text:
An Unlikely Lunch
When Maupassant met Swinburne
By Julian Barnes
January 24, 2012

Julian Barnes on when a young Guy de Maupassant was invited to lunch at the holiday cottage of Algernon Swinburne. A flayed human hand, pornography, the serving of monkey meat, and inordinate amounts of alcohol, all made for a truly strange Anglo-French encounter.

In the first half of the 19th century, the British began to discover Normandy. Previously, the point of entry into France for most travellers had been Calais, which felt safely half-English, and where even the beggars importuned new arrivals in their own language. Those prepared to make the longer crossing to Dieppe were rewarded with a greater sense of strangeness: typified by the women in red-and-blue regional costume, clacking sabots and high white coifs that made them look like a cross between chefs and nuns. Hazlitt, passing through in 1824, noted that such headdresses were “much the same as those which the Spectator laughed out of countenance a hundred years ago in England”; and he concluded more generally that “In France one lives in the imagination of the past”. For the tourist, this meant antiquities and picturesque ruins within easy reach. The coastline was a further attraction: for those addicted to the new health-kick of sea-bathing, to the gentler pleasures of gambling (the casino at Dieppe opened in 1822), or to painting and sketching. Gradually, the journey from London became quicker — a combination of the London to Brighton railway and the new steam-packets brought the time down to a mere 11 hours by the 1840s. For centuries Dieppe’s main relationship with Britain had consisted of suffering occasional bombardment from the Royal Navy; now there were not just summer tourists, but year-round residents. There was even a quartier des Anglais (on the hill between the Paris road and the chateau), served by an Anglican chaplain and a British consul. And since the French more or less simultaneously decided to make Dieppe a sophisticated destination, the town flourished.
British artists had started coming here as soon as the Napoleonic wars were over. John Sell Cotman delighted in the luminous quality of the Dieppe light (it is an unpatriotic truth that looking north from Dieppe is more visually complex than looking south from Brighton); Turner came several times in the 1820s; Richard Parkes Bonington in the 1830s. We tend to associate the Normandy coastline — Etretat, Pourville, Varengeville, Fécamp — with Monet and the impressionists; but (as with Cézanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire) previous generations of painters had preceded them. Boudin, who later taught Monet the principles, and the necessity, of pleinairisme, painted in Dieppe, as did Corot and Daubigny; while Delacroix came here in 1850 and 1852. His diary contains an unflattering depiction of the English colony, whose invitation he had accepted out of boredom. He went to the salon of a certain Mrs Sheppard, and the next day rebuked himself: “What a fool you are, getting a sore throat from talking to idiots, arguing with petticoated silliness for a whole evening, with everyone going on about God, and ‘the justice of the world’ and ‘good and evil’, and ‘progress’!”
Now that the Channel tunnel has restored most traffic to the more northerly crossing, and the ferry service from Newhaven runs at unfriendly hours, Dieppe has sunk back into being largely French again. Serious war damage makes it harder to recreate in the mind the century — from 1815 to 1914 — during which the town became so fashionable. By the 1850s it had “the smartest and most popular plage in France”; the casino was rebuilt at regular intervals, each time more extravagantly; the British laid out what was only the fourth golf course in France, while the Paris crowd came down for steeplechasing at the new racetrack. The Prince of Wales kept a mistress and perhaps an illegitimate child in Dieppe; Lord Salisbury, while prime minister, built himself a chalet outside the town and maintained that, thanks to the telegraph station at Beachy Head, he was in better contact with London than if he had been on a Scottish grouse moor.
Simona Pakenham, who chronicled Dieppe’s Anglo-French entente in 60 Miles from England (1967), commented tartly that “The English colony was generally indifferent to any form of culture”. But the French needed the arts as the British needed sports. So Liszt played at the Bains Chauds; Meyebeer came; Rossini composed an operetta for the theatre. By the end of the 19th century, the casino summer band was recognised as the best in the country, since it was filled by Parisian orchestral players on holiday. In 1907, one of its violists was promoted to conductor, and surprised everyone by directing all Beethoven’s symphonies from memory: this was Pierre Monteux, who six years later conducted the premiere of The Rite of Spring.
Not all the British visitors were philistines. The town was Sickert’s second home for several decades; and the British feature strongly in the impressive (and highly cosmopolitan) list of belle époque visitors to the town. These include Monet, Pissarro, Whistler, Degas, Renoir, Beardsley, Conder, Fritz Thurlaw (the Norwegian painter), Henry Harland (the editor of The Yellow Book), William Rothenstein, Proust, Saint-Saens, Fauré, Debussy, Maeterlinck, Puvis de Chavannes, Percy Grainger, Adelina Patti, George and Gerald du Maurier, Ernest Dowson, George Moore, Max Beerbohm, Annie Besant, Marie Tempest, John Barrymore and Gladys Cooper. The night boat of May 20 1897 brought Oscar Wilde, freshly sprung from Reading jail and carrying the manuscript of De Profundis. It is a small but interesting footnote to the history of the Dieppe ferry terminal that the two most noteworthy events there both involved pseudonyms. In 1848 Louis-Philippe, the last king of France, heading for exile in England, was hustled aboard a packet of the General Steam and Navigational Company bearing a passport in the suspiciously ordinary name of William Smith. Half a century later, Wilde came ashore, cloaked in the look-at-me alias of Sebastian Melmoth.
The British brought trade, money and work to Dieppe; they laid the railway, and built the town’s station with English bricks. Neither race was or is as hospitable as they like to imagine themselves, but a working cordiality existed between the French and the British. The portrait painter and socialite Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942) operated for many years as a one-man diplomatic service, summering in Dieppe and wintering in London: his studio, just beneath the walls of the castle, was used by Degas, Whistler, Sargent, Boldini, Sickert, Conder, Beardsley and Helleu. “My dear friend,” Henry James said to Blanche, “Your Dieppe is a reduced Florence, every type of character for a novelist seems to gather there” — not that the Great Dieppe Novel was ever written. Such Anglo-French conviviality was helped by a willingness to speak one another’s language. Sickert was regarded as “un vrai Dieppois”, even managing the local fisherfolk’s patois; Wilde and Dowson both spoke and wrote excellent French. So did an English poet whose passing residence along the coast in 1868 led to one of the stranger Anglo-French literary encounters, one that echoed on for decades, in France at least. It also encapsulated the way the French preferred to see the British — and perhaps still do.
Etretat, some 50 miles west of Dieppe, has become a high point of pilgrimage for the artistic faithful, who gather above its white cliffs — especially the one that curves down into a great chalk flying-buttress — to compare eroded reality with visual memories of Monet’s pictures. By 1868 the impressionists had not yet arrived: Etretat was a fishing town that also attracted a certain number of tourists and summer residents. Among their number that year were the 18-year-old Guy de Maupassant and his mother (the family chateau of Miromesnil, where Guy had been born, was a few miles outside Dieppe). The water and its attendant pursuits — swimming, boating, rowing — were to become a thematic constant in Maupassant’s life and work; so it’s appropriate that the water was what provoked the encounter between this muscular, boastfully heterosexual French prose writer and a petite homosexual English poet: Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Swinburne, then aged 31, was staying outside the town in a low thatched cottage belonging to his friend George Powell. The people of Etretat had Frenchly decided that Powell was a milord — even if one modestly concealing his real identity under his mother’s maiden name. (In fact, Powell was his real name, and he was uncoroneted. He was brought up on the family estate at Nanteos, near Aberystwyth, went to Eton and Oxford, and died at 40.) Maupassant later wrote that Powell’s “solitary and bizarre” way of life had astonished the local bourgeois and mariners who were “little used to British fantasies and eccentricities”; he himself was to be afforded a closer look at what such Britishness consisted of.
One September morning, Swinburne went swimming from the beach at Etretat and got into difficulties. According to Powell, treacherous undercurrents had carried the poet out to sea “through a rocky archway” (that very cliff formation Monet later celebrated). Ten minutes later Powell heard shouts from the clifftop that a man was drowning. He ran to the water’s edge, and after a few minutes received the news that Swinburne had been safely picked up by a fishing smack heading for nearby Yport. The poet, writing to his mother (and doubtless downplaying the event), described “a real sea adventure” in which he had been swept two miles out: “Luckily I was all right but very tired, and the result was that I made immense friends with all the fishermen and sailors about — who are quite the nicest people I ever knew.” Maupassant, who was somewhere near the scene, claimed that the poet had been “dead drunk” (despite it being ten o’clock in the morning); also, that he himself had gone out in one of the rescue boats; alternatively, that he had at the very least waded into the water and got soaked to the waist.
Whatever the specifics of the near-drowning and the rescue, Maupassant received an invitation to lunch the next day from the grateful Powell. According to Swinburne (again writing to his mother), the place where they lived was an idyllic retreat: “Powell has got the sweetest little farmhouse fitted up with music, books, drawings, etc . . . and of course he pokes me into the nicest room . . . There is a wild little garden all uphill, and avenues of trees about. The sea is splendid, and the cliffs very like the Isle of Wight — two arches of rock each side of the bay, and one needle only, exactly like half the Freshwater pair.” Maupassant described his visit to the cottage on three separate occasions: orally to Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt in February 1875, an account that Goncourt transcribed into his Journal; in a newspaper article of November 1882 for Le Gaulois (“L’Anglais d’Etretat”)1; and in his introduction to the French translation of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1891. Though the versions overlap and at times contradict one another, the main story line would have been enough to send the honest burghers of the Isle of Wight scaring up the libel lawyers.
Maupassant noted “an inscription over the door which I didn’t read on that first occasion” — though if he had, he would have known more what to expect. There were pictures everywhere, some “splendid”, others more like “the imaginings of a lunatic”. Powell was short and fat, Swinburne short and thin, “with a pointed face, a hydrocephalous forehead, pigeon-chested, agitated by a trembling which affected his glass with St Vitus’ dance, and talking incessantly like a madman.” Here and there were laid out displays of bones; while a flayed human hand, supposedly that of a parricide, was the bohemian equivalent of a talking point. A large pet monkey was noisily present, being “titillated” by Powell, and trying to shove Maupassant’s head into his glass whenever he took a drink. Lunch included what the Frenchman assumed to be some kind of fish; though when he asked its name, his host “replied with a peculiar smile that it was meat, and I could not get any more out of him.” The fact that spirits rather than wine were served with lunch also struck the young Frenchman as peculiar — though perhaps was not all that surprising. Many of the British who were attracted to France at this time (not just artists and writers, but bankrupts, runaway fraudsters and bogus priests, mixed up with respectable folk seeking to make a pension stretch further than it did in England) were struck by the cheapness of French spirits — which also, of course, made them drunker quicker.
