Lodge was some-times scornful of bankers and had little regard for Hanna, but he saw Bryan as a Robespierre. The Massachusetts senator had been fighting to keep undesirable immigrants out of the United States by imposing a literacy test (the measure passed Congress but was vetoed by President Cleveland). Now he worried about the enemy within, fed by an alien ideology. Lodge, who dreaded class warfare, described Bryan's call to pit mass against class "as a mean cry." "Bryanism," he exhorted in a campaign speech, was an alien menace, an evil import from the people who had cursed France with the Terror and the guillotine. Bryan's plot to appropriate wealth, he declared, had been borrowed "from across the ocean ....The man who uses it is not fit to be trusted. It was the cry heard in Paris and resulted in the horrors of the Commune."22 Lodge was not just mouthing campaign rhetoric. He was truly worried about the fate of the Republic. One day during the campaign he visited New York to have lunch with Roosevelt and Owen Wister. The talk took a gloomy turn. How long would the American form of government endure? After a pause to con-sider, they agreed: about fifty years. This may seem surprisingly pessimistic. The three men were at the pinnacle of a seemingly secure, indeed dominant social class—the "Wasp Ascendancy," as another Porcellian man, Joseph Alsop, Roosevelt's great-nephew and a leading newspaper columnist of the Cold War era, would rather longingly look back upon it almost a century later. Yet the fear of Bryanism was real. Some in the upper crust made light of it: at a ball in Bar Harbor, the Maine resort of the very rich, a pageant featuring a man carrying a cross and sixteen debutantes wearing crowns of
thorns was performed to mock Bryan's famous speech. But Theodore Roosevelt worried that the lower classes would soon be responding to the cry of Aux barricades! "What a Witches Sabbath they did hold in Chicago!" he wrote Lodge after Bryan's speech at the Democratic convention in July. A week later he wrote Barrie, "Not since the Civil War has there been a Presidential election fraught with so much consequence to the country. The silver craze surpasses belief." Roosevelt saw the nation at the edge of a moral and social abyss. To his friend the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice he wrote, "If Bryan wins, we have before us some years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American Republic." Roosevelt went on to worry that the Americans were becoming "effete" and losing their "moral spring," and—worked up enough to indulge loopy racial theories of inherited characteristics — wondering why Germans, despite their martial history, made worse New York City policemen than the Irish. Writing Lodge, who was recovering from nervous and physical exhaustion on a small island near Nantucket, Roosevelt confessed that he was feeling "a little knocked up" by his work with the New York police. "Oh! How I do long for a chance to see you and to talk with you. I'd like to see a white man now and then." (Lodge struck the last sentence from the published correspondence.) The two friends reunited on the campaign trail, touring' upstate New York and making a pilgrimage to Canton, Ohio, where McKinley was campaigning from his front porch (so much more dignified, they felt, than Bryan's careening about at the back of a train).
and
A puppet government in Honolulu, installed by the sugar interests, was to turn the islands into an official American territory, but a treaty of annexation signed in 1897 lacked the required two-thirds vote in the Senate. Now, with Japan emerging as a Pacific naval power, Roosevelt was too impatient to wait for the politicians. He was looking for an excuse to take Hawaii. Furiously scribbling his note to Mahan, Roosevelt turned his attention to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Puerto Rico: "Until we definitely turn Spain out of those islands (and if I had my way that would be done tomorrow) we will always be menaced by trouble there."' He concluded, "I need not say that this letter must be strictly private ... to no one else excepting Lodge do I talk like this." Meanwhile he was working navy back channels to be ready for the hour when war would come. Every day he took the short walk from his office in the old State, War, and Navy Building, across Pennsylvania Avenue and one block up Seventeenth Street, to the Metropolitan Club. His stride was always brisk, hastened by the prospect of vigorous debate and his lunchtime favorite, double lamb chops. The men's club, a Victorian brick structure with high-ceilinged rooms and heavy, dark paneling, served as a kind of White House mess hall before there was such a thing. Founded during the Civil War by financial men who had come from Wall Street and Philadelphia to sell war bonds and wanted a proper city club, the Metropolitan was a government unto itself. Its members included cabinet members, diplomats, and senior military officers. Roosevelt, often in the company of Lodge, dined often with Mahan, the nervous, weedy-looking, recently retired captain who was by now regarded as the most
influential naval thinker in history. Roosevelt frequently helped Mahan spread his secular religion of navalism, the ideology that sea power is the key to global power. (In 1890, in a more consequential meeting than Roosevelt could possibly have realized, he had introduced Mahan to a Harvard friend, Baron Kaneko Ken-taro, whose translation of Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power on History would directly lead to the buildup of the Japanese Imperial Navy.) Roosevelt was not planning war on the back of an envelope; he had professional help. He was in close communication with Mahan's old base of operations, the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
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"The Maine Was Destroyed by Treachery," the Journal screamed. Promoting "the journalism that acts," Hearst offered a $50,000 reward "for the detection of the perpetrator of the Maine outrage" and found three senators and two congressmen willing to go to Havana as "Journal commissioners" aboard a Hearst yacht, the Anita. Hearst tried to hire some divers to inspect the wreck of the Maine, but they were turned away by Spanish authorities. The Journal instead printed a rumor: "War! Sure! Maine Destroyed by Spanish ... This Proved Absolutely by Discovery of the Torpedo Hole! "
In Washington an uneasy quiet prevailed. Silent crowds stood outside the White House and gathered in the lobby of the secretary of the navy's office, where a scale model of the Maine was dis-played, the tiny naval ensign on the fantail lowered to half mast. President McKinley told Senator Charles Fairbanks of Indiana, "I don't propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe." Long, who had been awakened at 1:00 a.m. on the morning of February 16 by a messenger bearing news of the Maine, complained in his journal of losing a night's sleep, tentatively concluding: "My own judgment is, so far any information has been received, that it was the result of an accident."' Roosevelt took the contrary view. "Assistant Secretary Roosevelt Convinced the Explosion of the Warship Maine Was Not an Accident" read the headline just below the banner in the, February 17 Journal. There was no elaboration in the article.
Roosevelt was very anxious that the sinking of the Maine not go down as an accident. He had good reason to believe in fact the Maine had been destroyed because of a design flaw - and a powerful motive to cover up any such finding, not just because he wanted war with Spain, but because he feared a backlash against the navy's backbone, the modern battleship.
By coincidence, he had before him on his desk that day a letter from Lieutenant Commander Richard Wainwright officer aboard the Maine. The letter suggested that the secretary of the navy appoint a board of officers to look at the precautionary measures taken by the navies of England, France, Germany, and Italy—to insulate magazines from incendiary heat, including the heat produced by fire in a coal bunker. Roosevelt was well aware of the pattern of coal fires in other battleships.
Some senators were fretting that the modern battleship was inherently vulnerable to disaster.
Roosevelt thought a moratorium on the building of battleships was "the last pitch of cowardice and baseness"
and
One Oklahoma trooper recalled that the men were suspicious. Roosevelt was said to be a rich cop from New York- worse he wore glasses- but Roosevelt had heard it all before. In the Dakota territory he had been mocked as "four eyes" and for shouting "Come hither!" to ranch hands.
and
Aboard the Brooklyn, Associated Press correspondent George Graham watched with appalled awe as the Spanish fleet—the flagship Infanta Maria Teresa, followed by the battleships Vizcaya, Cristobal Colon, and Almirante Oquendo and the destroyers Pluton and Furor— emerged from the harbor channel by Morro Castle at roughly ten-minute intervals. The parade was at once solemn and gaudy. While the American warships had been daubed in dull gray, the hulls of the Spanish warships were painted glossy black, the superstructures buff white. The brightwork was varnished and painted, and gold figureheads were freshly gilded. Enormous silk battle flags streamed boldly. Brightly colored awnings shaded the decks as if for a garden party, and the men stood at attention on the yardarms.14 Aboard the USS Texas, Captain Jack Philip marveled at the ships sailing out to their doom "as gaily as brides to the altar." Then he gave the order to open fire. The heavily varnished paneling in Admiral Cervera's state-room quickly ignited when the American salvos began crashing in. On the bridge the stoical Captain Concas recalled "shells were bursting all around us." He fell, badly wounded, along with two aides — the only men still alive outside the armored conning
tower. The Maria Teresa began to belch black smoke. Slowly the burning vessel turned toward shore and made for a small cove, where she beached before she could sink. Rocked by explosions, theVizc, gya also ground onto a sandbar. The men on the Texas cheering, but Philip called out, "Don't cheer, boys, the poor devils are dying." One by one the ships of His Imperial Majesty were burned, sunk, grounded, scuttled.
and finally....
the little boy who had worshipped the glo_ rious victims of the Civil War was born again. "I have always been unhappy, most unhappy, that I was not severely wounded in Cuba in some striking and disfiguring way," he declared in his old age. He abhorred weakness, in himself or anyone else, In 1912, as he was on his way to give a speech, Roosevelt was shot in the chest at point-blank range by a madman. The bullet's impact was diffused by Roosevelt's glasses case and the pages of the speech he was holding, but it left a dime-size hole in his rib cage. Roosevelt insisted on giving the speech nonetheless, and talked for over an hour, his teeth gritted, his face whitening as the bloodstain on his shirt spread. Roosevelt craved dangerous adventure in an almost pathological way. On a recklessly daring expedition into the Amazon jungle in 1913 he cut his leg, and the wound became infected. Delirious at times, he asked to be left to die, and agreed to come along only when his son Kermit refused to leave him behind. With the advent of World War I, Roosevelt ranted that President Wilson was a coward for trying to keep the country out of war, and he attacked pacifists as less than men while demanding their persecution." Though overweight and increasingly infirm, he proposed to Wilson that he be given command of a division to fight in France. Not wanting to make Roosevelt either a hero or a martyr, Wilson declined. "I don't understand," Roosevelt complained to Wilson's aide, Colonel E. M. House. "After all, I'm only asking to die." House, who was fed up with Roosevelt by this time, paused and replied, "Oh? Did you make that point quite clear to the President?"" Roosevelt felt blessed to be able to send his sons to war. He would rather have his own children "die than have them grow up weaklings," he once said. He need not have worried. The boys all saw combat, which in the Great War was vaster and grimmer than anything Roosevelt witnessed in Cuba. Archie recalled the sensation of shooting a German and then, in a rage, stomping on his face, staining his boot with blood up to the ankle. He felt, he later wrote, like a creature "of the Stone Age." When Archie was wounded by a German artillery barrage, there were toasts all around at Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt wrote Archie that "Mother, her eyes shining and her cheeks flushed... dashed her glass to the floor." The rest followed suit. Outsiders would have found this celebration perverse, and even Roosevelt's friends might have
Monday, August 31, 2015
Japan from The Dark Valley
It is significant that, in addition to attacking Jews in Britain, Mosley himself tried to stir up national hostility against the Japanese. His Fascist Week was full of head-lines such as "THE REALITY OF THE YELLOW PERIL." It insisted that Nippon's commercial rivalry was Britain's gravest economic problem and called for an "embargo on Japanese goods." "Japan is the cuckoo among nations," it shrilled, "Japan is the modern pirate."' Certainly Japan, the newest industrial nation, was catching up with Britain, the oldest, at an extraordinary rate between the wars. The Land of the Rising Sun actually seemed capable of eclipsing the empire on which the sun never set. But the Far Eastern colossus was to be seriously hurt by the Depression. Accordingly Japan became the first major power during the 1930s to export its aggression.
ACCORDING to the Japanese maxim, which might stand as an epigraph for the nation's history in the aftermath of the 1929 Slump, "internal dis-order leads to external troubles."' Despite amazing economic progress, which had enabled Japan to survive hard times following the Yokohama earthquake, the country still had a much lower standard of living than industrial pioneers such as Britain. The salary of a senior army general was less than 500 pounds a year, while a tenth of greater Tokyo's 5 million inhabitants existed on as little as 7 yen a month (14 shillings or 3.50 dollars). In the villages, where nearly half of Japan's 64 million people lived, peasants barely managed to subsist on the tiny plots which they tended, as Kipling had observed, with "comb and toothpick." Actually, though it possessed the smallest arable acreage per head of any country in the world, Japan had the most productive agriculture. And from 1927 to 193o rice harvests were unusually abundant. But this bounty of nature caused a disastrous drop in the price of "the king of grains." Thus the Japanese, possessing few raw materials and reliant on international trade, were sha-tered by the Depression. Nowhere else did the economic crisis implode more viciously or explode more rapidly. It pervaded the life of the country and warped the psyche of its inhabitants. It emphasised the poverty and fragility of their existence in a land so bereft of raw materials, so reliant on foreign trade. The slump in agricultural prices was catastrophic. Farming families, whose average annual income was only 300 yen, found that their rice fetched a third less in 1930 than it had in 1929. They could not even cover their costs, let alone reward themselves adequately for back-breaking toil knee-deep in the paddy-fields. Worse still, owing to the increasing popularity of rayon as well as to the collapse of the American market, the price of their other main cash crop, the "God-sent merchandise"5 of raw silk, fell by more than half. This devastated the rural economy, making it hardly worthwhile for farmers to remain in the arduous service of "the hon-ourable little gentleman," as the silkworm was styled. Not since the turn of the century had they received so little for their harvests. Now, with higher rents and debts to usurious money-lenders of some boo yen per rural household, • they could barely support their families. In some areas money virtually disappeared and farmers lived by barter—two quarts of rice for a packet of Shikishima cigarettes. The situation was made worse by a population explosion resulting in four births a minute—nearly a million new mouths to feed each year. As the contemporary cliche ran, Japan combined "an Oriental birth rate with an Occidental death rate."' For nationalistic rather than moral reasons, the authorities opposed birth control. When the American campaigner Margaret Sanger visited Japan in 1922, her literature was confiscated and she was forbidden to lecture. Later one of her Japanese followers was stabbed. But when the Depression struck, "the masses were driven into becoming a huge laboratory for contraception by necessity." As one maga-zine charmingly put it, "Groping in the dark, sometimes in violation of official regulations, they learned various devices. " The device which Japanese men liked least was the condom, which one later compared to putting on Wellington boots in order to take a bath.
