Gulliver in the land of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part IV

"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 4, A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms"

Gulliver's ship taken over by mutineers and he is set adrift near an unknown island, likely near Madagascar. He has with him the kinds of trading goods one employs in dealing with "savages" -- knives, bracelets of false pearl, small mirrors, and beads.

He encounters the Yahoos and is disgusted by their physical appearance, even as his description makes it apparent they are humanoid.

He next finds the Houyhnhnms, civilized horses, who are astounded to be confronted by a Yahoo with clothing -- "whereof they had no conception" -- and the faculty of speech.

The Yahoos are meat eaters; the Houyhnhnms vegetarians. Of necessity, Gulliver adopts a vegetarian, salt-free diet and "cannot but observe, that I never had one hour's sickness while I stayed in this island."

A dinner guest arrives at the home of the "master horse" in a sleigh drawn by four Yahoos.

Upon closer inspection, Gulliver realizes Yahoos are "savage" humans, but he refuses to see them as of his kind.

Gulliver avoids being seen without clothes in order to "distinguish myself as much as possible from the cursed race of Yahoos."

He relates that "the word Houyhnhnm in their tongue signifies a horse, and in its eytmology, the perfection of nature." In keeping with that perfection, the Houyhnhnm have no shame of "any parts of their bodies" and their language has no word for lying or, thus, for doubt or disbelief.

Gulliver describes to the master horse the life of servitude of his kind in England -- and of methods of training including bridles, saddles, whips, and spurs and the castrating of working horses to make them more docile -- drawing similar outrage as to when he told the Brobdingnag King about European munitions.

As Gulliver describes the variety of human behavior to the master horse -- lawsuits, drunkenness, whoring, gaming, sodomy, treason, murder, theft, poisoning, coining false money, rape, etc. etc. -- he needs to stop to explain every one of those vices as none exist among the Houyhnhnm. "This labor took up several days conversation before he was able to comprehend me."

Gulliver then embarks on an encyclopedic yet matter-of-fact enumeration of all the reasons why the princes of his own land go to war and a brief overview of the carnage of battle. To which the master horse responds that "whoever understood the nature of Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice."

Then, Gulliver describes the profession of law, again unknown to the Houyhnhnm: "I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves."

The use of money, the extremes of Yahoo wealth and poverty, and global trade are expoused. England, Gulliver explains, exports the food that could easily feed its masses: "sending away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spread among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, foreswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, star-gazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, freethinking, and the like occupations; every one of which terms, I was at much pains to make him understand."

Gulliver then describes the diseases caused by the Yahoo's tendencies toward excess and then the medical profession with its love of purgatives and emetics. He further relates: "Besides real diseases we are subject to many that are only imaginary, for which physicians have invented imaginary cures."

The master horse contemplates the odiousness of the human form compared to other creatures and concludes it not unwise that those of Gulliver's homeland choose to cover their bodies "and by that invention conceal many of our own deformaties from each other."

Gulliver takes trips to observe the Yahoos in the wild and more and more sees the similarities in his species behavior in its natural state with that of civilized Europe. These field trips culminate in his nearly being raped by an 11 year old Yahoo girl when he his nakedness is revealed while swimming in a pond.

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Gulliver among the Laputans and nearby states

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part III

"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 3, A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan."

Laputa a floating island that contains the royal court, hovering over the vassal lands below.

The entire principality impoverished by abstract science -- mathematics is the only topic of learning, astronomy the only subject of court discourse, and music the only art form. Those in the floating city detached from the reality below; those below live in rags, victims of a public policy focused on future projections -- the scientists are called "projectors" -- rather than present.

Laputans live with their heads tilted so that one eye is always looking at the stars. They are so lost in their own thoughts that servants are equipped with small baldders with which they gently hit their masters' eyes, ears, and mouths in order to remind them to look at, listen, and respond to their interlocutors.

Gulliver's tailor in Laputa measures him, inaccurately, with a sextant. Not surprisingly, then, ill-fitting clothes are common in Laputa.

Dining in Laputa: "shoulder of mutton cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboid, and a pudding into a cycloid ... the servents cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures."

Among the experiments at the Academy of Science in the city below the floating island are projects to extract sun-beams from cucumbers; to return human excrement to its original food matter; to build houses from the roof downward to the foundation; and to prevent the growth of wool on young lambs in order to create a race of naked sheep.

The Academy also houses a primitive computer -- a twenty foot wooden frame with bits of wood strung along wires on which are written all the words of their language. By pulling all the wires simultaneously, the words are shuffled into a new order, with the sentences thus created scrutinized for meaning. In time, of course, all possible sentences and meanings would of necessity occur along the wires of the frame. The scientist ("projector") proposes to hasten his work by constructing fifty such frames (a network!)across the kingdom.

Gulliver finds equally dubious ideas under consideration at the Academy of Political Science, including proposals that princes choose ministers based on merit, make policy decisions based on the public good, "and many other wild impossible chimeras that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive."

Another Laputan political scientist proposes that the heads of political opponents be surgically opened and hemispheres of their brains swapped so that each legislator holds both perspectives.

Leaving Laputan possessions, Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib, a land of the dead where he interviews great personages of the past and discovers the falsity of official histories and the prevalence of corruption, vice, cowardice, ingratitude, and dishonesty among the powerful and noble.

He next ventures to Luggnagg, where a small number of individuals each generation are born into immortality -- a miserable condition, Gulliver discovers, as those "struldbrug" experience life as a continuing process of decrepitude; an eternity of enfeeblement.

He returns via Japan which, interestingly, is in commerce with both the mythic lands of Gulliver's most recent voyages and with Europe.

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Gulliver in Brobdingnag

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part II

"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 2, A Voyage to Brobdingnag."

Brobdingnag situated by Gulliver and by map in first edition as a peninsula on west coast of North America, well above known California settlements of Monterrey and Mendocino (and thus, it is fun to imagine, quite possibly the Long Beach peninsula of Washington State).

Encountering giant Brobdingnags, Gulliver muses on changes in status brought by size and power alone: "in this terrible agitation of mind, I could not forebear thinking of Lilliput . . . Where I was able to draw an Imperial Fleet in my hand, and perform those other actions which will be recorded forever in the chronicles of that empire, while posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by millions. I reflected what a mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this nation as one single Lillupitian would be among us."

From living myth in Lilliput to insignificant morsel, Gulliver's initial status in Brobdingnag that of an animal; the farmer plucks him from amid the furrows and examines him as he would a weasel. "What could I expect but to be a morsel in the mouth of the first among these enormous barbarians that should happen to seize me."

Immediate reaction of farm family is to treat Gulliver like an animal or plaything despite his human characteristics and behavior -- the mother shrieks as if he were a toad or shrew; the son dangles and plucks at him the way all children are mischievous "toward sparrows, rabbits, young kittens, and puppy dogs"; and the infant sticks the tiny Gulliver in her mouth.

It is the young daughter who sees Gulliver's personhood (though she seems to enjoy dressing and undressing him as if he were a doll) and he comes into her care until the plan arises to exhibit him at the town fair for money arises. The daughter realizes Gulliver is to be taken away from her just as "last year, when they pretended to give her a lamb, and yet, as soon as it was day, sold it to a butcher."

Gulliver exhibited by the farmer far-and-wide, performing English mannerisms such as flourishing his sword and doffing his hat for the eager crowds. Resonance here with how natives were brought back to Europe by explorers as curiosities.

Gulliver's name in Brobdingnag is Grildrig (Little Man).

Gulliver sold to Queen, who finds him appealing. King at first cannot decide if he is an animal or clever clockwork. He becomes a part of the royal household, quickly earning the resentment of the Royal Dwarf, now supplanted as a curiosity.

Gulliver's size allows him to see how disguisting household flies are with their feces and secretions. He is horrified to see Queen devour entire birds, bones and all, though he devoured Lilliput's tiny viands in similar fashion.

Magnitude of Brobdingnagians makes apparent the imperfections of their flesh -- mottled, pitted -- just as miniature Lilliputians seemed physically perfect and charming.

Equivalent to looking through a microscope, Gulliver sees true nature of the world: "the most hateful sight of all was the lice crawling on their clothes. I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than a European loise through a microscope, and their snouts with which they rooted like swine."

"Gulliver's Travels" as an ocular adventure. His great size in Lilliput allows him to see the pettiness of human society; his tiny size in Brobdingnag reveals the grossness and beastliness of human existence.

More disgust, this time ofalcatory: "The Maids of Honor . . . would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted; because to say the truth a very offensive odor came from their skins."

Pre-Darwinian moment: a monkey at the Castle mistakes Gulliver for "a young one of his own species," runs off with him and rocks him like a baby while feeding him from his own provender.

The king interrogates Gulliver on the affairs of England. Gulliver provides a panygeric, but after close questioning the King states: "from the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

Attempting again to assert superiority of English society, Gulliver describes his world's munitions and offers to construct such devices for Brobdingnag. The king is horrified that such murderous, inhuman machines could be viewed as a sign of a nation's greatness and finds Gulliver's offer repellent, calling him an "impotent and groveling insect."

Regarding such denunciation, Gulliver opines to his reader that the King has "narrow principles and short views" in his rejection of a technology which would make him "absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people."

The Brobdingnag King's political philosophy: "he gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together."

Gulliver reads a work of Brobdingnag philosophy that suggests humans must have once been of greater stature. A devolution from Brobdingnagians (x10)through Europeans to Lilliputians (-10)?

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Gulliver in Lilliput

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part I

True title of this first volume of work now popularly known as "Gulliver's Travels" is: "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 1, A Voyage to Lilliput."

