Morning Read The Slippered Waves
¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 5 September 1748 is not only full of pithy adages — “Pleasing in company is the only way of being pleased in it yourself” — but adorned, if that is the word, with the finest, most choice misogyny, eloquently but concisely put. It is positively pattern:
As women are a considerable, or at least a pretty numerous part of company; and as their suffrages go a great way towards establishing a man’s character in the fashionable part of the world (which is of great importance to the forture and figure he proposes to make in it), it is necessary to please them. I will therefore, let you into certain Arcana, that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal; and never seem to know. Women, then, are only children of a larger growth…
When someone incredulous young person wants to know what the world was like when the word “people” implied a company of men only, one need only recommend Chesterfield’s momentary treatise.
¶ In Moby-Dick, There is a lovely paragraph in Melville’s quietly spooked chapter on the sighting of a great squid.
But one transparent morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the mainmast-head.
¶ Chapter XLV of Don Quixote ends with a fantastic tirade from Quixote himself, as he demands to be unhanded by officers seeking to arrest him for having “liberated” the galley slaves. It is cheeky of Cervantes to put this catalogue of privileged, aristocratical exemptions in the mouth of a lunatic.
Ah, vile rabble, your low and base intelligence does not deserve to have heaven communicate to you the great truth of knight errantry, or allow you to understand the sin and ignorance into which you have fallen you when you do not reverence the shadow, let alone the actual presence, of any knight errant. Come, you brotherhood of thieves, you highway robbers sanctioned by the Holy Brotherhood, come and tell me who was the fool who signed an arrest warrant against such a knight as I? Who was the dolt who did not know that knights errant are exempt from all jurisdictional authority, or was unaware that their law is their sword, their edicts their courage, their statutes their will? Who was the imbecile, I say, who did not know that there is no patent of nobility with as many privileges and immunities as those acquired by a knight errant on the day he is dubbed a knight and dedicates himself to the rigorous practice of chivalry? What knight errant ever paid a tax, a duty, a queen’s levy, a tribute, a tariff, or a toll? What tailor ever received payment from him for the clothes he sewed? What castellan welcomed him to his castle and then asked him to pay the cost? What king has not sat him at his table? What damsel has not loved him and given herself over to his will and desire? And, finally, what kight errant ever was, or will be in the world who doe snot have the courage to single-handedly deliver four hundred blows to four hundred brotherhoods if they presume to oppose him?
¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward goes to the movies, and then writes to Lornie about it.
I only spent one night in Hollywood but I utilized it by sitting in a projection room and seeing the film they have made of Bitter Sweet. No human tongue could ever describe what Mr Victor Saville, Miss Jeanette MacDonald and Mr Nelson Eddy have done to it between them. It is, on all counts, far and away the worst picture I have ever seen. MacDonald and Eddy sing relentlessly from beginning to end looking like a rawhide suit case and a rocking horse respectively. Sari never gets old or even middle aged. “Zigeuner” is a rip snorting production number with millions of Hungarian dancers. There is no Manon at all. Miss M elects to sing “Ladies of the Town” and both Manon’s songs, she also dances a Can-Can! There is a lot of delightful comedy and the dialogue is much improved, at one point, in old Vienna, she offers Carl a cocktail! Lord Shayne was wrong, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy are very definitely the worng age for Vienna. It is the vulgarest, dullest vilest muck up that I have ever seen in my life. It is in technicolour and Miss M’s hair gets redder and redder until you want to scream. Oh dear, money or no money, I wish we’d hung on to that veto.
¶ Even in the days of La Rochefoucauld (praised by Chesterfield in another important passage of today’s letter), it was true that you can’t get a job unless you already have a job.
Pour s’établir dans le monde, on fait tout ce que l’on peut pour y paraître établi.