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Frolicsome Engines
The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence
By Jessica Riskin
May 4, 2016

Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs — Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life.

How old are the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence?  Many might trace their origins to the mid-twentieth century, and the work of people such as Alan Turing, who wrote about the possibility of machine intelligence in the ’40s and ’50s, or the MIT engineer Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics. But these fields have prehistories — traditions of machines that imitate living and intelligent processes — stretching back centuries and, depending on how you count, even millennia.
The word “robot” made its first appearance in a 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek entitled R.U.R., for Rossum’s Universal Robots. Deriving his neologism from the Czech word “robota”, meaning “drudgery” or “servitude”, Čapek used “robot” to refer to a race of artificial humans who replace human workers in a futurist dystopia. (In fact, the artificial humans in the play are more like clones than what we would consider robots, grown in vats rather than built from parts.)
There was, however, an earlier word for artificial humans and animals, “automaton”, stemming from Greek roots meaning “self-moving”.  This etymology was in keeping with Aristotle’s definition of living beings as those things that could move themselves at will.  Self-moving machines were inanimate objects that seemed to borrow the defining feature of living creatures: self-motion.  The first-century-AD engineer Hero of Alexandria described lots of automata.  Many involved elaborate networks of siphons that activated various actions as the water passed through them, especially figures of birds drinking, fluttering, and chirping. ※※Indexed under…FountainsAvian
The siphon would have had a particular attraction to the ancient automaton-maker, in that it makes water travel upward, counter to what it would otherwise do. According to Aristotle, while living things moved themselves at will, inanimate things moved according to their natures: heavy things, made of earth or water, descended, while light things, made of air or fire, ascended. A siphon, by allowing water to ascend, appears to violate Aristotle’s principle, and it also tends to work intermittently, creating the illusion of wilful behavior.
Waterworks, including but not limited to ones using siphons, were probably the most important category of automata in antiquity and the middle ages.  Flowing water conveyed motion to a figure or set of figures by means of levers or pulleys or tripping mechanisms of various sorts.  A late twelfth-century example by an Arabic automaton-maker named Al-Jazari is a peacock fountain for hand washing, in which flowing water triggers little figures to offer the washer first a dish of perfumed soap powder, then a hand towel.
Such hydraulic automata became ubiquitous on the grounds of palaces and wealthy estates.  So-called “frolicsome engines” were to be found as early as the late thirteenth century at the French chateau of Hesdin, the account books of which mention mechanical monkeys, “an elephant and a he-goat”.1 Over the next two centuries, the chateau collection expanded to include “3 personnages that spout water and wet people at will”; a “machine for wetting ladies when they step on it”; an “engien [sic] which, when its knobs are touched, strikes in the face those who are underneath and covers them with black or white [flour or coal dust]”; a “window where, when people wish to open it, a personage in front of it wets people and closes the window again in spite of them”; a “lectern on which there is a book of ballades, and, when they try to read it, people are all covered with black, and, as soon as they look inside, they are all wet with water”; a “mirror where people are sent to look at themselves when they are besmirched, and, when they look into it, they are once more all covered with flour, and all whitened”, and so on, and so on.2
By the time the French essayist and diarist Michel de Montaigne went traveling through Europe in 1580–81, hydraulic automata had grown so commonplace that he grew bored, though he continued dutifully to record them in his travel diary.  At one palace, for example, he saw sprays of water from “brass jets” activated by springs.  “While the ladies are busy watching the fish play, you have only to release some spring: immediately all these jets spurt out thin, hard streams of water to the height of a man’s head, and fill the petticoats and thighs of the ladies with this coolness”.3
Twenty years later, the French King Henri IV hired the Italian engineer Tomaso Francini to build him some waterworks for the royal palace at Saint Germain en Laye. Francini built hydraulic grottoes devoted to the Greek pantheon and their adventures: Mercury played a trumpet and Orpheus his lyre; Perseus freed Andromeda from her dragon.  There were automaton blacksmiths, weavers, millers, carpenters, knife-grinders, fishermen, and farriers conducting the obligatory watery attacks on spectators.
Even more than in royal gardens and on noble estates, medieval and early Renaissance automata appeared in churches and cathedrals. Automaton Christs — muttering, blinking, grimacing on the Cross — were especially popular. A mechanical Christ on a crucifix, known as the Rood of Grace, attracted pilgrims to Boxley Abbey in Kent during the fifteenth century.  This Jesus “was made to move the eyes and lipps by stringes of haire”. The Rood could move its hands and feet, nod its head, roll its eyes, and show “a well contented or displeased minde: byting the lippe, and gathering a frowning, forward, and disdainful face, when it would pretend offence: and shewing a most milde, amiable, and smyling cheere and countenaunce, when it woulde seeme to be well pleased”.4
Mechanical devils were also to be found. Poised in sacristies, they made horrible faces, howled, and stuck out their tongues.  The Satan-machines rolled their eyes and flailed their arms and wings; some even had moveable horns and crowns.
The Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi even mechanized Paradise itself: “a Heaven full of living and moving figures could be seen as well as countless lights, flashing on and off like lightning”.5  While elsewhere, elaborately engineered hells rumbled with thunder and flashed with lightning, spewing forth writhing automaton serpents and dragons.
These machines helped inspire the idea that perhaps automata accomplished something deeper than merely entertaining tricks: perhaps they genuinely modeled the workings of nature.  The French philosopher René Descartes made this case powerfully during the 1640s, arguing that the entire world, including living bodies, was essentially machinery composed of moving parts and could be understood in just the way a clockmaker understands a clock.  His work was foundational to modern science in general, and to modern physiology in particular.  In developing his mechanist model of science, Descartes invoked the lifelike machines all around him.  Indeed, he lived for a time in Saint Germain en Laye and almost certainly visited the hydraulic grottoes of Henri IV, which he described in detail.
With the sixteenth-century advent of the pinned cylinder — a barrel with pins or bars sticking out, such as in a music box — even more complex lifelike machines were possible. Around this time, a new word also arose to describe human-like machines in particular: “android”, derived from Greek roots meaning “manlike”. This was the coinage of Gabriel Naudé, French physician and librarian, and personal doctor to none other than the automaton-loving Louis XIII.6
Pinned cylinders were the programming devices in automata and automatic organs from around 1600. In 1650, the German polymath Athanasius Kircher offered an early design of a hydraulic organ with automata, governed by a pinned cylinder and including a dancing skeleton.
Of course, it’s an anachronism to call sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pinned cylinders “programming” devices. To be sure, there is a continuous line of development from these pinned cylinders to the punch cards used in nineteenth-century automatic looms (which automated the weaving of patterned fabrics), to the punch cards used in early computers, to a silicon chip. The designers of the automatic loom used automata and automatic musical instruments as their model; then Charles Babbage — the English mathematician who designed the first mechanical computers during the 1830s, the Analytical and Difference Engines — in turn used the automatic loom as his model. Indeed, one might consider a pinned cylinder to be a sequence of pins and spaces, just as a punch card is a sequence of holes and spaces, or zeroes and ones. However, it is important to remember that neither Babbage, nor the designers of the automatic loom, nor the automaton-makers thought of these devices in terms of programming or information, concepts which did not exist until the mid-twentieth century. For example, ideas about the division of labor inspired the  automatic looms of the Industrial Revolution as well as Babbage’s calculating engines — they were machines intended primarily to separate mindless from intelligent forms of work.
With pinned cylinders, beginning in the early part of the eighteenth century, people began to design automata that actually enacted the tasks they appeared to perform.  The first simulative automata were designed in the 1730s by a Frenchman named Jacques Vaucanson, and quickly became the talk of Europe.  Two were musicians, a “Piper” and a “Flutist”.  The flutist had lips that flexed in four directions, delicate jointed fingers, and lungs made of bellows that gave three different blowing pressures.  It was the first automaton musician actually to play an instrument, rather than being a music box with a decorative figure.  It played a real flute: you could even bring it your own.
Vaucanson’s third automaton was the notorious “Defecating Duck”. While it  flapped its wings and cavorted duckishly, its main attraction was that it swallowed bits of corn or grain and excreted them at the other end in a changed form.  (This part of the act was a fake: the corn that went in the front remained hidden for surreptitious removal, while the rear end was preloaded.)
Although none of Vaucanson’s automata survive, their cousins do.  Among these are three androids designed in the 1770s by a Swiss clock-making family named Jaquet-Droz: a lady “Musician” and two little boys, a “Writer” and a “Draughtsman”.  The “Writer” can be arranged to write any message of up to forty characters; the “Draughtsman” sketches four pictures in charcoal; and the “Musician” plays several airs on a harpsichord.  The trio are eerily lifelike, and still hold court in Neuchatel, Switzerland.  Their eyes follow their fingers as they work, the “Draughtsman” blows the charcoal dust from his page periodically, and the “Musician” seems to sigh with emotion as she plays (she actually breathes for an hour before and after the act, giving spectators a certain frisson as they arrive and depart).
Later on in the eighteenth century, engineers and automaton makers became concerned with trying to mechanize two processes deemed the epitome of living intelligence: speech and chess playing. A flurry of talking heads in the 1770s, ’80s and ’90s was triggered by a prize competition sponsored by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences for a machine that could produce the sound of vowels. People went far beyond just vowels. A Frenchman named Mical designed a pair of talking heads in 1778.
They contained “artificial glottises arranged over taut membranes”, but their dialogue in praise of Louis XVI was rather dull: “The King gives Peace to Europe”, intoned the first head; “Peace crowns the King with Glory”, replied the second; and so on.
About a decade later, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen designed a speaking machine using an ivory glottis, bellows for lungs, a leather vocal tract with a hinged tongue, a rubber oral cavity and mouth, and a nose with two little pipes as nostrils.  Its pronouncements were more whimsical than those of Mical’s talking heads: “my wife is my friend”, for example, and “come with me to Paris”.
Kempelen was more famous for another “automaton” that he designed and built in 1769, the chess-playing Turk.  This life-sized model was exhibited all over Europe and America by Kempelen himself and then by others until its demise in a fire in 1854; in the course of its long career, reportedly beating both Napoleon and Charles Babbage.  Although aspects of its movement — the motion of the arms, head, etc. — were mechanical, it was not, of course, a full automaton. The crucial chess-playing aspect was the work of a succession of skillful and diminutive human chess players concealed in its pedestal, something all but admitted by Kempelen, who said his main achievement had been to create an illusion.  People no doubt knew it was a hoax, but they were fascinated anyway, because it dramatized the question of the age: whether a machine could reason, and relatedly, whether the human mind might itself be a kind of machine. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentin a chess-playing automaton
Edgar Allan Poe was taken by the question and in 1836 wrote an essay about Kempelen’s Turk and Babbage’s Difference Engine.  He believed a machine could calculate, because calculation was a fixed and determinate process, but not that a machine could play chess because, he said, chess was indeterminate: the machine would have to respond to its opponent’s moves.  So Babbage’s machine was genuine but Kempelen’s fraudulent.
When I’ve assigned Poe’s essay to engineering students, they’ve found his reasoning strange: why couldn’t a machine respond to each move of its opponent?  Here is another example of how people’s intuitions about the nature of life, mechanism and science continually transform.  Poe assumed a machine was necessarily unresponsive. Two centuries earlier, Descartes had made the opposite assumption, and almost two centuries later, so did my students.
How should we regard Hero of Alexandria’s siphon-driven birds, the medieval automaton Christs, the Renaissance frolicsome engines, the android musicians, artists, writers, and talking heads of the eighteenth century? They can certainly be seen as the ancestors of modern projects in robotics and artificial intelligence. But they were also expressions of a very different mode of understanding. Rather than embodying the concepts of programming, feedback, or information so important today, they were born from other ideas: animate versus inanimate matter, wilful versus constrained motion, mindless versus intelligent labor. It is hard to imagine that our own conceptual frameworks will one day seem as remote and exotic as an Aristotelian account of Hero’s siphons seems to us, but they surely will. Can knowing this perhaps help us to imagine what might come to replace information, programming, and feedback as the key concepts for understanding life, sentience, mechanism, and mind?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jessica Riskin


