I’ve been working on something recently which I can now, at long and joyous last, announce… The Cultural Tutor’s Grand Tour: The Story of Europe in Six Cities.

It’s an original audio series I’ve made with Audible, a travel show with a slightly different angle on what it means to travel.

The whole history of a city can be discovered from its smallest details, details concealing stories that are unexpected, tragic, beautiful, and bizarre. And so it is these stories I’ve tried to gather, the ones you can discover just by wandering around a city’s streets and paying attention to the things we usually overlook. Clocks, football, architecture, love letters, lamp posts, coffee — these are also history, are also culture!

What will we encounter on The Cultural Tutor’s Grand Tour?

A cemetery built in the year 5845 (not a typo), the (surprisingly) thrilling history of the cappuccino, Istanbul’s most peculiar graffiti, the mystery of why there are ten days missing in your phone’s calendar, and the Dutch origins of the famous French tricolour. We’ll hear first-hand accounts of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and the Viking siege of Paris in 885 AD — both brought to life by the miracles of modern sound engineering — and we’ll meet the likes of Jo van Gogh (Vincent’s sister-in-law), Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and Erik Satie.

The stories are endless: FC Barcelona’s world-famous jersey was taken straight from a boys’ school in England; Naples had foreign exchange students coming all the way from China in the 18th century; our word ‘tomato’ comes straight from the Aztec word tomatl, because tomatoes came to Europe from the Americas — along with pineapples, chillis, and even potatoes!

If you’d like to listen, here’s the link; I do hope you enjoy it.

And now back to this week’s Areopagus, which comes to you as the second instalment of our Valentine’s Special: an essay on why we write about love, why we read about love, and whether it’s any good for us. There is also a ‘musical prelude’ to set the tone, both literally and figuratively.

I have tried something slightly different here. The approach, subject, and purpose are all atypical for the Areopagus. Whereas I normally try to prioritise clarity above all else, I have given this essay a more impressionistic and wide-ranging style. For example, as a rule I never mention anything in the Areopagus — a writer, an art movement, a technical term — without explaining its full context. With this essay, however, I have let myself make certain references without explaining them fully. But I have only done this because, so far as I could tell (and I hope I’m not wrong) it suited the subject better to write this way.

With all that being said, and without further ado, I present Books versus Love.

Subscribe now

Prelude: Classical Music

Piano Concerto No. 5, II: Adagio un poco mosso

Ludwig van Beethoven (1811)

Performed by Friedrich Gulda and the Berlin Philharmoniker

Flower Clouds by Gustave Moreau (1903)

For a musical prelude I had no choice but to select the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Its name is simply the tempo at which the piece is supposed to be played: Adagio un poco mosso means “Slowly, but with a little bit of movement.” The first movement is Allegro, meaning “Quickly”, and the third movement is Allegro ma non troppo, meaning “Quickly, but not too much”.

A concerto is any piece where you have a single soloist accompanied by an orchestra; the soloist could be playing a cello, violin, or (as in this case) piano. Whereas the other movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto feature more prominent strings and winds, the second movement uses them very subtly and gently, almost minimalistically, to enhance the piano rather than battle with it. And so, although standalone it is sumptuous, heard in the context of the full concerto — between the far more dramatic and energetic first and third movements — Adagio un poco mosso is even more beautiful, like a lovely flower blossoming impossibly among the rocks of a wild mountainscape.

Beethoven was a master of ‘absolute music’, which is music without any externally attached meaning or context. The alternative is ‘programme music’, where a piece is given a title or even accompanying text to explain its themes and ideas. Think of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which is inspired by the Napoleonic Wars.

But that doesn’t mean ‘absolute music’ isn’t about anything, of course. Because, even if individual notes don’t have any intrinsic meaning, they nonetheless make us feel a certain way. Adagio un poco mosso is not “about” love any more than clouds at sunset are “about” love; and yet the music is, just like those clouds, charged with the most meltingly romantic atmosphere we could imagine. And so, liberated from any particular meaning imposed on it by a specific title or theme, we are free to let this heavenly music guide our imaginations and hearts without the burden of context.

Books versus Love

Or: Bones & Bile contrasted with the Written Word,
and the Right Offices of Science and Art, so-called, Compared

George Orwell once wrote an essay called Books versus Cigarettes. In it he compared the relative cost of both and lamented that his compatriots spent their money on the former when they could have been getting much of the latter for less the price. These days his argument doesn’t quite hold true, but there are many other things to which we might compare books: boozing, football, socialising, soaps, dancing, gardening, daydreaming, sleeping, podcasts, or video games. Most often in the 21^st century we compare books with the Internet, or various parts of it, especially social media. By making these comparisons we mean to say that books are a better use of time than, say, doomscrolling Instagram or flicking through a few dozen YouTube reels. Consider the results of this poll, released last year. It caused quite a stir, precisely because our general belief is that people should spend more time reading rather than doing whatever else they happened to be doing instead:

Books are always flattered by such comparisons. That is why we make them; the purpose is to encourage reading. Alas, there is another comparison we must draw, and one that — troublingly — does not flatter books but cautions us against them.

Where to begin? I confess that, at one moment or another of late, I was thinking of nothing other than all the books I could have been — and, felt, should have been — reading. I have barely paid Charles Dickens any attention, for example. When, if not now, will I finally find the time to read him? But what of all the books I have read that demand rereading? Dante is never far from my mind. Do I really understand anything about his Divine Comedy? And how many times, after all, can one read Shakespeare? An infinitude, for he is always far ahead, waiting for us to catch up. And what of reading books in their original tongue? I speak a little Latin and less Greek, as they say — time to correct this fault? It would only take a few months of a few hours’ concerted study each day to do so. But then we also have Italian, Arabic, and Chinese, and so many other languages, dead or living, that I would benefit from learning.

This feeling follows me around and sits on my back. A horrible fogginess that distracts me from wherever I am by thoughts of what else I could be doing. Nothing unusual; we all bear, hour by hour, phantasms of elsewherity. But the curious thing about distraction-by-books is that it usually relates to the very thing we are (or should be) doing at the very moment of our distraction. If books teach us about life, surely there comes a point at which we must live rather than read. Else why read at all?

True, I have tried to read a lot; my friends tell me that I am “well read”. But by any historical standard I am woefully underread. The sheer erudition of somebody like Francis Bacon (for example) is startling: his works, like those of so many others I have quoted in these newsletters, Montaigne or Erasmus or Browne, are patterned with a shockingly broad array of references to and quotations from other writers. What it means to be well-read now (like what it means to be a heavy smoker!) is not what it meant one, two, three, or four centuries ago.

So: these thoughts and more besides (again, mainly drawing up mental lists of all the books I haven’t read) were running through my mind. Bad enough in any case; worst of all because I was having these book-thoughts while in the company of somebody I love, and who loves me, and to whom I should have been giving all my attention.

What was the point of all these books I had read if, in the midst of life itself, I was unable to live it?

In The Eagle’s Nest — a book I find myself returning to, again and again, almost against my will, as one of the broadest and wisest little things ever written — John Ruskin points out that we would rather meet Theseus himself (the mythical founder of Athens) than see his famous statue, carved by Phidias and placed on the Parthenon, though now in the British Museum. His argument was about the relationship between art and life; Ruskin argued that art must always, by definition, be secondary and inferior to life itself, saying:

You shall never love art unless you learn to love the thing it represents better.

Of all possible authorities on this matter he gives William Shakespeare, speaking through the character of Theseus (hence his comparison) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Theseus’ bride has commented on the shoddiness of a play performed in celebration of their marriage; he responds:

The best, in this kind, are but shadows.

The best of art is only ever a shadow of life, is always in reference to life — and can therefore only be understood inasmuch as we know life, or can only be of value inasmuch as it teaches us about life, or helps us to see it more clearly.

I wonder why Ruskin didn’t also use the example of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. At its culmination (read no further to avoid a spoiler) King Leontes is shown a statue of his long-dead wife, Hermione. All present remark on its supremest quality; Leontes most:

Still, methinks,
There is an air comes from her: what fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
For I will kiss her.

This statue is Hermione herself, thought dead but actually living. The obvious, necessary question: would Leontes rather have a perfectly lifelike statue of his wife, or his living wife? We may take her statue, in asking this question, as a symbol of all art, while the real Hermione is a symbol of that which art refers to, life itself. There is surely only one answer: the real Hermione. To give any other answer is a repudiation of living. And so, this being the case — that life is always preferable — why read at all?

To unpluck that thorn we must first seek out another: why would anybody ever write about love — the intensest kind of life — in the first place? The truth is plain enough. As Lord Byron says in Don Juan, so perfectly and troublingly:

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?

He is talking of Petrarch, the poet and scholar of the 14^th century whose legendary sonnets (the basic model on which all subsequent, in Italy and elsewhere, would be based) were written in the shadow of Laura. Some have argued was not real, that she was only ever an emblem of love, an imagined object of Petrarch’s affections supposed to hold the same place in his heart and mind as Beatrice did in Dante’s. Perhaps. But even in this imagined circumstance he did not have her. Alternatively, even if we accept that she was real, this is also true. In reality or fiction, Petrarch was never united with his great love.

To me it seems a lack of love is all that has ever driven writers to write of love; a lack, or at least some form disunity, for whomsoever wrote of love perfected? We know why all these love books have been written. The opening sonnet of Sir Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti goes:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”
“Not so,” (quod I) “let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

All literature of love is an attempt by the writer to deal with struggle or strife; there is no other possible reason to write of love, because love lived is in itself perfect. Spenser, scared not of his own death but of the death and ultimate erasure of his passion, wants to immortalise it in verse. That is why he has written; we are serving him by rereading his love poetry, giving continued life (as he hoped) to his mortal passion, so long as we pay it precious attention. Would we have been better reading that, then, or better living our own passion, or even striving to preserve our own against time?

Spenser was not alone; Shakespeare in his nineteenth sonnet reveals at last why he has bothered writing them at all:

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Time diminishes all things material, even beauty; but against Time humankind has invented a sort of antidote, in pigment, stone, or word, called Art.

Sir Philip Sidney, writing his own sonnet sequence within a decade of Spenser and Shakespeare, explains his purpose, more honest and less grand, in the very first:

Loving in truth, and feign in verse my love to show,
That she, dear She, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stay;
Invention, Natures child, fled step-dame Studies blows;
And others feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throws,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

Sidney differs from Shakespeare and Spenser; he does not yet admit of seeking to immortalise his love in verse, but wishes instead to win his love’s love (in the first place) by writing some.

In every case, thus far, Byron seems to have been right. Each of our poets has written of love because there was something they lacked or at least were forced to reconcile: their lover was dead, or did not love them, or they feared that inevitably onsetting Time threatened to bury their passions forever.

And why else did Dante write? His whole journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven seems to have been a quasi-blasphemous, visionary apology for his apocalyptic love, redrawing the lines of Christian faith so that his love for Beatrice could fall within them. But, in cases both of Dante and Petrarch, and of Sidney and Spenser and Shakespeare, do you really believe they would have rather written their poetry and not had their loves, or had their Beatrice and Laura and not written at all? It would be a terrible thing, were the first proposition true, and would mean that everything they ever wrote between them was fraudulent.

Another way of asking this is: would you rather watch an adventure unfold on screen, or be part of an adventure? Perhaps life is, must always be, a disappointment, a falling-short. If this is true then love literature — all “Love Art” — ever aims at bridging this gap between what we hope or suspect is possible and what we know to be experientially available. Ah, but we are tempted by it! I can only call it “the Unbridgeable” — that feeling, known to all who have felt it, of a strange inconsolable sense of separation from what was and what is, the tremulous pain of a moment passed and unrecoverable.

Byron also said, incorrectly but revealingly:

In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love.

And I think that explains half the things he ever wrote!

This sense of Not-Having, this Neverhaving — a philosopher or somesuch will have coined a better neologism; for now, not having read them, I settle for my own awkward compound — is the substance of almost all Love Art.

A mere shadow, empty and eternally unsatisfactory, though alluring because of how closely the illusion matches the hoped-for and desired ends. A sort of coward’s way out for those unwilling to risk the catastrophic defeats that real love necessarily entails. Easier to read of Orlando’s fury, and thereby deludedly think we know something of love, though it be but a shadow’s shadow, than let ourselves fall hopelessly and absolutely in love, only to be spurned in the end and find our world crashing down about us. We choose the cheapest of shortcuts, trifling like Faustus with our soul to secure the meagrest of pleasures, for fear that the higher and real delight — from which the shadow is cast — will turn out too far past our grasp.

A perfectly happy person would never write, or even read, anything. Happiness is surely (and by definition) unified and thus stable, indivisible and imperfectible; the act of writing (or reading) is one of creation, of an extending outwards or an absorption, and can therefore only be carried out by a disunited, dividual, perfectible being.

The only possible alternative is what we call “devotional” literature: a type of work usually religious, always overflowing with joy. Perhaps, creatures as we find ourselves, the human uncontrollably spills over into rapture precisely when unity is achieved — when Love is perfected. Of this sort, of Devotional Love Art, I turn to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the imperturbable rejoinder to Byronism. She had her love, and wrote nonetheless:

We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue onward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes, there
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea.
But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

There is no chord of lament here; she is not ill-at-ease with Time’s erasure, not seeking to woo or court. There is none of Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Sidney.

The final of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets is a renouncement of his Love, a kind of Shakespeare-in-Prospero last bow:

Leave, me, O love which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things.
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedomes be;
Which breakes the clouds, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And thinke how evill becommeth him to slide,
Who seeketh heav’n, and comes of heav’nly breath.
Then farewell world; thy uttermost I see:
Eternall Lov, maintaine thy life in me.

Sir Philip switches, after a hundred sonnet’s worth of suffering, from what he elsewhere calls mere “desire” to something he considers higher. It is a leap from the romantic to the devotional — and he promptly ceases to write his love poems!

As Marlowe says in Hero and Leander, another tale itself of people who loved rather than writing about love:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-rul’d by fate.

This is true, but it does lie within our power to respond when our will to love or hate has been overruled. Shall we accept this love and plunge into it, or shall we flee, frightened?

We become twisted around one another so strangely in love, and it terrifies us. You can always tell when somebody has never been in love, has fled with fright from the apparition of the abyss. There is a caution in them, a distance. And of those who have been spurned? Even the purest love can be translated by hope into hatred. The deepest hatred always springs from an inability to reconcile oneself with failure in love.

But there is a part of us that would rather see the statue of Theseus than meet the king himself, a part of Leontes that would prefer to have a lifelike sculpture of Hermione that he might weep over instead of his beloved wife returned. We are frightened that, having the thing so anticipated, it will not meet our expectations. Neverhaving is itself a kind of permanence, defined perhaps by perpetual turmoil, but constantly satisfying to us because we can spend a lifetime struggling with it. This darker element draws us in; we want to be in that state of disharmony represented so exquisitely by Petrarch, Byron, and Spenser’s ilk — it is in some sense comforting, in some way sustaining, to indulge in the acute awareness of not being able to have something. There is, we may say, a certain rapture in falling.

After all, in our most beloved romantic stories we do not find the lovers ever writing of their romance; they are, always, living it. And there is always a struggle, always a Neverhaving. Though many tales of romance do conclude in perfect union, that is where the story ends. For what else is there to say? “And they lived happily ever after” is a sentence; it cannot be a book or play.

To speak something is to kill it, in a way; it is, necessarily, a crystallisation of something fluid and formless, plastic and evoluble, joyous and mysterious in its dreamlike essence, into something hard and real, unsatisfying if improperly cast, and like marble impossible to reshape if flawed, only destructible, capable only of being left behind as a failed vision, an unfulfilled project.

This awful tension I have rarely found more magnificently expressed than in the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva:

Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.

The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.

But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.

Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.

Her composure is startling as she walks a tightrope, glancing upwards, downwards, backwards, forwards, across the landscape of her life and the skyscape of what her life might have been or might yet be. She explores that dark, enchanting dichotomy between Neverhaving and Having to its utmost. I let Tsvetaeva be the last word here.

We have ranged widely, must now collect our thoughts. The question that remains is whether reading (or writing) can ever be an end in itself, as love is an end. Though I adore Montaigne, I wonder what his life was like, and at what points precisely he ever lived. Above all I am bothered by the idea that Montaigne, when at dinner or with his children, or riding about his estate or reluctantly visiting the city, did nothing other than think about how he would describe these experiences. Was he always paying attention to the thoughts provoked in his mind by his surroundings, and pursuing those new lines of thought, rather than actually living in and engaging with those surroundings? Montaigne himself commented on this, I am sure, though I cannot remember in which essay and cannot place my hand on the quote. But, certainly, in one fashion or another, and probably several times, he will have made this observation.

Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Arthur Schopenhauer (among numberless others; these are but the ones I recall most vividly) have written of the danger of reading too much. Or, in William Hazlitt’s words:

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him or in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

Are books a pathway to something higher, then, or a mere escape, or less than that a way of consoling ourselves, or even less than that a substitute for true knowledge?

Humankind has been in a permanent, irreversible, and rapturous state of psychosis — though sometimes faltering, or fragile — ever since we invented (or discovered?!) language. It opened up a whole new way of being, like falling into an abyss, of increasing velocity and perpetually accumulating returns. This explains our constant embracing of carnal pleasures, or even carnal sufferings. Of the lowest order they are food and drugs, then sleep, because these are fundamentally non-linguistic, predating language, not requiring it. Then, most obsessively of all, most pleasurable and tormenting, most addictive and demanding, are violence and (to respect the taboo it perhaps ought to be?) ‘amorous congress’. No words needed here. They are bloody, animalistic, and vital — they are atavistic.

So the question is: whither humankind? We have been mangled permanently by language; such is the pessimistic view. We have been offered enlightenment, liberation, and bliss by language; such is the optimistic view. What is language? It matters not. What does it do? That is the question — because it does not seem to add anything to us. Only, it has allowed us to perceive ourselves more clearly and thoroughly, to look inwards and find what was already there, only invisible, finally revealed.

Of love I am unsure, for love may have emerged when language was invented or discovered. It is not really carnal, though parts of can sometimes be, and is only partly atavistic; dually attached is a higher and profounder grace, an all-consuming fire, in which we can choose to burn up or flee from into the darker, more comforting recesses of mere earthly delight.

In the end, I think, there is some worth in books. John Ruskin also said that the only possible purpose of art (of any good art) is either to give form to truth or grace to utility. Art, giving form to the truths of love, helps us make clearer sense of what we feel but cannot quite understand. It is (like Beatrice to Dante!) a guide, a lantern in the distance to direct us, but never a replacement for life itself, which is the thing to which we are being directed by Art.

Let me put all of that another way. What does science tell us about humankind? Lots. From a skeleton, even from a single bone, we can retell half the story of a whole life: of what they ate, where they lived, what diseases burdened them, what food nourished them. These are the miracles of chemistry, biology, and the other physical sciences. With the brightest minds and most perceptive technologies we can discover multitudes from a grain of human matter.

But what no bone can ever tell us, not even fragmentally, is how the human being who once possessed it felt. We could speculate that a certain person having had a certain disease or grisly wound meant they suffered much, and was thus unhappy. But this is childish. Day to day I find no correlation between a person’s happiness and any of their outward characteristics, be they of health or wealth or anything else. Emotion and circumstance are separated spheres. And least of all a bone tells us about love; science reaches its limits.

What a person wrote, however, can tell us what they believed or felt. So that is the right role of art, then — it is the science of emotion and imagination, which are no less part of our nature than bones and bile, may even be the highest elements. Consider it a spectrum, ranging from the basic facts of chemistry through to one’s belief or lack thereof in god; science, through to literature, are the means by which we measure and understand any given thing about a human being.

Love Art either consoles or guides us; consoles us against Neverhaving, or guides us toward what we know lies within us — that perfect union of having — and urges us bravely to seek it. But there the offices of Love Art stop short; at some point we must Love, or risk Loving, rather than reading or writing about it. Leontes rightly said that no fine chisel could ever cut breath; no Love Art could ever replace Love.

I return to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and what I think are four (three and a half, really) of the best lines ever written of Love, or ever that could be written:

…when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life, Love.

