Or in What High Metropolis of Mars

 The Absence of the Muse
by Clark Ashton Smith 

 O Muse, where loiterest thou? In any land
Of Saturn, lit with moons and nenuphars?
Or in what high metropolis of Mars --
Hearing the gongs of dire, occult command,
And bugles blown from strand to unknown strand
Of continents embattled in old wars
That primal kings began? Or on the bars
Of ebbing seas in Venus, from the sand
Of shattered nacre with a thousand hues,
Dost pluck the blossoms of the purple wrack
And roses of blue coral for thy hair?
Or, flown beyond the roaring Zodiac,
Translatest thou the tale of earthly news
And earthly songs to singers of Altair?

Hieroglyphics and Rebusses

 Jeremy Bentham's Church of Englandism and Its Catechism Examined gets a passing mention in Newman's Loss and Gain, so I went back and re-read it, and, holy moly, I had blocked out how much of an unhinged, lunatic, nearly eight-hundred-page rant it is. Bentham has a besetting sin in which he will often not provide any arguments for his position, merely classifying things in tendentious ways, and yet clearly thinks he is providing an argument by doing so; he also often, when he does deign to give an argument, clearly thinks he is speaking in a plain, literal way, when in reality load-bearing parts of his arguments almost always depend on metaphors and analogies. Church of Englandism takes both of these Benthamite traits and exponentializes them. But I also looked into some of the critial responses to the work, and they are sometimes a delight. The very best is the review in The British Critic for November 1818, which begins:

We have been very credibly informed, that Mr. Jeremy Bentham is an original thinker; and we are not inclined to doubt the assertion. We feel certain that he is a most profound thinker; for in many a part of this work before us, we have run out every fathom of our critical line, without once being fortunate enough to sound the bottom of a meaning. Words, as we have been taught, or so many signs and symbols of mental conceptions; and as we have no other means by which we can determine the quantity of such conceptions, unless through the medium of these signs and symbols, it is no unfair deduction, if we assert that unintelligible speaking is a proof of equally unintelligible thinking; in other words, that a man who writes in hieroglyphics, conceives in rebusses. Or to put the proposition in terms which Mr. Jeremy Bentham himself will not deny, unless, (which is not probable,) he supposes there can be any other authority equal to his own, "uncognoscibility being the end; indistinctness, voluminousness, confusion, and uncertainty, are so many means," Pref. xxxvii. We know not how we can put our readers more completely in possession of the present work (except excip; for where mischief is to be done this writer can speak plainly enough) than by the above appropriate quotation.

Mr. Jeremy Bentham is known to his own coterie of petty sophists and political quacks, as the author of a variety of treatises, more or less closely printed, published or unpublished, out of print, or waste paper, of which a "list hastily and imperfectly collected," is subjoined in his new volume. He has employed himself, at divers times, on morals, legislation, hard-labour, usury, mad-houses, taxation, special juries, perjury, economy, and parliamentary reform; and his depth of knowledge on each subject is said by those who have read his works, to be co-extensive with its variety -- a fact which we will not take upon ourselves to dispute, as we have no means of denying it. Moreover, he lives in a cock-loft, looking into the bird-cage walk; and as he cannot always make his countrymen understand the English, in which he thinks, he has occasionally employed a most respectable foreigner, to do it into French, for the benefit of our neighbours across the water.

From this slight sketch of the nature of Mr. Jeremy Bentham's lucubrations, our readers of course will be prepared for the impossibility of our attempting to present them with any detailed analysis of the contents of the work before us. As a literary phaenomenon it must always be regarded with curiosity; for except the lobster-cracking Bedlamite, we recollect no professed lunatic whose hallucinations have been published under his own immediate inspection; and they related more to physical than to moral effects....

The British Critic also had an association with Newman, although that came later. It was founded in 1793 by a bunch of High Church Anglicans who wanted to counteract ideas from the French Revolution and a public forum for discussing conservative Anglican ecclesiology. In the early 1810s, it was bought by Joshua Watson, the philanthropist, and Henry Handley Norris, the theologian, who were both key figures in the so-called Hackney Phalanx, a loosely strutured High-Church Tory group that was more actively engaged in reform and activism. (The review above is from this period.) For financial reasons, it combined with another review in 1826 to become officially The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record. In the 1830s, it was having significant financial difficulties, and in 1836, Newman made a deal with Joshua Watson and the then-editor, James Shergold Boone, to provide them with authors who would write a portion of the review entirely for free. This led to The British Critic being a major vehicle for the Oxford Movement, and was arguably a more important, and perhaps more successful, and certainly less self-destructive, part of the Movement than Tracts for the Times. Nonetheless, Boone and Newman couldn't really agree on editorial matters, with the result that he resigned in 1837, to be replaced by Samuel Roffey Maitland, who soon after resigned. For all his many admirable qualities, including being famously sweet-tempered, it is a consistent feature of Newman's career that he was difficult to work with, in the paradoxical way that you would expect someone affable, headstrong, and arguably oversensitive to be. After Maitland, first Newman and then, in 1841, Thomas Mozley became editors, and the dominant editorial view of the review became rather bellicose, used less often to give a general High Church voice and more often for polemic about internal disputes in the broader High Church movement, and eventually came to an end in 1843.

