Butler, Palmerston, and the soldiering menace

Each week on Substack I publish a clerihew, my favorite form of light verse: a quatrain in AABB with intentionally awkward scansion and forced rhyme. The subject is always a person, whose name constitutes the first line. My clerihews usually concern historical figures. My subject last week was General Benjamin Butler.

The joke in the poem itself had to do with something tawdry that Butler, playing the part of the moneygrubbing Yankee to the hilt, supposedly did while dining at a wealthy lady’s home while in charge of the Union occupation of New Orleans. But in my brief historical note afterward I mentioned something for which he was infamous: General Order No. 28 of May 15, 1862, which reads:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

The women of occupied New Orleans had not welcomed the Union army or navy into the city and had shown repeated disrespect to them. One story has a lady emptying a chamber pot onto Admiral David Farragut. Cartoons depict them spitting at Union soldiers. One suspects simple snubs and insults were most widespread. But Butler could allow none of this to stand. In case it wasn’t clear, General Order No. 28 calls for any woman (he denies them the title “lady,” an obvious dig) disrespecting his troops to be considered and treated as a prostitute.

The reaction was predictable and swift. Here’s Confederate General PGT Beauregard, who issued a general order of his own in response, a straightforward appeal to gallantry and the protection of women’s honor:

Men of the South! shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters and our sisters, be thus outraged by the ruffianly* soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat, at their pleasure, the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse friends, and drive back from our soil, those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties.

Political authorities weighed in as well. President Jefferson Davis condemned Butler. The Governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, published a longish open letter in which he echoed Beauregard, defended the women of New Orleans as reacting naturally to an invading foreign force, and, interestingly added force through historical argument:

The annals of warfare between civilized nations afford no similar instance of infamy to this order. It is thus proclaimed to the world that the exhibition of disgust or repulsiveness by the women of New Orleans to the hated invaders of their home and the slayers of their fathers, brothers, and husbands shall constitute a justification to a brutal soldiery for the indulgence of their lust. . . . History records instances of cities sacked and inhuman atrocities committed upon the women of a conquered town, but in no instance in modern times, at least without the brutal ravishers suffering condign punishment from the hands of their own commanders. It was reserved for a Federal general to invite his soldiers to the perpetration of outrages at the mention of which the blood recoils in horror.

Unable to penetrate deeper into Confederate territory or to break the spirit of civilian resistance, Moore suggests, Butler “sees the fruits of a victory he did not help to win eluding his grasp, and nothing left upon which to gloat his vengeance but unarmed men and helpless women.”

There’s a lot going on here, and more I could have quoted.

Over the years I’ve seen this incident downplayed as Confederate hysteria, with everything from “Lost Cause” mythology to “the patriarchy” playing a role. The short version: Southerners were ninnies upset about nothing, and anyway they deserved it. Sometimes the fact that Butler’s order did not result in a wave of rapes is adduced in support, but this is post facto justification. No one living through this could have known how it would turn out. The example of history gave them plenty to worry about.

And the historical dimension is what most piqued my interest. Reading up on Butler ahead of publishing that clerihew, I discovered in Library of America’s great four-volume set of primary source materials a British reaction to General Order No. 28. Here’s a note delivered by Lord Palmerston, then prime minister, to American ambassador Charles Adams (son of john Quincy, grandson of john) on June 11, 1862:

My dear sir,—I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not impossible to express adequately the disgust which must be excited in the mind of every honorable man by the general order of General Butler given in the inclosed extract from yesterday’s Times. Even when a town is taken by assault it is the practice of the Commander of the conquering army to protect to his utmost the inhabitants and especially the female part of them, and I will venture to say that no example can be found in the history of civilized nations till the publication of this order, of a general guilty in cold blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled licence of an unrestrained soldiery.

If the Federal Government chuses to be served by men capable of such revolting outrages, they must submit to abide by the deserved opinion which mankind will form of their conduct.

Adams asserted that he would not “recognize” Palmerston’s note—which was marked Confidential—“unless he was assured it was official.” Palmerston replied that it was, and publicly condemned Butler in a speech in the Commons. Adams, according to his secretary’s journal, “was much offended,” considering Palmerston’s note an “impudent” act of “insolence” and its arguments “sophistical.” Adams’s secretary, who viewed Adams as the winner of the tangle, thought Palmerston was projecting:

Knowing the brutality of his own officers and soldiers he readily imagined ours of the same stamp, and insolently presumed to lecture Mr. Adams on a thing which was not his business. His ill-manners were properly rebuked. American soldiers, he will find out, are not beasts, tho’ English soldiers are; and he will also learn that it is only a debased mind that would construe Gen’l Butler’s order as he has done.