After lunch the two Englishmen brought out some gigantic portfolios and showed young Guy — perhaps in a misguided attempt to groom him — pornographic photographs taken in Germany, all of male subjects. “I remember one of an English soldier masturbating on a pane of glass.” Powell was by this time very drunk, and kept sucking the fingers of the flayed hand (which was apparently used as a paperweight). A young servant came in, and the portfolio was swiftly closed. In these exotic and ghoulish surroundings, the conversation proceeded at the highest cultural level. Swinburne, who had published his first series of Poems and Ballads two years previously, and was already notorious in his own country, displayed “an immense fund of learning”. He translated some of his poems into French for Maupassant’s benefit, and enthused about Victor Hugo (whose entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica he was subsequently to write). Powell for his part had been to Iceland and brought back a store of old songs and legends which he had translated. The two men struck Maupassant as “singularly original, remarkable and bizarre”, a pair of hallucinatory visionaries in the tradition of Poe and ETA Hoffmann. “If genius,” he concluded, “is, as people say, a kind of delirium of the higher intelligence, then Algernon Charles Swinburne is assuredly a genius.”
Maupassant accepted a second invitation to lunch a few days later. This passed more peacefully, since the intrusive monkey was now dead, hanged from a tree by the young servant. Powell had ordered a huge block of granite for its tomb. At the end of the meal the two visionaries gave the Frenchman some liquor which nearly knocked him out; taking fright, he fled back to his hotel. Even so, he made one last visit, in the course of which he drew attention to the inscription above their door. It read: Chaumière de Dolmancé (Dolmancé’s Cottage). Maupassant asked the Englishmen if they knew who Dolmancé was (the hero and homosexual corrupter of Sade’s La Philosophie dans le Boudoir). They said that indeed they did. “Then that is the sign of the house?” Maupassant asked. “If you like,” they replied, “with terrifying expressions on their faces.” The Frenchman again fled, avoiding Swinburne and Powell thereafter.
The account in the Goncourt Journal, as translated and edited by Robert Baldick (OUP, 1962), breaks off at this point. Perhaps for reasons of space, but more likely for reasons of taste in that only just post-Chatterley era, the rest of the French text was excised. In it, Maupassant continued:
Yes, they lived there together, satisfying themselves with monkeys or with young servant lads of fourteen or fifteen, sent out to Powell from England every three months or so: little servant boys of exquisite cleanness and freshness. The monkey that slept in Powell’s bed and shat in it every night was hanged by the servant boy, partly out of jealousy but also out of annoyance at having to change the sheets all the time.
The house was full of strange noises and the shadows of sadism; one night, Powell was seen and heard firing a revolver in the garden at a black man. Those two were real Sadeian heroes, who wouldn’t have held back even from crime. Then this house, so full of living mystery, was suddenly silent, suddenly empty. Powell just disappeared, and no one knew how he had got away. No carriage was ever called for him, and no one had met him on the roads.
This is a rather novelistic ending, perhaps unsurprising given that Maupassant had had seven years to work up the story, and that it was being both told, and written down, by a fiction writer. At other times he ended the story differently. The 1882 account concludes with Maupassant going back to the Sadeian cottage a couple of years later, discovering that its contents were being sold off, and buying, as a souvenir of the two Englishmen, the parricide’s flayed hand. The block of granite had by now been raised into the monkey’s sepulchre, and the incident with the revolver is given fuller explanation. It was the young servant who was black, and it was he who was being shot at by an enraged Powell for having hanged the monkey. “Afterwards, the lad wandered around for days without food or a roof over his head, and then reappeared and began to sell barley-sugar in the streets of Etretat. He was finally expelled from the district after having very nearly strangled a customer who complained about his goods.”
Maupassant’s later versions also elaborate on the suspicious protein the Englishmen served. In his 1882 account, he strongly suspects that it might have been monkey, not least because it was said to be common knowledge in Etretat that “this Englishman [Powell] ate only monkey — boiled, roasted, sautéed, or in a confit”. By the time of the 1891 account, Maupassant claims he had knowingly eaten spit-roasted monkey — indeed, the joint had been ordered in his honour from a purveyor of exotic meats in Le Havre. However, “The mere smell of the dish as I entered the house made me feel queasy, and the dreadful taste of the animal permanently removed all subsequent desire ever again to repeat such a meal.”
This gastronomic queasiness did not imply any broader moral or social revulsion; quite the contrary. Maupassant, doubtless hoping to provoke readers of Le Gaulois, concluded his 1882 account thus: “The world would be a lot jollier if one came across ménages like that one a little more often.” He certainly played up the theme of the innocent young Frenchman (even if one already alive to Sadeian reference) falling into a nest of genial English perverts intent on displaying national characteristics. Goncourt deliberately drew on Maupassant’s description of Swinburne and Powell when writing his novel La Faustin (1882), in which an 18th-century English sadist called George Selwyn not only displays many of Swinburne’s mannerisms, but also happens to retire to a cottage on the coast called Chaumière de Dolmancé. However, all of Maupassant’s versions, despite their dwelling on perversity, are underpinned by deep admiration for the duo: for their literary and artistic passion, their rejection of bourgeois living, their recklessness and bravado.
The French have traditionally regarded biography as a rather low form, being either mere gossip, or at best a reductive process, one that tethers the work to the life, rather than recognising the extent to which the work flies free of it. The Anglo-Saxon tradition is more tethering and more moralising; the biographer’s overt or tacit intention too often being, as John Updike has put it, to “reduce celebrities to a set of antics and ailments to which we can feel superior”. Whereas it never occurred to Maupassant to feel superior, or think that Swinburne’s extravagant life in any way invalidated, diminished or necessarily coloured his work. This is partly a matter of Flaubertian aesthetics; partly the consequence of how the French saw, and to some extent still see, the British. They think of us as polite, unspontaneous beings trained to such control and self-control that sometimes the lid has to blow off, both in art and life. Hence our personal eccentricities and a line of artistic non-conformity. Contemporary British writers are still being fitted into this historic schema. I remember once trying to keep a straight face when a French journalist, seeking to place me in my proper English context, proposed that my key literary ancestors were Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll and Monty Python. Of course I enthusiastically agreed.
Maupassant never doubted that Swinburne was a genius. “He is a poet of exalted and frenzied lyricism, who is not in the least interested in the humble, decent reality which contemporary French artists obstinately and patiently seek; rather he strives to depict dreams and subtle thoughts which are sometimes ingenious and grand, sometimes inflated, but even so magnificent.” And it was the same when other British writers and artists of the time came up for French description and judgment. The French expected them to behave in peculiar ways, but declined to allow amusement or shock at their habits to affect aesthetic judgment. Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote of Sickert living in Dieppe for “thirty years, married, divorced, remarried, widower, or about to remarry”, moving between smart society and the obscure lodgings he shared with a red-haired fishmongress, and doing crazy things such as cutting off his hair to surprise a small girl; and in all those 30 years nobody ever saw him paint. None of this stopped the French accepting him as a true Dieppois and a true artist: “He was to be the painter of Dieppe. No other artist so perfectly felt and expressed the character of the town, whose Canaletto he has become.” Degas’s judgment on Wilde, after the 28-year-old Oscar had visited the painter’s Paris studio, was: “He behaves as if he’s playing Lord Byron in some suburban theatre.” Goncourt called Wilde un puffiste (a braggart, a blagger), and thought even his homosexuality wasn’t particular to himself, but imitative, if not plagiaristic: he had copied it from Verlaine, and also from Swinburne. The diarist Jules Renard wrote cuttingly, “He has at least the originality of being an Englishman” — the French never quite got hold of Wilde’s Irish connection. But while they saw him as a false human being, they judged him a true poet.
The British who disembarked at Dieppe the century before last were often surprised by the cheerful affability of the people they encountered. When Hazlitt was staying in Dieppe, “A man and woman came and sang ‘God Save the King’ before the windows of the Hotel, as if the French had so much loyalty at present that they can spare us some of it.” (Hazlitt correctly noted that a reciprocal gesture beneath the windows of a Brighton or Dover hotel would be highly improbable.) A year after the incident at Etretat, Swinburne returned to stay with Powell at the Chaumière de Dolmancé once again. In the town, he was “rather astounded at finding myself rushed at, seized by the arms and legs, hoisted and cheered, and carried all down the street with shouts of welcome, by the fisher folk and sailors who knew me again at once”. Powell said to him, “Why, don’t you know you’re their hero?” — a status Swinburne thought unmerited by the mere act of not quite drowning.
The poet memorialised his time on the Normandy coast in two ways. For the rest of his life he kept the “outsize garments” (outsize because he was so tiny) in which the rescuing fishermen had dressed him. And in his 1883 collection, A Century of Roundels, he published a poem called “Past Days”:
Above the sea and sea-washed town we dwelt,We twain together, two brief summers, freeFrom heed of hours as light as clouds that meltAbove the sea.
The poem is partly a lament — for the dead Powell, and for passing time; also an idyll recreating “the days we had together” among “The Norman downs with bright grey waves for belt” and the “bright small seaward towns”. It is singularly lacking in references to monkey meat or Sadeian practices. Despite Swinburne’s considerable reputation in France, it seems that he and Maupassant never again met. What Maupassant, or his heirs, did with the flayed human hand is not recorded.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 24, 2012

author: Julian Barnes


text:
The Krakatoa Sunsets

By Richard Hamblyn
May 28, 2012

When a volcano erupted on a small island in Indonesia in 1883, the evening skies of the world glowed for months with strange colours. Richard Hamblyn explores a little-known series of letters that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins sent in to the journal Nature describing the phenomenon -  letters that would constitute the majority of the small handful of writings published while he was alive.

