Continued excavations

 D Johnson on Jane A.

... modifies many present-day assumptions about early-nineteenth-century marriage and the family, in the light of which we might easily misread Austen’s work. Perry argues that by Austen’s day, earlier “kinship orientation based on blood relations” was in the throes of changing to “a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties,” that is, the family you married into was becoming more important than the one you were born into. Women who found themselves on the cusp of this broad social change in real life, and the heroines of fiction, depended on marriage for the happiness and the financial security that might have formerly come from their birth family. She finds evidence that in Austen’s day, moreover, manners and morals were becoming more strict and women’s place more restricted and precarious than at previous periods in English life, the alteration explored in Austen’s books. The world was becoming Victorian. 

At the same time there were changes in the management of inheritance. Wealth, which had often been distributed more equitably among family members of both sexes, was now, with the newly prevalent system of primogeniture, transmitted vertically from eldest son to eldest son, leaving daughters and younger sons at the mercy of the heir. This is a situation often seen in Austen’s novels, one familiar inStance being Mr. Collins’s hold over the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice. Besides challenging our understanding of some canonical early-nineteenthcentury fiction, Perry notes that in understanding the novels, “social historians and literary critics often pass over sibling or parental relationships as irrelevant to the ‘real story,” because today we assume that a story should be about the founding of a conjugal couple, a marriage. 

Have we been misled “by the conjugal bias intrinsic to twentieth-century concepts of evidence and research methods”? In Perry’s view, previous definitions of the family have been based on incorrect inferences from Statistical norms and prescriptive conduct manuals. Statistics taken from public records of marriages and births ignore “many of the other filaments in the web of kinship that located people psychologically in the period,” because there arc no published records of such filaments a maiden aunt, like Austen living with the family, for example, would not appear in any record. And where modern readers assume that a novel will contain a love story, the main story the author had in mind might in fact be about a bad or good brother, a long-lost relative, fathers separated from daughters, a devoted aunt, or some other aspect of the birth family (with mothers often missing or unimportant, as in Austen). Such elements were more important than love stories in the novels Austen read, like Tristram Shandy or The Castle of Otronto. Perry takes special issue with the influential scholar Lawrence Stone, who, in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977), established a view she feels is misleading, of an evolution toward “companionate marriage,” meaning a marriage of intellectual equals, which in turn encouraged better education for women. The better-informed wife and mother was supposed to devote herself to husband and children. Perry questions not so much whether this happened as whether it was a positive development. “Stone’s male-centered fantasy,” she remarks, “assumes that educating women to be companions for men was the best thing that ever happened to them,” but ignores the hidden disadvantage that in this role many women became isolated from their biological families, lost status as sisters and daughters, and were more dependent than ever, but now on their husbands.  This loss of female authority was accompanied or explained by other social factors that were not in women’s interest: the growing “dispersion of communities, and the growing power of individualism,” and changes in property laws and marriage settlements that left sisters and daughters less well provided for than they had been, and with little legal leverage. Inheritance issues drive most of Jane Austen’s plots and subplots; and because she was on the cusp of changes that would increasingly commodify women and virginity for the marriage market, trends masked by conventions of romantic love, she came to seem to some later readers as somewhat hardhearted in the practicality of her views, for instance (in Perry’s example) her implicit mockery in Sense and : Sensibility of Marianne Dashwood’s “ardent belief in a first and only love,” a belief that would have made no sense in an earlier period, when a third of all marriages Were second marriages, after the death of a Spouse, but was| fashionably new in Marianne’s day. Perry’s elucidation of the plots of eighteenth and early-nineteenth century novels in the light of these  broad social changes goes a long way toward explaining why many of them do not move us today; the reunion of long-lost fathers and daughters, for instance, or the intense relation of brother and sister no longer seem especially affecting. The long-lost relative plot simply had more emotional force when the “consanguinal” family  rather than the “affinal” family was the principle focus of emotional life.

She....came under the influence of Wordsworthian theories of memory and emotion. He finds that Mansfield Park is dominated by the Wordsworthian use of substitution, of loved ones and objects—Fanny’s beloved mementos and the transparencies of Tinturn Abbey in her room. 

Both he and Knox-Shaw emphasize that it is important to remember that Austen’s writing career was divided into two phases, the early three novels —Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbeywritten in the eighteenth century by a very young woman; the last three‘Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion—written in the Romantic period by a mature woman, after a silence of seven years, which can account for many of the differences in tone and outlook on some issues, and more of a sense of the disappointments and compromises in any life. 

The narrator of Mansfield Park says it is about “the cure of unconqucrable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments.” Ino mocking, unchanging passions that can be cured, is she endorsing fidelity or laughing at people who believe in it? Our understanding of Austen’s intentions is complicated by her habitual, ironic tone. Critical arguments surrounding authorial intention are always something of a problem, because they presume that an author actually executes his intentions, and critics tend to forget that the gap between what.a writer plans and does is enormous. And any writer is aware that critics sometimes seem to have very little sense of how a work is actually written or believe inevitable things that are in fact arbitrary and conscious choices, like point of view, or even characters’ names; and treat as arbitrary things that are really determined, compelled by the writer’s experience or personality. Austen critics are obliged: by the dearth of information about her to cling to small bits of information—a single reference in the letters to the slave trade or Evangelicalism, for instance, losing sight of the rather loose way in which an author’s reading and her work are connected.

Her technical brilliance is the focus of Richard Jenkyns’s “appreciation.” He points out that the famous aphorisms that begin Pride and Prejudice’ . are meant as a pair, statement and “balancing contradiction,” a formula from Anglican liturgy and familiar to Austen from a lifetime of churchgoing. The rest of the first chapter is an extended dialogue, a little play, a tour de force derived from Austen’s interest in theatricals; to know her attitude is perhaps to shed light on the theatricals in Mansfield Park, disapproved of by Sir Thomas Bertram, Edmund, and Fanny herself, but beloved by Austen. Jenkyns is especially interesting on the form of Pride and Prejudice—its carefully constructed mirror-image chapters and its reliance on techniques borrowed from the theater. 

An understanding of how Austen got her effects could bring us closer to an understanding of her writing than if we were to consider content alone. It is through the patterns and pairings, the formal divisions (chapters, etc.), proportion of dialogue to indirect discourse, length of scenes, and the placement of surprises that the reader discerns the writer’s intention, and reading this way places the reader in an uncon— scious dialogue not with the characters but with Austen herself—the artist making choices—and this, notwithstanding the critical fashions of the recent past—is one of the most enjoyable activities of reading. 

On Dinah Washington 

B ecause we now tend to think of the blues and jazz of the swing era nostalgically and associate the music with older listeners, it is surprising to imagine someone like Dinah Washington, whose portrait has even been on a US postage stamp (depicted with graying hair which she never lived to have), as she was when she first attracted national attention: a hypersexual eighteen-year-old. The fact is, Washington represented the norm for what was then a music made primarily by and for young people. Hampton was playing dance music derided in its time as juvenile and vulgar. Indeed, like Washington, most of the singers (and many of the instrumentalists) in big bands during World War II were teenagers speaking to their peers when they made their first records: Ella Fitzgerald was seventeen; Doris Day, sixteen; Billie Holiday, eighteen; Mel Tormé, nineteen. (The heart of Hampton’s theme song, “Flying Home,” was an exhilarating tenor saxophone solo by the late Illinois Jacquet, who was nineteen when he recorded it.) 

She had a strict policy of recording only one take of a song, thereupon terrorizing the producers, the conductors, and the musicians playing in the sizable orchestras which frequently accompanied her in an era when records were made “live” in the studio, without overdubbing to patch flubbed notes. As one of her producers, Clyde Otis, warned the arranger Belford Hendricks, “Work out all the kinks in the orchestration.... If she’s gonna give you one take, that’s what you’re gonna get.” At least once, Washington left a recording session before others were satisfied; as Cohodas describes the scene, she headed toward the door and said, “It’s not going to get any better. You fix it.” 

As a result of her refusal to give more than one take, her work lacks the refinement that we tend to associate with the music of café society, but it has the fire, the tension, and the surprise often lacking there. It is also impressively short on vocal errors, although Washington sometimes avoided them by simplifying the melodies.

On Rembrandt by R Hughes

Sometimes Rembrandt’s subjects are too connected to the commonplace world for everyone to like them. There is an extremely vulgar side to Rembrandt. This in itself is no surprise, given the bawdry for which seventeenth-century Holland was notable. It may well be that giving vent to it was Rembrandt’s compensation for the anal obsession with neatness and cleanness that characterized Dutch domestic life. He did etchings of a man peeing and a woman defecating. A dog, tensely extruding a large turd from its backside, appears in the foreground. And his large painting of the infant Ganymede snatched up into the sky by Zeus in the form of an eagle shows the child uncontrollably pissing in terror, which must be about the most anti-classical rendering of a scene from the classics ever given by a major artist—though it is certainly what you would expect a baby boy to do under the circumstances.

Cognate with this is Rembrandts capacity for conveying unvarnished, unedited pain. In that he had something in common with the as yet unbom Goya, and with hie own con temporary the great Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera (1591 1682) Probably the most fearsome example in Rem brand's work was that enormous canvas The Blinding of Samson, a monument of sadistic fury which the painter sent as a gift to Constantyn Huygens, secretary to the Stadtholder and author of the first memoir to heap praise on the then young painter. It ts a perfect horror show of a painting, fully in accord with Jacobean taste. 

Such is the spint of The Blinding of Samson, except that the good, or at least the not bad, are doing the bleeding. There are soldiers pinwaing the belpless strongman, there » Delilsh, rotaping wilh scasor in onc band and his mat of be in the other, and Unere anuolber solucr, Like some gicamung and mahkynant becile wm by armour amid the coulucd taagke of Limbs and wrapoas, purhuag the dagger intu Samaun’s cre wehbe Lbeie & ho record of wheter Huygens bed uhis repubive aad cao, prescne, oF hung it 10 bes bows; Mh icons & striking example of the diplomatic ineptitude which, in combinauon with Rembrandt's persomal extravagance and his general financial incompetence, would eventually lead bim to bankruptcy. 

