William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

This post is mostly about The Excursion, the massive poem that Wordsworth wrote in middle age, but I've given it a little prelude (ha, ha) about a much better-known poem from fifteen years earlier.

Strange Fits of Passion (1799)

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,

All over the wide lea;

With quickening pace my horse drew nigh

Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;

And, as we climbed the hill,

The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot

Came near, and nearer still.

Wordsworth wrote the Lucy poems while in Germany. This one, more than the others, is anecdotal. (Since then we've become so browbeaten by first-person anecdote in poetry that we take the form for granted.)

Portrait of Wordsworth by William Shuter, 1798

[Image source: Cornell University Library, where the portrait now resides. The likeness was taken on 26 April 1798, at Nether Stowey (according to Dorothy's Alfoxden Journal). William Shuter, a Bristol artist, was staying there; Coleridge must have organized the sitting. Five months later Wordsworth set off for Germany.]

The moon sets every day, but we don’t often see it do so. Canonical literature, though it's always going on about sunsets, virtually ignores the existence of moonsets, except in this poem.

We usually notice the moon when it’s full, and the big (or apparently big) moonrise that occurs soon after sunset is often remarked on. But a moonset near the full would occur near dawn, the coldest part of the night when (at least in temperate climes) we tend to sleep on, and even if we’re out and about the spectacle is usually lost in the mist. The little white ghost of a waning moon is hardly ever noticed when it sets during the hours of daylight. The most impressive moonset I've seen was a lazy moon on a cold winter night which became yellower and bigger, and finally just after midnight a smoky red as it dropped into the west. So rarely have I noticed a moonset in my fifty years that it hadn't really occurred to me that the setting moon must often go through the same colour changes as the setting sun.

If the moon is going to set earlier in the evening, not too many hours after sunset, it must be a brand-new sliver of a moon, which is probably not what most readers envisage while they're reading this poem.

However, the hill makes a difference. After crossing the “wide lea” westwards, with the moon spreading its light, Wordsworth’s lover starts to ascend rather sharply, and “Lucy’s cot” is on a ridge. Thus the moon could seem to “set” when still comparatively high in the sky. Wordsworth had often noticed the sharpness of Lakeland’s high night-horizons, and e.g. famously written of how “the stars moved along the edges of the hills”.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof

He raised, and never stopped:

When down behind the cottage roof,

At once, the bright moon dropped.

To realize the emotional charge of this, it’s worth going out on a suitable clear evening and making it happen. The roof should be quite close, perhaps less than a hundred meters away; it happens just as the lover arrives. The moon falls “at once” because it is the lover’s relatively rapid approach, not the moon’s own descent, that causes it to drop out of sight. In those nights without any streetlights, the instantaneous change in the light would have been dramatic. If you are suitably sensitized, it still can cause a shiver.   

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happy christmas

Abies nordmanniana

Christmas trees for sale in Asda. Someone had torn off a branchlet, which I eagerly salvaged.

When I was a child the Christmas tree both in Sweden and England was invariably Norway Spruce (Picea abies) and what people of my generation will fondly remember is pricking their fingers on the sharp needles, the difficulty of preventing the heavier baubles from slipping off the rather thin glossy foliage, and later sweeping up all those needles, which tend to fall off in the dessicated air of modern houses. Of course the Norway Spruce is also a much-loved component of the Nordic forest.

Anyway, the luxury Xmas tree of today, as seen here, is Caucasian Fir (Abies nordmanniana, sometimes called Nordmann Fir); the needles are stouter, pleasant to handle, and usually don't fall off. The labels say that you can plant the tree out when Christmas is over. I'm a bit sceptical about that, since most silver firs dislike town air, but apparently on basic soils it does better than Norway Spruce.

Abies nordmanniana

Abies nordmanniana, upperside

Abies nordmanniana, underside

Abies nordmanniana is a refugia species of the Caucasus region. It is a big tree: specimens in the Western Caucasus reserve reach 85m, the tallest trees in Europe.

It also grows throughout Turkey, but always in mountains. The Turkish ssp. equi-trojani is presumably so-called because it forests the upper parts of the mountain familiar to all western literary types as Mount Ida.  Its Turkish name is Kazdağı ("goose mountain").

Judging from the lack of hairs on the shoot, this branchlet is indeed ssp. equi-trojani, so if you get fed up with thinking about Christmas while reading this post, then think about Paris and Oenone instead.

