Widlife

The population of the world’s wildlife declined by 27% between 1970 and 2005.

That is the headline. It means that this is the average drop in the size of the populations of about 1,500 animal species that have been tracked by the Zoological Society of London for the WWF, which was once called the World Wildlife Fund – which says more in fewer syllables. The research is published in the WWF’s Living Planet Index, which you can download here.

1,500 is a small number and only 4,000 population clusters in total were tracked. Still, the headline may be justified. I presume that the clusters are extant, but reduced, or have some dwindled to zero and are there extinctions within the 1,500?

Thomas Stamford Raffles, whom we have already met in Singapore and in Java, was one of the founders of the Zoological Society in 1826. He was its first President, but died of apoplexy immediately after assuming office. The Society established the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park – London Zoo – in 1828.

Chinese in Britain

The first five parts of a series called Chinese in Britain were re-broadcast together on BBC Radio 4 yesterday and will be online for another week. The second five will be re-broadcast on May 23. Chinatown began in London in Limehouse (in Docklands in the East End) and didn’t establish itself in Soho until the ’70s.

The Leica

“The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still.

In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat.

Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis.

Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener.

A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls.

People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone.

Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica.

Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment.

The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet.

The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless.

The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers.

The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out.

And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis.

He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him.

The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out:

‘Monsieur Bouvet!’ ”

___

Georges Simenon, L’enterrement de Monsieur Bouvet, Paris, Presses de la cité, 1950; Eugene MacCown, translator, Inquest on Bouvet, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1958

The Japanese

… are surrounded by an atmosphere – which bends and refracts the words which try to penetrate it.

Other people who point to themselves point to their chests. The Japanese point to their noses. And if you point to something, they look at your face.

The gusts of talk. Graham Greene: “A mutter from an aviary”. A public intimacy.

I think of water gurgling into a drain. It’s a pleasant language to hear uncomprehendingly.

Goethe’s Italian Journey

Hellenic holy ground

A modern tendency towards the secularization of a Western way of life which had previously been lived within a Christian religious chrysalis had its effect upon the originally religious institution of Pilgrimage. Since an early stage in the growth of this institution, pilgrimage-resorts had tended to become museums of the visual arts; for, in wholly or mainly illiterate societies, it was a commonplace that pictures and sculptures were the books of an unlettered majority. In another context we have quoted a passage in the Ion of Euripides in which a party of Athenian women pilgrims to Delphi are brought on to the stage as sightseers perambulating the precincts of the temple of Apollo. The interest that these visitors find in looking at the works of art with which the temenos [religious precinct] is adorned lies in identifying these portrayals of mythical characters and scenes that are part of the familiar furniture of the spectators’ own imaginations. This delight in the visual satisfactions that a pilgrimage-resort can provide was inherited from naïve and illiterate religious pilgrims to the holy places of Paganism and Higher Religion by sophisticated and erudite secular pilgrims to relics of the works of Hellenic art, and sites and scenes of events celebrated in surviving records of Hellenic history, when a fifteenth-century Italian renaissance of Hellenism had invested these visible and tangible “antiquities” with an aura of pseudo-religious sanctity in the sight of a cultivated ruling minority in a Modern Western World.

This secularized Modern Western version of an ancient religious institution took the form of a “grand tour” that, for the polite society of the Transalpine and Transmarine countries of a Modern Western World, found its earliest goal in a Roma Profana from whose long-obscured virgin countenance a pious Humanism had been gingerly stripping away Roma Sacra’s meretricious enamel mask. A classic example of the genre was Goethe’s Italienische Reise (peregrinabatur A.D. 1786-8).

“In Italy Goethe directed his attention above all to the artistic treasures. The works of art that captivated him were, however, almost exclusively confined to the relics of Antiquity and those modern works which, like Palladio’s buildings, have brought Ancient forms back to life. The concentration of his interest on this genre was carried by him to such extremes that at Venice he had no eye for Titian’s pictures, and at Assisi none for the celebrated Franciscan Church with its picture-covered walls and ceiling. The nearer Goethe approached to Rome, the more passionate and tempestuous became his yearning to set foot in the Capital of the World. After his arrival there on the 20th October [, 1786] [square brackets in original], he lived through his Roman days in a state of high beatitude. Here he found himself renewing his youth. He felt himself regenerated and endowed with a new capacity for the enjoyment of Life, the enjoyment of History, Art and Antiquity.”

[Footnote: Karl Alt in Goethes Werke: Auswahl (Berlin, N.D., Bong, 4 vols.), vol. 1, pp. xxix-xxx. [Translation presumably by Toynbee.] While the paramount objective of the Modern Western “grand tour” was to venerate the relics, and set eyes upon the scenes, of an antecedent Hellenic culture whose legacy to an affiliated Western Civilization had at last come to be appreciated at its full value by latter-day Western Humanists, this was not, of course, the cultivated traveller’s sole concern. The typical Modern French, Dutch, English, German, Scandinavian, or American visitor to Italy was, unlike Goethe, eager also to acquaint himself at first hand with the Italian monuments of an earlier phase of his own Western culture, and also to improve his own mastery of this culture in its contemporary phase by sampling other contemporary local varieties of it besides the one in which he himself had been educated owing to the accident of his having been born in the particular province of the Western World of which he happened to be a native.

[The interest in the tourist’s own civilization’s past which was one of the attractions exercised by Italy on a Transalpine or Transmarine Modern Western secular pilgrim was a manifestation, not of the renaissance of an antecedent culture, but of a different vein of nostalgia which we have labelled “Archaism” (see V. vi. 49-97). This Modern Western transposition of an archaistic yearning from the Time-dimension into the Space-dimension by giving vent to it by way of a secular pilgrimage had had its counterpart in Hellenic history in the grand tours that had been in the fashion for cultivated Romans from the second century B.C. until the onset of the paroxysm with which an elderly Hellenic Society was afflicted in the third century of the Christian Era. After the Hellenic World had recovered from this stroke – in so far as it ever did recover from it – the secular Hesperian pilgrim to Greece, in the wake of a Titus Flamininus, a Cicero, a Nero, a Hadrian, and an Aulus Gellius, gave way to the religious Hesperian pilgrim to Palestine on a new course set by an Aetheria and a Jerome. In a Western World in the modern chapter of its history, a Gibbon and a Goethe and a Byron and a Leake reverted, under the auspices of a fifteenth-century Italian renaissance of Hellenism, from Aetheria’s and Jerome’s religious pilgrimage to Hadrian’s and Gellius’s cultural tour.]

Yet, fruitful though this sojourn in Rome was to prove for all the future literary labours of a Bürger-höfling man of genius, Goethe’s comfortable journey to Rome from Karlsbad in A.D. 1786 was prosaic compared with the veritable pilgrimage to a now profanely holy city that had been made in A.D. 1755 in formâ pauperis by Goethe’s revered [Footnote: See Goethe’s appreciation of Winckelmann in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book VIII (vol. iv, pp. 279-80, in Karl Alt’s Auswahl).] plebeian forerunner Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the shoemaker’s son.

There are some other footnotes in this passage. The Goethe quotations seem to be from Alt’s selections.

[Footnote: “Palladio was penetrated (durchdrungen), through and through, by the essence of the Ancients, and was conscious of the pettiness and narrowness of his own age – in the spirit of a great man who is resolved not to resign himself but to re-mould the rest of Creation (das Uebrige) as far as possible in accordance with his own noble concepts.” – Goethe: Italienische Reise, ed. by Schuchardt, Chr. (Stuttgart 1862, Cotta, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 117.]

Already-troubling German talk of noble concepts.

[Footnote: “The monstrous substructures of the churches – piled one on top of another, BabyIonian fashion – in which Saint Francis rests, did not detain me. I gave them a wide berth to my left, with a feeling of aversion. ... Then I asked a handsome youngster the way to the Maria della Minerva [the ci-devant pagan Hellenic temple in the heart of the city] [Toynbee’s square brackets]. … The growth in spiritual stature that I owe to the contemplation of this work of art is something ineffable. It will bear everlasting fruit. … [As I made my way down again,] [Toynbee’s square brackets] the dear Minerva gave me one more last glimpse of her benign and consoling countenance, and then I took a side glance to my left at the melancholy cathedral of Saint Francis” (ibid., pp. 159-61).]

[Footnote: “My yearning (Begierde) to reach Rome was so great, and was increasing by such leaps and bounds from moment to moment, that it would brook no further delay, so I made no more than a three-hours’ stop in Florence. ... I hurried through the place post-haste – the cathedral, the baptistery and all that. Here, once again, an entirely new and unknown world confronts me – and it is a world on which I have no inclination to linger (verweilen). The lay-out of the Boboli Gardens is exquisite. At Florence my exit was as rapid as my entry” (ibid., pp. 168 and 156).

[Students of Goethe’s outlook and êthos will be reminded of a more famous passage in which the same verb verweilen is employed apropos of the same temptation to linger on the course of a journey – heading, in this case, not towards a physical Rome, but towards a spiritual goal of human endeavours. In agreeing the terms of his fateful wager with Mephistopheles, Faust makes the following commitment:

Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
“Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!”
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehen!

Goethe: Faust, ll. 1699-1702, quoted in II. i. 281.]