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Robert Greene, the First Bohemian

By Ed Simon
January 27, 2016

Known for his debauched lifestyle, his flirtations with criminality, and the sheer volume of his output, the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene was a fascinating figure. Ed Simon explores the literary merits and bohemian traits of the man who penned the earliest known (and far from flattering) reference to Shakespeare as a playwright.

The only known image of the dramatist, poet, pamphleteer, and initially unrepentant libertine Robert Greene is a woodcut from John Dickenson’s Greene in Conceipt, printed in 1598, six years after its subject had died an early death at the age of thirty-four. Dickenson’s book pretends to be a posthumous publication of the still infamous raconteur, bawd, and wit; the frontispiece depicts Greene as bundled up in his death shroud, a cloth topknot twisted off at the peak of his head. He sits in an ornate chair, hunched over a book in which he is scribbling desperately. Greene seemingly needs to write as much as possible before his untimely expiration; it is an image of the debauched bohemian penning some sort of confession for his wanton, drunken, scurrilous ways.
His bearded face pokes through the death shroud like a woman peeking out through a babushka, and he has a look of dour concern, as if he is aware that his gossipy printed accusations against colleagues, his addiction to sack, his whoring, his mistreatment of his family, and his prolific writing for money has led to the sick dissolution he finds himself in. He perhaps is worried about a worse punishment in the hereafter. Yet the woodcut is amateurish in a way that makes it inadvertently hilarious: the viewer is able to see under the table-clothed desk that Greene writes upon, yet his legs are not visible, making one wonder if he is without them, or if they are simply very stubby. His arms are thin and awkward-looking, and the bundled death shroud gathered about his figure acts less like the memento mori the artist no doubt intended it to, but instead makes Greene appear to be nothing so much as a particularly erudite, sentient onion.
Greene has recently had a resurgence in scholarly interest, in part because he was no slouch of a writer. His 1589 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is a rarely performed gem of the early English theater, engaging themes of magic, power, and vanity, and if it is not the equal of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, it is at least a worthy companion piece to it. In the play, Greene fictionalizes the career of the infamous medieval Franciscan (and precursor to a modern scientist) Roger Bacon and his attempts to build a massive, divinatory, conscious bronze head. The piece is thematically fascinating from our contemporary standpoint and deserves more critical attention than it has received, not least because the bronze head is evocative of a digital artificial intelligence, while the friar’s attempts to encircle Britain in a massive brass wall remind one of current security state paranoia.
In addition to his dramatic career, during his short life Greene produced twenty-five prose works, in which he established himself as a London literary character whose personality was as commodified as his actual writing, and whose seemingly outrageous and sinful lifestyle was a promotional measure for his pamphlets. Professional writing was a completely new concept in late Elizabethan England, and though playwrights and poets like Jonson certainly had a knack for self-advertising, they still craved the respectability of aristocratic patronage, and sometimes displayed a wariness about the so-called “stigma of print”. Greene didn’t exhibit the same uneasiness: he pumped out books at an astonishingly prolific rate. Dr Johnson famously said that only an idiot would write for a reason other than money; if this is the case, then Robert Greene was a very smart man, even if his lifestyle was sometimes more threadbare than he would have liked.
As with any writer whose oeuvre is as wide and diverse as his, Greene’s output can be of spotty quality. He developed a reputation for desiring notoriety more than fidelity to artistic vision, and yet in this he prefigures the professional writers of subsequent generations, and also the bohemians with whom his name is so often associated. It’s true that bohemianism is a nineteenth-century affectation, drawing its name from the 1851 novel La Vie de Bohème by Henri Murger and celebrated by Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La boheme. It could be argued that the sort of marginal, transgressive, romantic lifestyle attached to art itself requires the deprivations and degradations of a capitalist economy to really develop, something that was nascent in Greene’s day. And in a more practical sense, one could think that Greene’s own crass devotion to making money from cheap print was a rejection of the utopian aestheticism embraced by true bohemians. This, however, would be a mistake: if anything, Greene’s grubby, opportunistic attitude towards literary work, coupled with his public persona as an outcast, makes it hard not to see him as a consummate bohemian. This is not in spite of, but precisely because of, his higher education. A recipient of an MA from Cambridge, Greene was labeled alongside other dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and John Lyly as a “University Wit”, something that he could be overwhelmingly elitist about.
If anything, bohemianism from the French symbolists to the Lost Generation to the Beats didn’t just accept a certain elitism, but thrived on it. The bohemian is after all separate from the stultifying strictures of bourgeois or square society. Central to this vision — whether you’re Rimbaud in the steep, crooked lanes of Montmartre, or Allen Ginsberg in the alleyways of Greenwich Village — is a sense of slumming it. Greene was a good Cambridge man, getting drunk in taverns and whorehouses, denouncing fellow writers in print, and greedily pawing the returns from his work. This doesn’t contradict his classification as a bohemian; it confirms it.
With the incantatory and psychedelic style of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the university training, and the rows of smudged pamphlets bringing bank into Greene’s pockets (which ensured another hungover morning) he resembles a sort of early modern William S. Burroughs. Like Greene, Burroughs was also slumming it and his avant-garde novels with lurid covers and names like Junky and Queer could be found lining the magazine stalls of mid-century Grand Central and Penn Station. These twentieth-century cheap paperbacks with their primary colored illustrations of leggy dames and muscular young men are the equivalent of Greene’s “coney-catching” pamphlets, which provided the respectable with the secrets of rakish and criminal life much as Burroughs told the middle-class tales of anomie among the marginalized addicts and perverts of New York.
Greene titillates readers with stories about “coney-catching” (a euphemistic metaphor for theft; a “coney” was an early-modern term for a rabbit), and cut-pursing, which involved literally cutting open someone’s bag without them noticing. In his accounts Greene reports the exploits of seedy, dissolute Londoners for his respectable audiences in a glassy and journalistic tone, supposedly narrating in a repentant voice, but with a sense that a bit of the amoral still clings to its supposedly reformed author.
Greene’s most famous work is A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance. It is in a manner a conversion narrative. Yet unlike John Bunyan or John Wesley, Robert Greene has one eye open while he is in penitential prayer. Reformation audiences were like modern evangelicals, they loved a good sinner’s tale, and Greene knew how to lay it on thick. A Groatsworth of Wit combines several modes together: fable, poetry, and memoir are exhibited in the relatively short text, reflecting the promiscuous relationship between fiction and non-fiction that was so popular in Renaissance romance.
The pamphlet purports to be the story of two brothers, Roberto and Lucanio, and their time spent with a courtesan named Lamilia. Her name is evocative of the succubus Lamia, a beautiful daemon and muse of classical mythology (enshrined in John Keats’ poem of 1820). Upon the death of their father, industrious Lucanio is left the entirety of the inheritance, and Roberto, who is a lay-about, loafing, forever speculating scholar, gets only a groat. After a night of storytelling, songs, and sexual innuendo supplied by Lamilia, Roberto attempts to conspire with the courtesan to fleece his own brother. She betrays Roberto’s confidences and he is cast out. He eventually meets an actor who convinces him of the financial possibilities of the theater. Soon Roberto becomes a successful playwright, while Lucanio spends all of his money on Lamilia and ends up working as a pimp.