Links of Note

 * Tim Sommers, Two Sources of Objectivity in Ethics, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Cansu Hepçağlayan, Political friendship as joint commitment: Aristotle on homonoia (PDF)

* Kendric Tonn: Painting in an Age of Digital Art, at "Trunkville"

* Chloé de Canson, Bayesianism and the Inferential Solution to Hume’s Problem (PDF)

* Lucia Oliveri, Imagine Learning Through Play, at "The Junkyard"

* Phil Corkum, Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics (PDF)

* Brian Potter, How Common Is Accidental Invention?, at "Construction Physics"

* John Walsh, Wolff on Obligation (PDF)

* Francine F. Abeles, Lewis Carroll's ciphers: the literary connections

* Razib Khan, How the West was wrought, "Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning"

Little Flower

 Today is the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church. From The Story of a Soul, Chapter XI:

But how shall I show my love, since love proves itself by deeds? Well! The little child will strew flowers . . . she will embrace the Divine Throne with their fragrance, she will sing Love's Canticle in silvery tones. Yes, my Beloved, it is thus my short life shall be spent in Thy sight. The only way I have of proving my love is to strew flowers before Thee—that is to say, I will let no tiny sacrifice pass, no look, no word. I wish to profit by the smallest actions, and to do them for Love. I wish to suffer for Love's sake, and for Love's sake even to rejoice: thus shall I strew flowers. Not one shall I find without scattering its petals before Thee . . . and I will sing . . . I will sing always, even if my roses must be gathered from amidst thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter shall be my song. 

 But of what avail to thee, my Jesus, are my flowers and my songs? I know it well: this fragrant shower, these delicate petals of little price, these songs of love from a poor little heart like mine, will nevertheless be pleasing unto Thee. Trifles they are, but Thou wilt smile on them. The Church Triumphant, stooping towards her child, will gather up these scattered rose leaves, and, placing them in Thy Divine Hands, there to acquire an infinite value, will shower them on the Church Suffering to extinguish its flames, and on the Church Militant to obtain its victory.

Renato Casaro (1935-2025)

 Renato Casaro -- arguably the greatest film-poster artist of all time -- died today. Perhaps more than anyone else he established what people expect film posters to be, handpainting the original of each one in a dashing style. You have certainly seen some of his posters; some of his more famous ones were for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, Conan the Barbarian, Dune, Total Recall, Terminator 2, True Lies, La Femme Nikita, The Princess Bride, The NeverEnding Story, and Dances with Wolves. (You may notice that there are a fair number of Arnold Scharzenegger films; Casaro once said that he was the perfect actor to paint.) But, of course, he was a major influence on many other film poster artists. Film poster art is a bit of niche aristic genre, but Casaro put an immense amount of genius into it, and it always showed.

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus

 Today is the feast of St. Jerome, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. Everybody always remembers St. Jerome's crotchetiness, but he had a softer side. From a letter to Gaudentius, who had asked how he should raise his infant daughter for the religious life:

It is hard to write to a little girl who cannot understand what you say, of whose mind you know nothing, and of whose inclinations it would be rash to prophesy. In the words of a famous orator she is to be praised more for what she will be than for what she is. For how can you speak of self-control to a child who is eager for cakes, who babbles on her mother's knee, and to whom honey is sweeter than any words? Will she hear the deep things of the apostle when all her delight is in nursery tales? Will she heed the dark sayings of the prophets when her nurse can frighten her by a frowning face? Or will she comprehend the majesty of the gospel, when its splendour dazzles the keenest intellect? Shall I urge her to obey her parents when with her chubby hand she beats her smiling mother? For such reasons as these my dear Pacatula must read some other time the letter that I send her now. Meanwhile let her learn the alphabet, spelling, grammar, and syntax. To induce her to repeat her lessons with her little shrill voice, hold out to her as rewards cakes and mead and sweetmeats. She will make haste to perform her task if she hopes afterwards to get some bright bunch of flowers, some glittering bauble, some enchanting doll. She must also learn to spin, shaping the yarn with her tender thumb; for, even if she constantly breaks the threads, a day will come when she will no longer break them. Then when she has finished her lessons she ought to have some recreation. At such times she may hang round her mother's neck, or snatch kisses from her relations. Reward her for singing psalms that she may love what she has to learn. Her task will then become a pleasure to her and no compulsion will be necessary.