During the winter of 1883 the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins descended into one of his periodic depressions, “a wretched state of weakness and weariness, I can’t tell why,” he wrote, “always drowsy and incapable of reading or thinking to any effect.” It was partly boredom: Hopkins was ungainfully employed at a Catholic boarding school in Lancashire, where much of his time was spent steering his pupils through their university entrance exams. The thought that he was wasting his time and talents weighed heavily upon him during the long, brooding walks he took through the “sweet landscape” of Ribblesdale, “thy lovely dale”, as he described it in one of the handful of poems he managed to compose that winter. He was about to turn forty and felt trapped.
Such was his state of mind when the Krakatoa sunsets began. The tiny volcanic island of Krakatoa (located halfway between Java and Sumatra) had staged a spectacular eruption at the end of August 1883, jettisoning billions of tonnes of ash and debris deep into the earth’s upper atmosphere. Nearly 40,000 people had been killed by a series of mountainous waves thrown out by the force of the explosion: the Javan port of Anjer had been almost completely destroyed, along with more than a hundred coastal towns and villages. “All gone. Plenty lives lost”, as a telegram sent from Serang reported, and for weeks afterwards the bodies of the drowned continued to wash up along the shoreline. Meanwhile, the vast volcanic ash-cloud had spread into a semi-opaque band that threaded slowly westward around the equator, forming memorable sunsets and afterglows across the earth’s lower latitudes. A few weeks later, the stratospheric veil moved outwards from the tropics to the poles, and by late October 1883 most of the world, including Britain, was being subjected to lurid evening displays, caused by the scattering of incoming light by the meandering volcanic haze. Throughout November and December, the skies flared through virulent shades of green, blue, copper and magenta, “more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets,” wrote Hopkins; “the glow is intense; that is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire.”
In common with most other observers at the time, Hopkins had no idea what was causing the phenomenon, but he grew fascinated by the daily atmospheric displays, tracking their changing appearances over the course of that unsettled winter. At the end of December he collated his observations into a remarkable 2,000-word document, which he sent to the leading science journal, Nature. The article, published in January 1884, was a masterpiece of reportage, a heightened prose poem that mixed rhapsodic literary experimentation with a high degree of meteorological rigour:
Above the green in turn appeared a red glow, broader and burlier in make; it was softly brindled, and in the ribs or bars the colour was rosier, in the channels where the blue of the sky shone through it was a mallow colour. Above this was a vague lilac. The red was first noticed 45º above the horizon, and spokes or beams could be seen in it, compared by one beholder to a man’s open hand. By 4.45 the red had driven out the green, and, fusing with the remains of the orange, reached the horizon. By that time the east, which had a rose tinge, became of a duller red, compared to sand; according to my observation, the ground of the sky in the east was green or else tawny, and the crimson only in the clouds. A great sheet of heavy dark cloud, with a reefed or puckered make, drew off the west in the course of the pageant: the edge of this and the smaller pellets of cloud that filed across the bright field of the sundown caught a livid green. At 5 the red in the west was fainter, at 5.20 it became notably rosier and livelier; but it was never of a pure rose. A faint dusky blush was left as late as 5.30, or later. While these changes were going on in the sky, the landscape of Ribblesdale glowed with a frowning brown.  (from G. M. Hopkins, “The Remarkable Sunsets”, Nature 29 (3 January 1884), pp. 222-23)
Hopkins was a gifted empirical observer with a near-forensic interest in the search for written equivalents to the complexity of the natural world. Such interest in the language of precision was shared by many scientists at the time, science, like poetry, being an inherently descriptive enterprise. Anyone who reads the official Royal Society report on the Krakatoa sunsets (published in 1888) will find flights of poetic prose to rival those of Hopkins, who described such language as “the current language heightened and unlike itself,” a dynamic written form that was particularly suited to the expression of what he called “inscape”: the distinctive unity of all natural phenomena that gives everything in nature its characterising beauty and uniqueness. The force of being that holds these dynamic identities together he termed “instress”, instress being the essential energy that enables an observer to recognise the inscape of another being. These post-Romantic notions formed a kind of personal poetic creed, a logocentric natural theology that was rooted in the work of Duns Scotus, the medieval Christian philosopher.
For Hopkins, inscape and instress lay at the heart of his religious and poetic practice, as well as being vital means of apprehending the natural world. In a journal entry for 22 April 1871, for instance, he records “such a lovely damasking in the sky as today I never felt before. The blue was charged with simple instress, the higher, zenith sky earnest and frowning, lower more light and sweet.” Note that he felt the damasking as well as saw it, and note, too, his calibrated descriptions of the banded blues of the sky, the higher “earnest and frowning”, the lower “more light and sweet.” His journals are full of such poetic quantifications, which he used as notes towards a quintet of articles that he published in the journal Nature, all on meteorological subjects. The first two, published in November 1882 and November 1883, were letters describing anti-crepuscular rays (cloud-shadows that appear in the evening sky opposite the sun), while the following three were all on the subject of the Krakatoa sunsets, which had evidently furnished the melancholy Hopkins with a much-needed source of distraction.
He was not alone in his interest; all over the world, writers, artists and scientists responded to the drama of the volcanic skies. The poets Algernon Swinburne, Robert Bridges and Alfred Tennyson (then poet laureate), wrote lengthy descriptive strophes prompted by the unearthly twilights, although, as the historian Richard Altick pointed out, “the only good poetry that resulted from the celestial displays is found in Hopkins’ prose” (Richard D. Altick, “Four Victorian Poets and an Exploding Island”, Victorian Studies 3 (March 1960), p. 258). This is a fair assessment, though I do have a sneaking fondness for Tennyson’s blank-verse approximation of the cadences of Victorian popular science:
Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peakBeen hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe?For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve . . . The wrathful sunset glared . . .   (“St. Telemachus”, pub. 1892)
Visual artists also found themselves extending their colour ranges in awed emulation of the skies. Painter William Ascroft spent many evenings making pastel sky-sketches from the banks of the Thames at Chelsea, noting his frustration that he “could only secure in a kind of chromatic shorthand the heart of the effect, as so much of the beauty of afterglow consisted in concentration.” He exhibited more than five hundred of these highly-coloured pastels in the galleries of the Science Museum, in the repository of which they remain to this day, little known and rarely seen.
In Oslo, by contrast, the sunsets helped inspire one of the world’s best-known paintings: Edvard Munch was walking with some friends one evening as the sun descended through the haze: “it was as if a flaming sword of blood slashed open the vault of heaven,” he recalled; “the atmosphere turned to blood — with glaring tongues of fire — the hills became deep blue — the fjord shaded into cold blue — among the yellow and red colours — that garish blood-red — on the road — and the railing — my companions’ faces became yellow-white — I felt something like a great scream — and truly I heard a great scream.” His painting The Scream (1893), of which he made several versions, is an enduring (and much stolen) expressionist masterpiece, a vision of human desolation writhing beneath an apocalyptic sky, as “a great unending scream pierces through nature.” As it happens, the final eruption of Krakatoa on 27 August 1883 was the loudest sound ever recorded, travelling almost 5,000 km, and heard over nearly a tenth of the earth’s surface: a great scream indeed.
As for Hopkins, the publication of his Krakatoa essay coincided with the welcome offer of a professorship in classics at University College Dublin. He left Lancashire for Ireland in February 1884, relieved to have made his escape. It didn’t last. Homesick, lonely and overworked, Hopkins succumbed to his worst depression yet, his misery traced in the so-called “terrible” sonnets of 1885 (“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”). He died of typhoid fever in June 1889 (aged 44), and was buried in an unmarked grave. Only his close friend Robert Bridges was aware of his greatness as a poet, and the bulk of his work remained unpublished until 1918. In fact, apart from a handful of minor poems that had appeared in obscure periodicals, the five Nature articles were the only works that Hopkins published in his lifetime.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Richard Hamblyn

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Painting the New World

By Benjamin Breen
April 24, 2012

In 1585 the Englishman John White, governor of one of the very first North American colonies, made a series of exquisite watercolour sketches of the native Algonkin people alongside whom the settlers would try to live. Benjamin Breen explores the significance of the sketches and their link to the mystery of what became known as the "Lost Colony".

