... I haven't actually stopped reading. Eight weeks of learning how to live a new life, mid-divorce, have rather interfered with my time and attention span.
But I still have my Kindle. I am immersed in a nineteenth-century biography of Marie Antoinette by Charles Duke Yonge, having already read Madame Campan's Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. Why is it that the queen seems to be the very epicenter of the French Revolutionary whirlwind? Perhaps because I read books about her. If I condescended to read books about Danton, perhaps he would seem the very epicenter of the French revolutionary whirlwind.
And was she an "ordinary woman," as Stefan Zweig called her, totally unable to cope with the disasters at the end of her life? (Could anyone?) Or was she quite astute, only tragically thrust onto a ridiculous stage by an accident of birth, and then surrounded, seemingly mid-performance, by a gang of thugs and fools who very much and very simply wanted to kill her? In 1787 she wrote of changes in French politics to her friend, the Duchesse de Polignac, vacationing in England:
The words 'opposition' and 'motions' are established here as in the English Parliament, with this difference, that in London, when people go into opposition, they begin by denuding themselves of the favors of the king; instead of which, here numbers oppose all the wise and beneficent views of the most virtuous of masters, and still keep all he has given them. It may be a clever way of managing, but it is not so gentleman-like. The time of illusion is past, and we are tasting cruel experience. We are paying dearly to-day for our zeal for and enthusiasm for the American war ....
To me this does not sound like the helpless, befeathered, sleepy-eyed flibbertigibbet of the Vigee-Lebrun portraits, nor does it fit in with the sort of popular half-knowledge which understands Marie Antoinette as somehow really ancillary to the whole exciting business, but anyway deserving of her fate because she was rich, or idle, or ignorant, or titled, or a woman. Then again, it's possible that the people around her at the time knew perfectly well she was not a helpless flibbertigibbet, but rather an anti-revolutionary conspirator looking for help from her foreign and imperial relations, and lying about it, up to the very end. This was treason, though to her, queen and daughter of an empress, it was clear she had every right to bring her riotous and misguided people back to "calmness." "What is going on in France," she wrote, "would be an example too dangerous to other countries, if it were left unpunished."
And here we are, two days after Bastille Day. Still apparently unpunished. But I must go on reading.
The trouble is, a Kindle allows you to read so much at once. The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 1 -- here, the teenaged genius discusses his annoying mother:
... though timely Severity may sometimes be necessary & justifiable, surely a peevish harassing System of Torment is by no means commendable, & when that is interrupted by ridiculous Indulgence, the only purpose answered is to soften the feelings for a moment which are soon after to be doubly wounded by the recal of accustomed Harshness. I will now give this disagreeable Subject to the Winds.
And he writes a lot about his debts and his weight loss. It is interesting and encouraging, though, to see him grow up, to read him become sympathetic, self-deprecating even about his poetry, and humbly anxious to maintain old friendships. "I do not know how far our destinations in life may throw us together, but if opportunity and inclination allow you to waste a thought on such a hare-brained being as myself, you will find me at least sincere, and not so bigoted to my faults as to involve others in the consequences." Old men kept his letters for fifty years.
Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington MacAulay. The Victorian schoolboy of legend read it or was assigned to read it, and out of it all, memorized it seems mostly this:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods...."
I liked the scholarly prose discussion of what happened to Rome's pre-imperial historical documents better than the poetry which MacAulay invented to try to recreate something of what they had said. It seems the Gauls burned Rome's archives in the 4th century B.C.E. when they sacked the city, and that Roman historians of later centuries knew perfectly well they had no documents upon which to base anything they wrote or thought they knew about that time. They had only, it seems, memories of popular legend and poetry; it would be as if American historians could only reconstruct the colonial period from childlike songs about Paul Revere's ride, or Washington crossing the Delaware. MacAulay's Lays are his imaginative reconstructions of what those word of mouth songs might have been; they concern the biggest topics of remote Roman history, like Rome's wars against more powerful Italian neighbors, or the class struggles between patrician and plebeian. It's astonishing, what MacAulay understood his readers would already know about what he was doing.
The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of the Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scaevola, and of Cloelia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the defense of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legend about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.
Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages. Not at all what you might think -- not at all gamy little exposes of Victorian marriages that were troubled, as written by the men and women involved. Rather, simply short stories by a variety of Victorian authors, Kipling, Conan Doyle, etc., about characters in troubled marriages. Kipling's "The Bronckhorst Divorce Case" was not very interesting, and I have yet to move on to Doyle's "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange."
Also on my Kindle home page are the Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de l'Enclos -- very strange; are the French really that different? When she warbles on about "love," does she mean sex, does she mean the love that makes a couple married sixty years nurse one another through the last illnesses, or does she mean a kind of freewheeling indulgence (including sex), of every new crush that comes along and excites you and flatters your vanity? -- on the grounds that indulging so is only human nature and therefore one must be humane and sophisticated and true to it?
The White House Cookbook.The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband. The Spectator. Under Two Flags by Ouida, who I think was somehow scandalous and terribly popular in another era. The Chaplet of Pearls by Charlotte Yonge, ditto. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, certainly ditto. Aristotle. Twenty-four Little French Dinners ... not by Aristotle, that last.
Is it permissible to scribble brief notes about a book I haven't quite finished yet, but that is overdue at the library? A few things strike me:
I doubt there can ever again be American historians of the Civil War working at the same level as men like Bruce Catton or his Southern counterpart, Shelby Foote. They were both of exactly the right generation to have grown up with boyhood memories of actual veterans' stories, told by old men in small towns at the turn of the twentieth century, and to be able to publish in the 1950s, just when the centennial of the war was coming. I am sure all this permeated their scholarship and it brought still more alive, for them and for us their readers, the regimental histories and enlisted men's diaries from which they drew so much detail. The deer bounding out of the forest just before the battle of Chancellorsville commenced, late on a spring evening; horses, wagons, cannon, and mules trampled and sunk in feet of mud on the pointless winter march to Falmouth.
Fredericksburg: thousands of Union soldiers lined up in the town and marched as ordered across a short rise of ground to the stone wall before Marye's Heights, where they were slaughtered by Confederate artillery and rifle fire. It all happened on a day in mid-December, 1862. It is very strange to see it, in the imagination, as a slowly unfolding tableau, and to think that all these men were "his majesty the Baby of some twenty years back," as Tom Wolfe described the pilots involved in the space program's early disasters in The Right Stuff. Thousands of mothers on that day in 1862 could not see the tableau, could not rush forward from kitchen and laundry and pull their very special baby out of the marching mass. They could only hear about it later.
One of the themes of the book: no matter what advantages a nation may have in war, industrial or financial or what have you, it can still lose if it can't match the enemy's passion. This is why the North came close to losing and why no one at the time could relax and assure himself "the South never really had a chance." Yes, the South did. Their soldiers, in Catton's words, were "men of passion."
The bulk of the book is what I think historians call "order-of-battle analysis." Terrain, logistics, strategy, weather, the building of pontoon bridges and the "unlimbering" of guns. The most dull sort of history to read, for most people including me; and yet, it is what the men went through from one day to the next, and it is why battles were won or lost. Anyway this is Catton's strength, once he gets down to it. The opening chapter, in which he introduces half a dozen characters via their tangled relationships with one another and loads it all up with trivial anecdote, reads like something the editor made him do to appease the reader who doesn't like order-of-battle analysis.
Finally: extraordinary that American men went into woods and farms and mowed one another down, en masse, with cannon and rifle fire only a hundred and fifty years ago. And Gettysburg is yet to come.
Two English ladies, living two generations apart, travel half the world in pursuance of their husbands' careers. Lady Mary made a circuit from London through the Low Countries to Austria to Hungary to the Ottoman capital, and from there via the Mediterranean to north Africa, Italy, and thence to Paris and then home; all this over the course of about two years, 1716-1718, while her husband was an ambassador. In the 1650s and 1660s, Lady Fanshawe covered less ground but also had a rougher time of it, for the English Civil War you might say crafted her itinerary. Her husband, later the baronet Sir Richard Fanshawe, sided with the monarchy against Oliver Cromwell, and so the couple spent a great deal of time during the Commonwealth beating about from England to the Netherlands to France to Spain -- anywhere royal heads were still safe -- raising money for the dispossessed prince who, on Cromwell's death, became King Charles II.
Both women wrote books which, if not timeless repositories of wisdom, are nevertheless remarkable time capsules of life and adventure in their respective eras. Lady Mary's Letters are the more interesting to read, since she was a better, indeed a delightful writer who not only performed at concert pitch for an audience of great friends like Alexander Pope himself, but also carefully chose and polished what she wanted posterity to see. Her book only came out decades after her death. She was probably a fun person to be around, too, if perhaps a little snooty. She loves being the clear-eyed, liberated and logical Protestant Englishwoman, asking tough questions of the friars showing her holy relics in Bavarian churches. If the church possesses, for instance, both the mantle of a saint and a silver-plated griffin's claw, does that mean the griffin was also a saint? Her host smiled abashedly.
