~~~

Back June 4.

St Anne

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

[Footnote: Watts, Isaac [...].]

We are in Glenn Gould territory at the beginning of the clip below. I don’t think Gould played William Croft, and I don’t know who is playing here, but Croft is a seriously underrated composer. His St Anne is one of the great tunes.

Isaac Watts’s text, O God, Our Help in Ages Past, paraphrasing Psalm 90, was later set to it. The result is a great hymn. It could only be Protestant. It is often sung on Remembrance Day.

Croft was organist at St Anne’s Church in Soho. Watts and Croft were of the same generation, born in the 1670s. Handel used St Anne in one of his own anthems. Bach may have borrowed it in a fugue.

St Anne, in Christian and Islamic tradition, was the mother of the Virgin Mary.

After the piano, Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. Then a further recording by an unnamed organist.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

The Ashikaga Shogunate

Background in May 21 post.

An attempt to re-establish a civilian government [...] was made immediately after the downfall, in A.D. 1333, of the military regency which had been ruling Japan from Kamakura since A.D. 1184. [Footnote: See Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 319: Murdoch, J.: A History of Japan, vol. i (London 1910, Kegan Paul), p. 539. The civilian Imperial Government at Kyoto had made one previous attempt, as early as A.D. 1221 [the Jōkyū War], to overthrow the Kamakura Bakufu (ibid., p. 442).] This rally, however, was abortive. Within five years the restored civilian régime had been superseded by a new military regency which was not the less true to type because it made the conciliatory gesture of establishing its official headquarters at Kyoto – the ancient Imperial Capital – instead of simply entrenching itself in the north-eastern stronghold from which Japan had been ruled for 150 years by Minamoto Yoritomo and his successors. This swift reversion to Militarism was the first symptom of a fresh rout. In the days of the Shoguns of the Ashikaga Dynasty who succeeded one another at Kyoto from A.D. 1338 until the last of the line was hustled off the stage by Hideyoshi in A.D. 1597, Japan suffered worse tribulations than she had known in the days of the previous line of Shoguns who had succeeded one another at Kamakura from 1184 to 1333.

The immediate sequel to the establishment of the Ashikaga Shogunate was the unprecedented scandal of a schism of the Imperial House itself into two rival courts. This enormity, which was a sin against religious ritual as well as a breach of political etiquette, had to be atoned for by fifty-five years of civil war (gerebatur A.D. 1337-92); and, even when the Ashikaga Shogunate – acting in the name of the court which was its puppet – eventually succeeded in suppressing the rival court which had refused to acknowledge its title, the tale of calamities did not cease. In the fifteenth century of the Christian Era a feudal anarchy which the Shoguns were impotent to reduce to order goaded an intolerably oppressed peasantry into a chronic state of revolt and stimulated the monasteries to militarize themselves – in flat defiance of all precepts of both the Greater and the Lesser Vehicle – as the only alternative to becoming the lay militarists’ victims. In the War of Onin (gerebatur A.D. 1467-77) the Imperial City of Kyoto was devastated by street-fighting between contending provincial forces who made the capital their arena. In the sixteenth century the Shoguns were overtaken by the ignominious fate which their predecessors had inflicted on the Emperors. The Shogun’s de jure powers were now exercised de facto by a Kwanryo [technically the governor of the eight provinces of the Kanto region]; and this travesty of government by the deputy of a deputy was perhaps the one thing worse than no government at all. [Footnote: The century between the opening of the War of Onin in A.D. 1467 and Nobunaga’s assumption of dictatorial powers de facto in A.D. 1568 seems to have been the worst phase of the whole of the Japanese “Time of Troubles” (Sansom, op. cit., pp. 394. 5 and 419-40).] [In the same way, the shikken regents had ruled on behalf of the Kamakura shoguns.] This was the state of misery to which Japan had been reduced by the second paroxysm of her “Time of Troubles” [the first was under the Kamakura shoguns] before her convulsed and writhing frame was forced into a strait-waistcoat by the successive exertions of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi and Ieyasu (militabant A.D. 1549-1615).

The ensuing Pax Tokugawica – the Universal State which ended a Time of Troubles which had begun, in Toynbee’s view, with the military revolutions of the twelfth century – was cut short by the second collision of Japan with the West.

Kamakura is northeast of Kyoto, but should it be described as a “north-eastern stronghold”?

Other footnotes in this passage give further references to Sansom and Murdoch.