As lucklesse to many, as sinister to myselfe. Such was the Elizabethan colonist John White's gloomy assessment of his tenure as the first governor of Britain’s fledgling colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. As White lived out his final days on an Irish plantation in 1593, he struggled to come to terms with his ambivalent legacy in the “Newfound Worlde.” Just eight years earlier, White had set out for North America as part of an expedition led by a fiery-tempered courtier named Sir Richard Grenville. This voyage was not without its challenges – White recalled laconically that in a battle with Spanish mariners he was “wounded twise in the head, once with a sword, and another time with a pike, and hurt also in the side of the buttoke with a shot.” Yet in this time White also witnessed natural marvels, helped build a new colony, and even celebrated the birth of his now-famous granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first child of English/Christian parentage to be born on American soil. Ultimately, however, White’s ambitions ended in catastrophe, with the mysterious disappearance of the ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children who comprised the Roanoke colony – a group that included his daughter and granddaughter.
In the centuries since White’s death, his story has diverged in an interesting way. Generations of schoolchildren raised in the United States can probably recall reading about the “Lost Colony” at Roanoke in textbooks. In these simplified accounts, White and his fellow colonists typically figure as doomed but visionary pioneers in a larger narrative of British-American exceptionalism.
Among professional historians, White is equally famous, but for rather different reasons. In recent histories of colonial British America, it is John White the artist, rather than John White the colonial governor, who takes center stage. This is because White was a watercolor painter of extraordinary talent whose works number among the most remarkable depictions of early modern indigenous Americans ever created.
To be sure, many other European contemporaries of White offered up visual depictions of  native Americans. Readers of André Thevet’s early account of Brazil Les singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1557), for instance, could expect to be treated to renderings of Tupí Indians harvesting fruit, singing songs (complete with musical notation recorded by Thevet) and even munching casually on barbequed human thighs and buttocks.
Yet White’s illustrations stood out among those of his peers. Rather than working via woodblock printing or engraving, White produced paintings in vivid watercolors. This allowed him to achieve a level of lifelike detail which printed illustrations couldn’t hope to match. One of the most striking examples of White’s eye for detail is found in his tender depiction of an Algonquian Indian mother with her daughter.
In 1585, one of White’s companions in Virginia, a natural philosopher and inventor named Thomas Hariot, remarked that the indigenous children he encountered in America “greatlye delighted with puppets and babes which are broughte oute of England.” White’s painting actually offers a direct visual proof of this observation: in the hands of the woman’s child, one can spot a tiny female doll wearing Elizabethan dress.
As the historian Joyce Chaplin notes in her book Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003), this image was later recreated by the Dutch printmaker Theodore de Bry, who used White’s watercolors to create engravings for Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). De Bry’s depiction shows the Indian girl holding not only “an English doll in Elizabethan clothing,” but “an armillary sphere,” which served as “an instructional and decorative representation of the globe and heavens” (Chaplin 36).
White also had a remarkable ability for “zooming out” from a scene to create an imagined isometric perspective. His painting of an Algonquian village stands out as one of the most detailed depictions of indigenous American village life to survive from the sixteenth century.
As the detail of the dancing circle in the lower right of this image suggests, White seems to have had a particular interest in Algonquian religious ceremonies. Another painting by White along similar lines gives a precious glimpse of pre-contact American Indian religious practice and daily life:
What, then, was White’s final legacy? In a narrative first printed in Richard Hakluyt's Voyages, White described his return to Virginia in 1590 in search of the colonists he had left at Roanoke (he had returned to England three years earlier in efforts to obtain “supplies, and other necessities”). His account evokes the haunted landscape of a ghost story, and its eerie details have made it part of American folklore ever since. On the 17th of August, White recalled, three ships under his command reached Roanoke, where they “found no man, nor signe of any that had been there lately.” The next evening, one of White's sailors spied “a fire through the woods” and the men “sounded a Trumpet, but no answer could we heare.”  The light of the next daybreak revealed that this was “nothing but the grasse, and some rotten trees burning.”
Finally, however, White found evidence of the colonists’ wherabouts. In a tree, he discovered “three faire Roman Letters carved C. R. O.”: this was a pre-arranged maker which White understood “to signifie the place where I should find them”: Croatan. White's suspicion was confirmed with the discovery of a scene that is now almost mythical:
We found no signe of distresse; then we went to a place where they were left in sundry houses, but we found them all taken downe, and the place strongly inclosed with a high Palizado [i.e. a palisade of wooden stakes], very Fortlike; and in one of the chiefe Posts carved in fayre capitall Letters C R O A T A N, without any signe of distresse, and many barres of Iron . . . and such like heavie things throwne here and there, overgrowne with grass and weeds . . .
Interestingly, White’s account here connects his two identities as governor and painter. He remarks that his men “found diverse Chests which had been hidden and digged up againe” surrounding the palisade. Among these chests, White was surprised to find objects which he knew “to be my owne”: “books” and “pictures” he had created in the years before, now “scattered up and downe . . . [and] spoyled.”
In the end, White was unable to follow up on these strange clues: storms forced the expedition’s ships to turn back before reaching Croatan, and he returned to Britain with the mystery unresolved. The ultimate fate of the Roanoke colonists continues to be debated. Some have conjectured that White’s fellow colonists may have opted to join a local Algonquian Indian tribe and adapt themselves to the very different (and rather more effective) Amerindian methods of contending with the harsh American landscape.
It is unlikely that we’ll ever know what happened – but if White’s daughter and granddaughter really did become incorporated into an Indian tribe, it would have made a strange sort of sense. Few sixteenth century Europeans looked upon indigenous Americans with anything other than a jaundiced and prejudiced eye. Yet White’s sensitive and humane portrayals of daily life among the Algonquians tell a different story, and suggest that his own stance toward the native peoples he encountered in the New World was rather more complex. In White’s sensitive depiction of the Algonquian woman and her child holding a European doll, perhaps we can discern a foreshadowing of the hybrid Euro-American fate of his own daughter and grandchild. The intertwined tales of the failed colony White governed, the family he raised, and the artworks he created offer one of the earliest examples of the mingling of cultures that would define the history of the Americas in the centuries to come.

The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: enjamin Breen


text:
The Assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval

By David C. Hanrahan
May 8, 2012

Only once has a British Prime Minister been assassinated. Two hundred years ago, on the 11th May 1812, John Bellingham shot dead the Rt. Hon. Spencer Perceval as he entered the House of Commons. David C. Hanrahan tells the story.