......

But this, of course, raises problems for the modern picture-lover, which begin with the supposed supremacy of “handwriting” as a test of authenticity. Beginning with the pseudo-scientific physiognomist Giovanni Morelli, on whose work Bernard Berenson based his own criteria for identifying Italian artists of the distant past, it was assumed — often correctly —that a painter will reveal who he is in those very parts of the painting over which he takes the least conscious control: the “handwriting,” the squiggles and tweaks with which he semiautomatically draws an earlobe, a nostril, an eye. This is all very well, and it is useful much of the time, but the curious thing about Rembrandt’s disciples is that they so often managed to reproduce the characteristic hooks and crotchets of their master’s line with astonishing and, it seems, convincingly unconscious fidelity. Hence the sharp and even embittered character of arguments about Rembrandt attribution. There can be few people left who believe he painted the Berlin Gemaldegalerie’s Man with the Golden Helmet, which was once not only accepted without demur but revered as a touchstone of Rembrandt’s work by such authorities of yesteryear as Jakob Rosenberg, W.R. Valentiner, and the muchfeared Wilhelm Bode, and also by a huge public. 

Today the focus of Rembrandt insecurity is the Frick Collection’s The Polish Rider which has been “questioned” (as the ominous term has it) by the muchfeared Rembrandt Research Project, Amsterdam .

And on A. Wilson

Mr. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such plays as ‘Fences’ and ‘“‘The Piano Lesson,” denounces society’s failure to support all-black theater companies, and argues that the values of the black community are compromised if black actors, directors and playwrights can only work within the structure of the mainstream, white dominated theater.

Mr. Brustein, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and the longtime theater critic of The New Republic, says that Mr. Wilson’s position reminds him of the arguments for black separatism that were heard in the 1960’s, and that it goes against the American tradition of integration. 

The struggle between the two men has galvanized the theater world for the better part of a year, ever since Mr. Wilson delivered a keynote address last June at the national conference of the Theater Communications Group, an umbrella organization of nonprofit theaters.. Titled ‘The Ground on Which I Stand,” the speech was an impassioned call for a separate black theater, without which, Mr. Wilson contended, black actors and directors were participating only in ‘‘art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society.” 

Mr. Wilson’s anger is fueled, at least in part, by the contention that of the 66 major companies solid enough to belong to the League of Resident Theaters, only one is black; and that foundations and other supporters of black theater have chosen to put their money into increasing the presence of blacks in white-dominated theater organizations rather than into building new theaters within the black community. He also denounced one of liberalism’s prize achievements in the theater, the recent trend toward ‘‘nontraditional,”’ or colorblind, casting, which has Opened up numerous employment opportunities for black actors. 

‘“‘To mount an all-black production of a ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play conceived for white actors is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our Own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans,’ Mr. Wilson stated. 

' Mr. Wilson went on to attack Mr. Brustein, who, as a longtime critic of multiculturalism, has often said that social goals have come to take precedence over purely artistic ones in financing of the contemporary arts. Mr. Brustein, for his part, says he views Mr. Wilson’s demands as a cultural version of affirmative action, and he fears that their acceptance would have the effect of lowering standards, much as.critics of affirmative action assert that traditional standards are compromised by its use in admissions and hiring at universities and corporations. To Mr. Wilson, this claim is nothing more than racism by another name. “The truth is that often where there are esthetic criteria of excellence, there are also sociological criteria that have traditionally excluded blacks,’’ Mr. Wilson said in his June speech, whose ripples were magnified when it was reprinted last fall in American Theater magazine. ‘I say raise the standards and remove the sociological consideration of race as privilege, and we will meet you at the crossroads, in equal numbers, prepared to do the work of extending and developing the common ground of the American theaer.” 

Mr. Brustein did not take this quietly. In an essay titled “Subsidized separatism” in The New Republic he called Mr. Wilson’s Speech a “rambling jeremiad’” with ‘echoes of 1960’s radicalism, particularly the language of black nationalism.” He suggested that Mr. Wilson, as a playwright who had achieved wide success, in the mainstream theater, was something of a hypocrite for arguing in favor of a black theater. 

‘“‘Wilson’s pervasive tone of victimization, in fact, is oddly inappropriate for a playwright whose six plays all found their way to Broadway, where they won two Pulitzer. Prizes and I don’t know how many Tonys,”’ Mr. Brustein declared. . 

He concluded: “I don’t think Martin Luther King ever imagined an America where playwrights such as August Wilson would be demanding, under the pretense of calling for healing and unity, an entirely separate stage for black theater artists. What next? Separate schools? Separate washrooms? Separate drinking fountains?”’ 

Such rhetoric is worthy of a play in itself, and each side has been reveling in its hyperbole as the noise level has increased. But both men are too smart, and too politically savvy, to believe in the pure, unfettered and exaggerated positions’ they have been advocating. In a telephone con.° versation last week from his home in Seattle, Mr. Wilson was calm and reasoned, stating: “It just comes down to how we are going to participate in the American theater. If we had 9 or 10 black theaters instead of one, our contribution would be larger. In order for blacks to make tReir best contribution, we need theaters to develop our artists. Blacks do not have a history of going to the theater, and you need to develop that audience.’’ 

Mr. Brustein, speaking from London, where he was in the midst of a | week of theatergoing, was courtly if not conciliatory and said he viewed the debate leSs as an issue of the theater than as ‘‘a crucible for clarifying the conflict between the old methods of integration — Martin Luther King’s position — and the separatism that’s associated with black power,”’ 

“Equal opportunity doesn’t mean equal results,’ he said. 

Hovering over all of this is, finally, another issue. August Wilson is the nation’s pre-eminent black playwright, and Robert Brustein is one of the few critics who has not admired his plays. A secondary theme of this whole debate has to be the perennial power struggle between artists and critics: the artist, frustrated at the critic’s lack of sympathy for his work, lashes out, ascribing to him not merely a difference in taste but blame for much of the world’s ills. . The critic, stunned that his negative views seem to have done nothing to slow the artist’s meteoric rise, strikes back to assert his power. Soon they are calling each other every name in the book, and pushing each other toward positions more extreme than either might, on his own, have taken, locked together ina dance of ideology that goes far beyond anything either man ever conceived. , 

Scads more

 

Anthony L. On JMB

...like Roald Dahl, he admired the heartlessness and cunning of the young far more than he did their good behavior, and, for every mention of skipping fairies in “Peter Pan,” there will be some dashed-off sketch of alarming and sanguinary malice. Look between the cracks of the play, in the stage directions, and you will find his prose hardening and cooling into casual sadism, as in this line about Tootles, one of the pirate boys in Neverland: 

He has been in fewer adventures than any of them because the big things constantly happen while he has stepped round the corner; he will go off, for instance, in some quiet hour to gather firewood, and then when he returns the others will be sweeping up the blood. 

The most unfeeling child of all, needless to say, is Peter Pan himself. He flits through the play and the novels, and he has flitted through a century of stage productions and movies, and one result of those flittings is that we regard him as airy and innocuous. In truth, he is mean and green, a mini-monster of capering egotism; could there be any more dazzling proof of self-regard than a boy who first shows up in pursuit of his own shadow? In the early versions of the play, there is no Captain Hook, because there is no need for him. Peter supplies all the cruelty that is required.

All of this was enough to wreck Barrie, or, at least, to throw intolerable shadows over the remainder of his life. Few of his works, aside from “Peter Pan” and his desert-island comedy of class conflict, “The Admirable Crichton,” are remembered now, yet in 1922 he was invested with the Order of Merit, the grandest of British honors. He died in 1937, and we should be thankful that he didn't live to be a hundred, and so to witness the terrible final act. On April 5, 1960, Peter Llewellyn Davies, by then an esteemed publisher, threw himself under a subway train in London. We should not presume to read a mind in torment, but we may note in passing that, if he had lived another month, he would have reached the centenary of Barrie's birth and thus, one imagines, a fresh flurry of interest in “Peter Pan’ — “that terrible masterpiece,” in the words of Peter Llewellyn Davies.

On Thucydides and Herodotus

Herodotus in his Histories treated the international conflict of the Persian Wars between 491) and 479 BCE as a turning point in Greek history, in fact devoting most of his vast text to reconstructing the war itself and the events leading up to it, all prefaced by lengthy ethnographic descriptions of the numerous, and far-flung, provinces of the Persian empire that it involved. About the Scythians, for example, he said that they 

take the seeds of... cannabis, creep [into a tent-like structure], and throw the seeds onto the blazinghot stones within. When the seeds hit the stones, they produce smoke and give off a vapor such as no steam bath in Hellas could surpass. The Scythians howl, awed and elated by the vapor. This takes the place of a bath for ihem, since they do not use any water at all to wash their bodies. 

Archaeology confirms this account in detail. 

D uring the past half-century, however, Thucydides’ almost superhuman reputation has come under severe critical scrutiny, while Herodotus’ stock has correspondingly risen—a fact to which Robert Strassler’s new Landmark volume of translation and commentary bears substantial witness. The change does little more than belatedly reflect a fundamental revolution in Western cultural values that has taken place during the last two hundred years. Greece, in particular the Athenian democratic ideal, only came to be privileged over Rome after the Greek, French, and American revolutions gave imperialism a decidedly shopworn look. Thucydides’ main virtue for the seventeenth-century monarchist Vhomas Hobbes had been that “he made me realize how silly is che mocracy.” (This is hardly surprising. For true democracy Thucydides had no more time than did that aristocratic intellectual Plato; he welcomed the authoritarianism implicit in Pericles’ de facto rule as first citizen, and his favorite acknowledged form of government was in fact a limited oligarchy.) The swing toward idealistic republicanism was further developed in the English-speaking world’ by the banker George Grote’s unprecedentedly liberal History of Greece, published in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856, which praised not only democracy but the Sophists as the true heralds of freedom. 