                   Hither came at noon
Mournful Oenone, wandering forlorn
Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills.
Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck
Floated her hair or seem'd to float in rest.
She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine,
Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade
Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff.
----
They came, they cut away my tallest pines,
My tall dark pines, that plumed the craggy ledge
High over the blue gorge,

----
(From Tennyson's poem Oenone (1829).)

"Pines" is an understandable error. Obviously Paris' ship was made from Caucasian Fir!

Abies nordmanniana, bud

Abies nordmanniana, buds

Abies nordmanniana, shoot

Abies nordmanniana, twig

Close-up of slightly older wood, with cracks developing.

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (1749)

Tom (Albert Finney) and Mrs Waters (Joyce Redman) in the 1963 film of Tom Jones

Tom Jones (1749) was the most admired of eighteenth-century novels, at least by the English novelists of the nineteenth-century "great tradition", and it is still admired today (for example, by Michael Schmidt in The Novel: A Biography). Yet it has not always proved easy to write about. This piece picks up from one of the classic essays, by William Empson in 1958 (it's on JStor).

In what I'm going to say there are spoilers from the outset, and I seriously urge you not to look at this if you're just embarking on a reading of Tom Jones. To prevent accidental contamination, there now follows a short advertising break!

*

RENEWABLE IS SERIOUS.

On that afternoon [in May 2014] Germany generated 74 percent of its electric needs from renewable sources. (Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/climate-will-we-lose-endgame/


THE ONLY THING WE REALLY NEED TO DO IS PHASE OUT COAL.

Yet as Nordhaus himself points out, studies attempting to analyze how we might most efficiently reduce carbon emissions strongly suggest that just one of these margins should account for the bulk of any improvement—namely, we have to sharply reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generation. (Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/climate-change-gambling-civilization/

I am quoting these snippets more for their intrinsic interest than because of their specific relevance to Tom Jones.

Maybe what I'm really thinking of is a current blogpost by Tim Parks (also in the NYRB) called Why Read New Books?  We should persist, he says, with the effort of reading gnarly contemporary novels because of the questions they pose about the life we're living in now.  When the reader of a modern novel feels that the author really "hits the nail on the head", it's part of a crucial conversation about how the world is now. Parks adds parenthetically:  "This won’t happen reading Fielding’s Tom Jones, where half the pleasure is: Wow, how different the world once was."

Still, Tom Jones does have some kind of relevance to the modern world, and that's where I come back to Empson's classic essay, in which he writes about Fielding's "double irony". He means the characteristic passages that are winkingly directed against (or for) both sides of a question. Empson speaks of Fielding's relativism and of his recognition that there are multiple moral codes within a culture, a complexity that can't be dissolved merely by deciding that one code is right and another wrong; here in its infancy, Empson claims, is the most essential insight that we can learn from reading novels.

That insight is painfully and urgently needed in a world that is drifting away from social consensus: where the people of right and left increasingly speak different languages, indeed are insulated (not least by the internet) from ever conversing with each other except by flame-war. A world where, for example, both climate-deniers and environmentalists react with shock and reductive dismissal to the idiocies of their opponents. I don't need to deny my own ardent environmentalism to recognize this as a terrible state of affairs.

Advertising break over. Back to Tom Jones.  

*

Sophia Western (Susannah York), Squire Western (Hugh Griffith) and Tom (Albert Finney) in the 1963 film.

Only the middle third of Tom Jones takes place actually on the road, yet it has generally the air of being a picaresque novel.  This pervasive air of insouciance conceals plotting that's both intricate and steely, as everyone knows.

The plot is of the "lost heir" type. We are so used to encountering the lost heir plot being done badly in later fiction (where it's all too often just a perfunctory wrap-up, the landed-property equivalent of a deus ex machina) that it's possible to rather overlook the interest of the revelations in the packed final pages of Tom Jones.

We understand, of course, that Mrs Waters is not Tom's mother after all, breathe a sigh of relief (thinking about that episode at Upton), and we're glad to know that Tom's now a rich heir and can wed his Sophia. Then we put the book down.

But this is to leave all the emphasis on the happy uniting of the two largest estates in Somersetshire.