The rest of the letter takes a somewhat darker turn, as Jerome turns to reflecting on the evils of the day, but flashes like this little comment on raising girls are found throughout his works; he was the sort of curmudgeon who is a bit of teddy-bear if you catch him at the right time and in the right way.

O Well for Him that Loves the Sun

 Ballad of the Sun
by G. K. Chesterton  

O well for him that loves the sun,
That sees the heaven-race ridden or run,
The splashing seas of sunset won,
And shouts for victory. 

 God made the sun to crown his head,
And when death's dart at last is sped,
At least it will not find him dead,
And pass the carrion by. 

 O ill for him that loves the sun;
Shall the sun stoop for anyone?
Shall the sun weep for hearts undone
Or heavy souls that pray? 

 Not less for us and everyone
Was that white web of splendour spun;
O well for him who loves the sun
Although the sun should slay.

Fortnightly Book, September 28

 The Oxford Movement began in the 1830s and developed afterward in response to shifts in the relationship between Parliament and the Church of England; a significant early stimulus was the passing of the 1833 Church Temporalities Act, in which Parliament peremptorily reorganized some dioceses of the Church of Ireland and shut down a source of ecclesiastical revenue in order to solve a broader political problem. The actual provisions were deliberately chosen to cause minimal disruption, and even greater efficiency and sustainability, but it unsettled a significant portion of the Church of England, to whom it brought home the point that Parliament could easily just disestablish the Church or overrule it or reorganize it for any purpose it pleased, despite this apparently being inconsistent with both the notion of a Church going back to Christ and the customs of England. John Keble's 1833 Assize sermon, "National Apostasy", touched a chord in a wide variety of people. Nor were they unjustified in this worry, and a series of other controversies, both small and large, expanded the movement. A number of figures, including Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey, began publishing polemical tracts to make their ecclesiology public; this Tractarian movement was the intellectual core of the movement, although there were many people involved with the Oxford Movement whose relationship with the Tractarians was rather loose and sometimes even critical. The Tractarian refusal to back down made the Oxford Movement one of the central intellectual disputes of the age, and their very 'High' notion of what was meant by the Creed in talking of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" led to people accusing them of being Romanizers. Indeed, while it is not by any means true of all, a significant portion of the movement, including some of its leading lights, eventually did leave the Church of England to join communion with Rome. Newman's conversion was the most explosive, happening in 1845.

One of those who converted relatively early on was Elizabeth Furlong Shipton Harris, who found, once she became Catholic, that she did not like it. She wrote a book, originally anonymous, From Oxford to Rome: And How It Fared with Some Who Lately Made the Journey, published in 1846. It was a dialogical novel that attempted to warn people about the dangers that led to the horrifying increase in conversions to Rome. I've skimmed through the book; it's actually quite intelligently, if perhaps idiosyncratically, written, and I suspect that Harris captures a great deal of the way in which the flourishing of Romanticism made the Oxford Movement attractive to people. Someone sent it to Newman in 1847 (Newman never mentions mentions the book by name, but from his references to it, it was almost certainly Harris's), and he was very unimpressed. He thought that its depiction of Oxford life was wrong ("wantonly and preposterously fanciful" was his phrase), that its characterization of those involved was generally implausible even given the diversity of views in the Oxford Movement, and that in particular it treated the movement as mired in a pompousness and pretentiousness that failed to grasp the sincerity of many of the people involved. (It is certainly true that the major figures in Harris's work speak and thinking in an over-heated, flowery way that goes beyond common Victorian novelistic conventions, even for a dialogical novel.) It perhaps also did not help his opinion that the novel can be read as implying that Newman was heavily to blame for turning an idealistic reform movement into a Roman-Catholic-generating machinery. However, it was substantive enough that it needed response. But responding to a novel with a treatise or a vigorous polemic seemed a poor choice, so Newman decided to write a better novel on the same subject. That novel was Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, which was published in 1848.

The novel was successful, being immediately a bestseller and (not unrelatedly) also a source of considerable controversy. Dialogical novels are not very popular today, but they were at the time, and it is generally considered one of the most brilliantly written examples. Newman seems to have suceeded in his attempt to capture what Oxford University life was actually like in his Oxford days, and his satire of English incoherence on religion have impressed more than a few people through the years. The novel was often read, and criticized, as an apologetic work, although Newman himself did not think that a novel was a good place for apologetics, and explicitly denied that it was ever intended to be such a work rather than what it was, an attempt to write a better novel. It's very likely that the fact that Newman was primarily focused on writing a novel with more truth, probability, and insight than an already existing novel, rather than making a specific argument, is one of the reasons it stands above so many other dialogical novels in the period.

In any case, for the next fortnightly book, I am re-reading Loss and Gain.