Lady Fanshawe, however, probably led a more interesting life, at least to the reader sitting in comfort and clicking through her Memoirs on a Kindle. (What would the ladies have thought about that?) In old age, she wrote in firm but somewhat pedestrian style of all the things that had happened to her on her travels, almost week by week, for years. She wrote for her one surviving son, so there are many family details that he could have untangled better than we can do. She seems to have had no desire to please a fretful posterity with gay, polished summations: these memoirs were meant to honor her late husband, and so she fleshed out anything and everything that concerned him, right down to the apparently photographic memories of official state ceremonies (he was an ambassador, too), and to what guards wore which uniforms, and what the people lining the dusty roads, cheering, looked like.
Yet what with the travel and the narrow escapes and the forged passports, the shipwrecks and the perpetual hunt for money, one wonders how the former Ann Harrison herself stood it. Perhaps she found it wonderfully "interesting" too, and all for the service of a noble and godly prince. Perhaps seventeenth century Englishwomen were simply made of sterner stuff than we can imagine. I would think after a while, the adventures would simply turn ghastly, and the reward of reaching a career in the wasp's nest of Stuart diplomacy, only to find betrayal and disgrace there, would finally break anyone's spirit. The twenty pregnancies added in must have been small help in times of family turmoil. (For her part Lady Mary, in the course of her Letters, appears to have had two.) Six miscarriages, including a set of triplet boys, fourteen births, withal four survivals to adulthood: Lady Fanshawe recounts them all, and notes in every case when death happened and where "my son" or "my daughter" is buried. For one decade-long stretch, she lost a child, on average, every two years.
It's best to let these ladies speak for themselves, but before listening to them, it's also wise to note one way in which both their eras now overlap our own. It lies in their experience of Islam. For several centuries now, we Westerners, we Americans especially, have been able to develop an amnesia about Islam because we have not much encountered it. Until very recently, the U.S. Marines' hymn's lyrics about "the shores of Tripoli" might have been the only (and beyond oblique) reference to Islam remotely a part of American life. We are accustomed instead to religion as a sedate, gentle human construct -- each one a part of the civic fabric -- and to understanding that everyone simply agrees, one day a week, to let one another worship peacefully where all choose, all faiths being essentially the same: benign.
Islam is different, and our ancestors saw it. Lady Fanshawe, sailing from England to the safety of the Continent circa 1650, knew that the approach of a Turkish vessel meant the real threat of a combat, capture, and slavery. "When we had just passed the Straits, we saw coming towards us, with full sails, a Turkish galley well manned, and we believed we should all be carried away slaves ...." She was not a hyperventilating Islamophobe. The Muslim slave trade was vigorous to say the very least. Two generations later, Lady Mary traveled and lived in the Ottoman Empire as a distinguished guest, made great progress in learning Turkish and appears also to have made polite noises when her hosts encouraged her to study "alcoran." She wrote, for public consumption, glowing descriptions of splendidly rich, beautiful cool Turkish homes sumptuously appointed in rare woods and and glowing fabrics, all plashing with fountains, and of fields and gardens blooming in the warm Mediterranean January; she wrote of her cloistered friend, the enchanting Fatima, exquisite and serene.
But she also traveled through the wild Serbian countryside in company with "bassas," imperial Ottoman officials, and their guards, the "janizaries" (slave soldiers, originally kidnapped Christian boys forcibly converted to Islam), both of whom preyed grotesquely on the helpless Serbian peasants. They slaughtered their animals, ate their food, and then charged them "teeth-money," "a contribution for the use of their teeth, worn with doing them the honour of devouring their meat. ... the wretched owners durst not put in their claim, for fear of being beaten." She notes that all this oppression is owing the "natural corruption of a military government, their religion not allowing of this barbarity, any more than ours does." Here, she is wrong. The bassas and the janizaries could certainly have pointed to Islam's laws demanding the jeziya, the tax levied on infidels for being infidels.
And in a section of letters at the end of the book, which seem to have been intended to remain private (from Letter LIII forward -- "Footnote, this and the following letters are now first published"), she is even less sanguine about the wonders of Muslim civilization. Men go in terror of "the vile spirit of their government," which "stifles genius, damps curiosity, and suppresses an hundred passions." Women go in terror of men.
The luscious passion of the seraglio is the only one almost that is gratified here to the full; but it is blended so with the surly spirit of despotism in one of the parties, and with the dejection and anxiety which this spirit produces in the other, that ... it cannot appear otherwise than as a very mixed kind of enjoyment.
Even the lovely Fatima herself is of startling parentage. She is the daughter of a Polish Christian woman, kidnapped and enslaved in one of the many running battles the Ottoman Turks fought in eastern Europe, always lunging for more conquest -- more jihad. Mind you, this was long after the Crusades. They had only just been beaten back from Vienna in 1683, about halfway through our two ladies' flourishings. The date of that Muslim defeat was September 11.
It is all part of a pattern that we have had the luxury of forgetting, a historical truth that was delivered to our attention in short doses during the 1980s and 1990s, and then with ferocious confidence on another September 11. This historical truth is not that Muslims are awful people; it is that Islam is the only major world faith which demands the subjugation of all non-believers, period. When its most passionate adherents take the mandate seriously, war, conquest, enslavement, punitive taxes, and the raising of mosques on other people's sacred sites are the norm. Two vigorous, educated women, living in the most civilized cities in Europe three and four hundred years ago, saw normative Islam in action on their travels in Europe. They recorded it, matter-of-factly. Pay attention to these voices, for, not only can they help cure us of our pleasant and dangerous amnesia, but the more you read in old books, the more you'll find these ladies are just two of a surprisingly large company of witnesses.
But, we said we would let them speak for themselves. They did take notice of less deadly subjects. They enjoyed audiences with royal personages, cast a jaundiced eye over other women's dresses and hair, attended archery demonstrations among court ladies, went to the opera. The great disadvantage of reading on a Kindle is that you cannot ruffle back and forth through the pages. You have to click about, one little screen at a time, and you forget things. I had forgotten that Lady Mary, gadding regally about, saw the ruins -- or what she believed were the ruins -- of both Troy and Carthage. For a gentlewoman of the Augustan age and a friend of Pope, this must have been a supremely pleasing experience. And early on in her travels, she wrote with delight of Vienna as a garden spot for mature women:
A woman, till five and thirty, is only looked upon as a raw girl, and can possibly make no noise in the world, till about forty. I don't know what your ladyship may think of this matter; but 'tis a considerable comfort to me, to know there is upon earth such a paradise for old women; and I am content to be insignificant at present, in the design of returning when I am fit to appear no where else.
And as for the storm-tossed Lady Fanshawe, wife of a Stuart cavalier from the age of sixteen, this is her first meal after a shipwreck, and she's enraptured to get it:
... we sat up and made good cheer; for beds they had none, and we were so transported that we thought we had no need of any, but we had very good fires, and Nantz white wine, and butter,and milk, and walnuts and eggs, and some very bad cheese; and was not this enough, with the escape of shipwreck, to be thought better than a feast? I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoken when every word seemed to be our last.
These women lived lives, if I may mix a metaphor, at full throttle and without a safety net. Lady Fanshawe and her husband were glad to start married life with a fortune of £20 cash, which he used to buy pen and paper, the tools of his trade (diplomacy). For her part, Lady Mary wrote her friends, half-jokingly, that she hoped to survive the trip from Vienna through Hungary to Peterwaradin in Serbia, in the depths of winter, but that it would make her of necessity incommunicado for a while. Her steely, un-self-pitying address to a correspondent could sum up any one day or year that either of these two ladies ever lived through: "Adieu, dear sister: this is the last account you will have from me of Vienna. If I survive my journey, you shall hear from me again. I can say, with great truth, ... 'I have long learnt to hold myself as nothing'; but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I have all a mother's fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in my heart."
A book about what made the greatest works of art and discoveries in science come to be, and why; and why these came to be where and when they did, and at the hands they did. A book, at the end, about whether or not human accomplishment is actually declining, whether or not it is true, as Keats -- Keats! -- lamented, "the count of mighty Poets is made up, the scroll is folded by the Muses ... the world has done its duty" (Endymion, Book II, lines 720 ff).
Human Accomplishment is clear but still difficult, loaded with propositions and proofs drawn from statistics which, far from being "damned lies," show themselves as very logical and reliable tools to help explain how things shake out in the collective human experience. The book is also loaded with painstaking goings-over of every possible exception and argument that might be presented to everything the author says. That is not a fault, far from it of course, it's the sign of an honest and a rigorous mind trying to out-think you before you do. But you'll have to follow along closely in order to keep up with him, through five hundred pages and nearly three thousand years of world cultural history.
Charles Murray starts, as he started The Bell Curve years ago, by insisting that a few basics of his present study are beyond quibble, never mind laymen's quibbling. They exist. In The Bell Curve it was the fact of I.Q., and its measurability. In Human Accomplishment it is the fact of objective excellence in the arts and sciences, and its measurability.