Lilliput situated by Gulliver and by map in first edition as near Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land).

Gulliver a common man brought into Court. The "foreigness" of his Lilliputian sojurn as much a matter of contact with Princes and ministers as experience of the 1/10th scale world.

Indication of gulf in manners between the sailor Gulliver and his noble patrons in his act of successfully extinguishing an uncontrollable blaze in the royal palace by urinating on it.

Gulliver's name among the Lilliputians is Quinbus Flestrin (the Man Mountain).

Lilliput on first glance seems harmonious, but is soon revealed as riven by faction -- the high-heeled Tramecksans vs. the low-heeled Slamecksans -- and, more bitterly still, by the heresy of those who eat soft-boiled eggs from the larger end (Big-endians) rather than the small-end.

Lillupitians and Blefuscuans separated by language and by sect (Small-endian Lilliputians vs. Big-endian Blefuscuans). As with Europeans prior to Age of Discovery, scepticism among learned men that other lands and peoples can exist despite overwhelming evidence, in Gulliver's testimony that they must.

Though Gulliver rises to nobility by aiding the Lillupitian Emperor in foiling the invasion plans of the Blefuscuans -- in gratitude, he is made a "Nardac" -- he earns the enmity of that monarch by not participating in the proposed eradication of the Big-endian heretics. From which, Gulliver draws lesson that: "Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into balance with a refusal to gratify their passions."

Matter of factness of ministerial accusations and factional plots against Gulliver, from secret poisonings to legal sentences of blinding or starvation. Ministerial denunciations of Gulliver are military (threat of his strength), economic (burden of his feeding), political (suspicion he is a crypto- Big-endian) and moral (his act of urinating on the Royal residence, even if to save it from the flames).

Gulliver's experience as a courtier in Lilliput of the vagaries of princely favor causes him to resolve "never more to put any confidence in Princes or Ministers, where I could possibly avoid it."

Gulliver takes refuge in Blefuscu and arranges for his departure in the salvaged longboat. He nurtures a small herd of Lillupitian livestock as testmony of his adventure, though one of the sheep is eaten by a rat on the English ship that rescues him.

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"Micah Clarke" Concludes: Honorable mercenaries and thieves

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Ten

Just as Micah saved Decimus from the Dutch slaver at the book's opening, so Decimus appears on the scene to free Micah from his bondage and to set him up as a soldier-of-fortune in Europe -- welcoming him to the brotherhood of "the old and honorable guild." Thus, Decimus becomes yet another of Micah's several father figures.

Decimus further establishes the honorable highwayman Hector Marot on board the slaver with the plan that he will incite a mutiny among the Barbadoes-bound enslaved Puritans.

"If I were captain," chortles Decimus, "I would rather have the Devil himself, horns, hoof, and tail, for my first mate than have that man aboard my ship."

For his own part, Decimus has blackmailed Beaufort into arranging for him a commission to fight Indians in the New England colony of Virginia.

Micah relates that Decimus "did so out-ambush their ambushes and out-trick their most cunning warriors," that the Indians gave him a name meaning "the long-legged wily one with the eye of a rat."

At night, Micah still has visions of Decimus' face with its "shifting, blinky eyes turned toward me in his sidelong fashion."

He was, Micah concludes, "a bad man in many ways . . . cunning and wily, with little scruple of conscience; and yet so strange a thing is human nature, and so difficult it is to control our feelings, that my heart warms when I think of him, and that fifty years have increased rather than weakened the kindliness which I bear to him."



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The Taunton Assizes: The work of legal slaughter

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Nine

Micah betrayed and arrested. He is warned by soldiers that his fate will be determined by civil rather than military law. "They have a lawyer coming from London whose wig is more to be feared than our helmets. He will slay more men in a day than a troop in a ten mile chase."

The Taunton Assizes: trials merely formalities where prisoners were "hauled before a judge and insulted before being dragged to the gibbet."

Chief Justice Jeffreys: "he raved like a demoniac and his black eyes shown with a vivid vindictive brightness that was scarce human. The jury shrank from him as from a venomous thing when be turned his baleful glance upon them. At times, as I have been told, his sternness have way to an even more terrible merriment, and he would lean back in his seat of justice until the tears hopped down upon his ermine. Nearly a hundred were either executed or condemned to death on that opening day."

The streets of Taunton lined with the rotting corpses of rebels. Micah sees "the limbs of former companions dangling in the wind, and their heads grinning at us from the tops of poles and pikes."

Use of kettledrums at military executions "to drown out any last words that would fall from the sufferers and bear fruit in the breasts of those who heard them."

Rather than facing execution, Micah and fifty other prisoners sold as slaves for overseas Plantations as James' way of rewarding his loyalists.

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The Battle of Sedgemoor: The work of military slaughter

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Eight

Eve of the battle of Sedgemoor: "nothing less than a miracle could preserve us from defeat, and most of us were of the opinion that the days of miracles were past. Others, however, thought otherwise. I believe that many of our Puritans, had they seen the heavens open that night, and the armies of the Seraphim and the Cherubim descending to our aid, would have looked upon it as by no means a wonderful or unexpected occurance."

"The whole town was loud with the preaching. Every troop or company had its own chosen orator and sometimes more than one . . . Men were drunk with religion as with wine. Their faces were flush, their speech thick, their gestures wild."

The somber Micah: "win who will, English blood must soak the soil of England this night."

The devil-may-care Sir Gervas: "The more room for those who are left."

Micah: "The chances are that few of us will ever see tomorrow's sun-rise."

Sir Gervas: "I have no great curiosity to see it. It will be much as yesterday's."

When it becomes apparent that the battle is lost, Monmouth rides off with his entourage: "There, far away, showing up against the dark peat-colored soil, rode a gaily-dressed cavalier, followed by a knot of attendants, galloping as fast as his horse would carry him from the field of battle. There was no mistaking the fugitive. It was the recreant Monmouth."

Sir Gervas, who dies bravely among his men, initially mistaken by Royal troops for Monmouth. Clear that Monmouth can only act the part of nobility and bravery.

Of the carnage, Micah reflects: "men must either give up war or they must confess that the words of the Redeemer are too lofty for them, and that there is no longer any use in pretending that His teaching can be reduced to practice."

While escaping after the rout, Micah prevents Decimus from finishing off a helpless Royal officer, earning the dangerous enmity of the soldier-of-fortune.



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Fickle leaders, barbarous soldiers, and noble highwaymen

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Seven


As the military tide turns against him, Monmouth's failings become manifest: "Swinging from the heights of confidence to the depths of despair, choosing his future council of state one day and proposing to fly from his army the next, he appeared from the start to be possessed by the very spirit of fickleness."

The vain but generous and brave dandy Sir Gervas is inspired by his sojurn among the "clodhoppers" and rural tradesmen: "Truth to tell, I have lived more and learned more during these few weeks that we have been sliding about in the rain with our ragged lads than ever I did [at court]. It is a sorry thing for a man's mind to have nothing higher to dwell upon than the turning of a compliment or the dancing of a corranto."

Royal troops portrayed as given to plunder and torture, the latter a set of skills learned in service in North Africa and Russia -- a byproduct of Imperial activity and, so, not native to England. Smugglers and highwaymen, such as Captain Murgatroyd and Hector Marrot, are possessed with a sense of English due process and fair play.

The highwayman Hector Marrot on his trade: "there is no road that is not familiar to me, nor as much as a break of the hedge I could not find in blackest midnight. It is my calling. But the trade is not what it was [with the introduction of paper bills of exchange]. If I had a son, I would not bring him up in it."

Marrot's story of retired highwayman who becomes a great landlord and sits in judgement of others -- "condemning some poor devil for stealing a dozen eggs" -- reminiscent of Defoe.

Marrot characterizes thieving as "hunting, save that your quarry may at any time turn round upon you, and become in turn the hunter. It is, as you say, a dangerous game, but two can play at it, and each has an equal chance."


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"The voices of preachers rose up like the drone of insects"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Six

Beaufort publicly imprisons and condemns Micah as a traitor but then privately and secretly releases him.

During Micah's public condemnation by Beaufort -- before his covert release by the same noble -- debate over whether he should be tortured to reveal details of Monmouth's forces. Again recalling Scott's "Old Mortality" mention is made of placing "a lighted match between the fingers."

When Micah reports on his experiences and Beaufort's divided loyalty, Monmouth muses: "He would fain stand upon both sides of the hedge at once . . . Such a man is very like to find himself on neither side, but in the very heart of the briars."

In the meantime, Monmouth's camp has become religiously divided: "the voices of preachers rose up like the drone of insects" with "every wagon or barrel or chance provision case converted into a pulpit, each with its own orator and little knot of eager hearkeners."

As the courtiers and professional military men worry about the lack or ordinance, the zealots rail that the Lord will provide as he did at the walls of Jerico.

Decimus pleased at this outbreak of dissention and fervor: "the leaven is working. Something will come of all this ferment."

Monmouth's sympathy with these rough-clad zealots a dubious one. When military events begin to turn against him, he is described as "moodily tapping his jeweled riding-whip against his high boots."

Then, the "leaven" truly begins to boil over as one of the extreme sectarian preachers urges his followers to (Taliban like) demolish Wells cathedral in order to regain God's favor. Cathedrals "altars of Baal . . . built for man-worship rather than God-worship . . . the old dish of Popery served under a new cover."

The sectaries literally commence to tear-down religion. Shouts the Cathedral verger: "they have pulled down Saint Peter and will have Paul down too unless help comes. There will not be an Apostle left."

Soon the zealots are joined by looters and drunken rioters taking advantage of the disarray and destruction. Micah, Sexton et al. try to calm the affray and soon "a Civil War within a Civil War breaks out."