Not everyone, by the way, has been so readily pleased by Fielding's "double irony". Raymond Williams, for example, called it a "genial, manipulative bluff". His point was that Fielding in the end thoroughly confirmed the values of the propertied classes.

And of course that's true, in a way. Fielding was a Tory and an Etonian, he came from an aristocratic family (he and everyone else supposed that it descended from the Hapsburgs, though this has since been shown to be an ancestral fraud). He did believe in landed property, though the squirearchy had its faults, of course, as affectionately satirized in Squire Western: his drunkenness, illiteracy, opinionatedness, domestic tyranny and good-hearted simplicity.

After reading almost a thousand pages to reach this point, most of us are ready for a rest. But actually it's interesting to turn the book over and read at least the first few chapters again, newly armed with the information revealed in its ending. Something like a new book emerges, and it's a considerably darker one. You might call it the story of Jenny Jones.

*

And first, of course, we must pause to admire Fielding's brilliant planning. It's clear from numerous glancing allusions in the opening pages that Tom's parentage was no afterthought; now we can appreciate the previously-overlooked references to Miss Bridget's "violent fit of illness" (I, 6), or to Jenny's attendance on the very night before the baby was placed in Mr Allworthy's bed.

Jenny's story is told all in the wrong order. Straightened out, it looks like this.

Jenny is young but not pretty (I, 6; II, 3) She is evidently very poor, because for four years she has been a maidservant to the Partridges (themselves poor). She turns out to be a gifted student, so Partridge at first enjoys granting her ardent request to be taught Latin, then comes to dislike her as she outdoes him. Eventually, Mrs Partridge wrongly suspects her of an affair with her husband and dismisses her (II, 3); she returns home to her mother. Here Miss Bridget approaches her, at first employing her as a servant "to read to her". Miss Bridget is going to have a baby, the  fruit of an illicit love-affair with a young chap (Mr Summer) who has subsequently died of smallpox.  Jenny Jones is handsomely paid to attend the birth (with her mother), to take the child to her own home, to bring it to Allworthy's bed when he returns from his business trip, and finally to confess the child as hers (I, 6): "[I] thought myself, by her generosity, nobly rewarded, both for my secrecy and my shame" (XVIII, 7).

This is one of two points in Tom Jones where Fielding shows us the business decisions of poverty. The other one is Black George's theft of Tom's bank-notes; an offence for which Tom pardons him in absentia, though against Allworthy's advice. Fielding explains very well that George could feel friendly and sympathetic to Tom at the same time as robbing him; situated as he was, the opportunity was just too good to pass up. As for Jenny, she makes, perhaps, a bad bargain. The neighbourhood certainly do not forgive her for her "shame". Mr Allworthy subjects her to a severe sermon (I,7), but kindly arranges to remove her to a more distant neighbourhood to escape the consequences of her ruined reputation. He strongly advises her to turn over a new leaf, and gives her a chance to do so, "if her own inclinations should ever hereafter lead her to chuse the road of virtue" (I, 9).

Of course she had never chosen otherwise, but when we next hear of her (about a year later), she has decamped with a recruiting officer (II, 6). (Hence Partridge is falsely condemned of fathering the child, Jenny being dismissed by Allworthy as a slut and her hypothetical evidence of no account in Partridge's defence.) Jenny says later that she was deceived by promises of marriage and, from her own reading on the subject, believed herself married in the eyes of God; which prompts Allworthy to a sexist reflection on why it's better for lower-class women to have no learning at all than to so mislead themselves (XVIII, 8).

Jenny lives faithfully with this unnamed officer until his death some twelve years later. Finding herself a "stray sheep" prevented by the world's prejudice from returning to "the road of virtue" (XVIII, 8), she takes up with a certain Captain Waters and lives faithfully as his wife for "many" years. It is as Mrs Waters that she is known from now on (happily preventing her being identified by Partridge at Upton). Eventually, however, she contracts a dubious relationship with Ensign Northerton (IX, 7). Captain Waters being under orders, he parts with his "wife" at Worcester (temporarily, as they both imagine); she meets up with Northerton, now on the run, and generously aids him until he robs her and attempts to rape her - at which point, Tom comes to her rescue (IX, 2). She falls in love with Tom and they spend a night of passion at the inn at Upton (IX, 5), but she soon discovers and accepts that he is in love with someone else (IX, 6). On her now-resumed journey to Bath she passes easily enough into a liaison with Mr Fitzpatrick (XVII, 9), unaware that he already has a wife. She discovers this in London, after Fitzpatrick is wounded by Tom.

