The Piper of Dreams

 This painting – The Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani – was the subject, or one of the subjects, of a fascinating talk on Radio 3 last night (in the often rewarding slot labelled The Essay). I had never heard of it or knowingly seen it before, but this was a picture that made a huge impact in its day – its day being 1915, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy and created a sensation. Reproduced in various formats and in huge numbers by the Medici Society, it found its way to many parts of the world, eclipsing even Holman Hunt's The Light of the World in popularity, and, in particular, it gave solace to soldiers in the trenches and to their families. It is hard, now, to see quite why, but presumably it had something to do with the peaceful English woodland setting, the otherworldly, magical feel of the image – and those fairies that are flying around the piper and cavorting on the forest floor. This other world, on the edge of material reality and outside of time, could hardly have been further from the grim realities of life in the trenches, and perhaps there was some kind of consolation in those fairy presences. 
  The vogue for fairy painting, having taken off in the mid-Victorian period with the likes of Richard 'Dicky' Doyle and John Anster Fitzgerald ('Fairy Fitzgerald'), had never really gone away, and fairies were very much, as it were, in the air in the Great War period: the famous Cottingley fairy photos, fakes that took in many people, including Conan (nephew of Dicky) Doyle, were taken in 1917, the same year as Liza Lehmann's much-parodied song 'There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden'. Not long after the war, the Flower Fairies books of Cecily Mary Barker began to be published with great (and lasting) success. But The Piper of Dreams also relates to another curious obsession of the time –  with the piping faun of the forest, Pan, who turns up in the writings of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Machen, Saki, Eleanor Farjeon and a host of others, including even E.M. Forster (The Story of a Panic, 1911). His most memorable appearance, perhaps, is in the weirdly incongruous  'Piper at the Gates of Dawn' interlude in The Wind in the Willows. What is it with us Brits? Supposedly hard-headed empiricists, we seem always to have been addicted to fantasy and enchantment, to imagined pasts that never existed, to myth and mystification, to talking animals and creatures of magic – hence, I suppose, our world-conquering fantasy literature, from Lewis Carroll to J.K. Rowling, by way of Narnia and the Riverbank, Middle Earth and the world of Beatrix Potter. And those are just the highlights...
  As for Estella Canziani, fairies were by no means her only line: she painted portraits and landscapes, and was an interior decorator, travel writer and folklorist, especially of northern Italy. She lived all her life (1887-1964) at the very illustrious address of 3 Palace Green, in the grounds of Kensington Palace. 

An Opening

 It was on this day in 1824 that the National Gallery opened to the public – not in its present building, but in a quite inadequate town house at 100 Pall Mall. Already by this stage 'the nation' (i.e. the government) had failed to buy a succession of major collections as they became available, but one it did acquire was that of the banker John Julius Angerstein, and it was his Pall Mall house that duly became the first National Gallery. 
  More purchasing opportunities were to be missed over the coming decades, but things changed when Sir Charles Eastlake was appointed its director. He was a man whose taste ran to the Northern and Early Italian 'primitives', and one of the beneficiaries of his purchases in that line was Edward Burne-Jones. As a young man, he studied Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage obsessively (he told his wife in the year of his death that 'his whole life long he had hoped to do something as rich and deep in colour as the Arnolfini, and now it was too late'), also Botticelli's Virgin and Child, the golden Filippo Lippi Annunciation, Fra Angelico's Christ Glorified in the Courts of Heaven and the mysterious Piero de Cosimo now known as A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph [below]. 'In front of these pictures,' writes Penelope Fitzgerald in her excellent biography, 'the shade of the young Burne-Jones, in his soft hat, must still hover.' A pleasing thought for my next visit to the dear old National Gallery, whenever that might be – soon, I hope...

The Struggles of a Bestselling Author

 The other day, half listening to the radio, I caught part of an interview with Lee Child, who is, I understand, one of the top-selling authors in the world, thanks to his wildly successful Jack Reacher thrillers. At one point he was talking about the mechanics of writing his books, and my ears pricked up. Apart from some early efforts in longhand, he has always, he told the interviewer, written his books on Microsoft Word (me too, Lee, with somewhat less commercial success). He used to be able to do this quite easily, but thanks to endless updates and 'improvements', he now finds himself unable to navigate what used to be simple tasks, notably pagination. Since the latest updates, he simply cannot work out how to paginate his headers. So here's what he does: he works with his previous novel as his document, deleting the text, leaving the pagination intact, and inserts his new copy into the old document. Result: a new novel, duly paginated. Ingenious, but hardly what Microsoft had in mind, I imagine.
   This was good to hear, after the blood, sweat and tears I shed over Word in the course of writing The Mother of Beauty (evidence of which can be seen by the sharp-eyed in certain, er, irregularities in layout, etc). I thought it was just me – but no: here is a massively successful bestselling author defeated by Word and driven to desperate improvisation to overcome the difficulties it throws in the writer's path. Perhaps he should get his pen out and revert to his original method... Why is it that every update and 'improvement' – of practically anything – only seems to make life more difficult?

