Dr Johnson and General Oglethorpe

This week’s batch of The Rest is History is a four-episode series on Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and their world. So far it’s a delight, and reflects well on Johnson. It also got me thinking about Johnson’s friendship with one of my heroes: soldier, humanitarian, and founder of Georgia James Oglethorpe.

I can’t recall how I first discovered their connection but it may have been through reading John Buchan’s Midwinter, a novel set during the Jacobite Rising in ’45 and in which both men appear. Possibly because of that, I dug into my copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and turned up a number of charming and tantalizing anecdotes about Johnson’s dinners at Oglethorpe’s house (and one in which Johnson unexpectedly hosts Oglethorpe).

I’ve been meaning to research this further but haven’t gotten around to it; what I can do is copy a few choice excerpts into this, my commonplace book, something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I hope y’all enjoy these as much as I have.

Here’s Boswell’s first mention of Oglethorpe, in the context of the publication of Johnson’s neoclassical poem London in 1738:

One of the warmest patrons of this poem on its first appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose ‘strong benevolence of soul,’ was unabated during the course of a very long life; though it is painful to think, that he had but too much reason to become cold and callous, and discontented with the world, from the neglect which he experienced of his publick and private worth, by those in whose power it was to gratify so gallant a veteran with marks of distinction. This extraordinary person was as remarkable for his learning and taste, as for his other eminent qualities; and no man was more prompt, active, and generous, in encouraging merit. I have heard Johnson gratefully acknowledge, in his presence, the kind and effectual support which he gave to his London, though unacquainted with its authour.

A good sketch of Oglethorpe’s character and virtues. I’d like to look into this further (this GHQ article is where I’ll start), as Oglethorpe was in England recruiting for his regiment in 1738 but Johnson’s London was initially published anonymously.

Boswell’s first account of a dinner at General Oglethorpe’s has Boswell provoking conversation with a question about the morality of dueling. Oglethorpe leaps in before Johnson can reply: “The brave old General fired at this, and said, with a lofty air, ‘Undoubtedly a man has a right to defend his honour.’” Not one to break character, the General.

There’s a bit of back-and-forth with Oliver Goldsmith before Boswell presses Johnson on the question of “whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.” Johnson gives a “masterly” and lengthy answer in favor of dueling as a form of self-defense. Oglethorpe chips in with an anecdote about accidental insult diplomatically avoided:

The General told us, that when he was a very young man, I think only fifteen, serving under Prince Eugene of Savoy, he was sitting in a company at table with a Prince of Wirtemberg. The Prince took up a glass of wine, and, by a fillip, made some of it fly in Oglethorpe’s face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him instantly, might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been considered as cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye upon the Prince, and smiling all the time, as if he took what his Highness had done in jest, said ‘Mon Prince,—’. (I forget the French words he used, the purport however was,) ‘That’s a good joke; but we do it much better in England;’ and threw a whole glass of wine in the Prince’s face. An old General who sat by, said, ‘Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l’avez commence:’ [He did well, my Prince; you started it] and thus all ended in good humour.

Dr. Johnson said, ‘Pray, General, give us an account of the siege of Belgrade.’ Upon which the General, pouring a little wine upon the table, described every thing with a wet finger: ‘Here we were, here were the Turks,’ &c. &c. Johnson listened with the closest attention.

An evening of war stories with General Oglethorpe!

There are several other mentions in the Life of dinners at Oglethorpe’s house, but not as much conversation. We do get observations of Oglethorpe’s character, though, such as Boswell’s note that “[t]he uncommon vivacity of Oglethorpe’s mind, and the variety of knowledge . . . sometimes made his conversation too desultory.” That is, he rambled. Johnson glossed this by saying of that Oglethorpe “never COMPLETES what he has to say.” One imagines him as an interesting conversationalist who leaps quickly from subject to subject.