Toynbee may have shared, at first, Goethe’s indifference, or aversion, to a post-classical Italy, but in a post on the ninth-century Mahayanan Buddhist complex of Borobudur in Java, I quoted his description of the Sacro Speco in Subiaco as “a holy of holies for me”.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

Hellenic holy ground

Disadvantages of a classical education

The writer of this Study had to confess that he himself had been a life-long addict to [the] sentiment for Hellenic ground. It had led him to make the traditional Modern Western Humanist’s pilgrimage to “classical lands” as soon as he had finished his studies at home, in partibus Barbarorum, at the Medieval Western Christian University of Oxford, and he had been confirmed in his devotion to this profanely sacred soil by the inexhaustible benefits that he had found himself deriving, ever after, from a ten-months’ stay, first in Rome and then in Greece, in A.D. 1911-12. He could never forget his feelings on the 30th September, 1911, when, for the first time, he had made the journey from Genoa to Rome by the coastal railway. After returning, with indifference, the stare of a Leaning Tower of Pisa, which had peered in at him through his railway-carriage window looking just as it had always looked in the pictures of it, he was thrilled to find himself crossing the Arno into territory that had lain within the frontiers of the Roman Commonwealth since before the outbreak of the First Romano-Punic War. “Henceforth”, he found on the 20th May, 1950, that he had entered in his ephemerides for the 30th September, 1911, “I know every stage of the way, and can always tell where we are by the look of the country. Cecina, with distant Volterra mountains to the left … O pulcherrima Maritima Tusciae – haec vera Italia, non Ligures neque Taurini.” [Toynbee’s words. The Ligures and Taurini were ancient north Italian peoples.] At that moment he had the strange experience of setting eyes on his spiritual home for the first time in his life when he was in his twenty-third year; and the effect was heightened when, on the 20th November, 1911, he found his ship travelling up the Gulf of Corinth, threading its way through an isthmian canal, and breaking out into the Saronic Gulf of the Aegean Sea, to confront the pilgrim dramatically with the converging view of serried classic sites closing in round him at point-blank range: Salamis, Aegina, Methana, Megara, Cithaeron, Peiraeus, Lycabettus, Hymettus, Laurium. This was the spectacle that had overwhelmed Servius Sulpicius Rufus one day in the year 45 B.C. when he had run into it from the opposite direction (see his letter to Cicero (Ad Familiares, iv, 5) quoted in IV. iv. 315).

The present writer had also to confess that, in his neglect of a “post-classical” Italy, he had gone to farther extremes than Goethe’s worst extravagances. Goethe had at least set foot in Assisi, whereas the writer, down to the 13th August, 1952, had been content with a Pisgah sight of Assisi caught from Spello on the 30th October, 1911. Moreover, though he had three times been shunted into and out of Venice by train en route between Calais and Constantinople, he had not set foot in Venice till the third of these occasions – on the 30th April, 1923, between the hours of 5.0 and 6.0 A.M. – and had then failed to advance farther than the pair of Late Roman Emperors in porphyry who embrace one another on the threshold of St. Mark’s. His third offence against his native Western cultural past was that he had always so far deliberately refused to break any journey in Tuscany, for fear that the siren charms of a Medieval and Early Modern Italy might detain him from pressing on into Hellenic holy ground in a “Roman Italy”, a Greece, and a Turkey that had been the goal of his pilgrimages up to date.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

Irena Sendler

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3918822.ece

HARDtalk

BBC World and BBC 24, often rather poor channels, have the world’s best interview programme, HARDtalk, broadcast four times a week. There are South Asian versions: HARDtalk India and HARDtalk Pakistan. Sackur takes the usual British combative-for-combativeness’s-sake approach, but does it better than his predecessor. Recent subjects (that link is to BBC iPlayer; those below are to the programme’s website and offer lower quality):

Dimeji Bankole, Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives
Peter Mandelson
Vasily Petrenko, Petersburgian conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
Gene Robinson

There is a vast archive, which seems wholly or partly exempted from the BBC’s seven-day rule. I wanted to give it (or rather Sackur) this footprint here.

49th parallel

“I see a long, straight line athwart a continent. No chain of forts, or deep flowing river, or mountain range, but a line drawn by men upon a map, nearly a century ago, accepted with a handshake, and kept ever since. A boundary which divides two nations, yet marks their friendly meeting ground. The 49th parallel: the only undefended frontier in the world.”

Voiceover in Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), UK, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Survivors of a German U-boat sunk in Hudson Bay evade capture by travelling across Canada to the still-neutral United States. The film was intended to help to bring America into the war. Vaughan Williams wrote his first film score for it (worth hearing: you can get it on iTunes). “Nearly a century ago”: in the Oregon Treaty of 1846.

The parallel at Waterton Lake (Alberta/Montana)

Curiosity

Religio historici
Religio historici 2

Curiosity may be focused on anything in the Universe; but the spiritual reality behind the phenomena is, I believe, the ultimate objective of all curiosity; and it is in virtue of this that curiosity has something divine in it.

Experiences, OUP, 1969

Gallicus Tumultus

Mowgli’s finger
Naked Gauls

From the days of Camillus to the days of Caesar, during the four centuries which it took the Romans to build up their empire, the peril which was their bugbear – more trying to Roman nerves than Carthaginian galley-beaks or Macedonian pike-heads – was the barbarian avalanche: the “Gallicus Tumultus”; and the genius of Hannibal showed itself in nothing so much as in his decision to attack Rome from the quarter from which, in Roman eyes, an aggressor ever appeared the most formidable. In making the passage of the Alps and bringing the Celtic avalanche down with him in full force in his descent of the Italian slope, Hannibal was seeking to reproduce artificially, for the undoing of the Romans, the natural catastrophe which, some two centuries earlier, had overwhelmed the Etruscans. He was seeking to bring upon the Romans the destruction which, in Mr. Kipling’s story, Mowgli brought upon Shere Khan when he sent the herd of buffalo stampeding down from the head of the valley upon the tiger who stood trapped in the valley-bottom. But the strategy which succeeded so brilliantly in the hands of the fictitious Indian changeling failed in the hands of the historic Carthaginian man of genius, because Hannibal’s human antagonists reacted, in this desperate situation, quite otherwise than Mowgli’s bestial victim. Instead of losing nerve, like Shere Khan, and turning tail, the Romans refused to “despair of the Republic” and turned at bay; and in defeating Hannibal and his Celtic allies they determined their own destinies.

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934

Palestine Remembered

Records of refugee camps, photographs from the nineteenth century to the present, oral history at http://www.palestineremembered.com/. Use with care.

Islam and slavery

qunfuzcreation on the Zanj Revolt: http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2008/05/zanj-revolt.html.

Nakba 60

Global event calendar: http://www.badil.org/Publications/badil-nakba-60-info-packet/events.htm

Borobudur

Early in the Christian era, Indonesia came under the influence of Indian civilisation through the influx of Indian traders and monks. By the seventh and eighth centuries, kingdoms closely connected with India had developed in Sumatra and Java.

The Buddhist temples of Borobudur in central Java were founded c 800. But the seat of the Buddhist kingdom of Sri Vijaya (seventh century or earlier–thirteenth century) was Sumatra.

Then, in the late thirteenth century, power shifted southeast to Java, where the Hindu kingdom of Majapahit (1293-1527) had arisen; for two centuries Majapahit controlled Indonesia and parts of the Malay Peninsula.

Arab traders (or were many of them Indian?) arrived in large numbers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They established Islamic sultanates. By the end of the sixteenth century, Islam had replaced Buddhism and Hinduism as the dominant religion in the islands. Today, Hinduism survives mainly on Bali.

Following the Anglo-Dutch Java War (1810-11), Java was under British administration (1811-16). The governor, Lieutenant Governor-General Thomas Stamford Raffles, collected Javanese antiques. On a tour of inspection in 1814, he was informed about a monument deep in the jungle near the village of Bumisegoro. He sent HC Cornelius, a Dutch engineer, to investigate.

In two months, Cornelius and his two hundred men cut down trees, burned down vegetation and dug away the earth to reveal the monument. Hartmann, a Dutch administrator, continued Cornelius’s work, and by 1835 the whole complex was revealed.

There, there it is – that consummate work of Buddhist art which I have so often gazed upon longingly in photographs. The obliging pilot of the Garuda plane has gone out of his way to wheel round the stupa-crowned hill of Borobudur en route from Djakarta to Jogja. Though he is travelling as slowly as he can, the vision has come and gone in a flash; yet, even if I had been condemned to enjoy no more than this single Pisgah-sight, that would have repaid me for having come more than half-way round the World. Thanks, however, to the hospitality of the Gadjah Mada University at Jogjakarta, I am to see this Wonder of the World again, and this time from the ground; and when, two mornings later, we take the northward road by car, I find myself keyed up to a more thrilling sense of expectancy than at any moment on my present pilgrimage since my approach to Cuzco over the Andean watershed.

For the first four-fifths of our forty-kilometre drive, the cottages, nestling among cocoa-nut palms, jostle one another so closely along both sides of the road that one can hardly catch a glimpse even of the rice-fields behind their backyards. But at last we swerve leftwards out of the great north road that runs on to Semarang. The plain begins to undulate; and we are heading towards a range of mountains that rivals anything in Central Australia or in Greece for the beauty of its outline. The professor who is conducting us
suddenly points towards the middle distance. And there is Borobudur again, standing in its natural setting, which neither air-view nor photograph can display, though the harmony between Man’s architecture and Nature’s landscape is the making of this masterpiece of artistry.