An ascetic who drank no sake, the hollow-cheeked, handlebar-moustached, colourfully be-ribboned General Araki also condemned the evils of capitalism and its parasitic beneficiaries. He spoke with vatic fervour about the need for spiritual strength. He even believed that earthquakes were good for Japan, bolstering the character of its people, encouraging self-denial and teaching indifference to material possessions. Attaching significance to the fact that he had been born under the sign of the Tiger, Araki drew little sketches of tigers and presented them to visitors as sou-venirs. They were impressed. No one articulated faith in Japan's "holy mis-sion in the world" with greater "religious intensity." No one preached Japanese imperialism more volubly—or more bombastically. It was his ultimate aim, Araki declared, to instill into the nation the soul of a soldier. Even the thin blood of the aged Saionji, who regarded such hopes as Utopian, was stirred by Araki's tumultuous eloquence. The General kept young officers in a state of "constant ferment."76 By giving them their heads he sabotaged Inukai's efforts to enforce civilian rule. Declaring that "the true spirit of our nation has been quickened to life through the Manchurian crisis,"77 Araki also permitted an almost uncontrollable expansion of the Japanese war in China, which subsequently brought on a nervous breakdown and retrospective regrets. "I didn't want to do the things that are being done in North China," he said in 1936, but "the situation . . . was already there . . . it is like telling someone not to get involved with a certain woman. There is nothing you can do about it . . . if the woman is pregnant." Fatalism combined with activism is one of the most bewildering Japa-nese characteristics. Like many of his countrymen, Araki saw himself as a pawn of fate. As much as any Surrealist he believed in the certainty of chance. He willingly swayed with the "tide of events" (taisei), displaying a "voluptuous contentment in being buffeted by the great forces beyond his control." Yet in prophetic vein he himself juggled with cosmic forces. He declared that:
We cannot let things drift any longer. We are the leading Asiatic power and we should now take matters into our own hands. We must be active, ever expending the last portion of our national strength. We must be pre-pared to wage a desperate struggle. The Whites have made the countries of Asia mere objects of oppression and imperial Japan should no longer let their impudence go unpunished.
Like Ishiwara, Araki saw the Manchurian Incident as a prelude to global war (though his prime target was Russia) and he approved the army's northward push: Chinchow was taken early in January 1932 and Harbin a month later. Araki also endorsed the Kwantung Army's plans for the con-quered territory as adumbrated by Itagaki in a lecture to Hirohito's advis-ers at the Imperial Palace on II January. As Marquis Kido recorded, "Col. Itagaki gave hints that Manchuria would be placed under a new ruler, and that the Japanese army would take charge of a national defense of the new Manchurian state."" To disguise these intentions and to retaliate against damaging Chinese boycotts of Japanese goods, the armed services, again with Araki's blessing, took the momentous step of extending the war southwards. They used as a base their enclave in the great international entrep8t of Shanghai, where even the clanging tramcars were plastered with slogans like "Overthrow Japanese Imperialism" and "Sever Economic Relations with Japan."
CHINA'S commercial gateway, its largest manufacturing centre and its most populous urban area, Shanghai was the most cosmopolitan city in the world. A magnet for emigres of every race and "a thicket of spy agen-cies,"82 its International Settlement (plus the separate French Concession) profited enormously from extra-territorial administration, favourable tax rates and peace—nationals whose countries were at war suspended hostili-ties in Shanghai. Here, close to the vast mouth of the yellow Yangtse and guarded by the guns of grey warships flying the flags of many nations, flourished a strange, polyglot, quasi-colonial community. The highest buildings in Asia, monuments to the dominion of the taipan, were secured on their concrete rafts embedded in the silty Bund. Surveyors regularly checked the foundations of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank's skyscraper in case it sank under the weight of silver in its vaults. Palatial cinemas proliferated, showing films in English, French, Italian and Japanese. So did garish nightclubs, frothy soda fountains, drab mission halls, gay amusement parks with miniature golf courses, neon-lit department stores like Sun Sun's and more automobiles than in all the other Chinese cities combined. Like a phosphorescent tide, the native world lapped against this foreign bastion, though Chinese were banned from its parks. The Chinese city was a warren of wooden sweatshops, teeming bazaars, dilapidated godowns and smoke-belching factories. Its sordid slums pullulated with traders, mendicants, gamblers, gangsters, drug addicts, slave children and coolies. According to a contemporary estimate Shanghai contained more prostitutes per head of population than any other city on earth: one in 130, com-pared to one in 250 for Tokyo, one in 481 for Paris, one in 580 for Berlin and one in 96o for London. There were 1,500 opium dens and the crime rate was twelve times higher than that of Chicago: visiting policemen from the Windy City begged to be allowed to "go home:13 Shanghai even possessed a leper colony. In the sultry air (and near land fertilised by human manure distributed by the municipal (`honey carts") disease was as rife as famine. Each year nearly 30,000 corpses were picked up from the streets and one "Shanghailander" newspaper urged that the police should sweep them clean of deformed beggars, whom it called "this refuse". Such a simmering cauldron was easily brought to the boil. In January 1932 the Japanese had no difficulty in provoking a murderous affray as a pretext for military aggression, especially after a Chinese paper had deplored the recent failure of an assassination attempt (by a Korean nationalist) on Hirohito—which the Japanese themselves described, in a classic periphrasis, as "the Emperor Disrespect Incident." Eager for the navy to steal some of the army's thunder, Admiral Shiozawa Koichi deployed 2,000 blue-jacketed, white-putteed marines equipped with rifles, machine-guns, light artillery and armoured cars. Late on the moonless night of z8 January 1932, under the lurid glow of flares, they attacked the heavily-populated Chapel district, just north of the International Settlement. They were backed by detachments of "reservists" who subjected civilians to appalling atrocities, looting, raping, burning and murdering at will. The next day carrier-borne aircraft bombed the area, smashing the flimsy structures to atoms and causing fierce conflagra-tions, with flames leaping 100 feet into the air. Seaplanes flew so low to strafe the inhabitants that it was possible to see the faces of the pilots who, in martial Japanese fashion, were supplied with swords and pistols but not parachutes. From the safety of the International Settlement Westerners drove their Buicks to photograph the charred ruins and to view dead bodies being torn apart by snarling dogs. Meanwhile a "brown wave" of refugees fled with their possessions piled into trams, cars, carts, rickshaws and wheelbarrows." Old men shuffled by, clutching bamboo birdcages. Young women hobbled on tightly-bound feet tugging children quilted against the cold. By contrast the Communist-trained Chinese 19th Route Army, thought to be a rabble in pagoda-shaped straw hats, rubber-soled canvas shoes and grey cotton uniforms (the insignia fastened to their shoulders with safety pins), stood firm. After prolonged combat they even managed to counter-attack. So, having grievously lost face, the Japanese navy had to call in the army. But even when attacked by thousands of steel-helmeted troops equipped with tanks and howitzers and protected against the snow by olive-drab woollen overcoats, the Chinese fought on tenaciously. Their snipers, hiding in buildings and bamboo thickets behind the Japanese lines, were particularly effective. One nearly managed to kill General Ueda Kenkichi in his field headquarters, shooting a hole just above the red band in his hat. He was most upset, complaining to the American journalist Edgar Snow: "The Chinese have no sense of honour or what is proper in warfare. Sniping is outlawed by most civilized coun-tries.' When the pressure got too much for them the Chinese managed to retreat in good order, whereupon the Japanese claimed victory. So, in May, after protests from the League of Nations and the United States and complex negotiations, an armistice was signed and peace came once more to Shanghai. However, as a result of the fighting (particularly the bombing of civilians—the first major instance in history), public opinion in Europe and America moved decisively against Japan. But governments, hag-ridden by the Depression, which Henry Stimson described as "an emer-gency like war," were still cautious about reacting in a way that might lead to real conflict. Thus the economic crisis not only prompted Japanese aggression, but also inhibited the great powers from doing anything about it. Britain's position was particularly weak, considering its vast interests in the East. As Neville Chamberlain wrote, "If we got into a real quarrel with Japan she could blow our ships out of the water one by one as they tried to get out of the Whangpoo.
Hymans' words about the League's continuing to work to "ensure the peace of the world" rang hollow.' Coming on top of its unsuccessful attempts to secure disarmament and alleviate the Depression, the League's failure to restrain Japan was disastrous. It fatally undermined the principle of collective security and gave international sanction to the policy of appeasement. At a time when all members of the League were punch-drunk from the economic crisis, when Roosevelt was about to launch the New Deal, when Hitler was poised to create a totalitarian state, when Stalin was striding through blood to make a brave new world, it was understandable that the great powers should avert their gaze from Japan's aggression. But by resorting to non-recognition and relying
on moral condemnation the League demonstrated that it was not pre-pared to enforce its will. The tragedy of the 1930s was that supporters of the League's ideals took so long to realise that peace could only be defended by war. For Japan quitting the League was a fateful step into the valley of shadows. Matsuoka himself seemed to have some inkling of this. For he had warned the Assembly not to adopt the report, which would lead inevitably to Japan's exit, because a disintegrating China and a menacing R already threatened the peace of the world; so "we look into the gloom of the future and can see no certain gleam of light before us." Now Matsuoka's country had been solemnly arraigned before the bar of the world as an international criminal. Nippon was bitterly scornful that the League had been unable to exact punishment and supremely confident that, after pausing to digest Manchuria, it could pursue its expansionist course unscathed. But pariahdom also provoked paranoia. Japan felt persecuted and indulged in messianic passions. Militarists took stricter control of the country's destiny despite their gross ignorance of the outside world, their internecine factionalism and their hysterical bellicosity—in 1933 the Deputy Foreign Minister lamented, "The Army seems determined to attack Russia in 1935, and the Navy the United States in 1936."136 National-ists brandished ever more fiercely "the Sun Flag of the Land of the Rising Sun" which would, according to Kita Ikki, "light the darkness of the entire world. "137 Isolation bred intransigence.
ACCORDING to the Japanese maxim, which might stand as an epigraph for the nation's history in the aftermath of the 1929 Slump, "internal dis-order leads to external troubles."' Despite amazing economic progress, which had enabled Japan to survive hard times following the Yokohama earthquake, the country still had a much lower standard of living than industrial pioneers such as Britain. The salary of a senior army general was less than 500 pounds a year, while a tenth of greater Tokyo's 5 million inhabitants existed on as little as 7 yen a month (14 shillings or 3.50 dollars). In the villages, where nearly half of Japan's 64 million people lived, peasants barely managed to subsist on the tiny plots which they tended, as Kipling had observed, with "comb and toothpick." Actually, though it possessed the smallest arable acreage per head of any country in the world, Japan had the most productive agriculture. And from 1927 to 193o rice harvests were unusually abundant. But this bounty of nature caused a disastrous drop in the price of "the king of grains." Thus the Japanese, possessing few raw materials and reliant on international trade, were sha-tered by the Depression. Nowhere else did the economic crisis implode more viciously or explode more rapidly. It pervaded the life of the country and warped the psyche of its inhabitants. It emphasised the poverty and fragility of their existence in a land so bereft of raw materials, so reliant on foreign trade. The slump in agricultural prices was catastrophic. Farming families, whose average annual income was only 300 yen, found that their rice fetched a third less in 1930 than it had in 1929. They could not even cover their costs, let alone reward themselves adequately for back-breaking toil knee-deep in the paddy-fields. Worse still, owing to the increasing popularity of rayon as well as to the collapse of the American market, the price of their other main cash crop, the "God-sent merchandise"5 of raw silk, fell by more than half. This devastated the rural economy, making it hardly worthwhile for farmers to remain in the arduous service of "the hon-ourable little gentleman," as the silkworm was styled. Not since the turn of the century had they received so little for their harvests. Now, with higher rents and debts to usurious money-lenders of some boo yen per rural household, • they could barely support their families. In some areas money virtually disappeared and farmers lived by barter—two quarts of rice for a packet of Shikishima cigarettes. The situation was made worse by a population explosion resulting in four births a minute—nearly a million new mouths to feed each year. As the contemporary cliche ran, Japan combined "an Oriental birth rate with an Occidental death rate."' For nationalistic rather than moral reasons, the authorities opposed birth control. When the American campaigner Margaret Sanger visited Japan in 1922, her literature was confiscated and she was forbidden to lecture. Later one of her Japanese followers was stabbed. But when the Depression struck, "the masses were driven into becoming a huge laboratory for contraception by necessity." As one maga-zine charmingly put it, "Groping in the dark, sometimes in violation of official regulations, they learned various devices. " The device which Japanese men liked least was the condom, which one later compared to putting on Wellington boots in order to take a bath.
An ascetic who drank no sake, the hollow-cheeked, handlebar-moustached, colourfully be-ribboned General Araki also condemned the evils of capitalism and its parasitic beneficiaries. He spoke with vatic fervour about the need for spiritual strength. He even believed that earthquakes were good for Japan, bolstering the character of its people, encouraging self-denial and teaching indifference to material possessions. Attaching significance to the fact that he had been born under the sign of the Tiger, Araki drew little sketches of tigers and presented them to visitors as sou-venirs. They were impressed. No one articulated faith in Japan's "holy mis-sion in the world" with greater "religious intensity." No one preached Japanese imperialism more volubly—or more bombastically. It was his ultimate aim, Araki declared, to instill into the nation the soul of a soldier. Even the thin blood of the aged Saionji, who regarded such hopes as Utopian, was stirred by Araki's tumultuous eloquence. The General kept young officers in a state of "constant ferment."76 By giving them their heads he sabotaged Inukai's efforts to enforce civilian rule. Declaring that "the true spirit of our nation has been quickened to life through the Manchurian crisis,"77 Araki also permitted an almost uncontrollable expansion of the Japanese war in China, which subsequently brought on a nervous breakdown and retrospective regrets. "I didn't want to do the things that are being done in North China," he said in 1936, but "the situation . . . was already there . . . it is like telling someone not to get involved with a certain woman. There is nothing you can do about it . . . if the woman is pregnant." Fatalism combined with activism is one of the most bewildering Japa-nese characteristics. Like many of his countrymen, Araki saw himself as a pawn of fate. As much as any Surrealist he believed in the certainty of chance. He willingly swayed with the "tide of events" (taisei), displaying a "voluptuous contentment in being buffeted by the great forces beyond his control." Yet in prophetic vein he himself juggled with cosmic forces. He declared that:
We cannot let things drift any longer. We are the leading Asiatic power and we should now take matters into our own hands. We must be active, ever expending the last portion of our national strength. We must be pre-pared to wage a desperate struggle. The Whites have made the countries of Asia mere objects of oppression and imperial Japan should no longer let their impudence go unpunished.
Like Ishiwara, Araki saw the Manchurian Incident as a prelude to global war (though his prime target was Russia) and he approved the army's northward push: Chinchow was taken early in January 1932 and Harbin a month later. Araki also endorsed the Kwantung Army's plans for the con-quered territory as adumbrated by Itagaki in a lecture to Hirohito's advis-ers at the Imperial Palace on II January. As Marquis Kido recorded, "Col. Itagaki gave hints that Manchuria would be placed under a new ruler, and that the Japanese army would take charge of a national defense of the new Manchurian state."" To disguise these intentions and to retaliate against damaging Chinese boycotts of Japanese goods, the armed services, again with Araki's blessing, took the momentous step of extending the war southwards. They used as a base their enclave in the great international entrep8t of Shanghai, where even the clanging tramcars were plastered with slogans like "Overthrow Japanese Imperialism" and "Sever Economic Relations with Japan."