There’s also the anecdote alluded to above, when Oglethorpe apparently assumed Johnson was having him over for dinner—entirely unbeknownst to Johnson. How this mixup occurred Boswell doesn’t say, but when he

mentioned this to Johnson, not doubting that it would please him, as he had a great value for Oglethorpe, the fretfulness of his disease unexpectedly shewed itself; his anger suddenly kindled, and he said, with vehemence, ‘Did not you tell him not to come? Am I to be HUNTED in this manner?’ I satisfied him that I could not divine that the visit would not be convenient, and that I certainly could not take it upon me of my own accord to forbid the General.

Boswell found Johnson talking to some ladies that night, morose because of a poorly performed play, but when Oglethorpe arrived Johnson was “was as courteous as ever.” A glimpse both of Johnson’s regard for Oglethorpe—which Boswell mentions almost every time he comes up—as well as some of Johnson’s mental troubles.

A final detail with regard to Johnson’s respect for Oglethorpe: one evening at Oglethorpe’s for dinner, Johnson “urged [him] to give the world his Life. He said, ‘I know no man whose Life would be more interesting. If I were furnished with materials, I should be very glad to write it.’”

It’s a shame we never got that book.

Again, a topic for further research one of these days. In the meantime, check out The Rest is History’s series on Johnson, and definitely give Buchan’s Midwinter a look. I glanced back through the parts mentioning Oglethorpe—Johnson is a major character throughout while Oglethorpe lurks in the background—and greatly enjoyed the novel’s final chapter, in which Johnson and Oglethorpe finally meet. The novel’s protagonist, Jacobite spy Alastair Maclean, who has befriended Johnson over the course of the uprising, arrives at Oglethorpe’s headquarters but

was not prepared for the sight of Oglethorpe; grim, aquiline, neat as a Sunday burgess, who raised his head from a mass of papers, stared for a second and then smiled.

“You have brought me a friend, Roger,” he told the young lieutenant. “These gentlemen will be quartered here this night, for the weather is too thick to travel further; likewise they will sup with me.”

When the young man had gone, he held out his hand to Alastair.

“We seem fated to cross each other’s path, Mr Maclean.”

“I would present to you my friend, Mr Samuel Johnson, sir. This is General Oglethorpe.”

Johnson stared at him and then thrust forward a great hand.

“I am honoured, sir, deeply honoured. Every honest man has heard the name.” And he repeated:

“One, driven by strong benevolence of soul,
“Shall fly like Oglethorpe from pole to pole.”

The General smiled. “Mr Pope was over-kind to my modest deserts. But, gentlemen, I am in command of a part of His Majesty’s forces, and at this moment we are in the region of war. I must request from you some account of your recent doings and your present purpose. Come forward to the fire, for it is wintry weather. And stay! Your Prince’s steward has been scouring the country for cherry brandy, to which it seems His Highness is partial. But all has not been taken.” He filled two glasses from a decanter at his elbow.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

* * * * *

Addendum: After posting this yesterday I listened to the end of the second episode, which mostly concerns Boswell, and Tom Holland quoted—in part—a charming passage from Boswell’s journals about his starstruck astonishment to be sitting and talking with Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith: “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.”

As it happens, I had just read the same passage in The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, by Leo Darmosch. For my purposes, Holland left out an extremely important bit. Here’s the whole passage from Darmosch:

In 1772 Boswell was flattered to be invited to dinner by General James Oglethorpe, then in his seventies, who had been a pioneer in prison reform and co-founder of the colony of Georgia. In his journal Boswell noted, “Mr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith and nobody else were in the company. I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind. Here I am in London, at the house of General Oglethorpe, who introduced himself to me just because I had distinguished myself; and here is Mr. Johnson, whose character is so vast; here is Dr. Goldsmith, so distinguished in literature. Words cannot describe our feelings. The finer parts are lost, as the down upon a plum; the radiance of light cannot be painted.” (283)

I read this while browsing Mr K’s, our local used bookstore. I didn’t end up taking The Club home—I’m trying, however feebly, to thin our library out—but I did pick up Trevor Royle’s Culloden, which includes several pages on Oglethorpe’s role in suppressing the Jacobite Rising.