Micah, speaking now as an old man, concludes that he never saw a more brutal battle than the religious fight within the cathedral.


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"I see the threads that are used in the weaving of you"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Five

Foreshadowing of Decimus' ambitions: "from this time onward, the cunning man framed his whole life and actions in such a way to make friends of the sectaries and to cause them to look upon him as their leader. For he had a firm belief that in all such outbreaks as that in which we were engaged, the most extreme party is sure in the end to gain the upper hand. 'Fanatics,' he said to me one day, 'mean fervor, and fervor means hard work, and hard work means power.' That was the center point of all his plotting and scheming."

Seeing only blacks and whites -- "This England of ours is divided into two camps, that of God and that of the Antichrist" -- the Puritans are unable to evaluate as subtle a character as Decimus.

Decimus describes quite directly the changing loyalties of his career as a soldier of fortune and, in response, the Puritan mayor of Taunton states how clear it is that Decimus has unswerving principles.

Monmouth arrives, bringing with him another soldier of fortune, a Brandenburger, whom Decimus has often fought against and sometimes with.

Decimus verbally fences with a member of Monmouth's retinue: "'I studied sword-play under Signor Contarini of Paris' said Lord Grey, 'Who was your master?'" Decimus replies: "'I have studied, my lord, under Signor Stern Necessity of Europe.'"

Micah volunteers for a solo mission to try to recruit Lord Beaufort to Monmouth's banner. On eve of departure he shares letters from home -- from the philosophical carpenter, the amorous sailor, and his stern father -- with Sir Gervas, who has become his confidant.

Hearing the seemingly irreconcilable advice contained in the three letters, Sir Gervas says fondly: "I now begin to understand your manufacture Clarke. I see the threads that are used in the weaving of you."

The carpenter, Zachariah Palmer, urges Micah to hold to "the beautiful, often professed, and seldom practiced doctrine" of love for one's fellow man, but seeing fervor of both parties concludes: "Church and Dissent are at each other's throats as ever. Truly, the stern law of Moses is more enduring than the sweet words of Christ."

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"How closely the Evil One can imitate the workings of the Spirit"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Four

Micah, Reuben, and Decimus encounter the bibilous roue Sir Gervas Jerome who, speaking of his thirst, claims to be "as dry as a concordance" and states he would welcome arrest as a dissenter and even imprisonment as a welcome change of pace.

Micah thinks Sir Gervas is jesting when he offers his services as a valet; he is so slow to realize that the aristocrat is ruined that Sir Gervas addresses him as "oh most astute and yet most slow-witted master."

Speaking of the Jewish moneylenders who have a hold on his Estate, Sir Gervas moans "the ten tribes have been upon me and I have been harried and wasted, bound, ravished, and despoiled . . . They have hewed into pieces mine estate rather than myself."

Sir Gervas on the dispersal of his retinue in the wake of his bankruptcy: "when the honey-pot is broken it is farewell to the flies."

With Sir Gervas now in their company, Micah's party falls in with a group of puritans heading for rendevous with Monmouth. Decimus adjusts his behavior to match them, singing hymns and expounding faith in the almighty.

Soon, the puritan band is confronted by horse troopers. Decimus, in command, slays an officer (a cornet) under a white flag when he haughtily tries to incite desertion among the dissenters (interestingly similar to action of Balfour of Burley in "Old Mortality"; the same section makes reference to Wappinenschaws and popinjays as in opening chapters of that Scott novel).

After the puritan victory, the minister, Pettigrue, bridles at Decimus' comparison of the bravery of the dissenters to that of Turks he has seen in battle.

"'I trust sir,' said the minister gravely, 'that you do not intend . . . to infer that there is any similarity between the devil-inspired fury of the infidel Saracens and the Christian fortitude of the struggling faithful!'"

"'By no means,' Saxon answered, grinning at me over the minister's head. 'I was but showing how closely the Evil One can imitate the workings of the Spirit.'"

Micah reacts as Decimus, now a hero to the puritans, continues to play the role of the extreme sectary: "I could not but marvel at the depths and completeness of the hypocrisy which had cast so complete a cloak over his rapacious self."

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Plunder and Alchemy

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Three

Traveling cross-country to Monmouth's camp, Decimus immediately commences looking for opportunities for plunder: "What would war be without plunder! A bottle without wine -- a shell without the oyster."

Of Micah's increasingly strong and angry moral remonstrances, he jests: "Od's mercy! I see you will start carving me anon and take me to Monmouth's camp in sections."

In one village, Micah and Decimus encounter two Royal officers strangely conversant in the latest theories of chemistry.

Later (they have now been joined by Micah's loyal friend Reuben) the adventurers arrive at the secluded cabin of a dispossessed noble, Sir Jacob Clancing of Snellaby, who has turned to alchemy.

In service to Charles I, Sir Jacob had experienced a different kind of transmutation as he converted his wealth and property into military resources for the doomed King: "My silver chargers and candlesticks were thrown into the melting-pot . . . they went in metal and came out as troopers and pikemen."

With Cromwell's success, Sir Jacob's estate goes to a baser kind of alchemist: a soapmaker.

Upon the Stuart Restoration, Sir Jacob seeks restitution from Charles II, but is offered instead a commission as a "lottery cavalier," a licensed keeper of a gambling house "allowed to have a den in the piazza of Covent Garden, and there to decoy the young sparks of the town and fleece them at ombre."

Incensed to see the dissolute Stuarts waste on their revels money they deny to those nobles seeking restitution, Sir Jacob retires from court in order to painstakingly rebuild his fortune through his alchemical knowledge.

The doubtful and greedy Decimus: "Perhaps you have found out how to convert pots and pans into gold in the way you have spoken of. But that cannot be, for I see iron and brass in this room which would hardly remain there could you convert it to gold."

Sir Jacob: "Gold has its uses and iron has its uses . . . It can indeed be done, but only slowly and in order, small pieces at a time, and with much expenditure of work and patience."

Observing a locked chest, Decimus determines to rob Sir Jacob of his gold. Answering Micah's objections: "he can make more as easily as your good mother maketh cranberry dumplings."

Micah stays awake to protect his host's possessions from his plundering companion.

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Decimus Saxon, the "strange fish"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Two

Sailing in the harbor, Micah and his friend Reuben rescue a man who jumped in the sea to escape an altercation on board a Dutch ship.

The braggart and soldier of fortune Decimus Saxon, "tenth child of a worthy father," had been in a violent dispute with two of his brothers: Nonus and Quartus. Becomes apparent that all three brothers had been engaged in the slave trade.

Saxon has with him letters for several of the Independent sect, including Micah's father.

A change into dry clothing at Micah's home also seems to change Decimus' identity: "it seemed as if he had cast off his manner with his rainments," no more the flippant "bedraggled castaway who had crawled like a conger eel into our fishing-boat" but rather a demure and pious warrior for the faith.

Micah's father, utterly taken in by Decimus' manner -- "a man of parts and piety" -- outfits him as his son's companion in sending the youth off to war as part of Monmouth's forces.

As they prepare to travel across country to join Monmouth, Micah objects to the cover story Decimus proposes as dishonorable and a lie: "I should rather be hanged as a rebel than speak a falsehood."

Decimus counters that all warfare is a manner of lying: "For what are all strategems, ambuscades, and outfalls but lying on a large scale? What is an adroit commander but one who has a facility for disguising the truth?"

The freebooter casts off his piety once out of range of Micah's father: "Master Decimus Saxon had flung to the winds the precise demeanor which he had assumed in the presence of my father, and rattled away with many a jest and scrap of rhyme of song ad we galloped through the darkness."

"'Gadzooks!,' said he frankly, 'it is good to be able to speak freely without being expected to tag every sentence with a hallelujah or amen.'"

Further making his opportunism apparent, Decimus relates to the increasingly scandalized Micah the story of how, captured by the Turk, he escaped death and slavery by taking on the identity of a devout Muslim.

Micah: "'What,' I cried in horror, 'you did pretend to be a Musselman?'"

Decimus: "Nay, there was no pretence. I became a Musselman."



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"Micah Clarke": The Rising of the "Old Leaven"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part One

Set at time of Monmouth's Rebellion, the events in Arthur Conan Doyle's "Micah Clarke" occur just a few years before those in Scott's "Old Mortality."

Framed as story told by an old man -- Micah Clarke -- to his grandchildren, relating experience of his own youth.

He speaks as among the last survivors: "it is not likely that in the whole county of Hampshire, or even perhaps in all England, there is another left alive who is so well able to speak from his own knowledge of these events."

Micah's father a Dissenter and veteran of Cromwell's army; generally mild, but can be subject to fits of "the old leaven" what "his enemies would call fanaticism and his friends piety." Micah's mother is a churched Protestant -- a believer in the Church hierarchy -- and so his religious heritage is divided between extremes.

The adult friends of Micah's youth include a bookish carpenter, Zachary Palmer, who shares with the boy works of serious drama and poetry as well as Classics and treatises of contemporary political philosophy. His other "father" is Solomon Sprent, a retired seaman, tattooed with the Old and New Testaments (Creation upon his neck and the Ascension upon his left ankle) and full of romantic stories of faraway lands and adventure, his talk "a library in itself." Micah's intellectual heritage is thus also divided between extremes.

Rumors abound that there will be a rising of the "Independents" under the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic James II.

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Aretino: "the miraculous monster of mankind"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XVIII (final)

The Renaissance wanes in the loss of Italy's dream of cultural supremacy: "sapped of religious faith, politically disrupted, dominated by the barbarian, Italy was demoralized; and the deepening despair of its society was manifest, like a phosphorescence of decay, in its lust for fame."

