text:
On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

By Anca Pusca
October 31, 2011

On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin took his own life in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects on the relevance of Benjamin's oeuvre in a digital age, and the implications of his work becoming freely available online.

Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish intellectual of kaleidoscopic abilities and interests — literary critic, philosopher, translator, essayist, radio presenter — has always fascinated academics and intellectuals. His dense academic prose, his unique reading of Marxism, his fascination with Jewish mysticism, but more importantly, his ability to capture some of the major transformations of the early 19th century Europe in a series of literal and temporal frames that distilled the very material which gave it consistency — iron, concrete, shopping arcades, new technologies such as photography and film, ideological propaganda — into words, earned Benjamin a cult-like following which continues today. Artists, philosophers, theorists from every discipline, continue to offer different readings and meanings to his work, which remains strikingly relevant to social and political transformations today.
If Benjamin’s public is mainly of an academic nature today, that was certainly not the case at the time of his writing. With his habilitation rejected by the University of Frankfurt, Benjamin was forced to survive outside of academia, and hence to write accordingly: most of his work appears in fragments — essays, short stories, journal entries, letters, newspaper and journal articles, radio broadcasts — which mainly appeared in the public domain through his journalistic and radio work, with the exception of a few pieces intended for publication by the Institute for Social Research led by Horkheimer and Adorno. This significantly affected not only his writing style — making most of it much more accessible to a larger public — but also his thoughts on the role of language and text. The fragmentary nature of his work, initially a result of financial and practical constraints, later became a trademark of Benjamin’s methodology, particularly obvious in his unfinished magnus opus, the Arcades Project.
Conceived as a catalogue of thoughts and images on 19th century Paris as the emblematic modern city, the Arcades Project brings incredible innovation not only stylistically — through the fragmentary nature of the text, which could be read and accessed in non-linear fashion — but also intellectually, by breaking the traditional frame of text which rests upon a necessary temporal and linguistic progression, and effectively establishing a new architecture which relies less on words and more on the images and material that those words conjure. Benjamin effectively reconstructs different Parisian frames, capturing them not unlike a photographer captures a scene. Each of these frames, as fragments of text, contains its own temporality, existing both in relation to but also independent from the others. By embedding the relevance of each frame into a temporality that emerges directly from the material it depicts — for example, by depicting the old Parisian arcades in ruin as a new type of architecture emerges — Benjamin creates a unique dialectic in which the present can never exist as independent from either the past or the future.
The return of Benjamin’s work back to its original wider audience, the public domain, at this particular point in time, creates a series of new possibilities that Benjamin himself could not have envisioned. Internet technology and the ability to collect, categorize and re-arrange Benjamin’s fragments in an electronic publication form could perhaps provide Benjamin with a post-humos solution to his struggle to organize the Arcades Project in a manner that would both appease publishers and maintain its innovative framework. One can already imagine the possibilities of a new interactive electronic Arcades Project in which Benjamin’s fragments could easily be navigated through the click of a button, the text appearing as a digital image, a material fragment much closer to Benjamin’s original intentionality.
Benjamin’s obsession with sorting, filing, keeping tabs on his work, making copies of manuscripts to leave with different friends, carrying a copy of the unfinished manuscript of the Arcades Project with him to his death, as he attempted to escape Nazi-occupied France, shows his determination to protect his work, his hope for eventual publication for future audiences. This is an incredible opportunity to pay Benjamin the ultimate compliment, by finding and bringing together all the fragments of his work, many of which still lie undiscovered and untranslated, and bringing them together into the public domain, free from the constraints of the publishers on which Benjamin depended so desperately during his life.
The publication of his writings on technology, online, particularly his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility’, but also his other writings on media, could not be more appropriate and relevant at this particular point in time. His essay on the ‘Work of Art’ has been used by many of today’s artists and theorists to understand the impact of digital technologies, as a form of reproductive technology, on art, culture and political mobilization. His arguments about the prioritization of the act of seeing, the increased speed through which information/the image in processed when reproduced by mechanical means, but also, the extent to which the technically reproduceable image is now completely removed from the actuality, and intentionality of the scene where it was initially created, remain strangely relevant today.
The inability of perception to detect ‘authenticity’ — to connect the image with the original setting in which it was taken — had, according to Benjamin, important repercussions for how mass culture was re-imagined and potentially manipulated by different ideologies. Through technology, the image no longer stayed in the domain of ‘art’, but rather moved into the domain of ‘politics’. If film, the cutting edge technology at the time, served according to Benjamin: ‘to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily’, one can easily apply a similar logic to different internet technologies today. Benjamin was however both admirative and weary of the technology of film, for the so-called ‘film capital’ could be used both in the interest of and against the masses. As we are increasingly learning today, same goes for ‘internet and social media capital.’
So many of Benjamin’s writings continue to carry important implications for the wider public today. It is perhaps high time that we remove the ‘aura’ around Benjamin’s figure — an aura built around limited accessibility to and tight control of his work — and return Benjamin and his oeuvre to his public.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 31, 2011

author: Anca Pusca


text:
What Makes Franz Liszt Still Important?

By Leon Botstein
October 17, 2011

This week sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt. Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, explores what we can still learn from the life and music of Liszt.

