Amritsar and Lahore

Minnesotan reader, imagine, if you can, that the perversity of human nature has split your splendid state in two, by driving an international frontier in between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Imagine that every Catholic in the United States, north-west of that outrageous line, has had to flee for his life, leaving home, job and professions behind him, and cross the line to live the wretched life of a “displaced person” on the safe side of it. Imagine that every Protestant south-east of the line has had to make the same tragic migration, in the opposite direction. And then imagine that the road traffic across the new frontier has been entirely cut off (there is a no-man’s land, two miles broad, that is forbidden ground for cars traveling in either direction). Railroad traffic still survives, but it has been reduced to a single train a day. The armed guards on board it change, as the fearsome border is crossed. Imagine all this, and you will have pictured to yourself what has happened in real life to that unfortunate country the Panjab and its historic twin cities, Amritsar and Lahore.

Amritsar is a creation of the Sikh religion. The Golden Temple was planted in the wilds, and a secular city grew up around it. But, till the deadly partition in 1947, a Sikh who lived in Amritsar never dreamed that he might be debarred from carrying on his profession in Lahore, while a Muslim who lived in Lahore never dreamed that he might be debarred from owning and cultivating a field in the district of Amritsar. Lahore was the Sikhs’ and Muslims’ common capital; the broad Panjab countryside was the common source of their livelihood.

Why has the rankling memory of an ancient feud impelled these once intermingled communities to sort themselves out at such a dreadful cost to both of them? The fate that they have brought on themselves seems ironic to the foreign inquirer who feels sympathy for both alike; for, as it appears to the outsider, the Sikh faith and Islam have a close affinity with one another. The atmosphere of Amritsar strikes a Western observer as being decidedly Islamic and, indeed, almost Protestant. Hindu worship is a casual, disorderly affair; Sikh worship is as precise and as highly disciplined as the proceedings in a mosque or in a Calvinist church. The Granth Sahib, which is the Sikh Khalsa’s holy scripture, is an anthology in which selections from the works of Kabir and other Muslim mystics find a place beside the works of Guru Nanak, the father of the Sikh faith. And the veneration paid to the Granth Sahib goes beyond the furthest extremes of Protestant Christian bibliolatry. Why could not Sikhs and Muslims – and, for that matter, Hindus as well – go on living side by side in an unpartitioned Panjab? The perversity of human nature is the greatest of the mysteries of human life.

We took that international train and arrived at Lahore, without incident, in advance of the scheduled time. How strange to see Ranjit Singh’s tomb shouldering its way between fort and mosque. It was certainly a provocative act to plant the Sikh warlord’s sculpture at the most sensitive spot in the Muslim quarters of Lahore. But then, who built that magnificently austere imperial masjid, whose courtyard is bigger than that of any other mosque in the sub-continent? The builder was Aurangzeb. And who committed the provocative act of razing the principal Hindu temple in Benares and planting a mosque in its place? Aurangzeb, again. Who else could it be? And so, the tale of wrong and counter-wrong stretches back through a long chain of generations.

As a result of Partition, Lahore has gained in political importance. It is no longer the capital of a unitary Panjab, but it has now become the capital of a unitary Western Pakistan. Yet it is no longer what it was when Kim clambered over the famous cannon (which still stands in its place) in a city that was then still a common home for the followers of three faiths. Amritsar has a surer future, for it will remain the religious centre of the Sikhs so long as the Khalsa endures; and the Sikhs, in losing the Panjab, have gained the world. Today, they are established all over India (above the wheel of every second bus and taxi, you spy that unmistakable bearded and turbaned head). And they have not kept within India’s frontiers. They have made their way eastwards, through Burma and Singapore and Hong Kong, to the Pacific slope of Canada. They are the burliest men on the face of the planet – tough and capable and slightly grim. If human life survives the present chapter of Man’s history, the Sikhs, for sure, will still be on the map.

Amritsar was founded by the fourth Sikh guru, Ram Das, in 1574. The Lahore built by the Mughals, up to the austere Aurangzeb, must have been one of the greatest cities on earth. You can still feel that greatness, although the green city has fallen a long way. The Shalimar Gardens look neglected. The decline is heart-breaking, because it is so obvious what Lahore should be today: a city of open, enlightened Islamic culture (surely such a thing is possible) and of intellectual and artistic life generally, on the edge of India, and simultaneously Pakistan’s centre of energy-, IT- and health-related industries and advanced research. It may be all of these things partially.

Lahore was the capital of the province of the Punjab in British India. When India was divided, it went to Pakistan and became the capital of West Punjab. In 1955 the provinces, states and tribal areas of the western half of Pakistan were merged into a unitary province of West Pakistan (Toynbee says Western) and East Bengal was renamed East Pakistan. The capital of West Pakistan was Lahore and of East Pakistan Dhaka. In 1969 Yahya Khan dissolved the one unit system and restored the provinces of West Pakistan. West Punjab became simply Punjab. In 1971 East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh.

With the loss of Lahore to Pakistan, Chandigarh was built as the new capital of the Indian Punjab, with the help of Le Corbusier. In 1966, a Hindi-speaking state, Haryana, was carved out of the eastern and southern part of the Punjab. The western part retained a Punjabi-speaking majority and remained as the Punjab. Chandigarh was on the border and was made a Union Territory in order to serve as the capital of both states.

In 1959 Ayub Khan moved the capital of Pakistan from Karachi, which had been founded as the capital of Sindh by the British in 1843, replacing Hyderabad, to Rawalpindi in the Punjab. He had taken power in the first army coup in the previous year. There was a feeling that too much attention was going to the south. But Rawalpindi was not the capital for long: a site to the north of it was selected for the building of a new city, designed by Toynbee’s friend Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis. Work began in 1960 and Islamabad became the capital in 1967, but the government did not fully relocate until the ’80s.

How did anyone for a moment believe that the two halves of Pakistan could be a single country or that the western half could be made into a “unitary” province?

Toynbee’s piece on Amritsar and Lahore is quoted in full at sikhchic.com. IJ Singh (New York) says: “One comment by Toynbee should make us sit up and take notice. He says, ‘And the veneration paid to the Granth Sahib goes beyond the furthest extremes of Protestant Christian bibliolatry.’ Yes, this is exactly what we do when we are unable or unwilling to engage the Guru by reading the Guru Granth, but are content to worship it by lamps, air conditioning, ornate rumallas, incense and aarti. This tells us how far we have departed from the message of Sikhi. A telling comment by an astute observer; now, the onus is ours.”

Prem Singh (London) comments: “‘Slightly grim’? Strange to read how others perceive you, isn’t it?”

The Golden Temple (Wikimedia Commons)

East to West, A Journey Round the World, OUP, 1958

A casual affair

Hindu worship is a casual, disorderly affair [...].

East to West, A Journey Round the World, OUP, 1958

Anxiety

Ever since I can remember, I have been conscious of being anxious; my anxiety has prompted much of my action, including many of my creative acts. My anxiety has two causes; I am anxious to play a good and useful part in the society in which I am a participant [is that a cause?]; but I am also anxious for fear that, if I am not preoccupied by mundane activities, I shall find myself spiritually naked and unscreened in the presence of the Ultimate Spiritual Reality that I have encountered, so far, only in two brief experiences. I am taking refuge from a recurrence of these experiences when I immerse myself in work; and this is just as cowardly, and just as frivolous, as turning on the television (a form of escapism which I arrogantly despise). Here I am confessing my agreement that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” [Hebrews 10:31]. This is strange because, when I am thinking rationally, I am a religious agnostic.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, second edition, with a previously unpublished essay, Gropings in the Dark, written in September 1973 after the completion of Mankind and Mother Earth, and a new Preface, May 1978, by Veronica Toynbee, OUP, 1979, posthumous

Funeral march

On 11 11 1918 at 11 am, Paris time, the Armistice treaty between the Allies and Germany came into effect. And at that moment in the day on the nearest Sunday in all subsequent years there has been a two-minute silence in a ceremony at Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall.

And there, afterwards, a mysterious march is played.

The silence is marked by a field gun on Horse Guards Parade at the beginning, as Big Ben strikes eleven, and at the end. The wind thuds against BBC microphones. Then Royal Marines buglers sound the Last Post. The royal family lays wreaths in silence. When the time comes for politicians and Commonwealth representatives and others to lay theirs, something called “Beethoven’s funeral march” is announced.

Here is part of the 2009 ceremony last Sunday. The march starts at 3:00. It’s played a little faster than usual.

Anyone who grew up in England in the ’60s, when there were only two channels and few live events, will have seen or heard this moving broadcast. Many veterans of the Great War took part. That war’s last survivor living in the UK died this year.

It was broadcast as a public, a state, occasion. I think it still is. There are still no cuts to grieving mothers.

What is that march?

I’ve heard this broadcast intermittently for decades and always been struck by its music, but especially by “Beethoven’s funeral march”.

But for as long as I’ve had a sense of what Beethoven wrote, I’ve asked myself “what Beethoven funeral march, for heaven’s sake?”. If this is by Beethoven, why do we never hear about it on any other occasion? Why was it not included in the Deutsche Grammophon edition in 1970? Why is it never recorded? It’s a remarkable piece of music, a sort of funereal fantasia, with its commanding opening upbeat and haunting refrain. But Beethoven wrote only two funeral marches that anyone has heard of. The famous one is in the Eroica. The other is in the twelfth piano sonata, from a year or two earlier, which is a kind of dry run for the tune, before he split its atom in the symphony.