On Monday 11 May, 1812, an unremarkable, anonymous man, just over forty years of age, made his way to the Houses of Parliament.  The man had become a frequent visitor there over the previous few weeks, sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons and carefully examining the various members of the government through his opera glasses.  At 5.00 p.m. on this particular day he walked into the lobby that led to the House of Commons and sat near the fireplace.  No-one could have known that he was carrying, concealed on his person, two loaded pistols.
As it was a fine evening Mr. Spencer Perceval, the Tory First Lord of the Treasury, or Prime Minister, had decided to dispense with his carriage and walk from No. 10, Downing Street, to the Houses of Parliament.   He arrived there around 5.15pm, entered the building and walked down the corridor towards the lobby entrance to the House of Commons.  He handed his coat to the officer positioned outside the doors to the lobby.
As Mr. Perceval entered the lobby a number of people were gathered around in conversation as was the usual practice.  Most turned to look at him as he came through the doorway.  No-one noticed as the quiet man stood up from beside the fire place, removing a pistol from his inner pocket as he did so.  Neither did anyone notice as the man walked calmly towards the Prime Minister.  When he was close enough, without saying a word, the man fired his pistol directly at Mr. Perceval’s chest.  The Prime Minister staggered forward before falling to the ground, calling out as he did so words that witnesses later recalled in different ways as: “I am murdered!” or ‘Murder, Murder’ or ‘Oh God!’ or ‘Oh my God!’
Amid the confusion, a number of people raised Mr. Perceval from the ground and carried him into the nearby Speaker’s apartments.  They placed him in a sitting position on a table, supporting him on either side.  Most ominously, the Prime Minister had not uttered a single word since falling on the floor of the lobby, and the only noises to have emanated from him since had been a few pathetic sobs.  After a short time Mr. Smith MP, on failing to find any perceptible sign of a pulse, announced his terrible conclusion to the group of stunned onlookers that the Prime Minister was dead.
Before long Mr. William Lynn, a surgeon situated at No. 15 Great George Street, arrived on the scene and confirmed that Mr. Smith was indeed correct.  The surgeon noted the blood all over the deceased Prime Minister’s coat and white waistcoat.  His examination of the body revealed a wound on the left side of the chest over the fourth rib.  It was obvious that a rather large pistol ball had entered there.  Mr. Lynn probed an instrument into the wound and found that it went downwards and inwards towards the heart. The wound was more than three inches deep.  The Prime Minister, who was not yet fifty years of age, left behind a widow, Jane, and twelve children.
In the shock of what had happened, the assassin was almost forgotten.  The man had not attempted to escape as he might well have done amid the confusion.  Instead, he had returned quietly to his seat beside the fireplace.  The identity of the man was revealed as John Bellingham, not a violent radical but a businessman from Liverpool.  The details of his story soon began to emerge.  As a result of a dispute with some Russian Businessmen, Bellingham had been imprisoned in Russia in 1804 accused of owing a debt.  He had been held in various prisons there for the next 5 years.  Throughout all of this time he had pleaded with the British authorities for assistance in fighting his cause for justice.   He believed that they had not given his case sufficient attention.
Bellingham was finally released from gaol and returned to England in 1809 a very bitter man.  He felt deep resentment against the British authorities and immediately set about seeking financial compensation from them for his suffering and loss of business.  Once again, however, Bellingham felt that he was being ignored.  He petitioned the Foreign Secretary, the Treasury, the Privy Council, the Prime Minister, even the Prince Regent, but all to no avail.  No one was willing to hear his case for compensation.  Finally, he came to the insane decision that the only way for him to get a hearing in court was to shoot the Prime Minister.
On the Friday following the assassination of the Prime Minister, John Bellingham did indeed get his day in court, but only to answer a charge of murder.  His trial took place in a packed court room at the Old Bailey, presided over by Sir James Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.  The tall, thin Bellingham came before the court wearing dark nankeen trousers, a yellow waistcoat with black stripes and a brown greatcoat.   The members of his defence team first attempted to get the trial postponed on the grounds that they had not been given sufficient time to prepare for the case.  Mr. Peter Alley, Bellingham’s chief counsel, told the court that he had only been given the case the day before and that he had never even met Mr. Bellingham until that very day.  He asserted that given adequate time, in particular to find medical experts and witnesses in Liverpool who knew Mr. Bellingham personally, he was confident he could prove his client to be insane.  The Attorney General, Sir Vicary Gibbs, on behalf of the prosecution, argued vehemently against any such postponement.  Ultimately Mr. Allen’s request was unsuccessful and the trial proceeded.
The Attorney General set about dismantling the reason Bellingham had given as justification for his heinous act by arguing that the Government had been aware of what had happened to him in Russia, had examined his claims and had rejected them. He also rejected any notion that Bellingham was insane.  He said that Bellingham had been well able to conduct his business and had been trusted by other to conduct theirs without any hint of insanity on his behalf.
When his time came to speak, Bellingham continued to base his defence upon what had happened to him in Russia: his unjust arrest for a debt he did not owe and the failure of the British Government to assist at that time and since.  Before outlining the details of his experience in Russia, he stated that he was pleased the judge had not accepted his counsel’s arguments alleging his insanity.  He made it clear that although he believed what he had done to be necessary and justified, he bore Mr. Perceval or his family no personal malice:
Gentlemen, as to the lamentable catastrophe for which I am now on my trial before this court, if I am the man that I am supposed to be, to go and deliberately shoot Mr. Perceval without malice, I should consider myself a monster, and not fit to live in this world or the next.  The learned Attorney General has candidly stated to you, that till this fatal time of this catastrophe, which I heartily regret, no man more so, not even one of the family of Mr. Perceval, I had no personal or premeditated malice towards that gentleman; the unfortunate lot had fallen upon him as the leading member of that administration which had repeatedly refused me any reparation for the unparalleled injuries I had sustained in Russia for eight years with the cognizance and sanction of the minister of the country at the court of St. Petersburg.
Bellingham was clear about where he felt the blame lay for Spencer Perceval’s death:
A refusal of justice was the sole cause of this fatal catastrophe; his Majesty’s ministers have now to reflect upon their conduct for what has happened.   . . . Mr. Perceval has unfortunately fallen the victim of my desperate resolution. No man, I am sure, laments the calamitous event more than I do.
In the end, of course, his arguments for justification had no influence upon a judge and jury shocked by his horrific murder of the Prime Minister.  The Lord Chief Justice even became openly emotional and began to cry at one point during his statement to the jury:
Gentlemen of the jury, you are now to try an indictment which charges the prisoner at the bar with the wilful murder . . . of Mr. Spencer Perceval, . . . who was murdered with a pistol loaded with a bullet; . . . a man so dear, and so revered as that of Mr. Spencer Perceval, I find it difficult to suppress my feelings.
He dismissed any idea that Bellingham might have been insane at the time of committing the crime:
. . . there was no proof adduced to show that his understanding was so deranged, as not to enable him to know that murder was a crime.  On the contrary, the testimony adduced in his defence, has most distinctly proved, from a description of his general demeanour, that he was in every respect a full and competent judge of all his actions.
In such circumstances it is no surprise that John Bellingham was found guilty of  Spencer Perceval’s murder by a jury that took only fourteen minutes to reach a verdict.  On the following Monday he was executed and his body sent for dissection to St. Bartholomew’s hospital.  He is remembered in history as the only assassin ever of a British Prime Minister.

The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: David C. Hanrahan


text:
The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi

By Andrew McConnell Stott
November 14, 2011

Andrew McConnell Stott, author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, introduces the life and memoirs of the most famous and celebrated of English clowns.

Few biographers have proved so reluctant, but when the raw materials that would become The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi reached Charles Dickens’ desk in the autumn of 1837, he was far from impressed. “I have thought the matter over, and looked it over, too,” he told his publisher, Richard Bentley, “it is very badly done, and so redolent of twaddle that I fear I cannot take it up on any conditions.”
What he saw had begun life as a sprawling manuscript of some 400 “childlike and simple” pages written by the pantomime clown, Joseph Grimaldi, in the course of his long retirement from the stage. When a publisher proved hard to find, Grimaldi contracted with a theatrical journalist, Thomas Egerton Wilks to help him revise the entire manuscript, but died before it was completed. Wilks sold the unfinished project on to Bentley, who considered Dickens perfect for the job — not only had he idolized Grimaldi as a child, fondly recalling trips to Covent Garden “to behold the splendour of Christmas Pantomimes and the humour of Joe,” but his own Sketches By Boz (1836) had been widely commended for displaying “the spirit of Grimaldi.”
Having finally relented, Dickens saw it off in a matter of weeks, subjecting it to “a double and most comprehensive process of abridgement,” resetting the narrative from the first person to the third, and not even bothering to write it down, preferring to dictate it to his father, who could be found “in exulted enjoyment of the office of amanuensis.”
Despite all its evident haste, The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi remains unmistakably “Dickensian,” recalling passages from Nicholas Nickleby, Hard Times and others. Without doubt, his most important decision was to place the biographical details of Grimaldi’s life within a strict economy of pleasure and pain that draws stark contrasts between the tinsel of the stage and the shabby reality of his many hardships. Laughter and misery becomes the balance-beam on which Grimaldi’s existence is constantly weighed as every career triumph is paid for with a proportionate personal agony, and every moment of joy countered by grief.
In presenting Grimaldi’s life in this way, Dickens was cementing much of what was popularly perceived during Grimaldi’s own lifetime. Born into a theatrical family in 1778, “Joe” was a superstar of Regency theatre who rose to national prominence in 1806 playing Clown in the pantomime of Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg. His unique comic gifts had been honed since making his first appearance onstage at the age of two, tutored by his father, Giuseppe, a cruel and eccentric dancing master known throughout London’s close-knit theatrical community as the “Signor.” The Signor had fathered several children by different women — most of them young dancers indentured as his apprentices — but as his first boy, it was Joe on whom his future hopes were settled. The Signor’s methods of instruction were gruelling, as were the regular beatings and medieval punishments he inflicted on those that failed to meet his expectations, which included locking children into stocks, or throwing them into a cage and hoisting it into the flytower to leave them dangling precariously over the stage. Home life was little better, as the Signor was horribly morbid, living in perpetual fear of death, and especially of being buried alive. When he finally died in 1788, his will directed that his eldest daughter cut his head from his corpse just to be certain.
The Signor’s passing was a liberation, yet at age nine, Joe was suddenly the family’s principal breadwinner, and he spent the remainder of his childhood running between performances at Sadler’s Wells and Drury Lane theatres and appearing as a supernumerary in various pageants, spectacles, and crowd scenes, only graduating to pantomimes in his twenties. Regency pantomimes were markedly different from the entertainments that we know today, and were comprised of an opening that was usually based on a fairy tale, and a second, much longer performance, called the “harlequinade.” The openings usually involved a pair of star-crossed lovers forbidden to marry by a tyrannical parent, miming the action in their “big heads” — huge, caricatured papier mache masks — until they were magically transformed into the lead characters of the harlequinade, four figures instantly recognizable to every man woman and child in Regency Britain — the mercurial, acrobatic Harlequin; his gauzy, dove-like lover Columbine; and their enemies the elderly “libidinous, miserly Dotard,” Pantaloon, and his titular manservant, the “incorrigible emblem of gross sensuality,” Clown. What followed was a series of frenetic scenes in which Harlequin and Columbine were pursued through a series of lavish sets that could be magically transformed with a whack from Harlequin’s magic bat, which, primed with a pinch of gunpowder, was the original “slapstick.” The humour was crude and physical, but with its emphasis on transformation and the unexpected, it was the perfect entertainment for the age of revolutions.
Aside from his comic talents and fine singing voice, Grimaldi was an innovator, widely acknowledged as the father of modern “slap and motley.” It was Grimaldi who overhauled the Clown’s appearance from the rustic booby that had remained more-or-less unaltered since the sixteenth century, to the heavily made-up and colourfully-attired clowns that we are familiar with today. The new make-up left not a centimetre of skin exposed — not even in the nostrils or inside of the lips — and, as such, it implied a much stricter division between the man and the mask, an impenetrability that acted as a kind of invitation to speculate about what they might have concealed. Was there, perhaps, a division in Grimaldi himself? Rumours to this effect arose during the initial success of Mother Goose: the King of Clowns, it was reported, was subject to debilitating bouts of offstage depression, reports he himself chose to confirm with a punning quip, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night.” A series of anecdotes followed that prefigured Dickens’ biographical portrait in black-and-white, the most famous of which dates from the 1820s and involves a visit to the surgeon, John Abertheny. Grimaldi, hoping to find a cure for his depression, asks Abertheny for advice, and unaware of his client’s identity, the surgeon prescribes the diversions of “relaxation and amusement”:
“But where shall I find what you require?” said the patient.
“In genial companionship,” was the reply; “perhaps sometimes at the theatre; — go and see Grimaldi.”
“Alas!” replied the patient, “that is of no avail to me; I am Grimaldi.”
Clowning also made extraordinary physical demands, and as early as 1813, The Times was already expressing misgivings about the sustainability of his performances: “It is absolutely surprising,” it wrote, “that any human head or hide can resist the rough trials which he volunteers. Serious tumbles from serious heights, innumerable kicks, and incessant beatings, come on him as matters of common occurrence, and leave him every night fresh and free for the next night’s flagellation.” Sure enough, Joe’s health worsened with each passing season until reaching a point where he had to be carried to his dressing room and revived after each performance. Laughter demands an exorbitant prince. “Poor Joe!” wrote the author William Robson, “it was like the boys and frogs; it was sport to us, but death to you.”
Grimaldi was 45 when he gave his last regular performance. This was young — his father had continued well into his seventies — but by 1823, he was suffering so badly from arthritis and various digestive complaints that it was impossible to continue. He would reappear two years later at a pair of gala performances to celebrate his career, but made his contributions seated in a chair. With the retirement of its greatest exponent, pantomime quickly entered a period of decline, as the slapstick antics of the harlequinade were replaced with bloated stage effects and meaningless scenery. As Grimaldi approached the end of his life, his battered old body became a symbol for the exhaustion of Regency popular culture, and by extension, the lost youth of Dickens’ generation. Dickens had already conveyed as much in “The Stroller’s Tale,” one of the first instalments of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1835). Here, “Dismal Jemmy,” himself a down-at-heel actor, recalls the time he comes across a fellow performer, a “enfeebled by dissipation and emaciated by disease.” It is night and the theatre is dark. “I was dressed to leave the house,” Jemmy recalls,
and was crossing the stage on my way out, when he tapped me on the shoulder. Never shall I forget the repulsive sight that met my eye when I turned round. He was dressed for the pantomime, in all the absurdity a clown’s costume. The spectral figures in the Dance of Death, the most frightful shapes that the ablest painter ever portrayed on canvas, never presented an appearance half so ghastly. His bloated body and shrunken legs — their deformity enhanced a hundred fold by the fantastic dress — the glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which the face was besmeared: the grotesquely-ornamented head, trembling with paralysis, and the long skinny hands, rubbed with white chalk — all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance of which no description could convey an adequate idea, and which, to this day, I shudder to think of.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 14, 2011