Browning could not have written those lines had she not loved first and written later. Writing was an aid to her ability to see and understand inwardly the magnitude of her love. Perhaps, having written once or twice, and read more often, she was able to love better. I hope so, but do not know. All we can be certain of is that she had rather felt the love she expressed than expressed it.

And here Browning pushes up against the limits of what can actually be said. We remember that Sidney stopped writing his sonnets when he chose devotion over desire; Browning could not have gone much further. All who have loved, or at least loved truly, are familiar with the event horizon that, once passed, turns all our words into irony.

Giving form to truth is the oldest and only service of Art; some truths, however, must remain forever formless — and, given form, necessarily die. It could not be any other way. For if this feeling — this way of being, really — could be described, then what a pathetic outcome for all our hopes and fears! If love is boundless, is somehow universalising and sublime, then it must necessarily be indescribable.

Reading about love can be good for us, but one day we must be put down our books and be brave enough to love, hoping only that those books will have helped us work up the courage to do it.

And that’s all

If reading about love is difficult to justify, then reading about reading about it hardly stands a chance! Nonetheless I hope you’ll think this has been justified, my Beloved Readers. A more typical Areopagus (featuring its seven short lessons) will be returning to your inboxes within the next fortnight. Until then — exeunt!

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor

Subscribe now

Share Areopagus

What awaits? Azerbaijani opera, life in Medieval Norfolk (told by the people who lived it), a painting that resides on the fault-line between two epochs (plus a little Montaigne), and the world’s most charming hospital. Through each of these we will investigate different kinds of love: Mystical, Familial, Educational, and Charitable.

After those first four sections on Music, Historical Figures, Painting, and Architecture, I have replaced this instalment’s final three sections (usually Rhetoric, Writing, and the Seventh Plinth) with an essay about love. Specifically: the question of why we love reading about love, and whether this is useful or even good for us. Chaucer once said so, six hundred years ago, but was he right?

For out of olde fields, as men sayeth,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
And out of olde books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men learn.

All that, at least, was my plan. But upon completion I realised this was the longest Areopagus I had ever written. So I have decided to send it in two parts: the first this week; the second next week. That should give you, my Beloved Readers, fair time to read and absorb what has been written, should you so choose to read it. In which case all that remains to be said is: Part One of your Valentine’s Special starts now…

Subscribe now

I - Classical Music

Overture, Chorus, and Duet from Layla and Majnun

Uzeyir Hajibeyov (1908)

Performed by the Choir and Orchestra of the Azerbaijan State Opera

14th century illustration from Amir Khusrow’s version of Layla and Majnun

In the 7th century, in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, two children fell in love. Their names were Qays and Layla. But, when they had grown up and Qays wanted to marry Layla, her father refused. Qays’ passion did not dim; their enforced separation only intensified his devotion to and longing for Layla. So magnitudinous was his love — a love that inspired him to endless song — that his brethren named him Majnun, meaning “The Possessed”. Qays’ father took him on pilgrimage to Mecca, where he was urged to pray to God for an end to his obsession; Qays prayed instead for his love to grow more intense. But he was never united with Layla and they died apart.

These are the basic facts of a story, truthful or not, that has become what Lord Byron called ‘the Romeo and Juliet of the East’; a legend with the central themes of lifelong yearning and the impossibility of perfect union in a material world.

It was a tale that spread from Arabia throughout the wider Middle East and beyond: to North Africa, Turkey, Iran, India, and Central Asia. Each new generation, each new culture, crafted their own version of the story: the Persian poet Nizami created the most famous and ‘canonical’ in the 12th century, followed by the likes of Amir Khusrow (in India, during the 13th century), Jami (in Afghanistan, during the 15th century), and Hatefi (in Iran, during the early 16th century) each with different interpretations, distilling and elaborating into hundreds of different, equally-valid retellings the legend of Layla and Majnun.

In the middle of the 16th century another version was composed by the Azerbaijani poet Fuzuli, who was born and lived in Baghdad. This was a city caught in the political and cultural cross-winds; Fuzuli himself was trilingual and also wrote poetry in Persian and Arabic. Baghdad, over the course of his life, was ruled successively by the Aq Qoyunlu, then the Safavids, and finally (marked in 1534 by the arrival in Baghdad of Suleiman the Magnificent himself!) the Ottoman Empire. But Fuzuli never quite established a position of artistic security and found himself appealing to one ruler and then another for support, lamenting in his own work the long-lost, golden age of artistic patronage that had been enjoyed by Nizami and poets of his era.

And so, during the early years of Ottoman rule, trying to find a place under the new regime, Fuzuli wrote his own version of the legend of Layla and Majnun, reducing its scope and purifying its themes in pursuit of a more mystical retelling. He drew from both Hatefi and Nizami, selecting from each what they had done best, and focussed more on stripping away what was unnecessary — a great many additional scenes which were, although dramatic, not essential to the legend’s deepest purposes — rather than adding his own material. It was Divine Love discovered through Earthly Love, not Earthly Love itself, that fascinated Fuzuli; he explains in his preface:

O Thou, the intoxication of whose beauty reacteth on love; Thou who constructed with love the building of the Created; Thou who twisteth in curls the locks of Layla; Thou who putteth the chain around Majnun’s neck!

If I while searching for Reality set out along the way of the metaphor, if with the pretext of fable I expose the mystery, if I undertake to describe Thee through Layla, if I beg by the mouth of Majnun, kindly transform the night of my hope into day, make my fortune shine, and grant me success.

His became the definitive retelling throughout Ottoman lands. And so, three hundred years later, in 1908, when a twenty-one year old polymathic composer called Uzeyir Hajibeyov (he also taught and wrote on mathematics, history, geography, and linguistics) decided to write an opera about Layla and Majnun, it was Fuzuli’s poem that he took for his lyrics and plot. Hajibeyov was (like Fuzuli) an Azerbaijani, and what he wrote was the first ever Islamic opera.

Thus he introduced for the first time into broadly western musical formulas the sounds, motifs, and ideas both of his native Azerbaijan — in particular the mugham, a form of traditional Azerbaijani song — and the broader mixture of Islamic, Turkish, and Persian culture in which Layla and Majnun was grounded. Like the Baku Opera House itself (where the opera debuted) it is, and authentically, a stylistic and thematic fusion between West and East.

I should also mention that Hajibeyov wrote the Azerbaijani national anthem; his music generally, and Layla and Majnun specifically, are among the nation’s great cultural treasures.

What I have included here are the Overture, an opening chorus set during Layla and Majnun’s schooldays, and a later duet. Across these three excerpts you can hear both the range of Hajibeyov’s opera — the western operatic form; the eastern musical language — and the intoxicating, sorrowful majesty of its story. Listening to this music we are listening to the end-point of a dozen different interpretations of the same legend, interpretations made both centuries and thousands of miles apart, combined together in a process, not of dilution, but of enrichment and intensification.

The original Arabian legend, the poetic splendours of Nizami, Hatefi, and Fuzuli, and the musical genius of Hajibeyov, plus all the centuries of religious and cultural context: they meet here, in this music, telling the tale of a love, like Dante’s in his Divine Comedy, that married mortal with eternal, immaterial with material, into transcendent love. As Fuzuli writes in the closing stanzas of Layla and Majnun:

That day that saw the end of my desire,
That tempted me thus feebly to aspire
To join with Layla Majnun’s mighty name
In magic verses, that the world might claim
A masterpiece of love made manifest
In showing still these lovers, nobly blessed,
Saw love at last, as constant as the sun,
In life though parted, dead they ruled as ONE.

All translations from Fuzuli by Sofi Huri.

II - Historical Figure(s!)

The Pastons

In 1774 a man called John Fenn bought some old documents that had (via three other collectors) originally come from the estate of the 2nd Earl of Yarmouth; he was called William Paston and he had died childless in 1735, the last of his family line.

John Fenn struck gold: these documents, carefully preserved for three centuries, contained hundreds of letters that had been written by William Paston’s ancestors during the 15th century. In 1787 he published them and brought what we now call the ‘Paston Letters’ to the world: the most complete contemporary account of life in the Late Middle Ages.

These were ordinary letters — the Late Medieval equivalent of our texts, messages, calls, and emails — never supposed to be read by anybody but the recipient, and certainly never intended for publication. What they provide is a totally honest and unvarnished window into the 15th century; a sprawling mass of melodramas and mundanities, described and dealt with first-hand by five generations of the same Norfolk family, uncorrupted by the opinions or agendas of historians and censors.

The Pastons were originally peasant farmers, but rose from obscurity to regional prominence, and their letters track this rise, providing a kind of narrative arc that knits them together. The earliest letters date to the 1420s; by the end of the century members of the Paston Family had served in Parliament and the Royal Household, had fought in wars abroad and been to University. There were troubles along the way — imprisonment, death, impoverishment, and war — and all the bickering you’d expect from any family, alongside everything else from love letters to shopping lists.

And the Pastons were writing these letters to one another during a famous and crucial period in English history: the Wars of the Roses, no less! And so we can experience those wild and troubling times from the perspective of people actually living through and having to deal with them.

Their language itself is also interesting: English had reached a new maturity after coming out from under the shadow of French and Latin, as embodied in the great poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who had only died in 1400 and whose work was known to the Pastons; then the printing press arrived in England in the 1470s, forever changing how the language was spelt and used, but crystallising many of its features and taking as its basis the English of the 15th century. So these letters were written at a vital midpoint when the foundations of the language we still use were being laid; hence we can understand them:

Ryght trusty and welbelovyd cosyn, I comaund me to yow. And please yow to wete [‘wete’ or ‘weet’ means know] that I am avertysed that at a dyner in Norwiche, wher as ye and othyr jentylmen wer present, that that ther were certeyn personez, jentylmen, whiche utteryd skornefull language of me.

Readable with careful attention and a glossary of Middle English, but less straightforwardly readable than it actually was at the time. So all further quotes come from an elegant modernisation of the Paston Letters by Norman Davis; not wholly modernised, but to the extent that we can read them with the ease these letters were supposed to have, while retaining the colour and texture of 15th century English.

Enough introductory caveating from me; time to hear from the Pastons themselves! And, to help you follow who’s who, I have made this simplified family tree:

Rather than giving you a condensed chronological history of the family through their letters, I offer a selection of what is most interesting, revealing, funny, surprising, shocking, and wonderful, hoping that you will get to know these Pastons along the way.

What sort of things did they write about? Here John II complains about the weather:

I also mislike somewhat the air here.

And John III tells his mother to be mindful of catching a cold:

And, mother, at the reverence of God, beware that ye be so purveyed for that ye take no cold by the way towards Norwich, for it is the most perilous March that ever was seen by any man’s days that now liveth.

You can already see that, nearly six hundred years later, some things never change. As John III also wrote to his mother:

I have much more to write, but mine empty head will not let me remember it.

Moments like these remind us that the Paston Letters were not, like most things we ever read, intended for publication. There are endless errors, both of fact and spelling, and the senders frequently stop short of providing the descriptions historians would have laboured over. When John III was spending time in Flanders, for example, he cuts off his explanation of the wedding festivities he has been attending and promises to finish them in person:

And as for the Duke’s court, as of lords, ladies, and gentlewomen, knights, squires, and gentlemen, I heard never of none like it save King Arthur’s court. But my troth, I have no wit nor remembrance to write to you half the worship that is here; but that lacketh, as it cometh to mind I shall tell you when I come home.

Meanwhile Margaret sends to her sons a letter — they are in London — containing words that every parent in the world has said to or sent their children:

And for God’s love let your brother and ye beware how that ye walken, and with what fellowship ye eaten or drinken and in what place.

And consider Margaret writing to John II, urging him to send a letter to his grandmother, who hasn’t heard from him in a long time:

Your grandam would fain hear some tidings from you. It were well do that ye went a latter to her how ye do, as hastily as ye may. And God have you in his keeping, and make you a good man, and give you grace to do as well as I would ye should do.

Throughout the letters Margaret repeatedly chides her husband for not writing more often:

I marvel much that ye send me no more tidings than ye have sent.

And again, though in her characteristically touching way:

I pray you heartily that ye will send me word how ye done and how ye speed in your matters, for by my troth I cannot been well at ease in my heart, nor not shall been, till I hear tidings how ye don.

Or writing to say how sad she is that he won’t be back for Christmas:

I am sorry that ye shall not at home be for Christmas. I pray you that ye will come as soon as ye may; I shall think myself half a widow because ye shall not be at home. God have you in his keeping. Written on Christmas Eve.

The relationship between John I and Margaret is probably the most important in these documents, and although most of their surviving letters are one way (from Margaret to John) we can discern their respective personalities, and the development of their marriage, as the Pastons rise to status and wealth.

But, going back to where it all began (and this is much the beauty of the Paston Letters; we come to know a real family over the course of five generations!) we have a beautifully simple account from Agnes, writing to William, of their son’s marriage in 1440; ‘the gentlewoman’ is, of course, Margaret:

I send you good tidings of the coming and the bringing home of the gentlewoman that ye weeten of from Reedham this same night, according to pointment that ye made therefore yourself. And as for the first acquaintance between John and the said gentlewoman, she made him gentle cheer in gentle wise, and said he was verily your son.

A year later, in 1441, Margaret sends this letter to John, with an extraordinary and genuine tenderness; he is away on business, as became the norm in their marriage:

I pray that ye will wear the ring with the image of Saint Margaret that I sent you for a remembrance till ye come home. Ye have left me such a remembrance that maketh me to think upon you both day and night when I would sleep.

And, a little later, we find this request from Margaret to buy her gems for a necklace. It seems John I was rather careful with his money; might we call him stingy? This is also a fabulous example of how we can extrapolate from a handful of hastily written lines whole episodes from the lives of the Pastons:

I pray you that ye will do your cost on me against Whitsuntide, that I may have something for my neck. When the Queen was here I borrowed my cousin Elisabeth Clere’s device, for I durst not for shame go with my beads among so many fresh gentlewomen as here were at that time.

John’s letters to Margaret are different. They almost exclusively concern affairs of business and state: his properties, his servants, his goods, and everything that needs to be done. While he was imprisoned (it happened thrice!) he sent her a lengthy list of tasks to be carried out and problems to solve, ending with this not-so-tender demand:

Item: that I have an answer of all my letters, and every article in them.

What this does reveal (other than John I’s curt, businessmanlike, ambitious nature) is that the role of certain women was more prominent than we might expect in the Middle Ages. Whenever John I was away (which was most of the time) Margaret was in charge of their houses, businesses, estates, and servants. Although John holds the centre in purely narrative terms, it is the character of Margeret that looms largest, that glues together the whole family across its generations and tribulations.

So the Paston Letters portray a world both amazingly familiar and amazingly unfamiliar. In the same letter that Margaret sends her husband a shopping list:

I pray you that ye will vouchsafe to don buy for me 1 lb. of almonds and 1 lb. of sugar, and that ye will do buyen some frieze to maken of your childer’s gowns.

She also sends a very different kind of list:

Right worshipful Husband, I recommend me to you, and pray you get some crossbows, and windases to bend them with, and quarrel… also I would ye should get two or three short poleaxes to keep with doors, and as many jacks, an ye may.

Not only almonds and sugar for cooking, but also crossbows and poleaxes for the defence of one’s house! So, although these people and their opinions, emotions, and relationships have hardly aged at all, they clearly did live in different times.

Consider what importance is placed upon books; they are cheap now, but in the 1460s — before the printing press had arrived! — they were incredibly precious objects. Here John III writes to his elder brother; the “he” in question is the Earl of Arran:

He is lodged at the George in Lombard Street. He hath a book of my sister Anne’s on the Siege of Thebes. When he hath done with it he promised to deliver it you. I pray you let Portland bring the book him with him.

Similarly, many letters conclude with a request to burn them. As when Elisabeth Clere, a cousin of John I, finishes one with these words:

Cousin, I pray you burn this letter, that your men ne none other man may see it; for an my cousin your mother knew that I had sent you this letter she should never love me.

Just as modern messages can be screenshotted and shared, in times gone by letters could be shown around or even copied and circulated.

And, lest we forget, there was no Post Office in the Middle Ages! Letters enclosed by personalised wax seals were sent with friends, servants, or anybody travelling toward the place you wanted to send it. Hence John III explains to his father:

…beseeching you to have me excused that ye had no writing from me since that I departed from you, for so God me help I sent you a latter to London anon after Candlemas by a man of my lord’s, and he forgat to deliver it to you and so he brought to me the letter again, and since that time I could get no messenger till now.

Given the likelihood of letters being lost or remaining undelivered, it was important to be clear about what letters had been received; the Medieval equivalent of our modern checkmarks next to messages as proof of delivery and receipt. Margaret confirms as such to her husband, even mentioning who brought them to her:

Please it you to weet that I received your letter that ye sent me by John Holme on Wednesday last past, and also I received another letter on Friday at night that ye sent me by Nicholas Newman’s man.

The letters are often dominated by reports of what other people have been saying, and these conversations are recorded in very direct, very plain language, astonishingly similar to how we report such conversations today: he said this, then she said that, and so on. It reads as gossip. This is Agnes writing to her son in 1451, painting a lively picture of neighbourhood disputes playing out in church:

I greet you well, and let you weet that on the Sunday before Saint Edmund, after evensong, Agnes Ball came to me my closet and bade me good even, and Clement Spicer with her. And I asked him what he would; and he asked me why I had stopped in the King’s way. And I said to him I stopped no way but mine own, and asked him why he had sold my land to John Ball; and he swore he was never accorded with your father. And I told him if his father had do as he did, he would a be ashamed to a said as he said.

And all that time Warren Harman leaned over the parclose and listened what we said, and said that the change was a ruely change, for the town was undo thereby and is the worse by £100. And I told him it was no courtesy to meddle him in a matter but if he were called to counsel.

Their manner of dating letters is curious. Rather than referring to the Julian Calendar, by which the year in the letter quoted here would have been 1474, they often use regnal years; “E. IV 13” is the thirteenth year of the rule of King Edward IV:

3 day of June anno E. IV 13.

And throughout, with occasional exceptions, they date their letters not by the day of the month (e.g. 23rd of February) but by whichever feast day (i.e. saints’ days and other Holy occasions like Christmas or the Annunciation) is closest. Here are three examples:

Written at Norwich on the Friday next before Saint George.

Written in haste on Saint Peter’s Day by candle-light.

Written at Norwich on the Friday next after Pulver Wednesday.

A subtle reminder of how times have changed, of how our relationship with time itself has changed. For Medieval people it was a calendar of religious feasts that defined the passage of year; Christmas and Easter are rare survivors of that system.

More Medieval texture comes from this letter, sent by Margaret to John III; the 15th century was a more colourful, delightful, and tasty world than we are accustomed — not helped by grimy and drab depictions of past ages in cinema or TV — to imagining:

I send you 5s. to buy with sugar and dates for me. I would have 3 or 4 lb. of sugar, and beware the remnant in dates, and send them to me as hastily as ye may. And send me word what price a pound of pepper, cloves, maces, ginger, cinnamon, almonds, rice, raisins of currants, galingale, saffron, grains, and comfits — of each of these send me word what a pound is worth, and if it be better cheap at London than it is here.

Or Edmond writing to his elder brother, John III, and requesting an array of fabrics and materials with all their splendid names and colours:

I pray you to buy me three yards of purple chemlet, a bonnet of deep murrey, an hose cloth of yellow kersey of an ellen, a girdle of plunket ribbon, four laces of silk, two of one colour and two of another, three dozen points, white, red, and yellow, and three pair of patterns… mother greets you well, and prays you that ye will buy her a runlet of malmsey out of the galley.

So the letters possess an extraordinary range: we have messages of love, neighbourhood gossip, family feuds over property, shopping lists, foreign excursions, and also adventure; in 1485 the Duke of Norfolk wrote directly to John III, calling him up to serve with the King’s armies:

Well-beloved friend, I commend me to you, letting you to understand that the King’s enemies be a land, and that the King would have set forth as upon Monday but only for Our Lady Day; but for a certain he goeth forward as upon Tuesday… Where I pray you that ye meet with me at Bury… and that ye bring with you such company of tall men as ye may goodly make at my cost and charge… And I pray you ordain them jackets of my livery, and I shall content you at your meeting with me.

