-keeping and gardening. Matthews died the following year, but he had his revenge on Haslam from beyond the grave. In 1815 a House of Commons committee was set up to investigate conditions in madhouses, including allegations of mismanagement and cruelty at Bethlem. When examined, Haslam blamed the hospital staff: they were incompetent and frequently drunk, and the resident surgeon was “so insane as to have a strait-waistcoat”. In response, the head keeper testified that Haslam, frustrated by Matthews’ refusal to accept his authority, had kept him in handcuffs “to punish him for the use of his tongue”. Chaining non-violent patients had become emblematic of the evils of the old madhouse system, and indeed Haslam had criticised the practice in his own books. When the Committee’s report was published in 1816, he was dismissed by the Bethlem governors. Haslam’s career was ruined. He sold everything he owned, doggedly retrained as a physician and eventually took his M.D. at the age of sixty. He became a specialist legal witness in trials involving criminal lunacy, giving his opinion on questions such as imbecility and “lucid intervals”. But Matthews’ case seems to have destroyed his certainty that the mad could be unfailingly distinguished from the sane. In his old age, when asked in court whether a defendant was of sound mind, he replied: “I never saw any human being who was of sound mind”. Pressed further by the judge, he simply added: “I presume the Deity is of sound mind, and He alone”. Mindcraft from the Wellcome Collection The above animation from Beakus is part of of the Wellcome Collection’s new online and digital exhibition titled Mindcraft, which explores a century of madness, murder and mental healing, from the arrival in Paris of Franz Anton Mesmer with his theories of ‘animal magnetism’ to the therapeutic power of hypnotism used by Freud. Learn more here. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 12, 2014

Mike Ja

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:17.325249

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Redressing the Balance Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theatre of Nature By Bert van de Roemer August 20, 2014 Bert van de Roemer explores the curiosity cabinet of the Dutch collector Levinus Vincent and how the aesthetic drive behind his meticulous ordering of the contents was in essence religious, an attempt to emphasise the wonder of God's creations by restoring the natural world to its prelapsarian harmony. The cabinet of curiosities of the collector Levinus Vincent (1658-1727) was known as one of the finest and most remarkable in the Dutch Republic during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A visitor once stated that, in the same way that nobody would believe you could visit Rome without seeing the pope, so nobody would believe you‘d visited Amsterdam without seeing Vincent’s collection. Vincent himself called his collection a “Wonder Theatre of Nature” (Wondertooneel der Nature). The collection comprised of eight cabinets containing, among other things: 600 phials of animal cadavers in spirits, 288 boxes of indigenous and exotic insects, 32 drawers of shells and crustaceans, 14 drawers of minerals and fossils, and a cabinet with a woodland-like scene created from different kinds of corals and sponges. Though the sheer volume and variety of exotic and marvellous objects on display played a key part in the fame of Vincent’s collection, it was also the unique manner in which these objects were presented which made the collection so special. Indeed, a German visitor, the scholar and bibliophile Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, wondered what was cause for more astonishment, the objects themselves or the novel manner of their presentation. Through various prints Vincent had made of his cabinets we can see just what so impressed its visitors and the enormous effort that Vincent and his wife Joanna van Breda must have taken in arranging their precious collectables. Earlier collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually displayed a heterogeneous assemblage based on the accumulation of individual objects, all juxtaposed in such a way as to emphasise variety, abundance and contrast. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, a new tendency of ordering began to gain favour. Collectors were focused more on the overall composition of their collection as a totality, paying particular attention to the proportional and aesthetic harmony between the individual objects. More and more the abundance of nature became subject to a mathematical and symmetrical ordering. The cabinets of Vincent, so painstakingly arranged by himself and his wife Joanna van Breda, were at the forefront of this movement and the example par excellence of such a style. The great importance that such an aesthetic ordering played in Vincent’s cabinet is shown in the frontispiece he had designed for his small catalogue, Wondertooneel der Nature, published in 1706. In the background of the image there stretches out a hall with eight symmetrically placed cabinets. The foreground reveals allegorical figures that tell the viewer about various aspects of collecting. The figure on the far left represents the Explorer. He holds a net to collect insects, fishes and other small animals, and the zodiac around his shoulders shows that his inquisitive mind should have no limits. He is shown peering under the exquisitely embroidered garment of the figure next to him, who represents Nature, here depicted as the many breasted goddess Isis with a city wall crown on her head and a globe under her arm. The Explorer, ever curious, is investigating what Nature has to offer. To the right of Nature sits the personification of Seafaring with oar in hand and a shell on her head under which flows her hair as waves of the sea. She represents the possibility given to Dutch collectors to be able to collect such exquisite exotica from the East and the West. At the far right of the picture is a reclining figure holding a letter, a caduceus and a jar containing a lizard. Behind her ear sits a writing pen. She represents the Enthusiast or the Collector, describing and noting down everything she observes and communicating this with her fellow collectors and enthusiasts. With respect to this new method of harmonious and aesthetic ordering, the sculpted group in the background at the very back of the hall between the cabinets is particularly significant. The woman in the middle is described as a ‘swift nymph’ who is responsible for the good order of the collection; the beehive in her hands expresses that her busy efforts can be compared with the indefatigable work of the bees, constantly storing honey in the ‘remarkable structure’ of wax cells. The nymph is assisted by two putti, named ‘Pattern’ and ‘Adornment’. The former holds a compass and a set square and takes care of the harmonious layout of the ground-plans, the latter holds a peacock’s tail and a drawing and sees to it that the vertical elevations of the cupboards make for a splendorous and magnificent sight. The end results of this expert ordering become apparent in the seven prints of the separate cabinets shown in the second part of the catalogue. A closer look at these will show how Vincent and Joanna varied in different modes of display, but were both consistent in their desire for harmonic proportion. For instance, Vincent possessed two large cupboards of which the upper halves comprised five shelves filled with phials containing animals suspended in spirits, including remoras, swordfish, snakes, toucans, sloths, opossums, chameleons, crocodiles and even some human embryos. The space between the shelves diminished gradually on each higher level and Vincent gives, like all of his other drawers and cupboards, the exact measurements in his catalogue. Each shelf was divided into thirteen compartments by delicately turned pillars and each compartment contained one large phial flanked by two smaller ones. When looking at these prints, comparison with the bees in their beehive seems certainly apt. The cupboards presented an elegant harmonic spectacle in which proportional and geometric order ruled. Another, more stylized mode of display, can be seen in the cabinet containing insects, eggs and dried animals. In this print, one of the drawers with insects is turned on its side to show its contents to the beholder. The butterflies, beetles and flies are arranged in decorative patterns of symmetrical curls and loops. The countless individual specimens form the tesserae by which the grander form is built. In his description Vincent stresses that every insect was placed according to their colour, size and design in relation to the adjacent specimen, but also with consideration of the total design that, according to Vincent, resembled pieces of embroidery: ‘a work that is impossible to represent in words or images’. Looking at the print we can only wonder what the effect would have been like in real life with all the shining and brilliant colours of the insects still present. Vincent told a German visitor, who compared the drawers with delightful tapestries, that tsar Peter the Great took to his knees before this cabinet to take a closer look, a posture that was later interpreted to be an act of praise. The pride of the collection was a cabinet containing 68 drawers with 288 boxes of insects and some small birds. Vincent stresses that the collectables here were submitted to an ‘extraordinary regular order’. As science historian Emma Spary has pointed out in her article “Scientific Symmetries”, the print shows a deliberate juxtaposition of the boundless variety of nature with the strict ordering practices of the collector. She discerns three tiers. In the upper part we see three columns of drawers, showing the ‘order imposed by the human possessor’ and expressing the ‘classificatory principles used by the naturalist’. The upright drawers in the lower half presenting their contents show how the ‘strong contrasts in form and pattern’ of the insects were subjected to a ‘bilateral symmetry in ordering’. On the ground, the third tier, we see specimens ‘placed completely at random, even, apparently, escaping the frame of the picture’. They show the boundless and disordered state in which nature presents herself, and which man could bring into better, more organized states through his intellectual and artistic capacities. From a modern point of view the activities of Vincent and Joanna might seem a frivolous way of passing time, but we only have to think about the enormous amount of effort they must have put into their compositions to understand the many words of praise from their guests. For example, creating the drawer with butterflies must have been a particularly laborious and toilsome task. First, as insects constrict their legs and wings as they die, each specimen would have to have been brought back to its natural posture. This was done by soaking them and then placing each leg and wing, without breaking them, to their original state. Next, a rough sketch of the total design would have been made, which was then elaborated on special gridded paper. This would then have been transferred to the bottom of the velvet-lined drawer. Then, with tiny needles each insect, one by one, would have been pinned in the drawer, slowly building up the total form. The utmost care was taken so that each specimen fitted according to their proportion, colour and design in relation to its neighbour. Thus a gigantic work of natural mosaic was created. But even then the work would have still not been finished: three to four times a year all the boxes and drawers with insects would have to have been rubbed with lavender oil for preservation. In the panegyrics on the collection the designs of Vincent and Joanna are often compared with the most delicate pieces of embroidery, tapestry or damask. This was no coincidence, as it relates to Vincent’s trade. In the literature he is often described as a ‘damask merchant’ or simply a ‘merchant’ but this does not fully do him justice. He was indeed a merchant of luxurious tissues such as silks and damask, but first and foremost he presented himself as a ‘designer of patterns’. The silk production was a complex and specialized industry that involved many different crafts, from creating the first thread to selling the final cloth. Pattern designers often had an artistic background and from Vincent himself – whose education remains a mystery – it is known that he was a member of the guild of St. Luke, the guild for painters. The artistic skills he used in his trade were applied to add lustre to his collection. In his catalogues, time and time again, Vincent emphasizes that the arrangements were according to his own ‘ordinance and design’. It seems to have been of great importance. He also repeatedly expresses the great pains and costs it took to maintain his cabinet. But it was certainly not an idle pastime. He declares that many visitors, whilst looking at his collection, were strengthened in their religious faith. Vincent presented this as his ultimate goal. He noted the beneficial effects of his cabinet: the righteous saw themselves affirmed in their beliefs, while the ungodly found reason to acknowledge the Almighty. The faith of visitors was not only affirmed by the magnificent objects they beheld, but also by the special manner of its presentation. Levinus and Joanna were creating a spectacle that presented nature in a harmonious and balanced state, a state which it had once known in Paradise. After the Fall and the Deluge, nature was considered to have departed from this original harmony and fallen into disarray. This was now rectified by Levinus’ and Joanna’s intricate and laborious work. One visitor wrote: ‘Where once in paradise was Adam with his Eva, thou are there with your spouse to arrange God’s wonders.’ Another poem expressed how Joanna and Levinus ‘re-created’ nature in their cabinet. By presenting their collectables in such designs they were not only presenting a pleasurable sight, but also restoring nature to the beauty of its prelapsarian state. In this way, in Vincent’s room of cabinets, knowledge of nature, aesthetic appreciation and religious contemplation all intermingled and enhanced each other. His collection functioned, indeed, as a wonder theatre of nature. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 20, 2014

ert van de Roemer

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:17.836186

forgotten-failures-of-african-exploration

Forgotten Failures of African Exploration By Dane Kennedy April 22, 2015 Dane Kennedy reflects on two disastrous expeditions into Africa organised by the British in the early-19th century, and how their lofty ambitions crumbled before the implacable realities of the continent. The exploration of Africa by the British is a story that has been told time and again, often in tiresome detail. We have shelves full of biographies of famous explorers like David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, along with countless other books on the subject. These tales of adventure invariably end in the hero’s triumphant return to “civilization” or brave death in “darkest Africa”. Such stories were popular with the Victorian public, and they remain popular today. Yet some major African expeditions have never received much attention. These were expeditions that ended in ignominious failure. Because they undermine the triumphalist narrative of the European encounter with Africa, they have been all but erased from historical memory. For this reason alone, they deserve revisiting. They also happen to tell us a lot about what the British hoped to achieve in Africa, and why it proved such a challenge. The Napoleonic wars had barely come to an end when in 1815 the British government sent two large, well-financed expeditions into the African interior. One was a naval expedition whose mission was to sail up the Congo River, break through its barrier of cataracts, and push as far upriver as possible. The other was an army expedition whose mission was to march inland from the Guinea coast, contact African states in the interior, and follow the Niger River to its outlet. Europeans still did not know where the Congo River began or the Niger River ended. Some geographers speculated that they were one and the same body of water, raising hope that the two expeditions might meet one another on their journeys. That hope, along with all the others authorities invested in the two expeditions, would be swept away by the implacable realities of Africa. What we know about the naval expedition comes mainly from the posthumous journals of its commander, James H. Tuckey, and its chief naturalist, Christen Smith, which were published as Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire, Usually Called the Congo, in South Africa, in 1816 (London: John Murray, 1818). Like many naval expeditions of the era, it was presented as a scientific enterprise, sent out to gather knowledge about the natural world. Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society and leading proponent of scientific exploration, helped plan the expedition. He recruited Smith, a botanist trained at the University of Copenhagen, and recommended that Bolton and Watt build a steamship specially designed to carry its crew up the Congo. Though the steamship didn’t work out, the expeditionary party included, in addition to Smith, a zoologist, a geologist, a marine biologist, and a gardener from Kew. The book ends with a series of appendices detailing the hydrographic data, natural specimens, and ethnographic information collected by the expedition. Along with some of the book’s illustrations, the appendices testify to its scientific ambitions. So what went wrong? First, the expedition encountered suspicion and resistance from those Africans whose cooperation it required. At Embomma, the main port at the mouth of the Congo, slave merchants declared that “our intentions could not be good, and that the King should . . . not let me ascend the river” (p. 109). They suspected that the expedition’s aim was to shut down the slave trade, a not unreasonable assumption in light of the British naval patrols that were sailing in West African waters with precisely this purpose in mind. Tuckey had to give “my assurances of not coming to prevent the slave trade, or to make war” (p. 110). Even so, slave traders repeatedly obstructed the progress of the expedition. The slave trade had other adverse effects. The expedition’s chief translator was a freed slave from the region who was reunited at Embomma with his father. Although he accompanied the expedition further upriver, he soon deserted, taking four Embomma porters with him. For all its claims of scientific neutrality, the expedition found itself inextricably enmeshed in the turmoil caused by the slave trade and its suppression. The fatal blow, however, came as a result of the region’s dreaded disease environment. The party was struggling to bypass the cataracts by land when, one by one, its members fell ill. Tuckey’s party decided to turn back, but the return journey was “worse for us than the retreat from Moscow” (p. 222). His journal entries became briefer and less coherent. He was soon dead: so was Smith, his team of naturalists, and over a dozen officers and members of the crew. All had been swept away by yellow fever. In the words of John Barrow, the Admiralty official who had planned the mission, “never were the results of an expedition more melancholy and disastrous” (p. xliii). While Tuckey’s journal details the ordeals he and men endured on the expedition, it also includes passages that suggest the sheer sense of wonder that he must have felt as he ventured up the Congo. In an early entry, he describes “the lofty mangroves overhanging the boat, and a variety of palm trees vibrating in the breeze; immense flocks of parrots alone broke the silence of the woods with their chattering, towards sun-set” (p. 91). And the final poignant sentence of his journal, written shortly before he died, observed: “Flocks of flamingos going to the south denote the approach of the rains” (p. 225). If the Congo expedition was a tragedy, then — to borrow Karl Marx’s famous dictum — the Niger expedition was a farce. It set out from a trading station at the mouth of the Rio Nunez River. Its aim was to march into the interior, establish diplomatic and trading relations with African kingdoms along the way, and follow the Niger downstream in the footsteps of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who had disappeared a decade earlier during his journey to trace the river’s course. The expedition consisted of 69 Royal African Corps troops (40 of them white, 29 black), 32 African civilians, 200 pack animals, several field cannon, various other weapons, a plentiful supply of gifts for local rulers, and the standard necessities for such a large force. Scientific objectives were less prominent in this expedition, though it did include a naturalist, the German Adolphus Kummer. The party was still in base camp when its commander, Major Peddie, succumbed to some sort of fever, as did another officer. Unbowed, the expedition set out under a new commander, Captain Campbell. While disease posed a threat to the men, it proved even more deadly to the pack animals they used to carry their goods and supplies. Horses, donkeys, bullocks, and camels died off at an alarming rate. This proved to be the expedition’s undoing. It had moved scarcely a hundred miles into the interior when the losses reached crisis proportions. With nearly half its stock dead, it had to bury its field guns and appeal to the ruler of Futa Jallon for porters. This ruler, known as the Almamy, proved a shrewd negotiator. He repeatedly upped his demands for payment, withdrawing his porters on each occasion until the British gave in. He also placed crippling restrictions on the route the caravan wanted to take through his territory. It gradually dawned on Captain Campbell that the Almamy had no intention of allowing his party to reach its destination: he wanted to prevent the British from supplying his enemy, the kingdom of Sego, with arms. Eventually, the expedition was forced to abandon its supplies and retreat to the coast, where Captain Campbell promptly died, as did the officer who succeeded him. End of story? Hardly. In an astonishing act of hubris, the British gave it another go, and with a stubbornness that beggars belief, they adopted the same strategy that had proven so disastrous the first time. Now under the command of Major William Gray, the expedition regrouped and set out from the mouth of the Gambia River, roughly a hundred miles north of its previous point of departure. Once again it relied on a train of pack animals to move its supplies, and once again they succumbed to diseases, parasites, and poisonous plants. Once again the expedition tried to hire porters from local rulers, and once again those rulers used this leverage to make extortionate demands for gifts and transit fees while working “to oppose our further progress” (p. 211). The rule of Kaarta actually began in fact to refer to “the whites [as] his tributaries” (p. 263). Throughout these ordeals, Gray continued to insist that he driven by a disinterested desire to reach the Niger and trace its course. “Whenever I spoke of the Niger, or my anxiety to see it,” Gray reports, his African interlocutors “asked me if there were no rivers in the country. . . we inhabit” (p. 349). Although the book he wrote about the expedition was titled Travels in Western Africa in the Years 1818, 19, 20, and 21 from the River Gambia, through Woolli, Gondoo, Galam, Kasson, Kaarta, and Foolidoo, to the River Niger (London: John Murray, 1825), he never actually set eyes on the Niger. Like its naval counterpart, this land expedition ran into resistance from local elites who feared that the British would interfere in their slave trading operations. It also found that it had entered an environment plagued by wars between neighboring states, making passage through the region nearly impossible. Grey finally swallowed his pride and appealed for rescue to the French, whose influence in the region the British had sought to supplant. The forlorn party finally returned to the coast a full six years after the original expedition had set out. The long endeavor had proven a costly, ignominious failure. These were the two most ambitious expeditions the British would undertake in Africa until the equally disastrous Niger expedition of 1841. Though their failure was an embarrassment that the British quickly erased from their collective memory, these expeditions are no less worthy of attention than the West African expeditions that made household names of Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, John Lander, and others. They are in some respects more illuminating than their more successful counterparts about the mix of motives that drove the British to explore Africa. Science—geographical science in particular—certainly played a prominent role, but so too did various other considerations. Both expeditions were driven by a desire to establish a new relationship with Africa and Africans in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade. These probes of the main river systems of West and Central Africa sought highways into the interior that could facilitate alternative trading opportunities. Establishing diplomatic relations with states in the African interior was part of this strategy, but it also presumed that force might be required. This was why the army expedition was so large and heavily armed. It was prepared to engage in colonial conquest. Similarly, the commander of the naval expedition believed that “the progress of civilization [in Africa] can only be done by colonization” (p. 187). Yet the failure of both expeditions to achieve their objectives exposed the stark disparity between ambition and achievement. The British still lacked the capacity to enter the continent and intervene in its affairs in any meaningful way. In part, this was due to the African disease environment, which proved so destructive to both expeditions. But it was also due to the strength and resourcefulness of African states and peoples: they were able to obstruct and undermine the objectives of the British at every turn. The most successful explorers were those who recognized their vulnerability and worked in careful collaboration with indigenous parties. What the two expeditions discussed here demonstrate is that the explorers of Africa may have been the harbingers of colonial conquest, but they were hardly its agents. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 22, 2015

Dane Kenned

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:18.168617

wild-heart-turning-white-georg-trakl-and-cocaine

Wild Heart Turning White Georg Trakl and Cocaine By Richard Millington October 29, 2014 To mark the 100th anniversary of the death by cocaine overdose of Austrian lyric poet Georg Trakl, Richard Millington explores the role the drug played in Trakl's life and works. He doesn’t know whether his behaviour was unusual, he didn’t drink but took large amounts of cocaine. This remark is taken from the medical file of Georg Trakl and is part of a brief account of the poet’s movements and behaviour in the month or so preceding his committal for observation to a psychiatric hospital in Kraków in early October 1914. Just six weeks earlier, towards the end of August, the 27-year-old Trakl had undertaken the 1000-kilometre train journey from Innsbruck, at the western end of the Habsburg Empire, to the far eastern crownland of Galicia, where he was to be deployed as a military pharmacist. His frontline experience was brief but traumatic. During the Battle of Grodek-Rawa Ruska of September 8-11, he was assigned sole care of ninety badly wounded soldiers sheltering in a barn, a task for which he had neither the training nor the equipment. As he later recounted from his hospital bed in Kraków to his friend and publisher Ludwig von Ficker, when one of the wounded men had ended his own suffering by shooting himself in the head, Trakl had fled outside only to be confronted by the sight of local peasants hanging lifeless in the trees. One evening during the westward retreat of the defeated Austro-Hungarian forces, he announced his own intention to shoot himself, but was forcefully disarmed by his comrades. His committal followed on October 6, and he died in hospital on November 3. His medical file lists the cause of death, complete with exclamation mark, as “Suicid durch Cocainintoxication!” When news of Trakl’s death on the Russian front reached intellectual celebrity Karl Kraus in Vienna, Kraus reacted by claiming that the poet was “hardly a victim of war. It was always incomprehensible to me that he could live at all. His insanity wrestled with godly things”. In the light of what we now know about Trakl’s final months, it is fair to conclude that Kraus underestimated the role that the war played in his demise: there are indeed compelling reasons to number him among its many victims. Yet the enduring value of Kraus’s assessment is that it draws attention to the importance of other factors that made Trakl’s hold on life so tenuous even before first-hand experience of armed conflict precipitated his final crisis. His war story is neither one of the destruction of innocence nor of the betrayal of naïve faith, but rather of the exacerbation of existing vulnerability. What, then, are we to make of Kraus’s assertion that Trakl’s “insanity wrestled with godly things”? First and foremost, the poet’s readers are likely to associate this statement with his dark, exquisite, often enigmatic verse, once characterized by Ludwig Wittgenstein as “beautiful yet incomprehensible” and as possessing “the tone of true genius”. Rainer Maria Rilke was similarly startled by its other-worldly quality, comparing the act of reading his younger compatriot’s second published collection Sebastian in Dream (1915) to being “pressed against panes of glass: for Trakl’s experience occurs like mirror images and fills its entire space, which, like the space in the mirror, cannot be entered”. Unlike Wittgenstein and Rilke, however, Kraus knew Trakl personally, even having holidayed with him for ten days in Venice in August 1913, and when he expressed amazement at the poet’s ability to “live at all”, he was probably thinking less of his poetry than of his personality. Many aspects of Trakl’s biography point to chronic maladjustment. This is reflected to varying degrees in his inability to hold down a regular job, his sometimes eccentric behavior, his tendency to brooding and melancholy, his habitual identification with abject figures (such as Germany’s best-known feral child Kaspar Hauser), his suspiciously close attachment to his younger sister Grete, and last but not least his drug and alcohol abuse. Trakl’s partiality for “dark poisons”, as he would call them in several late poems, embodied a self-destructive tendency that at a basic, physiological level certainly did more than anything else to render his earthly existence so precarious. “A heavy drinker and drug-eater” is the characterization offered by Ficker, a man by no means given to cheap sensationalizing, least of all in matters concerning his brilliant protégé. From the perspective of Trakl’s wider biography, the cocaine overdose that killed him appears as the culminating act in an unrelenting process of self-poisoning that loomed large over his brief adult life. Documentary evidence of Trakl’s cocaine use is restricted to the notes in his medical file and therefore to the ten-week period of his active military service in Galicia and hospitalization in Kraków. It is probable, however, that he had at least tried cocaine before, as this was in common medicinal use in the years before the First World War. Ease of access to the full range of available pharmaceuticals was one of several advantages presented by Trakl’s decision to pursue pharmacy as a respectable and gainful career to complement his literary endeavours. He took his first steps along this path immediately after leaving school in autumn 1905, starting with a three-year apprenticeship at a local chemist’s shop in his native Salzburg, followed by two years of pharmacy study in the imperial capital Vienna. Trakl’s letters suggest that his two intoxicants of preference during the pre-war years were alcohol and Veronal (the first barbiturate to be marketed for medicinal purposes), but he is known to have used a wide range of substances, and clearly the imperative to achieve intoxication in any form was more important for him than particular effects associated with individual substances. Ready availability was probably an important reason for Trakl’s choice of cocaine while on active service in Galicia. First isolated from Andean coca leaves by Friedrich Gaedcke in 1855, in the final decades of the nineteenth century the cocaine alkaloid had been extolled as something of a wonder drug, most enthusiastically by none other than the young Sigmund Freud. Popular tonics such as Vin Mariani and Coca-Cola had made its stimulant effects available to a wide consumer base throughout Europe and North America. Among its numerous medical applications, its local anaesthetic properties had the most profound and lasting impact, so much so that the suffix –caine subsequently became standard in naming synthetic substances with similar properties. An exponential increase in the need for anaesthetics explains the accelerated production and geographical diffusion of cocaine during the First World War. As Hans Maier explains in his 1926 study Der Kokainismus, the main European source of the drug at this time was the German pharmaceutical industry. Whereas recreational use had previously been restricted mostly to major urban centres, the war made cocaine relatively easy to obtain in places as remote, for example, as the Galician countryside to which Trakl’s unit was posted, or for that matter the small Russian village in which Mikhail Bulgakov’s story “Morphine” is set (“Morphine” tells the story of a young doctor who unsuccessfully attempts to cure his morphine addiction by replacing morphine with cocaine and is based on Bulgakov’s own experience of the years 1917-18 in the province of Smolensk). In the aftermath of the war, as Maier notes, the chaotic distribution of army stocks aided the huge rise in the popularity of cocaine that saw it become a “champagne drug” among European socialites during the roaring twenties. In contrast to his medical file, Trakl’s poetry contains no obvious traces of the heavy cocaine use of his final months — or indeed of any earlier, undocumented use. In this respect it differs from the literary work of his German contemporary Gottfried Benn, a doctor specializing in skin and venereal diseases who between 1915 and 1917 was stationed at a hospital for prostitutes in occupied Brussels. Benn’s cocaine experiments of his Brussels period have a clear literary correlative in several poems and dramatic scenes celebrating the euphoria and vitality associated with cocaine intoxication. Trakl’s reticence about cocaine is consistent with a broader pattern in his poetic treatment of intoxicants. Other terms excluded from his poetic lexicon despite denoting substances he is known to have consumed in considerable quantities include alcohol, beer, schnapps, chloroform, barbiturate, Veronal, morphine, and opium. Of themselves, these omissions might appear unremarkable. Like the Polish Modernist Witkacy, who signed many paintings not with his own initials but with those of the drugs he had consumed while producing them, poets of the post-Romantic age might sometimes choose to insert factual or fictional records of self-medication into their works as tools of self-stylization, but there is no expectation for them to do so. Yet in Trakl’s case, these omissions become significant because of the apparent contradiction they present to the overall prominence within his poetry of psychoactive substances and their effects. One distinguishing feature of Trakl’s literary approach to drugs is the lack of an obvious confessional gesture, a lack that places him outside the dominant tradition inaugurated by Thomas De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century account of his opium-induced visions. Instead, direct and indirect references to intoxicants and intoxication are integrated closely into his poetic diction and contribute to its distinctive flavour. The poetry he wrote over the last five years of his life is chiefly concerned with plotting parallel processes of decay in the natural and human worlds, and intoxication plays a significant part in aestheticizing his lyric speaker’s confrontation with grim reality. “Towards Evening My Heart” from his first published collection Poems (1913) is illustrative: Towards Evening My Heart In the evening you hear the scream of bats, Two black horses jump in the meadow, The red maple rustles. To the traveller the small inn appears by the wayside. Wonderful the taste of young wine and nuts, Wonderful: stumbling drunk into darkening wood. Through black branches painful bells sound, On the face dew drips. Drunkenness here is more than an escape. What is “wonderful” about it is not that it changes or erases the content of the speaker’s consciousness, which remains “painful”, but that it gives his consciousness an intoxicated-aesthetic form. The instrument of intoxication mentioned is also representative. In his poetry, Trakl shows an overwhelming preference for wine, “young” or otherwise (other epithets include “fiery”, “golden” and “purple”), which is less a reflection of his real-life habits than a sign of how well this beverage fits into a wider framework of rich pastoral and religious imagery. The modern and medical connotations of a word like “cocaine”, by contrast, make it quite unsuitable for Trakl’s poetic purposes. Combined with knowledge of the heavy cocaine use of his final months, the deep integration of intoxication into Trakl’s poetics has nonetheless encouraged commentators to pick out indirect cocaine references in several poems. According to Alberto Castoldi, for instance, Trakl’s oxymoron “black snow” encapsulates cocaine’s ambivalence as an instrument of both self-abasement and self-transcendence. He cites the opening quatrain of the proto-surrealist “Delirium”, composed in 1913, by way of illustration: The black snow that runs from the rooftops; A red finger dips into your forehead Blue flakes sink into the bare room, These are the dead mirrors of lovers. Attempts to pin determinate symbolic meaning to Trakl’s “delirious” images are necessarily fraught, so readings of this kind must be treated with caution. Moreover, it should be remembered that for a confirmed landscape poet such as Trakl, the primary referent of a word such as “snow” will always be “snow” in the literal, meteorological sense. Nonetheless, the plausibility of seeing hidden cocaine references in lines such as these has an intriguing etymological basis. Maier notes that the nasal inhalation of cocaine in powder form emerged as a popular form of administration in the years 1912-14, and it was precisely this new fashion that produced the drug’s soon legendary association with whiteness and its common metaphorical designation as “snow” (if anything, even more common in German than in English). The affirmation of cocaine symbolism in a poem such as “Delirium” would place Trakl in the poetic tradition that Marcus Boon associates with Charles Baudelaire, whose reticence about intoxicants in his poetry (conspicuous by contrast with the directness of his famous prose disquisition Les Paradis artificiels) “contributes to a certain literary myth” about drugs, surrounding them with an aura of mystery and secrecy and giving them an almost godly or diabolical unspeakability. Accepting the possibility of covert cocaine symbolism in Trakl’s whiteness and snow imagery means that certain images come to look distinctly like premonitions of the poet’s own fate. The lines “A heart / Turns rigid in snowy stillness” occur in the poem “Limbo”, written in spring 1914, just a few months before his departure for the eastern front, while the poem “The Heart”, which dates to the same period, opens with the line “A wild heart turned white by the wood” and closes with “O heart / Shimmering across into snowy coolness”. As it happens, the prophetic tone in Trakl’s poetry became increasingly pronounced over the last year or so of his life, and the scope of his visions was often much broader. The works of his final period abound with images of collapsing cities, dying peoples and falling stars, although his attention repeatedly turns, as it had in the pastoral scenes of his earlier work, to the fate of individuals or specific groups — women, lovers, soldiers — within his now-apocalyptic landscapes. The last and most heavily anthologized poem he wrote, one of only two he composed during his frontline service in Galicia, contains the most succinct summation of the decline theme running right through his oeuvre (“all roads lead to black decay”), as well as probably the bleakest of all his prophecies in its stark concluding image of genocidal annihilation (“the unborn grandchildren”). The title of this poem, “Grodek”, evokes the site of the battle where the poet himself had, as he related to Ficker, been touched by “the full misery of mankind”. And here we in turn touch upon the most definite link between Trakl’s poetry and his cocaine use. It is a link that involves neither any obvious influence of his drug use upon his literary work, nor any kind of direct or indirect poetic representation of his life experience, but rather a concurrent intensification of established tendencies in both spheres. Just as his final poem provides the most radical expression of the preoccupation with decay and decline characterizing his entire oeuvre, so too his heavy cocaine use of the same period amounts to a radicalization of the self-destructive tendency that was always inherent in his drug habit. Following their own internal logic, both developments came to an abrupt end when the poet’s own wild heart turned white on November 3 1914. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 29, 2014

