Tag: Gilbert White

Tapping the glass


(Ernest Board, ‘The discovery of the barometer: Torricelli experimenting in the Alps’, 1643: Wellcome Collection.)

Alluding to the still-controversial matter of Edward Jenner’s experiments, Lord Byron in 1818 observed:

But vaccination certainly has been
    A kind antithesis to Congreve’s rockets,
With which the Doctor paid off an old pox,
By borrowing a new one from an ox.

The Congreve rocket, the editors note, was used at the Battle of Leipzig (1813), producing sufficient noise and glare to frighten and confuse the French.[1]

Fright and confusion have been much in evidence lately, not least in connection with vaccination rather than the Congreve rocket. But then Jenner’s use of cowpox germs led to resistance on religious grounds, people refusing to be treated with ‘substances originating from God’s lowlier creatures’ and when vaccination was made compulsory in 1853, this ‘led to protest marches and vehement opposition from those who demanded freedom of choice.’[2]

The rain, currently exercising its freedom of choice, appears to positively enjoy being rain and doing the things rain does. ‘How dark/ seems the whole country we enter’, the poet Keith Douglas wrote, ‘Now it rains,/ the trees like ominous old men are shaking.’[3] In her novel set in late 15th century Somerset, Samantha Harvey’s narrator observes that: ‘In the village at this time of year we had only one way of telling the weather: if you can see the ridge, you know it’s going to rain; if you can’t, it’s already raining.’[4]

Wet or dry, the last week or two has seen me out for the most part on my own, sticking mainly to the lower paths in the park because my back was noticeably resentful of hills and acutely keen to tell me so. The Librarian has been walking later and alone, for longer and on an altogether higher plane. Aware that I was missing some lines from the handful of poems committed to memory, I’ve taken to carrying a paperback in my pocket so I can prompt myself. My memory seems more and more to resemble the version proposed by Mr Sherlock Holmes to a sceptical Dr John Watson early in A Study in Scarlet, the brain as a kind of attic with limited space, so that: ‘“Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.”’[5]


I’m reasonably discreet but a woman with a child in a pushchair may have flinched a little to hear as she passed me that ‘John Macdonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,/ Waited till it came to life, and hit it with a poker’. Describing the same circular route as myself, though in the contrary direction, she may have been in time to catch the last run through: ‘It’s no go the Herring Board, it’s no go the Bible,/ All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.’ The last lines of MacNeice’s poem seem painfully apt: ‘The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,/ But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.’[6]

In my sunnier moments, it also prompts the thought of how many houses used to have barometers—I must have come across dozens—and how relatively few do so now. It’s hardly surprising: they were for use not ornament and the Met Office forecasts are increasingly accurate. There’s also this new-fangled thing called the internet.


(North east view of Selbourne, from The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by Gilbert White © The British Library Board)

The naturalist Gilbert White, at whose house barometers and thermometers ‘were much-prized members of the household’—and who was ‘assiduous’ in his readings and recordings—wrote of house-crickets that: ‘Whatever is moist they affect; and therefore often gnaw holes in wet woollen stockings and aprons that are hung to the fire: they are the housewife’s barometer, foretelling her when it will rain; and are prognostic sometimes, she thinks, of ill or good luck; of the death of a near relation, or the approach of an absent lover. By being the constant companions of her solitary hours they naturally become the objects of her superstition.’[7]

Pressure rising, pressure falling. We don’t, I suppose, really need to tap the glass of a barometer these days. Farce or tragedy or tragicomedy, it’s being played out before our eyes—quite enlightening, no doubt, for those in the habit of thinking that we had only the one plague to contend with.

Writing little more than a year before his death, Byron had a word about barometers:

The London winter’s ended in July,
    Sometimes a little later. I don’t err
In this: whatever other blunders lie
    Upon my shoulders, here I must aver
My Muse a glass of weatherology;
    For Parliament is our barometer:
Let radicals its other acts attack,
Its sessions form our only almanac.[8]

If Parliament is our barometer now, I think it’s safe to say that the weather prospects are not encouraging.

Notes

[1] Lord Byron, ‘Canto I’, Don Juan, edited by T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 78, 580n. On the proof, Byron’s friend, John Cam Hobhouse wrote: ‘Mon cher ne touchez pas à la petite Verole [smallpox]’: ‘Appendix’, 757.

[2] See: https://www.jenner.ac.uk/about/edward-jenner (accessed 8 January 2022)

[3] Keith Douglas, last lines of ‘Soissons’ (1940): The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas, edited by Desmond Graham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 47. Soissons is a commune in Hauts-de-France, roughly 100 kilometres north-east of Paris.

