Wednesday Morning Read
¶ In the Decameron (VI, vi), the ultimate nobility of a Florentine family is established by its ugliness: the ancestors were formed so long ago that God hadn’t yet mastered the art of fashioning human features.
If you don’t believe me, picture the Baronci to yourselves and compare them to other people; and you will see that whereas everybody else has a well-designed and correctly proportioned face, the Baronci sometimes have a face that is long and narrow, sometimes wide beyond all measure, some of them have very long noses, others have short ones, and there are one or two with chins that stick out and turn up at the end, and with enormous great jaws like those of an ass; moreover, some have one eye bigger than the other, whilst others have one eye lower than the other, so that taken by and large, their faces are just like the ones that are made by children when they are first learning to draw. Hence, as I’ve already said, it is quite obvious that the Lord God created them when he was still learning His craft. They are therefore older than anybody else, and so they are more noble.
This cheeky blend of insult, impudence, and blasphemy will probably strike sophisticated readers as very “Italian,” but it is really just Florentine, as is “Italian” – the language — itself.
¶ In the Aeneid, Evander exhorts Aeneas to wage war on the Rutulians, a leading Latian tribe whose leader, Turnus, objects to the Trojan sense of entitlement. Venus marks her approval with a thunderbolt, and then, as the forces marshal, she presents her son with the shield that Vulcan has wrought for him. We’ll get to that tomorrow.
¶ Brief Lives: Abbott, Allen, Alleyn, Andrewes, Archer. Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) was one of the captains of the Authorized Version project, but Aubrey doesn’t write about that. Instead, he tells us two stories. One concerns an alderman who would helplessly fall asleep during sermons. The aftermath is what’s remarkable. Andrewes actually got into hot water with the Puritan faction for advising this gentleman to take a nap before service (this worked). In the second story, as Bishop of Winchester, he presented one of his poorer parsons with a prebendary by serving the relevant documentation in a dish, as a dessert. Aubrey tells us that the poor vicar, who wondered what he’d done wrong, to be summoned by the bishop, had no idea what to expect. How sweet!
¶ The problem with Middle English, for a modern reader, is that the language seems clotted and thick — slow-witted, in short. But it’s just old-fashioned, that’s all. Read by a fluent speaker, the verse not only comes sharply alive but makes Modern English sound a bit otiose.
Flustered at first, now totally foxed
were the household and the lords, both the highborn and the low.
Still stirruped, the knight sweveled round in his saddle
looking left and right, his red eyes rolling
beneath the bristles of his bushy green brows,
his beard swishing from side to side.
When the court kept its counsel he cleared his throat
and stiffened his spine. Then he spoke his mind:
“So here is the House of Arthur,” he scoffed,
“whose virtues reverberate across vast realms.
Where’s the fortitude and fearlessness you’re so famous for?
And the breathtaking bravery and the big-mouth bragging?
The towering reputation of the Round Table,
skittled and scuppered by a stranger — what a scandal!
You flap and you flinch and I’ve not raised a finger!”If he hem stowned upon fyrst, stiller were thanne
Alle the heredmen in halle, the hygh and the lowe.
The renk on his rouncé hym ruched in his sadel,
And runischly his rede yyen he reled aboute,
Bende his bresed browes, blycande grene,
Wayved his berde for to wayte quo-so wolde ryse.
When non wolde kepe hym with carp he coghed ful hyghe,
And rimed hym ful richly, and ryght hym to speke:
“What, is this Arthures hous,” quth the hathel thenne,
“that al the rous rennes of thurgh ryalmes so mony?
Where is now your sourquydrye and your conquestes,
Your gryndellayk and your greme and your grete wordes?
Now is the revel and the renoun of the Rounde Table
Overwalt wyth a worde of on wyyes speche,
For al dares for drede withoute dynt schewed!”
¶ In Le rouge et le noir, Mathilde decides that she is in love with Julien, because he would be a Danton in a new revolution. Stendhal lets slip the extreme slightness of her perspective, not to mention the shakiness of her reasoning, as she draws conclusions from the behavior of her well-born admirers:
— Mais, reprit-elle tout à coup, l’oeil brillant de joie, l’amertume et la fréquence de leurs plaisanteries prouvent en dépit d’eux, que c’est l’homme le plus distingué que nous ayons vu cet hiver.
— But, she added quickly, her eye shining with joy, their bitterness and their jokes at his expense only prove, in spite of themselves, that they regard him as the most distinguished man of the season.
“… cet hiver”! Mathilde’s mixup of the heroic and fashionable will probably prove fatal for Julien.
¶ Clive James’s subject today is the Yugoslav writer, Dubravka Ugresic. I say “Yugoslav,” because Ms Ugresic, a Croatian herself, views the nationalist breakup of Tito’s state as, if not exactly a bad thing, then a far from unmixed blessing. James’s summary of her “voice” packs a wallop.
She comes from one of what Kundera memorably called the Kidnapped Countries, and she has given it its voice, which is the voice of a woman. The woman carries plastic bags full of the bad food and the thin supplies she has queued for by the hour while the men sit around in the square scratching their crotches and dreaming up the next war. In the course of their dimwitted conversations, the men refer to any given woman as a cunt. The twin functions of the cunt are to put dinner on the table and lie down when required. Most male readers will find this an uncomfortable prospect, as they are meant to. Multicultural ideologists, if there are any left, will find it even less comfortable than that. According to Ugresic, multiculturalism in rich countries abets ethnic cleansing in the poor ones.
The survival value, for the human species, of men who sit around in the squares &c is at this point strictly historical — vestigial, if you like. Instead of squares, they should be sitting around in museums, where they can only shoot at one another.