To find and catalogue excellence in the arts and sciences, Murray does something that you or I could have done if we had thought of it. He consults mini-libraries of the definitive encyclopedias on all his topics -- dictionaries of music, of scientific biography, of mathematics, books of the Oxford-Companion-to- sort -- which chronicle the considered judgment of experts in all fields regarding the finest artists, scientists, and mathematicians who ever lived. If any person is important enough to be mentioned in half the sources, he merits inclusion as a "significant figure" in Human Accomplishment. (And as Murray reminds us, if you happen to paint just one canvas, or write one book, that people still look at or quote a hundred years after you die, you are already in a tiny and honorable human minority.) The very, the extraordinarily rare souls who are mentioned in many sources, or even in all, men like Shakespeare, Milton, Galileo, Mozart and Wagner, earn a kind of raw score -- 20, 50, 93, most rarely, 100 -- and are either "major figures" or simply "the giants."
To readers who would object that consulting encyclopedias simply means consulting and trusting the very fallible and prejudiced opinions of men passing on received tastes about great men, Murray replies, no. Excellence is not subjective. Everyone recognizes that difficult human pursuits have standards of achievement, and everyone can think of something in his life in which he is expert, some topic the amateurish treatment of which will bore him. Understanding and accepting the status of a Michael Jordan or a Jack Nicklaus, even if we don't know basketball or golf, means that we are intellectually obliged to understand and accept the status of Michelangelo, agreed upon among people who know art. Or, in everyday terms: you know how you react when a neophyte innocently expands upon some subject that has been the joy of your lifetime.
It's hardly my task to recapitulate Murray's book here, but I must also salute (in some detail) his dealing deftly with that other objection to one of the facts of excellence in human achievement, namely, the modern whine that the majority of the excellent in all the sources unfailingly turn out to be dead white European males, and that this can't be right. But it is. Even very up-to-date scholars who make reputations purporting to disprove it, to "set the record straight," don't actually do so. Consulting new mini-libraries of histories and encyclopedias loaded with carefully researched entries for ambitious but little-known women and non-Europeans still produces lists of the great which agree, statistically, with his lists, loaded in turn with the usual Bachs and Dantes. Murray's simple phrasing here can't be bettered. Looking at the revisionist books attempting to show that artistic and scientific achievement as great as Europe's has happened consistently outside Europe, and has been ignored, he says:
[Revisionist authors'] language evokes the image of an exaggerated European contribution without ever specifying that it is exaggerated. It is standard practice. ...
... Science and Technology in World History presents material on non- European societies. But [the authors] are also trying to present the substance of what crucial things happened where, done by whom. The ten people with the most index entries are, in order, Aristotle, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Ptolemy, Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and Archimedes -- a wholly conventional roster of stars. ...
The contrast between the packaging for the books and their actual texts is emblematic of our times. The packaging evokes the way that intellectual fashion says things should be. The facts reflect the way things really are (pp. 254-255).
At the heart of his argument, Murray thus comes to the question: why the preponderance of dead European males at the very pinnacles of literature, music, painting, mathematics, and science? What makes human beings -- what made those men especially -- create and discover grand things, difficult things which benefit mankind, or which still please and teach him centuries and millenia after the giants' deaths?
He carefully works out a formula. You need incomprehensible talent, for one thing. There must be talent of the kind that causes us to gawp at the Sistine chapel ceiling "and ask, how can a human being have done that?" You also need a "monomania" for work. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven or was it thirty-eight plays, plus all the sonnets plus the long poems, and died at fifty-two. Keats died at twenty-five, Mozart at thirty-five. The poor health and medical care of previous eras is not the point. The point is what these men accomplished even in so little time. They were working, always working, and would have gone on working had they lived to be ninety-nine, as Titian claimed he had.
And, outside the person with talent, you must have a world that gives him a chance. It has nothing to do with a white male world giving a black man or a woman a chance. Talent and a monomania for work can show up in any person, anywhere. Human Accomplishment includes graphs and tables on Chinese painting, Indian philosophy, Arab literature, and more. Part of Murray's theme is that, given even a little time for each generation of humanity to look about it, sublime achievements are not ignored. To the question, for example, why do we not hear more of great women composers? the answer is, there really, really aren't any.
To have a chance, for the talented man or woman with a monomania for work, meant not to be born a subsistence farmer. To have a good chance meant not to be born into a culture which valued duty to family and community -- medieval Islam, Confucian China, even traditional Judaism -- above any inner duty to achieve a personal vocation at any cost. And to have a chance meant to know and contribute to artistic and scientific "structures," ways of working all ready or at least getting ready for the artist or scientist to fill in. The writer needs the structure of the epic poem or later the novel, the composer needs the structure of the symphony. The structures themselves grow out of what Murray calls "meta-inventions," huge mental leaps forward which gave creative people new things to do. In the West the secular observation of nature was one, the development of polyphony (several different lines of melody in one piece of music) another, the working out of linear perspective in painting a third.
And above all, Murray thinks, to foster great accomplishment the talented person needs to be encouraged by his culture to believe that an ultimate Truth, Beauty, and Good exist, which he in turn is personally valuable enough to uncover. Without that confidence, meta inventions don't necessarily happen, and structures can remain empty. It's a kind of double-whammy "aren't things divine/aren't I, too" attitude. It's a religious attitude, shared by hyper-achieving ancient (pagan) Greece and hyper-achieving (Christian) Europe, yet not shared with the same fervor by otherwise deeply religious cultures (Islam), and certainly missing from the modern secular West. Driven out by intellectuals like Freud, Darwin, and John Dewey, who have shaped our modern ideas of relativism and being non-judgmental even though we remain vague about their actual works (and anyway these men certainly did not intend to wreck Western achievement), it has been fiercely kept out by their intellectual disciples. These are the MFA professors who train artists and writers, the people who run galleries and edit poetry journals and would laugh out of court any protest that the creation of objective Beauty, say, is pleasing to God. And yet, strangely, the West suspected accomplishment was collapsing before "postmodernism" came along: recall our friend Keats and his folded scrolls.
Where a culture's elites, artists themselves or gatekeepers of the arts, deny the possibility of finding objective Truth or creating objective Beauty, great lasting art will not be made. The times matter; artists can't rise above their culture, and see what "pygmies" refuse to see. But this is difficult to accept. Shouldn't any real talent still know some sort of inner vision, exactly right, Beautiful, Truthful, and perfectly his in any age?
(Incidentally, scientists here are more or less off the hook when it comes to failing to achieve because their elites discourage the pursuit of truth and beauty. Scientific achievement has declined, but largely, Murray shows, because so much work of the greatest importance has already been done, and scientists know it. He describes science as a kind of jigsaw puzzle whose hugest pieces were fitted into place by men like Aristotle and Galileo. Their professional descendants, however gifted, appear to have little left to do but tinker, to help improve humanity's lot; if they truly were to fall into postmodernism's trap, and start doing bad science for some ideological cause, or because "truth is subjective," the result would only be error, which other scientists would be glad to pounce upon. We hope. Nevertheless, the pouncing scientists would have still to pursue the scientific method to begin with, and the scientific method itself is one of those meta-inventions which, once hit upon, cannot be stolen or lost, but can be forgotten.)
... an inner vision, exactly his, and beautiful in any age? Not particularly. If that were true, there should be hoards of art and literature from talented people who lived in cultures hostile for centuries to individual achievement. By the same token, there should be hoards of superb art from the last century or even the last fifty years, when we all understand that everything is relative and there are no right answers. There are no such hoards. If you would counter that of course there are, only Murray is a judgmental ass, he would counter-counter with the desert island question. It may seem trite, but it provokes honesty. If you were to be stranded on a desert island for ever, what books, art, and music would you pack in one suitcase? Now look carefully at them. What did that era of human accomplishment know that we refuse to know?
The reader can protest he won't recapitulate Murray's book and yet end up doing it, badly, because the work is so involved. It's really not the sort of book you can argue with, because he smothers you with proofs and that rigorous out-thinking of all your protests. Perhaps the best we can do is give ourselves a sort of pop quiz about the whole thing.
Let's see if we understand. Meta-invention: polyphony (France, 12th century);structure: fugue; human accomplishment: the "Little" Fugue (G minor). Creative giant: Johann Sebastian Bach, Germany, fl. 1725. Bach's index score, Western music inventory: 87. Compare to Beethoven (Germany), index score 100 -- i.e., mentioned in all sources, Schubert (Austria), index score 44, and Aaron Copland (USA), index score 7. Duke Ellington (USA) and Walter Piston (USA), index score both 2.
What does it mean to travel? And isn't it fun reading a book on a Kindle?
Yes, it is fun, if I may answer the second question first. A travel book published by Somerset Maugham in 1905 is the sort of thing you might chance upon in an old library or a used book sale, or you might know about it if you are a student of Maugham. Still, the chances of such serendipity are slim, if you go about your book hunting in the usual way. Maugham's memory has faded and he has become known for only one or two things, Of Human Bondage primarily. The way to find Land of the Blessed Virgin now is to be given a Kindle as a surprise for your birthday, spend four nights figuring it out, and then use it to go to Project Gutenberg and start downloading free, obscure, out-of-copyright books. If you happen to browse through their collection by author's last name, choosing M at random, you will soon find Maugham -- and Mansfield, Katharine -- and there at your fingertips is the output of his career. And hers. The tide at full flood, as it were, proof of an author's stature when your great-grandmother was reading good books. There is Land of the Blessed Virgin, and there also Mansfield's travel book, In a German Pension.