Borobudur is a four-sided pyramid, built up in tiers of balustraded terraces round a natural eminence. Each terrace runs between two continuous bands of reliefs, depicting scenes from the legend of the Buddha. Some of these are old and familiar friends – for instance, that square-rigged ship scudding before the breeze. But the reliefs must wait. Before I pore over them I must mount to the summit and view the whole monument as the architect meant it to be viewed, with the green lawns at its foot, the forest-clad mountain for a drop scene at the back, and the glassy rice-fields embroidering the fertile plain to the east. Wild Nature; Nature tamed by Man; the genius of the architect and the sculptor; the earthly life of the blessed Redeemer of all sentient beings: here is a comprehensive poem about the mystery of the Universe, a symphony of the inaudible music of the spheres.

How am I to convey this ineffable poetry to your mind’s eye? If your native city is Peking, try to imagine the Altar of Heaven magnified manifold without forfeiting any of its beauty. If you are a Londoner you must attempt a more difficult feat of imagination. You must transfigure the Albert Memorial by magnifying it, too, manifold and also transfiguring its hideousness into loveliness. [How hideous is the Albert Memorial?] Yet, do what one will, no prescription of mine can convey to you the interplay between the monument and the landscape. If only I could exchange soul and body with one of those Hindu-minded Javanese Muslims who spend night after night here in contemplation. Then I might be able to incorporate Borobudur into my innermost being and carry it with me as “a possession for ever” [Thucydides] – in defiance of the precepts of the Buddhist philosophy that Borobudur expresses. Which shall I choose? The detail of the reliefs or the panoramic view? Well, I can always go on studying the reliefs in a picture-book in my study in Kensington, so I will spend the rest of this all too brief half-morning in gazing alternately, from the summit of the stupa, at the rising mountain and the reclining plain.

Do you challenge my adoration of Borobudur? Do you tell me that its rhythm is ultra-baroque? Do you prefer the classic severity of the neighbouring Buddhist shrine at Mendut, or the animation of the reliefs round the Shaiva temple at Prambanan, where the hero is, not Gautama, but Rama? You might perhaps convince my mind, but you could never change my feelings. Borobudur holds my heart: it is a holy of holies for me, on a par with the Sacro Speco [St Benedict’s cave in Subiaco] and the Sainte Chapelle. As the stupa-crowned hill disappears behind the palm groves, I crane my neck round to take a wistful farewell look at it. In a trice I am engulfed among the 8,000 university students and the 40,000 secondary schoolchildren of Jogjakarta, all mounted, Dutch-wise, on bicycles, “Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?”

Keats, Ode to a Nightingale.

Toynbee visited Indonesia in August and September 1956.

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

Left to right: Borobudur by Isidore van Kinsbergen c 1873; two images where I have put the source in the title of the image; one from Wikipedia.

Asians

I found a file of sketches of Asians (and a Berber and Egyptians). I wrote them c 1995 and earlier. Here are some of them. I’ve resisted the temptation to change. Make allowance for youth, and excuse the Maughamesque manner.

—

Ascetic cut of Buddhist shoulders …

The right shoulders, exposed by saffron robes, are a bronze sculpture, the curves of a stupa, the bell in a shrine.

—

I arrived in Bangkok on the day of the city elections. Professor Krisda Arunvongse, Governor of the Metropolitan Administration (the mayor), who had been at Davos and whom I had hoped to see, had been voted out. I rang him at home and he told me the news. He called me more than once to arrange a meeting time, but we kept missing each other. Eventually, he drove across Bangkok himself to bring me a present, which he left at the reception of my hotel while I was out. The staff were a little overwhelmed and lined up when they recognised him, palms together in the Thai attitude. Thai politics, with all their venality, are full of these gestures. A Prime Minister will suddenly appear in a hospital or a monastery. Krisda was not treating me as an old friend (I wasn’t one) but by force of habit, and with a little time on his hands, continuing to be the Governor of Bangkok.

Prince Norodom Ranariddh of Cambodia, the son of Sihanouk and First Prime Minister, carries this southern Buddhist bodily mobility to the point of virtuosity. He darts around a group of visitors like a wound-up toy, greeting its most and least important members, always addressing the whole room, complimenting them on their ties or touching on matters of state. It is a stunning exhibition of charm and comedy. He leaves as suddenly as he arrived, leaving them breathless and delighted as at the end of a coloratura aria.

Like many Cambodians, he talks much louder than the Thais, almost shouts. Chanthol Sun, Secretary of State for Economy and Finance, speaks at a conference as if he is addressing troops on the front.

The mobility of kings. In European kingship.

—

Koreans sit on the floor innocently, like poor people, but with an aristocracy of bearing the Japanese cannot command. Their eyes are humorous, Eskimo-like, their faces often noble and commandingly handsome, their talk personal and intelligent. They are bandy-legged, as if their bodies had been formed on the backs of Mongolian ponies.

—

Modern Egyptians look like ancient. High nose-bridge. Even brow. African hair.

—

In India, you come to love thinness.

Below slim upper bodies, sudden paunches. Solar smiles. In the northwest and Pakistan odd mouths that look as if they have been sucked. Tamil dead-square shoulders, upper bodies as if from a cubist pantomime. In Kerala and Gujarat, Arab genes, a whiff of the Gulf.

—

Iranians. Plunging eyebrows which meet over the nose: Khomeini was typical in this respect. Black beards, stubble. Slim hips. Legs taper. Wide thighs.

—

The Berber head was El Greco-like in its abnormal length. The voice was high. The slightly-humped back, genetically widespread in Morocco, and a sign of spirituality, an imprecation of the shoulders.

—

Kenneth Williams’s nostrils were frequently flared to comic effect, but even when relaxed exposed the inside of the wall of the nose. So do the nostrils of many Turks.

Canaletto and Tiepolo

The intolerable strain which modern Venice was incurring in the Levant, in her infatuation with the dead self of her medieval Levantine glory, demanded, and received, in psychological “compensation”, an Epicurean relaxation of Venetian life at home; and this latter-day Venetian cultivation of the pleasures of the passing hour resembled its Hellenic original in being the refined expression of a low vitality. In Canaletto’s meticulous portraits of a Venice from whose atmosphere the sunlight has faded away we seem to see the ashes of a holocaust in which the Venetians had burned their energies out since the days when they had savoured the full-blooded colours of a Titian and a Tintoretto [...].

That was in yesterday’s post. Tintoretto’s colour could be full-blooded, but in some of his greatest paintings nearly all the colour is drained away and the result is close to monochrome. But he and Titian also belong to the period when Venice was declining.

One cannot help thinking that Galuppi, in a different context, would have been heard by Browning (and Toynbee) as spring-like.

Tiepolo influenced the pessimistic Goya. His sky is still blue, but the figures in his ceilings, elegant and lighter than air, take their airy positions in an invisible vortex and seem in the process of being flushed away. The elements of the painting are drawn towards a cosmic plug-hole. The skies are rather empty, as if some of them have already disappeared.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Galuppi among the Cretan crags

1952.

The present writer received his first intimation of the mortality of the Western Civilization in an experience (mentioned in this Study already in IV. iv. 282) at the south-eastern corner of the Island of Crete, en route from Khandrà to Palaíkastro, on the 19th March, 1912. Rounding the southern shoulder of a mountain, he was startled at suddenly finding himself face to face with the ruins of a country house in the Baroque style of architecture. If the date of this experience had been A.D. 1952 instead of being A.D. 1912, probably he would not have felt the same shock; for by A.D. 1952 a deserted and dilapidated seventeenth-century country house was no longer an unimaginable object in the landscape of the writer’s native province of the Western World; but in A.D. 1912 every house of the kind in England would have been intact and have been inhabited – as likely as not, by descendants of the country squire who had had the house built for him some two or three hundred years back in the past. What was startling and disturbing for a Western observer in A.D. 1912 was to see a piece of architecture which, in his mental picture of his native country, was associated with the living world of his own generation standing here in Crete as starkly dead and deserted as the monuments of an Hellenic architecture at Gortyna and Praesus, and the monuments of a Minoan architecture at Cnossos and Phaestus, that he had been inspecting within the last few days in the course of his journey. This inevitable comparison awakened his imagination to the truth that, on this island, a civilization which was his own, and which on his own island was then still self-confidently alive, was already as dead as the civilizations that had come and gone in earlier generations of this species of society.

Gazing at what, at that date, was so portentous a spectacle for Western eyes, the English traveller realized that this house must have been built, on the eve of the Great Veneto-Ottoman War of Candia (gerebatur A.D. 1645-69), by some Venetian country gentleman or official, and that this seventeenth-century Venetian builder must have taken it just as much for granted as his English contemporaries, who were then building other houses in the same style on another island, that his new family mansion would continue to be occupied by his descendants for many generations to come. The Englishman then reflected that a Venetian rule in Crete that had been extinguished by Ottoman arms in A.D. 1669 had by that date been in existence for no less than 457 years – a span of time which, in A.D. 1912, was longer than that of the duration, up to date, of British rule in the oldest of the overseas possessions of the British Crown. The inference was inescapable. If the Venetian Empire had perished, the British Empire could not be immortal; and, if the Western Civilization, in which Great Britain as well as Venice lived and moved and had her being, had become extinct in a former Cretan province of its domain, there could be no province, on any shore of either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, in which a Westerner would be justified in assuming that his civilization was invested with the incredible privilege of being exempt from the jurisdiction of Death the Leveller.

Crete had passed from Byzantium to the Arabs in 824. The Arabs destroyed the old city of Gortyn and made a new capital, Khandak, known to the Venetians (as was the whole island) as Candia, to the Byzantines as Chandax, and now called Heraklion.

Byzantium reconquered Crete in 960 and held it until it passed to Venice in 1204-12, after the Fourth Crusade. The Turks conquered it in 1669. Crete did not join independent Greece until 1913.