She hastens gaily to Tom (in prison) with the good news that Fitzpatrick is not dying, but is somewhat disappointed to find Tom so penitent and uninterested in making love to her. (Fielding beautifully delineates her moral "decline"; she has now become accustomed to her adventurous and irregular lifestyle.) After meeting Dowling (XVIII, 7) she learns who Tom is, and also that Mr Allworthy (as she supposes) is trying to get Tom condemned for Fitzpatrick's murder.

It's at this point that she writes Tom a letter (XVIII, 2). The letter contains a couple of ambiguous phrases contrived by Fielding to seem to be referring to the "incest" that Partridge (imagining her to be Tom's mother) believes has taken place at Upton. This can't be her real meaning, and it's perhaps a question how far Fielding troubled himself to work out that real meaning.  But presumably when she writes of "other crimes" she only means whatever lies behind Allworthy's supposed opinion of Tom as a thorough "villain" .

She, also, of course, infers that Allworthy is still unaware that Tom is his own nephew; and so she hastens to precipitate all the eventual revelations in Book XVIII. Allworthy being thus undeceived by her, he in turn offers hope of her own reformation: "Mrs Waters fell now upon her knees before him, and, in a flood of tears, made him many most passionate acknowledgments of his goodness.." (XVIII, 8) But I believe her reformation had already begun, as soon as she discovered that her Upton lover was no other than the new-born infant she had once carried into Mr Allworthy's bed. She of course could not fear having committed incest, but I think the coincidence shocked her and that this is the true explanation for the passage in her letter about the Upton dalliance, "reflection upon which is like to embitter all my future life" (rather than regret for it leading to Tom's loss of Sophia, as Empson proposed).

As to those of lower account, Mrs Waters returned into the country, had a pension of £60 a-year settled upon her by Mr Allworthy, and is married to Parson Supple, on whom, at the instance of Sophia, Western hath bestowed a considerable living. (XVIII, Chapter the last)

There's a certain irony in that phrase, "As to those of lower account". It refers, primarily, to social standing. In this winding-up chapter, Fielding has already dealt with minor gentlefolk like Nightingale and Mrs Fitzpatrick, though they are relatively unimportant to the plot. The account of Mrs Waters begins his winding-up of the lower ranks; it is followed by accounts of Black George, Partridge and Molly.

But it's also a tacit admission that Tom Jones doesn't really do Jenny Jones justice; that her story, challenging to the settled values of the squirearchy, is one that Fielding knows, but can't find the space to fully explore. This imperfect but generous, intelligent and rather heroic woman is being dismissed, however happily for her financial security, into the arms of the distinctly unheroic Parson Supple.

Tom and Mrs Waters, from a series of erotic prints of literary scenes (before 1780)

[Image source: British Museum]

*

Mr Allworthy can't be held responsible for Jenny's later misadventures. Nevertheless an immediate-second-reading of the opening Books presents Allworthy in a distinctly less favourable light, mainly because we now know (as we don't on a first reading) that his judgments of Jenny and later Partridge are both entirely mistaken.

The kindly satire lurking in a passage like this now bursts into flame.

Scandal, therefore, never found any access to his table; for as it hath been long since observed that you may know a man by his companions, so I will venture to say, that, by attending to the conversation at a great man's table, you may satisfy yourself of his religion, his politics, his taste, and indeed of his entire disposition: for though a few odd fellows will utter their own sentiments in all places, yet much the greater part of mankind have enough of the courtier to accommodate their conversation to the taste and inclination of their superiors.  (Book II, Chapter VI)

The paragraph begins as if piling further eulogy on Allworthy. By the end, it reveals the life around him as a sham. If "you may know a man by his companions", then it seems rather a concern that the good Mr Allworthy's companions are such an unholy lot. The second half of the paragraph explains how this could happen: Allworthy's much-publicized goodness demands a show of good manners at his table; it's an invitation to hypocrisy. The penetrating magistrate, unfortunately, is easily imposed on. But it's only with the full understanding provided by Book XVIII that we realize to what an extent Allworthy's record as a judge in these early chapters is one of unrelieved failure. The innocent he finds guilty (Jenny, Partridge, Tom); the truly guilty, on the other hand, find in him a true friend, or something just as good. Everyone around him plays a part: the two Blifils, his own sister Bridget, Thwackem and Square, Deborah Wilkins... (The apotheosis of this sham world might be the astonishing epitaph on Captain Blifil (II, 9.))