Marking anniversaries of the birth and death of historic figures, particularly in music, is somewhat akin to commemorating annually the date of death of family members. It is never quite clear whether we are struggling to remember those to whom we were once close as we pursue our lives without them, all in an effort to assuage the guilt that comes with the natural tendency to forget, or whether we are indulging in a form of nostalgia, shaped in part by using the selective memory of the past to make claims about what our present and future lives ought to be but have seemingly little chance of becoming. And as we commemorate we rarely penetrate beneath the surface of received opinion, revising a set of inherited judgments.
In our concert life these anniversaries become easy excuses to justify a comfortable and unexamined account of what history has bequeathed as “great” music. Marking the 100th or 200th anniversary rarely leads to a change in the concert repertory. We belabor the obvious. One might consider the Gustav Mahler centenary in 1960 as an exception since it took place at the beginning of a Mahler revival. But the two-year extended Mahler remembrances that are justified by the 100th anniversary of his death (2011) and the 150th of his birth (2010) have functioned to ossify a sentimental historical portrait and further enshrine the central place Mahler’s music has in the orchestral repertory.
The case of Franz Liszt, who was born in 1811 and died in 1886, is more complex. Celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth ought to have been an opportunity to revisit a figure who helped define Romanticism, the role of the piano on the stage and in the home, and, most importantly, how music functions for most of the literate public. Yet our attention to him remains largely muted and ambivalent. Only a few of his works are still in the standard orchestral repertory — the piano concertos and one tone poem Les Preludes. Pianists bring out a few select works in recital, mostly to display the virtuosity they demand. This is in stark contrast to Chopin, his contemporary, whom Liszt championed. The choral and organ music are never performed. If one compares this to Liszt’s output, not only for the piano, (which is gargantuan in scope), one cannot help but be struck by the obscurity that most of his music has fallen into. The last effort in a major city to revive Liszt’s music took place in New York in the 1970s under the leadership of Pierre Boulez.
If we choose to remember Liszt more than in passing, it is as the legendary and charismatic personality he was, with all its complexities — his notorious love life, his turn to religion, his relationship with Richard Wagner and Wagner’s second wife, Liszt’s daughter Cosima. There never has been a better subject in music history for a Hollywood movie. He was classical music’s most successful, colorful, and long-lived superstar; he acquired and retained more groupies than any one before or since.
We may also choose to recall that he was likely the greatest and most facile pianist that ever lived and perhaps the most influential teacher of the instrument. Liszt’s pupils and their pupils dominated the musical landscape for generations. He defined the personality of the concert pianist, even though, ironically, Liszt gave up concertizing relatively early in his career. Perhaps we also acknowledge Liszt’s uncommon generosity to and support for his contemporary composers, from Chopin and Wagner to Grieg and Saint-Saëns, as well as his influence on a younger generation, including Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Jean Sibelius.
As the bicentenary comes to a close without much ado, what have we missed? What indeed might we still learn and profit from taking a deeper and more comprehensive look at Liszt and his career?
First, Liszt ought to remind us that our approach to music should not be dependent on some construct of nationality that helps prop up the popularity of a composer. Reputations in classical music after Beethoven seem increasingly dependent on nationalist enthusiasms. We seek Hungarians to perform Bartók, Russians Tchaikovsky, the English Elgar, the French Debussy, and Americans Copland and Ives. Liszt defies this easy categorization. He was at one and the same time crucial to what we now regard as quintessentially Hungarian, German, and French. His reach as an artist and composer transcended national categories and reminds us of the limitations of nationalist appropriations and stereotypes.
Second, Liszt’s art bridged all genres. At the heart of his music for the piano was improvisation, an art sadly lost in what we now term classical music. Few, if any classical musicians can do it. Notation in his piano music sought to mirror an art that was spontaneous and tied to a moment of performance. His elaborations and fantasies for the piano based on the operatic works of others suggest many ways of freely adapting and altering music we like and wish to remember. The same can said for his transcriptions of works by Bach and Beethoven, where music written for one medium is translated into another. Liszt’s piano versions of the Beethoven symphonies (Beethoven was a composer Liszt venerated and spent a lifetime advocating) were particular favorites of that brilliant eccentric, Glenn Gould. We musicians would be well served by following Liszt’s example by liberating ourselves from some delusive ideology of faithfulness to historic texts, adapting old and new music into the framework of our own new music, and altering it to reach a generation of listeners accustomed to new sounds and a novel acoustic environment.  Liszt did that using the piano, and by so doing he helped create an enthusiastic audience of spectators.
Third, Liszt pioneered in rendering music an art form connected to literature, painting, and narration. His notion that instrumental music can and should evoke character, landscape, plot, emotion, and ideas (for example in his tone poem Die Ideale, based on Schiller) laid the groundwork for what we now take for granted as the musical semantics and rhetoric we encounter in music for film and television. The magic in Liszt was that just music alone sufficed to spur the audience’s imagination. Playing Liszt and listening to his work reminds us of the power of music to tell and augment a story and evoke and embellish a memory. This is particularly the case with respect to the connection between spirituality and religion and music, as Liszt’s late orchestral work From the Cradle to the Grave and his massive oratorio Christus make clear.
Fourth, Liszt was a tireless innovator, never content to repeat himself. Without Liszt’s experiments in the uses of harmony and sonority and the shape of musical form (for example, the stress on single melodies and motives and therefore imaginative repetition in works of considerable duration) much of late Romanticism and Modernism, particularly that associated with Wagner, would be unthinkable. He harbored few prejudices and was, to the end of his days, receptive to the work of younger composers and enthusiastic about new ideas — as his generous treatment of Russian composers amply suggests. We live in too segmented an environment, where the classical and the popular are still segregated, except for occasional all too facile efforts at so-called crossover works and events. Originality was just one of the goals Liszt pursued. He borrowed happily from others and sought to integrate diverse influences into a synthetic and syncretic expressive musical art form. That expansive tendency helped lend him early on in his career as a composer the ill deserved reputation of being all too facile and superficial.
Fifth, consistent with his adherence to improvisation and transcription, he defined interpretation as a creative act, even when performing a Beethoven sonata, as close to a “sacred” text as exists in the 19th-century piano literature. He added and subtracted, inserted transitions, and refashioned the meaning of historic masterpieces. Perhaps the best known is his adaptation of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy into a work for piano and orchestra.
A more protean, gifted, generous, and versatile figure in music’s history can hardly be imagined, one who sought to keep the past alive and to link tradition with the contemporary. From Liszt we can learn that mere imitation and endless repetition of the same will not do and will condemn an art form to a form of living death.  Virtuoso par excellence that he was, he despised mere athleticism in music — the single-minded obsession with speed, accuracy, circuslike tricks, and above all, arbitrary affectation in the rendering of music, attributes that have come to define our contemporary concert life. He demanded that performance and composition be kept together and define the performing musician. And yet he reveled in the theater of performance, with lightness and irony.
However, in order to gain the full measure of Liszt’s achievement and to benefit from his example far more of his music needs to be heard on the concert stage. Two great symphonic works, the Dante and Faust symphonies—although they have made periodic comebacks—need to be a regular part of the repertory. The same applies to the many orchestral tone poems, from Orpheus to Tasso. And the great choral music (the Missa solennis and the 13th Psalm, for example) should return to active life and take their place alongside the Mozart Requiem and Handel’s Messiah. Last but not least, there is the endless treasure trove of piano music well beyond the Transcendental Etudes.
Liszt was the first composer-performer to find ways, as a pianist and conductor, to reach a wide public, to make music accessible and enjoyable to more than a self-styled elite of connoisseurs. He did so by connecting music to the public’s wider interests, in poetry and prose, in politics, in history, and in art and religion. He wrote on music, including a biography of Chopin. He ran a court theater in Weimar where he gave the first performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Schumann’s Genoveva. He laid the foundations of Hungary’s modern musical life by founding Budapest’s conservatory. He used his fame and artistry on behalf of political and humanitarian causes.
What we can and must learn from Liszt is precisely what it means to be a musician, and to be, as a musician, at the center of a community’s political and cultural life, and to do so fearlessly, courageously, and generously. He set an example of what it requires to be, truly, a citizen of the world as a composer and performer, as one who broke rules and conventions to chart new paths. That was the message contained in Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 centenary appreciation of Liszt. The very same exhortation needs repeating a century later. The difference is that in 1911 Liszt the composer had become largely derided. Today he is no longer controversial, just neglected.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 17, 2011

author: Leon Botstein

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


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Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance
Dan Carter Beard’s Foray into Fiction
By Abigail Walthausen
June 11, 2014

An esoteric disease which reveals things in their true light; three pairs of disembodied feet galavanting about the countryside - Abigail Walthausen explores the brief but strange literary career of Daniel Carter Beard, illustrator for Mark Twain and a founding father of the Boy Scouts of America.