This was the most radical change in Western assumptions about the ancient world since the Renaissance, and it prepared the ground for many other changes. Alexander the Great, for example, hitherto looked up to as the imperialist conqueror par excellence, now had to have his career of conquest explained and justified as a crusade designed to bring Hellenic culture to the benighted East (Victorian missionary work in Africa and Polynesia helped to support this view of him). The century-long struggle by feminists from the suffragette movement onward meant that eventually their automatic exclusion from the Thucydidean historiographical canon would be seriously questioned. 

On Liebnitz and Spinoza

 For many Christian thinkers of the time being a godless Jew and leading a morally excellent life was a dreadful contradiction if thewell contradiction if there was no God in one's life anything bad was possible yet by any 17th century standard of morality Spinoza led an exemplary life Stewart mentions that his only indulgences were smoking and wearing silver shoe buckles. 

Like Spinoza, Leibniz was a philosopher of propositions. He held, for example, that there must be a sufficient reason why something is the way it is and not otherwise. This means that everything that happens can be explained and nothing happens just by chance. This is Leibniz’s well-known principle of sufficient reason. He also advocated the principle that things that have no discernible difference with respect to their properties, say, two indistinguishable drops of water, are identical; there is, he concluded, only one such drop. This is his princtple of the identity of indiscernibles. But unlike his Dutch counterpart, Leibniz did not try to turn his propositions into a way of life: he was a fashionable diplomat, not a sage. In Stewart’s words he was “the ultimate insider,” whose work in metaphysics and philosophy coincided with an intense involvement in worldly affairs and often took the form of letters of advice written to powerful patrons. By the time he was twenty-four, Leibniz was a leading figure in German efforts to contain the expansionist policies of Louis XIV. (He tried to persuade the French king to launch a crusade against Egypt, as a way to divert the French army away from Germany.) When he and Spinoza met, his income as a diplomat was eleven times higher than Spinoza’s as a lens grinder. He died rich, leaving his nephew a huge sum of over 12,000 thalers. When the nephew’s wife heard of this windfall, “she fell to the floor in a frenzy and died of joy.” 

Leibniz was engaged in speculative philosophy, looking at philosophy as a mirror (speculum) of life rather than as a guide. Leibniz made a distinction, which greatly influenced Kant, between the universe as it really is—or rather as it is viewed by God = and the universe as it iS presented to us finite human beings. The universe in itself is the proper subject of metaphysical speculation. The world as it appears to us is the realm of science. Science deals with appearances—with what we actually sce —not with ultimate reality, with which it need not concern itself. In making this distinction Leibniz freed science from the yoke of metaphysics and religion. 

With the help of such guiding principles Leibniz speculated about the nature of ultimate reality. It consists, he thought, of nothing but a multiplicity of soul-like entities that he called monads. Space, time, material particles, cause and effect, are all appearances and not part of ultimate reality. In the world of monads each monad mirrors the whole universe. God, in this account, is a super-monad, a necessary being that by its very existence provides sufficient reason for everything that could have been otherwise. Monads, unlike atoms, do not interact but evolve by preestablished harmony the way clocks are synchronized. The synchronizer is God. 

With the help of this rather weird conception, Leibniz tried to solve nagging problems in Christian doctrine such as the problem of evil: how the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God created a world in which evil exists. He hoped that his speculations would help support conventional Christian beliefs and practices.

Spinoza was an atheist in a particular sense of the word: not godless, but one who denies the existence of a theistic God. The theistic God is a person. He expresses himself by his will. He is a supreme being, omniscient, Omnipotent, and perfectly benevolent. In the historical religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the theistic God created a world distinct from himself by free will. The theistic God sustains the world out of his goodness and is worthy of our devotion and worship. The source of our knowledge about the theistic God, according to the historical religions, is revelation to prophets and messengers. Spinoza found the idea of a theistic God profoundly superstitious. Reason, not revelation, he believed, should be our source of knowledge about God. Revelations are dreams and fantasies of self-appointed prophets. Spinoza’s God, as one and the same as Nature, is not transcendent and separated from the world. Everything in the world follows causally and necessarily from the nature of God in the same way that the sum of the angles in a triangle equaling 180 degrees follows from the nature of the triangle. The world is not created and sustained by the will of a person any more than the will of the triangle is what makes the sum of its 3 angles equal 180 degrees. The theistic God can live without the world. Spinoza’s God cannot exist apart from the world; 4°. he is immanent in the world or, —if you like, he is the world. By ‘contrast, Leibniz wanted to retain the attributes of the theistic God as understood by Christianity and provide them with proper philosophical underpinnings. The main attribute of God is freedom to choose. God is a being who was free to choose this world Out of all possible worlds. He sustains this world out of his goodness hence our world is the best possible world. 

On white jazz

Applied to jazz, such realignment of perspective (allied with the kind of ex post facto condemnation of long-ago social norms known to historians as ‘‘presentism’”’) has also produced an imbalance, a shoe-on-the-other-foot reconception of jazz history that minimizes the role of whites or, in some prominent instances, airbrushes them out of the picture altogether. 

Cultural and racial politics have deeply divided even jazz musicians themselves. Those responsible for the schism, whatever their motives, have fostered fractiousness and fracture, rivalry and mutual suspicion, near-beatification of some figures and shameless neglect of others. In sum, a dynastic view of jazz history: black masters, and white (when present at all) acolytes and exploiters. 

It’s been too easy to justify such tampering as feeding a noble goal: granting American blacks — particularly urban, high-risk black youth — the worthiest of birthrights, a lineage brimming with estimable role models. In that visualization, every black child Erowing up in the United States in the next century Can place himself or herself at the core of what is best in the popular culture 

But the architects of that vision have falsified the record, indulging in what Pins calls, in “The Republic,” the “‘Noble Lie". Some circumstances allow “beneficial fictions,” perversions of fact in the interests of outcome, or the higher good, Plato has Socrates telling Glaucon. In the case of jazz, the noble lie is achieved at great cost. The true losers may be neither the white musicians of the historical past nor their descendants, now laboring against strong racial currents in today’s music business, but rather the intended beneficiaries, American blacks; the message they receive is of a black cultural preserve, invaded and colonized by white America, and now being “reclaimed.” At its heart, it is a message of divisiveness and disunity, of balkanization.

Black jazzmen of the pioneer generations were unhesitating in expressing respect for white musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, Adrian Rollini, Joe Venuti, Jack Teagarden, Miff Mole, Frank Trumbauer, Steve Brown, Benny Goodman, Dave Tough and Eddie Lang. More than once, Louis Armstrong hailed Bunny Berigan, a white, as his favorite &4mong fellow trumpeters, The tenor saxophone pioneer Coleman Hawkins advised young fans to listen to his band of choice, the white Casa Loma Orchestra, for lessons in ensemble teamwork. Records played a key role, crossing color lines with ease, permitting black and white musicians to hear and learn from one another with a regularity seldom available on the job. The saxophonist Eddie Barefield loved to recall the expression on 17-year-old Lester Young’s face when, one snowy night in Bismarck, N.D., the future ‘‘Prez’’ first heard ‘‘Singin’ the Blues,” as performed on record by Frank rumbauer, whose dry, witty saxophone yle became Young’s chief inspiration. 

D. Denby on the Scottish Enlightenment

...a vivacious and erudite celebration of the flowering of Scottish intellectual life in the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment, as people now call it—maintains that Aikenhead’s execution “haunted” the century that followed. Just six decades after the student's rant to his friends, an Edinburgh ecclesiastical assembly attempted to excommunicate the freethinking Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume, perhaps the most thoroughgoing skeptic in the history of philosophy, believed that religion is a portrait not of how the cosmos works but of how the human mind works—of what men and women want and need. His view of life was worldly and sociable. Like many of the learned Scots, he revered the new science of Copemicus, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton; he believed in the experimental method and loathed superstition. Hume was admired in Edinburgh by some, disdained or dismissed by many others. But, after a tumultuous debate, the motion to excommunicate him failed, by a vote of fifty to seventeen. Hume's chief tormentor, a splenetic clergyman named George Anderson, died a few months later, and, Buchan concludes, “an ecclesiastical era drew to an end.” 

In the years between the two trials, Edinburgh had changed from a dour near-theocracy to a cosmopolitan center. Not just Hume and Adam Smith and James Boswell but a host of superb lesser fires burst into public acclaum. 

The fountainhead was Francis Hutcheson, a kind of pan-Enlightenment figure, who, from 1729 until his death, in 1746, held the chair in moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where he broke with tradition by lecturing in English as well as Latin. Hutcheson, a frequent visitor to Edinburgh, was Adam Smith's teacher and he encouraged Hume's early efforts. He was suspicious of metaphysics or any claims not based on observation or experience. Empiricism and the inductive method was the clarion call of the Scottish Enlightenment. Space. time, mass, movement, force—these things could be known in a way that such metaphysical imponderables as “divine purpose” and “final causes” could not. 

The intellectual break wih the past was drastic and seeming irreversible. In 1770, James Hutton, a farmer, began poking at the peculiar shapes and textures of the Salisbury Crags, the looming, irregular rock formations in Edinburgh. Hutton noticed something astonishing—fossilized fish remains embedded in the rock. The remains suggested that volcanic activity had raised the mass from some depth in the sea. In 1785, he delivered a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which included the remarkable statement that “with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end.” Coolly discarding Biblical accounts of creation, the book that he eventually published, “The Theory of the Earth,” helped establish the foundations of modern geology. Shortly before Hutton’s investigation, in 1769, James Watt refashioned the steam engine. In recent years, scholars have traced the rudiments of modern psychology, anthropology, the earth sciences, and theories of civil society and liberal education to eighteenthcentury Scotland. 

For those who keep track of such things, the Scots, in current accounts of intellectual history, have caught up with the French as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought. Yet the learned Scots were remarkably unlike the French philosophes; indeed, they were unlike any other group of philosophers that ever existed. 