CHINA'S commercial gateway, its largest manufacturing centre and its most populous urban area, Shanghai was the most cosmopolitan city in the world. A magnet for emigres of every race and "a thicket of spy agen-cies,"82 its International Settlement (plus the separate French Concession) profited enormously from extra-territorial administration, favourable tax rates and peace—nationals whose countries were at war suspended hostili-ties in Shanghai. Here, close to the vast mouth of the yellow Yangtse and guarded by the guns of grey warships flying the flags of many nations, flourished a strange, polyglot, quasi-colonial community. The highest buildings in Asia, monuments to the dominion of the taipan, were secured on their concrete rafts embedded in the silty Bund. Surveyors regularly checked the foundations of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank's skyscraper in case it sank under the weight of silver in its vaults. Palatial cinemas proliferated, showing films in English, French, Italian and Japanese. So did garish nightclubs, frothy soda fountains, drab mission halls, gay amusement parks with miniature golf courses, neon-lit department stores like Sun Sun's and more automobiles than in all the other Chinese cities combined. Like a phosphorescent tide, the native world lapped against this foreign bastion, though Chinese were banned from its parks. The Chinese city was a warren of wooden sweatshops, teeming bazaars, dilapidated godowns and smoke-belching factories. Its sordid slums pullulated with traders, mendicants, gamblers, gangsters, drug addicts, slave children and coolies. According to a contemporary estimate Shanghai contained more prostitutes per head of population than any other city on earth: one in 130, com-pared to one in 250 for Tokyo, one in 481 for Paris, one in 580 for Berlin and one in 96o for London. There were 1,500 opium dens and the crime rate was twelve times higher than that of Chicago: visiting policemen from the Windy City begged to be allowed to "go home:13 Shanghai even possessed a leper colony. In the sultry air (and near land fertilised by human manure distributed by the municipal (`honey carts") disease was as rife as famine. Each year nearly 30,000 corpses were picked up from the streets and one "Shanghailander" newspaper urged that the police should sweep them clean of deformed beggars, whom it called "this refuse". Such a simmering cauldron was easily brought to the boil. In January 1932 the Japanese had no difficulty in provoking a murderous affray as a pretext for military aggression, especially after a Chinese paper had deplored the recent failure of an assassination attempt (by a Korean nationalist) on Hirohito—which the Japanese themselves described, in a classic periphrasis, as "the Emperor Disrespect Incident." Eager for the navy to steal some of the army's thunder, Admiral Shiozawa Koichi deployed 2,000 blue-jacketed, white-putteed marines equipped with rifles, machine-guns, light artillery and armoured cars. Late on the moonless night of z8 January 1932, under the lurid glow of flares, they attacked the heavily-populated Chapel district, just north of the International Settlement. They were backed by detachments of "reservists" who subjected civilians to appalling atrocities, looting, raping, burning and murdering at will. The next day carrier-borne aircraft bombed the area, smashing the flimsy structures to atoms and causing fierce conflagra-tions, with flames leaping 100 feet into the air. Seaplanes flew so low to strafe the inhabitants that it was possible to see the faces of the pilots who, in martial Japanese fashion, were supplied with swords and pistols but not parachutes. From the safety of the International Settlement Westerners drove their Buicks to photograph the charred ruins and to view dead bodies being torn apart by snarling dogs. Meanwhile a "brown wave" of refugees fled with their possessions piled into trams, cars, carts, rickshaws and wheelbarrows." Old men shuffled by, clutching bamboo birdcages. Young women hobbled on tightly-bound feet tugging children quilted against the cold. By contrast the Communist-trained Chinese 19th Route Army, thought to be a rabble in pagoda-shaped straw hats, rubber-soled canvas shoes and grey cotton uniforms (the insignia fastened to their shoulders with safety pins), stood firm. After prolonged combat they even managed to counter-attack. So, having grievously lost face, the Japanese navy had to call in the army. But even when attacked by thousands of steel-helmeted troops equipped with tanks and howitzers and protected against the snow by olive-drab woollen overcoats, the Chinese fought on tenaciously. Their snipers, hiding in buildings and bamboo thickets behind the Japanese lines, were particularly effective. One nearly managed to kill General Ueda Kenkichi in his field headquarters, shooting a hole just above the red band in his hat. He was most upset, complaining to the American journalist Edgar Snow: "The Chinese have no sense of honour or what is proper in warfare. Sniping is outlawed by most civilized coun-tries.' When the pressure got too much for them the Chinese managed to retreat in good order, whereupon the Japanese claimed victory. So, in May, after protests from the League of Nations and the United States and complex negotiations, an armistice was signed and peace came once more to Shanghai. However, as a result of the fighting (particularly the bombing of civilians—the first major instance in history), public opinion in Europe and America moved decisively against Japan. But governments, hag-ridden by the Depression, which Henry Stimson described as "an emer-gency like war," were still cautious about reacting in a way that might lead to real conflict. Thus the economic crisis not only prompted Japanese aggression, but also inhibited the great powers from doing anything about it. Britain's position was particularly weak, considering its vast interests in the East. As Neville Chamberlain wrote, "If we got into a real quarrel with Japan she could blow our ships out of the water one by one as they tried to get out of the Whangpoo.
Hymans' words about the League's continuing to work to "ensure the peace of the world" rang hollow.' Coming on top of its unsuccessful attempts to secure disarmament and alleviate the Depression, the League's failure to restrain Japan was disastrous. It fatally undermined the principle of collective security and gave international sanction to the policy of appeasement. At a time when all members of the League were punch-drunk from the economic crisis, when Roosevelt was about to launch the New Deal, when Hitler was poised to create a totalitarian state, when Stalin was striding through blood to make a brave new world, it was understandable that the great powers should avert their gaze from Japan's aggression. But by resorting to non-recognition and relying
on moral condemnation the League demonstrated that it was not pre-pared to enforce its will. The tragedy of the 1930s was that supporters of the League's ideals took so long to realise that peace could only be defended by war. For Japan quitting the League was a fateful step into the valley of shadows. Matsuoka himself seemed to have some inkling of this. For he had warned the Assembly not to adopt the report, which would lead inevitably to Japan's exit, because a disintegrating China and a menacing R already threatened the peace of the world; so "we look into the gloom of the future and can see no certain gleam of light before us." Now Matsuoka's country had been solemnly arraigned before the bar of the world as an international criminal. Nippon was bitterly scornful that the League had been unable to exact punishment and supremely confident that, after pausing to digest Manchuria, it could pursue its expansionist course unscathed. But pariahdom also provoked paranoia. Japan felt persecuted and indulged in messianic passions. Militarists took stricter control of the country's destiny despite their gross ignorance of the outside world, their internecine factionalism and their hysterical bellicosity—in 1933 the Deputy Foreign Minister lamented, "The Army seems determined to attack Russia in 1935, and the Navy the United States in 1936."136 National-ists brandished ever more fiercely "the Sun Flag of the Land of the Rising Sun" which would, according to Kita Ikki, "light the darkness of the entire world. "137 Isolation bred intransigence.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Ford Madox Ford
From It Was the Nightingale
I will make a personal confession. . . . It has been my fate to be mistaken for—or to be told that I resem-bled—three men that I particularly disliked resembling. . .. Whenever I have gone to public literary assemblies I have inevitably heard two or three people say: "Here's Gosse!" And two or three others would whisper: "Isn't that man like Oscar Wilde!" That I could just stomach though I should much have disliked to meet the fate of either of those writers. But when the late John Quin, the collector, said to me on our first meeting in Ezra's studio in the rue Notre Dame de Champs: "Hullo, George Moore, how well you are looking!" I had hard work to refrain from knocking him down. I think I should have knocked him down if he had not had the sense to see that I looked well . . . for George Moore! I had so often been taken for Mr. Moore or told that I resembled him that, by that time; it had be-come an obsession. There was nothing of that sort attaching to John Galsworthy. When you thought of him you thought of green fields in the cool, calm, bright weather of George Herbert. He had a sort of Greek aura as of perfect physical motion accompanying measured speculations in a halcyon atmosphere of eternal youth. . . . I at least have never got over the feeling that he was, as Conrad called him, "young Jack" and I cannot bring myself really to believe that he ever had any perturba-tions of the spirit though actually I have known him have—and indeed I have accompanied him through, some dark periods. And even at this moment I cannot
think of him as other than the Fortunate Youth—happy at once in the lines on which his life was laid and in the occasion of his death. For it is no sorrow to die amidst the still resounding acclamations of a whole planet—and in the same week as George Moore. You may have the feeling that however Fate may deal here-after with your name you are at least one of twin pillars that were the terminal stones—the portals of an age. I was some years younger than Galsworthy but he did not publish his first book until six years after I had published mine. In consequence, he being always unob-trusive and I overbearing, I got very early into the habit of considering him, and of treating him, as a much younger man. So that, when I read of his death it was almost as if I had lost a younger brother in the flower of his age. I first saw him in a sporting club. They told of him there a curious anecdote; the fame of it hung over him like a curious legend so that, though I was not introduced to him for several years, I was accustomed to speculate as to what sort of a fellow he could be. In those days he was the young man about town—at any rate to all appearances. He had eaten his dinners at the Middle Temple, which every young man of good position then had to do, so that he was an unpracticing barrister. He was moderate in everything, sedulous in the effort to pass unnoticed in the best places where young men about town shew themselves. He had a little bachelor establishment; kept a small stable; drank very moderately and dressed with the careful negligence that was then required of you. So he always appeared to be in harmony with his surroundings.
I will make a personal confession. . . . It has been my fate to be mistaken for—or to be told that I resem-bled—three men that I particularly disliked resembling. . .. Whenever I have gone to public literary assemblies I have inevitably heard two or three people say: "Here's Gosse!" And two or three others would whisper: "Isn't that man like Oscar Wilde!" That I could just stomach though I should much have disliked to meet the fate of either of those writers. But when the late John Quin, the collector, said to me on our first meeting in Ezra's studio in the rue Notre Dame de Champs: "Hullo, George Moore, how well you are looking!" I had hard work to refrain from knocking him down. I think I should have knocked him down if he had not had the sense to see that I looked well . . . for George Moore! I had so often been taken for Mr. Moore or told that I resembled him that, by that time; it had be-come an obsession. There was nothing of that sort attaching to John Galsworthy. When you thought of him you thought of green fields in the cool, calm, bright weather of George Herbert. He had a sort of Greek aura as of perfect physical motion accompanying measured speculations in a halcyon atmosphere of eternal youth. . . . I at least have never got over the feeling that he was, as Conrad called him, "young Jack" and I cannot bring myself really to believe that he ever had any perturba-tions of the spirit though actually I have known him have—and indeed I have accompanied him through, some dark periods. And even at this moment I cannot
think of him as other than the Fortunate Youth—happy at once in the lines on which his life was laid and in the occasion of his death. For it is no sorrow to die amidst the still resounding acclamations of a whole planet—and in the same week as George Moore. You may have the feeling that however Fate may deal here-after with your name you are at least one of twin pillars that were the terminal stones—the portals of an age. I was some years younger than Galsworthy but he did not publish his first book until six years after I had published mine. In consequence, he being always unob-trusive and I overbearing, I got very early into the habit of considering him, and of treating him, as a much younger man. So that, when I read of his death it was almost as if I had lost a younger brother in the flower of his age. I first saw him in a sporting club. They told of him there a curious anecdote; the fame of it hung over him like a curious legend so that, though I was not introduced to him for several years, I was accustomed to speculate as to what sort of a fellow he could be. In those days he was the young man about town—at any rate to all appearances. He had eaten his dinners at the Middle Temple, which every young man of good position then had to do, so that he was an unpracticing barrister. He was moderate in everything, sedulous in the effort to pass unnoticed in the best places where young men about town shew themselves. He had a little bachelor establishment; kept a small stable; drank very moderately and dressed with the careful negligence that was then required of you. So he always appeared to be in harmony with his surroundings.
The Ides of March
The usage and very structure of our language exhibits and inculcates the belief that we are passive in the presence of life. Bound committed helpless. Our language tells us that we are given such and such qualifications at birth. That there is a Great Giver who gave Clodia beauty, health, wealth, high birth, and conspicuous intelligence and to another slavery, disease, and stupidity. She has often heard it said that she was endowed with beauty (by what endower? ) and that an-other was cursed with a sharp tongue—did God curse? Even if we assume the existence of a God who, as Homer says, pours out from his urns his good and evil gifts, I am amazed at the pious who insult their God by failing to see that as this world is run there is a field of circumstance that is not commensurate with God's providence and that God must have so intended it. But to return to our Clodia: the Clodias under such a dispensation never receive enough; they are poisoned by resentment against this niggardly Giver who has only given them beauty, health, wealth, birth, and intelligence, who is holding back a million gifts, namely, perfect felicity in every moment of every day. There is no rapacity equal to that of the privileged who feel that their advantages have been conferred upon them by some Intelligence and no bitterness equal to that of the ill-conditioned who feel that they have been specifically passed over. Oh, my friend, my friend, what better thing could I do for Rome than to put the birds back into the world of birds, thunder back into the phenomena of the atmosphere and the Gods back into the memories of infancy?