Richard Millington

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:18.821046

ignorant-armies-private-snafu-goes-to-war

Ignorant Armies Private Snafu Goes to War By Mark David Kaufman March 25, 2015 Between 1943 and 1945, with the help of Warner Bros.' finest, the U.S. Army produced a series of 27 propaganda cartoons depicting the calamitous adventures of Private Snafu. Mark David Kaufman explores their overarching theme of containment and how one film inadvertently let slip one of the war's greatest secrets. In early 1942, with America still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hollywood mobilized for war. Soon, silver-screen luminaries like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable were pinning wings to their lapels, making the roster of the U.S. Army Air Forces look like the opening credits of an MGM blockbuster. And while Tinseltown bristled with shiny new uniforms and all-too-perfect smiles, neighboring Toontown was also banging the proverbial drum. From Walt Disney to Warner Bros., the animation studios were letting slip the dogs — and ducks — of war. Donald, of course, was a natural recruit (he’s a sailor, after all). The feathered hero saw action in the jungles of Asia, braving snipers and ravenous crocodiles to single-wingedly wipe out an enemy airbase. Not to be outdone, Daffy proved that he too was a bird to be reckoned with. In 1943, the fowl-mouthed mallard parachuted commando-style behind German lines to wage unholy and untranslatable havoc. Others followed suit: Popeye punched Nazis, Superman sunk ships, and Bugs Bunny peddled war bonds. For these veterans of paint and light, it was a merry war, a loony war, and for none so much as for the army’s secret mascot: Private Snafu. Every G.I. worth his creamed chipped beef knew the acronym, but when it first appeared on the barracks screen in a cartoon titled Coming! Snafu! in June of 1943 — the first of twenty-seven such films produced between 1943 and 1945 — the boys were greeted with a more wholesome interpretation: “Situation Normal, All . . . Fouled Up!” Even watered down, this would seem a curious mantra for a series of training films aimed at preparing enlisted men for the challenges of modern world warfare — that is, until one meets the protagonist. Introduced, tongue-in-cheek, as “a patriotic, conscientious guy who thinks the army’s swell,” Private Snafu is a short, bald, motor-mouthed Brooklynite with a penchant for catching tropical diseases, leaking classified information, and accidentally blowing himself up. He is, in sum, a shining example of what a soldier should not be, and he stands as a testament to how the military brass evidently viewed G.I. Everyman: naïve, careless, and perpetually horny. The cartoons were the product of an extraordinary collaboration. During the Second World War, the production of propaganda and training films fell to the First Motion Picture Unit, a motley crew of actors, artists, writers, and filmmakers under the supervision of Hollywood director Frank Capra, that champion of small-town American values who had already given the world Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and would go on to direct It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). As the ringleader of this circus, Major Capra — later Colonel Capra — oversaw not only the Snafu shorts but also the highly successful Why We Fight series, which would win him an Academy Award for “Best Documentary” in 1943. Typically, these projects were outsourced to local studios with the necessary time and resources at their disposal. When it came down to finding a group of animators willing to take on Private Snafu, Disney proved too expensive and too dictatorial, and so the contract went to Leon Schlesinger’s Warner Bros. Cartoons studio. At the time, the boys of “Termite Terrace” (as the studio was known) were still relatively obscure. In retrospect, though, the talent roster behind the Snafu cartoons reads like a pantheon of animation icons: Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, and the “Man of a Thousand Voices” himself, Mel Blanc. Into this mix, add Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. “Dr. Seuss”), then working as a political cartoonist for the leftist New York newspaper PM, and the merry mashup is complete. With so many dangerous minds on the job, it’s little wonder that work on the cartoons was carried out in the utmost secrecy. The security measures, which divided up production duties among different departments whose individual workers were not permitted to see the finished films, make the Warner Bros. operation look like a parody of the Manhattan Project. But in spite of the hush-hush atmosphere, the subject matter seems harmless enough on the surface. The twenty-six surviving episodes — all black-and-white — run the gamut of military safety topics: everything from how to maintain proper hygiene in the field, to what to do when faced with a squadron of malarial mosquitos, to why it’s simply not a good idea to go skipping through a mine field. In Bob Clampett’s Fighting Tools (1943), for example, Private Snafu learns that keeping his rifle muzzle-down in the mud can lead to a sticky situation when caught off guard by a Wehrmacht patrol. Similarly, in Chuck Jones’s Gas (1944) — an episode in which Bugs Bunny makes a brief cameo — Snafu learns the value of keeping his gas mask handy when poisonous clouds of Teutonic nastiness catch him napping under a tree. Other cartoons foreground the challenges of working in exotic climes, such as Jones’s (ironically-titled) In the Aleutians — Isles of Enchantment (1945) and Freleng’s Hot Spot (1945), which finds Snafu humping it out in the deserts of occupied Iran. Still others focus on the basic necessities, like keeping a proper diet on the march. In Frank Tashlin’s bizarre The Chow Hound (1944), the ghost of a slaughtered bull presides over its own devouring, growing furious as the puerile private throws out perfectly good chunks of carcass. The moral: don’t waste chow. It dishonors the beasts who nobly volunteered to be “processed” for the cause. Although such cock-and-bull stories may have had the desired effect of teaching soldiers the facts of military life, this didactic function obscures a more crucial one, that of providing an outlet for resentment while simultaneously defusing popular misconceptions, like the rumor that other branches of the service are safer and more glamorous (Three Brothers, 1944) or the nagging suspicion that everyone back home is having a ball while the grunts are out risking their lives (The Home Front, 1943). In effect, these cartoons are a form of officially sanctioned subversion, a kind of Foucauldian pressure valve designed to vent the average soldier’s discontent, releasing just enough anarchic energy to keep the system functioning. Take, for instance, Gripes (1943). Directed by Freleng, this short opens with Snafu on kitchen patrol, scrubbing pots, peeling potatoes, and, well, griping: I joined this here army to join in the fun,A-jabbin’ the Jap and a-huntin’ the Hun.And look at the job that they handed to me:KP, KP, KP, and KP! After cataloguing more woes of army life — long lines, longer needles, and endless hours in the infirmary — the soldier’s thoughts turn to mutiny. Fortunately, Snafu’s imagined rebellion is interrupted by his personified military conscience: the gravely-voiced, cigar-smoking, perpetually five-o’clock-shadowed Technical Fairy, First Class. This cuddly sergeant with wings plays an avuncular role in the cartoons, managing, on occasion, to prevent the private from dismembering or otherwise making a fool of himself. In this case, the Technical Fairy shows Snafu a vision of what would happen if he were in charge. Upon receiving his fantasy promotion to “Master-Sarge-Super-Sarge-Whoopity-Doo,” Snafu proceeds to issue a series of dictums. No more cleaning latrines. No more discipline. Instead, each enlisted man will be provided with “two dames” and an extended leave pass. As charming as this image of state-sponsored prostitution may be, it all goes pear-shaped when the Germans make a surprise attack. With his troops intoxicated and the Luftwaffe bearing down, Snafu decides it’s better to take a needle in the tuckus than an incendiary bomb where the stars and stripes don’t shine. The fantasy dissolves. Hierarchy is restored. And while the private happily scrubs his pots and pans, the Technical Fairy dishes out wartime ethics: “The moral, Snafu, is the harder you work, / The sooner we’re gonna beat Hitler, that jerk.” Many of the Snafu shorts follow a similar pattern: the activation of dangerous desires, which are then disarmed by the narrative logic of the cartoon itself. This form of vicarious indulgence is also evidenced by the films’ rather frank depictions of sexuality, which were more — shall we say — developed than one would expect from cartoons of that era. Because military films did not have to be approved by the Hays Office — the body responsible for enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code — the animators could push the boundaries of adult humor in ways that conventional Hollywood could not. In addition to suggestive language, the cartoons abound with buxom cabaret dancers, eager girls-next-door, and mysterious femmes fatales. These virtual pin-up queens, clearly intended to appeal to a G.I. aesthetic, invite a curious sort of voyeurism. From a contemporary perspective, this peephole on the past can be a bit disturbing; watching a seventy-year-old image of a cartoon vixen bending over her vanity table in nothing but a garter belt, one suddenly has the uneasy realization that one is ogling the grandmother of Jessica Rabbit. But for the lonely soldiers who first saw these films, representations of women served simultaneously as erotic outlets and warnings against being distracted by long legs and batting eyes. For example, in Booby Traps (1944), directed by Bob Clampett, we find our hero in the desert “liberating” a local harem. The only problem is that this bevy of bombshells is actually a nest of homicidal fembots whose curves are (quite literally) explosive. In Snafu’s world, women — with the possible exception of one’s mother — are not to be trusted. Indeed, the only long-term relationship that seems to work out is the odd rapport between the private and his Technical Fairy. On at least one occasion, the happy ending culminates with an image of Snafu and his imaginary NCO engaged in a big, wet kiss. (Don’t ask. Don’t tell.) Each of these overarching themes — the preservation of bodily integrity, the mitigation of resentment, and the negation of female sexuality — boils down to one predominant concern: containment. And of all the tropes of containment found in the cartoons, the most persistent is the control of information. With titles like Spies (1943), Rumors (1943), and Censored (1944), the Snafu films present a primer on keeping one’s mouth shut. Of these, Chuck Jones’s Spies is the most memorable. Composed in Seussian verses, Spies finds the loquacious private home on leave with a head full of confidential plans regarding troop deployments to Africa: ※※Indexed under…Containmentof information I just learned a secret—      It’s a honey, it’s a pip!—But the enemy is listening,      So I’ll never let it slip.‘Cause when I learn a secret,      Boy, I zipper up my lip! The enemy is indeed listening. And Snafu, chronically unable to keep his zipper up in any situation, goes about unaware of the sinister stereotypes — beefy Teutons, toothy Japanese, and alley cats with gingivitis — who are poised to pick up scraps of intelligence. Stopping at a newsstand, Snafu greets the pornography-peddling proprietor — “Hey, give me some magazines to read for when I’m on the ship!” — and his careless words are overheard by three bystanders who look suspiciously like Benito Mussolini, Hermann Goering, and Fumimaro Konoe. “Don’t breathe a word to no one,” they chant, “but he’s going to go by ship!” Cut to Snafu at the local watering hole, where a heady combination of booze and broads erodes the “pad-a-lock” in his brain, releasing a gush of useful information into the ready lap of a femme fatale who packs a mini-typewriter in her garter. “Say, you’re a nifty trick,” he drunkenly tells her. “I hope I meet some babes in Africa as cute as you are!” Later, in her lair, Snafu manages to drop a final, crucial detail — It’s been a wonderful evening,      And I’d like to stay some more,But I gotta get a move on—      I sail at half past four! — at which point the Aryan beauty’s breasts transform into swastika-shaped radio transmitters with a direct line to the Führer, who, upon receiving these titbits, dispatches a pack of U-boats to intercept the transport. The ship is torpedoed, and the private finds himself in a fiery cauldron lorded over by a hellish Hitler. Apparently, not even a guardian fairy can prevail over the uncontrollable desire to self-destruct, a compulsion that wends its way through the cartoons with the obstinacy of a death drive. For all their preoccupation with secrecy, however, one still wonders why the cartoons themselves were kept confidential. What was so dangerous about personal hygiene? Did it really matter if the Germans found out that U.S. servicemen were being encouraged to keep information from the Germans? In short, what was the big secret? As it happens, there was a big secret — a really big secret — but one unknown to the directors, writers, and artists who inadvertently let it slip. In May of 1944, Jones and his team produced Going Home. Penned (most likely) by Geisel, the cartoon was intended as yet another warning against loose lips on leave. Upon arriving back in his hometown, Snafu proceeds to regale a succession of family members, girlfriends, bartenders, and gas station attendants with tales of Allied maneuvers, new landing field designs, and other “restricted stuff.” Then — in one of those cosmic coincidences that reaffirm one’s belief in God, Loki, or the Illuminati — the cartoon takes a singularly prophetic turn. Snafu brings a date to the local movie theater, where a newsreel flashes: “U. S. SECRET WEAPON BLASTS JAPS.” The headline is followed by an image of an island reduced to a void, like a wound in the water. Snafu grabs his girl and whispers (loudly): I know what did it —What made the big hole —Our new flyin’ bazookaWith radar control. As the imprudent private gives a rundown of the weapon and its features, the viewer sees a vaguely familiar image, more bomb than bazooka, with mysterious valves and menacing fins. This, once again, was the spring of 1944. At that very moment, grave-looking scientists in remote desert bunkers were smoking cigarettes, poring over blueprints, and ordering shipments of uranium-235. When the powers-that-be got wind of the fact that Warner Bros. had independently invented the atomic bomb, shady departments flew into action. The cartoon was pulled, not to see the light of day until some years after the war, and the filmmakers, who had no clue as to what was happening, suddenly found themselves in the middle of a poorly written spy thriller, complete with intimidating visits from government spooks in homburgs and trench coats. There were no prosecutions, of course. How could there have been? To do so would have meant acknowledging the existence of the Manhattan Project over a year before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not to mention that this was no conspiracy, but rather an accident of ink, paint, and imagination. All the same, this chance unveiling reminds us that cartoons are themselves sites of fusion, crucibles where technology, violence, and creativity combine in ways that collapse the divide between reality and fantasy, leaving us to ponder which is more disturbing: the fact that these comic minds could randomly hit upon the most significant breakthrough in modern warfare, or that the scientists responsible for designing and building the most destructive weapon in human history — a device capable of eradicating all life on Earth in the blink of an eye — seemed to share so much in common with the creator of Wile E. Coyote. Perhaps the ultimate irony is not that a series of military training films obsessed with maintaining secrecy nearly let the bomb drop, but that the Snafu cartoons, which flirted so promiscuously with subversion as a mode of catharsis, accidentally succeeded in becoming genuinely subversive. Nevertheless, when the reels were shelved after the war, it’s doubtful this was due to their military indiscretions, but more likely out of fear that their racial caricatures would offend a newly rehabilitated Germany and Japan. Now declassified and available in the public domain, the films offer a glimpse of a time before enemies became friends and friends enemies, before the Cold War ushered in a new situation, even more fouled up, in which Snafu’s “secret weapon” threatened — and continues to threaten — an ending with no merry melody, no curtain drawn, and no Porky Pig to stammer “That’s all, folks!” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 25, 2015

Mark David Kaufman

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:19.318244

the-empathetic-camera-frank-norris-and-the-invention-of-film-editing

The Empathetic Camera Frank Norris and the Invention of Film Editing By Henry Giardina May 20, 2015 At the heart of American author Frank Norris' gritty turn-of-the-century fiction lies an essential engagement with the everyday shock and violence of modernity. Henry Giardina explores how this focus, combined with his unique approach to storytelling, helped to pave the way for a truly filmic style. The story of cinema begins in violence. The first motion picture camera was constructed by Etienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist who, in seeking to prove Darwin’s theory of evolution through recording animals in motion, created a rifle-shaped device — a kind of “photographic gun” — in order to record birds in flight. Even without this detail there was, for those first exposed to moving images, a sense of violation inherent in the concept. Film was defined at the start by the same protean aspect that made it impossible to define. Was it a way of documenting life, or telling stories? Was it in service of fact or fiction? Art or science? Could the shadow-like findings of the camera ever be trusted as concrete, or as something more than apparition? The first film apparatus, though developed at the end of the nineteenth century, only reached full maturity by the start of the quite different twentieth century. It was the concept of capturing reality in full that first appealed to the two scientists, Marey and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the motion picture camera’s accidental co-creators. But to its first audiences, film represented something different: a total manipulation of reality, an uncomfortable expression of modernity, and a reflection of the contradictions of modern life. A sense of the moving image as deception, as trickery, accompanied the earliest manifestations of cinema, from the abrasive thaumatrope1 onward. It was the story of the terrified audience response to the Lumiere Brothers’ 1896 film L’Arriveé d’un Train that solidified the sense of alienation between the earliest films and their audiences. This is referred to as cinema’s “founding myth” — the idea that the earliest consumers of moving pictures had neither the capacity nor the tools to distinguish film from reality. The turn-of-the-century novelist Frank Norris makes infrequent reference to the then-new art of cinema in his writing, but when he does, it is always to a distinct purpose. In his 1899 novel McTeague, a group of characters go to the theater and are treated to a short film as part of the program. Their responses vary from wonder to distrust as they are faced with the sheer impossibility of what appears before them. McTeague himself is “awe-struck”: “Look at that horse move his head,” he cried excitedly, quite carried away. “Look at that cable car coming — and the man going across the street. See here comes a truck. Well, I never in all my life!” Norris had written McTeague in the late 1890s, after a term of reporting on the Spanish American war for a San Francisco newspaper. The novel — a gruesome story of greed, revenge, and sexual darwinism — was to put him on the map at the age of twenty-nine. The response of the American public of the time — still relatively prim and conservative at the turn of the century — to McTeague’s naturalism was a mixture of fascination and fear, a sense that propriety had been breached in Norris’ no holds barred tale of sex of murder. The depiction of sex and modernity was unlike anything in the current American literary landscape; as a result, the young author was somewhat uncategorizable at first. In 1899 he seemed to have come out of nowhere, a twenty-nine-year-old San Francisco reporter who had come out with a notable novel that didn’t seem to fit inside of any clear mold. In an attempt to link him to some pre-existing tradition, the American press often referred to Norris as an “American Zola” whose graphic depictions of a violent modern world went so far as to outdo the French master himself — as they would outdo Theodore Drieser years later — taking up the gauntlet with his own, more popular naturalist works. But it was Norris’ comfort with depictions of violent sexuality, the world of machines, and a sense of American “melting-pot” ethnicity (including large sections written in dialect and several unfortunate anti-semitic depictions) that made him an indecent writer by the standards of the time. It was also what made his body of work a kind of blueprint for what the cinema would become in no time at all: something that was not, as yet, full art or commodity but squarely in between, trading on sex and violence to draw its earliest audiences and keep them in their seats. McTeague’s depiction of an early commercial film audience is a scene that fits queerly into the rest of the story, as a strange foreboding of things to come. In McTeague’s incredulity, his mother-in-law’s distrust of the film apparatus as a kind of trick, and his wife Trina’s enchantment at the device, the reader gets an encapsulated view of the different responses to one of the most violently modern events of the time: a trip to the cinema, to see a past reality unfold as if in real time before people who were slightly unable to believe in this reality. This is part of Norris’ grand project, throughout the small but thematically consistent body of work he produced from the age of twenty-nine to his death three years later at thirty-two: a depiction of the everyday shock of new media and industrialization, the concept of capturing time and presenting its fictional form as the truth, through the film apparatus. Even if the story of audience members fainting at the arrival of the train on-screen is, as many suspect, a fiction, the reason for its existence as lore stems from a very real disjuncture, part of the premise of the industrial age. How can the present reality hold a living document of the past? How can a unit of lost time make such a realistic reappearance in the present? By the turn of the century, the complex relationship between the way life was being represented and the way representation was changing the structure of real, lived life, was becoming a study in itself. Bergson, lecturing in Paris in 1902, compared the “mechanism” of thought and the mechanism of the camera. In everyday life, he said, “we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us.” Norris’ The Octopus came out in 1901, a year before Bergson’s lecture. In it, one of the main characters has a filmic vision before falling asleep: . . . as his mind relaxed in that strange, hypnotic condition that comes just before sleep, a series of pictures of the day’s doings passed before his imagination like the roll of a kinetoscope. By 1902, the natural parallel between the mind and the camera as equal agents of visual interpretation was already being drawn. What had begun as a shock to the system was quickly becoming culturally internalized, yet still somehow alien. Modernism would become a sort of response to this, putting forth a body of art and literature that centered on the juncture between physical reality and the human brain that encounters and, without missing a beat, reinterprets it. The only distinction that seemed to have existed for the earliest film audiences was between belief and understanding. To trust in such an improbable invention as the camera required a grand, collective leap of faith, similar to the kind required by religion or occult forms of spirituality. Indeed, film was from the very start compared to ghosts, phantoms, and dreams, figments which were authored by the mind but were not to be trusted by the rational brain. These are also things that neither science nor religion had any way of making cohere, and as such would soon become signposts of psychology. It was film’s natural place inside of this same area — between something witnessed and something believed, something that exists but cannot be completely explained to the satisfaction of many — that made it appear uncanny by Freud’s famous 1919 definition: the thing that calls into question not only our external environment, but the stability of our own minds and susceptibilities, our faculties of perception. In 1898, Norris experienced trauma of a more conventional kind during his work as a correspondent in the Spanish American War. In a letter from the front he describes the indelible imagery of battle: I want to get these things out of my mind and the fever out of my blood and so if my luck holds I am going back to the old places for three weeks and for the biggest part of the time I hope to wallow and grovel in the longest grass I can find in the Presidio Reservation on the cliffs overlooking the ocean and absorb ozone and smell smells that don’t come from rotting and scorched vegetation, dead horses and bad water. On his return to America, Norris’ intention was to get back to a sane, calm style of living. Instead, he used the period of recovery after the war to conceptualize and write the bulk of McTeague, the grim, realist work that would cement its author’s reputation as an unflinching naturalist, a novelist of violence. The violent reality of the changing world was not something that could be ignored or forgotten once experienced, especially in an environment of combat. It came out in Norris’ work, in cinematic manifestations which would, in turn, influence the art of filmmaking still in its infancy at the time of his death. Norris completed eight novels in all, alongside a large body of short stories and journalistic pieces. For such a short and relatively indecisive career, the clarity and fixity of Norris’ style is surprising from the start. From McTeague onward, his themes are clear, as is his mode of spinning them into narrative. The earliest and most Victorian of his novels, Vandover and the Brute, lays out a crude, almost experimental sketch of the concept of the “human animal”, borrowed from his greatest influence and naturalistic forbear, Emile Zola. It tracks the decline of its hero, Vandover, from a state of youth and purity to a place of total corruption and degradation, brought about by sexual impropriety and a loss of funds. McTeague is a more sophisticated version of the same story, with a larger cast of characters and a greater emphasis on setting.2 McTeague the dentist is described as uneducated and hot-tempered, and seems, initially, to be saved by his marriage to Trina, a slightly more refined member of the bourgeoisie, and the child of recent German immigrants. The two of them are undone, however, by a series of changes in their income and social status, and the innate and simmering violence of both characters is slowly revealed through their decline. The Octopus was the first novel in what Norris planned out as “The Trilogy of the Wheat”, an anthology conceived as a fictional-journalistic treatise (much like what Sinclair’s The Jungle would be in 1906) following the life of the wheat crop from growth to distribution to corporate speculation. The Octopus opened the story with a reimagining of the Mussel Slough tragedy of 1880, a bloody example of corporate monopoly that had become, by the time of Norris’ retelling in 1900, a crucial part of the history of the developing West Coast. The second novel was The Pit, which followed Laura Jadwin, a cultured and idealistic woman married to a man whose dealings in the stock market nearly destroy them both. The final novel, The Wolf, was planned to focus on wheat growth and famine in Europe. Norris died before he could begin research. The literature of the American West was, at the turn of the century, being made almost from scratch, lacking a distinct literary tradition to extend or comment upon, or to emerge from. Its stories were based on and inspired by the evolving landscape of the West itself, poised in this period directly between its original identity as wilderness and the climate of industrialization that was rapidly becoming the new reality. The wild, sprawling landscape of California was no longer a frontier, not yet quite a metropolitan center. The film industry would of course change all that — and quickly. Norris grew up inside of the changing urban landscapes of Chicago and San Francisco, and made it his purpose, near the end of his life, to track these changes politically in his fiction. Yet his artistic development as a painter, a journalist, and finally a prose writer, was defined by his relationship to the visual world, and the changing ways of interpreting that world that were growing up around him during the time in which he lived. “One of the legacies of his painterly experience,” his biographers write, “was a fictional aesthetic that similarly downplayed the role of imaginative license and emphasized the Academic values of close observation of life and technical ability in its representation.” This was, as well, his journalistic inheritance. For Norris’ Wave assignments abroad, he was entrusted with a camera. “Whatever he thought of that day,” said Will Irwin, another Wave correspondent, “whatever he had seen with the eye of his flash [camera] or the eye of his imagination, he might write and print.” When he went to cover the Spanish American war, he and his fellow journalists were expected to document what they saw visually as well as in writing. It was, after all, the first filmed American war. In Norris’ early journalistic work for The Wave and McClure’s, he had already developed the most important aspects of this style. There is in evidence the harsh, overbearing symbolism and crude metaphor which, in the novels, would give way to a variation on the Homeric epithet, a process by which he reduces his characters, by use of a repeated, unchanging phrase, to fixed visual entities, able to be called up as concrete images in the reader’s memory. There is also the forward-moving, action-driven style of narration that is circular and self-referential, such as that used to describe the panoramic views of location that open both McTeague and The Octopus, and the style of repetitive description defined by overuse of adjectives, often in threes (in McTeague, the perfume of Trina’s hair is “sweet, heavy, enervating”. McTeague’s sexual impulse, meanwhile, is “hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted”) that seek to mimic on the page the locomotive style of action they are describing in the scene. It may be that Norris’ work reflects the cinematic mission by the simple virtue of having grown up alongside it. But Norris’ tendency of editing on the page seems to lay out the blueprint for a true filmic style. If his novels are not quite screenplays, they are at the very least sophisticated film treatments, anticipating the kind of intuitive visual storytelling that film had not yet mastered. In the period between 1909 and 1924, the classical editing technique was born, developed in America primarily by D.W. Griffith. It was also in this period that four of Norris’ major works were adapted to film. McTeague was adapted three times, The Pit twice. The first and last of these adaptations brought on a serious shift in the way that cinema as an art form and the changing laws of artistic adaptation were discussed in the culture at large. 1909’s A Corner in Wheat, adapted and directed by D.W. Griffith, showcases one of the first sophisticated uses of parallel editing in cinematic history by leaping across location to juxtapose the different social realities of its characters as they played out in the real time of the film. 1924’s Greed was Erich von Stroheim’s famous, doomed attempt to translate McTeague, page by page, to the language of the screen. In The Octopus, Norris actually edits on the page, jumping between locations to contrast between the different realities of the disenfranchised working class and the glutted lifestyle of the rich. The discrepancy is laid out in such a way that the reader must feel some level of responsibility for it. The response is a mix of indignation, guilt, and helplessness. Here are the rich, here are the poor, here is the gap between them. The relationship between them, and how we must feel about it, is clear. Nothing divides them but a line, a visual break in the narrative. No attempt is made on Norris’ part to ease the reader into their new location — the cut is sudden and severe, almost disorienting. It is from this strangely experimental sequence that Griffith’s own film takes its cues. A Corner in Wheat combines the most dramatic aspects of The Octopus and The Pit to make a more emotionally succinct statement about economic disparity. Griffith condenses the thesis of the “Trilogy of the Wheat” in thirteen minutes, showing us the different lives of the wheat crop: in the abstract (the stock market) and in reality, and on the shelves, where market forces have driven its value beyond what can be afforded by lower and middle-class citizens (or even harvested by the impoverished farmers). Cause and effect are placed side by side, as tableaux. We are given the lively dinner party in one frame: And the poverty tableau in the next: In the second frame the actors stand still — it is a purely visual moment without any attempt made on the part of the actors to simulate reality. The sense of life having come to a complete halt is clearer in the jarring cut between the intensely animated dinner party scene and this stark portrait. The cut is made too quickly for us to do anything but compare images, and feel. When Griffith reinterprets the death of Norris’ villain for the screen, he uses the same cutting technique to make a vague moral point. In one frame, the Wheat King falls into the pit of threshed wheat, the very substance that has made him his fortune: In the next, rioting breaks out at the bakery. The police are called in: In the next cut, the Wheat King is all but buried in a violent hourglass effect. Only his fingers are visible: Parallel editing became, after A Corner in Wheat, a type of statement technique. It was a quick and intuitive way to forge a clear relationship between two separate image sequences that, without this relationship, could have stood for anything. In Norris’ 1897 essay, “Fiction is Selection”, he argues that writers are editors more than inventors. The job of “writer and mosaicist alike” is “to select and combine.” It is from the rough-hewn design in a writer’s brain that a story must be whittled, for nothing can be created that is not already, in some form, hidden in the folds of memory. “Imagination!” He writes. “There is no such thing; you can’t imagine anything that you have not already seen and observed.” Film’s greatest strength was, from the start, its ability to emotionally manipulate viewers on a mass scale. It spoke to one as easily and as powerfully as it spoke to millions, controlling viewers seamlessly and guiding them toward a forgone conclusion that he believes he has come upon naturally, by an organic, empathetic process. Filmic storytelling was, in even its earliest manifestations, a way of transforming the frighteningly unpredictable human body into a predictable set of responses. If, in the first quarter of the 20th century, the camera as mechanism stood for pure truth, editing was selection, manipulation, violence. If film as footage stood for impartiality, editing allowed for the presence of an author. Editing was the true artistic aspect of a mode of storytelling that was still too new to be considered an art form. Editing gave film what it desperately needed to become art in the eyes of its audience: a point of view. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 20, 2015

Henry Giardina

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:19.874174

a-bestiary-of-sir-thomas-browne

A Bestiary of Sir Thomas Browne By Hugh Aldersey-Williams June 17, 2015 Hugh Aldersey-Williams takes a tour through Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a work which sees one of the 17th-century's greatest writers stylishly debunk all manner of myths, in particular those relating to the world of animals. Sir Thomas Browne was a seventeenth-century physician in the English city of Norwich. Between tending his patients, he wrote some of the greatest prose in the English language: Religio Medici, the confession of his Christian faith to those who believed he might be an atheist; Urn Burial, a meditation on our mortal remains and the vanity of monuments; and its verdant companion, The Garden of Cyrus, a speculation on the importance of pattern and number in nature. However, the greatest and most popular work in his lifetime is the one that is now most neglected, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a vast catalogue of “vulgar errors” — urban (and rural) myths of the seventeenth century — which Browne debunks with unique and characteristic wit, style, and generosity. Many of these “vulgar errors” concern silly things that people believed about animals. Browne was an astute observer of natural history, well-positioned to correct these errors, and to make his own contribution to the field. He wrote a Natural History of Norfolk and gave several species their now familiar English names. What follows is an ad hoc “bestiary” drawn from these writings, intended to illustrate above all Browne’s gentle method of correcting those who too easily believe in nonsense and superstition. The Badger In the seventeenth century, country folk believed that the badger had legs on one side shorter than the other — the consensus was that the short legs were on the left. The idea may originate in the observation that badgers ran easily along the furrows of ploughed fields, where the legs on one side might be on higher ground than the other. Browne might have refuted this myth simply enough by drawing attention to the fact that the badger’s legs, as measured perhaps from a convenient skeleton or preserved specimen, are of equal length. But he doesn’t do this. Instead, he wants his readers to think about it. He calls upon “the three Determinators of Truth . . . Authority, Sense, and Reason”. However, the authorities he cites (purposely chosen, one feels) are in disagreement. So we must look (“Sense”) and think (“Reason”). Browne asks us to consider what other animals we have seen that are lopsided, trusting that we will be able to think of none, before leading us to the conclusion that such asymmetry is surely “repugnant unto the course of Nature”. The Kingfisher Often, when learned authorities (which range from ancients such as Aristotle and Pliny to Renaissance naturalists he has learnt of on his continental travels) fail him, or when sense and reason do not convince, Browne tries an experiment. Bizarrely, it was once believed that a dead kingfisher hung up by its bill made a good weathervane. To test the idea, Sir Thomas procures one of the dead birds and rigs it up from a thread — an untwisted silk thread, so that no bias is introduced into the experiment. The bird hangs and turns, apparently at random in relation to the wind: “it observes not a constant respect unto the mouth of the wind, but variously converting, doth seldom breast it right”, Browne tells us. Faced with this inconclusive result, he refines the experiment. Here he shows himself as a true modern scientist. He gets a second bird, and now finds that “If two be suspended in the same room, they will not regularly conform their breasts, but oft-times respect the opposite points of Heaven.” He has shown conclusively that a dead kingfisher is not a good weathervane. Sometimes, though, an experiment does not yield the desired result. People also believed that the bittern, another bird of the kingfisher family, requires the reeds among which it lives in order to make its characteristic mating cry — a low “booming” note that may be heard over distances of two miles. The belief was that the bird must use the reeds somewhat like a bassoon. On this occasion, Browne obtains a live bittern, which he proceeds to keep in his yard, where he denies it access to reeds. The bird fails to boom. But Browne understands this isn’t the end of the matter. Perhaps the bittern was lovelorn or just fed up. He knows, in the formulation popularized by Carl Sagan, that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. In the end he is forced to rely on the testimony of a friend who has been out in the wild reedbeds and says he has seen bitterns booming without artificial aids. Some Other Birds Thomas Browne was born in London and trained as a physician first at Oxford and then abroad in the best schools of anatomy and physic, but he settled and established his medical practice in Norwich in the county of Norfolk. There he makes numerous observations and gives the names we still use to several species, including the mistle thrush, the shearwater, and the merganser. The Unicorn Many of the foolish things people believed in the seventeenth century arose from seeing them in pictures, often as heraldic emblems or in biblical illustrations. Such pictures would have been regarded as true in the same way that our twentieth-century parents and grandparents once thought “the camera never lies”. One widely pictured creature was the unicorn, which had been incorporated into the royal coat of arms of James I when he acceded to the English throne in 1603. It’s still on my British passport. But the trouble was, nobody in England had seen a unicorn. So did the creature exist in far-off lands? Browne is surprising as he begins to tackle this “vulgar error”. “There may be many Unicorns,” he writes. It is soon clear that he means the word unicorn in its literal sense — a unique horn — and includes the rhinoceros and even the narwhal — the “sea-unicorn” — in his reckoning. He is more doubtful about the emblematic white creature with the horse’s body and goat’s tail whose horn projects from its head at an angle that, as he notes, would make it impossible for it to graze. Browne has good reason to be concerned about the truth or fiction of unicorns at a time when people are selling substances of supposed medical effect that they claim are made from unicorn horn. This is his motive for addressing the many “vulgar errors” to do with special properties claimed for animals, minerals, and vegetables. In an age when medicine is primitive and unregulated, his careful doses find themselves in competition with raw herbs and false remedies of street-corner “quacksalvers”. The Basilisk Browne disavows the existence of many imaginary beasts, but he is reluctant to consign them all to oblivion. He retains the basilisk — a hybrid of a serpent and a cockerel — and satyrs — men with equine ears and tails. “Their shadowed moralities requite their substantial falsities”, he writes. In other words, their role in the myths in which they appear makes them too valuable to let go. We might feel the same today about some of the creatures appearing in the pages of Dr Seuss or Where the Wild Things Are. The Whale Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick contains a long, scientifically descriptive chapter entitled “Cetology”. It draws upon many factual sources, but not least upon Thomas Browne’s account of a sperm whale that he visits when it is beached on the Norfolk coast. Like many others, Browne attends the scene out of curiosity, but also because he hopes to retrieve some of “that medicall matter” known as ambergris, as well as to investigate the spermaceti, the mysterious oil that is held in a reservoir in the animal’s massive head. Unsurprisingly given their size and rare appearances, whales were regarded as portents. Dutch engravings of the period portray beached whales as an allegory of the endangered nation or its overflowing riches. For Browne, as later for Melville, the whale was a vast curiosity, the container of many physical and metaphysical mysteries. Noah’s Ark The existence or otherwise here or there of unfamiliar creatures is a topic that is only just beginning to be explored. Early in his life, Browne travelled to Ireland, where his stepfather had estates. There he noted the presence of spiders — unremarkable maybe, but worth pointing out since in the rest of Britain it was ignorantly believed that Ireland was without spiders quite as much as it was without snakes. Observing the arrival of exhausted seabirds on the Norfolk coast, Browne was among the first to conclude that annual migration over huge distances must be part of their life cycle (he coined the word “migrant” as well as more than seven hundred other neologisms). ※※Indexed under…SpidersBelief in Ireland's lack of Taking a global view of nature’s diversity also informed Browne’s religious belief. So it is that he finds he cannot hold the story of Noah’s flood as historical truth. Why? Because there is no mention in the Bible of all the American species that were just beginning to come to the attention of European scholars. Surely if the native Americans had originated in the Old World, they would have taken with them horses, but left behind them the “beasts of prey, and noxious creatures” that are to be found there. “By what passage those, not onely Birds, but dangerous and unwelcome Beasts came over”, was the question. “How there bee creatures there, which are not found in this triple Continent; all which must needs bee strange unto us, that hold but one Arke, and that the creatures began their progresse from the mountaines of Ararat.” Starfish In his long, lush essay, The Garden of Cyrus, Browne muses on the significance of the number five in nature. He has observed it in the arrangement of many flowers and thinks he discerns its presence too in the net-like surfaces of catkins and pine cones. He is unfortunately ignorant of the work of Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, who described the sequence of numbers that encodes the golden ratio. Yet he tantalizingly anticipates the science of phyllotaxis which found that the Fibonacci sequence and therefore the number five truly do underlie all plants. In his catalogue of five-fold nature, Browne lists also the starfish, but he knows nothing of the radiolaria, tiny marine micro-organisms that also possess this symmetry, or of viruses which repeat this pattern at an even smaller scale. Morgellons While studying medicine in Montpellier in southern France, Browne observed a local affliction to which he gave the name morgellons. The illness manifests as an eruption of tiny hairs on the skin, and was cured by applications of milk or honey. In 2002, morgellons resurfaced as a modern anxiety-related illness with similar symptoms. The disease spread rapidly, thanks to the internet, but was brusquely dismissed by many doctors as “delusional parasitosis”. Tests never found the alleged hairs. Oddly, the hairs of morgellons observed by Browne, before microscopes were widely in use, were visible to the naked eye; by the twenty-first century, the morgellon’s hairs had shrunk to microscopic size. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 17, 2015