Although Daniel Carter Beard is best known as one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, he was also a well-known illustrator and a literary man. The latter is evident in a definite flair for titling apparent at all points in his career, from the alliterative titles of his illustrated woodcrafts manuals (among them Shelters Shacks and Shanties, Bugs Butterflies and Beetles, and Signs, Symbols and Signals) to his ominous autobiographical Hardly a Man is Now Alive. But the most memorable monikers amongst his books come from a pair of novellas that he wrote early in his career and promptly tried to forget: Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance.
These novellas, published in 1892, were written during a period in Beard’s life when he was enduring backlash for the illustrations he had done for Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He was blacklisted by magazines and publishers alike not just because of his association with the controversial anti-church, anti-industrialist, anti-imperialist content of Twain’s work, but because in many instances Beard’s illustrations for the novel were more inflammatory than the text itself.  Although Twain was pleased with Beard’s work, saying, “Dan Beard is the only man who can correctly illustrate my writings for he not only illustrates the text, but he also illustrates my thoughts,” the illustrations often diverged from the story’s literal plot and sometimes even from its explicit message. In several of his most notable revisions, Beard inserted the faces of contemporary figures into his work. As a great follower of Henry George’s politics, Beard also worked in a number of illustrations that use Georgist language to promote the “single tax” theory. In both cases, Beard was working to ensure that Twain’s anachronisms would be read as explicit critiques of 19th century society, a mission he would continue in his work on Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance.
In Moonblight, a labor movement novel, Beard develops the politics that he began in his Yankee illustrations. The story’s nameless protagonist is an owner of a mining company who discovers a medieval manuscript while staying the night at a tavern in the room of a stranger. The book details the condition of “moonblight,” an esoteric disease which allows people to “see things as they really are.” After said fascination has set in, crews of coal miners with blackened faces become antebellum slaves before our protagonist’s eyes. When he attends a meeting of mine-owners he sees that their faces take on the likenesses of a fox, a wolf, and a rattlesnake.
Later, “when a question of agreeing upon a form of lease that would evade the eviction laws for the protection of the miners was broached,” the narrator becomes disgusted and sees  “not an assemblage of gentlemen, but a lot of parasitic insects, covering the body of a miner, and sucking his blood.”  But all lessons do not come from his altered vision;, mentors are just as important in demonstrating not just social injustice and treachery, but the explicit doctrine of Henry George. Sam, a barkeeper, insists that all landless men like himself are slaves, and that the solution to this problem for each man alike is to “Jes charge him fer der rent of der land he uses.” Professor Follium, a geologist, dilates on the rights of man to land ownership as he explains:
A baby is born. It has ears: that means it was intended to hear. It has a mouth to receive nourishment: that means that nourishment is provided for it. It has neither wings nor fins, but feet: that means that it must walk, and is a land animal, and must have land to walk on. All these things will teach you that it has an inherent right to light, air, water, and food; to procure the latter it has hands to transform the products of the earth to a suitable form by labor. I have already said that Nature has provided untold wealth for the babe, yet we will not allow it to use its hands, unless it does so for us.
Despite incredible similarities in the way that Beard illustrated A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Moonblight, his writing inverts a number of paradigms and motifs from Yankee. In case readers were not entirely sure that Twain was criticising the 19th century and not just the 6th, Beard reverses the time travel and brings Medieval superstition into the 19th century in order to educate a naive industrialist. In both books, the moon has uncanny power over people: while Twain’s Hank uses it to wrest power from the masses that populate his adopted medieval life, Beard’s narrator channels the moon to show universal human truths.  He muses, “Freedom is health: slavery is disease. . . The old white-faced moon saw this — saw the disease grow until it proved almost fatal; and the silver light from the sky shone over many a bloody field where Labor laid on the altar of Freedom thousands of her sons.”
Just as so many of Beard’s pen and ink images are surrounded in curls of smoke, the literary scenes he creates are often hazes and conflations of images — things obscured or transformed by altered states of mind and magic. His illustrations in Yankee and Moonblight alike are closer to Renaissance emblems that they are to narrative illustrations. Although the intent of Beard’s illustrations for Twain was often overtly political and didactic, his illustrations of his own work added the subtlety that his own writing lacked. If Beard’s stories were simplistic, lacking Twain’s type of moral ambiguity, his drawings added a dimension of sensitivity to the issues he handled so awkwardly.
Although Moonblight is a more polemical expansion of Yankee, Six Feet of Romance, which shares the volume, is a puzzling companion -- it is not at face value political at all. Although its title suggests (perhaps only accidentally) a story that is shaded with morbidity and perverse sex, it is instead a story that is ultimately about nostalgia.  Nostalgia, for Twain, was political in its own sense. Twain set his Yankee down among the knights of the round table as a reaction to Walter Scott’s glorification of chivalry, an attitude Twain held responsible for the long persistence of slave culture in the south. Beard was more amenable to the sentiment. As Six Feet of Romance opens,  the narrator is sitting among a collection of salvaged household items, relics that inspire him to unironically reflect on times gone by:
My antique frying-pans, toasters, and waffle-irons all have very long handles; the andirons of the same date rear their massive brass heads several feet above their strong wrought-iron cross-bars. How plainly these things tell us of the great log fires that roared in their ample fireplaces in the brave old days of our great grandsires!
His attention fixates on a favorite item, an old foot stove, so intently that his surroundings became “misty and indistinct, and finally disappear.” In the suddenly unfamiliar haze of his New York Studio, a hand appears and then a pair of feet in dainty period dress. When the mysterious hand reaches into the foot stove and absconds with its coal cup, our narrator is forced out of his comfortable chair and must pursue not just this pair of disembodied feet, but two more pairs representing men of aristocratic and common origins (we can tell from their shoes). All six feet, followed by Beard, mysteriously leave New York and go for a romp in the countryside. Ultimately, the man in the scruffier boots prevails over the aristocrat in a duel and the woman of the dainty red shoes walks off with him, leaving the foot stove behind. When the narrator comes back to reality in his studio, we wonder what the point of this reverie was. Is it that his alter ego, the boots hanging alongside the buckskin pants, was on the right side of history? That the true America is with the rough and tumble Sons of Daniel Boone? There is a shade of that, but more than anything, the piece is a whimsical flight by a highly visual man. Nostalgia, he posits, holds none of the harm that Twain seems to see in it — it is a gorgeous way to daydream.
The valiant and hopeful heroes of Beard’s own fiction were not only unpopular; they did not even elicit the controversy of his politicized Twain illustrations. It is hard to know what Daniel Carter Beard thought of his own work — he leaves all mention of Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance out of his autobiography. This omission leads us to assume that it was an experiment he was unhappy with, one that happened at a difficult period when his reputation kept magazine work scarce and prospects limited.  Although the novellas were no success, this ongoing dialogue with Twain was important to the formation of the voice he used in his  “crusade for American boyhood.”
The achievements that I have discussed so far, illustrating for Twain and founding the Boy Scouts of America, actually only account for the final 30 pages of Beard’s 360 page autobiography, Hardly a Man is Now Alive. The rest of the book demonstrates a strong link between his affection for Twain and his inventions in scouting. The remaining 330 pages are devoted to Beard’s childhood and young adult years with a great emphasis on coincidence and the forces that brought him into (and out of) a great many scrapes and near disasters. Even when describing his adulthood, he tells stories of mischief. While he was working as a surveyor, he says he “took delight in always putting into [his] records mention of real occupancy, genteel or disreputable.” He describes with pride a small menagerie he kept in his Queens backyard that included a Javanese pygmy musk deer. During one stay at a hotel, he alerts the management of the infestation with an “impromptu natural history collection of cimex lectularia” that he makes by stringing the insects on a piece of thread and leaving the garland with his complaint at the front desk.
If Beard’s life story has a thesis, it is not so much that he helped American youth by establishing scouting, it is that he was himself the quintessential American youth, that well into adulthood Beard was a doppelgänger to Huckleberry Finn and his mischievous model and creator, young Mark Twain. About the author he writes:
Beyond a doubt, in his youth he was more of a real boy than any other boy between Canada and Belize. If the boy Sam Clemens thought of more things, did more things, got into more scrapes than any other lad, if he were endowed with a greater capacity of mischief, it was because of his more highly developed imagination. With that imagination he developed a broad charity for others.
Although it is clear that Beard was interested in youth work throughout his career (much of his earliest work appeared in youth magazines like St. Nicholas), there is one story he tells in multiple books to explain his initial call to scouting. As he is walking through New York on a cold winter’s day, he sees boys at the foot of a statue of Benjamin Franklin. In some versions of this emblematic moment the children are newsboys sleeping there, and in some they are urchins playing dice games. Both stories are of a Hank Morgan or a Huck Finn — the self-sufficient scout and the mischievous rascal.
Beard’s intense and extended engagement with Twain was an important step towards developing the tone of Boy Scouts: the relationship nourished his visions for the ideal boy, the connection between man and land, and the place of nostalgia and tradition in American culture. These novellas serve as a bridge between the straightforward pedagogical texts like The Handy Book and the narrative and ceremony of the Boy Scouts of America. The experiments with Twain-style irreverence and with politcal illustrations established an interesting channel for Beard to transform Robert Baden-Powell’s chivalric brand of scouting into something more uniquely American. Especially as a member of the BSA’s founding committee, Beard was adamant that members must look inward, to the US, for inspiration and that scouts must not be modeled on narratives of “King Arthur, Richard the Lionhearted, Saladin of Saracens, or Robinhood.” He could easily summarize this list by saying: avoid all those sacred cows that lie within the satire of Twain.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Abigail Walthausen


text:
Olaus Magnus’ Sea Serpent

By Joseph Nigg
February 5, 2014

The terrifying Great Norway Serpent, or Sea Orm, is the most famous of the many influential sea monsters depicted and described by 16th-century ecclesiastic, cartographer, and historian Olaus Magnus. Joseph Nigg explores the iconic and literary legacy of the controversial serpent from its beginnings in the medieval imagination to modern cryptozoology.