1970s comment sections

See what this passage from Dave Barry’s recent memoir Class Clown in which he recounts his experiences working at a local daily newspaper as a young reporter in the early 1970s reminds you of:

“I also learned a lot about what readers of a local newspaper are, and are not, interested in. You could make a major mistake in a story about a meeting of a zoning board and never hear a peep from the readers about it. But if you, in writing a photo caption, misidentified a goose as a duck (I did this), you would hear about it from literally dozens of readers, some of them quite irate. And if the newspaper should ever—God forbid—leave out the daily horoscope, the phones would not stop ringing.”

I’ve given it away in the title of this post, of course, but this reminds me of nothing so much as trying to communicate on the internet. Majoring on the minors, mindlessly angry criticism, even astrology—there is nothing new under the sun. And there’s that famous bit of internet advice that, if in need of information, you shouldn’t directly ask for it, but instead make an incorrect assertion on the topic and watch the corrections pour in from the Actually guys.

Just in case we forget that technology seldom introduces entirely new bad behavior, it just amplifies it. And Barry has tons and tons of these stories.

Class Clown is a great read, by the way—funny throughout, often moving, it offers both a fun capsule overview of Barry’s life and about fifty years of journalism and culture.

Sehnsucht and flying

This week while running Christmas errands—including a couple trips to urgent care—I listened to the latest episode of The Rewatchables, a 100-minute conversation about F1, which was great entertainment both in the theatre and at home.

The movie is bookended with scenes in which the main character, skilled “never-was” driver Sonny Hayes, is asked about the money involved in racing. Both times he says, “It’s not about the money.” Both times he’s asked in response, “So what is it about?” The answer comes just past the midpoint of the movie, when Sonny opens up to Kate, his romantic interest. After explaining his past—early promise, a near-fatal crash, anger, resentment—he describes realizing that what he’d lost in his youth was his “love for racing.” That’s what it’s really about. And that love is both rooted, sustained, and occasionally manifested in a specific experience. Sonny:

“It’s rare, but sometimes there’s a moment in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful, and I can see everything. And no one, no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to. I want to. Because in that moment—I’m flying.”

Kudos to Brad Pitt for selling this speech. I felt it.

What the discussion on The Rewatchables made me realize, in reflecting on this expression of longing and its fulfillment at the climax of the movie for the nth time since watching F1, is that Sonny is describing a sensation for which we actually have a word: Sehnsucht.

Sehnsucht is a loanword from German meaning “longing” or “yearning” or, in the prosaic translation possible, “desire,” but implies much more than these. Far from a rational want or need or a simple appetite which can be gratified materially, Sehnsucht is sharp, long-lasting, oriented toward something far-off, rare, but obtainable, and is as sweet to endure as it is to fulfil. It was an important concept to the German Romantics and—the point of this post—CS Lewis.

Lewis wrote about Sehnsucht explicitly in a few places (and there’s an academic journal dedicated to Lewis’s work by this name), but his most memorable and poignant descriptions of it some from his memoir Surprised by Joy, in which Sehnsucht plays the title role. In the first chapter, Lewis describes three childhood incidents that awakened in him a sense of and permanent desire for “joy.” This aching desire proved yet more poignant by breaking in unexpectedly—while peering into his brother’s toy garden, when reading Squirrel Nutkin, when reading an English translation of skaldic poetry—and unpredictably. Lewis:

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to all three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is the kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

As Sonny Hayes might put it, “It’s not about the money.”

F1 is satisfying because it makes us feel Sonny’s Sehnsucht, a source and object of desire worth orienting one’s entire life around, and the joy, too deep for words, that comes with its satisfaction. This speaks to people—look at the climactic scene on YouTube and browse the comments. I’m not going to pretend that F1 is high drama, but it’s exquisitely crafted entertainment and, in the person of Sonny and his sweet, unsatisfied desire to “fly,” dramatizes beautifully an aspect of the human heart that is all too easy to ignore or, in our age, simply smother.