Or, in 1471, when the Paston Brothers fought in the Battle of Barnet (for the losing Lancastrian side) — John II writes to their mother in the aftermath:

Mother, I recommend me to you, letting you weet that, blessed be God, my brother John is alive and fareth well, and in no peril of death. Nevertheless he is hurt with an arrow on his right arm beneath the elbow, and I have sent him a surgeon.

Reading the Paston Letters is like reading an epistolary novel, with a great deal more implied than is actually spoken of; we are faced with a fascinating puzzle to arrange for ourselves, and all kinds of personalities to judge and brief mentions of events that, with judicious speculation, can be fleshed out and fully imagined. Just take Margaret’s haunting words to John II after his father has died; he has now inherited the family’s dispute over Caister Castle, originally left to John I by a knight called Sir John Fastolf (partial inspiration for Shakespeare’s Falstaff) but claimed by the Duke of Norfolk:

I had liefer ye had never know the land. Remember it was the destruction of your father.

John II struggled to live up to his father’s expectations and reputation. When John I was still alive he sent his eldest son to London, there to join the King’s household and hoping he would make a name for himself. But John II failed. Clement (John II’s uncle) writes to John I and gives this withering assessment of the young man:

I feel by W. Pecock that my nephew is not yet verily acquainted in the King’s house, nor with the officers… Wherefore it were best for him to take his leave, and come home… for he is not bold enough to put forth himself.

John II’s relationship with his parents feels remarkably modern, like something taken straight from a film — or, indeed, from real life! Consider this letter, written to John II by his mother in 1463. She is furious with him for having left home without telling anybody, and lets him know that his father, in particular, is extremely angry. It is another remarkably relatable bit of writing that closes whatever gulf we think separates us from our ancestors. Notice how Margaret, although she is unhappy with John II’s behaviour, nonetheless seeks to protect her son from his father’s anger:

I conceive that ye think ye did not well that ye departed hence without my knowledge. Wherefore I let you wit I was right evil paid with you. Your father thought, and thinketh yet, that I was assented to your departing, and that hath caused me to have great heaviness. I hope he will be your good father hereafter, if ye demean you well and do as ye owe to do him.

I would ye should send me word how ye do, and how ye have chevished for yourself since ye departed hence, by some trusty man, and that your father have no knowledge thereof. I durst not let him know of the last letter that ye wrote to me, because he was so sore displeased with me at that time.

So John II, a young man who could seemingly do nothing right, pleads with his father:

I beseech you of your fatherly pity to tender the more this simple writing, as I shall out of doubt hereafter do that shall please you to the uttermost of my power and labour.

John I later writes to Margaret, saying that he will try to be a better father to their son for her sake; these people had the very same emotional struggles and subtleties that we all know and feel today! But, crucially, John I outlines what bothers him most about their son: not his specific decision to leave the household without telling anybody (even though that was embarrassing for the Pastons) but his general lack of initiative and drive in life:

Where ye desire me that I should take your son to grace, I will for your sake do the better… And howbeit that, in his presumptuous and undiscreet demeaning, he gave both me and you cause of displeasure, and to other of my servants ill example, and that also guided him to all men’s understanding that he was weary of biding in mine house, and he not ensured of help in any other place, yet that grieveth not me so evil as doth that I never could feel nor understand him politic nor diligent in helping himself, but as a drone amongst bees which labour for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone doth naught but taketh his part of it.

John II’s behaviour did not improve. Nonetheless when Margaret hears that he has returned, but that her husband will not take him in, she writes a letter of magnificent tenderness and care. We can sense her efforts to protect her son — all the while knowing his faults — and to manage her husband’s truculent nature:

I understand by John Pamping that ye will not that your son be take into your house, nor help by you, till such time of year as he was put out thereof. For God’s sake, sir, a pity on him, and remember you it hath be a long season since he had aught of you to help him with, and he hath obeyed him to you… And at the reverence of God, be ye his good father and have a fatherly heart to him.

But this is what John I says in response: an actually quite sorrowful account of how little he understands his own son, and how lowly he thinks of him. Has John I accepted any personal blame for his son’s failings? It seems not. This was already startling modern; equally familiar is the notion of a family member who (in John I’s words) wants to do nothing other than “dwell again your house and mine”, only to “eat and drink and sleep”:

As for your son, I let you weet I would he did well, but I understand in him no disposition of policy ne of governance, as man of the world ought to do, but only liveth, and ever hath, as man dissolute, without any provision; ne that he busieth him nothing to understand such matters as a man of livelode must needs to understand; ne I understand nothing of what disposition he purposeth to be, but only I can think he would dwell again in your house and mine, and there eat and drink and sleep.

After John I’s death in 1466, when John II became head of the Paston Family, he struggled in vain to step out of his father’s shadow. The aforementioned Caister Castle was besieged by the Duke of Norfolk, who wanted to claim it for himself; John III was at home and defending it, while John II was in London. Margaret writes to her eldest an alarming letter, not only because she implies that John III and the rest of the family servants might die, but because it will be an eternal shame to John II and that people already think less of him because of his failure to resolve the situation:

Your brother and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Caister, and lack victual; and Daubeney and Berney be dead, and divers others greatly hurt, and they fail gunpowder and arrows, and the place sore broken with guns… so that, but they have hasty help, they be like to lose both their lives and the place, to the greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any gentleman, for every man in this country marvelleth greatly that ye suffer them to be so long in so great jeopardy without help or other remedy.

But John II fights back with a lengthy letter detailing how she is mistaken about certain facts of the situation, saying that Daubeney and Berney are not dead, and explaining what he has been doing to solve it; and, as if snapping at her, these lines:

But, mother, I feel by your writing that ye deem in me I should not do my duty without ye wrote to me some heavy tidings; and, mother, if I had need to be quickened with a letter in this need I were of myself too slow a fellow.

As the Paston Letters progress we see these family relationships grow, sever, break, and evolve. Margaret, for so long a defender of John II against his father, now writes to John III to complain of his elder brother’s wasteful habits and how much money he is spending. The shame is all the greater because — three years after his death! — John I still doesn’t have a gravestone:

He writeth to me also that he hath spend this term £40. It is a great thing. Methinketh by good discretion there might much thereof a been spared. Your father, God bless his soul, hath had as great matters to do as I trow he hath had this term, and hath not spent half the money upon them in so little time… At the reverence of God, advise him yet to beware of his expenses and guiding, that it be no shame to us all. It is a shame, and a thing that is much spoken of in this country, that your father’s gravestone is not made. For God’s love, let it be remembered and purveyed for in haste. There hath be much more spent in waste than should have made that.

It can’t have helped John II that, whatever he did, people compared him to his father, who seems to have been a serious and driven, very unfriendly but very successful, man. John II, meanwhile, comes across as totally disinterested in business and politics; he likes carousing, hunting, and joking. Even Margaret, in her sympathy, could not change his nature; as she wrote to John III, in another moment of total honesty that tears away our stereotypes about past ages:

Methinketh by your brother that he is weary to write to me, and therefore I will not acumber him with writing to him.

But quite beautifully, in the wake of their father’s death and their mother’s growing hostility, a touching brotherly bond forms between the two Johns. Consider John II, writing to his younger brother and asking for advice about an incredibly funny (funny now; mortifying then) social faux pas he has committed:

Also I should have said that my lady was of stature good, and had sides long and large, so that I was in good hope she should bear a fair child; he was not laced nor braced in to his pain, but that she left him room to play him in. They say that I said my lady was large and great, and that it should have room enough to go out. And thus whether my lady mock me, or they, I know not. I meant well, by my troth… If ye can by any mean weet whether my lady take it to displeasure or not, or whether she think I mocked her, or if she write it but lewdness of myself, I pray you send me word.

Meanwhile, back in Norfolk, Margaret plans to leave the Paston’s family home and return to the house where she grew up. John III writes to John II of the situation, and despite his jocular tone describes what must have been a very miserable domestic scene: a mother quarrelling with her sons and the servants taking her side against them. In particular the line “all that we do is ill done” is gallingly timeless:

Many quarrels are picked to get my brother E. and me out of her house. We go not to bed unchidden lightly. All that we do is ill done, and all that Sir James and Pecock doth is well done. Sir James and I be twain. We fell out before my mother with ‘Thou proud priest’ and ‘Thou proud squire’, my mother taking his part, so I have almost beshit the boat as for my mother’s house.

The situation grows worse; Margaret says she will cut John III out of her will!

And in this anger between Sir James and me she hath promised me that my part shall be naught; what your shall be I cannot say. God speed the plough!

But John III, in his characteristically good spirits — indeed, John III emerges as the most impressive and likeable of the Pastons: a loving brother, a brave soldier, a tender lover, and somebody able to make the most out of any situation, and to laugh when things go wrong — simply makes fun of it all:

Sir James is ever chopping at me when my mother is present, with such words as he thinks wrath me and also cause my mother to be displeased with me… And when he hath most unsitting words to me, I smile a little and tell him it is good hearing of these old tales.

So this brotherly love grows; when John III tells his elder brother that there is a woman he wants to woo, John II writes back with advice for how to do so. Perhaps here, at long last, we see what John II was really interested in and good at all along. The finer things in life — socialising, courting, gourmandising — rather than his father’s obsessions over property, money, and business:

Ye be personable, and peradventure your being once in the sight of the maid, and a little discovering of your good will to her, binding her to keep it secret, and that ye can find in your heart, with some comfort of her, to find the mean to bring such a matter about as shall be her pleasure and yours, but that this ye cannot do without some comfort of her in no wise. And bear yourself as lowly to the mother as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor that ye be too glad to speed nor too sorry to fail. And I always shall be your herald, both here if she come hither and at home when I come home.

Or consider this touching line in a letter sent by John II to his younger brother:

Ye know this hand, therefore needeth no mention from whom it cometh.

Family drama is unceasing. Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in the letters — because of the high emotions it flames into life on all sides — is when Margery Paston (John II and John III’s younger sister) decides to marry the family’s estate manager, a man called Richard Calle who has been a loyal servant of the Pastons for many years, but was nonetheless below her status.

It feels like the kind of thing we see in films and read in books all the time, a sort of tired trope that never really happened; it did happen. Just read what Richard Calle writes to Margery in 1469, describing their situation in beautiful but melancholy, exquisitely straightforward but devastating language. This might just be the most moving of all the letters in the collection. We sometimes wonder if people in the past loved like we do today; this is sorrowful proof:

Mine own lady and mistress, and before God very true wife, I with heart full sorrowful recommend me unto you, as he that cannot be merry nor naught shall be till it be otherwise with us than it is yet; for this life that we lead now is neither pleasure to God nor to the world.

Wherefore I beseech Almighty God comfort us as soon as it pleaseth him, for we that ought of very right to be most together are most asunder; meseemeth it is a thousand year ago since that I spake with you. I had liefer than all the good in the world I might be with you. Alas, alas, good lady, full little remember they what they do that keep us thus asunder.

I understand, lady, ye have had as much sorrow me as any gentlewoman hath had in the world; as would God all that sorrow that ye have had had rested upon me so that ye had be discharged of it.

This is a painful life that we lead; I cannot live thus without it be a great displeasure to God… Mistress, I am afraid to write to you, for I understand yet have showed my letters that I have sent you before this time; but I pray you let no creature see this letter. As soon as ye have read it let it be burnt, for I would no man should see it in no wise.

This letter was written with as great pain as ever wrote I thing in my life, for in good faith I have be right sick, and yet am not verily well at ease, God amend it.

Meanwhile Margaret writes to John II about the situation with a coldness we do not expect; the otherwise tender and diplomatic Margaret calls her own daughter a prostitute — a “brethel” — and says she will never love her again:

I pray you and require you that ye take it not pensily, for I wot well it goeth right near your heart, and so doth it to mine and to other; but remember you, and so do I, that we have lost of her but a brethel, and set it the less to heart; for an she had be good, whatsoever she had be it should not a been as it is, for an he were dead at this hour she should never be at mine heart as she was

Nonetheless she urges John II not to try and secure a divorce between Margery and Richard:

As for the divorce that ye writ to me of, I suppose what ye meant, but I charge you upon my blessing that ye do not, nor cause none other to do, that should offend God and your conscience.

Of the times they were living through there is also much to say. We encounter historically significant events with the Pastons, and thereby learn that reading about wars and depositions and revolutions in history books gives them a cohesion and clarity they lacked to all who were involved. Though, equally, those frightful times can seem a little less frightful when we hear about them first-hand. After all, we think everything now, in 2026, is worse and more difficult and complicated than ever. But Margaret Paston said the same thing nearly six hundred years ago:

God for his holy mercy give grace that there may be set a good rule in this country in haste, for I heard never say of so much robbery and manslaught in this country as is now within a little time.

Or, once again from Margaret:

Trust not much upon promises of lords nowadays… A man’s death is little set by nowadays. Therefore beware of simulation, for they will speak right fair to you that would ye fared right evil.

And, even more familiar, John II writing to his younger brother and telling him to be careful what he says and to whom:

There is much ado in the north, as men sayn. I pray you beware of your guiding, and in chief of your language, so that from henceforth by your language no man perceive that yet favour any person contrary to the King’s pleasure.

Famous events, battles, and characters flash through the Paston Letters, as when Elisabeth Clere, a cousin of the Pastons, spends time with Queen Margaret of Anjou. Or when a servant of Sir John Fastolf’s writes to John I, asking him for help because he has been struggling ever since Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450 — that is, the Jack Cade immortalised in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II! — and recounts his meeting with the infamous rebel Cade, the Captain of Kent:

…and I was brought forthwith before the captain of Kent… and he said plainly that I should lose my head. And so forthwith I was taken and led to the captain’s tent, and an axe and a block was brought forth to have smitten off mine head. And then my master Poynings, your brother, with other of my friends, cane and letted the captain, and said plainly that there should die a hundred or two that in case be that I died. And so by that mean my life was saved.

In 1461 William II writes to his elder brother with news that the Yorkists have defeated the Lancastrians in battle and that Edward IV has seized the throne, meanwhile Henry VI and his Queen had fled to Scotland:

William II to John I (1461 April): First, our sovereign lord hath won the field, and upon the Monday next after Palm Sunday he was received into York with great solemnity and processions… King Harry, the Queen, the Prince, Duke of Somerset, Duke of Exeter, Lord Roos, been fled into Scotland, and, and they been chased and follow &c.

There are dozens more examples like this, of moments we read about in history books actually happening in front of our eyes, as news of what has literally just happened is shared with family and friends. One struggles to imagine how alarming these events must have been. But, remarkably, many of the letters contain false or at least slightly inaccurate reports of what has occurred; ‘false news’ is as old as news itself.

A word, now, on the ‘style’ of the letters. Middle English was the language of the Pastons; by the end of the 15th century it was morphing into what we call Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. You can hear both in the Paston Letters.

In a letter by William Lomnor to John I describing the death of the Duke of Suffolk in 1450 (an event dramatised in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II) we find that familiar Biblical register: the simple but stately language, the string of sentences connected by ‘ands,’ the concrete but colourful vocabulary:

And in the sight of all his men he was drawn out of the great ship into the boat, and there was an axe and a stock; and one of the lewdest of the ship bade him lay down his head, and he should be fair ferd with, and die on a sword; and took a rusty sword, and smote off his head within half a dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russet and his doublet of velvet mailed, and laid his body on the sands of Dover.

Also, Lomnor concludes his message with a bizarre but gorgeously human mistake:

Written in great haste at London the 5 day of May, &c.

By your wife, W.L.

By your wife! It is the kind of typo we all fear in 2026; coming from the year 1450 it is even more hilarious and humanising than anything else in these letters.

We also hear a great deal of Shakespeare in the Pastons’ language; he was born just a few generations later, we must remember. It isn’t so much Shakespeare’s heightened poetry that we hear, which relied on developments from Italy, from Renaissance humanism, that hadn’t yet taken hold of English when the Pastons were alive. But Shakespeare’s prose, and in particular the language of his commoners, or even of Falstaff and Prince Hal at Eastcheap, of the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is at home in these letters. Consider this passage (without worrying about its context) from a letter sent by John I to his wife — the almost musical flow of the words, the insults, the vivid imagery:

And if he will not, let him verily understand that he shall be compelled to find him surety of the peace meagre in his head, and that shall neither be profitable nor worshipful. And let him weet that there have be many complaints of him by that knavish knight Sir Miles Stapleton, as I sent you word before; but he shall come to his excuse well enough, so he have a man’s heart, and the said Stapleton shall be understanding as he is, a false shrew. And he and his wife and other have blavered here of my kindred in hudder-mudder, but by that time we have reckoned of old days and late days mine shall be found more worshipful than his and his wife’s or else I will not for his gilt gisper.

Among these fabulous papers we also find the earliest surviving example of a Valentine’s Day letter; so we arrive, finally, at this Areopagus’ stated theme. In the year 1477 a lady called Dame Elizabeth Brews writes to John Paston III, who has been courting her daughter Margery Brews:

Cousin, I recommend me unto you, thanking you heartily for the great cheer that ye made of me and all my folks the last time that I was at Norwich. And ye promised me that ye would never break the matter to Margery unto such time as ye and I were at point. But ye have made her such advocate for you that I may never have rest night nor day, for calling and crying upon to bring the said matter to effect.

And, cousin, upon Friday is Saint Valentine’s Day, and every bird chooseth him a mate; and if it like you to come on Thursday at night, and so purvey you that ye may abide there till Monday, I trust to God that ye shall so speak to mine husband, and I shall pray that we shall bring the matter to a conclusion.

‘Upon Friday is Saint Valentine’s Day, and every bird chooseth him a mate.’ Remarkable words. Because the Valentine’s Day tradition as we know it only started shortly before the time of these letters. It was Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1381 poem A Parliament of Fowls that first solidified the connection between Valentine’s Day and Love; hence Dame Elizabeth’s reference to birds choosing their mate. Also, I should say, and quite thrillingly, in a catalogue of books belonging to the Paston Family, A Parliament of Fowls is listed.

But now for the Valentine’s letter itself: here we have Margery Brews writing to her prospective husband in February 1477, even penning a poem:

Right reverend and worshipful and my right well-beloved Valentine… My lady mother hath laboured the matter to my father full diligently, but she can no more get than ye know of, for the which God knoweth I am full sorry.

But if that ye love me, as I trust verily that ye do, ye will not leave me therefor; for if that ye had not half the livelode that ye have, for to do the greatest labour that any woman alive might, I would not forsake you.

And if ye command me to keep me true wherever I go,
Iwis I will do all my might you to love and never no more.
And if my friends say that I do amiss, they shall not me let so for to do,
Mine heart me bids evermore to love you.
Truly over all earthly thing,
And if they be never so wroth, I trust it shall be better in time coming.

I beseech you that this bill be not seen of none earthly creature save only yourself.

There’s a second letter from Margery to John III, sent a few days letter, containing this sign-off — its earliest recorded usage:

By your Valentine, Margery Brews.

Their marriage was sealed, even though the dowry was less than John III (and, above all, Margaret Paston) had wanted; nonetheless he seems to have loved her sincerely, and she him.

How to conclude? With two more letters. The first, written by Agnes to her son John I in 1465, just a year before his death. It is so beautiful, and so utterly timeless, that I hardly think explanations or caveating are worthwhile:

Son, I greet you well, and let you weet that… blessing that I prayed your father to give you the last day that ever he spake, and the blessing of all saints under heaven, and mine, mote come to you all days and times. And think verily none other but that ye have it, and shall have with that that I find you kind and willing to the weal of your father’s soul, and to the welfare of your brethren.

By my counsel, dispose yourself as much as ye may to have less to do in the world. Your father said, ‘In little business lieth much rest.’ This world is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe; and when we depart therefrom, right naught we bear with us but our good deeds and ill. And there knoweth no man how soon God will clepe him, and therefore it is good for every creature to be ready. Whom God visiteth, him he loveth.

And, finally, we have an explanation for why we have the Pastons Letters at all. They were not unique in their own time; they were perfectly ordinary. What makes them special is that, among millions of letters sent during the Middle Ages, these have survived. And it was John I we have to thank for it; as Margaret explains to her eldest son, just after John I’s death:

And in all wise I advise you for to beware that ye keep wisely your writings that been of charge, that it come not in their hands that may hurt you hereafter. Your father, whom God assoil, in his trouble season set more by his writings and evidence than he did by any of his movable goods.