A great deal of lovely prose is hidden away in the pages of these books and thousands of downloadable others like them, books which may never have been earth-shatteringly great, but which were well crafted by talented people still steeped in an educational system we don't remember; books which served as sophisticated and pleasurable diversions for a public that didn't have much else to do with leisure time except read. And read. And read some more. (And so get a taste of that education. Quick, when were the Moors in Andalusia?) When Somerset Maugham went to Spain in his twenties, he was capable afterwards of writing:
And presently I turned round to look at Seville in the distance, bathed in brilliant light, glowing as though its walls were built of yellow flame. The Giralda arose in its wonderful grace like an arrow; so slim, so comely, it reminded one of an Arab youth, with long, thin limbs. With the setting sun, gradually the city turned rosy-red and seemed to lose all substantiality, till it became a many-shaped mist that was dissolved in the tenderness of the sky.
Now, isn't that rather nice? Why not know it?
Apart from its lovely prose, Blessed Virgin is illuminating as a sort of workaday record of the way a young English gentleman saw Spain a hundred years ago. Incidentally, the title doesn't bespeak any coherent theme, although you might expect it would when you see that the reproduced frontispiece is a Baroque painting of the Virgin Mary. "Sketches and impressions," yes -- that's the bespoke theme. This workaday record of travel records things that I suppose shouldn't surprise us. We shouldn't be too awed, for example, by his going about on his own on horseback -- that was probably the equivalent of our renting a car for our needs today. The two circumstances which seem to have made his trip Adventure travel with a capital A were, first, that his time was open-ended. He was living in Spain, and when he moved on, he sailed for Africa, not home. Second, each day was often a solitary, native-style struggle to find food, shelter, and warm dry clothing, somewhere in the countryside. This was not the vacation we would expect when we travel. He saw interesting and famed sights, but he also simply wandered, because he wanted to go from this town to that on a particular road, or he wanted to approach this village from the north and not the south. He saw the Alhambra because you almost have to, but he also saw a prison and hospital because he wanted to. To be fair, he was also not a mere "Cook's" tourist but the young English literary gentleman no doubt thinking of material for future books.
His memoir, with all its word painting, returns us again and again to our first question, returns us more often and inescapably imperiously than our author likely intended: what does it mean to travel? What does the stranger ever really see or understand? (Mansfield's book is written from a far different perspective. She was staying in a German pension for her health, and confined her writing to a progression of mostly snarky, pompous sketches on the awful people -- "Herr Rat", and the like -- she was staying with. I bailed after the story of the Child Who Was Tired, all about an abused little servant girl who finally smothered the yowling, middle-class baby in her charge.) Only a hundred years ago, Maugham saw a Spain parts of which which come straight out of those medieval nightmare paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Diseased and limbless beggars still asked alms outside the churches. Horses were still killed during bullfights, as Hemingway witnessed later. And Maugham took care to observe peasants plowing, and townspeople going to see tacky, screechy theatrical shows, because that was Spain. If travel means you are supposed to go outside your comfort zone and see something of the way other human beings live on your very own planet, then he certainly did so. Yet, the "seeing" of whole book is also hampered by his indulging throughout that ultimate cliche, and I'm sure, throughout, he knew it: the romance of the warm, leisured, poor but happy (and incidentally, exotically ex-Muslim) south versus the cold, grey, moneyed and soulless (boring Christian) north. At one point, the young gentleman traveler thinks he has seen enough to write this:
A farmhouse such as this seems to me always a type of the Spanish impenetrability. I have been over many of them, and know the manner of their rooms and their furniture, the round of duties there performed and how the day is portioned out; but the real life of the inhabitants escapes me. My knowledge is merely external. I am conscious that it is the same of the Andalusians generally, and am dismayed because I know practically nothing more after a good many years than I learnt in the first few months of my acquaintance with them. ...They have no openness as have the French and the Italians, with whom a good deal of intimacy is possible even to an Englishman, but on the contrary an Eastern reserve which continually baffles me. I cannot realise their thoughts nor their outlook. I feel always below the grace of their behaviour the instinctive, primeval hatred of the stranger.
From the layout of a farmhouse, he thinks he can judge the Spaniard's "Eastern reserve"? Are they not people much like any other people? But who knows, given precisely the way he traveled and his native brains, perhaps he's right. Then why go? What have you learned, about the world, about yourself -- or is the point of travel to have mere fun? Towards the end of his chronicle, he'll try his hand at answering our questions. Travel can be done well or badly, of that he is sure. To travel well, to not be a vulgar Cook's tourist who only admires a view and then eats lunch, "the comeliness of your life or the beauty of your emotion" must transform what you see. "When the old red brick and the green trees say to you hidden things, and the vega and the mountains are stretched before you with a new significance ... so as to make, as it were, an exquisite pattern on your soul, then you may begin to find excuses for yourself."
Excuses for having gone at all, apparently. But can't an exquisite soul also see significance at home? Leaving Spain, the thought occurs to him. "And then from Cadiz," he writes,
I saw the shores of Spain sink into the sea; I saw my last of Andalusia. Who, when he leaves a place that he has loved, can help wondering when he will see it again? ... The traveller makes up his mind to return quickly, but all manner of things happen, and one accident or another prevents him; time passes till the desire is lost, and when at last he comes back, himself has altered or changes have occurred in the old places and all seems different. ... and perhaps, notwithstanding all his passionate desires, he will indeed never return.
Of course the intention of this book is not to induce people to go to Spain: railway journeys are long and tedious, the trains crawl, and the hotels are bad ... It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad; and the man who stays at home, preserving his illusions, has certainly the best of it.
The man who stays home and preserves his illusions has the best of it. Or perhaps, the woman who just goes to one place, and that for a practical reason, has the better of it even though she writes a poorer book. Of our two travellers I preferred Maugham, but I must admit, if humor in the recollection of a journey is a sign of anything -- of having traveled "well," perhaps -- then here Mansfield outshines him. While admiring the singing shepherds and the orange trees he apparently never overheard stuffy, front parlor gems like this:
" 'Do you know,' said a voice, 'there is a man who LIVES in the Luft Bad next door? He buries himself up to the armpits in mud and refuses to believe in the Trinity.' "
An English lady, "Mrs. Arthur Webster," writes in 1919 a book about the French Revolution which depicts everything as a German-inspired criminal conspiracy. This is the first book I have ever encountered which has no publication information except the date. It must have been "privately printed."
It's an extraordinary book. Because she tells the story as a conspiracy led by, and against, people, it hangs together as a narrative as books driven by analysis of economics do not. She also quotes sources which look very solid, very primary: Desmoulins on Mirabeau, Prussian emissaries on Frederick himself. Yet every conspiracy theory is supposed to have a leap of illogic at its heart, which it is the historian's duty to find. I am too ignorant to yet find Mrs. Webster's -- except that -- who on earth was Nesta Webster?
Massive and superior, of course, but still not exactly what I was looking for. I want the story, not a synopsis of its economic causes and psychic effects. Still, what a fund of knowledge he had. There is also this quote from a man once "well-known," one Luigi Cornaro:
"...how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am ... in my eighty-third year I have written a most amusing comedy."
What stands out above all is Burckhardt's contention that individuality marks the Renaissance type, while race-membership marked the medieval.
Who would have thought a man could write a dull book about the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa? He's repetitive, he's flailing -- from the pepper trade to Darwin to plate tectonics to the 19th century telegraph system to Muslim-Dutch tensions in Java to personal recollections and shop talk about his summer in Greenland in the 1960s -- he's breathlessly anxious to assure us the explosion was hugely, terrifyingly big. It was really, really big. By the time he reaches the actual event, on page 200 and something, he passes it by in a paragraph so that we have to look back and blink and re-read it. Oh. That's it? I guess he found the circus elephant in the hotel room more interesting. And, really, need we know that the Dutch colonial ladies wearing feathers in their hats in Java that summer might have been wearing feathers from birds which had actually flown through Krakatoa's roiling and terrifying (and really big) ash clouds?
He also uses the word "rather" too much, but that's a minor point. The whole thing reinforces my impression: in general, avoid books written after about 1975 or so. Something has simply gone out of the English language, or out of the English-speaking, organizational mind. Let's hope the loss is temporary.
The theme of this enormously dense book is Kaiser Wilhelm's personal responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, and consequently for its hideous aftermath, World War II, and the decline of Europe (John Keegan would say its "ruin") as a civilized world power.
It's a book that could only have been written in the 1960s, not in the sense that nobody before or after that decade could write enormously dense books about the Kaiser, but in the sense that by publication date (1964), enough time had passed to give the author some perspective, all the while events remained alive enough to encourage him to take his reader along on leisurely explorations of little details which later scholars probably summarize or ignore. There are details, for example, about how fast the train went carrying the body of Queen Victoria to her funeral site in 1901, the Kaiser her grandson, who hated being late, accompanying her ... possibly 92 miles per hour ....