In “Leviathan,” published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes had developed a mechanistic view of human behavior: men were en tirely amoral; they reacted positively to anything that gratified their seIf-interest, calling it “good,” but the reaction was no more than a mechanical response to a stimulus. Unless they were overawed by a strong central authority, men would quickly be at one another's throats. The Scots were also familiar with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s “Maximes,” a wickedly funny collection of aphorisms that dissolved virtue in the acid of selfinterest. If we performed a benevolent act, La Rochefoucauld suggested, we did so in order to stoke our vanity or to seek a return of favor. But I lutcheson, and also Hume and Smith, were repelled by such fashionable cynicism; they were determined to prove that virtuc was grounded in human nature itself. H could so many modern ways of thinking have emerged in so seemingly backward a place? Buchan, a journalist, essayist, and novelist, describes the physical substance of Edinburgh with enormous gusto. In 1700, the city had its towers, its ancient castle, and a magnificently broad long strect running down its center. A walled city built on a high butte with a gentle lake on one side, Edinburgh was stunningly beautiful but dirty and poor, a foul-smelling, mucky place whose citizens tossed their wastes onto the street at night while a cloud of peat smoke hung in the sky above—“auld reckie,” it was affectionately called by its inhabitants. The common dict, dreary and conducive to alcoholism, consisted of fish, pottage, milk, kale, and a great deal of home-brewed small beer. James Boswell, when he was not in London pursuing Dr. Johnson and women, may have been Edinburgh’s most famous drunk, but there were many others. Everyone, including children, drank whiskey, claret, rum, and ale. By the middle of the century, there were six hundred drinking establishments servicing a town of only forty thousand. Buchan says that there were few public buildings, so that all legal, civic, and ecclesiastical business was conducted in dark taverns. 

Early in his career, David Hume devoted a chapter in “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” (1748) to disputing miracles. One might have supposed that miracles were beyond proof and therefore beyond argument, but saune didn’t think so. “A miracle is a stolat:on of the laws of nature,” he asservs, and then engages in a lawyerly intexrogation of the evidence. What’s the number and reliability of the witnesses? How close are they to the event itself? For Hume, the question is not whether miracles happen but under what conditions belief in them spreads. He moves the discussion from revelation to epistemology and arrives at the following mis_, chievous conclusion: “No testimony is suf| ficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the | fact, which it endeavours to establish.” 

Hume was greatly impressed by the recent news that nature operated according to laws provable by repeated experiment; he must have feared that the uncritical acceptance of Biblical miracles put at risk our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. If it was possible to clear away the superstition and speculation that had passed for science in the past, could something analogous be done in political and moral philosophy? , 

Wisdom, for Hume, begins with the acknowledgment of uncertainty—of the _ Limits of what we know. We have perceptions of the world in the form of impressions, Hume says, some of which, in recollection, become ideas—that is, the ideas have the force of impressions, without which they are meaningless. We're able to navigate our way through the world because such impressions of it are coherent, they support one another with respect to time and space. But the power of reason to prove much of what we know is weak, and Hume denied that our beliefs about the world could be ascertained with anything like scientific certainty. Events occur in a particular sequence (a billiard ball, struck by another, moves forward), yet reason cannot establish that one event necessarily causes another. Sequence should not be confused with causality. The best we can say is that our repeated experience of the sequence allows us to believe that it will occur in the future. Hume was fascinated by what we would call consciousness, but he always leads us back to experience, which is the arena, the test, the goal. 

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. His father was a lawyer who died when the boy was very young, his mother the daughter of a prominent judge. Hume was being groomed for law when, at the age of thirteen, epic poetry and philosophy overwhelmed him; he read obsessively until, at eighteen, he developed hypochondriacal tendencies and suffered a kind of nervous breakdown, an event from which he recovered by exercising and by eating a great deal (a lifelong habit—he became enormously fat). A convivial bachelor, he required company, preferably a dinner party at home (he prided himself on his “cookery”) or a debate at the Select Society, a group of fifty of Edinburgh’s most clubbable and erudite minds. Hume had no recorded romantic life, though he enjoyed the company of elegant women in Edinburgh and in Paris, where he was certifiably a success (“/e bon David”) among the aristocratic ladies who entertained intellectual luminaries. His friend Adam Smith, born a little later, in 1723, was an asexual bachelor, too. The men shared temperamental quirks, derived, perhaps, from similarities in their childhoods. Both were reared by their mothers—Smith’s father, a customs inspector, died before he was born, and as a middle-aged man Smith still lived with his mother (and his maiden cousin). Except for the recklessly energetic Boswell, who recounted his heroic copulations in his journal, the Scottish intellectuals were given less to sensuality than to the comforts of a solitary domestic routine and easy fellowship with friends. Sociability was whit mattered, and in their writings the world, teeming yet measurable, is always with them.

Defining certain regularities ir one’s experience of the world—if not with scientific precision, then at least with observational rigor—was central to the problem of moral theory. What were the social arrangements in which these regularities appeared and in which our moral life was carried out? By the mideighteenth century, the Scots had realized that the acts of kings and queens and the words of religious or humanist sages were less important—less formative of social life—than such things as modern manufacture, commerce, and international trade. 

Early in “The Wealth of Nations,” the colossal book published in 1776 but first conceived many years before, Adam Smith announced, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.” Looking about him at mid-century, Smith saw a great deal of “trucking” and bartering—a vast, buzzing, articulated landscape of productive and commercial activity that connected everyone to everyone else. In a stirring passage, he evokes the seemingly rude existence of a day laborer. The man’s woollen coat, kitchen implements, and glass windows can be produced only by the combined labor and codrdinated exchange of literally thousands of individuals (“ship-builders, sailors, sailmakers, rope-makers . . .”), as well as by the contribution of such institutions as farms, mines, mills, smithies, shipping companies. National wealth, Smith insisted, consists in the sum total of productive activities, such as those which furnish the laborer’s house—and not, as earlier economic theory maintained, in the amount of gold and silver hoarded in state treasuries, or the total agricultural output protected by tarifts. Smith's analytic framework amounts to a shift in consciousness of how the world works, of how individuals fit into a national economy? it is the birth of the gross domestic product, the recognition that national wealth is something created by the entre populace. . 

For Smith, commerce was the glue that held the show together. “The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so,” Smith said in an early lecture. “And in this manner everyone is practicing oratory on others through the whole of his life.” The men and women in this vast system of speech are performing as rational agents, freely selling their labor and goods, exchanging, buying, and consuming. This rational actor calculates his best advantage in any given situation and gets what he wants by appealing to the same calculating instinct in others. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” What Smith is describing is the ethos that came to be called capitalism. A startling irony proceeds from his formulation, an irony confounding to the literal-minded and outrageous to those who demand moral consistency of the world. Each man, imagining that he’s working for his own advantage, is at the same time inadvertently working to increase the general wealth. The mechanism that transforms the many self-advancing efforts into general affluence is, of course, the market, along with its attendant bodyguard and ruthless enforcer, competition—the two of them, in tandem, ceaselessly setting wages and prices, adjusting supply and demand, goading, redirecting, enlarginy, rewarding, annihilating. 

In Smith's system, commercial man might not be docile, exactly, but he could be governed, and, just as important, he could learn to tolerate his neighbor's religion in order to do business with him. In the nineteenth century, Smith's happy view of life in commercial society was rejected by the Romantics as insipid and by the Marxists as naive, a mask for the despair of alienation. The later development of industrial capitalism, including the emergence, after Smith’s death, of dangerous factories and the immiseration of workers jammed into enormous sordid cities, was not something that Smith had envisioned. But his frequently stated belief in minimal government interference with the economythe doctrine of laissez-faire—should not be taken as passive acceptance of the depredations of capitalism. Adam Smith was not an earlier version of Milton Friedman or Jack Kemp. He would not have been pleased with the inequities of income in the United States today. He defended the rights of labor and deplored the withering effects of specialization on the individual worker. Smith was a liberal in both the modem and the classical sense. Buried in the work Of the great framer of Capitalism as a vast impersonal system, there is a modern humanist. 

Modern market societies, Smith and Mice thought, made men more reasonable, even more “polite,” but neither of them supposed that commercial relations provided all the values that men needed to live by. Their mentor Francis Hutcheson, writing in 1725, had suggested that, just as people derived infF voluntary pleasure from beauty, so they spontaneously delighted in nerforming, \ or observing benevolent actions. Benevolence made us feel good in the same way that a Greek statue does. The moral response matched the aesthetic response; disgust at ugliness was matched by disgust at cruelty; together, these responses constituted a kind of natural moral sense. Hutcheson was so sure that we enjoyed the spectacle of virtue that he made a weird kind of hedonic calculation, a numerical system in which different acts were rated according to the pleasure they gave. Hutcheson, who invented the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers,” which the ufhitanans made so much of in the next century, reflects the peculiarly sunny temperament of the Scotush moralists. His system depends on our possession of favorable innate tendencies; to him, the moral sense was just thit—a sense, akin to sight or smell. Hume, in “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals” (1751), tries to put a little muscle into Hutcheson's pleasant ideas. He begins by admitting, as always, the limited powers of reason: by itself, reason can no more give us notions of virtue and vice than it can prove a necessary connection between events. “’Tis not contrary to reason,” Hume once said, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” Reason lacks power to command, judge, or reform behavior. Common observation suggests, on the contrary, that morality is based on sentiment and passion: we look at Nero, or at a neighborhood thief, and we feel disgust. Like knowledge of the world, moral sentiment begins with particular impresstons—a key idea, since it suggests that we should make moral judgments individually rather than by category. 

What causes the impressions? It turns out that there are a few kindly elements in human nature, caused by the experience of family love in childhood, that could be called universal: 

It is sufficient for our present purpose, if it be allowed, what surely, without the greatest absurdity, cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the clements of the wolf and serpent. | et these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be tnsufhuent to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must sall direct the determimatians of our mund, and where cvery thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous. A moral distinc tron, therefore, immediately arises; a general sentement of blame and approbation; a tendency, however faint, to the abjects of the one, and a proportionable aversion to those of the other. 