Here, in its context, is the earlier account of the experience of 1912, as published in 1939.

If the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. could fairly claim the title of “the Education of Hellas”, the Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Christian Era might have called herself “the Education of Western Christendom” with equal justice. If we scrutinize the countenance of our Western Society in that “modern” chapter of its history which runs from the latter part of the fifteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth, we shall find that its “modern” economic and political efficiency, as well as its “modern” aesthetic and intellectual culture, is of a distinctively Italian origin. In this chapter of its history our Western Civilization was launched on a new course by an Italian impetus; and this impetus came from the radiation into Transalpine Europe, of a special Italian version of the general Western culture of the preceding age. This local Italian culture made its conquests in Transalpine Europe, and thereby opened a new chapter in the history of the Western World as a whole, because it was brilliantly superior, in a number of vital points, to anything that Transalpine Europe had yet succeeded in achieving. The unrivalled creativity of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was thus the original driving-force behind the movement of Western Civilization during a span of four ensuing centuries which, on this account, might aptly be called our “Italistic Age”; and here we find ourselves confronted, once again, by our Attic paradox; for, throughout a period of our common Western history [sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] which bore the image and superscription of Italian acts of creation in the past, the contemporary Italian contributions to the general life of the age were conspicuously inferior to those of medieval Italy’s modern Transalpine converts.

Declines always begin early with Toynbee. To say that Italy’s had begun before 1500 seems strange now, since it leaves out of account the Rome of the Counter-Reformation. But

The comparative cultural sterility of Italy during the four hundred-years’ span of Western history which began circa A.D. 1475 was manifest in all the medieval [my italics] homes of Italian culture – in Florence, in Venice, in Milan, in Siena, in Bologna, in Padua – and a connoisseur of Italian life in this period of eclipse would be able to drive the point home by presenting an eclectic picture composed of features drawn from the life of each and all of these cities. [Footnote: For the general state of Italy in this age see Collison-Morley, L.: Italy after the Renaissance (London 1930, Routledge); Belloni, A.: Il Seicento, second edition (Milan 1929, Vallardi), Natali, G.: Il Settecento (Milan 1930, Vallardi, 2 vols.); eundem: Cultura e Poesia in Italia nell’ Età Napoleonica (Turin 1932, Società Tipografica), Lee, V.: Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, second edition (London 1907, Fisher Unwin).] An amateur may content himself with citing the single case of Venice as a particularly poignant illustration of a malady that afflicted every one of these historic Italian communities in this Modern Age.

In a profound change of circumstances which was cruelly adverse to the welfare of the whole Italian city-state cosmos, Venice was superficially more successful than most of her neighbours in holding her own. She did not lose her independence to a Transalpine conqueror (as Milan lost hers after having come within an ace of making herself mistress of all Northern Italy); and she did not lose it to an Italian empire-builder (as Siena lost hers to Florence, and Bologna hers to the Papacy, and Padua hers to Venice herself). Having always previously avoided political commitments on the Italian mainland and concentrated her political energies on acquiring an empire overseas, Venice deliberately reversed her policy in the course of the fourteenth century, and replied to the continental imperialism of the Visconti by embarking on an offensive-defensive movement in the same field which produced more lasting political results than those Milanese conquests which had drawn Venice into the continental arena. When the Visconti had disappeared from the Italian scene, and when Milan herself had become the prize of contending Transalpine Powers – to be bandied about from French hands to Spanish, and from Spanish to Austrian – Venice remained in possession of the largest of the new consolidated dominions which had now replaced the medieval mosaic of North and Central Italian city-states. This latter-day Venetian empire on Italian soil was both more extensive and more dangerously exposed to attack by Transalpine aggressors than the latter-day Florentine empire which became the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; yet, in contrast to Florence, Venice managed both to acquire and to retain her empire without being driven to renounce the luxury of continuing to live under her ancestral republican constitution. This preservation of her medieval domestic liberties was a unique distinction which Venice shared with her maritime rival Genoa; and Genoa – absolved from the necessity of defensive empire-building by her good fortune in enjoying the protection of the natural rampart of the Maritime Alps – was never called upon to face the fateful question whether an empire can be governed by a republic.

This relative successfulness of Venice in an age of general Italian discomfiture was not a windfall of happy accidents, but was the reward of a clear-headed and unslumbering statesmanship; and the quality of this Venetian statesmanship can be tested by comparing it with Athenian behaviour in corresponding situations. If Venice succeeded in gaining and holding an empire without having to submit herself to a despotism at home, this was because she avoided the strain which Imperialism generally imposes upon communities that indulge in it; and she achieved this negative yet by no means negligible success by making her yoke so easy, and her burden so light [footnote: Matt. xi. 30.], that her Paduan and Brescian subjects were free from any temptation to exchange their present status for that of their Bolognese or Milanese or Pisan contemporaries. In corresponding circumstances Athens made her tyranny so odious to her subject-allies that they soon yearned for a Spartan, or even for an Achaemenian, yoke as a more tolerable alternative servitude. And the inferiority of Athenian to Venetian statesmanship comes out as clearly in its handling of the problem of how a small state at the geographical centre of an international system should keep its footing after it has been dwarfed by the rise of new titans on an expanding periphery. We have seen how Athens was invariably worsted by this problem: how sometimes she recklessly threw down the gauntlet to Powers for whom she was no match, and thereby brought upon herself the disasters of 338 and 262 and 86 B.C., while at other times – as, for instance, in the critical year 228 B.C. – she showed an equal lack of judgement in the unseasonable pursuit of an unaspiring policy of isolation. This persistent ineptitude, which is the main thread of continuity in Athenian foreign policy from the days of Demosthenes to the days of Anstion, affords a remarkable contrast to the masterliness of a Venetian diplomacy which managed to stave off for nearly three hundred years that partition of the Republic’s Italian dominions among the Transalpine Powers which was the grand design of the League of Cambrai.

The secret of Venice’s success, in certain situations in which Athens failed, was an ability to rise above the vice of self-worship in which those Athenian failures seem to find their explanation. But the success of modern Venice has been only relative and negative; on the whole and in the end, Venice failed to make any fresh creative contribution to the life of a society in which she managed to survive; and this Venetian failure can be explained by the fact that Venice, too, did succumb, in her own way, to the nemesis of creativity.

In the field of domestic politics the infatuation with a dead self which had nerved Venice to maintain her own medieval republican constitution at the same time inhibited her from anticipating or emulating the modern constitutional achievements of Switzerland or the Northern Netherlands by transforming her latter-day Italian empire into a federal state on a republican basis. While Venice was never so wrong-headed as to oppress her subject cities, she was also never so broad-minded as to take them into partnership; and so, in A.D. 1797, the political régime in the Venetian dominions in Italy was still just what it had been in A.D. 1339; that is to say, a mild hegemony under which a number of subject communities had to take their orders from a single privileged sovereign city-state.

Again, in the field of foreign policy, the extraordinary skill with which modern Venetian statesmanship succeeded in maintaining the integrity of the latter-day Venetian dominions in Italy, without involving Venice in efforts beyond her strength, did not find its counterpart in the contemporary policy of Venice in the Levant. In her dealings with the Great Powers of the modern Western World Venice took care not to exhaust herself as Florence exhausted herself in the age of Charles VIII or Holland in the age of Louis XIV. On the other hand Venice devoted herself to the forlorn hope of defending her ancient empire in the Levant against the rising power of the ‘Osmanlis with an obstinacy which equalled the Dutch courage of a William of Orange and with a recklessness in facing overwhelming odds which reminds the historian of the spirit in which Athens confronted a Macedonian Philip and Antigonus and a Roman Sulla. In the War of Candia (gerebatur A.D. 1645-69) the Venetian Commonwealth – undeterred by the uniformly disastrous outcome of the series of losing battles which it had been fighting against the ‘Osmanlis since the time of the War of Negrepont (gerebatur A.D. 1463-74) – threw the last ounce of its military strength into the prolongation of a struggle which, however long it might last, could have no other ending than the loss of Crete. Through this unseasonable intransigence Venice permanently weakened her stamina without any result beyond the unprofitable satisfaction of knowing that she had compelled the Ottoman Power to pay the same exorbitant price for a Pyrrhic victory.

The modern Venetian idolization of the medieval Venetian empire in the Levant, which inspired the Venetians to this vain act of self-immolation, drove them on to renew the unequal struggle at the first opportunity. When the tide turned against the ‘Osmanlis in a war with the Danubian Hapsburg Power which began with the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in A.D. 1682 and ended in 1699 in the peace of Carlowitz, the Venetians hastened to intervene on the anti-Ottoman side and set out to compensate themselves for the loss of Crete by conquering the Morea. The vehemence with which they prosecuted their revenge was momentarily rewarded by the acquisition of Ottoman territories on the mainland which were greater in area than the aggregate of all the islands which Venice had lost to the Pādishāh between 1463 and 1669. Yet the only enduring effect of this War of the Morea upon Venetian life was to rule out the last faint hope of recovery from the exhausting effects of the War of Candia. The conquest of the Morea itself was ephemeral; for all that Venice had won from the ‘Osmanlis on the mainland in 1684-99 she lost to them again in 1715, with the island of Tenos – her last foothold in the Archipelago [of the Cyclades] – into the bargain. In this ill-judged final bid for dominion in the Levant Venice was simply creating a diversion for the benefit of the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, who duly profited by making permanent acquisitions at the Ottoman Empire’s expense in the Danubian Basin and on the Black Sea Steppes.