These insights, not of course wholly concealed in the first reading, become noticeably sharpened in the second. Fielding's pervasive "double irony" creates the potential for something we might call double narrative.

[Image source: National Portrait Gallery. The only "authentic" portrait of Henry Fielding, painted by William Hogarth in 1762, then engraved by James Basire. Hogarth made the portrait eight years after Fielding's death; it was based on a silhouette supplied to him by Margaret Collier, a family friend. This was Fielding at 48, towards the end of his life (Mrs Collier went along on the voyage to Lisbon).

Info from Peter Jan de Voogd: Henry Fielding and William Hogarth: The Correspondences of the Arts, Volume 30, Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam, 1981), pp. 31-33.  De Voogd casts significant doubt on the common assumption that Fielding and "my friend Hogarth" had in fact been closely acquainted.]

The Coxwold-Gilling Gap

The view towards Kilburn White Horse. The Hambleton Hills in the distance, and the Howardians at our back.

This was on a walk from Kilburn to Byland Abbey on 9th August.

The Coxwold-Gilling Gap is a rift valley formed at the end of the Cretaceous period. The land fell 500-1000ft between the two parallel faults where the Hambleton and Howardian escarpments now face each other, about a mile and a quarter apart.

Odontites vernus

I took some not very inspiring photos - too much breeze! - of Red Bartsia (Odontites vernus, formerly verna), a common semi-parasitic plant of dampish meadows. I assume this is ssp. serotinus, based on the branches being at an angle of >50 degrees from the stem.

The name "Bartsia" has magical connotations for me, because it's also been attached to a number of showier Arctic-Alpine plants that recall happy days in the Swedish fells. (In fact, these species belong not to Odontites but to the related genera Bartsia and Pedicularis.)

Fraxinus excelsior

European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior). Sometimes a very beautiful tree. (Never mind what Alan Mitchell says!)

Byland Abbey

By consulting the ground-plan, it's possible to get an idea of what life must have been like here: the separate dormitories and cloisters for the novices; access to the latter from the monks' quarters (I suppose for the use of instructors); the fire and cookhouse at a junction between the monks' and novices' dormitories, so its heat would spread through both; the monk's quarters acting as a defensive wall around the abbot's magnificent lodgings, with gardens between.

Superb toastie at the cafe over the road from the abbey.

The White Horse from High Kilburn

We came back via Oldstead and High Kilburn. Since it was still only 19:00, we decided to restore our upland balance by taking the car up onto the Moors, pausing briefly to snuff the air and take photos somewhere near the Tabular Hills.

A table of Corallian limestone.

Ling (Calluna vulgaris)

I've never lived close enough to acid moorland or heathland to really get familiar with it. It only seems to support about six species, but I still feel a sensation of novelty, and of course August is the perfect time to visit. 

Bell Heather (Erica cinerea)

Cross-leaved Heath (Erica tetralix)

Tormentil (Potentilla erecta) among buds of Ling.

A tabular hill and Cirsium palustre

Fraxinus excelsior

European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) again, this time up on the moors

Some sort of rush, Probably Hard Rush (Juncus inflexus), but I've never really got round to understanding rushes as yet.

After this we drove up past Black Hambleton to Osmotherley, trying to spot a non-existent stone circle on the way.*  Then back to Kilburn via the A19 and Thirsk.

* It's actually a collapsed hayloft, and anyway we didn't see it. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tall-guy/6505906187/)  We were also confused by the nearby presence of the words "Osmotherley Stones" on the OS map. This seems to be just a location-name. I don't know what stones it's talking about. Maybe a natural outcrop.

Hester Lynch Piozzi: Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786)

Hester Lynch Piozzi in 1785-86, by an unknown Italian artist

[Image source: National Portrait Gallery]

Chronology

1709  Samuel Johnson born

1735  Marries Elizabeth (Tetty) Jervis

1740/41 Hester Lynch Salusbury born

1746-55 Johnson’s Dictionary

1749   The Vanity of Human Wishes

1750-60 The Rambler, The Adventurer, The Idler

1752  Tetty Johnson dies

1759  Johnson’s mother dies. Rasselas

1763  Johnson meets James Boswell

1763  Hester marries Henry Thrale.

1765  Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare.