In describing the benefits of human nature, Hume sounds almost plaintive; he asks for our belief in a minimal case for human decency. Beginning with this minimal case, Hume, in an earlier book, “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1740), laid out a genealogy of morals. In the family unit of primitive society, people acted generously toward one another, so there was no need for formal rules, But when families banded together for vonvenienc°, safety, and support, property fell into dispute, and formal rules, which is what Hume means by “justice” —what'’s yours and what’s mine—became necessary. As communities develop in size, men’s natural selfishness, without disappearing, is joined by enlightened self-interest—an approval of what is good for the community and thus good for you and me. That common standard created by enlightened self-interest is what we call morality. In Hume's language, universal traits like benevolence, kindliness, and love for one’s children are “natural” virtues, while socially necessary traits like courage, honesty, justice, and loyalty are “artificial” virtues; that is, they are engendered by our need to live with one another. All societies admire such virtues and disdain cowardice, dishonesty, treachery, and meanness. We are angered by criminal behavior even if we are not hurt by it personally. Everyone, or almost evcryone, weeps or smiles at the same point ina play. F{uman nature exists, and moral codes created by our need to live together exist, too. 

You can see the common standard , Hume says, by noting the Janguaye tt people use. [fF somcos e designates another as “adversary,” he sveaks only for hirnself; if he describes .n ther as “odious,” he is appealing tu wic pread feelings of distaste. Hume i> speakin.s not only of the comnion lang. we of b is.ness or law but of tie gossip a. the vege able market and the water we'l. Eicbbes and La Rochcfoucauld and he other moral skeptics, it turns out, vere partly night in their description of human nature, but, in the end, paradoxically, a moral code is created, not defeated, by self-interest: we create a code precisely because we have mutually opposed interests but must leam to live with one another. If one studies the language, Hume urged, one can see that most people approve of what is socially useful, disapprove of what is socially destructive, and remain indifferent to acts that express individual self-interest. We can build morality on the first two and allow the third a free existence without judging it one way or another. 

Hume's “Principles of Morals” lacks beauty, passion, and drama. There is no perversity or darkness in this worldly view. Hume's is the everyday view, the life-as-it-is~-commonly-lived view, a forerunner of both utilitarianism and pragmatism. Human nature, sentiment, and sociality itself create morals. In a society held together by commerce and property, and by law based on property—modem democratic society—such commonsense ideas offer the minimal but necessary faith, Hume and the other Enlightenment Scots anticipated a civil order in which most people would continue to adhere to religion but would rely less and less on God as a guide to everyday lite. Such reliance would be replaced by a modified confidence in the successful functioning of institutions like the legal osstem, the civil service, schools and universities, and business and commerce. The administration of such enterprises is the ideal of “instrumental rationality,” as Max Weber called it, by which things run impersonally and reasonably well for evervone—not a spiritually impassioned wav of life, to be sure, and by no means suthcient to satisfy many of our desires, but one that allows, as an over-all framework, for the greatest individual development, the greatest freedom. It’s a framework that most Americans, even very religious Americans, actually depend on from day to day—the unspoken rationale of American secular liberty. Capitalism and liberal society dont seem especially heroic until threatened by fanatics; only then do people have to fight for what they’ve taken for granted, 

Ukraine

 By Timothy Garton Ash

Last autumn Ukraine imprinted itself on the political consciousness of the world for the 1st time in its history. And what was christened the Orange revolution vast crowds were in Orange scarves gathered in subzero temperatures in Kiev's independence square to demand a fair election for president. They won. Under its new president, Vitor Yushchenko, Ukraine can move toward what he and his allies hope will be a working democracy and market economy under the rule of law. and toward membership in the European Union. 

 Observers have placed Ukraine's “orange revolution™ in a sequence of peaceful democratic revolutions stretching from the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 in Central Europe, through the “rose revolution” in Georgia in 2003. to what some are already calling the “cedar revolution” in Lebanon. Many Ukrainians are understandably delighted by this attractive labeling, so different from the largely negative or Nonexistent image they have had in the past. Yet we must look beyond the news headlines to discover how and why this change has come about, and what its consequences may be. 

The history of Ukraine begins a thousand years ago, when the rulers of a trading stale based in Kiev—or Kyiv, to use the Ukrainian spelling, converted to Byzantine Christianity. After the Mongol invasions, Kyiv and surrounding lands were absorbed by the then combined state of Poland-Lithuania, in which Ukrainians were exposed to the influence of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. As Russian power extended westward, educated Ukrainians offered their services to the Russian empire. The Ukrainian language, related to both Polish and Russian, allowed them to assimilate easily. As nationalism emerged in the nineteenth century, Russians came to see Ukraine as a branch of their own nation. At the same time a Ukrainian national movement began to articulate a distinctive Ukrainian culture. However, Ukraine failed to achieve independence in 1918. Attempts by Ukrainians to found a state were blocked by Bolshevik and Polish forces. Woodrow Wilson did not think Ukraine was a nation, and the Western powers conceded Ukrainian lands to the Russian White Armies in the hope that they would defeat Bolshevism. In 1921, Ukraine was divided up between the Boisheviks and Poland.' The Bolsheviks granted Ukraine generous space within the new Soviet Union, but the peasantry in Soviet Ukraine was destroyed by the collectivizanion of agriculture, while the Orthodox Church was subordinated and corrupted, and the intelligentsia was decimated. Among Stalin’s worst crimes was the organized famine of 1932 1933, which took the lives of at feast three million people in Soviet Ukraine. His regime was displaced in 1941 by the Nazis. who regarded Ukraimans as racially inferior, and brutally treated them as such. Ukraine's Jewish population was all but eliminated in the Holocaust, in which the German occupiers were aided by the collaboration of a minority of Ukrainians. Some Ukrainian nationalists attacked and killed local Poles. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers starved to death in German camps. Yushchenko’s father, who survived Auschwitz. was one of the lucky few. With the return of Soviet power at the end of the war Ukrainian lands were gathered into one pohtical unit. In 1945. Stalin annexed western Ukraine from Poland. thereby bringing people with a different experience of politics into the Soviet Union. Some of them came from Galicia, a part of Austna between 1772 and 1918 that was incorporated into Poland. These Ukrainians were mostly Greek Catholics, their “uniate” church combining an Eastern liturgy with subordination to the Vatican. Between the two wars the Galicians had been citizens of Poland, which, while an increasingly authoritarian state, generally allowed free expression and accepted the rule of law. After 1945 Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist official in charge of Ukraine, took control of the Soviet pacification of its western part. It was he who added the Crimean peninsula to Soviet Ukraine in 1954, giving the country its present shape. 

Soviet power weakened or celiminated in Ukraine those elements of civil societyprivate farms, churches, the intelligentsia—that had helped to prepare the way for the velvet revolutions in its more fortunate neighbors, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Sull, when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Ukraine had a name, a capital, a place on the map. But its independence arrived without a major popular movement to shape it.” Its foundations were fragile. Many in Russia refused to accept the reality of Ukrainian independence.

During the 1990s, Ukraine was an electoral democracy undergoing a shaky transition to a post-Soviet version of capitalism. Between 1994 and 2004, the regime of President Leonid Kuchma. in which the President appointed almost everybody that mattered. adopted increasingly corrupt, brutal, and undemocratic methods. Kuchma pioneered what has been called “the blackmail state.” Having itself encouraged widespread corruption, his administration blackmailed officials and private citizens by threatening them with evidence of wrongdoing gathered by the secret policesuch evidence being known as kompromat, the old Soviet term for “compromising material.” Kuchma also cultivated intimate relations with some of Ukraine’s new industrial barons, letting them take over state assets—particularly coal, steel, and natural gasand giving them other favors in return for their political support. The system seemed to work. 

After World War I, the Ukrainian conservative Vyacheslav Lypyns’kyi had an optimistic thought: even a corrupt Ukrainian state, if it lasted, could create a Ukrainian nation. The rich would adapt to its laws and seek connections with state officials. Those with no cultural attachment to Ukraine would see themselves as citizens of a Ukrainian state if they had a stake in its institutions? The 1990s put these ideas to the test. Agile businessmen and women took over former state assets, created and exploited monopolies, and made lucrative investments. In far-eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border, Rinat Akhmetov, the son of a miner, accumulated a fortune now estimated at more than $3 billion, starting with coal and steel. By financing political parties, these oligarcns — generally Russian speakers from the cast got themselves elected to parliament. Many of them moved to Kyiv and courted favor with President Kuchma. One of them, Viktor Pinchuk. married Kuchma’s daughter. Such oligarchs had a vested interest in the survival of Ukraine. In an enlarged Russia, or a restored Soviet Union. they would have been small fish in a big pond. their connections of little value. 

Kuchma’s Ukraine endorsed the institutions and the symbols of independent statehood. It had embassies, an army, its own police. The national anthem used by the briefly independent Ukrainian People’s Republic after World War 1 was restored in 1992, and amended in 2003. Every night on television people saw the outline of their country on the weather map. Ukrainian was the state language. Foreign journalists were asked to use the word “Kyiv” rather than “Kiev.” Teachers at elite schools used Ukrainian in their classes, and the texts of civil service and university exams were in Ukrainian. Even as much of the political elite continued to speak Russian off camera, the public use of the Ukrainian language became a sign that the state was established.” Kuchma himself published a book entitled Ukraine is Not Russia. 

In 2004, the Kuchma system outdid itself. Viktor Pinchuk and Rinat Akhmetov acquired the privatized Kryvyi Rih steelworks, although their bid was $800 million lower than that of a consortium led by US Steel. One favor deserves another, so Akhmetov helped to finance the presidential campaign of Kuchma’s prime minister and handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Had Yanukovych become president, Ukraine would have remained independent, but its resources would have been even more tightly controlled by a few oligarchs. However, Kuchma’s system had two major flaws. First, Ukrainians had the right to vote. Both Kuchma’s regime and its candidate, a supremely uncharismatic politician with two criminal convictions in his youth, were unpopular. Second, not everyone with money and political power was satisfied. 