He ‘set more by his writings and evidence than he did by any of his moveable goods.’ That is to say, John I carefully preserved all his correspondence, and it was this habit, or at least a particular trove of preserved documents, that found their way into the hands of John Fenn in 1774.

If you want to learn about life in a previous era — and therefore, by extension, to learn about our present era — the Paston Letters are almost unequalled in their range, depth, and texture. Even the likes of Bede, William Harrison, or Jocelyn of Brakelond were nonetheless historians writing as historians; even the letters of Pliny the Younger were prepared for publication and the letters of Abelard and Heloise were written by highly educated theologians and philosophers. Meanwhile the Pastons were, if not totally ordinary people, in the sense that they were landed and literate in a time when most were neither, fairly ordinary; nobody would be talking about them now if not for these letters.

We would be hard-pressed to think of much we have in common with a family living six hundred years ago, but the Paston Letters prove otherwise; reading them, I find it difficult to think of anything we don’t have in common. All the emotions and thoughts are there, the subtleties and difficulties of our relationships, the struggles over property and inheritance, the varied personalities clashing and blending. Whatever differences there actually are between the 15th and 21st centuries suddenly seem small: what difference has the iPhone or Internet really made? These people did not have flushing toilets, electricity, cars, or nylon — and yet they were, it seems, essentially indistinguishable from us.

We ask again: what was life like in the past? A beautiful and turbulent question which, if answered, will reveal much about times both past and present. One way to answer it (the best way, I propose) is by reading what people from the past said themselves. That could be historians and poets (who have provided most of the things we read written by people from the past) or it could be (more rarely) normal people. That is what we have tried to do today; I hope it has been worth your time.

III - Art

Cymon and Iphigena

Lord Leighton (1884)

This is, in every sense of the word, a very old-fashioned painting. Whatever the likes of Pablo Piccasso represent, Cymon and Iphigena represents the opposite. I say that neither in praise nor criticism of either; only, I think, it is true that they are the respective endpoints of opposite views about the nature of art.

But, of course, that is only true because of our broader, ever-changing society; whatever a society believes — or is beginning to believe, or losing belief in — will always appear in its art. To paint something like this requires a level of historical credulity no longer really present in the world; we are now either much more realistic, or far more cynical, depending on your point of view, about the past.

The subject is taken from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories written in the middle of the 14th century. They are told over the course of ten days by ten friends who have retreated from the Black Death (which Boccaccio lived through) to rural isolation. This story, told on the fifth day, concerns the adventures of two lovers called Cymon and Iphigena; the scene chosen by Lord Leighton comes at the very beginning.

Cymon, a young man who has proven impossible to teach and is known around the island of Cyprus for his stupidity and foolishness, stumbles across a young woman called Iphigenia, sleeping on the grass by a pond, beneath the flowering trees of May. He falls in love and reforms his ways, at which point their adventures begin. Here is how the change to Cymon’s character is described in the Decameron:

Love’s arrow having, then, through Iphigenia’s beauty, penetrated into Cimon’s heart, whereinto no teaching had ever availed to win an entrance, in a very brief time, proceeding from one idea to another, he made his father marvel and all his kinsfolk and every other that knew him.

…he first, to the utmost wonderment of every one, in a very brief space of time, not only learned the first elements of letters, but became very eminent among the students of philosophy, and after (the love which he bore Iphigenia being the cause of all this) he not only reduced his rude and rustical manner of speech to seemliness and civility, but became a past master of song and sound and exceeding expert and doughty in riding and martial exercises, both by land and by sea.

In short, not to go recounting every particular of his merits, the fourth year was not accomplished from the day of his first falling in love, ere he was grown the sprightliest and most accomplished gentleman of all the young men in the island of Cyprus.

Lord Leighton chose to paint his version of Cymon’s first meeting with Iphigenia in Autumn rather than Spring, essentially for the sake of its richer, deeper, and more symbolic colours; it allowed Leighton to submerge his scene in that burning orange light (recognisable from his most famous work, Flaming June) and cast over it a smouldering, liquid atmosphere that suits the passion he sought to evoke; the very canvas seems to exude an delicious, sense-melting heat.

Cymon and Iphigenia is a good example of late 19th century Academic Art. This was the style taught in official academies and favoured by the artistic establishment; it was also, to a large extent, the kind of art most loved by the general public. Traits of Academic Art include a general preference for ‘realism’, meaning that these paintings depicted the world as we see it. But, equally important, Academic Art was never realistic in subject; rather than ordinary people or contemporary life it was scenes from history and mythology, whether drawn from Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, or the Bible, that the academies promoted. Hence it was also idealised. So what we have in Lord Leighton’s Cymon and Iphigena is an idealised subject painted realistically; it had been like this in Europe ever since the Renaissance.

But Leighton was also influenced by the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites, two anti-establishment art movements (German and British, respectively) that returned to the highly symbolic, vividly coloured, stylised art of the Middle Ages. Whereas some Academic Art can feel cold, as if people are painting particular things in a particular way because that’s what they’ve been taught to do, rather than because they actually believe in it, Lord Leighton imbued his art with a very real, sensuous, and detectible passion. His close attention to natural details, his scrupulous rendering of luxurious textures like fine silk or burnished copper, his astonishingly intense colour palette, and his dreamlike, ambivalent, allusive atmospheres are the fruits of this influence.

So Cymon and Iphigenia embodies a society pulling in opposite directions: the experimental and essentially rebellious tendencies of the Pre-Raphaelites on one side, and the classical, time-honoured, establishment principles of Academicism on the other. Leighton united them and even served as President of the Royal Academy of Arts, but it was a synthesis that proved unsustainable.

This tension is more obvious to us, set against the retrospective context of knowing what would come next; just compare Cymon and Iphigenia with something like A Battery Shelled by Wyndham Lewis, the founder of Vorticism, painted in 1919. Lewis was born in the year Leighton painted Cymon and Iphigenia; he is a perfect example of just how radically the next generation departed both from the rigours of Academic Art and the sensuousness of Pre-Raphaelitism.

You can see why Leighton’s style seemed so old-fashioned and claustrophobic when compared with this sort of thing, and why both Leighton and Academic Art (and even Pre-Raphaelitism!) went so hard and fast out of favour in the 20th century. It was also a style so closely associated with the previous era — with the pomp and hubris of a generation that had led Europe into the catastrophes of the First World War — that it seemed to represent everything that should be left behind.

But a century has passed even since the radical 1920s; what do we make of Cymon and Iphigenia now? It is the kind of painting that some people find unbearably sentimental and claustrophobically detailed, or at least rather boring, and that others will find absolutely intoxicating, luxurious, phantasmagorical, and ravishing.

Who is right? Both are right, of course, because a contradictory reaction to something like Cymon and Iphigenia is a true reflection of our own endlessly varied natures. Unanimous reactions are rare and perhaps unwelcome, because unanimity is the property of plain and inoffensive things. We all need and prefer different kinds of art because we are all different. Everybody has had difference experiences in love and life, and therefore different styles of art, whether Academic or Cubist, Gothic or Abstract, will make more or less sense to each of us, reflect more or less clearly our personally discovered truths about this world. For although Love is universal, even that which is universal emerges in myriad different forms; the universal force of life itself manifests in the colours and forms of over four hundred thousand different kinds of flower!

By way of conclusion, and on a somewhat (though not so) different note, the story of Cymon and Iphigenia as told by Boccaccio, and this painting by Lord Leighton, are a fabulous allegory for education. Falling in love — with a particular period of history, with the beautiful logic of mathematics, with a certain painter, poet, or philosophical paradox — is the first step to really learning something, because if a passion can be kindled then everything else follows with ease.

As Michel de Montaigne (the sensiblest man who ever lived) said in his essay On the Education of Children:

But the teacher that I would have… is such a one as knows it to be his duty to possess his pupil with as much or more affection than reverence to virtue.

He believed, even in the 16th century, that beating education into children (either literally or figuratively) was simultaneously a waste of time, bad for the student, bad for the teacher, and bad for society:

As to the rest, this method of education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness, quite contrary to the practice of our pedants, who, instead of tempting and alluring children to letters by apt and gentle ways, do in truth present nothing before them but rods and ferules, horror and cruelty. Away with this violence! away with this compulsion! than which, I certainly believe nothing more dulls and degenerates a well-descended nature.

The goal is to help people fall in love with a subject, not stoop to any necessary means for giving them a certain quantity of knowledge:

…by dint of the lash, you give them their pocketful of learning to keep; whereas, to do well you should not only lodge it with them, but make them espouse it.

Montaigne believed philosophy was the study of how to live well, not of obscure logical formulae, confusing rules, and pedantic memorisation of dates, facts, and propositions. Life itself can be education, and people learn best when they are enjoying themselves, even in places we wouldn’t typically associate with learning:

By this method of instruction, my young pupil will be much more and better employed than his fellows of the college are. But as the steps we take in walking to and fro in a gallery, though three times as many, do not tire a man so much as those we employ in a formal journey, so our lesson, as it were accidentally occurring, without any set obligation of time or place, and falling naturally into every action, will insensibly insinuate itself. By which means our very exercises and recreations, running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, and fencing, will prove to be a good part of our study.

Montaigne’s essay is worth reading in full, both for its general observations (that hold true even five hundred years later) and the way he talks about his own youth and education; Montaigne is more wise than any philosopher, more engaging than any novelist, more funny than any satirist, and more lyrical than any poet. Both he and Lord Leighton’s Cymon and Iphigenia remind us that Love is not only romantic; Love is a universal guiding spirit, as necessary in the schoolroom as on Valentine’s Day, as important to architects as to footballers.

IV - Architecture

The Hospice of Beaune

When we hear the words ‘Gothic Architecture’ we think of towering cathedrals with their stained-glass windows and gargoyles, or perhaps bleak castles with rickety turrets and wind-blasted loop-holes. This isn’t inaccurate, but I think the true heart of Gothic Architecture, of the Medieval spirit, is misunderstood when we only think of those colossal churches or fantastical fortresses — because Gothic Architecture wasn’t exclusive to the Middle Ages’ grandest monuments. Just as Contemporary Architecture defines everything from our modern skyscrapers to our modern schools, Gothic Architecture was about ordinary buildings as well as cathedrals and castles.

The Hospice of Beaune in Dijon — now French but once the capital of the independent Duchy of Burgundy — is a perfect example of that. In 1441 the Chancellor of Burgundy, a man called Nicolas Rolin, asked Pope Eugene IV for permission to create an almshouse — a refuge and hospital for the poor, sick, and elderly — and a new religious order to run it. Permission was granted and in 1443 a founding deed was signed:

I, Nicolas Rolin, knight… and chancellor of Burgundy, on this Sunday, the 4th of the month of August, in the year of Our Lord 1443… in the interest of my salvation, desiring to exchange temporal goods for heavenly goods… I found, and irrevocably endow in the city of Beaune, a hospital for the poor and sick, with a chapel, in honor of God and his glorious mother.

Eight years later on 1st January 1452, the Hospice opened; it only closed in 1971, over five hundred years later, and thereupon turned into a museum.

Where to begin? With those roofs, of course! To use colourful glazed tiles in this way — arranged in those lovely patterns — was unique to Burgundian architecture; you find similar roofs all around Dijon. Despite their charm, they are really very simple. One wonders why we don’t try this sort of thing more often; it is a straightforward way to make any given city’s more streets more delightful. And once again (needless to say!) our stereotype of the Middle Ages as a colourless and drab era is, when we look at the things they left behind, patently false.

The rows of dormer windows — each with their own steep and crocketed gables, cusped and carved bargeboards, and elaborate spirelets like a ship’s masts — are another delight typical of Northern European Gothic architecture:

The Hospice interior, especially its ‘Hall of the Poor’, is equally Gothic: we have a soaring pitched roof, painted with leaves, supported by a network of painted beams that appear to be emerging from the mouths of dragons and fearsome beasts, plus howling grotesques and forest creatures carved between.

Although the furniture inside the Hall of the Poor dates to the 19th century — when Gothic Restorations were in vogue — it is in keeping with surviving Medieval furniture elsewhere in the Hospice.

There is also a chapel attached to the Hall, and for it Rolin commissioned an altarpiece by the Flemish master painter Roger van der Weyden. See, the dynasty that ruled Burgundy in the 15th century also ruled over parts of the Netherlands, forming a short-lived but extraordinary political and cultural union that fostered artists like Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin, Hugo van der Goes, and even composers like Guillaume Dufay. Hence the presence of an unmistakeably Flemish oil painting, with its luminous textures and pristine details, in Dijon. As it happens, Rolin also employed a Flemish architect to design the Hospice.

So the Hospice of Beaune is a miracle of ordinary Gothic architecture; half-timbered galleries with painted panels, glazed roof tiles arranged in pleasing patterns, and a cobbled courtyard — in each case nothing more than humble materials treated lovingly and carefully — are all you need.

But what links this hospital with love, our present theme, is revealed by looking down: not at the technicolour roofs, nor the stained-glass, nor van der Weyden’s altarpiece, but at the tiles beneath our feet:

These tiles depict the letters N and G (both stylised) intertwined, with the word SEULE, intermingled with stars, forming a circle around them. N was for Nicolas Rolin and G was Guigone de Salins, his beloved wife; SEULE means “only”, in reference to her as Rolin’s one true love. He also called her his star, hence the stars on the tiles. But Guigone de Salins was not only Rolin’s beloved; she founded the Hospice alongside him and managed the whole place after his death.

And if we close the panels of van der Weyden’s altarpiece then we can see, in the shimmeringly lifelike oil paint of Early Netherlandish Art, both Nicolas Rolin (bottom left) and Guigone de Salins (bottom right). Husband and wife, founders of the hospital, united forever in prayer and committed to their lifelong purpose of providing both physical care — through their Hospice — and spiritual care — through the art they commissioned, the paintings and carvings — to the needy:

We think of the Middle Ages as a uniquely barbaric, cruel, and miserable era; their surviving art and architecture tells a different story.

And that’s all

The first part of our Valentine’s Special is done. Can love be reduced to mere words? We have tried thus far in our explorations of Mystical, Familial, Educational, and Charitable Love. But, next week, we will address the question directly. Until then, as you go about your various and merry ways, my Beloved Readers, I leave you with a final verse of Fuzuli’s from his sublime Layla and Majnun:

These words they heard, and then to every side
Ran off in glee as sparks fly all around
When fire is scattered, yet a kindled fire
Remained in Layla’s soul as, all alone,
She sorely grieved and scattered from her eyes
Sweet pearls of tears, as rain clouds scatter rain.

Let that be our adieu for now.

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor

Subscribe now

Share Areopagus

Many of us like to set reading goals at the beginning of each year. Perhaps one per month; possibly (and ambitiously!) one per week. Could mine be among that precious number? Maybe! If not — too bad. But, if only because my book was written with the intention of directing readers to other, much older, much better books, I hope it stands a chance of making your cut.

Also (I should say) this newsletter is fairly long (about nine thousand words) and contains a number of images. As a result it may not appear fully in your email inbox, and will abruptly cut off at some point. This is not an error! You just need to click ‘show full email’ (or something similar, depending on your email provider) to see it all. Alternatively, you can read the full thing on Substack, either the website or app.

All of which leaves just one thing to be said: avanti!

Subscribe now

I - Classical Music

Le roi s’amuse III: Scène du bouqet

Léo Delibes (1882)

Performed by the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra

King Francis I of France in the Studio of Benvenuto Cellini by Francesco Podesti (1839)

On 22nd November 1832 a play by Victor Hugo (of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame fame) debuted in Paris. It was called Le roi s’amuse, meaning “The King Amuses Himself’”, and took as its subject King Francis I, who ruled France during the early 16th century. But Francis was not treated kindly by Hugo; the play presents him as an unscrupulous letch. This was interpreted by the authorities as a slight against King Louis Philippe, and so the play was banned after a single performance.

In 1855 Giuseppe Verdi wrote an opera based on Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, but with a different title (Rigoletto) and altered setting (Renaissance Mantua, instead of Renaissance France). Verdi had censorial troubles of his own, though in his case with the Austrian government, which then ruled northern Italy. Nonetheless (and needless to say) it was a success, and proved popular even (and ironically!) in Paris.

Finally, in 1882, exactly fifty years after its first (and only) performance, Le roi s’amuse was staged again. For this new run a set of incidental music was written by Leo Delibes; ‘incidental music’ is the theatrical equivalent of a film score, i.e. music created to accompany and elevate a performance. Léo Delibes had already written his two great ballets, Sylvia and Coppélia, both of which were hits in their own day and remain popular. It was one year later, in 1883, that he would write the work for which he is most famous: Lakmé, an opera that includes the ubiquitous and eternal aria Dôme épais le jasmin, better known as The Flower Duet.

Delibes’ incidental music for Le roi s’amuse has six parts, plus a reprise of the first, each based on historical musical forms that were popular during the Renaissance (i.e. when the play is set). These are the gaillarde, pavane, lesquercarde, madrigal, and passepied, along with the air that forms its third part, called Scène du bouquet. I think we can hear Delibes having fun with his opportunity to revive and explore Renaissance-style dances; his incidental music for Le roi s’amuse is a kind of miniature Neo-Renaissance masterpiece, and Scène du bouquet is its melodious, supremely moving core. One feels more sophisticated, more lovely, more in love, just listening to it; these are two of the gorgeousest minutes of music ever written.

So, although Léo Delibes wrote what is surely (though competing with Puccini’s Nessun Dorma) the definitive opera aria (insofar as popular culture is concerned), Delibes did not only write The Flower Duet; he was a prolific, popular, fabulously talented composer, and Scène du bouquet is just one of the many other musical fruits his compositional brilliance brought forth.

II - Historical Figure

The Venerable Bede

When the Tuesday before the Ascension of our Lord came, he began to suffer still more in his breathing, and there was some swelling in his feet. But he went on teaching all that day and dictating cheerfully, and now and then said among other things, ‘Learn quickly, I know not how long I shall endure, and whether my Maker will not soon take me away.’ But to us it seemed that haply he knew well the time of his departure; and so he spent the night, awake, in giving of thanks.

That is how a monk called Cuthbert (not to be confused with Saint Cuthbert), writing in the year 735 AD, described the final hours in the life of a man called Bede. Both were monks at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, a monastery in northern England.

Bede was a prolific author, most of whose works have — remarkably! — survived. They include extensive commentaries on the Bible, biographies of various saints or monks, a martyrology, poems, hymns, epigrams, and textbooks on etymology, how to calculate dates, and the art of poetry. These were transcribed, copied, and distributed around Britain and Europe. Bede was a beacon of learning, both secular and religious, famed during his lifetime and afterward for piety and scholarliness. Consequently he was awarded the affectionate epithet of ‘venerable’; in 1899 he was made a saint.

Just one example of his legacy is that Bede popularised the use of Anno Domini (i.e. AD) as a way of dating years. He did not invent it, but Bede’s use of AD — rather than existing methods, such as dating by the regnal year of Byzantine Emperors — was an essential contribution to its rise.

But, of all his works, one stands far above the rest as his most famous and enduring: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. What is it? A book narrating the history of Britain from its earliest days, through the Roman occupation, the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and the gradual spread of Christianity, down to his own time. It was dedicated to King Coelwulf of Northumbria and finished in the year 731 AD. Bede died four years later, having just started his final project, which was to translate the Gospels into English. He was buried at Jarrow, but his body — like that of Saint Cuthbert — was moved to Durham Cathedral, where it remains to this day.

I would not recommend Bede’s Ecclesiastical History with the same readiness that I have recommended Jocelyn of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of St Edmund’s or the Letters of Heloise and Abelard; as windows into the Middle Ages they are more direct and immediate than Bede.

Nonetheless his great work is worth reading. First (and more narrowly) because it deals with a chapter of history that is uniquely important to northern England. Anybody from that part of the world will have heard of saints like Aidan, Cuthbert, Oswald, or Hilda — Bede fills in those long-established blanks for us, and puts wonderfully clear faces to these familiar but mysterious names. With Bede we also encounter a range of other figures more generally famous in British history: the likes of Alban, Columba, Hengist and Horsa, or Augustine. To understand what England really is, and where it came from, Bede is required reading.