and
Last night, my noble friend, I did something which I have not done for many years: I wrote an edict; reread it; and tore it up. I indulged an uncertainty. These last few days I have been receiving unprecedentedly absurd reports from the disembowelers of birds and the audi-tors on thunder. Moreover, the Courts and the Senate have been closed for two days because an eagle let fall an untidy mess within an arrow's flight of the Capitol. My patience was drawing short. I refused to perform myself the ceremonial of propitiation, to mime the frightened self-abasement. My wife and my very servants looked at me askance. Cicero deigned to advise me that I should comply with the expectations of popular superstition. Last night I sat down and wrote the edict abolishing the College of Augurs and declared that henceforward no days were to be regarded as unlucky. I wrote on, giving to my peo-ple the reasons for this action. When have I been happier? What pleasures are greater than those of honesty? I wrote on and the constellations glided before my window. I disbanded the College of Vestal Virgins; I married the daughters of our first houses and they gave sons and daughters to Rome. I closed the doors of the temples, of all our temples except those of Jupiter. I tumbled the gods back into the gulf of ignorance and fear from which they came and into that treacherous half-world where the fancy invents consolatory lies. And finally the moment came when I pushed aside what I had done and started to begin again with the announcement that Jupiter himself had never existed; that man was alone in a world in which no voices were heard than his own, a world neither friendly nor unfriendly save as he made it so. And having reread what I wrote I destroyed it. I destroyed it not for Cicero's reasons—not because the ab-sence of a state religion would drive superstition into clan-destine forms and still baser practices (that is already taking place) ; not because so sweeping a measure would disrupt the social order and leave the people in despair and dismay like sheep in a snowstorm. In certain orders of reform, the dis-locations caused by gradual change are almost as great as those caused by a total and drastic alteration. No, it was not the possible repercussions of the move which arrested my hand and will; it was something in and of my self. In myself I was not certain that I was certain. Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence and no mystery anywhere in the universe? I think I am. What joy, what relief there would be, if we could declare so with com-plete conviction. If that were so I could wish to live forever. How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, with-out guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives. You and I long since decided that the Gods do not exist. Do you remember the day that with finality we agreed upon that decision and resolved to explore all its consequences—sitting on the cliff in Crete, throwing pebbles into the sea, counting porpoises? We took a vow never to allow our minds to offer entrance to any doubt upon this matter. With what boyish lightheartedness we concluded that the soul was extinguished at death. [The English language cannot reproduce the force of this phrase in Caesar's Latin where the very cadence ex-presses a poignancy of renunciation and regret. The recipient of the letter understood that Caesar was referring to the death of his daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, the overwhelming loss of his life. Mamilius Turrinus was with him when the news of her death reached Caesar's headquarters in Brittany.] I thought I had not relapsed from all the strictness of these assertions. There is only one way, however, to know what one knows and that is to risk one's convictions in an act, to commit them in a responsibility. In drawing up the edict last night and in foreseeing the consequences that would ensue, I was driven to examine myself most strictly. All the conse-quences I would most gladly face, certain that the truth would ultimately fortify the world and all that are in it, but only if I were certain that I was certain. Some last hesitation arrests my hand. I must be certain that in no corner of my being there lingers the recognition that there is a possibility of a mind in and be-hind the universe which influences our minds and shapes our actions. If I acknowledge the possibility of one such mystery, all the other mysteries come flooding back: there are the Gods who have taught us what is excellent and who are watching us; there are our souls which are infused in us at birth and which outlive our death; there are the rewards and punish-ments which furnish a meaning to our slightest action. Yes, my friend, I am not accustomed to irresolution and I [
am irresolute. You know how little I am given to reflection; whatever judgments I arrive at I arrive at I know not how, but instantaneously; I am not adept at speculation, and since the age of sixteen I have regarded philosophy with impatience, as a tempting but fruitless exercise of the mind and as a flight from the obligations of immediate living. It seems to me that there are four realms in which, with dread, I see in my life and in the life about me, the possibility of this mystery: The erotic—have we not explained away too easily all that accompanies the fires that populate the world? Lucretius may be right and our jesting world wrong. I seem to have known all my life, but to have refused to acknowledge that all, all love is one, and that the very mind with which I ask these questions is awakened, sustained, and instructed only by love. Great poetry—poetry is indeed the principal channel by which all that most weakens man has entered the world; there he finds his facile consolations and the lies that reconcile him to ignorance and inertia; I count myself second to no man in my hatred of all poetry save the best—but great poetry, is that merely the topmost achievement of the man's powers or is that a voice from beyond man? Thirdly, a moment that accompanies my illness and whose intimation of greater knowledge and happiness I cannot hastily dismiss. [This sentence is evidence of the unbounded confidence that Caesar felt in his correspondent. Caesar never per-mitted any reference to be made to his attacks of epilepsy.] And finally, I cannot deny that at times I am aware that my life and my services to Rome seem to have been shaped by a power beyond myself. It may well be, my friend, that I am the most irresponsible of irresponsible men, capable long since of bringing upon Rome all the ills that a state can suffer, but for the fact that I was the instrument of a higher wisdom that selected me for my limitations and not for my strength. I do not reflect, and it may be that that instantaneous operation of my judgement is no other than the presence of the daimon within me, which is a stranger to me and which is the love which the gods bear to Rome and which my soldiers worship and the people pray to in the morning.
and
Clodia: "You taught me that the world has no mind. When I said that life was horrible you said no, that life was neither horrible nor beautiful. That living had no character at all and had no meaning. That the universe did not know that men were living in it."
and
Caesar: I sometimes think that it is the candor of their greed that pleases me; they do not pretend to love me for myself. I shall go so far as to say that I have occasionally been moved to pleasure when one or other of them lets fall an expression of his contempt for me—in that ocean of flattery in which I live and move. It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the per-son which others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say "thou slave." A dictator is believed to be nig-gardly of benefits, incalculable in displeasure, jealous of ca-pable men, athirst for flattery, and not ten but twenty times a day I feel myself drifting toward those qualities and must draw back sharply. And ten times a day, as I await the arrival of the Queen of Egypt, I find myself dreaming of the possi-bility that she, now grown a woman, can see that all that I can give to her and to her country I give outright; that she need not contrive to obtain it; that all the devices within her power cannot obtain what it is unsuitable to accord her; and that these things being understood, we may move in a realm that is . . . but I am drifting beyond the possible.
and
These last weeks, not my dream, but my waking state has been the contemplation of futility and the collapse of all belief. Oh, worse than that: my dead call to me in mockery from their grave clothes and generations still unborn cry out, asking to be spared the clownish parade of a mortal life. Yet even in my last bitterness I cannot disavow the memory of bliss. Life, life has this mystery that we dare not say the last word about it, that it is good or bad, that it is senseless, or that it is ordered. That all these things have been said of it is evidence only that all these things are in us. This "life" in which we move has no color and it gives no sign. As you once said: the universe is not aware that we are here. Let me then banish from my mind the childish thought that it is among my duties to find some last answer concerning the nature of life. Let me distrust all impulses within me to say at any moment that it is cruel or kind, for it is no less ignoble from a situation of misery to pronounce life evil than from one of happiness to call it good. Let me not be the dupe of well-being or content, but welcome all experience that re-minds me of the myriad cries of execration and of delight that have been wrung from men in every time. From whom better than from you could I have learnt this? Who ever so constantly invoked the extremest ranges of yea and nay—who, but Sophocles, known throughout his ninety years as the happiest man in Greece, and yet from whom no dark secrets were hid? Life has no meaning save that which we may confer upon it. It neither supports man nor humiliates him. Agony of mind and uttermost joy we cannot escape, but those states have, of themselves, nothing to say to us; those heavens and hells await the sense we give to them, as all living things awaited, incult and abashed, the names that Deucalion and Pyrrha pro-nounced over them. With this thought I dare at last to gather about me those blessed shades of my past whom hitherto I had thought of as victims of life's incoherence. I dare to ask that from my good Calpurnia a child may arise to say: On the Meaningless I choose to press a meaning and in the wastes of the Unknowable I choose to be known. The Rome upon which I have built my life does not exist in itself save as an agglomeration of structures larger or less large than another, of citizens more or less industrious than those of another city. Flood or folly, fire or madness may destroy it at any time. I thought myself to be attached to it by inheritance and upbringing, but such attachments have no more meaning than the beard that I shave from my face. I was called to its defense by the Senate and the Consuls; so Vercingetorix de-fended Gaul. No, Rome became a city for me only when I chose, as did many before me, to give it a sense and for me Rome can exist only in so far as I have shaped it to my idea. I now see that for years I childishly believed that I loved Rome and that it was my duty to love Rome because I was a Roman—as though it were possible or worthy of respect to love accumulations of stones and throngs of men and women. We are not in relationship to anything until we have en-wrapped it in a meaning, nor do we know for certainty what that meaning is until we have costingly labored to impress it upon the object.
and
Last night, my noble friend, I did something which I have not done for many years: I wrote an edict; reread it; and tore it up. I indulged an uncertainty. These last few days I have been receiving unprecedentedly absurd reports from the disembowelers of birds and the audi-tors on thunder. Moreover, the Courts and the Senate have been closed for two days because an eagle let fall an untidy mess within an arrow's flight of the Capitol. My patience was drawing short. I refused to perform myself the ceremonial of propitiation, to mime the frightened self-abasement. My wife and my very servants looked at me askance. Cicero deigned to advise me that I should comply with the expectations of popular superstition. Last night I sat down and wrote the edict abolishing the College of Augurs and declared that henceforward no days were to be regarded as unlucky. I wrote on, giving to my peo-ple the reasons for this action. When have I been happier? What pleasures are greater than those of honesty? I wrote on and the constellations glided before my window. I disbanded the College of Vestal Virgins; I married the daughters of our first houses and they gave sons and daughters to Rome. I closed the doors of the temples, of all our temples except those of Jupiter. I tumbled the gods back into the gulf of ignorance and fear from which they came and into that treacherous half-world where the fancy invents consolatory lies. And finally the moment came when I pushed aside what I had done and started to begin again with the announcement that Jupiter himself had never existed; that man was alone in a world in which no voices were heard than his own, a world neither friendly nor unfriendly save as he made it so. And having reread what I wrote I destroyed it. I destroyed it not for Cicero's reasons—not because the ab-sence of a state religion would drive superstition into clan-destine forms and still baser practices (that is already taking place) ; not because so sweeping a measure would disrupt the social order and leave the people in despair and dismay like sheep in a snowstorm. In certain orders of reform, the dis-locations caused by gradual change are almost as great as those caused by a total and drastic alteration. No, it was not the possible repercussions of the move which arrested my hand and will; it was something in and of my self. In myself I was not certain that I was certain. Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence and no mystery anywhere in the universe? I think I am. What joy, what relief there would be, if we could declare so with com-plete conviction. If that were so I could wish to live forever. How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, with-out guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives. You and I long since decided that the Gods do not exist. Do you remember the day that with finality we agreed upon that decision and resolved to explore all its consequences—sitting on the cliff in Crete, throwing pebbles into the sea, counting porpoises? We took a vow never to allow our minds to offer entrance to any doubt upon this matter. With what boyish lightheartedness we concluded that the soul was extinguished at death. [The English language cannot reproduce the force of this phrase in Caesar's Latin where the very cadence ex-presses a poignancy of renunciation and regret. The recipient of the letter understood that Caesar was referring to the death of his daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, the overwhelming loss of his life. Mamilius Turrinus was with him when the news of her death reached Caesar's headquarters in Brittany.] I thought I had not relapsed from all the strictness of these assertions. There is only one way, however, to know what one knows and that is to risk one's convictions in an act, to commit them in a responsibility. In drawing up the edict last night and in foreseeing the consequences that would ensue, I was driven to examine myself most strictly. All the conse-quences I would most gladly face, certain that the truth would ultimately fortify the world and all that are in it, but only if I were certain that I was certain. Some last hesitation arrests my hand. I must be certain that in no corner of my being there lingers the recognition that there is a possibility of a mind in and be-hind the universe which influences our minds and shapes our actions. If I acknowledge the possibility of one such mystery, all the other mysteries come flooding back: there are the Gods who have taught us what is excellent and who are watching us; there are our souls which are infused in us at birth and which outlive our death; there are the rewards and punish-ments which furnish a meaning to our slightest action. Yes, my friend, I am not accustomed to irresolution and I [
am irresolute. You know how little I am given to reflection; whatever judgments I arrive at I arrive at I know not how, but instantaneously; I am not adept at speculation, and since the age of sixteen I have regarded philosophy with impatience, as a tempting but fruitless exercise of the mind and as a flight from the obligations of immediate living. It seems to me that there are four realms in which, with dread, I see in my life and in the life about me, the possibility of this mystery: The erotic—have we not explained away too easily all that accompanies the fires that populate the world? Lucretius may be right and our jesting world wrong. I seem to have known all my life, but to have refused to acknowledge that all, all love is one, and that the very mind with which I ask these questions is awakened, sustained, and instructed only by love. Great poetry—poetry is indeed the principal channel by which all that most weakens man has entered the world; there he finds his facile consolations and the lies that reconcile him to ignorance and inertia; I count myself second to no man in my hatred of all poetry save the best—but great poetry, is that merely the topmost achievement of the man's powers or is that a voice from beyond man? Thirdly, a moment that accompanies my illness and whose intimation of greater knowledge and happiness I cannot hastily dismiss. [This sentence is evidence of the unbounded confidence that Caesar felt in his correspondent. Caesar never per-mitted any reference to be made to his attacks of epilepsy.] And finally, I cannot deny that at times I am aware that my life and my services to Rome seem to have been shaped by a power beyond myself. It may well be, my friend, that I am the most irresponsible of irresponsible men, capable long since of bringing upon Rome all the ills that a state can suffer, but for the fact that I was the instrument of a higher wisdom that selected me for my limitations and not for my strength. I do not reflect, and it may be that that instantaneous operation of my judgement is no other than the presence of the daimon within me, which is a stranger to me and which is the love which the gods bear to Rome and which my soldiers worship and the people pray to in the morning.
and
Clodia: "You taught me that the world has no mind. When I said that life was horrible you said no, that life was neither horrible nor beautiful. That living had no character at all and had no meaning. That the universe did not know that men were living in it."
and
Caesar: I sometimes think that it is the candor of their greed that pleases me; they do not pretend to love me for myself. I shall go so far as to say that I have occasionally been moved to pleasure when one or other of them lets fall an expression of his contempt for me—in that ocean of flattery in which I live and move. It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the per-son which others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say "thou slave." A dictator is believed to be nig-gardly of benefits, incalculable in displeasure, jealous of ca-pable men, athirst for flattery, and not ten but twenty times a day I feel myself drifting toward those qualities and must draw back sharply. And ten times a day, as I await the arrival of the Queen of Egypt, I find myself dreaming of the possi-bility that she, now grown a woman, can see that all that I can give to her and to her country I give outright; that she need not contrive to obtain it; that all the devices within her power cannot obtain what it is unsuitable to accord her; and that these things being understood, we may move in a realm that is . . . but I am drifting beyond the possible.
