Summer XXVII. The Tempest + Last of summer

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XXVI. Music

Today I have read The Tempest. It is perhaps the play that I love best, and because I seem to myself to know it so well, I commonly pass it over in opening the book. Yet, as always in regard to Shakespeare, having read it once more, I find that my knowledge was less complete than I supposed. So it would be, live as long as one might; so it would ever be, whilst one had strength to turn the pages and a mind left to read them.

... It is ripe fruit of the supreme imagination, perfect craft of the master hand. For a man whose life’s business it has been to study the English tongue, what joy can equal that of marking the happy ease wherewith Shakespeare surpasses, in mere command of words, every achievement of those even who, apart from him, are great? I could fancy that, in The Tempest, he wrought with a peculiar consciousness of this power, smiling as the word of inimitable felicity, the phrase of incomparable cadence, was whispered to him by the Ariel that was his genius. He seems to sport with language, to amuse himself with new discovery of its resources...

Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue. If I try to imagine myself as one who cannot know him face to face, who hears him only speaking from afar, and that in accents which only through the labouring intelligence can touch the living soul, there comes upon me a sense of chill discouragement, of dreary deprivation. I am wont to think that I can read Homer, and assuredly, if any man enjoys him, it is I; but can I for a moment dream that Homer yields me all his music, that his word is to me as to him who walked by the Hellenic shore when Hellas lived? I know that there reaches me across the vast of time no more than a faint and broken echo; I know that it would be fainter still, but for its blending with those memories of youth which are as a glimmer of the world’s primeval glory. Let every land have joy of its poet; for the poet is the land itself, all its greatness and its sweetness, all that incommunicable heritage for which men live and die. As I close the book, love and reverence possess me. Whether does my full heart turn to the great Enchanter, or to the Island upon which he has laid his spell? I know not. I cannot think of them apart. In the love and reverence awakened by this voice of voices, Shakespeare and England are but one.

Alpha.

I can’t say that I’ve read Shakespeare in my “mother tongue.” We both speak English, but they are hardly the same language. Not infrequently I feel the need for a translator for what I suspect are some of his best lines. The meaning of English words change over time while some disappear from common usage as still others appear. The Cultural Literacy of readers changes even more. The most uneducated theatergoer of Shakespeare’s time would know references I can only guess at.

Even so, I probably get a greater percentage of what Shakespeare tried to communicate than I get from reading Homer or Goethe in translation. Thomas Mann may be easier to read in translation since, as much as I appreciate his prose, I don’t detect that much poetry in it. James Agee is an American writer I esteem so much that I would urge non-English speakers not to bother reading him in translation -- unless you could find an equally talented and poetic translator. Like Edward Gibbon and Wendell Berry, he has a knack of writing sentences that make me smile merely from his use of language. The subject doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.

There is, however, another side to what I started saying about Shakespeare and changing language and the understanding of that language. Shakespeare has done an amazing job of preserving his own time. If there had been no Shakespeare, that time, and the language of that time, would be so much more foreign to us than it is now. Every performance of Shakespeare is a magical trip back to 16th century England.

Last weekend of summer.

I worked three straight eight hour days to close out our “official” summer, and the last day was the best. The local newspaper reported that 60,000 people gathered to watch or participate in “the largest dragon boat festival in the United States,” including teams from all over North America, and almost no one seemed to know how to sort their damn trash. (Why would anyone think that big aluminum cooking trays belong in with the Compost?) Between day one and day two (I worked a different event on Friday) I fine tuned my usual work plan and took advantage of some leeway I have with my boss on account of being the oldest, but more importantly, longest serving employee, so that I totally rocked yesterday. I practically received a standing ovation when I finally went to our headquarters (the usual array of giant debris boxes (dumpsters) where there was very little to sort as I had pre-sorted most of the event up-front. We were subcontractors on this job and I’ve worked many times with the guy who was in charge of the people doing set-up and hauling. He knows me and is also one of those rare people in the real world I actually enjoy talking to. He must have instructed his crews to back off and let me take care of the stations on Sunday, as I was even able to take most of them down at the end of the day, so that even the final bags were mostly sorted and could just be tossed or emptied into the dumpsters.

The frustrating thing is that all our events could be this smooth if only everyone would just do what I do. But it is surprisingly hard to convince them. And by the time they figure it out, they are often ready to move on to other things, as part-time, seasonal, low-pay, trash related work turns out not to be everyone’s life goal.

Many years ago, back when we did all our sorting back-of-house, we had a great team of people (only three of us survive) and one woman said, as four of us stood around a table drenched in compost juices sorting bag after bag of event trash, that she had a new dating rule that required her to expose her potential boyfriends to the sorting life as quickly as possible. This after a guy she was seeing took one look at her literally jumping into 40 yards of compost and took off never to be seen again. Mostly, our crews seem to date each other -- which gets awkward after the break up.

But yesterday went swimmingly. I’m tired and just a little sore but I can’t really think of any way I would have preferred to have spent my weekend.

Oww! I think I sprained my rotator cuff patting myself on the back.

Next: Autumn I. Hawkweed.