But of course Lewis would remind us that even Sehnsucht is not desire itself, but a pointer beyond: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. . . . Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

Tellingly, despite getting the girl, saving his friend’s team, raising a younger driver to maturity, and winning the big race, F1 ends with Sonny back on the road, chasing that feeling of flying.

Jenkins on regionalism and contingency

One of the best perks of teaching is the opportunity to review examination copies of textbooks. This morning I received a copy of the new sixth edition of A History of the United States, by Philip Jenkins, part of Bloomsbury’s Essential Histories series. Jenkins is a historian of religion whose work I’ve greatly appreciated over the years, and I was excited to discover that he’s also written a short, one-volume American history text. I’m reading it with a view to replacing the late Robert Remini’s Short History of the United States in one of my online adjunct courses.

So far it’s off to a good start. One of the challenges of teaching history is trying to draw attention to recurrent patterns or themes. The standard multi-author committee-produced textbook—what you think of when you hear the word—usually does this clumsily, if at all. A single-author text that pays a bit more attention to literary qualities, like Remini’s Short History or Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope, can develop these themes and throughlines narratively as it goes—which is also, not coincidentally, how I teach the subject.

Jenkins begins by explicitly laying out the themes he wants the reader to notice in a dedicated introductory chapter. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be my favorite approach, but it allows Jenkins to describe some of the peculiar parameters of American history very specifically, priming the reader to detect them. I especially liked what he had to say about two in particular:

First, having established “the tyranny of distance” as one of the key factors in the story, he points toward the differing trajectories and cultures of the US’s many regions, the two earliest and most important of which are the north and the South:

Different regions produced their own distinct cultures, the exact nature of which has given rise to much debate. The question of “Southern-ness” has been a popular topic for such works, though the very term betrays the prejudice that it is the south that is untypical from an American or even world norm. In terms of its history of slavery and racial hierarchy, the American South closely resembles the worlds of the Caribbean and of much of Central or South America. We could equally well argue that it was rather the north of the early nineteenth century that produced a set of cultural and intellectual assumptions that were bizarre by the standards of the contemporary Western world, while the aristocratic, rural, and deferential south was a much more “normal” entity than its egalitarian, urban, and evangelical neighbors. For anyone acquainted with the astonishing social turbulence of the Northern cities before the Civil War, it is startling to hear claims that it was the south that had a peculiar tendency to violence.

This is not just about geography but about culture and historiography. For a long time, the extent to which New Englanders have portrayed their story as normative, as the story of the US to which recalcitrants and rebels have to be brought into conformity, has been invisible. (Why, for example, did the entire country just celebrate a holiday inspired by the Pilgrims?) This can lead to especially warped interpretations since, as Jenkins points out, the culture that arose in the northeastern US is such a weird historical outlier. Restoring a broader perspective creates a better understanding not only of north and South, but of the whole.

Even more crucially, Jenkins pushes back against whiggishness, the assumption that history moves determinedly along toward a particular endpoint, both of the present and the past:

Yet when we tell the story of US expansion, it is tempting to describe a natural and even inevitable process, by which the Lower Forty-Eight acquires its predestined dimensions and natural borders. That was certainly how Americans thought, and how they recorded events, and we still use the phrase that was commonly cited to describe this process. . . . 

The speed and seemingly irresistible weight of American expansion make such a narrative of Manifest Destiny tempting. US histories can look like a map on a television documentary, with an illuminated core region along the East Coast, which spreads swiftly and inevitably over those hitherto dark regions, which in turn become lit up as they achieve their authentic destiny of being included in that United States. It is hard not to write the story backward, as if the ending was always predetermined. The problems with such an account are many[.]

Among these problems is the implied sense of inevitability Jenkins mentions, a sense rooted in the most subtle and insidious bias of historical study, historian’s fallacy, which erases the fog in which historical figures operated. Jenkins emphasizes contingency and the fact that historical actors didn’t know the end of the story. Here’s an example I mentioned, with reference to this piece by Jeremy Black, in my Substack digest over the weekend:

For much of American history, many Americans were convinced that the lands that became Canada would inevitably fall into the possession of the United States. That was a real prospect during the War of 1812, and frequent later tensions between the United States and Great Britain made it highly likely that Canada would someday be a theater for American conquest and annexation.