and
These last weeks, not my dream, but my waking state has been the contemplation of futility and the collapse of all belief. Oh, worse than that: my dead call to me in mockery from their grave clothes and generations still unborn cry out, asking to be spared the clownish parade of a mortal life. Yet even in my last bitterness I cannot disavow the memory of bliss. Life, life has this mystery that we dare not say the last word about it, that it is good or bad, that it is senseless, or that it is ordered. That all these things have been said of it is evidence only that all these things are in us. This "life" in which we move has no color and it gives no sign. As you once said: the universe is not aware that we are here. Let me then banish from my mind the childish thought that it is among my duties to find some last answer concerning the nature of life. Let me distrust all impulses within me to say at any moment that it is cruel or kind, for it is no less ignoble from a situation of misery to pronounce life evil than from one of happiness to call it good. Let me not be the dupe of well-being or content, but welcome all experience that re-minds me of the myriad cries of execration and of delight that have been wrung from men in every time. From whom better than from you could I have learnt this? Who ever so constantly invoked the extremest ranges of yea and nay—who, but Sophocles, known throughout his ninety years as the happiest man in Greece, and yet from whom no dark secrets were hid? Life has no meaning save that which we may confer upon it. It neither supports man nor humiliates him. Agony of mind and uttermost joy we cannot escape, but those states have, of themselves, nothing to say to us; those heavens and hells await the sense we give to them, as all living things awaited, incult and abashed, the names that Deucalion and Pyrrha pro-nounced over them. With this thought I dare at last to gather about me those blessed shades of my past whom hitherto I had thought of as victims of life's incoherence. I dare to ask that from my good Calpurnia a child may arise to say: On the Meaningless I choose to press a meaning and in the wastes of the Unknowable I choose to be known. The Rome upon which I have built my life does not exist in itself save as an agglomeration of structures larger or less large than another, of citizens more or less industrious than those of another city. Flood or folly, fire or madness may destroy it at any time. I thought myself to be attached to it by inheritance and upbringing, but such attachments have no more meaning than the beard that I shave from my face. I was called to its defense by the Senate and the Consuls; so Vercingetorix de-fended Gaul. No, Rome became a city for me only when I chose, as did many before me, to give it a sense and for me Rome can exist only in so far as I have shaped it to my idea. I now see that for years I childishly believed that I loved Rome and that it was my duty to love Rome because I was a Roman—as though it were possible or worthy of respect to love accumulations of stones and throngs of men and women. We are not in relationship to anything until we have en-wrapped it in a meaning, nor do we know for certainty what that meaning is until we have costingly labored to impress it upon the object.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
The decadence of France
from the dark valley:
Indeed, so impotent were all its governments that historians have described France between the wars as a "stale-mate society." Yet the impression of stasis is not altogether accurate. Nor is the complementary suggestion that France was hopelessly unstable because governments kept changing, as though the game of ministerial musical chairs was central to the life of the nation. The truth is that who-ever was in office, the Civil Service was in power. France had a long tradi-tion of directorial administration. Officials of all sorts had wide-ranging authority which they exercised with vigour and (often) with discretion. Take the energetic Prefect of Police in Paris, Jean Chiappe, for example. He established pedestrian crossings between rows of metal studs, banished several herds of goats from the inner city and prevented Paris's 25,000 prostitutes from soliciting too blatantly in the streets, though his plan to improve still further the "moral tone" of the capital by abolishing vespa-siennes, the stinking iron pavement pissoirs, met with insurmountable male opposition.35 There was much less opposition to the system of preventive detention (similar to the arbitrary arrest achieved by lettres de cachet under the Ancien Regime) which Chiappe employed chiefly to suppress the Communists. This was because most people, however much they cher-ished their revolutionary tradition, accepted the status quo. Before the Depression and the rise of Hitler they were unmoved by challenges from political extremists of Left and Right. Bourgeois and peasant gave their allegiance to the secular republic. In this land of 40 million individualists, the conservative consensus ruled. Less government was better government and if it did not work well . . . it worked after a fashion. In this it was like the plumbing in a country where most lavatories were "Turkish" holes in the ground. It was like the telephone service, where making a call from a post office could involve a wait of up to three hours. It was like the dirty, antiquated railways, where trains that attempted to run on time seemed liable to crash. It was like the safety matches which, after myriad splinter-ing strikes, failed to ignite or glowed without flame, only to explode into sulphurous life, hop from their sticks and burn a hole in the carpet. Gallic logic notwithstanding, Frenchmen prided themselves on their mastery of the art of muddling through—debrouillage. Nowhere was this art practised with more aplomb than in Emile Zola's bursting "belly of Paris," Les Halles. Situated in a tangle of mean streets just behind the Bourse, this monstrous food market was of far more interest to the average sensual man than the temple of stocks and bonds. In fact the 50-square-yard area closest to the Bourse which was devoted to the sale of mush-
The Decadence of France
157
rooms gave rise to flights of lyricism that could never have been prompted by mere money. There, heaped in a massive array of boxes and baskets, were not just common or garden boules de neige but pungent little cedes from the south that incite to abandon and the wholesomeness of sin, large pine needle mushrooms from up near Lille, the special medium mushrooms from outside Rouen with the flesh tones of Jeanne d'Arc to be ravished by irreverent teeth and swallowed as a sub-stitute for magic.
But mushrooms were only drops in the ocean of produce which nightly flooded into Les Hales, threatening to overwhelm the ten huge pavilions built by Napoleon III—his "umbrellas of glass and iron." For miles around the city centre roads were clogged as wave upon wave of wagons struggled to deliver their tide of merchandise—chicory from Roussillon, tomatoes from Cavaillon, cabbages from Anjou, apples from Normandy, carrots from Nanterre. They brought in shoals of mackerel from the Channel ports, trout from the Vosges, eels from Brittany, squid from the Mediterranean, crayfish (Zola's "liquid fire") from the Atlantic. Gory tumbrils carried freshly butchered carcasses from the abattoirs of Vau-girard and La Villette, beef from Savoy and Charente, mutton from the Pyrenees and the Auvergne, poultry from Perigord and pork from Correze. Little had changed in the life of Les Halles since Zola's classic evocation 6o years before. Still the giant hangars magnified a deafening cacophony: the crack of whips and neighing of horses, the crash of iron hooves and wooden clogs on the pave, the curses of blue-bloused porters (some wear-ing the red stocking caps of liberty like their Jacobin forefathers), the jostle of crammed barrows and overflowing trolleys amid towers of crates and pyramids of boxes, the hoarse cries of sellers and the answering clamour of buyers, the tumult of tormented souls in a mercantile pandemonium. Still each dawn transfigured this infernal world, glancing through the shutters, chasing the shadows from the hollows in the roofs, illuminating the forest of pillars and bathing even the dimmest provender in a lambent glow. Still the senses were ravished by the sight and smell of mountains of tangerines, plateaux of raspberries, jungles of thyme, morasses of pâté, prairies of dahlias, seas of shrimps. Still, as Zola had noted, much of the produce rotted before it could be sold, so that the market was "a vast ossuary, a graveyard of corpses, a charnel-house of stench and putrefaction." Zola made it all so romantic that when their nightclubs closed elegant fljneurs flocked to this cornucopia of squalor, to drink onion soup and ogle the prostitutes.
Indeed, so impotent were all its governments that historians have described France between the wars as a "stale-mate society." Yet the impression of stasis is not altogether accurate. Nor is the complementary suggestion that France was hopelessly unstable because governments kept changing, as though the game of ministerial musical chairs was central to the life of the nation. The truth is that who-ever was in office, the Civil Service was in power. France had a long tradi-tion of directorial administration. Officials of all sorts had wide-ranging authority which they exercised with vigour and (often) with discretion. Take the energetic Prefect of Police in Paris, Jean Chiappe, for example. He established pedestrian crossings between rows of metal studs, banished several herds of goats from the inner city and prevented Paris's 25,000 prostitutes from soliciting too blatantly in the streets, though his plan to improve still further the "moral tone" of the capital by abolishing vespa-siennes, the stinking iron pavement pissoirs, met with insurmountable male opposition.35 There was much less opposition to the system of preventive detention (similar to the arbitrary arrest achieved by lettres de cachet under the Ancien Regime) which Chiappe employed chiefly to suppress the Communists. This was because most people, however much they cher-ished their revolutionary tradition, accepted the status quo. Before the Depression and the rise of Hitler they were unmoved by challenges from political extremists of Left and Right. Bourgeois and peasant gave their allegiance to the secular republic. In this land of 40 million individualists, the conservative consensus ruled. Less government was better government and if it did not work well . . . it worked after a fashion. In this it was like the plumbing in a country where most lavatories were "Turkish" holes in the ground. It was like the telephone service, where making a call from a post office could involve a wait of up to three hours. It was like the dirty, antiquated railways, where trains that attempted to run on time seemed liable to crash. It was like the safety matches which, after myriad splinter-ing strikes, failed to ignite or glowed without flame, only to explode into sulphurous life, hop from their sticks and burn a hole in the carpet. Gallic logic notwithstanding, Frenchmen prided themselves on their mastery of the art of muddling through—debrouillage. Nowhere was this art practised with more aplomb than in Emile Zola's bursting "belly of Paris," Les Halles. Situated in a tangle of mean streets just behind the Bourse, this monstrous food market was of far more interest to the average sensual man than the temple of stocks and bonds. In fact the 50-square-yard area closest to the Bourse which was devoted to the sale of mush-
The Decadence of France
157
rooms gave rise to flights of lyricism that could never have been prompted by mere money. There, heaped in a massive array of boxes and baskets, were not just common or garden boules de neige but pungent little cedes from the south that incite to abandon and the wholesomeness of sin, large pine needle mushrooms from up near Lille, the special medium mushrooms from outside Rouen with the flesh tones of Jeanne d'Arc to be ravished by irreverent teeth and swallowed as a sub-stitute for magic.
But mushrooms were only drops in the ocean of produce which nightly flooded into Les Hales, threatening to overwhelm the ten huge pavilions built by Napoleon III—his "umbrellas of glass and iron." For miles around the city centre roads were clogged as wave upon wave of wagons struggled to deliver their tide of merchandise—chicory from Roussillon, tomatoes from Cavaillon, cabbages from Anjou, apples from Normandy, carrots from Nanterre. They brought in shoals of mackerel from the Channel ports, trout from the Vosges, eels from Brittany, squid from the Mediterranean, crayfish (Zola's "liquid fire") from the Atlantic. Gory tumbrils carried freshly butchered carcasses from the abattoirs of Vau-girard and La Villette, beef from Savoy and Charente, mutton from the Pyrenees and the Auvergne, poultry from Perigord and pork from Correze. Little had changed in the life of Les Halles since Zola's classic evocation 6o years before. Still the giant hangars magnified a deafening cacophony: the crack of whips and neighing of horses, the crash of iron hooves and wooden clogs on the pave, the curses of blue-bloused porters (some wear-ing the red stocking caps of liberty like their Jacobin forefathers), the jostle of crammed barrows and overflowing trolleys amid towers of crates and pyramids of boxes, the hoarse cries of sellers and the answering clamour of buyers, the tumult of tormented souls in a mercantile pandemonium. Still each dawn transfigured this infernal world, glancing through the shutters, chasing the shadows from the hollows in the roofs, illuminating the forest of pillars and bathing even the dimmest provender in a lambent glow. Still the senses were ravished by the sight and smell of mountains of tangerines, plateaux of raspberries, jungles of thyme, morasses of pâté, prairies of dahlias, seas of shrimps. Still, as Zola had noted, much of the produce rotted before it could be sold, so that the market was "a vast ossuary, a graveyard of corpses, a charnel-house of stench and putrefaction." Zola made it all so romantic that when their nightclubs closed elegant fljneurs flocked to this cornucopia of squalor, to drink onion soup and ogle the prostitutes.
The Introduction of the Balloon by Holmes
whose name was Joseph Montgolfier, was bringing his bags to Versailles to give a public demonstration before King Louis XVI. It was scheduled to be held in the large courtyard in front of the palace that September. All this sounded fantastical enough. But then Franklin reported that a member of the Academie des Sciences, Dr Alexandre Charles, had stolen a march on Montgolfier by inflating a silk bag with the newly discovered `inflammable air' and launching it in public from the Champs de Mars on 27 August. What was astonishing was the lifting power of this simple device. The silk bag or `balldon, although it was only six feet in diameter, had quickly risen so high that it could no longer be seen. It had crossed the Seine and travelled fifteen miles outside Paris before it burst. This was a distance which a horseman could barely cover in a hour at the gallop. Then Franklin reported that Montgolfier and his brother Etienne had successfully launched their own balloon from Versailles on 11 September. Unlike Charles's gas balloon, it was powered by hot air, it was very big, and it was beautifully decorated with heraldic symbols. Moreover, its lifting power was spectacular. In a wicker cage attached to the neck of the bag it had carried a sheep, a duck and a cockerel (the French national symbol) right over the rooftops of Versailles, and had stayed aloft for seven minutes. All the animals had returned to earth alive and well. It was clear what would happen next. Either the Montgolfiers or Charles would try to send a man up in a balloon. The prospect was amazing, and nothing else was talked about in France. Franklin thought that balloons might eventually 'pave the way to some discoveries in Natural Philosophy of which at present we have no conception. He instanced the examples of 'magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement'.2 Initially Banks wrote back sceptically. 'I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania until some experiment like to prove beneficial either to society or sci-ence is proposed: Nevertheless, he conceded by mid-September 1783 that with the Montgolfiers' Aerostatic Experiment' at Versailles, the French had 'opened a Road in the Air, and this might mark a new 'Epoch' If fur-ther experiments proved successful, then 'The immediate Effect it will have upon the Concerns of Mankind [will be] greater than anything since the invention of Shipping:3 Paradoxically enough, Banks's first conception of balloon transportation was a thoroughly earthbound one. He saw the balloon as 'a counterpoise
to Absolute Gravity': that is, as a flotation device to be attached to traditional forms of coach or cart, making them lighter and easier to move over the ground. So 'a broad-wheeled wagon' normally requiring eight horses to pull it might need only two horses with a Montgolfier attached. This aptly suggests how difficult it was, even for a trained scientific mind like Banks's, to imagine the true possibilities of flight in these early days.