If there is anything “sophistical” in this exchange, it is this. The explicit insult and implicit threat in General Order No. 28 were clear, hence the outrage. This is perhaps the first move in the long game of pooh-poohing the outrage at Butler.

At any rate, the women of New Orleans, Southerners generally, and foreign observers like Lord Palmerston knew what was up. So did Lincoln. Whether out of principle, canny strategic considerations, or for reasons of pure PR, Lincoln removed Butler from command in New Orleans in December 1862.

I was struck by the similarity of Palmerston’s appeal to that of Moore. Both correctly observe the dangers of a population of soldiers toward civilians in an occupied area. Both correctly observe that part of the long, slow evolution toward an ideal of “civilized” warfare involved the responsibility of leadership to protect civilians, even enemy civilians, and “even when a town is taken by assault,” which in the ancient world and much of the Middle Ages was understood to give the victor carte blanche to loot and rape.

Here’s something I’ve had to work hard to make my students understand given our “thank you for your service” culture of trust and admiration for soldiers: historically, soldiers were a menace. Even your own soldiers. (Perhaps especially your own soldiers, since if all was going well you would never see the enemy.) Discipline, martial law, flogging and the firing squad, and the inculcation of chivalrous ideals were partial solutions to the threat posed by large bodies of bored, strong, regularly paid young men to the civilian population, but only partial solutions. And these crumbled following the French Revolution which, as David Bell makes clear in The First Total War, rejected limited “civilized” warfare as an irrational fiction and embraced ruthless pragmatic brutality.

So, what to make of all this? Far from hysteria or Lost Cause mythologizing, the outrage was justifiable and the concern real. To pretend otherwise is partisanship.** Palmerston knew his history, and how thin and artificial the barrier between civilization and barbarism is. Adams imagined Union soldiers to have transcended history. One of these men is, at best, a deluded optimist.

A few years ago, quoting the Oxford History of Modern War, I wrote about the Civil War as a psychological conflict. Butler’s General Order No. 28 is a good example of what this looked like before the “frankly terrorist” campaigns of Sherman and others, campaigns that had more than a little of Jacobin total war in them. In addition to military victory, Butler needed to crush the enemy psychologically. Nothing short of abject subjugation would do, which is why Butler became a darling of the punitively-minded Radical Republicans. No “hearts and minds” here. In that way it’s of a piece with other nationalist wars.

* Appropriately, ruffian comes into English from Italian, in which it means “pimp.” Dante uses it in Inferno XVIII, the circle of panderers and seducers. Moore plays on the same theme when he writes that Butler can “add to infamy already well merited these crowning titles of a panderer to lust and a desecrator of virtue.”

** As a measure of the extent to which these events are still subject to purely partisan interpretation, why do we hear so much about the Southern desire to protect women being “misogyny” and “patriarchy,” but not Butler’s expressed intention to treat Southern women as prostitutes out of political spite?

Ties that could never be chosen

Yesterday Alan Jacobs shared a thought-provoking short post on “the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen,” a deep cultural shift that has made all of us more autonomous and less human. Jacobs mentions family ties specifically, which we all receive rather than select, and includes the following quotation from the late Sir Roger Scruton’s final book, a study of Wagner’s Parsifal:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

As it happens, I’ve just finished reading a new edition of Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic about Walter of Aquitaine. The poem is set in the mid-fifth century world of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Huns. The action begins in the court of Attila somewhere in central Europe. There, we meet:

• Walthari, heir to a Visigothic kingdom in the west

• Hildigunda, daughter of the Burgundian king

• Hagano, a Frankish nobleman

All three are hostages to Attila, collateral in a peace deal between Attila and their respective kingdoms. Further, Walthari and Hildigunda have been pledged to each other in marriage since childhood, and Walthari and Hagano, through the trials of combat in the ranks of Attila’s allied fighters, have become fast friends.

But then the peace treaty between Attila and the Franks ends and Hagano flees before he can be killed, and when Attila, as a reward for Walthari’s brave and loyal service (being a medieval hostage involved a lot more collaboration with one’s host than the word suggests now, and could be quite cushy), announces his plan to marry Walthari into his family and keep him on permanently, Walthari decides to flee, too, and to take Hildigunda with him. They love each other and don’t want their childhood betrothal undone.

One might expect a frantic pursuit across Europe but Walthari and Hildigunda’s flight goes smoothly until they reach Frankish territory. There, Gundahari attempts to stop them and confiscate not only Walthari’s horse and treasure but Hildigunda herself. He calls on Hagano’s aid, but Hagano refuses to fight his old friend until ten other men—including, crucially, some of his own kinsmen—have been killed. The climactic action is akin to that six-minute brawl in the alley in They Live, a brutal knock-down drag-out that ends with renewed friendship.