Roeder presents his fourth "lawgiver," Aretino, as a prophet of art ("the lust of the eye was the first revelation of his gospel") and, it would seem, media culture and consumerism -- Aretino forms a partnership with the painter Titian, marketing his work to noble patrons.

"The real religion of Italy," Roeder writes, "the impulse with which the Renaissance had been laboring all along, was the deathless passion of art."

Ushering in the modern (even postmodern) age, Aretino was adept at "persuading the world to accept him at his own valuation." In turn he assayed the value of others: "he created and controled public opinion; he dispensed censure and honor and made and unmade reputations."

Roeder continues: "He was the lawgiver of the vainglory of life. . . . Though his reputation rested on nothing more solid than puff, he lived on it."

More consumerism. Aretino "composed a whole series of epistles to the Venetians in praise of the table, spending hours of delicious gustation in the recollection and anticipation of food."

A random Roederism: "Life was a puzzle to those who lived it and a pattern to those who watched it."

Aretino considers himself "a miraculous monster of mankind" and sees his enormous appetites as a testament to the glories of God's creation.

He sees Christ as in all things benevolent and forgiving: "Christ, so far as we know, in His humanity, left no prisons nor wheels nor ropes nor flames to torture those who, if they have misread His laws, confess their error. He punishes with mercy all those who cry."

His self-image so closely tied to his robust nature, Aretino dreads the arrival of old age even more than most men: "No. A thousand times no -- against the dread advances of age Aretino mustered all his animal spirits and shook his whole body in vigorous denial."

Aretino's achievement: "Of all the ideals for which men had lived and suffered and died he had made a mockery and a farce; he had voided every creed and discredited every code; his work was done. He had accomplished his mission. He had destroyed all the superiorities of man to nature."

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"They hung to Rome like a plague"; death of a man whose philosophy "became a self-portrait"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XVII

Even when peace is negotiated between Pope and Holy Roman Emperor, the lawless troops, demanding back pay, will not leave Rome.

"Famine and pest had followed the sack . . . the armies were rapidly depleted [by disease, desertion, feuds, hunger] but the survivors were tenacious and clung to Rome like the plague."

From his safe perch in Venice, Aretino launches caustic slavos against the Pope and his advisors.

The Pope is evacuated by the Emperor to Orvieto, which is where he receives the famous embassy from Henry VIII seeking to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

Castiglione dies shortly after success of his efforts to reconcile the Pope and the Emperor; at the point where his service to others has finally been rewarded by his elevation to Bishop. Thus, poetically perhaps, Castiglione lives only so long as he is serving the ambitions of others.

Though it began as a portrait of others, "The Courtier" finally became a self-portrait of its author. After believing so determinedly in others, Roeder concludes, Castiglione was at last forced by his book's publication to believe in himself.

"'The Courtier,' so long in maturing and so often remoulded, underwent one more transformation in his mind and emerged with a new value and its last moral meaning. It was his religion."

Roeder reports that in later years the Emperor Charles is said to have kept three books by his bedside: Machiavelli's "The Prince," Castiglione's "The Courtier," and the Bible.


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The industry of destruction; death of "a sheep in wolf's clothing"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XVI

Aretino is alternately panygerist and critic and given to exceeding his boundaries -- the polar opposite to Castiglione who revels in boundaries.
Running afoul of the Pope and nearly dragging his current patron, Federico. Gonzaga, into that ditch, Aretino finds himself an outcast from the courts of the powerful.

Embracing that role, Aretino styles himself as "the Truth Teller, born to strip men of their pretences; and of all their pretences, the most transparent were their pretensions to honor, truth, loyalty, courage. Princes, like parasites, knew no law but self-interest and he was their Scourge."

Aretino takes refuge in Venice, "the liberal asylum of the outcast, the expatriate, the freethinker."

With the Spanish Imperial armies surging into Italy, Federico worries about the future of his principality: "he was in the position -- the lofty position of the weathervane -- to scan the map of Italy and discern the drift of the morrow."

Roeder describes the new sack of Rome by murderous, plundering Spanish and German troops: "day after day the industry of destruction progressed . . . the city was divided into districts and the harrow passed over it slowly, exhaustively.

Amorality, then as now, of the banking and legal professions: "To meet the needs of the army, banks reopened and notaries reappeared, drafting inventories, registering bills of ransom, cashing notes of exchange, and storing loot. Like maggots on a charnel pile, they digested the disaster." Extortion becomes an industry, torture a pastime of idling troops.

German troops engage in a daily revelry of sacrilidge, tormenting priests, staging mock masses, and proclaiming Luther the pope.

Looking out over the devastation and rapine from his refuge at Castel Saint Angelo (with "slaughtered innocents lying moth-like below its walls") the Pope "as a cat licks itself, wept himself clean."

On Machiavelli's death, Roeder concludes he was "a sheep in wolf's clothing," that however unscrupulous his principles, his integrity was "flagrant" and his patriotism unstinting.

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The rise of satire

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XV

Leo's favorite pastime is hunting. Roeder describes one five week fit of venery that involved a cavalvade of 2000 hunters, traveling to far-flung Papal preserves, pursuing an array of beasts including red deer, wolves, hares, hosts, stags, and hedgehogs.

Leo plays cards with abandon: "he played cards briskly, promptly paying his losses and flinging his winnings over his shoulder."

Roeder introduces the satirist Aretino whose anonymous lampoons give him great influence over the affairs of the Vatican. Recognizing satire and gossip as the lifeblood of the Vatican, Castiglione sees the low-born Aretino's dominance of that form as a portent of further social decay.

Machiavelli finally advances within the Medici ranks not because of his political theory but due to his satire -- the success of his play "The Mandrake."

Pope Leo dies and Cardinals are assembled to elect successor, with both Medici and Gonzagan heirs vying.

Election drags on for so long, that one Cardinal dies in the process and rations for electors are reduced to one meal a day and then to just bread and water in order to hasten their deliberations.

Astoundingly, the new Pope, Adrian VI, is Flemish and a reformer who lives in a small corner of the Vatican with a single housekeeper. Aretino rails against his pedantry. Rome's economy, dependent on Papal largesse, collapses.

Adrian lives only a short time and, after another long conclave, a new Medici Pope is elected: Clement VII.


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Castiglione: "Life compressed into a sheaf of shining pages"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XIV

Castiglione's "The Courtier" a testament to his formative years at the peaceful, enlightened court of Urbino. Roeder calls it a "theory of the leisure class."

His goal is to bring the principles of the now dissolved court of Urbino -- conviviality, conciliation, adaptability, self-discipline, humanity -- into practice in the tumultuous world of Rome and Italian society in general.

Manners "the convivial form of morals . . . elementary and unchanging." but even as he writes "The Courtier," Castiglione can see the futility, the belatedness of his tribute.

Upon completion of "The Courtier," Roeder has Castiglione reflect "there it lay, the substance of his life, compressed into a little sheaf of shining pages."

Having experienced too early the "hardening world of pleasure and intrigue," the once charming boy favorite of Julius, Federico Gonzaga has coarsened into a surly, lustful, and perhaps murderous youth. Isabelle d'Este places him under Castiglione's tutelage.

The Medici Pope Leo senses the spirit of the time and it is not religion (Savaranola) or politics (Machiavelli) but rather art. Thus "swarms of artists, scholars, poets" flocked to Rome to take advantage of his prodigality.

Leo is not drawn to the strife of Michaelangelo, prefering instead the graceful facility of Rafael. Leo: "in art he loved ease and charm; life was strenuous enough, and much too harsh."

After Lorenzo d'Medici's death, his uncle Pope Leo tries to reconcile with the previously ousted Gonzaga clan: "he applied on every occasion the emollient salves of his softest phrases to the sore spot . . . The mere mention of the name of Gonzaga set his mouth flowing with unctious saliva."

The loyal Castiglione then sent as an emissary to Rome to negotiate on behalf of the Gonzaga.

Castiglione writes from the court of the inconstant, calculating Pope: "this is the house of change and variation and it is difficult to discover its secrets."

Negotiating with Leo, Charles V of Spain, recently made Holy Roman Emperor, uses suppression or support of the Lutherans as a bargaining chip.

Leo's indecisiveness: "he vacillated like a delicate instrument, vibrating nervously to every atmospheric disturbance."

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"Old Mortality" Concludes: "The scene was another and yet the same"

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Seven

Henry returns incognito from refuge in Europe; with ascension of William and Mary, political and religious situation has now reversed, with the Whigs in power and the Jacobites insurgent. Claverhouse has become a rebel, fighting with the Highlanders.

Dietary advice from Henry's aged maid: "I would approve o' your eating butcher-meat maybe as often as three times-a-week -- it keeps the wind out o' the stamack."

Surveying the Inn at Howff after the absence of many years -- and with many lives lost in the interim -- Henry observes melancholically how "the scene was another and yet the same . . . let the tide of the world wax or wane as it will, enough will be found to fill the places which chance renders vacant; and in the usual occupations and amusements of life, human beings will succeed each other as leaves upon the same tree, with the same individual difference and the same general resemblance."

The rural dram house keeper (significantly, she has gone blind) Mistress Maclure has extended her charity to those on both sides of the conflict -- "blaming nane and condemning nane" -- and only suffered for doing so.

Balfour, become a delusional hermit, holds some secret that allows him to control the fate of the Bellenden property, now in the hands of a usurper, Basil Olifant.

Of Olifant, Balfour confides: "These lands are a bit between his jaws and a hook in his nostrils, and the rein and the line are in my hands to guide them as I think meet."