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939

Settlers

May 19. Arab village: ʿAsira al-Qibliya. Settlement: Yitzhar. Was the Palestinian killed in the second clip? There are three videos in the BBC report.

A Japanese city-state

Japan [...] has produced only one solitary city-state, Sakai.

Sakai, near Osaka, was an autonomous city run by merchant citizens which flourished during the Muromachi or Ashikaga shogunate, 1337-1573.

Ashikaga is the name of the clan. Muromachi comes from the Muromachi Street of Kyoto where the third shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, established his residence.

At the beginning of her authentically recorded history, Japan was a unitary empire, and in 1868 she became a unitary empire again. During the seven centuries ending in 1868 [from the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate, which lasted from 1185 to 1333, until the Meiji “restoration”] the political map of Japan was a mosaic of local states which had been held together during the latest two and a half of those centuries [Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1868] under the hegemony of the most powerful of them, but, except for Sakai, these Japanese states had not been city-states. They had been feudal states, each of them ruled from a castle by a baron [daimyo] commanding a war-band of retainers [samurai].

The shoguns were military dictators. Kamakura was the city, thirty miles southwest of Tokyo, where the Kamakura shoguns were based. The most decentralised of the shogunates had been the Muromachi.

The establishment of the shogunate or bakufu at the end of the twelfth century saw the beginning of a de facto samurai control of Japan which lasted for seven hundred years, until the Meiji Restoration.

So three shogunates:

Kamakura (at Kamakura) 1185-1333
Muromachi or Ashikaga (at Kyoto) 1337-1573
Tokugawa (at Edo) 1603-1868

Tokugawa Ieyasu, who founded the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo, was from the Matsudaira clan of daimyos in Mikawa province and gained supremacy at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

Toynbee seems to be implying that Edo was a feudal state, rather than merely the seat of the shogunate. No doubt it was: parts of Mikawa province (and others?) were administered directly by the bakufu. I assume that it also controlled directly some land around Edo.

Cities on the Move, OUP, 1970

War Requiem

If you have even a grain of sympathy with the person (quoted in a comment here somewhere) who described Britten’s War Requiem as classy kitsch, then Jarman’s 1989 film may not be for you. But while it is on YouTube, here it is. The requiem is still a twentieth-century masterwork. The film uses the original recording with Fischer-Dieskau, Vishnevskaya, London Symphony Orchestra, Melos Ensemble, Bach Choir and Britten conducting. Wikipedia:

“It was shot in 1988 by the British film director Derek Jarman with the 1963 recording as the soundtrack, produced by Don Boyd and financed by the BBC. Decca Records required that the 1963 recording be heard on its own, with no overlaid soundtrack or other sound effects [or interjections?]. The film featured Nathaniel Parker as Wilfred Owen, and Laurence Olivier in his last acting appearance in any medium before his death in July 1989. The film is structured as the reminiscences of Olivier’s character, the Old Soldier in a wheelchair, and Olivier recites ‘Strange Meeting’ in the film’s prologue.”

Actors, in other words, but the entire Decca soundtrack that follows the prologue is unadulterated.

Lieder and arias

Emily Ezust’s Lied, Art Song and Choral Texts Archive.

Rob Glaubitz’s Aria Database.

Serenade

Schubert, Ständchen, from Schwanengesang, with Gerald Moore, London, October 1951.

Fischer-Dieskau, conductor

I heard an infectious finale of Haydn’s London Symphony in a San Francisco coffee shop c 1992. The barista (not the word then) had propped up what you see below, which I recommend. Salzburg ensemble. Live 1973.

Buy.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

I have nothing much to say about him. He loomed so hugely over postwar Germany that all one can do is go back and listen to him again, at all ages of the voice.

Somewhere there must be a proper online dieskaugraphy. No singer has roamed as widely or as learnedly or as Germanly. He may well be leaving the largest recorded legacy of any singer in any genre ever. He lived in the great age of recording, which is now over.

I can recommend Bruno Monsaingeon’s film, which may only be available on VHS, but will come back. It was made to celebrate his 70th birthday.

I enjoyed his late recording (in Italian) of one of Shostakovich’s last works, the long, more or less forgotten Suite on Verses of Michelangelo of 1974, with Aribert Reimann accompanying. Music from an old composer setting a middle-aged, but far from tired, Michelangelo, and suited to an old, even fading, voice.