         Johnson meets the Thrales. A year later, he moves in with them.

1775  Journey to the Western Islands

1777-81 Lives of the Poets

1781  Henry Thrale dies

1783  Hester moves to Bath. Last meeting with Johnson (April).

1784  Hester marries Gabriel Piozzi (July). Death of Johnson (December).

1785  Hester writes Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson in Italy (Summer).

          Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

1786  Anecdotes published.

1791  Boswell’s Life of Johnson

1809  Gabriel Piozzi dies

1821  Hester Piozzi dies

The main points arising from this chronology are as follows. Johnson was in his mid-fifties when he met the two young friends who did so much for him and who would become his chief biographers (Boswell and Hester Thrale disliked each other, by the way). His wife had died more than a decade earlier. The literary achievements that had established him were in the past; he was semi-retired. In another sense, his life may be said to have begun again. During the remaining twenty years of his life he lodged most of the time with the Thrales, in fact for most of each week throughout their marriage. Hester was usually pregnant; the Thrales had twelve children. Henry Thrale’s death, the burden of supporting an increasingly difficult Johnson, and his disapproval of the liaison with Piozzi, brought all this to an end. Hester’s life, in turn, began again. She was about 24 when she first met Johnson, and about 42 when they last saw each other.

She revered Johnson; he was always her friend; and she had nursed him through serious depressions. Still, her book is quite candid; there was something monstrous about him. At first his presence in the house (she calls it her confinement) was “terrifying”, towards the end “irksome”. Boswell tries to canonize him, portraying his prejudiced, bullying and often unintelligent conversation as if it was a dialogue in heaven.

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Alexander Pope (1688-1744):An Essay on Man

Alexander Pope in 1716, portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller

[Image source: Philip Mould Historical Portraits, which describes how portraits of Pope concealed his bowed and crippled appearance.]

An Essay on Man in Four Epistles

[The epistles were published separately in 1733-34. Apparently written in 1730-31, but perhaps Pope deliberately gave them a Horatian three years to mature.]

The madness of superfluous health, says Pope in one of the chiding moments in the Essay on Man. There are rather too many chiding moments. The balance feels wrong. One did chide in such expository poems, Hesiod had done it, so had Lucretius, but Pope's lessons have not a sufficiently copious enthusiasm to excuse his lofty reproofs.  Go, wiser thou... Go wondrous creature... Fools! (he proceeds) thou fools ... Blind to truth... Cease then... - and much more in the same vein. This is not so much about enlightening the insanely healthy questioners as about telling them to shut their noise: Whatever is, is RIGHT. His paean to Order involves too much ordering people about.

Anyway, here's the phrase back in its context, the opening lines of Epistle III:

Here then we rest: 'The universal cause
Acts to one end, but acts by various laws.'
In all the madness of superfluous health,
The trim of pride, the impudence of wealth,
Let this great truth be present night and day;
But most be present, if we preach or pray.

It's the healthy, wealthy and proud who hold all the poetic cards here. How can Pope, the great apophthegmist, try and pass off this unmeaning, uninteresting verbiage about the universal cause as a great truth? As pallid is my conception of Pope preaching, or indeed Pope praying. I think he'd rather be playing in the road with the trim and impudent.

Pope knew there was something unachieved about the Essay on Man. He self-accuses it of a certain dryness, of generality without detail; defines its method as a faute de mieux; demotes it to the status of preliminaries to a more fruitful sequel; tacitly condemns it by not delivering that sequel. 

Still, the great chain is fascinating. When he says:

See dying vegetables life sustain,

See life dissolving vegetate again:

when he sees the insulated concentration of the kind:

Say, will the falcon, stooping from above,

Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove?

when (best of all) he admires the essential motors of action and passion, and their creative patterning thus:

The rising tempest puts in act the soul,

Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole...

Passions, like elements, though born to fight,

Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite...

these are glimmerings of the processes that sustain an ecology. That image of a chain, however, is inevitably too one-dimensional; too much like a gentlemanly line, or the grades of estate staff. It has its later analogy in apex predators and the like, but it isn't helpful when thinking about the inter-relations of complex groups of plants and animals. Pope intermittently knows it too: the lioness has a hopeless sense of smell. Who claims the grain? Even the humble birds. And the enchanting hog, "that ploughs not nor obeys thy call", makes his living as well as Man.