Second (and more broadly) his Ecclesiastical History is worth reading if only to investigate whether he is writing about a world that is recognisably our own. What is the nature of the difference between we of the 21st century and our ancestors, from any part of the world, of past ages? Is it a gulf merely of time, or also of technology?

Though he lived in an age more violent and chaotic than our own, Bede writes with a liveliness and purity of spirit that belie our popular conception of the ‘Dark Ages’ as an era wholly without learning, love, light, or life.

In the preface, where Bede dedicates his work to King Coelwulf and explains that he has written it to be transcribed and distributed more widely, Bede also (and perhaps surprisingly!) explains his sources: ancient writers, more recent scholars, word-of-mouth, and official documents. As he says of a fellow monk called Nothelm:

The same Nothelm, afterwards went to Rome, and having, with leave of the present Pope Gregory, searched into the archives of the Holy Roman Church, found there some epistles of the blessed Pope Gregory, and other popes; and, returning home, by the advice of the aforesaid most reverend father Albinus, brought them to me, to be inserted in my history.

So this was a well-researched book, not idle or fabulous speculation interwoven with mythologies and folk tales. But most surprising is the interconnectedness of the world Bede describes. His Ecclesiastical History includes endless journeys around Europe, especially to and from Rome, whether for the sake of pilgrimage, on official church business, or out of sheer curiosity.

We hear of Aidan who was invited from Ireland to serve as Bishop of Northumbria; of Swidbert who was sent from Northumbria and founded a monastery in Düsseldorf; of Theodore, who was born in Tarsus on the southern coast of modern Turkey, and via Constantinople was sent to Britain by Pope Vitalian, where he became Archbishop of Canterbury; of Willibrord, a Yorkshireman who was made the first ever bishop of the Netherlands under Duke Pepin of the Franks, the great-grandfather of Charlemagne.

Alongside these are endless letters to and from popes, bishops, or kings, and accounts of great congregations at Whitby or Hertford — the synods — organised to decide certain matters, particularly (a gripe and obsession of Bede’s) the true date of Easter.

And, despite our general notion of the Middle Ages (and especially the Early Middle Ages, or Dark Ages) as being ignorant of the ancient world, Bede quotes and references a litany of classical writers, including the likes of Virgil, Pliny, and Josephus. He also begins his Ecclesiastical History with a very precise chronology of the Roman emperors who ruled over Britain, all the way down to the Empire’s collapse, listing Julius Caesar, Augustus, Claudius, Severus, Diocletian, Gratian, and the rest — people we wrongly imagine as forgotten during the Dark Ages.

We do learn of life’s hardships in those long centuries; war and famine, disease and injury, all feature prominently in Bede’s History, though these latter usually in relation to their miraculous cures by bishops, hermits, or holy dust. It is this aspect of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History that the modern reader will find hardest to sympathise with. We are most likely to shake our heads at their credulity, and complacently congratulate ourselves for being so enlightened, so able to penetrate the superstitious illusions of past ages with our sure and scientifically-bolstered knowledge that miracles are impossible. But read Bede’s account of the popular response to the death of Saint Oswald, a pious Northumbrian king who was slain in battle:

How great his faith was towards God, and how remarkable his devotion, has been made evident by miracles even after his death; for, in the place where he was killed by the pagans, fighting for his country, sick men and cattle are frequently healed to this day. Whence it came to pass that many took up the very dust of the place where his body fell, and putting it into water, brought much relief with it to their friends who were sick. This custom came so much into use, that the earth being carried away by degrees, a hole was made as deep as the height of a man.

We no longer use the word ‘miracle’, but our belief in the possibility of certain special substances or particular behaviours that will cure our ailments and improve our lives remains undiluted. I am not referring to modern medicine; I mean the essentially endless procession of new (and very trendy) habits, products, or ingredients, that daily sweep the internet and soon thereafter our streets. It isn’t so much the things themselves (although plenty of our modern methods and habits are no more ‘scientifically proven to work’ than saints’ relics!) as the way we believe in them, that I’m talking about. Was the belief of Bede’s contemporaries in the benefits of dust stained with Saint Oswald’s holy blood so different from our belief in the possibility that some new product, revealed to us by cutting-edge marketing or lifestyle influencers, will finally solve our problems?

Bede also describes how, in the process of Christianising Britain, missionaries were urged to adopt pagan sites, refitting temples as churches and even adopting and adjusting their rituals, like animal sacrifice. We are frequently told that various Christian celebrations, especially their dates, are linked to ancient pagan ways; Bede, quoting a letter from Pope Gregory, explains how and why this happened. So this is not a purely idealised history; Bede offers plenty of political and historical realism.

…the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.

…to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures; because he who endeavours to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps.

And remember: at this point in time there was no such thing as England. The country we now call by that name was divided into multiple, frequently warring, variously Christian or pagan kingdoms. Here, narrating the Council of Hatfield, Bede lists them: Egfrid of the Northumbrians, Ethelred of the Mercians, Aldwulf of the East Angles, and Hlothere of Kent.

In the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, under the rule of our most pious lords, Egfrid, king of the Northumbrians, in the tenth year of his reign, the seventeenth of September, the eighth indiction; Ethelred, king of the Mercians, in the sixth year of his reign; Aldwulf king of the East Angles, in the seventeenth year of his reign; and Hlothere, king of Kent, in the seventh year of his reign…

The theme of Bede’s book might well be progress, a national journey from disunity to unity, primarily religious but also political. He died before England became a single kingdom, but Bede recorded the events that preceded and paved the way for it. We learn, in particular, that the Church was a unifying force, both culturally and politically; though kings were rival rulers, bishops were united, serving together under their most senior, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and beyond him the Pope in Rome.

Nonetheless, Bede does not shy from criticising his beloved Church; in particular he was uncomfortable with the lavish lifestyle of certain bishops, and wherever he knew of priests derogating from their duties he said so:

…even our Lord’s own flock, with its shepherds, casting off the easy yoke of Christ, gave themselves up to drunkenness, enmity, quarrels, strife, envy, and other such sins.

We in the 21st century might believe partisanship has grown worse of late, and that our relationship with the truth more strained than ever; Bede, like so many historians, seems to describe precisely the same problem:

…the island began to abound with such plenty of grain as had never been known in any age before; along with plenty, evil living increased, and this was immediately attended by the taint of all manner of crime; in particular, cruelty, hatred of truth, and love of falsehood; insomuch, that if any one among them happened to be milder than the rest, and more inclined to truth, all the rest abhorred and persecuted him unrestrainedly, as if he had been the enemy of Britain.

His Ecclesiastical History can be funny at times, unintentionally or not, especially thanks to Bede’s personal bugbear. We all have one; his was calculating the date of Easter, even bringing it up when praising the otherwise universally loved Aidan:

I have written thus much concerning the character and works of the aforesaid Aidan, in no way commending or approving his lack of wisdom with regard to the observance of Easter; nay, heartily detesting it, as I have most manifestly proved in the book I have written, De Temporibus.

Meanwhile this is what he says of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons:

In a short time, swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island, and the foreigners began to increase so much, that they became a source of terror to the natives themselves who had invited them.

It is a strange and striking world that Bede preserved for us, a world of miracles, holy deeds, pious or violent kings, deposed princes, politically prudent marriages, wise and eccentric nuns, lonely churches of wood with beams impervious to fire, vast stone monasteries on distant peninsulas, pedantic ecclesiastical disputes, lengthy explanations of how to calculate dates, letters from popes, perilous journeys through hostile lands, the declarations of great synods, hermits living on lake-islands, vivid descriptions of Hell and Heaven, including the destruction of the World and a proto-Dantean vision of the afterlife, accounts of the distant Holy Land, of the churches at the Sepulchre and Golgotha, shepherds cured of blindness by saints, and genuinely touching accounts of friendship, as of Cuthbert and Herebert.

There are also moments of quite lyrical magnificence in his Ecclesiastical History, most famously the parable of the sparrow, as told at a great congregation called by King Edwin of Northumbria to discuss adopting the Christian faith:

The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.

We learn of the origins of church music, emerging at a time when — unlike ours! — there was not unceasing sound and song wherever people went; trained singers, few and far between, brought this fabulous art with them:

The Abbot John did as he had been commanded by the Pope, teaching the singers of the said monastery the order and manner of singing and reading aloud, and committing to writing all that was requisite throughout the whole course of the year for the celebration of festivals; and these writings are still preserved in that monastery, and have been copied by many others elsewhere. The said John not only taught the brothers of that monastery, but such as had skill in singing resorted from almost all the monasteries of the same province to hear him, and many invited him to teach in other places.

In another famous chapter we learn of Caedmon, England’s first poet — the first to compose poetry in the vulgar tongue, then Old English, rather than Latin — and how he received his gift. An elegant and moving story:

…he had never learned anything of versifying; and for this reason sometimes at a banquet, when it was agreed to make merry by singing in turn, if he saw the harp come towards him, he would rise up from table and go out and return home.

Once having done so and gone out of the house where the banquet was, to the stable, where he had to take care of the cattle that night, he there composed himself to rest at the proper time. Thereupon one stood by him in his sleep, and saluting him, and calling him by his name, said, “Cædmon, sing me something.” But he answered, “I cannot sing, and for this cause I left the banquet and retired hither, because I could not sing.” Then he who talked to him replied, “Nevertheless thou must needs sing to me.” “What must I sing?” he asked. “Sing the beginning of creation,” said the other. Having received this answer he straightway began to sing verses to the praise of God the Creator, which he had never heard.

Bede’s is a history told robustly and affectionately, aware of political realities but believing forthrightly in the possibility of purity on Earth, with a cast that is both wide and deep; it is, above all, a deeply, deeply, deeply Medieval book.

Who was Bede? He tells us at the conclusion of his history (which is where he also provides a list of all the other works he has written): a simple and scholarly monk who loved his books and who does not seem to have ever left northern England.

Having been born in the territory of that same monastery [Monkwearmouth-Jarrow], I was given, by the care of kinsmen, at seven years of age, to be educated by the most reverend Abbot Benedict… and spending all the remaining time of my life a dweller in that monastery, I wholly applied myself to the study of Scripture; and amidst the observance of monastic rule, and the daily charge of singing in the church, I always took delight in learning, or teaching, or writing.

For our final words we turn to Bede himself, included at the end of his dedication to Coelwulf; a humble request from a man who did so much for his own age and people, and who continues to serve us now, well over one thousand years later:

I beseech all men who shall hear or read this history of our nation, that for my infirmities both of mind and body, they will offer up frequent intercessions to the throne of Grace. And I further pray, that in recompense for the labour wherewith I have recorded in the several provinces and more important places those events which I considered worthy of note and of interest to their inhabitants, I may for my reward have the benefit of their pious prayers.

All quotes are from A.M. Sellar’s translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.

III - Art

The purple noon’s transparent might

Arthur Streeton (1896)

I have two things to say about this painting. First: Arthur Streeton (who painted it) was a member of the Heidelberg School. This was an art movement, or really (at the time) a specific group of painters who originally gathered at a suburb of Melbourne called Heidelberg (hence their name). They have also been called the Australian Impressionists, and this is accurate; it was Streeton and his contemporaries who first, if not quite brought to Australia, then fulfilled and embodied, the avant-garde methods and ideas of the French Impressionists.

And so what’s fascinating about the Heidelberg School, beyond the intrinsic loveliness of their paintings, is that we see a familiar artistic approach reapplied in a different context; rather than the cypresses of southern France or boulevards of Paris portrayed in broad brushstrokes and blue-backed colours smudging together, it is (in the particular case of The purple noon’s transparent might) the cattle, eucalyptus trees, and windpumps of the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales.

The second thing to comment on is this painting’s name, an ideal case study for the art of titling. Titles are strange. They aren’t part of the work — one could watch a film, read a book, or look at a painting without knowing its name — and yet, if we do know a title, it affects how we think and feel. Titles direct our attention by selecting a particular character, place, or idea; Hamlet is about Hamlet, for example, and Wuthering Heights is set in Wuthering Heights. But they can also be misleading, or metaphorical, and entirely reframe what a given work of art would otherwise seem to be about. Julius Caesar only speaks only 135 lines in the eponymous play; is he really the ‘main’ character? Joseph Conrad’s choice of Heart of Darkness for the title of his most famous book has surely contributed to its success; the book is masterful regardless of what we call it, but that title throws up so many questions (most obviously: “what is the ‘heart of darkness?’”) and lends the book a kind of scriptural or mythical quality. They are extraneous to an artwork but also inseparable. Even when an artist refuses to give their work a title, that itself is a choice which shapes how we view it; things have to have names, otherwise we can’t actually talk about them.

And so Streeton’s rather unusual title forces us, even against our will, to look at the painting differently. What is ‘transparent might’? The title is actually a line by the English poet Percy Shelley, writing in 1818. Will Shelley’s poem give us further clues to Streeton’s intention? Here’s the full stanza from which that line is taken:

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon’s transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City’s voice itself, is soft like Solitude’s.

So far, so good; Shelley is describing the serenity of a coastal scene. Are we to think this was all Streeton had in mind, taking for his subject nothing more than the beauty of midday, though with an Australian rather than (as Shelley had written) European setting? We read on:

Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned—
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround—
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

After portraying an essentially perfect spring day on the outskirts of a splendid seaside city, and having described his landscape without any metaphorical embodiment of anything other than emotional peace and spiritual serenity, Shelley plunges into absolute and unrelenting, though highly composed, misery. Does this change our view of Streeton’s The purple noon’s transparent might?

After all, Shelley called his poem Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples. Are we then to search for notes of sadness, of dejection, in Streeton’s idyllic landscape? Maybe! But whatever its potentially hidden implications, without the title Streeton gave it we wouldn’t have been inclined (I think) to look for them. Perhaps his whole intention was to force us into a strange quest of hunting for dejection in a landscape ostensibly devoid of it, and even conjuring it in our imaginations despite having no real basis in the painting itself. Small details lead us on; we search for a solitary onlooker.

Maybe none of these theories hold water; perhaps Streeton chose that line simply because it captured something of his homeland’s nature, and thought nothing of Shelley’s wider poem; perhaps his intention was to place Australian arts, and the nation itself, on a level with the lauded arts of western Europe, casting Shelley as a kind of welcome rival. Or could it have been ironic? Maybe it’s all a ruse, and Streeton hardly thought of it, and wanted to lay traps for future interpreters.

Streeton did comment on the painting’s formulation, recalling the extreme heat of the two days he painted it — a heat, through Streeton’s skill, we experience: one feels a sheen of sweat on the forehead just looking at those shrivelled shadows, glassy waters, and baking blue hills — and his obsession with Shelley at the time. Nonetheless he did not directly explain the painting or its title; that is a delightful riddle for us, a hundred and thirty years later, to solve. Streeton could have called it Hawkesbury River at Noon and left it there; he did not, and we may thank him for it!

IV - Architecture

Crespi d’Adda

A little less than ten miles south-west of Bergamo, in northern Italy, lies a peculiar town with a peculiar name: Crespi d’Adda. Its peculiar name explains its peculiar nature: Adda, for the name of the river along which it was built, and Crespi, for the industrialist — Cristoforo Benigno Crespi — who built it.

Construction started in 1878, with a cotton mill and large blocks for the first workers to live there. But when Cristoforo Crespi’s son — Silvio — took over in 1889, the town was redeveloped and improved. As he explained:

The system of building large, multi-storey houses, capable of housing ten or even twenty families, was a mistake. They were built like barracks, not homes.

And so individual homes were built for each working family instead, with larger houses for the foremen, and quite luxurious villas for managers. By 1910 there was also a school, church, hospital, hotel, theatre, sports field, cooperative, and club — all owned and run by the company.

This sounds remarkable, but it wasn’t unusual; the late 19th century was the Golden Age of ‘company towns’. These were settlements built for and populated entirely by the workers of a given company, which then managed all town affairs.

Some succeeded; many failed. They had their problems, both in terms of urban design and how they were managed, but they also represented some of the earliest attempts at total, cohesive, modern town planning, and at improving the previously miserable living conditions of factory workers. These 19th century industrialists took it upon themselves to provide everything for their employees… including their moral codes! Certain behaviours were encouraged or dissuaded, and the Damoclesian sword of being fired (and therefore also losing one’s family home) gave employers immense and surely troubling power over the employees who lived in these company towns.

So Crespi’s relationship with the people who worked for him retained the framing of the lord-vassal bond that defined the Middle Ages (and preindustrial world more generally), whereas our current idea of the employer-employee relationship has cast off that framing almost entirely. To restate that sentence in a less abstract way, and as an example of what I mean, consider this fabulous structure:

It dominates Crespi d’Adda; what is it? The summer residence of the Crespi family. Much as Medieval lords lived in manors or castles, and as their vassals worked the land around these strongholds, Crespi chose to build himself a Neo-Gothic mansion at the heart of his industrial town, complete with the swallow’s tail crenellations and banded red bricks of Medieval Lombardic architecture.

One’s landlord and employer being the same person does not sound ideal; but, if ours is an era where those who run our biggest corporations seem further removed from their employees than ever, there is at least something interesting about the idea of a CEO living in the midst of those who work for them, and the idea that such a CEO might feel obliged (as Crespi did) to provide clean, affordable, and quite lovely housing, alongside everything else needed for a decent life.

Still, this castle is not quite the most striking structure in the town; that is surely the cotton mill itself, which encapsulates the long-forgotten 19th century idea that a building’s purpose needn’t restrict or even relate to its appearance:

Nearby is another work of industrial eclecticism, the Taccani Hydroelectric Power Plant, built in 1906 to provide energy for the town and its mill; this, too, has been designed with the same decorative delight one would normally expect of a palace or grand public building. These days we think that industrial buildings, whether cotton mills or hydroelectric power plants, are necessarily boring at best, though ugly as a rule; Crespi d’Adda is surviving proof that it needn’t be so.

Crespi sold the town in 1929 and thereafter it changed ownership several times, with much of the housing sold off privately, until the cotton mill finally closed in 2004; the power plant remains operational, however, and Crespi d’Adda is still inhabited. The town and its complex of buildings became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, primarily for how cohesively they encapsulate the lost age of company towns.

One could take a cynical view of Crespi d’Adda, and of the whole 19th century culture of industrial paternalism; nonetheless, and even taking into account any and all rightful criticisms of Crespi’s ilk, there is much we might learn. No age is purely good; no age is purely bad. The work of history is to discern one from the other, and to investigate whether we can learn from the former without risking the latter.

V - Rhetoric

Questions in the Time of the Internet

The wisdom literature of all the nooks and ages of the world has lots in common. Regular observations on universal flaws or features of the human condition reoccur across monotheistic, polytheistic, ancient, and modern religions or mythologies. These observations are usually paired with or take the form of advice: better do this; better not do that.

One of these recurring themes is the difficulty of speech. Not the art of rhetoric itself, or the necessity and use of becoming skillful in speech. Rather, I mean the more troubling matter of when and when not to speak, of when to ask questions and when not to, of when to answer or even refuse to answer. It has been said we live in a time of informational overload; the Internet is ubiquitous, essentially infinite, and brutally addictive. We want and think we need to know so many things: we are Googling all the time, and now we are asking various incarnations of AI a thousand million questions every minute of the day. But we must be careful; our ancestors can help.

If we had no limits of time or effort, it wouldn’t matter what we ask. We’d have time to ask every single possible question, and follow-up question, until everything we needed or wanted to know had been revealed, and we understood it all. But we do have limits of both time and effort! Ergo we cannot ask everything. What we do ask, then, better be worth asking; what we respond to better be worth responding to.

The wisdom-poetry of Norse mythology treats knowledge itself as a magical thing, symbolised by Odin’s mastery of runes — in other words, writing itself! — and therefore also of spells. But this quite sublime symbolism is presented alongside very straightforward, very practical, and altogether timeless advice. Not least, from the 10th century Hávamál, that the less we say, the wiser we seem:

In mockery no one | a man shall hold,
Although he fare to the feast;
Wise seems one oft, | if nought he is asked,
And safely he sits dry-skinned.