Much of the tension in Waltharius therefore comes from the attempts by the characters to honor unchosen obligations. Namely:

• Walthari, Hildigunda, and Hagano’s hostage relationship with Attila, which was chosen for them by their families (and is threatened by events back home and Attila himself)

• Walthari and Hildigunda’s betrothal, which was chosen for them by their parents (and is threatened first by Attila and then by Gundahari)

• Walthari and Hagano’s friendship, which was chosen for them, in a sense, by Attila and their families (and is threatened by Gundahari)

• Hagano and Gundahari’s lord-vassal relationship, which was chosen for them by Gundahari’s succession (and is threatened by Gundahari’s presumption and Walthari’s skill with a sword)

Per Scruton, these are conflicts that cannot easily be resolved, if at all, and medieval people were acutely aware of that. The conflict of obligations is hardly unique to Waltharius. Think of the Volsungsaga, in which Signy must not under any circumstances fail to avenge her father, but can only do so by killing her husband Siggeir, whom she must not under any circumstances fail to protect. No happy ending there.

In each case above, the characters must choose which obligation is prior, and honor that. One suspects that a modern person in similar circumstances would nope out of there, as the kids say. Medieval people had a word for that.

That “we cannot always rectify” such “predicaments” does not make them absurd, however. The unchosen is prior to and deeper than any transactional alternative that the world of what Jacobs calls “metaphysical capitalism” can offer. But one wonders, given the inescapable success of the commodifying, transactional vision of the world, whether a story like Waltharius is even intelligible to modern people.

All the more reason to read, study, and share it.

Take a minute to read all of Jacobs’s post, as well as the handful of earlier posts he links to at the top. The edition of Waltharius I read is an updated version of Brian Murdoch’s translation published by Uppsala Books. It’s a delight. Check it out here or at Uppsala’s website here.

Homer and His Iliad at Miller's Book Review

I’m excited to say I have another guest post at Miller’s Book Review on Substack. Today I review classicist and historian Robin Lane Fox’s excellent recent book Homer and His Iliad, which I read this summer and briefly noted in my summer reading post here.

A short sample:

The poem’s style suggests that Homer was illiterate, master of a strictly oral tradition, but with important differences from the bodies of modern oral epic so often used to understand him. These epics from Albania, Finland, and the central Asian steppes are transmitted communally, mutate from telling to telling, and have a loose-limbed, gangling structure of “and then . . . and then,” stretching across their heroes’ entire lives.

The Iliad, on the other hand, is a tightly focused and artistically unified whole that minutely dramatizes one major incident over the course of a few weeks. Its characters, themes, and setting remain consistent throughout. Even minor details which Lane Fox calls “signposts”—a hero’s armor, horses taken as booty—are established early in the poem so that, when they reappear sometimes thousands of verses later, they do not seem a contrivance.

All of which indicate a single creative mind behind the work, a mind capacious enough to keep an entire war’s worth of characters and plot lines straight without reference to writing. If the style is indicative of oral poetry, the content—in its control, economy, and subtlety—suggests one poet.

Read the whole thing at Miller’s Book Review and be sure to subscribe for twice-weekly reviews and essays. I’m grateful to Joel for inviting me to contribute again.

Vindicated by Dr Johnson

Back at the beginning of the summer I briefly meditated on great books that I’ve tried to read but simply can’t. I wrote in some detail about The Grapes of Wrath but also mentioned Paradise Lost, which I have started many times and never finished—a fact I always feel a little ashamed of.

Well, this week I started reading Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel, which is excellent so far, and in the introduction he included this passage from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets:

“‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

This has been precisely my experience, and if Samuel Johnson could say the same—with much more besides—I can feel a little better about this gap in my reading.

Addendum: Having read the portion of Johnson’s life of Milton in which Johnson assesses Paradise Lost on the merits, I find some of his criticisms precisely accurate and insightful—the allegorical figures don’t work, Adam and Eve’s situation is literally unimaginable, and Milton has set himself the impossible task of describing at length things that can’t be described—while others are more specious. Maybe what will finally propel me through Paradise Lost is the need to make up my own mind about these controversies. To justify the ways of Dr Johnson, that is.

On artistic innovations that don’t make art better

For years now I’ve wanted to write a blog post about the Coke machines on my college’s campus. They’re sleek, modern, and high tech, with WiFi-integrated chip card readers and LED lights and a system of robotic conveyor belts that whisk your drink out of the rack to dispense it in a rotating receptacle with its own recessed lighting.

They also don’t work very well. All that innovation has resulted in more points of failure than the rudimentary, purely mechanical Coke machines I grew up with. One of those might occasionally have eaten your change. These can break in at least twenty ways. I’ve counted. Technological sophistication has actually made the machines worse for their original purpose.