In November 2000, the headless body of Heorhiy Honhadze, a journalist known for his criticism of Kuchma, was discovered in woods outside Kyiv. Audiotapes purportedly leaked by one of Kuchma’s bodyguards recorded a \oice that sounded like Kuchma’s giving orders that Honhadze be done away with, For a few months, Ukrainians took to the streets to demand a “Ukraine without Kuchma.” Protesting students built a tent city in Kyiv. Although their movement failed, this popular mobilization was a new experience for thousands of Ukrainians. 

Three years later, Viktor Yushchenko Jed a candle-lit vigil in memory of the millions of victims of the Stalinist political famine of 1932 and 1933. The presidential campaign was well underway, and many Ukrainians admired the way Yushchenko asked quietly for public remembrance of the national past. But his opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, had Kuchma’s support, financial backing from oligarchs, and unlimited television coverage. With little access to television, Yushchenko campaigned everywhere in person. He countered televised attacks on him by making personal visits to villages, shaking hands, showing his face. 

Last September, several weeks before the election, he was poisoned bya dose of dioxin. The first symptoms appeared after he had dinner with senior secret police officials, although no connection with the poisoning has yet been definitively established. He returned to the campaign with his formerly handsome face horribly ravaged by severe acne and scar tissue. This, he said, “is the face of Ukraine today.” The Kuchma administration secretly instructed television channels to call the claim of deliberate poisoning a “bare-faced lie” and a campaign trick. A TV channel owned by Viktor Medvedchuk, an oligarch close to Kuchma, suggested that Yushchenko’s illness was caused by questionable personal habits. 

Despite all these obstacles, Yushchenko won a plurality in the first round of presidential elections last October 31, On Sunday, November 21, during the second round, the Kuchma regime coordinated a campaign to falsify the voting results. That evening, it announced a victory for Yanukovych with a margin of about 3 percent. President Vladimir Putin hurried to congratulate him. However, independently commissioned and Western-funded exit polls made jt clear that Yushchenko had won a decisive victory.

And so the orange revolution began ...with protests against the rigged election. While the Kuchma regime dominated television, the student mavement that called itself Pora’ “It's time”-used the Internet, googling information about the ways other protests had been organized, from Slovakia to Georgia. This use of the Web was something new in the history of East European velvet revolutions. “I'm not a child of the Internet,” a Belgrade student demonstrator said in 1997, “but I'd like to be." When Ukrainian students started erecting tents on Kyiv’s main shopping boulevard in the early hours of Monday morning, their Web site immediately announced this fact to the world, in English, at 02:33:11 AM. They later explained that they had expected the regime to falsify the results of the second round, and had therefore prepared their next moves well! in advance. That same Monday, many Ukrainian diplomats, both in Kyiv and abroad, announced their “total and unconditional support” for Yushchenko. Their statement was e-mailed around the world. What changed everything, however, was the response of ordinary people. At first thousands of Kyiv’s citizens demonstrated, then hundreds of thousands; soon after, people from the rest of the country answered the call to come to Kyiv. Warming himself by a brazier of burning timber on one of those freezing winter nights, Svyatoslav Smolin, a burly, pasty-faced man in a khaki jacket, explained to one of the authors how he came to be living in the improvised revolutionary “tent city,” having abandoned his usua! job, which is to check the radiation levels around Chernobyl. On that Monday evening, he heard through the single opposition television channel that thousands of people were gathering in the capital to protest against the “stealing” of the second round of the presidential election. He turned to his wife and said, “I Just have to go.” Vasil Korkhuda, from a Village near the Carpathian mounlains, Where he runs a smail travel agency, made the same spontaneous decision. So did Elena Mayarchuk, an attractive young woman in a fur coal and the by-now obligatory orange scarf, who runs the Mary Kay beauty shop in a small town in western Ukraine. 

Here were ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing. One was irresistably reminded of Prague in 1989 or Poland during the first Solidarity revolution in 1980 and 1981, But where in Poland a quarter-century before it was workers and peasants who were in the vanguard, here it was a fledgling middle class—students, travel agents, the owner of a beauty parlor. 

During those revolutionary days last autumn, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko usually appeared together on the platform in Independence Square: he a tall, solid, reassuring figure, the horrible pockmarks on his face from the dioxin poisoning now the stigmata of a national hero; she a small, intense woman often in Ukrainian national dress, with her blonde-dyed hair braided in faux-peasant Style. The “pas Princess” became the “goddess of the revolution,” though all the time looking more like Marie-Antoinette. 

The orange revolutionaries’ first commandment was: never use violence. This is the feature that most plainly distinguishes velvet revolutions from the Jacobin and Bolshevik models of 1789 and 1917. As in several other cases during and since 1989, members of the security forces stepped back from the very brink of using force against the protesters.” Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, and their allies kept Independence Square full, they maintained peaceful blockades around government buildings, and they waited for the chance to negotiate. 

The Supreme Court ordered the central election commission not to make any announcement of victory, pending an investigation of fraud. On December 3, the Supreme Court found that fraud had indeed taken place, and ordered that the second round of elections be repeated by December 26. Meanwhile, aided by international mediators al a series of “round table” meetings, Yushchenko made a deal with oulgoing president Kuchma, who agreed to step aside and to stop supporting Yanukovych. Yushchenko, for his part, agreed to a reduction of presidential power. Parliament passed the appropriate constitutional amendments on December 8. So even as the revolution proceeded, the outlines of a healthy separation of powers emerged: a judiciary with remedial authority, an executive branch with less power, and a legislature with more. 

Yushchenko won the December 26 repeal of the second round of the elections, and was inaugurated as president in January. Tymoshenko was confirmed as prime minister on February 4, Their new government is attempting to move Ukraine closer to Western European standards of economic and political behavior, After returning some corruptly privatized companics to public control, to be offered for sale again, the new government will undertake to enforce property rights. Yushchenko has proposed an amnesty for pcople who have acquired fortunes by dubious means, the better to collect their taxes. In Europe’s fastest-growing economy, with 9.6 percent GDP growth in 2003 and an estimated 12 percent in 2004, there is plenty of new wealth to go around. 

Oligarchs who originally opposed the newly elected leaders seem to be giving their grudging assent to the new order. Speaking to one of the authors at the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, Pinchuk said that he would support the new powerholders if they do not resort to illegal actions, and he thought that Rinat Akhmetov, the supreme oligarch in eastern Ukraine, would do the same. All they asked for, said Pinchuk, was respect for the law. To anyone who knows their record, this may sound like humbug, but it is useful humbug. 

Much has been made of a supposedly sharp religious, historical, and linguistic division between the Ukrainian western half of the country and the Russian eastern half. The reality is more complicated. Ukraine is a country with a variety of religions, including considerable numbers of Greek Catholics, but Orthodox believers are a large majority, and their votes were split between the two candidates. Culture and history influence today's political outcomes, but they do not dictate them—contrary to the argument of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. A Ukrainian historian has observed that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the longer a particular part of Ukraine was ruled by Poland in the past, the more likely were its voters to support candidates emphasizing Ukrainian patriotism. Io the first presidential elections in 1991, the candidate of the Rukh independence movement won provinces that had been ruled by Poland for five hundred years. In 1994, the pro-Westerm candidate gained provinces ruled by Poland for three hundred years. In 2004, Yushchenko added those ruled by Poland for only one hundred years." Western Ukraine keeps expanding eastward. 

“The whole country speaks Russian!” said a plainly irritated President Putin.

Tossing the articles

Ian B on the Weimar: 

It might seem ironic that this era of urban sophistication and political violence should bear the name of a provincial town in Thuringia, whose main distinction, apart from some fine eighteenth-century architecture, is that Goethe and Schiller once ran a theater there for the Duke of Weimar. The German republic, lasting from 1919 to 1933, was named after Weimar because that is where the government was formed and the constitution written. The Weimar National Theater, where these matters were concluded, was thought to be a safer place to found a democracy than the center of unruly Berlin, to which the government was soon transferred. The setting was anything but grand. 

 Like the Italian Futurists and the Sovict Constructivists, he saw beauty in this. There was still an almost fetishistic hope in the benign qualities of speed, efficiency, and mass movement, a hope that was shared by many Communists and fascists alike. This rationalist idealism was particularly strong among the architects and , designers. Walter Gropius declared , that spending two days of World War I under the rubble of a house destroyed by an artillery shell had given him the ambition to build—not just beautiful . new buildings, but a new and better society, based on reason, efficient function, and collective well-being. Backed by the socialist government of Thuringia, Gropius became the first chairman of the Bauhaus. “The arts must be brought together under the ' wing of a great architecture,” he said, - and architects, sculptors, and painters “must all go back to the crafts.” If the angst and rage of the individ_ ual artist was one aspect of Weimar Republic culture, the image of the artist as craftsman working toward a better, socialist society was another. Although we now appreciate the expressionist visions of such painters as Kirchner or Beckmann, their influence at the time was marginal compared to the clean, rational lines of architects and designers, such as Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius himself. The main idea was to invest as much artistic effort in humble chairs or kitchen utensils as in great urban buildings. Stephen Spender suggested in these pages that the Weimar Republic’s motto might have been “Sermons in saucepans, communicating an “atmosphere of individual freedom for those who could be satisfied by useful objects in a setting of democratized humanism.” Spender pointed as well to the public housing projects designed during Weimar by well-known modern architects, including Le Corbusier, in Frankfurt and Stuttgart as well as Berlin. Generations of art school students all over | the world were taught to copy the formal models of Bauhaus design, and many eventually felt the urge to rebel against them. But there is still something moving about the hope for a better future based on science, technology, and human reason. 