To say less (and listen instead) is usually best:

A witless man, | when he meets with men,
Had best in silence abide;
For no one shall find | that nothing he knows,
If his mouth is not open too much.
(But a man knows not, | if nothing he knows,
When his mouth has been open too much.)

The great Thomas à Kempis, quoted before in the Areopagus and frequently in my book, had much to say here. He was a 15th century Dutch priest who wrote a kind of spiritual guidebook called the Imitation of Christ. Throughout, he repeatedly warns against the danger of unnecessary questions, of questions that distract us from what is actually useful and meaningful in life:

Woe unto them who inquire into many curious questions from men.

And:

Blessed is the simplicity which leaveth alone the difficult paths of questionings

Or, most simply and brilliantly of all:

Leave curious questions.

Some of this was meant in a very particular historical context; Thomas à Kempis rejected the triflingly complex, altogether pedantic theological and ecclesiological disputes that defined the Middle Ages and seemed, in his time, to be doing more harm than good for the Catholic Church:

And be not given to inquire or dispute about the merits of the Saints, which is holier than another, or which is the greater in the Kingdom of Heaven. Such questions often beget useless strifes and contentions: they also nourish pride and vain glory, whence envyings and dissensions arise, while one man arrogantly endeavoureth to exalt one Saint and another another.

But his observations of what is good for humankind exceed that context; his Imitation of Christ is timeless. Here, and again, contrasting our limited time on Earth with the overwhelming multitudes of things we might ask about or seek to understand, he urges us to pursue what is obviously and actually worth knowing:

Our own judgment and feelings often deceive us, and we discern but little of the truth. What doth it profit to argue about hidden and dark things, concerning which we shall not be even reproved in the judgment, because we knew them not? Oh, grievous folly, to neglect the things which are profitable and necessary, and to give our minds to things which are curious and hurtful! Having eyes, we see not. And what have we to do with talk about genus and species!

This passage is reminiscent of a famous parable told by the Buddha, of a man struck by a poisoned arrow, in the Cūḷamālukya Sutta. It is lengthy, but worth reading:

Suppose a man was struck by an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends and colleagues, relatives and kin would get a surgeon to treat him. But the man would say: ‘I won’t extract this arrow as long as I don’t know whether the man who wounded me was an aristocrat, a brahmin, a peasant, or a menial.’

He’d say: ‘I won’t extract this arrow as long as I don’t know the following things about the man who wounded me: his name and clan; whether he’s tall, short, or medium; whether his skin is black, brown, or dingy; and what village, town, or city he comes from. I won’t extract this arrow as long as I don’t know whether the bow that wounded me was straight or recurved; whether the bow-string is made of swallow-wort fibre, sunn hemp fibre, sinew, sanseveria fibre, or spurge fibre; whether the shaft is made from a bush or a plantation tree; whether the shaft was fitted with feathers from a vulture, a heron, a hawk, a peacock, or a stork; whether the shaft was bound with sinews of a cow, a buffalo, a black lion, or an ape; and whether the arrowhead was spiked, razor-tipped, barbed, made of iron or a calf’s tooth, or lancet-shaped.’

That man would still not have learned these things, and meanwhile he’d die.

Just because we can know something doesn’t mean we should spend our time trying to know it; not all knowledge is equally valuable in the hunt for emotional contentment, spiritual peace, and intellectual satisfcation. Time is precious.

Buddhist scripture has more to offer; no world religion or philosophy places such emphasis on this particular problem. The Pañha Vyākaraṇa Sutta, for example, describes the four ways of asking questions. Note the fourth:

Monks, there are these four ways of answering questions. What four? There is a question that should be answered categorically. There is a question that should be answered analytically. There is a question that should be answered with a counter-question. There is a question that should be set aside.

Or, in the alternative formulation of Sir John Falstaff, from Henry IV Part I:

Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher, and eat blackberries? A question not to be asked. Shall the son of England prove a thief, and take purses? A question to be asked.

And we hear it again in the Old Testament, in the Book of Proverbs:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.

There is also Gilgamesh — the hero of the eponymous Sumerian legend, humanity’s first and oldest epic, composed some four thousand years ago or more — who seeks the secrets of eternal life after seeing his friend die. He goes in search of a man called Utnapishtim, the only human to have been blessed by the gods with immortality:

“I have come on account of my ancestor Utnapishtim, who joined the Assembly of the Gods, and was given eternal life. About Death and Life I must ask him!”

He finds Utnapishtim, who speaks to our hero:

“Gilgamesh, you came here exhausted and worn out. What can I give you so you can return to your land? I will disclose to you a thing that is hidden, Gilgamesh, I will tell you.”

Utnapishtim says that he will reveal the secret of eternal life to Gilgamesh if he can stay awake for seven days and seven nights. Gilgamesh falls asleep; how can he hope to conquer death if he cannot conquer sleep? Gilgamesh must die, and his pursuit of immortality has only increased his burden. Gilgamesh asked himself whether immortality was possible; he would have been happier, taking the advice of the Buddha or Thomas à Kempis or Odin, to leave that question unanswered.

It is a strange truth echoed in another passage from the Hávamál:

A measure of wisdom | each man shall have,
But never too much let him know;
For the wise man’s heart | is seldom happy,
If wisdom too great he has won.

Icelandic mythology, Sumerian legend, Buddhist parables, Medieval priests, Hebrew scripture, and Shakespeare; these we have surveyed, but one fountain of wisdom remains: the 2004 science fiction thriller I, Robot. Although I don’t suppose it counts as ‘wisdom literature’, cinema is surely the modern equivalent of ancient mythology, and one line from that film has always stayed with me. Perhaps you will recognise and remember it also:

That, detective, is the right question.

The Internet contains many things, but most of what it contains will do us no good; our ancestors, from all corners of the Earth, knew this, and we would be wise to heed their wisdom when the false promise of unbounded knowledge is more alluring, more readily available, than ever before.

VI - Writing

The Ring and the Book

In 1860 Robert Browning came across a very old book at a flea market in Florence; it was bound in yellow leather and contained a set of legal documents relating to a strange and scandalous case dating to the year 1698. Browning read these documents and they fired his imagination — so he wrote a kind of epic poem based on what he affectionally called this ‘Old Yellow Book’. It runs to 21,000 lines, divided into twelve parts, and is usually described (fairly, I suppose!) as a ‘verse novel’ rather than a straightforward epic poem; epic in length, but essentially domestic in subject.

Told briefly, the case concerned the alleged murder of a woman called Pompilia, along with her parents, by the nobleman Count Guido Franceschini, to whom she had been married; involved in this case were also a priest, Caponsacchi, who had helped Pompilia flee Count Guido and may have been her lover, and even Pope Innocent XII, to whom this case was referred. Among its myriad problems were the question of Pompilia’s birth (had the Comparinis, her alleged parents, adopted her?) and a trove of supposed letters exchanged between Pompilia and Caponsacchi, plus the contents of various wills, original motivations for the marriage, and obscure legal precedents.

Without dwelling on the poem itself (though a day may come!) what I find most instructive about its conception is Browning’s decision not to narrate the whole story from his or another single perspective, but to give each major character their own hearing, their own chance to make a case for themselves.

We begin with Browning himself, explaining how he found the Old Yellow Book and why he decided to turn its contents into a verse novel; then we hear from the citizens of Rome, both those for Pompilia and for Guido, from a lawyer not involved in the case, from Count Guido, from the priest Caponsacchi, from Pompilia, from two lawyers (both the prosecution and defence), from Pope Innocent XII, from Guido once again, and finally from Browning on the other side of his work.

We can read the materials that inspired Browning’s poem; the Old Yellow Book is available online (here)! There’s something thrilling and revealing about going straight from those torturously detailed, intermingling and inconsistent legal accounts and arguments, to Browning’s majestic poem, and wondering how we might have done the same. Could we have imagined such a story, given the same source material?

But, more to our point, the fact is that Browning tells the same story ten times from nine points of view (Guido’s point of view is given twice, though at different stages in the narrative), plus a prologue and epilogue from his own perspective, on either side of his Herculean effort. In other words… he wrote the same story twelve times over! Each part brings with it new or alternative facts, changed arrangements of narrative, differing emphases, and divided worldviews; at no point do we feel we’ve heard it all before, and I (for one) found my sympathies adjusting with every new chapter I read.

The Ring and the Book teaches, among many other things, that we can’t and perhaps even shouldn’t only write things once over. A story told is not a story finished; any given way of telling a story is only one of thousands, and we would be fools not to search out those other ways. Writing the same thing again — a story, an essay, whatever it is — forces you to actually inhabit the mindset, emotional landscape, and worldview of other people. Told but once, we can complacently believe we are telling a story (or explaining a set of faces or ideas) from either an objective or alternative point of view. Only when we have to rewrite that same narrative from a different perspective do we realise that we were, all along, telling it as ourselves, neither objectively nor alternately.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

What never changes?

There’s a saying that “some things never change,” or the old-fashioned French version usually shorted to “plus ça change”, from “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, meaning “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” I think this is pretty much true, and few things are more heartening or humanely amusing than to find what feel like modern stereotypes in old books. The way Erasmus described being a student in the 1490s, and the way Victor Hugo describes students in both Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, are essentially indistinguishable from how we think of students now: shabbily dressed, full of idealistic and unrealistic ideas about society, and totally penniless but always somehow drunk nonetheless.

The French Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay (born in 1522; died in 1560) provides us with another five-hundred-year-old case of plus ça change. It’s the fifteenth poem of a collection called Regrets, written during three miserable years in Rome, when all he could do was think of home.

You’d like to know, Panjas, how I spend my time?
I think about tomorrow and its expense,
How, without cash in hand, I can finance
A hundred debts contracted in my name.
I go, I come, I run, I waste no time,
I court a banker for a small advance;
One debtor fixed, another tries his chance;
I don’t pay out a quarter of their claims.
Now here’s a letter, an account, a bill;
Tomorrow’s the consistory with still
More news to cause a headache, if not worse.
Here there’s clamour — protests, shouts, and cries;
Tell me, my Panjas, are you not surprised
At how, despite all that, I’m writing verse?

A penniless artist! A ‘creative’ (as we call them now) struggling to find financial stability! A sulking poet moaning that the economy has no place for him! Have we not heard this before, perhaps even met such a person or read such an article lamenting such a situation this very day? I think so. Plus ça, and all that.

Walter Pater’s exquisite The Renaissance (published, to shock and awe, in 1873) contains a chapter on Joachim du Bellay. As an art critic and art historian Pater is sort of like the Anti-Ruskin. To talk as Pater himself talked, Pater as a critic is like a pearl-fisher, who has fished his exquisite little pearls from the hidden corner of a bay otherwise well-populated by swimmers and fishermen, and presents them to us without judgment or explanation; Pater gives elegant, obscure, almost purely symbolistic, but utterly convincing impressions of particular artists — that is, compared to John Ruskin’s absolute precision of description and explanation, his actual scholarly interest in and knowledge of the material world (botany, minerology, meteorology), and (of course) the ubiquitous lodestar of his moral logic.

Had F. Scott Fitzgerald been an art critic, he would have written like Pater; had Pater commented on Fitzgerald, he would have said (perhaps) that, “he was a man who had perfected the rare but very melancholy art of writing in nothing but mondegreens.” Or maybe not! Both were writers who forged sweeping but convincing characterisations of humanity or human behaviour from the minutest observations, and presented them in highly imagistic, very allusive, very delicately and carefully wrought sentences.

This is what Pater says about du Bellay:

Much of Du Bellay’s poetry illustrates rather the age and school to which he belonged than his own temper and genius… its interest depends not so much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on the circumstance that it was once poetry a la mode, that it is part of the manner of a time—a time which made much of manner, and carried it to a high degree of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age which threw much of its energy into the work of decoration. We feel a pensive pleasure in seeing these faded decorations, and observing how a group of actual men and women pleased themselves long ago.

Pater is correct. The chief pleasure of reading Joachim du Bellay is to learn about his time and society; but, when we find him versifying his financial struggles as an artist, we realise that we are reading about a society that, despite what we are taught and led to believe, remains recognisably our own, and that it was one inhabited, for all that was different in it, by people of precisely the same sort as you and me.

Pater delineates himself in this way, and does not fail to identify what is special in du Bellay rather than merely of his age; though du Bellay is a pristine aesthetic mirror to the spirit of Renaissance France (before the Wars of Religion), he also achieved a personality revealed through that aesthetic:

But if his work is to have the highest sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfy curiosity, if it is to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical value, it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of his age, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions, and by so conforming to have charmed and stimulated that age; it is necessary that there should be perceptible in his work something individual, inventive, unique, the impress there of the writer’s own temper and personality.

The above-quoted poem, from Joachim du Bellay’s Regrets, and much like the rest of those fabulous Regrets, represents what is individual in him, his own true temper, even if it has been expressed in the trappings of his times. He was a funny man:

I hate the Florentine’s greed and usury,
I hate the thick slow-witted Sienese,
I hate the lying tongues of Genoese
And cold Venetian ways, hostile and sly.
I hate Ferrara folk (don’t ask me why)
And Lombards who break any oath they please,
Fat lazy Romans, lolling at their ease,
Neapolitans puffed up with vanity.
I hate the rowdy English and the Scotch,
Burgundian traitors, French who talk too much,
The haughty Spaniard and the drunken German.
I short, I hate some vice in every nation,
I hate myself for all imperfection,
But most of all I hate pedantic learning.

Or, more straightforwardly:

You don’t believe in God? Something much worse:
That you’re a pedant; that’s the crowning vice.

But he was not misanthropic or cynical; when du Bellay rails against Rome it is always, if not tongue-in-cheek, then highly self-aware; not inauthentic (really quite shocking, at times, for its plainness!) but quite forgiving, and simultaneously self-critical. Do you get the same feeling from his poetry? I hope so.

If I frequent the Vatican, I see pride
And secret vice disguised by ceremony,
The martial noise of drums, strange harmony,
And scarlet prelates, splendidly arrayed.

Du Bellay was not only funny, and not only a talented complainer; he was also capable of refined and sincere expressions of love, especially of that peculiar, essentially self-imposed or sought-after suffering-in-longing so typical of Renaissance sonneteers: the likes of Ronsard, Spenser, Sidney, and (the original) Petrarch. This comes from du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, very different to his Regrets, called The Olive:

If our whole life be less than one short day
In time eternal, if each turning year
Takes in its course the days that come no more,
If all that’s born is destined to decay,
Why do you love the darkness of our day,
My dreaming soul, imprisoned as you are,
When to a brighter dwelling you might soar
With such wide wings to bear you far away?

What unites his life and poetry and satire is world-weariness; du Bellay’s verse resonates with a serious, self-aware melancholy, with a Byronic Weltschmerz two and a half centuries before Byron was born. From du Bellay’s Antiquities of Rome, a collection of poetic meditations on the ruins of the Roman Empire:

Newcomer, eager to find Rome in Rome
And finding there’s no Rome in Rome to see,
Old palaces, this crumbling masonry
Of walls and arches, that’s what men call Rome.

…

Rome is the only monument to Rome,
And Rome by Rome alone was overcome.

…

So, step by step, did Rome’s great empire grow
Until Barbarians who laid it low
Left only ancient ruins free for all
To pillage, like poor fellows that are seen
Stepping behind the harvester to glean
Whatever careless remnants he lets fall.

We can see why Pater chose du Bellay for one of the select few artists to be studied in The Renaissance; he had a certain sensibility, and what we might call a forwardness of perspective — du Bellay’s poetry contains much that was true of the Renaissance more generally, and (vitally) contains much that would become true in future ages.

But I’m getting away from things; the Areopagus is winding ineluctably down, and January must have its way.

All translations of Joachim du Bellay by Anthony Mortimer.

And that’s all

In the final section of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, where he returns to his own perspective as the author of this verse novel, reflecting on why and how he has written it, he says:

What was once seen, grows what is now described,
Then talked of, told about, a tinge the less
In every fresh transmission; till it melts,
Trickles in silent orange or wan grey
Across our memory, dies and leaves all dark,
And presently we find the stars again.
Follow the main streaks, meditate the mode
Of brightness, how it hastes to blend with black!

A tinge the less in every fresh transmission. Gallingly, gruesomely, gorgeously truthful… and terribly sad! What is the Areopagus if not things seen, grown described, talked of, and (finally) told about? Well: I hope to have stemmed that trickling in silent orange or wan grey, and restored the faintest flicker of brightness’ first mode.

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor

Subscribe now

Share Areopagus

It begins with a simple news bulletin, simple though sweet: I’ve been invited to join a panel of judges for a competition to design lamp posts. There’s a plan afoot to build the United Kingdom’s first new city in over fifty years. It’s called Forest City and you may have heard about it in the news. Those behind this plan intend to hold design competitions for all its street furniture and urban infrastructure; lamp posts are the first. The idea is also that, regardless of the precise path Forest City takes, and how long its vision waits to be realised, these competitions can serve a much broader role and provide models for new street furniture elsewhere. Details of the competition, including how to submit, are here.

If you are a designer, please consider making a submission. If you know any designers, please tell them about it. If you are not a designer, but care about the appearance of lamp posts, and perhaps have some ideas on how they might look… why not make a submission, in any case?

With that said (and another reminder that my book is available to all looking for Christmas presents as the calendar rushes toward the 25th!) we may return to those old (though not too old) and familiar (though not overbaked) words: another seven short lessons begins…

Subscribe now

I - Classical Music

Ero e Leandro

Alfredo Catalani (1885)

Performed by the Warmia National Orchestra

The Parting of Hero and Leander by J.M.W. Turner (1837)

Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia) once published a volume of poetry called Minorities. These were not his poems (he only wrote one, highly mysterious, which serves as the epigram to Seven Pillars of Wisdom) but his favourite poems. Even more specifically, they were the poems he had collected and taken with him on his travels, either literally (on scraps of paper, copied out, or leaves torn from books) or immaterially (in his memory). It was called Minorities because, as Lawrence explains with the book’s subtitle, it comprised:

Good Poems by Small Poets and Small Poems by Good Poets.

This came to mind as a suitable introduction for Alfredo Catalani’s Ero e Leandro. Many will recognise his name, but most won’t, and this particular piece is hardly a concert staple. Catalani stands on the first pole outlined by Lawrence; Ero e Leandro is one of the ‘Good Poems by Small Poets’ (small and good , as Lawrence meant, in terms of fame rather than merit), or in our case, a ‘Good Piece by a Small Composer’.

Alfredo Catalani, born in Tuscany in 1854, is most famous for his 1892 opera La Wally, though really just for one particular part of it: the gorgeous aria Ebben? Ne andrò lontana. It is popular for a reason, and deserves all the popularity it has. But no man who could write such beautiful music as that could not also have written more. Well, he did; Catalani’s Ero e Leandro was composed and published in 1885.

This is a tone poem, a genre popular during the Romantic Age of the 19th century, whereby composters wrote a single-movement orchestral piece inspired by and based on a specific story, place, person, or idea. Its theme is the Ancient Greek myth of Hero and Leander; its title is their Italianised names.

Those who know the myth… good! Those who don’t… I’d rather not spoil it. Better listen to the music, then read the story and see if the music served. Even reading a summary will do; like most myths, that of Hero and Leander has no definitive form. It is one of those perfected miniature legends that defies expansion or alteration and can only be retold, not reworked. That is precisely the beauty and power of mythology. We already know the ending, but that only makes it sweeter, bitterer, or grander.

Perhaps the most famous retelling was a poem written by Christopher Marlowe, though he died before completing it; George Chapman finished the rest and it was published in 1598. The poem is lovely, particularly Chapman’s description of Hero and Leander’s eventual transformation into goldfinches and what the birds’ colours symbolise. Chapman also concludes with a curious belief that had formed around the myth of Hero and Leander — that it was the first ever Ancient Greek legend, even older than that of the Trojan War:

And this true honour from their love-death sprung,—
They were the first that ever poet sung.