To serve as the cat’s-paw for plucking other people’s chestnuts out of the fire was the last role which Venetian statesmanship would have chosen to play; and it was a role which Venice never did fall into playing on the political chessboards of medieval Italy and modern Western Europe. Such political ineptitude ran altogether counter to the Venetian tradition and the Venetian êthos; yet the Venetians succumbed to this folly, and persisted in it to their own undoing, in a sphere where the policy was ruinous from every material standpoint. The cost, in “blood and treasure”, of postponing the loss of Candia for twenty-five years, or obtaining possession of the Morea for twenty-eight, could not be recouped by any commercial profits that were to be drawn from these Levantine dominions; for the territorial possessions which had been effective points d’appui for Venetian trade in the Levant in the Pre-Ottoman Age had been rendered, long since, commercially valueless through the mere fact of their being reduced to the position of tiny enclaves in the vast domain of an Ottoman Empire which had engulfed the whole of the hinterland; and this hinterland itself had been impoverished by the diversion of the main stream of international trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Thus the Levantine stake for which Venice played her ruinous game against Turkey in the Modern Age was nothing more substantial than a passion to “save” her “face” by retaining the cumbersome territorial tokens of a past political greatness. The fact that this passion should have mastered the habitually cool and calculating Venetian mind is a striking testimony to the deadliness of the malady of self-idolization.

The spirit in which Venice surrendered herself to this malady is enshrined for Posterity in the material relics of her Levantine empire. The massive fortifications of her original Levantine places d’armes – a Negrepont and a Modon and a Coron and a Candia – speak, more eloquently than any words, of the limpet-like tenacity with which, through two hundred years of strenuous defensive warfare, the Venetian Commonwealth clung to every disputed foothold, and incidentally turned these Levantine reefs and crags and islands and peninsulas into a veritable museum of military architecture in which the twentieth-century traveller may watch the transition from medieval tower-and-curtain-wall to modern bastion-and-glacis. The vanity of the ephemeral revenge which Venice took upon the Ottoman victor in her final feat of conquering the Morea is likewise mutely proclaimed in the present state [ie condition] of Monemvasía – “the Little Gibraltar” [footnote; Like Gibraltar, Monemvasía is a rock connected with the continent by a low-lying spit of land. The name, in Greek, means “One Way In”; in English it survives as the label of the “Malmsey” wine which was exported from the medieval French principality of the Morea to the countries of the West. The missing link between the English Malmsey and the Greek Monemvasía is the French Malvoisie.] – where the traveller who cares to scale the rock can still enter the citadel in the footsteps of the Janissaries who made their entry on the 10th September, 1715, [footnote: For the capitulation of the Venetian garrison of Monemvasía to the Ottoman forces in September 1715 see Brue, B.: Journal de la Campagne que le Grand Vezir Ali Pacha a faite en 1715 pour la Conquête de la Morée (Paris 1870, Thorin), pp. 51-7.] and can pick his way over the summit among the carcasses of the dismantled Venetian cannon, whose bronze bodies lie where they fell when their splintered wooden carriages rotted away.

The nemesis of medieval Venetian creativity took a stern material shape in the frowning military works which modern Venice has left as her cenotaph in the Levant; but the same writing on the wall is no less plainly manifest in the melancholy works of art which were being created at home by those latter-day Venetian painters and musicians who were contemporaries of the last of the great Venetian captains, Francesco Morosini, the conqueror of the Morea. At first sight it may seem incredible that the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Venetians who were living that elegantly frivolous carnival life which the music and the pictures commemorate were the same flesh and blood that fought and died in the breach at Candia; but second thoughts tell us that the very sharpness of the contrast in ethos proves the two moods complementary. The intolerable strain which modern Venice was incurring in the Levant, in her infatuation with the dead self of her medieval Levantine glory, demanded, and received, in psychological “compensation”, an Epicurean relaxation of Venetian life at home; and this latter-day Venetian cultivation of the pleasures of the passing hour resembled its Hellenic original in being the refined expression of a low vitality. In Canaletto’s meticulous portraits of a Venice from whose atmosphere the sunlight has faded away we seem to see the ashes of a holocaust in which the Venetians had burned their energies out since the days when they had savoured the full-blooded colours of a Titian and a Tintoretto; and the same note of “dust and ashes” struck a nineteenth-century English poet’s ear in A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

Here you come with your old music,
and here’s all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice,
where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark’s is, where the Doges
used to wed the Sea with rings?

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive,
sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions,
those solutions – “Must we die?”
Those commiserating sevenths –
“Life might last! we can but try!”

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket,
creaking where a house was burned –
“Dust and ashes, dead and done with,
Venice spent what Venice earned!
The soul, doubtless, is immortal –
where a soul can be discerned.”

“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it,
and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too –
what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?
I feel chilly and grown old.

We have met Browning before here and will surely meet him again. I broke up the long lines to make them fit into the narrow column of this blog. The Victorians had barely heard of Vivaldi.

The writer of this Study is familiar with a picture of Canaletto’s, now hanging in an English house, in which the only patch of colour is the Union Jack which floats from the poop of an English ship riding at anchor among baroque palaces and churches. This blare of English red and blue, which catches and holds the gazer’s eye among the muffled Venetian browns and greens and greys, proclaims, in the visual language of Canaletto’s brush, that the dominion of the sea has passed into other than Venetian hands.

The truth that Venice is “dead and done with”, and the moral that others, besides “Venice and its people”, may be “merely born to bloom and drop” [Browning], have also been impressed upon the present writer’s imagination by another visual image which remains as sharply printed on his mind to-day as at the instant when he received it more than twenty-five years ago. Turning the corner of a mountain in a lonely district at the eastern end of Crete, he once suddenly stumbled upon the ruins of a baroque villa which must have been built for the pleasure of a Venetian grandee in the last days of Venetian rule in the island before the ‘Osmanlis came to reign there in the Venetians’ stead. It was a house which might have been built for a contemporary nobleman in England, and have been lived in – had it stood on English ground – by its builder’s descendants down to the tenth generation in the writer’s own day; but, having been built, as it happened, by Venetian hands in Crete, this piece of modern Western architecture was as utterly “dead and done with” – as veritably “a museum piece” – in A.D. 1912 as the Minoan palaces at Cnossos and Phaestus which the traveller had been looking at a few days before. In the common mortality which had overtaken each of them in turn, at moments more than three thousand years apart, these desolate habitations of vanished thalassocrats bore witness, against their makers, that

in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing,
some with deeds as well undone,
Death came tacitly and took them
where they never see the sun.

[Browning again.] As the English traveller recalled the English poet’s lines, he reflected that the four and a half centuries for which Venice had been mistress of Crete were a longer span of time than the present age of his own country’s rule over the earliest acquired of her overseas dominions; and his ears seemed to catch an echo of Galuppi’s music among the Cretan crags.

In you come with your cold music,
till I creep in every nerve.

That baroque ruin in Crete, as it stood in A.D, 1912, was a memento mori for an England that was then still alive, as well as for a Venice that was then already dead.

The passage goes on to discuss Venice’s role in the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century. We will save that for another day.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Culture and the mother tongue

1915.

As a record of achievement, the Bible Society has printed a text from St. John in four hundred and thirty-two different languages. The total number of mutually unintelligible idioms that are or have once been spoken on this earth must indeed run to many thousands – in parts of Central Africa each village speaks its own, and grandsons can barely make themselves understood to their grandfathers – and yet this little pamphlet was a remarkable tour de force. Of those few hundred dialects many had never been put into writing before, while some were actually inexpressible in any existing script, and owed the first codification of their phonetic system to the ingenious missionary.

Written languages are undoubtedly the exception. Even in Europe we were startled a few years ago by a dispute between Young Turks and Albanians as to whether the latter should employ the Arabic or the Latin alphabet for the teaching of their hitherto unwritten tongue in their not yet existent primary schools. And even where a script exists, it seldom serves more than the transitory needs of every-day life. Only in the rarest cases does it become the medium for a higher spiritual activity than the current administration of the community and the current business of its individuals, by enshrining a literature which preserves the tradition of the past and enriches with its cumulative force the life of the present. When this happens, the written language has become the vehicle of what the Germans called “Culture.”

“Culture-Languages” are the fairest fruits and the most fertile seeds of human civilization. They only arise in the bosom of highly developed, fully self-conscious societies, and once arisen they spread far and wide among populations in a more rudimentary phase. Both their rarity and their expansive power are illustrated by the fact that all the scripts of all the languages written in the world to-day can be traced back to less than half-a-dozen originals; and it would probably be true to say that the majority of those people in the world to whom the conception of culture has meant anything have always associated it with some foreign tongue.

There is no grievance or injustice in this. For, although the originators of culture have generally been conquerors, force has been the least important factor in their achievement. Backward peoples accept and cherish alien culture, not because it is imposed upon them, but because it is a pearl of great price, which they can neither dispense with nor provide for themselves. Often the conqueror accepts it from the conquered. Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit [Captive Greece took captive her uncouth conqueror, Horace], and the Latin language in its turn dominated Western Europe for a millennium after the Roman Empire had passed away, when Virgil, the Vulgate, and Justinian won wider territories for their culture than the legions whose cantonments lay desolate on the Danube and the Rhine. Even the East has falsified Mohammed’s precept. The Arabic speech and script owe their extension far less to the Arab’s sword than to the religious and literary value of the prophet’s Koran, which won homage from the Turk, and opened the way to new worlds in Central Asia and Africa, where the Arab himself had never penetrated. Indeed, the triumph of a “culture language” over idioms less richly endowed seems almost independent of volition. When Indians of diverse dialect meet to protest against British domination, the discussion tends to slip into the English tongue, because this is the common channel through which all of them have derived the ideas of democracy and self-government which they wish to communicate to one another and to assert against the nation that originally introduced them.

