I Can't Quite Figure Out David Gilmour

David Gilmour is the author of one of my favorite short biographies (of Giuseppe di Lampadusa, author of The  Leopard) and of several other books that I've read with pleasure and profit.   Right now I'm finishing up his In Search of Italy and I can't quite figure out what to make of it.

On the surface, it looks like it might be a yawn: a 10-peaks-in-10-weeks slog through a lot of long-forgotten dates and names.  It does start a bit slowly--about the Romans he doesn't have a lot to add but then the competition is pretty stiff. It is in the Renaissance that he really hits his stride.  Yes, there are a lot of names and dates, but this is definitely not just predigested Wiki: rather, he shows an extraordinary knack for for the crisp and lethal insight about people and correspondingly about entire social movements.  He is particularly good on the late 19th Century: his is one of the most helpful brief accounts I ever saw of the Cavour/Garibaldi revolution, giving full display to its essential fraudulence and self-delusion.  Which is not to say that his tone is particularly savage: indeed his very restraint is enough to make his account all the more telling.

And here's the puzzle.  A book like this usually begins with an account of how much the author loves his subject--at one point I had the impression that Gilmour actually lived in Italy though I now think I am mistaken.  Yet it's odd to see how someone who really loves the country could tell the story with which measured detachment--neither lost in his own enthusiasm, not choked in bitterness.  What we have instead is some marvelous story telling set against a background of almost glacial reserve.

By way of a taste, here is Gilmour's account of "the partisans," famed in song and story, who fought so valiantly (as we are told) against the retreating Germans in World War II.   You can find their memory kept green "in Verona’s Piazza Brà, beside the great Roman amphitheater," in the statue of "a young fighter of the Resistance, handsome and fearless, a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscription with the words, ‘To those who died for Liberty’."  Gilmour elaborates:

After the armistice in 1943 Italians joined the Resistance for a variety of motives. Some were anti-fascists who wanted to defeat fascism, some were patriots who wanted to expel invaders, and more were communists who aimed for both of these things and a political revolution as well. Many , however, simply drifted into it because they were on the run from German and fascist forces. Although they were unskilled in open combat, the partisans proved to be effective in guerrilla warfare: they blew up bridges and killed fascist officials, they helped liberate the cities of the north from the German occupation, they punctured the credibility of Salò and they signalled the redemption of Italy. For some twenty months they fought courageously, and about 40,000 of them were killed. Yet there were never very many of them, perhaps 9,000 at the end of 1943, some 80,000 at the end of 1944, and about 100,000 by March 1945, when victory was certain. 1 Comparable numbers had volunteered to fight for the Republic of Salò even though most of them must have known that defeat was inevitable . The Resistance was thus not the nation in arms: it was about one-third of 1 per cent of it in arms, roughly the same proportion that had volunteered to fight the Austrians in 1848.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 5833-5842). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

The Invention of the Ukraine

Responding to that Ukraine post, Brad asks:

Where did the Union Republics of the USSR come from? The Czar's empire was not organized in any such way, was it?

He's got a point.  I suppose the answer is: the usual mix of violence and fiction, with perhaps rather more violence than some.  The Russkies had spent a good part of the 19th Century beating up on the "Southern" components, most of which had cultures utterly unrelated to the Beloved Motherland, and knew it. Cf. Tolstoi, Haji Murat and Lermontov, Hero for Our Time, passim.

Ukraine is a more complicated case.  Like just about every state, it's a ragbag --Andrukohovych's point, I suppose. We know that today, part (but not all?) of the Ukraine has a culture that is "like" Mother Russia's, though just what part and just how much like is hotly contested.   We know also that the 19th Century was the great age of national invention. And we know also that, unfortunately for all concerned, the "Ukraine" is part of a great swath of mostly flattish land with few high-saliency physical markers--which is to say,  no defensible borders. where multitudes are often charging back and forth making life miserable for those in their path.   Frank Golsczewski summarizes:

  Historically, the southern areas of today's Ukraine were unsuccessfully claimed by the Kievan Rus' around the ninth and tenth centuries, though they were inhabited by Turkic or other steppe peoples, the Tatar Mongol Golden Horde, and the Crimean khanate, a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.  Only in the eighteenth century were they resettled by Russia (as Novaja Rossija, 'New Russia, using settlers from all over Europe), after the Russian Empire under Catherine II and Prince Potemkin conquered the steppe and Crimea.  

link.  Thus it seems that 19th Century "Ukraine" was a mélange of Russian Empire and Austrio-Hungarian Empire with remnants of the Golden Horde, along with Rusyns and Ruthenians (if and insofar as they are distinct) plus Poles and--oh, yes of course, Jews.    But  the late 19th Century brought about what you might guess if you're familiar with the history of any other European nation--an outbreak of Ukraniophilia with plays, poems, novels, and the inevitable maps purporting to show what "Ukraine" was and ever had been. The principal advocate/culprit appear to be one Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, whose ten-volume History of Ukraine-Ruthenia is said to be devoted to establishing the uniqueness of the Ukranian line.  Here is a modern critique.  It is said that Hrushevsky's own mother was a Pole and that his death in 1934 occurred "under mysterious circumstances."

Bonus extra: for your amusement, I copied the first long paragraph above ("He's got a point") and ran it through Google translate, first in Russian, then in Ukranian (neither of which I can read, though I can usually dope out the alphabet). The reader is invited to judge the degree to which they are "the same."

Он попал в точку. Я полагаю, что ответ: обычное соединение насилия и фантастики, с, возможно, а еще большему насилию, чем некоторые. В Russkies провел большую часть 19-го века избиения на "Южный" компонентов, большинство из которых имели культуры совершенно не связанные с любимой родины, и знал, что это. Ср. Толстой, Хаджи Мурат и Lermentov, Человек без свойств, повсюду.

And Ukrainian:

Він потрапив в точку. Я вважаю, що відповідь: звичайне з'єднання насильства і фантастики, з, можливо, а ще більшого насильства, ніж деякі. У Russkies провів більшу частину 19-го століття побиття на "Південний" компонентів, більшість з яких мали культури абсолютно не пов'язані з улюбленої батьківщини, і знав, що це. СР Толстой, Хаджі Мурат і Lermentov, Людина без властивостей, всюди.

Abraham, Brigham and AJ

I've been spending some time with John G. Turner's absorbing biography of Brigham Young and I find my mind seeking him to fit him into a larger culture that includes Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. 

Sure, the comparison is a stretch, but bear with me here.  It seems to me that the period beginning with Jackson and pretty much ending with Lincoln was the one time in American history when raw, unvarnished country boys--nobodies from nowhere--could rise to positions of real leadership,  Rise, moreover, on their own talents and energy, if not always their virtue. 

I'm not quite sure how far I can go with this without torturing the evidence beyond all recognition.   Jackson, surely is he most dramatic example of the three, not least because of his untrammeled and, yes, undisciplined energy: the man who won his great battle after the war was over, the scourge of the Indians, the man who destroyed an economy largely because he didn't understand it and was blissfully untroubled by his own incomprehension.*   Jackson's real contribution, I suspect, was not so much himself but the revolution he crystallized: the explosion of energy from a whole multitude of hitherto nameless and faceless Americans: the "ordinary sort: who proved themselves capable of extraordinary achievement.

Young's beginnings may have been quite as humble as Jackson's but they were close and he was, in any event, the sort who likely wouldn't have been able to make a place for himself in any earlier time.  His achievement may at first blush seem more modest: governor of a :"state" (broadly defined) and not president of an emerging nation.  But reading Turner builds the conviction that it may be easier to underestimate Young precisely because he was more successful: he made it look easy.

Or better: look easy from a distance.  Closer up, you can see what an extraordinary accident he was.  Poorly educated and the possessor of no noteworthy skills--except, perhaps, extraordinary energy--he found himself in a position top put a claim on leadership by the sheer fortuity of Joseph Smith's untimely death.  What he did show from that moment on through the rest of his life was a singular capacity to lead, coupled with (they do not always go together) a remarkable knack for administration.    Taken together, these qualities allowed him to dominate his movement from then on until his death some 30 years later.  It's hard to imagine Mormonism without him: indeed it's an entertaining thought experiment to wonder what might have become of these peculiar people had it been Young and not Smith who had been murdered by the mob in Illinois.

Which brings us to Lincoln who, in comparison with the other two, emerges as even more extraordinary than he does on his own.  Starting with at least as fragmentary an education as the other two, he equipped himself in a skilled trade and a learned profession--and as perhaps the best writer/speaker of ll our 44 Presidents.    And the elemental energy y that seems to define the other two--at least on the outside, Lincoln showed none of that.  .   What he did show was that still center in the eye of the storm that made him so hard to overestimate, so easy to undervalue.

I don't mean to belittle Young here.  Rather, my point is that each of the three personifies and even articulates a culture that no one before it could have anticipated and that we in our own time find difficult even to comprehend.


*I confess I didn't always feel this way: I grew up on Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson which now seems to me to be to be a bit of starry-eyed hero worship: Schlesinger in training for the courtier role he played so comfortably for Jack Kennedy.

Oh and another footnote.  It fell to me in my delusion to suggest to his mother that we name our son "Andrew Jackson;" we could call him "AJ."  I am eternally in her debt that she would have none of it.

Report from the End Times

It's conventional for accounts like this to provoke analogies (real or imagined) to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  But I'd say a more plausible, if equally facile, comparison might be to the end of the Roman Republic--a gaggle of loosely intertwined clans all striving for eminence in a polity which from many perspectives wasn't really governed at all.     Readers who have not chucked their copies of Roland Ronald Syme may want to dust them off for a refresher.

Ibn Khaldûn Provides a Context For Somali Piracy

Vagrant recollections after seeing Captain Phillips, which might win yet another Academy Award for Tom Hanks, should win for Barkhad Abdi and surely ought to win one for Paul Greengrass (sensational filming, nothing like it).    It is said that Ibn Khaldûn, fourteenth-century Arab scholar, was the first to notice and describe cycles in history--and in particular to note how "desert" populations (think Genghis Khan or Mohammed) may rise up and conquer "settled" peoples, only to be supplanted by other desert peoples in their turn.

Since desert life no doubt is the source of bravery, savage groups are braver than others.  They are, therefore, better able to achieve superiority and to take away the things that re in the hands of other nations. The situation of one and the same group changes, in this respect, with the change of time.  Whenever people settle in fertile plains and amass luxuries and become accustomed to a life of abundance and refinement, their bravery decreases to the degree that their wildness and desert habits decrease. 

This is exemplified by dumb animals, such as gazelles, wild buffaloes, and donkeys, that are domesticated.  When they cease to be wild as a result of contact with human beings, and when they have a life of abundance, their vigor and violence undergo change.  This affects even their movements and the beauty of their coat.  The same applies to savage human beings who become sociable and friendly. 

The reason is that familiar customs determine human nature and character.  Superiority comes to nations through enterprise and courage.  The more firmly rooted in desert habits and the wilder a group is, the closer does it come to achieving superiority over others, if both (par tires) are proximately equal in number, strength, and group feeling. 

In this connection, one may compare the Mudar with the Himyar and the Kahlân before them, who precede them in royal authority and in the life of luxury, and also with the Rabî'ah who settled in the fertile fields of the 'Irâq.  The Mudar retained their desert habits, and others embarked ion a life of abundance and great luxury before they did. Desert life prepared the Mudar most effectively for achieving superiority.  They took away and appropriated what the other groups had in their hands.  

--So Ibn Khaldûn,  The Muqaddimah 107 (Franz Rosenthal Trans., 2005).  Thomas Barfield gives a modern account along similar lines in The Perilous Frontier (1992) his history of nomadic peoples along the northern border of China.  Last I knew, there were statues of Ibn Khaldûn  in Cairo and Tunis, and his face was/is on the Tunisian 10 dinar note.

One Solution to the Government Spending Crisis

Plunder:

Except a body of about four thousand cavalry, well armed, and fit to make a steady impression in battle, the rest of the army were light-armed troops, mounted on small horses, which found subsistence every where, and carried them with rapid and unexpected marches, whether they meant to commit depredations on the peaceable inhabitants, or to attack an armed enemy, or to retreat into their own country. Their whole equipage consisted of a bag of oatmeal, which, as a supply in case of necessity, each soldier carried behind him; together with a light plate of iron, on which he instantly baked the meal into a cake in the open fields. But his chief subsistence was the cattle which he seized; and his cookery was as expeditious as all his other operations. After flaying the animal, he placed the skin, loose and hanging in the form of a bag, upon some stakes; he poured water into it, kindled a fire below, and thus made it serve as a caldron for the boiling of his victuals.

I mean, why do we pay those guys anyway?

David Hume, History of England, Vol. 1b on the invasion of the Scots in the reign of Edward III.  H/t Gutenberg.

Hume on The Calamity of Bad Government

Like his great predecessor Shakespeare, David Hume understood the calamity that is bad government.  Here he sums up the career of Henry III of England

The most obvious circumstance of Henry's character is his incapacity for government, which rendered him as much a prisoner in the hands of his own ministers and favorites, and as little at his own disposal, as when detained a captive in the hands of his enemies. From this source, rather than from insincerity or treachery, arose his negligence in observing his promises; and he was too easily induced, for the sake of present convenience, to sacrifice the lasting advantages arising from the trust and confidence of his people. Hence too were derived his profusion to favorites, his attachment to strangers, the variableness of his conduct, his hasty resentments, and his sudden forgiveness and return of affection.
   
Instead of reducing the dangerous power of his nobles, by obliging them to observe the laws towards their inferiors, and setting them the salutary example in his own government, he was seduced to imitate their conduct, and to make his arbitrary will, or rather that of his ministers, the rule of his actions. Instead of accommodating himself, by a strict frugality, to the embarrassed situation in which his revenue had been left by the military expeditions of his uncle, the dissipations of his father, and the usurpations of the barons, he was tempted to levy money by irregular exactions, which, without enriching himself, impoverished, at least disgusted, his people. Of all men, nature seemed least to have fitted him for being a tyrant, yet are there instances of oppression in his reign, which, though derived from the precedents left him by his predecessors, had been carefully guarded against by the Great Charter, and are inconsistent with all rules of good government. And on the whole, we may say, that greater abilities, with his good dispositions, would have prevented him from falling into his faults, or with worse dispositions, would have enabled him to maintain and defend them.

--David Hume, History of  England v. 2, 64-5 (Liberty ed. 1983).  In fairness to Henry, he arrayed himself against long odds.  He succeeded his father, King John, he of the Great Charter, Magna Carta--at the age of nine (he ruled, not always securely, from 1216 until his death in 1272).  Sources agree that he was, as Hume suggests, pious, hard-working and mostly well-intentioned.  Proving once again that good intentions are only part of the battle. And however ineffectual he may have proven at the task of governance, he left one of the legacies of any English monarch: it was he who (re)built Westminster Abbey, into much the presence that we see now.

An Intriguer and a Mischief-Maker

Writing yesterday about Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, I remarked on the generosity of his understanding: his capacity to see merit in adversaries like William Hampden. But his capaciousness is not universal. Clarendon had no such affection for Hampden's great ally, John Pym. Here is a bit of Clarendon's judgment on Pym:

In the short parliament ..., he spoke much, and appeared to be the most leading man; for besides the exact knowledge of the forms, and orders of that council, which few men had, he had a very comely and grave way of expressing himself, with great volubility of words, natural and proper; and understood the temper and affections of the kingdom as any man; and had observed the errors and mistakes in government; and knew well how to make them appear greater than they were. After the unhappy dissolution of that parliament, he continued for the most part about London, in conversation and great repute amongst those lords who were most strangers to the court, and were believed most averse to it; in whom he improved all imaginable jealousies and discontents towards the state and as soon as this parliament was resolve to be summoned, he was as diligent to procure such persons to be elected as he knew to be most inclined to the way he meant to take. At the first opening of this parliament, he … seemed to all men to have the greatest influence upon the house of commons as of any man; and, in truth, I think he was at this time, and for some months after, the most popular man, and the most able to do hurt, that hath lived in any time.

In short, an intriguer and a natural trouble-maker. There's more, but nothing to alter the tone. Earlier, Clarendon has let himself go: “No man had more to answer for the miseries of his kingdom, or had his hand, or head, deeper in their contrivance.” From Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, excerpted in Clarendon at 245-49, 246-7 (G. Huehns ed. 1978).

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon

Now that I have stupefied the faithful out of their skull with my persistent citations to David Hume, allow me to recall another voice in the same genre. That would be Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, great—perhaps the greatest—servant of the House of Stuart in the turbulent age of the English Revolution.

Hyde was, after his manner, a  remarkable historian, but he was more: through his daughter, he was the grandfather of two monarchs.  Still, his memorable achievement was how, in forced retirement—exile—out of power and otherwise unoccupied, he produced his masterpiece: his  History of the Rebellion, the record of his times and with it, his life. The book is not easy to describe: it is part narrative, part advocacy, part rumination on the tasks and possibilities of government. Also perhaps—though I'm not sure of this—the greatest single account of those years of upheaval.  I should think only real competitor would be Hume himself,* who undertook his own history a couple of generations later with a view to restoring the shopworn reputation of that same doomed Stuart monarchy. Aside: they say that history is written by the winners but is that really true? In the case of the English—also, I should say, the American Civil War—what the losers have lost on the battlefield, they seem at least partially to have recaptured in the library.

My guess is that Clarendon is even more completely forgotten than Hume. Hume, of course has his reputation as a philosopher to sustain him. Clarendon's name survived in the Clarendon Code which, inter alia, forbade nonconformist preaches from residing within five miles of their former livings unless they took a a loyalty oath. He also gave his name to the Clarendon Building, once the home of the Oxford University Press, and Clarendon House, in it time admired as one of the grandest great houses in London but long since demolished (and who remembers the people that building are named after, anyway?).

Clarendon's History itself, one would have to admit, takes a bit of patience. It's in part an old man's remembrance with some of the longeurs you would expect from that sort of thing. At times you'd have to suspect a certain amount of score-settling and self-justification. But his real strength is in his character sketches.  Clarendon was, after all, primarily a man of action, which means he lived in a world where your skill at judging your fellows can be a matter of life or death.  A friend of mine this morning writes that as he read Clarendon, "I kept saying to myself, when he looks at someone he sees so much more than I do."  All true; and in the end, what's remarkable is how fair-minded so much of it sounds.   Just by way of example:

He was of that rare affability and temper in debate, and of that seeming humility and submission of judgment, as if he brought no opinion with him, but a desire of information and instruction; yet he had so subtle a way of interrogating, and, under the notion of doubts, insinuating his objections, that he left his opinions with those from whom he pretended to learn and receive them. And even with them who were able to preserve themselves from his infusions, and discerned those opinions to be fixed in him, with which they could not comply, he always left the character of an ingenious and conscientious person. 

On first glance, this may appear to be just an encomium. But consider it again: “subtle a way of interrogating … insinuation of doubts … pretended to learn.” The thing is, the subject here is John Hampden, leader of the parliamentary forces against the King and necessarily therefore one of Clarendon's great adversaries. Last I knew, their statues stood facing each other across the lobby at the Palace of Westminster—a remarkable instance of assimilating implacable conflict into a common story.--Anyway, the delight of this history is the way the author is able to identify the talents and appreciate the virtues even of his foes.  Hampden was, in sum:

 

[A] man of greater cunning, and it may be said of the most discerning spirit, and of the greatest address and insinuation to bring any thing to pass which he desired, of any man of that time, and who laid the design deepest. … He was of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out, or wearied by the most laborious; and of parts not to be imposed upon by the most subtle or sharp; and of a personal courage equal to his best parts; so that he was an enemy not to be wished wherever he might have been made a friend; and as much to be apprehended where he was so, as any man could deserve to be.

And finally:

In a word, what was said of Cinna might well be applied to him; 'he had a head to contrive, and a tongue to persuade, and a hand to execute, any mischief.' His death [emphasis added—ed.] therefore seemed to be a great deliverance to the nation.

As one might say, with enemies like that, who needs friends? 

Access to Clarendon is in some ways easier than to Hume, in some ways harder. If you are a glutton for punishment with a bottomless wallet, you can buy all six volumes from Oxford (of course) at upwards of $200 per volume (nothing as cheap or convenient as the Liberty Edition Hume, though).  Or you could read what appears to be a complete reprint here. Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be any Clarendon at Gutenberg or Librivox.

For those of more restrained enthusiasm, Oxford offers a selection in its World Classics line—paperback, and also Kindle. There's an older one-volume including selections from the history along with selections from an autobiography (excellent introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also did a biography of Clarendon). There's other stuff out there; just in general, if you are searching I think you may have better luck at Amazon.co.uk than in the US list. Oxford also offers some helpful audio.

Acknowledgment I got my own introduction to Clarendon through another neglected gem: The Legal Imagination (1973) by James Boyd White, surely the most interesting (and unusual) law classroom book I've ever encountered. It seems to be out of print; Amazon offers only five copies, those from after-market sellers (there is an “abridged paperback”--I'll bet someone talked him into paring it down for the undergraduate market--but it's not a patch on the real thing). White (who has continued to produce important work on the frontier between law and literature) offers a bit of context on the book here. White says in his acknowledgments that he learned about Clarendon from this man.

Fun Fact: Google “Edward Hyde,” and you'll likely wind up here.

*  I suppose another contender might be G.M. Trevelyan's England Under the Stuarts, but I haven't read it.

Fie on Goodness, Fie!

Still keeping company with Hume.  I went to Hume as a followup to what I've been reading about Scandinavia--not, I recognize, to get the last word on Anglo-Danish relations, but at least to get some sense of what one so influential in his own time might have thought and taught on the subject.

So be it, although I have learned something since I began that I didn't know before. That is: Hume actually composed his history as it were backwards, beginning with the runup to the Revolution of 1688 and working thence by degrees back to the beginnings in the Celtic swamps and bogs.  This gives rise to the suspicion that he might have been doing this last (first?) part just for money, as a followup to the later (earlier?) volumes that appear so to have engaged his attention

No matter: Hume is a shrewd and clear-sighted observer even when (if?) he is proceeding in overdrive, and he tells an old story with a fluency and with may not have its match anyplace else. Here's a Hume reflecting on the vagaries of power in a semi-civilized world:

The extensive confederacies, by which the European potentates are now at once united and set in opposition to each other, and which, though they are apt to diffuse the least spark of dissension throughout the whole, are at least attended with this advantage, that they prevent any violent revolutions or conquests in particular states, were totally unknown in ancient ages; and the theory of foreign politics in each kingdom formed a speculation much less complicated and involved than at present. Commerce had not yet bound together the most distant nations in so close a chain: wars, finished in one campaign, and often in one battle, were little affected by the movements of remote states: the imperfect communication among the kingdoms, and their ignorance of each other's situation, made it impracticable for a great number of them to combine in one object or effort: and above all, the turbulent spirit and independent situation of the barons or great vassals in each state, gave so much occupation to the sovereign, that he was obliged to confine his attention chiefly to his own state and his own system of government, and was more indifferent about what passed among his neighbors. Religion alone, not politics, carried abroad the views of princes, while it either fixed their thoughts on the Holy Land, whose conquest and defence was deemed a point of common honor and interest, or engaged them in intrigues with the Roman pontiff, to whom they had yielded the direction of ecclesiastical affairs, and who was every day assuming more authority than they were willing to allow him. \

David Hume, History of England. This interlude occurs in the eve of the accession of Henry II, who took the throne in 1154.

 

Hume on William the Conqueror: Harold Tricked

William of Normandy, not yet William the Conqueror, sees that he may be able to exploit the weakness and disorder of his adversaries to make himself King of England.  His chief obstacle is Harold Godwinson.earl of Essex .  William isn't afraid of using violence when appropriate--he is, after all, the man who won the Battle of Hastings.  But he also knew how to proceed via unction and guile:

By mischance, Harold is delivered up as a prisoner to William:

 William received [Harold] with every demonstration of respect and friendship; and ... he took an opportunity of disclosing to him the great secret of his pretensions to the crown of England, and of the will which Edward [the extant king]  intended to make in his favor. He desired the assistance of Harold in perfecting that design; he made professions of the utmost gratitude in return for so great an obligation; he promised that the present grandeur of Harold's family, which supported itself with difficulty under the jealousy and hatred of Edward, should receive new increase from a successor, who would be so greatly beholden to him for his advancement Harold was surprised at this declaration of the duke; but being sensible that he should never recover his own liberty, much less that of his brother and nephew, if he refused the demand, he feigned a compliance with William, renounced all hopes of the crown for himself, and professed his sincere intention of supporting the will of Edward, and seconding the pretensions of the duke of Normandy. William, to bind him faster to his interests, besides offering him one of his daughters in marriage, required him to take an oath that, he would fulfill his promises; and in order to render the oath more obligatory, he employed an artifice well suited to the ignorance and superstition of the age. He secretly conveyed under the altar, on which Harold agreed to swear, the relics of some of the most revered martyrs; and when Harold had taken the oath, he showed him the relics, and admonished him to observe religiously an engagement which had been ratified by so tremendous a sanction.  The English nobleman was astonished;  ....

David Hume, History of England, Vol. 1, Part A. 

Terminated with Extreme Prejudice

Hardicanute, Canute the Hardy, succeeded his father, Canute the Great, as  king of Denmark in 1035.  He felt he also had claim to the throne of England but he was squeezed out of it by his half-brother, Harold Harefoot.  Fortuitously, though, Harold died and a deputation of worthies asked Hardicanute to take his place.

David Hume takes up the story:

The first act of Hardicanute's government afforded his subjects a bad prognostic of his future conduct. He was so enraged at Harold for depriving him of his share of the kingdom, and for the cruel treatment of his brother Alfred, that in an impotent desire of revenge against the dead, he ordered his body to be dug up, and to be thrown into the Thames; and when it was found by some fishermen, and buried in London, he ordered it again to be dug up, and to be thrown again into the river; but it was fished up a second time, and then interred with great secrecy. 

David Hume, History of England, vol. 1, ch. 3.

Doesn't say whether they buried the fishermen with him.

 

Teammates

Here's a new one on me.  In his remarkable introduction to Beowulf, R. W. Chambers discusses the case of Hrethric and Hrothulf, Scandinavian princes.  Chambers says:

Hrethric is then almost certainly an actual historic prince ... Of Hrothmund, his brother, Scandinavian authorities seem to know nothing. He is very likely a poetical fiction, a duplicate of Hrethric.

You'd been wondering, right?  But what is interesting here is not just Chambers conclusion; rather, it is his argument:

 For it is very natural that in story the princes whose lives are threatened by powerful usurpers should go in pairs. Hrethric and Hrothmund go together like Malcolm and Donalbain. Their helplessness is thus emphasized over against the one mighty figure, Rolf or Macbeth, threatening them.

A footnote expands on the point:

 Compare the remark of Goethe in Wilhelm Meister, as to the necessity of there being both a Rosencrantz and a Guildenstern (Apprenticeship, Book V, chap. v). 

Chambers, R. W. (Raymond Wilson) (2011-03-30). Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (Kindle Locations 649-54 and 8229-8230).  Kindle Edition.   The referenced passage from Wilhelm Meister is:

“Why not compress them into one?” said Serlo. “This abbreviation will not cost you much.”

“Heaven keep me from all such curtailments!” answered Wilhelm, “they destroy at once the sense and the effect. What these two persons are and do, it is impossible to represent by one. In such small matters we discover Shakespeare’s greatness. These soft approaches, this smirking and bowing, this assenting, wheedling, flattering, this whisking agility, this wagging of the tail, this allness and emptiness, this legal knavery, this ineptitude and insipidity,—how can they be expressed by a single man? There ought to be at least a dozen of these people, if they could be had: for it is only in society that they are anything; they are society itself; and Shakespeare showed no little wisdom and discernment in bringing in a pair of them. Besides, I need them as a couple that may be contrasted with the single, noble, excellent Horatio.”

Link.  I admit I had never thought of this before, and I'm wondering how far it can be pursued.  Should we include the case of Brutus and Cassius, for example, conspiring to accomplish the death of Caesar?  Or Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome (though it may be Romulus who killed his brother)?  The Infante Don Carlos and his companion, the Marquis of Posa, in Verdi's Don Carlos?  I thought of one other dandy example when this matter first came to my attention last night, though I'm not bringing it up just now.* There most be others?

*Oh, right: Hengist and Horsa.

Hume on Monks

You gotta be alert to catch the good stuff here.  

The monks, who were the only annalists during those ages, lived remote from public affairs, considered the civil transactions as entirely subordinate the ecclesiastical, and, besides partaking of the ignorance and barbarity which were then universal, were strongly infected with credulity, with the love of wonder, and with a propensity to imposture; vices almost inseparable from their profession and manner of life.

I may go on with this for a while.

David Hume. The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part A. / From the Britons of Early Times to King John (Kindle Locations 644-647).

Hume on Whom to Trust

Thanks to the good folks at Project Gutenberg and LibriVox, I've been refreshing my memory* on one of the shrewdest, if necessarily not the most up to date, of English historians: that would be David Hume, Esq., who still after all the centuries achieves a clarity of vision that would be hard to match.   Interesting that he begins with a bit of what I guess you could call historiography:

The curiosity entertained by all civilized nations, of inquiring into the exploits and adventures of their ancestors, commonly excites a regret that the history of remote ages should always be so much involved in obscurity, uncertainty, and contradiction. Ingenious men, possessed of leisure, are apt to push their researches beyond the period in which literary monuments are framed or preserved; without reflecting, that the history of past events is immediately lost or disfigured when intrusted to memory and oral tradition, and that the adventures of barbarous nations, even if they were recorded, could afford little or no entertainment to men born in a more cultivated age. The convulsions of a civilized state usually compose the most instructive and most interesting part of its history; but the sudden, violent, and unprepared revolutions incident to barbarians, are so much guided by caprice, and terminate so often in cruelty, that they disgust us by the uniformity of their appearance; and it is rather fortunate for letters that they are buried in silence and oblivion. The only certain means by which nations can indulge their curiosity in researches concerning their remote origin, is to consider the language, manners, and customs of their ancestors, and to compare them with those of the neighboring nations. The fables, which are commonly employed to supply the place of true history, ought entirely to be disregarded; or if any exception be admitted to this general rule, it can only be in favor of the ancient Grecian fictions, which are so celebrated and so agreeable, that they will ever be the objects of the attention of mankind. Neglecting, therefore, all traditions, or rather tales, concerning the more early history of Britain, we shall only consider the state of the inhabitants as it appeared to the Romans on their invasion of this country: we shall briefly run over the events which attended the conquest made by that empire, as belonging more to Roman than British story: we shall hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon annals; and shall reserve a more full narration for those times, when the truth is both so well ascertained, and so complete, as to promise entertainment and instruction to the reader.

 High marks to the Scotsman for skepticism about the oral tradition, though I suspect he rates rather too highly the records of ore civilized times.  And what's this stuff about "ancient Grecian fictions"  getting a bye because they "are so celebrated and agreeable"?   Whatever; Hume offers an instructive application of his own theory when he comes to consider the case of one "Arthur," called in to aid the Britons against the advancing Saxons: 

The southern Britons, in this extremity, applied for assistance to Arthur, prince of the Silures, whose heroic valor now sustained the declining fate of his country.  This is that Arthur so much celebrated in the songs of Thaliessin, and the other British bards, and whose military achievements have been blended with so many fables, as even to give occasion for entertaining a doubt of his real existence. But poets, though they disfigure the most certain history by their fictions, and use strange liberties with truth where they are the sole historians, as among the Britons, have commonly some foundation for their wildest exaggerations.

 Sounds right to me: there may be a grain of sand in that oyster of song and story although it may be obscure to any except the most aggressive inquirers.   Hume does seem more credulous in addressing the story of Hengist and Horsa, conventionally the invader-founders of Kent.  I think modern specialist treat them as equally imaginary with Arthur but Hume accepts the narrative of their careers pretty much as fact.

--
*Not that I ever read the whole six volumes.  But I did read the excellent Pelican reprint, covering the reigns of James I and Charles I.  I read it back to back with a one-volume narrative by perhaps a more famous old warhorse: Thomas Babington Macaulay.   The comparison was instructive: Hume stood solidly on the shelf while Macaulay came across as (entertaining but) something of a gasbag.

Karl Marx and the Violent Overthrow of the Streetlight

Karl Marx lived out most of his  adult life in blameless bourgeois respectability in London where, inter alia, he was once elected Constable of th Vestry of St. Pancras.  But hey, even the sinister mastermind of World Revolution has to blow off a little steam every once in a while:

[I]n the 1850s, probably during the Crimean War. Marx, Edgar Bauer, and Wilhelm Liebknecht had taken part in a pub crawl one night. After considerable consumption, they came to an establishment where a group of Odd Fellows, working-class members of an English lodge, were drinking. At first the encounter went well, and enthusiastic toasts were offered, denouncing “Russian Junkers,” since, as Liebknecht pointed out, most Englishmen could not tell the difference between Prussia and Russia. But gradually another mood took over and Edgar Bauer denounced English “snobs,” followed by a drunken Marx, who launched into an enthusiastic speech praising German Wissenschaft and German music. No other country, Liebknecht remembered him saying, had produced musical artists like Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven. Germany was well ahead of England, and only its current wretched economic and political conditions prevented it from being ahead of all other nations, as it one day would be. Liebknecht noted that he had never heard Marx speak English so well. The assembled Odd Fellows were less than happy and turned on their guests with cries of “Damned foreigners!” Just barely escaping a beating, the three émigrés rushed out into the street, where they began throwing rocks at gas lamps, and had to flee again to avoid being arrested by the Bobbies who had appeared to investigate the tumult.

Sperber, Jonathan (2013-03-11). Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (p. 494-5). Norton. Kindle Edition.

Loose Change on Human Capital

I've been reading a bit lately on the post-Civil War settlement and in particular, the question of how to redeploy the former slaves, now citizens, in control of their own (as we might have said) labor power.  In particular, about the celebrated mantra of "40 acres and a mule"--give 'em land, let 'em work it for themselves and stay out of their way.  

I've always had the vague sense that 40-acres was supposed to be undoable and last night I got to wondering--was it undoable?  What did it require?

For an answer, consider: there were something like 4 million slaves liberated by the war.  As a wild stab, let's figure five people per family.  So, 800,000 families.  Ill spare you the pencil work but this translates into land about equal to the state of Mississippi.  This would include, of course, the rich bottomland of the delta.  But it would also include the scrub in the Faulkner country up north, which is hardly worth anything to anybody.  So, throw in a second state.  Throw in Louisiana.  More scrub and more delta.

So, doable.  Didn't happen, of course.  My own take is that it was that ol' darlin' Andrew Johnson who made it his business to assure that no freed slave got anything except his freedom and sometimes maybe the pants he stood up in.  And FWIW, I'll bet he thought that free-the-slaves stuff was a dreadful mistake.

Fun to speculate on what the world might have looked like if he hadn't got in the way.

The Strouse Morgan

Note to self: quit reading all those hot-off-the-press must reads.  A few of them are good and original: a lot of them just recycle stuff you've been reading on the blogs, etc.  A lot re good 35-paage longreads tucked inside 180 pages of hard cover.Stick to stuff a few years, maybe a few centuries, old. 

Case in point: Jean Strouse's biography of JP Morgan.  I read Ron Chernow's doorstopper about the House of Morgan a few years ago and figured I could skip Strouse.  Not sure what changed my mind: perhaps Chernow had faded enough in my memory that I was ready for refresher.  Anyway, the takeaway: I'm not sorry to have read Chernow but I am delighted to have read Strouse.  For understanding how 19th Century finance worked, it's one of the best things I've run across so far.  Some critics complain that it is too thick with detail and that might be true.  But the details are still the natural venue of the devil and I don't know anybody (including Chernow) who walks you through so many individual deals in a way that makes you understand what the players were trying to accomplish and how they did it.   

That' last is particularly true of what I suppose you'd have to say is a hobbyhorse: railroad reorganization: the salvaging and refinancing of rail projects in boom years from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Century.   Among many other virtues, Strouse does an admirable job of putting the rail problem in context: vastly excessive overbuilding, "ruinous competition," (as they so loved to call it) and the exquisite challenge of nurturing investors, particularly foreign investors who still saw America as a cowboys-and-injuns show.  Strouse shows that not the least of Morgan's achievements is how he made the American market plausible: a place where you could put your money knowing that a deal was a deal.  And that may be the core point of the Morgan story: difficult, irascible, self-absorbed, unreflective though he have been, still Morgan was a man who wanted things to work.  He saw every project as an occasion, not just to make money (though he made plenty) but to put together a project with a result: a railroad, a power company, a sovereign government, whatever.

 Another reason Strouse is so good at her job is that she seems to understand the complexities and ambiguities of a competitive market place, together with the problem of (as the 19C liked to call it) "the trusts."  She makes it clear (how could she not?) that concentrated power may confer unimaginable wealth on the lucky holder of the winning ticket.  But she just as well shows how colossally wasteful the 19th-Century investment casino might be.

A bit of more general reflection: I suspect one reason why there isn't more good business-financial history is that most people who tackle these projects really don't have much of a feel for their task.  I liked Chernow because I felt he did seem to know what he was doing. I like Strouse better.  That might be partly a matter of coverage: Chernow was trying to cover the whole history of the firm, not just a single lifetime--and in fewer pages--so naturally he was a bit thinner on the ground.  But here;s the thing: much as I liked the Chernow Morgan book, I felt his later effort on Alexander Hamilton was far better (I haven't read his others).  Could it be that he learned from experience?

The Senatorial Party

I must have read this before, it's my underlining.  But it comes as a revelation:

The most significant thing about Herodotus is that he is the literary expression of a whole people, as cunning in their ability to deal with facts as their prototype, Odysseus, was cunning to deal with monsters.  Herodotus traveled widely and judged rationally of all he saw, but in the vast scope of his story he perforce relied mostly on hundreds of other Greeks who had gone to all the limits of the world with which he dealt, or who had lived before him and handed down to him information on the past, and who were as questioning and as sane as he. 

The epic subject of Herodotus will haunt the philosophy of history from his day to ours. The conflict of molar, obliterative mass civilization emanating from a single power center versus the dynamism of the manifold-centered city-state--eighteenth century America versus 1968 U.S.A.--Herodotus' History is the first large-scale anti-imperialist indictment.  But what is wrong with imperialism?  Did not Persian ecumenical egalitarianism, so like the empire of the Incas, ensure a greater good to a greater number than did the anarchic communalism of Greece?  Eventually the city-state failed so completely that there was no other solution than the takeover of the Persian Empire itself by Alexander.

This would certainly be the utilitarian judgement; but the "Senatorial party"--Herodotus, Tacitus, Cicero, de Tocqueville, Lord Acton--have always disagreed. ...

--So Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited  42-45, at 44-45 (1968).  I really don't remember the phrase "senatorial party," though I underlined it (I believe in the 80s).  It's a beguiling notion until you reflect that it is the party of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.  I assume Rexroth was looking for something more austere and patrician but public-spirited.  The last one I can think of who might meet that model is Lloyd Bentsen.  Am I forgetting anybody important?

Truman-Acheson Letters?

Has anyone bothered to publish the correspondence of President Harry S. Truman and his Secretary of State (and beloved friend) Dean Acheson?   From the snippets I've seen, I'd guess it would be at least as riveting as the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and for the same reason--two old men who had stood at the center of the cataclysm of their time, now free of ambition or any need for pretense, delighted to share their mature wisdom with each other.

You'd think--but wait a minute, turns out there is such a volume, published in 2010 and co-edited by Acheson's son, David.  There are effusive endorsements from the Great and Good, and five-star Amazon reviews--but only three of them, half as many Peter Hochstein gets for Heiress Strangled in Molten Chocolate.  No accounting for tastes, I guess.  And I don't  suppose anybody under 60 40 has any idea who Dean Acheson was.  Or for that matter, Harry Truman.   Still for old times' sake, I'll have to give it a try.