I have shown him twice here so far, and not in Schubert, Schumann, Brahms or Wolf. His rendering of Pfitzner’s beautiful An die Mark is now blocked on YouTube in the UK on copyright grounds, but in case you can access it, here is the link. It alone would serve as a commemoration of Fidi – who was, come to think of it, born in Berlin. I am sorry I can’t hear it now.

And here was Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting in Britten’s War Requiem. Peter Pears, tenor, and (from “‘None,’ said the other” at 3:10) Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Benjamin Britten, Melos Ensemble; elsewhere in the recording, Galina Vishnevskaya, soprano, London Symphony Orchestra, Bach Choir:

Cushions

We’ve had the BBC on whistles and baby bottles.

(Addendum to baby bottles.)

The Town Taking on China, episode 2, BBC2 television, May 15, is on BBC iPlayer until May 25. The town is Kirkby. BBC: “Tony Caldeira is a man on a mission – to create a British workforce who can defeat the economic might of China – using only cushions!”

The Chinese beat

H. A. L. Fisher has made fun of me for taking the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang seriously. “In the great operatic performance of humanity he detects,” Fisher says of me, “the occurrence of this Leitmotiv of Yin and Yang. Other ears will be less sensitive to the regularity of the Chinese beat” (The Nineteenth Century and After, December, 1934, p. 672). On this I can only comment: “They have ears, but they hear not” (Psalm cxxxv.17).

Fisher made an oblique reference to Toynbee in the Preface to his History of Europe (1935).

“One intellectual excitement has [...] been denied to me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for this historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”

(The Nineteenth Century was a monthly literary magazine founded in 1877 by James Knowles, architect of Albert Mansions in Victoria Street. Many early contributors were members of the Metaphysical Society (1869-80). In 1901, the title was changed to The Nineteenth Century and After. It was published with that name until 1951 (or 1972?). The Nineteenth Century and After was also the title of a poem by Yeats in The Winding Stair (1933).)

Colour printing on title pages is rare, and always pleasant to find. It was commoner in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when red was often used. The Taoist Yin-Yang symbol appears in blue and red, without dots, on the title page of A Journey to China, or Things Which Are Seen, Constable, 1931. On the South Korean flag, the red is on top of the blue, with no dots. Toynbee’s book has the red on the left and the blue on the right.

The Taegeuk symbol appears in Korean carvings of the seventh century (or even earlier). As far as I know, it has never been used in Japan.

In China, where it is called Taijitu, it appears (according to Wikipedia) later: a version of it in the eleventh century (Northern Song) and something closer to the modern symbol in the sixteenth (Ming). When were the dots introduced in China?

The design has Celtic, Etruscan and Roman precedents which precede the earliest Korean examples, though no eastern origin for them has been shown. The classical pattern, with dots, appears for the first time anywhere in the Notitia Dignitatum, among shield patterns of the Western Roman army c AD 430. The document has survived in manuscript copies. There is a certain oriental appeal in these patterns at a distance.

The Yin and Yang duality is introduced in the first volume of A Study of History (pp 196-204).

They are always mentioned in this order – Yin, the static condition, and Yang, the dynamic activity – and never the other way round (Forke, A.: Die Gedankenwelt des chinesischen Kulturkreises (Munich and Berlin 1927, Oldenbourg), p. 110).

A Study of History, Vol XII: Reconsiderations, OUP, 1961 (footnote)

A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934 (footnote)

Montezuma’s revenge

The Mexic social consciousness [...] is reported to be alive down to this day among certain of the “Indians” of New Mexico, a state of the North American Union which was once [until the Mexican-American war of 1846-48] the northernmost outpost of the Mexic World. “I was told not long ago,” writes Mr. Edwyn Bevan (in The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge 1923, University Press), p. 103) “by some one who knew intimately the native peoples of New Mexico, that they cherished still, by a secret tradition, the unconquerable belief that Montezuma was not really dead, that one day he would come back and drive out the White Man and restore the world as it was before. In some villages it was the custom for a man to climb every day before daybreak to the top of a neighbouring hill and all alone watch the dawn, because that might be the day on which Montezuma might return.”

This was part of a Pueblo (southwest US Native American) myth, according to which the original Aztec homeland lay in New Mexico and the original Aztec king was a Pueblo. In fact, Aztec civilisation did not reach this far. The Aztec Ruins National Monument near the town of Aztec, New Mexico, was misnamed by early American settlers and is a Pueblo structure.

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

The New York Public Library

Anne Day, New York Review of Books, June 7.