Summer XVIII. The English class character

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XVII. Class struggle

It is easy to understand that common judgement of foreigners regarding the English people. Go about England as a stranger, travel by rail, live at hotels, see nothing but the broadly public aspect of things, and the impression left upon you will be one of hard egoism, of gruffness and sullenness; in a word, of everything that contrasts most strongly with the ideal of social and civic life. And yet, as a matter of fact, no nation possesses in so high a degree the social and civic virtues. The unsociable Englishman, quotha? Why, what country in the world can show such multifarious, vigorous and cordial co-operation, in all ranks, but especially, of course, among the intelligent, for ends which concern the common good? Unsociable? Why, go where you will in England you can hardly find a man -- nowadays, indeed, scarce an educated woman -- who does not belong to some alliance, for study or sport, for municipal or national benefit, and who will not be seen, in leisure time, doing his best as a social being... Sociability does not consist in a readiness to talk at large with the first comer. It is not dependent upon natural grace and suavity; it is compatible, indeed, with thoroughly awkward and all but brutal manners...

Yet it is so difficult to reconcile this indisputable fact with that other fact, no less obvious, that your common Englishman seems to have no geniality. From the one point of view I admire and laud my fellow countryman; from the other, I heartily dislike him and wish to see as little of him as possible. One is wont to think of the English as a genial folk. Have they lost in this respect? Has the century of science and moneymaking sensibly affected the national character? ...

Two things have to be borne in mind; the extraordinary difference of demeanour which exists between the refined and the vulgar English, and the natural difficulty of an Englishman in revealing his true self save under the most favourable circumstances.

So striking is the difference of manner between class and class that the hasty observer might well imagine a corresponding and radical difference of mind and character. In Russia, I suppose, the social extremities are seen to be pretty far apart, but with that possible exception, I should think no European country can show such a gap as yawns to the eye between the English gentleman and the English boor. The boor, of course, is the multitude; the boor impresses himself upon the traveller... To understand this multitude, you must get below its insufferable manners, and learn that very fine civic qualities can consist with a personal bearing almost wholly repellent.

Then, as to the dogged reserve of the educated man, why, I have only to look into myself... set me among a few specimens of the multitude, and am I not at once aware of that instinctive antipathy, that shrinking into myself, that something like unto scorn, of which the Englishman is accused by foreigners who casually meet him? ... If I know myself at all, I am not an ungenial man; and yet I am quite sure that many people who have known me casually would say that my fault is a lack of geniality. To show my true self, I must be in the right mood and the right circumstances -- which, after all, is merely as much as saying that I am decidedly English.

Alpha.

Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I hope he wasn’t really hoping to change anyone’s mind here. The English are sociable and genial if you define those terms in a very tenuous way.

I can’t be too harsh as his last paragraph could just as well be describing me. In the right company I will talk your ear off, otherwise I can do a good imitation of a sullen Calvin Coolidge. (The story goes that a young woman sitting next to Coolidge at a dinner party confided to him that she had bet a friend she could get at least three words of conversation from him. Without looking at her he quietly retorted, "You lose.")

If I were chronically ill but had the occasional good day, I wouldn’t describe myself as healthy. So I think it would be misleading to describe myself as genial.

Ryecroft lived in a very social time, if we define that term to include civic and special interest activities of all kinds. I attribute this primarily to boredom in the pre-TV/radio/recorded music/video game age. My great grandfather belonged both to the Masons and to an American fraternal organization of the 19th century called The Red Men. There is also a photograph (which I can't find) of a Prussian Junker type, a member of a model train club of this period, lying on the floor engrossed in a little train. The American Chautauquas were also aspects of this civic/social mania. I would argue that, as charming or odd as all these activities were, they didn’t really make their participants “social” in the sense one usually means when describing an acquaintance as being “social” or “outgoing.”

But now lets talk about the “gentlemen” and the “boors.” It interests me that Ryecroft doesn’t put this in any sort of political context, but England is in the middle of a class war at this time, with the repeal of the Corn Laws and changes to Inheritance laws attacking the upper, landed, classes (and the rural economy as a whole). The way the Corn Laws were a “Popular” cause to undermine the economy that supported many of the people eager for change; was a 19th century equivalent of our “popular” enthusiasm for the Wal-Mart economy which has so wonderfully destroyed both the local retail economy and the national manufacturing economy. It is fairly depressing that now, as then, people will answer “yes” if you ask them if they want cheaper goods or cheaper food without stopping to ask what they will have to pay to get this supposed improvement.

I was thinking that today’s American equivalent of the class division Gissing is writing about would be racial, and that does work to some extent, but I think “intellectual” might be the better contrast. Today it’s the people with limited intelligence (and education) that are at a disadvantage. The people here who protest the Google Buses are mostly people for whom that form of employment is unimaginable. They are as effectively excluded from the “nerd” world as if they had been born into the wrong family in the 19th century. There are plenty of other reasons to object to the Google Economy and the Google Life-style, but I suspect a large part of the hostility is simply that this is a party they haven’t been, and will never be, invited to.

The story about the common man in the fancy restaurant, also got me thinking about language. Since 1066, the landed elite in England used language to place the common people at a disadvantage. The language of the court and of the courts was either French or Latin (possibly Dutch and German much later). While vernacular languages gradually gained status across Europe (initially as a result of Protestants translating the bible), French and Latin retained a special status. And this was true in Russia as well -- which reminds me that Russia is mentioned here as having a similar class divide. What I don't know is if it was less true in France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Could the common Frenchman understand the language of the court in 18th century France?

You can’t structure society so as to place the common man at a disadvantage -- English, for most of English history, was the language of the outsider only a little less than Gaelic or Welsh were -- and then complain that they lack sophistication.

The funny thing about English becoming the new lingua franca is that it has absorbed so much of French and German and Latin (and Yiddish and Hindi and Spanish) that it almost is a common language. If you go back in time more than a few centuries no one in England would be able to understand the English of today.

Next: Summer XIX. The English class character.