Of the chain's mechanism, no satisfactory explanation emerges.

From Nature's chain whatever link you strike,

Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

In Pope's own terms it's difficult to see what could justify this assertion except a pious compliment to the great maker's precision. The chain is conceived as a fragile perfection, like the one and only answer to a difficult sum. Adaptation, the continuing self-repair and adjustment to changed conditions, these ideas are not to be glimpsed. The chain, being divinely imposed and RIGHT, is apparently too static to require what, to our eyes, makes the natural world a far more impressive creation.  

And still, there's sometimes a wonderful energy in Pope's intuitions roving, with a liberty that was already becoming amateurish, from Nature to Man. This of the strange comforts that make us unwilling to trade places with another:

The starving chemist in his golden views

Supremely blessed, the poet in his muse.

Of our toys: the child "Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw" carried through to the deflating grace of "beads and prayer-books are the toys of age". No simplicities of RIGHT here: but a broad, amused, wonderment; the spirited delectation of a superfluous health that Pope experienced only in his verse.

(2007)

[Previously published in Intercapillary Space.]

John Gay: The Birth of the Squire (1720)

[Image source: http://www.jacquithomson.com/2014/07/party-seven-bumpers-of-beer.html]

"Gay has all the gifts of a great poet except the highest intensity of passion and imagination", I read in one of those multi-volume paperback surveys of EngLit that were so popular thirty years ago. The writer (Charles Peake) seems to be inadvertently recalling Matthew Arnold on Chaucer, and indeed it's Chaucer who is bound to come to mind - not so much Chaucer's manner as, what is yet more unusual, some kinship in the vistas opened up by the poetry - when we read such lines as the following:

Beagles and spaniels round his cradle stand,

Kiss his moist lip and gently lick his hand;

He joys to hear the shrill horn's ecchoing sounds,

And learns to lisp the names of all the hounds.

With frothy ale to make his cup o-'er-flow,

Barley shall in paternal acres grow:

The bee shall sip the fragrant dew from the flow'rs,

To give metheglin for his morning hours;

For him the clustring hop shall climb the poles,

And his own orchard sparkle in his bowles.

This is early in the poem, when Gay is still, just about, doing what his subtitle claims: imitating the Pollio of Virgil (i.e. the fourth Eclogue). Hence the sentence beginning "With frothy ale" runs parallel with Virgil's prophecy of a golden age. Nor can the beauty of such a harvest be denied. [*see Note 2] Surely Pope learnt from here the prophetic music beginning "Another age shall see the golden Ear", that would end the Epistle to Burlington? Yet Pope's  "His father's acres who enjoys in peace" is as it were ironized in advance by Gay's vision, written ten years earlier, of a golden age requiring heroic capacities for all-day drinking on the part of its chief consumer. 

But it isn't the cycle of these liquid harvests, consumed in their season, that finally does for Gay's hero. His downfall is the strong ale,

Firm-cork'd, and mellow'd till the twentieth year;

Brew'd or when Phoebus warms the fleecy sign,

Or when his languid rays in Scorpio shine.

That is, in March or October, the standard times for brewing "keeping beers". Small and table beers were brewed more or less all year round; but these strong ales were for special occasions and guests, as at the squire's own birth,

And old October reddens ev'ry nose.

The October beer was the most esteemed, because at that time of year the malt comes fresh from the barley harvest; to compensate, the successful brewing of March beer involved selecting top ingredients and brewing it even stronger than October beer since it would have to survive the risk of fermentation during the heats of summer. Naturally a certain snobbery attached to ales that were laid down for many years. Though the legend of mellowing implied that this ageing improved the drink, the real point was that only a very strong brew, costly to produce, would ever keep that long; thus it reflected favourably on status of the house. The anonymous author of The London and Country Brewer (1736) notes:

[The method described] is attended with extraordinary Labour and Time, by the Brewers running off the wort almost continually, and often returning the same again into the mash Vat, but then it certainly gives him an opportunity of extracting and washing out the goodness of the Malt, more than any of the common Methods, by which he is capacitated to make his October or March Beer as strong as he pleases. The Fame of Penly Beer is at this time well known not only throughout Hertfordshire, but several other remote Places, and truly not without desert, for in all my Travels I never met with any that excell'd it, for a clear amber Colour, a fine relish, and a light warm digestion. But what excell'd all was the generosity of its Donor, who for Hospitality in his Viands and this October Beer, has left but few of his Fellows.