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:20.434705

julia-pastrana-a-monster-to-the-whole-world

Julia Pastrana A “Monster to the Whole World” By Bess Lovejoy November 26, 2014 Julia Pastrana, a woman from Mexico born with hypertrichosis, became one of the most famous human curiosities of the 19th century, exhibited the world over as a "bearded lady" while both alive and dead. Bess Lovejoy explores her story and how it was only in 2013, 153 years after her passing, that she was finally laid to rest. When Julia Pastrana was born, in the mountains of Western Mexico in 1834, her mother worried that her looks were the result of supernatural interference. The local native tribes often blamed the naualli, a breed of shape-shifting werewolves, for stillbirths and deformities, and after seeing her daughter for the first time, Julia’s mother is said to have whispered their name. She fled her tribe — or was cast out — not long after. Two years later, Mexican herders searching for a missing cow found Julia and her mother hiding in a mountain cave. They took them to the nearest city, where Julia was placed in an orphanage. Sweet, intelligent, and almost totally covered in black hair, she became a local celebrity. After hearing of her unusual looks and charming disposition, the state governor adopted Julia to serve as a live-in amusement and maid. She stayed with the governor until she was twenty, when she decided to return to her own tribe. But she never completed the trip home: an American showman known as M. Rates met her somewhere on her journey back to the mountains, and persuaded her to take up a life onstage. Julia would go on to become one of the most famous human curiosities of the nineteenth century, variously known as “the Ape Woman,” “the Bear Woman,” or “the Baboon Lady.” She made her debut in December 1854, at the Gothic Hall on Broadway in New York City. She wore a red dress, sang Spanish folk tunes, and danced the Highland Fling. Huge, appreciative crowds flocked to see her, although it wasn’t really the singing and dancing they were after: they came to gawk at her hairy face and body, her jaw that jutted forward, her unusually large lips, and her wide, flat nose. The advance publicity billed Julia as a “Bear Woman from the wilds of Mexico!” while others said she looked like an ape. In his book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, Jan Bondeson records a contemporary newspaper account: The eyes of this lusus natura beam with intelligence, while its jaws, jagged fangs and ears are terrifically hideous . . . nearly its whole frame is coated with long glossy hair. Its voice is harmonious, for this semi-human being is perfectly docile, and speaks the Spanish language. It’s worth noting that the idea that Julia was half-human didn’t originate with the press. Physician Alexander B. Mott, son of renowned New York surgeon Valentine Mott, examined her during a private back-room viewing and declared her a hybrid, half-human and half-orangutan. Other doctors agreed. At the time, orangutans were the biggest and most fearsome primate most Americans knew, a symbol of wild, primitive nature and dangerous sexuality. The rampaging orangutan of Poe’s 1841 story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, who slits a beautiful woman’s throat with a straight razor, helped cement the associations of these creatures with horror, fascination, and sex. But the link wasn’t new: two hundred years earlier, Dutch doctor Jacob Bontius wrote that orangutans were “born from the lust of Indian women, who mix with apes and monkeys with detestable sensuality.” And while Julia’s promotional material emphasized her femininity, in keeping with other representations of nineteenth century bearded women, it also underlined her animalistic, racialized otherness. Her promotional material referred to her tribe of “Root-Digger Indians” as “spiteful and hard to govern,” living in animal caves and enjoying intimate relations with bears and apes. The implications were clear: Julia was both a symbol of our repressed animal natures and the literal product of sex with beasts. In England, where Julia ventured with a new impresario after successful tours of the eastern US and Canada, this otherness continued to be a useful promotional strategy. A poster advertising Julia’s show at London’s Regent Gallery, where she appeared three times a day in 1857, portrayed her with exaggerated, reddened lips and a large nose, much like contemporary racialized images of African-Americans. (This despite the fact that at least one doctor declared she had “no trace of Negro blood.”) The twelve-page promotional booklet that Theodore Lent, Julia’s new showman, prepared advertised her as “the Baboon Lady,” and again described her parents’ close contact with wild animals. But it also assured audiences that in Julia “the nature of woman predominates over the ourang-outang’s,” and described her as sociable, clever, and kind. While Julia’s promotional package included certificates from scientists attesting to her hybrid nature, from the start there were those who knew she was entirely human. Anatomist Samuel Kneeland Jr, former curator of comparative anatomy for the Boston Natural Historical Society, examined Julia and declared her all human, and “a perfect woman, performing all the functions of her sex.” In 1857, the zoologist Francis Buckland visited her London hotel room and described her “hideous” facial features but “exceedingly good” figure, adding that she “had a sweet voice, great taste in music and dancing, and could speak three languages.” He added: “I believe that her true history was that she was simply a deformed Mexican Indian woman.” The most famous English scientist of the day, Charles Darwin, did not go to see her in London, but learned of her existence and of a cast taken of her teeth, which was supposed to show an irregular double set in both upper and lower jaws. In his Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Darwin compared Julia to hairless dogs, theorizing that skin disease in the animal world could be connected to excess teeth. Julia, however, didn’t have extra teeth, just thickened gums that made misleading impressions on the casts. Had anyone bothered to ask her about her mouth, she would have explained that she had the usual number of teeth. But almost all the doctors who examined her directed their questions to Lent, while Julia kept silent. Silent but lucrative, which was how Lent liked it. Exhibiting Julia had made Lent a wealthy man, but by then rival showmen, possibly even including P.T. Barnum, began to take an interest in her. Lent decided to make the arrangement with his living, breathing, investment more permanent; he proposed to Julia. We don’t know exactly what Julia thought of Lent, although Bondeson believes she was in love and “touchingly devoted” to him. Certainly, Julia’s entire world revolved around her showman: she was not allowed to go out during the day, in case being seen on the street would diminish her earning power, and only travelled to the circus at night wearing veils. She had very few friends, although she did develop a rapport with the Viennese actress and singer Friederike Gossman, who later said that a “light fog of sadness” always hung over Julia. Nevertheless, Julia accepted Lent’s proposal. She once told Gossman, “[my husband] loves me for myself.” Aside from Gossman, one of the few who took Julia seriously as a person was German circus owner Hermann Otto. He visited Julia in Vienna and had a long conversation with her, later recording his impressions in his book Fahrend Volk (Travelling People). He wrote that Julia seemed: a monster to the whole world, an abnormality put on display for money, someone who had been taught a few artistic turns, like a trained animal. [But] for the few who knew her better, she was a warm, feeling, thoughtful, spiritually very gifted being with a sensitive heart and mind. . . and it affected her very deeply in her heart with sadness, having to stand beside people, instead of with them, and to be shown as a freak for money, not sharing any of the everyday joys in a home filled with love. In the winter of 1859, the couple travelled to Moscow, where crowds flocked to their exhibition at the Circus Salomansky. That August, Julia discovered she was pregnant. The baby, which arrived in March 1860 after a difficult birth, was unusually large, covered in hair like his mother, and had the same pronounced lower facial features. Julia was said to have held him and cried. The baby lived only thirty-five hours, and Julia, who had been lacerated with forceps during the birth, survived for just a few more days after that. The official cause of death was metro-peritonitis puerperalis (inflammation of the peritoneum about the uterus), but more romantic sources say she died of a broken heart. Lent admitted spectators to her deathbed, where she is supposed to have said “I die happy, because I know I have been loved for my own sake.” This fits nicely into the nineteenth century predilection for grand last words, but it seems a little too perfect to be true. By impregnating his wife, Lent’s plan to secure his investment through marriage had backfired—or so it seemed. At the hospital where Julia gave birth, Lent met a Professor Sokolov of Moscow University. Sokolov was an expert on embalming, and had recently pioneered a technique that blended mummification with taxidermy, creating corpses that still looked rosy and alive. He and Lent struck a deal, in which Sokolov would buy the bodies of Julia and her son, preserve them, and put them on display at the university’s Anatomical Institute. Sokolov kept the details of the embalming to himself, although we know the process took him six months. When the bodies were sufficiently infused with decay-arresting chemicals, Sokolov posed both mother and child standing up, the baby perched on a rod with an alert expression on his face, his mother standing with hands on her hips, feet wide apart, face turned to one side. The confident pose makes it possible to imagine Julia, just for a moment, as being like any self-possessed young woman standing on the corner waiting for a friend, a bus, a taxi, the end of the day to come. But Julia had a far more unusual story. Her body stayed at the Anatomical Institute’s museum for only six months, before Lent, hearing how good she and her son looked, took advantage of an escape clause in his contract and returned to take them back. Evidently he realized that Julia could be a money-maker dead as well as alive. Lent put the bodies on display in London in 1862, where they could be seen for a shilling—less than he charged when Julia could sing and dance, but at least now he could display her for longer periods of time. Again the scientists weighed in: Buckland visited and said “the face was marvelous, exactly like an exceedingly good portrait in wax,” while The Lancet declared the embalming “completely successful.” The bodies went on to tour, and when they visited Vienna, Hermann Otto described seeing his old acquaintance in a “red, silk-like harlot’s dress with a frightening rictus across her face.” A few years later in Karlsbad, Lent heard of another woman, Marie Bartel, who suffered from conditions similar to those of his late wife. (Today the official diagnosis for Julia’s maladies is generalized hypertrichosis lanuginosa, which produced the hair covering her face and body, and gingival hyperplasia, which thickened her lips and gums). Determined to add Marie to his show, Lent threw a bag of plums over a wall and into the garden where she spent her days. A little while later, he persuaded her father to let him marry her. He promised to never exhibit Marie, but the oath was short-lived. Soon she was singing and dancing onstage as “Zenora Pastrana,” Julia’s “little sister,” with the embalmed mummies of Julia and her son behind her for an added macabre touch. But perhaps “Zenora” had the last laugh. After further exhibitions throughout Europe and America, the pair retired in St. Petersburg, where Lent began to go insane. At least once, he showed up nearly naked on a bridge over the River Neva, shrieking incomprehensibly, tearing up bank notes and throwing them into the water. Marie had him committed to an asylum, where he died shortly thereafter. As for Marie, she moved back to Germany and sold the embalmed bodies of Julia and child, which then shuttled among fairs, amusement parks, museums, and chambers of horror throughout Europe for decades. In 1921, Haakon Lund, manager of Norway’s then-biggest carnival, purchased the bodies of Julia and her son from an American in Berlin. They arrived as part of a cabinet of curiosities that held 8,000 other objects, including body parts submerged in giant glass jars, preserved heads, deformed fetuses, Siamese twin embryos, two-headed calves, an entire human skin nailed to a plank, and other choice items. Lund exhibited selections from the cabinet alongside a wax museum of venereal diseases, calling it the Hygienic and Anatomical Exhibition. The show toured through Norway in the 1920s with the slogan “Humanity, know thyself.” By then, however, the culture around exhibiting human oddities had started to change. As the nineteenth century progressed, “freak” exhibitions fell more and more out of favor, and Lund took pains to present his exhibition under the guise of popular education. He hired medical students wearing white lab coats to serve as guides, and displayed posters that at least gave the pretence of providing medical and scientific background information. However, during World War II the Nazis deemed the exhibit obscene, and ordered the wax models melted down for candles — an order which Lund managed to avoid. After surviving the war, the bodies went into storage in the 1950s. By the 1970s, when the bodies emerged for small tours, they were frequently greeted by outrage in the newspapers. In 1973 Sweden banned their presence, saying corpses could no longer be exhibited for profit. This marked the end of their touring days, and Lund stashed the mummies in the carnival’s storehouse near Oslo. Three years later, teenagers broke in and ripped off Julia’s arm, thinking she was a mannequin. The police later recovered the bodies, but Julia’s infant was damaged beyond repair. He ended up in the trash. Julia’s body re-emerged in the public consciousness in 1990, when journalists at the Norwegian magazine Kriminal Journalen discovered her languishing in the basement of Oslo’s Institute of Forensic Medicine. From then on, the fate of Julia’s body became a fixture of Norwegian newspaper reports and government committees. Journalists, academics, and other officials spilled a great deal of ink debating the merits of burying her versus keeping her body above ground so that scientists might one day study her conditions. In the end, Norway’s Ministry of Church, Education and Research decided to keep the remains above ground, and they were moved to the Institute of Basic Medical Science at the University of Oslo in 1997. In 2005, Laura Anderson Barbata, a Mexico City-born, New York-based visual artist then on a residency in Oslo, began petitioning the university for the repatriation of Julia’s body. Barbata had become aware of Julia’s plight two years earlier, after her sister produced a play called The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World, which is conducted entirely in the dark. While the initial replies from the university were disappointing, Barbata persisted, placing a death notice for Julia in an Oslo newspaper and arranging for a Catholic Mass to be said for her. In 2008, Barbata was allowed to make her case before Norway’s National Committee for the Evaluation of Research on Human Remains, which agreed that “it seems quite unlikely that Julia Pastrana would have wanted her body to remain a specimen in an anatomical collection.” The governor of Julia’s home province of Sinaloa got involved, as did the Mexican ambassador to Norway, and an official petition for Julia’s return to Mexico was lodged. In February of 2013, Julia’s body—encased in a white coffin covered in white roses—was finally buried in a cemetery in Sinaloa de Leyva, a town near her birthplace. Despite all she endured, Julia’s story had something of a happy ending. It’s a pity she wasn’t alive to see it — and to know she was remembered as more than a monster. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 26, 2014

ess Lovejo

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:20.790907

neanderthals-in-3d-lhomme-de-la-chapelle

Neanderthals in 3D L’Homme de La Chapelle By Lydia Pyne February 11, 2015 More than just a favourite of Victorian home entertainment, the stereoscope and the 3D images it created were also used in the field of science. Lydia Pyne explores how the French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule utilised the device in his groundbreaking monograph analysing one of the early-20th-century's most significant archaeological discoveries - the Neanderthal skeleton of La Chapelle. On August 3, 1908, French prehistorian Jean Bouyssonie, his brother, Amédée Bouyssonie, and their colleague Louis Bardon found a Neanderthal skeleton in a system of caves near La Chapelle-aux-Saints in south-central France. The discovery was exciting for the newly-emerging field of paleoanthropology because the Neanderthal was found in its original, undistrubed archaeological context — in situ — and excavations of the skeleton revealed that it was more complete than anything else in the fossil record. La Chapelle quickly became an iconic fossil within scientific and popular circles and went on to inspire everything from dioramas at the Field Museum of Natural History to science fiction’s A Guerre du Feu (Quest for Fire.) After the skeleton was excavated, the Bouyssonies sent the remains to the eminent Marcellin Boule, the Director of the Laboratory of Palaeontology at the prestigious Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Boule conducted a two-year detailed anatomical study of the fossil that culminated in a hefty monograph, L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, published in 1911. L’Homme was the first and most comprehensive publication of Neanderthal skeletal anatomy in scientific literature, establishing the La Chapelle skeleton as the most complete fossil reference for early paleo-studies. Boule’s detailed anatomical description of the skeleton provided a framework for any new Neanderthal fossils discovered and the 1911 reconstructions of La Chapelle became the basis for all subsequent Neanderthal research. It is filled with chapters of anatomical descriptions, careful measurements, photographs of the skeleton in the ground, prior to excavation, as well as sketches of geomorphic cross-sections from the cave. The book was and is a masterpiece: a complete anatomical and cultural summary of the La Chapelle Neanderthal, opening with the story of the fossil’s excavation and ending with comparisons to the few other turn-of-the-twentieth-century discovered Neanderthal specimens from across Europe. In addition to the tables of metrics and photographs of the La Chapelle fossil, Boule included another type of media that gave readers of L’Homme a way to interact with the fossil for themselves. At the back of the book, Boule included six stereoscopic plates of the Neanderthal skull. By the time L’Homme was published the stereoscope would have been a familiar object, one of the many optical toys — along with kaleidoscopes, zoetropes and cameras — through which the nineteenth-century eye had peered in wonder. The stereoscope’s particular trick was to give a a two dimensional image an illusion of depth. Gazing through its viewfinder, the two slightly offset images of the stereoscopic plate, or stereogram, positioned in front would combine to create an illusion of three dimensions. The stereoscope’s powers of replication enchanted a public enamored with what historian of technology Robert Silverman calls “philosophical toys.” “The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing room; philosophers talk learnedly about it, ladies are delighted with its magic representations, and children play with it,” noted Robert Hunt, a British photo-chemist, about the ubiquity of stereoscopes in 1856.1 The device, however, was much more than just a toy or illustrative distraction — it developed also into an important tool for laboratory and scientific work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just as telescopes and microscopes expanded what is visible, the stereoscope expanded what and how researchers were able to see different specimens. The three dimensional stereoscopic images were a different type of text to be read and imbued with scientific and cultural meaning. For anatomists at the turn of the twentieth century, stereograms enabled bones to be examined in all dimensions, without having to handle the actual, physical bone. The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Anatomy, for example, announced the publication of its first set of stereoscopic cards in 1905: “In looking over these illustrations, what strikes one first is the excellent way in which they have been reproduced.”2 What worked for anatomists also worked for paleoanthropologists such as Boule. Indeed, early-twentieth-century paleoanthropology borrowed heavily in its method and theory from anatomy, and most researchers who studied fossils had a background in anatomy. In order to properly describe the anatomical characteristics of fossil material, researchers published tables of published tables of metrics and measurements which aided in comparisons between different groups of modern humans and great ape populations. Publications included photographs, sketches, and references to casts, any number of things that would let researchers see the fossil and how it compared with other anatomical specimens. As fossils were themselves too rare and important to send between researchers, proxies — casts, measurements, sketches, photographs, and highly detailed descriptions — were needed to provide accurate and sufficient information.3 Drawing from a tradition of stereoscopic anatomical atlases, the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal plates gave the reader a first-person experience of interacting with the fossil in three dimensions. Under Boule’s careful direction, Monsieur J. Papoint of the Laboratoire de Paleontologie at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, contributed dozens of pen-and-ink illustrations to L’Homme — sketches of the skeleton as well as drawings of stone tools that were found in the original excavations. The six sterograms show the La Chapelle skull in every anatomical position: superior, anterior, lateral, everything. All of the stero cards were stamped with the publishing house (Masson & Cie Editeurs), and the plates credit Heliog L. Schutzenberger as the photographer. At 278 pages, Boule’s L’Homme was comprehensive, his anatomical comparisons thoughtful, and his research judiciously in keeping with other lengthy then-contemporary tomes of prehistory. In the stereo cards, the skull is carefully situated on a shiny platform — the skull’s reflection gleams off the surface — and the fossil itself rests on a small metal and wood pedestal. The skull, however, is the only part of the Neanderthal skeleton to be photographed in stereoscopic view and the only element to have additional “props” (a pedestal and table.) Although the props would have been necessary to precisely line up the two images, they introduce a subtle laboratory rhetoric to the Neanderthal plates and L’Homme writ large. In this context, the Neanderthal skull is a scientific object that is seen only when it is propped up by other objects — a tableau which must be captured by the stereoscope to be read as an evolutionary text. The stereoscopic plates included in L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints were in complete keeping with the instrumental value of the stereoscope and these images went a long way toward creating and legitimizing the La Chapelle Neanderthal as a taxonomic icon and “classic Neanderthal” in scientific and popular circles. In the decades after Boule’s publication of the La Chapelle Neanderthal, his interpretation of Neanderthals was quickly co-opted into the popular caricature of a slouchy, barbaric troglodyte. The Neanderthal, according to Boule, was a sad specimen of nature — an evolutionary dead-end, to put it most kindly. (This view was first put forward in L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints and solidified in later decades through Boule’s additional research.) Near the mid-twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, however, Boule’s research and interpretations of Neanderthals came under massive criticism and even ridicule. The stereo cards of the Neanderthal skull gave readers of the L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints the opportunity to see for themselves the complexity of the Neanderthal crania. This added dimensionality of the stereo cards helped bring the La Chapelle skeleton to the forefront of paleoanthropological research in the early twentieth century — the stereo plates deepened viewers’ connections to the fossil. (L’Homme’s beautifully detailed stereoscopic prints of each bone from the skeleton were the 1911 version of data sharing.) While it is easy to think of 3D rendering of fossils as a recent technological phenomena, stereograms offer a glimpse at the explanatory power of stereoscopic images and highlight the connections three-dimensional viewing made between viewer and object. Including stereoscopic images of the La Chapelle Neanderthal helped solidify the fossil’s iconic status in the early-twentieth-century paleoanthropology. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Animated GIFs of the skull. An approximation for how the image would have looked in 3D. Animated GIFs of the skull. An approximation for how the image would have looked in 3D. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 11, 2015

Lydia Pyne

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:21.268737

the-mystery-of-lewis-carroll

The Mystery of Lewis Carroll By Jenny Woolf July 1, 2015 The author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which sees its 150th anniversary this year, remains to this day an enigmatic figure. Jenny Woolf explores the joys and struggles of this brilliant, secretive, and complex man, creator of one of the world's best-loved stories. When Charles L. Dodgson was born in January 1832, his paternal aunt wrote a letter to his parents, welcoming the “dear little stranger” and begging them to kiss him on her behalf. His clergyman father, already “overdone with delight” whenever he looked at his family, put a notice in The Times to announce the arrival of his much-wanted first son. The baby would grow up to become Lewis Carroll, author of two of the most famous children’s books in the world. Mystery, and even controversy, would surround him in later life, but one thing that never changed was his deep attachment to the members of his family, or theirs to him. For his first eleven years, the Dodgsons lived in a small parsonage in the midst of fields, in the scattered village of Daresbury, Cheshire. The parsonage burned down over a hundred years ago, but its site still remains, marked out in bricks and enclosed in a decorative iron fence, with countryside all around. Its rooms are tiny, for Charles’ father was only a poor curate, and he had to take in pupils and grow some of his own food. But Charles remembered Daresbury Parsonage as a happy spot, an “island farm, ‘midst seas of corn.” He and an ever-growing number of brothers and sisters roamed in the surrounding countryside, and his sisters remembered him as a typical boy, climbing trees and playing in local ponds. After his father was promoted, the family moved to a large rectory in the village of Croft-on-Tees, in Yorkshire, and soon grew to eleven children. Charles was very young when he seems to have decided to become the family’s main entertainer. He amused his brothers and sisters tirelessly, creating elaborate games for them to play in the garden, telling them stories and creating magazines for them. His own youthful contributions to these magazines occasionally show hints of what was to come. Alice’s Duchess, who saw a “moral” in everything, echoes his poem “My Fairy”, written at the age of thirteen, in which he gently criticises the explicit moralizing of contemporary children’s books. I have a fairy by my sideWhich says I must not sleep. When once in pain I loudly cried It said, “You must not weep”. . . . When once a meal I wished to taste It said, “You must not bite” When to the wars I went in haste It said, “You must not fight”. “What may I do?” at length I cried, Tired of the painful task. The fairy quietly replied And said “You must not ask”. Moral: “You mustn’t.” From all accounts, Charles relished the role of older brother, and his siblings are reported to having thought a lot of him; they certainly stayed in close touch all his life. It seems that he was markedly protective, for as a schoolboy he was known for getting into fights in defence of smaller boys. Later in life, friends sometimes commented on how well he looked after them — one niece even affectionately compared him to a “mother hen”. He had much in common with some of his sisters, and was less keen on the countryside sports that his brothers liked. An early anti-vivisectionist, he shared a concern for animal welfare with his youngest sister, Henrietta. Schooling was not compulsory at the time, but it was better for a boy to attend school if he wanted to have a professional career. Charles was mostly educated at home, but when he was twelve he was sent to a little school in nearby Richmond, where he boarded with the headmaster, his wife and family, and was very happy. By contrast, he loathed the three years he spent at boarding-school in Rugby. He did well, and won prizes, but he hated the school’s lack of privacy, uninspired teaching, and savage bullying. Years later, he admitted it had not been totally bad, for he had made some friends, but he added that “no earthly considerations” would ever induce him to repeat the years he had endured there. At nineteen, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, his father’s old college. He did very well, and before long was appointed a Fellow, known as a “Student”, and was engaged in teaching mathematics. As he moved further into his twenties and got more involved in the job, he remained close to his family, making the long trip back North during vacations, and socialising with his brothers and sisters at other times. It is hard to know what he really thought about Christ Church. It did offer opportunities to read, reflect, and use his mind, and, in making a success of his life there, he was doing what both he and his family expected. It also offered him the chance to meet many of the well known figures of the time, and his circle of friends does include large numbers of famous people. And he needed a decent salary, for his father had little money, and, as the eldest son, he knew he would assume responsibility for everyone after his father died. On the other hand, the college was almost all-male and child-free, and may have seemed emotionally rather bleak. In order to comply with the college’s archaic rules, he most reluctantly took Holy Orders, and knew he would be obliged to remain unmarried and celibate as long as he stayed in the job. Teaching the undergraduates did not suit him, for with his quiet voice, gentle manner and troublesome stammer, he found it hard to keep order. Some of his rougher contemporaries made fun of his speech difficulty, and many of the undergraduates were rich young men who did not want to learn and considered themselves better than him. He seems to have coped with the emotional discomforts of his life by presenting a cold, remote face to those he did not know well. He wrote his brothers and sisters long, entertaining letters, got involved in college politics and spent as much time as possible with the Liddell children, Harry, Ina, Edith and Alice, who lived in the college Deanery. With them, he could be more like his real self, the person he showed to his family. He took the children out, helped them with all kinds of projects, and made up stories for them. So this was the outward appearance of the man who created the story of “Alice in Wonderland” in 1862, when he was thirty years old. The famous story is said to have been told during a boating trip on July 4, when Charles, his friend Duckworth and the three Liddell girls rowed to the village of Godstow. Actually, the story may have taken shape over two or three trips that summer — but in any case, the children loved it. Alice Liddell was ten at the time, three years older than the “Alice” of the story. She was a clever, artistic little girl, with short, dark hair, and a bold confident gaze, and Charles was very fond of her. When she pestered him to write the story out for her, he did, although it was over two years before he arrived at the Deanery with his pretty handwritten volume of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. It has sometimes been suggested that Charles was in love with Alice, or wanted to marry her as she grew older, but there is no evidence for this at all. In fact, he may only have named the character “Alice” to please his little friend, for he later took pains to point out that Alice the child was not the “Alice” he’d imagined in the story. His own contemporary illustrations, too, show Alice with long, fairish hair, quite unlike Alice Liddell’s dark bob. He stayed friends with Alice’s older sister Lorina for the rest of his life, and in fact gossip did circulate that he might have had his eye on her. It was unusual for a man in his position to seek out children’s company so publicly, and many people thought that he must have had hopes of either the oldest girl or the governess. No evidence exists to back this up, but it is known that the friendship with Alice withered as she left childhood behind. He was not an important part of her family’s social circle, and there are hints that she did not particularly like being world-famous because of someone else’s book. Charles did not record Alice’s reaction to his gift, but many other people who saw the story loved it; so many, indeed, that he had already decided that he would publish it by the time he’d presented it to Alice. The publisher Alexander Macmillan agreed to work on it, although the agreement was that Charles would have to pay most of the cost of production. Charles boldly committed over a year’s salary to the project. Then, he scrapped the whole first edition of 2000, because Tenniel disliked the quality of the printing. Fussiness was one of his personal characteristics, as were a certain impetuousness, boldness, and a determination to do what he felt was right, however inconvenient and difficult it might be. When the book first appeared, Charles was not optimistic about its prospects. He thought he would lose about £200, which was a huge sum then. He might recoup the loss if sales were exceptionally good, “but that,” he concluded grimly, “I can hardly hope for”. Famous last words! Eventually, Alice enabled him to retire early, although it did not make a fraction of the money that such a bestseller would generate today. Within a decade, Charles’ pseudonym of “Lewis Carroll” was a household name, and when he died in 1898, the book and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass were world-famous. They are now available all over the world, both in the original unaltered mid-Victorian texts and in numerous rewritings and adaptations, movies, artworks, musicals, and animations. As the books’ fame grew, people naturally wondered about the man who had written them, but Charles had no intention of revealing himself to the public. Writing a children’s book did not particularly enhance his professional career, and he flatly refused to acknowledge in public that he was “Lewis Carroll”. In fact, as far as his daily life went, “Lewis Carroll” was a complete non-person. Charles was always known personally only by his real name, letters directed to the pseudonym were returned unanswered, and he would walk away if strangers dared to mention “Alice” in his presence. As the years went on, interest in him did not lessen, and he presented an ever more off-putting, grave, moralistic image to the outside world, and indeed, to many of his colleagues at Christ Church. It has sometimes been wondered why he went to these lengths. Part of the reason seems to have been a need for privacy. After all, he lived in a semi-communal setting, and often spent time with his large extended family, as well. He dreaded being accosted by strangers, and he treasured periods of solitude in order to work on the mathematics which fascinated him. He also wanted freedom from outside scrutiny. Within the circle of family, children and his many bohemian and artistic friends, he was teasing, humorous, sometimes emotional, occasionally reckless and iconoclastic. These were not qualities expected of staid, clerical academics in the restrictive world of the Victorian middle class. In this way, perhaps the sentiments of “My Fairy” applied to him, even in adult life. In particular, his love of the theatre and his passion for theatrical people created a problem so far as his public image was concerned. Theatres were not respectable in the mid-nineteenth century, and the plays they presented were often trivial and frivolous. Even though their reputation improved during his lifetime, his parents and most of his sisters never attended one in their lives. But for him, the theatre was a whole fantasy world, and the actors were its inhabitants. He was a perceptive, knowledgeable critic of their work, and he was also a most gifted and dramatic storyteller himself. In different circumstances, he might have become professionally involved with the stage, but this was impossible in the life which he actually had. The few adults to whom he told stories remembered him as a remarkable raconteur with a funny story for every occasion and the ability to reduce a listener to helpless laughter. He could also gather an audience with great ease, when he chose, as Ruth, daughter-in-law of the Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse, described in a memoir. As a little girl, she once arrived at a children’s party and saw a pale old clergyman in black clothes. She glumly assumed that he would spoil everything. Yet, “the party soon became Mr. Dodgson’s party,” she said, and he talked so fascinatingly, that “I remember how exasperating it was to be asked whether I would like another piece of cake, when I was trying so hard to hear what he was saying”. Although he had several child friends who were boys, he made no secret of the fact that he preferred female company, and his nephew biographer also took the unusual step (for the time) of pointing out that most of his friends were ladies. He relaxed in the presence of females across all ages, and his bachelor rooms at Christ Church contained hundreds of books of poetry, myth, magic, and legend, and toys and fancy dresses. At a time when the line between the sexes was firmly drawn, he had no interest in sport and war, but enjoyed fairies, animals, dressing up, art, and beauty, as well as puppets, dolls, and stuffed toys. Even when he was an old man, his niece Irene remembered what fun it was crawling with him on the floor, playing with a toy bear. And it is perhaps significant that the only toy from his childhood that he bothered to photograph was a boy doll or puppet called “Tim”. As well as his passion for the theatre, he was also a keen photographer, mostly of people and particularly of children. Some of his young models remember how successfully he kept them interested and occupied during what was then a long and boring process, and parents sometimes commissioned him professionally to photograph their children. His nude images of children seem controversial today, but nudes of both sexes and all ages were acceptable as valid artistic subjects then, and in fact, some of the child images of his respectable contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, seem far more startling to the modern eye. However, his love of children and his admiration for child nudity are sometimes taken to be evidence that he was a paedophile. It is impossible for anyone to know the definite truth about the sexual life of another, particularly someone long dead and from a different culture. But again and again, children who knew him, including those photographed nude by him, remember him with real love and affection, in recollections that indicate he did not in any way behave like a paedophile. As Evelyn Hatch, who he photographed nude as “Odalisque” recalls, “What I remember most about Mr. Dodgson was his kindness. . . . his aim was to give happiness and to make life richer. . . he was an ever-welcome guest.” Dozens of other recollections of little girls echo views like this. In general, he seems to have had a positive, constructive attitude, and he made the best of his life. But in some essential ways, he could not be himself, and his family said that he suffered periodically from black depression. At these times, they felt that the sincere love of his child friends kept him going. His affection, in turn, meant a great deal to many of them. Time and again they report that he took them seriously when nobody else did, and understood their points of view. Among many touching memories are those of Ethel, niece of Matthew Arnold, who recalls how “the hours spent in his dear and much-loved company, [were] oases of brightness in a somewhat grey and melancholy childhood”. He never married, and apparently never wanted to. Victorian marriage (with the prospect of many more dependants) would certainly have been a heavy addition to the constraints under which he already lived. It would have lost him what independence he had, and the mere fact of being married at all would have presented him with serious practical problems for many years. His closeness to his siblings might also have been a contributing factor to the decision. Only three of the eleven ever wed, and the remaining seven remained under his care for the rest of his life. However, as he grew older, he acquired many lady friends. This sometimes led to mild controversy. Victorian social life was highly formal, and it was thought improper for eligible men to have unchaperoned adult female friends. During his youth he had been unable to spend time alone with respectable women, but after he passed what Victorians considered to be the age of “romance,” he openly went on holiday with woman friends, and gathered a sizeable circle of admiring ladies around him. As author Laurence Hutton recalled in 1903, shortly after his death, “he liked young women, who all liked him, and Oxford is now full of women, mature and immature, who adore the gentle memory of the creator of ‘Alice’”. In later life, although he was kind, generous and involved to those close to him, he became increasingly difficult, eccentric and annoying to outsiders. He also began spending considerable time fretting about tiny moral points and examining finer points of his own conscience. As he saw his own death approaching, he became very anxious not to offend God in any way. Much of his later fiction — self-conscious, badly structured, and over-moralistic — reveals this anxiety. It was a relief to him to escape into the intellectual study of logic, which increasingly gripped him. But he still relaxed and seems to have gained strength from the company of the children he loved, and he continued to tell them original, funny, startling, and brilliant tales to make them happy. Adults rarely heard them, but his close friend Gertrude Thomson described them as being “like rainbows” — unique, beautiful, and evanescent. He never wrote any of these tales down, and in a rare burst of confidence not long before he died, he told Gertrude Thomson that he didn’t know what people saw in the “Alice” books. Yet although he apparently chose to regard them as unimportant fairy tales, we know that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion Through the Looking Glass were both created at times of great personal stress for him. It is reasonable to assume that they were in some way therapeutic, and perhaps he did not want to think too deeply about what they represented. Although he never wanted to discuss them with adults, he always wanted them to reach the widest possible child audience. And over the last 150 years, millions of children have grown up on “Alice”. Many of these have gone on to produce their own works of art inspired by the curious little girl. To many of us, the wonderful variety of these cultural works makes a fascinating study — one that is nearly, though not quite, as interesting as the study of Charles Dodgson himself. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 1, 2015