I am not sure, also, if later books on the World Wars are quite so apt to begin, as this does and as William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp did, with serious and pained explorations of the, do we dare say, atrocious German character. It was 1964. Photographs and memories of the concentration camps were only twenty years in the past. Veterans of 1940-1945 were still young men barely into their forties; plenty of veterans of 1914-1918 were still hearty men in their late sixties or just nearing seventy. They had had their lives shaped and had set foot on a continent whose millions, across two generations, had had their lives destroyed by German decisions. When they sat down to read or to write about it, it seems they wanted answers to the question why. Why the Germans.
The passage of forty more years has laid most of those veterans in peaceful graves, and so has faded immediate memories and dulled that curiosity. I suspect political correctness has done the rest, frankly freezing any tendency to dare ask questions about national characteristics which sober men once asked -- even when they recognized that the Nazis were partial to those questions, too. Michael Balfour begins what one expects to be a simple biography of the Kaiser with a chapter on the huge topic "The Historical Background: 400 B.C. - A.D. 1880," and follows this with a second big chapter on "The Background to Anglo-German Relations." Anyone expecting a life story to begin with a discussion of a subject's parents or grandparents soon learns he is in the hands of a different type of scholar.
As he probes the Kaiser's moral responsibility, what Balfour studies in this book is the tragic conflation of three or four giant historical circumstances, centering on one people when that people was still burdened with the personal crapshoot of a hereditary monarchy. By the nineteenth century political liberalism and parliamentary democracy had evolved, most naturally and prominently in Britain. But "Germany" -- Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, dozens of other small warmed-over medieval fiefdoms -- had only just united as a nation state, and Germany's people equated their country with the means that had unified it: a powerful military, a landed and splendid noble class, and a mystic, ancient German-ness outdazzling small things like individual rights, middle class urban living, and drab, democratic electioneering. By the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and surging economic prosperity had arrived, most prominently in sea-girt, trading, colonizing Britain. But Germany was landlocked, and its economic life amounted to a long game of catch-up, mostly Balfour thinks because so much of its population was either absorbed in farming and the military, or lost to emigration ("800,000 left in the decade after unification alone," among them a set of my own great-grandparents, who departed in 1874.)
In the late nineteenth century, also, the nations of Europe still stood ready to contemplate war with one another in any combination at any time for any reason. It seems as if the middle ages had not died, and powerful men still ogled dragon-drawn maps and grinned over what dukedom could be had for what princess and why. Add to this that behemoth to the east, Russia, which considered itself the owner of the Balkans and yet made it policy to overleap central Europe ("we are Central Europe," the Kaiser said) and ally with France and Britain, too, for whatever reasons it liked. Add to this the Industrial Revolution's improvements in weaponry and transportation, and you have a sinister stage for the Kaiser to tread.
Then there is Wilhelm himself. The reader expecting to learn about his private life, his marriage, and the births of his children will not learn much. This is a man's book. Wilhelm grew up under the thumbs of his frantically English mother, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter Vicky, and -- not to sound comical -- of the frantically German Bismarck. German-ness and Englishness warred within him. He was intelligent but light-minded, and he had power, simply because he was born, at a time when a Germany suffering political and economic growing pains could pursue lethal plans because "the national mood" would not have it otherwise.
On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. The killer was a Serbian subject of that empire. The assassination of an empire's heir really serves as an announcement that that empire is stupid and shouldn't exist. A simple way of putting it, but those of us who have never quite understood why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's death mattered might perhaps understand that. Russia, would be owner of the Balkans, supported Serbia. Outraged Austria was Germany's ally, and so in that summer the clanking machineries of alliance and counter alliance, of monarchical and ministerial decision-making in Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Britain, all moved. Russia was the first to mobilize troops. In five weeks, the rest was done. One of the reasons why war had to be declared, Balfour says, was simply because pre-arranged railway timetables for getting German troops to the front --any front, for any reason -- required the pestering of Russian officials for explanations and replies that, outrageously, failed to come on time. When they didn't, the Kaiser, on August 1, 1914, signed the declaration of war which called into being all the others.
At the back of Norman Davies' huge book Europe, there is an appendix with the numbers of soldiers killed or dead of wounds by 1918: in round figures Russia lost 1.7 million, France 1.35 million, Britain 908,000, Italy 650,000; Germany lost 1.7 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million. It remains incomprehensible to see human deaths, and these the deaths of active young men only, expressed as fractions of a million.
The Kaiser signed the paper which started World War I, but how much was he responsible for everything leading up to it? Balfour concludes that "he was not fit for the outsize job destiny assigned him." True, but no one would have been. And, under the Kaiser's leadership (or lack of it), what was Germany's responsibility? More than once, Balfour says that it should be incumbent on nations, as it is on individuals, to realize they are not alone in the world and that their actions and ambitions will rub up against other peoples' and other nations,' and perhaps cause problems and suffering. Small actions, apparently trivial choices especially could be paramount in retrospect; in describing the Kaiser's birth to a young mother who suffered a horrific labor and delivery, Balfour asks whether history might have moved differently, if only the doctor attending had been a German committed to saving the baby rather than an Englishman committed to saving the mother (who lived to work the influence she did).
He does not quite say that the Great War proves nations should rise above happenstances, recognize their frightful moral interdependence, and trim the sails of their self-interest accordingly. As a historian and an adult he knows they don't and won't, especially not the most active and the most ambitious. On his last pages he writes, in fact, that there is no way of imagining how World War I could not have happened. "There are a number of things which one cannot imagine happening in a significantly different way unless one presupposes so many other alterations in the world as to turn the exercise into idle speculation." Germany was anxious for its "place in the sun." Britain was rich. Russia supported Serbia. Kaiser Wilhelm was born. And so on. " 'It happened because it happened,' " as Norman Davies quotes a later scholar in Europe.
Balfour ends with a quote that is true, if not terribly helpful. (What helps to understand World War I, and/or human nature? Scholars write huge books, and still don't know.) It also serves to illustrate a writing style that is really beautiful, and beautifully sustained, throughout all the enormous density:
We must always remember that it is our choices and decisions which will go to circumscribe the freedom of succeeding generations. Taken individually they may seem trivial, but taken together, and along with other people's, they add up to destiny.
Madame du Barry was the last of a long line of official royal mistresses of the French kings. She followed Madame de Pompadour into the affections and the lit of King Louis XV, and lived splendidly with him at Versailles for the last six years of his life, from 1768 to his death in 1774. The monarch was succeeded by his grandson, the unfortunate King Louis XVI, who for a variety of reasons not least of which was marriage to Marie Antoinette, seems to have kept no mistresses of his own.
When Louis XV and Madame du Barry met, he was in his late fifties and she was in her early twenties. The circumstances of their meeting, the role she played, the whole course of her life, all was so extraordinarily alien to us and our world that it seems one can't really write a review of a biography of her. One must muddle along and almost rewrite the biography, not because it wasn't good enough but simply to get all the information straight.
The position of royal mistress at Versailles was virtually a ministerial one. Exactly as in the Tudor court of sixteenth century England, powerful or merely grasping or merely needy people scouted out beautiful women to place before the king's eye, hoping that a new and grateful "Favorite" would be able to persuade him to grant favors, lands, incomes, religious sanctions, best of all official government posts, among the faction to whom she owed her elevation. (In Madame du Barry's case, this was one Jean du Barry, called "the Roue," a provincial comte who was making a living in Paris by schooling and then essentially selling pretty girls to wealthy men.) A difference between Tudor England and eighteenth-century France was that Henry VIII would never find himself seriously baited with a woman who was not herself of some genuinely powerful landed family; Louis XV, in contrast, met Madame du Barry because the palace of Versailles was open to the public. One spring day, because her patron, the Roue, had a kind of small-claims-court issue to pursue with the royal bureaucracy, she arrived, and his Majesty saw her in the crowd.
She was breathtakingly beautiful, voluptuous, ash-blond, large-eyed, and it seems sweet- natured and gentle, too. (It's a pity really that she should have been portrayed in Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette as a belching gypsy.) Within a few months, she was ensconced in that vipers' nest of a palace, where every faction faced a counter-faction fighting to the death for position and power, and the personal really was political. She lived in a blazing whirl of jewels, glorious dresses, fabulously appointed private chateaux, gambling parties, hate and gossip. And like all previous "Favorites," her position ultimately depended on the health of the king. As long as he lived in sin, his Catholic Majesty could not hear Mass or take Communion. Yet, he could not die without having returned to the forgiveness and sacraments of the church, and he could not return to them unless he first dismissed the Favorite forever. In those days of sudden mortal illness, La Dubarry, like all her predecessors, never knew when a royal "indisposition" might become a "maladie," and spell the end of her "Left-handed" reign. When the time came, etiquette required that she leave instantly, without goodbyes.
It happened in the spring of 1774. The king died after a horrific two week siege of smallpox, professional bleeding, and finally it seems gangrene. Madame du Barry lived most of the next two years in a local exile, put under house arrest in a convent because the new king and especially his queen, Marie Antoinette, took a high moral line about the former Favorite's purpose at the former court. Once forgiven and released, however, she next entered into what was perhaps the happiest part of her life. King Louis XV's settlements on her had been generous and she still owned a fortune in jewels as well as her lovely and famous home of Louveciennes, not far from Versailles. She had many friends, a busy and elegant social life such as only the eighteenth century French aristocracy ever enjoyed, and a long and happy love affair with the handsome and noble duc de Brissac.