RIP

 News comes today of the death of the pianist Menahem Pressler, just months short of his 100th birthday. Pressler was born in Germany but fled with his parents in 1939, initially to Italy, then to Palestine. His grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins were all to die in concentration camps. 
Having successfully launched himself as a pianist in postwar America, Pressler joined the Beaux Arts Trio in 1955 and remained with it right through to its dissolution in 2008. Here is a taste of Pressler with the great trio, in their last year together, performing the opening movement of Dvorak's wonderful 'Dumky' Trio...

Unpublished!

 Here's a first: this morning I learn that I have violated Blogger Community Guidelines, and as a result one of my posts has been 'unpublished'. Lordie, what had I done? Was it something I wrote during the great Covid panic? No, nothing of the kind: the offending post was headed 'Beddoes', was related to the poet and physician Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and seemed to consist almost entirely of links. So I can only assume that one of those links contained some kind of malware or virus – how odd. Happily there is still some Beddoes content on the blog, including this mini-anthology from June 2017, headed 'Beddoes: Algae and Pearls': 

Born on this day in 1803 was the death-obsessed poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes (son of the founder of the fun-loving Pneumatic Institute). He spent much of his troubled, rather short life abroad, studying and practising medicine, apparently in the hope of finding physical evidence of the immortal soul, and writing lyrical pieces, often fragmentary, and tragic dramas in a heightened Jacobean mode.
  As a dramatist, he lacked all the essentials (as did so many would-be playwright poets of the Romantic period) - but the best of his lyrics are something else, something quite unique. Edmund Gosse, in the preface to his 1890 edition of Beddoes' works, puts it like this: 'At the feast of the muses he appears bearing little except one small savoury dish, some cold preparation, we may say, of olives and anchovies, the strangeness of which has to make up for its lack of importance. Not every palate enjoys this hors d'oeuvre, and when that is the case, Beddoes retires; he has nothing else to give. He appeals to a few literary epicures, who, however, would deplore the absence of this oddly flavoured dish as much as that of any more important piece de resistance.' Ezra Pound talks of Beddoes in terms of 'a mass of algae and pearls' and 'the odour of eucalyptus or sea wrack'...
 This is his best-known, most anthologised lyric, a thing of seamless perfection:

Dream-Pedlary
 i

If there were dreams to sell,
     What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
     Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life's fresh crown
Only a roseleaf down.
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
     What would you buy?

      ii

A cottage lone and still,
     With bowers nigh,
Shadowy, my woes to still,
     Until I die.
Such pearl from Life's fresh crown
Fain would I shake me down.
Were dreams to have at will,
This would best heal my ill,
     This I would buy.

      iii

But there were dreams to sell,
     Ill didst thou buy;
Life is a dream, they tell,
     Waking, to die.
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
     And, if I had the spell
     To call the buried, well,
     Which one would I?

      iv

If there are ghosts to raise,
     What shall I call,
Out of hell's murky haze,
     Heaven's blue hall?
Raise my loved longlost boy
To lead me to his joy,
     There are no ghosts to raise;
     Out of death lead no ways;
     Vain is the call.

      v

Know'st thou not ghosts to sue?
     No love thou hast.
Else lie, as I will do,
     And breathe thy last.
So out of Life's fresh crown
Fall like a rose-leaf down.
     Thus are the ghosts to woo;
     Thus are all dreams made true,
     Ever to last!


  Here is Beddoes in livelier, but more macabre mode:

Old Adam, the carrion crow,
The old crow of Cairo;
He sat in the shower, and let it flow
Under his tail and over his crest;
And through every feather
Leak'd the wet weather;
And the bough swung under his nest;
For his beak it was heavy with marrow.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It's only two devils, that blow,
Through a murderer's bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts' moonshine.

Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife,
When we have supped on king's marrow,
Where shall we drink and make merry our life?
Our nest it is queen Cleopatra's skull,
'Tis cloven and crack'd,
And batter'd and hack'd,
But with tears of blue eyes it is full:
Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo!
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It's only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer's bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts' moonshine. 

  Here is one of Beddoes' favourite forms - a 'dirge':

If thou wilt ease thine heart 
Of love and all its smart, 
Then sleep, dear, sleep; 
And not a sorrow 
Hang any tear on your eye-lashes; 
Lie still and deep, 
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes 
The rim o’ the sun to-morrow, 
In eastern sky. 