Catalani’s tone poem is incredibly sensitive to its theme: delicate without luxuriousness, dramatic without melodrama, romantic without sentimentalising. It does feel somewhat familiar, and verges on the formulaic. But so what? This piece has a gloriously cinematic atmosphere, and sweeps us along from beginning to end, from the heights of love through the crashing of waves and into tragedy. Of course, we wouldn’t know this music is about Hero and Leander without its title; even not knowing, I think it would move us. Knowing, though, it’s even better.

II - Historical Figure

Kabir

Kabir was born to an Islamic family in the holy city of Varanasi, northern India, in the year 1440. Of his early life (his whole life, really) there is more legend than fact. What we do know is that, though a Muslim, he wanted to study under the Hindu guru Ramananda, who had been pushing back against religious orthodoxy.

Varanasi at that time was dominated by the priests of Islam and the priests of Hinduism, by Mullahs and Sufis and Brahmans, who viewed one another in what seems to have been a very collegial way, frequently engaging in cross-denominational, cross-creed discussions about philosophy and theology.

Well, Kabir became Ramananda’s brightest pupil, and carried his teacher’s attempts at synthesising supposedly distinct religions to new heights. How? Through poetry, joining a long tradition of mystical and contemplative poet-theologians who had looked past mere rules in search of the real, essentially unquantifiable, experiential nature of the universe.

For Kabir, neither Hinduism nor Islam, viewed as coherent religious creeds, contained all the answers. As he wrote:

It is needless to ask of a saint the caste to which he belongs;
For the priest, the warrior, the tradesman, and all the thirty-six castes, alike are seeking for God.
It is but folly to ask what the caste of a saint may be;
The barber has sought God, the washerwoman, and the carpenter—
…
Hindus and Muslims alike have achieved that End, where remains no mark of distinction.

Some of his poems were highly autobiographical; in this case Kabir explains how he arrived at his particular version of enlightenment, and lays out his quite startling rejection of all rites, ceremonies, and idols:

O Brother! when I was forgetful, my true Guru showed me the Way.
Then I left all rites and ceremonies, I bathed no more in the holy water:
Then I learned that it was I alone who was mad, and the whole world beside me was sane; and I had disturbed these wise people.
From that time forth I knew no more how to roll in the dust in obeisance:
I do not ring the temple bell:
I do not set the idol on its throne:
I do not worship the image with flowers.
It is not the austerities that mortify the flesh which are pleasing to the Lord,
When you leave off your clothes and kill your senses, you do not please the Lord:
The man who is kind and who practises righteousness, who remains passive amidst the affairs of the world, who considers all creatures on earth as his own self,
He attains the Immortal Being, the true God is ever with him.
Kabir says, ‘He attains the true Name whose words are pure, and who is free from pride and conceit.’

Crucially, Kabir was not a hermit or monk, not one of those wisemen or mystical poets who retreat from society. He actively rejected the idea that we should subject ourselves to material discomfort in order to achieve spiritual perfection, and chose to embrace the delights of life — arts, crafts, and music — over the hermit’s cave or monk’s cell:

Dance, my heart! dance today with joy.
The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music, and the world is listening to its melodies:
Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music. The hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in laughter and tears.
Why put on the robe of the monk, and live aloof from the world in lonely pride?
Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts; and the Creator is well pleased.

He had a family, including several children, and a job. His work was weaving, and it’s weaving that Kabir is usually depicted. Among all this, he also composed and performed poetry; Kabir loved music, and his poetry is infused with musical symbolism:

The light of the sun, the moon, and the stars shines bright:
The melody of love swells forth, and the rhythm of love’s detachment beats the time.
Day and night, the chorus of music fills the heavens; and Kabir says,
’My Beloved One gleams like the lightning flash in the sky.’

The beauty of musical symbolism is that anybody can grasp it. Ordinary language and familiar, simple imagery pervade Kabir’s poetry. It is tempting to use his professional trade as a metaphor… well, I am tempted! As he wove different threads into uniform patterns, Kabir wove the threads of different religions into his universalising conception of God, of Oneness, of whatever we choose to call it:

Beneath the great umbrella of my King millions of suns and moons and stars are shining!
He is the Mind within my mind: He is the Eye within mine eye.
Ah, could my mind and eyes be one! Could my love but reach to my Lover! Could but the fiery heat of my heart be cooled!
Kabir says: ‘When you unite love with the Lover, then you have love’s perfection.’

He rejected orthodoxy and rejected authority. It was the universal and unifying, eternal and inseparable religion of love, of direct experience, that Kabir believed in:

There is nothing but water at the holy bathing places; and I know that they are useless, for I have bathed in them.
The images are all lifeless, they cannot speak; I know, for I have cried aloud to them.
The Purana and the Koran are mere words; lifting up the curtain, I have seen.
Kabir gives utterance to the words of experience; and he knows very well that all other things are untrue.

And this was an experience available to any and all who let themselves pay attention to it, wherever and whoever they were; Kabir says we needn’t be in a temple or church or mosque to find Oneness:

Kabir says: ‘Whether I be in the temple or the balcony, in the camp or in the flower garden, I tell you truly that every moment my Lord is taking His delight in me.’

And, among all this, Kabir was wholly unafraid of criticising the priests and religious authorities, accusing them of hypocrisy and dismissing their rules and ceremonies as distraction from what really matters:

The Kazi is searching the words of the Koran, and instructing others: but if his heart be not steeped in that love, what does it avail, though he be a teacher of men?
The Yogi dyes his garments with red: but if he knows naught of that colour of love, what does it avail though his garments be tinted?

He even makes the openly heretical claim that religions do not differ at heart, calling himself a devotee of all Gods — which are the same God — and, again, refusing to accept the dictates of organised religion with its scriptures, temples, and priests:

If God be within the mosque, then to whom does this world belong?
If Ram be within the image which you find upon your pilgrimage, then who is there to know what happens without?
Hari is in the East: Allah is in the West. Look within your heart, for there you will find both Karim and Ram;
All the men and women of the world are His living forms.
Kabir is the child of Allah and of Ram: He is my Guru, He is my Pir.

Kabir’s rejection of religious authority and orthodoxy, combined with his claims of religious unity, got him (unsurprisingly, in a holy city dominated by priests!) into trouble. But Kabir’s life was spared by the enlightened Emperor Sikander Khan Lodi, who chose to banish him from Varanasi instead. Thereafter, until the end of his life, he travelled northern India with his disciples.

Kabir’s life is soaked in legend, and the final is the loveliest of all. Upon Kabir’s death (so we are told) his Hindu followers wanted to cremate him and his Muslim followers bury him. When they pulled back the cloth laid over his body, however, it had disappeared; a heap of flowers was what they found. Half were taken to Maghar and interred, the other half to Varanasi and burned.

A private dream of mine is to imagine how Kabir might have gotten along with Erasmus, who was alive and working at precisely the same time — only, in Renaissance Europe rather than India. I like to think they would have been friends, agreed about much (with the exception of Erasmus’ general disinterest in and apparent disdain for music!), and learned a great deal from one another. It is, at least, a thrilling conversation to speculate over.

How to conclude? I will say that there is a particular quality to Kabir’s poetry that I can only describe as welcomingness. The poetry of mystics, professing (and often genuinely) revealing to us great wisdom, can sometimes come across as intimidating or judgmental. But Kabir does not judge us for our ways, and seems egolessly eager to share his spiritual joy. Kabir was convinced that enlightenment could be found in the home, in a simple and delightful domestic life, not only in monasteries, among the temples, or before an altar:

He is dear to me indeed who can call back the wanderer to his home. In the home is the true union, in the home is enjoyment of life: why should I forsake my home and wander in the forest? If Brahma helps me to realise truth, verily I will find both bondage and deliverance in the home.
…
Kabir says, ‘The home is the abiding place; in the home is reality; the home helps attain Him Who is real. So stay where you are, and all things shall come to you in time.’

His poetry rewards reading, and now more than ever. Regardless of our own religious beliefs or creed, and even if we do not ‘agree’ with him (though I find that a strangely inappropriate word here; one struggles to ‘disagree’ with Kabir any more than one might ‘disagree’ with a flower), Kabir offers through his poetry a realm of peaceful, uncomplicated contemplation — much needed, I think, in a time of digital overload:

To what shore would you cross, O my heart?
there is no traveller before you, there is no road:
Where is the movement, where is the rest, on that shore?
There is no water; no boat, no boatman is there;
There is not so much as a rope to tow the boat, nor a man to draw it.
No earth, no sky, no time, no thing, is there: no shore, no ford!
There, there is neither body nor mind: and where is the place that shall still the thirst of the soul? You shall find naught in that emptiness.
Be strong, and enter into your own body: for there your foothold is form. Consider it well, O my heart! go not elsewhere.
Kabir says: ‘Put all imagination away, and stand fast in that which you are.’

He transports us to a metaphysical plane, infused with the purest of natural imagery, and the most ancient of senses, that we struggle to access in the Age of the Internet, when a relentless river of stuff — adverts, shorts, reels, infographics, news bulletins, memes, video essays, pop-ups, clickbait, logos — drowns us each and every day. Kabir is something else; we don’t have to live like this, and can enter another way of being, if only for the duration of a single poem:

Between the poles of the conscious and the unconscious, there has the mind made a swing:
Thereon hang all beings and all worlds, and that swing never ceases its sway.
Millions of beings are there: the sun and the moon in their courses are there:
Millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on.
All swing! the sky and the earth and the air and the water; and the Lord Himself taking form:
And the sight of this has made Kabir a servant.

Finally, I should say that Kabir is a wonderful entry point for anybody curious to tread beyond the bounds of western poetry, as immediately comprehensible — both for what is universal in humanity, and what is specific in his tradition — as Rumi or Hafiz.

In an epoch (like every epoch) where it is always one the two options Kabir outlines below that we find ourselves forced to pick, and see others picking around us, his great and enduring majesty lies in refusing to choose either:

Kabir seeks neither to establish nor destroy.

All translations by Rabindranath Tagore.

III - Art

Anonymous Masters

No artist in history (I think) can claim a more evocative name than the ‘Master of the Gardens of Love’, an engraver from the Netherlands who worked and lived during the first half of the 15th century. Why so called? Because we do not know his name.

During the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance it wasn’t customary for woodcutters or engravers to sign their works, and the result is that thousands of unsigned prints, many of them extraordinary works of art, and many of them at least fascinating or important for one reason or another, have come down to us. By comparing these prints, and figuring out — based on style, subject, any hint of an identifying mark, or chemical clues hidden in pigments or paper — which ones were made by the same person, we can approximate the existence of a single artist.

But, once identified, what to call them? Any noteworthy artist from before the 19th century is called an ‘Old Master’. These printmakers, then, are Old Masters. How to distinguish them? By whatever most distinguished their work.

So, for example, we have the Master of the Small Landscapes, who specialised in precisely what his title suggests — delightful snapshots of rural life in 15th century Flanders, wholly undramatic and focussed purely on the charm of cottages, mill-ponds, brick gables, footbridges, cattle, and peasant routines. These prints were published by Hieronymus Cock (who also published the prints of Pieter Brueghel the Elder) and seem to have played a vital role in the establishment of landscapes as an artistic genre of their own.

Otherwise, and more enigmatically, there’s the Master of Embroidered Foliage. This was a Netherlandish painter (or painters!) who worked in Bruges at the zenith of the Northern Renaissance. I say painter or painters because the jury is out on whether this was one artist or several; clear enough, however, is that a handful of paintings produced during the closing years of the 15th century are sufficiently stylistically united that they must have been the work of, if not a single artist, then a group working closely alongside one another in the same workshop. What unites them is (among other things, including the specific pose of the Madonna and Child) their particular way of depicting foliage. The canopies of their trees have a luminous, beaded quality, very much like sequins sewn to a cloth in big, rolled-up bunches. It’s very stylised, and not at all what trees actually look like, but incredibly effective for portraying their massy, glittering green-ness, and very pretty to look at.

The most epic anonymous title belongs to a 17th century Austrian sculptor known as the Master of the Furies. He made blood-chilling statuettes of what the Romans called Furies, and the Greeks Eumenides, a trio of terrifying goddesses who guarded oaths by haunting and torturing any who broke them — and also of their victims:

The Master of the Antiphonary Q of San Giorgio Maggiore is surely the bizarrest, though its meaning is straightforward. An antiphonary is an illustrated choirbook, San Giorgio Maggiore was a monastery in Venice (famous from Monet’s paintings of it), and the master in this case was an illuminator who made for said monastery a 15th century antiphonary which, among the monastery’s many antiphonaries, was catalogued as Q. Nonetheless it makes for a delightful title, and the master’s work is also delightful, not unlike the illustrations of Phoebe Anna Traquair I wrote about in the most recent instalment of the Areopagus:

Another wonderful and remarkably modern-sounding name is Master W with the Key, so called because that’s how he signed his works: with a W and a key, side by side. His engravings, which largely portray bits of Gothic design, likely for carpenters and masons to work from, are sumptuous. You can see his signature at the top of this print, just to the left of the pinnacle.

But what about our Master of the Gardens of Love? He was one the earliest practitioners of copper engraving, and what he used this novel technique to depict were scenes of courtly love, according to its Late Medieval ideals and motifs, thus including walled gardens, maidens playing amorous games with chivalrous knights, and an array of deeply symbolic birds.

And that, surveyed briefly, is the world of anonymous masters. A little game I like to play is wondering what titles might have been given to various artists whose names we do (thankfully) know. Could J.M.W. Turner have become the Master of Mud? For Vincent van Gogh we could have the sweet and truthful Master of Sunflowers. For Leonardo, perhaps, in reference to his revolutionary use of sfumato, the Master of the Smoky Eyes. John Martin we can call the Master of Apocalypse, and Giorgione something alluring like the Master of the Melancholy Shepherd.

IV - Architecture

Antwerp Central Station

In 1905 a new train station in Antwerp, Belgium’s second-largest city, was opened. It had taken six years to build, was designed by Louis Delacenserie, and encapsulated much of what was wonderful about the design movement Belgium had recently given to the world: Art Nouveau.

I don’t suppose Antwerp Central is a strict work of Art Nouveau. Really it embodies general 19th century historical eclecticism more, whereby different historical styles were fused together. Art Nouveau, meanwhile, and as the name indicates, was about finding new methods and forms of design. Nonetheless, Antwerp Central glitters with the onrushing spirit of Art Nouveau, particularly in its procession of glass: its massive fanlights, barrel-vaults, and domes.

It’s an impressive building (eminently), and adjectives like grand or monumental or lavish come to mind. Another I would use, and somewhat less common, is retro-futuristic. You can imagine a kind of steampunk airship tethered to its dome, and its great hallways filled with brass automata. Those particular associations may be a consequence of the books I read as a child, but (I think!) their spirit is accurate. Antwerp Central looks how somebody living two hundred years ago, in the early or mid 19th century, might have conceptualised the future.

And, in truth, Antwerp Central has always been retro-futuristic! After all, this building was constructed using groundbreaking new technologies like plate glass, steel girders, and even concrete — technologies which represent a kind of distinguishing evolution from old to new in the history of architecture. What came before them is one thing; what came after is wholly different. This station, however, represents an extraordinary midpoint between those two eras, teetering on a brief and possibly unsustainable architectural knife-edge between the coequally vast abysses of past and future. You can see a whole new conception of architecture — one that was metallic, gigantic, and fundamentally industrial (our age) — bursting through the motifs and ideas — marble columns and akroteria, metopes and triglyphs — of an older age. It’s glorious.

Antwerp Central also has a fantastical train shed some forty metres high and nearly two hundred metres long. This was functional. Like St Pancras in London (for example), train sheds had to be so massive because of the steam and smoke produced by the trains. Without so much headroom, all that smoke would have smothered and rendered inoperable the platforms. We don’t have that problem now; hence train sheds aren’t a thing. And what a shame! Not that our trains no longer produce so much smoke (although steamtrains are, by almost universal assent, so thoroughly charming), but that we no longer need to be build these colossal structures… and therefore don’t. Though, even then, necessity clearly didn’t represent the limit of architects’ ambitions — at Antwerp Central, they did more than what they had to.

Above all, though, I would ask how this building makes you feel. Train stations are especially interesting for (among other reasons) the frequency with which they serve as the first building a person sees, or at least sees completely, inside and outside, and also enters, in any given city or town; train stations are architectural first impressions. We call their great chambers ‘entrance halls’ (note the dual meaning implied by trance here) for a reason! But I sometimes wonder if this fact is, if not quite wholly forgotten, at least not given due respect. Antwerp Central shows what is possible when that fact is treated with reverence. Are trains not miraculous things? I think so.

V - Rhetoric

Hypophora versus Erotema

AI writing is everywhere. I will keep my general views on ChatGPT guarded for now, though you can probably guess what they are. As a rule I try to avoid anything written by AI, but its ubiquity makes that difficult and, in any case, the whole thing is (admittedly) altogether fascinating. There’s one thing in particular I will mention.

How to recognise AI writing? There are certain well-known clues, among them (lamentably, given my love for it!) the use of em dashes (i.e. — ) and a tendency for inoffensive, generic, and essentially meaningless conclusions that use phrases such as: “it inspired profound reflection in the audience”.

AI writing also uses extensive imagery, and does so in a way not wholly unreminiscent of euphuism. This was a style of writing popular in the 16th century that revolved around (amid dozens more highly conscious rhetorical flourishes) the continuous contrasting of one thing with another. The name for this is antithesis, and it’s very effective. In AI writing one thing is always contrasted with another, usually with the word ‘just’ employed somewhere along the way: “It wasn’t just a newsletter — it was revolution.” That sort of thing.

Tricolons — i.e. a sentence with three parallel parts — are also common, alongside specific but genuinely stereotypical examples. Specificity is usually very good, and makes writing better. You don’t just talk about ‘trees’ when describing the south of France; you talk about ‘cypresses’. But, with AI, imagery is inevitably reduced to a series of isolated, distinct, quantifiable phrases instead of disparate, diffused, potentially misleading, actively elusive (and allusive!) impressions, which is what any example or image actually is when we notice in real life, and commit what we have noticed to paper or pixel.

Another of its traits is posing and answering short questions. AI will describe the immediate aftermath of Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal in the 1986 World Cup (for example) by saying something like:

The crowd? Silenced.
The players? Shocked.
The world of football? Changed forever.

To ask and answer one’s own question is called hypophora, and it’s a very effective technique. Questions are stories; to ask a question is to create a desire (even against our will, as listeners or readers!) for resolution. It also helps streamline one’s argument, because every question acts as a miniature signpost. Above all, and amid several other effects, hypophora has the essential advantage of providing additional information in a more engaging way.

Anyway, reflecting on this, I suddenly realised that I haven’t yet seen AI use a different form of question: erotema, the technical term for what we colloquially call a ‘rhetorical question’, one asked without expectation of a verbal or written answer because that answer is implied and therefore doesn’t need to be said. Our natural manner of speaking and writing is full of rhetorical questions, more than we quite realise. We also have a general habit of answering rhetorical questions, though not by answering the specific thing asked (for then it wouldn’t be a rhetorical question) but by jumping straight to what is implied by the rhetorical question.

Why doesn’t AI use rhetorical questions? I don’t think I need to answer that.

VI - Writing

Ruth

About ten days ago (or it might have been twelve, or fourteen!) a friend observed that, although we often call people ruthless, we never say they are (alternatively) ‘full of ruth’. This spurred two questions. First, is it a thing that can, or ever has been, said? Second, does ruthless have any connection to Ruth, of the eponymous book of the Bible?

The word ruthless is not alone in seeming to have a stem, with a suffix or prefix, that is rarely or never written or spoken without its suffix or prefix. Think of the word ‘disappointing’. Have you ever heard somebody describe something as ‘appointing’? I have not. You can see the sense of disappoint when you think about it, but the word has drifted from that precise meaning. We also have spineless but not spineful; there is spiny, but that means something else entirely. There’s firm and infirm, but not infirmity and firmity. Though deniable is a word you hear from time to time, it isn’t used with the same gigantic frequency as undeniable. Everything in the news is described as unprecedented; more often I should like to hear things called precedented, which is mostly what they are. We remember things often — less often than we member them.

