Elsewhere

I am conservative by nature.  But please take note, dear readers:  that is not a political statement.  I have no interest whatsoever in the acts or omissions of presidents, prime ministers, premiers, princes, or other potentates.  I feel the same way about utopian political schemes of any stripe, together with their mad inventors, purveyors, and true believers.  We all know the ultimate end of chimerical, delusive, and disingenuous dream-worlds.

No, my conservatism is a matter of temperament.  The modern world has always seemed to me to be an unsatisfactory place.  Hence, I often find myself mourning the passing of, and harboring nostalgia for, human things that vanished either before my time on earth began or during my short (and ever-shortening) stay here.

This, for instance:

                    Then

Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty,
     A hundred years ago,
All through the night with lantern bright
     The Watch trudged to and fro.
And little boys tucked snug abed
     Would wake from dreams to hear --
"Two o' the morning by the clock,
     And the stars a-shining clear!"
Or, when across the chimney-tops
     Screamed shrill a North-east gale,
A faint and shaken voice would shout,
     "Three!  and a storm of hail!"

Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (Constable 1913).

When I read this, I cannot help but feel that the human world has taken a grievous and irremediable wrong turn.

Charles Oppenheimer (1875-1961)

"From a Tower, Kirkcudbright"

Some of you (perhaps nearly all of you) may say:  "But what of the innumerable human accomplishments over the past millennia, the advances in knowledge, and the progress humanity has made?"  Yes, I am indeed quite pleased with the state of modern plumbing, thank you.  I am also fond of physicians and other health care professionals, and their craft.  And I am delighted with the promptness and efficiency of pizza delivery services.  I can come up with other examples as well, if pressed.  But my unease persists.

                  On a Vulgar Error

No.  It's an impudent falsehood.  Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church?  Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly?  They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror?  They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.

C. S. Lewis, Poems (Geoffrey Bles 1964).

Charles Oppenheimer, "Kirkcudbright under Snow" (1934)

So, there you have it:  I long for watchmen and bell-men, for human cries and bell-ringing far off in the deep of night.  I'm afraid I shall never change.  But that's just me.

                  The Bell-man

From noise of Scare-fires rest ye free,
From Murders Benedicitie.
From all mischances, that may fright
Your pleasing slumbers in the night:
Mercy secure ye all, and keep
The Goblin from ye, while ye sleep.
Past one aclock, and almost two,
My Masters all, Good day to you.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648), in Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume I (Oxford University Press 2013).

Charles Oppenheimer, "The Old Tolbooth, Kirkcudbright" (1931)

Abstention

As I have noted on previous occasions, each generation believes that the World is going to Hell in a handbasket.  How could it be otherwise? Whether it arrives via a footsore messenger, a sailing ship in port from distant lands, telegraph, television, or the Internet, the News of the World is not, and has never been, calculated to inspire confidence in the goodwill and beneficence of humanity.

Thus, when I launch into one of my periodic rants about Modernity (Science, Progress, the media, politicians, et cetera), I ought to know better.  Yes, of course:  the World is going to Hell in a handbasket.  But this has never been the fault of current events, which are invariably horrendous and dispiriting.  Nor is it the fault of the makeshift (and risible) political, economic, and scientific nostrums that are developed in each generation in order to "explain" and "correct" all that is wrong with the World.  Rather, this has always been a matter of False Gods versus Eternal Verities.

Still, I must confess to believing this:  when it comes to the balance between Eternal Verities and False Gods, there has been a grievous wrong-turning.

                    On a Vulgar Error

No.  It's an impudent falsehood.  Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church?  Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly?  They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror?  They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.

C. S. Lewis, Poems (1964).

Dudley Holland, "Winter Morning" (1945)

The False Gods usually have the upper hand:  their superficial appeal and their promise of immediate gratification are alluring.  The Eternal Verities are, on the other hand, sober and tradition-bound.  Old-fashioned. Sentimental.  Boring.

You may have noticed that I have not attempted to define the False Gods and the Eternal Verities.  Although I have no illusions about human nature, I persist in believing that most of us know the difference between the real and the feigned, the true and the false.  In the final scene of Mr. Sammler's Planet, Artur Sammler stands beside the body of his nephew Elya Gruner, which lies on a gurney in an autopsy room in the bowels of a hospital.  In "a mental whisper," Sammler speaks the final words of the novel:

"At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be.  He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet -- through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding -- he did meet the terms of his contract.  The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows.  As I know mine.  As all know.  For that is the truth of it -- that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (Viking Press 1970).

                         Existence

Clearly this stupid world doesn't inspire
anything now but an intense antipathy,
an urge to vanish and be done with it;
you hardly dare pick up a newspaper.

Perhaps we should go back to the old home
where our ancestors lived under the eye
of heaven, and find the curious harmony
that sanctified their lives from womb to tomb.

It's some kind of faith for which we yearn,
some gentle web of close dependencies
transcending and containing our existence.
We can no longer live so far from the eternal.

Michel Houellebecq (translated by Derek Mahon), in Derek Mahon, Echo's Grove (The Gallery Press 2013).

Charles Cundall, "Temeside, Ludlow" (1923)

A poem that Mahon wrote long before he translated Houellebecq's poem seems apt.

                  Nostalgias

The chair squeaks in a high wind,
Rain falls from its branches;
The kettle yearns for the mountain,
The soap for the sea.
In a tiny stone church
On a desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing 'Abide with Me.'

Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (The Gallery Press 1999).

