Nonsense upon Stilts

 'Natural rights is simple nonsense,' declared Jeremy Bentham: 'natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts.' He was right: rights are not 'natural', they are prescribed, i.e. created, by human societies (those human societies that like the idea). The notion of 'natural rights' is simply a carry-over from 'natural theology'.
  Unfortunately, the general idea of rights has proved highly seductive, at the expense of its proper concomitant, duties. Most rights would be better framed as duties: our duties towards our fellow humans – or, indeed, animals, who are now seen as having 'rights' of their own. But it gets worse: trees now have 'rights' too. Believe it or not, there exists a Universal Declaration of Tree Rights – it seems you don't even need a pulse or a central nervous system to have rights now. Mercifully, the Declaration does not confer 'legal personhood' on trees, which must surely mean that these 'rights' are not legal but 'natural'. They are indeed 'nonsense upon stilts'.
   As such, they have of course proved attractive to certain flaky councillors in such redoubts of New Age thinking as Lewes in Sussex, which has just become the first English town to recognise trees' 'right to flourish and to maintain their natural life cycles, ecological functions and evolutionary processes' across the whole town. I suppose it will do no harm... Anyway, I am irresistibly reminded of this poem, by George Pope Morris: 

WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather's hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
    Thy axe shall harm it not!

That old familiar tree,
Whose glory and renown
Are spread o'er land and sea,
And wouldst thou hew it down?
Woodman, forbear thy stroke!
Cut not its earth-bound ties;
O, spare that aged oak,
    Now towering to the skies!

When but an idle boy
I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy
Here too my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
My father pressed my hand —
Forgive this foolish tear,
    But let that old oak stand!

My heart-strings round thee cling,
Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing,
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I've a hand to save,
Thy axe shall hurt it not. 

A Wreath of Roses

 Having spent too long reading little but non-fiction (much of it for review), I turned back to fiction recently, reading A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor, recommended and lent to me by my cousin. I had read a few Taylors, including what is surely her masterpiece, Angel, and was happy to discover more. 
  Published in 1949 as Taylor's fourth novel, A Wreath of Roses opens promisingly, with a shocking event (no spoilers) at a sleepy provincial railway station, witnessed by Camilla, a woman on the brink of middle age who has led a quiet, even prim life and is on her way to her annual holiday. All is about to change for Camilla when she meets a conventionally handsome, self-assured man who calls himself Richard Elton. He is exactly the kind of man she is not usually attracted to, and it is soon clear that he is a liar and a fraud – and yet, even when she knows this, she cannot help being drawn into an affair that she sees as her last chance of romance before life closes over her. Gradually, she discovers that Richard has far worse things  to hide than a bogus war record...
  At the beginning of the story, Camilla is on her way to stay, as she has done every summer for years, with her best friend Liz, in the cottage of their older friend, Frances, a painter. These summers have always been idyllic, at least in retrospect, but this year everything has changed: Liz is now married to a rather tiresome vicar and her time is taken up with her baby, Harry, while the aging Frances is facing a crisis in her art and her life. At first I found these characters and their situation rather cold and uninvolving – and it has to be said that the baby Harry and Frances's dog, Hotchkiss, are two of the least attractive of their kind in fiction. However, the Camilla-Richard storyline was enough to keep me reading – and I'm glad I did, as everything comes to life at the halfway point with the arrival of Morland Beddoes, the man who has been buying Frances's paintings (and loving her at a distance) for years. This fascinating, deeply sympathetic character brings warmth and heart to the milieu, and is central to driving the action to its dramatic climax. Described as 'Elizabeth Taylor's darkest novel', A Wreath of Roses lives up to the billing, but is crafted with such quiet, elegant expertise that one hardly notices how clever – and how dark – it is. 

  

A Bit of Paternity

 Time for a poem. 
   Here is one by the always excellent Dick Davis, about a situation every parent – and grandparent – will be familiar with: the awful helplessness we feel in the presence of a child inconsolably, unreachably upset or hurt...