Most artists of the time were not utopian Futurists, however, or Bauhaus style idealists, but felt more ambivalent, if not hostile, toward the machine age. Grosz, for one, accepted that “line has become a photographic and not a personal fact.”° In some pictures by George Grosz, people are literally faceless, blank figures identified simply as the Boxer, or the Gymnast.

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The House the George Built:

I can verify that as late as 1950... Los Angeles still seemed like a cow town to eastern eyes, with a defiantly antiquated-looking trolley clanking its way from a vestigial downtown to a string of minimalist beaches without a dune or an honest-to-God wave to be seen. The water moved just enough to prove it wasn’t a lake, and it didn’t so much invite you in as put up with you when you got there —if, that is, you were one of those eastern nerve-cases keen on swimming. For everyone else, the beach was just another place to have one’s picture taken and to be discovered by a famous producer. 

-Wilfrid Sheed

 John Lahr on stage fright:

The paradox of acting is that like surfing it requires both relaxation and concentration. If there is concentration without relaxation or relaxation without concentration the performance doesn't work. Composure is repose Odets observed in his diary. What the public wants and what the performer sells is the illusion of control of never being at a loss. The actor is a model of perfect personality one who is not wounded or worried or maimed or endangered as Wilde described it. The performer's poise works as a defense against shame and social threats both signals security and creating it projecting confidence and neutralizing aggression. POISE according to the analyst Leo rangel is a way of recapturing the blissful state of the infant who developed strategies to ensure his mother's collaboration to prevent the agitation that would lead to his being put down or dropped. Poise is an expression of the desire to be wanted and loved ...a form of social security which is never at play in solitude, when there is no danger from without, no fear of ridicule. One is not at the moment being observed and judged.. Actors of course watch themselves like hawks some like Noah Coward turn poise into a philosophy of life their careers are perpetual performance of charm.

At 1 point in the 1989 show Dame Edna patrolled the edge of the stage looking for someone to do nude cartwheels on stage..."and now the mood has completely changed hasn't it" she said. "I don't know what you'd call it blind terror I think don't you? But don't be nervous please. Supposing I chose for argument sake you in the 3rd row. Hello have you done much cartwheel work? We found audiences prefer an amateur nude cartwheelist... they do. They have a way of falling over which is vulnerable and well strangely appealing. You will not know you're doing these cartwheels ...do you know why? You'll be in deep shock.

Wills on W James

Life among the Jameses was a perpetual tussle for control. Partly because there was so much unconventionality and gleeful disorder in the family, control was a strategy and a goal for most of the members. 

His children were able, in time, to mock (mainly kindly) this Dickensian character, but not to break free of his influence. They had lived too long undef the Niagara Falls of his enthusiasms. Henry, the novelist, was drawn to séances, ghosts, clectrical shock treatment, and health fads. He devoted himself to “Fletcherizing,” the system that Horace Fletcher called Menticulture, which involved among other things masticating one’s food thirty-two times per swallow. When Henry developed health problems later on, he attributed them to this health cure. Henry Adams’s wife Marian (“Clover”) probably had Henry’s well-known Fletcherism in mind when she said that the trouble with his literary style was that “he chaws more than he bites off.” 

William was even more adventurous than Henry in his experiments upon himself and his exploration of mediums and gurus. He added electrical shocks, injection with serums from bull or goat testicles, hypnotism, anaesthetic trance, mind cure, and consumption of various mood-altering chemicals (including mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate vernal and chloroform’). James would have felt quite at home in the psychedelic Sixties. He regularly attended séances, and became a strong supporter of and officeholder in the Society for Psychical Research. He sat outside the room of a psychic-researcher friend who was dying, hoping the friend would communicate something “from the other side.” He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth is divine and should be prayed to, and the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anaesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality. 

On the handsome reissues of Calvino

...plus three volumes of essays and lectures, and the problem begins to emerge: a completist’s book heaven can be a browser’s purgatory. ~ I speak as both a lifelong completist and a former bookstore clerk, one who watched and sometimes guided readers as they attempted to choose a book. Ennoble an author’s Italo shelf with too many uniformly enticing editions, and the problem becomes one of luck in the reader’s selection. This is hardly Calvino’s problem alone. Steerforth Press has made it as likely that a reader curious about Dawn Powell will come out of a bookstore clutching the glum early volumes set in Ohio or the misfiring ‘‘Happy Island’’ as latch onto the enchanting “‘Turn, Magic Wheel’ or ‘‘The Locusts Have No King.’’ Will that reader return? Vintage Books, meaning well, has set up a similar obstacle in the path of Philip K. Dick’s canonization — nearly two dozen flawed or even poor books, attractively presented, jostle beside the masterpieces. 

And random words from the NYT 

fideistic- believing that everything that can be known about God or divine things is known only or primarily by faith and never by reason alone 

Foucauldian pertaining to the French phitlosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote on the relationship between knowledge and power 

hermeneutics the art or science of the interpretation of literature 

hybridities things having the nature of mixed parentage 

Interlority pertaining to the inner nature of things 

monovalent having a valence of one; related to the capacity of an element or radical to combine with another to form molecules 

ontic- having the status of real and ultimate existence 

Our Mutual Friend

 The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters, that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree, in full umbrageous leaf.

Trilling on WDHowells

 Howells’s historical interest for us continucs through all his developing career. His famous pilgrimage to New England, his round of visits to the great literary figures of Massachusetts, is a locus classicus of our literary history. It culminated, as everyone remembers, in that famous little dinner which Lowell gave for him at the Parker House; it was the first dinner that Howells had ever seen that was served in courses, in what was then called the Russian style, and it reached its significant climax when Holmes turned to Lowell and said, “Well, James, this is the apostolic succession, this is the laying on of hands” Much has been made of this story, and indeed much must be made of it, for although Holmes probably intended no more than an irony-lightened kindliness to a very young man, his remark was previsionary, and the visit of Howells does mark a succession and an era, the beginning of an American literature where before, as Howells said, there had been only a New England literature. Then Howells’s uprooting himself from Boston to settle in New York in 1888 marks, as Alfred Kazin observes, the shifting of the concentrations of literary capital.

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It is of course in his novels that Howells is at his best as a social witness, and he can be very good indeed. The reader who wants to test for himself what were in actual fact Howells’s powers of social insight, which have for long been slighted in most accounts of them, might best read _A Modern Instance, and he would do well to read it alongside so perceptive a work of modern sociology as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, for the two books address themselves to the same situation, a change in the American character, a debilitation of the American psychic tone, the diminution of moral tension. Nothing could be more telling than Howells’s description of the religious mood of the 1870s and 1880s, the movement from the last vestiges of faith to a genteel plausibility, the displacement of doctrine and moral strenuousness by a concern with “social adjustment” and the amelioration of boredom. And the chief figure of the novel, Bartley Hubbard, is worthy to stand with Dickens’s Bradley Headstone, or James’s Basil Ransom and Paul Muniment, or Flaubert’s Sénécal, or Dostoyevsky’s Smerdyakov and Shigalov, as one of a class of fictional characters who foretell a large social actuality of the future. Howells has caught in Hubbard the quintessence of the average sensual man as the most sanguine of us have come to fear our culture breeds him, a man somewhat gifted —and how right a touch that Hubbard should be a Writer of sorts, how deep in our democratic culture is the need to claim ~“ 

2 Henry James’s essay on Howells is well known, and in that essay there are three statements which by implication define the ground of our present indifference to Howells. They have the advantage for our inquiry of ap. pearing in the friendliest possible context, and they are intended not as judgments, certainly not as adverse judgments, but only as descriptions. 

This is the first statement: “He is animated by a love of the common, the immediate, the familiar, and the vulgar elements of life, and holds that iN proportion as we move into the rare and strange we become vague and arbitrary; that truth of representation, in a word, can be achieved only so long as it is in our power to test and measure it.” 

Here is the second statement: “He hates a ‘story; and (this private feat is not impossible) has probably made up his mind very definitely as to what the pestilent thing consists of. Mr. Howells hates an artificial fable, 2 denouement that is pressed into service; he likes things to occur as in lite, where the manner of a great many of them is not to occur at all.” 

And here is the third: “If American life is on the whole, as I make no doubt whatever, more innocent than that of any other country, nowhere s the fact more patent than in Mr. Howells’s novels, which exhibit so constant a study of the actual and so small a perception of evil” 

It will be immediately clear from these three statements how far from our modern taste Howells is likely to be. I have said they are objective starements, that they are descriptions and not judgments, yet we can hear in them some ambiguity of tone—some ambiguity of tone must inevitably be there, for James is defining not only his friend’s work but, by inversion, his own. And almost in the degree that we admire James and defend his artistic practice, we are committed to resist Howells. But I think we must have the grace to see that in resisting Howells, in rejecting him, we are resisting and rejecting something more than a literary talent or temperament or method. There is in Howells, as I have tried to suggest, an odd kind of muted, stubborn passion which we have to take account of, and respect, and recognize for what it is, the sign of a commitment, of an involvement in very great matters—we are required to see that in making our judgment of him we are involved in consideratons of way of life, of quality of being. 

His passion and its meaning become apparent whenever he speaks of the commonplace, which was the almost obsessive object of his literary faith. “The commonplace? Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which [the novelists] have never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to ‘the riddle of the painful earth’ on his tongue.” We might go so far as to grant that the passion of this utterance has a kind of intellectual illumination in it which commands our respect, but we in our time cannot truly respond to it. We are lovers of what James calls the rare and strange, and in our literature we are not responsive to the common, the immediate, the tamillar, and the vulgar elements in life. 

Or at least we have a most complicated relation to these elements. In Our poetic language we do want something that has affinity with the Common, the immediate, the familiar, and the vulgar. And we want a certain aspect or degree of these elements in all our literature—we want them in their extremity, especially the common and vulgar. We find an interest in being threatened by them; we like them represented in their extremity to serve as a sort of outer limit of the possibility of our daily lives,  As a kind of mundane hell.. They figure for us in this way and Ulysses in the wasteland in Kafka's novels and stories even in Yates and they account I believe for the interest of comfortable middle class readers in James Farrell. In short we consent to the commonplace as it verges upon and becomes the rare and strange the commonplace of extreme poverty or ultimate boredom may even come to imply the demonic And be valued for that let life be sufficiently depressing and sufficiently boring in its commonplaceness it's  and we shall have been licensed to give up quiet desperation And to become desperately fierce. We are attracted by the idea of human life in as it were putrefaction in stewing corruption we sense the force gathering in the fermentation.