Another category is words which, lacking their suffix or prefix, do not take an opposite but wholly different meant. ‘Demoralise’ (for example) is not, as we use the word today, the opposite of ‘moralising’. If we recapitulate that does not mean that we are capitulating for a second time. Notwithstanding and withstanding are similar.

There’s also weird compressions like albeit, which can be modified in surprising ways. Albeit is simply a gathering of ‘all be it’, but seeing it written with spaces might raise the question… can ‘be’ change tense? Yes! In The Merchant’s Tale Geoffrey Chaucer uses the phrase “al were it” as a past tense form of albeit. I think alwereit could be a very useful (and fabulously peculiar-looking) word. Even more exciting is its future tense form, of which I cannot find any example: the marvellous alwillit. What about nevertheless? Why not neverthemore too?

Anyway — back to ruth.

First: it is a thing that people have said. I realised this last week when (before having actually looked into the matter!) I decided to read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Included was a short essay called ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, written by Emily’s sister Charlotte to explain the real personalities of the two women who had written under those pseudonyms: Ellis Bell and Acton Bell were, in reality, Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë. It features this line:

The awful point was, that while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity.

George Chapman also used it in Hero and Leander:

…the yellow shows their saint,
The dainty Venus, left them; blue, their truth;
The red and black, ensigns of death and ruth.

Ruth was a word more common during the Middle Ages and Renaissance; even by the Brontës’ time it was fairly archaic. Still, it is a recognised English word.

Second: it does not have anything to do with Ruth. A shame — her book is one of my favourite parts of the Bible! Its etymology goes back to the Dark Ages, with an Old Norse (rather than Hebrew) origin in the word hryggð, which became hrēowan in Old English. That evolved into ruth, though all along the word maintained its original meaning of remorse or compassion.

To be ruthless, then, is to be without remorse or compassion; to be ruthful, meanwhile, is to be remorseful and compassionate. But the whole quality of ruth, according to its ancientest meaning, also blends into grief and sorrow. So it is a powerful word! And to lack it, to be ruthless, is a more woeful and terrifying prospect than that which, using the word so frequently and so casually, I quite understood.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Boskos thromuldo boskos? Kerelybonto!

Anything timeless grips and thrills me; anything timeless (be that a song, painting, building, poem, or journal entry) has the unique power of bringing the past to life.

Timelessness has two broad forms: greatness and ordinariness. Neither is better; they are different. The Pyramids at Giza are an example of great timelessness. Nobody can fail to be awed by them. These are man-made mountains, pure geometry on a colossal scale and in so majestically a material way that they transcend the feeble context of political systems, art movements, or even language.

What about ordinary timelessness? I give this little carving from Beverley Minster in northern England as an example. It’s five hundred years old and portrays a monkey using a dog as bagpipes:

The timelessness here is of the person who made it, not the thing itself, as with the Pyramids. Up from the supposedly dark chasm of five centuries, over the apparently unsurpassable gulf of technology that lies between our ancestors and we, reaches the joyous and simple humour of a carpenter whose name has been forgotten, but whose delight in a ridiculous scene precisely matches ours. This little carving is hardly different from all the thousands of nonsensical memes shared online every day.

So: Shakespeare is timeless. That is not a controversial statement. Though, I suppose, the reasons we say it (and rightly say it) relate to his observations on the human condition. Human nature (unlike scientific theories or political ideologies, which when they guide a work of art limit its time-relevance) is unchanging. His plays, like the Pyramids, transcend the contextual boundaries that hem in most of what we make.

But Shakespeare offers other, more ordinary kinds of timelessness. There are many examples. My favourite comes from All’s Well That Ends Well, one of his least-performed plays (though its title is well-known).

The particular scene involves a ploy proposed by a group of French lords and soldiers to their leader, a young man called Bertram, the Count of Rousillion. They are concerned about his closest friend, Parolles, whom they believe is leading the Count astray. They offer to ambush and capture him, pretending to be foreign soldiers, and then interrogate him while the Count, concealed, looks on; the lords assure him that Parolles will disavow his friend and reveal his secrets. The Count agrees to this project; the lords and their soldiers dress up and find a suitable hiding place.

Only, they realise, Parolles will see through their ruse if they speak in their native tongue; he is well-travelled and familiar with French, Danish, Dutch, German, and Italian. What to do? Make up a language and pretend to understand one another:

Second Lord: He can come no other way but by this hedge-corner.
When you sally upon him, speak what terrible
language you will: though you understand it not
yourselves, no matter; for we must not seem to
understand him, unless some one among us whom we
must produce for an interpreter.

All agreed, they await Parolles’ approach. He ambles along, muttering to himself; the soldiers beat their drums and charge out from cover:

Second Lord: Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo.

All: Cargo, cargo, cargo, villiando par corbo, cargo.

PAROLLES: O, ransom, ransom! do not hide mine eyes.

They seize and blindfold him

First Soldier: Boskos thromuldo boskos.

PAROLLES: I know you are the Muskos’ regiment:
And I shall lose my life for want of language;
If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch,
Italian, or French, let him speak to me; I’ll
Discover that which shall undo the Florentine.

First Soldier: Boskos vauvado: I understand thee, and can speak
thy tongue. Kerely bonto, sir, betake thee to thy
faith, for seventeen poniards are at thy bosom.

PAROLLES: O!

First Soldier: O, pray, pray, pray! Manka revania dulche.

Second Lord: Oscorbidulchos volivorco.

First Soldier: The general is content to spare thee yet;
And, hoodwink’d as thou art, will lead thee on
To gather from thee: haply thou mayst inform
Something to save thy life.

PAROLLES: O, let me live!
And all the secrets of our camp I’ll show,
Their force, their purposes; nay, I’ll speak that
Which you will wonder at.

The particular fun is in the sense of play we get. You know a set-piece is coming wherein the characters need to invent a new language, and you’re already laughing at the prospect and simultaneously excited to see how they pull it off. And when they do, even though you knew it was coming, it’s gloriously good fun.

This sort of thing is a comedy staple. We’ve seen it a hundred times before and we’ll see it a thousand times again; each of those hundred times it made us laugh, and for the next thousand we’ll keep on laughing. I recall a scene in the 2004 comedy Johnny English, starring Rowan Atkinson, when the witless (and eponymous) spy accidentally injects himself with a serum intended for his target, after which he loses control of his limbs (and lips). As a child, I found this scene impossibly funny.

That Shakespeare wasn’t ‘above’ the simple, delightful humour of gibberish will not surprise those who know and love him. But, for people who haven’t read much Shakespeare and are (justifiably, I should say!) sceptical of his immense reputation, I suspect this will be surprising. Not only because of the straightforwardness and unpretentiousness of the humour (note: it is unpretentious and straightforward, not vulgar or sarcastical) but also because it feels so contemporary, so fresh and modern. The funniness and outlandishness of deploying nonsense phrases like “oscorbidulchos volivorco” or “kerely bonto” totally surpass any contextual boundaries of time, religion, or technology; it is therefore timeless, in a slightly-but-not-so-different way to Shakespeare’s penetrating, all-illuming anatomy of human nature.

And that’s all

December! December! Where will it lead? In search of an ending we land on another excerpt from All’s Well That Ends Well, far shorter and colossally different in tone and suggestion. Stupendously, this line comes but a few moments before Parolles’ gibberish-ambush; as the lords and soldiers await his approach, they overhear Parolles talking to himself. The otherwise foul-mouthed, yellow-bellied, treacherous and scoundrellous, lecherous and rancid rogue reveals (to the lords’ and soldiers’ surprise, no less than ours) total awareness of and apparent frustration with his own foolery, cowardice, and bluster:

Tongue, I must put you into a
butter-woman’s mouth and buy myself another of
Bajazet’s mule, if you prattle me into these perils.

Upon hearing it, a shocked lord asks, magnificently:

Is it possible he should know what he is, and be
that he is?

Do you know what you are, and — knowing — would you still be it?

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor

Subscribe now

Share Areopagus

First, I’ll be giving a talk on 27th November in London with How To Academy, and you can get tickets here. It’s at 6:15pm in Covent Garden and I have some very, very exciting things planned for it. Also, of course, it will be delightful to meet and chat with attendees afterward!

Second, The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School has been included among Waterstones’ Best History Books of 2025. Humbling. And even more so given the illustrious company it’s keeping there! So, should you be looking for Christmas presents… I gently submit it for your consideration.

Third, the beautiful Spanish version of my book — El Tutor Cultural — is finally out, and you can get it here!

Anyway, and otherwise, suffice to say that responses to the short film I released a few weeks ago have been heart-warming. The video now has over two and half million views on YouTube, and the ac…

Read more

It’s simultaneously a standalone piece and the pilot for a future series that will explore history through art and architecture, both for the sake of those things themselves and also to see what we can learn from them about life in the 21st century.

If you like the sound of this project, and want to hear more, then you can join this email list. No doubt I’ll share future developments in the Areopagus, but that list will be the place for announcements exclusively relating to The Modern World.

Alongside watching it on YouTube (where subscribing to my new channel and liking or commenting on the video is most welcome!), you can also watch it on X. Any reposts, comments, or likes there will be incredibly helpful in gathering attention and sharing the f…

Read more

It’s been a peculiar couple of weeks, but on the whole my decision three years ago to quit a job that wasn’t doing me any good, and pursue breathlessly and even slightly recklessly the dream that compelled me above all others, has felt like the right one.

So here we are. For yourself, or perhaps as a gift, for anybody interested in my work already or looking to begin a journey into the rich world of culture — a world so much richer than the one we are led toward by what most conveniently appears in these strange, online times! — there is this book I have written.

(If you happen to order it from Amazon, and think the book worthy of feedback, your reviews on that site are incredibly, incredibly helpful!)

Enough book talk — time rolls on. And the inimitable poet Kabir, writing five hundred years ag…

Read more

This also means, of course, that there’s one week left to take advantage of Waterstones’ 25% discount, which you can get by using the code CULTURAL25 when ordering from their website. The link is here. For all other pre-orders you can find a list of booksellers (including the Spanish edition!) here.

So: the book is divided into seven ‘pillars’ — so-called because pillars, though they are quite beautiful in their own right, can never hold up a building alone. It is only by their unity they work — like all elements of culture, from art to history to literature, which are really just different facets of the same jewel. Each pillar is roughly based on a particular aspect of what we usually call “culture”, but similar themes and ideas ripple through them al…

Read more

Well, this marks the culmination of a lifelong dream that started at least 23 years ago. But more on that later. For now, I have only two things to say. First, that any and all links to pre-order the book (for international deliveries you can go to Blackwell’s) are to be found here. Second, that a great muchness of my gratitude goes to you, my Dear Readers. When I started the Areopagus three years ago I had no book, nor any book deal, to speak of — only a dream, a conviction, and a laptop. That I can now hold a book in my hands and say that I wrote it is not only due to those three things; it is also, perhaps even primarily, due to a fourth thing I did not have when I started out: readers.

Thank you.

And now — bac…

Read more

What have I been doing? Putting the finishing touches to my book, The Cultural Tutor, which will be released on 4th September. For all readers who live in the UK, I should mention again that Waterstones are offering a special 25% discount if you pre-order it from them. The link to do so is here and the code required to secure that discount is, unsurprisingly, ‘CULTURAL25’. Otherwise, of course, you can use Amazon.

But that’s not all! I am delighted to announce that the Spanish edition of my book, El Tutor Cultural, is now available for pre-order. Here’s the link, including international shipping — and here’s the cover:

Otherwise: an Amazon link to order the book in the US and Canada will be available soon. I’ll let you know. If you’d like to pre…

Read more

I’ve written a book, set to be published by Penguin on 4th September this year.

It’s called The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School and it’s the summation, the culmination and crystallisation, of everything I’ve been doing online these past three years.

Where to begin? What to say? If you’re a regular reader then you’ll have some idea what’s in the book and what it’s about. Culture — art, architecture, history, poetry, philosophy, literature — is for everybody. And, crucial in our times, it’s both an alternative to the 24 hour content cycle and an antidote to doomscrolling. That’s my belief, the guiding star in what I write and what I’m trying to do.

My book is intended as an all-encompassing cultural primer, a whirlwind introduction to the things we’re interested in but do…

Read more

Read more

Anyway. To return to the Areopagus and set the tone I give you a few lines from the great Anna Akhmatova:

The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person that I am,
I should know at last what envy is.

Reading her poetry I find myself — as when reading all the greatest poets — in the presence of a mind that somehow seems to observe this world in a higher resolution, in its full technicolour reality. Such is the uplifting — and, therefore, sometimes troubling — power of poetry.

Onwards.

Read more

For the god of Ithome approves of the Muse
who comes unsullied and wearing the sandals of freedom.

This Eumelus was a celebrated poet, a composer of grand religious anthems and cycles of epic poetry chronicling the mythical history of Corinth, his native city. But, of all that work, and despite centuries of praise for him, those two lines you have just read are (among a handful of similar fragments) all that remain of Eumelus’ poetry.

A whole life of verse… and this is more or less all we have to show for it! A fact that demands some solicitude. Of all the things you have ever said or written, what two lines would you choose to endure — the only thing that survives of you — two and a half millennia hence? Impossible to answer, perhaps; worth wondering, surely.

And, with that perspective-broadening question in mind, another Areopagus…

Read more

But, first, a technical matter. Some of you have been receiving emails that are “clipped” — that means the newsletter is not fully displayed in your inbox, and that you may have missed parts of them, particularly The Seventh Plinth and Question of the Week. A message like this may appear, interrupting the newsletter mid-sentence:

This can be fixed either by reading the Areopagus in the Substack app (or online) or by clicking “show full email” or “view entire message” when reading it in your inbox. That should open the whole newsletter and ensure you don’t miss a thing.

All that being said, all administrative queries quelled — time for us to wander the mysterious and miraculous paths of romance. Another Areopagus begins…

Read more

Anyway. I sit here at my familiar desk, writing out these words for you — and a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva comes to mind:

My desk, most loyal friend,
thank you. You’ve been with me on
every road I’ve taken.
My scar and my protection.

My loaded writing mule.
Your tough legs have endured
the weight of all my dreams, and
burdens of piled-up thoughts.

Strange and wonderful to think how objects — desks, shoes, pens, glasses, hats — can become companions, and how many of the most important moments in our lives, whether good or bad, they have shared with us. Just think how much your average street light (for example) must have witnessed: how many kisses, quarrels, midni…

Read more

Well, this much I say — that you may have noticed I am now offering a paid subscription to the Areopagus. Each new volume still goes out for free, because the value of education is surely in its reach. So what a paid subscription will get you is access to the full archives of the Areopagus, which are approaching one hundred volumes and nearly half a million words. You’ll also receive additional material — essays of the sort that don’t neatly fit the format of this newsletter, ones that I long have longed to write. But, above all, you’ll be supporting me to do this work — to do more of it, and more often. All this being the case, it is to the 16th century playwright Stephen Gosson I turn for needful words:

Bookes are but poore gifts, yet Kings receive them: upon which I presume, you will not turne This out of doores. Yet cannot for…

Read more

So, where to begin and how to set the tone? I have turned to William Wordsworth before; to him I turn again:

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

An eternally relevant reminder not to forget that, above all other books, we must read the living book of our world most often and most faithfully. And so, thus reminded, the Areopagus begins…

Read more

Read more

Anyway, enough time has passed — there is a whole world out there waiting to be wondered at! So let us do some wondering together at last; another Areopagus begins...

I - Classical Music

Die Tote Stadt: Act III, Scene III

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1920)

Performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

In 1892 the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach published a novella called Bruges-la-Morte. It was inspired by Bruges, a place he had only visited but never lived in, and had as its goal turning the city itself into a sort of protagonist. Bruges was then a sleepy Medieval town, overshadowed by its long-lost Gothic splendour, and Rodenbach sensed in this ghostly atmosphere a wonderfully unique kind of sadness. He was a Symbolist, after all, and Symbolism was all about elusive, introspective, almost mystical storytelling, whether in painting or music or literature. Making the city of Bruges into a character, then, was a suitably Symbolist endeavour. To aid this Rodenbach made the unusual decision to include several dozen photographs of the city's streets and canals in his book; the image above is one such example.

Bruges-la-Morte worked; its author's reputation was sealed and the definitive Symbolist novel had been written. Rodenbach later tried adapting it for the stage, under the title Le Mirage, and this play was published posthumously in 1900. Two decades later, in 1920, the twenty-three year old Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold turned Le Mirage into an opera. Its title is Die Tote Stadt, meaning "The Dead City" in German, and what we hear now is its finale. The opera was a huge success, although certain critics said its style was rather too Romantic, and therefore too rousing and dramatic. Perhaps these critics were right. A more haunting, impressionistic style — think of Satie, Ravel, or Debussy — would surely have better suited Rodenbach's strange and melancholy story.

For you might sense that this finale, and Die Tote Stadt in its entirety, feels very cinematic. But this is no surprise: in 1934 Korngold left Europe for the United States, where he established himself as a successful and highly influential Hollywood composer, even winning two Oscars for his work on the films of Errol Flynn. So Die Tote Stadt does sound cinematic, but not because it was influenced by cinema. Rather, Korngold was an early pioneer of film music and his work, beginning with operas like this before he wrote for the silver screen, ended up shaping what we think of now as cinematic soundtracks. Just one more example, I suppose, of how difficult it is to draw any hard lines between classical music and the music of film.

What fascinates me about Die Tote Stadt, above all, is how it represents a city that became a feeling that become a novel that became a play that became an opera. Quite the journey — and one wonders how much of Rodenbach's original impression of Bruges has survived through these transformations. But so much music, and art in general, is like this, as feelings or moments move like ripples through successive peoples and times and artforms.

II - Historical Figure

Jean de Froissart

Medieval Tour Guide

Jean de Froissart is a man I have quoted before in the Areopagus, always in relation to other people. Time, perhaps, to give him some recognition of his own! He was born in the County of Hainault (in modern France) in 1337. What his origins were have always been a mystery, but we know at least that by the age of twenty four he had entered the court of Philippa of Hainault, wife of King Edward III of England. There he composed poetry and started work on an all-encompassing history of his age. Over the next four decades he spent time in the courts of countless more kings, queens, and dukes, both in Britain and on mainland Europe, working tirelessly on his grand chronicle.

Froissart's history focussed largely on the Hundred Years' War between England and France, but included much else besides, such as the Peasant's Revolt and the famous duel between Jacques le Gris and Jean de Carrouges, recently turned into a film by Ridley Scott. What made Froissart uniquely well-placed to write this chronicle was his constant travelling, his restless interviewing of eye-witnesses, and his familiarity with nobility all across the continent. Here he describes journeying to see the Count of Foix, on the border between Spain and France; a perfect example of Froissart's extensive connections and a curious insight into travel during the Middle Ages:

At the time I undertook my journey to visit the Count de Foix, reflecting on the diversity of countries I had never seen. I set out from Carcassonne, leaving the road to Toulouse on the right hand, and came to Monteroral, then to Tonges, then to Belle, then to the first town in the county of Foix; from thence to Maisieres, to the castle of Sauredun; then to the handsome city of Pamiers, which belongs to the Count de Foix, where I halted to wait for company that were going to Béarn, where the count resided. I remained in the city of Pamiers three days; it is a very delightful place, seated among fine vineyards, and surrounded by a clear and broad river called the Liege. Accidentally, a knight attached to the Count de Foix, called Sir Espaign du Lyon, came thither on his return from Avignon: he was a prudent and valiant knight, handsome in person, and about fifty years of age. I introduced myself to his company, as he had a great desire to know what was doing in France. We were six days on the road travelling to Orthès. As we journeyed, the knight, after saying his orisons, conversed the greater part of the day with me, asking for news; and when I put any questions to him he very willingly answered them.

It was for his portrait of chivalry, above all, that Froissart's Chronicle enjoyed such enduring popularity right through to the 19th century. He explains with splendid clarity the nature of Late Medieval warfare and the codes of honour that governed knightly combat, along with colourful descriptions of tournaments and hunts and other events we now think of as typically Medieval. One of Froissart's most famous episodes relates to King Edward III's siege of Calais in 1347, when Edward said he would spare the city's population if six of its citizens, or burghers, surrendered to him. Froissart tells us what happened in the city:

Read more