Here’s a quotation I’ve been meaning to share for a while, a passage from poet Dana Gioia’s essay “Notes on the New Formalism,” which was published in 1999 but that I first ran across last year:

These young poets have grown up in a literary culture so removed from the predominantly oral traditions of metrical verse that they can no longer hear it accurately. Their training in reading and writing has been overwhelmingly visual not aural, and they have never learned to hear the musical design a poem executes. For them poems exist as words on a page rather than sounds in the mouth and ear. While they have often analyzed poems, they have rarely memorized and recited them. Nor have they studied and learned poems by heart in foreign languages where sound patterns are more obvious to nonnative speakers. Their often extensive critical training in textual analysis never included scansion, and their knowledge of even the fundamentals of prosody is haphazard (though theory is less important in practice than mastering the craft of versification). Consequently, they have neither much practical nor theoretical training in the way sounds are organized as poetry. Ironically this very lack of training makes them deaf to their own ineptitude. Full of confidence, they rely on instincts they have never developed. Magisterially they take liberties with forms whose rudimentary principles they misconstrue. Every poem reveals some basic confusion about its own medium. Some misconceptions ultimately prove profitable for art. Not this one.

The failures of both modern poetry and modern Coke machines stem from a fundamental misapprehension of their purpose—what they’re for, how they’re supposed to work. The basics are neglected. Not for nothing does the phrase mechanical failure apply in both instances. What you end up with is pointless sophistication (cf. Jacques Barzun’s definition of “decadence”) that often doesn’t even work.

A silly comparison, probably, but one that is broadly applicable.

On Ian Fleming’s prose rhythm

Ian Fleming (1908-64)

I’ve made the case for the strength of Ian Fleming’s writing in the James Bond novels before, usually emphasizing his concrete word choice, his concise and vivid descriptions, and his strong, direct, active narration. These are all characteristic virtues of his style. But one I haven’t paid much direct attention to is the cadence or rhythm of his prose—in poetry, meter.

This week I started reading Casino Royale to my wife before bed every night. I’ve read Casino Royale several times before and even listened to the excellent audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, but this is my first time reading it aloud myself. Going through it in this way, I noticed Fleming’s attention to rhythm immediately.

Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter. Bond, undercover at a French casino, has just received a telegram from M via a paid agent in Jamaica. He’s thinking about the process of relaying information to headquarters when this paragraph begins:

Some of this background to his cable passed through Bond’s mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M. He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work. Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.

Fleming shows a lot of his skills here, including variety of word choice and sentence length. Both of those tend to be treated as boring mechanical aspects of writing (“Vary your sentence length” is a pretty rote piece of writing advice that is seldom elaborated upon) but, as this paragraph should show, both skills are crucial to rhythm and, ultimately, mood.

The rhythm of the words and phrases controls the pace of the paragraph, which rises and falls. It begins with two short, simple sentences followed by a slightly longer, slightly more complicated one expanding on the meaning of the first two. Then comes the centerpiece of the paragraph. Read this again, aloud:

“He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work.”

This is a marvelous sentence, 61 words long and almost musical. It starts slowly, building momentum as Bond considers his situation before plunging into a downhill run that begins at the conjunction but and slows again, ominously, in the final dependent clause.

Here’s where word choice comes in. Fleming didn’t write poetry but he understood how to use its effects. The long vowels in the last several words, almost every word of that last clause—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—as well as the heavy emphasis the most important words require metrically—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—have a braking effect, slowing the reader and bringing him back down to the reality of Bond’s situation. Right alongside Bond.

All of which points to the purpose of this kind of rhythm: setting tone and mood. Narratively speaking, little happens in this paragraph. Bond stands holding a telegram slip, thinking. A lesser writer would turn this into pure exposition. But the way Fleming narrates Bond’s thinking imparts to the reader what it feels like to be Bond in this situation.

The same is true of the entire chapter. In Casino Royale’s first chapter, Bond 1) realizes he is tired, 2) receives a message, 3) sends a message, and 4) goes to bed. But through Fleming’s writing, we get exhaustion, self-loathing, a degree of paranoia (who wants to be “watched and judged” by “cold brains,” even those on your own side?), and a great deal of unexplained danger.

Here’s how the first chapter ends. Read this aloud with these things in mind:

His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Great stuff, and subtly done.

Poetry of reinforcement

From Tom Shippey’s preface to his new translation of Beowulf, in which he notes some of the strange poetic artifacts of the poem’s alliterative form and explores their deeper implications—both for the poem’s original audience and for us:

King David as Anglo-Saxon bard in the Vespasian Psalter

One may sum up by saying that, rather oddly, the words in the poem which receive the greatest sonic emphasis are sometimes the ones which carry the least information. They are there to help the poet with the first of his major aims: which is, one might say, to maintain the beat and the meter of his poetic lines.