Patience and Fortitude, December 1948, Wikimedia Commons

Ten historical novels

William Skidelsky, The Observer, May 13.

Carlos Fuentes

Guardian.

Over the western front

YouTube (footsoldier63): “Filmed by a French dirigible [airship] crew in 1919, this 2 minute segment is only part of the original 78 minute film currently held in France. No commercially available copy of the complete original film is available yet … but we live in hope. The pilot served as a member of the resistance during WW2 and was shot by the Germans in 1944.”

Most or all of this sequence shows Ypres. It is worth going to full screen to watch it. The soundtrack is (for some reason) Tristan und Isolde. Download from Vimeo.

The pilot of the airship was Jacques Trolley de Prévaux, the cameraman Lucien Lesaint.

These two minutes, more or less, were used in a 2010 BBC television documentary about aerial photography of the western front during the First World War, and may be taken from it. I did a post about that programme.

Yesterday, I was asked whether the complete 78 minutes were now available on DVD. The answer, as footsoldier63 tells us, is no. This is odd, as to see the full sequence, if the quality is like what we have in the extracts, would be mesmerising.

I suggested to Mike Delahay that he contact the French army archives in Paris, where the film is stored. (The French air force was part of the army until 1933. Trolley de Prévaux was actually a navy man.) The archives site is www.ecpad.fr. There is important material, including video, there, but nothing from the flights of Trolley de Prévaux.

Bertrand Russell on Christianity

1959. CBC source. Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian had been published in 1927 and had originally been a talk given on March 6 that year at Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society.

One Sunday morning (I’m told), when I was a young boy, and at about the time of this interview, my parents pointed out to me, as he walked on the edge of Richmond Green, a “very famous person”.

A few feet away was a godson of John Stuart Mill and a man whose grandfather, the prime minister, had visited Napoleon on Elba and whose maternal grandmother had been a friend of the widow of the Young Pretender.

Taliban poetry

Review by Robin Yassin-Kassab at Pulse of Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn, editors; Mirwais Rahmany, Abdul Hamid Stanikzai, translators; Faisal Devji, foreword; Poetry of the Taliban, Hurst & Co.

“What is so interesting is that the Taliban’s official face and past practice has been so fiercely anti-Sufi, anti-historical, and seemingly anti-culture. This book provides an entirely different outlook. Indeed, in their rich memory of 19th century British invasions, of Afghan folklore and Islamic heroism, the Taliban poets seem more awake to history than we are.”

Book site. Amazon. Blogs: Alex, Felix.

Bertrand Russell on Israel

Bertrand Russell’s last public statement was dated January 31 1970. He died, aged 97, on February 2. The statement was read out at, and perhaps written for, an International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo on February 3. It was published in The Washington Post on March 2. (Nasser died in the following September.)

An apparently complete version, as read in Cairo, is here. This, on a quick glance, is identical to what is published at the end of Ray Perkins Jr, editor, Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell: Letters to the Editor, 1904-69 [various publications], Chicago, Carus Publishing Company, 2002.

A summary of Russell’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict is here.

The bombing of Egypt to which he is referring was during the War of Attrition from 1967 to ’70, which ended with the frontiers unchanged. Israel did not withdraw from Sinai until 1982.

Mazurka

Chopin’s opus 24, no 2 played by Arthur (Artur, RCA prefers to say) Rubinstein. In a Liszt-Chopin evening I’d programme this just after Liszt’s charming Églogue (post here). I’d like to hear Vianna da Mota play this.

Skyboxification

Thomas Friedman on Michael Sandel. New York Times Sunday Review.

Quasi-public spaces (old post).

Here I quoted Arundhati Roy on the “most successful secessionist struggle in India”. She was referring to the ominous retreat of the Indian middle and upper classes to gated residential communities.

Facebook is a gated community, though not for the rich. I prefer the public squares of the web.

Imperial Messenger

“Look, I’m a little confused. Do the math for me. You are wearing an Islamic head covering, you are obviously a religious person, but you were educated in an American university and now you are bringing the Internet to Kuwait. I don’t quite see how it all adds up.”

“A Russian journalist, circling the Coke machine, under the CNN screen, speaking Russian into a cell phone, in NATO headquarters, while Kosovo burned – my mind couldn’t contain all the contradictions.”

“The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been – but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.”