Then came the Revolution. A few years into the turmoil, Madame du Barry's house was broken into, and almost all her jewelry stolen. Her lawyer made the mistake of circulating a kind of "reward" poster throughout Paris, inventorying the hoard in great detail. The virtuous revolutionaries who wanted everyone to be equal got a new look therefore at "the woman DuBarry's" lifestyle. And when the jewels turned up in London she made the mistake -- if it was a mistake -- of traveling there not once but four times in the next few years, ostensibly to recover her property and settle lawsuits about it. While there, she happened to make large donations to exiled French aristocrats and churchmen allied with the foreign powers ready to surround and destroy republican France. Most of the stolen jewelry seems never to have been found.
On her fourth return home, she found her house confiscated. The last months of her life were spent battling a mysterious figure, an Englishman named George Greive who had turned up at Louveciennes and its local village, and had set about agitating the populace and Madame's own servants against her. In those days when revolutionary violence had become the norm and its scythe had in turn put government into the hands of less and less experienced men, anybody could bring death to a neighbor by publishing any article in any broadsheet accusing him of "aristocratic tendencies" -- or simply by calling him an aristocrat. Greive pursued Madame du Barry with "wolfish ferocity." She evaded him for a while by carefully defending her legal rights under the new legal systems of the country, but when in September of 1793 the government was captured by the Jacobin party -- the left-est of the left -- she found herself doomed. Greive asked for her arrest on grounds of aristocratic leanings, and the Committee of General Safety agreed. In her letters written from prison, she hints that Greive raped her when he took her into custody.
She was tried and condemned to death, along with her bankers, in December of 1793. Her shrieks of terror and her struggles on the guillotine have often stood in marked contrast to the " 'icy disdain' " (more likely the shocked stupor, the author thinks) of other victims. But in her very last hours Madame du Barry had tried to save herself by telling her jailers the locations of buried treasure at her chateau, in exchange for her life. She believed she had succeeded in the bribe, up until the executioner came to her cell to cut off her hair and bind her arms. "The merciful drug of resignation did not have time to paralyze her senses," Loomis writes. "Neither emotionally nor physically did she go to the guillotine a dying woman." She was fifty.
It's an excellent book filled with what must be some of Loomis' best prose. The passage describing "the last of the great Versailles receptions," on the occasion of the wedding of the Dauphin to Marie Antoinette in 1770, is especially beautiful. Historians of the ancien regime are always at pains, and usually at a loss, to fully convince us of the incomprehensible sophistication of this civilization. " 'Of their kind they were perfect,' " -- he quotes Taine -- " 'there was not a gown, not a turn of the head, not a voice or turn of phrase which was not a masterpiece of worldy culture and the distilled quintessence of everything exquisite which the social art has ever elaborated.' "
The very fact that we need to have this explained to us -- good grief, they were people, how otherworldly can they have been? -- probably shows how divorced we are from any real understanding of it. For me it finally comes through, faintly, in excerpts from Madame du Barry's letters. She writes to her friends with a calm simplicity on all sorts of occasions, each word a simple pulse beat of meaning, whether she is announcing a party or saying "I love you." She writes to her lover's daughter, with whom she is of course on good terms: "No one has felt more than I the great loss which you have just suffered. I hope you will understand the reason for my delay in mingling my own tears with yours. The fear of adding to your grief prevents me from speaking to you of it. Mine is complete ...."
This was a few days after the duc de Brissac had been murdered outside her chateau by a mob, his body mutilated and partly eaten, and his head thrown through a window into her living room where it rolled to her feet. " 'One does not die of grief,' " she wrote, simply, a little later.
In the end, I am surprised by one thing, and that is the last two paragraphs of Loomis' book. After writing a lyrical and sympathetic biography, he nevertheless regretfully but officially condemns Madame du Barry on behalf of his modern reader. She slept with the king for money, he says, and also she was unforgivably rich when others were poor.
True. But that is not the same thing as hurting other people. Even the king was a widower when she met him. It's a tricky thing to judge whether it was criminal of her to, perhaps, aid the enemies of her country, when her country had transformed politically and legally into something entirely new and continually free-forming. And fantastically, officially violent. It was the cusp of a new world; which explains why an upcoming monarch of France's future would be "king of the French," not king of France. Loomis does not explore this in his last two paragraphs. He only acknowledges: in the end, "she was kind."
More importantly, since we live now under a deep-dyed leftist President whose disciples are legion, who also hates bankers and wants everyone to be equal, I can't help but read La Du Barry's story with a certain funny chill. A new and free-forming government is not particularly a good thing. Under the veneer of any civilization, human beings are all alike. But surely it can't happen here.
I had hopes of enjoying this book. As I flip through it now, it still looks interesting and erudite. I am glad to learn that dreams and visions were popular subjects of Florentine art, "where the great fresco cycles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries drew chiefly on the Golden Legend of Jacopo della Voragine and the life of Saint Francis." I am glad to know also that perspective in navigation and perspective in art are linked: "Toscanelli, who taught Brunelleschi, also advised Columbus and the king of Portugal. ... Many of the landscapes of the quattrocento, especially Baldovinetti's, have the character of aerial maps; the bare Tuscan hills ... are now shown furrowed by husbandry." Interesting. Maybe it would be best to flip through the book backward.
Read forward, properly, The Stones of Florence unfortunately becomes annoying in a hurry. The author begins with the obligatory chapter announcing what Florence is really like, circa 1963 -- hot, drab, and unwelcoming -- and insulting tourists essentially for not knowing what she knows. Why do intellectuals hate tourists? Is this a Western phenomenon, or do Japanese tourists, for example, also hate fellow Japanese tourists abroad, and write books about how dumb they look?
By page 49, I had reached this, after wading through a short discussion on the popularity of the classic Greek look in Renaissance sculpture -- "Naturally, in none of this statuary, which was once a la mode (nor in the graceful Cellini either), is there a grain of that local tender piety, religious or civic, that appears in its purest, most intense concentration in Donatello ...." And my brain now up and spoke of its own accord. Woman, it asked, who has told you all this? You are not a native Florentine, no more than the tourists. And what in blazes is "local tender piety"?
After that, I did a bit more skimming, forward, but then gave up. The book has no theme or story of any kind to tell, and the author herself seems to have no voice. If she was aiming for the cool detachment that the reviewers quoted on the back of the book praise her for, then I suggest she succeeded too well. She has many wonderful facts at her disposal, and I can vaguely tell that the chapters are meant to cover certain topics -- painting here, history there, at the end art restoration, and how wrong Ruskin was about the essential Giottos he thought he saw -- but reading the book only inspired me to ask that dread, necessary question which all writers should ask themselves, many times, and then forestall in others by the quality of their answering performance. So what? For me, and despite her obvious abilities, she had no answer.
About ten years ago, Commentary published an article on the demise of the secondary source intellectual. It was too bad, the author wrote, that standards in the publishing world had become not so much very professional, as so very professorial. Nowadays, anyone with a book to write on some topic or other, anyone who wanted a prayer of being taken seriously, had first to do what historians looking for a Ph.D. and tenure at a university do: go and unearth primary sources and write from original research, even though the resulting book might develop the same theme and reach the same conclusions as it would have done from the support of secondary sources only, bound and ready in good public libraries. Oh, and to have a prayer of being taken seriously, it was best to already have a Ph.D., before getting to work.
Indeed, it was too bad. Secondary source intellectuals, urbane and entertaining writers whose "Acknowledgements" used to be profuse in thanks to librarians and typists, had often produced delightful, unusual stuff which amused and educated the general reader. And they did, even if only for the satisfaction of their own muse, what I suppose could be called the Lord's work. (The muse's work?) Look at the flyleaf of an older book, and see the long variegated lists of topics "By the same author." A biography of Disraeli might precede a book on gardening and follow a personal travel journal or a history of Dutch art. The muses were wonderfully busy.
Life in a Medieval Castle is an example of the kind of secondary source history whose demise Commentary's author regretted. Its bibliography contains nothing like the Calendars of State Papers that all of today's "real" professionals consult. In it we also find those entrancing old references that the secondary source writer takes seriously, but that the professional today would either ignore or eagerly set aside to explore at some later time in order to write a new, original source monograph dissecting that source for its own sake. Who on earth, for instance, was Ella Armitage, and why did she write and publish Early Norman Castles in 1912? No matter. Joseph and Frances Gies found her worthwhile, and not as a specimen.
The Gieses were a married couple who concentrated on medieval history in their long and, let me say speedily, respected professional career. It may be that in all their other books they worked from original sources, and only relaxed a bit with this one. It's a good book, but is essentially a compilation of good, secondary source information lacking that new theme or major conclusion, exclamation point, with which a scrabbler-through of state papers would want to astonish the world. It's the kind of book that an advanced high school student or undergraduate would use if he needed information on "A Day in the Castle" (chapter VI), "The Villagers" (chapter VIII), or "The Castle at War" (chapter X).