This seems a rather humble aim to us, for our idea of poetry is that its wording should be exact, unexpected, provocative—to paraphrase the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, who has just been introduced to Shakespeare—words which make you feel like you'd sat on a pin. But we emphasize novelty, originality, surprise: and accordingly we fail to feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition. And it is this which satisfied the poet's second major aim: to express the ethos of a social group.

The modern vision of the poet as an outsider speaking truth to power and challenging norms is not only historically recent but a sadly narrow and limiting vision of what poetry does. It requires a posture of continuous antagonism to everything that grows both tedious and phony. The stereotype of the tiresome and hypocritical modernist poet and his or her predictably transgressive free verse exists for a reason.

But worse, this vision of poetry and the poet warps the interpretation of the great poetry of the past. People go galloping off in search of the hidden subversion in Homer or Beowulf and, having searched long enough and screwed their jeweler’s loupe of critical theory tightly enough into their eye, find it. Turns out these poets were just like the longhairs at the campus poetry slam. But, satisfied with presentist political interpretations, they miss what’s actually going on—and the chance to encounter people radically unlike themselves.

Good poetry can challenge, certainly. But I’d argue that the most effective and lasting prophetic verse challenges from within a culture—thus the entire power of the Old Testament prophets—rather than from some self-congratulatory political margin. But just as often, if not more so, good poetry reminds its audience of who they are. Remember, it says, This is us. This is what we love. This is what we must protect. And, with striking frequency, This is what we have lost. Consider the worlds in which the Iliad and Beowulf were composed and the poetry of reinforcement and shared love and loss makes much more sense.

Recovering the ability to “feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition” may prove a crucial part of the modern man’s great spiritual task.

Shippey has an online Beowulf “masterclass” coming up at the beginning of December. I’ve already signed up. It should be well worth your while if you’re interested in this period and its poetry. You can find information about the class here.

Homer's imaginative sympathy

Earlier this week I ran across a book called The World of Herodotus at our local used book store. The author sold me on it instantly—Aubrey de Sélincourt, whom I know best as a translator of Livy and Herodotus for Penguin Classics in its early years. When I got home and was leafing through it, I happened across this passage, which expresses what is to me one of the strongest and characteristic features of Homer’s poetry:

“[T]he burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy.”

— Aubrey de Sélincourt

Is the Iliad the tragedy of Hector, who is killed, or of Achilles, who loses his friend—and is himself doomed, as we know, to early death? The question is idle, because the burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy. It is no part of Homer’s purpose to exalt the Greeks at the expense of the Trojans or the Trojans at the expense of the Greeks. He does not take sides. If Mycenae is ‘golden’, Troy is ‘holy’; if Achilles is ‘splendid as a god’, Hector is ‘glorious’, and Priam as well as Agamemnon is shepherd of his people. We are moved by the grief of Achilles when his friend is killed, but we are moved as deeply by the noble scene in which the King of Troy humbles himself to come to Achilles’ tent and beg for the body of his son. Greeks and Trojans—all are men, splendid in manhood, and the poet looks upon them with benign and indifferent love. They fight to the death, for it is the nature of men to do so—of men proud of their strength and skill, hungry for honour and fame, glorying in the sunlight and the world of sense, but doomed so soon to fall like the leaves of a tree and to go down into the eternal darkness. It is a view of life stripped of complexity, bare of speculation, unburdened by any mystery but the ultimate mysteries of beauty and of death.

I’ve taken pains to explain Homer’s fair and sympathetic presentation of both sides of the Trojan War—his concern being less with political rights and wrongs or regional loyalty and more with arete regardless of who demonstrates it—to my students for many years. This puts it beautifully.

I especially like how de Sélincourt talks of sympathy rather than its weakling modern cousin, empathy. Sympathy, which is not coincidentally a Greek word, is what Homer evokes so powerfully throughout, even—or perhaps especially—in those vignettes that introduce us to a character as he’s dying violently. Remember that, at root, sympathy means to feel with or even to suffer with, and who hasn’t finished the Iliad feeling as if he’s suffered alongside Hector, Achilles, and Priam?

I have to anticipate at least one modern rejoinder, though, provoked by de Sélincourt’s repeated use of the word men there. Wouldn’t a dead white man’s sympathies be narrow and bigoted? Aren’t the Iliad and the Odyssey just war stories for boys? Aren’t the main characters all afflicted with toxic masculinity? Certainly the readership for the present fad of feminist parallax fiction based on Greek myth would think so, to judge by the way they talk about these stories. To which I can only say that they haven’t read Homer very well, if at all, and that it’s not Homer whose “breadth of imaginative sympathy” is limited.

If Homer, in his world, could reach across boundaries and battle lines to feel and understand—and to make his audience feel and understand—I think he deserves as much or better from us.