[4] Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018), 91.

[5] Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels, edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company 2006), 34.

[6] Louis MacNeice, ‘Bagpipe Music’, Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), 95, 96.

[7] Alexandra Harris, Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English  Skies (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 209; Gilbert White, The Illustrated History of Selborne (London: Macmillan, 1984), 210.

[8] Byron, ‘Canto XIII’, Don Juan 453.

Those autumn leaves (turn, turn, turn!)

(Henry Robinson Hall, Coniston Lake from Lake Bank: The Dock Museum, Barrow-in-Furness)

As early as 1 August, John Ruskin at Coniston Lake declared that, ‘The summer is ended. Autumn begun.’ Gilbert White, though, also a close watcher of the seasons, the natural world and everything in it that occurred before his eyes, wrote on 9 September 1781: ‘Red-breasts whistle agreeably on the tops of hop-poles etc., but are prognostic of autumn.’[1] We tend to associate that word now with the progress of a disease but it means only ‘knowing before’ and a prognosticator, my dictionary assures me, means a predictor, especially a weather prophet. Looking forward to autumn, anyway.

On this same day in 1767, White had looked back to the previous summer and feeding his tame bat, which would take flies out of a person’s hand. He added that: ‘Insects seemed to be most acceptable, though it did not refuse raw flesh when offered: so that the notion, that bats go down chimnies and gnaw men’s bacon, seems no improbable story.’[2]

Momentarily, ‘raw flesh’ offers to my suggestible mind the ‘person’s hand’ just mentioned (biting the hand that feeds you, I suppose); while ‘gnaw men’s bacon’ is also oddly disturbing, probably traceable to the word ‘gnaw’. It tends to recall to me the image of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, though, when I look at the painting again (it was first a mural, then transferred to canvas), it’s not what I think of as ‘gnawing’. Werner Hofmann distinguishes Goya’s Saturn from that of Rubens, because there is no delight here: Goya’s cannibal ‘horrifies the observer because he himself is horrified.’ Hofmann also notes that madness has driven him to his crime, ‘like Ugolino devouring his sons in the tower of Gualandi.’[3]

(Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring his Son: Museo Nacional del Prado)

This is from Dante’s Inferno, the penultimate canto (which T. S. Eliot cites in his notes to The Waste Land). Count Ugolino was head of the Guelf government in Pisa for a time until overthrown by a Ghibelline uprising initiated by the Archbishop Ruggieri, in what John Sinclair refers to as ‘this competition of mutual knavery and intrigue’. Locked in a tower with his children and left without food, he watches his sons die one after another and, deranged by grief, eats them. Now, in Dante’s Hell, he gnaws on the skull of the Archbishop (the word occurs in a reference to a tale from ancient history—one of the seven kings who besieged Thebes, mortally wounded by an assailant whom he killed ‘and gnawed the head with rage’). Having told his story, Ugolino ‘with eyes askance took hold of the wretched skull again with his teeth, which were strong on the bone like a dog’s.’[4] Yes, that to me is gnawing – with a vengeance, you might say.

On 9 September 1929, Sylvia Townsend Warner lay under London plane-trees and experienced a moment of extreme joy. ‘There like a bird I sat and sang. An antediluvian old lady with a bow streaming from the back of her hat sat sketching nearby, two little girls played dodge round a tree, and I heard the swish-swish of dead leaves sweeping. It was a moment for ever. Spring cannot bring me the same ravishment. Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.’[5]


(John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves: Manchester City Art Gallery)

Yes, if I had to choose, I might well come down on the side of autumn (eschewing all references to the seasons of a life as opposed to the life of the seasons), though why choose? The pleasures of spring are just a little too obvious, perhaps. Here, in autumnal mode, is young Olive Garnett (sister of the more famous Edward), author and diarist, to whom we’re indebted for some of the earliest glimpses of Ford Madox Ford, his wife Elsie, Conrad, James and others of the period. She’s on Hampstead Heath, skirting the heath in fact, ‘gathering blackberries the while & arrived at that delightful little footpath to the Finchley Road. In the field behind the paling were two haystacks, a pig & some cows.’[6]

(What do you do in the autumn? I do this).

And now the rain has stopped, started again, stopped again. Tiring weather. My sympathies stray towards Elizabeth Bishop, who writes to her friend, the writer and editor Pearl Kazin, 9 September 1959. ‘And—oh well, we read and read and read, all the time, and the books pile up, and I remember a little here and there, and the magazines are snowing us under, and what good it all does drifting around in this aging brain I don’t know!’[7]

We are waiting for a gap in the clouds.