In his comprehensive study, The Great Sea-Serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise (1892), Dutch zoologist Antoon Cornelius Oudemans lists more than three hundred references to the notorious sea monster in his chronological “Literature on the Subject”. The first ten of those, 1555-1665, cite Olaus Magnus’ sea serpent: editions of Olaus’ Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (“History of the Northern Peoples”) and natural histories of Conrad Gesner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Edward Topsell, and John Jonston. The list establishes Olaus’ serpentine monster as the major ancestral source of sea serpent lore from the sixteenth century to widespread sightings of such creatures in Oudemans’ own time. It is the basis for illustration and discussion of the creature in marine studies and popular fantasy up to the present, five hundred years after Olaus created it.
While Oudemans cites natural histories in which copies or variations of Gesner’s famous woodcut of Olaus’ sea serpent appear, his list does not refer to the monster’s iconic source: the 1539 Carta Marina. Oudemans had not seen the map. After it went out of circulation by the 1580s, it was lost for three centuries until a copy was discovered in the Munich state library in 1886, shortly before publication of The Great Sea-Serpent. A second copy surfaced in 1962 and is now in the Uppsala University Library. The wall map, measuring about 5 feet (1.5m) wide and 4 feet (1.2m) high, was the largest, most accurate, and most detailed map of Scandinavia––or of any European region––at that time. A Catholic priest exiled with his Archbishop of Uppsala brother, Johannes, from their native Sweden after it converted to Lutheranism, Olaus began compiling the nationalistic map in Poland in 1527. Created to show the rest of Europe the rich history, culture, and natural wonders of the North prior to the Reformation, the map was printed in Venice twelve years later.
The northern seas of the marine and terrestrial map teem with fantastic sea monsters either drawn or approved by Olaus. The most dramatic of those, off the busy coast of Norway, below the dreaded Maelström, is the great serpent, coiling around a ship’s mast and lunging with bared teeth at a sailor on the deck. Like the map’s other sea beasts, the serpent is not just a cartographical decoration to fill space, as in Jonathan Swift’s “elephants in wont of towns.” It is meant to represent a real animal, one that Nordic sailors and fishermen vividly described to Olaus on his travels around Scandinavia. The Latin legend accompanying the image indicates the monster is 300 feet (91.4m) in length. According to the map’s key, on the other hand, it is “A worm 200 feet long wrapping itself around a big ship and destroying it.”
A variation of the influential Carta Marina sea serpent appears on Sebastian Münster’s sea monster chart, Monstra Marina & Terrestria (1544 and after), but fame of Olaus’ iconic figure spread through nascent marine biology with Conrad Gesner’s reversed woodcut of it in the 1558 volume of his monumental Historiae Animalium. Nonetheless, Gesner, now regarded as the Father of Modern Zoology, distanced himself from all the Carta Marina sea beasts he presented by disclaiming that Olaus himself was responsible for the accuracy of their pictures and descriptions. Edward Topsell copied the Gesner woodcut in his 1608 History of Serpents. Ulisse Aldrovandi’s naturalistic version of Gesner’s serpent, without ship or sailors, graced the pages of John Jonston’s book of fishes and was reproduced into the eighteenth century as “Serpens Marinus Mari Noruegico familiaris Aldr.”
Seminal lore of the Carta Marina monster opens a chapter in Olaus’ History of the Northern Peoples (1555), the first entry in Oudeman’s list of works on the sea serpent. Olaus began the voluminous map commentary upon completion of the Carta Marina. Nearly every sea beast pictured on the map is documented in the History’s sensational, climactic Book 21, on sea monsters. Vignettes based on the Carta Marina typically accompany the texts. Olaus’ account of the Great Norway Serpent, in Chapter 43, is frequently quoted in works Oudemans cites and in later studies. The following passage, often modernized by later writers, is from the History’s first English translation: A Compendious History of the Goths, Swedes & Vandals and Other Northern Nations (1658):
They who in Works of Navigation, on the Coasts of Norway, employ themselves in fishing or Merchandise, do all agree in this strange story, that there is a Serpent there which is of a vast magnitude, namely 200 foot long, and more –– over 20 feet thick; and is wont to live in Rocks and Caves toward the Sea-coast about Berge: which will go alone from his holes in a clear night, in Summer, and devour Calves, Lambs, and Hogs, or else he goes into the Sea to feed on Polypus [octopus], Locusts [lobsters], and all sorts of Sea-Crabs. He hath commonly hair hanging from his neck a Cubit long, and sharp Scales, and is black, and he hath flaming shining eyes. This Snake disquiets the Shippers, and he puts up his head on high like a pillar, and catcheth away men, and he devours them; and this hapneth not, but it signifies some wonderful change of the Kingdom near at hand; namely that the Princes shall die, or be banished; or some Tumultuous Wars shall presently follow.
Olaus proceeds to describe another sea serpent, one sighted near the town called Moos in 1522. That beast “lifts himself high above the Waters and rouls himself round like a sphere.” Scandinavians believed that its appearance presaged the banishment of King Christian II and subsequent political upheaval in the Northern countries. Dutch fishmonger Adriaen Coenen, following the History and heavily influenced by Gesner, illustrated and described both sea serpents in his private manuscript, The Whale Book (1585), much of which has only recently been printed in facsimile. Scholiast Olaus continues his chapter with discussion of classical and medieval writings on terrestrial snakes and marine serpents.
Olaus’ account of the Sea Orm, largely accepted into the early seventeenth century, is challenged a century later by Erich Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen. Pontoppidan devotes Chapter 8 of the second volume (1753) of his Natural History of Norway to reports of sea monsters and other strange animals of the deep. Initially skeptical of sea-serpent tales, the bishop was ultimately convinced of their existence by “full and sufficient evidence from creditable and experienced fishermen, and sailors, in Norway, who can testify that they have annually seen them.” While he respectfully cites Olaus’ History in earlier pages of his volumes, his assessment of the book’s credibility when it comes to sea monsters is a different matter. Writing during the Enlightenment, Pontoppidan condescendingly––and rather hypocritically––charges that in writing about the sea serpent, Olaus “mixes truth and fable together, according to the relations of others; but this was excusable in that dark age when that author wrote.” He adds, though, that, “Notwithstanding all this, we in the present more enlighten’d age are much obliged to him, for his industry, and judicious observations.” He then quotes Olaus’ discredited description of the Great Norway Serpent.
Pontoppidan also believed in the Kraken (giant squid), which he regarded as the largest creature in the ocean. He calls Olaus’ “credulous” account of an immense whale mistaken for an island “a notoriously fabulous and ridiculous romance”––even though he himself describes the Kraken’s eating habits in terms of medieval bestiaries’ allegorical whale (Satan), whose sweet breath draws small fish (sinners) into its mouth.
The Bishop of Bergen’s own authority was fading by the time Sir Walter Scott mistakenly conflates him with Olaus Magnus, whose nominal title of Archbishop of Uppsala passed on to him after Johannes’ death. In Note 6 of The Pirate (1821), Scott writes:
. . . the wondrous tales told by Pontoppidan, the Archbishop of Upsal, still find believers in the Northern Archipelago.  It is in vain, they are cancelled in the later editions of Guthrie’s Grammar, of which instructive work they used to form the chapter far most attractive to juvenile readers.