You can hear sketches for the Eroica march here at a site (you can’t spend less than an hour there) called The Unheard Beethoven. (This is the march, if it wasn’t an orchestration of Chopin’s, which used to interrupt normal radio broadcasts in totalitarian countries when a leader died, before the nervous apparatchiks had steeled themselves to make the formal announcement.)

There is a third march, but it is never called one. It is a fragment of a funeral march, which Beethoven throws in, with hair-raising effect, in the coda of the first movement of the ninth symphony. It appears in the woodwind, and is overwhelmed by falling and rising chromatic cellos and basses and then full strings before the conclusion.

In the BBC broadcast this year, the Cenotaph march was still being announced as “Beethoven’s funeral march”. I googled this a few years ago, before the Internet was up to much, and couldn’t solve the problem. Now I can. It isn’t Beethoven, though it used to be attributed to him as WoO Anhang 13. Even then, it was never recorded. It was sometimes called “Beethoven’s funeral march no 1”. (What was no 2?) It was played as such at the funeral of Edward VII.

The march is actually by Johann Heinrich Walch. Walch wrote many marches. The allies marched into Paris in 1814 to the tune of his Pariser Einzugsmarsch and the Germans used it in their victory parade there in 1940. It’s a rather trivial piece. You can find it on iTunes, but you can’t find the funeral march which is worthy of Beethoven. Nobody knows who wrote the Last Post, but that could be Beethoven too.

The War Game 3

I predicted that the YouTube clips of The War Game in my November 1 post would not be available for long and they have already been removed. This is petty-minded of the BBC, which has earned enough by now by licensing the film it refused to show on television, while the film’s maker, Peter Watkins, has earned nothing. The BBC’s public service remit alone should require it to disseminate it free of charge. You can probably get it on other sites.

The War Game

The War Game 2

A place in the sun

As well as “Yellow Peril”, Kaiser Wilhelm II coined the phrase “place in the sun”, Platz an der Sonne, which Toynbee quoted.

It came into a speech on June 18 1901 during the Lower Elbe Regatta, addressed to the Bürgermeister of Hamburg and others on board the passenger steamship Prinzessin Victoria Luise of the Hamburg-Amerika line.

“In spite of the fact that we have no such fleet as we should have, we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun [in Africa, the Pacific and China]. It will now be my task to see to it that this place in the sun shall remain our undisputed possession, in order that the sun’s rays may fall fruitfully upon our activity and trade in foreign parts, that our industry and agriculture may develop within the state and our sailing sports upon the water, for our future lies upon the water. The more Germans go out upon the waters, whether it be in races or regattas, whether it be in journeys across the ocean, or in the service of the battle flag, so much the better it will be for us.

“For when the German has once learned to direct his glance upon what is distant and great, the pettiness which surrounds him in daily life on all sides will disappear. Whoever wishes to have this larger and freer outlook can find no better place than one of the Hanseatic cities. … We are now making efforts to do what, in the old time, the Hanseatic cities could not accomplish, because they lacked the vivifying and protecting power of the empire. May it be the function of my Hansa during many years of peace to protect and advance commerce and trade!

“As head of the Empire I therefore rejoice over every citizen, whether from Hamburg, Bremen, or Lübeck, who goes forth with this large outlook and seeks new points where we can drive in the nail on which to hang our armour. Therefore, I believe that I express the feeling of all your hearts when I recognize gratefully that the director of this company who has placed at our disposal the wonderful ship which bears my daughter’s name has gone forth as a courageous servant of the Hansa, in order to make for us friendly conquests whose fruits will be gathered by our descendants!”

Alfred von Tirpitz had been appointed Secretary of State of the Navy in 1897 and held the office through the naval arms race with Britain, until 1916.

On the night of December 16 1906 the Prinzessin Victoria Luise had departed from Kingston, Jamaica, while on a cruise, when her captain mistook one lighthouse for another and grounded her. The passengers were safely disembarked on the following morning. The captain remained on the vessel after the evacuation, retreated to his cabin, and shot himself. A German Admiralty court posthumously found him negligent in May in the following year. Salvage operations began immediately after the grounding, but waves caused further damage. The ship was declared a total loss on December 19.