Notes

[1] Ruskin, 1884 diary entry and White quoted by Geoffrey Grigson, The English Year: From Diaries and Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 103, 122.

[2] Gilbert White, The Illustrated History of Selborne (London: Macmillan, 1984), 39.

[3] Werner Hofmann, Goya: ‘To every story there belongs another’, translated by David H. Wilson (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 243.

[4] Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. I: Inferno, Italian text with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), Canto XXXIII, 405-409; Tydeus, one of the leaders of expedition of the ‘Seven against Thebes’, mentioned 402.

[5] Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman (London: Virago Press, 1995), 43.

[6] Diary entry, Tuesday 9 September: Tea and Anarchy! The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett, 1890-1893, edited by Barry C. Johnson (London: Bartletts Press, 1989), 46.

[7] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, edited by Robert Giroux (London: Pimlico, 1996), 376.

Rabbits, posts, house-crickets

KW

(Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar, seeing a dagger before him (‘Infamy, infamy. They’ve all got it in for me’), in Carry On Cleo (1964), via IMDB.)

July: formerly Quintilis, the month was renamed in honour of Julius Caesar, not long before his murder in 44 BC.

‘If the first of July it be rainy weather,
’twill rain more or less for four weeks together.’

The cat climbing onto my chest at around 04:30 wakes me enough to remember to pinch and—lightly!—punch a Librarian. There’s a mutual muttering of ‘white rabbits’, one of those ancient traditions that turns out to be not so very old. ‘Several correspondents’ in the Westminster Gazette in the spring of 1919 claiming that, with local variants, it was common in many parts of Great Britain, isn’t overwhelmingly convincing of great age.[1]

I don’t think of myself as superstitious. Lead me to the nearest ladder propped against a house front and I’ll walk under it; and I positively encourage black cats, whether crossing my path from the left or the right. But between the railway bridge at one end and the line of shops and the supermarket at the other, there’s a road that runs past a pub, an old church and the city farm – and has a row of bollards mounted on the pavement. Quite often, barely conscious of doing so, I touch each bollard as I pass. I think that responds to a half-buried memory of a story told about Samuel Johnson – where did I see that? I read an old Oxford World Classics paperback edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson years ago: it started falling apart, unsurprisingly given its huge length, and I later bought an Everyman hardback edition. Looking recently, I didn’t find it in either. I think now I must first have seen it referred to in The Book of Witches by Oliver Madox Hueffer (Ford’s brother), where he mentions ‘Dr Johnson’s idiosyncrasy for touching every post he passed upon his walks abroad’.[2] The passage in question concerns a man called Whyte, who described watching Johnson walk along the street:

I perceived him at a good distance working along with a peculiar solemnity of deportment, and an awkward sort of measured step. . . . Upon every post as he passed along, I could observe he deliberately laid his hand; but missing one of them, when he had got at some distance, he seemed suddenly to recollect himself, and immediately returning back, carefully performed the accustomed ceremony, and resuming his former course, not omitting one till he gained the crossing. This, Mr. Sheridan assured me . . . was his constant practice.[3]

Reynolds, Joshua, 1723-1792; Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

(Sir Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson: National Trust, Knole)

In six volumes, there’s space to gather in all manner of additional related material; in a one-volume edition, however bulky, something has to give. Johnson’s behaviour, anyway, seems to have been more indicative of obsessive compulsive disorder. I can at least take comfort in the fact that if I miss a post I don’t turn back.

Superstition. A widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as bringing good or bad luck; omens, divination, sorcery; a deep-rooted but unfounded general belief (no jokes about contemporary political attitudes at this juncture, though, the situation being almost beyond a joke). But uses of it vary hugely. ‘Chance or free will?’ Sybille Bedford asked. ‘Which is it that we the irreligious, the superstitious ones, mean when we say, “in the lap of the gods?”’[4] In the view of Graham Greene’s assistant commissioner in It’s a Battlefield, ‘One had to choose certain superstitions by which to live; they were the nails in the shoes with which one gripped the rock. This was what a war threw up: a habit, a superstition, one more trick by which one got through the day.’[5] And Wyndham Lewis, characteristically combative, remarked in an early story, ‘The Cornac and His Wife’: ‘One of our greatest superstitions is that the plain man, being so “near to life,” is a great “realist.”’[6]