What Scott is referring to here is William Guthrie’s Norway chapter in A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World (published in multiple editions following the death of the author in 1770). Guthrie extols the “wonderful animals which, according to some modern accounts, inhabit the Norwegian seas.” Among those creatures is the “sea-snake, . . . one of the most remarkable and perhaps the best attested.” Bishop Hans Egede’s famous 1734 encounter with “a large and frightful sea-monster” and other sightings qualify as “modern.” Olaus’ fabled sixteenth-century monster does not. It goes without mention. Scott concludes his note by debunking the sea-serpent story of a respected mariner he knew: the sighted beast, a hundred feet (30.4m) in length, with “the wild mane and fiery eyes which old writers ascribe to the monster,” was most likely a “good Norway log” in the misty waters.  One of the “old writers” in question was most certainly Olaus, whose serpent description Scott had earlier included in a quoted footnote to “The Mermaid” in the third volume of his 1803 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. In later editions of his collection, Scott added, “A sort of sea-snake immense enough to have given rise to this tradition, was thrown ashore upon one of the Orkney Isles in 1808.”
Despite Walter Scott’s revision of accepted lore, Atlantic sightings of animals regarded as sea serpents multiplied throughout the nineteenth century, as Oudemans’ list so extensively attests. The most notable scientific attempt to identify actual marine animals with the sea serpent was Henry Lee’s now-classic Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), produced in association with the International Fisheries Exhibition in London. By that time, Pontoppidan’s veracity had diminished even more than it had in Scott’s day. In introducing the Scottish historians of the sea serpent, Lee writes, “Here, I suppose, I ought to indulge in the usual flippant sneer at Bishop Pontoppidan.” He nonetheless regards nineteenth-century scholarly scorn for the prelate as undeserved because Pontoppidan recorded only recent reports of the creature after centuries of accounts. Lee then quotes Olaus’ recounting of the two Norway serpents. He acknowledges that the History is “full of wild improbabilities and odd superstitions” because it was written in a medieval age, but he found it to be “most amusing and interesting” and praises it for its “wonderful insight of the habits and customs of the northern nations in his day.” Given his zoological approach, Lee concludes that Olaus’ serpent was actually based on tales of gigantic calamari.
Writing shortly after publication of Sea Monsters Unmasked, Oudemans rebuts Lee’s identification of Olaus’ serpent. The Dutch author concedes that Olaus’ description of the monster devouring livestock on the coast of Bergen was fabulous. And even though he considers its scales in the History facsimile “badly drawn,” he believes the artist intended to depict an actual large snake. Oudemans ends his exhaustive tome by contending that most of the 187 “sea serpents” reported were pinnipeds, enormous seals or sea lions.
Oudemans’ identification of marine animals mistaken for “sea serpents” is only one of an extensive list that includes whales, squid, sharks, porpoises, eels, and oarfish. As Oudemans’ serpents recede farther and farther from scientific inquiry into cryptozoology’s search for “hidden” animals, the tradition initiated largely by Olaus’ sea serpent on the Carta Marina continues, right up to our time. Within a single week in October 2013, the discovery of two dead oarfish on the California coast spread throughout the global media. Reports hailed the rarely seen deep-water fish as “sea serpents,” their species likely responsible for legendary sightings throughout history. Articles and bloggers speculating on what drove the 14- to 18-foot (4.2-5.4m)-long animals to shore cited folkloric portents of earthquakes and tsunamis. Growing to about 26 feet, giant oarfish with red crests are the longest of bony fish.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 5, 2014

author: Joseph Nigg


text:
Darkness Over All
John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy
By Mike Jay
April 2, 2014

Conspiracy theories of a secretive power elite seeking global domination have long held a place in the modern imagination. Mike Jay explores the idea’s beginnings in the writings of John Robison, a Scottish scientist who maintained that the French revolution was the work of a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati.