Ultimately, Roberto’s bohemian excess leaves him sick, dying, and broke. While waiting to die, he writes about several playwrights he has known, and warns anyone who may be interested in working in theaters about the perils in encountering these figures, judged to be every bit as nefarious as the courtesans and pimps of Lamilia’s den of iniquity. He writes of a famous dramatist guilty of atheism who many assume to be Marlowe, of a modern Juvenal who it is hypothesized is Thomas Nash, and of a third acquaintance driven to “extreme shifts” to survive, and which it has been conjectured may refer to George Peele.
Eventually Greene, rather predictably, reveals that the story which has been told is actually his own. He bemoans how being a Southwark dramatist has doomed his morals and health. Greene unconvincingly asks for repentance, and writes in feigned fear of his impending death. As is the narrative convention of the conversion tale, the reader is treated to some juicy details of not just “Roberto” Greene’s life, but indeed of his interactions with the increasingly famous members of bohemian London. In this way, Greene basically invented the gossipy celebrity tell-all, just as trashy as a tabloid account about the predilections and peccadillos of the inhabitants of Sunset Boulevard. Greene’s pamphlet may have contained a plea for salvation, but he wasn’t going to go to hell before settling some scores.
Greene, Marlowe, Nash, and Peele were all college-educated and represented an upwardly mobile intelligentsia that was reshaping English society by finding success through intellectual acumen and not just aristocratic connection. For though they were men denied their “groatsworth”, that is, not aristocrats, they were still classically educated, firm in their Greek and Latin, and conversant with traditional culture. Greene reveled in the exploits of the degenerate in his coney-catching pamphlets, but he was resentful of those he viewed as outside his class having the hubris to see themselves as capable producers of culture (even though his own academic record at Cambridge was less than impressive).
Greene’s chief target was “an upstart Crow”, who “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you”. Readers would have understood the “upstart Crow” to be an actor — crows being mere mimics of actual voices and having no language of their own. As an “upstart” he would be one whose young age betrays his ambition as arrogant and naïve. That this actor-turned-playwright “supposes” he is able to “bombast out a blank verse” (the alliteration of the line being slightly ridiculous and also mimicking the explosive “bombast” and arrogance of this writer), belies the fact that this upstart crow is simply a “Johannes factotum”, that is a “Johnny Do-It-All”, or a Jack-Of-All-Trades (and master of none).
This Johnny-Do-It-All has beautified his verse “with our feathers”. He has appropriated the “mighty-line” of Marlowe’s unrhymed iambic pentameter with blustery confidence (though he is a mere technician). He has a “tiger’s heart, wrapped in a player’s hyde”, unable to fully escape the stigma of first playing on the stage before he would write for it. This line makes more sense when placed in some context — it’s a parody London audiences would recognize — “Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide” — from a play called Henry VI: Part III. It was by an actor with the hubris to think he could write plays the equal of someone like Greene, a writer by the name of William Shakespeare.
And this playwright was popular — Greene complains that by his “own conceit” he was “the only Shake-scene” in the country. It’s the earliest known written reference to Shakespeare as a playwright. Baconians, Oxfordians, and all other conspiracy theorists who doubt the veracity of Shakespeare’s authorship should note that Greene didn’t doubt Shakespeare was the author of his plays, he just didn’t think those plays were any good. But it is Shakespeare’s name, not Greene’s, that history bequeathed to posterity. Jonson shared some of Greene’s prejudice against the workman-like son of a glove maker from Stratford, infamously saying that Shakespeare knew “small Latin, and less Greek”. And yet he also said that Shakespeare was “the soul of the age”. Greene was ultimately very much of his time, which is in its own way an irreparable literary loss, for our era could be greatly enriched by him. Nobody could credibly claim that he has that talent of the playwright and poet who he so mercilessly attacked in his deathbed confession, but his verse may still be able to speak to us, perhaps even sing.
Greene could marry an educated man’s verse with the poetry of the street. His poem “Weep Not, My Wanton” has the cadence and rhythm of the folk ballads which were just starting to be disseminated through cheaply printed broadsheets, some of which would be collected as Child Ballads and played as music for centuries. He writes, “Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee: / When thou art old there’s grief enough for thee. / Mother’s wag, pretty boy, / Father’s sorrow, father’s joy”. In content, theme, and scansion it reminds one of the Scottish folk ballad “Lord Randall”, which would first be printed less than two decades later, and would more famously become the basis for the chorus of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. Indeed with its simple rhymes, its inverted parallelisms (“Father’s sorrow, father’s joy”), it wouldn’t have been surprising if one heard a musical arrangement of this in a Macdougal Street bar or a coffee shop off of Canal or Houston in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Greene, like Dylan and all other high-culture cannibals of folk and popular culture, had an ear for everyday speech and was able to write poetry that sounds simple but not simplistic.
Greene’s misanthropic pose towards the world wasn’t new — his lyric from a poem included in A Groatsworth of Wit that reads “Deceiving world, that with alluring toys / Hast made my life the subject of thy scorn” expresses an attitude that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to Solomon in Ecclesiastes. Greene is Oscar Wilde’s romantic who may be lying in the gutter but is staring at the stars. In his jaded, hurt, and bruised relationship with the world, Greene sings:
Oft have I sung of love and of his fire;But now I find that poet was advised,Which made full feasts increase of desire,And proves weak love was with the poor despised;For when the life with food is not sufficed,What thoughts of love, what motion of delight,What pleasance can process from such a weight?
Greene knows he has talent, but now his “gifts bereft” from the “high heavens”. Parnassus is inaccessible, the muse does not speak, and Greene sees “the murder of my wit”. Well into his thirties, Greene wasn’t a young man anymore, especially in an era that saw death call on many so much earlier than in subsequent generations. And yet there is a bit of the Romantic death in Greene as an artist whose excesses pushed him to the edge of creativity and mortality.
If the nineteenth century had Keats and Rimbaud, and the twentieth our “Club of 27” composed of rock stars who expired before infirmity, then Greene is a worthy candidate for the sixteenth century. He writes of poetic inspiration “Because so long they lent them me to use, / And so I long their bounty did abuse”. He begs unsuccessfully that “Oh that a year were granted me to live, / And for that year my former wits restored!” He ends “My time is loosely spent, and I undone”. If we’re to believe the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare got his final revenge on the dead Greene when he based one of his greatest characters on him: a drunken, cowardly blowhard by the name of Falstaff.
We can’t retroactively diagnose what killed Greene at the age of thirty-four. The writer Gabriel Harvey wrote that it was because of “a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine”. Based on what we know of his lifestyle, cirrhosis seems not unlikely, though one can’t discount the possibility of venereal disease (even if he didn’t bear the trademark physical deformations or madness of syphilis). Perhaps it was a combination of causes.
Poets had died young before — Philip Sidney was famously slain by a bullet at Zutphen, Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey was felled by an axe of Henry VIII, and Chidiock Tichborne, whose youth was “but a frost of cares”, was executed by order of Elizabeth. But the aristocratic Sidney was a martyr for the Protestant cause in defense of the Dutch during the Eighty Years War, and the other two were killed for political and religious reasons. Greene was simply a hack writer and versifier. He is the first of a type: the artist pushed to extremes, who has the courage to go beyond the edge into excess, but who does not have the strength to return.
The brazen head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay only speaks three lines: “Time is. . . . Time was. . . . Time is past”. Now we have new machines, more powerful than Greene’s magical brazen head. Can the poets of the past speak again? Can a new brazen head proclaim that, for Greene, “Time is now”?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 27, 2016

