'As sure as there is a Space infinite...'

And here's something to raise the tone...
  I heard this piece on Radio 3 the other morning and it brought me up short, the more so when I learned it was written by Gavin Bryars, a composer perhaps best known for the chanson trouvé 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet', and for co-founding the gloriously inept Portsmouth Sinfonietta. It's from The Fifth Century, Bryars' setting of words from the fifth of Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. The text set here is 'As sure as there is a Space infinite, there is a Power, a Bounty, a Goodness, a Wisdom infinite, a Treasure, a Blessedness, a Glory...' Here is the link – 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3210dgdT-_0

  Staying with music, today is the anniversary of the birth (in 1866) of the great Italian pianist, composer, teacher and transcriber Feruccio Busoni. I first discovered him through his Bach transcriptions, and the greatest, most monumental of these is surely the magnificent Chaconne in D minor. Today I came across a recording of Michelangeli playing this masterpiece live. It's a lush, virtuosic performance, very much in the 'romantic' manner, but I'm sure Busoni would have approved – and I think Bach would have too...

As the Actress Said...

Here's something to lower the tone.
  The phrase 'As the actress said to the bishop' is still just about extant (on this side of the pond), employed to draw attention to a double entendre. A slightly naff expression, it was a favourite of Ricky Gervais's David Brent in The Office. But where did it originate? I hear you ask wearily. Well, it has an origin story, which may or may not be true, but it certainly made me laugh, so I pass it on...
  It seems the actress, socialite and alleged royal mistress Lillie Langtry was a guest at a country house party, where one of her fellow guests was a bishop. While they were strolling together in the rose garden, the bishop had the misfortune to prick his thumb. Later that day, at dinner Miss Langtry inquired of the bishop, 'How is you prick?' 'Throbbing,' he replied, causing the butler to drop a tureen of potatoes. 

[This reminded me of Arthur Marshall's account of Clemence Dane's unfortunate turns of phrase.]

Rembrandt in Birmingham

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of prints on loan from the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam  – 58 of them in total, nearly all etchings. I was there yesterday, and would urge anyone with an interest in Rembrandt and in etching to visit if you can. There are portraits and self-portraits, landscapes, biblical subjects, genre scenes, studies and sketches, and there are even a few of the original copper plates – also, helpfully, a video explanation of the technique of etching and a display of etching tools and materials. Each of the prints, from the tiniest sketches to the larger, more finished works, is worth a close look, and the museum helpfully provides magnifying glasses so that even the most delicate lines and marks can be examined. The skill with which they are made, and the punch the best of them pack, seem almost miraculous. Looking intently at these works was both richly satisfying and  borderline exhausting, but it left me more convinced than ever that Rembrandt is either the greatest artist there ever was, or the equal of any other contender for that title. This touring exhibition is on until June 1st, and is going nowhere else in the the UK, so catch it if you can.   

As well as the Rembrandts – supplemented by a few of his etchings from the museum's own collection – there is a small display of prints by two West Midlands artists: Raymond Cowern (1913-86), a fine etcher, painter and illustrator, and Harry Eccleston (1923-2010), whose engraving skills were such that he became the Bank of England's first in-house artist-designer, creating the first pictorial British bank-notes (Newton, Wellington, Shakespeare, Wren and Florence Nightingale). Both men were products of Birmingham School of Art. 

From the French

 There are reports of a poetry revival in France, with book sales even of new poetry surging. This is being interpreted as a response to troubled and uncertain times, poetry offering a kind of solace or escape – which sounds plausible enough, though it's hard to see a poetry revival happening in this country any time soon. If it does, those in quest of solace will more likely be looking for it in the poetry of the past than of the present. 
  Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, so let's go for a French one – in translation, of course.
Richard Wilbur was a great translator from the French. His Molière translations are regarded as the gold standard – but here is something on a smaller scale, a sonnet translated from Stephane Mallarmé (who, like many French littérateurs, took Edgar Allan Poe very seriously)... 

The Tomb of Edgar Poe

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven — O endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.

