A Stubbs and a Digression

The colours of the trees and the quality of light just now, as the greens of summer fade and autumn tints begin their takeover, puts me in minds of that great English painting, The Reapers by George Stubbs, which hangs in Tate Britain (digression: I didn't know that the Tate was originally called the National Gallery, Millbank – until the name was changed by a man generally reckoned the 'least successful' of all Tate directors, James Bolivar Manson, a frustrated painter and alcoholic, whose drunken excesses culminated in a 'scene' at a grand reception in Paris at which he 'punctuated the ceremony with cat-calls and cock-a-doodle-doos, and finally staggered to his feet, hurled obscene insults at the company in general and the minister in particular, and precipitated himself on the ambassadress, Lady Phipps, some say with amorous intent, others with lethal intent'. Digression ends.) 
Those who run what is now Tate Britain have burdened The Reapers with this deadening interpretative caption: 
'As a depiction of labour, this picture is greatly idealised. The workers are spotlessly clean despite their drudgery. The church in the distance, and the farm manager on the horse to the right, serve as reminders of spiritual and social authority. Stubbs's picture can be seen as a celebration of the order and nobility of rural life, in tune with the concern with efficiency shown by agricultural writers of the time like Arthur Young. Alternatively, you may think that his picture robs these workers of their individuality and denies the harsh realities of work for sentimental effect.'
Not only does this ignore all aesthetic, artistic or technical aspects of the painting, it also imposes on poor old Stubbs intentions that were surely not his: did he really have Arthur Young's agricultural reforms in mind then he painted it?  More likely, surely, that his mind was infused with vaguely remembered images of the classical pastoral, biblical scenes (Ruth amid the alien corn), and of course earlier paintings of the same subject. But never mind all that – at today's Tate, Marxism rules. What would James Bolivar Manson say? Cock-a-doodle-doo?

Day and Robb

 Lichfield was a great centre of what we now call the Midlands Enlightenment (I'd prefer to call it Mercian myself). Erasmus Darwin was the focus, but there were other luminaries in town, none of them stranger, or more besotted with Ideas – specifically those of Rousseau – than Thomas Day. The link below will take you to a piece I wrote about him for Engelsberg Ideas –

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-madness-in-rousseaus-method/

And while we're at it, I also have a review of Graham Robb's The Discovery of Britain in this month's Literary Review, Britain's finest literary magazine. Here it is in its original form, slightly different from the printed version –

‘Given a certain lapse of time,’ writes Graham Robb in this exhilarating journey through British history, ‘all history is wrong, including the histories which correct the erroneous histories.’ This is a healthy attitude for a historian to have, and sits well with the kind of open, four-dimensional history that is Robb’s speciality, a history that makes room for ‘the surprising contractions, dilations and reversals of time’ – and, indeed, of space: as Robb points out, there has been a long tradition of overestimating the size of this ‘spindly, sea-wracked island’ with its improbable shape. In fact the island is so small that, in ideal conditions, thirteen pairs of eyes could see the whole of it from thirteen high points, and, wherever you are, the sea is never more than seventy miles away.
   Robb typically explores his terrain on two wheels (as in his classic The Discovery of France), and this history begins with the author and his wife returning from a French cycling expedition in 2018 to find the island of Britain effectively cut in half as a result of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ali. Later that day, Robb conceives the idea of ‘a social, geographical and political history of the British Isles based on the evidence of natives, nomads, invaders and immigrants, the mighty and the impotent, the blindingly famous and the utterly obscure. The narrator would refer to his own self-inflicted or unavoidable experiences as a child and young adult…’ He does indeed, and these scenes from his own life enliven and illuminate the narrative very effectively, not least because he spent his early years in such a variety of interesting locations with unsuspected historical depths, from the Scottish borders to the English midlands. In the village of Powick in Worcestershire, where he spent some of his early years, he found himself in a ‘time-muddled landscape’ where the present coexisted with strange remnants of a deeper past and ‘every weekday morning, an assortment of rural types left the pages of Anglo-Saxon and medieval history and processed along the road’. As a boy, he and his pals built impenetrable dens in a huge, ancient hedge bank, which he later discovered was just a stone’s throw from a secret nuclear bunker.
   As its subtitle suggests, The Discovery of Britain takes in a vast sweep of time, though the focus is of course on the history of Britain – little more than thirty lifetimes, as Robb points out (and a little over eighty lifetimes would take us all the way back to the Neolithic). As you would expect of the author of The Ancient Paths, his revelatory account of Celtic mapping and land surveying, Robb is keen to reclaim pre-Roman British civilisation from the calumnies of Roman history.  He is also keen at every point to unpick the banner headlines of history and show that, again and again, ‘history fails to confirm the fiction’. He demonstrates that even such things as the Norman conquest and the Saxon invasions were far from straightforward. Nor was the English Civil War as divisive as is generally thought: in most of England, away from such hotspots as Lancashire, ‘neutralism was the norm’. Likewise, only a tiny minority of parliamentarians voted for the king’s execution, and very few found it a cause for celebration. The English have always preferred peace and that ‘mysteriously efficient  process’ known as ‘muddling through’. The agrarian revolution undeniably happened, but resistance and ‘active ignorance’ – sticking to the old ways – survived all improvements, the past, as ever, not swept away but lingering to coexist with the present. As the landscape historian W.G. Hoskins pointed out, ‘Everything is older than we think’ – and, of course, more complex.
   The Discovery of Britain is at once broadly chronological and thematic, the author devoting chapters to such subjects as the English shire system, the coming of Christianity (and its peaceful coexistence with paganism), the development of the English language, the education system (or, for a long time, lack of system), the growth of London, the development of transport and the ‘social revolution’ of the interwar years, but it is no dry chronicle, being at various points intertwined with scenes from the life of the author and his family: Robb’s hitch-hiking experiences and glimpses of his early love life, memories of various sub-criminal activities, of being an undergraduate (and fellow) at Oxford, and of a period working, or rather skiving, for the London Borough of Lambeth. His parents’ wartime experiences are particularly interesting, his mother working as a nurse looking after prisoners of war in Edinburgh castle, his father working with the ARP in bomb-ravaged Hull. It is only as the story draws nearer to the present that things become less interesting; a history that has flowed along a tumultuous, meandering, never predictable course is canalised into something narrower, straighter and more familiar. Perhaps this was inevitable, but Robb’s account of the past few decades seems almost sketchy, and oddly selective. He pays due attention to sex abuse scandals in the church but makes no mention of the ‘grooming gangs’ in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere. Similarly, he entirely ignores the dramatic demographic changes of recent decades; for him the story of immigration seems to end some time back in the 1970s. This is a shame, but it doesn’t alter the fact that overall this is a brilliantly entertaining, learned and illuminating history, a worthy companion to The Discovery of France.