I tend to think of it as something quite mundane, homely, barely noticed or remarked, the almost automatic responses to those ladders or lines on the pavement. The word’s origins, whether from Middle English or Old French, seem to point back to Latin, ‘standing over’, suggestive of protection as much as threat but also a quite ordinary part of the landscape. Sarah Moss has her sisters Alethea (Ally) and May in the garden: ‘A magpie hops under the beech tree. Foolish superstition, Mamma says, but even so Ally finds herself casting around for another one to make two for joy. Maybe she can save this one until she sees another and count them as a pair, like carrying numbers in arithmetic. Carrying magpies.’[7]

White-birds

( https://naturalhistoryofselborne.com/ )

The great naturalist Gilbert White mentions house-crickets in a domestic setting: ‘Whatever is moist they affect; and therefore often gnaw holes in wet woollen stockings and aprons that are hung to the fire: they are the housewife’s barometer, foretelling her when it will rain; and are prognostic sometimes, she thinks, of ill or good luck; of the death of a near relation, or the approach of an absent lover. By being the constant companions of her solitary hours they naturally become the objects of her superstition.’[8]

I think a somnolescent ‘white rabbits’ and occasional absent-minded post-touching probably keeps me on the safe side of ‘obsessive’ – in those contexts, anyway.

 

References

[1] Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, editors, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192.

[2] Oliver Madox Hueffer, The Book of Witches (New York: The John McBride Co., 1909), 278.

[3] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell (Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1934), I, 485, fn1. This and much more is referred to and discussed by Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., in an article, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Tics and Gesticulations’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 22 (April 1967), 152-168.

[4] Sybille Bedford, Quicksands: A Memoir (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005). Her 1963 novel is called A Favourite of the Gods.

[5] Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), 170.

[6] Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, edited by Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), 102.

[7] Sarah Moss, Bodies of Light (London: Granta Books, 2015), 85.

[8] Gilbert White, The Illustrated History of Selborne (1789; London: Macmillan, 1984), 210.

Gilbert White of Selborne

Skylark

(Skylark: https://findingnature.co.uk/animal/skylark/ )

In Great Trade Route, Ford Madox Ford, recalling a visit to a New Jersey truck farm in the company of William Carlos Williams, commented on the behaviour of a snipe which was distracting the men from the nest to protect its young, an example of what Gilbert White famously termed storgé, using the Greek word for familial or ‘natural’ affection, one of the four Greek terms for ‘love’, along with philia, agape and eros: all were discussed in C. S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves (1960).[1]

Ford often mentioned Gilbert White of Selborne (born 18 July 1720), the ‘parson-naturalist’, in both fictional and non-fictional contexts. In Parade’s End, White crops up in the first volume, Some Do Not. . .  as Christopher Tietjens spars with Valentine Wannop on their night-ride.

Gilbert-White

(Gilbert White)

‘He said:
“Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn’t it phalæna …”
She had answered:
“From White . . . The Natural History of Selborne is the only natural history I ever read….”
“He’s the last English writer that could write,” said Tietjens.
“He calls the downs ‘those majestic and amusing mountains,’” she said. “Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from? Phal … i … i … na! To rhyme with Dinah!”
“It’s ‘sublime and amusing mountains,’ not ‘majestic and amusing,’” Tietjens said. “I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public schoolboys of to-day, from the German.”’[2]

Later, in the third volume, A Man Could Stand Up—, Tietjens is in the trenches, where his Sergeant enthusiastically praises the skylark’s ‘Won’erful trust in yumanity! Won’erful hinstinck set in the fethered brest by the Halmighty!’

Tietjens says ‘mildly’ that he thinks the Sergeant has ‘got his natural history wrong. He must divide the males from the females. The females sat on the nest through obstinate attachment to their eggs; the males obstinately soared above the nests in order to pour out abuse at other male skylarks in the vicinity.’

‘“Gilbert White of Selbourne,” he said to the Sergeant, “called the behaviour of the female STORGE: a good word for it.” But, as for trust in humanity, the Sergeant might take it that larks never gave us a thought. We were part of the landscape and if what destroyed their nests whilst they sat on them was a bit of H[igh].E[xplosive]. shell or the coulter of a plough it was all one to them.’

The sergeant is highly sceptical of such sentiments:

‘“Ju ’eer what the orfcer said, Corporal,” the one said to the other. Wottever’ll ’e say next! Skylarks not trust ’uman beens in battles! Cor!”
The other grunted and, mournfully, the voices died out.’