Jenny Woolf

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:21.807285

ghostwriter-and-ghost-the-strange-case-of-pearl-curran-patience-worth

Ghostwriter and Ghost The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth By Ed Simon September 17, 2014 In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board. Although mostly unknown today, the resulting books, poems, and plays that Worth "dictated" to Curran earned great praise at the time. Ed Simon investigates the curious and nearly forgotten literary fruits of a “ghost” and her ghostwriter. Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. . . Good friends, let us be merrie. On July 8th 1913, after months of experimentation, a St. Louis housewife named Pearl Curran finally had a breakthrough with her Ouija board. From this initial correspondence, Pearl Curran wrote (or depending on your perspective, transcribed) millions of words she attributed to a seventeenth-century poet who called herself Patience Worth. Historical novels, religious tracts, and lyric poems were published and embraced by mainstream scholars as authentic examples of early American literature mediated from beyond the grave. The figure of Patience Worth was commended as an exemplary writer by organizations such as the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. She was included in journals alongside such future canonical authors as Edna St. Vincent Millay and she appeared in collections such as the Anthology of Magazine Writing and the Yearbook of American Poetry. All the more amazingly, readers and critics agreed that this was new work by a woman who claimed to have been dead for more two and a half centuries.</span These writing were either authentic documents that provided astounding evidence of humanity’s survival after death, or an intricate and impressive hoax that hoodwinked scholars, critics, and editors. There is also another possibility, that these works were the improvisational literary productions of a prodigy who believed herself to be a conduit of some muse from the hereafter. Questions of authorship and intention aside, what remains are the books, plays and poems — once popular literature, and now forgotten. Curran’s output prompts us to ask some fundamental questions about history, genre, intention, affect, authorship, and why we choose to read what we read. Furthermore, her writings are a fascinating curio of an era in American literary history when academics and quacks, the rational and the occult, scholarship and magic all mingled together in popular discourse. Pearl Curran was born in 1883, towards the end of a century that saw the national landscape and the Unites States’ position in the world radically altered. She and her audience were inheritors of the sometimes bizarre religious diversity of the American nineteenth century. It was a century that began with the religious anarchism of the Second Great Awakening, was defined by an apocalyptic Civil War, and which moved into the bourgeois and respectable spiritualism of the late Victorian era. Occult experimentation was embraced by leading thinkers and writers like William James who with other leading scientists founded the American Society for Psychical Research. Curran was enmeshed in a culture of esoterica that she would have encountered during a Victorian adolescence. And the figure of Patience Worth “revealed” herself at a perfect time, just as the rising international power that was the United States began to critically re-evaluate its seventeenth century Puritan origins. Colonial American writings were long dismissed as embarrassing anti-intellectual relics by great nineteenth-century authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the early years of the twentieth century however, scholars began re-evaluating the seventeenth-century canon. Pearl Curran supplied a perfect model in her creation of Patience Worth, who was included alongside actual poets as an example of colonial American artistic genius. As the United States began to assert itself on a global stage it looked back towards its then agreed upon New England origins and began to refine its creation myth, extolling the virtues of Puritan thrift, industriousness, and individuality. Importantly for Curran the colonial period was also one where women’s voices were surprisingly not ignored. In early American poetry the seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) dominates as the single most exemplary and important literary figure. Other women writers like Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711) were the Puritan equivalents of best-sellers. This new found enthusiasm for colonial American letters arrived at a perfect time for Curran. Indeed, the relative respect that colonial women writers like Bradstreet received dovetailed well with the feminine realm that was the early Twentieth century séance. As Gioia Diliberto makes clear in her excellent introduction to the Patience Worth phenomena, “Patience Worth: Author from the Great Beyond”: “Soon, scores of self-anointed mediums. . . burst on the scene, most of them women, whose passivity and purity, it was believed, made them ideal vessels to receive news from the Other Side.” It’s possible to view Curran as a native literary genius who, unable to promote her own authentic voice, is forced to invent a fictional persona that operates as her literary mask. Indeed, this is often how the case of Patience Worth is read. It’s not without precedent. From the Fox sisters of upstate New York to Madame Blavatsky, the séance has often been a woman’s game, able to supply a distinctly feminine voice when the larger society would not otherwise listen. It is certainly possible to see Patience Worth in these terms. But it’s limiting to exclude other possible interpretations of this strange corpus. Curran cannot be seen as just another literary-minded medium. Her case was different. Mediums like Blavatsky strongly delineated between their own writings and the short passages attributed to spirits. Curran however produced an incredible number of writings, all of which were attributed to Patience Worth. There are scores of poems, letters, and novels including Telka, The Sorry Tale, Hope Trueblood, The Pot upon the Wheel, Samuel Wheaton, An Elizabethan Mask among other works. How should one consider the sheer amount and breadth of such works? If a hoax, it is still a hoax that is anything but simple, or easy. Although we do not need to explain such a prolific career framed in such a bizarre manner by suggesting that Patience Worth was a real person, there exists the possibility that Curran understood authorship in a more unconventional way than the wider culture frequently does. Between the possibilities of Patience Worth’s reality and Pearl Curran’s duplicity there exists a third option: that Pearl Curran transcribed these works believing Patience Worth to be real, a creation of her own mind communicating these words back to her. An internal muse if you will, whose existence serves to reevaluate the simple individual models of authorship we conventionally hold to. As such, her corpus provides an occasion for thinking about where inspiration comes from, how authors generate their writings, and the ways in which something as seemingly well understood as writing still contains a kernel of mystery at its core. Outside of occult circles, the embarrassing metaphysical nature of Patience Worth has relegated her to complete obscurity in the academic world for a century. There is not much respectability in the academic study of something that seems to be a hoax. This is an unfair fate for writings that, though not as technically proficient as works deemed canonical, still deserve study and attention, not just because of the way they illuminate an unusual period of American literary history, but also because the writings themselves are arguably more aesthetically proficient than one might expect. The critics who extolled the quality of Worth/Curran had their reasons for doing so, some of which still hold up. It should be emphasized again, that these are not just short lyric poems that one could see a Ouija-using author writing in a few minutes. The sheer length of some of her books is astounding in itself, to say nothing of their literary quality. One need only flip through The Pot upon the Wheel, a verse play whose dialogue sometimes reminds one of the spiritual urgency of a classical religious text like the Bhagavad-Gita. Or take A Sorry Tale, a more than six hundred page esoteric account of the life of Christ that at points reaches a prophetic pitch calling to mind the theology of William Blake. Thankfully, this critical blind-spot is beginning to be rectified, with scholarly books like Daniel Shea’s The Patience of Pearl: Spiritualism and Authorship in the Writings of Pearl Curran published in 2012, and the aforementioned Diliberto article in 2010. They provide an excellent overview on the particulars of the Patience Worth case, analyzing not just biography, but also the context that produced these writings, and their reception and their loss. When dipping into the voluminous corpus of writings one of the first things you notice is that they don’t bare the haphazard stream-of-consciousness style so common in the automatic writing practiced by Dadaist poets and other Avant-Garde groups. But they also don’t read like seventeenth century American prose and poetry, despite what early critical advocates of Pearl Curran like Casper Yost may have claimed. At most, one could say that the works exhibit qualities of pastiche in their depiction of how American Puritans wrote and talked — though none of this should diminish the very real personality that seems to come through the communications of Patience Worth. She appears as variously smart, pious, sentimental, feisty, and sarcastic. She doesn’t read as a mere echo of Curran herself. As artistic creation, the idea of Patience Worth rather than her words are what is central. In reading her verse, one encounters a persona that, while three-dimensionally vibrant, doesn’t seem to match our expectations of how a seventeenth century New England woman would write. While syntax and phrasing can seem largely “authentic” there is little of the orthodox Calvinism one finds in actual early American poets like Bradstreet, Edward Taylor or Michael Wigglesworth. Rather, she seems to offer a broadly spiritual, new age philosophy in keeping with the circumstances of her “discovery.” In terms of theme and language she is broadly “American” in the way we think of, say, Dickinson or Frost as being particularly American. She seems to mimic Dickinson (who was only really being rediscovered at the time that Pearl Curran was working) in her poem “Who said that love was fire?” Curran writes: Who said that love was fire?I know that love is ash.It is the thing which remainsWhen the fire is spent,The holy essence of experience. Admittedly, she departs from Dickinson’s distinctive ballad meter which conjures the structure of hymn, but at least visually the poem calls to mind the short lyrics of the “Bard of Amherst”. While not particularly sophisticated, there are some notable elements: the rhetorical question that she leads with, the images of fire and ash, and the line, “It is the thing which remains” (particularly evocative of Dickinson). The most unfortunate aspect of the poem is its last line which reminds one of particularly poor translations of Rumi or Hafez, and also reflects so much of the orientalist theosophical milieu that Pearl Curran traveled in — certainly much more than it does seventeenth century Puritan American religious lyric. In another poem, “Child’s Prayer,” she takes as her theme the sort of sentimental subject that would not be out of place in Bradstreet, while still mimicking the style of nineteenth century American poets who were influenced by the Second Great Awakening: Ah, Emptied Heart:Ah, emptied Heart! The Weary o’ the path!How would I to fill ye up o’ love! With its declarations and its exclamation points she reminds us of Walt Whitman, even if she does not share his recognizable mighty lines. An example of one of her more sophisticated lyrics is in the poem “The Earth the Fields Lay Stretched in Sleep.” She writes: Dead, all dead!The earth, the fields, lie stretched in sleepLike weary toilers overdone.The valleys gape like toothless age,Besnaggled by dead trees.The hills, like boney jaws whose flesh hath dropped,Stand grinning at the deathy day. In her depiction of an autumnal melancholy, she conflates nature with skeletal corpse images, a gothic personification similar to the memento mori tradition of the Puritanism she was supposedly an adherent of. Later, a lily is compared to a “brown-robed nun,” an entirely un-Puritan image in this strangely ecumenical religious world of Patience Worth. This same heterodox antinomian faith is evident in the title to her poem, “Predestined Love,” where one of the sternest doctrines of Calvinism is tweaked into one of universal love. As this brief reading has shown, there is much literary merit in Curran’s work - so why then this neglect? The bizarre origin of the writings shouldn’t be an impediment to a reasoned study of their structural qualities. After all, William Butler Yeats attributed several of his lyrics to a spirit named Leo Africanus whom he encountered through the use of a Ouija board while a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Without suggesting that the writings of Curran and Yeats are of similar artistic value, it would seem that dismissing them entirely on the grounds that there is a connection to the occult is unfair if a similar standard isn’t applied to Yeats. In both of these cases it might be helpful to think of the mediated personalities as being complex heteronyms of a type exemplified by the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (a contemporary of Curran and one also fascinated by automatic writing and the occult). A heteronym is a particularly complicated pen-name; in addition to a false name there is an entirely false identity, a fictional writer where literariness is extratextual to the poem or book itself. These concepts, of the heteronym and the muse, inspiration and authorship raise interesting questions about the epistemology and ontology of literature. Where does literature ultimately come from? What is legitimate as an object of reading and study? Can a literary hoax still be read as literature? The Patience Worth case complicates questions of authorship. While it seems clear that Curran is the literal author, the fictionality surrounding the very productions of authorship helps to complicate our conceptions of creation and interpretation. Since the French philosopher Roland Barthe’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” both formalists and historicists have become increasingly comfortable with the idea that authorship itself is a sort of fiction. Patience Worth/Pearl Curran makes this fictionality all the more obvious. As such, it seems that she is more than overdue for a critical rediscovery. In the long view of cultural history, her place becomes even more interesting. Biography and history become compressed and the relationship between who is a real person and who is a fictional person becomes more ontologically uncertain. I’m going to break any sort of pose of objectivity and say emphatically that I do not believe that Patience Worth was anything more than a full-bodied creation of Pearl Curran. It’s worth pointing out that there are no records of any actual Patience Worth having lived either in New England, or Dorsetshire where Curran claimed the poet was born. Yet, imagine someone reading Curran a millennium from now. Would such distinctions as whether Worth is “real” or not matter to this imagined reader? For classicists there are arguments about the “reality” of an author named Homer, ones that scholars working on much later periods don’t have to consider in the same way. Philosophically, if a heteronym’s words seem as full and real as an actual person, why can’t they be treated as such? The fullness of the fictionality of Patience Worth is that it is a fictionality which imposes itself on the real world, and that in itself is a fascinating act of literary creation. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 17, 2014

Ed Simon

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:22.664864

the-price-of-suffering-william-pynchon-and-the-meritorious-price-of-our-redemption

The Price of Suffering William Pynchon and The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption By Daniel Crown November 11, 2015 William Pynchon, earliest colonial ancestor of the novelist Thomas Pynchon, was a key figure in the early settlement of New England. He also wrote a book which became, at the hands of the Puritans it riled against, one of the first to be banned and burned on American soil. Daniel Crown explores. On October 16, 1650, the General Court of Boston summoned the town executioner. Like his name, the executioner’s thoughts as he made his way to the marketplace that afternoon, far from the gallows at Boston Common, remain lost to history. Still, reason dictates that even a man inured to the grisliness of the execution racket must have worn a smile of relief on this, such an odd and unprecedented day. A typical workday for the professional death-dealer, when pressed into duty, would have usually entailed dusting off an old ladder, uncoiling a good bit of rope, and eventually sliding a noose around the neck of a prisoner. Not today. Today, the General Court, ever aware of the affecting power of symbolism, had charged the executioner of Boston with a comparably breezy task. He was to conjure a torch, listen to a town official prattle off a public proclamation, and then, with theatrical gusto, set fire to a pile of William Pynchon’s The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.1 “Derogatory!” the Court had called the book the previous day. “Erroneous”. “Unsound”. “Heretical”.2 Pithy denunciations, certainly, but ones with both immediate and lasting ramifications. Indeed, The Meritorious Price, written by the earliest colonial ancestor of the novelist Thomas Pynchon, had the lifespan of a Boston mayfly. A London publisher issued the first and only edition of the “small quarto volume of a hundred and fifty-eight pages” early in 1650.3 It made its way to Boston by summer. Mere months later, the book’s detractors had all but wiped it out of existence. What the Boston executioner had started, general disinterest finished with aplomb over the ensuing centuries. Only four copies of the book remain extant. The Meritorious Price, of course, reads today harmlessly enough. Truth be told, a modern reader need only fear boredom from Pynchon’s exegesis on the origins of Grace. To leading officials in the government of Massachusetts Bay, however, this was an insidious text, an exercise in heresy—one the Puritan clergy believed capable of throwing their young and vulnerable colony into irreversible chaos. Pynchon, a prominent layman with a devoted constituency, was charismatic enough to inspire a movement similar to the Antinomian debacle that had nearly brought the colony to its knees in the previous decade. Notwithstanding his lofty place in New England society, Pynchon and his book simply had to go. The ensuing controversy, placed within the context of Pynchon’s life, perfectly encapsulates the tenuous relationship between colonial New England’s people, its Church, and its State. In many ways, William Pynchon is the forgotten founding father of colonial New England. Though largely unheralded today, there is no refuting he had his hands all over the enterprise from its very inception. Born around 1590, Pynchon came from an old and prestigious family. He owned a sizable amount of land in Springfield, Essex, where he served as a churchwarden — a lay position, typically held by prominent parishioners, which represented the laity at official meetings of the Anglican Church.4 It is unknown when Pynchon began to associate with Puritans, though it is widely held that by the 1610s he had befriended numerous influential reformers5, more than a few of whom advocated removal to America. Soon after arriving in 1630, Pynchon helped found and govern a settlement at Rocksbury—now Roxbury, Massachusetts. On May 14, 1636, he, along with a handful of pioneering Puritans, abandoned the colony to establish the Plantation of Agawam. From the start, he served there as a magistrate, overseeing local disputes and legal matters. It was not long before Agawam began to run afoul with its neighboring English settlements. Situated between the borders of Massachusetts and Connecticut, Pynchon’s colony had been affiliated with the latter since its foundation in 1636. During the Pequot War (1636–1638), Pynchon refused to jeopardize his lucrative trade agreements with nearby Native American tribes, putting him at odds with those in charge of the war effort. This was particularly true in Connecticut, which hosted many of the war’s fiercest battles. Ultimately, the animosity between Pynchon and Connecticut led to Agawam — which was soon renamed Springfield — becoming a part of Massachusetts when the two colonies redrew their lines in 1638.6 Taking full advantage of the distance between Springfield and Boston, Pynchon soon bolstered his rogue reputation by openly questioning the authority of the Massachusetts government.7 Four years before the publication of The Meritorious Price, seven members of the Plymouth Colony took a public stand against the Bay colony’s stranglehold on local politics. Though New England’s Church and State remained technically separate, only members of the predominate Puritan churches were eligible for governmental positions.8 This stripped many members of the colonial community — particularly Presbyterians — of any sense of agency in their home colonies. Not only did these men, all of them English citizens, have to pay taxes to support Puritan ministers with whom they fundamentally disagreed, but they were also forced to agree to restrictive citizenship regulations, which they believed blatantly defied English law.9 In response to this, Robert Child and six others presented the General Court with a Remonstrance and Petition in 1646. In March 1647, Pynchon, seemingly unrequested, wrote to Gov. John Winthrop with advice on the matter. His words heavily hinted at what would become one of the implicit themes in The Meritorious Price. Noting a contemporary controversy in Scotland, Pynchon not only reminded the governor that American colonies remained subject to English law, but he also championed the merits of reasonable religious tolerance: For the parliament doe not hould any certaine fourme of Church government to be commanded in the particulars thereof as the only way of Christ . . . But truly where zeale of gods glory and godly wisdome are joined together: a world of good hath bin don by godly ministers even in England that have held no certain fourme of discipline.10 For obvious reasons, Pynchon’s criticism of the colonial government proved immediately controversial. His true troubles began, however, the moment he turned his attention to the failings of the Massachusetts clergy. Historians are not sure when, exactly, Pynchon began to write The Meritorious Price. The spiritual and intellectual growth processes behind the book also remain a mystery, though Pynchon later admitted he wrote it as a synthesis of sorts, combining sermons and books crafted by a handful of controversial, but non-heretical English Puritans: chiefly Anthony Wotton and Hugh Broughton. As the historian Michael Winship argues in his essay, “William Pynchon Reexamined,” The Meritorious Price is an incredible accomplishment for a man who likely did not have access to a comprehensive theological library in the colonies. It brims with references to esoteric texts, suggesting Pynchon spent his last years in England gathering sources to augment the gestating arguments of his controversial book. Lest anyone misunderstand his intent for The Meritorious Price, he sums up the crux of these long-brewing arguments in a single paragraph on the book’s title page: The Meritorious Price of Redemption, Justification, &c., Cleering from Some common Errors; And proving: 1. That Christ did not suffer for us those unutterable torments of God’s wrath, that commonly are called Hell-torments, to redeem our soules from them. 2. That Christ did not bear our sins by Gods imputation, and therefore he did not bear the curse of the Law for them. 3. That Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of Law (not by suffering the said curse for us, but by a satisfactory price of attonement; viz. by paying or performing unto his Father that invaluable precious thing of his Mediatroiall obedience, whereof his Mediatoriall Sacrifice of attonement was the master-piece. 4. A sinners righousnesse or justification is explained, and cleared from some common errors. According to a letter written in the following months by five prominent New England ministers as a response to a group of Pynchon’s English supporters, this paragraph alone proved enough to raise the ire of the General Court. The letter states that the Court first received the book during its quarterly meeting in October 1650. “At the same time,” they write, “a Ship in the Harbor was ready to set sail for England.” The Court, they continue: perceiving by the Title Page that the Contents of the Book were unsound, and Derogatory, both to the Justice and the Grace of Christ, [worried that] this Book being published under the name of a New English Gentleman, might occasion many to think that New England also concurred in the allowance of such Exorbitant Aberrations.11 It is likely, then, the Court did not read the entirety of Pynchon’s book before having it burned. In their eyes, its opening pages were rife enough with heresy to merit immediate action. With this in mind, the Court ensured the aforementioned ship left Massachusetts without The Meritorious Price. Instead, it sent a letter of repudiation. In it, the Court did not merely rebuke Pynchon; they committed to paper a wholesale abjuration of the controversial conversations then occurring within the native Anglican Church and its growingly abundant offshoots. Old England had let its ecclesiastical leash go slack. New England would not make the same mistake. To understand why, exactly, the Court reacted this way, one cannot avoid diving headlong into the debates that largely defined mid-17th-century Puritanism. Puritans of the era, both in the homeland and the colonies, lived and worked within an at times suffocating paradox. One of the major draws to the faith involved its emphasis on a personal relationship with the Bible. The Puritan clergy, then, had to figure out a way to encourage people of the faith to read the text without reading too much into it. While the Church taught and promoted very specific interpretations of scripture — particularly those defending the tenets of predestination — this did little to satiate the most curious and defiant in their ranks. As more and more fringe theologians grew in prominence, new and controversial exegeses soon proliferated across the Atlantic community. Given that England was currently winding up a ten-year civil war — one caused at least in part by controversial doctrinal issues — the colonial clergy was perhaps justifiably sensitive to what it deemed divisive ideas and innovations. When considering potential heresy, clergy members kept an eye out for a series of red flags. Pynchon’s book rose just about all of them. First, he openly and defiantly questioned the nature and origin of God’s Grace. Most Puritans of the era believed that God had gifted his spiritual elect with salvation by “imputing” his son with their sins on the cross. In effect, these sins were wiped clean the moment Jesus died and descended into Hell where he “suffered the extremity of [God’s] wrath”. To Pynchon, Christ was not so much a sacrifice as a mediator. According to the historian Philip F. Gura, Pynchon believed that “since sin had come into the world through Adam’s archetypal transgression, Christ’s perfect obedience to the Father’s will — evidenced by his passion and death — and not the Father’s imputation of men’s sins to him, redeemed the elect from Adam’s curse”. In other words, mankind inflicted its wrath upon God (in the form of man), and not the other way around. The elect, then, earned salvation through the example of Christ’s perfect life, which culminated on the cross. Obedience, not Jesus’ suffering, ultimately served as the wellspring of Grace.12 While Pynchon does not explicitly say so, The Meritorious Price nonetheless put the millennia-old idea of “works” back on the table — a belief that flew in the face of Grace-based redemption. Though Pynchon in effect doubled down on predestination by denouncing Antinomians and other troublesome Anabaptist groups (which had advocated for universal Grace in the past), the Court likely did not read these contentions when it made its initial ruling. Based solely upon the nutgraph printed on the title page, the Court seems to have inferred from the text that anyone, should they live piously, might earn Grace rather than receive it. This constituted Pynchon’s second major offense. Many who read The Meritorious Price saw this belief as incongruent with the notion of a spiritual elect. Finally, Pynchon’s motives themselves came under fire. During the court process, it became clear the author did not believe the Massachusetts clergy held a monopoly on biblical interpretation. As Gura writes, Pynchon believed ardently in “the latitudinarian principle that no man — be he minister or magistrate — was infallible and thus [no man had the right] to impose ecclesiastical or doctrinal norms on an individual otherwise directed by his conscience”.13 According to the historian Michael Winship, this particular stance is what ultimately damned Pynchon’s book. The Meritorious Price spoke directly to what the Massachusetts clergy saw as “the problematic involvement of laity in professional theological quarrels”.14 None of Pynchon’s arguments, after all, were new. Pynchon admitted as much in future works. Wotton and Broughton, Pynchon’s greatest influences, both promoted similar theologies years earlier; yet, thanks in large part to their professional status, neither saw their respective books summarily rejected as did the founder of Springfield. Though a prominent member of Massachusetts’ society, Pynchon was nonetheless a theological layman. When he published his work, he crossed a line. Governor John Endicott and his council made this abundantly clear in a letter written on October 20, 1652, to one of Pynchon’s defenders, Henry Vane. Pointing out that “ministers in all the four jurisdictions” had deemed the book heretical, the Council nonetheless regretted having to publicly embarrass Pynchon, a man held in such high regard in Springfield. He likely would have avoided censure, the letter continues, “had he kept his judgment to himself, as it seems he did above thirty years”. However, when Pynchon “[published and spread] his erroneous books amongst us, to the endangering of the faith of such as might read them . . . we held it our duty, and believe we were called of God, to proceed against him accordingly”.15 In addition to the burning of Pynchon’s book, the General Court also commissioned a theologian named John Norton to write an official rebuttal. They then summoned Pynchon to appear before the General Court in May 1651.16 There Pynchon offered the Court a half-hearted apology. “I have not spoken in my book,” he relented, “so fully of the price, and merit of [Christ’s] sufferings as I should have done”.17 The General Court accepted the man’s contrition, though the magistrates did demand he appear before them again the following October. They set bail at £100. This time, Pynchon absconded. As it turned out, he’d already made plans for a permanent return to England. It was there that Pynchon’s gloves truly came off. No longer held back by Massachusetts’ restrictive policies on lay-theology, he quickly published another book in 1652. In this work — titled The Jewish Synagogue — Pynchon took the New England clergy to task for veering too far from accepted doctrine with its foundational ideas about “visible saints”.18 In doing so, Pynchon joined a growing chorus of dissenters who took issue with the restrictive nature of church membership in the colonies. And Pynchon was just getting started. By the time he died in 1662, he had published numerous further works, including an official response to Norton’s rebuttal under the cheeky title of The Meritorious Price of Man’s Redemption. Though Pynchon polished his original arguments in this work, he nonetheless used the book to reaffirm the most controversial of his views, including those for which he had publicly apologized at the General Court.19 In the end, Pynchon’s ideas about imputation and atonement never gained much traction. For all of its failures as a theological text, however, The Meritorious Price did live on, if only in the shadows of America’s earliest self-spun history. From the early-19th century onward, historical societies began to use Pynchon’s text as a literal and figurative footnote — often referencing The Meritorious Price as America’s “first banned book”. It is also worth noting that Pynchon’s equally enigmatic descendent, Thomas, has brought occasional attention to the book over the past five decades, making multiple references to his family history in his short stories, as well as in his classic novel Gravity’s Rainbow. This is not, however, to say that the impact of The Meritorious Price was entirely limited to future eras. In the decades following William’s death, the New England clergy’s staunch defense of restrictive church membership eventually softened as new and evolving viewpoints among the laity threatened to damn their church into irrelevancy. Though there is no direct link between Pynchon’s work and this radical shift in the colonial paradigm, historians have recently elucidated the fact that the father of Solomon Stoddard, one of the key figures in the reformation of the Church’s membership policy, once went to prison for his support of Pynchon’s book. This gives “the strong indication” that The Meritorious Price and Stoddard’s important innovations “grew from the same New England roots”.20 If so, then this stands as yet one more important facet of Pynchon’s lost legacy — a record paradoxically consumed and invigorated within the cleansing light of the executioner’s flame. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 11, 2015