Funeral Notes

 As we grow older, we inevitably find ourselves attending more and more funerals (I was at one only yesterday, down in Kent), and noticing, perhaps, how much they have changed over the years. I think the first funeral I attended must have been back in the Sixties, for one of my grandmothers, and it was the first and last time I went to pay my respects to the body, duly laid out in its coffin in the undertakers' parlour; that no longer seems to happen, at least in C of E circles. Back in those days, funerals, for those not avowedly atheist, were invariably some version of the Book of Common Prayer's Order for the Burial of the Dead, without eulogies. It must have been a couple of decades later, maybe more, that I first experienced a humanist, or secular, funeral service. Since then it seems to have become the norm, and any kind of Christian service something of a minority taste. The standard funeral now is an individually tailored affair, consisting of  eulogies and (usually secular) music, with pauses for personal reflection, and little else. Such occasions are invariably described as 'a celebration of the life' – which is fine, but isn't there also something to be said for the universal, one-size-fits-all approach of the traditional religious service? It recognises the levelling effect of death,  which makes all people of all social ranks, the righteous and the flawed alike, one in death, each equally a scrap of humanity – a scrap, and a universe! (I seem to be developing Carlylean habits) – a spark of the eternal fire. A secular 'celebration' tends inevitably to recognise only the better elements of the dear departed's character and behaviour, whereas the religious service recognises the whole person, and sends that whole person to join the Great Majority, praying that eternal rest and light perpetual will be their fate. And mercy, by God's grace. No prizes for guessing what kind of funeral service I want, when the time comes (and no, I'm not expecting that to be any time soon). 

A Man Who Liked to Strike a Pose

Yesterday I was in London (my dear, the noise – and the people!) to have a leisurely lunch with an old friend. Afterwards, with time to kill before my homeward train left, I thought I'd pop in to the National Gallery to have a quick look around. Oh dear. The days of popping in – the days when Ronald Firbank's Mrs Shamefoot could drop in to tidy her hair in front of the Madonna of the Rocks – are long gone. Now airport-style security means long, slow-moving queues stretching into the middle distance, and zero chance of a flying visit. No wonder the gallery's visitor numbers are down by nearly half. Happily the National Portrait Gallery, around the corner, is far more penetrable, so I popped in there for a quick mooch. That was when I saw the self-portrait above, which made me audibly laugh. It's by a St Ives painter, Arthur Hayward (1889-1962), who clearly liked a joke. Here he portrays himself grandly as The Artist, striking a pose every bit as flamboyant and histrionic as any struck by Rubens or Rembrandt or Van Dyck. In the background is the harbour of St Ives, a subject Hayward painted many times, usually in an easy-on-the-eye Impressionist style – or is it actually a painting of the harbour? The same background appears again in the self-portrait below, in which Hayward, for some reason, paints himself in the guise of a Breton onion-seller (an 'Onion Johnny', as they were known). He has the beret, but not the traditional striped jersey, and he appears to be wearing a college scarf. The onions look good enough to eat.

Hayward also painted himself as a (presumably French) skier, in a self-portrait called Le Skieur. He was certainly a man who liked to strike a pose...

'of all seasons most gratuitous'

It's the first day of Astronomical Spring, the weather has warmed up, and the sun is shining from a blue sky as if at the beginning of a primary-school essay titled 'A Spring Day'. Who better to spoil the mood than dear old Philip Larkin? Here is his poem 'Spring', a Petrarchan sonnet that is not exactly full of the joys thereof –

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled-looking glass,
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water
Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter;

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,

Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. 

That poem is dated 19 May 1950. On this date (20 March) in the same year, Larkin wrote (or signed off on) this curious take on the writer's life. I like the second section particularly...

The Literary World

I
‘Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me, and for which no power will compensate me…’

My dear Kafka,
When you’ve had five years of it, not five months,
Five years of an irresistible force meeting an
immoveable object right in your belly,
Then you’ll know about depression.

II
Mrs. Alfred Tennyson

Answered
begging letters
admiring letters
insulting letters
enquiring letters
business letters
and publishers’ letters.
She also
looked after his clothes
saw to his food and drink
entertained visitors
protected him from gossip and criticism
And finally

(apart from running the household)
Brought up and educated the children.

While all this was going on
Mister Alfred Tennyson sat like a baby
Doing his poetic business.