author: Ed Simon

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Out of Their Love They Made It
A Visual History of Buraq
By Yasmine Seale
September 21, 2016

Although mentioned only briefly in the Qur'an, the story of the Prophet Muhammad's night journey to heaven astride a winged horse called Buraq has long caught the imagination of artists. Yasmine Seale charts the many representations of this enigmatic steed, from early Islamic scripture to contemporary Delhi, and explores what such a figure can tell us about the nature of belief.

Oh this is the creature that never was.They didn’t know it, still they daredto love its stride, its bearing and its breast,clean to the calm light of its eyes.It was not. Out of their love they made it,this pure creature . . . Rainer Maria Rilke,from Sonnets to Orpheus
You came here because you were told to, and because here is where wonderful things are known to happen at night. You comb the streets, the tangle of unfamiliar smells — poultry, muskmelon, marigold — until you reach the pockmarked, once-red wall of the Ship Palace. There’s a sad sort of majesty to the place, but you’re not here for the beauty of ruins. You’re here for the hauz, the tank, its fabled waters now scummed over with algae and detritus. In your hand there is a pamphlet, saffron yellow and Hindi scrawl, with a telephone number and an instruction: to call between 6 and 8 p.m., to speak long and loud, to say hello.
You say hello and for a moment the horse flickers into life, its incandescent frame reflected in the water. A crowd has bloomed around the tank. Children sing into receivers: “hello” becomes a ten-syllable word. Soon the line is swamped as callers compete for the creature’s fitful attention. Not quite the miracle you had in mind, this rickety chimera — part neon piñata, part show pony, plus wings — assembled at the local metalworks and lit up by Chinese-made LEDs. Still, it is a thing of wonder: a winged horse rests on the surface of a lake and human voices make it glow.
Say Hello to the Hauz (2010), the brainchild of designer and filmmaker Vishal Rawlley, was an attempt to revive the long-neglected water reservoir in Mehrauli, one of the seven ancient cities that make up the state of Delhi. Drawing on the story of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven astride a winged horse called Buraq, Rawlley designed a sculpture of the creature, fitted it with a phone line and a constellation of fairy lights, and left it to bob in the middle of the tank. People could dial in and speak; their voices would trigger the phantasmagoria. In the night footage preserved online, Buraq’s skeleton flashes on and off to the babble of unseen voices. The gasps are subtitled, the curiosity palpable. What to an outsider may have seemed an alien landing was really the portal to a mythic past: the horse had a history here.
The hauz was built in the thirteenth century after an early “slave sultan” of Delhi, Shamsuddin Iltutmish, dreamed he was visited by the Prophet Muhammad astride his winged steed. In the dream, the Prophet directed the king to a fountainhead that sprang where Buraq struck the ground with her hoof. On waking, the story goes, Iltutmish hurried to the site where he discovered the mark of a hoof imprinted on the earth. Dreams were an important part of the apparatus of medieval kingship; auspicious visions could steady a shaky crown. More, a widely circulated hadith declared that seeing the Prophet in a dream was equal to seeing him physically. To dream of the Prophet, then — in other words, to be considered a direct witness to his words and deeds, which together form the basis of Islamic law — was to be in a very privileged position indeed, and Iltutmish acknowledged the honour with due piety: he built a water tank, the Hauz-i-Shamsi, to mark the hallowed spot. For centuries the tank remained a site of local devotion. Magical properties were ascribed to its waters, and the great fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta described how small boats ferried pilgrims to the red sandstone pavilion at its centre.
The story of the reservoir and its otherworldly aura echoes another origin myth: that of the Hippocrene, or Horse Fountain, which sprang from the hoof-scuff of Pegasus and is remembered in Greek mythology as a fount of poetic inspiration. Unlike Pegasus, however, who emerged fully formed from the blood of Medusa, Buraq’s conception was gradual, her evolution more peculiar and circuitous. She crops up on Persian miniatures and Pakistani trucks, Zanzibari ephemera and Libyan airplanes, Senegalese glass paintings and Indian matchboxes. Yet despite her many incarnations, or perhaps because of them, her essence remains elusive. There is no original, no definitive Buraq, but rather an unruly palimpsest of jumbled creeds, kitsch, and sheer artistic caprice.
The bare bones of Buraq look like this. From the Arabic root b-r-q, which means to shine or sparkle, her name evokes the lightning speed with which she carried the Prophet from Mecca to Jerusalem and thereon to heaven, an episode known as the mi‘raj, or “ascension”. The Qur’an alludes to this journey — in two cryptic verses that lend a whole chapter (“The Night Journey”) its title — but makes no mention of the vehicle. Because Buraq is absent from scripture, theologians give her short shrift, confining her to fly-by-night cameo roles: she first appears in the eighth century, in the earliest extant biography of the Prophet, as a “winged beast, white in colour, smaller than a mule and larger than an ass”. Buraq is a creature not of scripture but of lore, and in these early writings she is still a vague, unfinished thing, uncertain of shape, let alone sex. She will take centuries to evolve a human face: some five hundred years passed before the historian al-Tha‘labi wrote that Buraq “had a cheek like the cheek of a human being”, a not-quite metaphor that launched her never quite completed metamorphosis.
The literature on Muhammad’s ascension to heaven grew to be enormous, but only after it slipped its scriptural moorings and slid out into poetry and folklore. Every life of the Prophet had a chapter on the subject, and scholars and mystics endlessly pondered its meaning. The story was deployed and reinterpreted among Islam’s subcultures, and also among its foes: there are versions in Malay, Uzbek, and Old French, in Buginese and Castilian, and a beautifully illuminated version in Chaghatay, a form of Middle Turkish named after Genghis Khan’s second son. Like Buraq herself, the story has never settled into a final form; it alters every time it is told. In some accounts, the duo do not stop at Jerusalem but venture through the seven heavens where, at the climax of their journey, the Prophet comes face to face with God. There he might meet a celestial rooster, or a polycephalous angel, and sometimes he pays a visit to his mother and father in hell. In others, the Prophet ascends to heaven by means of a glittering ladder, having fastened Buraq to a wall at the foot of the Temple Mount. (To this day the spot is known as the Buraq Wall to Muslims and the Western or Wailing Wall to Jews.)
Buraq was not born a woman, she became one — but when this happened is unclear. At some point an anonymous genius gave her a lustrous mane and a jeweled throat, and artists have never looked back. In her many guises classical and modern, Buraq is squarely female, adorned now with a peacock tail, now with a leopard-print coat, almost always with a gem-encrusted crown and brightly coloured wings. She grew into a staple of Muslim visual art, seizing the collective imagination until writers too followed suit. By the sixteenth century, the Persian historian Khwandamir could write that Buraq had
a face like that of a human and ears like those of an elephant; its mane was like the mane of a horse; its neck and tail like those of a camel; its breast like the breast of a mule; its feet like the feet of an ox. Its breast looked just like a ruby and its hair resembled white armor, shining brightly by reason of its exceeding purity.
The Persian language has no gender, obliging writers like Khwandamir to continue to describe Buraq in neuter terms even as she gained in feminine lustre and finery. It is perhaps no coincidence that Buraq is most spectacularly beautified in works by Persian miniaturists, as if these artists were giving excessively lavish expression to a femininity their language would not allow them to convey in words — as if the sexual restraint (the “greyness”) imposed by one medium made for an aesthetic of sexual maximalism in another.
If Buraq’s early, skeletal form most recalled Pegasus, the sexless winged horse of classical antiquity, her new embellishments brought her closer to those other feminized hybrids, Sphinx and Chimera. Gustave Flaubert summed up the appeal of such composite, yet distinctly female creatures: “Who has not found the Chimera charming; who has not loved her lion’s snout, her rustling eagle’s wings, and her green-glinting rump?” In taking on the allure of these figures, however, Buraq also acquired a troubling ambiguity. After all, unlike those other mythical beings, Buraq is a devotional object, theologically more akin to an archangel than to a many-headed beast of prey. She is, existentially, inseparable from Muhammad — she exists only to carry him on his journey — making her feminized appearance all the more startling. Visually, they evolve in opposite directions: the more Buraq gains in baroque adornment, the more the figure of Muhammad seems to retreat into allegory. As her body comes to the fore, his grows austere and immaterial.