author: Andrew McConnell Stott


text:
Remembering Scott

By Max Jones
March 29, 2012

A century on from his dramatic death on the way back from the South Pole, the memory of the explorer Captain Scott and his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition is stronger than ever. Max Jones explores the role that the iconic visual record has played in keeping the legend alive.

Why are some historical figures remembered, while others are forgotten?  Major-General Henry Havelock was the toast of the nation in 1857. One of the British heroes of the ‘Indian Mutiny’, Havelock died after the relief of the city of Lucknow. Such was the fame of the devout Christian soldier, parliament approved the erection of his statue in Trafalgar Square, which still stands today. A decade ago, however, Mayor Ken Livingstone complained that most Londoners had no idea who Havelock was.
The memory of Captain Scott, who died in Antarctica one hundred years ago, has fared much better than Havelock’s. The centenary of Scott’s last expedition has generated a wave of books, events, radio broadcasts and television documentaries over the last two years, including BBC 2’s The Secrets of Scott’s Hut fronted by modern celebrity-explorer Ben Fogle, a major new exhibition at the Natural History Museum, and a national memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Scott’s exploits in the uninhabited continent of Antarctica are free of the troubling associations which surround many other imperial heroes. Should the statue of a man known primarily for subjugating India still stand in the centre of a city where over one in ten of the inhabitants have roots in South Asia? As with so many aspects of our imperial past, Britons have found it easier to ignore and forget rather than confront such difficult questions.
In part, of course, Scott is remembered today because his last expedition is such a great story: the drama of the race with Norwegian Roald Amundsen; the heart-breaking arrival at the South Pole a month too late; the agonising suspense of the return march; the tragic end only 11 miles from a supply depot which would have saved them. Yet a great story alone offers no guarantee of remembrance. Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition and his incredible boat journey to South Georgia were surprisingly neglected in Britain until the end of the 1990s.
Elsewhere1, I have emphasised the significance of Scott’s own words to his continued remembrance. The ‘Message to the Public’ Scott wrote at the back of his journal remains one of the ultimate expressions of bravery in the face of death. Scott’s journals are on permanent display as one of the ‘Treasures of the British Library’. The centenary celebrations would have been far less extensive if a search party had not found the journals in November 1912.
But visual iconography has also proved essential to sustaining Scott’s story. His decision-making has been widely criticised, most savagely in Roland Huntford’s classic debunking biography Scott and Amundsen (London, 1979). Scott deserves great credit, though, for his appointment of Herbert Ponting as the expedition’s self-styled ‘camera artist’. Ponting’s early life remains obscure, but we know he abandoned his family to pursue a full-time career in photography. He later observed that he wouldn’t even recognise his own son if he walked past him on the street.
Ponting exposed around 25,000 feet of film and 2,000 photographic negatives in the Antarctic. Rarely, if ever, has an expedition been documented so thoroughly and so beautifully. Publishers and film-makers today can be confident of the availability of rich visual resources for any new Scott project, with striking photographs of the central characters, wild life and Antarctic environment.  Ponting frequently juxtaposed awe-inspiring natural features with tiny human figures, presenting the Antarctic as a medieval fortress besieged by brave polar knights.
In 1914, Ponting mounted a hugely successful series of illustrated lectures about the expedition at the Philharmonic Hall, performing in front of 100,000 people in only two months. The lectures proved so successful, King George V invited him to give a special performance at Buckingham Palace. Ponting had the misfortune, however, of purchasing the complete rights to the expedition’s film record from the Gaumont Company just before the outbreak of the First World War. Ponting would spend much of the next two decades attempting to exploit his Antarctic work, but never matched the success of the Philharmonic Hall lectures.
Although his work continues to shape visual representations of Antarctica, Ponting did not take the most famous photograph of Scott’s last expedition. The explorers themselves exposed ten plates at the South Pole. In one they appear to slouch around Amundsen’s tent like rock stars on an album cover. Henry Bowers pulled the cord which took the most iconic image of the Antarctic disaster. This  photograph remains the most frequently reproduced: five grim faces marked by hardships endured and the certain knowledge of hardships to come, the forlorn union jack a reminder of their defeat. The survival of this remarkable photograph helps explain the enduring appeal of Scott’s story. In 2000 Hello Magazine published two special editions celebrating ‘The 20th Century in Pictures’, ‘An Heirloom to Treasure’. Scott, Bowers, Evans, Oates and Wilson stared out from the front cover.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Max Jones


text:
The Unsinkable Myth

By Richard Howells
April 11, 2012

This week sees the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, one of the deadliest peacetime disasters at sea. Richard Howells, author of The Myth of the Titanic, explores the various legends surrounding the world's most famous ship.