There’s what word inevitably again. (A helpful rule: when trying to understand a past culture, look at what the movers and shakers thought was inevitable at the time.) Jenkins expands on the problems of assuming inevitable outcomes, of “arcs” “bending” toward particular results:

Quite apart from any cultural or racial biases, the whole idea of “inevitability” is shaky. The emergence of the continental United States with its boundaries, that Lower Forty-Eight, was contingent, dependent on the outcome of political struggles and social movements. It is easy to imagine scenarios when the United States would have acquired a very different shape, and this is no mere issue of speculative alternative history. We are dealing with what well-informed people believed or hoped in those earlier eras. Most basically, it was far from obvious to contemporary observers that the United States would have resisted multiple serious efforts at secession or partition, which reached their peak during the 1860s. In retrospect, we know that the nascent Confederate States of America created in 1860 would not endure as a major New World power, or that the remnant United States of America would not be confined to the north-east and Midwest; but Abraham Lincoln could not take that fact for granted.

What happened was not inevitable, things could have turned out differently, and uncertainty is an important part of every historical story. Conveying these facts is an important part of my approach to teaching, and I’m hopeful that the rest of Jenkins’s book will underscore these themes.

For what it’s worth, I’d still recommend Remini’s book, but Remini’s narrative is a little too complacently satisfied with the postwar liberal consensus—the idea of America as an idea, gradually developing its doctrines to ever fuller and broader degrees—which is itself a kind of whiggishness. And when initially selecting a text for this course I considered McClay’s book, but its otherwise excellent narrative has a few too many major omissions (the Plains Indians Wars)—yet another historiographical and teaching problem.

Ambiguous bowdlerization

Last Friday I reviewed Game Without Rules, a great collection of spy stories by Michael Gilbert. Some spoilers ahead for the last story in the book, “A Prince of Abyssinia,” but also an important and vexing question.

Though appearing in most of the eleven stories in the book, Mr Calder’s beloved and intelligent Persian deerhound Rasselas has the spotlight in this story, as evidenced by the title: Rasselas being named after the title character in Dr Johnson’s novella The History of Rasselas: A Prince of Abyssinia.

The plot of this story concerns the return of a former Nazi agent who, captured and tortured by Mr Calder during World War II, wants revenge. In the climax, this agent captures and traps Mr Behrens to prevent him from intervening, then appears disguised at Mr Calder’s cottage. Rasselas senses his intentions and attacks but is killed, and the agent is killed in turn. After a moment in which Mr Calder and Mr Behrens grieve, here’s how the story ends:

Between them they dug a deep grave behind the woodpile, and laid the dog in it and filled it in, and patted the earth into a mound. It was a fine resting place, looking out southward over the feathery tops of the trees, across the Weald of Kent. A resting place for a prince.

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood.

At least, that’s how my Herald Classics copy from Union Square & Co concluded. But in looking later at Mr Calder and Mr Behrens’s hodgepodge of a Wikipedia article—haphazardly put together even by Wikipedia’s standards—I saw that last paragraph quoted at greater length. I checked the passage on Wikipedia against the recent Penguin paperback published as part of their Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series. Here’s the original last paragraph:

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood. He was the illegitimate son of a cobbler from Mainz and greatly inferior to the dog, both in birth and breeding.

Odd—not only that the American edition from Union Square omits the concluding sentence of the story—and the entire book!—but that it omits such a thematically important one, explicitly juxtaposing the noble dog with the duplicitous agent, a worthy animal against a scummy, murderous man.

I’m not sure how or why this happened. A copyediting mistake? Carelessness? Or censorship? If the latter, why this sentence? I call this “bowdlerization” in the title of this post but I can’t be sure preventing Gilbert from being mean about a fictional Nazi spy’s parentage is the reason the sentence disappeared. There is no note on the copyright page about changes to the text, no butt-covering editor’s note, nothing in Alex Segura’s introduction or on Union Square’s website—no notice whatsoever that the text is different from what Gilbert originally wrote.