A prudent toper would drink these "sipping beers"  from a "dwarf ale", a small funnel-shaped glass (their modern descendants are the barley wines). In his final scene the squire, the last man standing, goes for a different approach:

Methinks I see him in his hall appear,
Where the long table floats in clammy beer,
'Midst mugs and glasses shatter'd o'er the floor,
Dead-drunk his servile crew supinely snore;
Triumphant, o'er the prostrate brutes he stands,
The mighty bumper trembles in his hands;
Boldly he drinks, and like his glorious Sires,
In copious gulps of potent ale expires.

A bumper is a mug or glass filled right to the brim, usually for the purposes of making a ceremonial toast.[*see note] In this case the toast is a private one; just as the honoured guests appear to be absent and the friends of whom Gay promises to write turn out to be nothing but a "servile crew".

Moral censoriousness, however, is not what Gay is about; the sting of satire is taken off by this being framed as only a hypothetical finale (everything after the scene of the squire's birth is narrated partly in a fast-forwarding present tense and partly in a prospective future tense, so the precise degree of fictionality claimed by the various episodes is impossible to pin down). Just as he did not stick to imitating Virgil, so he did not quite manage to sustain an "ages of Man" structure, but the pervasive idea of speeded-up temporal cycles has been layered onto a groundwork of pleasures, that goes like this:

Hunting
Drink
Hunting
Drink
Hunting
Latin (scorned)
Priscilla, the milkmaid
Hunting
Drink

All these pleasures, and a good few subsidiary ones, are portrayed with the utmost sensual brilliance, and this is not absent even in the darkened tones of that final scene where we share an ugly delight in the liberated tongue of

Foul scandal to the lying lip affords,

and even in the rock-bottom splurge of "copious gulps of potent ale". Lips and mouths are ever-present forces in this poem.

After the hero is incapacitated from the chase following that fateful tumble on St Hubert's Day (November 3rd) when

Low in the dust his groveling honour lies,

Headlong he falls, and on the rugged stone

Distorts his neck, and cracks the collar bone

he becomes instead a country justice and a severe preserver of game from the depredations of poachers; a conversion in mid-hunt that leadenly echoes Hubert, patron saint of hunters, who turned to the Lord as a result of encountering a miraculous hart with a crucifix set between its antlers.) Here, and when he makes his spirited defence against learning ("Why should he wiser prove than all his race?"), the hero is seen - under duress - haplessly trying to impose orderliness on the tides of pleasure, which in the end carry him away. 

But is it he who has this thought, or is it his "too fond mother"? - You can read it both ways, just as you can't be sure if

These storys that descend from son to son,

The forward boy shall one day make his own

means that he appropriates his father's tall stories or simply ends up with the same sort of stories to tell. His life is a prolongation of the family's, and indeed the household's, since Priscilla takes a full share of responsibility for their energetic use of "The dairy, barn, the hay-loft and the grove". Because the squire is the realization of a community's idea he eludes satire (as often in Gay) by being both beneath it and beyond it.

*

John Gay, painted by William Aikman (c. 1720)

[This painting is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (though not currently on display). Image Source: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/a/artist/william-aikman/object/john-gay-1685-1732-poet-and-dramatist-pg-718 . I've brightened it up a bit.]

*

Note 1:

  Prithee fill me the glass,
  Till it laugh in my face,
With ale that is potent and mellow;
  He that whines for a lass
  Is an ignorant ass,
For a bumper has not its fellow.

This is a drunken song that is sung out by Sir Wilfull Witwoud, in Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) - an irresistible country squire very much in line with the figure in Gay's poem. Sir Wilfull's song proceeds to connect the seasonal/diurnal cycles with drinking; he is a stage presence in the long tradition that begins, perhaps, with Heracles in the Alcestis : the bumptious late arrival who unexpectedly diverts an already absorbing play along the brink of chaos.

Note 2:

Lyrical home-brewers would be hard-pressed to choose for their motto between this of Gay and the lines by Shakespeare:

And were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass...

(2007)

[This was first published in Intercapillary Space.]