Banks was very conscious that the discovery of a lighter-than-air gas had actually been achieved by two English chemists, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley. They had called it 'inflammable air' because of its light-ness and explosive properties. Priestley's Experiments on Different Kinds of Air had been translated in France in 1768. All the experiments had then been repeated and refined by their rival, the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, in Paris. He had measured the buoyancy of this gaz' (a word not yet coined in English) more accurately, and renamed it `hydrogen. But no one had manufactured it on a large scale, or realised its dramatic practical applications. The Montgolfier brothers were commercial paper manufacturers from Annonay, near Lyons, in the Ardeche. They were an effective business team. Joseph was the shrewd entrepreneur, and Etienne was the madcap inventor. They were interested in chemistry for commercial reasons. They had followed Priestley's and Lavoisier's work, and had speculated about putting lighter-than-air gas into paper containers. As early as 1782, Joseph had humorously suggested the theoretical possibility of flying an entire French army into Gibraltar, and seizing it from the English. The troops would fly suspended beneath hundreds of huge paper bags. Lavoisier's 'hydrogen' was produced by passing sulphuric acid over iron filings. It was one-thirteenth of the weight of common air, and con-sequently could produce a powerful lift if sufficiently concentrated in a light container (Cavendish had used soap bubbles). But it was slow and dangerous to produce, potentially explosive, and easily escaped from con-tainers made of silk or animal bladders. Hot air, on the other hand, was easily produced by any kind of controlled fire, and could be temporarily contained in inflated silk or paper. It produced a short-term lift, as heat agitates the air molecules, making them move apart and become more buoyant than the surrounding cooler, denser air (and at best about half its weight). This lift was however less powerful than that of hydrogen, was easily dissipated, and consequently required much bigger balloons to sustain the same power of ascent, or carry the same payload. Joseph Montgolfier later said he had tried Lavoisier's gaz' unsuccessfully, but discovered the principle of hot air by watching his wife's che-mise inflating when she hung it over the hearth to dry. He made several small experimental 'aerostats, finally adopting a pear-shaped balloon, with a wide neck that could be lowered over a fire. The Montgolfiers described it memorably as 'putting a cloud in a paper bag'. On 5 June 1783, they successfully launched their first large paper balloon in open country outside Annonay. It was probably intended as a piece of advertising for their paper business, and it was a dazzling sight. When inflated, their balloon stood thirty foot high, 110 feet in circumference, and took eight men to hold it down. It was crudely constructed of painted silk sections backed with coarse paper and simply buttoned together. In fact it contained no hydrogen gas at all, but simply 22,000 cubic feet of hot air collected from braziers burning straw and damp wool. French hot air proved to have enormous lifting power. When released it rose gracefully to an estimated 6,000 feet, barely visible, and remained aloft for ten minutes.' Perhaps most significant of all, it drew an enormous crowd of onlookers. This ability of the balloon to attract attention and pull large numbers of people has always remained part of its mystique, and an important part of its history. Montgolfier had discovered a scientific principle quite as interesting as that of aerial buoyancy. With ballooning, science had found a powerful new formula: chemistry plus showmanship equalled crowds plus wonder plus money. Reports of the flight travelled through-out France, and the Montgolfiers were soon invited to give official demonstrations, first at Versailles and then in Paris. The Marquis de Condorcet, the head of the Academie des Sciences, appointed a commit-tee to investigate the invention and consider sponsoring its development. It assembled France's leading men of science, including Lavoisier and Claude Berthollet.8 Now there was the feeling of urgency, even of a race. People began contacting the Montgolfiers, applying to the Academie, or publicly vol-unteering to be 'the first aerial traveller in the world.
and
balloon, which began wallowing dangerously on its moorings, to the whistles and suggestive jeers of the crowd. Lunardi made a rapid, though perhaps surprising, decision. Realising that Mrs Sage was the star attraction, after a hasty conference with Mr Biggin, he himself sprang from the gondola, allowing the balloon to make a safe launch with its reduced payload of two. He apparently had no qualms about leaving the control of the balloon (and Mrs Sage) in Mr Biggin's sole care. Unfortunately, in his haste to depart, Lunardi failed to do up the lacings of the gondola's door. As the balloon sailed away over Piccadilly, the crowd were treated to the provoking sight of the beau-tiful Mrs Sage on all fours in the open entrance of the gondola. The crowd assumed that she had fainted, and was perhaps receiving some kind of intimate first-aid from Mr Biggin. In fact she was coolly re-threading the lacings to make the gondola safe again. As she later cheerfully admitted, she felt largely responsible for the launching difficulties, as she had omitted to inform Lunardi that she made up '200 pounds of human weight' (over fourteen stone), and he had been far too gallant to enquire. Finally getting to her feet as the balloon floated over Green Park, Mrs Sage trod on Lunardi's barometer and broke it, thus depriving Mr Biggin of any instrument with which to measure their height. Nevertheless, in due course the two of them were lunching peacefully off sparkling Italian wine and cold chicken, occasionally calling to people below through a speaking-trumpet.47 The flight followed the line of the Thames westwards, at one point passing through a snowstorm (surprising for mid-June, remarked Mr Biggin nonchalantly), and landed heavily near Harrow on the Hill, smashing through a hedge and dragging across an unharvested hayfield. The infuriated farmer began threatening Mr Biggin and abusing Mrs Sage — she later described him succinctly as 'a savage. But the hon-our of the 'first female aeronaut' was unexpectedly saved by the young gentlemen of Harrow School, who rushed out across the fields to greet her, put together a cash collection to pacify the farmer, and carried her bodily (she had hurt 'a tendon in her foot') and in triumph to the local tavern, where everyone evidently got gloriously drunk. Later there was much speculation at Mr Biggin's London club as to whether he had been the first man to board a female aeronaut in flight. Gallantly, Mr Biggin refused to comment. The members of Brooks's Club were said to be laying bets on who should first have 'an amorous encounter' in a balloon.
The cry Tunardi, come down!' now became a kind of catchphrase, with a suggestive double-entendre implied. Mrs Sage herself felt she had achieved true celebrity, writing modestly to a friend: 'I suppose when I go out I shall be as much looked at as if a native of the Aerial Regions had come down to pay an earthly visit.' She added that the views were magnificent, and that at no point had she needed to open her bottle of smelling salts.
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The early heroic period of ballooning, between 1783 and 1800, appeared to come to a dead end. Individual balloonists went on flying, but not for long. Dr Jeffries returned to Boston in 1789. Lunardi died poverty-stricken in Lisbon in July 1806. Blanchard collapsed with a heart attack after a forced landing in Holland in 1809, and died a few weeks later while apparently attempting to parachute from his new balloon. A few cele-bratory ascents continued in Paris, notably by the showman Jacques Garnerin and by Blanchard's eccentric young wife Sophia, who spe-cialised in aerial firework displays. But she too was killed in 1819, when her balloon was ignited by fireworks. It must have looked as if balloon-ing was, scientifically speaking, a cul de sac. Though the hydrogen balloon or Charlier triumphed (temporarily) over the hot-air balloon or Montgolfier, the inability to navigate either form of aerostat appeared to destroy all hopes of finding any immediate technological applications. Balloons simply remained beautiful, expen-sive and dangerous toys, although the high ascents achieved by the French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac and others did promise hoped-for advances in meteorology. Gay-Lussac ascended to 23,000 feet above Paris in 1804, establishing the limit at which human beings can breathe. The mysteries of barometric pressure, the function of clouds, the generation of winds and weather systems, were increasingly fascinating. Interest in meteorology, a nascent science, grew and produced the beautiful cloud classifications of Luke Howard and the valuable wind-scale system of Francis Beaufort. Howard (1772-1864), a Quaker and the first professional meteorologist, published his great study and classifica-tion of atmospheric phenomena, On the Modification of Clouds, in 1804. He first proposed the four basic cloud-types, using Latin terms in imita-tion of Linnaean cataloguing. These were cumulus (heaped cloud), stratus (layer cloud), cirrus (long-hair or high mare's-tail cloud) and nimbus (raincloud), with various combinations such as cumulo-nimbus (the classic heaped-up rain-carrying clouds of an English summer). All are still in use, with additional combinations such as cirro-stratus (high, thin, fine-weather clouds).
to Absolute Gravity': that is, as a flotation device to be attached to traditional forms of coach or cart, making them lighter and easier to move over the ground. So 'a broad-wheeled wagon' normally requiring eight horses to pull it might need only two horses with a Montgolfier attached. This aptly suggests how difficult it was, even for a trained scientific mind like Banks's, to imagine the true possibilities of flight in these early days.
Banks was very conscious that the discovery of a lighter-than-air gas had actually been achieved by two English chemists, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley. They had called it 'inflammable air' because of its light-ness and explosive properties. Priestley's Experiments on Different Kinds of Air had been translated in France in 1768. All the experiments had then been repeated and refined by their rival, the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, in Paris. He had measured the buoyancy of this gaz' (a word not yet coined in English) more accurately, and renamed it `hydrogen. But no one had manufactured it on a large scale, or realised its dramatic practical applications. The Montgolfier brothers were commercial paper manufacturers from Annonay, near Lyons, in the Ardeche. They were an effective business team. Joseph was the shrewd entrepreneur, and Etienne was the madcap inventor. They were interested in chemistry for commercial reasons. They had followed Priestley's and Lavoisier's work, and had speculated about putting lighter-than-air gas into paper containers. As early as 1782, Joseph had humorously suggested the theoretical possibility of flying an entire French army into Gibraltar, and seizing it from the English. The troops would fly suspended beneath hundreds of huge paper bags. Lavoisier's 'hydrogen' was produced by passing sulphuric acid over iron filings. It was one-thirteenth of the weight of common air, and con-sequently could produce a powerful lift if sufficiently concentrated in a light container (Cavendish had used soap bubbles). But it was slow and dangerous to produce, potentially explosive, and easily escaped from con-tainers made of silk or animal bladders. Hot air, on the other hand, was easily produced by any kind of controlled fire, and could be temporarily contained in inflated silk or paper. It produced a short-term lift, as heat agitates the air molecules, making them move apart and become more buoyant than the surrounding cooler, denser air (and at best about half its weight). This lift was however less powerful than that of hydrogen, was easily dissipated, and consequently required much bigger balloons to sustain the same power of ascent, or carry the same payload. Joseph Montgolfier later said he had tried Lavoisier's gaz' unsuccessfully, but discovered the principle of hot air by watching his wife's che-mise inflating when she hung it over the hearth to dry. He made several small experimental 'aerostats, finally adopting a pear-shaped balloon, with a wide neck that could be lowered over a fire. The Montgolfiers described it memorably as 'putting a cloud in a paper bag'. On 5 June 1783, they successfully launched their first large paper balloon in open country outside Annonay. It was probably intended as a piece of advertising for their paper business, and it was a dazzling sight. When inflated, their balloon stood thirty foot high, 110 feet in circumference, and took eight men to hold it down. It was crudely constructed of painted silk sections backed with coarse paper and simply buttoned together. In fact it contained no hydrogen gas at all, but simply 22,000 cubic feet of hot air collected from braziers burning straw and damp wool. French hot air proved to have enormous lifting power. When released it rose gracefully to an estimated 6,000 feet, barely visible, and remained aloft for ten minutes.' Perhaps most significant of all, it drew an enormous crowd of onlookers. This ability of the balloon to attract attention and pull large numbers of people has always remained part of its mystique, and an important part of its history. Montgolfier had discovered a scientific principle quite as interesting as that of aerial buoyancy. With ballooning, science had found a powerful new formula: chemistry plus showmanship equalled crowds plus wonder plus money. Reports of the flight travelled through-out France, and the Montgolfiers were soon invited to give official demonstrations, first at Versailles and then in Paris. The Marquis de Condorcet, the head of the Academie des Sciences, appointed a commit-tee to investigate the invention and consider sponsoring its development. It assembled France's leading men of science, including Lavoisier and Claude Berthollet.8 Now there was the feeling of urgency, even of a race. People began contacting the Montgolfiers, applying to the Academie, or publicly vol-unteering to be 'the first aerial traveller in the world.
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balloon, which began wallowing dangerously on its moorings, to the whistles and suggestive jeers of the crowd. Lunardi made a rapid, though perhaps surprising, decision. Realising that Mrs Sage was the star attraction, after a hasty conference with Mr Biggin, he himself sprang from the gondola, allowing the balloon to make a safe launch with its reduced payload of two. He apparently had no qualms about leaving the control of the balloon (and Mrs Sage) in Mr Biggin's sole care. Unfortunately, in his haste to depart, Lunardi failed to do up the lacings of the gondola's door. As the balloon sailed away over Piccadilly, the crowd were treated to the provoking sight of the beau-tiful Mrs Sage on all fours in the open entrance of the gondola. The crowd assumed that she had fainted, and was perhaps receiving some kind of intimate first-aid from Mr Biggin. In fact she was coolly re-threading the lacings to make the gondola safe again. As she later cheerfully admitted, she felt largely responsible for the launching difficulties, as she had omitted to inform Lunardi that she made up '200 pounds of human weight' (over fourteen stone), and he had been far too gallant to enquire. Finally getting to her feet as the balloon floated over Green Park, Mrs Sage trod on Lunardi's barometer and broke it, thus depriving Mr Biggin of any instrument with which to measure their height. Nevertheless, in due course the two of them were lunching peacefully off sparkling Italian wine and cold chicken, occasionally calling to people below through a speaking-trumpet.47 The flight followed the line of the Thames westwards, at one point passing through a snowstorm (surprising for mid-June, remarked Mr Biggin nonchalantly), and landed heavily near Harrow on the Hill, smashing through a hedge and dragging across an unharvested hayfield. The infuriated farmer began threatening Mr Biggin and abusing Mrs Sage — she later described him succinctly as 'a savage. But the hon-our of the 'first female aeronaut' was unexpectedly saved by the young gentlemen of Harrow School, who rushed out across the fields to greet her, put together a cash collection to pacify the farmer, and carried her bodily (she had hurt 'a tendon in her foot') and in triumph to the local tavern, where everyone evidently got gloriously drunk. Later there was much speculation at Mr Biggin's London club as to whether he had been the first man to board a female aeronaut in flight. Gallantly, Mr Biggin refused to comment. The members of Brooks's Club were said to be laying bets on who should first have 'an amorous encounter' in a balloon.
The cry Tunardi, come down!' now became a kind of catchphrase, with a suggestive double-entendre implied. Mrs Sage herself felt she had achieved true celebrity, writing modestly to a friend: 'I suppose when I go out I shall be as much looked at as if a native of the Aerial Regions had come down to pay an earthly visit.' She added that the views were magnificent, and that at no point had she needed to open her bottle of smelling salts.
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The early heroic period of ballooning, between 1783 and 1800, appeared to come to a dead end. Individual balloonists went on flying, but not for long. Dr Jeffries returned to Boston in 1789. Lunardi died poverty-stricken in Lisbon in July 1806. Blanchard collapsed with a heart attack after a forced landing in Holland in 1809, and died a few weeks later while apparently attempting to parachute from his new balloon. A few cele-bratory ascents continued in Paris, notably by the showman Jacques Garnerin and by Blanchard's eccentric young wife Sophia, who spe-cialised in aerial firework displays. But she too was killed in 1819, when her balloon was ignited by fireworks. It must have looked as if balloon-ing was, scientifically speaking, a cul de sac. Though the hydrogen balloon or Charlier triumphed (temporarily) over the hot-air balloon or Montgolfier, the inability to navigate either form of aerostat appeared to destroy all hopes of finding any immediate technological applications. Balloons simply remained beautiful, expen-sive and dangerous toys, although the high ascents achieved by the French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac and others did promise hoped-for advances in meteorology. Gay-Lussac ascended to 23,000 feet above Paris in 1804, establishing the limit at which human beings can breathe. The mysteries of barometric pressure, the function of clouds, the generation of winds and weather systems, were increasingly fascinating. Interest in meteorology, a nascent science, grew and produced the beautiful cloud classifications of Luke Howard and the valuable wind-scale system of Francis Beaufort. Howard (1772-1864), a Quaker and the first professional meteorologist, published his great study and classifica-tion of atmospheric phenomena, On the Modification of Clouds, in 1804. He first proposed the four basic cloud-types, using Latin terms in imita-tion of Linnaean cataloguing. These were cumulus (heaped cloud), stratus (layer cloud), cirrus (long-hair or high mare's-tail cloud) and nimbus (raincloud), with various combinations such as cumulo-nimbus (the classic heaped-up rain-carrying clouds of an English summer). All are still in use, with additional combinations such as cirro-stratus (high, thin, fine-weather clouds).