Daniel Crown

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:23.678945

copying-pictures-evidencing-evolution

Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution By Nick Hopwood May 18, 2016 Copying — unoriginal, dull, and derivative by definition — can be creative, contested, and consequential in its effects. Nick Hopwood tracks Haeckel’s embryos, some of the most controversial pictures in the history of science, and explores how copying put them among the most widely seen. New images are flooding the world, and the sciences contribute more than their fair share. But open a textbook, turn on the TV, or visit a webpage and look at the pictures. There among the recent entrants from laboratories, clinics, and field sites, a few golden oldies jostle for attention. While most images fade away fast, a minority represent knowledge for long periods — even in science, where we might have expected constant updating. The checkered history of one extraordinary image family can illuminate these afterlives. Striking comparisons of vertebrate embryos debuted in the books by the anticlerical German zoologist Ernst Haeckel that took a Darwinist system to the reading public in the 1860s and ’70s. The Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural history of creation) went through eleven editions between 1868 and World War I and was translated into a dozen languages; it was “perhaps the chief source of the world’s knowledge of Darwinism”. The more embryological Anthropogenie managed six editions between 1874 and 1910 and was twice Englished as The Evolution of Man. With fossils in short supply, comparative embryology offered compelling evidence of common descent. Haeckel arranged this in vivid visuals for the first time. Haeckel’s embryos come in grids. The “columns” correspond to vertebrate species, in the lithograph from the Anthropogenie members of the four lower classes: “fish”, salamander, turtle, and chick, and four mammals: pig, cow, rabbit, and human. The rows stand for stages, here “early”, “fairly early” and “late”. We see the embryos begin very similar and diverge towards their adult forms. Look harder and there is also evidence for Haeckel’s dictum “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”: we climb our evolutionary tree in the womb. For example, the top row corresponds to an ancestral stage equivalent to the jawless fish. But differentiation from a near-identical origin is the more obvious point, and provocative enough, especially when surrounded by liberal rhetoric and swipes at religion. Let the “church militant” damn “the naked facts of human germ history” as “diabolical inventions of materialism”, Haeckel thundered, “embryology is the heavy artillery in the struggle for truth”. The Schöpfungsgeschichte had not been out a year when a researcher sympathetic to evolutionism, but hostile to Haeckel’s approach, accused him of various pictorial misdemeanours. Infamously, Haeckel had had single woodblocks printed three times to represent the embryos of a mammal, a bird, and a reptile. He corrected this sharp practice in the second edition and eventually admitted his “extremely rash foolishness”. More debatable are the plates, on which he was charged with skewing the evidence by drawing the embryos more similar than they really are. These allegations came to a head in the mid-1870s, when Haeckel’s Anthropogenie put embryology in the eye of a storm over Darwinism, not to mention major confrontations between the state and the Catholic Church, and between evolutionists and physiologists in biology. The “German Darwin” countered that his figures were schematics, appropriate simplifications that legitimately expressed his view; would his critics have him draw without thinking? With the theory of evolution underpinning ideologies of progress, enough people took his side that the plates could stay in his books, but the fraud allegations never went away. In 1908–10, they flared up in a larger, nastier battle that made front-page news in Germany and was reported internationally, including in the United States, then taking over as the powerhouse of science. Haeckel’s diagrams still became standard textbook illustrations of comparative evolutionary embryology in twentieth-century American high-school and college textbooks. Until another intense controversy, that is. By the mid-1900s embryologists had largely abandoned Haeckel’s questions, but from the 1980s some became interested in evolution again, and in 1997 one accused him of fraud — in ignorance of the long history of forgery charges. Many biologists now rejected the pictures, and the neo-creationist advocates of so-called intelligent design forced some publishers to take them out. Putting “Haeckel’s embryos” into google takes you to websites like Answers in Genesis and Darwinism.refuted.com. But Darwinism should not be at stake: the molecular homologies discovered in the last few decades confirm the fact of evolution more persuasively than Haeckel ever could. Where his embryos do excel, however, is in providing food for thought about how images succeed and fail. The controversies generated by the forgery charges help make assumptions explicit. That certain groups repudiated the pictures in certain places at certain times also pushes us to explain how they could have been so warmly embraced or blithely taken for granted by others and elsewhere. But the potential of the case has long been buried under the more obvious but less interesting question: “Did he forge them, then?” I can answer: compared with the standard practice of his day, Haeckel’s drawing was unconventional, reckless even, but there was no intent to deceive and he had little interest in cheating. Even to give Haeckel a fair trial, however, we would have to consider how friend and foe negotiated what would count as fraud. To grasp how his images became taken for granted and caused trouble, we must cast a still wider net. It might seem frivolous to devote attention to popular pictures that Haeckel scrawled on the back of an envelope in five minutes. It is worth it, because his embryos mediated between cutting-edge research, the general press, and classroom teaching during the decades when a mass audience saw science illustrated for the first time. These images are strategic because they played such varied roles — puzzling, beautiful, inaccurate, forged, classic — for so many different people. They enthralled a “secret league” of schoolboys drinking in the “hidden back room” of a “fairly disreputable” Cologne pub, for whom Haeckel’s evolutionism solved the mystery of life and replaced the Christian faith. They also engaged the most expert comparative vertebrate embryologists who ever lived. Reconstructing the genesis and copying of the pictures, the launching and repetition of the charges, and the way pictures and charges circulated among scientists and laypeople shows how alleged forgeries could become textbook illustrations and even icons. Along the way, the story reveals how developing embryos, which few people had ever seen when Haeckel started out, were made objects we can compare and debate. The rest of this essay focuses on copying, and how it made Haeckel’s grids, and made them known, while generating a fascinating series of variations on a theme. Copying was at issue from the beginning: Haeckel’s first accuser said his plates manufactured false identities by miscopying standard illustrations from the literature. Haeckel insisted privately that his own specimens had informed his drawings too, and stressed that he had allowed himself — as was not standard then — to depict all the embryos in the same view, at the same size, and in the same dramatic style. Those googly eyes perhaps owed more to the tricks of the popular lecturer than university professors usually committed to print. More positively, and less remarked, the arrangement of the figures created the innovative grid design. The plate in the first edition of the Schöpfungsgeschichte offered three pairwise comparisons, of dog and human embryos at an early stage, and of dog and human, turtle and chick, at a later one. “During the first two months of development”, Haeckel thundered, even “nobles . . . are scarcely distinguishable from the tailed embryos of the dog and other mammals”. But the pairs did not yet make a grid. Only in the second edition, when all captions moved to the back of the book, did Haeckel and the lithographer take advantage to set up a grid that powerfully aligned the embryos for easy comparison at each stage. It was challenging enough to construct a developmental series for one species: material was scarce — the earliest human embryos were unknown till the mid-twentieth century — and it took much cutting, drawing, and interpreting to turn the nondescript contents of eggs or clumps in blood into clear and comparable images. To coordinate such series for multiple species was harder still, but the grid created an inviting space. Later editions of Haeckel’s books revised and expanded the plates. The early ones had drawn on the German farmyard, heath, and forest, but as embryologists exploited networks of empire Haeckel added such exotics as ostrich, spiny anteater, koala, and gibbon. The grid structure encouraged him to fill with “deductions” some cells that a more prudent zoologist might have left empty pending further research. That would damage his reputation when these late editions, which themselves accounted for a small fraction of the copies in circulation, were the basis for plates in cheap pamphlets that kindled controversy on the eve of World War I. Most translations amplified the early grids, but Haeckel’s extraordinary fame around 1900 justified a second English version of the Anthropogenie and this carried the full imperial parade. Yet an image does not become iconic through publication in books by a Haeckel or even a Darwin alone; it needs to be copied further. Haeckel’s embryos were reproduced in other evolutionary works as evidence of common descent. Authors and illustrators either did not know about the forgery charges or discounted them. But there are significant absences: no German professor used Haeckel’s drawings for decades and some of his staunchest defenders played safe by assembling their own embryo groups instead. In the 1890s, his embryos, first published in books printed a thousand or two at a time, nevertheless entered encyclopaedias with runs of a quarter million per edition. Copying not only makes images known, it may also simplify or modify them as users select a canonical form. Today, “Haeckel’s embryos” are almost synonymous with reproductions and adaptations of the double plate in the first edition of the Anthropogenie, but it took many years for this one to win out. Two limit scenarios represent the range of early copies from both Schöpfungsgeschichte and Anthropogenie. At one extreme, authors treated the grids in academic lectures by a distinguished German professor as authoritative sources of figures, and raided them for individual drawings. This made simpler illustrations, more suited to more popular books, and cheaper, especially when they had to be re-lithographed or re-engraved. The most unusual is an art nouveau chapter header from Das Liebesleben in der Natur (Love life in nature), the bestselling eroticization of evolutionism by Haeckel’s ally and friend Wilhelm Bölsche. At the other extreme, expert evolutionists implicitly accepted the criticism of Haeckel, keeping the grid structure but replacing every figure to provide impeccable evidence for largely Haeckelian conclusions. These accurate arrays were rather unsuccessful, however, and by the early twentieth century books increasingly borrowed Haeckel’s plates as redrawn and engraved in an uncontroversial secondary source, George John Romanes’s “exposition of Darwinian teaching” in the first volume of Darwin and After Darwin. Via photomechanical printing it was now straightforward to reproduce the whole grid. All this time, the forgery charges had been continually rewarmed. As an outcome of the battles over Haeckel in the 1870s, Darwinism was effectively banned from German schools, but this added an extra frisson of transgression to viewing these forbidden fruits. Religion teachers, catching children reading Haeckel under the desk, denounced his pictures as “outrageous forgeries”. Traditionalist parents warned their daughters that such horrible illustrations were unsuitable for girls. The embryos conducted ideological sparks across the generations and between milieux. Then Haeckel became an even bigger target through his role in creating a mass audience for science. The Riddles of the Universe, his (unillustrated) primer of scientistic anticlericalism, sold some 400,000 in German alone and was translated into a dozen languages. The most famous and notorious German scientist, the greatest living evolutionist, was a lightning rod for controversy and a target for legions of enemies, especially on the Christian right. (Haeckel moved rightwards himself, but had more supporters among liberals and on the left, a fact that became awkward when some Nazis celebrated this advocate of eugenics or “racial hygiene”.) Fearful of working-class atheism, in 1908 right-wing populists levelled new charges against plates in pamphlets after big public lectures by Haeckel. Newspapers whipped up a scandal for the people. Biologists rallied round the figurehead of German Darwinism and against the threat of political interference, without condoning the drawings. But after he died in 1919 his reputation declined further, as physiological approaches made the running in embryology and highbrows looked down on his popular philosophy. American textbooks saved his pictures. Textbooks notoriously recycle images as well as errors, but for lack of direct evidence specific cases can be difficult to explain. Patterns of use help. Haeckel’s diagrams were introduced into the United States much earlier than Germany because high schools taught more evolution-based elementary biology and Americans knew less about the accusations. Even after 1925, when the state of Tennessee outlawed human evolution in the public schools and tried John Scopes for teaching “that man has descended from a lower order of animals”, the embryos stayed in schoolbooks, albeit in bowdlerized form. College textbooks reproduced the drawings from around 1930 because they “excel in emphasizing essential agreements and ultimate differences”. Expansion of the books and the bureaucratization of the industry established the general conditions for recycling. Specific factors explain how these images survived big threats: the modern evolutionary synthesis (which at mid-century ousted Haeckel’s, by implication, unmodern one) and the curriculum modernizations of the 1960s. Creationists, the most dogged critics, were marginal, and few evolutionists realized what a question mark hung over the pictures. Their use was favoured by the confused legacy of comparative evolutionary embryology. (Was recapitulation simply wrong, or was there a core of truth? Did embryos recapitulate adult forms, or only embryonic ones?) Use was stereotyped. Take a mid-century college textbook, turn to the chapter on “Evidences of organic evolution”, find no. 3: “Comparative embryology”, and chances are the most readily available image will illustrate a few formulaic paragraphs in a stable combination or “imagetext”. The pictures were also protected by crediting Romanes not Haeckel. The text might say that Haeckel was wrong, or at best overzealous; that recapitulation was false, or at least an exaggeration; and that the embryos did not march in parallel, but rather diverged — and point to his drawings to prove it. This could happen because the images were never a readout of the recapitulation theory, but primarily display similarity and divergence, and so were open to alternative evolutionist interpretations. These embryos had nevertheless been all but absent from one whole class of book: those devoted to embryology. The images were imported from more general works only in the early 1980s, when interest in “evolution and development” revived. They structured knowledge even in advanced reviews that renovated the idea, elaborated from Haeckel’s grids, that there is a stage — his top row — on which vertebrates converge from different beginnings and from which they then diverge. This set the scene for the latest round of forgery charges. In 1997, a London developmental biologist denied that there is a sharply defined common stage, and the rise of creationism, fraud-busting, and the internet amplified his claim. The diagrams were expunged from the textbooks, but creationists did not want to remove all trace. In a typical irony of iconoclasm, they ensured that the embryos were more reproduced than ever before — as negative icons of Darwinist infamy. For a while it looked as though the pictures would be used only where distancing was understood, such as by creationists or historians of science. But at the end of 2010 they occupied the most sought-after space in science publishing, the cover of the leading journal Nature. Illustrating articles that used genomic methods to confirm the conserved stage, Haeckel’s grid took the form of a mosaic generated by sampling a database of gene expression patterns in fruit-fly embryos. The drawings had not just hung on; they were still involved in innovation after 140 years. Who would bet that they will not one day be more fully rehabilitated, and if they are, that they do not start a major controversy again? There is another irony. Haeckel’s embryos could spread because they were effectively in the public domain. German copyright law allowed reproduction with acknowledgement; permission to reproduce from Romanes was readily granted; and publishers redrew the figures. But in the early 2000s, when critics and defenders of evolution contested the history on blogs, it became clear that specific copies from Haeckel and Romanes could be hard to find. One library rarely held all editions and few of the relevant textbooks were online. Many of Haeckel’s embryos are freely available all the same. Their histories show how copying produced an image family and how the differences mattered. From the making of the first grid through the variations that adapted it to a host of other books, copying has been creative. In the accusation that Haeckel miscopied standard images, it has been contested. And, from the battles of the 1870s to the recent dispute over the conserved stage, it has been consequential. That is the shock of the copy. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 18, 2016

Nick Hopwood

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:24.220424

frolicsome-engines-the-long-prehistory-of-artificial-intelligence

Frolicsome Engines The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence By Jessica Riskin May 4, 2016 Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs — Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life. How old are the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence? Many might trace their origins to the mid-twentieth century, and the work of people such as Alan Turing, who wrote about the possibility of machine intelligence in the ’40s and ’50s, or the MIT engineer Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics. But these fields have prehistories — traditions of machines that imitate living and intelligent processes — stretching back centuries and, depending on how you count, even millennia. The word “robot” made its first appearance in a 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek entitled R.U.R., for Rossum’s Universal Robots. Deriving his neologism from the Czech word “robota”, meaning “drudgery” or “servitude”, Čapek used “robot” to refer to a race of artificial humans who replace human workers in a futurist dystopia. (In fact, the artificial humans in the play are more like clones than what we would consider robots, grown in vats rather than built from parts.) There was, however, an earlier word for artificial humans and animals, “automaton”, stemming from Greek roots meaning “self-moving”. This etymology was in keeping with Aristotle’s definition of living beings as those things that could move themselves at will. Self-moving machines were inanimate objects that seemed to borrow the defining feature of living creatures: self-motion. The first-century-AD engineer Hero of Alexandria described lots of automata. Many involved elaborate networks of siphons that activated various actions as the water passed through them, especially figures of birds drinking, fluttering, and chirping. ※※Indexed under…FountainsAvian The siphon would have had a particular attraction to the ancient automaton-maker, in that it makes water travel upward, counter to what it would otherwise do. According to Aristotle, while living things moved themselves at will, inanimate things moved according to their natures: heavy things, made of earth or water, descended, while light things, made of air or fire, ascended. A siphon, by allowing water to ascend, appears to violate Aristotle’s principle, and it also tends to work intermittently, creating the illusion of wilful behavior. Waterworks, including but not limited to ones using siphons, were probably the most important category of automata in antiquity and the middle ages. Flowing water conveyed motion to a figure or set of figures by means of levers or pulleys or tripping mechanisms of various sorts. A late twelfth-century example by an Arabic automaton-maker named Al-Jazari is a peacock fountain for hand washing, in which flowing water triggers little figures to offer the washer first a dish of perfumed soap powder, then a hand towel. Such hydraulic automata became ubiquitous on the grounds of palaces and wealthy estates. So-called “frolicsome engines” were to be found as early as the late thirteenth century at the French chateau of Hesdin, the account books of which mention mechanical monkeys, “an elephant and a he-goat”.1 Over the next two centuries, the chateau collection expanded to include “3 personnages that spout water and wet people at will”; a “machine for wetting ladies when they step on it”; an “engien [sic] which, when its knobs are touched, strikes in the face those who are underneath and covers them with black or white [flour or coal dust]”; a “window where, when people wish to open it, a personage in front of it wets people and closes the window again in spite of them”; a “lectern on which there is a book of ballades, and, when they try to read it, people are all covered with black, and, as soon as they look inside, they are all wet with water”; a “mirror where people are sent to look at themselves when they are besmirched, and, when they look into it, they are once more all covered with flour, and all whitened”, and so on, and so on.2 By the time the French essayist and diarist Michel de Montaigne went traveling through Europe in 1580–81, hydraulic automata had grown so commonplace that he grew bored, though he continued dutifully to record them in his travel diary. At one palace, for example, he saw sprays of water from “brass jets” activated by springs. “While the ladies are busy watching the fish play, you have only to release some spring: immediately all these jets spurt out thin, hard streams of water to the height of a man’s head, and fill the petticoats and thighs of the ladies with this coolness”.3 Twenty years later, the French King Henri IV hired the Italian engineer Tomaso Francini to build him some waterworks for the royal palace at Saint Germain en Laye. Francini built hydraulic grottoes devoted to the Greek pantheon and their adventures: Mercury played a trumpet and Orpheus his lyre; Perseus freed Andromeda from her dragon. There were automaton blacksmiths, weavers, millers, carpenters, knife-grinders, fishermen, and farriers conducting the obligatory watery attacks on spectators. Even more than in royal gardens and on noble estates, medieval and early Renaissance automata appeared in churches and cathedrals. Automaton Christs — muttering, blinking, grimacing on the Cross — were especially popular. A mechanical Christ on a crucifix, known as the Rood of Grace, attracted pilgrims to Boxley Abbey in Kent during the fifteenth century. This Jesus “was made to move the eyes and lipps by stringes of haire”. The Rood could move its hands and feet, nod its head, roll its eyes, and show “a well contented or displeased minde: byting the lippe, and gathering a frowning, forward, and disdainful face, when it would pretend offence: and shewing a most milde, amiable, and smyling cheere and countenaunce, when it woulde seeme to be well pleased”.4 Mechanical devils were also to be found. Poised in sacristies, they made horrible faces, howled, and stuck out their tongues. The Satan-machines rolled their eyes and flailed their arms and wings; some even had moveable horns and crowns. The Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi even mechanized Paradise itself: “a Heaven full of living and moving figures could be seen as well as countless lights, flashing on and off like lightning”.5 While elsewhere, elaborately engineered hells rumbled with thunder and flashed with lightning, spewing forth writhing automaton serpents and dragons. These machines helped inspire the idea that perhaps automata accomplished something deeper than merely entertaining tricks: perhaps they genuinely modeled the workings of nature. The French philosopher René Descartes made this case powerfully during the 1640s, arguing that the entire world, including living bodies, was essentially machinery composed of moving parts and could be understood in just the way a clockmaker understands a clock. His work was foundational to modern science in general, and to modern physiology in particular. In developing his mechanist model of science, Descartes invoked the lifelike machines all around him. Indeed, he lived for a time in Saint Germain en Laye and almost certainly visited the hydraulic grottoes of Henri IV, which he described in detail. With the sixteenth-century advent of the pinned cylinder — a barrel with pins or bars sticking out, such as in a music box — even more complex lifelike machines were possible. Around this time, a new word also arose to describe human-like machines in particular: “android”, derived from Greek roots meaning “manlike”. This was the coinage of Gabriel Naudé, French physician and librarian, and personal doctor to none other than the automaton-loving Louis XIII.6 Pinned cylinders were the programming devices in automata and automatic organs from around 1600. In 1650, the German polymath Athanasius Kircher offered an early design of a hydraulic organ with automata, governed by a pinned cylinder and including a dancing skeleton. Of course, it’s an anachronism to call sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pinned cylinders “programming” devices. To be sure, there is a continuous line of development from these pinned cylinders to the punch cards used in nineteenth-century automatic looms (which automated the weaving of patterned fabrics), to the punch cards used in early computers, to a silicon chip. The designers of the automatic loom used automata and automatic musical instruments as their model; then Charles Babbage — the English mathematician who designed the first mechanical computers during the 1830s, the Analytical and Difference Engines — in turn used the automatic loom as his model. Indeed, one might consider a pinned cylinder to be a sequence of pins and spaces, just as a punch card is a sequence of holes and spaces, or zeroes and ones. However, it is important to remember that neither Babbage, nor the designers of the automatic loom, nor the automaton-makers thought of these devices in terms of programming or information, concepts which did not exist until the mid-twentieth century. For example, ideas about the division of labor inspired the automatic looms of the Industrial Revolution as well as Babbage’s calculating engines — they were machines intended primarily to separate mindless from intelligent forms of work. With pinned cylinders, beginning in the early part of the eighteenth century, people began to design automata that actually enacted the tasks they appeared to perform. The first simulative automata were designed in the 1730s by a Frenchman named Jacques Vaucanson, and quickly became the talk of Europe. Two were musicians, a “Piper” and a “Flutist”. The flutist had lips that flexed in four directions, delicate jointed fingers, and lungs made of bellows that gave three different blowing pressures. It was the first automaton musician actually to play an instrument, rather than being a music box with a decorative figure. It played a real flute: you could even bring it your own. Vaucanson’s third automaton was the notorious “Defecating Duck”. While it flapped its wings and cavorted duckishly, its main attraction was that it swallowed bits of corn or grain and excreted them at the other end in a changed form. (This part of the act was a fake: the corn that went in the front remained hidden for surreptitious removal, while the rear end was preloaded.) Although none of Vaucanson’s automata survive, their cousins do. Among these are three androids designed in the 1770s by a Swiss clock-making family named Jaquet-Droz: a lady “Musician” and two little boys, a “Writer” and a “Draughtsman”. The “Writer” can be arranged to write any message of up to forty characters; the “Draughtsman” sketches four pictures in charcoal; and the “Musician” plays several airs on a harpsichord. The trio are eerily lifelike, and still hold court in Neuchatel, Switzerland. Their eyes follow their fingers as they work, the “Draughtsman” blows the charcoal dust from his page periodically, and the “Musician” seems to sigh with emotion as she plays (she actually breathes for an hour before and after the act, giving spectators a certain frisson as they arrive and depart). Later on in the eighteenth century, engineers and automaton makers became concerned with trying to mechanize two processes deemed the epitome of living intelligence: speech and chess playing. A flurry of talking heads in the 1770s, ’80s and ’90s was triggered by a prize competition sponsored by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences for a machine that could produce the sound of vowels. People went far beyond just vowels. A Frenchman named Mical designed a pair of talking heads in 1778. They contained “artificial glottises arranged over taut membranes”, but their dialogue in praise of Louis XVI was rather dull: “The King gives Peace to Europe”, intoned the first head; “Peace crowns the King with Glory”, replied the second; and so on. About a decade later, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen designed a speaking machine using an ivory glottis, bellows for lungs, a leather vocal tract with a hinged tongue, a rubber oral cavity and mouth, and a nose with two little pipes as nostrils. Its pronouncements were more whimsical than those of Mical’s talking heads: “my wife is my friend”, for example, and “come with me to Paris”. Kempelen was more famous for another “automaton” that he designed and built in 1769, the chess-playing Turk. This life-sized model was exhibited all over Europe and America by Kempelen himself and then by others until its demise in a fire in 1854; in the course of its long career, reportedly beating both Napoleon and Charles Babbage. Although aspects of its movement — the motion of the arms, head, etc. — were mechanical, it was not, of course, a full automaton. The crucial chess-playing aspect was the work of a succession of skillful and diminutive human chess players concealed in its pedestal, something all but admitted by Kempelen, who said his main achievement had been to create an illusion. People no doubt knew it was a hoax, but they were fascinated anyway, because it dramatized the question of the age: whether a machine could reason, and relatedly, whether the human mind might itself be a kind of machine. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentin a chess-playing automaton Edgar Allan Poe was taken by the question and in 1836 wrote an essay about Kempelen’s Turk and Babbage’s Difference Engine. He believed a machine could calculate, because calculation was a fixed and determinate process, but not that a machine could play chess because, he said, chess was indeterminate: the machine would have to respond to its opponent’s moves. So Babbage’s machine was genuine but Kempelen’s fraudulent. When I’ve assigned Poe’s essay to engineering students, they’ve found his reasoning strange: why couldn’t a machine respond to each move of its opponent? Here is another example of how people’s intuitions about the nature of life, mechanism and science continually transform. Poe assumed a machine was necessarily unresponsive. Two centuries earlier, Descartes had made the opposite assumption, and almost two centuries later, so did my students. How should we regard Hero of Alexandria’s siphon-driven birds, the medieval automaton Christs, the Renaissance frolicsome engines, the android musicians, artists, writers, and talking heads of the eighteenth century? They can certainly be seen as the ancestors of modern projects in robotics and artificial intelligence. But they were also expressions of a very different mode of understanding. Rather than embodying the concepts of programming, feedback, or information so important today, they were born from other ideas: animate versus inanimate matter, wilful versus constrained motion, mindless versus intelligent labor. It is hard to imagine that our own conceptual frameworks will one day seem as remote and exotic as an Aristotelian account of Hero’s siphons seems to us, but they surely will. Can knowing this perhaps help us to imagine what might come to replace information, programming, and feedback as the key concepts for understanding life, sentience, mechanism, and mind? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 4, 2016

Jessica Riskin

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:24.809859

robert-greene-the-first-bohemian

Robert Greene, the First Bohemian By Ed Simon January 27, 2016 Known for his debauched lifestyle, his flirtations with criminality, and the sheer volume of his output, the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene was a fascinating figure. Ed Simon explores the literary merits and bohemian traits of the man who penned the earliest known (and far from flattering) reference to Shakespeare as a playwright. The only known image of the dramatist, poet, pamphleteer, and initially unrepentant libertine Robert Greene is a woodcut from John Dickenson’s Greene in Conceipt, printed in 1598, six years after its subject had died an early death at the age of thirty-four. Dickenson’s book pretends to be a posthumous publication of the still infamous raconteur, bawd, and wit; the frontispiece depicts Greene as bundled up in his death shroud, a cloth topknot twisted off at the peak of his head. He sits in an ornate chair, hunched over a book in which he is scribbling desperately. Greene seemingly needs to write as much as possible before his untimely expiration; it is an image of the debauched bohemian penning some sort of confession for his wanton, drunken, scurrilous ways. His bearded face pokes through the death shroud like a woman peeking out through a babushka, and he has a look of dour concern, as if he is aware that his gossipy printed accusations against colleagues, his addiction to sack, his whoring, his mistreatment of his family, and his prolific writing for money has led to the sick dissolution he finds himself in. He perhaps is worried about a worse punishment in the hereafter. Yet the woodcut is amateurish in a way that makes it inadvertently hilarious: the viewer is able to see under the table-clothed desk that Greene writes upon, yet his legs are not visible, making one wonder if he is without them, or if they are simply very stubby. His arms are thin and awkward-looking, and the bundled death shroud gathered about his figure acts less like the memento mori the artist no doubt intended it to, but instead makes Greene appear to be nothing so much as a particularly erudite, sentient onion. Greene has recently had a resurgence in scholarly interest, in part because he was no slouch of a writer. His 1589 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is a rarely performed gem of the early English theater, engaging themes of magic, power, and vanity, and if it is not the equal of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, it is at least a worthy companion piece to it. In the play, Greene fictionalizes the career of the infamous medieval Franciscan (and precursor to a modern scientist) Roger Bacon and his attempts to build a massive, divinatory, conscious bronze head. The piece is thematically fascinating from our contemporary standpoint and deserves more critical attention than it has received, not least because the bronze head is evocative of a digital artificial intelligence, while the friar’s attempts to encircle Britain in a massive brass wall remind one of current security state paranoia. In addition to his dramatic career, during his short life Greene produced twenty-five prose works, in which he established himself as a London literary character whose personality was as commodified as his actual writing, and whose seemingly outrageous and sinful lifestyle was a promotional measure for his pamphlets. Professional writing was a completely new concept in late Elizabethan England, and though playwrights and poets like Jonson certainly had a knack for self-advertising, they still craved the respectability of aristocratic patronage, and sometimes displayed a wariness about the so-called “stigma of print”. Greene didn’t exhibit the same uneasiness: he pumped out books at an astonishingly prolific rate. Dr Johnson famously said that only an idiot would write for a reason other than money; if this is the case, then Robert Greene was a very smart man, even if his lifestyle was sometimes more threadbare than he would have liked. As with any writer whose oeuvre is as wide and diverse as his, Greene’s output can be of spotty quality. He developed a reputation for desiring notoriety more than fidelity to artistic vision, and yet in this he prefigures the professional writers of subsequent generations, and also the bohemians with whom his name is so often associated. It’s true that bohemianism is a nineteenth-century affectation, drawing its name from the 1851 novel La Vie de Bohème by Henri Murger and celebrated by Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La boheme. It could be argued that the sort of marginal, transgressive, romantic lifestyle attached to art itself requires the deprivations and degradations of a capitalist economy to really develop, something that was nascent in Greene’s day. And in a more practical sense, one could think that Greene’s own crass devotion to making money from cheap print was a rejection of the utopian aestheticism embraced by true bohemians. This, however, would be a mistake: if anything, Greene’s grubby, opportunistic attitude towards literary work, coupled with his public persona as an outcast, makes it hard not to see him as a consummate bohemian. This is not in spite of, but precisely because of, his higher education. A recipient of an MA from Cambridge, Greene was labeled alongside other dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and John Lyly as a “University Wit”, something that he could be overwhelmingly elitist about. If anything, bohemianism from the French symbolists to the Lost Generation to the Beats didn’t just accept a certain elitism, but thrived on it. The bohemian is after all separate from the stultifying strictures of bourgeois or square society. Central to this vision — whether you’re Rimbaud in the steep, crooked lanes of Montmartre, or Allen Ginsberg in the alleyways of Greenwich Village — is a sense of slumming it. Greene was a good Cambridge man, getting drunk in taverns and whorehouses, denouncing fellow writers in print, and greedily pawing the returns from his work. This doesn’t contradict his classification as a bohemian; it confirms it. With the incantatory and psychedelic style of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the university training, and the rows of smudged pamphlets bringing bank into Greene’s pockets (which ensured another hungover morning) he resembles a sort of early modern William S. Burroughs. Like Greene, Burroughs was also slumming it and his avant-garde novels with lurid covers and names like Junky and Queer could be found lining the magazine stalls of mid-century Grand Central and Penn Station. These twentieth-century cheap paperbacks with their primary colored illustrations of leggy dames and muscular young men are the equivalent of Greene’s “coney-catching” pamphlets, which provided the respectable with the secrets of rakish and criminal life much as Burroughs told the middle-class tales of anomie among the marginalized addicts and perverts of New York. Greene titillates readers with stories about “coney-catching” (a euphemistic metaphor for theft; a “coney” was an early-modern term for a rabbit), and cut-pursing, which involved literally cutting open someone’s bag without them noticing. In his accounts Greene reports the exploits of seedy, dissolute Londoners for his respectable audiences in a glassy and journalistic tone, supposedly narrating in a repentant voice, but with a sense that a bit of the amoral still clings to its supposedly reformed author. Greene’s most famous work is A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance. It is in a manner a conversion narrative. Yet unlike John Bunyan or John Wesley, Robert Greene has one eye open while he is in penitential prayer. Reformation audiences were like modern evangelicals, they loved a good sinner’s tale, and Greene knew how to lay it on thick. A Groatsworth of Wit combines several modes together: fable, poetry, and memoir are exhibited in the relatively short text, reflecting the promiscuous relationship between fiction and non-fiction that was so popular in Renaissance romance. The pamphlet purports to be the story of two brothers, Roberto and Lucanio, and their time spent with a courtesan named Lamilia. Her name is evocative of the succubus Lamia, a beautiful daemon and muse of classical mythology (enshrined in John Keats’ poem of 1820). Upon the death of their father, industrious Lucanio is left the entirety of the inheritance, and Roberto, who is a lay-about, loafing, forever speculating scholar, gets only a groat. After a night of storytelling, songs, and sexual innuendo supplied by Lamilia, Roberto attempts to conspire with the courtesan to fleece his own brother. She betrays Roberto’s confidences and he is cast out. He eventually meets an actor who convinces him of the financial possibilities of the theater. Soon Roberto becomes a successful playwright, while Lucanio spends all of his money on Lamilia and ends up working as a pimp. Ultimately, Roberto’s bohemian excess leaves him sick, dying, and broke. While waiting to die, he writes about several playwrights he has known, and warns anyone who may be interested in working in theaters about the perils in encountering these figures, judged to be every bit as nefarious as the courtesans and pimps of Lamilia’s den of iniquity. He writes of a famous dramatist guilty of atheism who many assume to be Marlowe, of a modern Juvenal who it is hypothesized is Thomas Nash, and of a third acquaintance driven to “extreme shifts” to survive, and which it has been conjectured may refer to George Peele. Eventually Greene, rather predictably, reveals that the story which has been told is actually his own. He bemoans how being a Southwark dramatist has doomed his morals and health. Greene unconvincingly asks for repentance, and writes in feigned fear of his impending death. As is the narrative convention of the conversion tale, the reader is treated to some juicy details of not just “Roberto” Greene’s life, but indeed of his interactions with the increasingly famous members of bohemian London. In this way, Greene basically invented the gossipy celebrity tell-all, just as trashy as a tabloid account about the predilections and peccadillos of the inhabitants of Sunset Boulevard. Greene’s pamphlet may have contained a plea for salvation, but he wasn’t going to go to hell before settling some scores. Greene, Marlowe, Nash, and Peele were all college-educated and represented an upwardly mobile intelligentsia that was reshaping English society by finding success through intellectual acumen and not just aristocratic connection. For though they were men denied their “groatsworth”, that is, not aristocrats, they were still classically educated, firm in their Greek and Latin, and conversant with traditional culture. Greene reveled in the exploits of the degenerate in his coney-catching pamphlets, but he was resentful of those he viewed as outside his class having the hubris to see themselves as capable producers of culture (even though his own academic record at Cambridge was less than impressive). Greene’s chief target was “an upstart Crow”, who “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you”. Readers would have understood the “upstart Crow” to be an actor — crows being mere mimics of actual voices and having no language of their own. As an “upstart” he would be one whose young age betrays his ambition as arrogant and naïve. That this actor-turned-playwright “supposes” he is able to “bombast out a blank verse” (the alliteration of the line being slightly ridiculous and also mimicking the explosive “bombast” and arrogance of this writer), belies the fact that this upstart crow is simply a “Johannes factotum”, that is a “Johnny Do-It-All”, or a Jack-Of-All-Trades (and master of none). This Johnny-Do-It-All has beautified his verse “with our feathers”. He has appropriated the “mighty-line” of Marlowe’s unrhymed iambic pentameter with blustery confidence (though he is a mere technician). He has a “tiger’s heart, wrapped in a player’s hyde”, unable to fully escape the stigma of first playing on the stage before he would write for it. This line makes more sense when placed in some context — it’s a parody London audiences would recognize — “Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide” — from a play called Henry VI: Part III. It was by an actor with the hubris to think he could write plays the equal of someone like Greene, a writer by the name of William Shakespeare. And this playwright was popular — Greene complains that by his “own conceit” he was “the only Shake-scene” in the country. It’s the earliest known written reference to Shakespeare as a playwright. Baconians, Oxfordians, and all other conspiracy theorists who doubt the veracity of Shakespeare’s authorship should note that Greene didn’t doubt Shakespeare was the author of his plays, he just didn’t think those plays were any good. But it is Shakespeare’s name, not Greene’s, that history bequeathed to posterity. Jonson shared some of Greene’s prejudice against the workman-like son of a glove maker from Stratford, infamously saying that Shakespeare knew “small Latin, and less Greek”. And yet he also said that Shakespeare was “the soul of the age”. Greene was ultimately very much of his time, which is in its own way an irreparable literary loss, for our era could be greatly enriched by him. Nobody could credibly claim that he has that talent of the playwright and poet who he so mercilessly attacked in his deathbed confession, but his verse may still be able to speak to us, perhaps even sing. Greene could marry an educated man’s verse with the poetry of the street. His poem “Weep Not, My Wanton” has the cadence and rhythm of the folk ballads which were just starting to be disseminated through cheaply printed broadsheets, some of which would be collected as Child Ballads and played as music for centuries. He writes, “Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee: / When thou art old there’s grief enough for thee. / Mother’s wag, pretty boy, / Father’s sorrow, father’s joy”. In content, theme, and scansion it reminds one of the Scottish folk ballad “Lord Randall”, which would first be printed less than two decades later, and would more famously become the basis for the chorus of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. Indeed with its simple rhymes, its inverted parallelisms (“Father’s sorrow, father’s joy”), it wouldn’t have been surprising if one heard a musical arrangement of this in a Macdougal Street bar or a coffee shop off of Canal or Houston in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Greene, like Dylan and all other high-culture cannibals of folk and popular culture, had an ear for everyday speech and was able to write poetry that sounds simple but not simplistic. Greene’s misanthropic pose towards the world wasn’t new — his lyric from a poem included in A Groatsworth of Wit that reads “Deceiving world, that with alluring toys / Hast made my life the subject of thy scorn” expresses an attitude that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to Solomon in Ecclesiastes. Greene is Oscar Wilde’s romantic who may be lying in the gutter but is staring at the stars. In his jaded, hurt, and bruised relationship with the world, Greene sings: Oft have I sung of love and of his fire;But now I find that poet was advised,Which made full feasts increase of desire,And proves weak love was with the poor despised;For when the life with food is not sufficed,What thoughts of love, what motion of delight,What pleasance can process from such a weight? Greene knows he has talent, but now his “gifts bereft” from the “high heavens”. Parnassus is inaccessible, the muse does not speak, and Greene sees “the murder of my wit”. Well into his thirties, Greene wasn’t a young man anymore, especially in an era that saw death call on many so much earlier than in subsequent generations. And yet there is a bit of the Romantic death in Greene as an artist whose excesses pushed him to the edge of creativity and mortality. If the nineteenth century had Keats and Rimbaud, and the twentieth our “Club of 27” composed of rock stars who expired before infirmity, then Greene is a worthy candidate for the sixteenth century. He writes of poetic inspiration “Because so long they lent them me to use, / And so I long their bounty did abuse”. He begs unsuccessfully that “Oh that a year were granted me to live, / And for that year my former wits restored!” He ends “My time is loosely spent, and I undone”. If we’re to believe the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare got his final revenge on the dead Greene when he based one of his greatest characters on him: a drunken, cowardly blowhard by the name of Falstaff. We can’t retroactively diagnose what killed Greene at the age of thirty-four. The writer Gabriel Harvey wrote that it was because of “a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine”. Based on what we know of his lifestyle, cirrhosis seems not unlikely, though one can’t discount the possibility of venereal disease (even if he didn’t bear the trademark physical deformations or madness of syphilis). Perhaps it was a combination of causes. Poets had died young before — Philip Sidney was famously slain by a bullet at Zutphen, Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey was felled by an axe of Henry VIII, and Chidiock Tichborne, whose youth was “but a frost of cares”, was executed by order of Elizabeth. But the aristocratic Sidney was a martyr for the Protestant cause in defense of the Dutch during the Eighty Years War, and the other two were killed for political and religious reasons. Greene was simply a hack writer and versifier. He is the first of a type: the artist pushed to extremes, who has the courage to go beyond the edge into excess, but who does not have the strength to return. The brazen head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay only speaks three lines: “Time is. . . . Time was. . . . Time is past”. Now we have new machines, more powerful than Greene’s magical brazen head. Can the poets of the past speak again? Can a new brazen head proclaim that, for Greene, “Time is now”? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 27, 2016

