Robert Graves / Waterloo

Robert Graves (1895-1985), author of 'Goodbye to All That' & 'The White Goddess'

My father had a most appropriate response to reading Bulletins , chiefly Rochester, Jim Morrison & the Uses of Obscenity  I would think (you can find that post by clicking on the label 'obscenity' at the bottom of this page). He sent me a terrific little book I had never heard of: Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing by Robert Graves. It was published by Kegan Paul. Someone has pencilled '1936' in the front, but I showed it to Alex (my friend who is a 2nd-hand book dealer), who was as intrigued as me, & a little research showed us it was probably published in 1927. It is an essay on the history, nature & possible future of swearing. Its title, at first sight rather odd, comes from two factors. First, it was written as part of a series of such essays called Today & Tomorrow, & you can see adverts for others in the series in the back of the book. The titles almost all follow that formula:-  [Classical reference: what the essay is about] e.g. Daedalus, or Science & the Future ; Thrasymachus, the Future of Morals ; etc. etc. You get the idea. Second, Graves has chosen Lars Porsena in particular because it is a reference to the 1st line of Macaulay's poem Horatius  (from his Lays of Ancient Rome , hugely popular in the 19th c. - Lars Porsena was an Etruscan king who attacked Rome in its very earliest days of being a Republic):


"Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it, & named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East & West & South & North,
To summon his array."
 

Horatius defending the bridge into Rome against the invading Etruscans
 

I want to share with you an excerpt from this book by Graves which I found particularly funny: then Graves' poem The Persian Version; then the last paragraph of Lars Porsena &c. ; & to finish, an account by a soldier who was at the Battle of Waterloo of what it was like.

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So - the excerpt -


"The ingenious General G------r, so remarkable an artist in swearing that he must one day earn a paragraph in the revised D.N.B., used this form of profanity with the happiest effect. Once, when inspecting the famous "Z" Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery, he was dissatisfied with its response to his order "Dismount !" He bellowed out: "Now climb back again, you pack of consumptive little Maltese monkeys !" "Z" Battery complained to Headquarters of this affront, & General G-----r was in due course asked for his explanation & apology. He gave it briefly as follows:

'Sir,

I have the honour to report that, on the occasion to which I am referred, my order to dismount was obeyed in so slovenly a fashion that for the moment I was deceived. I concluded that I was actually assisting at a performance by a troupe of little Maltese monkeys, amusing enough but crippled by disease. I tender my apologies to all ranks of "Z" Battery for my mistake.

I have the honour to be, Sir,

Your obedient servant,

J. G-----r
Major-General '"

- Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing, p;14-15

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Robert Graves

The Persian Version


Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer's expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece - they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together. 



[N.B. The Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) was an utter disaster for the Persians & a decisive victory for the Greeks.]

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James Joyce (1882-1941)

In the very last paragraph of Lars Porsena &c., after a brief four page analysis of James Joyce's Ulysses - the excellence or otherwise of which I am unable to comment on since I haven't read Ulysses, which fact is projected to be the subject of a future Bulletin - Graves suddenly makes some very insightful remarks about Shakespeare's Sonnets, which I want to reproduce here. This is the last paragraph in full:

"It is quite right that Ulysses should be censored since its chief public in England could at the best of times be only an obscene one: and it is not an obscene book, but on the contrary perhaps the least obscene book every published: that is why it is censored. And there is every reason why Shakespeare's sonnets should be censored at the same time, and more strictly, because the public blinds its eyes to the painful history that the sequence gives and makes it 'extravagant flattery of a patron' or 'an academic exercise'. Joyce is read as obscene instead of successfully past obscenity: Shakespeare instead of being read as pure lust is not even read as lusting."

This reminds me forcibly of Ted Hughes' brilliant description of the Sonnets in his Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being :

"This 'total, unconditional love', wilfully subjecting itself to hardship & pain, worshipping the physical beloved (whether she likes it or not) as an incarnation of the Divine, animates the troubadours & Dante. Something of the same burns in the Sonnets, but with a difference, a rawness, an untheologized, surprised, private pain."

- Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being (ISBN 0571166040), p.60

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

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To finish, an account of what it was like to be at Waterloo by a soldier who was there. This is quoted in The Napoleonic Wars 1803-1815 by David Gates, which is where I found it; it comes originally from Adventures in the Rifle Brigade & Random Shots from a Rifleman by Captain Sir John Kincaid. The quote in question comes at the end of the following; Gates writes:

"Even if they were in a position to enjoy a bird's-eye view of a particular engagement - & very few of them ever were, if only because of the sheer size of Napoleonic battles - most ordinary soldiers were far too busy trying to keep themselves & their comrades alive to worry about the grander affairs going on around them. As an acquaintance of Captain Kincaid, the celebrated diarist, stated about Waterloo (or, at least, so Kincaid assures us):

'I'll be hanged . . . if I know anything at all about the matter, for I was all day trodden in the mud & galloped over by every scoundrel who had a horse; &, in short . . . I only owe my existence to my insignificance.'"

Byron, West, Macaulay & 'Correctness'

Recently, I bought a book second-hand called Byron: Twentieth Century Views. It is a collection of 20th c. critical essays about Byron, edited by a man called Paul West, published in 1963. (How odd it is to write 20th c. as a thing over & done with, just as historical as the 19th or the 2nd c.) Mr West writes the following in the 1st & 2nd paragraphs of his introduction:


".... There is no excluding the biography, & it is vain to rebuke critics who invoke it: Byron is not one of those poets who can be used as a specimen for discussions of verbal chiaroscuro. It may be possible to sustain such discussions for a while on the basis of a passage here or there; but he is not a poet of clever shades any more than he is impersonal. To try excluding the man is eventually to discover that little of the poetry can stand alone &, if it is made to, seems like fragments from the hands of various pasticheurs.

No doubt this proves Byron not a great poet. If he is great, he is so for reasons not primarily poetic ...."


You may well imagine how utterly staggered I was by the easy & entirely unjustified assurance of the 2nd to last sentence there. West is referring off-hand to a vast set of unstated critical assumptions about what the terms poet & great poet mean, as if they were so widely-shared, so well established, so well known there is no need whatsoever to define them any further. In passing, I am perfectly well aware what chiaroscuro means - I have no idea what discussions of verbal chiaroscuro means, & I think if challenged West would be hard put to explain what he actually means by it either. The two things that strike me chiefly in relation to Byron's poetry about this passage are its irrelevance & its effrontery.

I am emphatically not saying that Byron is sacred or above criticism: but at his best I rate him very highly indeed. If a definition of great poet excludes Byron, then that definition is wrong: it requires re-defining. But let the man himself speak:

Lord Byron (1788-1824)

"                             17
'Que scais-je ?'* was the motto of Montaigne,
   As also of the first Academicians:
That all is dubious which Man may attain,
   Was one of their most favourite positions.
There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain
   As any of Mortality's Conditions:
So little do we know what we're about in
This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.


                              18
It is a pleasant voyage perhaps to float
   Like Pyrrho, on a sea of speculation;
But what if carrying sail capsize the boat ?
   Your wise men don't know much of navigation;
And swimming long in the abyss of thought
   Is apt to tire: a calm and shallow station
Well nigh the shore, where one stoops down and gathers
Some pretty shell, is best for moderate bathers."


- Don Juan, Canto 9
[*old French for 'What do I know ?']



"                            8
You know or don't know, that great Bacon saith,
  'Fling up a straw, 'twill show which way the wind blows;'
And such a straw, borne on by human breath,
   Is Poesy, according as the mind glows;
A paper kite, which flies 'twixt life and death,
   A shadow which the onward Soul behind throws:
And mine's a bubble not blown up for praise,
But just to play with, as an infant plays."


