Morning Read: Gamboge
¶ For some reason, the egotism of Lord Chesterfield’s ambitions for his son hits me like a slap in the letter of 29 October 1748.
My anxiety for your success increases in proportion as the time approaches of your taking your part upon the great stage of the world. The audience will form their opinion of you upon your first appearance (making the proper allowance for your inexperience), and so far it will be final, that, though it may vary as to the degrees, it will never totally change. This consideration excites that restless attention with which I am constantly examining how I can best contribute to the perfection of that character, in which the least spot or blemish would give me more real concern, than I am now capable of feeling on any other account whatsoever.
Something else is beginning to settle: Chesterfield’s schizophrenic view of “good company.” On the one hand, it is the final arbiter of mert. It is capable, for example, of “making the proper allowances for your inexperience.” On the other hand, it consists for the most part of very silly people.
Good company — how lost to time that is. Note that Chesterfield never uses the term “salon,” for the good reason that the term did not come into use (in the sense of a gathering of cultivated people) until the Nineteenth Century.
¶ In Moby-Dick, Stubb and Flask are sent out to kill a right whale, an inferior creature. As they paddle back to the Pequod, they engage in an unsufferably-starchy, woo-hoo chat about “that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah.” I haven’t an earthly.
“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil there [Fedallah, I think] is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”
¶ The infinitely more enjoyable Don Quixote pairs conversation in which Sancho and his master, respectively, are advised of the foolishness of their ambitions by doting females. A good deal of the humor lies in the transposition of the women’s voices: Teresa Panza speaks with the self-possession of a great lady, while Don Quixote’s niece is, not vulgar certainly, but slightly “hysterical.”
“Oh, woe is me,” said the niece, “my uncle’s a poet, too! He knows everything, he understands everything, and I’d wager that if he wanted to be a mason, he’d know how to build a house as well as a cage.”
“I promise you, my niece, responded Don Quixote, “that if these chivalric ideas did not carry with them all my thoughts, there would be nothing I should not make and no curiosity my hands would not create, especially cages and toothpicks.”
What I’m enjoying most about Don Quixote is discovering that, far from being the demented fool that I expected — far from being, in short, Sancho Panza — the hero is very stern. This makes him both funny and lovable — at the safe remove of a four-hundred year-old classic.
¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward is hauled into court for currency violations. On the advise of none other than George Bernard Shaw, he pleads Not Guilty and is lightly fined (relatively speaking). Barry Day tells us that Ivor Novello, in contrast, actually went to prison for using too much petrol. It would not have been out of place for the editor to do a little research on the figures behind this wartime persecution of homosexual entertainers.