Three Friedman quotations, I assume accurate, in a review at New Left Project by David Wearing of Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger – Thomas Friedman at Work, New York, Verso, 2012.

Risibly inane. Friedman is never deep, and he is prejudiced against Arabs even if he believes in their decency as potential Americans. But he is not always as bad as this. He is right about some things, like America’s obsession with al-Qaeda.

Other titles in Verso’s Counterblasts series: Jade Lindgaard and Xavier de la Porte, The Imposter – BHL in Wonderland, and Derrick O’Keefe, Michael Ignatieff – The Lesser Evil?

Recent posts on Friedman at Pulse.

Earlier post here.

Acis and Galatea

I’d begin a film of Handel’s masque Acis and Galatea with a long still shot, during the overture, of a rubbish tip, showing identifiable household items.

Tom Jobim, Ensemble Instrumental Barroco, Núcleo de Música Antiga, Escola de Música do Estado de São Paulo

Two cultures

My comment yesterday was not based on some ridiculously snobbish idea that if you talk to business or industry to gauge economic confidence, it should be to big companies. It came from the fact that people in London are disconnected from the world of manufacturing. They don’t know much about it or take it seriously. Their friends work in media and service industries. Factories are somewhere else. The gap exists in all developed economies, but is wider in the UK than in Germany or Japan, and amounts to a cultural and social schism.

There was a snobbery about industry in Britain, a disdain for people who worked with their hands, with or without machines. The proletariat in English cities lost its rural roots early in the industrial age. (While the bosses set their hearts on retirement in the country.) Modern city-dwellers have, in turn, lost their industrial roots. Hence the shallow cosmopolitanism of a Tony Blair.

Related schism: science vs humanities. CP Snow’s two cultures thesis may have been questionable in all kinds of ways, but was interesting. He condemned the British educational system for having over-rewarded the humanities, especially Latin and Greek, at the expense of science and engineering. We never had a Prussian system. Toynbee was an example of a man who knew everything about Latin and Greek and nothing about science. The modern political establishment in Britain knows nothing about science or the humanities. And British politicians never sound less convincing than when they speak of skills-training. I heard an echo of some of this in those BBC reports.

Snobbery: third-world governments accuse publishers of showing poverty in photographs instead of their pet infrastructure project or the new airport road (airport roads being propaganda statements in their own right).

Baby bottles

What comes into British journalists’ minds when they hear the word engineer? Probably the man who fixes your boiler. What comes into their minds when they think of industry? As the economic sky was darkening in summer 2008, the editors of BBC Radio 4’s “flagship” lunchtime news programme The World at One sent out a reporter to gauge the mood of “industry”.

Where did he go? To a pharmaceutical company? An aircraft manufacturer? A biotech lab? No. He went to a company that made whistles.

I recorded this at the time in a post. Today, in a still more ominous time, the same programme sent out a reporter to judge the mood of a small manufacturing company in the light of vague policy announcements just made in the Queen’s Speech. The segment was introduced with “Let’s move on now to the economy”. What did the company make? Solar panels? Electronic components? Automobile parts? No. Baby bottles.

This is not (in case you assume this) the quirky editorial tradition of one news programme. Nor did the Queen’s Speech mention babies or children, except in relation to custody and care. It illustrates something about British awareness of industry which could be illustrated in other ways.

The other business story today was the near-demise of Clinton Cards, a chain of shops which sells greetings cards. This was important as a human story as it has 8,000 employees.

The programme is online for the next seven days.

Lords reform, 1539-1999

Wikipedia has a useful article going back to the removal of the abbots and priors. Reform has stalled since 1999. Options.

The throne from which the Queen’s Speech is made,
c 1880.

Holland and Bowersock

(Now it sounds like a law firm.) Tom Holland’s reply to Glen Bowersock in the Guardian. I mentioned Holland’s new book about the Romano-Persian endgame and the origins of Islam a couple of weeks ago.

Both articles are worth reading, but severe limitations of space mean that they are skirting around questions about early Islam that really demand 7,000-word articles in the New York Review of Books, not a few inches in a daily. The arguments deserve to be outside scholarly journals, but as presented here are hardly comprehensible to ordinary readers. I don’t know who is right, but I had wondered about a few things in Bowersock’s “dyspeptic” piece. His superior phrase “with the publisher” about some early Qurʿanic manuscripts found in Sanaʿa: could there therefore already be a consensus about what they meant? His insistence that QRSh means only to congeal or clot, not to gather people: some language-instinct made me wonder whether that was so. But Bowersock is a major scholar. I just wish this discussion could be aired properly.

