Gladstone on Macaulay

 I have never read Macaulay's histories. In his essays, I tend to be aware of the thumb on the scale, confident that someone could work from the same documents and come up with a very different interpretation. In his biography of Gladstone, Roy Jenkins mentions in passing, as judicious, a notice of Macaulay that Gladstone wrote, a review of The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. It is possible to find this on line, via the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and eventually HathiTrust. (If your IP address indicates that you are outside the US, this may not work.)

The review is quite long (the life and letters ran to two volumes), and with many interesting passages. A fair sample is

Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of partisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been, and probably much more will be, said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is among the very rarest, as well as the most precious, of human virtues. But there never was a writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This, during his lifetime, was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by his opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of the range of controversy. He wrote for truth; but, of course, for truth as he saw it; and his sight was coloured from within. This colour, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a mordant; it was a fast colour; he could not distinguish between what his mind had received, and what his mind had imparted. Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong; and of those calamities which are due to the intellect only, and not the heart, there can hardly be a greater. The hope of amending is, after all, our very best and brightest hope; of amending our works as well as ourselves. Without it we are forbidden revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad aurus, when we have accidentally, as is the way with men, slipped into Avernus. While, as to his authorship, Macaulay was incessantly labouring to improve, in the substance of what he had written he could neither himself detect his errors, nor could he perceive him when they were pointed out.

I will remark that Macaulay had once published an unfavorable, very well written review of a pamphlet of Gladstone's; but Gladstone had long moved on from the views he professed there. 

Popular Down the Hall, Part II

 Sunday's New York Times Book Review included a review by Clancy Martin of Emily Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, a book on the French postmodernists. I was interested to read Martin's personal take. He had dropped out of a graduate program in philosophy at the University of Texas, defeated by the emphasis on the postmodernists. After a few years away, having done his best to read them, he returned but found

Bad news for Clancy. You guessed it: Not even a decade later, the fashion had changed. As one of my friends at the time, now a professor at the University of Texas, told me: "It's so sad that you showed up thinking we'd all still be reading Rorty. You should've gone to the English department."

(Now I think of it, my very slight acquaintance with the postmodernists about fifty years ago came from an English class.)

It is interesting to see a confirmation, or at least reiteration, of Quine et al.'s complaint about Derrida. It is also interesting to read that Richard Rorty, who for some years seemed to be the house philosopher of The New Republic, was involved in postmodernism. Another gap in my reading.

Which Would Have Startled Dr. Graham

 In Chapter XXIX of Two Years Before the Mast Dana wrote of a time of hard physical labor, packing a ship with hides to be carried around Cape Horn to Boston, that

During all this time,--which would have startled Dr. Graham--we lived upon almost nothing but fresh beef; fried beefsteaks three times a day,--morning, noon, and night.  At morning and night we had a quart of tea to each man; and an allowance of about a pound of hard bread a day; but our chief article of food was the beef. A mess, consisting of six men, had a large wooden kid piled up with beefsteaks, cut thick, and fried in fat, with the grease poured over them.  Round this we sat, attacking it with our jack-knives and teeth, and with the appetite of young lions, and sent back an empty kid to the galley. This was done three times a day.  How many pounds each man ate in a day, I will not attempt to compute.  A whole bullock (we ate liver and all) lasted us but four days.  Such devouring of flesh, I will venture to say, was seldom known before.  What one man ate in a day, over a hearty man's allowance, would make a Russian's heart leap into his mouth. Indeed, during all the time we were upon the coast, our principal food was fresh beef, and every man had perfect health; but this was a time of especial devouring; and what we should have done without meat, I cannot tell.  Once or twice, when our bullocks failed and we were obliged to make a meal upon dry bread and water, it seemed like feeding upon shavings.  Light and dry, feeling unsatisfied, and, at the same time, full, we were glad to see four quarters of a bullock, just killed, swinging from the fore-top.  Whatever theories may be started by sedentary men, certainly no men could have gone through more hard work and exposure for sixteen months in more perfect health, and without ailings and failings, than our ship's crew, let them have lived upon Hygeia's own baking and dressing.

 Dr. Graham was an advocate of vegetarianism, and is remembered in the eponymous Graham crackers. Whatever the value of his theories of nutrition, anyone who has ever made s'mores around a camp fire is grateful to him.