Where now the rider?

I mentioned in my summer reading recap that I’m currently reading Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, which my daughter thoughtfully picked out for me from her classroom’s library. Here’s a passage from about a third of the way into the book, the first time Joey, the horse, and his second owner, a British cavalry officer, see combat in the fall of 1914:

The gentle squeak of leather, the jingling harness, and the noise of hastily barked orders were drowned now by the pounding of hooves and the shout of the troopers as we galloped down on the enemy in the valley below us. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the glint of Captain Nicholls’s heavy sword. I felt his spurs in my side and I heard his battle cry. I saw the gray soldiers ahead of us raise their rifles and heard the death rattle of a machine gun, and then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.

A simply narrated but powerful moment, and presented believably from the point of view of an animal. Having seen Spielberg’s film adaptation several times, I had a good idea what the outcome of this attack would be, and yet when I read “quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore,” I choked up. I was moved.

Part of it is the fate of the kind, noble, courageous Captain Nicholls, and part of it is the finely wrought dramatic irony of Joey not realizing at first what has happened. (Another novel to do the same thing extremely well is Richard Adams’s Traveller.) But another factor is surely the image that the passage creates—the riderless horse.

The movie, in one of its most beautifully shot and stirring scenes, makes dramatic and stirring use of this image, but for my money the subtlety and simplicity of the original in Morpurgo’s novel cuts deeper.

Reading this passage brought to mind another riderless horse, this one from Michael Shaara’s great Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels. Just before Pickett’s Charge, the climactic Confederate assault on the last day of the battle, General Lewis Armistead cautions a fellow brigade commander named Richard Garnett against participating in the attack. Garnett is ill and can’t march in with the infantry; he’ll have to ride, and that means he’ll be a huge target. Garnett will not be dissuaded—an officer’s job is to lead.

The attack commences and Pickett’s division, including Armistead and Garnett’s brigades, moves out and comes under heavy artillery and finally rifle and canister fire. As Armistead, coming up with his men behind Garnett’s brigade, nears the Union line, we read:

Armistead thought: we won’t make it. He lifted the sword screaming, and moved on, closer, closer, but it was all coming apart; the whole world was dying. Armistead felt a blow in the thigh, stopped, looked down at blood on his right leg. But no pain. He could walk. He moved on. There was a horse coming down the ridge: great black horse with blood all over the chest, blood streaming through bubbly holes, blood on the saddle, dying eyes, smoke-gray at the muzzle: Garnett’s horse.

A gut punch of a conclusion to an already apocalyptic paragraph. Armistead briefly looks over the field to see if Garnett is still alive, unhorsed and on foot somewhere, but the reader knows immediately. The riderless horse tells the whole story.

The same horse reappears once later, after the attack has failed, as General Longstreet, the overall commander of the assault, responds to the destruction of his men:

There was nothing to send now, no further help to give, and even if Lee on the other side would send support now it would be too late. Longstreet hugged his chest. He got down off the fence. A black horse rode up out of the smoke: familiar spot on a smoky forehead, blood bubbling from a foaming chest: Garnett’s mount.

If the first passage is an apocalypse, with the horse a sign in the midst of catastrophe, here the horse is the final, mournful sign of defeat, a single, hollow death knell.

As with War Horse, the film adaptation Gettysburg uses this image to good effect. I think the purely visual language of film may even improve it. First, the film expands the point of view of Shaara’s novel by actually showing the viewer what happens to Garnett. He charges the Union line, trying to lead by example, and rides directly into the sights of a Union cannoneer who fires at him point-blank.* Garnett disappears instantly. We get a stunned reaction shot from General Lee, who watches from afar through his field glasses, and then this shot:

Soon after we cut to Armistead’s brigade following behind, and Armistead sees the horse and knows. No words are necessary.

And later, after Armistead has briefly breached the Union line, been shot down and captured, and the attack has collapsed, the horse reappears a final time—not for Longstreet as in the novel, but for General Pickett, who had insisted that Garnett be allowed to ride at the head of his brigade, a poignant double reminder.

The film does this wordlessly, in one of its most powerful shots.** First, as the walking wounded straggle back to the Confederate line the horse passes among them at a trot:

The camera follows, both panning and tracking with it from right to left—away from the fighting and the failed objective—to end on a poignant medium shot of Pickett, pushing in as he lowers his field glasses. The usually vivacious and fiery Pickett has been stunned into silence:

The riderless horse goes back much further than War Horse and The Killer Angels, of course. Consider the plaintive questions of The Wanderer. When the poem’s speaker turns from describing his lonely fate to ask where everything that once mattered and made life a comfort to him has gone—genap under nihthelm, darkened under night-helm—the very first pair in the list is:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

“Where is the horse? Where the young man?” Or, in a more famous but slightly less literal rendering by Tolkien, “Where now the horse and the rider?” These are paired in a way that doesn’t scan with most of the rest of the poem, suggesting their inseparability even in the loss of both.