There is some simple background in this blog:

Since the domestication of the Arabian camel, nearly 2,000 years before Muhammad’s day, Arabia had been traversible, and ideas and institutions had been seeping into the peninsula from the Fertile Crescent that adjoins it on the north. The effect of this infiltration had been cumulative, and, by Muhammad’s time, the accumulated charge of spiritual force in Arabia was ready to explode.

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

Defending Rome

“Of this city of Rome you could not say either that it was left unfortified with a Lacedaemonian bravado or that it was enclosed in fortifications of a Babylonian magnificence. … You have not, however, you Romans, neglected to build walls; only you have run them round your empire and not round your city. You have placed them in the uttermost parts of the Earth; yet they are magnificent walls which are worthy of you and are a sight for the eyes of all who live within their shelter – though it would take an intending sight-seer months or even years to reach them if Rome itself were the starting-point of his journey; for you have pushed your way beyond the outermost circuit of the Inhabited World and there, in no-man’s-land, you have drawn a second circuit with a more convenient tracée which is easier to defend – for all the world as though you were simply fortifying a city. … This circuit is utterly impregnable and indestructible at every point; it outshines all others; and no system of fortifications that was ever constructed before bears any resemblance to it.” [Footnote: Aristeides, P. Aelius: In Romam, edited by Keil, B., in Aelii Aristidis Quae Supersunt Omnia, vol. ii (Berlin 1898, Weidmann), pp. 114-15 (Or. XXVI, §§ 79-84).]

Roman walls at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates; image from Yale excavations between the wars; main Yale Dura-Europos site

Dura-Europos was founded in 303 BC by the Seleucids. It controlled the river-crossing on the route between the other newly-founded cities of Antioch and Seleucia (which was further east, on the Tigris). In the later 2nd century BC it came under Arsacid Parthian control. The Romans captured it in 165, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, roughly at the time Aristides was writing, and abandoned it after a Sassanian siege in 256-7 (the Persians may have used poisonous gases). It was then covered by sand and mud. American archaeologists discovered it in the late nineteenth century.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Not knowing war

“They no longer find it credible that there were ever such things as wars; and, when the word ‘war’ is mentioned to-day, it has a mythical sound in most peoples’ ears. [...].” [Footnote: Aristeides, P. Aelius: In Romam, edited by Keil, B., in Aelii Aristidis Quae Supersunt Omnia, vol ii (Berlin 1898, Weidmann), [...] (Or. XXVI [...]) [...].]

Aelius Aristeides (old post)

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The Grand Inquisitor and Christ

[The] epiphany of the ruler of a universal state as the one shepherd whose oecumenical monarchy makes one fold for all Mankind [footnote: John x. 16.] appeals to one of the Human Soul’s deepest longings, as, in Dostoyevski’s fable, the Grand Inquisitor reminds a subversive Christ.

In The Grand Inquisitor, a parable in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan imagines Christ returning to Earth and meeting a leader of the Spanish Inquisition in Seville.

“Thou mightest have taken … the sword of Caesar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that Man seeks on Earth – that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap; for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors – Timurs and Chingis Khans – whirled like hurricanes over the face of the Earth, striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the World and Caesar’s purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?” [Footnote: Dostoyevski, F.: The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book V, chap. 5: “The Grand Inquisitor”.]

The translator is not stated, but is Constance Garnett, as one would expect.

Dostoyevsky had encountered the figure of the Grand Inquisitor in Schiller’s Don Carlos.

The Spanish Inquisition lasted from 1480 to 1834. List of Grand Inquisitors.

Postscript: El Greco and Modernism, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf runs until August 12.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Kleinstaaterei

The Germans do not, like ourselves, take their national existence for granted; for though in the sphere of art and intellect their nationality is possibly more strongly grown than ours, in the  political sphere it is a thing of yesterday. No more than a generation separates them from their “Heptarchy.” The wars which ended “Kleinstaaterei” were fought by the fathers of the men who are fighting now. Their political nationhood is still a new and precarious structure. It may be dissolved again into its elements or it may be preserved; on the other hand, it may be immensely enlarged by fresh acquisitions.

