Illth Revisited

 Today is the birthday of the great Victorian critic John Ruskin (born 1819). The last time I marked his birth was way back in 2009, when this blog was in its swaddling clothes. I wrote then about the Ruskinian notion of 'illth', the opposite of wealth, creative not of well-being but of ill-being. I was writing when the world was suffering from the prodigious illth-creation of the bankers – this was the time of the 'credit crunch'/ financial crisis (which the bankers of course came through unscathed and unreformed). Today, with the world increasingly controlled by an amoral transnational kleptocracy, and The Machine rolling ever onward in its dehumanising work, illth is everywhere. Ruskin would be appalled, but not, I think, surprised: when a society is without a sacred dimension, a sense of the past and a strong attachment to place and community/nation, this is what happens. A good thing he's not alive to see it – I think even he might be lost for words. 

Look Left, Look Right

Yesterday I was in London, having lunch with an old friend, who, it turned out, had not seen the rehung National Gallery (despite living in London – ain't it always the way?). As we were close by, we stepped in, and I had the pleasure of seeing her enjoy the impact of the magnificent rehang for the first time. One of its boldest and most brilliant strokes was to open an uninterrupted vista from one end of the building to the other, so that, as you enter the Sainsbury Wing galleries, you reach a place where you can look to your left and see the great Mond Crucifixion, an early Raphael, painted under the influence of Perugino, and one of his most beautiful works – and, to your right, at the far end of the long, long enfilade of galleries, George Stubbs's masterly, life-sized study of Whistlejacket, surely the greatest and most imposing equestrian painting ever made. To stand between these two masterpieces, looking from left to right, from right to left, is surely the most heart-lifting, aesthetically thrilling experience London has to offer. And of course it is merely a foretaste of the National Gallery's treasures... I'll be back.

Carlyle and Back, Via Frank Muir

 'So, this is death. Well.' With these words, on this day in 1881, Thomas Carlyle died, at the ripe age of 85 – remarkable longevity for one who seemed never to be in good health. 'Thomas Carlyle is dead at last, by the acknowledgment of all newspapers,' wrote Henry James, kicking off a long, appreciative but by no means uncritical essay on his old friend, 'Some Personal Recollections of Carlyle', published in The Atlantic. Carlyle's reputation today is fragile, partly because he is open to charges of racism and other regrettable attitudes, and partly because he is such a tough, challenging read, such raw red meat, for today's reader – and, as with many Victorians, brevity is not in his gift. Outside the academy, he is still read, I think, by a few enthusiasts – and I am, up to a point, one of them: I'm still reading, and still hugely  enjoying, his thrilling, lightning-lit account of The French Revolution, a chapter at a time, before I sleep. Surely no one ever wrote history like Carlyle. 

  Today is also the anniversary of the birth of Frank Muir (1920), the genial, six-foot-six-inch comedy writer, radio and TV personality (and more), who is currently to be seen in reruns of that splendid BBC panel game Call My Bluff, facing the equally genial, even taller humorist Patrick Campbell (who had a stammer to Frank Muir's lisp). Among Muir's more serious works were an excellent autobiography, A Kentish Lad, and The Frank Muir Book: An Irreverent Companion to Social History, a treasure-house of quotations and odds and ends, which I wrote about here... And that final quotation about Wordsworth's handshake takes us back to Thomas Carlyle.

A Very Fine Cat Indeed

 I recently posted a couple of Venetian-themed poems by Robin Saikia which had impressed me. Seeking to find out more about this little-known but clearly talented poet, I discovered that he had published, in 2020, a dramatic monologue titled A Very Fine Cat Indeed, devoted to Dr Johnson's beloved Hodge. Naturally I bought a copy, but I'm sorry to report that I found it disappointing. What I was hoping would be a dramatic monologue in the Browning line turned out to be a short piece for the stage, in which Johnson mourns the recently dead Hodge. The monologue blends real and imagined events, and includes some well-known moments from Boswell. Saikia catches Johnson's voice pretty well, but without achieving enough sonority or depth to give a full impression of the man. The piece seems like a thin watercolour sketch when something more like an oil painting is called for. To make matters worse, there is some seriously bad proof-reading. The opening paragraph of the Introduction begins thus:

'When I first had the idea of writing a dramatic monologue about Hodge, I began by trying to found [sic] out what, if anything, had been previously been [sic] attempted in this line.' What he found was Samuel Beckett's dramatic fragment Human Wishes, in which a sleeping Hodge (stage direction asleep, if possible) is present. Saikia describes the play as being 'largely about Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale and her circle'. Really? That doesn't sound much like the play I read and wrote about five years ago...  

  The saving grace of A Very Fine Cat Indeed is that the slim volume is padded out with five Appendices. One is 'An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson's Favourite Cat' by Percival Stockdale (a rival of Johnson's), a mock-heroic work beginning 'Let not the honest Muse disdain/For Hodge to wake the plaintive strain' and ending 'Let Virtue in they [sic] bosom lodge;/Or wish thou hadst been born a Hodge.' Another is Leigh Hunt's account of Johnson stepping out to buy oysters for Hodge. Then there are some thoughts on animals by Jeremy Bentham, and Christopher Smart's 'Jeoffry' (from Jubilate Agno) – 'For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry...' New to me was this charming poem by Susan Coolidge (of What Katy Did fame). Slightly rose-tinted perhaps, but a fine tribute to Johnson the cat-lover – 

Burly and big, his books among,
Good Samuel Johnson sat,
With frowning brows and wig askew,
His snuff-strewn waistcoat far from new;
So stern and menacing his air,
That neither Black Sam,
nor the maid
To knock or interrupt him dare;
Yet close beside him, unafraid,
Sat Hodge, the cat.