Ed Simon

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:25.338969

out-of-their-love-they-made-it-a-visual-history-of-buraq

Out of Their Love They Made It A Visual History of Buraq By Yasmine Seale September 21, 2016 Although mentioned only briefly in the Qur'an, the story of the Prophet Muhammad's night journey to heaven astride a winged horse called Buraq has long caught the imagination of artists. Yasmine Seale charts the many representations of this enigmatic steed, from early Islamic scripture to contemporary Delhi, and explores what such a figure can tell us about the nature of belief. Oh this is the creature that never was.They didn’t know it, still they daredto love its stride, its bearing and its breast,clean to the calm light of its eyes.It was not. Out of their love they made it,this pure creature . . . Rainer Maria Rilke,from Sonnets to Orpheus You came here because you were told to, and because here is where wonderful things are known to happen at night. You comb the streets, the tangle of unfamiliar smells — poultry, muskmelon, marigold — until you reach the pockmarked, once-red wall of the Ship Palace. There’s a sad sort of majesty to the place, but you’re not here for the beauty of ruins. You’re here for the hauz, the tank, its fabled waters now scummed over with algae and detritus. In your hand there is a pamphlet, saffron yellow and Hindi scrawl, with a telephone number and an instruction: to call between 6 and 8 p.m., to speak long and loud, to say hello. You say hello and for a moment the horse flickers into life, its incandescent frame reflected in the water. A crowd has bloomed around the tank. Children sing into receivers: “hello” becomes a ten-syllable word. Soon the line is swamped as callers compete for the creature’s fitful attention. Not quite the miracle you had in mind, this rickety chimera — part neon piñata, part show pony, plus wings — assembled at the local metalworks and lit up by Chinese-made LEDs. Still, it is a thing of wonder: a winged horse rests on the surface of a lake and human voices make it glow. Say Hello to the Hauz (2010), the brainchild of designer and filmmaker Vishal Rawlley, was an attempt to revive the long-neglected water reservoir in Mehrauli, one of the seven ancient cities that make up the state of Delhi. Drawing on the story of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven astride a winged horse called Buraq, Rawlley designed a sculpture of the creature, fitted it with a phone line and a constellation of fairy lights, and left it to bob in the middle of the tank. People could dial in and speak; their voices would trigger the phantasmagoria. In the night footage preserved online, Buraq’s skeleton flashes on and off to the babble of unseen voices. The gasps are subtitled, the curiosity palpable. What to an outsider may have seemed an alien landing was really the portal to a mythic past: the horse had a history here. The hauz was built in the thirteenth century after an early “slave sultan” of Delhi, Shamsuddin Iltutmish, dreamed he was visited by the Prophet Muhammad astride his winged steed. In the dream, the Prophet directed the king to a fountainhead that sprang where Buraq struck the ground with her hoof. On waking, the story goes, Iltutmish hurried to the site where he discovered the mark of a hoof imprinted on the earth. Dreams were an important part of the apparatus of medieval kingship; auspicious visions could steady a shaky crown. More, a widely circulated hadith declared that seeing the Prophet in a dream was equal to seeing him physically. To dream of the Prophet, then — in other words, to be considered a direct witness to his words and deeds, which together form the basis of Islamic law — was to be in a very privileged position indeed, and Iltutmish acknowledged the honour with due piety: he built a water tank, the Hauz-i-Shamsi, to mark the hallowed spot. For centuries the tank remained a site of local devotion. Magical properties were ascribed to its waters, and the great fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta described how small boats ferried pilgrims to the red sandstone pavilion at its centre. The story of the reservoir and its otherworldly aura echoes another origin myth: that of the Hippocrene, or Horse Fountain, which sprang from the hoof-scuff of Pegasus and is remembered in Greek mythology as a fount of poetic inspiration. Unlike Pegasus, however, who emerged fully formed from the blood of Medusa, Buraq’s conception was gradual, her evolution more peculiar and circuitous. She crops up on Persian miniatures and Pakistani trucks, Zanzibari ephemera and Libyan airplanes, Senegalese glass paintings and Indian matchboxes. Yet despite her many incarnations, or perhaps because of them, her essence remains elusive. There is no original, no definitive Buraq, but rather an unruly palimpsest of jumbled creeds, kitsch, and sheer artistic caprice. The bare bones of Buraq look like this. From the Arabic root b-r-q, which means to shine or sparkle, her name evokes the lightning speed with which she carried the Prophet from Mecca to Jerusalem and thereon to heaven, an episode known as the mi‘raj, or “ascension”. The Qur’an alludes to this journey — in two cryptic verses that lend a whole chapter (“The Night Journey”) its title — but makes no mention of the vehicle. Because Buraq is absent from scripture, theologians give her short shrift, confining her to fly-by-night cameo roles: she first appears in the eighth century, in the earliest extant biography of the Prophet, as a “winged beast, white in colour, smaller than a mule and larger than an ass”. Buraq is a creature not of scripture but of lore, and in these early writings she is still a vague, unfinished thing, uncertain of shape, let alone sex. She will take centuries to evolve a human face: some five hundred years passed before the historian al-Tha‘labi wrote that Buraq “had a cheek like the cheek of a human being”, a not-quite metaphor that launched her never quite completed metamorphosis. The literature on Muhammad’s ascension to heaven grew to be enormous, but only after it slipped its scriptural moorings and slid out into poetry and folklore. Every life of the Prophet had a chapter on the subject, and scholars and mystics endlessly pondered its meaning. The story was deployed and reinterpreted among Islam’s subcultures, and also among its foes: there are versions in Malay, Uzbek, and Old French, in Buginese and Castilian, and a beautifully illuminated version in Chaghatay, a form of Middle Turkish named after Genghis Khan’s second son. Like Buraq herself, the story has never settled into a final form; it alters every time it is told. In some accounts, the duo do not stop at Jerusalem but venture through the seven heavens where, at the climax of their journey, the Prophet comes face to face with God. There he might meet a celestial rooster, or a polycephalous angel, and sometimes he pays a visit to his mother and father in hell. In others, the Prophet ascends to heaven by means of a glittering ladder, having fastened Buraq to a wall at the foot of the Temple Mount. (To this day the spot is known as the Buraq Wall to Muslims and the Western or Wailing Wall to Jews.) Buraq was not born a woman, she became one — but when this happened is unclear. At some point an anonymous genius gave her a lustrous mane and a jeweled throat, and artists have never looked back. In her many guises classical and modern, Buraq is squarely female, adorned now with a peacock tail, now with a leopard-print coat, almost always with a gem-encrusted crown and brightly coloured wings. She grew into a staple of Muslim visual art, seizing the collective imagination until writers too followed suit. By the sixteenth century, the Persian historian Khwandamir could write that Buraq had a face like that of a human and ears like those of an elephant; its mane was like the mane of a horse; its neck and tail like those of a camel; its breast like the breast of a mule; its feet like the feet of an ox. Its breast looked just like a ruby and its hair resembled white armor, shining brightly by reason of its exceeding purity. The Persian language has no gender, obliging writers like Khwandamir to continue to describe Buraq in neuter terms even as she gained in feminine lustre and finery. It is perhaps no coincidence that Buraq is most spectacularly beautified in works by Persian miniaturists, as if these artists were giving excessively lavish expression to a femininity their language would not allow them to convey in words — as if the sexual restraint (the “greyness”) imposed by one medium made for an aesthetic of sexual maximalism in another. If Buraq’s early, skeletal form most recalled Pegasus, the sexless winged horse of classical antiquity, her new embellishments brought her closer to those other feminized hybrids, Sphinx and Chimera. Gustave Flaubert summed up the appeal of such composite, yet distinctly female creatures: “Who has not found the Chimera charming; who has not loved her lion’s snout, her rustling eagle’s wings, and her green-glinting rump?” In taking on the allure of these figures, however, Buraq also acquired a troubling ambiguity. After all, unlike those other mythical beings, Buraq is a devotional object, theologically more akin to an archangel than to a many-headed beast of prey. She is, existentially, inseparable from Muhammad — she exists only to carry him on his journey — making her feminized appearance all the more startling. Visually, they evolve in opposite directions: the more Buraq gains in baroque adornment, the more the figure of Muhammad seems to retreat into allegory. As her body comes to the fore, his grows austere and immaterial. Bodies are everywhere in this story, and they are awkward. The friction between the historical Prophet and his fantastical mount, between the sacred and the physical, reflects a similar divide within Buraq herself: she has been perceived both as a dream-horse — mythical, sexless, emblematic — and as a creature of flesh. And Buraq as animal, especially in her more sexualised incarnations, in turn raises thorny questions about the body of the Prophet himself. Artists generally elided this problem, or creatively eluded it; early images of the Prophet tend to show him with a veil, and more recently his body has been symbolized by a white cloud, a rose or a flame. Did the Prophet ascend to heaven in body or only in spirit? For all those who grappled with the meaning of the night journey, this was a central question. One solution was to skirt the problem of bodies altogether. The Persian polymath Avicenna thought the mi‘raj a purely internal, intellectual journey; less concerned with Muhammad’s ascent than with the potential elevation of anyone engaged in abstract thought, he used the story’s currency as a folk narrative to coax a largely uninitiated community into the pursuit of philosophy. For Avicenna, the ascension tale was a useful means of dispelling anxieties about foreign intellectual traditions: by presenting these questions in terms familiar to his Muslim audience — and by reframing the Prophet’s ascension as a spiritual journey one should try to emulate — he showed that the study of philosophy was not only compatible with traditional Islamic teachings, but central to the task of the pious believer. This sounds all very well and rational, but if bodies are erased from the story — if the night journey was merely a voyage of the mind, a static reverie — what is to be done with Buraq, who is pure colour and pure form, who stands for nothing beyond her exuberant self? Avicenna doesn’t say. The reality of the prophet’s flight is dismissed in a line (“It is known that he did not go in the body, because the body cannot traverse a long distance in one moment”), but winged horses are not so easily idealised. Buraq is unavoidably, infectiously physical. Astride her back, the Prophet is wrenched out of abstraction, trapped and tangled up in the body of the beast as Leda by the swan in Yeats’ poem: “and how can body, laid in that white rush / But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?” Others felt it too. The Ottoman poet Veysi was obsessed with the physical character of the night journey, which he held to be the salient event in Muhammad’s biography; his contribution to the genre was accordingly titled The Life of the One Who Ascended. Veysi’s most famous work, the Habname or Book of Dreams, takes the form of a dream conversation between Sultan Ahmed I and Alexander the Great, and suggests a belief in the essential fluidity between the world of dreams and real life. A similar fluidity pervades Veysi’s account of the night journey, which stresses the physical reality of the ascension and of the transcendental world to which the Prophet traveled. Central to his argument are detailed descriptions of Buraq and of the Lote Tree of the Limit, which marks the edge of heaven and the boundary beyond which nothing can pass. The tree has an infinite number of branches, each with an infinite number of leaves, and on each leaf sits a huge angel carrying a staff of light. A Sufi text calls it “a tree without description”, which grew from “an unimaginable ocean of musk”. What sorts of things are these that are rendered in exquisite detail yet remain “without description”, both sensually evoked and still “unimaginable”? The clue to Buraq’s nature, perhaps, lies in this paradox. That Avicenna and Veysi represent seemingly irreconcilable views — that Buraq can be considered both pure abstraction and pure physicality — is hardly surprising; it is in her nature to divide. In its earliest versions the ascension story functioned as a kind of shibboleth: those who believed in Muhammad’s heavenly ascension were regarded as having accepted his prophetic mission, whereas those who did not were deemed to have rejected Islam itself. This problem of belief was recently revived in a debate archived on YouTube under the title “Richard Dawkins versus Muhammad’s Buraq horse”. The Oxford Union had invited Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, to share the stage with the journalist Mehdi Hasan — Science v. Religion, firebrand against firebrand. At one point in the video, Dawkins exclaims twice in disbelief: “You believe Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse!” The crowd jeers, Hasan flounders, and the debate grinds to a deadlock. The mere mention of Buraq — her quaintness, her garish absurdity — was apparently enough to clinch the argument, exposing Hasan the “believer” as irretrievably backward, painfully naive, or a fraud. The debate made for uncomfortable viewing. It seemed odd that among all the mystery of religious lore, the night journey — and its sensational metonym, the winged horse — should be singled out for special treatment in this way. Buraq, true to her name, seems to have become a lightning rod in the atheist crusade, a byword for the irrationality of Islam and religion in general. Yet by posing the question restrictively in terms of “belief”, both speakers ignored the many ways in which believers and non-believers might engage with an object like Buraq (in the literal sense of object, “a thing presented to the mind”), not simply as an article of faith but as metaphor, myth, paradox, emblem, or visual trope. Buraq is a product of miscegenation. First found in the nineteenth century BC, the motif of winged horses was picked up by the Assyrians, made its way through Greece and Asia Minor, and eventually became ubiquitous in Eurasia: Etruscans, Persians, Celts, Finns, Koreans, Bengalis, and Tatars all boast some version of the myth. Often these horses are able to travel at supernatural speed; they sometimes have a human head; and they can also be linked to storms and lightning. So it turns out that Buraq, far from being the risible cultural aberration deplored by Dawkins, is actually a version of one of the oldest and most widespread myths in our history, her shimmering body a receptacle for the many myths, metaphors, and moral concerns that Islam inherited. The world was a combination of real and mythological objects until somewhat recently; a clear distinction could hardly be made before the onset of modern comparative biology. And yet science has not abolished the interstitial zone which a figure like Buraq inhabits: we need such liminal objects to connect seemingly divergent realms of empirical and spiritual experience. Her presence in contemporary culture acts as a bridge between knowledge and belief, between rationalist taxonomies of the world and the vestigial power of myth. This idea finds its most forceful and literal expression in the Islamic transport industry, where the figure of Buraq, usefully combining piety and speed, recurs as a kind of patron saint. She gives her name to airlines from Libya to Indonesia, to bus companies, freight ships and motorcycle-taxis, to a space camp, to an engineering college, and to Pakistan’s first drone. The fluidity of Buraq as an aesthetic and linguistic object perhaps explain her pliability in being put to commercial use: she presides not just over wings and wheels but is also used to sell plastic and PVC, heavy metal and heavy-duty diesel (BURAQ LUBRICANTS), Indian food, and surgical instruments. The longer you study her, the deeper you dig, the more elusive Buraq’s identity becomes. In a luminous essay, “The Chimera Herself”, Ginevra Bompiani parses the symbolic implications of these composite creatures. The many-headed Chimera exemplifies the arbitrary union of countless experiences — she is the synthesis of disparate things. “She who, in myths, was purely a fiery apparition, without a voice or a history, was to become, in the early days of modern philosophy, the ens rationis, the creature of language, the metaphor of metaphor”. As a hybrid, Buraq does what metaphors do: she makes the impossible visible. “Achilles is a lion” is literally false; you cannot figure it, yet there it is on the page. In the basic metaphorical statement, “A is B”, Buraq plays the same role as the copula (the “is”), brazenly flouting the law of non-contradiction, mixing that which should not be mixed. “Since she does not exist”, Bompiani writes, “the question arises as to what Chimera is”. That depends, some might say, on what the meaning of the word is is. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 21, 2016

Yasmine Seale

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:25.881903

the-strange-case-of-mr-william-t-horton

The Strange Case of Mr William T. Horton By Jon Crabb March 9, 2016 Championed in his day by friend and fellow mystic W. B. Yeats, today the artist William T. Horton and his stark minimalistic creations are largely forgotten. Jon Crabb on a unique and unusual talent. The publisher Leonard Smithers (1861–1907) launched, bankrolled or otherwise helped the careers of an impressive variety of names: Richard Burton, Aubrey Beardsley, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and Max Beerbohm were all referred to as “Smithers People” at one time or another. He drew to his circle the most eccentric and interesting characters of the era and in 1896 launched the arts and literary magazine the Savoy to showcase many of them. Aubrey Beardsley was made art editor while Arthur Symons was placed at the editorial helm. While not entirely a “Decadent” outfit (it also published George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad), the magazine became a lightning rod for the curious and in it, as Bernard Muddiman wrote, “the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home”1. It also launched the career of an illustrator and mystic named William T. Horton. Arguably one of the most fascinating and most unusual of all the “Smithers People”, he published very little work and remains almost completely unknown today. In total, Horton contributed to four issues of the Savoy, which actually makes him the magazine’s most regular artist besides its art editor Aubrey Beardsley. His first contribution was three drawings accompanied by biblical quotes, which appeared in the second issue. These incredibly striking images bear little resemblance to other work of the period. Even in an era of bizarre decadence, they not only look unique, but practically leap off the page and declare their own weirdness. The Three Visions themselves are evoked by expansive swathes of black and white, minimal line, and a style that is simple yet highly unusual and even a little unnerving. These early pictures foreshadow the interests that would define William T Horton’s art: effective marshalling of black and white, strangely sinister figures, and an intense mysticism. Horton is a mysterious character in part because his catalogue of published work is so small, and in part because there is so little written about him. Ten years after his death, Roger Ingpen published William Thomas Horton (1864–1919): A Selection of His work with a Biographical Sketch (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1929), which provides a brief sketch of his life, but little more. His letters to W. B. Yeats have been catalogued and archived, but there is precious little beyond that. It is from these letters that we know Horton was initiated into the famous Golden Dawn occult society on Saturday, March 21, 1896, with W. B. Yeats as his sponsor.2 He also entered into a chaste, platonic relationship with fellow mystical enthusiast Amy Audrey Locke. Both are mentioned obliquely in W. B. Yeats’ dedication for his esoteric work, A Vision (1925). Horton was a lonely figure, but his friendship with Yeats was an important one which led directly to his initial Savoy work. Yeats shared a flat with Arthur Symons at Fountain Court3 and in a letter dated March 28, 1896, Horton writes, “I must write & thank you most warmly for laying my drawings before Symons who has very kindly chosen 3 for the forthcoming Savoy.”4 Horton is also known to have met his most obvious point of comparison, Aubrey Beardsley. Roger Ingpen reveals the amazing synchronicity that Aubrey Beardsley actually went to the same Brighton Grammar School that, some years earlier, Horton had gone to. Prior to his work for the Savoy, “He paid a visit to Beardsley whom he described as entirely unspoiled by his great success, and who gave him some words of encouragement at a time when he had hitherto obtained little encouragement elsewhere”.5 He is also quoted as having spoken at times “of the beauty of Beardsley’s line almost in despair”.6 It is worth noting that Beardsley (1872–1898) reached his creative peak and died by the age of twenty-five, while Horton (1864–1919) did not start studying art until he was twenty-nine and begin professionally illustrating until he was thirty-two.7 Comparisons between him and Beardsley are usually made in the few contemporary reviews he received, and have continued since his death. Peppin and Mickelthwaite in Dictionary of English Book Illustrators: The Twentieth Century (London: John Murray, 1983) wrote “Horton’s drawing had qualities of directness and clarity, even if it lacked Beardsley’s sophistication and complexity; his imagery was often powerful and original — he believed it to be inspired by some occult influence.”8 But while there are elements of the bizarre in the work of both illustrators, Horton is far less similar or derivative than a great many other Beardsley imitators that populated the late 1890s. There is a loneliness and directness unique to his art. Where Beardsley celebrates the excesses of civilization, detailing it in complex and exquisitely overwrought detail, Horton conjures isolation with wide open spaces of blank page punctuated with sparse moments of intricacy. Beardsley’s final drawings for the Savoy exemplify his growing complexity but by comparison, Horton’s other Savoy illustrations are stark affairs, such as his Ballade des Pendus in No. 6 and his drawing in No. 7 to accompany Keats’ lines: Now more than ever seems it rich to dieTo cease upon the midnight without pain. In 1898, the arts and literary magazine Dome included a few Horton images, which are of a slightly less sinister variety than his other work. That same year though, the editor of the Dome — E. J. Oldmeadow — published Horton’s masterpiece, A Book of Images, through his company Unicorn Press. This showed him moving further into symbolist, mystical art and features a number of profoundly empty, almost existentially threatening images that dealt with modern city themes. The Wave shows a town dwarfed by an immense tsunami, poised to crush the tiny houses. Nocturne illustrates a city’s skyline — a diminutive device he used several times — and then cleaves it in two with a river. The Gap continues the theme of separation with an abyssal chasm between two barely discernible settlements. ※※Indexed under…Wavespoised to destroy a town If his grotesque qualities were harking back to the Decadence of Beardsley, then surely his interest in separation, loneliness, and fractured humanity was heralding the arrival of the Moderns. W. B. Yeats wrote the introduction to A Book of Images and firmly established the mystical qualities behind the work, writing that Horton “has his waking dreams, but more detailed and vivid than mine; and copied them as if they were models posed for him by some unearthly master”.9 He later calls Horton’s images “the reverie of a lonely and profound temperament”.10 Yeats’ introduction also reveals the reason behind Horton’s preference for black and white images: He tried at first to copy his models in colour, and with little mastery over colour when even great mastery would not have helped him, and very literally: but soon found that you could only represent a world where nothing is still for a moment, and where colours have odours and odours musical notes, by formal and conventional images, midway between the scenery and persons of common life, and the geometrical emblems on mediaeval talismans.11 This profession to the synaesthesia of mystical vision aligns him with the occult theory of correspondence in vogue with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Symbolists. The impossibility of realizing the true symphony of correspondence outside of mystical reverie confines him to black and white, but arguably his restraint allows for an even bigger impact on the imagination. In a letter to Yeats dated July 30, 1896, Horton writes: I agree with Dürer that it is impossible to depict exactly the unearthly beauties & colours that form part of my Visions. Blake attempted to depict the colour & to my mind failed [. . .] Even the form in black & white gives only an idea but then the colour can be filled in by imagination. But in form and colour the imagination from the outset is defiled, adulterated [. . .] Never yet have I seen a coloured picture that could live up to the colouring of some of my Visions. Often the loveliness of colouring in Visions is brought about by the flashing, quivering, intermingling play of myriads of different tints, tints often never seen in Nature. And then there is the entrancing music in which Visions of beauty as it were, bathe and revel. To give the nearest idea of Visions would require the Greatest Artist & the Greatest Magician working in one.12 After the Savoy ceased publication at the end of 1896, the relationship between Leonard Smithers and Horton continued and resulted in Horton illustrating a high-quality edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven [and] The Pendulum in 1899. Given the disturbing, psychological tension of Poe, this would appear a perfect match, but for some reason — possibly at Smithers’ encouragement — Horton opted to do black chalk drawings, which are not as successful as his usual pen line drawings. He seemed to acknowledge this in a letter to Yeats: “Some, like Smithers, Robert Ross etc. speak highly of my chalks, others, like Oldmeadow, prefer my b. & white landscapes. You must remember the Poe chalks are merely an introduction to this style — I have done several since then which shew improvement.”13 In the late 1890s there is evidence that Leonard Smithers might have seen Horton as a possible replacement for Aubrey Beardsley, who had been a perfect illustrator for Smithers’ publications, but unfortunately for both of them was now dying rapidly from tuberculosis. In a letter to Yeats, Horton seemed optimistic about his relationship with Smithers: “I have another set for Vol. 2 of Poe if Vol. 1 pays & perhaps another Book of Images with drawings in Black Chalk — a bigger thing than the Unicorn B. of Images”.14 If he had made an impression on Smithers, it is uncertain what others thought of him. Ernest Dowson wrote to Smithers to say that the Savoy No. 2 was “better than the first number, as far as its literature, but Beardsley is not so good, & your new man Horton, I do not care for”.15 In a morbid twist, it seems as though Horton was inspired by Dowson when he illustrated the ghoulish front cover to a translation of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, published by Smithers in 1899. Oscar Wilde took the starving man on the cover to be a “horrible caricature of Ernest [Dowson]”.16 With overtones of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote Smithers after publication, “The picture of Hunger grows more like Ernest daily. I now hide it.”17 Dowson, the Decadent poet, was renowned for his youthful beauty but within a year would die from chronic alcoholism, aged just thirty-two. Horton did no further work for Smithers after Hunger and Poe, and retreated from that world of “naughty nineties” decadence further into solitary mysticism. In the early years of the new century he had several illustrations published in the Occult Review and several published in the Green Sheaf (1903–4), a magazine edited and published by Pamela Coleman Smith. Smith was the artist who illustrated the iconic Rider-Waite tarot deck (more properly, the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck) in 1910. Besides his own Book of Images, Horton also did illustrations for two other mystical books; another visionary text of his own, The Way of the Soul, a Legend in Line and Verse (London: William Rider & Son, 1910); and H. Rider Haggard’s The Mahatma and the Hare, a Dream Story (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911). Horton was clearly immersed in the London occult scene during the 1900s, but in 1905 he also finally attracted the attention of the Studio, the era’s foremost journal of design and illustration. The September issue featured several Horton illustrations, which are of a more mature and less ominous style. The short review, printed in full below, is a good insight into the critical reception of his work at the time. In their particular style they are decidedly of the best order, Mr Horton’s line being clear, precise and definite, and expressively decorative. It is a style of drawing which Mr Horton has always practiced successfully in his illustrations. It may be said to owe its inception partly to the genius of Aubrey Beardsley, and partly to Mr Anning Bell. Mr SH Sime has used it often admirably, and sometimes carelessly, in his designs. Mr Horton is always careful, but the patience with which he elaborates in places is always cleverly relieved by empty white spaces. In the management of these white spaces the artist shows cunning, and in the economical use of his line. It is a pretty and effective method of making a decorative drawing; and Mr Horton’s work is an example of sound and pure line work in a class of designing which depends entirely upon the purity and vigour of the drawing of single lines for its success as a method of artistic expression.18 In the final assessment it is this superior draughtsmanship that distinguishes him as much as his “strange adventure” in the occult described by W. B. Yeats.19 His highly symmetrical curvilinear forms are quite unique among his generation and show a skilful hand. Sadly, he published little after 1912 and, in 1916, suffered a mental breakdown after the death of his partner Amy Audrey Locke. In 1918, he was hit by a car and further incapacitated. He died in obscurity the following year. His friend Roger Ingpen published a biography in 1929 and began with the words: “He was not widely known to the general public, but his gifts were highly appreciated by a small circle who are faithful to the conviction that his work is destined to a wider recognition in the future.”20 I strongly hope that this comes to pass and that you too will be struck by his extraordinary drawings. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 9, 2016