A Bit of Paternity

To tell your weeping child,
'This too will pass, believe
Me, I've been here before'

Is to be one who walks
Communing with himself
Along a wintry shore

And thinks his murmured thoughts
Might calm the crashing waves,
The wind's inhuman roar. 


 

'A Right Decent Geezer'

 The day before yesterday I was walking around the Samuel Johnson birthplace museum with my brother and walking friends (their first time, and they were impressed). One of the interactive attractions caught my eye – 'Your Letters to Samuel Johnson'. Visitors were invited to take a sheet of paper headed 'Dear S.J.', write the great man a letter, and pin it on a dedicated board. Of those that were legible or made sense, most were not very interesting – but one stood out: this one...
'Dear S.J.
You seem like a right decent geezer.
Sincerely,
Ted Reynolds'
  One might balk at the noun – and Johnson would not have known it – but this seems to me a pretty sound assessment of Johnson's character. I wasn't tempted to write a letter myself. 

Yesterday we were in Tamworth, where, standing by the obelisk erected in memory of 'The Author of "Little Jim"', I treated my friends to a reading of that classic of Victorian sentimental verse. Their eyes remained resolutely dry. 

And here is a literary souvenir of another walk, a couple of years back – my somewhat unnerving encounter with John Keats on a street bench in Chichester. The bench commemorates Keats's stay in that fair city in 1819, in the course of which he began work on The Eve of St Agnes. 

Whistler

 Yesterday I finally made it to London for a much postponed lunch with an old friend and a visit to the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain ('the Tate', as it will always be to me). Arriving in London from Lichfield is always a shock: the noise – and the people! Not to mention the traffic fumes. En route to lunch I stepped into Westminster Cathedral, that great unfinished masterpiece, for some peace and quiet among the faithful. Those Eric Gill stations of the cross really are quite wonderful...
  The Whistler exhibition turned out to be on a larger scale than I expected, but not large enough to be exhausting, and the sheer variety of works on show – from tall vertical portraits to small-scale prints, drawings and sketches, from meticulously detailed etchings to bold, semi-abstract sweeps of colour and light – kept the interest from flagging. There was even a reconstruction of the famous Peacock Room, a dramatic make-over of his patron Frederick Leyland's dining room, done in complete defiance of Leyland's wishes. 
  The exhibition begins with the bravura self-portrait above, in which Whistler consciously references Velázquez's Las Meninas, a painting that haunted him, as it has haunted practically every artist ever since it was made. He was clearly 'in conversation' (or in competition) with Velázquez in those portraits he painted in which the subject emerges from a near-black background. The famous, indeed iconic, portrait of Whistler's mother, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, seemed larger than I was expecting, and fuller of interest. Its title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1 – nature, for Whistler, being something woefully deficient that had to be 'arranged' if art was to be made out of it. One of the Whistler quotations that pepper the exhibition is 'To say to the painter that Nature must be taken as she is, is to say to the player than he may sit on the piano.' Well, his 'arrangements' are certainly beautiful to the eye, and many, particularly the Nocturnes, display a quite miraculous delicacy of touch, texture and colour. 
  I particularly enjoyed Whistler's pastel and crayon studies of Venetian subjects, any one of which I would happily have taken away. In the end, I made do with a postcard of this one, The Palace: White and Pink – 

The homeward journey went wrong, as so often, at Milton Keynes, into which station (of evil memory) the train limped, already late, only to be held there for best part of an hour while a gas leak was investigated. A gas leak on a train! This was a new one on me. After two and a half uncomfortable trainbound hours, I disembarked at Lichfield, glad to be back.
  The Whistler exhibition, by the way, is on until 27 September – get there if you can; it will likely be many years before there's another chance to see so much of his best work gathered together in one place. 

Langham

 I was sorry to hear of the death of that gifted comic actor Chris Langham, whose career ended too soon and all too ignominiously. There's an excellent obit in the Telegraph, but it's likely paywalled. 
  Here's something I wrote about Langham a while back... 

3.9.39

 On this day in 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and we were launched into the Second World War. In London, sirens blared out, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Elsewhere on the home front, things were quieter...