At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-established reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics; he had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of ‘darkness over all’.
The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days, and within a year it had been republished many times, not only in Edinburgh but in London, Dublin and New York. Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and what had driven its bloody and tumultuous progress? From his vantage point in Edinburgh he had, along with millions of others, followed with horror the reports of France dismembering its monarchy, dispossessing its church and transforming its downtrodden and brutalised population into the most ruthless fighting force Europe had ever seen — and now, under the rising star of the young general Napoleon Bonaparte, attempting to export the carnage and destruction to its surrounding monarchies, not least Britain itself. But Robison believed that he alone had identified the hidden hand responsible for the apparently senseless eruption of terror and war that now appeared to be consuming the world.
Many had located the roots of the revolution in the ideas of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot and Condorcet, who had exalted reason and progress over authority and tradition; but none of these mostly aristocratic philosophes had advocated a revolution of the masses, and indeed several of them had ended their lives on the guillotine. In the early 1790s it had been possible to believe that the power-hungry lawyers and journalists of the Jacobin Club had whipped up the Paris mob into their destructive frenzy for their own ends, but by 1794 Danton, Robespierre and the rest of the Jacobin leaders had followed their victims to the guillotine: how could they have been the puppet-masters when they had had their own strings so brutally cut? What Robison was proposing in the meticulously documented pages of Proofs of a Conspiracy was that all these agents of revolution had been pawns in a much bigger game, with ambitions that were only just beginning to make themselves visible.
The French Revolution, like all convulsive world events before and since, had been full of conspiracies, bred by the speed of events, the panic of those caught up in them and the limited information available to them as they unfolded. In Britain, enemies of the revolution such as Edmund Burke had claimed from the beginning that ‘already confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming in several countries’, and by 1797 most believed — and with good reason — that secret societies in Ireland were plotting with Napoleon to overthrow the British government and invade the mainland. The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within the buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single protagonist, a single ideology and a single overarching plot that crystallised the chaos into an epic struggle between good and evil, whose outcome would define the future of world politics.
Robison’s vast conspiracy needed an imposing figurehead, a role for which Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, seemed on the surface to be an unpromising candidate. Obsessive and domineering, Weishaupt had from the beginning found difficulty in attracting members to his secret society, where they were expected to adopt mystical pseudonyms chosen by him, jump through the hoops of his strict initiatic grades — Novice and Minerval, Illuminatus Minor and Major, Dirigens and Magus — and take up subservient roles in his grandiose but unfocused crusade for world domination. After 1784, when the Order had been exposed and banned by the Elector of Bavaria, Weishaupt had exiled himself to Gotha in central Germany, since when he appeared to have done little beyond producing a series of morose and self-justifying memoirs of his adventures.
Yet there was much in the career of the Illuminati that offered, to Robison at least, a view of a far more expansive and sinister scheme. Weishaupt’s messianic sense of his own mission and the Order’s extravagant structures hinted at a far larger organisation than that which had been exposed, and its suppression had generated a furore quite out of proportion to the danger it represented. It had become a lightning-rod for the deep anxieties of church and monarchy about the agenda of reason and progress that was being seeded across Europe by the confident vanguard of philosophers and scientists. The Illuminati furore had generated hundreds of screeds, polemics, handbills and scandal sheets, all competing to file the most damning charges of godless infamy. It was these sources that Robison had spent years perusing intently for anecdotes and allegations to mould into the proofs of the conspiracy that he now presented. To the dispassionate observer, Weishaupt and his Illuminati might have offered an eloquent metaphor for the forces that were reconfiguring Europe, but for Robison they had become the literal cause: the centre, thus far invisible, of the web of events that had consumed the world.
Robison may have been a distant spectator of the Illuminati furore, but he was no dispassionate observer. While Proofs of a Conspiracy came as a surprise (and in most cases an embarrassment) to his friends and scientific colleagues, there were many reasons why the Illuminati had presented itself to him in this form. His discovery resolved long-standing suspicions and conflicts in both his private and professional life, and chimed in particular with his own curious adventures in freemasonry.
By 1797 Robison’s character had taken a grave and saturnine turn, far removed from the cheerful and convivial temperament of his youth. In 1785 he had begun to suffer from a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin: it seemed to emanate from beneath his testicles, but its precise origin baffled the most distinguished doctors of Edinburgh and London. Racked with pain and frequently bed-ridden, by the late 1790s he had become a withdrawn and isolated figure; he was using opium frequently, a regime which according to some of his acquaintances made him vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia. As the successive crises of the French Revolution shook Britain, the panic was particularly intense in Scotland, where ministers and judges whipped up constant rumours of fifth columnists and secret Jacobin cells. Tormented, heavily medicated and assailed by terrifying news from the outside world, Robison had all too many dark threads to weave into the plot that came to consume him.
Politics had also thrown a long shadow across his professional life. The physical sciences were in the grip of another French revolution, led by Antoine Lavoisier. During the 1780s Lavoisier had overthrown the chemistry of the previous century with his discovery of oxygen, from which he had been able to establish new theories of combustion and to begin the process of reducing all material substances to a basic table of elements. Lavoisier’s revolution had split British chemistry: some recognised that his technically brilliant experiments had transformed the science of matter, but for others his new and foreign terminology was, like the French metric system and the revolutionary Year Zero, an arrogant attempt to wipe away the accumulated wisdom of the ages and to eliminate the role of God. The old system of chemistry, with its mysterious forms of energy and its languages of essences and principles, had readily contained the idea of a life-force and the mysterious breath of the divine; but in Lavoisier’s cold new world, matter was reduced to inert building-blocks manipulated by the measurable forces of pressure and temperature.
Robison had never accepted the French theories, and by 1797 had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminatist plot. For him, Lavoisier — along with Britain’s most famous experimental chemist, the dissenting minister Joseph Priestley — was a master Illuminist, working in concert with infiltrated Masonic lodges to spread the doctrine of materialism that would underlie the new atheist world order. Madame Lavoisier’s famous salons, at which the leading Continental philosophes met, were now revealed by Robison to have been the venues for sacreligious rites where the hostess, dressed in the ceremonial robes of an occult priestess, ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry. Implausible though this image might seem, it was of a piece with other proofs that Robison had assembled in his book — for example, the anonymous German pamphlet that claimed that, at the great philosopher Baron d’Holbach’s salons, the brains of living children bought from poor parents were dissected in an attempt to isolate their life-force.
The Illuminati had infiltrated Robison’s professional life, but his most personal connection with their conspiracy came through freemasonry itself. He had been a member of the Scottish Rite for decades without ever regarding its lodges as more than ‘a pretext for passing an hour or two in a fort of decent conviviality, not altogether void of some rational occupation’; but his career had frequently taken him abroad, where he had been shocked to discover that not all masonic orders were so innocent. In 1770 he had spent a year at Catherine’s court in St. Petersburg, learning Russian and lecturing on navigation; during the course of his travels he had met with other masons and visited lodges in France, Belguim, Germany and Russia. What he saw had shocked him: by comparison with the Scottish Rite, the Continental lodges were ‘schools of irreligion and licentiousness’. Their members seemed to him consumed by ‘zeal and fanaticism’, their religious views ‘much disturbed by the mystical whims of J. Behmen [Jacob Boehme] and Swedenborg — by the fanatical and knavish doctrines of the modern Rosycrucians — by Magicians — Magnetisers — Exorcists, &c.’. Now, thirty years later, as he recalled the occultism and freethinking to which he had been briefly but unforgettably exposed, he had no doubt as to the source of the destruction that had engulfed the Continent.
Although Proofs of a Conspiracy became a handsome bestseller, the Illuminati conspiracy never gripped the imagination of the British political class as it did in mainland Europe. Once the crisis of the French revolution was past, some conservative voices would attribute this to superior British common sense, but in truth Britain at that time had more serious threats and conspiracies to contend with. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, a far more incendiary and radicalising work than any of the Bavarian Illuminati’s ‘secret texts’, had sold over two hundred thousand copies in its cheap sixpenny edition, a number that far exceeded what until that point had been considered the entire book-buying public. With the British fleet convulsed by mutinies and the government struggling to contain mass protests and riots, it was hardly surprising that the doings of a long-disbanded Bavarian lodge seemed less than a pressing concern.
Robison’s book, however, had a profound and enduring impact in the United States of America. Here, the polarised forces of revolution and reaction that had swept Europe were playing out in a form that threatened to split the Founding Fathers and destroy their fledgling Constitution. While the likes of Thomas Jefferson saw themselves as cousins of a French republic that had thrown off the shackles of monarchy and with whom they traded amid British naval blockades, other founders such as Alexander Hamilton, whose Federalist party favoured a powerful state geared towards protecting the interests of its wealthy citizens, feared the infiltration of the radical ideals of the French revolution. In an overheated political milieu where accusations of treason were hurled from both sides, Proofs of a Conspiracy was seized on eagerly by the Federalists as evidence of the hidden agenda that lurked behind fine-sounding slogans such as democracy, the abolition of slavery and the rights of man. Robison’s words were repeated endlessly in New England pulpits and pamphlets through 1798 and 1799, and Jefferson was publicly accused of being a member of Weishaupt’s Order.
But such charges were never substantiated; the ‘Illuminati Scare’ petered out and the Federalists lost power, never to regain it. Yet the episode had touched a nerve deep within the American political mindset, and it has been woven into many subsequent paranoias and panics. Robison’s ideas would continue to be rediscovered and reinvented, and to influence modern politics in curious ways. The doyenne of modern conspiracy theory, Nesta Webster, swallowed his theory whole but then came to believe the Illuminati were a smokescreen: the true conspirators were the ‘Jewish peril’ whose agenda had, she believed, been accurately exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although Webster later consigned herself to the margins by joining the British Union of Fascists, her support at the time was more broadly based, and she even won admiring citations in the journalism of Winston Churchill. ‘The conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt’, Churchill wrote for the Sunday Herald in 1920; ‘as a modern historian Mrs. Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role in the French revolution’. Many on the isolationist right continue to believe Robison’s theory to this day: the official John Birch Society line, for example, remains that Weishaupt’s Illuminati ‘was the ancestor of the Communist movement and the model for modern subversive conspiratorial movements’.
After Robison’s death following a final medical crisis in 1805 his Edinburgh colleague, the pioneering geologist John Playfair, wrote a respectful memoir that focused on his scientific achievements but was unable to avoid mention of the work for which he was best remembered. ‘The alarm excited by the French revolution’, Playfair suggested tactfully, ‘produced in Mr. Robison a degree of credulity which was not natural to him’. It was a credulity, he stressed, that had been shared by many who were unable to believe that the revolution had been a genuine mass movement reacting to the oppression of a tyrannical regime; they had clung to their belief that it must have been orchestrated by a small cell of fanatics, and that the lack of evidence for any such conspiracy was itself evidence for the conspirators’ cunning in concealing their operations from public view.
There was much plain sense in Playfair’s analysis, and it could equally be applied to many who subsequently came to believe in Robison’s theories, and who continue to believe them today. But if the shock of the modern world erupting into existence before his eyes had unbalanced Robison’s judgement, it had also given him a vivid, even visionary perspective on the new dangers that might result from wresting politics away from church and monarchy and placing it in the hands of the people. Forged in the same crucible as every modern political ideology from conservatism to nihilism, anarchy to military dictatorship, the Illuminati conspiracy has become a modern myth: not merely in the dismissive sense that its factual basis evaporates under scrutiny, but as a shapeshifting narrative capable of adapting its meaning to accommodate new and unforeseen scenarios. Since the 1970s, it has been gleefully satirised as a baroque folly of conservative thought by counterculture figures from Robert Anton Wilson onwards, yet this has only increased its fame and mystique: Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons demonstrates that today’s readers will still lap up Robison’s unreconstructed version of the story in their millions. In popular culture and old-time religion, satire and nationalist politics, the Illuminati conspiracy still resonates with its warning that the light of reason has its shadows, and even the most enlightened democracy can be manipulated by hidden hands.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Mike Ja


text:
Julia Margaret Cameron in Ceylon
Idylls of Freshwater vs. Idylls of Rathoongodde
By Eugenia Herbert
July 9, 2014

Leaving her close-knit artistic community on the Isle of Wight at the age of sixty to join her husband on the coffee plantations of Ceylon was not an easy move for the celebrated British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Eugenia Herbert explores the story behind the move and how the new environment was to impact Cameron's art.

The Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is currently undergoing a revival with a recent exhibition of her work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She has long evoked interest not only because of her distinctive style but also because of her eccentric personality, her dominant — very dominant — role in a circle that in many ways prefigured the Bloomsbury of her grandniece, Virginia Woolf. But there was another strand in her life that was quintessentially Victorian: the imperial. She was daughter, wife and mother of Empire. To top it off, four of her five sisters married “Anglo-Indians” — civil or military officials serving in India.
Her own embrace of this legacy, however, was equivocal at best; she went to Ceylon not by choice but by necessity in the twilight of her life. When she at last settled there, she had been immersed in photography for only just over a decade and was at last coming into her own as a very visible, if sometimes controversial, practitioner of the art. What is poignant are the ways that Ceylon affected not only the shape of her life, but also that of her art. It happened like this.
The progenitor of the clan, James Pattle, was part of the British establishment in India, the latest in a long line of officials in the East India Company. While James rose to a high rank, he was notorious as a drunkard and a liar. His wife, Adeline, was a French aristocrat, the daughter of the Chevalier de l’Etang, who had been exiled to the French outpost of Pondicherry, allegedly for being too close to the young Marie Antoinette. After a spell fighting the British for control of the continent, he had little difficulty in changing sides; in fact it was just as well he was far off in India when the French Revolution broke out. Adeline’s mother was the daughter of French-Swiss missionaries who had been in Pondicherry for several generations.
Fortified with this impeccable imperial pedigree, Julia Margaret was born in Calcutta in 1815 at a time when the British East India Company was still at its zenith. She was the second of seven surviving daughters. Like most colonial children she was sent back to Europe for her education with several of her sisters. In their case, most of the time was spent with their maternal grandmother roaming around Paris and Versailles. In contrast to the miseries detailed in Kipling’s “Baa Baa, Blacksheep”, the girls seem to have had a pleasantly relaxed (not to say, haphazard) education and to have suffered little from the separation from the parental fold. They were finally reunited with their parents in England for a brief period during James’s only home leave. When Julia Margaret returned to Calcutta the age of eighteen after an absence of fifteen years, it was assumed she would focus her attentions on finding a suitable husband.
This indeed she did, albeit in no particular haste. She met Charles Hay Cameron in Cape Town in 1836 where both were convalescing from illness. A Scot of aristocratic lineage but modest means, Cameron was twenty years her senior. He was collaborating with Macaulay on Indian legal and educational reform, and eventually succeeded Macaulay as legal member of the Council of India. They were married in Calcutta and spent the next twelve years there. Though a marriage of extreme opposites, it seems to have been a happy one. Four of their six children were born in India.
The family left India for good in 1848. There were probably several factors in their decision to abandon the ample salary and privilege Charles’ position offered. Julia Margaret always hated separations and dreaded sending her children off to school in England as was the universal custom; by then, too, her much loved sisters were also settling down in England. Furthermore, her husband’s health was precarious. Once in England Julia Margaret’s natural gregariousness found an infinite outlet in a large circle of friends. Indeed, both in London, and later in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, she attracted an assortment of painters and writers to complement her absorbing family life.
Over what would otherwise have been a very happy life, however, hung the ever-present cloud of financial uncertainty, indeed distress. Charles never had a job the rest of his life, although he doggedly held out hopes of appointment as an official in one of Britain’s colonies — he would have loved to return to Ceylon as governor — but his poor health was against him. As a classic Victorian valetudinarian he spent most of his days clad in a “dressing-gown of pale blue with black velvet buttons and a heavy gold chain”, receiving visitors in his bedroom or walking about the garden reciting Homer and Virgil, his long white locks giving him the air of an Old Testament prophet. What kept them afloat were generous — very generous —  “loans” from family members and above all from Charles’ old friend Lord Overstone, one of the richest men in England.
And all along, there was an elephant in the room: Ceylon.
Charles had first succumbed to the charm of the Eden-like island when he went out as co-chairman of the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission, appointed in 1829 to propose much needed reforms to the administration of Ceylon. As a jurist, Cameron’s mandate was to formulate a uniform code of justice for the island, to bring order out of the chaos of competing and poorly implemented systems of law: Roman Dutch, British, and Kandyan. This he did, inspired largely by the utilitarian theories of his friends Jeremy Bentham and James Mill.
Ceylon had become a British possession in 1796, mostly for strategic reasons — it boasted the finest harbor on the Bay of Bengal. When British hegemony in South Asia was solidified after the Napoleonic Wars, its strategic importance was downgraded and the government was faced with the dilemma of what to do with a territory that was a veritable palimpsest of foreign rule since the sixteenth century: Portuguese, Dutch, the British East India Company, the Presidency of Madras, and finally its incarnation as the first Crown Colony. Hitherto Europeans had been unsuccessful in attempts to control the interior of the island, but with the British conquest of the Kandyan Kingdom in 1815, their rule embraced not only the littoral but also its less hospitable hinterland with quite different social and legal structures.
The year Cameron spent in Ceylon — 1830-31 — was never forgotten. Indeed, he would have much preferred to settle there for good with his family rather than return to England (they stopped off in Ceylon on the way “home”), and he clung to this dream for the rest of his life. He had gotten in on the ground floor of the coffee mania that swept the island in the early 1840s, buying up large tracts of land at bargain prices to which he added over the years until he may well have been the largest single plantation owner in the colony. One tract became known as Cameron’s Land.
Coffee, he felt confident, would support his large family and set up his five sons as they grew to maturity. It is something of a mystery that this never happened. To be sure, coffee was vulnerable to all the dangers besetting monoculture on a grand scale. Some were domestic:  extremes of weather, blights and rodent infestations, poor management and ignorance, absentee landlords (which were the rule rather than the exception) demanding quick returns; others were global: competition from other producers such as the East Indies, periodic depression in England and Europe. Coffee consumption in England had risen every bit as fast as tea in the nineteenth century, but when times were hard it was adulterated with chicory and other cheaper ingredients.
Then there was the constant problem of an adequate labor force. Most of the field workers were recruited from the impoverished peasantry of southern India and crossed by sea to Colombo or to the northern part of the island via the Palk Straits, which was wider than the English Channel and even rougher. From there they had to make the rest of the long journey to the highland plantations by foot, often weakened by hunger and disease; many died on the way. Getting Ceylon coffee to market was itself a nightmare since the best regions for coffee growing were also the most remote — it had taken Charles eight hours by pony to go from his estate at Rathoongodde to the largest town, Kandy. Road building proceeded in fits and starts, depending on the health of government coffers. Until the railroad reached Kandy in 1867, coffee had to be hauled by bullock carts, far slower than ponies, over roads that were often little more than tracks. The bullocks themselves were in short supply since Ceylonese grasses were notoriously poor. It cost twice as much to transport the coffee the hundred miles or so from the Central Highlands to Colombo as it did to ship it half way around the world to England.
In spite of everything, the 1850s and 60s were boom years, a “Golden Age” of Ceylon coffee — in the early 1860s the island briefly led the world in coffee exports. Even into the mid-70s expansion of cultivation and high prices abroad minimized the initial impact of the fungus that would soon destroy the industry. It is hard to fathom why all this was not reflected in the Camerons’ finances. In fact, things had come to a head already in 1864 when even the patient Lord Overstone agreed with their son-in-law Charles Norman that the estate of Rathoongodde should be sold as the precondition for any more loans. Cameron stalled, however, even though by then he admitted to being virtually “penniless”; instead, he sent his son to manage the plantation. Perhaps Julia Margaret was indulging in some wishful thinking when she declared soon that under Ewen’s direction the estate was turning a profit of £1,000-£1,500 a year in contrast to the thousands of pounds of debt run up by the agents previously charged with administering it: only a few years later they were desperately pleading once more with Overstone for more loans — and this at a time when coffee prices were climbing to new heights.
But it was not just speculative fever and the sacra aurae fames that inspired Cameron to invest in ever more land in Ceylon and to insist on holding onto it through good years and bad. “[H]is reigning passion for his Ceylon properties,” Julia Margaret wrote an old friend in 1860, “has held him in sway + weakened his love for England for the last 20 years.” He truly loved the island and especially the wild landscape of the interior highlands ideal for coffee growing. Whatever his allegiance to the rather mechanistic doctrines of his fellow Utilitarians, he was a romantic at heart. Victoria Olsen, author of a splendid biography of Julia Margaret Cameron, quotes a moving letter to his wife when he paid a visit to his plantations in 1850. The bungalow he had had built at Rathoongodde was like a “Swiss cottage,” he wrote, then took her on a tour of its setting:
If you follow the path which winds round the grassy hill on the right you come in about 200 yards to a deep ravine down which flows a lovely mountain stream which I have christened the Julia oga. . ..When it crosses the path it forms a beautiful cascade falling in two white and foaming sheets of water, over the smooth face of a huge and solid mass of granite rock. At the bottom of the cascade it forms a pool about five feet deep, always cool and clear as crystal. . . . You see nothing on either side but the steep and wooded banks of the ravine with ferns and wild flowers in profusion. . . . The side of the valley so rising in front of you [sic], is covered, for about two thirds of its height, with fine coffee, then comes a belt of forest, above that the bright blue sky or the floating clouds.
The paths through coffee and forest went on for miles, with the “glorious prospects of mountains and valleys . . . before you. It would be nothing less than an eternal shame to you,” he added pointedly, “to be the owner of such a place and not to come and see it.” Life was so much cheaper than in England that even with the expense of their passages, they would come out ahead, he argued, if the family settled there for a spell. He was sure, too, that his health would be far better on the island.
But Julia Margaret resisted the idea of removing to Ceylon just as strenuously as Charles resisted selling Rathoongodde. She might name their refurbished home Dimbola Lodge after the valley in Ceylon where one of their estates was located, but her Dimbola was in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, next door to the Tennysons, and there she intended to remain.
The standoff continued until 1875 by which time Charles was 80 and Julia Margaret 60. Then at last, she resigned herself to settling in Ceylon. Her change of heart was due not only to their chronic penury but also to the fact that four of their five sons were already established there (her only daughter had died a few years before). Her circle of family and friends in England had gradually been diminished by death, and it was all the more important to her to be united with her sons and husband for whatever time was left to her. Given her views on the perils of the island (her husband had almost died on a visit there 1859-60), she made sure to bring along two coffins (and a cow).
Charles perked up immediately at the prospect. He had always insisted that “Ceylon is the cure for all things,” and so it proved. Like Lazarus he rose from his bed and mingled with friends and neighbors for the first time in twelve years. When the celebrated botanical painter Marianne North visited them in Ceylon, she marveled to find him “perfectly upright. He read all day long, taking walks round and round the verandah at Kalutara with a long staff in his hand, perfectly happy, and ready to enjoy any joke or enter into any talk which went on around him.” To her pleasure he would quote poetry and read aloud to her while she was painting. At other times he rode around on his pony.
Even Julia Margaret acknowledged the tropical beauty all about her. “The glorious beauty of the scenery — the primitive simplicity of the inhabitants & the charms of the climate all make me love Ceylon more and more,” she wrote to her old friend Sir John Herschel. She divided her time between Kalutara on the southwest coast, the home of her son Hardinge who was a colonial official, and the family estates in the Highlands. Nevertheless, the coffins did not go to waste (though there is no information about the cow): Julia Margaret died in 1879, Charles the following year. Plantation workers from the Rathoongodde estate carried the bodies the last difficult track to the churchyard in Bogawantalawa, a fervent believer buried alongside a fervent non-believer.
What does all this tell us about Julia Margaret Cameron the photographer? The contrast with her husband highlights all the more her own character and its embodiment in her work. Ceylon — and particularly the highlands of his beloved Rathoongodde — appealed to Charles’s love of nature, the wilder the better. Isolation not only did not bother him, it actually seems to have attracted him. His was a love of the classics, hers a love of the most contemporary artists and men of letters whom she scooped up in her personal embrace. He did not need, as Julia Margaret did, to be constantly surrounded by people — especially people she could boss around and at the same time shower with impetuous generosity. Her photography is intensely people-oriented. For her, beauty lay first and foremost in the human form, a form indeed with a face. She once declared: “The history of the human face is a book we don’t tire of if we can get its grand truths and learn them by heart.”
Her contemporaries found it next to impossible to refuse her when she demanded to photograph them — G. F Watts, Darwin, Carlyle, Tennyson, Herschel, a galaxy of famous men. She favored pensive, even melancholy poses with an emphasis on contrasts of light and shadow. Given her own inclination for exotic attire, it is not surprising that she garbed her female subjects, as Olsen notes, in almost Oriental extravagance. For her representations of religious subjects or characters from literary works such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, she would virtually shanghai her models on the grounds of beauty alone. It was commonly believed, reported Thomas Wentworth Higginson, that she “selected her housemaids for their profiles, that she might use them for saints and madonnas in her photographic groups.” Even children did not escape her clutches when it suited her agenda. What is almost entirely missing from her oeuvre, however, is any interest in landscape for itself. She might portray a female figure holding a flower or framed by a deeply-shadowed backdrop of leaves and blossoms, but they were not the focus themselves, not even in photographs such as The Gardener’s Daughter or The Rosebud Garden of Girls.
Ceylon was ill adapted to this repertoire. Madonnas and literary figures seemed out of place. There were few famous men — the governor, Sir William Gregory, rebuffed her attempts to photograph him. Fortunately the celebrated botanical painter, Marianne North, paid the Camerons a visit at Kalutara. “In a fever of excitement” at having a European model, Julia Margaret made a number of photographs of her, four of which survive. In defiance of the climate, she dressed North up “in flowing draperies of cashmere wool [such as Cameron herself was wearing], let down my hair, and made me stand with spiky cocoa-nut branches running into my head, the noonday sun’s rays dodging my eyes between the leaves as the slight breeze moved them, and told me to look perfectly natural (with the thermometer standing at 96°).” She was trying with indifferent success to replicate the portraits for which she was famous: North reading a book and gazing into the distance, North standing against a backdrop of trees (the prickly cocoa-nuts), and so forth. But one photograph is quite different from her usual style. The painter is standing at her easel to the left on the thatched verandah at Kalutara; to the right is a figure — a “native” —  stripped to the waist, wearing a dhoti, and holding an earthen vase over his shoulder; the vista opening up beyond the house is virtually unreadable.
North found the setting entrancing: “Their house stood on a small hill, jutting out into the great river which ran into the sea a quarter of a mile below the house. It was surrounded by cocoa-nuts, casuarinas, mangoes, and breadfruit trees; tame rabbits, squirrels, and mainah-birds ran in and out without the slightest fear, while a beautiful tame stag guarded the entrance; monkeys with gray whiskers, and all sorts of fowls, were outside.” Her painting, Bombay Pedlars on Mrs Cameron’s Verandah shows a group of figures, the peddlers, sitting cross-legged in the foreground surrounded by luxuriant tropical foliage with the water behind them. The house by the “great river” might well have reminded Julia of her home at Garden Reach overlooking the Hooghly River in Calcutta, but she seems to have been interested only in the painter painting the scene, not the scene itself.
If she made no photographs of Kalutara and its relatively tame environs, she also made none of the far wilder scenery that her husband loved so much (and which Marianne North painted on at least one occasion) — no woods and mountains and cascades, not even Adam’s Peak rising dramatically to the south of their plantations in the highlands. Nor did she choose to photograph indigenous art in any form in spite of the array of Buddhist and Hindu temples on display all around her. The only concession to Ceylon was a modest collection of individual or group portraits of maidservants and plantation workers, posed rather unnaturally outdoors and often at a distance from the photographer, and clothed to emphasize their exoticism. North notes that in one case she took such a fancy to the “superb” back of a young man that she insisted her son hire him as gardener, “though she had no garden and he did not know even the meaning of the word.” Nevertheless all of her Ceylon models are nameless — the titles seem to have been added later: Girl, Ceylon; A group of Kalutara peasants; and the like. Most critics have dismissed these as of more ethnographic rather than artistic interest.
There are two photographs so unlike anything she had ever done in either country and so similar to a host of pictures taken around the same time by other photographers that one questions their attribution. The photographs lack both the strong contrasts and the focus on the human face typical of her work. One shows large, indistinct groups of “natives” gathered in a forest clearing. A white diagonal extends into the left foreground — possibly tea chests? The other is a muster of plantation workers in descending height from men to women to children, their dress far from exotic and apparently revealing their status in the hierarchy from overseer to lowly field hand. The background is bleak rather than muted or decorative: a vast expanse of smoldering tree trunks and debris, with mountains vaguely delineated in the distance — the scene is typical of many other pictures of the clear-cutting and burning of whole forests to make way for coffee and, about this time, tea. Why pass up the sublime landscapes of Rathoongodde in favor of nature despoiled? Could these photographs in fact have been taken by one of her sons, Hardinge Hay or Henry Herschel (who later set up as a professional photographer in London)?
Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic vision was not that of Samuel Bourne or Felice Beato or W.L.H. Skeen. She had no desire to portray the imperial world as they did, ranging throughout India and Ceylon in search of the picturesque and the exotic. Anglo-Indian by birth, her tastes and ambitions were nevertheless circumscribed by the mid-Victorian world of England, the fleeting idyll that was Freshwater.
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author: Eugenia Herbert