Having said all this, let me assert that this deceptively brief book is packed with information, including long passages from other people's translations of primary medieval sources, that teaches the reader anew about the complexity and sophistication of the medieval world. Sometimes we are so anxious not to romanticize a glamorous-looking former time and place that we fail to do it justice -- we muddy it up with truthful assertions about its misery and filth and disease, forgetting that not everybody was miserable and sick all the time. The chapter on falconry alone raised my respect for this society and what it had the patience and passion to accomplish, merely for amusement. Then castles with stone walls twenty-four feet thick for a start, and the intricate workings of laws and rights governing village life and the common people's relation to authority, the hard labor of pre-industrial farming and the hard play of pagan-tinged holidays, -- all are recorded here and all combine to make the modern person feel he is skating along on the froth of life, held up by a web of blessed technology but completely ignorant of what survival, medieval-style, really meant. Electro-magnetic pulse attack, anyone? No, it's not the name of a rock group.
There are a few small surprises here. Little things, bits of information that we would think someone would have explained to us by now. (Perhaps this is why the Gieses are respected professionals.) The castle, the authors write, served a specific purpose. It was a private fortress sheltering a lord, his family and servants, and his small private army against larger outside forces during troublous times. Castles were first built by Byzantine Greeks campaigning in isolation in North Africa in the sixth century A.D. Adapted by the Muslim conquerors of medieval Spain and perfected by the barons and kings of northern Europe, the castle was the supremely powerful piece of medieval military technology as long as medieval conditions, military, economic, and social, obtained. It was nothing if not rural, nothing if not in command of rural life. Farm and village needed the castle's protection; the castle needed the farms' food and the villagers' labor and occasional service in war. When those conditions changed, when cities and merchants amassed more wealth in coin than the countryside could produce in kind and when centralized government took up the reins of power, the rural private fortress became obsolete. The introduction of gunpowder and cannon also helped batter it to pieces.
One more small surprise among all this professional information concerns the seemingly bizarre nature of European farming in the middle ages. I declare I will never understand this. Northern Europe is startlingly far north. Paris lies at about the same latitude as the Canadian-U.S. border, farther north than Lake Superior. The famed castles of Wales lie still farther north, at the same latitude as Newfoundland. Yet Chapter XI, "The Castle Year," describes an agricultural cycle by which crops were sown in "the winter," from late September to Christmas, and then different crops sown from Christmas to Easter, "the spring." Summer came after Easter week, and lasted till the first of August. The harvest, autumn, fell from August 1st to the end of September. Then a new agricultural year started with the winter planting.
I can certainly understand harvesting crops in September, and I understand that our American, continental climate is far harsher in general than Europe's, but I still stand in amazement at records showing that ground could be worked and seeds planted in December, January, or February. Yea verily, it almost sounds like evidence of global warming. If so, I would think the more of it, the better.
And where are today's equivalents of the Gieses, hardworking scholars who produced reliable, enjoyable secondary-source stuff for the erudition and enjoyment of the general reading public? Have they been driven out of the publishing world by gatekeepers competing for scarce dollars, and unwilling to offer the public, for those dollars, anything that seems unoriginal -- relaxed, unastonishing, unprofessorial? The author of Commentary's article compared the breed, if memory serves, to a butterfly, bright and lovely while it lived but evidently too fragile to survive. Too bad. The approved professionals nowadays sometimes seem all so uniformly moth-ish.
I think three months -- or was it four? -- to slog through a 681-page book on antiquity's epochal change from paganism to Christianity, which has sat on my shelves for twenty years and whose author may have long since died for all I know, is all right, isn't it? And did I say that right?
Robin Lane Fox's aims in Pagans and Christians are staggeringly ambitious, and are set out right there on the dust jacket for all to see and cope with, or flee as the case may be. I salute whatever book designer it was who composed this summary and squeezed it below a large illustration, but above the (large-print) title and (small-print) author's name. The summary announces sternly, RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE FROM THE SECOND TO THE FOURTH CENTURY A.D., WHEN THE GODS OF OLYMPUS LOST THEIR DOMINION AND CHRISTIANITY, WITH THE CONVERSION OF CONSTANTINE, TRIUMPHED IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD.
Oh, that.
I write in some exasperation only because the author annoyed me just a tad, on page 662, as I finished the book this morning. In one paragraph on this page it seemed to me that he negated two major theses for his entire book, and took his reader right back to the standard arguments for this epochal change, encapsulations of which you could probably find on Wikipedia this minute: that ancient paganism died because pagans were tired of its hopelessness, tired of not knowing whether to fear or not fear their goofy little statue-gods.
But that was just one paragraph, on page 662. Perhaps I missed some nuance in the previous 661 pages which would have proved to me that it all fit right in and that Mr. Fox had not thereby contradicted himself wholesale at all.
If I am confused I can't blame his writing style, which is excellent throughout. It is plain, elegant, respectful of the reader's intelligence, but blessedly un-academic. I find it curious, though, that after six hundred-odd pages of it, interspersed with lots of deeply careful tracings and retracings of this source or that, this letter, that inscription, this translation of that reference only known in Eusebius until a fragment of a papyri turned up in Egypt in 1980 -- dear me, you shouldn't dismiss with mimicry historians' tremendous hard work, but sometimes it just seems you have to -- I find it curious that what he ends up saying is simply that Christianity "triumphed" because, after a while, more people liked Christianity than liked paganism.
Of course that's not the only reason for the collapse of the old gods' dominion. I would say the fundamental story Mr. Fox is telling in the book is that, circa 300 A.D., an ageless pagan religious worldview in which communities of people from time to time sought the help or knowledge or mercy of the gods through the interpretation of dreams, or through civic celebrations and attendance at professionally staffed (but still genuinely eerie or "uncanny") oracles, gave way to a new Christian worldview in which individuals, possibly saved for heaven by Christ's sacrifice but also uniquely commanded to moral behavior, suddenly admitted the authority of a holy scripture into their private lives. Sin therefore as a daily worry, including sin in thought, and eternal life as a daily hope, were new. When enough people adopted this worldview, contributed money to it, lived by it, and caused it to shape society -- in other words, when "Christian business became public business" -- it rose to govern not only private lives, but the formerly pagan Roman state.
In Fox's telling, pagans seem to have adopted Christianity piecemeal, for a variety of reasons some of which remain mysterious. One of his major themes is "overachievement." Especially in its very early days when Christ's second coming was believed to be imminent and the faithful postponed baptism until they had reached an absolutely perfect sinless state worthy of it, the new religion held up standards of interior moral scrutiny and vivid spiritual achievement that appealed, and will always appeal, to certain personality types. (Christianity also eventually introduced to the world, he thinks, a commensurate phenomenon, the slacker majority.) The "years of instruction and preparation" for that baptism also appealed, making people feel "they were exploring a deep mystery, step by step." Christian belief in the power of the holy Spirit as a link between God and man, "the source of man's knowledge of himself, a power of conscience which pagan teaching had not recognized," was also new and led, for believers, to a "new and immediate miracle: a potential change in human nature itself" (pp. 314-316).
Persecution and martyrdom, when they happened, could impress witnesses, and sometimes prompted more conversions. After the passing of a few centuries, pagans in the ancient world, still very much the multitude -- the vitality of pagan worship and culture throughout this period is another major theme -- nevertheless noticed that Christians took care of their sick, widowed, orphaned, and elderly in organized ways that pagans did not necessarily do. They noticed also that Christians, along with Jews, held to indubitably higher standards on what we might tactfully call social issues. They "vigorously attacked" infanticide, the exposure of children, and abortion and, when they attained real power, they outlawed violent gladitorial shows.
What did early Christianity lack? After all, many pagans were never interested in it. Many witnesses of martyrdom did not watch in respectful awe, but blanched at what seemed Christians' grotesque zeal, and tried to reason eager victims out of their immolatory frenzy by pointing out the lovely earth and lovely weather, and asking whether it wasn't good to be alive, even if it did mean paying lip service to some Olympian formula for a minute. And Christianity stubbed its toe against a number of empirical problems. The decades and centuries passed, and Christ did not return, nor did the world end. Hope of eternal life with Jesus ("the wholly new idea of man's Redemption") was a beautiful thing, but the actual resurrection of the body seemed to most people a demonstrably foolish idea. Open any grave and see what's left of the human body after a little while -- and besides, if everybody comes back, how is all our property to be divided? Christian refusal to participate in "Romanity" (merely saying prayers for the safety of the Emperor, for instance), their concern to police each other's beliefs -- as the Church grew, "heresy" grew -- and what seemed their sterile glorification of celibacy, virginity, and chaste widowhood all struck pagans as hard and atheistical refutations of the human project. A project which could be summed up, I suppose, in the word civilian.
Civilian, in the sense of being civil? Not exactly. But the word isn't chosen at random. Very early in Pagans and Christians, Fox explains that the word pagan is an ancient Christian slang term, applied in the sense of "civilian," non-combatant, to people who were not yet soldiers in the army of Christ, enlisted to fight Satan.