Jon Crabb

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:26.245718

george-washington-at-the-siamese-court

George Washington at the Siamese Court By Ross Bullen April 21, 2016 Keen to appear outward-looking and open to Western culture, in 1838 the Second King of Siam bestowed upon his son a most unusual name. Ross Bullen explores the curious case of “Prince George Washington”, a 19th-century Siamese prince. In October of 1856, readers of the New York Daily Times were eager for news from Siam. In the 1850s, most Americans would only be familiar with the Southeast Asian nation now known as Thailand through its most famous citizens, Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins”, who had been living in the United States. since 1830. But the Kingdom of Siam itself — its geography, its government, its culture — was a total mystery. However, a new treaty between Siam and the United States, negotiated in 1856 by Townsend Harris, the first US Consul General in Japan, kindled a public interest in all things Siamese. In an article titled “From Siam”, the Times’ correspondent does not hesitate to dampen the public’s enthusiasm. “The importance of a commercial treaty with such a people has been and will be overrated in the United States”, he writes. “The present prospects of Siam are not flattering”. Seemingly without any sense of irony, the author of “From Siam” criticizes the widespread practice of slavery in Siam, and states his belief that “The kingdom is in a state of unrest . . . which may end in a civil war”. If the Times’ correspondent failed to see the shared potential for civil unrest in both his own country and Siam, other points of comparison between Siam and the United States were harder to ignore. The author reports that we had a Siamese Prince to visit our ship a short time since, who went by the proud name of ‘Prince GEORGE WASHINGTON.’ During George’s rambles around the ship, if any of his inferior subjects came in his way, they would sprawl themselves out instanter far down and wriggle themselves out of the way like a worm. A Siamese prince, demanding that his “inferior subjects” prostrate themselves before him, and adopting the name of the United States’ first president, was too odd a figure to ignore; indeed, descriptions of Prince George Washington would become a regular feature of American writing about Siam from the mid-1850s to the turn of the century. But who was this unusually named prince? And what did the Americans who wrote and read about him think he could teach them about Siam? Or about America? Prince George Washington was really Prince Wichaichan, the son of the Second King of Siam. The institution of the “Second King” was another common point of confusion for American and European visitors to Siam. The Times’ correspondent attempts to explain the position to his readers using an American political vocabulary: “The second King is a King only in name, being subservient to the first King in all things, and during the life of the first King he is a mere cipher in state affairs, except in his absence, when he holds the reins of government, being a kind of Vice-President.” Perhaps needless to say, the job of the Second King actually had very little in common with the vice presidency of the United States. When he came to power in 1851, King Mongkut created the role in order to appease his powerful younger brother, Pinklao. Although the position was largely symbolic, the title would have enhanced Pinklao’s claim to the throne in the event that he outlived Mongkut (he didn’t). Later in his life, Wichaichan would serve as Second King to Mongkut’s son Chulalongkorn. So although Wichaichan was an important political figure in Siam, he was also always kept at a firm remove from a real position of power. He would often meet with visiting US dignitaries, who could not help noting — implicitly and explicitly — the contrast between the nickname “George Washington”, which was synonymous with US political power, and Wichaichan’s seemingly neutered political ambitions. Wichaichan’s unusual nickname was the result of his father’s commitment to “modernize” Siam by studying and deliberately emulating Western culture. This “Siamese Occidentalism”, as the Thai anthropologist Pattana Kitiarsa explains it, “is not simply a reversal of Western Orientalist logics and power/knowledge relations. It is the historically and culturally rooted system of epistemological tactics employed by Siam’s rulers and intellectual elites to turn the Otherness of farang [white foreigners] into ambiguous objects of those elites’ desires to be modern and civilized.”1 Prince George Washington was one such “ambiguous object”, bearing both the name of a US president and a royal title that was wholly incompatible with the American political system. By naming his son Prince George Washington (in addition to his many other royal names and titles), Pinklao wished to communicate that he was a progressive person who was drawn to modern American culture, while never abandoning his fundamental commitment to Siam’s absolute monarchy. Pinklao’s self-fashioned hybridity was picked up on by visiting American writers, who almost always preferred him to the more conservative and conventional King Mongkut. For example, in his 1873 travelogue Siam, the Land of the White Elephant, as It Was and Is, George B. Bacon recalls a meeting with Pinklao in the year 1857. “It was hard to believe that I was in a remote and almost unknown corner of the old world, and not in the new”, Bacon writes of his visit with the Second King, since “the conversation was such as might take place between two gentlemen in a New York parlor.” For Bacon, even Pinklao’s clothing becomes a metaphor for the Second King’s Siamese-American hybridity and the transformation Siam itself will undergo as a result of its increased contact with the West. “Half European, half Oriental in his dress, he had combined the two styles with more good taste than one could have expected”, Bacon writes. “It was characteristic of that transition from barbarism to civilization, upon which his kingdom is just entering”. If an American writer like Bacon could view Pinklao’s clothing as a metaphor for Siam’s social transformation, then the Second King’s son, Prince George Washington, was an even more potent political symbol. There is some disagreement about whether Pinklao named Wichaichan “George Washington” himself, or if it was the work of a patriotic American missionary. In The English Governess at the Siamese Court, Anna Leonowens claims that “an American missionary, who was on terms of intimacy with the father, named the child ‘George Washington’”, and in an obituary for Wichaichan printed in the Baptist Missionary Magazine, author and missionary Fannie Roper Feudge claims that she “had the honor of naming the royal babe. . . and as the father had requested that the name selected should combine that of an English king and an American president, ‘George Washington’ was chosen”. It is unlikely that Wichaichan would have been given this nickname without his father’s explicit approval, but it is possible that Feudge or another American missionary may have suggested Washington as a suitable name for the young Siamese prince. If this is the case it would be consistent with how American writers in the nineteenth century used the iconic image of George Washington to think about the United States’ increasing contact with exotic and distant lands and peoples. Because he was such a definitive and recognizable symbol of the United States itself, Washington was the perfect figure for expressing concern over what might happen to the American character if it came into contact with a foreign “other”. Early in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, Ishmael struggles to reconcile his conflicted feelings for the South Seas harpooner Queequeg. At first Ishmael is worried that Queequeg is a cannibal who will murder him in his sleep, but after they share a bed for the night, Queequeg declares that he and Ishmael are “married. . . meaning, in his country’s phrase, that [they] were bosom friends”. Queequeg’s otherness is offset by his sudden and profound intimacy with Ishmael — the cannibal from Kokovoko is now part of Ishmael’s American family. Fascinated by his new friend, Ishmael offers the following odd description of Queequeg: With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face — at least to my taste — his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. Ishmael was not alone in his phrenological fascination with George Washington. In Orson Squire Fowler’s The Practical Phrenologist, Washington is presented as an example of the “well-balanced temperament”, which is “by far the best” skull type Fowler identifies. Queequeg may be “cannibalistically developed”, but his Washington-like phrenological features suggest that he is nevertheless an honest and respectable person. This interest in the features of the original George Washington’s skull can be detected in descriptions of Prince George Washington as well. In Feudge’s obituary for Wichaichan, she notes that “in person, ‘King George Washington’ was of tall, compact figure, indicative alike of strength and beauty; of full, pleasing face, and well-formed head”. Racialized George Washingtons were a recurrent trope in nineteenth-century American writing, including in texts set in the United States itself. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we are told that “the wall over the fireplace” of Tom’s slave cabin “was adorned with some very brilliant scriptural prints, and a portrait of General Washington, drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero, if ever he happened to meet with its like”. This portrait of a black George Washington had a real-life analogue in Hawaii, at least according to Mark Twain in an 1866 letter written during a visit to the islands (which were not yet part of the United States). “We were next introduced to General George Washington,” Twain writes, “or, at least, to an aged, limping Negro man, who called himself by that honored name.” After going on to tell us that this man is kept in chains in a Hawaiian prison, Twain drily notes, “I do not think he is the old original General W.” For literary critic Amy Kaplan, Twain’s black General George Washington and Melville’s cannibalistic George Washington both serve to “acknowledge and ridicule the desire for independence by non-white peoples”.2 Washington’s image, associated with the Revolutionary War and American liberty, is attenuated by his black skin or tattoos, creating a juxtaposition that would be amusing to white nineteenth-century readers who were sceptical that the freedoms Washington stood for could be extended to non-white persons as well. A similar dynamic is at work in descriptions of Prince George Washington, as American writers wanted to acknowledge and approve of attempts by Siamese elites like Pinklao, Wichaichan, and Chulalongkorn to “modernize” Siam by becoming more American, while also maintaining a strict distinction between the non-white Siamese and white Americans. In his recollection of his visit with Pinklao in 1857, George B. Bacon also shares his impressions of Wichaichan. Bacon is pleased with the physical appearance of the “tall, manly, handsome youth” when he meets him, but is even more taken aback by his unusual name: He has a kingly name — a more than kingly name. For the second king, seeking a significant name for his son, chose one which had been borne, not by an Asiatic, not by a European, but by the greatest of Americans — George Washington. ‘What’s in a name?’ It may provoke a smile at first, that such a use should be made of the name Washington, as if it were the whim of an ignorant and half-savage king. But when it shall appear, as I shall make it appear before I have finished, that this Siamese king understood and appreciated the great character of the man after whom he wished his son to be called, I think that no American will be content with laughing at him. I own that it moved me with something more than merely patriotic pride to hear the name of Washington honored in the remotest corner of the old world. Bacon’s optimism is qualified, however, when he and Prince George Washington walk together toward the Second King’s palace. “I suddenly missed the young man from my side, and turned to look for him”, Bacon writes. What change had come over him! The man had been transformed into a reptile. The tall and graceful youth, princely in look and bearing, was down on all his marrow-bones, bending his head until it almost touched the pavement of the portico, and, crawling slowly toward the door, conducted me with reverent signs and whispers toward the king, his father, whom I saw coming to meet us. For Bacon, this contrast between the regal air of the handsome, modern Prince named after “the greatest of Americans” and the absolute obeisance demanded by the Siamese monarchy is “characteristic of the strange conflict between the old barbarism and the new enlightenment which one meets at every turn” in Siam. Like the racialized George Washingtons described by Melville, Stowe, and Twain, this George Washington stops short of attaining the grandeur of his American namesake. This point is brought home for Bacon during his lunch with the Second King, as he imagines that “the portrait of the real George Washington on the wall” of Pinklao’s palace would “blush with shame and indignation” if “it looked down on the reptile attitude of his namesake.” Although the Washington portrait is merely a representation of the real George Washington, it is seemingly a more faithful copy of the original than the Siamese prince lying prostrate on his father’s floor. Although Wichaichan would succeed his father as Second King, his political career did not have a happy ending. In 1875, when his cousin First King Chulalongkorn tried to introduce progressive reforms to the Siamese political system, the conservative Wichaichan attempted to seize power. When this failed, he sought shelter with the British Consulate, eventually negotiating a truce with Chulalongkorn that allowed him to return to his palace, but with a reduced personal guard and limited political influence. Unlike General Washington, Prince George Washington had failed to lead a political revolution. Descriptions of Wichaichan following the “Front Palace Crisis” typically represent him as a somewhat sad, frustrated old man (even though he was only in his early forties). A striking example can be found in John Russell Young’s Around the World with General Grant, a travelogue that recounts Ulysses S. Grant’s world tour following his second term as president of the United States. Like George Washington, Grant was a president who earned his political capital through his storied military career. And so, in a very odd way, the meeting between Ulysses S. Grant and Prince George Washington was an anachronistic encounter between two of America’s most celebrated heroes. And yet, of course, the contrast between Prince George Washington and the real General Washington was too great for Grant — and Young, his biographer — to ignore. Young describes himself and Grant waiting for Wichaichan in his palace, which to their eyes “bore an aspect of decay”. “In a few moments his Majesty appeared and gave us a cordial greeting”, Young writes. An illness in his limbs gives him a slow, shuffling gait, and he told us he had not been in the upper story of his palace for a year. We sat under the canopy and talked about only America and Siam. No allusion was made to any political question, the King saying that he gave most of his time to science and study. Having a nominal authority in the State he has time enough for the most abstruse calculations. Deprived of any real power, Prince George Washington — now King George Washington — lived in a dilapidated palace and pursued harmless intellectual pursuits instead of the political duties that his royal birth and famous name should have prepared him for. “The King seemed sad and tired in his manner”, Young writes, “as if he would like really to be employed, as if he felt that when one is a king he should be at more stable occupations than turning ivory boxes on a wheel, or mixing potter’s clay”. When the real George Washington retired to his slave plantation at Mount Vernon he was regarded as a hero in the United States and throughout the world. The contrast between Washington’s retirement, resting on the laurels of a lifetime of military and political victories, and the forced retirement of Siam’s King George Washington is palpable in Young’s description, as a former US president looks with pity on a racialized and debased copy of one of America’s founding fathers. From the first time he was noticed by the New York Daily Times in 1856, until his death in 1885, Wichaichan would always be interpreted through the lens of his American nickname. Being named “George Washington” suggested that he was a new kind of Siamese noble, a modern, Americanized monarch who heralded a departure from the old stereotype of the “Oriental despot”. But his — and his father’s — commitment to the conservative conventions of the Siamese monarchy meant that Prince George Washington would always be kept at arm’s length from his famous namesake. In his famous book The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha describes “colonial mimicry” as a state of being “almost the same but not quite”, or more pointedly, “almost the same but not white”.3 This formulation encapsulates the attitude American writers had toward Prince George Washington, a sense of admiration and attraction offset by a deep revulsion toward cultural and racial difference. Although they were flattered to see their national hero honored in a foreign land, they believed that this living tribute could never match the original. There may have been two kings in Siam, but American history had room for only one George Washington. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 21, 2016

Ross Bullen

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:26.809117

the-secret-history-of-holywell-street-home-to-victorian-london-s-dirty-book-trade

The Secret History of Holywell Street Home to Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade By Matthew Green June 29, 2016 Victorian sexuality is often considered synonymous with prudishness, conjuring images of covered-up piano legs and dark ankle-length skirts. Historian Matthew Green uncovers a quite different scene in the sordid story of Holywell St, 19th-century London's epicentre of erotica and smut. Tentative warning: the essay includes some mildly explicit content, both text and image, which may not be suitable for all ages and dispositions! At the eastern end of the Strand, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice, William Gladstone stands atop a plinth. Four times Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister, this eminent, emblematic Victorian is flanked by four female effigies testifying to the virtues of education, inspiration, courage, and brotherhood. Gladstone himself looks stately and solemn, as is fitting, but also mildly outraged, all clenched fists and frowns. Well might he: he’s staring straight down what was, in his day, variously described as “a foul sink of iniquity”, “a place where dirt and darkness meet and make mortal compact” and, in the words of the Times, “the most vile street in the civilized world”. This was Holywell Street, the meridian of London’s booming pornography trade and, throughout the century, a byword for the dirty book trade long before Soho. It was the very antithesis of the noble and apparently rock-solid values embodied by Gladstone’s effigy companions and an affront to his own Christianity, which saw him scouring London’s streets late at night to rescue fallen women. Today, the street has vanished. If you rest your back against Gladstone’s plinth and look down the Strand you have colossal Australia House in front of you; the grimy Church of St Mary Le Strand a little further down, lost amidst swirling tides of traffic; and to your right, dreary Aldwych curving towards Holborn. But from exactly the same vantage point in Gladstone’s day the scene would have been very different: two narrow, rambling streets squirrelling into the distance. One, to the right, was Wych Street; the other, tucked directly behind the Strand, was Holywell Street. If, when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh, we are accustomed to think of the Victorians as a prudish and repressed breed, a trip down Holywell Street in the late nineteenth century would be an eye-opening experience. It was unusual in appearance. There were crooked timber-framed houses with gables lurching over the street, blocking out the light, as though caught in a time warp from medieval London. In some senses this gave it an antique, picture-postcard charm. But many of the old wooden-fronted, deep-bayed buildings were grimy and semi-dilapidated — sleazy, even. Books abounded, stuffed into sooty shop windows, spilling onto trestle tables on the pavement, and being forever unloaded from horse-drawn carts. Above one second-hand bookshop, at number 37, was a golden crescent moon with pouting lips, thick eyebrows, a fine nose, and sad, sulky eyes — reportedly the oldest shop sign in London, one that features prominently in contemporary paintings. It guarded the entrance to Half-Moon Passage, a dark alley reeking of urine, down which pedestrians could see swarms of vehicles and people on the Strand framed in a piercingly bright aperture as though caught in the lens of a camera obscura. Situated on the cusp of Fleet Street, the nerve centre of the biggest publishing industry in the world, Holywell Street was originally the terrain of radical pamphleteers and printmakers. But following a government crackdown on subversive print in the 1810s, maverick publishers diverted their revolutionary impulses from radical politics into lucrative pornography, and the street became a powerhouse of the dirty book trade. One denizen of Holywell Street was William Dugdale, one of the most prolific publishers of dirty books. He was a wily man, full of subterfuge. Some of his favourite tricks included passing off very old books as brand new simply by changing the title, or sometimes claiming new books were vintage, giving them an unjustified kudos. He also liked to rip chapters out of other people’s books and pass them off as original short works, add racy and suggestive subtitles to completely innocent novels, and write his own advertising copy, praising the brilliance of works he had himself written. In 1857 the government passed the Obscene Publications Act, threatening pornographers with ruinous prison sentences and transforming Holywell Street into a wellspring of illicit erotica. Dugdale had to operate under at least four fake names and from several different addresses. He had managed to evade custodial sentences for some time (brazenly threatening a jury with a knife at one point) but a decade later, his luck ran out. Finally convicted, he died a lonely death in the Clerkenwell House of Corrections in 1868 having received a sentence of hard labour which, at his age, was tantamount to a death sentence. But in spite of the draconian law, shopkeepers proved resourceful and Londoners could still find, dotted among the clothes-men’s stalls and the more respectable second-hand bookshops, dollops of pornography. “At present the sale of [illicit books and prints] is only partially suppressed”, declared the authoritative Survey of London in 1878. Of a typical day on Holywell Street, there would have been swarms of men — sometimes women too — hovering outside certain shop windows and occasionally vanishing inside to sink their teeth into the forbidden fruit of Victorian London. Suggestive title pages and obscene engravings in the window were indicative of a pornographic presence within. A mid-century Daily Telegraph article decried members of the weaker sex “furtively peeping in at these sin-crammed shop windows, timorously gloating over suggestive title-pages, guiltily bending over engravings as vile in execution as they are in subject”. And what kind of scene would have greeted customers? A dark and musty interior. The obligatory quotient of youths snout-deep in greasy books, a faint sheen of perspiration on their upper lips. A hawker arriving every so often to buy or sell. The shopkeeper eying each new customer with suspicion lest they be an undercover policeman, the bane of their existence. Say you visited in the 1890s: staring down at you would be a range of titillating titles like The Power of Mesmerism: A Highly Erotic Narrative (1891), The Seducing Cardinal (1830), and The Lustful Turk (1864). You might also find, a little further into the shop, Captain Stroke-All’s Pocket Book! (1844), An Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker (1878), and The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881). Customers wouldn’t want to miss, either, The Autobiography of a Flea (1887) and Revelries! and Devilries!! (1867). The latter has a lascivious frontispiece showing two naked women with birches ready to lash a pair of bare buttocks. To get hold of the most illicit publications, a discreet word with the bookseller might have been necessary, and even then it may have depended on whether he was on good terms with the porn king of the day. Some, like The Story of a Dildoe! — privately printed in 1880, obscenely illustrated (you can imagine how) and limited to a print run of 150 — were very rare, passing from hand to hand much like illuminated manuscripts in medieval London. Others, like Randiana, or Excitable Tales; Being the Experiences of an Erotic Philosopher (1884), were so salacious they were kept behind the counter. In this, readers are treated to a potpourri of sexual encounters featuring orgies, ecclesiastical buggery, and lesbian sex scenes complete with gutta-percha dildoes brimming with warm oil and milk. We know about these books which were readily available in Holywell Street thanks to the existence of the first pornographic bibliography in the English language, which can stake a claim to being one of the most thrilling — and longest — bibliographies ever compiled. It was published in three parts in the 1870s and 1880s by pornography connoisseur Henry Spencer Ashbee under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi. Ashbee was the biggest collector of pornography in nineteenth-century Europe; he would have been on first-name terms with many of the booksellers of Holywell Street. The first volume of his bibliography, published in 1877, is called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, mocking the Catholic Church’s Index of Banned Books and fittingly so, for most of the works featured were printed privately or secretly — they were just the kind of books the police would destroy. The word bibliography doesn’t really do justice to the originality and brilliance of Ashbee’s endeavour. Part précis, part review, part critical analysis with absurdly long footnotes giving it an illusory academic quality belying the sheer filth of many of the titles, it was patently designed to stimulate as much as to inform, and is striking testimony to late Victorian London’s booming pornography industry. The kinds of books available on Holywell Street, as listed by Ashbee, range from the fairly innocuous to the downright obscene. Ashbee describes An Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker, for instance, as “the most coldly cruel and unblushingly indecent of any we have ever read”. It is a sadistic account of the whipping of a young girl for the edification of the Mayfair Flagellation Society. The passages in which the victim is tied up, whipped, and penetrated tread a thin line between masochistic sex and outright assault. The self-avowed theme of the colonel’s live-action lecture was “the pleasures to be derived from crushing and humiliating the spirit of a beautiful and modest young lady”. Flagellation looms large in Victorian erotica as though a fitting punishment for protagonists so flagrantly breaching the moral codes of society. Another striking book — not least because the writing seems so modern — is The Horn Book, or A Girl’s Guide to the Knowledge of Good and Evil (1899). Like much erotica, it takes the form of a dialogue, in this instance between a bored housewife, Maud, and her sexual tutor, Charlie, a “brilliantly healthy” and libidinous twenty-eight-year-old, and is at once a tale of sexual awakening and a vivid sex manual for practical use. It is divided up into instructive sections on the male and female sexual organs, intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, “gamahuching” (oral sex), and of course “how to fuck without danger of fecundation”. Charlie and Maud demonstrate sixty-three different sex positions including “dog-fashion flying”, “the sack of corn backwards”, “the cock horse”, and “the elastic cunt”. It contains some great pillow talk. “I should like, my angel,” says Charlie, “to crush my whole being into your sweet body; in your velvet mouth; your pretty rose-pink cunt; your delicious chocolate bum-hole, and I would squirt therein countless jets of thick, rich seed”. In other books, it is the woman who is the sex monster, reflecting the traditional idea that women were intrinsically more lustful than men. The Delights of Love takes a “female rake” as its protagonist, an Italian widow who gives free reign to her passions and perversions after the welcome death of her impotent husband, and in The Story of a Dildoe!, “three young American ladies resolve to procure a dildo for their mutual gratification . . . then they all meet and deflower each other with this ladies’ syringe”. ※※Indexed under…Yellowskin due to excessive masturbation If this veers into lesbian territory then The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881) is one of the first pornographic works to focus exclusively on male homosexual experience in which hardly anything is left to the imagination. At no point in this work — or in any of the works mentioned above — are the sexual escapades of the protagonists frowned upon; even the most depraved form of sexual activity is presented as licit, open-minded, and liberating, and the pacey, picaresque style in which many of them are written is suggestive of a certain playfulness and harmlessness much at odds with mainstream attitudes towards casual sex. Colonel Spanker, in his sordid lecture, invokes the Garden of Eden to prove that “a luscious indulgence in the arts of love” is the most natural thing in the world despite being “condemned by a hypocritical world as wicked and obscene”. As this suggests, the Victorian establishment hailed pornographic books as evil incarnate, a corrosive threat to the very fabric of society. Ashbee describes society as being “at war” with the books; in 1856 Punch magazine wishes Holywell Street would be swallowed up by an earthquake; and one police inspector thought the “blackguard purveyors” of Holywell Street should be “taken and nailed by the ears to the nearest gatepost”. We have already noted too the deadly sentences meted out to some of the principal pornographers. To understand why erotic novels engendered such outrage, we need to get our heads around Victorian sexuality. Male readers: imagine thinking of your body as a physiological economy with a finite amount of resources to “spend” (the most commonly used word for ejaculation in this era). Imagine being taught that every youthful sexual indulgence is an unmitigated evil which wastes your vital force and stunts your physical growth and mental development. Any kind of incontinence is dangerous, you believe, but none more so than masturbation, which will lead to jaundiced skin, eruptions of acne, a slouching gait, clammy palm, leaden eye, and the inability to look anyone in the eye. The fate of a compulsive masturbator is to become a drivelling idiot or insufferable hypochondriac. Even within the presumed safety of marriage, you will have to walk a tightrope between abstemiousness and gratification — have no sex and you’ll be ruined, but have too much and you’ll melt into a goo of despondency as the symptoms of “spermatorrhoea” (an umbrella term for diseases caused by a loss of semen) take hold, leading to heart disease and death. It’s even worse for women. Female readers, imagine thinking of yourself as a sexless baby-producing machine, almost entirely devoid of any erotic desire and actually incapable of it during pregnancy when your baby will suck away your vital force from within. You will surrender to your husband’s desires only occasionally. Like men, you believe that sex serves a practical purpose — the population of the earth — but beyond that it is profoundly dangerous. Continence is the key. Your sex life is likely to be a sore and bitter trial. These ideas, so farcical and objectionable to twenty-first-century eyes, are lifted — sometimes word for word — from Dr William Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), no radical polemic but mainstream medical opinion. Anyone deviating one iota from his worthy advice (memorably described by historian Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians [1966] as “part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination”) is either indifferent to their health or just plain low. It is only after we get our head around Dr Acton’s alien sexual precepts that we can begin to understand the hysterical tone that united police, press, and politicians in lambasting pornography. For Victorian pornography was not just a foil to Dr Acton’s belief system but its antithesis, presenting as it does a world of sexual riches where women are game for anything and men are “limitlessly endowed with that universal fluid currency which can be spent without loss”, as Marcus puts it. Even Ashbee calls pornographic works “poisons” in the preface to his bibliography, warning that they must be distinctly labelled and “confined to those who understand their potency”. They are also, of course, an incentive to dreaded masturbation. That is why men like William Dugdale had to be destroyed in hard-labour camps. The perversions of Holywell Street pornography sometimes spilled over into real life. “This literature amused me much, as did the pictures of fantastic combinations of male and female in lascivious play and coition”, writes “Walter”, a pornography connoisseur and pseudonymic author of My Secret Life. “I began to see that such things are harmless, though the world may say they are naughty, and saw through the absurdity of conventional views and prejudices as to the ways a cock and cunt may be pleasurably employed”. My Secret Life was an Odyssean sexual memoir privately printed from 1888 and running to four thousand pages across eleven volumes. With its vivid descriptions of deviant sexual behaviour, it reveals that not everyone adhered to middle-class sexual ideals, to put it mildly. The memoir is so frank that a British printer was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for supplying it — in 1969! It still has the power to shock today with sentences like “while I fucked her, I hated her — she was my spunk-emptier” and “her cunt constricted . . . and sucked round my prick from tip to root moistening both itself and occupant, and my sperm shot out and filled it”. Over the course of a million words, Dr Acton’s sexual worldview is capsized. In the text, men can philander away to their hearts’ content — they will suffer no adverse effects unless they catch a sexually transmitted disease, which is always a risk for men like Walter. Nor are women passive and sexually submissive in the least; all you need to do, in Walter’s world, is fill them up with wine and meat, “let the grub work”, and they’re anyone’s. And they enjoy it, women, as the many sex scenes ram home. Nor are men, contrary to Dr Acton, in their uninhibited state always sex machines. My Secret Life addresses the taboo of impotency. “My God! It was not standing, not a bit of swell or stiffness was in it”, writes a horrified Walter at one point, finding his genitalia reduced to “a sucked gooseberry, a mere bit of dwindling, flexible, skinny gristle”. Overall, Walter’s memoir is a violent reaction against the repressed nature of Victorian sexuality and a striking manifestation of the sort of sexual freedom glimpsed in pornography. The problem, it seems to be saying, lies with society not pornography. In the latter part of the century, if customers wanted to get hold of pornographic prints or even stereoscopic slides (giving the illusion of depth to indecent images), they usually had to have a discreet word with the bookseller. Even then, they were likely to have been treated with suspicion. In 1880, a police inspector went undercover in search of a family-run mail-order enterprise that was corrupting Eton pupils by sending them indecent images unsolicited in envelopes marked “art studies”, in the hope that they would order more. The trail led straight to a Holywell Street bookshop. The officer found that risqué photographs could be purchased easily enough but to get his hands on some “choice specimens”, as he puts it in his Stories from Scotland Yard (1890), the police officer had first to earn the keeper’s trust before being led upstairs into “a dirty little place, which was part bed-room, part workshop . . . as filthy a hole as I have ever been into”. Here, he purchased some expensive hardcore pornography (for two guineas) — and left a shilling for the “little wretched piece of forlorn humanity” that was the shopkeeper’s baby. The pornographer’s suspicious wife followed him to the train station. The next day, the shop was raided, five thousand indecent photographs seized, and the man arrested. He was given two years’ imprisonment and the inspector rejoices in ending his “revolting trade”. If the sight of the pornographic prints and slides aroused customers, they could walk to the end of Holywell Street and double back into Wych Street. In appearance, it was similar to Holywell Street: grimy, narrow and with gables toppling over the street, but here many of the buildings were brothels — some flagellation brothels. Holywell Street was not known for its houses of ill repute but many of its chemists stocked sex toys. In spite of repeated police and government crackdowns, the pornographers of Holywell Street proved resilient. Every time one head honcho of the porn trade was arrested, another simply popped up in his place; the street’s shopkeepers were ever alive to the enormous commercial potential of smut. It began to look like the only way to suppress Holywell Street for good was to wipe it off the map. There had in fact been, throughout the course of the nineteenth century, a series of proposals to demolish Holywell Street and Wych Street, ostensibly to make the Strand wider and grander — it could become horribly congested between the churches of St Clement Danes and St Mary le Strand. But the prospect of exterminating the pornography trade gave the proposals added piquancy. And, right at the end of the nineteenth century, that is exactly what happened. By 1901, both Holywell and Wych Street would be gone, flattened to make way for soulless Aldwych, which was completed just after the First World War. London’s pornography trade didn’t vanish with them of course; its centre of gravity simply shifted to the other end of the Strand, to Charing Cross Road, which became the new nucleus of erotic books, and, after that, to Soho where sex bookshops can still be found to this day. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 29, 2016