Consecrating a memorial to German sailors, January 4 1891, Samoa. The territory became a German protectorate in 1900. Flickr credit: National Library of New Zealand.

~~~

In Saudi Arabia, where access is difficult. Back November 10.

The Yellow Peril

The first ripples of Chinese migration are already striking upon the East Indies, Australia and the Pacific sea-board of North America, and the brutality with which these states are repelling this peaceful, casual invasion shows how terribly they dread the pressure to come. Forcible exclusion will succeed for the present, because China still lies in the grip of a thousand years’ political paralysis; but the power of movement is already returning to her limbs. The fundamental factor of world-politics during the next century will be the competition between China and the new commonwealths. China will strive to reorganise her national life, and to bring all her immeasurable latent strength to bear on the effort to win her “place in the Sun” (a more titanic struggle this than Germany’s present endeavour): the others will make haste to swell the ranks of their white population till they can muster enough defenders to man the wide boundaries of the inheritance they have marked out for themselves, and become strong enough either to fling back China’s onset or to deter her from making it at all. All the threatened nations – Canada, the U.S.A., the South American republics, New Zealand and Australia – will draw together into a league, to preserve the Pacific from Chinese domination. Japan will probably join their ranks, for she is the Great Britain of the China Seas, and, just like ourselves, would be menaced most seriously by the emergence of a World-power on the continent opposite her island country. Russia, who has not even a strip of sea to protect her, but is China’s immediate continental neighbour along a vast land-frontier, will actually be the chief promoter of this defensive entente, for she will be exposed to the first brunt of the Chinese attack.

This was a common set of predictions in the early twentieth century. Toynbee does not use the phrase Yellow Peril, which seems to have been coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895. He commissioned a picture with this title from Hermann Knackfuß depicting the Archangel Michael leading an allegorical Germany against an Asiatic threat represented by a golden Buddha and ordered it to be hung in ships of the Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher Lloyd lines. Strangely enough, I can find only a low resolution image of it online: here it is. The phrase was often used in English in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. I am told that my German grandfather (1886-1964) occasionally used it.

Angel Island

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Welshmen and Bretons

A Welshman resident in Jersey once told the author that he was able to carry on a Keltic conversation with the Breton peasant women who came over from the mainland for a fair; yet though the Welsh and Breton dialects are so little differentiated, there is no common consciousness whatever between the populations that speak them.

The Breton is as good a Frenchman as the Welshman is a “Britisher.” The Welshman is distinguished within the general British mass not so much by his language as by his Nonconformity, which he shares with an important class of the whole English-speaking population: the Breton is a clerical, like his French-speaking Vendéan neighbour, not because of his Keltic speech, but because he is a peasant [as the picture below suggests] and inhabits a district remote from the centres of French national life.

Why dialect, not language? Because a dialect can be a different language which is culturally or socially subordinate to a standard language. It does not have to be a variant of a language (was he thinking about a meta-Celtic?).

Breton traders travelled further than Jersey. From the early nineteenth century until the 1960s many toured England as onion sellers or johnnies. Seventy onion johnnies died when the steamer SS Hilda sank at Saint-Malo in 1905. There’s a photograph online of one in Renfrewshire. They were often from the area around Roscoff. They used to call on us on their bicycles in the London suburb where I grew up.

Of course, the whole of Europe was a pattern of itinerant traders, which could be mapped.

Secondary picture source: Telegraph

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Historical sentiment

Above all we must be on our guard against “historical sentiment,” that is, against arguments taken from conditions which once existed or were supposed to exist, but which are no longer real at the present moment. They are most easily illustrated by extreme examples. Italian newspapers have described the annexation of Tripoli as “recovering the soil of the Fatherland” because it was once a province of the Roman Empire; and the entire region of Macedonia is claimed by Greek chauvinists on the one hand, because it contains the site of Pella, the cradle of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., and by Bulgarians on the other, because Ohhrida, in the opposite corner, was the capital of the Bulgarian Tzardom in the tenth century A.D., though the drift of time has buried the tradition of the latter almost as deep as the achievements of the “Emathian Conqueror,” on which the modern Greek nationalist insists so strongly.

And see Zionism. Emathia was the Homeric name of lower Macedonia.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Tusa’s 1989

1989: Day by Day. BBC Radio 4, from news archives. Doesn’t cover the whole year. Started on October 5 and runs until January 3 in 91 5-minute segments. There is a Sunday omnibus edition. He did something similar with 1968 last year.

The War Game 2

Citizens of West European countries were haunted [in the post-war world] by fears that some American decision, in which the West European peoples might have had no say, might inadvertently bring Russian atomic missiles hurtling down on Dutch, Danish, French, and British heads. Such West European fears of dire consequences descending upon Western Europe as unintended by-products of some impulsive American retort to some provocative Russian act of aggression were anxieties that might or might not be well founded, but their currency in Western Europe was a fact, and this psychological fact exposed a constitutional flaw in the structure of a commonwealth of Western nations in which all the partners, with the crucial exception of one partner whose “fiat” was “law”, were exposed to the risk of being involved in a perhaps irretrievable catastrophe as a consequence of decisions in which they might have had no voice, on issues in which, for them, the stakes were life and death.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

The War Game

The films about the possible end of human life that we are being asked to watch now (October 29 and 30 posts) are divertissements compared with the docudrama that I was made to watch at school in 1968 or ’69.

Peter Watkins’s The War Game (UK, 1965) was intended for the BBC, but “The effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”

The final passage must be the bleakest ever filmed. More below.



The War Game had been scheduled for transmission on August 6 1966, the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack. The BBC decided in November 1965 not to show it. Watkins asked it to allow a limited release in cinemas. This compromise was approved in March 1966. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament arranged many of the early screenings in the UK, and the film was seen on US college campuses in 1966 and ’67. It represented the UK in the 1966 Venice Film Festival and won an Academy Award in the same year. The BBC did not show it until 1985.

Watkins left Britain soon after making The War Game. He has been forgotten there and now lives in Sweden. Wikipedia links are at the top of this post. Here is his website.

The BBC retains all rights to the film, wherever shown. Consequently, these YouTube clips may not survive for long.

The scenario.

The US authorises tactical nuclear warfare against the Chinese, who have invaded American-occupied South Vietnam. Russia and East Germany threaten to invade West Berlin if the US does not withdraw that decision. The US does not acquiesce. Two US Army divisions attempt to fight their way into East Berlin, but the Russian and East German forces defeat them. The US launches a pre-emptive, NATO tactical nuclear attack on the eastern bloc. We are not told on what targets. Russian missiles strike Britain.

The story’s centre is Rochester in Kent, which is struck by an off-target missile aimed at Heathrow airport. Other targets mentioned are RAF Manston and the Maidstone barracks. The credits at the end tell us that much of the film was based on information obtained from the bombings of Dresden, Darmstadt, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from the 1954 Nevada Desert nuclear tests.

The film contains a quotation from Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem Song for Three Soldiers:

“Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier,
With weapons beyond any reach of my mind,
With weapons so deadly the world must grow older
And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?”

(It was a line of Benet’s poetry that gave the title to Dee Brown’s history of the destruction of Native American tribes by the United States, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.)

The other anti-war film we were shown in the same school hall at roughly the same time was Joseph Losey’s King and Country (UK, 1964).

Watkins

The BLDGBLOG Book

Reasons to read.

Owning water

After the Junior High School (see Judith Weingarten’s comment) emoting of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, I saw another film in Kuwait last week. It was called (rather weakly) Blue Gold and subtitled The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (US, 2008). Here the emotion was about the ownership of water.

Publicity material: “The film makes the case against commodification, proclaiming water as a precious public resource to be protected for eternity. With dwindling clean water supplies, conflicts are already developing between corporations, private investors, government interests and the human race that needs water to survive.”

Website: “In every corner of the globe, we are polluting, diverting, pumping, and wasting our limited supply of fresh water at an expediential (sic; other sics omitted) level as population and technology grows. The rampant overdevelopment of agriculture, housing and industry increase the demands for fresh water well beyond the finite supply, resulting in the desertification of the earth.

“Corporate giants force developing countries to privatize their water supply for profit. Wall Street investors target desalination and mass bulk water export schemes. Corrupt governments use water for economic and political gain. Military control of water emerges and a new geo-political map and power structure forms, setting the stage for world water wars.

“We follow numerous worldwide examples of people fighting for their basic right to water, from court cases to violent revolutions to U.N. conventions to revised constitutions to local protests at grade schools. As Maude Barlow proclaims, ‘This is our revolution, this is our war’. A line is crossed as water becomes a commodity.”

We know what the problems of water are. Rapidly falling water tables and drying rivers from over-exploitation by agriculture, industries and cities. Pollution. Flooding caused by deforestation and poor land management. Climate change and loss of glaciers. Social and political tensions that come from all this. Much of what the film says is correct.

But it is obsessed with one question: ownership. One of its bogeys is Nestlé. The film is in the spirit of the anti-Davos, the World Social Forum, and has scenes shot at one or more of its meetings. Here, from the World Economic Forum’s meeting at Davos in 2009, is a 60-minute panel on water in which Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of Nestlé, argues from a position opposite to that of the film, though there is some common ground. Basic water, he says, is a human right, meaning the few litres of water that each human being needs to drink each day and for basic hygiene. Using publicly-owned, subsidised, water to fill swimming pools and water golf courses is not a human right.

Water has to be managed. Blue Gold finds it self-evident that public ownership will produce better and fairer management than private ownership.