But wilt thou cure thine heart 
Of love and all its smart, 
Then die, dear, die; 
’T is deeper, sweeter, 
Than on a rose bank to lie dreaming 
With folded eye; 
And then alone, amid the beaming 
Of love’s stars, thou ’lt meet her 
In eastern sky. 

  And here's another dirge celebrating the romantic allure of death:

We do lie beneath the grass
In the moonlight, in the shade
Of the yew-tree. They that pass
Hear us not. We are afraid
They would envy our delight,
In our graves by glow-worm night.
Come follow us, and smile as we;
We sail to the rock in the ancient waves,
Where the snow falls by thousands into the sea,
And the drowned and the shipwrecked have happy graves.

  Finally, one more - an exquisite lyric that might have come straight from a Jacobean (even a Shakespearean) drama:


The swallow leaves her nest,
The soul my weary breast;
But therefore let the rain
On my grave 
Fall pure; for why complain?
Since both will come again
O'er the wave.

The wind dead leaves and snow
Doth hurry to and fro;
And, once, a day shall break
O'er the wave, 
When a storm of ghosts shall shake
The dead, until they wake
In the grave.

  The death-loving Beddoes took his own life (with poison) in Basel, at the age of 45, having written the same day to his executor, Revell Phillips: 'I am food for what I am good for - worms.'

Vast and Musical

 Well, that's done then. The new King is duly crowned. Vivat Rex! 
As I watched the grand ceremony unfolding in Westminster Abbey, a line of Larkin's kept floating into my mind. It's in his bleak late masterpiece 'Aubade', where he describes religion as 'that vast moth-eaten musical brocade' (no consolation to the thanatophobic Larkin). The line is less about religion itself, I think, than the church and its ceremonial, specifically the Church of England. Well, what was on display in the Abbey today was certainly musical, and vast, but it hardly seemed to me moth-eaten: indeed it came across surprisingly spruce and fresh and vital, perhaps because we haven't seen this particular ceremony for 70 years. 
  Musical it assuredly was, quite magnificent from the pre-service concert right through to the last note. And vast? Yes, the vastness was in the setting, the whole context – that soaring, lofty interior (so French, and yet so English), all that continuity, stretching back 'God knows how long', those centuries of history and tradition embedded in the building and the ceremony; the regalia, the costumes, the carefully structured language, the choreography, the beauty of a crowning which begins with the monarch presenting himself as a servant, and continues with the ancient magic of an anointing – and, beyond the ceremony itself, the context of the wider world in which the monarchy continues to function and evolve, forever changing, forever the same. The figure at the centre of all this seemed in himself touchingly small and wan, out of scale with the grandeur and pomp of the occasion, all that vastness. But who wouldn't be? It is the institution that matters, not the individual, and today's ceremony seemed to me, in its indirect, very English way – more magical (and musical) than logical – to be an eloquent argument for the continuation of that strange, irrational but somehow durable (and, I think, immensely valuable) thing, the British constitutional monarchy. God save the King! 

'Those who did not throw decanters were in a minority'

Lately, of necessity, I've been in transit rather a lot, mostly by train. Fortunately I have a nice fat book to keep me entertrained (a happy typo!): Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of Edward Burne-Jones (1975 – her first published title) – yes, I'm back among the ladies, and also, I suppose, back to my desultory project of reading all of Penelope Fitzgerald backwards. Edward Burne-Jones is an elegant, fluent and hugely skilful biography, handling masses of material with ease and keeping the reader (this one, anyway) turning the pages happily. As with her novels, she immerses us in a rounded, wholly convincing past world. Here is a vivid passage from early on, after Edward Jones (not yet Burne-Jones), a solitary young man with an impoverished Birmingham background, has met William Morris at Exeter College, Oxford, where the two very different men took to each other instantly and embarked on their lifelong collaborative mission...

 According to Mackail, 'the coarseness of manners and morals' at Exeter ' was 'distressing in the highest degree' to Morris. Burne-Jones, curiously enough, perhaps because he was used to Saturday nights in Birmingham, seems to have minded it less. 'One night a man threw a heavy cut-glass decanter of port at someone sitting next to me,' he told Rooke, 'and it went between us both and smashed to pieces on the wall behind, so that we were both drenched in port ,shirts and faces and all over our clothes, as though we were covered with blood.' What impressed Burne-Jones was that the man responsible, who had to be dragged forcibly out of Hall, later became 'a high dignitary of the church'. Those who did not throw decanters were in a minority. William Richmond, the painter, visited his elder brother at Exeter in 1854: 'My brother did not belong to the aesthetic set ... and among them two of them were pointed out to me as special oddities ... These were William Morris and Edward Jones.'