The New Europe, Some Essays in Reconstruction, Dent, 1915 (text taken from 1916 edition)

Appointment in Samarra

At the end of Somerset Maugham’s last play, Sheppey (Wyndham’s Theatre, September 14 1933, with Ralph Richardson), Sheppey dies and says to Death (text in The Collected Plays, Heinemann, 1952 edition):

“I wish now I’d gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor advised it. You wouldn’t ’ave thought of looking for me there.”

Death’s reply:

“There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him to-night in Samarra.”

American euphemism

The term “under-privileged” was current in an American middle-class vocabulary at this time [during the Cold War] as a euphemistic substitute for the stark word “unprivileged”. In American mouths “under-privileged” was a less unpalatable term, because it suggested that the difference of level was not very great; that its elimination was already on the agenda; and that “privilege” itself was, not an abuse which ought to be abolished, but an objective which could and should be attained by Everyman. “Under-privileged” was, however, a flagrantly illogical term, considering that the conferment of a favoured minority’s privileges on members of a depressed class must still leave a residual depressed majority on an implicitly unacceptable lower level or, alternatively, must abolish “privilege” itself [...]. A privilege that is shared by everybody, or even only by a majority, is a contradictio in adjecto, and a psychologist would perhaps have deduced from this revealingly illogical American euphemism the existence of an unresolved conflict in the souls of middle-class Americans between a natural human desire to retain the relatively high standard of living which they were now enjoying as members of an invidiously privileged minority and a conscience which must reproach itself so long as this stigma of privilege was [...] justifiable [for them] in virtue of its being a natural and normal human right that, by implication, must be Everyman’s due.

Americans are masters of euphemism. (On the other hand, you see the word INCONTINENCE in large letters above shelves in pharmacies.)

The OED does not help us in this case.

“underˈprivileged, adj. (and n.)

1. Less privileged than others; spec. experiencing a standard of living which falls short of an accepted norm, socially disadvantaged. Chiefly applied to persons.

2. absol. as n. with the.”

The first definition implies degrees of privilege. If the gap is wide, the less privileged person is underprivileged. This does not work. One can then at best object to a person being overprivileged. And since this word implies that the other is underprivileged it, too, must be rejected. The word makes moral sense only if the “accepted norm” is that of homo sapiens in relation to other species. A human specimen could then be underprivileged.

And the second definition is not really an absolute.

The first use known to OED is by James Barnes in A Princetonian, A Story of Undergraduate Life at the College of New Jersey, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896. “It was very quiet in the little square that was filled with nurse-maids and children moving about inside the railings – several little underprivileged ones peering in at them from the outside.”

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

1866 and 1871

The last moderate peace terms in our modern Western history were those which Bismarck imposed on the Hapsburg Monarchy in 1866. In 1871, when he had to make peace with a defeated France, Bismarck was confronted with a German Nationalism that had gained such strength under his fostering hand that it had become his master instead of his servant; and, against his better judgement, he was compelled by this masterfully recalcitrant anti-social force to inflict a rankling wound on the French national consciousness by tearing away Alsace-Lorraine from the French body politic. In our generation we have reaped the cruel harvest of this nineteenth-century sowing, in the legion of internecine national conflicts that have been devastating the World since 1914.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Prelates on post-horses

Or did they ride in wagons attached to the horses?

Constantius, the successor of Constantine and predecessor of Julian, was an Arian or semi-Arian. Ammianus was a tolerant-minded pagan.

“[Constantius II],” [footnote: Constantius II imperabat A.D. 337-61. – A.J.T.] writes [a testy] Ammianus Marcellinus of Antioch, “found the Christian religion uninvolved and straightforward and proceeded to muddle it up with old wives’ superstitions. As his delight in complicated theological hair-splitting was greater than his sense of responsibility for maintaining harmony, he provoked innumerable dissensions, and he added fuel to the galloping flames by organizing acrimonious debates. One consequence was that crowds of prelates made use of the public post-horses (iumentis publicis) for rushing to and fro on the business of these ‘synods’, as they call them. The prelates’ object was to wrench the whole practice of their religion into conformity with their own caprice; Constantius’s achievement was to ham-string the postal service (rei vehiculariae succideret nervos).” [Footnote: Ammianus Marcellinus: Res Gestae, Book XXI, chap. xvi, § 18.]