Friday, August 21, 2015
Richard the 3rd
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He pushed the portrait at her. What did she think of it? If that man were her patient what would be her verdict? "Liver," she said crisply, and bore away the tray in heel-tapping protest, all starch and blond curls. But the surgeon strolling in against her draught, kindly and casual, had other views. He looked at the portrait, as invited, and said after a moment's scrutiny: "Poliomyelitis." "Infantile paralysis?" Grant said; and remembered all of a sudden that Richard III had a withered arm. "Who is it?" the surgeon asked. "Richard the Third." "Really? That's interesting." "Did you know that he had a withered arm?" "Had he? I didn't remember that. I thought he was a hunchback." "So he was." "What I do remember is that he was born with a full set of teeth and ate live frogs. Well, my diagnosis seems to be abnormally accurate." "Uncanny. What made you choose polio?" "I don't quite know, now that you ask me to be definitive. Just the look of the face, I suppose. It's the look one sees on the face of a crippled child. If he was born hunchbacked that probably accounts for it and not polio. I notice the artist has left out the hump." "Yes. Court painters have to have a modicum of tact. It wasn't until Cromwell that sitters asked for `warts and all.' " "If you ask me," the surgeon said, absent-mindedly considering the splint on Grant's leg, "Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. 'I'm a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.' And no manners, grace, or generosity.
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A serious rebellion followed, which Richard put down with great ferocity. In order to recover some of his lost popularity he held a Parliament, which passed useful statutes against Benevolences, Mainte-nance, and Livery. But a second rebellion followed. This took the form of an invasion, with French troops, by the head of the Lancaster branch, Henry Tudor. He encoun-tered Richard at Bosworth, near Leicester, where the treachery of the Stanleys gave the day to Henry. Rich-ard was killed in battle, fighting courageously, leaving behind him a name hardly less infamous than that of John.
What on earth were Benevolences, Maintenance, and Livery? And how did the English like having the succes-sion decided for them by French troops? But, of course, in the days of the Roses, France was still a sort of semi-detached part of England; a coun-try much less foreign to an Englishman than Ireland was. A fifteenth-century Englishman went to France as a matter of course; but to Ireland only under pro-test. He lay and thought about that England. The Eng-land over which the Wars of the Roses had been fought. A green, green England; with not a chimney-stack from Cumberland to Cornwall. An England still unhedged, with great forests alive with game, and wide marshes thick with wild-fowl. An England with the same small group of dwellings repeated every few miles in endless permutation: castle, church, and cottages; monastery, church, and cottages; manor, church, and cottages. The strips of cultivation round the cluster, of dwellings, and beyond that the green-ness. The unbroken greenness. The deep-rutted lanes that ran from group to group, mired to bog in the winter and white with dust in the summer; decorated with wild roses or red with hawthorn as the seasons came and went. For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman. No one pushed in at your door to demand whether you were York or Lancaster and to hale you off to a concentration camp if your answer proved to be the wrong one for the occasion. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party. They fought a battle in your lower meadow, and turned your kitchen into a dressing-station, and then moved off somewhere or other to fight a battle somewhere else, and a few weeks later you would hear what had happened at that battle, and you would have a family row about the result because your wife was probably Lancaster and you were perhaps York, and it was all rather like following rival football teams. No one persecuted you for being a Lancastrian or a Yorkist, any more than you would be persecuted for being an Arsenal fan or a Chelsea follower.
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But at least he had the satisfaction of learning that the Englishman of the fifteenth century ‘drank water only as a penance’. The English labourer of Richard III’s day was, it seemed, the admiration of the continent. Mr Tanner quoted a contemporary, writing in France.
The King of France will allow no one to use salt, but what is bought of himself at his own arbitrary price. The troops pay for nothing, and treat the people barbarously if they are not satisfied. All growers of vines must give a fourth to the King. All the towns must pay the King great yearly sums for his men-at-arms. The peasants live in great hardship and misery. They wear no woollen. Their clothing consists of little short jerkins of sackcloth, no trowse but from the knees up, and legs exposed and naked. The women all go barefoot. The people eat no meat, except the fat of bacon in their soup. Nor are the gentry much better off. If an accusation is brought against them they are examined in private, and perhaps never more heard of.
In England it is very different. No one can abide in another man’s house without his leave. The King cannot put on taxes, nor alter the laws, nor make new ones. The English never drink water except for penance. They eat all sorts of flesh and fish. They are clothed throughout in good woollens, and are provided with all sorts of household goods. An Englishman cannot be sued except before the ordinary judge.
And it seemed to Grant that if you were very hard up and wanted to go to see what your Lizzie’s first-born looked like it must have been reassuring to know that there was shelter and a hand-out at every religious house, instead of wondering how you were going to raise the train fare. That green England he had fallen asleep with last night had a lot to be said for it.
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‘About the murder the murder of those two boys — isn’t it odd that no one talks of it?’
‘How do you mean: no one talks of it?’
‘These last three days I’ve been going through contemporary papers: letters and what not. And no one mentions them at all.’
‘Perhaps they were afraid to. It was a time when it paid to be discreet.’
‘Yes: but I’ll tell you something even odder. You know that Henry brought a Bill of Attainder against Richard, after Bosworth. Before Parliament. I mean. Well, he accuses Richard of cruelty and tyranny but doesn’t even mention the murder.’
‘What!’ said Grant, startled.
‘Yes, you may look startled.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘But Henry got possession of the Tower immediately on his arrival in London after Bosworth. If the boys were missing it is incredible that he should not publish the fact immediately. It was the trump card in his hand.’ He lay in surprised silence for a little, The sparrows on the window-sill quarrelled loudly. ‘I can’t make sense of it.’ he said. ‘What possible explanation can there be for his omission to make capital out of the fact that the boys were missing?’
Brent shifted his long legs to a more comfortable position. ‘There is only one explanation,’ he said. ‘And that is that the boys weren’t missing.’
There was a still longer silence this time, while they stared at each other.
‘Oh, no, it’s nonsense,’ Grant said. ‘There must be some obvious explanation that we are failing to see.’
‘As what, for instance?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think.’
‘I’ve had nearly three days to think, and I still haven’t thought up a reason that will fit. Nothing will fit the facts except the conclusion that the boys were alive when Henry took over the Tower. It was a completely unscrupulous Act of Attainder; it accused Richard’s followers — the loyal followers of an anointed King fighting against an invader — of treason. Every accusation that Henry could possibly make with any hope of getting away with it was put into that Bill. And the very worst he could accuse Richard of was the usual cruelty and tyranny. The boys aren’t even mentioned.’
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‘On the 20th he went with a small body of retainers to the Tower — did you know that the Tower was the royal residence in London, and not a prison at all?’
‘Yes, I knew that. It got its prison meaning only because nowadays being sent to the Tower has one meaning only. And of course because, being the royal castle in London, and the only strong keep, offenders were sent there for safe keeping in the days before we had His Majesty’s Prisons. What did Richard go to the Tower for?’
‘He went to interrupt a meeting of the conspirators, and arrested Lord Hastings, Lord Stanley, and one John Morton, Bishop of Ely.’
‘I thought we would arrive at John Morton sooner or later!’
‘A proclamation was issued, giving details of the plot to murder Richard, but apparently no copy now exists. Only one of the conspirators was beheaded, and that one, oddly enough, seems to have been an old friend of both Edward and Richard. Lord Hastings.’
‘Yes, according to the sainted More he was rushed down to the courtyard and beheaded on the nearest log.’
‘Rushed nothing,’ said Carradine disgustedly. ‘He was beheaded a week later. There’s a contemporary letter about it that gives the date. Moreover, Richard couldn’t have done it out of sheer vindictiveness, because he granted Hastings’ forfeited estates to his widow, and restored the children’s right of succession to them — which they had automatically lost.’
‘No, the death of Hastings must have been inevitable,’ said Grant, who was thumbing through More’s Richard III. ‘Even the sainted More says: “Undoubtedly the Protector loved him well, and was loth to have lost him”. What happened to Stanley and to John Morton?’
‘Stanley was pardoned — What are you groaning about?’
‘Poor Richard. That was his death warrant.’
‘Death warrant? How could pardoning Stanley be his death warrant?’
‘Because it was Stanley’s sudden decision to go over to the other side that lost Richard the battle of Bosworth.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘Odd to think that if Richard had seen to it that Stanley went to the block like his much-loved Hastings he would have won the battle of Bosworth, there would never have been any Tudors, and the hunchbacked monster that appears in Tudor tradition would never have been invented. On his previous showing he would probably have had the best and most enlightened reign in history. What was done to Morton?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Another mistake.’
‘Or at least nothing to signify. He was put into gentlemanly detention under the care of Buckingham. The people who did go to the block were the heads of the conspiracy that Richard had arrested at Northampton: Rivers and Co.
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He got rid of the lot.’
‘And Richard’s son? John? The bastard one.’
‘Henry VII granted him a pension of £20 a year, but he was the first of the lot to go.’
‘On what charge?’
‘On having been suspected of receiving an invitation to go to Ireland.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not. Ireland was the focus of loyalist rebellion. The York family were very popular in Ireland, and to get an invitation from that direction was as good as a death warrant in Henry’s eyes. Though I can’t think why even Henry would have bothered about young John. “An active, well-disposed boy”, he was, by the way, according to the “Foedera”.’
‘His claim was better than Henry’s.’ Grant said, very tart. ‘He was the illegitimate only son of a King. Henry was the great-grandson of an illegitimate son of a younger son of a King.’
There was silence for some time.
Then Carradine, out of the silence, said: ‘Yes.’
‘Yes to what?’
‘To what you are thinking.’
‘It does look like it, doesn’t it. They’re the only two who are missing from the list.’
There was another silence.
‘They were all judicial murders,’ Grant said presently. ‘Murders under the form of law. But you can’t bring a capital charge against a pair of children.’
‘No,’ agreed Carradine, and went on watching the sparrows. ‘No, it would have to be done some other way. After all, they were the important ones.’
Josephine Tey is persuasive but conversely, an online post convincingly states:
Under Charles II, renovations of the tower turned up two children's skeletons in the precise location that More said the princes' bodies were dumped. The skeletons were prepubescent -- too young to determine whether they were male or female (the last exhumation was conducted in the 1930s, before DNA testing). They were also dressed in velvet.
Alison Weir has pointed out that velvet was unknown in England prior to Edward IV's reign. So the bodies had to be dumped there after that time. There were only two pre-pubescents during that period who were in the Tower but never were found -- the princes. In addition, More's account mentioned that the two princes wrapped themselves in velvet blankets just before they were murdered.
Henry VII also had no motive to kill the princes. He reigned by right of conquest, not of blood. If the princes lived, it would not have invalidated his rule. In addition, Henry came to power two years after the princes were last seen alive. In that time, Edward would have aged from 12 to 14 -- in other words, he would have reached puberty and at least one of the two corpses could have been identified as male. So they couldn't have been killed under Henry's reign.
In addition, Richard stopped paying the princes' jailer in July of 1483, a good sign that there was no one alive to jail. And the princes were sighted during the early months of their captivity, but never after August of 1483.
Holmes on the Astronomer Herschels
Caroline also remembered long philosophical arguments at home in the evenings, when the brothers returned after concerts. She would lie awake in her bedroom, trying not to fall asleep and secretly delighting in William's quiet, calm voice steadily contradicting Jacob's furious out-bursts. According to her the names of Leibniz and Newton' were shouted from the parlour 'with such warmth that my Mother's interference became necessary: When their father was at home these conversations on philosophical subjects became even more rowdy, and would frequently last till dawn. The combination of Leibniz and Newton suggests that William and Jacob were arguing about the rival virtues of calculus (a mathematical system invented by Leibniz) and fluxions (a similar system invented — but jealously guarded — by Newton). Both systems produced the new mathematics of curves and gradients, essential to the astronomical calculation of planetary orbits and the elongated ellipses of comets. It was an unusual household.
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In November 1755 the five-year-old Caroline witnessed a strange portent of disruption in the after-shock of the Lisbon earthquake, which amazingly travelled as far as Germany. As she remembered it, the whole barracks shook. 'I saw both my parents standing aghast and speechless ... my brothers came running in ... all [the family] being panic-struck by the earth quake: 23 This earthquake, which killed over 30,000 people in Lisbon and shook cities throughout Europe, seemed to many to call into question the idea of God (or Nature) as a benevolent Providence, and to be a sign that a new kind of scientific knowledge was required. Among many speculative works, it inspired Voltaire's Candide. Caroline always retained a superstitious horror of earthquakes, and said she felt one years later when she stood by her father's deathbed.24 In the spring of 1756, when William was seventeen and Caroline was six, the Hanover Foot Guards were posted to England, to serve under their ally the Hanoverian King George II. It was the outbreak of a long, desultory and financially draining conflict with the French that would become the Seven Years War.