Bodies are everywhere in this story, and they are awkward. The friction between the historical Prophet and his fantastical mount, between the sacred and the physical, reflects a similar divide within Buraq herself: she has been perceived both as a dream-horse — mythical, sexless, emblematic — and as a creature of flesh. And Buraq as animal, especially in her more sexualised incarnations, in turn raises thorny questions about the body of the Prophet himself. Artists generally elided this problem, or creatively eluded it; early images of the Prophet tend to show him with a veil, and more recently his body has been symbolized by a white cloud, a rose or a flame.
Did the Prophet ascend to heaven in body or only in spirit? For all those who grappled with the meaning of the night journey, this was a central question. One solution was to skirt the problem of bodies altogether. The Persian polymath Avicenna thought the mi‘raj a purely internal, intellectual journey; less concerned with Muhammad’s ascent than with the potential elevation of anyone engaged in abstract thought, he used the story’s currency as a folk narrative to coax a largely uninitiated community into the pursuit of philosophy. For Avicenna, the ascension tale was a useful means of dispelling anxieties about foreign intellectual traditions: by presenting these questions in terms familiar to his Muslim audience — and by reframing the Prophet’s ascension as a spiritual journey one should try to emulate — he showed that the study of philosophy was not only compatible with traditional Islamic teachings, but central to the task of the pious believer.
This sounds all very well and rational, but if bodies are erased from the story — if the night journey was merely a voyage of the mind, a static reverie — what is to be done with Buraq, who is pure colour and pure form, who stands for nothing beyond her exuberant self? Avicenna doesn’t say. The reality of the prophet’s flight is dismissed in a line (“It is known that he did not go in the body, because the body cannot traverse a long distance in one moment”), but winged horses are not so easily idealised. Buraq is unavoidably, infectiously physical. Astride her back, the Prophet is wrenched out of abstraction, trapped and tangled up in the body of the beast as Leda by the swan in Yeats’ poem: “and how can body, laid in that white rush / But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?”
Others felt it too. The Ottoman poet Veysi was obsessed with the physical character of the night journey, which he held to be the salient event in Muhammad’s biography; his contribution to the genre was accordingly titled The Life of the One Who Ascended. Veysi’s most famous work, the Habname or Book of Dreams, takes the form of a dream conversation between Sultan Ahmed I and Alexander the Great, and suggests a belief in the essential fluidity between the world of dreams and real life. A similar fluidity pervades Veysi’s account of the night journey, which stresses the physical reality of the ascension and of the transcendental world to which the Prophet traveled. Central to his argument are detailed descriptions of Buraq and of the Lote Tree of the Limit, which marks the edge of heaven and the boundary beyond which nothing can pass. The tree has an infinite number of branches, each with an infinite number of leaves, and on each leaf sits a huge angel carrying a staff of light. A Sufi text calls it “a tree without description”, which grew from “an unimaginable ocean of musk”. What sorts of things are these that are rendered in exquisite detail yet remain “without description”, both sensually evoked and still “unimaginable”? The clue to Buraq’s nature, perhaps, lies in this paradox.
That Avicenna and Veysi represent seemingly irreconcilable views — that Buraq can be considered both pure abstraction and pure physicality — is hardly surprising; it is in her nature to divide. In its earliest versions the ascension story functioned as a kind of shibboleth: those who believed in Muhammad’s heavenly ascension were regarded as having accepted his prophetic mission, whereas those who did not were deemed to have rejected Islam itself. This problem of belief was recently revived in a debate archived on YouTube under the title “Richard Dawkins versus Muhammad’s Buraq horse”. The Oxford Union had invited Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, to share the stage with the journalist Mehdi Hasan — Science v. Religion, firebrand against firebrand. At one point in the video, Dawkins exclaims twice in disbelief: “You believe Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse!” The crowd jeers, Hasan flounders, and the debate grinds to a deadlock. The mere mention of Buraq — her quaintness, her garish absurdity — was apparently enough to clinch the argument, exposing Hasan the “believer” as irretrievably backward, painfully naive, or a fraud.
The debate made for uncomfortable viewing. It seemed odd that among all the mystery of religious lore, the night journey — and its sensational metonym, the winged horse — should be singled out for special treatment in this way. Buraq, true to her name, seems to have become a lightning rod in the atheist crusade, a byword for the irrationality of Islam and religion in general. Yet by posing the question restrictively in terms of “belief”, both speakers ignored the many ways in which believers and non-believers might engage with an object like Buraq (in the literal sense of object, “a thing presented to the mind”), not simply as an article of faith but as metaphor, myth, paradox, emblem, or visual trope.
Buraq is a product of miscegenation. First found in the nineteenth century BC, the motif of winged horses was picked up by the Assyrians, made its way through Greece and Asia Minor, and eventually became ubiquitous in Eurasia: Etruscans, Persians, Celts, Finns, Koreans, Bengalis, and Tatars all boast some version of the myth. Often these horses are able to travel at supernatural speed; they sometimes have a human head; and they can also be linked to storms and lightning. So it turns out that Buraq, far from being the risible cultural aberration deplored by Dawkins, is actually a version of one of the oldest and most widespread myths in our history, her shimmering body a receptacle for the many myths, metaphors, and moral concerns that Islam inherited.
The world was a combination of real and mythological objects until somewhat recently; a clear distinction could hardly be made before the onset of modern comparative biology. And yet science has not abolished the interstitial zone which a figure like Buraq inhabits: we need such liminal objects to connect seemingly divergent realms of empirical and spiritual experience. Her presence in contemporary culture acts as a bridge between knowledge and belief, between rationalist taxonomies of the world and the vestigial power of myth. This idea finds its most forceful and literal expression in the Islamic transport industry, where the figure of Buraq, usefully combining piety and speed, recurs as a kind of patron saint. She gives her name to airlines from Libya to Indonesia, to bus companies, freight ships and motorcycle-taxis, to a space camp, to an engineering college, and to Pakistan’s first drone. The fluidity of Buraq as an aesthetic and linguistic object perhaps explain her pliability in being put to commercial use: she presides not just over wings and wheels but is also used to sell plastic and PVC, heavy metal and heavy-duty diesel (BURAQ LUBRICANTS), Indian food, and surgical instruments.
The longer you study her, the deeper you dig, the more elusive Buraq’s identity becomes. In a luminous essay, “The Chimera Herself”, Ginevra Bompiani parses the symbolic implications of these composite creatures. The many-headed Chimera exemplifies the arbitrary union of countless experiences — she is the synthesis of disparate things. “She who, in myths, was purely a fiery apparition, without a voice or a history, was to become, in the early days of modern philosophy, the ens rationis, the creature of language, the metaphor of metaphor”. As a hybrid, Buraq does what metaphors do: she makes the impossible visible. “Achilles is a lion” is literally false; you cannot figure it, yet there it is on the page. In the basic metaphorical statement, “A is B”, Buraq plays the same role as the copula (the “is”), brazenly flouting the law of non-contradiction, mixing that which should not be mixed. “Since she does not exist”, Bompiani writes, “the question arises as to what Chimera is”. That depends, some might say, on what the meaning of the word is is.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 21, 2016

author: Yasmine Seale


text:
The Strange Case of Mr William T. Horton

By Jon Crabb
March 9, 2016

Championed in his day by friend and fellow mystic W. B. Yeats, today the artist William T. Horton and his stark minimalistic creations are largely forgotten. Jon Crabb on a unique and unusual talent.

