JR, B-P, MB

 In Eminent Edwardians (which I'm still reading, with great enjoyment), Piers Brendon tells of a curious connection between John Ruskin and the young Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, known to his family as 'Stephe'. B-P's formidably well connected mother consulted Ruskin about 'Stephe's vexatious habit of painting with both hands (on occasion with both feet)'. Happily the great man approved of the boy's ambidexterity and encouraged it, and B-P was to put it to good use in his military career, taking notes with either hand and making sketches with both simultaneously, drawing with one hand while shading with the other. Brendon also tells of an occasion when Thackeray came to dinner with the Baden-Powells and, 'when young Stephe attempted to join the party, paid him a shilling to go away – the earliest recorded instance of bob-a-jobbery.' 
   There is also one thing – and surely only one – the B-P had in common with Max Beerbohm: they were both educated at Charterhouse under Dr William Haig Brown, the headmaster who had moved the school out of the city and re-established it on a Surrey hilltop. This was just the school for young Stephe, offering 'few impediments to Stalkyish independence, to the practice of Spartan chivalry and Machiavellian chicanery. As for intellectual impedimenta of the kind provided by modern culture and ideas, the school was disinclined to clutter fledgling minds with such stuff.' All his life, B-P, the eternal schoolboy, was a keen and loyal Old Carthusian, and 'one of his sharpest disappointments during the siege of Mafeking was that he could find no other Carthusian with whom to celebrate Founder's Day'. He was, in Max Beerbohm's phrase, 'of the straitest sect'. In Old Carthusian Memories (1920), Max writes that 'the straitest sect is never happy. It simply can't bear the thought of having left Charterhouse. After-life for it is one long anticlimax' – which was certainly not the case for Beerbohm, though he writes quite affectionately about the old place, and is glad he spent five years there. 'The main thing that I had learnt there, and have not yet forgotten,' he writes, 'was a knack of understanding my fellow-creatures, of living in amity with them and not being rubbed the wrong way by their faults, and not rubbing them the wrong way with mine.' A very useful thing to learn; we could do with more of it in the world.
   Max continues: 'It is often complained that public schools tend to repress individuality in a child. Charterhouse in the eighteen-eighties did not at all tend that way ... Its traditions left plenty of latitude. I was a queer child. I didn't care a brass farthing for games. What I liked was Latin prose, Lain verse, and drawing caricatures. Nobody bothered me to play games. Boys and masters alike ... encouraged me to draw as many and as impudent caricatures as possible. I ought to have been very happy. But––oh, how I always longed to be grown-up! Boys are mostly not cursed with a strong instinct towards independence; nor men mostly, for the matter of that. I, alas, was.' Max went his own way – and so, along a very different path, did Baden-Powell. 

Hot

 These are not the dog days – they come in August when the dog star, Sirius, is rising – but, by heaven, they feel like it. It's proper hot, as we say around here, and more to come tomorrow. At least the butterflies are loving it – to the extent that a Silver-Washed Fritillary paid a fleeting visit to the garden the other day: they sometimes do this, flying far from their usual haunts, when the weather gets really hot. But talk of dog days inevitably leads me to this, one of Auden's best – so good it even impressed Randall Jarrell...

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:

The heather lies limp and dead

On the mountain, the baltering torrent

Shrunk to a soodling thread;

Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,

Vacant the scholar’s brain

Under his great hat,

Drug though She may, the Sybil utters

A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,

Lying in bed till noon,

Your bills unpaid, your much advertised

Epic not yet begun,

Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish

Some earthquake would astonish,

Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing

Unlock the prisons and translate

The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,

The hawthorn hedges in bloom,

When, serene in their ivory vessels,

The three wise Maries come,

Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in

By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:

Ah! how the cannons roar,

How jocular the bells as They

Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence,

Before it break and drown,

When the insurrected eagre hangs

Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt

Tombs of the sorcerers shatter

And their guardian megalopods

Come after you pitter-patter?

How will you answer when from their qualming spring

The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,

And out of the open sky

The pantocratic riddle breaks –

"Who are you and why?"

For when in a carol under the apple-trees

The reborn featly dance,

There will also, Fortunatus,

Be those who refused their chance,

Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,

And mawkish in their wits,

To whom these dull dog-days

Between event seemed crowned with olive

And golden with self-praise. 