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In November 1755 the five-year-old Caroline witnessed a strange portent of disruption in the after-shock of the Lisbon earthquake, which amazingly travelled as far as Germany. As she remembered it, the whole barracks shook. 'I saw both my parents standing aghast and speechless ... my brothers came running in ... all [the family] being panic-struck by the earth quake: 23 This earthquake, which killed over 30,000 people in Lisbon and shook cities throughout Europe, seemed to many to call into question the idea of God (or Nature) as a benevolent Providence, and to be a sign that a new kind of scientific knowledge was required. Among many speculative works, it inspired Voltaire's Candide. Caroline always retained a superstitious horror of earthquakes, and said she felt one years later when she stood by her father's deathbed.24 In the spring of 1756, when William was seventeen and Caroline was six, the Hanover Foot Guards were posted to England, to serve under their ally the Hanoverian King George II. It was the outbreak of a long, desultory and financially draining conflict with the French that would become the Seven Years War.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Joseph Banks from The Age of Wonder
The constant theft of goods, especially of anything made of metal, regularly disrupted relations between the two communities. It was theft, too, that most clearly demonstrated the cruel gulf between the two civilisations. To the Europeans theft was a violation of legal ownership, an assault on private property and wealth. To the Tahitians it was a skilful affirmation of communal resources, an attempt to balance their self-evident poverty against overwhelming European superfluity. There was no source of metal anywhere on the island. The Tahitians' hunting knives were made out of wood, their fish hooks out of mother-of-pearl, their cooking pots out of clay. The Europeans clanked and glittered with metal. As Cook himself observed, the Endeavour was an enormous treasure trove of metal goods: from iron nails, hammers and carpenters' tools to the most puzzling of watches, telescopes and scientific instruments. To the Tahitians it was wholly justifiable to redistribute such items. Banks, who had to keep a watchful eye on his scientific equipment, noticeably his dissection knives and his two solar microscopes, noted: 'I do not know by what accident I have so long omitted to mention how much these people are given to theiving. I will make up for my neglect however today by saying that great and small Chiefs and common men all are firmly of opinion that if they can once get possession of any thing it immediately becomes their own:"
(A very large ethical and philosophical issue about the nature of justice, property and ownership in society evidently lurked beneath these fleeting reflections of Banks and Cook. Over the next thirty years it would be addressed in various ways by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Beyond that lay the whole question of imperialism and colonialism, that great, tangled Victorian inheritance, loom-ing like a dark stormcloud on the distant horizon. For the time being the bluff innocence of this first expedition is well caught by Banks's naval biographer, Patrick O'Brian: 'In any case the thefts were not all on one side: [Captain] Wallis had taken possession of the entire island [of Tahiti] and its dependencies, which brings to mind the remark about the relative guilt of the man who steals a goose from off a common and the other who steals the common from under the goose.' Patrick O'Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (1987)
Ruminating on these larger ethical questions did not allow Banks to ignore simple practical problems, like the ubiquitous flies: 'The flies have been so troublesome ever since we have been ashore that we can scarce get any business done for them; they eat the painters colours off the paper as fast as they can be laid on, and if a fish is to be drawn there is more trouble in keeping them off it than in the drawing itself.'28 The men tried many expedients: fly swats, flytraps made of molasses, and even mosquito nets draped over Parkinson while he worked. Much time was spent in bargaining for sexual favours. The basic currency was any kind of usable metal object: there was no need for gold or silver or trinkets. Among the able seamen the initial going rate was one ship's nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in. The Tahitians well understood a market economy. There was a run on any-thing metal that could be smuggled off the ship — cutlery, cleats, handles, cooking utensils, spare tools, but especially nails. It was said that the Endeavour's carpenter soon operated an illegal monopoly on metal goods, and nails were leaving the ship by the sackful. Later in June there was a crisis when one of the Endeavour's crew stole a hundredweight bag of nails, and refused to reveal its whereabouts even after a flogging: 'One of the theives was detected but only 7 nails were found upon him out of 100 Wht and he bore his punishment without impeaching any of his accomplices. This loss is of a very serious nature as these nails if circulated by the people among the Indians will much lessen the value of Iron, our staple commodity.'29 Cook disapproved of sexual bartering, and made attempts to regulate the trade in love-making — 'quite unsupported, he later drily observed, by any of his officers. He remained philosophical, observing, not without humour, that there was a cautionary tale told about Captain Wallis's ship the Dolphin: when leaving Polynesian waters two years previously, so many nails had been surreptitiously prised out of her timbers that she almost split apart in the next Pacific storm she encountered. It was only later that the full, disastrous medical consequences of this spontaneous sexual trade became apparent.
of this first expedition is well caught by Banks's naval biographer, Patrick O'Brian: 'In any case the thefts were not all on one side: [Captain] Wallis had taken possession of the entire island [of Tahiti] and its dependencies, which brings to mind the remark about the relative guilt of the man who steals a goose from off a common and the other who steals the common from under the goose.' Patrick O'Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (1987), p.95.
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Banks was rather inclined to dwell on the superfluity of European needs. There was a growing snese of exhaustion and sickness for hearth and home. "The greatest part of the crew are pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia"
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Carl Linnaeus had turned collecting and displaying into something approaching a European art form. At Uppsala he planted clock garden or 'botanical sundial, marking each hour by clumps of plants that opened only at one particular time of day (according to the trength of the sun). The time could thus be 'read' by the rotating patches of open petals, and even by the release of flower perfumes (such as tobacco plants in the early evening). However, Linnaeus's genius for taxonomy and display disguised the fact that his natural history was essentially static•
Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) emphatically rejected evolution. His 'systematics' revealed no onnecting law of growth or change, as would the transformational notion explored by everal later botanists until Gregor Mendel (1822-84), patiently studying generation after generation of garden peas, gave rigour to the science of genetics. Coleridge pointed to this difference between an organising taxonomy and a dynamic scientific principle or law in essays in The Friend (1819). The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming speci-mens could also be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. 'Taxonomy, after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval sur-veys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy, had undeniable political overtones. Take a bird or a lizard or a flower from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that had had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto! It had become a tiny British colony.' Anne Fadiman, 'Collecting Nature, in At Large and at Small (2007)
and
Banks's own liberated behaviour in the years immediately following his :urn to London suggests that he too had been permanently affected by Tahitian experience. A visitor to Revesby in 1776 referred to him as `a wild eccentric character' who obviously still dreamed of his 'voyage to Otaheite, and neglected his estates." He was reported to have taken a young woman — presumably Sarah Wells — on a scandalous fishing party with Lord Sandwich and his mistress Martha Ray, during which the women sang and danced while the men 'played the kettle drums' (perhaps in an attempt to recreate the Tahitian timorodee). Public opinion might laugh at him as an old-fashioned libertine, as in a satirical poem that went into circulation entitled 'Mimosa or, The Sensitive Plant, Dedicated to Mr Banks. Yet Banks genuinely believed that British society was often cruelly restrictive towards women, although he told the author Mrs Ann Radcliffe that he thought women themselves were often responsible: 'The greater part of the Evils to which your sex are liable under our present Customs of Society originate in the decisions of women ... The Penalty by which women uniformly permit the smallest deviation of a Female character from the Rigid paths of Virtue is more severe than Death & more afflicting than the tortures of the Dungeon.' But gradually the reputation of the South Seas Paradise became more complicated: innocence gave way to experience. In February 1779 Captain Cook was killed by natives on a beach in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, during his third Pacific voyage. Several of his own officers thought Cook himself was at least partly to blame, for his increasingly aggressive use of heavily armed beach landing-parties, and his method of seizing native hostages upon arrival. His second-in-command, Captain Charles Clerke, wrote in his report: 'Upon the whole I firmly believe matters would not have been carried to the extremities they were, had not Capt. Cook attempted to chastise a man in the midst of this multitude.' But he also noted the horror with which the British crew learned that Cook's body had been dismembered and distributed, piece by piece, among the Hawaiian chieftains across the whole island
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Moby Dick from Dreyfus and Kelly's ATS
We have seen already that the whale is a mystery, that he supports an indefinite range of meanings and that ultimately, in fact, he is unrepresentable. This quality is first suggested in the extracts that stand as Preface to the book, and then amplified by the discussion of the mysterious whale painting in the Spouter Inn. The cetology chapter clinches the claim, arguing as it does that nothing worthwhile and true can ever be complete. But if the whale is God then he is a polytheistic god, and his is a world of multiple meanings and truths. Look at the extraordinary distinction that Melville draws between the Sperm Whale and the Bible's God. By tradition the Hebraic God refuses to show his face. When Moses asks God to show His glory, the Lord replies:
"I shall make all my goodness pass before you, and I shall pro-nounce in your hearing the name, 'Lord.' I shall be gracious to whom I shall be gracious, and I shall have compassion on whom I shall have compassion." But he added, "My face you cannot see, for no mortal may see me and live." [Exodus 33:18-20]
Melville has this Hebraic tradition firmly in mind when he proposes the Sperm Whale as a new kind of god, and he intends to go one step beyond the Bible's account. The extraordinary and sacred power of Melville's Sperm Whale consists not in its hiding its face from man. Rather, the Sperm Whale has no face at all:
But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firma-ment of a forehead, pleated with riddles . . . "
To say that the Sperm Whale has no face at all is to go beyond any traditional kind of religious mysticism. It is not just that his face is too
awesome to look at or too complex to grasp. It is not a matter of his exceeding the bounds of our capacity to understand him. Rather, the god of Melville's universe, and therefore Melville's universe itself, lacks a hidden truth. Its face is not hidden behind some pasteboard mask. The mask—the skin, the riddled brow—is all there is. At the center of Melville's understanding of the whale is the idea that there is no meaning to the universe hidden behind its surface events, that the surface events themselves—contradictory and myste-rious and multiple as they may be—are nevertheless all the meaning there is. As he says in a later chapter, "Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep."" Ishmael's amazing strength is that he is able to live in these surface meanings and find a genuine range of joys and comforts there, without wishing they stood for something more. This is what he means by "lowering the conceit of one's attainable felicity":
I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country."
This ability to live at the surface, to take the events of daily life with the meanings they present rather than to seek their hidden purpose, to find happiness and joy in what there already is, finds its easiest expression in a pre-Christian age. Indeed, not just a pre-Christian age, but a pre-Buddhist, pre-Platonic, pre-Hinduist, and pre-Confucian one as well.
SINCE KARL JASPERS'S 1949 book The Origin and Goal of History, historians and sociologists have emphasized a cross-cultural turn in the first millennium BC that Jaspers called the Axial Revolution This revolution introduced the idea—through Plato's metaphysical philosophy, the Buddha's conception of Nirvana, and various religious notions of Eternal Life—that there is a good beyond what we can find in the everyday conception of human flourishing; that there is a transcendent good that is the nature of the Divine. As Charles Taylor explains it:
The Axial Revolution tended to place the Divine on the side of the ultimate good; while at the same time redefining this as something which goes beyond what is understood as ordinary human flourishing: Nirvana, Eternal Life.56
It is precisely this conception of "going beyond" that Melville's faceless whale encourages us to resist. Rather than searching for some reasoning thing behind the mask as Ahab insists on doing, Ishmael thinks we should nurture the moods of everyday existence—the moods of the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, and any others we can learn about or discover—for the meanings they already offer. As Nietzsche points out, such a life is at its best in the pre-Axial wonder of the Homeric Age:
Oh, those [Homeric] Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial out of profundity.57
The profundity of this kind of superficial life consists not only in its ability to find genuine meaning in the rituals of the family table or, like Helen for example, in the wonder of Aphrodite's erotic world. It consists in the ability to live in the contradictions that these meanings present. Shining Helen is perhaps the most extreme example of this, as we have seen already: first she is drawn by Aphrodite's light to run away with the charming and handsome houseguest Paris, and then later she is happy to return to the domestic life of ease exemplified by Hera and enabled by her first husband, Menelaus. Throughout
Fanaticism, Polytheism, and Melville's "Evil Art" I 165
these turns and contradictions, indeed perhaps even because of them, Menelaus, and even Homer himself, sings her praise. Ishmael is also full of meaningful contradictions. His, however, take on a more explicitly religious tone. Ishmael is perfectly happy to transition, for example, from the joy of Father Mapple's powerful Presby-terian sermon to the wonders of Queequeg's weird idol-worshipping rites. Father Mapple is the former whaleman turned minister who reaches at the Whaleman's Chapel, down the road from the Spouter-an. When Ishmael visits his church one Sunday, before starting out on the Pequods voyage, Mapple's sermon focuses (naturally) on the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Unlike Queequeg, who slips out of the church sometime before the benediction, Ishmael stays for the entire sermon and seems to think that there is something worth retrieving in Mapple's Presbyterian vision of the universe. At the end of the sermon, for example, he reports that Mapple "showed a deep joy in his eyes." (Presumably this joy is something that Queequeg, in his complete rejection of Christianity, couldn't appreciate or even detect.) If Ishmael's goal is to chase away the "damp, drizzly Novem-ber in his soul," then perhaps this kind of Christian joy is one of the moods for which to aim. But there is clearly something in Mapple's view that Ishmael wants to reject as well. For Mapple's real goal is not just earthly joy but the highest ecstasy of heavenly delight. "Delight," he says, "top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven."" This rejection both of the joys of everyday communal existence and of all religions other than Christianity—this all-enveloping idea that the Christian God brooks no other and that Christian joy is the perfect heavenly delight—is undermined by Ishmael's very next act. For after he leaves Father Mapple's sermon, he returns to the Spouter Inn to join in Queequeg's idol rite. There is no doubt that this transition is at odds with Mapple's traditional conception of Christianity. But Ishmael, who was "born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church," gives a wonderful kind of Christian argument against this closed and total-izing interpretation of Christianity. It is by this argument that he con-vinces himself to stop at the surface and enter into Queequeg's rite. The argument goes something like this:
1. To worship is to do the will of God. 2. The will of God is to do unto others as I would have others do unto me. 3. I wish Queequeg would unite with me in my form of (Presbyterian) worship.
Therefore: I should unite with him in his form of (idol) worship.'
This argument, if taken seriously, seems to speak against the closed, inward, and totalizing isolation of Mapple's version of Christianity. It speaks, of course, against Queequeg's utter rejection of Chris-tianity as well. It suggests instead that Christianity in its essence requires openness to and community with others—even openness to other forms of (non-Christian) worship. Christianity itself, in other words, requires that one "cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations,"62 even, perhaps, to the point of joining in them. The implicit criticism is that Christianity goes astray not in its basic religious impulse, but rather in its totalizing turn. When Christianity accounts itself the one true faith, when it claims a total, unique, and transcendent truth, then it leads to isolation and lack of community. For in its search for some tran-scendent Divine it forsakes the multiple, communal goods that are already to be found here on earth. Ishmael's polytheistic view finds in the communal rituals of daily life, contradictory and polysemic and plural as they are, the meanings that can drive away the drizzly November of the soul. This is perhaps clearest in the famous chapter titled "A Squeeze of the Hand." At this rather late point in the story the Pequod has managed to kill a sperm
whale. Sperm whales are so named for the milky-white, waxy sub-stance called spermaceti that is found in their heads; it was originally mistaken for sperm or semen. This was one of the very valuable sub-stances that could be harvested from the whale, since it was used to make wax candles as well as oils, sweeteners, softeners, ointments, and so on. In the chapter in question the spermaceti has been collected into a large bath, where it has formed brilliant white crystals that are hard but oily to the touch. Ishmael finds himself, along with several Dther shipmates, assigned to the task of "squeezing these lumps back into fluid."63 During this task he sometimes finds himself unwittingly squeezing his co-laborers' hands. His description of this kind of lov-ing, communal experience seems to be the essence of Melville's under-standing of the Christian mood of agape, or Christian love for others. En what might have seemed a dreary and monotonous task, Ishmael manages to find Christian joy:
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affec-tionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acer-bities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."
In this joint, communal task Ishmael has the experience of "an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling," which seems clearly to be his characterization of agape love.
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