Seventy percent of the world’s water is used not for drinking or washing, but for agriculture. (A disproportionate amount of that goes into the supply chain for producing the rich world’s beef.) Biofuels are especially water-intensive. Most of the rest is used by industry. The issue is not ownership, but use and pricing. Precisely because water is precious, it must be priced. The failure to price it properly, says Brabeck-Letmathe, is the reason it is so abused. Ecologically-disastrous experiments such as Saudi Arabia’s now-abandoned programme of wheat farming were conducted because water was publicly-subsidised. Pricing water is, politically, extremely difficult to do and to regulate, but it must be done, by both public and private bodies. (Brabeck-Letmathe would probably concede that, with proper pricing mechanisms, publicly-owned water need not be subsidised water.)

Blue Gold is partly presented by the Council of the Canadians, the Polaris Institute, Food and Water Watch, Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, Water Paradigm, Ryan’s Well Foundation, River Alliance of Wisconsin, Navdanya, Anti-Privatization Forum in Johannesburg and the France Libertés Fondation Danielle Mitterrand. It is produced and directed by Sam Bozzo.

I’d hoped to see a third film in culture-starved Kuwait, but missed it: Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes.

Home

Yesterday, at a sparsely-attended film festival in Kuwait (there were some impressive young Kuwaiti scientists and ecological volunteers there today; here are some of them at kuwaitturtles.com), I saw Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home.

Arthus-Bertrand was the man behind La terre vue du ciel (1999), Earth from Above, first a book, but also a film. His new film is not for profit and has no copyright restrictions attached to it. It is also shot from the air. He wants it to be seen by as many people as possible in the weeks leading up to Copenhagen.

The main criticism I have is that it’s too beautiful. I railed against this kind of thing in relation to a historical documentary. I’m not taking that post back. (I have a stodgy pre-postmodern view of the difference between fact and fiction when it comes to this kind of film.) Does it matter here?

There was a sequence about the invention of agriculture from which I snapped the picture at the top of this post. The filter that has been applied to it looks shop-bought and is probably called “Van Gogh”. Rather childish in this context.

There are photographers’ ethics, based on what the equipment is and how they use it, that can define, at any given moment in technological history, what a real photograph is, relative as these realities must be. I’d make a rougher film. But roughness ends up being an act of will too. And this film is beautiful.

On Dubai: “Nothing seems further from Nature than Dubai, although nothing depends on Nature more than Dubai. Dubai is [...] the culmination of the Western model.”

Toynbee did not see the problem in the scientific terms in which we see it, but he knew what was coming. Warren Buffett (Fortune, November 10 2003), quoting Herb Stein: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

One can find serious faults with this film, but it has a cumulative power. Some people in the audience sat texting as its message was given to them. If I were painting a crucifixion, I’d have the soldiers texting.

Here is the film.

A noble paire

“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make Man better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night –
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures Life may perfect be.” [Footnote: Ben Jonson.]

From Ben Jonson’s Pindaric ode To the immortall memorie, and friendship of that noble paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H Morison.

Cary was married to Lettice, daughter of Sir Richard Morison of Tooley Park in Leicestershire.

Why memorie? Cary was killed in the Civil War at Newbury, after Jonson’s death. The ode is on the death (as far as I can tell natural) in 1629, at the age of twenty, of his brother-in-law.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

1989

Timothy Garton Ash on recent books, New York Review of Books.

Botha and Smuts

Louis Botha and Jan Christiaan Smuts fought with the Transvaal Afrikaaners against the British in the Second Boer War. In the settlement, or accommodation, of 1910, Botha became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, a semi- (from 1931 virtually) independent dominion under the Crown, and held the position until his death in 1919. Botha and Smuts fought with the allies in the First World War against German South-West Africa and German East Africa. Smuts helped in Versailles to found the League of Nations.

The visual image of General Smuts that is impressed the most clearly on my mind is the sight of him in Paris, in 1919, taking a stroll with General Botha during one of the intervals between the sessions of the peace conference. One often saw the two comrades in each other’s company; and Botha, who was then already a very sick man, would be leaning on Smuts’s arm, while Smuts would be helping his old friend along tenderly. Their affection for each other was moving. This long friendship drew out, in Smuts, a quality of loving-kindness that adorned his manifold gifts and went far to redeem his relatively few short-comings.

When Botha died, Smuts succeeded him and was prime minister until 1924, and again from 1939 to ’48, though he spent much of the Second World War advising Churchill in London. He supported Zionism. In 1948 his party lost to the strongly pro-Apartheid Nationalists. He died in 1950. In 1961 the last constitutional links with Britain were dissolved and South Africa became a republic.

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

This was a Depression, not Crash, song, but it will do to mark the anniversary.

The market slid on Thursday October 24 1929, but the catastrophic collapse occurred on Monday and Tuesday, October 28 and 29.

The song was written in 1931. The lyrics were by Yip Harburg, the music by Jay Gorney. It was sung by, among others, Bing Crosby.

Here by the little-known Charlie Palloy, with guitar and his orchestra, recorded in 1932. I’m not sure of the date of the Crosby.

Thames

“The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala”

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TS Eliot, from The Waste Land (1922). Typographical indentations in the original are not reproduced.

Noel Mewton-Wood

I revised the long post before last and inserted this paragraph about a pianist who died in 1953:

“Mewton-Wood was a pianist of the front rank, the equal of Lipatti. He was one of a group of classical musicians – Neveu, Lipatti, Ferrier, Kapell, Cantelli, Brain – who died young at around that time. Neveu, Kapell and Cantelli died in plane crashes, like Thibaud and Buddy Holly, Brain in a car crash, like Camus.”

His performance of a Weber piano sonata which is on YouTube (it starts here) is enough evidence, I would say, of his stature. I’d never consciously listened to a Weber piano sonata before. This is more like a fantasia. The first movement lasts nearly fifteen minutes. Sometimes we’re within sight of Beethoven, and the fast passages have a sort of Regency stride that we associate with Weber.

Britten composed his Canticle III, Still falls the rain (The raids 1940, Night and dawn), a setting of Edith Sitwell, for a memorial concert for Mewton-Wood which was given at Wigmore Hall in January 1955 with him, Peter Pears and Dennis Brain performing. There is a powerful version of it on YouTube from a performance given in 2009 in the Sacristy of Bramante in the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (whose refectory houses Leonardo’s Last Supper) with Mirko Guadagnini, tenor, Dimer Maccaferri, horn and Paolo Ceccarini, piano.

Plotinus and Ali Hujwiri

The Nirvāna that is the normal and permanent goal of the Hinayanian [obsolescent term for the Theravāda or southern Buddhist school] Buddhist arhat was [...] perhaps apprehended as a rare and fleeting experience by Plotinus, whose Neoplatonism was the last of the schools of Hellenic philosophy.

“The ecstatic trance, in which the distinction between the mind and its ideas, the self and self-knowledge, passes away, is not, so Plotinus would have us believe, a mere swooning and eclipse of the Soul while the World goes booming on, but a flight of the Alone to the Alone. Sense and spiritual contemplation and mystic union are psychological states corresponding to cosmic climes, and growth in self-knowledge may be described also as a journey of the Soul through the Universe to its far-off home. Only this should be noted, that the actual attainment of the noetic state, when once the Soul has been released from the bondage of rebirth, brings a cessation of what we regard as personal existence. The heaven of the Nous has no place for memory of the Soul’s past lives, and Being there is not an immortality that denotes conscious continuity; it is rather a blissful forgetfulness. And the last stage of identification with the One is a complete loss of identity” (More, P. E.: Hellenistic Philosophies = The Greek Tradition from the Death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon: 399 B.C.-A.D. 451, vol. ii (Princeton 1923, University Press), pp. 197-8).

On this showing, Plotinus’s Visio Beatifica might be described as an entry into Nirvāna that is momentary instead of being permanent, but which is genuine for so long as it lasts. On the other hand the common essence of the Neoplatonic and the Hinayanian Buddhist experience is apparently not to be found in the experience of either the Christian or the Islamic school of mysticism.

He quotes from the Encyclopaedia of Islam.

“Fanā’, an important technical term of Sūfism, meaning ‘annihilation, dissolution’. The Sūfī who attains perfection must be in a kind of state of annihilation. … The origin of the Muslim conception of fanā’ has … to be sought in Christianity, from which it seems to be borrowed. This conception simply means the annihilation of the individual human will before the will of God – an idea which forms the centre of all Christian mysticism. The conception thus belongs to the domain of ethics and not in the slightest degree to that of metaphysics, like the nirvāna of the Hindu. … The author of the Kashf al-Mahjub expressly states that fanā’ does not mean loss of essence and destruction of personality, as some ignorant Sūfīs think” (Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. ii (London 1927, Luzac), p. 52).

The author of the Kashf al-Mahjub was Ali Hujwiri, who lived in the Ghaznavid Empire from c 990 to 1077. He was born in Ghazni, in present-day Afghanistan, wrote in Persian and died in Lahore. The Ghaznavids, who were of mamluk origin, ruled much of Persia, Transoxiana and the Indus valley from 963 to 1187 and were not even nominally subject to the Abbasid caliphate.

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Frank Lloyd Wright and other mysteries

What’s My Line?, CBS, 1950-67.

Frank Lloyd Wright. June 3 1956.

Surreal to have this nineteenth-century gentleman, born in 1867, here. He died in 1959.

Salvador Dalí. January 27 1957.

Eleanor Roosevelt. October 18 1953.

She comes to life at the end.

William Schuman, composer and first president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. September 30 1962.

Schuman, unlike Copland, Barber, Bernstein – and even Piston, Hanson, Harris – never had a popular hit. Lincoln Center had opened on September 23. Bernstein conducted his friend’s eighth symphony at Avery Fisher Hall on October 4. There is a recording of the work on YouTube from a performance there on October 9. It’s worth hearing if you like that phase of American cultural history.

Noël Coward, looking rather dissolute on March 1 1959. He’d appear again five years later.

Ronald Reagan. July 19 1953.

Charming … but …

Maurice Chevalier. April 4 1965.

He had been the mystery guest once before. His mother was Belgian. He has a Belgian persona for me.

Van (Harvey Lavan) Cliburn. April 5 1964.

Cliburn was the young Texan who in 1958 won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. This was one of the great cultural episodes of the Cold War, like Gould’s visit, Nureyev’s defection and Stravinsky’s return. Cliburn’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s first concerto and Rachmaninoff’s third gave him an eight-minute standing ovation. The judges asked permission of Khrushchev to give first prize to an American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev asked. “Then give him the prize.” Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York. This was his third appearance as mystery guest. (The first was soon after Moscow, the second in 1962.)

The regular What’s My Line? panelists, under John Daly as chairman, were the journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, the actress Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf, the co-founder in 1927 of Random House.