- Don Juan, Canto 14


"                            13
With false Ambition what had I to do ?
   Little with love, and least of all with fame !
And yet they came unsought and with me grew,
   And made me all which they can make - a Name.
Yet this was not the end I did pursue -
   Surely I once beheld a nobler aim.
But all is over - I am one the more
To baffled millions which have gone before."


- [Epistle to Augusta]


"And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise
 Have a far deeper madness, and the glance
 Of melancholy is a fearful gift:
 What is it the telescope of truth,
 Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
 And brings life near in utter nakedness,
 Making the cold reality too real ?"


- The Dream, ll. 178-183



I would also direct your attention to When We Two Parted (http://www.potw.org/archive/potw40.html) & Darkness (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173081)

In the first two extracts quoted above, we can see how Byron is the ancestor of Noel Coward & Cole Porter in how he can sometimes put things in a way which is at once insouciant, affecting & true. I do not know whether this is a case of direct influence, or subterranean continuity in styles of humour. Whether conscious or not, the link to me seems clear.

Reflecting on West's assertion that Byron is not a great poet, because he does not conform to West's unstated definition of that term, it made me think of a passage by Macaulay, which is in his review written in 1830 of Moore's Life of Byron. Macaulay is talking about the concept of correctness as an overwhelmingly good thing in poetry & art generally. This passage seems to me to answer West perfectly, as well as expounding some basic & important truths about good & bad (or useful & useless) criticism. I have quoted some excerpts of the much longer passage until the final paragraph, which is quoted whole. The entire passage is well worth reading, as is the entire review.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)

".... In the same manner we constantly hear it said, that the poets of the age of Elizabeth had far more genius, but far less correctness, than those of the age of Anne. It seems to be taken for granted that there is some incompatibility, some antithesis between correctness & creative power. We rather suspect that this notion arises merely from an abuse of words, & that it has been the parent of many of the fallacies which perplex the science of criticism.

What is meant by correctness in poetry ? If by correctness be meant the conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth & in the principles of human nature, then correctness is only another name for excellence. If by correctness be meant the conforming to rules purely arbitrary, correctness may be another name for dulness [sic] & absurdity.

.... It would be amusing to make a digest of the irrational laws which bad critics have framed for the government of poets ....

It is not in the fine arts alone that this false correctness is prized by narrow-minded men, by men who cannot distinguish means from ends, or what is accidental from what is essential. M. Jourdain admired correctness in fencing. 'You had no business to hit me then. You must never thrust in quart  till you have thrust in tierce.' M. Tomes liked correctness in medical practice. 'I stand up for Artemius. That he killed his patient is plain enough. But still he acted quite according to rule. A man dead is a man dead; & there is an end of the matter. But if rules are to be broken, there is no saying what consequences may follow.' We have heard of an old German officer, who was a great admirer of correctness in military operations. He used to revile Bonaparte for spoiling the science of war, which had been carried to such exquisite perfection by Marshall Daun. 'In my youth we used to march & countermarch all the summer without gaining of losing a square league, & then we went into winter quarters. And now comes an ignorant, hot-headed young man, who flies about from Boulogne to Ulm, & from Ulm to the middle of Moravia, & fights battles in December. The whole system of his tactics is monstrously incorrect.' The world is of opinion, in spite of crtics like these, that the end of fencing is to hit, that the end of medicine is to cure, that the end of war is to conquer, & that those means are the most correct which best accomplish the ends."

Macaulay at full throttle on Machiavelli

This is not a blog post, it is just a piece of fun, a quote which is too long for Twitter. It is by Lord Macaulay, giving it both barrels, from near the start of his essay 'Machiavelli', written in March, 1827.

"It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the slightest circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all political science."

'Obloquy', 'hardened ruffian', above all 'palliating sophism' ! Outstanding stuff. Macaulay goes on to explain that in his view, this commonly held opinion of Machiavelli is far too simplistic. I could quote from this essay more or less forever. I recommend the whole piece very much indeed.