Matthew Green

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:27.338692

francis-van-helmont-and-the-alphabet-of-nature

Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature By Jé Wilson June 1, 2016 Largely forgotten today in the shadow of his more famous father, the 17th-century Flemish alchemist Francis van Helmont influenced and was friends with the likes of Locke, Boyle, and Leibniz. While imprisoned by the Inquisition, in between torture sessions, he wrote his Alphabet of Nature on the idea of a universal “natural” language. Je Wilson explores. In the frontispiece to his father’s book, The Origin of Medicine, published in 1648, there’s an engraving of a young Francis van Helmont. Tucked into a bizarre overlapping portrait, he peeks out at the reader from behind his famous father’s head, his right eye entirely obscured by the elder Van Helmont’s left ear. Francis’ father was Jan Baptist van Helmont, the Flemish chemist, doctor, and alchemist who is credited with founding the study of gases, and who claimed to be the first to use the word “gas” scientifically. After an early clash with the Inquisition, which didn’t like some of his nuttier medical ideas, Jan opted to play it safe and asked his son Francis to publish the bulk of his writing after his death. Dutifully complying, Francis squeezes into the picture. Orbited by the heraldic shields of his ancestors, he cozies up to Dad as if ready to take on this intellectual bequest: he will be the Van Helmont, his father’s true heir, for the rest of the seventeenth century. In some sense, this was accurate. Born in Brussels in 1614 and dying at the end of the century in 1699, Francis left his mark on the era — no less a luminary than Gottfried Leibniz wrote his epitaph — but his historical influence was slight and he is now largely forgotten. He makes an appearance, here and there, thanks mainly to his role in editing his father’s work. As late as 1911, an encyclopedia entry on Jan acknowledges that debt, but in mentioning Francis only scoffs at the “wilder confusion” of “mystical theosophy and alchemy” in his writings.1 And yet Francis, in his own day, was a celebrated physician, innovator, diplomat, and religious thinker, who was friends with the philosopher John Locke and the chemist Robert Boyle, and about whom Leibniz wrote: “If such a man had been born among the Greeks / He would now be numbered among the stars”.2 Leibniz actually ghostwrote Francis’ last book, Thoughts on Genesis, while Francis himself contributed to Leibniz’s metaphysical idea of the monad.3 Although it’s somewhat hard, after four centuries, to see the younger Van Helmont’s “stellar” substance, he was the type of person whose sphere of influence is local and immediate. His ideas generated more excitement in person than they did on paper. Friends found his conversation inspiring and original, and they admired his moral fiber. One, Henry More, even wept at the thought of his “goodness”, saying that Francis van Helmont could “draw moisture from flint”.4 Over the centuries, his influence has seeped down without notice, only to surface unexpectedly here and there. His religious ideas and translations were, for instance, instrumental in shaping the theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose own writing profoundly affected people as various as Emerson, Jung, Balzac, Strindberg, and Henry James, Sr.5 As for Francis’ own intellectual training, he was indebted to his father. He never attended a regular school; instead, Jan homeschooled the boy, spoon-feeding him alchemical, scientific, and mystical ideas along with his pabulum. (Francis’ baby food actually included a “Tree of Life” herbal supplement distilled from the cedars of Lebanon.)6 Jan, a follower of the physician Paracelsus, instilled in his son a reverence for the ancient occult Hermetic beliefs, along with those of the Renaissance Neo-Platonists; this meant that Francis grew up believing in the idea of one true antique theology inherent to all religions, whose divine teachings needed to be recovered. He also learned that man was a complete microcosm of the macrocosmic world, and that the only true knowledge came through divinely inspired intuition. At the same time, since such things coexisted, Francis was taught to respect an empirical scientific method, meaning that his education blended an objective approach to chemistry and medicine with a heavy larding of mysticism. Such schooling, directed at a boy who displayed a natural bent toward rebellion, would turn Francis into a freethinking misfit, always searching for answers regardless of danger or ridicule. In keeping with his early Lebanese cedar dosing, he became a health-conscious vegetarian and teetotaler at a time when such behavior was considered oddball to the point of insanity. (He did, in fact, live to the age of eighty-four when the average life expectancy was decades younger.) In the autobiographical preface to his father’s work, Francis describes how his relatives looked down on him for his strange ways and thought he would “at length become mad”: [F]or the preservation of my health, and increasing of my strength, I lived soberly for many Years together, I also abstained from fleshes, like as also from Fishes, Wine, and Ale or Beer; and that so far, that I incurred the contempt and disdain of my kindred, who upbraided me as I conjecture, from a good zeal: What unwonted thing doth he again begin?7 His unwonted leanings persisted all his life. A Christian kabbalist, Francis published translations of kabbalistic writings — the most comprehensive collection of the time. His interest in the Jewish kabbalah, which had acquired its enclave of Christian adherents during the Renaissance, stemmed from his desire to find a common ancient (ancient Christian, of course) source for all religions. It was an unorthodox pursuit, but he was, in general, devoted to unconventional and often liberal ideas: he translated a book advocating the reform of prisons, published writings that promoted religious tolerance, briefly became a Quaker, and established a short-lived work commune in Germany. Meanwhile, he kept busy as a political, economic, and medical advisor to princes, princesses, and other nobility — finding time between his doctoring and diplomacy to devise a mechanical cure for scoliosis, design a new kind of spinning wheel and a more efficient wheelbarrow, learn carpentry and weaving, and invent running shoes with springs. He also figured out how to temporarily preserve the corpse of his good friend Anne Conway (he pickled her in wine inside a lead coffin with a glass window) until her husband could return home from abroad and gaze at her features one last time.8 One of Francis’ more fascinating areas of study is a peculiar book he wrote on the subject of Hebrew. He formed his ideas about the language while being held and tortured by the Inquisition for a year and a half. In 1661, before he had published anything at all, the Catholic Church arrested and charged him with “judaizing” or of being a Jew, a catch-all charge in the seventeenth century that, in Francis’ case, appeared to mean “you have liberal ideas”.9 They were right about that — though, ironically, he would far rather have converted the Jews to Christianity than become a Jew himself — and he had every reason to expect he might be burned at the stake. Regardless, he took his imprisonment in stride, and between trips to the torture chamber he conceived his theory of language.10 Usually referred to as the Alphabet of Nature, the small book outlines Francis’ concept of Hebrew and his scheme for teaching deaf-mutes to speak it. The frontispiece to the book shows Francis sitting at a table in his cell in Rome; facing a mirror, he is scientifically measuring his lips with a pair of calipers. The theory he propounds is that the ancient and therefore uncorrupted Hebrew characters are actually diagrams illustrating how the lips and tongue should be positioned when uttering the sounds they make. A series of woodcuts in the book show cross sections of heads in profile with the speech organs exposed to reveal how they are shaped exactly like Hebrew letters. This resemblance — a kind of pronunciation guide — means that people who are deaf can easily learn to sound out Hebrew because the tools for speaking it are innate, rooted in the very bones and muscles of our bodies; our organs for speech match this wholly (and of course holy) “natural” language. Francis van Helmont, a whimsical proto Noam Chomsky, believed not that we are born with a mental template or apparatus for learning grammar but that we are born with the shape of the Hebrew characters literally written (or at least easily writable) in our mouths and throats. Though his theory was eccentric, Francis’ preoccupation with the idea of a natural language formed part of a long historical debate, still active in the seventeenth century, over whether language was natural or artificial. Since antiquity, two schools of thought had grown up around the question, with some believing that language was made of random symbols — a view Aristotle held — and some thinking words and letters accurately represented nature, an idea Plato was drawn to but which he ultimately found impractical and unlikely.11 Despite Plato’s misgivings, Neoplatonists and alchemists of later centuries embraced the idea of a purely natural language that had an innate connection to reality, as did Jewish and Christian kabbalists. For Francis van Helmont and those who thought like him, the abstract signs of language, especially the divine language of Hebrew, were firmly concrete. Words, letters, and symbols carried an innate power that not only corresponded intrinsically to the things they represented but could also reveal the invisible spiritual truths and secret symmetries of the universe.12 As for ancient Hebrew, it was of course the most natural language since it was the one God had specially given to Man, something you believed if you were similar to Francis, though this idea was of course hotly debated among philosophers and Christians, as were other related points about language.13 Do thoughts precede words or is language the prerequisite for thinking? Do things in the world exist before they are named? Which came first, the chicken or the word “chicken”? Francis would have said that the word came first. God had the word, and then made the chicken that corresponded to it; as each animal was created, it stepped into an already existing word-coat that perfectly expressed its essence. Adam, who later in Genesis names the animals, is therefore (from Francis’ perspective) being divinely inspired to name the animals with their real names, and not with randomly invented words. Given Francis’ belief that all true knowledge is latent in our microcosmic bodies — accessible through divine revelation — it is not surprising that his model of language imagines the Hebrew characters as being almost engraved inside us, physically wedded to our mouths. Taken to its limit, however, this faith in intuition and the innateness of knowledge could become dangerously democratic at a time when hierarchies were strictly enforced. Martin Luther, after all, founded Protestantism on such egalitarian bedrock: that any reader of the Bible had direct access to God. Even though Christian kabbalists thought their pursuits wholly in keeping with religiosity — “there is no department of knowledge that gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and cabala” wrote Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in 1486 — the Church begged to differ.14 Although tolerant to some extent, it considered the occult problematic, and to believe too strongly in the power of words could lead to trouble. For the Church, the idea that words could conjure, or that they held the means to some deep well of unsanctioned knowledge, undermined ecclesiastical authority. And if God wasn’t officially involved, then the supernatural force at work must be demonic. Had they known about it, his jailors would have considered Francis’ incipient work on language heretical. But long before it was published, they were already trying to condemn him for his unconventional behavior. Being tolerant and ecumenical at a time when Christian sects were killing each other on a daily basis, Francis was not popular with either Catholics or Protestants, and was in fact almost killed by a mob of Lutherans for trying to encourage compromise.15 His own description of himself in the preface to his father’s work might give an idea of what people didn’t like. Here, he says, is what is being said about him: [H]e is no where seen except in the company of most unconstant, strange, and uncouth persons, of whatsoever profession and employment; he will also incur a misfortune, for he knows not how to dissemble, he spareth none, neither great nor small, when he discerns that which is unjust.16 Others were right to think he’d get in trouble. His interest in justice, reform, and plain speaking did not endear him to the Catholic Church. Shortly before he was arrested, he made himself unpopular by working for a German prince who had asked him for advice on how to boost a region still economically depressed from the Thirty Years’ War. Francis suggested farming and skilled work for peasants and the “sons of citizens” alike.17 The result was a collection of workshops whose students included gentlemen and at which everyone learned how to weave, cook, cobble, and work the anvil, and where even the prince himself was invited to eat, work with his hands, and walk rather than ride. Hebrew was taught to all. The Inquisition fumed at the idea of such socialist class leveling: the nobility and the upper classes were being degraded. In its report, it was especially disgusted with Francis’ suggestion that the prince raise pigs (in “filthy pig pens”) on palace grounds.18 Francis was eventually released from the dungeons of Rome, but only because he had powerful friends who pleaded on his behalf, including that pig-tolerating prince himself. Like many books on the idea of a universal language, the Alphabet of Nature was a utopian work. Francis believed that discord would end if everyone could speak the same divinely inspired language and no longer disagree over the meaning of the scriptures. In the 1600s, the idea of a universal language appealed to many who thought there was room for improvement in the world’s ability to communicate.19 Many were invented, though none of those seventeenth-century languages became as successful as Esperanto, developed in 1887. One of the few to gain a following was that created by John Wilkins, who published his scheme in 1668, only a year after the Alphabet of Nature. In Wilkins’ “philosophical language”, every word contained its own definition, a dizzyingly rational design whose preposterousness appealed to Jorge Luis Borges: “children could learn this language without knowing it was artificial; later in school, they would discover that it was also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia”.20 To Francis van Helmont, though, ancient Hebrew already was the ideal universal language, the key that unlocked us and whose codes we held within; he would have considered the invention of a new and secular one counterproductive. St. Jerome might have called Hebrew the “language of hissing and broken-winded words” in contrast to the elegance of Latin, but for Francis ancient Hebrew was the bodily inscribed answer to perfect knowledge and harmony.21 It is hardly surprising that being isolated in prison made Francis think about being stuck on an island of deaf-mutes. Apart from the seclusion, he was also perhaps thinking of his torturers, who for a year and half were deaf to his reasoning. How could he communicate with these people, how could he make himself understood? He looked in the mirror, looked at himself as a source of knowledge, and his reflection told him everything: if you started with the smallest footnote of a man from the seventeenth century, you could end up with the book of the universe; if you examined the tongue and glottis, you might discover how easy it was to utter the natural words of Hebrew. Connection and understanding were possible, he believed: we could all speak the same language. In a time of raging violence among religious sects, this was indeed a hopeful attitude. In 1699, the year Francis died, Jonathan Swift’s fictional character Gulliver set off on his travels. In the story, Swift satirizes the idea of a universal language when he has Gulliver visit scholars hard at work on “a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever”, in which it is proposed that people carry around objects instead of speaking: “if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back”.22 Ironically, a scholar has recently suggested that the supposedly made-up nonsensical words of a Lilliputian language Gulliver encounters are actually closely derived from Hebrew, which Swift studied at Trinity College.23 These Hebraic words actually lend a measure of sense to what the Lilliputians are saying, meaning that Swift, in trying to invent a new foreign tongue, found himself borrowing, either consciously or not, from Francis van Helmont’s most natural and ideal “universal” language. Francis, too courteous to take the last laugh, would hardly have been surprised. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 1, 2016

Jé Wilson

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:28.051715

for-the-sake-of-the-prospect-experiencing-the-world-from-above-in-the-late-18th-century

“For the Sake of the Prospect” Experiencing the World from Above in the Late 18th Century By Lily Ford July 20, 2016 The first essay in a two-part series in which Lily Ford explores how balloon flight transformed our ideas of landscape. We begin with a look at the unique set of images included in Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (1786) — the first "real" overhead aerial views. Although it is often dismissed as a comedy moment, an amusing episode in the history of flight, ballooning had a profound effect on the epistemological model of being in the world and viewing landscape. That balloons are innately comic is undeniable, and their physical attributes were a gift to satirists of the late eighteenth century, who riffed delightedly on the graphic and semantic associations of this new and somewhat unlikely technology.1 Furthermore, in the first few decades of ballooning, its utility was unclear. Although flight had been achieved, the power to navigate had not, so balloons could not be used as aerial transport. Once airborne, balloonists were dependent on the mysteries of the upper air and its currents to carry them along. In this captive state, aeronauts set about conducting experiments with a full array of scientific instruments, their own senses and perception being among these. Tasting ginger to see if it was as spicy, or undertaking a complex mathematical equation to test mental acuity at altitude, went alongside checking height and air pressure. In some cases, science funding had got the aeronauts up there in the first place. The first successful manned balloon flights were conducted in France with state support. The ascents themselves became known as “experiments”, and were concerned with an exploration of the upper air. In Britain, the Royal Society withheld support from such endeavours, so the first British ascents were underwritten, in the words of one early balloonist, by “a tax on the curiosity of the public”.2 This affected the cultural profile of ballooning in England: it was always more of a spectacle than a science. In 1785, Tiberius Cavallo, a member of the Royal Society and author of the first English history of ballooning, concluded that: many, if not the greatest number of the aerial voyages, though said to be purposely made for the improvement of science, were performed by persons absolutely incapable of accomplishing this purpose; and who, in reality, had either pecuniary profit alone in view, or were stimulated to go up with a balloon, for the sake of the prospect, and the vanity of adding their names to the list of aerial adventurers.3 As Cavallo’s words suggest, there was a performative element to ballooning. Balloons were highly visible objects; Vincent Lunardi, who first brought the balloon to Britain, incorporated eye-catching colours and decorative flourishes to the already impressive forms of the balloon’s envelope and gondola. Anybody prepared to step into the gondola had to be ready to be seen, watched, and indeed documented. Balloon launches were highly public events, in part because of financial necessity. Michael Lynn documents many instances between 1783 and 1820 of crowds erupting into violence if the balloon failed, through caution or defect, to rise.4 Balloonists suffered from performance-related anxiety; they were all too aware of their spectators as they prepared for an ascent and, presumably were rather relieved to leave them behind. They then needed to be prepared to greet the astonished witnesses of their landing, wherever that might be, with enough charm to ensure their help in packing up the balloon and getting home. In a way, they also carried on performing long after that by writing up their voyages for publication. These accounts are a fascinating example of extreme travel writing, of efforts to communicate an utterly new experience to the reader. Lunardi published volumes of letters; as Clare Brant has pointed out, the conventions of the epistolary form invited readers to relive the sensations of the author in their imagination.5 Thomas Baldwin, an early balloonist who hired Lunardi’s balloon for an ascent over Chester in 1785, inscribed a long book about his one day in the air to “the principal inhabitants of Chester” who had covered his costs. Uniquely in this period, Baldwin attempted to describe his experience not only verbally, but using images: three expensively produced plates depicting the view from the balloon, the balloon in the view, and the charted passage of the balloon over the landscape. The first image in his Airopaidia, “A Circular View from the Balloon at its greatest Elevation”, departs from established conventions of landscape representation.6 At a quick glance it resembles an eyeball in its spherical regularity. In case it does not succeed in visually conveying his experience, Baldwin offers an explanation in words. “The Spectator is supposed to be in the Car of the Balloon, suspended above the Center of the View” (Baldwin:iv). The ground is visible in the “iris”, a central roundel which contains, upon inspection, the plan view of a town and its river. This is Chester, fondly placed at the centre of this entirely new kind of view. The town is framed by a thick “Amphitheatre, or white Floor of Clouds” (Baldwin:iv). Drawing clouds was clearly not one of Baldwin’s strengths. They are crudely worked, knobbly protuberances, signs for clouds (the first classification of clouds was made sixteen years later by Luke Howard7). The concentric circles formed by these rings of clouds, together with the blue ring at the edge, are meant to suggest depth. “The Breadth of the blue Margin defines the apparent Height of the Spectator in the Balloon (viz. 4 Miles) above the white Floor of Clouds, as he hangs in the Center, and looks horizontally round, into the azure Sky” (Baldwin:iv). Baldwin is trying to convey in one image both his sense of space and height and his view of the ground. The execution is not entirely successful. Nevertheless, the attempt is significant. In combining phenomenological and visual sensations, Baldwin is responding to the extraordinary new conditions of flight. The experience he is communicating is as much about the feeling of moving upwards and occupying a vast space as it is about perceiving the world from above. He invites readers to imagine themselves in the balloon at the apogee of the ascent, where they can look down at the earth, and out into the sky. He even advises they assume a physical position over the image, by placing the book “flat on a Table or Chair, and rather in the Shade: the Eye looking directly down upon the Picture” (Baldwin:v). With the “Balloon-Prospect” (Baldwin:154), Baldwin again departs from convention. It is a coloured map, accompanied, upon unfolding the page behind it, by a key which moors the elements of the image to more recognizable, and labelled, cartographic features. The city of Chester is once again included, this time in the bottom right-hand corner. As in the “Circular View”, the colours correspond to those Baldwin claims to have seen. The waterways are represented with all their twists and turns — Baldwin notes in the book that rivers appear “twining in Meanders infinitely more serpentine than are expressed in Maps” (Baldwin:41, also 81–2). The picture field is dominated by clouds over which, on closer examination, the erratic route of the balloon is plotted with a thin black line. The “Track of the Balloon” is marked on the key with a type and font matching that which spells out “River Mersey”; information about the journey (“Breeze”, “Balloon alighted here”) is printed in text matching that of the place names. The clouds still obscure the land below. It is as if the temporal and topographical information inscribed in the key are of equivalent value; the experience Baldwin had travelling over the landscape is as important to record and depict as the landscape he viewed. The observations of the journey and the observations of the landscape take equal weight. Having prepared the reader by presenting them, in the “Circular View”, with a picture of looking — an eyeball that turned out to be a radically different view from above — Baldwin demands a little more of them with this second aerial image. He includes two levels of time along with the strangely coloured landscape. Firstly, the atmosphere is represented by a “snapshot” or moment of the cloud form and distribution. Then a narrative unfolds along the winding black line that squiggles over the page. It is meant to be followed carefully: Baldwin asks the reader to use a rolled-up paper or their hands to form a kind of peephole when looking at the image, in order to “form a very accurate Idea of the Manner in which the Prospect below was represented gradually in Succession, to the Aironaut; whose Sight was bounded by a Circularity of Vapour” (Baldwin:v). In other words, the viewers themselves are to impose the frame in their interaction with the image. Baldwin’s inclusion of a sense of motion in his instructions (“gradually in succession”) suggests that the viewer should move this improvised viewfinder along the line, in a recreation of the journey. The images included in Airopaidia cater to Baldwin’s concern to record the ascent in as comprehensive a way as possible: they show the view from above, the view from below, and a map of the time and space of the journey. His choice of title gives an indication of his ambitions for the book. Though it chronicles his own experience, it also attempts to offer a more general, and exhaustive, account of aerostation, referencing in his portmanteau construction the newest literary form of definitive information (the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1768). In it, the sensation of flying is treated on an equal footing with the mechanics of ascension and the details of the journey. As seen in the text, Baldwin’s concern for the spectator is real, not just perfunctory. With respect to the images, Baldwin makes every effort to situate the viewer in the “correct” viewpoint, using graphic means to funnel their vision, and suggesting a particular physical engagement with the page. Not only does he supply short captions for the images, he also places them among extensive passages of description of his mental and visual impressions. As an ensemble of text and image, Airopaidia is intended to give readers the most vivid impression possible of the experience of flight, so that they might imagine themselves up in the balloon. Baldwin’s extraordinary presentation of his ascent experience provoked a rethinking of the conventions of landscape depiction and charting a journey. It led him to engage with what we might label aerial visuality, in writing and depicting vision and motion together. His practice raises several points that inform later representations of the experience of seeing and flying. Firstly, he does not draw in any respect upon the convention of a bird’s-eye view to represent his aerial views. They are vertical views; they lack horizons and a vanishing point, and the order that these features usually bring to the composition of an image. There is no foreground figure, no portrait of Baldwin in the gondola; indeed, the images contain no visual clue as to the apparatus of ascension. He has invented a new framing of the landscape, a vertical view that is nonetheless not quite a map in the contemporary sense. Secondly, the viewer’s interface with an aerial image is directed. They must assume a particular position and distance to see the image correctly, even restricting their view. Helen Wickstead and Martyn Barber suggest that with his “improvised ‘telescope’ or ‘microscope’” (the hand-as-viewfinder), Baldwin is “[t]ransporting the world into an interior where it can be contemplated outside the body”, an act “redolent of the camera obscura”.8 Not only is he the first to produce a “real” aerial view, he also sets a precedent for the considered positioning of the viewer of the image. Where seventeenth-century city views used framing and perspective to fix the viewer outside the image and in their social place, Baldwin is beginning to find ways of letting the viewer in — after all, many of his readers had paid a subscription to fund his ascent. His instructions for both aerial images are involved, exhaustive. Baldwin seems to me, and to other twenty-first-century historians, to have been unique, and outstanding, in attempting to convey the sensory and visual aspects of flight to his readers.9 It is striking that no other balloonist produced an image of the aerial view until the 1830s. There are two possible reasons for this. On one hand, Baldwin’s images may have been deemed failures of representation. Although only one edition of Airopaidia was printed, it must have been widely distributed by Baldwin, given the ubiquity of the book now in British academic libraries. Yet there is a critical silence, insofar as this can be judged given the limitations of documentary evidence — no contemporary reviews of the book have been found, and later references to it are scant. On the other hand, only a few years later, another viewing technology appeared which would furnish balloonists with a whole new reference point for their experiences of synoptic vision and visual immersion in landscape: the panorama. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 20, 2016

Lily Ford

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:28.563626

frankenstein-the-baroness-and-the-climate-refugees-of-1816

Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816 By Gillen D’Arcy Wood June 15, 2016 It is two hundred years since "The Year Without a Summer", when a sun-obscuring ash cloud — ejected from one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history — caused temperatures to plummet the world over. Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks at the humanitarian crisis triggered by the unusual weather, and how it offers an alternative lens through which to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a book begun in its midst. Deep in our cultural memory, in trace form, lies the bleak image of a summer two hundred years ago in which the sun never shone, frosts cruelled crops in the fields, and our ancestors, from Europe to North America to Asia, went without bread, rice, or whatever staple food they depended upon for survival. Perhaps they died of famine or fever, or became refugees. More likely, no record remains of what they suffered, except a faintly recalled reference in the tattered Rolodex of our minds. The year 1816 has, for generations, been known as “The Year Without a Summer”: the coldest, wettest, weirdest summer of the last millennium. If you read Frankenstein at school, you probably heard some version of the literary mythology behind that year. Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), having eloped with her poet-lover Percy Shelley, joins Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva for a summer of love, boating, and Alpine picnics. But the terrible weather forces them inside. They take drugs and fornicate. They grow bored, then kinkily inventive. A ghost story competition is suggested. And boom! Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein. Given this terrific story behind “The Year Without a Summer”, how strange that interpretations of Shelley’s novel almost entirely avoid the subject of 1816’s extreme weather. Call it English Department climate denial. More tellingly, our too-easy version of Frankenstein — oh, it’s all about technology and scientific hubris, or about industrialization — ignores completely the humanitarian climate disaster unfolding around Mary Shelley as she began drafting the novel. Starving, skeletal climate refugees in the tens of thousands roamed the highways of Europe, within a few miles of where she and her ego-charged friends were driving each other to literary distraction. Moreover, landlocked Alpine Switzerland was the worst hit region in all of Europe, producing scenes of social-ecological breakdown rarely witnessed since the hellscape of the Black Death. Shelley’s miserable Creature, in the context of the 1816 worldwide climate shock, appears less like a symbol of technological overreach than a figure for the despised and desperate refugees crowding Switzerland’s market towns that year. Eyewitness accounts frequently refer to how hunger and persecution “turned men into beasts”, how fear of famine and disease-carrying refugees drove middle-class citizens to demonize these suffering masses as subhuman parasites, and turn them away in horror and disgust. Two hundred years on, in a summer of more record temperatures, and worldwide droughts, when refugees once again stream across the borders of German-speaking Europe, can we really afford to ignore this reading of Frankenstein as a climate change novel? The novel is a cultural treasure, but it doesn’t belong behind a glass case. It’s alive, like the monster itself. It’s on the loose in our world and our minds, stoking our darkest terrors. Shelley’s untameable tale of human pathos, suffering, and destruction is headline news: on the TV and internet, in a million images, filling well-fed, well-housed citizens with horror. “The Year Without a Summer” is actually a misnomer. It criminally understates the agricultural calamity that engulfed Europe, North America, and the globe for three full years after the monster eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 spun a veil of volcanic dust around the Earth, blocking the sun. “Years Without a Summer” is at least more accurate, if not exactly hard-hitting as world-historical headlines go. 1816, 1817, and 1818. Three years of a global climate system gone haywire; floods and drought; storm tracks re-routed; ocean currents gone rogue; ruined crops; rampant disease; and a dull, meagre sun that seemed ready to fizzle out any moment. Historically speaking, the climate crisis was a “perfect storm” for Europe. It could not have come at a worse time. Twenty years of Napoleonic warfare had only just concluded on the bloody field of Waterloo. Economies were drained, trade relations in chaos, and now millions of demobilized soldiers were returning home, needing to be fed and put to work. A death toll is difficult to calculate for this immediate post-Waterloo period, but certainly tens of thousands perished from starvation and disease across Europe and the transatlantic zone, and perhaps a million worldwide. The experiences of Shelley’s Creature in the novel make for an unforgettable psychological account of what it meant to be an environmental refugee in that period: full of fear, consumed with rage and despair, racked with hunger, empty with loneliness. That said, Shelley renders the 1816 climate crisis in implicit, symbolic form, leading us to wonder what Switzerland (and Europe) was really like that year and the two years following. Of the many accounts that survive, none is more compelling, or resonant with Shelley’s novel, than the extraordinary history of the Baroness de Krüdener. The so-called “Lady of the Holy Alliance”, Krüdener was born in Livonia, married a Baron, wrote a popular romance novel called Valerie, then, after her religious conversion, became a close confidante of Czar Alexander during the post-Waterloo negotiations between the victorious allies. By the summer of 1816, this remarkable person had transformed herself from a giddy socialite into the leader of a travelling millennialist cult, and public enemy of Swiss authorities. She fueled her popularity through end-of-the-world sermonizing and munificent handouts to the starving refugees who followed her in droves. A reverent memoir of the Baroness de Krüdener was published in 1849. It contains excerpts from her private and public letters, and includes eyewitness accounts of her two-year ministry to the climate refugee hordes of France, Switzerland, and Germany along the banks of the Rhine near Basel. This was a key traversal point for refugees heading west along the river toward the port of Rotterdam, hoping for passage to North America — also for those who, unable to pay for passage, had been expelled from Holland, and were now enduring the unimaginable horror of a return journey to their abandoned villages. Looking at the Swiss map, the following scenes from Baroness de Krüdener’s one-woman humanitarian aid crusade took place barely a hundred and fifty miles from where our young Romantic tourists passed their sorry summer trading horror stories around the fireplace at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. The relationship between the Baroness de Krüdener memoir and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is more than uncanny, it’s ecological. Both are testaments of the direful times. June 1, 1816. Baroness de Krüdener has been drawing large crowds in Basel. Women, young and old, have been drawn to her example of piety, while the city fills with beggars, for whom she runs a sort of travelling soup kitchen. Fearful of her popularity and her rabble-rousing, apocalyptic message, the Basel authorities expel the Baroness from the town. She is once again homeless and without funds. But God will provide. Money flows to her from wealthy admirers, and a friend offers her a small house above the banks of the Rhine, called Hoernlein. There, on the morning of June 1, she opens her bedroom window to admire the picturesque view, only to be confronted by the soul-crushing spectacle of a refugee mass in rags, in a mile-long column, stretching from the town of Grenzach to her door. Three months of bad weather has reduced the countryside to misery and chaos. The rain never stops beating down. The wheat rots in the fields, so too the grapes on the vine. A loaf of bread costs ten sous. The Grand Duke of Baden, the German territory north of Basel, has ordered public prayers, twice daily, in every church of the kingdom. Anxiety is everywhere. Panic builds. The refugee numbers in the fields outside Basel grow day by day, from the hundreds to the thousands. Enemies of the Baroness infiltrate the crowd, mocking her with blasphemies while she preaches. The Basel police, too, have followed her. Sometimes they surround the house to keep the refugees at bay. Other times, they beat them furiously with their swords and drive them away into the fields and the forest. “Marche! Marche!” they yell. For the authorities of Basel, the greatest fear is that this army of beggars, having camped here, might stay and further deplete their own grain stocks. As winter approaches, the Baroness sells the jewels and fine clothes from her previous life as a salon belle to raise money: thirty thousand francs, all to feed the poor at her door, who now number four thousand a day. “If you only knew how my life is,” she writes to a friend, “the hundreds of suffering, miserable beings who cling to me: misery, misfortune, despair in a thousand forms, in a land of ruin and desolation.” Pale, skinny children and exhausted women, bereft even of clothing necessary to preserve modesty, pass under the windows of Baroness de Krüdener. Their fellow citizens look upon these refugees with hatred, afraid that a growing population will drive the price of bread in the region still higher, and drag them all into the black hole of famine. For this, they blame the Baroness, who is harassed by local thugs, and condemned in the newspapers. They call her “Devil Woman”. The new harvest has failed utterly, and now even the tradesmen and merchants in the towns are feeling the pinch of food shortages, on the brink of winter. Day after day, the starving poor come from miles around to Baroness de Krüdener’s little house on the Rhine for a ration of soup. In the heart of this worst of winters, the Baroness writes an open letter to Baron Berckheim, Interior Minister of nearby Carlsruhe, who has viciously attacked her in the press, impugning her motives and Christian sincerity: “If only you knew, Monsieur,” she writes in her indignant reply, the calamities that have destroyed these lands, you would easily understand my situation. Judge for yourself: ask yourself if in this desolate time, when thousands wander from place to place without work or food, when mothers exhausted by hunger and sorrow come to me, laying their pitiable children at my feet, and confess their temptation, in the depths of their despair, to drown them in the Rhine, ask yourself, should I refuse them shelter? . . . I well understand that governments are powerless in this time of distress. But to answer your charges against me, when the Rhine is clogged with corpses, the Black Forest echoes with the cries of the needy, and the cantons of Switzerland are ravaged by famine, I need only appeal to the tribunal of the Lord, whose authority is far greater than yours. As the winter of 1816–17 lapses into another cold, wet spring, the Baroness de Krüdener has spent a total of 120,000 francs in feeding an estimated 25,000 refugees, climate victims who would otherwise have died of hunger and cold. These desperate poor come from far beyond the Basel region, drawn by rumors of her largesse. Then, unbelievably, conditions worsen. It snows the entire month of April 1817, the harvest fails again, and all Switzerland teeters on the brink of collapse. The desperation on the faces of the refugees turns to a kind of dumb, inhuman stupor. From four in the morning, before the sun has risen, their groans and cries of hunger wake the Baroness from her bed. To the kitchen she goes in the darkness, where her small band of devoted followers is already preparing soup for another day in Hell. But by the summer of 1817, the burghers of Basel have had enough of the messianic posturings of the Baroness de Krüdener. She is ejected from Hoernlein, and escorted by police to the border. Word of the Baroness’s movements travels ahead of her. No one will take her and her refugees. In the town of Rheinfeld, her carriage is surrounded by armed townsfolk. She and her entourage face certain massacre but for the intervention of the police. It is the same at Moehlin, where only sanctuary in the house of the local priest rescues her from being stoned to death. In Zurich, the newspapers report that a young girl — in a waking trance — has foretold the imminent arrival of the Baroness de Krüdener, to be announced by a terrible storm. Once in Zurich, she draws massive crowds to hear her speak, and all are struck by “the living spirit in her words, her intimate knowledge of the human heart, and, most of all, by the irresistible charity in the tone of her voice and exhortations.” So, a celebrity evangelist is in the town. But outside of town, in the exposed and devastated countryside, horrors continue to mount, and the Baroness rejoins the epic human struggle for survival there. The summer of 1817, it turns out, is more dire even than 1816. A faithful remnant of seven hundred refugees follows the Baroness on her wandering route east. Every day, she provides each of them with a bowl for their subsistence ration. It’s a wrenching spectacle to see the voracity with which they consume their meager portion of soup. Hunger is their only thought, their sole preoccupation. Every natural sentiment has been extinguished. Even familial bonds are broken. One day a woman, having received her ration, snatches her child’s portion from his mouth and eats it herself. The same day, while the Baroness and her companions are at table eating their own frugal meal, a hideous apparition appears at the door. It is a young girl, reduced to a skeleton. Famine has caused her hair to fall out, and her belly is prodigiously swollen. She throws herself under the table to lick up crumbs, as if unaware of the people around her. The Baroness seizes hold of the child, and questions her. But the starving girl is not capable of speech, only a raucous, guttural sound. Hunger is her only language. By this time, in the canton of Appenzell, where the Baroness now finds herself, thirty or more die every day of hunger, victims of western Europe’s last ever famine. Beggars who venture outside their villages are assaulted with sticks. Those who try to help them are threatened and fined. The starving poor are reduced to dying in their homes alone. The Baroness, on the road through Saint Gall, comes upon a refugee tide stretching as far as the eye can see, four thousand at least in number. They stagger across the muddy fields, scrounging for grass and roots to stuff into their mouths, or picking at the carcasses of long-devoured dead animals. Dysentery, the famine’s accomplice, devastates their ranks. The death toll spikes again. The Baroness continues to preach wherever she goes: “Turn to God. Time is short. Death and famine ravage the land. Be warned, I beg you!” At last, in October, in Fribourg, the road ends for the Baroness de Krüdener. The authorities break up her entourage and repatriate her to Russia. Her two-year-long humanitarian aid train, her remarkable ministry to the suffering masses of central Europe in the “Years Without a Summer”, ends with a whimper. Scenes from the suffering world in extremis of Juliane de Krüdener in 1816 and 1817 are drawn from the same disaster landscape as Shelley’s Frankenstein. For this human tragedy that they witnessed in different degrees first hand, both the Baroness de Krüdener and Mary Shelley exhibit their own forms of creative sympathy. Frankenstein, no less than the soup kitchen at Hoernlein House, is a humanitarian composition. Like the hordes of refugees following the Baroness de Krüdener in 1816–17, Shelley’s Creature, when he ventures into the towns, is met with fear and hostility, while the privileged families of the novel, the De Lacys and the Frankensteins — like Krüdener’s burghers of Basel — look upon him with horror and abomination. The experience of Mary Shelley’s Creature embodies the degradation and suffering of the homeless European poor in the Tambora period; the violent disgust of Frankenstein and everyone else toward him mirrors the utter want of sympathy shown by bourgeois Europeans toward Tambora’s peasant army of climate victims suffering hunger, disease, and the loss of their homes and livelihoods. As the Creature himself puts it, he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season”, but “still more from the barbarity of man”. The summer of 2016 marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s first sitting down to write Frankenstein, one of the great cultural artifacts of modernity. It’s the bicentenary, too, of the so-called “Year Without a Summer”, which impacted her writing of the novel more than we ever guessed. In her masterpiece of science fiction-cum-disaster journalism, Shelley connected herself, psychologically, to the experience of the starving and diseased thousands in the neighbouring countryside, climate victims who never enjoyed proper representation in the press and parliaments of Europe but mostly sank into oblivion, unmourned. In Frankenstein’s Creature, Mary Shelley offers us the most powerful possible incarnation of the loathed and dehumanized refugee. The “Year Without a Summer”, with its ghost story competition by the lake, remains one of the best-loved biographical vignettes of the Romantic period. But now, as we commemorate that direful year, it is no longer the story it was. With drastic climate change as context, and by adding the likes of the Baroness de Krüdener to its celebrity cast list, we unveil a true myth still grander, more totemic, and more urgent. The monster is back. He’s on the loose. And because we are all of us Doctor Frankensteins, this rampant Creature, full of rage and hurt, is our responsibility now. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 15, 2016

Gillen D’Arcy Wood

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:29.059784