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A few thoughts by way of a pendant. The Daily Telegraph published a sad obituary a few days ago of an Australian pianist, Geoffrey Tozer, who died in August in Melbourne aged 54.

I have one of his Chandos recordings – of the concerto which Tchaikovsky made at the end of his life from part of a discarded symphony. The third concerto is a fascinating, rarely played, work, and is full of new sounds.

What went so wrong with Tozer’s career? Was it his name? Paul Keating gave some answers in a eulogy delivered at his memorial service, which is worth reading. It’s very – Paul Keating.

Neither the Telegraph nor Keating mentions Noel Mewton-Wood, another Melbourne pianist, as one of Tozer’s forbears, but clearly he was one, in more ways than one – especially with his championship of Busoni. Mewton-Wood committed suicide in London in 1953. Here’s an account of how it happened. He looks rather like Cliburn.

In Mewton-Wood’s small recorded legacy is a performance of Tchaikovsky 2, to complete our survey of the Tchaikovsky concerti. All three – Cliburn, Mewton-Wood, Tozer – are on iTunes, though the Cliburn may be from a return visit.

Mewton-Wood was a pianist of the front rank, the equal of Lipatti. He was one of a group of classical musicians – Neveu, Lipatti, Ferrier, Kapell, Cantelli, Brain – who died young at around that time. Neveu, Kapell and Cantelli died in plane crashes, like Thibaud and Buddy Holly, Brain in a car crash, like Camus.

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There was an English version of What’s My Line?, which ran on BBC television from 1951 to ’63. Unlike the vast archive of the American version on YouTube, there is very little of this. What there is (link here) is so innocent – with that charming central European postman – that one can hardly believe that this is what the British masses were watching half a century ago.

It is also curiously depressing. We are glad, at the end, to have moved on. This is from the year before Suez. Three regular panelists appear, with Eamonn Andrews as the host. Two were tragic figures. Lady Isobel Barnett, the exemplar, perfect hostess, immaculate public speaker – not an aristocrat, but the wife of a knighted mayor of Leicester – electrocuted herself in 1980 after she had been convicted of shoplifting. She was, or had become after the death of her husband, a kleptomaniac. Gilbert Harding, a broadcaster, was a repressed homosexual in the 1950s mould, whose life was even sadder. He only prefigures modern BBC celebrities by having attracted mass audiences by outbursts of rudeness.

If you want a UK example, equivalent to Frank Lloyd Wright, of a major artist with pre-television age roots entering the quiz-programme studio, you have William Walton, on a programme called Face the Music which ran on BBC2, in its main sequence, from 1966 to ’79. A team – Richard Baker, Joyce Grenfell, Robin Ray – would pretend to be more ignorant than it really was when answering questions posed by the pianist Joseph Cooper. Here is the second half of the programme, where Walton, the Oldham boy who seduced a series of rich women, married an Argentinian heiress and settled in Ischia, lumbers in at the time of his seventieth birthday, Easter 1972. His Sitwellian affectations are worth studying, the sycophancy of the studio is a sign of things to come. It’s a pity they chose his bombastic Spitfire prelude as one of the pieces he was supposed to recognise. A decade later, Walton was the subject of a remarkable film by Tony Palmer, At the Haunted End of the Day.

Occupied cities

Dull as Kuwait is – I spend part of my working time here, and have good Kuwaiti friends here – the centre of the town is not occupied by abusive, shrieking and drunk women and men every weekend, as most English city centres are.

Myths

Though shrines, rituals, tabus, and social conventions are highly charged with feeling, they do not come so close to the heart of a religion as its myths: the portrayal of death as the seed of life in the figure of Tammuz-Adonis-Osiris-Attis, embodying the fruitfulness of the year that dies to be born again; [footnote: John xii. 24; i Cor. xv. 35-8.] the portrayal of self-sacrifice for the salvation of fellow-sufferers in the figure of Christ or of a bodhisattva; the portrayal of superhuman spiritual stature in the figure of a hero whose mother is human but whose father is divine (the birth-story that is told of Jesus, Augustus, Alexander, Plato, and every pharaoh of Egypt since, at latest, the beginning of the Fifth Dynasty). Can these myths be discarded without taking the heart out of the faiths whose essence the myths convey? If the Universe is a mystery, and if the key to this mystery is hidden, are not myths an indispensable means for expressing as much as we can express of the ineffable? “No man hath seen God at any time” [footnote: John iv. 12.] and “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis”; [footnote: Goethe, Faust, l. 12104.] yet “das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist’s getan”. [Footnote: Ibid., ll. 12108-9.] This similitude of Absolute Reality in the World of Time and Change is the nearest approach towards the Beatific Vision that can be attained by human souls; and myths are the instruments through which these farthest flights of the Human Spirit are achieved.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

Wild apples

Wild apple forests, southern Kazakhstan, Tien Shan mountains.

The magistrate’s hand

After Glanvill, Sprat and Hobbes, Locke, in the printed version of the same set of lectures. From A Letter concerning Toleration, composed in 1685-6, published in 1689, early draft 1667.

An inconsiderable and weak number of Christians, destitute of everything, arrive in a Pagan country; these foreigners beseech the inhabitants, by the bowels of humanity, that they would succour them with the necessaries of life; those necessaries are given them, habitations are granted, and they all join together and grow up into one body of people. The Christian religion by this means takes root in that country and spreads itself, but does not suddenly grow the strongest. While things are in this condition, peace, friendship, faith, and equal justice are preserved amongst them. At length the magistrate becomes a Christian, and by that means their party becomes the most powerful. Then immediately all compacts are to be broken, all civil rights to be violated, that idolatry may be extirpated; and, unless these innocent Pagans, strict observers of the rules of equity and the law of Nature, and no ways offending against the laws of the society – I say, unless they will forsake their ancient religion and embrace a new and strange one, they are to be turned out of the lands and possessions of their forefathers, and perhaps deprived of life itself. Then, at last, it appears what zeal for the Church, joined with the desire of dominion, is capable to produce, and how easily the pretence of religion, and of the care of souls, serves for a cloak to covetousness, rapine, and ambition.

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It is worthy to be observed and lamented that the most violent of these defenders of the truth, the opposers of errors, the exclaimers against schism, do hardly ever let loose this their zeal for God, with which they are so warmed and inflamed, unless where they have the civil magistrate on their side. But, as soon as ever court favour has given them the better end of the staff, and they begin to feel themselves the stronger, then presently peace and charity are to be laid aside. Otherwise they are religiously to be observed. Where they have not the power to carry on persecution and to become masters, there they desire to live upon fair terms, and preach up toleration.

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Whatsoever some people boast of the antiquity of places and names, or of the pomp of their outward worship; others, of the reformation of their discipline; all, of the orthodoxy of their faith – for every one is orthodox to himself – these things, and all others of this nature, are much rather marks of men striving for power and empire over one another than of the church of Christ. Let any one have never so true a claim to all these things, yet, if he be destitute of charity, meekness, and good-will in general towards all Mankind, even to those that are not Christians, he is certainly yet short of being a true Christian himself. … The Gospel frequently declares that the true disciples of Christ must suffer persecution; but that the church of Christ should persecute others, and force others by fire and sword to embrace her faith and doctrine, I could never yet find in any of the books of the New Testament. … Neither Pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel commands no such thing. The church which ‘judgeth not those that are without’ (1 Cor. v. 12-13) wants it not.

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No man can be a Christian … without that faith which works, not by force, but by love. …

Although the magistrate’s opinion in religion be sound, and the way that he appoints be truly evangelical, yet, if I be not thoroughly persuaded thereof in my own mind, there will be no safety for me in following it. No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed. … I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust, and by a worship that I abhor. … Faith only, and inward sincerity, are the things that procure acceptance with God. … Men … must be left to their own conscience. …

There is absolutely no such thing under the Gospel as a Christian Commonwealth. … Christ … instituted no commonwealth … nor put he the sword into any magistrate’s hand, with commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former religion and receive His. …

Nobody ought to be compelled in matters of religion either by law or force.

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All the life and power of true religion consist in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing. … And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. …

Nobody is born a member of any church, … but everyone joins himself voluntarily to that society in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is truly acceptable to God. …

No religion which I believe not to be true can be either true or profitable to me. …

To believe this or that to be true, does not depend upon our will.

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Every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical. … The controversy between these churches about the truth of their doctrines and the purity of their worship is on both sides equal; nor is there any judge … on Earth by whose sentence it can be determined. The decision of that question belongs only to the supreme judge of all men. …

The truth certainly would do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself. …

Those whose doctrine is peaceable and whose manners are pure and blameless ought to be upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects. … Neither Pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

Geometry and ambition

Hobbes says cynically what Sprat would say constructively. From Leviathan, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil, published in 1651, under the Commonwealth.

The doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword, whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not, in that subject, what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man’s ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equall to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet, by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.

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By philosophy is understood the knowledge acquired by reasoning … to the end to be able to produce, as far as matter and humane force permit, such effects as human life requireth.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

Gods not wolves

After Glanvill, here are the quotations from Sprat, all from The History of the Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (editions from 1667). (The passages do not appear there in this order.) For Toynbee, the Enlightenment lies between two fanaticisms, the earlier religious, the later national. Sprat, while advocating natural philosophy, is conscious of the danger of a spiritual vacuum. Bayle is shown as having similar fears.

The fierceness of violent inspirations is in good measure departed: the remains of it will be soon chac’d out of the World by the remembrance of the terrible footsteps it has everywhere left behind it. And, though the Church of Rome still preserves its pomp, yet the real authority of that too is apparently decaying. … This is the present state of Christendom. It is now impossible to spread the same clouds over the World again: the universal disposition of this age is bent upon a rational religion. …