Lisbeth Jane Brand (1907-1970), "Winter"

The Eternal Verities are, well, eternal.  Call them revenants, but they are always there.  Let me be clear:  I have only a vague notion of what they are. I remain in thrall to the False Gods.  But the choice is ever ours.  Perhaps abstention is the first step.

                 The Valley Wind

Living in retirement beyond the World,
Silently enjoying isolation,
I pull the rope of my door tighter
And stuff my window with roots and ferns.
My spirit is tuned to the Spring-season;
At the fall of the year there is autumn in my heart.
Thus imitating cosmic changes
My cottage becomes a Universe.

Lu Yun (4th century A. D.) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918).

Remember, and take heart:  "They ain't quit doing it as long as I'm doing it."  Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952).

Charles Frederick Dawson, "Accrington From My Window" (1932)

"Anyone Happy In This Age And Place Is Daft Or Corrupt"

I have previously noted this conundrum:  Is the world going to Hell in the proverbial handbasket, or is the belief that this is so simply a stage that each generation passes through as it begins to age?  For my part, I believe, first, that the world is in fact going to Hell in a handbasket, and, second, that this belief has absolutely nothing (of course!) to do with my age.  As I have suggested before, my sympathies lie with the views expressed in "On a Vulgar Error" by C. S. Lewis.

Similar sympathies are, perhaps, evident in the following poem by Roy Fuller (1912-1991), which Philip Larkin (ever sly and cheerful) included in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse.  On the other hand, Fuller may be pulling our leg.  Although Fuller -- a committed (pun not intended) socialist in his younger years -- became more conservative as he aged, I am not sure whether he ever fully abandoned his youthful political views.  However, he did look upon modern culture with some skepticism.  In this regard, the essay "Philistines and Jacobins" in his Owls and Artificers: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1971) is very entertaining.   

                              Translation

Now that the barbarians have got as far as Picra,
And all the new music is written in the twelve-tone scale,
And I am anyway approaching my fortieth birthday,
               I will dissemble no longer.

I will stop expressing my belief in the rosy
Future of man, and accept the evidence
Of a couple of wretched wars and innumerable
               Abortive revolutions.

I will cease to blame the stupidity of the slaves
Upon their masters and nurture, and will say,
Plainly, that they are enemies to culture,
               Advancement and cleanliness.

From progressive organisations, from quarterlies
Devoted to daring verse, from membership of
Committees, from letters of various protest
               I shall withdraw forthwith.

When they call me reactionary I shall smile,
Secure in another dimension.  When they say
'Cinna has ceased to matter' I shall know
               How well I reflect the times.

The ruling class will think I am on their side
And make friendly overtures, but I shall retire
To the side further from Picra and write some poems
               About the doom of the whole boiling.

Anyone happy in this age and place
Is daft or corrupt.  Better to abdicate
From a material and spiritual terrain
               Fit only for barbarians.

Roy Fuller, Counterparts (1954).  Lempriere's Bibliotheca Classica states that Picra was "a lake of Africa, which Alexander crossed when he went to consult the oracle of Ammon."  It is also possible that Fuller is alluding humorously to "hiera picra," which is defined in the OED as "a purgative drug composed of aloes and canella bark."  It is my understanding that "hiera picra" may be translated as "holy bitter" or "sacred bitter."  Gaius Helvius Cinna was a Roman poet who (according to Plutarch) was murdered at Julius Caesar's funeral when he was mistaken for the conspirator Lucius Cornelius Cinna. 

                                                      Henry Raeburn
              "Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch"
                                                           (c. 1795)               

A Lost World, Part One: "The Backward Glance"

I am not fond of the artists of the "High Renaissance."  I confess that Michelangelo, da Vinci, Titian, and Raphael leave me cold.  Instead, I prefer the artists of the early- to mid-15th century, when the influence of the Middle Ages was still present.  Thus, in Italy, I favor Fra Angelico (c. 1395-1455) and Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1421-1497) -- in particular, Fra Angelico's frescoes in San Marco and Gozzoli's frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi.

But the best painting of the 15th century lies, in my humble opinion, not in Italy, but in the Burgundian Netherlands (the various duchies and fiefdoms ruled by the House of Valois-Burgundy).  The art is sometimes designated as "early Netherlandish painting" or "late Gothic painting," and the artists (for instance, Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden) are sometimes identified as "the Flemish Primitives."  But the labels are irrelevant.  In fact, as soon as I typed them, I got a queasy feeling -- I do not wish to enter the land of art-critical jargon. 

Instead, we are better off just looking.  Here is a detail from a painting by one of the best artists of the time.  For now, I will not identify the artist, because I do not want a name to get in the way of looking.  I intend to re-visit the painting in a subsequent post, where all will be revealed.                 

Of course, there is much that can be said, starting with the colors, the textures, the movement, the "minute particulars" . . . but I get that queasy feeling again.  However, the painting does prompt me to say this (and thus sound like a reactionary):  the idea that civilization progresses over time is, to quote the title of a poem by C. S. Lewis, "a vulgar error."  Here are two stanzas from the poem:

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.               

C. S. Lewis: "On a Vulgar Error"

I first encountered the following poem in Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.  Larkin's selection of poems was published in 1973, and it was criticized by many as being too "old-fashioned."  Given Larkin's sense of humor, one gets the feeling that he likely set out to provoke exactly that type of response.  In any event, here is the poem - which stands on its own (but it is easy to understand why Larkin would like it):

        On a Vulgar Error

No. It's an impudent falsehood.  Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church?  Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly?  They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror?  They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightaway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.

C. S. Lewis, Poems (1964), page 60.