 

Cathedrals at Dawn

Yesterday I went to see a rather wonderful exhibition of photographs of cathedrals by the late Peter Marlow. It has been touring England's cathedrals, and is currently on show in the north quire aisle of Lichfield.
Marlow had been commissioned in 2008 to photograph half a dozen English cathedrals – including Lichfield – for a set of stamps, and the experience inspired him to carry on and photograph every Anglican cathedral in England over the next three years. Each photograph was taken with the camera pointing East, and – what makes them so distinctive – in the light of dawn, with no artificial lighting whatsoever. Marlow did this partly as a way of following in the footsteps of earlier church photographers, who worked of necessity in available light, often using pinhole cameras and very long exposures. Marlow of course was employing much more advanced technology, and colour film, but his images have a similar quality of numinous stillness and intensity. The dim religious light of dawn turns out to be wonderfully radiant, with an ethereal quality that makes each cathedral look almost as if it is bathed in the light of heaven rather than earth. Indeed, cathedrals I knew quite well often looked so transformed that I hardly recognised them, but among those I had no difficulty identifying were Wells (above) and of course Lichfield (below). I've never been entirely sure photography is truly an 'art form', but Marlow's beautiful photographs certainly demonstrate that there are things, wonderful things, that only photography can do.  

TV Critic Gets Big Break

 

Born on this day 100 years ago, in South Africa, was Herbert Kretzmer, a man with an unusual combination of careers – journalist and songwriter. In the latter capacity, he co-wrote the best forgotten Peter Sellers/Sophie Loren song, 'Goodness Gracious Me', wrote the English lyrics for 'She' and 'Yesterday When I Was Young', and the book and lyrics for the musical Our Man Crichton (based on J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton), among other things. In the former capacity, Kretzmer was a feature writer on the Daily Sketch, and a profile writer on The Sunday Dispatch and the Daily Express, where he also served as drama critic. It was while he was working as a TV critic at the paper that pays my pension, the Daily Mail, that he had his big break – just about the biggest break any lyricist could hope for: he was commissioned by Cameron Mackintosh to write the English language version of a musical called, after its unlikely literary source, Les Misérables, a show which became, for reasons not readily apparent to me, a gigantic, a stratospheric hit. In a few days' time it will have completed a West End run of 40 years, and there's no sign of it ever ending. Kretzmer retired from journalism a wealthy man. He is believed to have made something in the region of £15 million in royalties from his big break. That's big. 