If this is intentional, it would not be the first case of stealth editing, a problem that has already afflicted e-books, often without the knowledge or permission of even living authors.

It also bothers me that I cannot be sure that the cutting of the final sentence is the only such instance in the book. It will take a while to look through and find others, though there is, in fact, at least one other omission at the very beginning. The Union Square edition cuts Gilbert’s dedication:

To Jacques Barzun, of Columbia University, an amateur of detection

Is it significant that a tribute to a famously conservative-leaning historian was deleted? Without any kind of acknowledgment from the publisher that anything at all has been cut, who can know? But whether this was simply editorial sloppiness or intentional cutting—and whether there are more such cuts to the texts of the stories—it is a troubling incident. And here I was daring to be hopeful about publishers rejecting censorship.

I hope I’m wrong. The Penguin Modern Classics edition appears to be unexpurgated, at any rate, and this gives me an excuse to reread these excellent stories soon.

Jones on Scott on the Middle Ages

For the anniversary of Agincourt over the weekend I started reading Dan Jones’s Henry V, a biography released late last year. I’m enjoying it so far, though I am still skeptical of the stylistic decision to write the story in present tense. I may have thoughts about here if and when I review it.

I began reading with some wariness but I came around quickly when, in the introduction, Jones strongly, straightforwardly argued for Henry’s greatness, something he aims to prove in his book, and several chapters in, when Jones dropped this footnote about a high-profile incident of trial-by-combat in France just before Henry’s time:

This case was the basis for the 2021 film The Last Duel, which made the 1386 battle between Carrouges and Le Gris a vehicle for a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first-century sexual abuse.

The Last Duel was a Ridley Scott movie, of course, which means that it was only ostensibly, superficially historical. And “ponderous” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Don’t take my word for it.

I love many of Scott’s movies but this presentism afflicts every one of his historical stories except, perhaps, his first feature, The Duellists, where the point is very much the look and technical perfection of the visuals. Style over substance may be Scott’s other besetting sin, but when he caves into that temptation there at least he’s not indulging in middlebrow navelgazing. I first wrote about this here with regard to Kingdom of Heaven way back in 2019 and—more recently and specifically on Scott’s cavalier disregard for history—before the release of the disastrous Napoleon. And of course I wrote about The Last Duel here. In the years since I saw it, my positive impressions have faded a great deal but my misgivings remain.

It’s just nice to see such succinct confirmation of the problem. Jones knows how to use a footnote.

The most helpful marginalia in my library

I mentioned this on a podcast once upon a time and recently told one of y’all about it in correspondence, but I want to jot it down for easy future reference in this commonplace book: the most helpful item of marginalia I’ve ever run across in a used book.

The book is JE Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts, an excellent history of war and combat in the Greek and Roman worlds. In an early chapter, Lendon writes of the heroic ethos of Homer’s Mycenaean characters and the role of competition therein:

But by far the most important arena for competition is the individual heroic fighting itself. It is in battle that a hero wins the admiration, the glory—the kleos, the kudos—that conveys high rank, honor, worth, or worthiness: timē. In the epic formula, battle is “where men win glory.”

Heroes compete in public performance in war and battle, performance which is constantly evaluated by their peers. A hero’s high birth and high deeds in the past create a favorable expectation in the eyes of observers, but the hero must uphold his reputation by the continual display of merit in action. Heroes compete in the display of Homeric virtues, aretai, which include strength, skill, physical courage, and fleetness of foot, but also cunning and wisdom and persuasiveness in council. The heroic epithets the poem applies to heroes reflect many of the Homeric excellences:

…the son of Tydeus, the spear-famed, and Odysseus,
and Ajax the swift-footed, and the brave son of Phyleus.