There can be no one, surely, reading this article who has not already heard of the Titanic. And there can be no one among them, equally certainly, who does not already know how the story of the Titanic ends. This is, when we think about it, really quite remarkable. There is no one alive today who actually remembers the Titanic: all the survivors are dead. For the rest of us, there is very little possibility that the disaster has directly affected us, personally or historically.
And yet . . . as we mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking on April 15th 1912, the world is full of it. We hear the repeated exhortation: “remember the Titanic” even though not one of us literally can. And yet . . . ask people and they will tell you not just about the iceberg, but probably also about the lifeboats, “women and children first”, and the band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the ship finally sank with the loss of some 1,500 lives. The captain, of course, went down with his ship.
But most of all they will tell you about the “unsinkable ship”, the biggest and finest ever built, the last word in luxury that sank, seemingly inevitably, on its first and only voyage. They said that “God himself could not sink this ship”, but on “her” maiden voyage “she” was duly ripped asunder.
There are two remarkable things about this. First that a 100 year old story continues to be told and re-told. Second that many of the component stories are simply not true. And fore-most amongst these is the big one: that prior to its departure from Southampton, the Titanic was feted by all as the “unsinkable ship”. It wasn’t. So how do we explain all this? The answer is that 100 years on, the sinking of the Titanic has long-since passed from history and into myth.
In the common parlance, a myth is a falsehood –or at very least an enduring popular misconception. But intellectually, a myth is much more complex and revelatory than that. A myth is more accurately a story (or an amalgam of stories) that may (or may not) be historically true but which contains a series of cultural truths embedded in narrative form. In this way it may (like a fable or a parable) not be “true” in the literal sense, but we can still say “there is a lot of truth in that story.” More than that, the content of the story tends both to flatter the teller and –crucially- to serve to make sense of a seemingly random universe. This is precisely the case with the Titanic.
When we study myths from an anthropological perspective and proceed to turn that scholarly gaze upon ourselves, we can see our changing and different selves reflected therein. Myths are not limited to distant, past, exotic or “primitive” peoples, and the Titanic is just such an evolving, modern myth that we continue to tell about ourselves. It is also a migratory narrative that is re-articulated in an expanding variety of media forms from print to postcards, books, music, television, merchandising and computer games. No medium, however, exemplifies this better than the feature film.
Films of the Titanic typically make great claims for their accuracy but in reality part very quickly from the historical record. The infamous “Nazi” Titanic film of 1943, for example, had the audacity to invent and place a German officer on board, who proceeded to give dire warnings to the British crew about the reckless inefficiency of it all. Inevitably, it was he who spotted the iceberg first and lived to give damning evidence at the official inquiry –but not before he had gallantly rescued a small child from her watery bed. Hollywood’s first “Titanic” feature (1953) showcased an entirely fictitious American family in pursuit of solid, mid-Western values, while Britain’s “A Night to Remember” (1958) is about class as much as it is about seamanship. Lew Grade’s “Raise the Titanic” (1980) is a totally fanciful Cold War parable; James Cameron’s multi-award winning “Titanic” of 1997, on the other hand, made great claims for its historical authenticity but centred upon a totally invented core of characters –none of whom (it must be repeated) ever existed. We are left, however, with the warm glow of personal fulfilment, cross-class possibilities, the pleasure of being poor and –most of all- true love beyond price. And if, finally, we cross into television, Julian Fellowes’ 100th anniversary “Titanic” mini-series is a well-shaken cocktail of actual and imaginary characters who interact as if nothing impossible were in fact taking place. The resulting concoction, of course, bears the distinct flavour of Britain not in 1912 but in 2012.
When we study popular cultural representations of the Titanic in whatever medium in close-up, we see the values of the culture, era, and society that made them in vivid reflection. A study of the Titanic in British popular culture from 1912 to the start of the First World War, for example, reveals distinctly late-Edwardian understandings of race, religion, class and gender, crowned by the captain’s much celebrated (but historically unverified) last order to his crew: “Be British!”
These historical snapshots are of immense value to the cultural sociologist, while to the semiotician they demonstrate once again the inherently flexible relationship between the signifier and the signified: The Titanic sinks consistently in the popular imagination, but the values that go down with it remain many and varied according to the particular perspectives of the tellers of the tale in both time and space.
Individual examples are individually revealing, but structural anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss remind us that in order to get a make a thorough analysis of a myth we need to understand it as a composite of all its component versions. So, in addition to the particular and ‘local’ variations we need to stand back and take stock of the overwhelming, universal themes. Consistent among all versions of the myth of the Titanic is the notion of the vessel as the “unsinkable” ship which sank on “her” maiden voyage. No version of the myth is complete without this fundamental ingredient, and it is an ingredient which will be more than familiar to students of classical mythology as a reworking of the Hellenic themes of Hubris and Nemesis.
In Greek mythology, Hubris is pride –usually that of man over-reaching himself in the face of the Gods. This is especially the case when man seeks to overcome nature which is the Gods’ rightful domain. So, we see the mortal Prometheus stealing the secret of fire from Zeus, and Icarus escaping the bonds of earth by flying with wings of wax. Inevitably and swiftly, Hubris results, for the Gods are vengeful. Prometheus has his liver pecked out by an eagle on a daily basis, while Icarus flies too near the sun: his wings melt and he falls to his death in the sea.
We can imagine, then, the mythic consequences of building a ship which “God himself” could not sink. Naming it “Titanic” was only adding to the Hubris, and so the “ill-fated” liner duly finds its Nemesis at the hands of on iceberg on its first and only voyage. The reported size and luxury of the ship only adds to the moral power and significance of the tale.
But here is the vital point that is missed in pretty well every re-telling of the myth of the Titanic: nobody really called the Titanic “unsinkable” until after the ship had sunk. The Titanic’s alleged unsinkability was essentially a post-hoc, popular cultural invention to provide a moral –a meaning- to a terrible but ultimately random event.  In this way, the historical Titanic became mythical within days of its sinking. The facts, even to this day, play second fiddle to the culturally preferred version.
To substantiate this point, we must remember that the Titanic was in fact the second of three almost identical “sister” ships constructed by the White Star Line. The eldest was the Olympic, which preceded the Titanic into service on just the same route and with precisely the same safety features as her second-string sister.    But the Olympic did not sink, and so was never dubbed “unsinkable.” The Titanic, on the other hand, went down and so the myth got to work, offering an “explanation” for the disaster –and explanation that would have made perfect sense to our Classical and cultural forebears. One hundred years on, therefore, our continued fascination with the Titanic reminds us that myth –unlike the actual Titanic –is alive and well today.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Richard Howells


text:
The Mysteries of Nature and Art

By Julie Gardham
November 28, 2011

Julie Gardham, Senior Assistant Librarian at University of Glasgow's Special Collections Department, takes a look at the book that was said to have spurred a young Isaac Newton onto the scientific path, The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate.

Courteous reader, this ensuing treatise hath lien by mee a long time, penned, but in a confused and undigested manner, as I gathered it, practised, or found it out by industry and experience.
So begins the preface to The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate, one of the most charming of seventeenth-century illustrated technical compendiums.
Describing mechanical contrivances that are a mix of the useful and bizarre, this work tackles the subjects of water works, fire works, drawing and painting, and miscellaneous experiments — the last of which Bate terms ‘extravagants’ because they are ‘confusedly intermixed’.
Technical manuals were produced prolifically in the seventeenth century, reflecting progress in technological growth. This was a time of fundamental transition, with a spirit of initiative and invention that resulted in significant advances in science. Innovations and developments in areas such as mechanics, astronomy and chemistry were to pave the way for the industrial revolution. Dissemination of new ideas via printed treatises was crucial to the efforts of inventors and technicians.
Bate’s work is resolutely practical in nature. Originally printed in 1634, according to the title-page its ‘treatises’ were ‘partly collected, and partly of the authors peculiar practice and invention’; as stated in the preface, Bate wrote it based on ‘industry and experience’. A small, economical and easily portable book, it was popular enough to warrant the publication of an expanded second edition only a year after the first. A further augmented edition was produced in 1654. While containing more illustrations, this last edition is poorly printed and is not nearly so attractive as its predecessors.
The first section on water-works describes various ingenious machines that convey and force water. There is, for example, an engine ‘to force water up to a high place’; this pump, we are informed, is ‘very usefull for to quench fire amongst buildings’. Other devices include weather glasses, water clocks, fountains, siphons, pumps, waterwheels, and watermills. Of the various water clocks described, my favourite has to be the one which utilizes a rather jolly grinning skeleton who marks the hours from a moving platform, reminding us all of our eventual doom.
Bate was evidently always on the look out for new ideas. The expanded second edition of his book contains many additions to the water-works section, including the description of the model of a water mill that he copied after seeing it at London bridge in 1633. He explains that it utilizes the ebb and flow of the River Thames, thereby conveying the water ‘above two miles in compasse, for the use and service of that city’ and praises it as ‘seeming very good’. These waterworks were well known; they were only demolished when London bridge was rebuilt in 1822.
But while many of Bate’s examples are undoubtedly practical, there are also several rather more outlandish machines designed solely for ‘recreation and delight’. Thus, we find ‘experiments’ for ‘producing sounds by ayre and water’. These rather delightful devices include one ‘whereby severall voyces of birds cherping may be heard’ and another ‘whereby the figure of a man standing on a basis shall be made to sound a trumpet’. A further elaborate machine is a depiction of Hercules ‘shooting at a dragon, who as soon as he hath shot, hisseth at him’. Many of these were designed expressly to decorate and enhance gardens, perhaps demonstrating that an obsession for complicated water features is not as modern a phenomenon as we think.
The second part treats of fireworks ‘for tryumph and recreation’. Its title-page is illustrated with a woodcut depicting a ‘green man’ wielding a fire club. With obscure and mythical origins, green men dressed in foliage and garlands traditionally led processions of fireworkers from medieval times. The customary greeting amongst the firework fraternity is still ‘stay green’.
Originally developed in China, fireworks have been used to mark celebrations and spectacles for hundreds of years. Bate begins with an introduction to the basic principles of the nature of elements and instructions in choosing ingredients, such as saltpetre, brimstone, coals and gunpowder. Detailed directions and guidance on the composition of various kinds of fireworks follow. It is surprising to see how many devices still in use today were familiar to Bate, including crackers, rockets and ‘fire wheels’. Some, however, can only be described as ambitious; even Bate admits that his flying dragon is ‘somewhat troublesome to compose’.
Bate next discusses art. He covers drawing in general, as well as techniques for ‘washing’ maps and other pictures with water colour,  limning, painting in oil, painting on glass, and engraving. There is much interesting advice on choosing the correct equipment, with recipes for mixing and creating colours. Several pages are devoted to wood engraving; in the second edition, Bate comments that engraving is ‘farre more tedious and difficult than the working in brasse’. The artist who actually produced the woodcuts for the Mysteries — which add so much to the book’s charm, no matter how troublesome the job — is not named.
The final part of Bate’s work is a miscellany of recipes and ‘secrets’, both technical and medical. These ‘extravagants’ incorporate ‘severall Experiments, as well serviceable as delightfull’. A mixture of odd information is found here. There are several methods of catching fish, including a technique for burning a light under water so that apparently ‘all the fishes neere unto it will resort about it, as amazed at so glorious a sight, and so you may take them with a cast net or other’.
Bizarre ways of catching birds are also given, amongst them one ‘to make birds drunk, so that you may take them with your hands’. Additionally, there is instruction in how to melt metal, how to make ice that will melt in fire but not dissolve in water, how to make cement and marble, and how to make invisible ink. Finally, there are some recipes for treating a wide range of ailments, from balms for sciatica and ointments for burns and toothaches, to medicine for ‘the biting of a mad dogge’. It is reassuring to note that Bate endorses his treatment ‘for to heale a red face that hath many pimples’ as being ‘proved’.
Frustratingly, nothing is known about the author of this highly entertaining compendium. His portrait (which appears only in the second edition) is supplied, but he offers no biographical information about himself.
The three editions I have had the pleasure of examining all come from the collection of John Ferguson, who was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow from 1874 to 1915. He tartly remarks that this portrait ‘represents Bate, who, doubtless, was a decent law-abiding citizen, as a person for whom no villainy would be too great to perpetrate’.
Predominantly a collector of alchemical works, Ferguson was also very interested in books relating to the history of inventions and ‘books of secrets’. Such texts are not studied as part of the modern science curriculum, but Professor Ferguson staunchly defended his belief in their importance, explaining that ‘the history of practical invention and of technical progress is one which might well engage the attention of students of anthropology and antiquities, as it throws light on many points connected with the growth of social life and civilization’. He also succinctly defines the arcane terminology for such works as books of ‘secrets’, saying: ‘the arts must be acquired by practice, and they are extended and improved by practice. Every one who exercises them comes to have special power and certain ways of doing things, which may enable him to surpass others who are similarly engaged. These are his “secrets”, which very often he cannot, or will not, reveal to others’.
While some of the knowledge imparted in Bate’s Mysteries may seem to us crude, if not downright eccentric, it is important to remember that manuals such as these did play an important role in the dissemination of scientific information. Ferguson actually recommends this text as a ‘book of genuine receipts’, its contents being ‘quite sensible and practical’. He praises Bate for describing apparatus that he had actually tried and found would work — unlike some of his contemporaries ‘who often gathered nothing else but mere nonsense’.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 28, 2011