Let it be a true observation that many modern naturalists have bin (sic) negligent in the worship of God; yet perhaps they have bin driven on this profaneness by the late extravagant excesses of enthusiasm. The infinit pretences to inspiration, and immediat communion with God, that have abounded in this age, have carry’d several men of wit so far as to reject the whole matter – who would not have bin so exorbitant if the others had kept within more moderate bounds. … From hence it may be gather’d that the way to reduce a real and sober sense of religion is, not by indeavoring to cast a veil of darkness again over the minds of men, but chiefly by allaying the violence of spiritual madness, and that the one extreme will decreas proportionably to the lessening of the other.

It is apparent to all that the influence which Christianity once obtain’d on mens minds is prodigiously decay’d. The generality of Christendom is now well-nigh arriv’d at that fatal condition which did immediately precede the destruction of the worships of the Ancient World, when the face of Religion in their public assemblies was quite different from that apprehension which men had concerning it in privat: in public they observ’d its rules with much solemnity, but in privat regarded it not at all. It is difficult to declare by what means and degrees we are come to this dangerous point; but this is certain, that the spiritual vices of this age have well-nigh contributed as much towards it as the carnal; and, for these, the most efficacious remedy that Man of himself can use is not so much the sublime part of divinity as its intelligible and natural and practicable doctrines.

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It was … some space after the end of the Civil Wars at Oxford, in Dr. Wilkins his lodgings, in Wadham College, which was then the place of resort for vertuous and learnèd men, that the first meetings were made, which laid the foundation of all this that follow’d. The University had, at that time, many members of its own who had begun a free way of reasoning, and was also frequented by some gentlemen, of philosophical minds, whom the misfortunes of the Kingdom, and the security and ease of a retirement amongst gown-men, had drawn thither.

Their first purpose was no more than onely the satisfaction of breathing a free air and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag’d in the passions and madness of that dismal age. …

For such a candid and unpassionate company as that was, and for such a gloomy season, what could have been a fitter subject to pitch upon then Natural Philosophy? To have been always tossing about some theological question would have been to have made that their private diversion, the excess of which they themselves dislik’d in the publick; to have been eternally musing on civil business, and the distresses of their country, was too melancholy a reflexion: it was Nature alone which could pleasantly entertain them in that estate. The contemplation of that draws our minds off from past or present misfortunes, and makes them conquerors over things, in the greatest publick unhappiness. While the consideration of men, and humane affairs, may affect us with a thousand various disquiets, that never separates us into mortal factions, that gives us room to differ without animosity, and permits us to raise contrary imaginations upon it without any danger of a civil war.

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Whatever other hurt or good comes by such holy speculative warrs (of which whether the benefit or mischief overweighs, I will not now examine), yet certainly by this means the knowledge of Nature has been very much retarded. … The wit of men has been profusely pour’d out on Religion, which needed not its help, and which was onely thereby made more tempestuous, while it might have been more fruitfully spent on some parts of Philosophy which have been hitherto barren and might soon have been made fertil.

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Experimental Philosophy will prevent men’s spending the strength of their thoughts about disputes, by turning them to works.

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Their principal endeavours have been that they might enjoy the benefits of a mix’d assembly, which are largeness of observation and diversity of judgments, without the mischiefs that usually accompany it, such as confusion, unsteddiness, and the little animosities of divided parties. That they have avoided these dangers for the time past there can be no better proof than their constant practice, wherein they have perpetually preserv’d a singular sobriety of debating, slowness of consenting, and moderation of dissenting. … They would not be much exasperated one against another in their disagreements, because they acknowledg that there may be several methods of Nature in producing the same thing, and all equally good; whereas they that contend for truth by talking do commonly suppose that there is but one way of finding it out. The differences which should chance to happen might soon be compos’d, because they could not be grounded on matters of speculation or opinion, but only of sense; which are never wont to administer so powerful occasions of disturbance and contention as the other.

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[They cultivate a plain style] [brackets in original], bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits or scholars.

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Nor is it the least commendation the Royal Society deserves, that, designing a union of mens hands and reasons, it has proceeded so far in uniting their affections. For there we behold an unusual sight to the English nation, that men of disagreeing parties and ways of life have forgotten to hate, and have met in the unanimous advancement of the same works. There the soldier, the tradesman, the merchant, the scholar, the gentleman, the courtier, the divine, the Presbyterian, the Papist, the Independent, and those of Orthodox Judgment, have laid aside their names of distinction and calmly conspir’d in a mutual agreement of labors and desires – a blessing which seems even to have exceeded that evangelical promise that the lion and the lamb shall ly down together; for here they do not onely endure each others presence without violence or fear, but they work and think in company and confer their help to each others inventions.

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If … our nation shall lay hold of this opportunity to deserve the applause of Mankind, the force of this example will be irresistibly praevalent in all countries round about us; the state of Christendom will soon obtain a new face; while this halcyon knowledge is breeding, all tempests will cease; the opposition and contentious wranglings of Science, falsely so call’d will soon vanish away; the peaceable calmness of men’s judgments will have admirable influence on their manners; the sincerity of their understandings will appear in their actions; their opinions will be less violent and dogmatical, but more certain; they will onely be gods one to another, and not wolves.

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All knowledge is to be got the same way that a language is: by industry, use, and observation.

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Such a philosophy they would build, which should first wholly consist of action and intelligence before it be brought into teaching and contemplation.

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By turning it [Philosophy] [brackets in original] into one of the arts of life, of which men may see there is daily need, they [the Royal Society] [ditto] have provided that it cannot hereafter be extinguish’d.

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What greater privilege have men to boast of then this, that they have the pow’r of using, directing, changing, or advancing all the rest of the creatures? This is the dominion which God has given us over the Works of His hands. … It is impossible for us to administer this power aright unless we prefer the light of men of Knowledge to be a constant overseer and director of the industry and works of those that labour. The benefits are vast that will appear upon this conjunction. … By this the conceptions of men of knowledge, which are wont to soar too high, will be made to descend into the material world, and the flegmatick imaginations of men of trade, which use to grovell too much on the ground, will be exalted.

It was said of civil government by Plato that then the World will be best rul’d when either philosophers shall be chosen kings or kings shall have philosophical minds. And I will affirm the like of Philosophy. It will then attain to perfection when either the mechanic laborers shall have philosophical heads or the philosophers shall have mechanical hands.

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I rather trust to the inclination of the age itself wherein I write; which (if I mistake not) is farr more prepar’d to be perswaded to promote such studies then any other time that has gone before us.

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An infinit variety of inventions, motions, and operations will succeed in the place of words. The beautiful bosom of Nature will be expos’d to our view: we shall enter into its garden and tast of its fruits, and satisfy ourselves with its plenty – instead of idle talking and wandring under its fruitless shadows, as the Peripatetics [followers of Aristotle] did in their first institution and their successors have done ever since.

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These two subjects, God and the Soul, being onely forborn, in all the rest they wander at their pleasure … and in bringing all these to the uses of human society.

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It is dishonourable to pass a hard censure on the religions of all other countries: it concerns them to look to the reasonableness of their faith; and it is sufficient for us to be establish’d in the truth of our own.

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While the Bishops of Rome did assume an infallibility and a sovereign dominion over our faith, the reform’d churches did not onely justly refuse to grant them that, but some of them thought themselves oblig’d to forbear all communion with them, and would not give them that respect which possibly might belong to so antient and so famous a church, and which might still have been allow’d it without any danger of superstition.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

An America of secrets

In Restoration England there was a conscious moving of spiritual treasure, as Toynbee puts it, from a religion discredited by “enthusiasm” into science. There were complex strands of thought (Toynbee does not present them with many nuances in any of his work) where religious and scientific minds met, intersected and differed, but it was a time and place of relative harmony between science and religion.

Religion was not abandoned, but science, with its clarity and simplicity, seemed able to correct the emotional and metaphysical extremes of superstitious enthusiasm. Wikipedia paraphrased: “Newton saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. His spokesman, Clarke (an apothecary and not a cleric), rejected Leibniz’s theodicy which removed God from participation in his creation, since, as Clarke pointed out, such a deity would be a king in name only, bringing us but one step away from atheism. But the unforeseen theological consequence of the success of Newton’s system over the next century was to reinforce the deist position advocated by Leibniz. The understanding of the world was now brought down to the level of simple human reason, and human beings became responsible for the correction and elimination of evil.”

Two centuries later came Darwin. Newton and Boyle wrote much about religion. Charles II gave the charter to the Royal Society, whose historian, Thomas Sprat, became Dean of Westminster and then Bishop of Rochester. A couple of posts ago, we stumbled upon Joseph Glanvill, who was rector of the Abbey Church at Bath from 1666 to 1680 and prebendary of Worcester in 1678 and “the most skillful apologist of the virtuosi” (unattributed quotation in Wikipedia) or leading propagandist for the approach of the English natural philosophers. Like Sprat, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society. (The political views of the early members of the Royal Society would be interesting to trace and analyse.) Toynbee in his Gifford Lectures offers several quotations from both Sprat and Glanvill. Here are the passages from Glanvill, all from his The Vanity of Dogmatising (editions from 1661).