I got my copy of this book used. The previous owner never wrote his or her name on the flyleaf and made very little marking or underlining in the book at all, but the last sentence of that first paragraph has a long squiggle of felt-tip pen underneath it, and the entire second paragraph is in a big bold bracket with the following in the margin:

Reputation, pedigree, expectations based on past performance, peer evaluation—that scrawled Sports offered me a one-word epiphany. I remember reading Soldiers and Ghosts eleven years ago, in the breakroom during my weekend shifts at the sporting goods store where I was picking up extra work between my two adjunct jobs. I don’t know if I slowly looked up from the page with a wide-eyed look of realization but that’s how I remember it feeling.

The next time I taught Ancient Greece I used precisely this comparison. I still do. It makes the alien world of Homer legible to my students instantly and, with the benefit of that understanding, offers a good point of departure for talking about what was distinct about the world.

Soldiers and Ghosts is an excellent book and one I benefited greatly from, but I wouldn’t have benefited quite as much as I did without my copy’s previous owner. I’m still grateful. I don’t write in my books very often. I probably should. If I can offer even a fraction of the insight of this one note for some future reader, it’d prove worthwhile.

Himmelfarb on Butterfield

In “Does History Talk Sense?” an essay on philosopher Michael Oakeshott in The New History and the Old, Gertrude Himmelfarb pauses to compare Oakeshott to Herbert Butterfield and his classic of historiography The Whig Interpretation of History:

Published in 1931, . . . Butterfield’s little book has long been the most influential critique of the practical, present-minded, progressive, judgmental mode of history; indeed, its title is the accepted, shorthand description of that mode. Although Butterfield himself took the Whig historians as the classic exemplars of the Whig interpretation or “Whig fallacy,” the concept is now understood generically to apply to any present-minded or future-minded reading of the past. The fallacy, as he describes it, has two sources: the distortions that come from the processes of selection, abridgment, generalization, and interpretation that are inevitable in the writing of history; and the natural tendency to read the past in terms of the present—to select, abridge, generalize, and interpret in accord with the knowledge of hindsight and the predisposition of the historian.

That’s just about the best one-sentence summary of the main points of Butterfield’s book. Himmelfarb follows up with a couple of important caveats:

In both respects the fallacy pertains to the writing of history, not to the past itself. And while Butterfield adjures the historian to be wary of that fallacy and to avoid it as far as possible, he does not take it as vitiating the independence and integrity of the past. The evidence of the past, the historical record, is inadequate and inaccurate, and the historian’s use of it inevitably aggravates these flaws. Yet the past itself is real and objective, and it is this past that the historian tries to discover and reconstruct. If the ideal always eludes him, it never ceases to inspire him.

“The evidence of the past . . . is inadequate and inaccurate, and the historian’s use of it inevitably aggravates these flaws. Yet the past itself is real and objective, and it is this past that the historian tries to discover and reconstruct.”

“History” in the sense of historical records—documents, inscriptions, and the stuff we find in the dirt—is flawed, partial, and incomplete but, unlike the postmodernist, who takes imperfection as permission to regard all sources and reconstructions of the past as equally invalid fictions, Butterfield avoids the gravitational pull of this hermeneutic black hole by pointing out that even with all its flaws, history is reflective of real things that actually happened.

That they must be pieced together by scholars with their own limitations and that their work and our knowledge will inevitably be flawed in no way changes that. If anything, it increases the responsibility of the student of history. The past has its own “independence and integrity.” We do not construct it but attempt to seek, find, and recover it. Modern and postmodern theories—call them legion, for they are many—are in this way too puritanical. Failing to find perfection, they take the easy way out by writing off all of it.

A good summary by Himmelfarb an important part of The Whig Interpretation of History, a book I’ve seen badly misunderstood by those who—like this high-profile evangelical preacher and educator—grasp the first half of Butterfield’s insight but not the second. About time to reread it—and more of Himmelfarb’s essays.

(Oakeshott, Himmelfarb, Butterfield—what a great bunch of names!)

Great literature is popular literature

…but not necessarily vice versa.