author: Julie Gardham


text:
Almost as Good as Presley
Caruso the Pop Idol
By John Potter
February 13, 2012

When he died in 1921 the singer Enrico Caruso left behind him approximately 290 commercially released recordings, and a significant mark upon on the opera world including more than 800 appearances at the New York Met. John Potter, singer and author of Tenor: History of a Voice, explores Caruso's popular appeal and how he straddled the divide between 'pop' and 'classical'.

‘. . . Then someone sat me down last night and I heard Caruso sing / He’s almost as good as Presley . . .’Ben Watt (Everything  But The Girl), from ‘The Night I heard Caruso Sing’, Idlewild.
Every generation seems to reinvent the tenor as something closer to a pop star than an opera star. The Three Tenors were among the late 20th century’s great musical marketing successes, and the brightest star that they acknowledged in the tenor firmament was cinema heart throb Mario Lanza. Lanza himself claimed Enrico Caruso as his greatest influence and famously played him on screen, reminding a wider audience that there was nothing incompatible with classical tenors and genuine popularity, whatever they were singing.
Although many fine divas stamped their mark on early recording, it was the tenor voice of Caruso which was the defining voice of the early twentieth century. His reputation was due to the fact that people could not only hear him in their own homes, but that his success could actually be measured in record sales; he was the first global superstar of the gramophone era. Such celebrity wasn’t new in what we think of as classical music, however, it was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for opera singers (such as Adelina Patti or Giuditta Pasta) to meet with the kind of reception we associate with pop stars. The fact is, there was no equivalent of today’s mass popular music — and nothing like today’s classical (in the sense of unpopular) either. Popular entertainment took a huge variety of forms from conjuring to celebrity whistling but singing was in the end just singing, and the best singers were opera singers largely because they had the best tunes. They all shared a basic level of vocality: even a vaudeville personality had to have voice enough to carry right to the back of a theatre: crooning and the intimate nuances enabled by the microphone were still in the future when Caruso died in 1921.
Three years earlier he was at the height of his fame. His many triumphs in 1918 included a Carnegie Hall debut (at one of several hugely successful find raising galas) and recording the patriotic song ‘Over There’ which would become the best selling recording by an opera singer for generations to come, putting him alongside Al Jolson as one of the century’s most successful recording artists to date. ‘Over There’ was certainly not an opera aria, and although Caruso was practically resident at the Metropolitan Opera for seventeen years his best selling records were actually lighter music such as Neapolitan songs and ‘Italian airs’. It was his voice that his public wanted, and they’d buy into whatever he chose to record.
That same year Al Jolson did a recital of his own songs with the 50 strong Boston Symphony Orchestra, having a month or two earlier followed Caruso on stage at a marathon concert in New York sponsored by the Army Tank Corps Welfare League in aid of returning soldiers. It was the first time Jolson uttered his famous catch phrase ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’, a response to Caruso’s rousing performance of Italian war songs culminating in a rendering of ‘Over There’ which had brought the house down. The two singers, both European émigrés who had conquered America, were then probably the most successful singers on earth. Although Jolson the entertainer and Caruso the opera singer inhabited different musical worlds, there were clearly circumstances where their respective arts could appeal to similar audiences and even happen at the same venue.  Both singers’ biographers tend to be rather reticent on the connections between these two great stars, but we know that they appreciated each other’s place in the scheme of things, and even each other’s singing. After their performances for the Tank Corps, Caruso invited Jolson back to his hotel room, and is said to have suggested they sing together at the Met. He may have been joking of course, and Jolson knew he wasn’t himself an opera singer, but the fact that he could make himself heard over a 50 piece orchestra shows that Jolson would have had no problem with the vast acoustic space of the world’s most famous opera theatre. Jolson and Caruso duetting on the opera stage is not as improbable as it might seem (had they been able to agree on what to sing): two months later the erstwhile vaudeville artiste Rosa Ponselle made her Met debut opposite Caruso himself in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino.
Vaudeville singers at the Met? Caruso able to duet with someone who called himself a jazz singer? How could such things possibly happen? Before amplification divided singers into those who were proper singers and those who might not be, all singers had to make themselves heard at the back of the hall, whether they were opera singers, vaudeville entertainers or blues shouters. That’s why so many ‘popular’ singers recording at the beginning of the 20th century sound so stilted and stylised — to project their voices a long way they had to sing with their larynxes lower than in normal speech. That maximised their acoustic efficiency and as a by-product gave them the richer sound that we now associate with classical singers. If they were singing in English it also generated the deeper vowels associated with Received Pronunciation (the non-regional accent sometimes called BBC English). Caruso and Jolson, faced with having to fill a vaudeville theatre or an opera house with sound, inevitably adopted a similar technique: there was no other way to sing in large theatres or halls, so they had much more in common vocally than, say, Placido Domingo and Sting.

Many people would have bought both singers’ records and may not have been very conscious of the different genres that they were later seen to represent. The idea of music being categorised as ‘popular’ or ‘classical’ would have meant very little to the man on the famous Clapham omnibus. Caruso didn’t see a big difference between a Puccini aria and a Neapolitan folk song — they were both ‘popular’ and likely to appear beside each other in recital programmes. Verdi and Puccini knew, as composers for generations before them had known, that the secret of a successful opera was to hit the punters with a stand-alone stonking good tune every now and again, a format which supported a huge sheet music industry and the burgeoning record business. For every person who heard an opera at the Met or Covent Garden, there was a potentially infinite number of record buyers or people who would sing the arias round the piano at home, alongside the ‘popular’ songs of entertainers such as Al Jolson. Jolson was aware that opera was of sufficiently high status to make it worth satirising, as in his hilarious (at the time) Pagliacci sketch. He knows exactly how opera singing works (he was the son of a cantor, who hoped for greater things from his absurdly ambitious offspring) but he surely understood that he could really only play one role: that of Al Jolson. Caruso was a huge success in many (carefully chosen) roles but his more serious repertoire didn’t give him many opportunities to shine simply as an entertainer.
But that didn’t stop him equalling Jolson in popularity. It wasn’t just patriotic songs and Italian lollipops: the big tunes that came out of the realistic plots and less cluttered singing of verismo opera were enormously successful too. In the first quarter of the 20th century (roughly between the first recordings and the first radio broadcasts) the worlds of what we now think of as the classical and popular were still tantalisingly close, with the difference between singers of the calibre of Caruso and Jolson often just one of repertoire and a certain sort of public engagement.  As the century progressed they would become increasingly polarised: composers, divorced from private patronage but often indirectly supported by the state, could indulge in the luxury of writing music that very few people wanted to hear, while the microphone rendered over-blown natural vocal projection unnecessary for those excited by the possibilities of a more subtle vocal delivery.  Opera singers retained their stylised vocality with its inevitable loudness, growing in status but contracting in reach with each generation. The mass audience that had been there for Rossini and Verdi preferred the immediate emotional hit provided by crooners, a direct mouth-to-ear experience which they could enjoy with friends at home rather than brave the stratified world of the opera house; ‘classical’ came to mean the opposite of ‘popular’.
Caruso would know nothing of this: he would continue to sing from beyond the grave, but increasingly on the wrong side of the growing divisions between the two genres. The 21st century is beginning to see (and hear) things differently, though, and many of us now take a broader view of Caruso’s art and achievement. ‘Over There’ has even been plundered for a TV commercial (which I’m sure Caruso would have enjoyed), but Ben Watt comparing the great tenor with Elvis Presley is a sign of more enlightened times. The digital age gives us unfettered access to the whole of music, unfiltered by snobbery and tradition, and perhaps Caruso can be released from the stale old classical ghetto: in his time he was indeed as good as Elvis.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 13, 2012

author: John Potter