Watt on love and the novel

Madame de Staél linked the fact that the Ancients had no novels with the fact that, largely as a result of the inferior social position of women, the classical world attached relatively little importance to the emotional relationships between men and women.! It is certainly true that classical Greece and Rome knew little of romantic love in our sense, and the erotic life in general was not given anything like the importance and approbation it has received in modern life and literature. Even in Euripides sexual passion is clearly considered as a violation of the human norm; while not exactly a vice, it is certainly not a virtue; and, for the man especially, to allow it much scope is an indication of weakness rather than strength. As for Latin literature, its similarly derogatory attitude is suggested by a passage in the commentary of Servius on the Aeneid: he explains that Dido’s love was not a serious enough subject for epic dignity, but that Virgil had redeemed himself by treating it in an almost comic style.

The idea that love between the sexes is to be regarded as the supreme value of life on earth is generally agreed to have had its origin in the rise of amour courtois in eleventh-century Provence, Courtly love is in essence the result of the transfer of an attitude of religious adoration from a divine to a secular object—from the Virgin Mary to the lady worshipped by the troubadour, Like modern individualism, therefore, the rise of romantic love has deep roots in the Christian tradition, and so it is very appropriate that it should be the basis of the ideal pattern of sexual behaviour in our society. The most universal religion of the West, according to Vilfredo Pareto,’ at least, is the sex religion; the novel supplies it with its doctrine and its rituals, just as the mediaeval romances had done for courtly love. 

Courtly love, however, could not itself provide the kind of connective or structural theme which the novel required. It was primarily a leisure fantasy invented to gratify the noble lady whose actual social and economic future had already been decided by her marriage to a feudal lord; it belonged to an a-moral world, a social vacuum where only the individual existed and where the external world, with its drastic legal and religious sanctions against adultery,2 was completely forgotten. Consequently the forms of mediaeval literature which dealt with everyday life paid no attention to courtly love, and presented womankind as a species characterised by an insatiate fleshly cupidity; while, on the other hand, the verse and prose romances which dealt with courtly love presented their heroines as angelic beings, and this idealisation was usually extended to the psychology, the background and the language of the story. Not only so: from the point of view of plot, heroic chastity is subject to exactly the same literary defects as inveterate promiscuity; both are poor in the qualities of development and surprise. In the romances, therefore, while courtly love provided the conventional beginning and end, the main interest of the narrative lay in the adventures which the knight achieved for his lady, and not in the development of the love relationship itself. 

Gradually, however, the code of romantic love began to accommodate itself to religious, social and psychological reality, notably to marriage and the family. This process seems to have occurred particularly early in England, and the new ideology which eventually came into being there does much to explain both the rise of the novel and the distinctive difference between the English and French traditions in fiction. Denis de Rougemont, in his study of the development of romantic love, writes of the French novel that ‘to judge by its literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most characteristic occupations of Western man’.!' Not so in England, where the break with the originally adulterous character of courtly love was so complete that George Moore was almost justified in claiming to have ‘invented adultery, which didn’t exist in the English novel till I began writing’ 

The values of courtly love could not be combined with those of marriage until marriage was primarily the result of a free choice by the individuals concerned. This freedom of choice has until recently been the cxception rather than the rule in the history of human socicty, especially as far as women have been concerned. The rise of the novel, then, would seem to be connected with the much greater freedom of women in modern society, a freedom which, especially as regards marriage, was achieved earlier and more completely in England than elsewhere, 

In eighteenth-century France, for example, daughters were customarily secluded from young men until their parents had arranged a marriage for them. The extent of women’s freedom in England was very striking in comparison, as Montesquieu! and many other contemporaries pointed out. In Germany the position of women was considered to be even more disadvantageous,? while Lady Mary Wortley Montagu criticised Szr Charles Grandison on the grounds that Richardson should have known enough about the restrictions on feminine rights in Italy to realise that his hero could never have begun his amour with Clementina in her father’s house.3 

The relatively great freedom of women in England had existed at least as far back as the Elizabethan period, but it was reinforced in the eighteenth century by some aspects of the rise of individualism. Economic individualism, we have seen, tended to weaken the ties between parents and children: and its spread was associated with the development of a new kind of family system which has since become the standard one in most modern societies, 

This system can be described as the ‘elementary’ family, to we A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's term,' or as the ‘conjugal’ family, to use Emile Durkheim’s.* In nearly all countries, of course, the family unit includes the ‘elementary’ or ‘conjugal’ group consisting of husband, wife and their children, but it also includes a whole complex of other less closely related kinsfolk: the use of the terms here, therefore, has a real defining force because it indicates that this elementary or conjugal group alone is what constitutes the family in our society; it is an entity formed by the voluntary union of two individuals. 

This kind of family, for which we will here use Durkheim’s term ‘conjugal’ as somewhat more descriptive and perhaps less imvidious than Radcliffe-Brown’s term ‘elementary’, is different from those of other societies and other periods in many respects, among which may be mentioned the following: on marriage the couple immediately sets up as a new family, wholly separate from their own parents and often far away from them; there is no established priority between the male and female lines of descent as regards property or authority, but instead both lineages are of equal relative unimportance; extended kinship ties in general, to grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc., have no compelling significance; and once set up, the conjugal family typically becomes an autonomous unit in economic as well as in social affairs. 

These arrangements seem obvious enough to us today, but they are in fact historically new, and they all increase the importance of the marriage choice, This choice is especially fateful for the woman, because, as a result of masculine dominance in the economic field, and of the social, residential and occupational mobility brought about by capitalism, it determines, not only her most important personal relationship, but also her social, economic and even geographical future. It is natural, therefore, that modern sociologists should see romantic love as a necessary correlative of the conjugal family system; 3 a strengthening of the intrinsic bonds between man and wife being absolutely necessary to replace the greater security and continuity of the woman's lot afforded by more cohesive and  Extended family systems and to provide the isolated conjugal unit and especially the wife with a strong supporting ideology.

Some of the most important causes of the very different modern emphasis have already been mentioned. Christianity in general, for example, was essentially an inward, individualist and self-conscious kind of religion, and its effects were strongest in Puritanism, with its stress on the inner light; while the indispensable Madame de Staél drew attention to the influence of the changed philosophical outlook of the seventeenth century on the novel’s subjective and analytic approach to character, the secularisation of thought which accompanied the new philosophy tended in the same direction: it produced an essentially mancentred world, and one in which the individual was responsible for his own scale of moral and social values. 

Finally, the rise of individualism is of great importance. By weakening communal and traditional relationships, it fostered not only the kind of private and egocentric mental life we find in Defoe’s heroes, but also the later stress on the importance of personal relationships which is so characteristic both of modern society and of the novel—such relationships may be seen as offering the individual a more conscious and selective pattern of social life to replace the more diffuse, and as it were involuntary, social cohesions which individualism had undermined. Individualism also contributed to Richardson’s emphasis on private experience in at least two other respects: 1t provided an audience deeply enough interested in all the processes that occur in the individual consciousness to find Pamela absorbing; and its economic and social development eventually led to the development of the urban way of life, a fundamental formative influence on modern society which seems to be connected in many ways with the private and subjective tendency both of Richardson personally and of the novel form in general. 

Eighteenth-century London had an importance in the national life of the time that was unequalled elsewhere. Throughout the period it was over ten times as large as any of modern urban man. The streets and places of resort in the various quarters of the town presented an infinite variety of ways of life, ways of life that anyone could observe, and yet for the most part utterly alien to any one individual’s personal experience. 

This combination of physical proximity and vast social distance is a typical feature of urbanisation, and one of its results is to give a particular emphasis to external and material values in the city-dweller’s attitude to life: the most conspicuous values —those which are common to the visual experience of everyone —are economic; in eighteenth-century London, for example, it was the coaches, fine houses and expensive clothes which pervade the outlook of Moll Flanders. There was no real metropolitan equivalent to the expression of the community values available to all represented by the parish church in the country. In many of the new centres of population there was no church at all, and, consequently, according to Swift, ‘five parts in six of the people of London [were] absolutely hindered from hearing divine service’ ;? and in any case the atmosphere of what was fast becoming ‘a mart of infidelity’3 tended to discourage church-going—Bishop Secker said that ‘people of fashion’ often attended ‘Divine worship in the country . . . to avoid scandal’, 

This decline of religious values in the town made way for the Supremacy of material values, a supremacy that was symbolised in the way that London was rebuilt after the Great Fire: under the new plan it was the Royal Exchange and not St. Paul’s which became the architectural focus of the City.? 

An environment so large and various that only a little of it can be experienced by any one individual, and a system of values that is mainly economic—these have combined to provide the novel in general with two of its most characteristic themes: the individual seeking his fortune in the big city and perhaps only achieving tragic failure, so often described by the French and American Realists; and, frequently in association with this, the milieu studies of such writers as Balzac, Zola and Dreiser, where we are taken behind the scenes, and shown what actually happens in the places we know only by passing them in the street or reading about them in the newspapers. Both these subjects also feature prominently in eighteenthcentury literature, where the novel supplemented the work of journalists and pamphleteers3 and revealed all the secrets of the town: both Defoe and Richardson appeal to this interest, and it is even more marked in such works as Fielding’s Amelia and Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker. At the same time London figured in much of the drama and fiction of the time as the symbol of wealth, luxury, excitement and perhaps a rich husband: for Steele’s novel-reading girl Biddy Tipkins, and for Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless it is the milieu where everything happens, where people really live: triumph in the big city has become the Holy Grail in the individual’s secular pilgrimage.