If we enquire the reason, why the Mathematicks, and Mechanicle Arts, have so much got the start in growth of other Sciences: We shall find it probably resolv’d into this, as one considerable cause: that their progress hath not been retarded by that reverential aw of former discoveries, which hath been so great an hinderance to Theoretical improvements.

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That all arts and professions are capable of maturer improvements, cannot be doubted by those who know the least of any. And that there is an America of secrets, and unknown Peru of Nature, whose discovery would richly advance them, is more than conjecture.

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The best account that many can give of their belief, is, that they were bred in it; which indeed is no better, then that which we call, the Woman’s Reason. And thousands of them, whom their profession and our charity styles Christians, are driven to their Religion by custom and education, as the Indians are to Baptism; that is, like a drove of Cattle to the water. And, had our Stars determined our nativities among the Enemies of the Cross, and theirs under a Christian horoscope, in all likelyhood Antichristianism had not been the object of our aversion, nor Christianity of theirs: But we should have exchang’d the Scene of our belief with that of our abode and breeding.

___

’Tis zeal for opinions that hath fill’d our Hemispheer with smoke and darkness, and by a dear experience we know the fury of those flames it hath kindled. Had not Heaven prevented, they had turn’d our Paradise into a Desert. … If our Returning Lord shall scarce find faith on Earth, where will he look for charity? … The union of a sect within it self is a pitiful charity: it’s no concord of Christians, but a conspiracy against Christ. … What eagerness in the profession of disciplinarian uncertainties, when the love of God and our neighbour, those Evangelical unquestionables, want that fervent ardor.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

The raw data

A religion cannot be true unless it has attained a true knowledge of our nature. It will have to have attained a knowledge of Man’s greatness and of his pettiness, and a knowledge of the reason for both these characteristics of his. What religion has attained this knowledge except Christianity? [Footnote: Pascal, Pensées, No. 433.]

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

An Oxford Elegy

A setting for narrator, chorus and small orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams, made in 1947-9, of parts of two poems by Matthew Arnold, The Scholar-Gipsy (1853) and the elegy Thyrsis (1865). The composite text is given on the YouTube clips (posted by Epodogus) and here. Arnold’s source for The Scholar-Gipsy was a story told in The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) by Joseph Glanvill.

“There was very lately a Lad in the University of Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts, and yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by his poverty forc’d to leave his studies there, and to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelyhood. Now, his necessities growing dayly on him, and wanting the help of friends to relieve him; he was at last forced to joyn himself to a company of Vagabond Gypsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their Trade for a maintenance. Among these extravagant people, and by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love, and esteem, as that they discover’d to him their Mystery: in the practice of which, by the pregnancy of his wit and parts he soon grew so good a proficient, as to be able to out-do his Instructors. After he had been a pretty while exercis’d in the Trade; there chanc’d to ride by a couple of Scholars who had formerly bin (sic) of his acquaintance. The Scholars had quickly spyed out their old friend, among the Gypsies; and their amazement to see him among such society, had well-nigh discover’d him: but by a sign he prevented their owning him before that Crew: and taking one of them aside privately, desired him with his friend to go to an Inn, not far distant thence, promising there to come to them. They accordingly went thither, and he follows: after their first salutations, his friends enquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was, and to joyn himself with such a cheating beggarly company. The Scholar-Gypsy having given them an account of the necessity, which drove him to that kind of life; told them, that the people he went with were not such Impostours as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of Imagination, and that himself had learnt much of their Art, and improved in further than themselves could. And to evince the truth of what he told them, he said, he’d remove into another room, leaving them to discourse together; and upon his return tell them the sum of what they had talked of: which accordingly he perform’d, giving them a full acount of what had pass’d between them in his absence. The Scholars being amaz’d at so unexpected a discovery, ernestly desir’d him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them satisfaction, by telling them, that what he did was by the power of Imagination, his Phancy binding theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the discourse, they held together, while he was from them: That there were warrantable wayes of heightening the Imagination to that pitch, as to bind anothers; and that when he had compass’d the whole secret, some parts of which he said he was yet ignorant of, he intended to give the world an account of what he had learned.”

Arnold describes the immediate neighbourhood of Oxford. He wrote in 1885: “I cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me – the hillside with its valley, and Oxford in the great Thames valley below.” The story, or Arnold’s poem, must have appealed to Housman.

Thyrsis commemorates Arnold’s close friend Arthur Hugh Clough, who had died in 1861. It contains lines describing the view of Oxford from Boars Hill:

“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.”

Vaughan Williams makes “June” “summer”. Arnold’s friendship with Clough developed at Balliol, Toynbee’s college. Arnold arrived there in 1841, in the term after Clough graduated. It was the time of the Oxford Movement, but neither became an adherent.

I don’t think Toynbee was attracted by this super-saturated world of sentiment. Perhaps he would have sympathised with Anthony Blanche/Harold Acton. He writes of “feeling acutely homesick for the historic Mediterranean” while walking on the Suffolk coast in 1913, when he was teaching in Oxford. But the story of the “Scholar-Gypsy” has echoes in his career. He abandons his Oxford study to “do wonders by the power of Imagination” and the fraternity he had deserted take him as an “Impostour”.

Dover Beach

Pax Mogulica and Pax Britannica

In the Hindu World, the Mughal Universal State collapsed and was superseded by a new alien polity.

The brief century of this British Rāj may still shine in retrospect with the serene beauty of an “Indian Summer” – and this perhaps even in Indian eyes. For the British Rāj was only founded after the antecedent universal state of the Hindu World had broken down into an anarchy which has made the eighteenth century of the Christian Era as evil a memory in Hindu history as the third century was in the history of the Roman Empire. It was this post-Mughal anarchy, and not the Pax Mogulica which preceded it, that the British conquest of India swept away by force. The Pax Britannica, which the British conquerors then imposed, has been more effective, more pervasive, and, in Western eyes at any rate, more beneficent than the peace which had been imposed, two centuries earlier, by Akbar (imperabat A.D. 1556-1605); and if the British and the Mughal régimes in India are to be compared, it cannot be argued that, even if the British régime is superior in practical achievement, the Mughal régime is morally more admirable in virtue of being a native product; for the founders of the Mughal Rāj were as utterly alien as the founders of the British Rāj were from the native social order of Hinduism; and a Bābur, cast away in Hindustan through the fortunes of war in Central Asia, was just as homesick for the temperate clime of his native Farghānā as any English sojourner in India has ever been for Kentish hop-fields or for Yorkshire moors. [Footnote: In the Indian chapters of Bābur’s memoirs there are repeated expressions of the author’s dislike for the Hindu World upon which he had forcibly inflicted himself, and, if these querulous passages were quoted anonymously, in isolation from their context, they might easily be taken for the indiscretions of some disgruntled twentieth-century English lieutenant-governor of an Indian province.]

The Pax Mogulica dawned with the accession of Akbar in 1556. After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 came Persian and Afghan invasions and Hindu, Sikh, Moslem, British and French subversion. The British deposed the last Mughal in 1858 and remained in India until 1947.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Olympic cities 1

What has determined the choice of modern Olympic cities?

The first revived Games in 1896 were clearly going to be in Athens. The Games were from the beginning intended to be itinerant, not held only in Greece. Political philhellenism was anyway enjoying a recrudescence in Europe, though devoid of romance this time. The ancient Games had begun in 776 BC and were suppressed either by Theodosius I in AD 393 or by his grandson Theodosius II in AD 435. The site of Olympia remained until an earthquake destroyed it in the sixth century CE.

The founder of the International Olympic Committee, Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, or Pierre de Coubertin, was French. The first meeting, in 1894, took place in Paris. Coubertin himself moved it to Lausanne in 1915, where its headquarters still are. The ancient Games had never taken place in Athens, but they were international.

“Hellas” seems originally to have been the name of the region round the head of the Maliac Gulf, on the border between Central and Northern Greece, which contained the shrine of Earth and Apollo at Delphi and the shrine of Artemis at Anthela near Thermopylae (the narrow passage between sea and mountain that has been the highway from Central Greece to Northern Greece and thence to the great Eurasian Continent into which Northern Greece merges). “Hellenes”, signifying “inhabitants of Hellas”, presumably acquired its broader meaning, signifying “members of the Hellenic society”, through being used as a corporate name for the association of local peoples, the Amphictyones (“neighbours”) which administered the shrines at Delphi and Thermopylae and organized the Pythian Festival that was connected with them. This was was one of four festivals [meaning sports festivals] in the Hellenic World that came to be recognized as “Panhellenic” (“international”), and not merely parochial, events.

The Amphictyones, called Hellenes, organised the Pythian Festival. When other Greeks became involved, they were called Hellenes in turn. Does “panhellenic” correspond to any ancient Greek word?

The other three were the Isthmian Festival held in the territory of Corinth; the Nemean, held in the territory of Phlius, in the Peloponnese (Morea) slightly south-west of the Isthmus of Corinth; and the Olympian, held in the territory of Elis in the west of the Peloponnese, to the north of Pylos. At a festival that had acquired Panhellenic status, the prizes awarded to winners of the artistic and athletic competitions were tokens that had no economic value. Parochial festivals had to attract competitors by offering valuable prizes; but the honour of being a victor at one of the Panhellenic festivals was so great that a material gratuity was unnecessary.

Though it was the Pythian Panhellenic Festival that gave the Hellenes their common name, the Olympian was the earliest of the four to acquire Panhellenic status. Public events were dated by Hellenic historians as having occurred in such and such an Olympiad (the Olympian Festival was held at intervals of four years); and admission to compete at Olympia came to be the test of recognition as being a Hellene. For instance, King Alexander I of Macedon, an unwilling subject of the Persian Emperor Xerxes who had given useful intelligence to the high command of the Hellenic coalition during the Persian invasion of Continental European Greece in 480-479 B.C., was rewarded by being admitted to compete at Olympia, not in virtue of the Macedonians speaking Greek as their mother-tongue, but on the strength of a legendary genealogy which derived the Macedonian royal family from Argos, a city in the north-east of the Peloponnese which was one of the most venerable of all the cities of Hellas. The Romans were admitted to compete at the Isthmian Festival as a token of gratitude for the service which they had rendered to the Hellenic World in 229 B.C. in suppressing the Illyrian pirates who had been ravaging the west coast of Continental European Greece.