Fortunatus was a sixth-century poet of the Merovingian court, who wrote in Latin and became a Christian bishop (and was venerated after his death).
'Soodling' means dawdling, 'baltering' tumbling along.
The 'three wise Maries' are three variously identified Maries from the Gospels who, according to medieval legend, made landfall in Provence after travelling from the Holy Land. 'Sossing' is simply onomatopoeic.
An 'eagre' is a kind of tidal wave, commonly known as a 'bore' – which would not have sounded quite as good: 'the insurrected bore'!

 

Ten Years Ago

 On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy Burnham)...

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/06/picture-of-day.html

Cometh the Hour...

 McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June
– Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –
That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation 
To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation.
His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham,
But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour party and indeed of the nation, the question many are asking is 'Can he turn 'em?'

'Lying flat in the bracken...'

Here's one for Father's Day, tangentially. A loose, joyful almost-sonnet, written by Gavin Ewart, sixty years ago this month...

June 1966

Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park
while the legs and voices of my children pass
seeking, seeking: I remember how on the
13th of June of that simmering 1940
I was conscripted into the East Surreys,
and, more than a quarter of a century
ago, when France had fallen,
we practised concealment in this very bracken.
The burnt stalks pricked through my denims.
Hitler is now one of the antiques of History,
I lurk like a monster in my hiding place.
He didn't get me. If there were a God
it would be only polite to thank him. 

Never Dull

 More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end, Chapter VIII of volume three, aptly titled Finis: 'Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself...' After a long, overheated passage of 'prophecy' from Alessandro Cagliostro, described by Carlyle himself as 'the Quack of Quacks', the author returns to take an elegant farewell: 
'And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together [you're not wrong, Tom]; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnate Word'. Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.'
   Well, it was quite a ride. This was a book that, as Carlyle put it, came 'direct and flamingly from the heart', and that is how it reads – impassioned, vivid, personal, written as if by an eye-witness who was in the thick of the action and now invites us to be there alongside him. Exclaiming, apostrophising, drawing the reader in with the first-person plural, he takes off into sometimes obscure flights of prose poetry, bringing in myths and scripture, scattering metaphors, references, personifications, archaisms and new-coined words left and right, always with an eye to bringing alive the extraordinary, often terrible events he chronicles. The effect at times is almost cinematic, wholly unlike any other history, and, God knows, it is never dull. 

 

So cross that he postponed his bath...

 I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I served my 22 years in Northcliffe House – and how Northcliffean the management style is/was. But I'll say no more (and Paul Dacre was always very nice to me). 
  I'm now reading about the languid aristocrat Arthur Balfour, Cambridge 'Soul', 'scented popinjay' and charming ornament of the highest society, who was steered into a political career by his uncle, Lord Salisbury, and ended up being Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, leading his party into the political wilderness for 20 years. As his government fell apart around him, nothing dented his aplomb: Brendon writes that 'The only reverse that evoked a gleam of passion in him was the Duke of Devonshire's resignation in 1903; the Prime Minister was so cross that in order to write the Duke a stiff letter he postponed his bath.' Not exactly The Thick of It, is it?
  Balfour found it hard to reconcile himself to being in Opposition, and could scarcely believe that the 'natural rulers' of the country were no longer in power. He 'found himself compelled to "go about the country explaining that I am 'honest and industrious', like a second footman out of place" and enduring those "attendant horrors" of public meetings, the "subsidiary luncheons and dinners, which are fatal to one's temper at the moment, and to one's digestion afterwards.' He was surprised to find that his reappearance in the Commons as Opposition leader was 'the signal for ill-mannered interruptions' – and for a most ungentlemanly attack from the new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 'a man who resembled nothing so much as an enraged sheep', and whose name the absent-minded Lord Salisbury had never been able to remember. C-B caddishly attacked Balfour for the very thing he most prided himself on – his silky forensic technique, 'the spinning of diaphanous webs in which his adversaries became fatally enmeshed'. This art the enraged sheep denounced as mere 'foolery' – and much of the House agreed. Times had changed, and Balfour's ideal of parliamentary debate as 'concord enlivened by mellifluous displays of intellectual counterpoint' had, alas, gone for good.  
  Still to come: Mrs Pankhurst and General Baden-Powell. I'm looking forward to them both.