Thus, the culture of an alien language is accepted by less civilized populations even more passively than the strong government of a conquering dynasty. But it is instructive to pursue the parallel further. We argued before that strong government is a transitory, though essential, phase of political development. Its function is to be the chrysalis of democracy, and it is too fruitful a force to hold its own against its offspring. So it is with a dominant language. It is natural that it should be accepted as a medium of culture by uncultured populations of other speech; but it is equally inevitable that the leaven should sooner or later transform the lump. The receptive population will either abandon its mother-tongue altogether and be absorbed linguistically as well as culturally in the dominant society; or else, if it possesses more vitality, it will educate its mother-tongue to perform the functions of the foreign idiom, and dispense with the latter as soon as it has fashioned for itself a new vehicle of culture out of the former. The Romans pillaged the literary monuments of Hellenism to build up a native Latin culture of their own. The Latin tongue in turn supplied culture to the Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe till they were ripe to translate the Vulgate into their native languages, and fashion their several versions into foundation-stones for so many national literatures.

This crisis in the history of a language, when it becomes a conscious instrument of culture, is precisely parallel to the crisis in the political history of a society when it repudiates the government of an external authority and consciously co-operates to organize its own social life. Both phenomena are acts of will. Just as the Italian nation was created politically by the will to throw off the autocracy of Hapsburg, Papacy, and Bourbon, so the national culture of Italy came into being when Dante, six centuries before, rejected the Latin hexameter for his mother-tongue, and when all others that spoke the same chose to regard the “Commedia” as their supreme ensample of humane literature. If “Culture” means participation in the heritage of humanity, “National Culture” means the conscious will to enjoy and increase this heritage through the medium of some particular language.

It follows that a national culture, whenever it manifests itself, is as elemental a force as a national democracy, and that to fight against it is to fight against God. No alien culture may dispute its title. Even the culture from which it drew its original inspiration must vanish like smoke before it. (The Roman Church exerted all its prestige in vain to stifle the new doctrines preached in the vulgar tongues of Europe.) Still less can a language once chosen as a national vehicle yield place to another which has asserted its individuality under the same circumstances and moulded itself on the same models. The national languages which have replaced Latin in Western Europe have, on the whole, conformed to this law of their growth, and developed peacefully side by side. Where a minority has abandoned its mother-tongue, it has done so without pressure, as the Irish have exchanged Erse for English in their national literature. Where a minority has clung to its native speech, it has been allowed to retain it, as Welsh has been retained in parts of Wales as an instrument for poetry and primary education. Only the more lately emancipated languages of Central and Eastern Europe have become committed to a disastrous struggle for existence.

In Hungary, for instance, Latin remained the official medium of the Diet until 1848. But instead of allowing the six languages native to different parts of the country to share on an equality the status from which Latin had been deposed, the Magyars have been striving ever since the year of revolution to secure for their own tongue the monopoly, and more than the monopoly, which Latin had originally enjoyed, and to banish the other five not only from Parliamentary debates, but from the law-courts, the press, the universities, and even the secondary schools. [The other five are German, Slovakian, Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian and Romanian.] This persecution, which is as unsuccessful as it is indefensible, has occupied the whole political energy of the population, the oppressors as well as the oppressed, and brought the real development of culture in Hungary to a standstill.

Germany’s treatment of the Polish language in Posen, the Danish in Schleswig, and the French in the “Reichsland” [Alsace-Lorraine] is too notorious for comment, but it is infinitely more significant than
“Magyarization” in Hungary, because it is based on a general theory, and is an earnest of the methods by which Germany proposes to put that theory into practice as widely as her power avails. Germany has proclaimed her national culture a “world-culture,” as different in kind from the culture of her neighbours as Hellenism was from the barbarism of Thrace, or Roman culture from the untutored ways of Illyrian and Gaul. No other national cultures have any rights against it, and if Germany emerges from the present war with the hegemony of Europe, the régime now enforced in her border provinces will ruthlessly be extended over vaster areas. “All else may perish, and humanity will be the gainer, so long as Germanism increases, multiplies, and inherits the earth.”

This monstrous German delusion of a universal culture-language arises from a radical misinterpretation of “World-History.” Because comparatively few languages have ever become vehicles of culture, and because these few have always won homage from uncultured peoples of alien mother-speech, the Germans attribute to the “Culture-Language” a mystic quality which differentiates it in toto, like the speech of Olympus, from the uninspired idioms of mortal men. Herein they greatly err. Culture is not, and never can be, an inherent quality peculiar to a particular language. It is the heritage ol the whole human race, cherished, enriched, and transmitted by one generation to another, from one corner to the other of the earth. Human languages are the vessels in which culture resides. No language has been a “culture-language” from the beginning, and none is incapable of becoming such in the end. Some may be called to be vessels of honour, and some of dishonour, but all are simply vessels, and nothing less or more. The German theory preposterously reverses the process of human development. As culture grows, it really takes into its service an increasing variety of tongues; and the phase of evolution called “Nationality” is characterized by the simultaneous propagation of culture through diverse languages flourishing side by side, just as in the political sphere it implies a pluralism of self-governing societies.

Does this give us that objective criterion for demarcating one nation against another which history and geography fail to provide? [A footnote here refers us to earlier passages in the same book.] Can we say that, where this plurality of culture-languages exists, all those who speak each language constitute a single nation in their totality? The definition would sound plausible, did we not find the Germans falling back on it as their second line of defence. At moments when they contemplate the possibility of defeat, they admit that they have failed to Germanize their French- and Polish-speaking borderers, and that the Germanization of all Europe is an extravagant phantasy. “But whatever happens,” they say, “we will not yield a foot of German soil. All who speak the language of Kant and Goethe shall remain heirs to the inheritance with which Kant and Goethe have endowed their tongue. German Alsace shall never be abandoned, and German Flanders shall for ever be retained within the national fold.”

The faultiness of this last desperate German claim to domination lies in its persistent neglect of the subjective factor. The mere possession of a mother-tongue does not impart a national culture, as the
German is the first to insist; else all mankind would be cultured, from the German himself down to the clicking Kaffir. What creates a national culture is the consecration of a native tongue to enshrine humanity’s spiritual inheritance, and this consecration is essentially an effort of will. Now, when a group of people performs this act of volition, it is just as possible for them to choose another group’s language to be the vehicle for their culture as it is for them to choose political co-operation with people the other side of a geographical barrier. The Albanians of Epirus, for example, raised themselves from barbarism by welcoming to their churches, and later to their primary schools, the alien language of the Greeks, and when the other Albanians summoned them, two years ago, to enter the new “national” state and found a new culture in their common mother-tongue, they vindicated their self-chosen Hellenism by an appeal to arms.

So it is with Alsace or Flanders, and Germany has been a loser on both accounts. For not only have the Poles refused obstinately to imbibe culture through any medium except their own Slavonic patois, but the Alsatians have been so wrongheaded as to renounce the mother-tongue they share with Kant and Goethe, and turn for culture to Latin France. The cause of their choice is not difficult to discover. While the speakers of German east of the Rhine were doing homage to the intellectual circle at Weimar, the Alsatians were living the great life of the French Revolution, and receiving their first political ideals and their first public education from the disciples of Rousseau and Voltaire.

The coldness of the Flemings towards Germanism is even more excusable. The German argument lays siege to them with military methodicality. “The Flemings,” it submits, “inherit the same Low-German variety of mother-tongue as the populations of Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and East Prussia. But these easterly Low-Germans on the Baltic have accepted the High-German speech as their culture-language, and become the very core of the consolidated German nation. What defence, then, can the westerly Low-Germans in Flanders offer for holding themselves offensively aloof?”

The Fleming’s single and sufficient answer is that his soul has never responded to the message of Goethe or Luther – for it was the religious and literary appeal of Luther’s Bible, and no philological formula of relation between Low and High-German vowel-systems, which fused the elements of modern Germany into one. But the dominant factor in Flemish national consciousness has been the rejection of Protestantism for a passionate loyalty to the Roman Church in an environment of heretics and unbelievers. The Germans will judge better whether the Flemings are destined to Germanization, if they will read Flemish history. Exactly a century ago, the Congress of Vienna yoked Flanders with Holland, where an identical Low-German dialect was not merely spoken but had been developed into a culture-language of the first rank. Yet the Dutch

Calvinistic tradition [footnote: The Dutch have remained proof against High-German culture for the same reason as the Flemings: they have never taken their religion from Luther’s Bible. Calvinism was as alien to Lutheranism as was the Counter-Reformation.] was so antipathetic to the Fleming that he fortified himself against Dutch culture with the foreign culture of his French-speaking neighbours, hazarded an armed revolution within fifteen years to break the Dutch political connection, and did not begin to build up an independent literature of his own in the Dutch-Flemish tongue till twenty years after his political independence from Holland was assured; while to this day he maintains his political co-operation with the French-speaking Walloons, and, for all his Flemish patriotism, allows their language to pass current with his own in his administration, his law-courts, and his schools. Is such a man a promising convert to Germanism? Are bayonets likely to teach him that High-German ablauts are the medium through which he is destined to partake of culture in this twentieth century?