And if we go back to the foundation of Western Literature, the last word of the Iliad, in a sentence that closes out Hector’s funeral and ends the action of the poem with thousands dead and the Trojan War still unwon, is the slaughtered Hector’s epithet: ἱπποδάμοιο, breaker of horses.

Is there any more poetic and immediately mournful image than the war horse with an empty saddle? Geared for war but aimless, it instantly suggests a whole tragedy. The riderless horse is a brave man, lost forever. The saddle is the gap he has left in the world.

* I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else mention this, but it’s pretty clear from the action around the gun that the filmmakers mean this to be Alonzo Cushing’s battery. Just watch what’s going on with the gunner and the dead officer right before Garnett charges.

** It’s not appreciated enough just how well shot Gettysburg is.

Swuster sunu

Peter Dennis’s depiction of the Battle of Maldon for Osprey’s Combat: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

One of the noteworthy aspects of The Battle of Maldon is the large number of named individuals, presented as real people, included in what we have left of the poem. Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, is the central figure in the poem’s action and themes, but there are many others like Æthelric and Offa, members of Byrhtnoth’s retinue; or Dunnere, “a simple ceorl” or non-noble freeman; or the brothers Oswold and Ealdwold. Many, like the latter, are given just enough biographical information to identify them to an audience presumably familiar with the event and the men who, overwhelmingly, died in it.

And the poet is careful to distinguish men with shared names, noting the presence of both a Wulfmær and a “Wulfmær the young” and, most damningly, Godric Æthelgar’s son who died fighting as opposed to “that Godric that forsook the field.” Others offer pure tantalization: Æschferð, Ecglaf’s son, from Northumbria, who “showed no faint heart,” is a “hostage” (gysel) of Byrthnoth’s household. Who is he? Why is he a hostage? What’s the Northumbria connection? And is it a coincidence that his name is so similar to Unferð Ecglaf’s son? We’ll probably never know—the poem is concerned only with recording his bravery.

In his notes on Maldon, Tolkien writes this of the first Wulfmær, Byrhtnoth’s nephew specifically by his sister (his swuster sunu): “The relationship was one of special import in Germanic lines and the especially close tie existing between uncle and sister’s son is motive in several legends (notably Finnsburg).”

Tolkien then makes a broader point about the relationship of stories like this to actual historical events and their treatment by modern critics and historians:

“Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.”

There is however no reason to suspect that Wulfmær was not actually swuster sunu of Byrhtnoth, and this is a good caution to that kind of criticism which would dismiss as falsification actual events and situations that happen to be [the] same as familiar motives of legends. Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first. The traditional affection of the relationship (whether or not it be a last survival of matriarchy or not!) may however have been the cause of the poet’s special mention.

I have complained before about the tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. According to these, this represents the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose—that is, propaganda.

Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion. The kind of historian or critic he describes has gotten the relationship of legend to reality backwards, and, more specifically in the case in question, they have ignored many other possible explanations for the inclusion of details like Wulfmær’s kinship with Byrhtnoth—not least that it might actually be true.

Later in his notes, Tolkien writes this of Byrhtwold, the old retainer (eald geneat) who gives the famous final speech of the poem, in which he declares his intention to die avenging Byrhtnoth: “We have here another instance of old traditional situation and actual occurrence coinciding. We need not doubt that Byrhtwold was an eald geneat, and that he actually spoke memorable words not unlike the remarkable ones here enshrined. Yet it was traditional for the eald geneat to be relentless and dauntless and ‘speak winged words.’”

Historians and critics would do better to accept that the literary and the actual “coincid[e]” a lot more often than they suspect.

I’ve previously written about a related problem, the tendency of suspicious historians, having seen through everything that strikes them as literary falsehood, to make history boring, here. (Cf CS Lewis on “seeing through” things.) For my thoughts on describing ancient and medieval works as “propaganda,” see here.

Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

The life of Edgar Allan Poe seems made to be picked apart. Poe tried and failed at so much, crossed paths (and swords) with so many people, told so many different stories about himself and had so many different stories told about him, and wrote so much in so many genres that topical examination not only suggests itself as an approach but can prove unusually fruitful.

Last year I read John Tresch’s new book The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, which reexamines Poe’s life and work in the light of his deep interest in science and his connections to both the scientific establishment and popular perceptions of science in his day. It was a great read, one of my favorites of the year. This year I stumbled across a book I missed when it came out in 2020, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples. I read it with great interest.