Two items that got my attention this week and continue some literary themes I’ve thought a lot about over the years (eg here, here, and especially here):

First, a writer at Front Porch Republic bookends his review of Alan Jacobs’s new book Paradise Lost: A Biography with an interesting story. Here’s the beginning of the review:

As I drove into a hotel parking garage one afternoon, I mentioned to the attendant that I had come for a conference on John Milton. “Milton?” he replied. “Wasn’t he the one who had Satan say it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven?” Yes, I said, that’s the guy!

and the conclusion:

Jacobs ends the book by asking whether Paradise Lost has any future outside of academic scholarship. He suggests that yes, it might. . . . After all, if a parking garage attendant in an American city still knows who Milton is, there is hope that Paradise Lost will continue to find admiring readers in the twenty-first century.

Second, a friend on Instagram sent me this reel of an Italian butcher reciting part of Inferno in his shop. As I noted on Instagram, hearing a native recite Dante really brings out the rhythm of Dante’s verse and especially the rhyme of terza rima in a way I seldom get picking through a bilingual edition. But what I most appreciated was his exuberant enthusiasm for Dante and the way he brought that into his shop. Here’s a man who has passages of the Comedy memorized and can recite them at length for their own sake, not because he’s a tweedy professorial type or so that he can dissect and deconstruct them.

This brought to mind a story about Dante himself related by 14th-century Florentine writer Franco Sacchetti. One day Dante overheard a blacksmith singing some of Dante’s poetry but garbling the words, “clipping here and adding there,” which “seemed to Dante to be doing him a very great injury.” Dante entered the smith’s shop and started hurling his tools into the street. When the smith protested, they had this exchange:

“What the devil are you doing? Are ye mad?”

Dante asked him: “What art thou doing?”

“I am doing my own business,” answered the smith; “and ye are spoiling my tools, throwing them into the street.”

Said Dante: “If thou desirest that I should not spoil thy things, do not thou spoil mine.”

“Thou art singing out of my book,” Dante explains later, “and art not singing it as I wrote it; I have no other trade but this, and thou art spoiling it for me.” Again—a writer’s words matter.

But that’s not my point here. What struck me in both stories were the humble—a butcher, a parking lot attendant—knowing their epic poetry (albeit imperfectly in the case of the smith, but who wouldn’t prefer a world in which you could walk downtown and hear tradesmen and shopkeepers talking about great literature, even if they make mistakes quoting it?). And they didn’t just know this poetry—it mattered to them. In case we needed any further proof, great literature really is for everyone and always has been.

By the way, the butcher is eighth-generation butcher Dario Cecchini. Here’s his shop and one of his restaurants, which specializes in fantastic-looking steaks. If and when I ever visit Florence again, this is on my to-do list. And he’s reciting lines from the beginning of Canto V of Inferno.

Artistic appreciation comes first

I was revisiting Chesterton’s Everlasting Man over the weekend and was struck by this passage in the opening paragraph of Chapter V, “Man and Mythologies”:

It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticize it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.

That last line is gold.

What I found striking was that Chesterton is essentially making the same point about understanding and interpreting mythology in general that Tolkien was in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Crtiics.”

“Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.”

— GK Chesterton

Early on Tolkien asks “why should we approach this, or indeed any other poem, mainly as an historical document?” And after summarizing the many prevailing angles of scholarship—and sometimes mere prejudice—from which Victorian and early 20th century scholars dismissed Beowulf as worthy of study, he argues: “[I]t is plainly only in consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view of conviction can be reached or steadily held.”

And he makes his point about the misunderstood—or simply missed—artistic purpose of the poet in a famous allegory:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

This is not to deny the value of doing the historical, cultural, and linguistic spadework to gain better understanding of mythology and its place in a given culture. That would be an overcorrection, as Tom Shippey has argued, in Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, that Tolkien’s lecture unintentionally swung the pendulum too far away from studying Beowulf for its history, so that Beowulf and Hrothgar are assumed to have the historicity of Leda and the swan.

These things require balance, but the artistic and imaginative—what Chesterton elsewhere in the same book called “the inside of history”—must come before historical parsing and sociological datamining. Once the artistic purpose is understood, what the myth-makers were hoping to see or show us from the top of their construction, the rest will fall more clearly into place.