"This participle," the Doctor wrote,
"The modern scholar cavils at,
But," – even as he penned the word,
A soft, protesting note was heard;
The Doctor fumbled with his pen,
The dawning thought took wings and flew,
The sound repeated, come again,
It was a faint, reminding "Mew!"
From Hodge, the cat...

The Dictionary was laid down,
The Doctor tied his vast cravat,
And down the buzzing street he strode,
Taking an often-trodden road,
And halted at a well-known stall:
"Fishmonger," spoke the Doctor gruff,
"Give me six oysters, that is all;
Hodge knows when he has had enough,
Hodge is my cat."

Then home; puss dined and while in sleep
he chased a visionary rat,
His master sat him down again,
Rewrote his page, renibbed his pen;
Each "i" was dotted, each "t" was crossed,
He labored on for all to read,
Nor deemed that time was waste or lost
Spent in supplying the small need
Of Hodge, the cat.

The dear old Doctor! Fierce of mien,
Untidy, arbitrary, fat,
What gentle thought his name enfold!
So generous of his scanty gold.
So quick to love, so hot to scorn,
Kind to all sufferers under heaven,
A tend'rer despot ne'er was born;
His big heart held a corner, even
For Hodge, the cat.

Reconnecting

 I spent much of the weekend in transit, travelling down to Guildford, in my old home county, and back again the next day. We were there for the post-wedding celebration of an old friend who has remarried – and a fine celebration and joyous occasion it was. What matters here is the back story, for this friend is the widower of the old friend whose funeral I wrote about on the blog five years ago – and, as if that wasn't enough tragedy for one life, he was also the father of the lovely young woman whose memorial I wrote about here the following year. She, her twin brother and the two younger daughters were like grandchildren to us (before we had any of our own), and it was wonderful, heart-lifting to reconnect with them all. I think at least some of the family will be visiting Lichfield soon...
  In Guildford we stayed overnight in an old hotel, a former posting house, with many stairs and creaking corridors. Our room was the James Boswell room, next to the Samuel Johnson room. A very fine room it was too, but, alas, there is no Johnsonian connection with Guildford. Or only an irrelevant one: the other 18th-century Samuel Johnson, an American theologian-philosopher, was born in Guildford, Connecticut. Ah well – unlike Dickens, Johnson didn't stay in practically every hotel in England.   

Walking Again

 Yesterday I was walking in the Oxfordshire countryside with my brother and walking friends. It was a gloriously sunny morning – the first in a long dreary while – and, for a wonder, it stayed that way for most of the day, only clouding over briefly in the early afternoon. Our walk began in the attractive little stone-built town of Eynsham and took in the villages of Church Hanborough and Freeland – all three of which had their churches open. St Leonard, Eynsham, has 'remarkably elegant' (Pevsner) nave arcades with concave mouldings – which find an echo, oddly, in the nave of St Peter and St Paul, Church Hanborough, a building blessed with some very fine 15th-century woodwork: screens, rood loft and pulpit. Freeland, by contrast, offers a small but sumptuously decorated high Victorian church by J.L. Pearson, with his trademark apse, and an attractive adjoining parsonage.
  So, a good day architecturally, but the walk was really the point – our first outing in five months, a sunny day, fine open countryside, and good company. I was delighted to see redwings in good numbers (having hitherto seen only a few this year), and parties of long-tailed tits, and skylarks testing their song, sensing spring in the air. The going was sometimes tough – mud and lying water, especially in the patches of woodland we had to traverse, or rather bash our way through, bent double, trying to keep our feet on something like dry land and not to fall over. But it was good. And the best of it all was that my brother, who has been recovering from radiotherapy and hadn't walked more than a mile or two in a long while, had no difficulty walking the full six miles of this memorable walk. 

Thomas + The Machine

Despite appearances, R.S. Thomas, the crag-faced curmudgeon of Sarn-y-Plas, had a tender side, which showed up quite often in his poetry, as in this love poem to his long-suffering wife of 51 years, the artist Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge –

Luminary

My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy's
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers. 


For me, a word stands out, almost incongruously, from this poem – Machine, 'the Machine'. It crops up elsewhere in Thomas's poetry too; it was clearly a major preoccupation of his. Here it is again – 

  . . . The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.

   God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.

And how about this startling image? 

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary?

'Overrun by vocabulary' – aren't we all, in this age of the internet, the mobile phone and social media? And Thomas wrote those lines in 1990, when that age had scarcely begun. For him, the Machine had always meant the relentless advance of technology, driven by money, gradually destroying the organic human world as it goes on its denaturing, deracinating, desacralising, ultimately dehumanising way. It's an image and a phrase that has taken off in recent years, as more and more people have become aware of the destructive processes that are going on in the high-tech world (though it's unlikely Rage Against The Machine had R.S. Thomas in mind when they chose their name). And now Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I admire for the way he has let his thinking develop and lead him on, has brought together his thoughts on the subject in a fat new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. I'm going to be reading it, off and on, over the coming months, and might well report back. Meanwhile, there's always R.S. Thomas...