The Man of the Crowd is both a short biography of Poe and an analysis of the urban contexts in which he lived almost his entire life and produced all of his work. Peeples divides the book into five chapters, each of which details one of the four cities in which he lived longest: Richmond, where he was fostered by the Allan family after the deaths of his parents; Baltimore, where he had family connections and got his first halting start in the publishing business; Philadelphia, where he came into his own, wrote a great deal of his fiction and poetry, and made a name for himself as a critic willing to start literary spats; and New York, his last stable long-term abode, where his wife died and his work and projects began to collapse around him.

The fifth and final chapter, “In Transit,” follows Poe’s last year and a half, a period spent almost entirely on the road between these cities—still writing, still publishing, still unsuccessfully striving to start his own monthly journal and now unsuccessfully courting a series of new brides.

In each chapter, Peeples captures not only the phases of Poe’s life—a complicated enough task, given its wild ups and downs—but the story of each city. Poe lived at a time of runaway urban expansion, of mass immigration and rapid industrialization, and Peeples succinctly charts how these cities had changed by the time Poe arrived and how they were changing while he lived there. Philadelphia, for example, had grown away from the Delaware River as it industrialized, shifting the city’s cultural and political center of gravity inland and outward, to the suburbs. Poe lived in both parts of the city at various times.

The Man of the Crowd balances this kind of sociological history with Poe’s personal and literary lives remarkably well. Peeples never allows his examinations of each city to overwhelm Poe and his family’s story, nor does he lose sight of the landscape in following Poe. This is the best kind of topical or analytical history, in that the big picture and small picture complement each other perfectly.

So, for example, when looking at how often Poe or the Poes moved (over thirty times in his short forty years), we see the interaction of artistic, commercial, and economic considerations with purely personal ones. Poe often moved his family from neighborhood to neighborhood to save on rent, or because they could not pay the rent, or to be nearer the offices of publishers or journals, but he also moved away from city centers to provide Virginia, his consumptive wife, a healthier environment.

It is the effect of the city on Poe’s personal and family life that proves most poignant. Peeples notes that at the time the Poes lived in Philadelphia and Poe, despite the quality of his work, struggled to hold down a job due to his alcoholic binges, “there were over nine hundred taverns” in the city, “including one [only] a block away” from the Poes’ house. For Poe, crime and disease were not the only hazards of walking across town. Unsurprisingly, he stayed sober longer when living on the outer edges of a city.

Peeples is also alive to the tragic symmetries of Poe’s urban life. Of Poe’s final business trip in 1849, a journey from which he never returned, Peeples writes:

The year before, Poe had tried to die in the city where he was born [Boston]; instead, he died in the city where he had found a career and family. But, in light of his peripatetic life, the location of his death seems less significant than the fact that he died “on the road.” Appropriately, the journey he had begun should have taken him to each of the four cities that shaped his career and where he lived most of that life: leaving Richmond, bound for New York by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Like so much of his life, though, this trip didn’t go as planned.

One of the charms of his relatively short study (180 pages not including notes, bibliography, and the like) is the wealth of telling detail Peeples includes. The familiar outlines of Poe’s life story are rounded out and given finer shading by the reminiscences of neighbors, friends, and would-be fiancées. The story of a young boy from one of Poe’s Philadelphia neighborhoods rowing him out to a quiet spot on the Schuylkill to shoot waterfowl was both unexpected and touching, as were details of Poe’s family life as observed by visitors. And, of course, the numerous little things that gave and give each city its unique tone and attitude are well integrated with Poe’s story. By the end you feel you know not only Poe, with all his good qualities as well as his tendency toward pride and self-sabotage, but four major cities as well.

I’ve barely even mentioned Poe’s work or any of The Man of the Crowd’s literary criticism, but that is not the book’s main focus. Peeples mostly avoids deep literary interpretation or speculation about the specific ways a given city or event may have influenced Poe’s work. Mostly. Where he does, he largely cites other scholars, almost as a formality. Was Poe’s later fiction is so violent because he grew up in a city with slave auctions? Or is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” somehow racially coded because Philadelphia, where he wrote and published it, had a large population of free black barbers? These theories seem obviously silly, and while Peeples doesn’t say so he is also refreshingly non-dogmatic and even openly skeptical about this kind of interpretation. What is most interesting is to note what Poe was working and where and when, and how the disparate pieces of his work fit together in time and place.

Like The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, this study of Poe is a study of his context, and works as a striking dual character sketch: of urban America in the first half of the 19th century—striving, rumbustious, commercial, confidently opinionated, prone to both grandeur and petty strife, and not a little dingy even in its better quarters—and of Poe himself, with all of the same adjectives applying.

The Man of the Crowd is an absorbing and well-written study of a great writer from an unexpected and informative new angle. If you have any interest in Poe or in the history of the United States during Poe’s lifetime, I heartily recommend it.