And yet, was the all-beef diet that healthy in the long run?

... the oldest man of the crew, had broken down under the hard work and constant exposure on the coast, and, having had a stroke of the palsy, was left behind at the hide-house under the charge of Captain Arthur.  The poor fellow wished very much to come home in the ship; and he ought to have been brought home in her.  But a live dog is better than a dead lion, and a sick sailor belongs to nobody's mess; so he was sent ashore with the rest of the lumber, which was only in the way. By these diminutions, we were short-handed for a voyage round Cape Horn in the dead of winter.  Besides S---- and myself, there were only five in the forecastle; who, together with four boys in the steerage, the sailmaker, carpenter, etc., composed the whole crew.  In addition to this, we were only three or four days out, when the sailmaker, who was the oldest and best seaman on board, was taken with the palsy, and was useless for the rest of the voyage.

 I take "a stroke of palsy" or simply "the palsy" to mean "a stroke". But medicine was not particularly advanced then, and though the heavy and sedentary might have been supposed to be at risk on a rich diet, I don't suppose anybody worried about the active and lean.

Twenty Lines of Homer

I have read of the discipline of a nightly "twenty lines of Homer", which I suppose to include construing, perhaps after copying out, twenty (Greek) lines of The Iliad or The Odyssey every night. At the moment, the only citation I can give is to one of Flann O'Brien's Keats and Chapman stories. One could not in some ways ask for a finer source than O'Brien; one could certainly ask for a more reliable one. Still I doubt that he invented the practice.

The first book of The Odyssey runs to just over 440 lines, so just over three weeks at that rate. If the others run about the same, then it would take a year and a half to get through The Odyssey. Given the world's population, I expect that someone, somewhere is undertaking this.

Odysseys

 On Tuesday, I happened to look at the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online (RPO) site. I did not find what I was looking for (something short and pithy for ESL students to recite). I did see, though, that the Random Poem of the Day was "Hereux qui, comme Ulysse" by Joachim Du Bellay, Given that the new movie The Odyssey is just out, this struck me as a curious coincidence. A niece suggested that it might not be coincidental, though I find it hard to see how the selection could profit RPO. Searches for "Ulysses" give much more space to Joyce than to Homer, let alone Du Bellay.

 "Hereux" qui remains the Random Poem of the Day. Perhaps it is really the Random Poem of the Week, since RPO gives births and deaths for "On this Day: July 17".

Like a Romance

 The preface to Descartes's Principles of Philosophy includes

I would suggest reading it all the way through, like a romance, without greatly straining one's attention, or being held up by any difficulties one encounters, so as simply to get a general idea of the subjects discussed. Afterwards, if one decides that these are worthy of them, it can be read a second time, so as to follow the sequence of my arguments; but, again, one should not let oneself be put off, if one loses the thread now and again, or if one does not understand all the arguments; simply mark with a pen the places one has found difficult, and read on to the end without a break. Then if one goes back to the book a third time, I venture to say that one will find the solution to most of the difficulties one has noticed the previous time; and if any still remain, a final re-reading should put paid to them.

(This is the preface to the French translation, taken from Michael Moriarty's translation, in The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings.)

When I arrived at college, somebody gave or sold me a how-to book of some sort, which included the advice to read any given text three times. The first was certainly for an overview, corresponding to Descartes's "like a romance". It seems to me that once was for the author's style; and that I can't remember the other one's purpose suggests where some of my academic difficulties came from.

The Baedeker of the Soul

 Noticed today in The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield:

Important writing, strange to say, seldom gives the exact flavor of its period; if it is successful, it presents you with the soul of man, undated. Very minor literature, on the other hand, is the Baedeker of the soul, and will guide you through the curious relics, the tumble-down buildings, the flimsy palaces, the false pagodas, the distorted and fantastical and faery vistas which have cluttered the imagination of mankind at this or that brief period of its history.

Dangerfield nominates Georgian Poetry and Sinister Street as his Baedekers for the period 1910 - 1914. I could think of a few works to nominate as guidebooks for the last 50 or so years.

[July 20, 2026: I blush to say that I wrote "Saintsbury" for "Dangerfield" here.]