Later in the same volume, Ford recurs to White in Valentine’s own reflections – Ford uses the image or allusion echoed in the thoughts of multiple characters to frequently brilliant effect:

‘Her mother was too cunning for them. With the cunning that makes the mother wild-duck tumble apparently broken-winged just under your feet to decoy you away from her little things. STORGE, Gilbert White calls it!’[3]

White-The-Wakes

(The Wakes, Gilbert White’s house:
http://gilbertwhiteshouse.org.uk/?venue=gilbert-whites-house)

In The Farther Shore: A Natural History of Perception, 1798-1984, a superb, rich study of how technological developments since the eighteenth century have affected the ways in which we interpret the world, Don Gifford wrote of how, for Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the ambition to be generally well read, that is, to have a reasonable grasp of all that was being published and made available, ‘was within reach’, and that a community of those sharing that distinction or at least that ambition was ‘at least imagined to be a given among educated men and women.’ His footnote mentions the assumption evident in Gilbert White’s letters that his correspondents shared his acquaintance with Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, Gray, Johnson, Hume, Gibbon, Sterne – as well as with the Bible, Virgil, Homer, Horace, the Koran, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. By the mid-80s (when he was writing this book), Gifford adds, ‘the idea of being well read and of belonging to such a community is a joke we have politely learned not to mention except with a shrug of self-deprecation.’

Of course, White’s acquaintance with Pope was not only with the man’s work: he was presented with a copy of Pope’s six-volume translation of the Iliad by the poet himself, when graduating with distinction from Oriel College, Oxford, in 1743.[4]

White’s fascinating and deceptively simple work has embedded itself in English culture in numerous contexts. His genius, as Ronald Blythe remarks, was ‘to revolutionise the study of natural history by noting what exactly lay outside his own back-door.’[5] In his first letter to the Honourable Daines Barrington in June 1769, White wrote, ‘I see you are a gentleman of great candour, and one that will make allowances; especially where the writer professes to be an out-door naturalist, one that takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others’ (Selborne 104). He produced hundreds of pages, records of looking and listening and remembering and wondering. Birds, plants, insects, weather, animals, not least the human. ‘My musical friend, at whose house I am now visiting, has tried all the owls that are his near neighbours with a pitch-pipe set at concert-pitch, and finds they all hoot in B flat. He will examine the nightingales next spring’ (Selborne 127).

White's_Selborne_1813_title_page

The local as the universal. A hundred and eighty years after White’s death, William Carlos Williams would note that the poet’s business was ‘to write particularly, as a physician works, upon a patient, in the particular to discover the universal.’ He quoted the line of John Dewey’s that he had come upon by chance, ‘The local is the only universal, upon that all else builds’, commenting elsewhere that, ‘in proportion as a man has bestirred himself to become awake to his own locality he will perceive more and more of what is disclosed and find himself in a position to make the necessary translations.’[6] Williams in Rutherford; Thoreau in Concord; White in Selborne.

Don Gifford points out that, ‘In effect, White’s perspective differs radically from our own because he had no a priori basis for distinguishing between trivial and significant things.’ So, in addition to seeing with his own eyes, White ‘had to see cumulatively, a second order of seeing’. He tells the story of Henry Thoreau reducing Ellery Channing to tears when the two men went out into the woods together: Channing knew so little about what to record that he returned with an empty notebook, desperate and frustrated.[7]

White’s journals were published in 1931 and, Alexandra Harris comments, ‘his work was tirelessly reissued over the next decade.’ But then, in addition to being valued for his ‘timeless qualities’, White was ‘also being used as someone relevant to the present time precisely because the world he knew was disappearing.’[8]

When we read those writers detailing the current decline or disappearance of so much British wildlife, through environmental damage, farming practices and government policies, the parallels hardly need stressing.

On the matter of White’s journals, let your fingers do the running, to this superb resource:
http://naturalhistoryofselborne.com/

House and garden, café and shop?
http://www.gilbertwhiteshouse.org.uk/

 

 
References

[1] Ford Madox Ford, Great Trade Route (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937), 184; Gilbert White, The Illustrated History of Selborne (London: Macmillan, 1984), 114, 133-134.

[2] Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not. . . (1924; edited by Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010), 163-164.

[3] Ford Madox Ford, A Man Could Stand Up— (1926; edited by Sara Haslam, Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), 63, 64, 65, 201.

[4] Don Gifford, The Farther Shore: A Natural History of Perception (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 158 and n., 5.

[5] Ronald Blythe, Aftermath: Selected Writings 1960-2010, edited by Peter Tolhurst (Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2010), 226.

[6] William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967), 391; Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1969), 28.

[7] Gifford, Farther Shore, 10, 11.

[8] Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson 2010), 171, 173.