The publisher Leonard Smithers (1861–1907) launched, bankrolled or otherwise helped the careers of an impressive variety of names: Richard Burton, Aubrey Beardsley, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and Max Beerbohm were all referred to as “Smithers People” at one time or another. He drew to his circle the most eccentric and interesting characters of the era and in 1896 launched the arts and literary magazine the Savoy to showcase many of them. Aubrey Beardsley was made art editor while Arthur Symons was placed at the editorial helm. While not entirely a “Decadent” outfit (it also published George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad), the magazine became a lightning rod for the curious and in it, as Bernard Muddiman wrote, “the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home”1. It also launched the career of an illustrator and mystic named William T. Horton. Arguably one of the most fascinating and most unusual of all the “Smithers People”, he published very little work and remains almost completely unknown today.
In total, Horton contributed to four issues of the Savoy, which actually makes him the magazine’s most regular artist besides its art editor Aubrey Beardsley. His first contribution was three drawings accompanied by biblical quotes, which appeared in the second issue. These incredibly striking images bear little resemblance to other work of the period. Even in an era of bizarre decadence, they not only look unique, but practically leap off the page and declare their own weirdness. The Three Visions themselves are evoked by expansive swathes of black and white, minimal line, and a style that is simple yet highly unusual and even a little unnerving. These early pictures foreshadow the interests that would define William T Horton’s art: effective marshalling of black and white, strangely sinister figures, and an intense mysticism.
Horton is a mysterious character in part because his catalogue of published work is so small, and in part because there is so little written about him. Ten years after his death, Roger Ingpen published William Thomas Horton (1864–1919): A Selection of His work with a Biographical Sketch (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1929), which provides a brief sketch of his life, but little more. His letters to W. B. Yeats have been catalogued and archived, but there is precious little beyond that. It is from these letters that we know Horton was initiated into the famous Golden Dawn occult society on Saturday, March 21, 1896, with W. B. Yeats as his sponsor.2 He also entered into a chaste, platonic relationship with fellow mystical enthusiast Amy Audrey Locke. Both are mentioned obliquely in W. B. Yeats’ dedication for his esoteric work, A Vision (1925). Horton was a lonely figure, but his friendship with Yeats was an important one which led directly to his initial Savoy work. Yeats shared a flat with Arthur Symons at Fountain Court3 and in a letter dated March 28, 1896, Horton writes, “I must write & thank you most warmly for laying my drawings before Symons who has very kindly chosen 3 for the forthcoming Savoy.”4
Horton is also known to have met his most obvious point of comparison, Aubrey Beardsley. Roger Ingpen reveals the amazing synchronicity that Aubrey Beardsley actually went to the same Brighton Grammar School that, some years earlier, Horton had gone to. Prior to his work for the Savoy, “He paid a visit to Beardsley whom he described as entirely unspoiled by his great success, and who gave him some words of encouragement at a time when he had hitherto obtained little encouragement elsewhere”.5 He is also quoted as having spoken at times “of the beauty of Beardsley’s line almost in despair”.6 It is worth noting that Beardsley (1872–1898) reached his creative peak and died by the age of twenty-five, while Horton (1864–1919) did not start studying art until he was twenty-nine and begin professionally illustrating until he was thirty-two.7 Comparisons between him and Beardsley are usually made in the few contemporary reviews he received, and have continued since his death. Peppin and Mickelthwaite in Dictionary of English Book Illustrators: The Twentieth Century (London: John Murray, 1983) wrote “Horton’s drawing had qualities of directness and clarity, even if it lacked Beardsley’s sophistication and complexity; his imagery was often powerful and original — he believed it to be inspired by some occult influence.”8
But while there are elements of the bizarre in the work of both illustrators, Horton is far less similar or derivative than a great many other Beardsley imitators that populated the late 1890s. There is a loneliness and directness unique to his art. Where Beardsley celebrates the excesses of civilization, detailing it in complex and exquisitely overwrought detail, Horton conjures isolation with wide open spaces of blank page punctuated with sparse moments of intricacy. Beardsley’s final drawings for the Savoy exemplify his growing complexity but by comparison, Horton’s other Savoy illustrations are stark affairs, such as his Ballade des Pendus in No. 6 and his drawing in No. 7 to accompany Keats’ lines:
Now more than ever seems it rich to dieTo cease upon the midnight without pain.
In 1898, the arts and literary magazine Dome included a few Horton images, which are of a slightly less sinister variety than his other work. That same year though, the editor of the Dome — E. J. Oldmeadow — published Horton’s masterpiece, A Book of Images, through his company Unicorn Press. This showed him moving further into symbolist, mystical art and features a number of profoundly empty, almost existentially threatening images that dealt with modern city themes. The Wave shows a town dwarfed by an immense tsunami, poised to crush the tiny houses. Nocturne illustrates a city’s skyline — a diminutive device he used several times — and then cleaves it in two with a river. The Gap continues the theme of separation with an abyssal chasm between two barely discernible settlements. ※※Indexed under…Wavespoised to destroy a town
If his grotesque qualities were harking back to the Decadence of Beardsley, then surely his interest in separation, loneliness, and fractured humanity was heralding the arrival of the Moderns. W. B. Yeats wrote the introduction to A Book of Images and firmly established the mystical qualities behind the work, writing that Horton “has his waking dreams, but more detailed and vivid than mine; and copied them as if they were models posed for him by some unearthly master”.9 He later calls Horton’s images “the reverie of a lonely and profound temperament”.10 Yeats’ introduction also reveals the reason behind Horton’s preference for black and white images:
He tried at first to copy his models in colour, and with little mastery over colour when even great mastery would not have helped him, and very literally: but soon found that you could only represent a world where nothing is still for a moment, and where colours have odours and odours musical notes, by formal and conventional images, midway between the scenery and persons of common life, and the geometrical emblems on mediaeval talismans.11
This profession to the synaesthesia of mystical vision aligns him with the occult theory of correspondence in vogue with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Symbolists. The impossibility of realizing the true symphony of correspondence outside of mystical reverie confines him to black and white, but arguably his restraint allows for an even bigger impact on the imagination. In a letter to Yeats dated July 30, 1896, Horton writes:
I agree with Dürer that it is impossible to depict exactly the unearthly beauties & colours that form part of my Visions. Blake attempted to depict the colour & to my mind failed [. . .] Even the form in black & white gives only an idea but then the colour can be filled in by imagination. But in form and colour the imagination from the outset is defiled, adulterated [. . .] Never yet have I seen a coloured picture that could live up to the colouring of some of my Visions. Often the loveliness of colouring in Visions is brought about by the flashing, quivering, intermingling play of myriads of different tints, tints often never seen in Nature. And then there is the entrancing music in which Visions of beauty as it were, bathe and revel. To give the nearest idea of Visions would require the Greatest Artist & the Greatest Magician working in one.12
After the Savoy ceased publication at the end of 1896, the relationship between Leonard Smithers and Horton continued and resulted in Horton illustrating a high-quality edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven [and] The Pendulum in 1899. Given the disturbing, psychological tension of Poe, this would appear a perfect match, but for some reason — possibly at Smithers’ encouragement — Horton opted to do black chalk drawings, which are not as successful as his usual pen line drawings. He seemed to acknowledge this in a letter to Yeats: “Some, like Smithers, Robert Ross etc. speak highly of my chalks, others, like Oldmeadow, prefer my b. & white landscapes. You must remember the Poe chalks are merely an introduction to this style — I have done several since then which shew improvement.”13
In the late 1890s there is evidence that Leonard Smithers might have seen Horton as a possible replacement for Aubrey Beardsley, who had been a perfect illustrator for Smithers’ publications, but unfortunately for both of them was now dying rapidly from tuberculosis. In a letter to Yeats, Horton seemed optimistic about his relationship with Smithers: “I have another set for Vol. 2 of Poe if Vol. 1 pays & perhaps another Book of Images with drawings in Black Chalk — a bigger thing than the Unicorn B. of Images”.14 If he had made an impression on Smithers, it is uncertain what others thought of him. Ernest Dowson wrote to Smithers to say that the Savoy No. 2 was “better than the first number, as far as its literature, but Beardsley is not so good, & your new man Horton, I do not care for”.15 In a morbid twist, it seems as though Horton was inspired by Dowson when he illustrated the ghoulish front cover to a translation of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, published by Smithers in 1899. Oscar Wilde took the starving man on the cover to be a “horrible caricature of Ernest [Dowson]”.16 With overtones of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote Smithers after publication, “The picture of Hunger grows more like Ernest daily. I now hide it.”17 Dowson, the Decadent poet, was renowned for his youthful beauty but within a year would die from chronic alcoholism, aged just thirty-two.
Horton did no further work for Smithers after Hunger and Poe, and retreated from that world of “naughty nineties” decadence further into solitary mysticism. In the early years of the new century he had several illustrations published in the Occult Review and several published in the Green Sheaf (1903–4), a magazine edited and published by Pamela Coleman Smith. Smith was the artist who illustrated the iconic Rider-Waite tarot deck (more properly, the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck) in 1910. Besides his own Book of Images, Horton also did illustrations for two other mystical books; another visionary text of his own, The Way of the Soul, a Legend in Line and Verse (London: William Rider & Son, 1910); and H. Rider Haggard’s The Mahatma and the Hare, a Dream Story (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911).
Horton was clearly immersed in the London occult scene during the 1900s, but in 1905 he also finally attracted the attention of the Studio, the era’s foremost journal of design and illustration. The September issue featured several Horton illustrations, which are of a more mature and less ominous style. The short review, printed in full below, is a good insight into the critical reception of his work at the time.
In their particular style they are decidedly of the best order, Mr Horton’s line being clear, precise and definite, and expressively decorative. It is a style of drawing which Mr Horton has always practiced successfully in his illustrations. It may be said to owe its inception partly to the genius of Aubrey Beardsley, and partly to Mr Anning Bell. Mr SH Sime has used it often admirably, and sometimes carelessly, in his designs. Mr Horton is always careful, but the patience with which he elaborates in places is always cleverly relieved by empty white spaces. In the management of these white spaces the artist shows cunning, and in the economical use of his line. It is a pretty and effective method of making a decorative drawing; and Mr Horton’s work is an example of sound and pure line work in a class of designing which depends entirely upon the purity and vigour of the drawing of single lines for its success as a method of artistic expression.18
In the final assessment it is this superior draughtsmanship that distinguishes him as much as his “strange adventure” in the occult described by W. B. Yeats.19 His highly symmetrical curvilinear forms are quite unique among his generation and show a skilful hand. Sadly, he published little after 1912 and, in 1916, suffered a mental breakdown after the death of his partner Amy Audrey Locke. In 1918, he was hit by a car and further incapacitated. He died in obscurity the following year. His friend Roger Ingpen published a biography in 1929 and began with the words: “He was not widely known to the general public, but his gifts were highly appreciated by a small circle who are faithful to the conviction that his work is destined to a wider recognition in the future.”20
I strongly hope that this comes to pass and that you too will be struck by his extraordinary drawings.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jon Crabb