Photograph at life.com, taken allegedly in 1901, of what seems to be a modern version (perhaps associated with the Paris Olympics of 1900?) of the Discobolus of Myron. Publication of this low resolution version here is non-commercial and considered fair use.

Hellenism, The History of a Civilization, OUP, Home University Library, 1959

Born in 1989

89 Voices, Outlook, BBC World Service, September 2009. Eight minutes each in audio versions.

Berlin, Arno Hoelzer

Warsaw, Anna Napiorkowska

Prague, Michaela Plikova

Budapest, Miklos Kerekfy

Bucharest, Cristina Pasat

Hugh Lloyd-Jones

Telegraph obituary. “As part of his wartime work, Lloyd-Jones had learned Japanese, and noticed how it was impossible, or at least difficult, to express certain Western concepts in that language. When he returned to Oxford, he set out in an essay for his tutor to refute St Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God by showing the difficulties of expressing it in Japanese. It was this, perhaps, that convinced him of the dangers of imposing anachronistic thought structures on the work of ancient writers.”

Hugh Lloyd-Jones was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1960 to 1989. Hugh Trevor-Roper was Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1957 to 1980. Lloyd-Jones was a Student of Christ Church. I often saw him when I was a student there with a small s, but I was not a classicist, so I was not taught by him.

Did this Hugh share the other Hugh’s opinion of Toynbee? He would have been a more natural opponent, since his field was Toynbee’s specialisation. Morton’s bibliography of Toynbee (1980) lists only one piece by Lloyd-Jones: a 1959 review in The Spectator of Hellenism.

A quick view of the web turns up a review (Prodigious Powers, London Review of Books, January 21-February 3 1982) by Lloyd-Jones of a posthumous work by Toynbee, The Greeks and Their Heritages (1981). It was reprinted in Lloyd-Jones’s Greek in a Cold Climate (1991).

It begins with a guarded sentence. “This posthumous work provides yet more evidence of the phenomenal energy and wide range of information of the late Arnold Toynbee.”

“Wide range of information.” There were many ways in which Toynbee was uncongenial to the Oxford academic establishment. I won’t summarise them. A historian who wrote about God as if he existed was anyway not “one of us”, ontology or no. Lloyd-Jones has qualified respect for this late book (which McNeill, Toynbee’s biographer, fails even to mention). He begins by summarising, in more or less neutral tones, Toynbee’s life and intellectual evolution, with the help of McNeill’s obituary notice in the 1977 Proceedings of the British Academy. Somervell’s abridgement of A Study of History made Toynbee, he says, “the Tolkein of historical studies”. I made that parallel myself in an early post. The date of publication of the final volumes of the Study was 1954, not 1953.

“Toynbee had studied all the latest speculations about Bronze Age Greece, and knew all about it that could be known – and indeed rather more than all: he does not hesitate to accept the somewhat sanguine speculations of the late TBL Webster, a scholar with whom he had several things in common.”

He finds Toynbee’s resumé of the Hellenistic period “unexciting”. Toynbee, “for all his learning, remained rooted in an attitude fashionable when he was young”: that it was all over by the end of the fifth century BC. This attitude, the dating of the beginning of the decline of Greek civilisation to the start of the Peloponnesian War, was hardly modified during the course of Toynbee’s career. It gave him the shape of the history of Greco-Roman, or as he called it, the Hellenic, civilisation, a plot which he proceeded to superimpose on the histories of other civilisations.

“He notes that the movement to reproduce the style and language of Classical Attic prose started during the first century BC. That was also the moment when the Academy went over from scepticism to dogmatism, and the whole trend of philosophy followed suit: it was then, rather than three centuries earlier, that the real decline began. Toynbee is again old-fashioned in his refusal to see that the archaising revival of Greek culture in the second century AD had some things to be said for it: the writers of the Second Sophistic are lively compared with the Byzantine imitators of the Classics.”

Lloyd-Jones finds things to admire in Toynbee’s handling of the Byzantine period. But “he shows no awareness of the immense cultural superiority of the Byzantines to the Crusaders which Sir Steven Runciman has so clearly described [surely he does elsewhere], nor does he seem conscious that the last age of Byzantium, between the reconquest of Constantinople from the Franks in 1261 and its capture by the Turks in 1453 [the Palaeologian age], was in many respects an age of great cultural vitality. What condemns the Byzantines is the fact that they were defeated by the Turks: Toynbee displays the same servility towards success as E.H. Carr. He has an interesting appendix on Gemistos Plethon, but exaggerates his inclination to paganism and underestimates the influence of his philosophy. A few pages of Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance supply a corrective in both matters.”

When we come to 1921, Toynbee “castigates the Greeks for having clung to ‘the Great Idea’: the hope of the re-establishment of something like the Eastern Empire with its capital in Constantinople. In 1921 it did not seem so foolish: the Turks had paid the penalty for their alliance with the Germans, and the Versailles Conference seriously considered the possibility of handing back the Imperial city to the Greeks. Lloyd George was captivated by the charismatic leader of a race living near to sea and mountains with whom he had much in common, Eleftherios Venizelos, and only Edward Montagu’s [he means Edwin Montagu’s] exaggerated fears of a ‘Khilafat’ agitation in India seem to have led him to give up the plan. If the universal weariness of war had not led the Allies to disperse their armies, they might have imposed a settlement in the Middle East which would have saved much trouble later, just as they might have dealt with Lenin.

“Toynbee goes on to discuss the language question in Greece, berating those Greeks who cling, at least for certain purposes, to the use of the katharevousa, the allegedly ‘pure’ form of Greek that is essentially an artificial revival of the Classical language. In its naïvest form, the cult of the katharevousa is undoubtedly ridiculous, and the attempt of the Colonels to enforce its use in schools can hardly be defended. Yet it has in its time served certain purposes. After the Greeks had been deprived of education and cut off from the Western world for four centuries, it was necessary to create a language suitable for various kinds of technical and abstract writing. Of those kinds of literature which are in some degree affected by it, not every one is to be condemned, and the nostalgia which created and preserved it can easily be understood. Modern Greek writers write in a variety of styles and a variety of linguistic forms, and in spite of the confusion caused by the language question, they have been able to make use of the possibilities which their situation offered them to create a literature which compares well with those produced by many richer and more favoured countries during the same period. Neither the English in general, nor Toynbee in particular, with his clear but not very distinguished style, are in a position to patronise them.”

The criticism of Toynbee’s style – he is at his least readable in this book – that it is “undistinguished” misses the mark, it seems to me. The Economist said the same thing in a review of McNeill’s biography in 1989. It is too individual to be called undistinguished, and it was heavily influenced by his classical education. Occasionally it is poetic.

“Just as an Irishman when he thinks historically places emphasis on certain events not stressed by English people, so does a Greek think much of happenings often forgotten by Western Europeans. He cannot forget that after the western half of the Roman Empire had collapsed, its eastern half carried on for a millennium; that after the western half had sufficiently civilised the barbarians who swamped it to achieve a partial recovery, it set out to defend the holy places of the common religion of the Empire against the infidel; that the Westerners took advantage of this situation to make a treacherous attack on the Easterners and rob them of their Imperial city; that after the Eastern Empire had most remarkably revived itself, the Westerners, even when appeased by a promise to adopt their own uncongenial form of Christianity, allowed it to be conquered and occupied by a barbarian enemy, preferring Muslims to Orthodox fellow Christians. In the war of liberation that began in 1821, the West did something to atone for this, but the Greeks can hardly be expected to forget that, in the years immediately following the Great War, the West encouraged hopes which it later disappointed. Toynbee says nothing about the conduct of his admired Turks in Cyprus since 1974.

“Professor McNeill justly credits Toynbee with ‘prodigious powers of concentration, phenomenal memory and sheer physical endurance of a regime at which most men would have quailed’: this is fully borne out by the book before me. He also ascribes to him the possession of ‘a very powerful intellect’: this seems a good deal more open to dispute.”

The Indian merchant

The present writer once heard, from a British resident in Constantinople, of [...] an Indian Muslim merchant who was a capable man of business and a loyal subject of the British Indian Government, but who cherished a keen sentimental regret for the lost dominion of Islam in India and consoled himself with the belief that in the Ottoman Caliphate there survived one Islamic Power which was as splendid as the Mughal Empire and as efficient as the British Rāj. After sustaining his self-respect as a Muslim upon this illusion for many years, this Indian merchant saved enough money to make a pilgrimage to the seat of the Caliphate at Constantinople – which meant more to him than the Holy Land of the Hijāz – and there became the guest of his British correspondent. The contrast between his long-cherished dream of the Caliphate and the sordid reality of the Ottoman Empire caused him a distress which it was painful to witness. He was appalled by the vast difference of standard between Muslim government in Dār-al-Islām and British government in India; and he went home with his spirit broken.

A Study of History, Vol V, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote, quoting the previous footnote)

William Kamkwamba

I sent a friend in Malawi a BBC News link about a young Malawian, William Kamkwamba, who had supplied his village with electricity by building a windmill out of junk. You might think that this is fairly common by now. Not in Malawi. Kamkwamba worked it out for himself and built it. He is now on a scholarship at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, where it turns out that my friend had met him. A book has been published about him. Here is his blog. Here is his photostream on Flickr.

My friend writes: “Nobody in Malawi seems to have heard of him, which does not surprise me, as all public attention seems to be concentrated on whether or not a certain Malawian MP has been bumped off on the orders of the hideous J.Z.U. Tembo, and how much money can be got from our new ‘development partners’, ie the mainland Chinese. [At the beginning of last year, Malawi expelled the mild and beneficent Taiwanese.] Someone like William K. who – for once – makes real and practical the tired post-colonial rhetoric of ‘African solutions for African problems’ is of no interest at all.”

Photo from www.inhabitat.com

Elegant Extracts

Another new blog. This one is by Robert Greaves, who already writes Matters Arising.

It’s a commonplace book. So far, we have had Samuel Johnson, Alexander McCall Smith and Psalm 19.

I haven’t taken the plunge with Alexander McCall Smith. The Sunday Times wrote of In the Company of Cheerful Ladies: “Some readers may wish to escape to somewhere a little more invigorating.” But I’ve devoted two posts to Ruskin Bond. The extract from The Full Cupboard of Life is charming.

The Okavango Macbeth, an opera for which McCall Smith wrote the libretto, had its premiere in Botswana on Saturday.