The sentiments of Ammianus, a Roman soldier of Greek birth writing history in the Latin tongue, would have been applauded by the Roman administrators who had called the imperial system of communications into existence and by the Greek men of letters who had eulogized it as its apogee. Though the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the pavement of the chaussées leading inland from its shores were free for all comers to traverse at their own risk, exertion, and expense, the imperial postal service was not a facility provided by the Government for the convenience of the public, but a burden imposed on the public by the Government for strictly official purposes; [footnote: See Hirschfeld, op. cit., pp. 190-1 and 204.] [Refers to Hirschfeld, O.: Die Kaiserlichen Verwaltungsbeamten bis auf Diocletian, 2nd ed. (Berlin 1905, Weidmann).] and, before the bishops took the mail-carts by storm, the passes (diplomata) entitling private persons to travel by public post were issued very sparingly, and this only on warrants from the very highest authorities. Itinerant second-century Greek lecturers who would have been happy to receive passes for themselves would have grudged them to itinerant fourth-century prelates if they could have foreseen the appearance of such strange personages above the historical horizon of their conventional-minded age.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The Latin Fathers

Tertullian, originally of Carthage (c 160-c 225)

Cyprian of Carthage (?-258)

Hilary of Poitiers (c 300-c 368)

Ambrose of Milan (c 340-397)

Jerome of Stridonium (c 347-420)

Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

Gregory the Great (c 540-604)

Isidore of Seville (c 560-636)

The Syriac Fathers

Ephrem the Syrian (c 306-373)

Isaac of Nineveh (?-c 700)

What others? Their works were widely translated into Latin and Greek.

The Desert Fathers

The desert was the Scetes desert (Wadi El Natrun) west of the Nile Delta.

Anthony the Great (c 251-356) (sic)

Hilarion (291-371)

Pachomius (c 292-348)

John Cassian (c 360-435)

Others, including some who spent shorter periods in the desert.

They founded the tradition of Hesychasm, from the Greek for stillness. Interior silence and continual prayer.

The Greek Fathers

(Those who wrote in Greek. Can one speak of Koine for the last two?)

Irenaeus of Lyons (?-c 202)

Clement of Alexandria (c 150-c 215)

Origen of Alexandria (c 184-c 253)

Athanasius of Alexandria (c 297-373)

The Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea (c 329-379), Gregory Nazianzus (c 329-389), Gregory of Nyssa (c 335-after 394), Peter of Sebaste (c 340-391)

John Chrysostom (c 347-407)

Cyril of Alexandria (c 378-444)

Maximus the Confessor (c 580-662)

John of Damascus (c 676-749)

The Apostolic Fathers

The Apostolic Fathers are believed to have been taught directly by one or more of the twelve.

Clement of Rome

Ignatius of Antioch

Polycarp of Smyrna

The Didache and Shepherd of Hermas are considered to be by Apostolic Fathers although their authors are unknown. Like the works of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp, they were written in Koine Greek.

To embed or not to embed?

For some reason, most of the best classical music blogs – On an Overgrown Path, Entartete Musik, others – rarely embed YouTube video (or audio-with-images). Bob Shingleton at OAOP calls those who do “creatively challenged”. Andrew Morris at Devil’s Trill agrees and says that he feels “slightly ashamed” when he does it. Alex Ross embeds more often. I’m with Alex.

I don’t want to write a music blog. Others are doing them better than I ever could. But I don’t want to leave music out of this history blog. And at a certain level of my psyche, I refuse to make a distinction between music and history. I don’t even have a “category” here for music.

I often embed music and other clips. Do I feel ashamed? Like most people, I don’t always credit the original uploader. If one gives picture credits, one should give YouTube credits. I feel guilty about that. And there is the question of the legality of some of the clips on YouTube in the first place. But I choose to regard that as a matter between Google, the uploader and the music industry. And yes, sometimes I realise that I am posting a clip because it is easier than writing something.

Like putting the clip on YouTube in the first place, embedding is sharing. Music must be shared. I hate headphones, which are a negation of sharing. Sometimes I even have things to say about the piece I am posting. Sometimes it is directly relevant to history.

Is it presumptuous to expect someone to stop what they are doing and listen to something just because you have posted it? Yes, just as it is to expect them to read what you are writing. It’s all presumptuous. You owe it to them to use as few words as possible.

This is a Gesamtblogwerk. Music is part of the great river. People can listen or not.

But there is a missionary element. I’ve spent hours trying to get tone-dead (I wrote that, not tone-deaf) people, and those with different tastes from mine, to listen to things, usually unsuccessfully, and this is partly the last shred of those hopes. That may make me a bore. It doesn’t make me “creatively challenged”.