No; it is the Germans who have much to learn. They must be taught that no objective criterion, however fundamental, can settle people’s culture, any more than their political allegiance, against the evidence of their own declared will.

The New Europe, Some Essays in Reconstruction, with an Introduction by the Earl of Cromer, Dent, 1915

Last of the Dictionary Men

A couple of weeks ago a Yemeni, Talal Doghish, placed a comment at the end of a post which had quoted Toynbee on Britain’s presence in Aden. He wanted to trace some friends of his grandfather, who were from Taiz and had worked with the French and British “in the sea [as] soldiers or workers” during the Second World War. Some of them had not returned. I suggested that he contact the embassies in San‘a’.

A couple of days ago I wandered into the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, on the south bank of the Tyne opposite Newcastle. As in London, a millennium footbridge leads to a large gallery on a south bank.

One of the exhibitions, by Bridge + Tunnel Productions (Tina Gharavi) and a sister organisation, Nomad Cultural Forum, with photographs by Youssef Nabil, was:

LAST OF THE DICTIONARY MEN
2 April - 5 May 2008
Stories from the South Shields Yemeni Sailors

Here is a BBC Tyne piece about it.

Yemeni seamen used to join British merchant vessels to serve as engine-room firemen and in similar jobs. Many were recruited at Aden, especially during the wars. Some joined the Royal Navy. Some found their way to South Shields and settled there, working in local industries. The exhibition is about South Shields’s last surviving first-generation Yemenis.

South Shields is close to the mouth of the Tyne, on its south bank, downstream from Newcastle and Gateshead. Newcastle was a port and a centre of shipbuilding and coal-mining. So was Sunderland, at the mouth of the Wear, to the south.

The Wikipedia article on South Shields has a section on the Yemenis. They have been there since the 1890s. An Arab Seamen’s Boarding House was opened in 1909. By the end of the First World War, the population was about 3,000. They were riots in 1919 (“Arab riots”) and another dispute in 1930, but they were about working practices which the Yemenis felt to be discriminatory, not race riots, and weren’t repeated. There were other Yemeni communities in Hull, Liverpool and Cardiff.

Many Yemeni seamen died in the wars. After the Second World War, heavy industry declined in the northeast. Shipbuilding eventually disappeared. Some Yemenis moved to other centres, such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Sheffield. Fewer arrived: there were fewer coal-burning ships requiring stokers. But there are still about 1,000 Yemenis in South Shields (defined how?: many had married local women).

In the exhibition, fourteen old televisions, placed on columns, show the Yemenis telling the stories of their migration, working lives and integration into the northeast. You listen through headphones. In the same room are thirteen monumental hand-tinted photographs by Youssef Nabil. One of the men died between the filming and the photographing. He is represented by a small black and white photograph.

The other part of the exhibition is a documentary film by Tina Gharavi, The King of South Shields. Why a film about Muhammad Ali?

Muhammad Ali visited South Shields in July 1977. He’d been asked by a friend to help in raising money for a boys’ boxing club there.

He decided to have his recent (third) marriage blessed there (the one to Veronica Porsche Ali). The ceremony took place at the Al-Ahzar Mosque, which had been founded by Yemenis. A Yemeni school is attached to it. It may have been the first purpose-built mosque in the UK.

He had been introduced to the Nation of Islam by Malcolm X, but had become a convert to mainstream Sunni Islam in 1975. X had made the same transition in 1964.

Ali’s arrival was an electrifying event. The expression on the boy’s face in the picture at the bottom shows the spell he was casting, and the presence of Ali in the mosque brought Islam into the consciousness of northeasterners perhaps for the first time.

1977 was a low point in the economic history of the northeast. It must have been difficult to imagine how Newcastle could recover and prosper again – but it has recovered. But 1977 was not as bad as 1936 had been. The Great Depression had all but halted shipbuilding. On October 5, 207 Geordie men began a march from Jarrow (south bank, down the river from Gateshead, up from South Shields) to London, 300 miles, to protest against unemployment and extreme poverty. Jarrow was also the home of the Venerable Bede. The last of the Jarrow marchers died in 2003.

Tina Gharavi, creative director of Bridge + Tunnel Productions and a lecturer in Digital Media at Newcastle University, says that the exhibition grew out of her research into Muhammad Ali’s visit to South Shields. As she interviewed the young men who had met Ali she felt the camera being drawn towards the more elderly men who also wanted to tell their stories.

“A lot of the men I was meeting at the boarding houses were in their 70s, 80s and 90s and it was very, very clear that their stories were hugely important, hadn’t been recorded, and needed a kind of context. I don’t do history documentaries, and I’m not really a historian but I almost [...] felt the responsibility to record it. They’re the last men who worked on the ships.” She felt an “urgency”.

“[Mohammed Nasser] was one of the men who worked in the Royal Navy rather than the Merchant Navy, so slightly different. [He is the one who died before he could be photographed.] He was in the Falklands War and was taken hostage in Argentina and tortured for a few days. And then Mr As-Sayadi, who is the chairman of the mosque, and who’s definitely in his 90s, had been in the World War II efforts. It [...] gives you a complete sense of the contribution that this community had to [this] society and this country - and it’s totally unrecognised, totally uncommemorated and unknown.”

It isn’t hard to guess, but the exhibition nowhere tells us how the phrase “Dictionary Men” arose. The combination of film and of exhibition as a kind of “installation” works well.

An international touring exhibition, conference, DVD and publication are planned for later in the year. You can already buy the DVD of The King of South Shields. You can download the brochure for the exhibition directly from this post by clicking here. There is a further BBC page on the Yemenis here, and material on YouTube. There’s a website for Yemenis in Britain: http://yib.org.uk/news.php. The sources for this post, including the images, are the links I’ve given and what I saw in the exhibition.

Suddenly Talal Doghish’s email had a social-historical context. His comment suggested that some Yemenis worked for the French. I’ll send him this post. There is an outside chance one of the links will help him in his search. One of the Dictionary Men has the same family name as his grandfather: Ghaleb.

Piano transcriptions

… Dont’t work (whatever apologies one makes for Liszt) because either (since they must reduce) they join lines of a multi-staved orchestral score in a way which leaves out exactly the connection you are listening for or they simulate long chords with unconvincing tremolandi or weak arpeggios.

Philipp von Boeselager

The last of the July 20 1944 conspirators against Hitler dies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1922004/Philipp-Von-Boeselager.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Boeselager

Hassan Dehqani-Tafti

The first Iranian since the seventh century to have become a bishop in his own country, apart from those of the Assyrian and Armenian churches, dies in England.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1918728/The-Rt-Rev-Hassan-Dehqani-Tafti.html

On an Italian Shore

“Kimos, son of Menedoros, a young Greek-Italian,
devotes his life to amusing himself,
like most young men in Greater Greece
brought up in the lap of luxury.

But today, in spite of his nature,
he is preoccupied, dejected. Near the shore
he watches, deeply distressed, as they unload
ships with booty taken from the Peloponnese.

Greek loot: booty from Corinth.

Today certainly it is not right,
it is not possible for the young Greek-Italian
to want to amuse himself in any way.”

___

The young man is seeing the booty from the Roman conquest and destruction of Corinth in 146 BC. Lucius Mummius Achaicus killed the men and sold the women and children into slavery and then burned the city. He was given the cognomen Achaicus as the conqueror of the Achaean League. The site was almost deserted for the next century.

Julius Caesar refounded the city as Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis in 44 BC, shortly before his assassination.

On an Italian Shore, from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, translators; George Savidis, editor, CP Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1992, at cavafy.com.

Wating for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians 2
In Alexandria, 31 BC
Kaisarion
The Ides of March

Prokudin-Gorskii 3

Prokudin-Gorskii
Prokudin-Gorskii 2

Original colour photograph of a group of prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian Empire at an unidentified place in Russian Karelia, near the White Sea, 1915.

The men are probably Poles, Ukrainians and other Slavs. Most of Prokudin-Gorskii’s politically-sensitive plates were confiscated when he left Russia for good in 1918. This one escaped, perhaps because what is being represented is not obvious.

It, a little anachronistically, obeys my two laws on nineteenth-century group photographs.

The image, which looks as if it has been sharpened, is from the Library of Congress Prokudin-Gorskii site.

The Hapsburgs and the Ottomans

The Battle of Mohács, 1526; a Turkish miniature (Wikipedia)

Toynbee’s phrase “Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy” does not, of course, refer to the Holy Roman Empire, which the Hapsburgs controlled from 1452 until its extinction in 1806 (there was a Wittelsbach interlude between 1742 and 1745), but to Austria as joined with Hungary and Bohemia.

The Hapsburgs were Dukes of Austria (1282-1453), Archdukes of Austria (1453-1804) and Austrian Emperors (1804-1918). The Kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia became constituent states of the Hapsburg monarchy in 1526. Moravia belonged to Bohemia. Franz I adopted the title Emperor of Austria two years before the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved. The Empire was called Austria-Hungary after a constitutional settlement with Hungary in 1867, the Ausgleich.

Poland and Sweden had their raisons d’être in serving as marches of the Western Society against an Orthodox Christian universal state which had been established in Russia by the Muscovites. Similarly, the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy existed in order to serve as a march of the Western Society against another universal state into which the main body of Orthodox Christendom, in the Balkan Peninsula, had been welded by the ‘Osmanlis. It was called into existence at a moment when the Ottoman pressure upon the Western World had suddenly become really formidable; it remained in the first rank of the Great Powers of Europe as long as the Ottoman pressure remained at its height; it began to decline as soon as the Ottoman pressure began to relax; and it finally fell to pieces in the same general war – the War of 1914-18 – in which the Ottoman Empire received its coup de grâce.