text:
George Washington at the Siamese Court

By Ross Bullen
April 21, 2016

Keen to appear outward-looking and open to Western culture, in 1838 the Second King of Siam bestowed upon his son a most unusual name. Ross Bullen explores the curious case of “Prince George Washington”, a 19th-century Siamese prince.

In October of 1856, readers of the New York Daily Times were eager for news from Siam. In the 1850s, most Americans would only be familiar with the Southeast Asian nation now known as Thailand through its most famous citizens, Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins”, who had been living in the United States. since 1830. But the Kingdom of Siam itself — its geography, its government, its culture — was a total mystery. However, a new treaty between Siam and the United States, negotiated in 1856 by Townsend Harris, the first US Consul General in Japan, kindled a public interest in all things Siamese. In an article titled “From Siam”, the Times’ correspondent does not hesitate to dampen the public’s enthusiasm. “The importance of a commercial treaty with such a people has been and will be overrated in the United States”, he writes. “The present prospects of Siam are not flattering”. Seemingly without any sense of irony, the author of “From Siam” criticizes the widespread practice of slavery in Siam, and states his belief that “The kingdom is in a state of unrest . . . which may end in a civil war”.
If the Times’ correspondent failed to see the shared potential for civil unrest in both his own country and Siam, other points of comparison between Siam and the United States were harder to ignore. The author reports that
we had a Siamese Prince to visit our ship a short time since, who went by the proud name of ‘Prince GEORGE WASHINGTON.’ During George’s rambles around the ship, if any of his inferior subjects came in his way, they would sprawl themselves out instanter far down and wriggle themselves out of the way like a worm.
A Siamese prince, demanding that his “inferior subjects” prostrate themselves before him, and adopting the name of the United States’ first president, was too odd a figure to ignore; indeed, descriptions of Prince George Washington would become a regular feature of American writing about Siam from the mid-1850s to the turn of the century. But who was this unusually named prince? And what did the Americans who wrote and read about him think he could teach them about Siam? Or about America?
Prince George Washington was really Prince Wichaichan, the son of the Second King of Siam. The institution of the “Second King” was another common point of confusion for American and European visitors to Siam. The Times’ correspondent attempts to explain the position to his readers using an American political vocabulary: “The second King is a King only in name, being subservient to the first King in all things, and during the life of the first King he is a mere cipher in state affairs, except in his absence, when he holds the reins of government, being a kind of Vice-President.” Perhaps needless to say, the job of the Second King actually had very little in common with the vice presidency of the United States. When he came to power in 1851, King Mongkut created the role in order to appease his powerful younger brother, Pinklao. Although the position was largely symbolic, the title would have enhanced Pinklao’s claim to the throne in the event that he outlived Mongkut (he didn’t). Later in his life, Wichaichan would serve as Second King to Mongkut’s son Chulalongkorn. So although Wichaichan was an important political figure in Siam, he was also always kept at a firm remove from a real position of power. He would often meet with visiting US dignitaries, who could not help noting — implicitly and explicitly — the contrast between the nickname “George Washington”, which was synonymous with US political power, and Wichaichan’s seemingly neutered political ambitions.
Wichaichan’s unusual nickname was the result of his father’s commitment to “modernize” Siam by studying and deliberately emulating Western culture. This “Siamese Occidentalism”, as the Thai anthropologist Pattana Kitiarsa explains it, “is not simply a reversal of Western Orientalist logics and power/knowledge relations. It is the historically and culturally rooted system of epistemological tactics employed by Siam’s rulers and intellectual elites to turn the Otherness of farang [white foreigners] into ambiguous objects of those elites’ desires to be modern and civilized.”1 Prince George Washington was one such “ambiguous object”, bearing both the name of a US president and a royal title that was wholly incompatible with the American political system. By naming his son Prince George Washington (in addition to his many other royal names and titles), Pinklao wished to communicate that he was a progressive person who was drawn to modern American culture, while never abandoning his fundamental commitment to Siam’s absolute monarchy.
Pinklao’s self-fashioned hybridity was picked up on by visiting American writers, who almost always preferred him to the more conservative and conventional King Mongkut. For example, in his 1873 travelogue Siam, the Land of the White Elephant, as It Was and Is, George B. Bacon recalls a meeting with Pinklao in the year 1857. “It was hard to believe that I was in a remote and almost unknown corner of the old world, and not in the new”, Bacon writes of his visit with the Second King, since “the conversation was such as might take place between two gentlemen in a New York parlor.” For Bacon, even Pinklao’s clothing becomes a metaphor for the Second King’s Siamese-American hybridity and the transformation Siam itself will undergo as a result of its increased contact with the West. “Half European, half Oriental in his dress, he had combined the two styles with more good taste than one could have expected”, Bacon writes. “It was characteristic of that transition from barbarism to civilization, upon which his kingdom is just entering”.
If an American writer like Bacon could view Pinklao’s clothing as a metaphor for Siam’s social transformation, then the Second King’s son, Prince George Washington, was an even more potent political symbol. There is some disagreement about whether Pinklao named Wichaichan “George Washington” himself, or if it was the work of a patriotic American missionary. In The English Governess at the Siamese Court, Anna Leonowens claims that “an American missionary, who was on terms of intimacy with the father, named the child ‘George Washington’”, and in an obituary for Wichaichan printed in the Baptist Missionary Magazine, author and missionary Fannie Roper Feudge claims that she “had the honor of naming the royal babe. . . and as the father had requested that the name selected should combine that of an English king and an American president, ‘George Washington’ was chosen”. It is unlikely that Wichaichan would have been given this nickname without his father’s explicit approval, but it is possible that Feudge or another American missionary may have suggested Washington as a suitable name for the young Siamese prince. If this is the case it would be consistent with how American writers in the nineteenth century used the iconic image of George Washington to think about the United States’ increasing contact with exotic and distant lands and peoples. Because he was such a definitive and recognizable symbol of the United States itself, Washington was the perfect figure for expressing concern over what might happen to the American character if it came into contact with a foreign “other”.
Early in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, Ishmael struggles to reconcile his conflicted feelings for the South Seas harpooner Queequeg. At first Ishmael is worried that Queequeg is a cannibal who will murder him in his sleep, but after they share a bed for the night, Queequeg declares that he and Ishmael are “married. . . meaning, in his country’s phrase, that [they] were bosom friends”. Queequeg’s otherness is offset by his sudden and profound intimacy with Ishmael — the cannibal from Kokovoko is now part of Ishmael’s American family. Fascinated by his new friend, Ishmael offers the following odd description of Queequeg:
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face — at least to my taste — his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Ishmael was not alone in his phrenological fascination with George Washington. In Orson Squire Fowler’s The Practical Phrenologist, Washington is presented as an example of the “well-balanced temperament”, which is “by far the best” skull type Fowler identifies. Queequeg may be “cannibalistically developed”, but his Washington-like phrenological features suggest that he is nevertheless an honest and respectable person. This interest in the features of the original George Washington’s skull can be detected in descriptions of Prince George Washington as well. In Feudge’s obituary for Wichaichan, she notes that “in person, ‘King George Washington’ was of tall, compact figure, indicative alike of strength and beauty; of full, pleasing face, and well-formed head”.