In final confrontation, it is the amoral, apolitical, irreligious Cuddie who fires the shot that brings everything to right.

Poking fun at his own pat narrative resoultions and happy endings, Scott's stand-in in the book's conclusion opines: "every volume of a narrative turns less and less interesting as the author draws to a conclusion; just like your tea which, though excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup."


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Dining with General Claverhouse

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Six

Upon breaking-up nest of Cameronians and thus rescuing Henry, Claverhouse orders summary execution of armed rebels and, in tone that suggests it is a legal nuisance, interrogation of unarmed preacher (Macbriar).

Then, in a sentence that suggests Morton's status is now that of an indulged and favored beast, Claverhouse instructs his orderly "let Mr Morton be civilly used and see that the men look well after their horses; and let my groom wash Wildblood's shoulder with some vinegar, the saddle touched him a little."

Claverhouse dines as the insurgents are executed. Noting Henry's distress, he philosophises: "in the beginning of my military career I had as much aversion to blood spilt as ever man felt; it seemed to me to be wrung from my own heart; and yet, if you trust one of those whig fellows, he will tell you I drink a warm cup of it every morning before I breakfast."

Claverhouse continues: "Men die daily -- not a bell tolls the hour but it is the death-note of some one or another; and why hesitate to shorten the span of others, or take over anxious care to prolong our own? It is all a lottery."

In transit the next day, Claverhouse expounds on what he sees as the difference between those killed by Balfour of Burley and the blood he and his troops shed: "There is a difference, I trust, between the blood of learned and reverend prelates, of gallant soldiers and noble gentlemen, and the red puddle that stagnates in the veins of psalm-singing mechanics, crack-brained demagogues, and silly boors; some distinction, in short, between spilling a flask or generous wine, and dashing down a can full of base muddy ale."

Claverhouse mock-distraught at Henry's lack of knowledge of chilvaric literature: "Did you ever read Froissart?" No. "I have half a mind to contrive you should have six months' imprisonment in order to procure you that pleasure."

Claverhouse maintains a "Black Book" with information on individual citizens, whether insurgent or not, much of it gathered by "loyal" ministers. Henry remonstrates: "Does it not revolt a mind like yours to follow a system that is supported by such minute inquiries after obscure individuals?"

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"Thou art unwise Henry Morton"

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Five

Henry reflects on how "our best and most praiseworthy feelings" become degraded: "the liberal principles of one man sink into cold and unfeeling indifference; the religious zeal of another hurries him into frantic and savage enthusiasm."

Balfour correctly guesses and highly disapproves Henry's motives for wanting to remain near the besieged castle -- to protect his beloved, Edith, and his mentor, Major Bellenden.

Balfour: "thou art unwise, Henry Morton, to sacrifice this holy cause to thy friendship for an uncircumcised Philistine, or thy lust for a Moabitist woman." Henry: "I neither understand your meaning, Mr. Balfour, nor relish your allusions."

Later, Henry remonstrates with Balfour on the zealot's plan to summarily execute Evandale: "we are in arms to put down such cruelties, not to imitate them."

Prevailing unworldliness at the front lines of the insurgent army does not inspire confidence : "their piquets and patrols were more interested and occupied in disputing the true occasion and causes of wrath, and defining the limits of Erastian herecy, than in looking out for and observing the motions of their enemies."

Sectarianism undermines insurgent army. When Henry seeks to save the bridge crossing from falling into the hands of Claverhouse, the Cameronian (zealot) dominated cavalry will not follow him as he has been condemned by the maniac Mucklewrath as an Erastian.

Fleeing from the royal troops, Henry and loyal Cuddie find themselves amid some of the most ardent Cameronians, including Macbriar and Mucklewrath.

Looking for a celestial cause for the defeat, they look threatenly at Henry, believing that God has delivered him into their hands. Cuddie: "they'll kill him, the murdering loons, and think they're doing a gude turn."

Having decided to murder Henry at the expiry of the Sabbath, the zealots begin a vigil to look for a sign of heavenly approbation for the slaughter.

Henry freed when Cuddie enlists Claverhouse to break-up the Cameronian nest.


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The council of the zealots

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Four

Henry's moderation and neutrality: he finds nothing to admire either in the oppressed religious zealots with their "gloomy fanaticism" and the "envenomed rancor of their political hatred" or in their military oppressors "the misrule, license, and brutality of the soldiery, the executions on the scaffold, the slaughters in the open field."

If the Bible in Lewis' "The Monk" is a compendium of all that is sinful, in "Old Mortality" it is a justification for extreme, ruthless, and ecstatic violence. For Balfour and Mause, the Bible demands the exercise of violence.

Henry cites to Balfour (Burley) his own respect for scripture as a guide to behavior but protests the Dissenters "wrest[ing] of certain passages out of their context" in order to justify killing.

Motive for Balfour's attempt to lure Henry into the insurgent camp is revealed in aside to the fanatical preacher Macbriar: that they must temporarily abide "Laodiceans and Erastians" in order to mass sufficient numbers against the Government.

Scott makes clear the personal ambition that underlies Balfour's militant religiosity.

Erastianism = "subjection of the church of God to the regulations on an earthly government."

In reading papers of the deceased Bothwell, Henry sees a once honorable man driven by failed love and adversity into depravity and coarseness. In the same documents, Balfour sees the myriad forms of Satan's influence.

Council of the insurgents a raucous event, theological rather than political or military. "The smoke . . . formed over the heads of the assembled council a clouded canopy as opaque as their physical theology."

(Turgenev will also use "smoke," in novel of that name, as a metaphor for the unsubstantiality of Revolutionary ideology).

Heated dispute between moderate (Poundtext) and radical (Kettledrumle) clerics broken-up by Balfour; the silenced divines "continued to eye each other like two dogs who, having been separated by their masters while fighting, have retreated, each beneath the chair of its owner . . . each indicating by occasional growls, by the erected bristles of the back and ears, that their discord is unappeased."

Theological debate reignited by ravings of bloodthirsty, apocalyptic madman Habakkuk Mucklewrath: "slay, slay -- smite -- slay utterly -- let not your eye have pity! slay utterly, old and young"

Henry agrees to serve with insurgents, with goal of "softening the horrors of Civil War" and opposing atrocities.

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"Thou shall be zealous even to slaying"

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Three

Claverhouse, the military commander and scourge of the Dissenters, rides a horse without a single white hair -- said by those he pursues to be "a gift from the Prince of Darkness" himself.

Lady Bellenden's breakfast for the visiting military host of the archaic variety: "the priestly ham, the knightly sirloin, the noble baron of beef" and flagons of beer, wine, and mead.

Lady Bellenden so seduced by rank that she cannot see Bothwell's degradation. In her own way, she is as single-mindedly deluded as her bible-quoting former servant Mause.

Claverhouse has a soft and courtly exterior that hides "a spirit unbounded in daring and ambition." He is "careless in facing death and ruthless in inflicting it on others."

Claverhouse's regiment has, as ornaments, black trumpeters: "six negroes in white dresses, richly laced, and having massive silver collars and armlets."

Claverhouse leads his troops against body of insurgents led by Balfour.

Balfour kills officer sent to treat for peace, horrifying his companions. To which Balfour replies: "is it not written, Thou shall be zealous even to slaying?"

Balfour fights with and kills Bothwell. Bothwell says: "Base peasant churl, thou hast spilt the blood of a line of kings"

Balfour replies: "Die bloodthirsty dog! Die as thou hast lived! Die like the beasts that perish -- hoping nothing -- believing nothing!"

And Claverhouse's whispered aside to the news of Bothwell's death: "the King has lost a servant and the Devil has gained one."

Claverhouse moves through melee untouched: "the awe on the insurgents' minds was such that they gave way to Claverhouse as before a Supernatural being."

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"A piece of lighted match betwixt the fingers"

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Two

At the miser Milnwood's table, all members of the household are watched "by sharp, envious eyes which seemed to measure the quantity that each dependent swallowed . . . In its progress from the lips to the stomach."

The robust appetite of the recently-arrived Cuddie causes Milnwood to regard him as a "cormorant."

Dinner interrupted by entry of the opportunist Bothwell and his troops in search of the religious fanatic Balfour: "in they tramped, a tremendous clatter upon the stone floor with the iron-shod heels of their large jack boots and the clash and clang of their long, heavy basket-hilted broadswords."

All members of the household -- for guilt or conscience or fear of being plundered -- find reason to fear Bothwell's domiciliary intrusion.

As part of interrogation, Bothwell threatens to torture Henry "by tying a piece of lighted match betwixt your fingers."

Cuddie's mother Mause an endless font of Biblical imprecation.

Riding with Henry as his prisoner, Bothwell affably explains how a soldier gets his fill of brandy at every household -- served by the Royalists out of affection, by the moderates out of fear, and by the radicals through force.

The royal-blooded but disenfranchised Bothwell on why he has not been recognized by James II: "his most sacred majesty is more engaged in grafting scions of his own than with nourishing those planted by his grandfather's grandfather.

Henry to be tried by: "the military commission, to whom it has pleased our king, our privy council, and our parliament that used to be tenacious of our liberties, to commit the sole charge of our goods and our lives."



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Old Mortality: Portrait of a Fanatic

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part One

Scott's "Old Mortality" set in period of Stuart Restoration, when Scottish Presbyterians ("Covenanters") suppressed as subversives harboring Republican (Roundhead) sympathies.

Story presented as told by an itinerant craftsman who travels from gravesite to gravesite -- thus his nickname "Old Mortality" -- restoring inscriptions on headstones of forgotten Presbyterian martyrs.

Jacobite royalists enforce recreation -- sports, dancing -- as well as military drills for young men in order to seduce them from severity of Covenanter society.

"To compel men to dance and make merry by authority, has rarely succeeded even on board slave ships where it was formerly sometimes attempted by way of inducing the wretched captives to agitate their limbs and restore their circulation during the few minutes they were permitted to enjoy the fresh air upon deck."

May Day celebration includes traditional game of shooting the "Popinjay": brightly feathered target suspended from a pole at great distance from the contestants.

Scott's account of rivalry of green-caped gentry and fashionable noble to hit Popinjay will be told by him again, much more elaborately, in archery contest won by Robin Hood in "Ivanhoe."

Scott introduces two zealots: the crude Royalist bully Bothwell (of royal blood, but disposessed) and the uncompromising dissenter Balfour, on the run having assassinated the Archbishop. (Later he will introduce the almost Satanic Claverhouse as the polar opposite to Balfour; the consummate cynic to Balfour's true believer).

Scott's hero Henry Morton, winner of the Popinjay contest, tries to navigate between the two extremes, but in a brave manner, like his dead father, rather than a cautious one, like his penurious uncle.

Uncompromising covenanters such as Balfour (also known as Burley) see the "indulged" Presbyterian ministers as tools of the Royalists: "a fighting of the wars of darkness with the swords of the children of light."

The brave fanatic (one could say terrorist) Balfour on his eventual fate: "my hour is not yet come. That I shall one day fall into their hands and be honorably associated with the saints whom they have slaughtered, I am full well aware. And I would that hour were come; it will be as welcome to me as ever wedding to bridegroom."

For all his ardor and certitude, Balfour still expresses doubt to Henry as to the source of an inspiration that causes him to violate "feelings of natural humanity" in order to serve divine will.

Balfour to Henry: "think ye our conquests must be only over our corrupt and evil affections and passions? No; we are called upon, when we have girded our loins, to run the race boldly, and when we have drawn the sword, we are enjoined to smite the ungodly, though he be our neighbor, and the man of power and cruelty, though he were of our own kindred, and the friend of our own bosom."

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The Prince: "A code of cultured savagery"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XIII

Florence is besieged by Julius' Spanish allies and the Republic falls, bringing the return of the previously deposed Medici. Upon Julius's death, Giovanni Medici is named Pope (taking the name Leo X) and Florence is once again ascendent.

Machiavelli's connection to the former Republican government of Florence places him under suspicion and he is arrested. At first, he cannot believe he can so quickly be disgraced -- "January does not vex me, provided February favors me." But he is falsely implicated in a plot, imprisoned, and tortured.

Machiavelli's friends arrange for his freedom and he goes into exile. There, impoverished, he consorts by day with rural tradesmen -- a butcher, a miller and two furnace makers -- but at night figuratively dons "royal and Curial robes" and mentally enters the world high politics, the world of The Prince.

The Prince, Roeder suggests, is in one sense Machiavelli's application for employment by the Medici, specifically Giuliano Medici who seeks to parlay his brother's Papacy into a state much as Caesare Borgia attempted. In line with this, The Prince is also an attempt to rehabilitate the memory of Caesare Borgia and his campaign to create a powerful state from Italy's patchwork of squabbling, divided city states. Ironically, Giuliano will be more influenced by Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, which is being written at the same time in another corner of Italy.

Roeder suggests that, in the end, The Prince "unwittingly confirms Savanarola," replacing the Friar's religious faith with a faith in the State and thus equally vulnerable to the liberatory spirit of the era. It is, thus, backwards looking, doomed to failure and "a melancholy work."

"For the salvation of Italy [Machiavelli] prescribed a code of cultured savagery, which was too primitive to be sucessfully practiced by a race which, for better or for worse, had outgrown barbarism."

"For how long does the world overlook the inoffensive?"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XII

In his military campaign to reclaim Perugia and Bologna for the Holy See, Julius II brings virtually the entire College of Cardinals with him as part of his baggage train.

When Castiglione returns to Urbino after his mission to England, he sees the vulnerability of that kingdom of ease and joy: "it needed so little to dispell that idyllic world -- a mere breath of struggle . . . how long does the world overlook the inoffensive?"

In order to free her husband from Venetian prison, the cultured Isabelle d'Este reluctantly agrees to send her beloved 10 year-old son and heir, Federico, to live with the Pope as a sign of good faith and parole.

Isabella's husband, Duke Francesco Gonzaga is "a virile nonentity" who spends most of his time with his dogs. "His animal coarseness, his primitive vanity . . . were a perpetual provocation to the civilized woman he had married."

Isabelle's ambition for her son Federico, on the other hand, is for him to be "a humane and enlightened Prince." Federico was Isabella's "living image, with his silken hair, his innocent eyes, his tender and manly nature; at eight he was already singing Virgilian hexameters at her knee, in a thin, high childish treble." His father, Duke Francesco, had grumbled at this cultured heir, threatening ineffectually "to take the boy over and make a man of him."

In addition to the demand for parole, Isabella sees the advantage of removing sweet Federico from Duke Francisco's influence. When the Duke is released from the Venetian prison, she sends Federico to the Vatican, accompanied by "tutors, a major domo, a lutist" and a collection of holy relics.

Wittingly or not (Julian II is widely rumored to be more than fond of young boys and his obsession with Michaelangelo's art further suggests his appreciation of the male form), Isabella's dispatch of the angelic, 10 year-old Federico to Rome has the result of taming the martial Pope; Julian become Federico's (and, thus, Isabella d'Este's) "hostage" to good behavior rather than the other way around.

Castiglione: Scion of an abolished world

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XI

Roeder introduces the third of his major Renaissance Italian "law givers" -- Castiglione. As Savanarola was situated as one who rises through his ability to speak and Machiavelli as one who sees, so Castiglione is presented as one who listens.

The nobly born Castiglione part of "a small and antiquated class, which the new age was rapidly outmoding . . . its roots lay in an abolished world and its traditional employments -- military, diplomatic, ecclesiastical -- had deteriorated with the rise of the new mercantile civilization of the Renaissance."

Roeder suggests that the aristocratic and religious mentalities share essential traits: both rely on discipline and discrimination and on the repression of what is new and vital. As religion has morals, so the aristocracy has manners.

Castiglione finds a haven in the remote mountain city state of Urbino, which had been seized by Cesare Borgia as part of his land grab, but then restored to its Duke Guidobaldo upon the ascension of Julius II.

Guidobaldo and his wife Elizabetta make of Urbino an "isolated, irresponsible" enclave of art, mirth, and joy, drawing to that city refugee and dispossessed nobles. Guidobaldo and Elizabetta's Urbino "the expression of an urbane, mellow, and balanced spirit, of an exquisite mean which only a ripe culture could produce."

"Honesty in pawn to necessity"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part X

The Borgia Pope dies and his body swells to enormous proportions: "the cheeks were enormous, the nose had doubled, the tongue clogged his mouth, the skin was black." All this gives rise to rumors of poisoning as his body is unceremoniously crammed into a coffin.

Caesare caught fever at same dinner and lies deathly ill. He survives his father and -- as his power base is the Vatican armies -- is relieved when choice for the next Pope is elderly and ailing, a caretaker. He reigns for 26 days.

Though scrupulously honest, Cardinal della Rovere makes a bargain with Caesare Borgia in order to amass votes to become Pope (Julius II). "They had compromised him, but his honesty had only been in pawn to necessity."

Julius almost immediately turns on Caesare, who quickly crumbles and goes penniless into exile. His eclipse as rapid as Savaronarola's; more ignomunious if less violent. At one point, in effort to stave-off exile, Cesare tries to reconcile with Duke of Urbino, who is visiting with Julius in Rome; when Guidobaldo refuses to admit him, Cesare sneaks in through secret Vatican passageway and prostrates himself, asking forgiveness, before the appalled noble.

Just as the Friar could not rule from soulcraft alone, so the Condotteri could not succeed by physical might alone.


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The Borgia Papacy

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part IX

Vatican scandals under the Borgias include myth of the "chestnut supper" at which it is rumored "50 naked courtesans and valets groveled on the floor -- gamboling for chestnuts and copulating at the feet of the Holy Father.

Cesare Borgia creates a power base from his command of the Vatican armies during his father's Papacy.  Machiavelli sees in the Borgias' reputation for sexual appetite an expression of their political vitality.

Caesare Borgia is effective both in the field and in negotiations; he "had the grace of a bullfighter and the practiced unction of a churchman" and "for all his muscular bearing, he might have seemed dapper."

The mercenary Vitellozzo Vitelli plots against his captain Caesare: "moody with syphylis, he nursed a sullen venereal anger and roused other malcontents."

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Machiavelli: open eyed and close mouthed

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part VIII

The young Machiavelli begins his first government job just weeks after Savonarola's burning. Described by Roeder as "open-eyed, close-mouthed . . . his only handicap was the originality of his mind"

Italian city states in this time do not have citizen soliders; warfare carried out by freelance militias (condotta) or mercenaries.

From fiasco of Pisan Wars, Machiavelli concludes that force requires faith (such as Savanarola inspired) to succeed. He sees Savaranola as both astute and a simpleton.

Regarding the impressionable nature of the populace, Caesare Borgia perceives: "in the political arena the glamor of crime, the reputation of mystery, swiftness, and ruthlessness was an immense asset."

Machiavelli sees a force of nature at work in Cesare Borgia's deployment of raw power in securing himself a state in Romagna.

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The burning of Savanarola

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part VII

Savanarola sternly criticized by Vatican as an "innovator" and abandoned by his political partisans in Florence. Roeder concludes that "the great theocratic experiment had failed . . . He had demonstrated exhaustively the sterility of Christianity either as a system of statecraft or a way of practical life."

Roeder avers that "the Roman tradition had been broken by two calamities, the barbarian invasions and the effeminizing influence of Christianity." Latter calls to mind that Savaronola, in Roeder's account, entered monastery out of failed romance and disgust over the masculine behavioral norms of his fellow students."

Roeder relates Machiavelli's witnessing of Savanarola's last sermons. Suggests that while Machiavelli sees clearly everything on the surface, he fails to understand Savanarola's inspiration, his sincere belief in his rightness. Machiavelli's insights are purely cerebral; he is blind to the spiritual.

On failure of Savanarola's trial and torture to reveal any motives for his pronouncements other than sincere belief, Roeder writes that "the Renaissance was trying the Middle Ages."

Savanarola hanged and burned in the Piazza -- with children casting stones at his corpse -- sharing the fate of so many "vanities" burned during his ascent.

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The burning of the vanities

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part VI

The burning of the vanities: "amid billowing crowds of smoke, the great pyramid of vainglories collected by [Savaronarola's] children. -- lewd pictures and books, lutes, cards, mirrors, and trinkets -- crumbled on the piazza, filling the nostrils of the godly with the acrid satisfaction of sic gloria."

Savanarola picks-up the intensity of his attack on the corruption of Rome and the church: "O whore of a Church, you have shown your foulness to the whole world, and your stench rises to Heaven."

Savanarola's intransigence: "the Friar was governed by a logic deeper than reason. Intoxicated with conviction, stimulated by struggle . . . His inveterate habit of simplifying every problem, reducing it to the simple black and white of right and wrong, had at last developed into an obsession."

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"The virus of power"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part V

In expelling French from Italy, Venetians enlist the mercenary Stradiouts: "the savage, head-hunting Albanian cavalry who had been promised a gold coin and a kiss from the lips of their commander for every French head."

In power vacuum following French invasion and expulsion, Savaranola grasps political power: "the virus of power had entered his veins and in its most insidious form, as an inalienable responsibility."

Another Maoist (or Taliban) resonance in Savaronarola's program of organizing Florentine youth into squads of moral enforcement teams as part of his campaign to suppress Carnival.

Savaronarola's young moral enforcers even more active during Lent: "they attacked the pastry sellers, they remonstrated with richly-dressed women, and when the remonstrance failed, stripped them of their veils and vanities."

Here the resonance is with Hitler's Nazi youth or Stalin's Communist Youth Brigades: "with the zeal of converts and the ardor of minors, they spied on and reported the sins of their parents" and patrolled the taverns and streets, causing dice games to break-up.


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Savanarola as Mao

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part IV

Election of licentious, greedy, but politically astute Roderigo Borgia as Pope: "a large bovine man, he weighed two hundred pounds worth of stability and order."

Savaranola heightens the level of his prophecy of godly retribution, the emblem of which becomes an arm and sword reaching down from the clouds with the words: "the sword of the Lord, swift over the earth and sudden."

Savaranola's reform of his convent of San Marco resonant of Mao's cultural revolution: a stamping out of property and individuality achieved by inciting the zeal of the youngest followers followed by a period of relaxed stringency and a fascination with pageantry (including one in which a young boy is dressed-up as the Virgin and adored by the chanting monks).

Also thought of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson post-9/11 and Katrina in Savanarola's gleefull greeting of the murdurous French invasion of Italy as act of personal vindication and godly retribution: "Lo the sword is come, the prophecies are verified, the scourging has begun . . . the time of singing and dancing is over; now is the time to weep your sins with torrents of tears."


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From mystagogue to demagogue

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part III

Roeder describes Savaronarola's transformation from scourge of the clergy to social critic -- "from mystigogue to demagogue" -- and, thus threat to Lorenzo di Medici's "invisible dictatorship."

The Medici acquire political power to protect their fortune, perceiving that: "wealth without power is insecure"

Lorenzo believes that "man is moved by self-interest" and thus, for him, Savaronarola is "a moral anomaly."

Lorenzo "lived by flair, by shrewdness, always alert to the promptings of life, improvising his conduct with every occasion, consistent to nothing but continual variety."

Lorenzo practically stalks Savaronarola, trying to bring him into his orbit. Only on his deathbed does Lorenzo succeed, but the intractable monk places conditions on hearing his confession. Upon Savaranola delivering the last, that he restore the freedom of Florence, Lorenzo "stares at him incredulously" then "slowly rolls over and dies."

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"He craved it with a hungry and connubial ardor"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part II

Savonarola, known for raging against clerical excess, recruited to preach in Florence by the effete intellectual Pico del Mirandola, who seeks a form of revenge against the church hierarchy for its cracking down on his Humanist intellectual projects.

Preaching to a large crowd of Florentines: "With the voice of the whirlwind he launched his prediction of the imminent scourging of the church . . . The words poured from him like a rhetorical haemorrage, anguish galvanized all his powers, and in a rush of invective, expostilation, threats, and appeals, he pressed and kneaded the multitude until the sluggish mass began to quicken and stir.

As Savonarola's crowds grow, he becomes addicted to oratory: "he craved it with a hungry and connubial ardor."

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"A Stagnant Replica of the Real World"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part I

Spurned by his first love and finding the world a place where "all vices are lauded and all virtues derided," the wealthy youth Savonarola seeks the "slow immersion into death" of the cloister.

Instead he finds "a small stagnant replica of the real world without," rife with politics, self-indulgence, and careerism. "The entire edifice was rotten with a ramifying network of decay. He saw the issue with the absolute insight of innocent youth, and it affected him like a personal injury."

Roeder later describes resentment of Savonarola by a young sonnambulist monk who ("mischievous as a monkey") plays pranks in his pretended unconscious ramblings and claims religious visions. He becomes jealous when Savonarola, who had dismissed the younger monk's visions, begins to report his own far more stern prophesies.

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Books Read in 2008

The final total for books read in 2008 came-in at 59, including some very lengthy works (indeed, Moby Dick was at best the 5th longest book read this past year).

The year began with the last parts of Eugene Sue's sprawling (21 volume; 2000+ page) Mysteries of the People and ended with Phineas Finn, the second volume of Anthony Trollope's "political" series: The Palliser Novels. From Sue's ardent chronicle of the struggle of the French proletariat to Trollope's respectful anatomy of degrees of rank among the British upper crust suggests what is lost as my French-dominated reading of the past ten years gives way to more British texts.

Other trends included a fair amount of nonfiction including, in sequence, books related to World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. I finally caught-up with several of Hemingway's major works. I picked-up the pace on Walter Scott, finding more nuance in his works (one needs, I think, to look past his central characters) than had previously been apparent. I also continued to work through key high gothic novels, which provided some of the best reading of the year. Discovered as well that Thomas Hardy's more obscure novels are surprising and very offbeat (including overt gay and lesbian characters).

Spent the month of August with back-to-back accounts of the American form of destructive obsession: first Nixon in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and then Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick -- both leaders took their ships down with them.

Favorite 2008 Readings: Probably James Hogg's Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, Nicholson Baker's angry slow-burn on WWII history in Human Smoke, and rereading Kipling's Kim.

Worst 2008 Readings: Certainly David Wrobleski's absurdly overpraised and insipid The Story of Edgar Sawtelle but also Thornton Wilder's effete The Cabala and the sad spectacle of Russell Banks coasting with The Reserve.

Biggest Surprise: David Rhodes's smart and humane Driftless.

Biggest Disappointments: Nicola Barker's disorganized (though occasionally stunning) Darkmans; Abe Kobo's extended toilet humor in Ark Sakura; rereading Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall and finding it undisciplined as a whole if still revelatory in places.

Reading Log for 2008:

13-Jan-08, Sue, Eugene: The Mysteries of the People (1857 France)
20-Jan-08, Murakami, Haruki: Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of World (1985 Japan)
21-Jan-08, Dinesen, Isak: Ehrengard (1962 Denmark)
26-Jan-08, Sciascia, Leonardo: Day of the Owl (1961 Italy)
27-Jan-08, Vollman, William: Riding Toward Everywhere (2008 USA)
2-Feb-08, Robb, Graham: The Discovery of France (2007 England)
3-Feb-08, Pollan, Michael: In Defense of Food (2008 USA)
6-Feb-08, Wilder, Thornton: The Cabala, The (1926 USA)
10-Feb-08, Hardy, Thomas: Desperate Remedies (1871 England)
21-Feb-08, Barker, Nicola: Darkmans (2007 England)
5-Mar-08, Scott, Walter: Quentin Durward (1823 Scotland)
22-Mar-08, Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White (1860 England)
23-Mar-08, Turgenev, Ivan: A Nobleman's Nest (1858 Russia)
30-Mar-08, Conrad, Joseph: Under Western Eyes (1911 England)
5-Apr-08, Dumas, Alexandre: Captain Pamphile (1839 France)
7-Apr-08, Verne, Jules: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864 France)
13-Apr-08, Baker, Nicholson Human Smoke (2008 USA)
27-Apr-08, Halberstam, David: The Coldest Winter, (2007 USA)
3-May-08, Banks, Russell: The Reserve (2007 USA)
7-May-08, Sebald, W.G.: Natural History of Destruction (1999 Germany)
7-May-08, Heim, Scott: We Disappear (2008 USA)
12-May-08, Hemingway, Ernest: Islands in the Stream (1952 USA)
19-May-08, Bird, Robert Montgomery: Sheppard Lee (1839 USA)
25-May-08, Purdy, James: In the Hollow of His Hand (1986 USA)
26-May-08, Millhauser, Steven: Dangerous Laughter (2008 USA)
2-Jun-08, Malloy, Brian: Brendan Wolf (2007 USA)
9-Jun-08, Frederic, Harold: Damnation of Theron Ware (1896 USA)
15-Jun-08, Zweig, Stefan: The Post-Offce Girl (1942 Austria)
22-Jun-08, Wroblewski, David: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008 USA)
25-Jun-08, Hanley, James: Boy (1932 Wales)
29-Jun-08, Dylan, Bob: Chronicles, Volume One (2006 USA)
6-Jul-08, Hemingway, Ernest: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940 USA)
15-Jul-08, Kipling, Rudyard: Kim (1901 England)
20-Jul-08, Bock, Charles: Beautiful Children (2008 USA)
27-Jul-08, Hadju, David: Ten Cent Plague (2008 USA)
3-Aug-08 McGrath, Patrick Ghost Town: Tales of New York (2006 England)
21-Aug-08, Pearlstein, Rick: Nixonland (2008 USA)
1-Sep-08, Melville, Herman: Moby Dick, or the Whale (1851 USA)
7-Sep-08, Abe, Kobo: Ark Sakura (1984 Japan)
8-Sep-08, Kantner, Seth: Shopping for Porcupine (2008 USA)
16-Sep-08, Scott, Walter: Guy Mannering (1815 Scotland)
21-Sep-08, Hemingway, Ernest: Farewell to Arms (1929 USA)
28-Sep-08, Hardy, Thomas: A Loadicean (1881 England)
3-Oct-08, Hemingway, Ernest: In Our Time (1925 USA)
5-Oct-08, Didion, Joan: Where I Was From (2003 USA)
12-Oct-08, Woiwode, Larry Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975 USA)
19-Oct-08, Zola, Emilie: Piping Hot (1888 France)
5-Nov-08, Trollope, Anthony: Can You Forgive Her? (1865 England)
9-Nov-08, Hogg, James: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824 Scotland)
13-Nov-08, Reid, Forrest: The Garden God, The (1905 Ireland)
16-Nov-08, Arnott, Jake: The Long Firm (1999 England)
25-Nov-08, Scott, Walter: The Antiquary (1816 Scotland)
30-Nov-08, Doyle, Arthur Conan: Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896 England)
30-Nov-08, Lewis, Matthew: The Monk (1796 England)
10-Dec-08, Rhodes, David: Driftless (2008 USA)
11-Dec-08, Bachelder, Chris: Bear v Shark (2001 USA)
17-Dec-08, Rezzori, Gregor von: The Hussar (1960 Austria)
20-Dec-08, Marsh, Richard: The Beetle (1897 England)
30-Dec-08, Trollope, Anthony: Phineas Finn (1869 England)

Reading Notes on Uncle Silas

Reading Notes: Sheridan LeFanu, Uncle Silas
January 2-4, 2009. Transcribed from Twitter.

Set-up of "Uncle Silas" surrounds young Maude with malign cast of characters, notably the comically devious governess Mdm de la Rougiere. 11:25 AM Jan 2nd from txt

Mdm Rougiere persuades Maud: "come, come, tell me little obstinate or I will break your little finger. Tell me everything." 1:26 PM Jan 2nd from txt

Maud's widowed father a Swedenborgian. He paces in and out of darkness -- and their house situated between visible and spirit worlds. 1:30 PM Jan 2nd from txt

The two portraits of Uncle Silas: the oval of golden-haired boy and full-length of the young rake: "a most expensive and vicious young man" 8:47 AM Jan 3rd from txt

Looking at the childhood portrait, Maud ponders from "what a small seed the hemlock or the wallflower grows." Her shy father the wallflower 8:59 AM Jan 3rd from txt

Cousin Monica speaks of Silas as a "sphinx" and Maud finds his expression unreadable: "derision, or anguish, or cruelty, or patience?" 9:51 AM Jan 3rd from txt

Silas, caustic, on his daughter Milly: "a very rustic Miranda and fitted rather for the society of Caliban, than of a sick old Prospero." 9:56 AM Jan 3rd from txt

LeFanu compares the reluctance of a sleepy child to go to bed with the struggle of the elderly to resist "the great sleep of death" 10:06 AM Jan 3rd from txt

Silas on Maud's report of beating of miller's daughter: "What a romantic little child, people of that rank think nothing of a broken head." 1:29 PM Jan 3rd from txt

Monica on Silas' ancient butler: "I won't wait for your butler, who would give me cakes baked by King Alfred and Danish beer in a skull." 3:33 PM Jan 3rd from txt

Silas subject to catatonic fits -- "queer spells" -- as well as selective quotation from the Bible, thus creating a new reputation for piety 3:37 PM Jan 3rd from txt

Monica sees Silas for the 1st time in 20 yrs: "Angels and ministers of grace! Such a specter! That odious smile makes me feel half insane." 3:59 PM Jan 3rd from txt

The bitter Silas to Monica: "We are very like turkeys, we have so much sense and generosity. Fortune wounded me, and the whole brood were upon me pecking and gobbling, gobbling and pecking, and you among them dear Monica. It wasn't your fault only instinct" 4:07 PM Jan 3rd from txt

Silas' fits: "hoverings between life and death, between intellect and insanity -- a dubious marsh fire existence, horrible to look on!" 5:09 PM Jan 3rd from txt

Silas' inner life a "systematic blasphemy" hidden beneath a deceptive surface that takes on rainments of humanity in order to lure others. 9:13 AM Jan 4th from txt

Silas akin to "goblin of the desert who appear in friendly shapes to stragglers from the caravan, lead them to where they're found no more" 9:18 AM Jan 4th from txt

"How marvelously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers one over the other! Take away that on the surface and straight you find a new stratum." 9:57 AM Jan 4th from txt

Toward end of "Uncle Silas," Mdm Rougiere asks Maud if she is cruel or just stupid. 450 pages spent in her dismal company confirm the latter 8:38 PM Jan 4th from txt

"Uncle Silas" fully partakes of British convention of centering a novel on an insipid figure, with real interest lying in subsidiary figures 8:42 PM Jan 4th from txt

Maud consistently ignores broad hints from other characters as to the plots against her: Christian charity taken to extreme of idiocy. 8:45 PM Jan 4th from txt

Supernatural in "Uncle Silas" just so much Gothic decor. Silas' demonism explained by opium addiction. Swedenborgian veil goes unlifted. 8:49 PM Jan 4th from txt

Reading Notes on The Chrysalids

Reading Notes: John Wyndham, The Chrysalids
Jan 1, 2009. Transcribed from Twitter.

Reading John Wyndham's post-apocalyptic "The Chryaslids," in which religious orthodoxy takes the form of absolute genetic purity. 11:12 AM Jan 1st from txt

Post-apocalyptic environment creates a new "Age of Wonders." Knowledge and tolerance become heretical. People hide "sins" of deviation. 11:22 AM Jan 1st from txt

The sailor Uncle Axel's account of peoples beyond the radiation-scarred "badlands" suggests that all one finds are different orthodoxies. 11:33 AM Jan 1st from txt

Axel "most of them whether they have seven fingers or four arms or hair all over or whatever is wrong, think their type is the true pattern" 11:39 AM Jan 1st from txt

Thought in reading "The Chryaslids" that it is nature's way to be various and in man's way to restrict variety, both moral and biological. 12:04 PM Jan 1st from txt

In parallel events of normal and mutant births to two sisters (David's mother & aunt), reality that all have mutation, deviance inside them. 12:48 PM Jan 1st from txt

Minister: "Accursed is the mutant, the seed of the devil within, trying unflaggingly, eternally to come to fruition, to destroy divine order” 12:54 PM Jan 1st from txt

David's prayer: "Oh God, please, please God let me be like other people. Won't you make it so when I wake up I'll be like everyone else?" 1:21 PM Jan 1st from txt

The eight Chrysalids, who communicate by ESP, are a step forward in evolution and thus abomination to religion which only looks backwards. 2:08 PM Jan 1st from txt

Living in secret, the Chrysalids envy the "norms": "the stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged." 5:32 PM Jan 1st from txt

"We had no positive -- we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out -- to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying." 5:37 PM Jan 1st from txt

Discovered, David, Rosalind, Petra are declared "deviants," "non-human and therefore not entitled to rights or protections of human society" 7:51 PM Jan 1st from txt

David explains hatred to Petra: "the more stupid [people] are the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different." "I don't see why," insisted Petra. 8:12 PM Jan 1st from txt

Chryaslids and the "Sealand" people precursors of network society and hive mind in their ability to have "think-togethers" 8:37 PM Jan 1st from txt

Proto-internet: Chrysalids and the "Sealand" people also communicate using a kind of graphic (rather than lingual) interface. 8:43 PM Jan 1st from txt

Inability to think collectively doomed the "Old People": "the more complex they made their world, the less capable of dealing with it" 8:47 PM Jan 1st from txt

Sealand woman explains that the oppressed are confused by their social ties and upbringing but that the oppressors are *not* so confused. 10:00 PM Jan 1st from txt

The oppressors recognize the danger of the "superior variant" and wish to suppress the change that it will bring -- to preserve stasis. 10:03 PM Jan 1st from txt

As David + Rosalind descend toward Sealand (New Zealand) they hear a sound like "the buzzing of a hive of bees." David: "our kind of people" 10:13 PM Jan 1st from txt

Seeing killing as part of the natural order, the Sealanders have no particular sympathy for "lower" creatures or less-evolved humanoids. 10:26 PM Jan 1st from txt

"The Chrysalids" interestingly predictive of not just network society -- even the problem of individuation -- but also posthuman philosophy. 10:31 PM Jan 1st from txt