The book closes with Christianity's triumph under the Emperor Constantine, who converted and then really made things happen. Lone, powerful men can do that. Among other acts he built churches, ended persecutions, and decreed that any party in any lawsuit could appeal to that new authority figure, the Christian bishop, for judgment -- and the bishop's decision then bound any other judge (p. 667). With the passage of time, Constantine gained to his side the most powerful argument of all, that the sky had not fallen with Christianity's usurping of the ancient gods' powers, and therefore they obviously had none and perhaps never did. "The lack of divine reprisals," it seemed, "did show that the 'anger' of the gods was no match for Christ" (p. 672). And in time, Fox argues, Christian worship fell into the patterns familiar to pagan life, patterns which he seems to think are natural to the human mind: long-dead saints began to "appear" to believers, as protecting gods did to Homer's heroes, and artists began to paint and make mosaics of Jesus' face, whose true lineaments no one knew.
The book is so rich in scholarship that anyone could pick out a different handful of themes and write a completely different review which would still be an accurate summation and yet not do the author justice. I'm sure I've overlooked topics or arguments which anyone else would consider major. Monasticism, the role of the wealthy urban religious patron, confession and confessors; and I've overlooked the little anecdotes from the modern day that Fox sprinkles throughout the book, and that help prove his point that "the transition from paganism to Christianity is where the ancient world still touches ours." He was writing in the 1980s, when Yugoslavia was on the brink of falling apart -- not that anyone knew it -- and little girls in Medjugorje were seeing visions exactly as had the martyrs of two millenia before, and the Homeric heroes of two millenia before that. What did they see, and why? "No generation," he says in his preface, "can afford to ignore whether Christianity is true and, if it is not, why it has spread and persisted."
For a Christian reader, this last statement will exemplify a great flaw in the book. Obviously the author is not a believing Christian, and so is cut off from simple truths. He nowhere quotes "For God so loved the world ...." For my part, I found the ending puzzling. He seems to try very hard, and to want to, but to actually tie nothing up. When it grew strong enough, yes, the Christian church eventually stamped out Mediterranean paganism. After Constantine made them safe, individual Christians could pull down pagan shrines without fear of reprisals, and the church could and did torture into silence the staff at pagan oracles. The official Christian view became that paganism had at best only prophesied the coming of Christ and Christianity, and had done nothing else on a day to day basis for the people living by it. By about the year 500 A.D., the pagan story was over.
Fair enough, and fairly clear. But Fox concludes with a short ramble concerning the Sibyl, prophecy, a church built over a Sibylline oracle at Rome, and then a vague worried hint that if Christianity in turn collapses, all religious experience must cease. Why? (This is a pretty large claim with which to end a book.) Because "yet 'not to everyone do the gods appear ...' " So ... some human beings will always receive some kind of epiphany, -- yet not?
At this point, one is tempted to take a break, turn to a google search, and see just for curiosity's sake whether the old fellow is still alive. Why, my goodness, yes he is! And who am I calling old? Just in his sixties. And even got a cameo in a movie he consulted for. Well, well. I must rearrange my ideas, and stop picturing a white-haired soul in a Bath chair, lap robe, and slippers, sitting by a fire in Oxford and scribbling notes in Latin. And no mistake: it's a great, great book.
Now this is history. Keep, for the moment, kings and battles and social movements. Give me a hideous murder among the very hautest of the haute monde of Paris, on the morning of August 18th, 1847, and give it to me in the word-painting of a professional type who seems to have vanished from today's bookshelves. Stanley Loomis begins: "Only forty years separated the reign of Louis-Philippe from the ancien regime. There were many men, therefore, ... who amid the plush-covered furniture, the tasselled hangings, and the wallpaper of the 1830s could recall the fragile futilities of that other age and in their mind's eye still see that simpler furniture upon which the shepherdesses of Trianon had once disposed themselves ...."
The story of the Praslin murder was laid out for me, first, in the great old movie All This and Heaven Too. Bette Davis' diction has never been more perfect than in that film; the little-known Barbara O'Neil earned an Oscar nomination as Madame la Duchesse, a role the polar opposite of her previous work as Scarlett O'Hara's saintly mother; Charles Boyer, as Monsieur le Duc, delivers one of those lines that you want to save up and use yourself in real life. Guilty and cagey, but pure in his love for a servant, he squints into the middle distance above his rigidly set jaw and hisses at a nosy fellow aristocrat, "You make me ashemed dhat I know you."
The movie was based on Rachel Field's 1938 novel of the same name. Stanley Loomis' book was published another generation after both, but follows the course of the film surprisingly closely. Someone -- novelist, filmmakers, historian, or all -- has done his homework.
The story is simply dreadfully unhappy at its core. The Duc and Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin were married young, for love, and had many children. By middle age, however, things had gone hellishly wrong. The duchesse became suffocating in her worship and jealousy of her husband. He stopped sleeping with her. (The movie copes with this very adroitly. We forget that people had sex and liked it before the 1960s.) She wrote him endless letters. There was something wrong between her and the children -- ill-feeling, certainly, but the duchesse also wrote of "corruption." The family ran through a string of governesses before hiring their last, Mademoiselle Henriette Deluzy. Even before she arrived, the Duc and Duchesse had actually signed an agreement that the Duchesse would not go near her own children, and that the future governess, whoever she was, would have all authority over the brood.
Mademoiselle Deluzy proved loving, competent, "fascinating." Society quickly assumed she was the duc's mistress, and even if she was not, the fact that she accompanied the father and children on trips while Madame la Duchesse stayed home certainly looked bad.
Six years on, in midsummer of 1847, Madame initiated divorce proceedings against Monsieur. The situation in the household looked so scandalous that the duchesse would certainly have been given custody of the children, which in divorce cases "in that civilization run by men" was not normal. (A glance at Anna Karenina will explain why. It was assumed that a divorcing woman would set up a new home with a new man and her illegitimate new family, although this would not have been the duchesse's case. But the fictional Karenin -- all men -- feared for a legitimate son's education as an orphan in some hovel with a common-law stepfather.) In that same summer, Mademoiselle Deluzy was abruptly discharged.
A month later, the duc murdered the duchesse, with hideous violence, on an August dawn at their Paris mansion, 55 rue du Faubourg St. Honore. This is currently the address of the Elysee Palace, official residence of the President of France, a building that has stood on the spot since the early 1700s. Can one number stand for two buildings? Or does official business go on in the very rooms where Madame once ran shrieking and bloodied from door to door, fending off her husband's knife?
He swallowed arsenic later that afternoon after a round of police questioning, and died the following week. Mademoiselle Deluzy was imprisoned on suspicion of complicity for three months. No less a figure than Victor Hugo wrote about it in the daily papers. The mobs were inflamed. In November, the governess was released for lack of evidence.
She moved to the United States, became a teacher in an exclusive New York girls' school, and then married a member of the Field family, of transatlantic-cable laying (Cyrus) fame. And of literary fame: Rachel Field, novelist, was a great-niece by marriage of the Henry Field who married the notorious "Mademoiselle D." The novel has fun with the second half of her life. The new and exciting Mrs. Field stands out among her good neighbors in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She serves coffee on a tray before the fireplace. She helps a young girl curl her hair, to cheer her while she is sick in bed, and the young girl gawps at her and exclaims, " 'Why, you are frivolous!' "
And the movie has fun with politics, or so I once thought. When Bette Davis finishes telling her salivating young American pupils the story of the poor governess who longs only for calm and anonymity now, she says, " 'And so the people of France fought the Revolution of 1848. For the king of France and the Peers to let this wicked woman go was the last straw....' " I used to think that Hollywood was making this up, in order to give a soap opera a more serious tone. It seems Hollywood was not. A great Peer and intimate of the royal family conveniently escaping public trial for murder, albeit escaping through a painful death himself, does seem to have had something to do with what history books -- and Wikipedia -- call the Fall of the July Monarchy.
Loomis writes that there is one eternal mystery to the Praslin murder, and that is simply why he did it. It was both premeditated -- the duc bolted doors and windows, and fetched arsenic days in advance -- and wildly violent. A "crime of passion." Neither he nor Mademoiselle ever admitted adultery or planned murder, and while surviving letters overflow with intense emotions and good writing, none clarify motive. None define "corruption." One of Loomis' themes is that something mawkish in the Romantic era itself turned people's heads, especially among the Parisian aristocracy who had come far from their eighteenth-century forbears' "discipline and ceremony" and now had little to do but brood, read novels, and take opium. The duchesse's copy of Mrs. Armytage or Female Domination, new but bloodstained, lies still among her things in the Paris National Archives. Or it did, in 1967.
And Mrs. Field, having lived to a fairly decent old age, died and lies buried in a dignified spot in a cemetery in dignified Stockbridge. "Dear Great-Aunt Henriette, Although I never knew you in life, as a child I often cracked butternuts on your tombstone," Rachel Field introduces her novel. For my part, I intend to turn again to the excellently entertaining Stanley Loomis, whose Paris in the Terror stands on my bookshelves, and whose Madame du Barry: a Biography is on order for me at the local library.