Racialized George Washingtons were a recurrent trope in nineteenth-century American writing, including in texts set in the United States itself. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we are told that “the wall over the fireplace” of Tom’s slave cabin “was adorned with some very brilliant scriptural prints, and a portrait of General Washington, drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero, if ever he happened to meet with its like”. This portrait of a black George Washington had a real-life analogue in Hawaii, at least according to Mark Twain in an 1866 letter written during a visit to the islands (which were not yet part of the United States). “We were next introduced to General George Washington,” Twain writes, “or, at least, to an aged, limping Negro man, who called himself by that honored name.” After going on to tell us that this man is kept in chains in a Hawaiian prison, Twain drily notes, “I do not think he is the old original General W.”
For literary critic Amy Kaplan, Twain’s black General George Washington and Melville’s cannibalistic George Washington both serve to “acknowledge and ridicule the desire for independence by non-white peoples”.2 Washington’s image, associated with the Revolutionary War and American liberty, is attenuated by his black skin or tattoos, creating a juxtaposition that would be amusing to white nineteenth-century readers who were sceptical that the freedoms Washington stood for could be extended to non-white persons as well. A similar dynamic is at work in descriptions of Prince George Washington, as American writers wanted to acknowledge and approve of attempts by Siamese elites like Pinklao, Wichaichan, and Chulalongkorn to “modernize” Siam by becoming more American, while also maintaining a strict distinction between the non-white Siamese and white Americans.
In his recollection of his visit with Pinklao in 1857, George B. Bacon also shares his impressions of Wichaichan. Bacon is pleased with the physical appearance of the “tall, manly, handsome youth” when he meets him, but is even more taken aback by his unusual name:
He has a kingly name — a more than kingly name. For the second king, seeking a significant name for his son, chose one which had been borne, not by an Asiatic, not by a European, but by the greatest of Americans — George Washington. ‘What’s in a name?’ It may provoke a smile at first, that such a use should be made of the name Washington, as if it were the whim of an ignorant and half-savage king. But when it shall appear, as I shall make it appear before I have finished, that this Siamese king understood and appreciated the great character of the man after whom he wished his son to be called, I think that no American will be content with laughing at him. I own that it moved me with something more than merely patriotic pride to hear the name of Washington honored in the remotest corner of the old world.
Bacon’s optimism is qualified, however, when he and Prince George Washington walk together toward the Second King’s palace. “I suddenly missed the young man from my side, and turned to look for him”, Bacon writes.
What change had come over him! The man had been transformed into a reptile. The tall and graceful youth, princely in look and bearing, was down on all his marrow-bones, bending his head until it almost touched the pavement of the portico, and, crawling slowly toward the door, conducted me with reverent signs and whispers toward the king, his father, whom I saw coming to meet us.
For Bacon, this contrast between the regal air of the handsome, modern Prince named after “the greatest of Americans” and the absolute obeisance demanded by the Siamese monarchy is “characteristic of the strange conflict between the old barbarism and the new enlightenment which one meets at every turn” in Siam. Like the racialized George Washingtons described by Melville, Stowe, and Twain, this George Washington stops short of attaining the grandeur of his American namesake. This point is brought home for Bacon during his lunch with the Second King, as he imagines that “the portrait of the real George Washington on the wall” of Pinklao’s palace would “blush with shame and indignation” if “it looked down on the reptile attitude of his namesake.” Although the Washington portrait is merely a representation of the real George Washington, it is seemingly a more faithful copy of the original than the Siamese prince lying prostrate on his father’s floor.
Although Wichaichan would succeed his father as Second King, his political career did not have a happy ending. In 1875, when his cousin First King Chulalongkorn tried to introduce progressive reforms to the Siamese political system, the conservative Wichaichan attempted to seize power. When this failed, he sought shelter with the British Consulate, eventually negotiating a truce with Chulalongkorn that allowed him to return to his palace, but with a reduced personal guard and limited political influence.
Unlike General Washington, Prince George Washington had failed to lead a political revolution. Descriptions of Wichaichan following the “Front Palace Crisis” typically represent him as a somewhat sad, frustrated old man (even though he was only in his early forties). A striking example can be found in John Russell Young’s Around the World with General Grant, a travelogue that recounts Ulysses S. Grant’s world tour following his second term as president of the United States. Like George Washington, Grant was a president who earned his political capital through his storied military career. And so, in a very odd way, the meeting between Ulysses S. Grant and Prince George Washington was an anachronistic encounter between two of America’s most celebrated heroes. And yet, of course, the contrast between Prince George Washington and the real General Washington was too great for Grant — and Young, his biographer — to ignore. Young describes himself and Grant waiting for Wichaichan in his palace, which to their eyes “bore an aspect of decay”. “In a few moments his Majesty appeared and gave us a cordial greeting”, Young writes.
An illness in his limbs gives him a slow, shuffling gait, and he told us he had not been in the upper story of his palace for a year. We sat under the canopy and talked about only America and Siam. No allusion was made to any political question, the King saying that he gave most of his time to science and study. Having a nominal authority in the State he has time enough for the most abstruse calculations.
Deprived of any real power, Prince George Washington — now King George Washington — lived in a dilapidated palace and pursued harmless intellectual pursuits instead of the political duties that his royal birth and famous name should have prepared him for. “The King seemed sad and tired in his manner”, Young writes, “as if he would like really to be employed, as if he felt that when one is a king he should be at more stable occupations than turning ivory boxes on a wheel, or mixing potter’s clay”. When the real George Washington retired to his slave plantation at Mount Vernon he was regarded as a hero in the United States and throughout the world. The contrast between Washington’s retirement, resting on the laurels of a lifetime of military and political victories, and the forced retirement of Siam’s King George Washington is palpable in Young’s description, as a former US president looks with pity on a racialized and debased copy of one of America’s founding fathers.
From the first time he was noticed by the New York Daily Times in 1856, until his death in 1885, Wichaichan would always be interpreted through the lens of his American nickname. Being named “George Washington” suggested that he was a new kind of Siamese noble, a modern, Americanized monarch who heralded a departure from the old stereotype of the “Oriental despot”. But his — and his father’s — commitment to the conservative conventions of the Siamese monarchy meant that Prince George Washington would always be kept at arm’s length from his famous namesake. In his famous book The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha describes “colonial mimicry” as a state of being “almost the same but not quite”, or more pointedly, “almost the same but not white”.3 This formulation encapsulates the attitude American writers had toward Prince George Washington, a sense of admiration and attraction offset by a deep revulsion toward cultural and racial difference. Although they were flattered to see their national hero honored in a foreign land, they believed that this living tribute could never match the original. There may have been two kings in Siam, but American history had room for only one George Washington.
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author: Ross Bullen