Estrangement from the Past

 'Universities are teaching English Literature students how to concentrate long enough to read lengthy novels. Some institutions are offering "reading resilience" courses to students...' So begins a news story in The Times, the rest of which is unfortunately concealed behind a paywall, but I think we get the gist: it's a phenomenon that has been remarked a good many times in recent years, on both sides of the pond (for example in this piece in The Atlantic last year). It certainly seems to be the case that less and less is being asked of schoolchildren in the way of reading hefty, serious stuff, and as a result they never face the challenge of ploughing through something long and demanding. I don't think it's the length as such that is proving so daunting, though – many of these children will have read volume after fat volume of Harry Potter, and probably Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and other fantasy novels. Indeed, if length was the problem, publishers would surely be bringing out shorter books, but there is no sign of that: as I might have remarked before, most current books are around a third too long. No, reading stamina isn't really the problem – rather, it is the challenge of reading something unfamiliar and demanding, especially something from ages that had very different preoccupations from our own. I would suggest that the root of the problem is an estrangement from the past, a lack of historical and cultural perspective, of a sound rooting in history and in what people have written and made and how they thought in past centuries. If your knowledge of such things is made up of a few random snapshots and samples, you are going to have a real problem tackling the classic works of the past, and they will be much more daunting that they need be. Sadly, schools seem to be largely failing to instil any real sense of history, of its continuity with the present, of how the present is imbued with it, a product of it. Without that grounding, students are inevitably going to struggle. Their education, and the culture they inhabit, have left them stranded in a kind of eternal present, from which it is going to be a real challenge to escape. I count myself lucky to have benefited from a grammar school education that forced me to tackle the hard stuff, and left me in no doubt that the past mattered at least as much as the paltry concerns of the present, and was every bit as real. 

The Sound of Poets

 We know what poets sound like, don't we? They speak in Received Pronunciation, sometimes in a curiously strangulated form – think T.S. Eliot – or in a kind of Oxford drawl, like Philip Larkin, or in the fruitier-than-fruit tones of Dylan Thomas, or in a more relaxed version of 'posh', like Betjeman. Regional accents are allowed for Northerners – Ted Hughes (the thinking man's Sean Bean), Simon Armitage, all those Liverpudlians. But there was a time, before Received Pronunciation took over (largely thanks to the BBC), when writers, like everyone else except some members of the gentry and aristocracy, spoke in a range of provincial accents, and the world sounded very different, both from how it sounds now and from how it sounds in period dramas and historical reconstructions.
Tennyson, by all accounts, spoke with quite a broad Lincolnshire accent all his life, though he could modify it according to circumstances. He loved Lincolnshire dialect, and wrote many dialect poems (though not as many as the dialect poetry specialist William Barnes of Dorset). Johnson spoke with the accent of his native Staffordshire, and was sometimes mocked for it, good-humouredly, by his friend Garrick. Shakespeare, another great son of Mercia, no doubt spoke with a Warwickshire accent, but what exactly he sounded like we shall never know. As for Keats, how 'cockney' was he? Did he sound like a Londoner or not? Controversy rages, in a small way. In one of many hostile contemporary reviews, he was accused of using 'Cockney rhymes', such as 'thorns' and 'fawns', 'shorter' with 'water' and 'fastens' with 'parsons'. This, according to linguists, is evidence of 'nonrhoticity', the tendency to drop Rs from the end of syllables and words – though such rhymes are perfectly respectable, and have been used by poets blessed with abundant rhoticity. Keats's letters feature such usages as 'ax' for 'ask', 'ave' for 'have' and 'werry' for 'very', but these are surely there for comic effect. The likelihood is that Keats, with his intense sensitivity and easily embarrassed nature, would have adapted whatever accent he had to suit any particular social situation he found himself in. Of course we shall never know – but we do, as it happens, have some idea of what Tennyson sounded like, from a wax cylinder recording made in 1890, in which the elderly poet declaims 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. It's an eerie sound, made all the more eerie in this 'virtual reading'...

'The chestnut pattering to the ground...'

 October already, and both the Rev. Richard Coles and Bryan Appleyard have posted Robert Frost's 'October' on Facebook (great minds, etc.). 
The advance of autumn affects poets in different ways. Emily Brontë positively welcomes it, complete with its promise of winter to come –

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day.

But the general autumn mood is, of course, one of melancholy, of 'languid grief'. Here's Dante Gabriel Rossetti going for it, in his 'Autumn Song' –

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the heart feels a languid grief

Laid on it for a covering,

And how sleep seems a goodly thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brain

Falters because it is in vain,

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf

Knowest thou not? and how the chief

Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the soul feels like a dried sheaf

Bound up at length for harvesting,

And how death seems a comely thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

But for me the most beautiful lines of autumn verse – apart from the supreme autumn poem, Keats's great ode – are these, from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam', recalling an autumn morning on the Lincolnshire Wolds...

Calm is the morn without a sound,

         Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

         And only thro' the faded leaf

The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

         And on these dews that drench the furze.

         And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

         That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

         And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

         These leaves that redden to the fall;

         And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair.