Shakespeare at Charlecote Park

Since Mrs Roth got out of hospital, I have been reading her Baron Munchausen. The first time I read this, I made the mistake of using one of the many modern bastardised editions—my copy had Ronald Searle illustrations, with a short but hyperbolic introduction by S. J. Perelman—but this time I returned to something like the original text, in a Dover reprint with the Doré plates. (The chapters are a little rearranged, but the prose is much the same.) Munchausen, written in English by a German, Raspe, and first published in 1785, is rife with grammatical peculiarities. When the Baron is posted to keep the Sultan's bees, his duties are

to drive the Sultan's bees every morning to their pasture grounds, to attend them all the day long, and against night to drive them back to their hives.

'Against night'? That Middle English idiom was long dead; the OED's latest citation is Stansby's 1634 Malory, and before that, Lord Berners' archaising 1523 version of Froissart. Raspe, of course, knew it as good current German idiom—gegen Abend, 'as the evening approaches'. Raspe also seems to have had difficulty with preterites: 'In an instant I took my gun from the corner, run down stairs, and out in such a hurry. . .', 'My ball had missed them, yet the foremost pig only run away. . .' The third edition, much expanded, makes the same mistake: 'while the whale was running away with the ship she sprung a leak'. But this expansion, which contains most of the material plundered by Terry Gilliam for his film, was written by a different hand: the anonymous hack paid to continuate Raspe's adventures perpetuated his solecisms as well.

*

The modern reader who has already heard a few of the Munchausen tales will be startled by the casual brutality of the original narrative. A fox is literally flogged out of its skin, a wolf eats its way through a horse's body and becomes trapped in the carcase, another horse has its rear end dissevered by a falling portcullis, and keeps on running nonetheless—in the continuation, the Baron nonchalantly slaughters 'several thousand' polar bears:

I had heard an old army surgeon say a wound in the spine was instant death. I now determined to try the experiment, and had again recourse to my knife, with which I struck the largest in the back of the neck, near the shoulders, but under great apprehensions, not doubting but the creature would, if he survived the stab, tear me to pieces. However, I was remarkably fortunate, for he fell dead at my feet without making the least noise. I was now resolved to demolish them every one in the same manner, which I accomplished without the least difficulty; for although they saw their companions fall, they had no suspicion of either the cause or the effect. When they all lay dead before me, I felt myself a second Samson, having slain my thousands.

Clearly, this is not a book most parents will want to read to their children. Later, the Baron finds himself with King David's sling in his pocket, and uses it to extricate his friends from a pickle. This episode gives rise to a digression on the sling. "You wish (I can see by your countenances) I would inform you how I became possessed of such a treasure as the sling just mentioned. (Here facts must be held sacred.)" (The insistence on probity and accuracy had been a motif of the outrageous fable since Lucian's True History; at the start of Baron Munchausen, the Baron's fidelity is testified at Mansion House, the Lord Mayor's seat, 'in the absence of the Lord Mayor', by Sinbad, Aladdin and Gulliver.) In this digression, the history of the sling intersects with another body of folklore:

One of its possessors, my great-great-great-grandfather, who lived about two hundred and fifty years ago, was upon a visit to England, and became intimate with a poet who was a great deer-stealer; I think his name was Shakespeare: he frequently borrowed this sling, and with it killed so much of Sir Thomas Lucy's venison, that he narrowly escaped the fate of my two friends at Gibraltar. Poor Shakespeare was imprisoned, and my ancestor obtained his freedom in a very singular manner. Queen Elizabeth was then on the throne, but grown so indolent, that every trifling matter was a trouble to her; dressing, undressing, eating, drinking, and some other offices which shall be nameless, made life a burden to her; all these things he enabled her to do without, or by a deputy! and what do you think was the only return she could prevail upon him to accept for such eminent services? setting Shakespeare at liberty! Such was his affection for that famous writer, that he would have shortened his own days to add to the number of his friend's.

Ho ho ho, said the reader of 1786, by which time the Bard's reputation had been solidified; the literate gentleman knew this bit of lore, Shakespeare the Deer-Stealer, quite well. It was Rowe, in the seminal biography he prefixed to his 1709 edition of the Works, who had given the story popular currency:

[The young Will Shakespeare] had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho' this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig'd to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.

Exciting, eh? The Greatest Writer of all Time™ began life as a mischievous rebel: not wicked, just naughty enough for a little frisson of insubordinacy. Mort aux vaches, indeed. Only last week was I browsing my little 1903 octavo of the Essays of Douglas Jerrold, Bard enthusiast and author of the bizarre satire, 'Shakespeare in China', when I chanced across his prose vignette, 'Shakespeare at Charlecote Park'.

One of the culprits was specially distinguished from his companions, more by the perfect beauty of his face than by the laughing unconcern that shone in it. He seemed about twenty-two years of age, of somewhat more than ordinary stature, his limbs combining gracefulness of form with manly strength. . . And as he doffed his hat to a fair head that looked mournfully at him from an upper casement, his broad forehead bared out from his dark curls in surpassing power and amplitude. It seemed a tablet writ with a new world.

Shakespeare's escape, here as in Munchausen, is obscure: "The servants rushed to the cellar—but the birds were flown. How they effected their escape remaineth to this day a mystery, though it cannot be disguised that heavy suspicion fell upon four of the maids." And as with Munchausen, Jerrold insists that the story was corroborated, in this case by one 'John-a-Combes'.

The legend has become something of a totem or shibboleth among Shakespeare scholars. Thus Sam Schoenbaum, one of the most influential of the poet's biographers, dismisses it as 'a picturesque relation deriving, one expects, from local Stratford lore passed on to Rowe's informant, the actor Betterton'. Schoenbaum notes that Lucy had no park at Charlecote until 1618, two years after Shakespeare's death; the apparent evidence of a pregnant pun in The Merry Wives of Windsor is dismissed as a coincidence, and not much of one.

One wonders if the legend might not have originated in Stratford long after The Merry Wives of Windsor was written and its author dead, among locals who read the play, recollected jests about luces and louses, and interpreted the passage in accordance with their own resentment against a powerful neighbourhood family.

"Time plays tricks," he concludes, sounding for a moment like a smug Iain Sinclair; "events merge." But he does not deny the story's romantic appeal, quoting Sir Thomas's descendant, Alice Fairfax-Lucy: "If it were ever authoritatively disproved, children of the future would be deprived of something that for centuries has made the poet live for them." And he allows that certain respectable scholars, including A. L. Rowse, give the tale credence.

René Weis, a Romantic at heart, when he came to write his own Shakespeare biography a few years ago, concluded that there wasn't much of interest still to be said on the subject, unless one simply accepted all the stories ever told about the Bard. What if. . . ? It is an original approach, in this sceptical age, to be sure. And a fun book. Weis has an entire chapter, not unexpectedly, on the Deer-Stealer. This passage is typical of the book:

Though its credibility has been repeatedly impugned, this is the only account with roots reaching back into the seventeenth century to offer any explanation for Shakespeare's abandonment of his wife and family. At the very least it has the authority of a written source with links as far back as Shakespeare's lifetime, and unless there is a reason to think that Rowe, and with him Betterton and, possibly, Davenant, aimed to mislead posterity, there is no good reason to distrust Rowe.

The argument from authority comes into its own on the next page:

Rowe had no interest in making up a scabrous piece of gossip. It is worth remembering that the greatest Shakespeare scholar and antiquarian of the nineteenth century, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, and Sidney Lee, the author a classic essay [sic] on Shakespeare in the original DNB, both admired and trusted Rowe.

We should trust Rowe's story, not for any intrinsic plausibility, but because two scholars of a century later admired his moral character. Sure, it's preposterous, but what else was Weis going to make of the afternoon he'd spent reading O H-P and Sidney Lee? About the deer, Weis has clearly done his homework, but his evidence never rises above the fabulously circumstantial. True, there was no deer park at Charlecote until 1618, but

There was certainly a warren, with plenty of game in it for hunting, including hare, pheasants and roe deer—the roes of Charlecote may have been in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote 'fleeter than the roe' in Taming of the Shrew. . . As a game reserve, the Lucys' warren was patrolled by several gamekeepers; they were there for a purpose, and perhaps one of them arrested the young Shakespeare.

Weis does himself a disservice with all this hedging. Let our leaps be unbridled! Let our baseless assertions at least be made with some deuced conviction, like in the good old days! Damn it man, the roes of Charlecote were in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote 'fleeter than the roe'; a gamekeeper at Lucy's warren did arrest the young Shakespeare. And he was subsequently freed when an old Monkhouse solved an itchy problem for Good Queen Bess. If we would embrace a legendary of Shakespeare, the latter story is as good as the first. No, better. We live in a gelded age, my friends. Munchausen is now only ever by proxy. We no longer have tall tales; only lies, and historians.

Malcesine

Anthony Sutcliffe's London: An Architectural History (2006) is a useful book, if rather odd in some respects. Useful for providing a reasonable discussion of a wide range of buildings, both well and less known, and comprehensively illustrated. Odd for the sudden outbursts of scorn ornamenting its general level of dispassion. For instance, Sutcliffe interrupts a review of Victorian public architecture for a rant against the 'Outright Bad Design' of R. L. Roumieu, labelling him 'the McGonagall of London design'. He sneers at Roumieu's often admired Dutch façades on De Beauvoir Square as 'crude Tudor detailing', and labels the architect's masterpiece, 33-35 Eastcheap, 'grotesque' and 'brutal'. (Incidentally, Ian Nairn does not 'condemn' the work, as Wiki claims; if you were familiar with the rhythms of that critic's thought, you would not reach that judgement of this passage—

Victorian wildness can come from half a dozen causes, from mere fashion to cantankerousness. But this is truly demoniac, an Edgar Allen Poe of a building. It is the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare. Like Poe, and unlike Horace Walpole or a modern detective novel, the horror is no game. Acutely pointed arches shrink away in front of the windows, the wall shrinks back in half a dozen varieties of terrified chamfer. Demolition is in the air; but it must be preserved—not as an oddity, but as a basic part of human temperament, and one which doesn't often get translated into architecture.)

So Sutcliffe has some character as a critic, even if he is no Nairn. But more interesting than Sutcliffe's quirks of taste is his candid reflection of his—our—age. From the introduction:

It is now difficult to go inside most London buildings. Churches have been a problem for many years, but since 11 September 2001 security and general suspicion have made matters worse. My 'Stop and Search' by a City policeman near the Monument was entirely courteous and indeed informative but it took thirty minutes, by which time the light had gone. I often shied away from encounters with security staff and other employees.

Sutcliffe's eye is therefore not the omniscient lens that one expects from an art-book; it is human and frail, clinging unabashed to chance and contingency. This was the real surprise of the book, and at moments the real pleasure. It means bizarre photographs like this one, transposing the glorious red brick of St Pancras to a wintry 1960s Moscow:


Elsewhere, a shot of the Caledonian Market clock tower is captioned: 'The threatening sky emerged mysteriously when this picture was developed.' Security paranoia, meanwhile, reaches its peak in the caption to a glorious old aerial panorama of Pentonville Prison: 'The author did not dare photograph the prison at a time of great tension.' This isn't at all ridiculous; stories abound. A notorious instance occurred two months ago, when an Austrian tourist was approached by two coppers (or possibly PCSOs, as one blogger has observed) and made to delete his photographs of double-decker buses and a modern bus-station, because taking pictures of London transport allegedly contravened some anti-terror legislation. There is indeed a seeping fume of suspicion, and it did not immediately follow 9/11, nor even the London bombings of 2005.

I myself, who take pictures every Sunday on my walks, have only encountered narrowed eyes once, and not those of the Met. I was up in Walthamstow—not far from where the Austrian tourists were shanghaied—examining the Town Hall, which I can't quite decide if I like. It does at least have a fine interior, and a full complement of chunky mid-century relief sculpture on the fronting columns:


Anyway, there I was, camera in hand, in the blazing light of day, the stone so bright my eyes were beginning to hurt, when a middle-aged Carribean woman approached me and asked 'if she could help me'. She was not, of course, asking if she could help. Her tone allowed no doubt: she meant, You do not belong here, please leave. This was officialdom shaking its suspicious stick. Nonetheless, she had, strictly speaking, asked if she could help me. I replied that I would love a cup of tea. She was not moved. What did I want here? I pointed at the building—a fine specimen, isn't it, I exclaimed with a false jollity. In retrospect, I should have taken a photograph of her, there and then. But she continued to watch me darkly until I sidled off, admittedly content with the pictures I had. I felt the thrill of having rubbed up against genuine oppression, but also a disappointment at the mildness, the tameness, of said oppression.

*

There is a historical precedent for all this. On September 13, 1786, a 37 year-old Goethe, in the course of his Italian tour, and in the face of strong winds on the road, stopped at Malcesine, near Verona in northern Italy. The next morning he went to visit the town's old castle; he sat on a step next to a locked gate, and began drawing the castle's tower. As he sat, people began to appear, until at last

one man came up to me, not of the best appearance, and asked what I was doing. I replied that I was sketching the old tower, as a memento of Malcesine. Thereupon he said that this was not allowed, and I should stop it. This he said in the common Venetian tongue, so that I really could hardly understand him, and so I answered that I could not understand him. Then he seized my paper with a true Italian Gelassenheit [best translated into Anglo-French: somewhere between sangfroid, nonchalance, and désinvolture], tore it up, and left it lying on my board.

The podestà, magistrate, is fetched, and asks Goethe why he is sketching the Festung or fortress; the young wag replies ich dieses Gemäuer nicht für eine Festung anerkenne, 'I don't credit these mere walls as a fortress'—'I prompted him and the crowd to consider the ruination of this tower and these walls, the lack of a gate, in short, the defencelessness of the entire situation, and assured him that I thought myself to be seeing and drawing nothing but a ruin.' Then comes the key passage:

Someone answered me: If it be only a ruin, what about it could then appear worthy of consideration? I replied very anfractuously, seeking time and favour, that they knew how many tourists wanted to travel to Italy purely for the ruins—that Rome, capital of the world, laid waste by the barbarians, remained full of ruins, which were sketched hundreds and hundreds of times—and that not everything from antiquity had been so well preserved as the amphitheatre at Verona, which I hoped to see soon as well.

Thus: Romanticism. The scene at Malcesine is suddenly transformed from an irrelevant squabble into a dramatised conflict between the aesthete, with his love of mediaeval ruins, and civic authority, which sees the fortress not as a beautiful work of architecture, but only as a site of political significance. It is observed to Goethe that the tower marks the boundary-line between the territories of Venice and the Emperor's Kaiserstaat, und deshalb nicht ausspioniert werden solle, and therefore ought not to be spied upon. The Italians worry that Goethe is an agent of Joseph II, a 'restless' man. Our hero replies that he is in fact from Frankfurt and in no thrall to the Emperor; a local Malcesinesco named Gregorio steps in and everything is sorted out, but not before Goethe gets a chance to practice his Italian, waxing lyrical to the throng on the desolate glamour of the scene at hand. (Goethe was not in fact arrested, as Wiki claims. Apparently that famous website is not always accurate.)

The 1786 story neatly mirrors today's clashes between photographic scurriers, their eyes out for the beautiful, the delapidated, the unexpected, the recondite, the fascinatively hideous; and local officials who can understand the urban landscape merely in terms of its civic and political function. Deviance, no matter how undeviant when seen in the context of culture or history, must be barred and debilitated.

[Update 05/07/09: I am stopped outside Crystal Palace station, during a routine Sunday stroll, by cops with sniffer dogs. Somehow, mirabile dictu, the hounds fail to detect the sizeable quantities of smack and blow stashed under both my oxters. Despite my (apparent) innocence, the officer requests my name, date of birth and address. 'Routine procedure, sir.' I ask if I am compelled by law to give my details, and he admits that I am not, but then tries to trick me. 'And what did you say your name was again, sir?' Could he not tell by my very voice that I am not one of his usual subjects, blasted and dupeable, with plenty to hide? He speaks into his walkie-talkie, in an attempt to intimidate me. I confess that I was a little intimidated. But I did not give. Still, at last—a police encounter with real menace! Another authentic London experience to cross off the To Do list. Jellied eels next week, cum liquore.]

Squaquarinellus

In Book 21 of Teofilo Folengo's Baldus (1517), a spoof epic in macaronic hexameters—that is, half Latin, half Italian, the latter frequently provincial—the eponymous hero and his friends find themselves in battle with a dragon or serpent (anguis, serpens, draco, drago, dragus, according to taste); finally, after one warrior rides its back and punches it to the ground, on the verge of death, it transforms into a formosa putina. . . cui nomen Smiralda fuit, de gente luparum, a beautiful girl by name of Smiralda, of the race of she-wolves. Falchetto, the dog-man leading the attack on the dragon, is about to duff Smiralda up too, but she entreats him:

Talibus ingannans, Falchettum porca carezzat
barbozzoque eius digitis putanella duobus
fat squaquarinellum, velut est ars vera piandi,
sive carezzandi menchiones atque dapocos. (ll. 446-449)

The putanella, little whore, fat squaquarinellum eius barbozzo duobus digitis: she does something to his chin [barbozzo in dialect, see here] with two fingers. The poem's recent translator, Ann Mullaney, renders the passage:

Tricking him with such words, the pig caresses Falchetto; the little whore takes his chin between two fingers and gives it a small tug, in accordance with the true art of getting and stroking dolts and low-lifes.

In Emilio Faccioli's 1989 translation into modern Italian, this squaquarinellus is given as 'con due dita gli va titillando il barbozzo'. Folengo's own phrase derives from the Mantuan idiom far squaquarin, which Cherubini paraphrases as far vezzi, that is, 'to fondle, caress, flatter'. The word seems to come in turn from the verb squaquarare, which appears three times in the poem: 1.144, 7.437, and 24.39, translated variously 'to sport', 'to live it up', and 'to soak up', where Cherubini offers ciarlare (to chat) and gozzovigliare (to carouse). The more usual meaning is 'to soften, quicken, loosen', also 'to shit, blurt out, reveal a secret', with connotations of both diarrhoea and soft cheese, two Dalinian motifs that occur throughout the poem.

At any rate, it strikes me that Smiralda's chin-pulling alludes to the well-known gesture made by Thetis when entreating Zeus at Iliad 1.501: she dexiterēi d' ar' hup' anthereōnos helousa, takes hold of his chin from below with her right hand, while at 8.371 Athena reports that Thetis ellabe cheiri geneiou, grasped [Zeus'] chin with her hand. (Compare 10.454, where the Trojan spy Dolon is about to do the same to Diomedes.) This gesture is illustrated in Ingres' rather garish and ungainly early painting:


Samuel Butler, in a notorious 1892 lecture arguing for the poem's female authorship, remarks, à propos of this passage, that 'it is still a common Italian form of salutation to catch people by the chin. Twice during the last summer I have been so seized in token of affectionate greeting, once by a lady and once by a gentleman.' Butler's holiday reminiscences aside, Thetis is not making the gesture as an 'affectionate greeting'—she is indicating her suppliancy. For Walter Leaf, who, like Butler, translated the Iliad, with a little help from his friends, the action suggests a beaten warrior who 'can only clasp his enemy's legs to hamper him, and turn aside his face so that he cannot see to aim the final blow, until he has at least heard the prayer for mercy'. R. B. Onians, in his fantastical Origins of European Thought (1951), disputes Leaf's interpretation, arguing that the chin (geneios), like the knee (gonu), is related to genus and generation: 'this would also explain why the chin, as if holy in the same way as the knee, was clasped by the Greek suppliant'.

Folengo's Smiralda, whose name has already been misheard as Smerdola two hundred lines earlier, is not humbly entreating Falchetto. Her gesture is instead ironic, a two-fingered teasing or chucking of the chin, softening Falchetto's heart and brain: a solicitative trollop, Thetis in burlesque.

Intercision

Imagine you're a harmless drudge. You've been assigned the task of scouring the works of Sir Thomas Browne for new words, or new uses of old words, or antedatings, and so you sit in your bright-lit windowless cubicle, poring over Urne Buriall, and The Garden of Cyrus, and then it's on to Religio Medici, and finally the Vulgar Errors. In the last of these, not quite as lexically fecund as the other works, you stumble on this:

What therefore may consist with history, by cessation of Oracles with Montacutius we may understand their intercision, not abscission or consummate desolation; their rare delivery, not total dereliction, and yet in regard of divers Oracles, we may speak strictly, and say there was a proper cessation.

You have little understanding of what it means, since you are only a humble word-spotter. And the word you spot, in this case, is intercision. You check your lists, and those of your colleagues; nothing yet. The word, whatever it means, is contrasted with 'consummate desolation', so it must mean something less than a complete destruction, and it must correspond in some degree to 'rare delivery'. More than that is hard to say. You check Cockeram, who says it means 'An intreating in ones behalf', clearly confusing it with intercession, which he has just defined as 'An intreaty in ones behalf'. You check Blount, who has 'a cutting off in the midst', from Latin intercisio. Clearly, whatever intercision means, it has a lot to do with intercisio. Du Cange merely has 'injuria', which seems to help little. How about modern Latin dictionaries? Lewis and Short offers 'a cutting through'. The OLD has nothing.

You are not stuck yet; intercisio, you reason, is clearly a nominal form of the verb intercido, which in turn is inter (between) and caedo (cut). So what do your lexica say on the verb? Here you strike gold. Lewis and Short list two intercidos: the first is 'to cut asunder, cut up, divide, pierce, cut through, part, divide, mangle, destroy', this clearly corresponding to the listed noun. But there is another: 'to fall between, to occur meanwhile, to happen, to fall to the ground, to go to ruin, be lost, perish'. This is promising. OLD, likewise, has 'to fall between, to be lost or wasted, go astray; to be lost from memory, fall into oblivion, be forgotten; to perish incidentally, to be destroyed during an action; to cease to exist, be lost, lapse, fail'. Intercisio, and therefore intercision, must have been formed from one of these verbs, each differing in shade. But which?

*

This is the classic problem of the neologism. Without an accepted context and range of meanings, a consuetudo, it can be impossible to determine the meaning of a word. It turns out, however, that intercision is not a neologism. In one context, in fact, it is common: the theology of grace. Lutheran doctrine held that it was possible for a member of the elect to fall from grace forever; Calvinism held that this was impossible, for a man's sin cannot override the divine act of bestowing grace. Thus Peter, who denied Christ, was nonetheless saved. This fall from grace is called intercisio or intercision; but even here the meaning is not clear-cut, at least in English. In 1626, the Cornish theologian Francis Rous published his Testis veritatis, writing:

God is for the Saints all the way from the first foreknowledge, unto the finall glory; what Arminius or [Peter] Bertius can make any Apostacy to be against us, when God is throughly for us? God being stedfast with us from Election to glorification, no interloper can come in with intercision to cut off and put a sunder this continued chaine of happinesse, which God hath joynd together and guardeth all the way.

In the same year, George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, argues likewise: 'This is certaine, all is not gone, all is not cut off by intercision; here is a Seede of God abiding. . . If all be not falne away, then this man in whom it abideth can not fall totally.' In both of the above quotations, intercision sounds like something permanent. Carleton returns to the theme in 1629, claiming that 'Man cannot by any sinne make void any act of Gods', and arguing against the possibility of 'an intercision of justifying grace, caused by the sinnes of the flesh'.

In 1633 George Downham, Bishop of Derry, thinks it 'ridiculous' that 'there should bee an intercision of justification (which I proved before to be a continued act) so oft as there is an intermission of the act of faith'. Here the intercision seems more temporary, as a phenomenon accompanying an intermission. A similar meaning is found outside a theological context, in 1641, when John Jackson notes, 'there hath beene of late an intercision, and interruption herein'.

Ambiguous also is a line from a 1627 oration by Thomas Gataker: 'Their death is rather a departing, or a going out of this world, or a passage to heaven, or a returne to God, then a deceasing, or surceasing, or intermission, or intercision, yea, or diminution, either of life, or of their good or happy estate.' We are tangled up by conjunctions: the or cannot always be an 'or rather', but may be between intermission and intercision, or intercision and diminution. Trying to pinpoint the exact meaning of 'intercision' comes down to a morass of hard-to-determine textual passages of uncertain relations to one another.

The OED lists the Browne passage under the meaning 'The action of cutting off the course of, stopping, or interrupting, esp. temporarily; the fact of being interrupted or ceasing for a time.' Immediately preceding the Browne is a quotation from one Richard Montagu—in Latin, Montacutius—Bishop of Norwich, Browne's home-town. The passage in full runs:

Doth ARMINIUS maintaine touching finall Perseverance, (you must tell mee, my good Informers, for I have not read him) that sometime the Called and Elect of God, the Chosen ones and Justified by Faith, such as S. PETER was, though they doe fall totally for a Time, shall yet recover necessarily againe, and not fall away finally, or for ever? If this be Arminianisme, and so his conclusion, then therein He holdeth with ARMINIUS. But I have bin assured, that ARMINIUS did hold as the Lutherans in Germany doe, not only Intercision for a Time, but also Abscission and Abjection too, for ever.

This in fact is from Montagu's 1625 Appello Caesarem, against which Rous published his Testis the following year. The last line looks suspiciously similar to Browne's 'intercision, not abscission', and the entry's compiler must have thought that Browne was referring to this in writing 'with Montacutius'. Montagu's 'Intercision for a Time' is clearly the same intercision as Downham's and Jackson's: an interruption, rather than the permanent sundering of Rous and Carleton. If this is Montagu's intercision, then presumably it is Browne's too. In 1647, John Trapp seems to make a similar distinction when he writes that 'Happy for us, that we are kept by the power of God to salvation, 1 Pet. 1. 5. for else it were possible for us to fall away and perish: an intercision there might be, nay an utter excision from Christ'.

The problem is that the 1625 passage is not the origin of Browne's words, at least not directly. Browne is in fact translating another line from Montagu from Latin. This is from his 1635 refutation of the ecclesiastical history of Baronius, and glosses the word cessare, normally translated as 'cease':

Cessare dicitur id, quod cum olim in usu frequentissimo fuisset, postea rarissime adhibetur: non penitus autem cessare, sed respectu prioris frequentissimi usus. Secundo, Cessare dicitur aliquid dupliciter: vel per Intercisionem ad aliquod tempus; vel per Abscisionem, et desolationem consummatam.

To paraphrase: cessare is what happens when a frequent activity becomes much rarer, without necessarily stopping altogether. And cessare can mean either an intercisio, or an abscision or consummate desolation. It is clear, Montagu continues, that the cessatio of the oracles was not an abscisio, but only an intercisio, for the oracles continued to speak thereafter. The natural reading of this passage is that after the cessatio, the oracles were still delivered, only much less frequently; in other words, that they fell into disuse. One might compare Quintilian: 'verba intercidant invalescantque temporibus', 'words become obsolete or current with the lapse of years'. This is not only the natural reading, it is consonant with what many other people had written about the oracles. To understand the word this way, therefore, would necessitate not only knowing other uses of intercisio, but also the contemporary discourse about this rather arcane subject: and how many lexicographers would be capable of that?

The 1625 passage, with its 'Intercision for a Time', seems to resolve the question in the other direction: presumably, though not necessarily, Montagu intended the same distinction in each case, and by intercisio and intercision meant a temporary interruption in proceedings. The oracles, then, would stop being given, but then later return. Nobody else, to my knowledge, ever argued this. And so the claim has a rather spectral quality to it: it rests on no consuetudo, and has no support other than the use of a similar word in a different language in a different work. If Montagu's Appello had been lost, we would have had, I think, to read differently his intercisio, and so Browne's intercision. All of a sudden, the meaning of this word, a museum-piece, looks highly contingent.

On Neologism, Part Two

[Part One here.]

The Good Book.

Lily and I—and, indeed, the rest of you, from afar—are approaching the fifth anniversary of our first romantic entanglement. At times like these we enjoy reminiscing about that first date of ours, which culminated, qua date, with us sitting on the bed, me reading to her, in my sonorous English voice, from her favourite Edward Gorey tale, 'The Unstrung Harp'. This was my introduction to Gorey, and I was sufficiently intrigued to read through the rest of his collected stories. One which we enjoy recalling is 'The Beastly Baby'. It is difficult to forget this monstrosity, unable to sleep by virtue of its guilty conscience, and, as we see here, frequently abandoned by its unfortunate parents, in the vain hope of being rid of the thing:


One wonders if Gorey had in mind Stephen Leacock's story, 'The Inexplicable Infant', from Nonsense Novels (1911). He must have known it. Here we have the same idea, delivered in the same deadpan, dry and black:

She had taken the baby and laid it tenderly, gently on a seat in the park. Then she walked rapidly away. A few minutes after a man had chased after Caroline with the little bundle in his arms. "I beg your pardon," he said, panting, "I think you left your baby in the park." Caroline thanked him.

Next she took the baby to the Grand Central Waiting-room, kissed it tenderly, and laid it on a shelf behind the lunch-counter. A few minutes an official, beaming with satisfaction, had brought it back to her. "Yours, I think, madame," he said, as he handed it to her. Caroline thanked him.

Then she had left it at the desk of the Waldorf Astoria, and at the ticket-office of the subway.

It always came back.

This 'nonsense novel' is not best of the collection: for my money, that would be '"Q." A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural'. It does, however, contain one brilliant joke. The poor farmer in his rural homestead, all clichés present and correct, is comforted by his wife:

"Ah, John, you'd better be employed in reading the Good Book than in your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it"--and she handed to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a moment and held the volume in his hand. He and his wife had known nothing of religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but the first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received had stood him in good stead. "Take the book," she said. "Read, John, in this hour of affliction; it brings comfort."

The farmer took from her hand the well-worn copy of Euclid's Elements, and laying aside his hat with reverence, he read aloud: "The angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal, and whosoever shall produce the sides, lo, the same also shall be equal each unto each."

Likewise, at the end of the story, Enderby has learned his lesson: 'Ah, my sons, henceforth let us stick to the narrow path. What is it that the Good Book says: 'A straight line is that which lies evenly between its extreme points.'' The comic potential of the confusing the Book with some other bible is a classic. One of my favourite instances is from an otherwise rather dull short story, by a literary overreacher, fool's gold: Alasdair Gray's 'Logopandocy', from his Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983). In this dialogue, 'Cromwell's Latin secretary' confronts a pro-Royalist Scottish aristocrat in his gaol-cell at the Tower in 1653, Midsummer's Eve. The secretary, Paradise Lost still but a gleam in his eye, says:

When time is ripe for it, my verse will do far more than illuminate the best essence of Thomas Malory's text, it will translate, clarify and augment the greatest and most truly Original Book in the Universe.

On which the aristocrat—the story's narrator—remarks to himself:

Such is my aim also, and I am thunderstruck to discover in the Puritan camp one who admires the work of Rabelais as greatly as I do.

The Scotsman is, of course, Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of the first two books of Gargantua and Pantagruel was published that very year. Now Urquhart was the literary neologist par excellence of his century. And so, finally, we arrive again at neologism, having faffed and fumbled about for far too long with other matters of relative insignficance.

*

I doubt Leacock would have cherished Urquhart. In the last of the Nonsense Novels, 'The Man of Asbestos'—unlike the others a story without humour, a sermon on dystopia, more Puteicis—the eponymous Man, a grey creature of the technological future, shows the narrator, to the latter's disgust, one of the scars where his education has been surgically implanted:

Here is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let in. That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least suffering.

To appreciate Urquhart, and not merely to be quaintly amused by him, one has to be the sort of person who values spherical trigonometry over poetry and history. Urquhart's treatise on the subject, the Trissotetras of 1645, must rank as one of the least intelligible mathematical works known to man. In one of the three dedicatory epistles—'An Epaenetick and Doxologetick Expresse, in Commendation of this Book and the Author Thereof, to all Philomathets', written by one 'J. A.' but sounding suspiciously like Urquhart himself—it is claimed that 'the abstrusest difficulties of this science by him [are] so neatly unfolded' that we should rank the author with his hero, the great Scottish mathematician John Napier. We also get a preposterous panegyric to Urquhart's erudition by the well-known Scottish polymath, Alexander Ross: 'Hoc duce, jam Lybicos poteris superare calores, / Atque pati Scythici frigora saeva poli.'


Within the fortress of the text itself, abstruse difficulties are merely manufactured. 'In amblygonosphericalls,' claims Urquhart, 'which admit both of an extrinsecall and intrinsecall demission of the perpendicular, nineteen severall parts are to be considered; viz. the perpendicular, the subtendentall, the subtendentine, two cosubtendents, the basall, the basidion, the chief segment of the base, two cobases, the double verticall, the verticall, the verticaline, two coverticalls, the next cathetopposite, the prime cathetopposite, and the two cocathetopposites.' Almost none of these words, of course, are listed in the OED. Urquhart comments on these 'Greek and Latin terms', which

for the more efficacy of expression I have made use of in this Treatise; in doing whereof, that I might both instruct the Reader and not weary him, I have endeavoured perspicuity with shortnesse; though, I speak it ingenuously, to have been more prolixe therein could have cost but very little labor to me. . .

One will readily believe that additional prolixity would have cost Urquhart very little, as suggested by the ellipsis truncating the above quotation. At any rate, the 'Lexidicion' which follows thereon attempts to explain each of the barbarous coinages found in the work, including, among those not above, obliquangulary, 'of all angles that are not right', poliechyrologie, 'the art of fortifying townes and cities', and my favourite, plusminused, 'said of moods which admit of mensurators, or whose illatitious termes are the never same, but either more or less then the maine quaesitas'. At this point one has the sensation of being suffocated with verbal ivy, a riot of syllabic curlicues, involving the throat.

In addition are the names of trigonometric figures; for these Urquhart deliberately follows his mediaeval forebears in logic (barbara, celarent) and music (gammuth, fa-so-la-ti-do), and coins words artificially stuck together from significant syllables. Thus, dacramfor is composed of da, 'the datas', cra, 'the concurse of a given and required side', m, 'a tangent complement', and for, 'outwardly'. Dacramfor is not in the OED; nor any of its myriad fellows.

The novelty of these words I know will seeme strange to some, and to the eares of illiterate hearers sound like termes of conjuration; yet seeing that since the very infancie of learning, such inventions have beene made use of, and new words coyned, that the knowledge of severall things representatively confined within a narrow compasse, might the more easily be retained in a memory susceptible of their impression. . . I know not why Logick and Musick should be rather fitted with such helps then Trigonometrie.

So many words, words, words! It is a classic seventeenth-century argument, nonetheless, and all the Royal Society fellows would be at it soon after. But why no admittance to the hallowed Dictionary? You will say, I know: these words are only used once! What use could they be? Let them perish at the rockface! And to you I reply, lickety-split:

prostisciutto, n. nonce-wd. [Blend of PROSTITUTE adj. and PROSCIUTTO n.] A female prostitute regarded metaphorically as an item on a menu. Perhaps with allusion to MEAT and related slang metaphors. 1930 S. BECKETT Whoroscope 1, "What's that? A little green fry or a mushroomy one? Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?"

A punning portmanteau from Beckett's Joyceolatrous juvenilia, used once in the history of the language, until the carrion scholars descended to feast on Beckett's early poetry, and had to quote him. Well, the OED likes to encourage young authors. How about older words?

scientintically, adv. A burlesque nonce-word, formed by a blending of scientifically and tint. 1761 STERNE Tr. Shandy III. v, "He must have redden'd, pictorically and scientintically speaking, six whole tints and a half. . . above his natural colour."

But come now! Everyone knows and loves Tristram Shandy! Who, by contrast, cares for old Urquhart?

cidentine, a. nonce-wd. (See quot.) 1653 URQUHART Rabelais II. xxxii, "As we have with us the countreys cisalpine and transalpine. . . so have they there the Countreys cidentine and tradentine, that is, behither and beyond the teeth."

A word for describing the location of countries within a giant's mouth, from a particular episode of Pantagruel: an integral part of the English language, no doubt. But stay, this is still somewhat Rabelais, 'tis in his book, even if it is not him as such ('. . . aussi ont-ilz deçà et delà les dentz'). What do you have in the way of pure Urquhart?

disobstetricate, v. Obs. nonce-wd. trans. To reverse the office of a midwife concerning; to retard or hinder from child-birth. 1652 URQUHART Jewel Wks. (1834) 210, "With parturiencie for greater births, if a malevolent time disobstetricate not their enixibility."

Too corny. Anything else?

epassyterotically, adv. [f. Gr. epassúteron, one upon another; cf. chaotically.] 1652 URQUHART Jewel Wks. (1834) 249, "He killed seven of them epassyterotically, that is, one after another."

Yes, that's better, yes. . .

hirquitalliency, n. Obs. nonce-wd. [f. L. hirquitallī-re (of infants) to acquire a strong voice (f. hircus he-goat) + -ENCY.] 1652 URQUHART Jewel 125, "To speak of her hirquitalliency."

Ah-ha! You see, again and again the OED tongues words out of The Jewel, or, to give its more authentic title, as the 2008 draft revision does (s.v. penitissim), Ekskubalauron. There are dozens of these vocables in the dictionary, each with only one citation, and that from The Jewel. None was used earlier, none has been used since. They are, strictly speaking—at least until this very post—Modern English hapax legomena. Or, as the Dictionary's first great editor, James Murray, put it, nonce words. The OED lists nonce word—'a word apparently used only ‘for the nonce’, i.e. on one specific occasion or in one specific text or writer's works'—and, in a delicious mise-en-abyme, quotes itself.

But not a single entry from the Trissotetras. Why is the one work slighted for the other? The one was surely known, as The Jewel is commonly cited from Urquhart's 1834 Works, which includes both treatises. Is it that the OED accepts such words only from 'literary' works, like Whoroscope, Tristram Shandy, Pantagruel, and, let us suppose, The Jewel? This cannot be the case: not only is The Jewel hardly literature in the same category as the others, being, among other things, a treatise on universal languages, and a panegyric to Scotland—but, as we saw in the last instalment, the OED is quite happy citing blas from technical books of the seventeenth century. So why?

*

Perhaps admittance into Murray's temple, or that of his descendants, is an aesthetic act. Or even an ethical one. Prosticiutto, scientintically, hirquitalliency: fine, bold, strong pieces, vivid, if a little rococo. What etymological fantasias they conjure! How they expand the language, as brooches pinned on the plainer stuff of a good prose or verse. And blas, too: a noble attempt, if ultimately in vain, to affix the vocabulary of a nascent and uncertain science. Into our society, along our finely-ordonnanced colonnades, we allow a hint of wonder, of the clamour of past voices, to prove we are not prudes, not puritans. We encourage diversity. As the people need their carnival or Saturnalia, the release of bottled energy, so the dictionary needs its nonce-words, to throw the makes and thises and perspicuouses into clearer relief, as good, upstanding members of lexical populace.

But— but this, this horror: this Trissotetras. All puffed up with arrogant frankensteins, choked and garbled, a masturbatory mess of syllables. Like that other book— what was it, yes? Finnegan's something? No expansion of the society, of the literature, of the language, just halls of heavy mirrors closed off to the world. We cannot encourage that sort of thing. Pantagruel we allow; The Jewel we allow. But not this Trissotetras. It may not be admitted to the Law. Let us abandon this beastly baby on a doorstep.

Will it be officious of me to observe that the Trissotetras is in danger of being left behind?

I say again, perhaps this doorkeeping is an aesthetic or ethical activity. The descriptivists, God bless them, want a grammar and a dictionary that do not prescribe, but only record. Who can blame them? As one of them recently said, 'how a language is used in the present is much more interesting than how it should be “properly” used'. Dealing with the fringes of the language—the neologisms, the portmanteaux and the nonce-words—we seem to see the necessity of choice. The lexical galaxy gets thinner, dimmer, as we recede from the centre; but it extends, in half-attested substance, to infinity. To admit all stray elements would be to admit typos, half-finished words, proper names, dords, and in all languages. Some words attested only once are accepted; others not. Thus we are forced to observe the rôle of personal judgement, unanswerable to absolute reasoning. The arbiters of the language, when their voice wavers, tell us why they arbitrate; what they would see in the Good Book.

On Neologism, Part One

The Scottish physician Thomas Short, at the end of a parenthesis on diseases, in the middle of a long footnote, extending over several pages through a discussion of chalybeate waters, from his 1734 Natural, Experimental, and Medicinal History of the Mineral Waters of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire, writes with a twinkle:

The Causes we assign for these Diseases, we have borrowed from the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphicks, as the incoercible Flatus, culinary Digestion, Evestrum vitae, Peroledi, Archeus, Gas, Blas, Deulock, &c. which we discourse of as distinct intelligent Beings in the human Body. These are things beyond the Ken of the present Age.—

It is a rare moment of linguistic fantasia in an otherwise unremarkable text: a series of lexical gobbets from the natural science of Paracelsus and Van Helmont, via his immediate source, William Simpson's Hydrologia Chymica (1669). Of all these charming arcanisms, only one has made it into popular currency, almost invisible in the cloud surrounding it here: gas. Of the others, only one, blas, has survived at all—revived a month ago, for instance, in the languagey sectors of the internet—thanks to a freak citation in the OED, handily cross-referenced in the etymology awarded its more famous twin: 'Van H. also invented the term BLAS'; although the OED's entry for blas rather bizarrely pairs it with an unrelated bit of Middle English dialect (sense 1), offering for sense 2 only, 'Van Helmont's term for a supposed ‘flatus’ or influence of the stars, producing changes of weather.' The OED clearly assumes no readers will come to blas except by way of gas: for while the latter entry clarifies which Van Helmont, the former does not. All the citations for blas, the phantom word, are Helmontian, except the last, a reference to Whitney's seminal Life and Growth of Language (1875). This is cited without quotation; but for you, reader:

Of the out-and-out invention of new words, language in the course of its recorded history. . . presents only rare examples. Sometimes, however, a case occurs like that of gas, already noticed as having been devised by an ancient chemist, as artificial appellation for a condition of existence of matter which had not before been so distinctly apprehended as to seem to require a name. Along with it, he proposed blas for that property of the heavenly bodies whereby they regulate the changes of time: this, however, was too purely fanciful to recommend itself to general use, and it dropped out of sight and was forgotten, while the other came to honor.

The full text of Life and Growth is online, although one word seems to have puzzled the OCR: that word, of course, being blas, which it renders Mas. So the OED defines blas as an influence of the stars on the weather, and Whitney, the old American windbag, defines it as an astral property that regulates time.

Stellae sunt nobis in signa, tempora, dies, & annos. Ergo patrant temporum mutationes, tempestates, atque vicissitudines. Quorsum opus habent duplici motu, locali scilicet, & alterativo. Utrumque autem, novo nomine Blas significo. . . Blas motivum stellarum, est virtus pulsiva, ratione itineris, per loca et secundum aspectus.

The stars for us are as signs, tempora, days and years. Therefore they effect the changes, tempestates and vicissitudes of the tempora. For this they require a double motion, that is locomotive and alterative. Both, however, I signify with the new name 'Blas'. . . Blas, the movement of the stars, is a propulsive power, by reason of their journey through places and according to their aspects.

The problem comes in the definitions of tempus and tempestas, which can mean time, season, occasion and weather. Either way, the Helmontian stars play a role in the astrological mechanism of the universe, which was wholly within the regular laws of natural science. Now the interesting question is: why has the OED preserved blas? Sure, it makes a nice rhyming twin with gas, and, as in Whitney, the two nicely illustrate the divergent possibilities of two initial bedfellows, a lexical version of Hawking radiation. That was the Liberman angle: 'it's too bad that 18th-century chemists couldn't find any real substance to which the reference of blas could be transferred, as the reference of gas was'.

But blas has no real substance as an English word: it exists in the penumbra of the lexicon, teasing us as a little jewel of potential meaning, but never so well-defined (time or weather? 'Both I signify. . .'), and never, more importantly, a true element in the inter-referential web of the vocabulary. It has no interaction with its fellows, except gas. It was only ever a parody of a word.

See, if not blas, why not peroledi or peroledes? For this is another Helmontism:

Habet ergo aer suos, non minus quam terra, fundos, quos Adepti vocant Peroledos. Invisibile itaque Gas, variis aeris stratis hospitatur, si aquae sua sint barathra, suae voragines, suae portae sunt in Peroledis, quas periti Cataractas Coeli, & valvas dixere.

Therefore the air, no less than the earth, has its own grounds, which the adepts call 'Peroledi'. Thus the invisible Gas is a guest in the various layers of the air, if the waters have their abysses, their chasms, so its own gates are in the Peroledi, which the experts call the sluices and folding-doors of heaven.

Oh, you want it in period English? It's only Margaret Cavendish, the second most famous English writeress of the seventeenth century, in a Philosophical Letter:

But rather then your Author [Van Helmont] will consent to the transchanging of Water into Air, he will feign several grounds, soils or pavements in the Air, which he calls Peroledes, and so many Flood-gates and Folding-dores, and make the Planets their Key-keepers; which are pretty Fancies, but not able to prove any thing in Natural Philosophy.

Is it purely in deference to the cute historical narrative of gas and blas that the OED likes blas and not peroledes? And why is it so much less generous to Van Helmont than to Paracelsus, who is awarded several neologisms in the dictionary? (In addition to the uncontroversial gnome and nostoc, Paracelsus gets archeus too, with a wholly unsatisfactory etymology section.) What are the criteria for formal recognition in the lexicon? What does it take to be a word?

[Part Two here.]

Macaronic Frühneuhochdeutsch, anyone?

One passage of many such, from the 1883 Weimar Luther, volume 34 of 127; in this instance, from the 'text' of a sermon delivered on the evening of 11 April, Easter Tuesday 1531.

Audivimus de poenitencia et remissione peccatorum. Das hab ich umb der kurtz wyllen uberlauffen et tamen clare, expresse. Das wyr aber das fest bschlissen, wollen wyr ein stuck odder ii vor uns nhemen. Der Her hat uns vorgemalet, was er vor eyn geberde furet unter seynen jungern, quod in medio illorum progrediatur et salutet illos ita, ut terreantur discipuli. Die selbige erschreckung wyl er nicht leyden, quia non vult estimari spiritus, qui non habet carnem et ossa. Er bekennet, das die geyster alßo erscheinen, tum non habentes carnem et ossa. Diß ist eyn sonderlich bylde pro impiis conscienciis. Der teuffel hat auch die arth, das er offentlich zw uns durchs worth odder heymlich durch gedancken zw uns kumme, uff das er hoc malum, das man heist ein falschen Christum. Satan hat auch die art, quod venit ad nos offentlich und heimlich, 1. per praedicationem, 2. per cogitationes potest etiam dicere: 'bonus dies' et 2. conscientiam terrere et sic hominem irr machen, ut nesciat homo, Christus sit necne, semper vult simia esse dei.

A translation of which would look something like this:

We have heard about repentance and the remission of sins. I wanted to run over that briefly and yet clearly, expressly. To conclude the feast, let's have a look at one or two passages. The Lord has shown us what gesture he makes among his disciples, for he goes among them and greets them thus, as the disciples are frightened. He does not want to suffer the same fearfulness, for he would not be thought a spirit without flesh and bones. He acknowledges that the spirits appear thus, not having flesh and bones. This is a peculiar image for impious consciences. The Devil is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly through words, or secretly through thoughts, such that, on account of this evil, one calls him a false Christ. Satan is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly and familiarly, 1. by spoken words (or, more specifically, 'by preaching, prophesying'), and 2. can also say 'good day' by thoughts alone, and 2. can frighten the conscience and thus make a man mad, so as not to know if Christ exists or not; always would he be the ape of God.

Luther is alluding to the narrative in Luke 24.36-39, where Christ appears to his disciples after the resurrection. In the Vulgate: 'Iesus stetit in medio eorum et dicit eis pax vobis ego sum nolite timere / conturbati vero et conterriti existimabant se spiritum videre / et dixit eis quid turbati estis et cogitationes ascendunt in corda vestra / videte manus meas et pedes quia ipse ego sum palpate et videte quia spiritus carnem et ossa non habet sicut me videtis habere.' And in the KJV: 'Jesus himself stood in the midst of [the disciples], and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. / But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. / And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? / Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.'

The function of Satan is always to burlesque God, that is, to imitate him in reverse; he is found as the 'ape of God' (simia dei, Gottes Affe) throughout Luther's sermons and commentaries. (Alfred Adam traces the motif to the Cistercian hagiographer Caesar of Heisterbach.) Like Christ, Satan strikes awe into the soul, but where Christ makes his presence manifest, Satan makes a man forget whether Christ exists.

So that's the theology taken care of. But what's going on with the languages? It seems highly unlikely that Luther should have delivered a sermon in hybrid German-Latin, even to a small circle of intellectuals. Some of the Latin fragments play on the Vulgate, but they are not direct quotations, and others have no obvious provenance. Malcolm Parkes writes:

The evidence indicates that the scribes [in Luther's circle] translated the essentials of what they had heard in German immediately into Latin, and then set down the discourse in Latin in order to use the customary methods of abbreviation in that language, which enabled them to record spoken discourse more quickly. Only when the process of instantaneous translation was too difficult, or when the German phrases were particularly striking, did the scribes write down Luther's own words. Subsequently the "reportator" translated the text back into the original language, expanding both the simplified forms and abbreviated thought in such a way as to make the record more readable.

Did the scribes omit to re-translate, in this instance? Or was the Weimar editor using an odd source-text? In any event, the German and Latin seem to play against each other, the one sometimes half-repeating the other, or elaborating upon it, like the interaction between a God and his Ape.

Wine and Water

When one cup in fell confusion
Wine with water blends, the fusion,
Call it by what name you will,
Is no blessing, nor deserveth
Any praise, but rather serveth
For the emblem of all ill.

Wine perceives the water present,
And with pain exclaims, "What peasant
Dared to mingle thee with me?
Rise, go forth, get out, and leave me!
In the same place, here to grieve me,
Thou hast no just claim to be.

— 'Denudata veritate', from the Carmina Burana, tr. Symonds.

The American next to me is in transcribing formulae for posset and gooseberry wine from a Middle English receiptboke. I go to the enquiries counter for some pointless request. As I wait, a young gentleman receives his book from Special Collections. It comes in a little packet, and when he pulls it out, I can see that it is smaller than his thumbnail. The look on his face, somewhere between surprise and annoyance, is priceless. He tries, momentarily, to read it, but is briskly defeated, and returns it to the counter. Curious, I order it myself. It turns out to be an 1896 Salmin edition of Galileo's Letter to Cristina (1615), 15 x 9 mm.

(The nice man on the desk says he has personally researched the book. Galileo wrote it so small, he informs me, to avoid the watchful eyes of the Inquisition; I hesitate to point out that this edition was printed almost three centuries after its words were penned, when the Inquisition had become a story with which to scare young Protestant boys into good behaviour.)

Galileo's letter is a plea for religious toleration of experimental science:

I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages but from sense­ experiences and necessary demonstrations. . . It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men.

If you stop and think about this, it is a little odd. The Bible, so as to make itself better understood, says things which are not literally true. But how can false things be well understood? Galileo's idea, which had in certain circles become a commonplace by 1700, was that the Bible fudged its physics (and metaphysics) so as not distract the foolish ancient rabble from their worship of God. But Nature acts without condescension, and so never lies.

*

Galileo, no doubt, would have pursed his lips at Cana—the classic miracle. Nature cannot transgress her laws: water cannot become wine. Perhaps, if he had been feeling scholastic, he might have suggested that the water merely took on the accidents of the wine, without changing its substance; a hundred years later he might have found some scientific approximation for the miracle, and trumpeted it up as a rational explanation. But here, for now, he would say that it mattered little about water and wine: the Bible simply wants us to know that Christ is the Lord our Saviour.

At any rate, Galileo could work apparent miracles with water and wine himself. In his 1638 Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche he describes an experiment, which runs, in Thomas Weston's elegant 1730 translation:

If I fill a round Crystal Bottle [palla di cristallo, ie. a crystal globe] with Water, whose Mouth is no bigger than that of a Straw, and after this turn its Mouth downwards, yet will not the Water, altho' very heavy and prone to descend in Air, nor the Air, as much disposed on the other Hand, as being very light, to ascend thro' the Water; yet will they not, I say, agree, that that should descend, issuing out of the Mouth, and this ascend, entering in at the same; but both keep their Places, and yield not to each other. But on the contrary, if I apply to the Mouth of this Bottle a little Vessel of Red Wine, which is insensibly less heavy than Water, we shall see it in an Instant gently to ascend by red Streams thro' the Water; and on the contrary, the Water, with the same Slowness, to descend thro' the Wine, without ever mixing with each other, till at length the Bottle will be full of Wine, and all the Water will sink to the Bottom of the Vessel that's underneath.

This is what Salviati, standing in for Galileo, claims to be happening in his thought-experiment:

The wine, instead of mixing with the water as we should expect, changes places with it, each liquid remaining pure. This passage has caused a certain stir in the scholarly literature. Alexander Koyré, the great historian of science, best known for his work on cosmology, considered the story as a reliance on untested thought-experiments gone too far: 'Galileo. . . had never made the experiment; but, having heard of it, reconstructed it in his imagination, accepting the complete and essential incompatibility of water with wine as an indubitable fact'. So much for casting off authority and beginning afresh from sense experience! Koyré, however, does not name a source.

As Koyré one-upped the empiricist Galileo, so James MacLachlan one-upped the rationalist Koyré in turn, and actually performed the experiment in time for a cheeky 1973 note in Isis.

In the late summer of 1971 I filled an after-shave bottle with water and inverted it over a goblet of red wine. A piece of drinking straw sealed in the mouth of the bottle dipped beneath the surface of the wine. For more than an hour I watched in fascination as a perfectly clear layer of water formed at the bottom of the goblet and became deeper and deeper! As Galileo had described, a thin red streamer wafted up through the water in the bottle and occupied a progressively redder and larger region at the top of the bottle. A light shining through the goblet made possible the detection of a streamer of water descending through the wine to form the layer at the bottom. After about two hours the bottle above had become a quite uniform red, and the layer of red left at the top of the goblet began to descend, ultimately making the liquid in the goblet a uniform pink.

So for MacLachlan, the wine and water do ultimately mix, but not before acting roughly as Galileo had said they would. Galileo, he is sure, actually witnessed the experiment, and so was able to describe its results with some precision. But, as it took Antonio Beltrán 25 years to point out, again in Isis (1998), the fact that the experiment can be done does not mean that Galileo actually performed it, and it is just as possible that, as Koyré had suggested, Galileo merely used a well-known example. Beltrán's evidence? The only similar experiment he can find is in Ambroise Paré's Des monstres et prodiges (1573):

The experience of two glass vessels called a wine-raiser, in which device, by placing the vessel filled with water on top of another filled with wine, it can be clearly seen how the wine rises through the water and the water descends through the wine, without their mixing, although they move through the same narrow pipe.

And just so Beltrán didn't go thinking he'd one-upped MacLachlan in turn, the editors of Isis allowed MacLachlan to blow Beltrán an amused raspberry in a note following the latter's article. MacLachlan thinks it pretty unlikely that 'a medical student in Pisa (being indoctrinated from Galenic treatises) would have read a French surgical work', although he does not at all deny the probability that Galileo's experiment was unoriginal. Both Beltrán and MacLachlan, in fact, miss a much more likely source for Galileo: Francis Bacon's 1627 compendium of experiments, Sylva Sylvarum, which contains, very near the start, an even stranger proposition:

Take a Glasse with a Belly and a long Nebb [spout]; fill the Belly (in part) with Water: Take also another Glasse, whereinto put Claret Wine and Water mingled; Reverse the first Glasse, with the Belly upwards, Stopping the Nebb with your fingar; Then dipp the Mouth of it within the Second Glasse, and remove your Fingar: Continue it in that posture for a time; And it will unmingle the Wine from the Water: The Wine ascending and setling in the topp of the upper Glasse; And the Water descending and setling in the bottome of the lower Glasse. The passage is apparent to the Eye; For you shall see the Wine, as it were, in a small veine, rising through the Water.

Here the wine not only slides up past the water without mixing, but actually further unmixes itself! Bacon states clearly that the experiment doesn't work the other way around, or with coloured water, and concludes from this that 'this Separation of Water and Wine appeareth to be made by Weight; for it must be of Bodies of unequall Weight, or ells it worketh not; And the Heavier Body must ever be in the upper Glasse.' And then he moves swiftly on.

*

Bacon, the better mage, really could turn water into wine, his own sort of miracle. Both he and Galileo described a Nature that seemed so marvelous, even as they insisted it was not. And so as to accommodate the occult secrets of hydromechanics to the understanding of every man, both wrote in the common tongue, and spoke in vivid parables, which they called 'experiments'.

Constitutions and Distempers

In 1681, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet—tutor to the Dauphin and unofficial head of the French Catholic Church, stuck with playing advocatus diaboli to theological hotshots like Jean Claude and Leibniz—published his Discourse on Universal History, a triumphalist account of ancient and mediaeval Christian history, largely forgotten in the eighteenth century, but resurrected in the nineteenth as a masterpiece of literature for French collégiens to copy out and learn by heart. In Discourse 2.11, Bossuet deals with idolatry:

God knew man's mind and knew that it was not through reason that one could destroy an error which reason had not established. There are errors into which we fall when we reason, for man often gets tangled up because of his reasoning: but idolatry had come in by the opposite extreme, by stifling all reasoning, and by granting predominance to the senses, which sought to clothe everything with the qualities that strike the senses. Thus the Deity had become visible and vulgar.

Religious errors, says Bossuet, occur when we no longer listen to Reason, and devote ourselves instead to sensory experience, which is full of confusion. The true Christian distinguishes what he sees from what he knows: he realises that God cannot be grasped by the senses, but only by thought.

*

Bossuet was on the losing end of history; he and his ilk would soon concede Ohio and spend the next century on the back foot. This concession is popularly known as the 'Enlightenment'. One faction who stood to make big gains in Ohio were the Deists, and among them the English Whig, John Trenchard, whose Natural History of Superstition appeared in 1709, lambasting popery and enthusiasms. Having offered a litany of superstitions, Trenchard proposes his own account of religious error:

It must necessarily happen when the Organs of Sence (which are the Avenues and Doors to let in external Objects) are shut and locked up by Sleep, Distempers, or strong Prejudices, that the imaginations produced from inward Causes must reign without any Rival, for the Images within us striking strongly upon, and affecting the Brain, Spirits, or Organ, where the imaginative Faculty resides, and all Objects from without, being wholly, or in a great measure shut out and excluded, so as to give no information or assistance, we must unavoidably submit to an evidence which meets with no contradiction, and take things to be as they appear.

The problem for Trenchard is not sense experience but our own minds: where Bossuet saw corruption seeping in from outside, Trenchard sees the outside world as a necessary check to our fantasies.

Bossuet lived in the France of Descartes—Trenchard in the England of Locke. Descartes's Discourse on Method had spoken of man's lumière naturelle, given us by God to follow reason and distinguish truth from error. For Trenchard this is merely an 'Ignis Fatuus of the Mind, which the Visionaries in all Ages have called the Inward Light, and leads all that have followed it into Pools and Ditches'. Descartes is really no better than a mystic: his daimonion or 'voice of God' has become a secular lumière, but it is still claimed to be a divine gift. Of course it can provide no criterion of truth and falsehood, for it has no ground in experience, and thus is subject to the humoral imbalances of the body—'Complexions, Constitutions and Distempers'.

An Inconvenient Tooth

— He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos.

Sometimes the world has an appalling air of doneness. I work best with unsolved, incomplete and unwoven materials—and the Germans have been doing their utmost to foil me of late. I spend a week researching the story of the Golden Tooth, with the plan to write an article on the subject, only to find that it has already been written, and as a whole book, with a comprehensive bibliography, only four years ago, and in German. The swinehound!

Teeth seem to be everywhere at the moment. My cuñada likes to tell the story of the Ndembu tooth-extraction ritual. The Ndembu culture, according to Victor Turner, attributes great spiritual significance to the front incisors, and when a tribesman is thought to be mixing awkwardly with the rest of his tribe, the witchdoctor pretends to extract one of the man's teeth, as a scapegoat object, symbolic of his social problems. The accompanying ritual includes the airing of grievances on both sides, so that the community can return to normal. Thus, cultural homoeostasis at work.

At the moment, Mrs. Roth's second lower right molar is more than a symbol of difficulty: it is a literal source of agony, having broken apart and set her gums and jaw at war with each other—the dentists can only throw up their arms in helpless confusion. Perhaps extracting the tooth would put her soul to rest, and cure her heart of its intrinsic evil: we are yet to discover. It is not the first time we've had a contretemps with her mandibles. Only last year she had to be fitted with a toothguard for her nocturnal bruxism. They took a cast of her dentures, a picture of which I saved for my own macabre enjoyment—


Fifteen pages of typical elegance are devoted to teeth in D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form (rev. ed. 1945). This is one of the most beautiful books ever written, on a visual, literary, even on an intellectual level. It is one of those books written for dreaming, and I'm sure I could produce a post on every single page. The images are works of art. A photograph of an elephant's jaw, for instance, could double as a recumbent Surrealist nude:


Meanwhile, a series of diagrams demonstrating the shapes of a horse's molars anticipate the biomorphisms produced by Hans Arp in the 1920s. Here we have the beauty of pure form if we want it, and the beauty of scientific analysis if we want that. Figure A represents an eroded molar in cross-section, and B and C are each less eroded. (Funny that Thompson should have chosen to arrange the diagrams in reverse order.)

What do the key-letters stand for? Logophiles rejoice! a (and a', a'') are ectolophs; b is a protoloph; b' a mesoloph; b'' a metaloph. -loph, here, from the Greek for 'crest'. c and c' are lakes, valleys, or fossettes, x is a col, and o cusps or conules. The vocabulary is ported from topography, which unexpectedly becomes the dominant metaphor in Thompson's prose:

"To recognise this lake or pit in the simple contours of the young incisor is an easy matter; but in the abraded molar the enamel-layer which once covered all its ups and downs forms a contour-line, or "curve of level," of great complexity. This contour-line alters as the levels change, and varies from one tooth to the next and from one year to another, so long as wear and tear continue. The geographer reads the lie of the land, with all its ups and downs, from a many-contoured map, but the worn tooth shews us only one level and one contour at a time; we must eke out its scanty evidence by older and younger teeth in other phases or degrees of wear. The "pattern" of a horse's molar tooth is indeed so closely akin to a map-maker's contours that some of the terms he uses may be useful to us. He speaks, for instance, of ridge-lines and course-lines, lignes de faite and lignes de thalweg; of a gap, or lowland way between two hills, in contrast to a col or saddle at the summit of a mountain-pass; or of a gorge, which is a narrow steep-sided valley; or a scarp, which is a long steep-faced hillside."

All this is consistent with Thompson's overall project to bring the living kingdoms closer to the mineral. In his mechanical-mathematical world, life diminishes in significance, and the processes of life, namely the evolutionary processes, begin to jostle with more fundamental physical forces for impact on living creatures. In perhaps the most dazzling chapter, sort of a twentieth-century Garden of Cyrus, Thompson expounds on hexagonal patterns in nature as the simplest product of symmetrical forces:

If the law of minimal areas holds good in a "cellular" structure, as in a froth of soap-bubbles or in a vegetable parenchyma, then not merely on the average, but actually at every node, three partition-walls (in plane projection) meet together. Under perfect symmetry they do so at co-equal angles of 120°, and the assemblage consists (in plane projection) of co-equal hexagons.

What interests us is that soap and vegetable matter are treated side-by-side, as equals—along with tortoise shells, sunflower whorls, the basalt columns of Giant's Causeway, cracks in drying mud or varnish, honeycomb, and so on and so on. The sheer scope of the argument is greater than any division between living and non-living objects: 'In dealing with forms which are so concomitant with life that they are seemingly controlled by life, it is in no spirit of arrogant assertiveness if the physicist begins his argument, after the fashion of a most illustrious exemplar, with the old formula of scholastic challenge: An Vita sit? Dico quod non.'

On Growth and Form is a great book because it is a transformative book: it transforms, or transmutes, the world we know into a world of fantasy, of secret forces vying for power. It transmutes geology into geometry, biology into pure mechanics. And as Thompson's thought tends towards a procedural (hypothetical) inanimism, it coincides with its opposite, animism. It was an animism, or something like it, that suggested to Jakob Horst, a physician at Helmstedt University (and a contemporary there of Giordano Bruno), the idea that gold could grow naturally, for instance on a boy's tooth. In 1594 he was presented to a young Silesian lad named Christoph Mueller, among whose new adult teeth was—supposedly—one made of solid gold. In his account of the phenomenon, De aureo dente (1596), he asserts:

The strange and distant material of the golden tooth comes about from blood flowing through veins in the cavity and substance of the golden tooth. The golden appendage is born from the tooth's osseous roots. The gold on the tooth feeds, lives and feels.

Horst goes on to argue that on Mueller's date of birth, 22 December 1585, the sun was in conjunction with Saturn in the sign of Aries, producing an excess of heat, which in turn fanned the nutritive force in the tooth, producing gold—an effect both natural and miraculous. Years later, Duncan Liddel, a Scottish physician also working in Germany, pointed out that the sun only entered the sign of Aries in March—even Horst's hokum astrology was bad. In 1599, the Ramist and alchemist Andreas Libavius summarised the philosophical grounds of Horst's thesis, to which he himself was opposed, and invoked an old methodological principle later adopted by Charles Darwin:

That gold can assume a vital principle, and perhaps become vegetable [i.e. growing], will not seem absurd to those who believe in the living gold born in the Danube, on which were branches and leaves of pure vegetable gold. Thence the chemists claim that the golden stone is also vegetable: then it seems that the beginning and foundation of vegetation belongs to 'mineral spirits' (succis mineralibus), since these occupy the middle position between vegetable and elemental things, just as zoophytes are between plants and animals—for Nature does not make a leap (natura non faciente saltum).

Thompson would have agreed: Nature does not make a leap, She makes transformations. Hence the perfect continuity between the organic and the inorganic. Of course, Horst's thesis was soon exposed. The tooth was a fraud: its gold had been merely painted on. One account claims that 'a certain nobleman got an inkling [of the imposture], came to the place pretty drunk, and demanded that the tooth be shown him; when the young fellow, at his master's word, kept silent, the nobleman struck his dagger into the boy's mouth, wounding him so badly that the aid of a surgeon had to be called, and so the deception was fully exposed'. When it comes to the generation of gold, the organic appears demarcated from the inorganic after all, despite such modern marvels as this.

In the West, these sorts of stories attract the positivist mind, comfortable in its assurance that such shenanigans don't get taken seriously by intellectuals any more. Thus Vincenzo Guerini, in his History of Dentistry (1909), scoffs: 'In our days news of such a kind would be immediately qualified, and universally held to be an imposture. But three centuries ago the most marvellous and unlikely things were easily believed in, often even by the learned'. Anthropological respect is accorded only to the superstitions of darkest Africa, as to those of the Ndembu in Zambia—superstitions that are not discomfortably close to home, and which, for this very reason, present no threat of fantastical transmutation, of bouleversement.


Plato has not been of much help to my suffering Lily. (Although she did enjoy having her nails done at Aristotle's little salon, next door.) Too busy with all this deuced chatter about Ideal Teeth and intradentine hierarchies. He has no drills in his office: only an assortment of books and lenses. And his understanding of the human anatomy and physiology, at least such as he presents in his Timaeus, is simply idiotic. His fees are astronomical. When I mentioned to him the possibility of gold teeth, he shook his head. But at least if she managed to grow a bit of gold on the end of her crowns it would help pay for an operation. I think it is worth giving it a shot, "science" be damned.