The impact of the Ottoman Power upon the Western World began with the hundred years’ war between the ‘Osmanlis and Hungary which culminated in the Battle of Mohacz (A.D. 1526). Before the opening of this long duel in A.D. 1433/4, the ‘Osmanlis and the Westerners had only crossed one another’s paths occasionally – and these occasions had arisen through the desultory interference of this or that Western Power in the distracted affairs of the Orthodox Christian Society with a half-hearted intention of preventing the ‘Osmanlis from accomplishing their work of welding the main body of [non-Russian] Orthodox Christendom together under Ottoman rule. This work, however, was substantially complete before the end of the fourteenth century of the Christian Era; it was not undone by the blow which Timur dealt the ‘Osmanlis at Angora [Ankara] in A.D. 1402; and, after a momentary pause, it was easily rounded off by Mehmed the Conqueror (imperabat A.D. 1452-81). It was not the annexation of Constantinople and the Morea and Trebizond and Qaraman [Karaman is in southern Turkey], but the offensive against Hungary, that made the greatest demands upon Ottoman military energies in the fifteenth century.

Hungary, standing at bay under the leadership of John Hunyadi and his son Matthias Corvinus (regnabat A.D. 1458-90), was the most stubborn opponent whom the ‘Osmanlis had yet encountered; and she was stimulated culturally as well as militarily by the tremendous effort involved in withstanding the Ottoman pressure almost single-handed. The disparity, however, between the respective forces of the two combatants was so great that the maintenance of the effort eventually proved to be beyond Hungary’s strength; and the ultimate break-down of Hungary and formation of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy – in order to carry on Hungary’s work with greater resources – were both portended in a number of preliminary and abortive attempts at political union between Hungary and several of her Western neighbours while the hundred years’ war between Hungary and the ‘Osmanlis was in progress. For instance, the Hungarian crown was fitfully united with the Bohemian during the years 1436-9 and 1453-7 and 1490-1526; both crowns were united with part of the Austrian patrimony of the Hapsburgs in 1438-9 and again in 1453-7; and Hungary alone was united with Austria from 1485 to 1490. Moreover, the crowns of Hungary and Poland were temporarily united for a second time from 1440 to 1444 – this time in the person of a Polish and not a Hungarian sovereign, and with the object, not of bringing Hungarian reinforcements to Poland in her struggle with the Teutonic Order (the purpose of the previous Hungarian-Polish union in A.D. 1370-82), but of bringing Polish reinforcements to Hungary in her struggle with the ‘Osmanlis. These loose and ephemeral unions were not enough to give Hungary the strong permanent reinforcement which she needed. They perhaps postponed but did not ultimately avert the crushing blow which the ‘Osmanlis finally dealt Hungary at Mohacz; and it was only a disaster of this magnitude that could produce a sufficient psychological effect to bring the remnant of Hungary together with Bohemia and Austria into a close and enduring union under the Hapsburg Dynasty. This result was immediate. The triple union was accomplished before the end of the calendar year (A.D. 1526) in which the Battle of Mohacz had been fought; and it endured for nearly four hundred years – only to dissolve in the same calendar year (A.D. 1918) that saw the final break-up of the Ottoman Power which had delivered the dynamic blow at Mohacz four centuries back.

Indeed, from the moment of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy’s foundation, its fortunes followed those of the hostile Power, whose pressure had called it into existence, in each successive phase. The heroic age of the Danubian Monarchy coincided chronologically with the period during which the Ottoman pressure was felt by the Western World most severely. This heroic age may be taken as beginning with the first abortive Ottoman siege of Vienna in A.D. 1529 and as ending with the second in A.D. 1682-3. In these two supreme ordeals, the Austrian capital played the same role – psychological as well as strategic – in the desperate resistance of the Western World to the Ottoman assault that Verdun played in the French resistance to the German assault in the War of 1914-18. The two sieges were both turning-points in Ottoman military history. The failure of the first brought to a standstill the tide of Ottoman conquest which had been flooding up the Danube Valley for a century past. The failure of the second siege was followed by an ebb which continued thereafter – in a secular movement that persisted through all pauses and fluctuations – until the European frontiers of Turkey, which stood at the outskirts of Vienna from 1529 to 1683 [there was a narrow Hungarian buffer], have fallen back in our time to the outskirts of Adrianople. The Ottoman Empire’s loss, however, has not been the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy’s gain [the anomalous tense reminding one how recent its collapse was when Toynbee was writing]; for the heroic age of the Danubian Monarchy did not survive the beginning of the Ottoman decline. The collapse of the Ottoman Power, which threw open a field in South-Eastern Europe for other forces to occupy, simultaneously released the Danubian Monarchy from the pressure which had been stimulating it into heroic activity hitherto; and the withdrawal of the former stimulus inhibited the Danubian Monarchy from taking advantage of the new opportunity. So far from entering into the heritage of the Ottoman Empire in South-Eastern Europe, the Danubian Monarchy now followed into decline the Power that had originally called it into existence, and eventually shared the Ottoman Empire’s fate.

In the counter-offensive which drove the ‘Osmanlis back from the walls of Vienna in 1683, the Hapsburgs found themselves at the head of an anti-Ottoman coalition which included Venice, Poland, and Russia; yet they never avenged the sieges of Vienna by laying siege to Constantinople. The peace-treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 restored to the Hungarian Crown the greater part of the Hungarian territory which had been lost to the ‘Osmanlis in 1526; the peace-treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 actually carried the frontier considerably beyond the line along which it had stood on the eve of the campaign of Mohacz, two centuries earlier. The peace-treaty of Belgrade in 1739, however, revised the frontier of 1718 in the ‘Osmanlis’ favour and to the Hapsburgs’ disadvantage. The fortress of Belgrade itself, which Hungary had always held against the ‘Osmanlis during the fifteenth century and which Prince Eugene had wrested from Ottoman hands in 1717, was retroceded in 1739 by the Hapsburg Monarchy to the Ottoman Empire; and though Austrian armies momentarily re-occupied Belgrade in the Austro-Turkish War of 1788-91 and again in the General War of 1914-18, Belgrade had another destiny. It finally passed out of Ottoman hands in 1866 to become the capital of the Serbian “successor-state” of the Ottoman Empire; and it was recovered by the Serbs from the Austrians in 1918 in order to become the capital of Jugoslavia, which is a “successor-state” of the Hapsburg Power as well as of the Ottoman. As for the south-eastern frontier of the Danubian Monarchy, it remained virtually stationary, at the line fixed in 1739, for the remainder of the Monarchy’s existence. During the hundred and eighty years which elapsed between the conclusion of the Peace of Belgrade and the moment when the Hapsburg Monarchy signed its own death-warrant in the Armistice of 1918, the Monarchy made only two further acquisitions of Ottoman or ex-Ottoman territory, and these were of trivial dimensions. [Footnote: The first of the two was the acquisition of the Bukovina [which is now split between Romania and Ukraine] in 1774-7; the second was the acquisition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was occupied by Austria-Hungary in 1878 and annexed in 1908.] Between 1683 and 1739, however, the Hapsburg frontier in this quarter had been advanced sufficiently far to relegate Vienna from the situation of a frontier-fortress to that of an imperial capital in the interior; and this change made itself felt in the city’s fortunes and character. The glory which Vienna had gained by keeping the Turks at bay in 1529 and 1682-3 was tarnished by the humiliation of French occupations in 1805 and 1809; and the Viennese, who had first made their name as the heroic defenders of Western Christendom, eventually became a by-word for an attractive but decidedly unheroic combination of fecklessness with amiability and softness with elegance. [Footnote: In the long run, this relaxing effect of an abnormal exemption from the pressure of the human environment has counted for more, in the evolution of the Austrian êthos, than the stimulating effect of the physical environment in the shape of an abnormally rough country. […] For Vienna, as the capital of the entire Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy over a span of four centuries, has outweighed the rural and highland remainder of Austria. It is the Viennese and not the Tyrolese who has set the tone of Austria in these latter days.]

Viennese culture reached its climax long after the heroic age. Vienna’s great age of music began with Mozart’s arrival in the city in 1781 (or after the death of Maria Theresa in 1780; Haydn was still at Eszterháza) and lasted until Mahler’s death in 1911; there was a prelude and postlude. Much of its culture, not only its musical culture, had an extraordinary intensity in the twenty years up to 1914.

If we look more closely, we shall see that the fate of Austria-Hungary was analogous to that of Poland-Lithuania. Just as the Polish counter-offensive against Russia at the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century precipitated the “Westernization” of Russian Orthodox Christendom and thereby rendered Poland’s previous raison d’être, as an anti-Russian march of the Western Society, superfluous, so the Austrian counter-offensive against the ‘Osmanlis in the last two decades of the seventeenth century precipitated the “Westernization” of the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the Balkan Peninsula and thereby deprived the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy of its raison d’être likewise.

The parallel extends to details. For example, when the “Westernization” of Russia was taken in hand by Peter the Great, the Russian imperial revolutionary did not obtain his Western inspiration through the medium of his backward and hostile Western neighbour Poland. He addressed himself, by preference, to Germany and Holland and England: countries which were then leading the van in the progress of the Western Civilization and which were not alienated from Russia by any unneighbourly tradition of hostility. Similarly, in the main body of Orthodox Christendom, when the process of “Westernization” was initiated – in a less delibera