[With the title “Objects 101” this originally appeared in The New Criterion for November 2011.]

One glass case had especially to be avoided. Inside it were two elaborately carved elephant tusks that I gathered were from the city of Benin, and while that itself could be explained to the children dragging along behind me, the ominous reddish-brown deposit that still clung to cracks in the ivory could not. So a detour was made around the walls of the Africa Room at the American Museum of Natural History. The children came from schools in Queens, the Bronx, and Harlem, and most spoke English. But talking about that particular exhibit would need a diplomatic finesse, and a happily managed dissimulation, far beyond the talents of a foreign student working as a guide in 1960.

What was really needed was a man like Neil MacGregor — Director of the British Museum since 2002, previously Director of the National Gallery in London, and a former editor of The Burlington Magazine. MacGregor is rightly admired for the firm stand he has taken on the Elgin Marbles, a treasure he plainly sees as being safer in Britain than in Greece. In the last year or so he has become well known for his BBC talks about a number of other items in his collection, later published as A History of the World in 100 Objects, where his easy manner and imaginative story-telling has allowed scores of previously silent objects to speak.

Give him a gold llama from Peru, and all you could want to know about the Incas comes packed into the next five pages. Give him some gold coins from Lydia in the time of Croesus and he tells us not only about their manufacture, but hints at our present financial discontents: “It was Croesus who gave the world its first reliable currency. The gold standard starts here. The consequence was great wealth.” Prompted by a Buddha from Gandhara, in Pakistan, circa 100-300 AD, he chats informatively about the kind of stone the image is made from, about the standard poses for the Buddha, and about the history of shrines in Gandhara — along with something he regards as “profoundly paradoxical”: that a “religion founded by an ascetic who spurned all comfort and riches, flourished thanks to the international trade in luxury goods.” The scope is wide; the writing clear; overall it’s a good read.

History and Identity

What interests me here however is something else — the profoundly paradoxical position of MacGregor himself. When resisting Greek calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles he is on record as saying that it is his museum’s duty to “preserve the universality of the marbles, and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol.” They belong to mankind, they are part of the human heritage, and though modern Greeks may wish to regard them as an integral part of their national identity, the Greeks, alas, must be seen as the deluded victims of an unfortunate parochial obsession. Now this may be right, or it may be wrong, but the curious thing is that when MacGregor deals with a number of other museum items in his possession he invariably treats them as representing the enduring national “identities” of this or that cultural group that should be respected and preserved.

Moche pots from Peru tell him that “in the Americas, as all over the world… ignored histories are now being recovered to shape modern identities,” a process “that seems destined to acquire an ever greater political significance.” A Maya relief reminds him of the 1994 rising in Mexico of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation: “Today, the Maya are using their past to renegotiate their identity” and to regain “a central role in national life.” A colorful feathered helmet from Hawaii given to Captain Cook — here he incorporates comments by Nicholas Thomas on modern Hawaiian tribal aspirations — is “a symbol of what we lost” and might reasonably hope to regain. It represents “encouragement for our future… as we seek independence from the United States.” Elsewhere, Babatunde Lawal, a professor of art history, is invited to explain how a bronze Ife head inspires Nigerian artists to “energize their quest for identity in the global village…” You can only wonder what the Greeks will make of all this. Isn’t the Director of the British Museum playing with fire?

There are other problems. A distinguished authority on paint and canvas, he knows about carving too. The items in his book are mostly arranged chronologically over the last two million years, and among the earlier exhibits is a small 11,000-year-old carved object showing two reindeer swimming one behind the other. It’s not big — the piece of bone is only eight inches long. You and I might see it as something whittled on a rainy palaeolithic afternoon, a toy for the children perhaps, while waiting for nightfall and the usual famished bears. But in MacGregor’s view this would be sadly myopic. He draws attention to the male reindeer’s impressive antlers, the scrupulous naturalism of the genitals carved under its belly, the four little bumps on the female antler’s underside that, he says, “look just like teats.” As indeed they do. Using these and other illustrative features he then goes on to argue that this is “a masterpiece of Ice Age art… superbly observed… in execution as well as in conception a very complex work of art.” Indeed, it shows “all the qualities of precise observation and skilled execution that you would look for in any great artist.”

Extravagant appraisals

Now as whittling goes you’d have to say it’s not bad. And personally I like the palaeolithic — we’ve all seen gallery walls not half as pretty as the walls of Chauvet Cave. But here’s what bothers me: after extravagant language like this has been used to describe an ancient piece of fretted bone, how are we going to talk about Donatello and Co? Or take the example of music. There are people in Australia who uphold the virtues of the didgeridoo, an unprepossessing hollow log with a smallish bore. Earnest composers respectfully write passages for it in earnest chamber works. But again, if didgeridoos were really the equivalent of other wind instruments, and their gloomy eructations were written about in a way that exhausts the vocabulary of musical esteem, what is there left to say about Mozart’s horn concertos? Does Neil MacGregor actually believe that Donatello, and what used to be daringly called primitive art, are in some way culturally equivalent? Is that where the argument is leading?

There’s a million-year-old palaeolithic handaxe from Tanzania, and we are told that “not only human beings but also human culture” began in Africa. As a beginning this has its anthropological place. But the reiteration of what becomes a wearing mantra seems odd, as is the statement that “every one of us is part of a huge African diaspora — we all have Africa in our DNA and all our culture began there”. All our culture? Surely the thing about human culture is not how it began in the Stone Age; it is how it flourished afterward in several high civilizations around the world. On the whole it seems to me a rather good thing that our ancestors did walk out of Africa 60,000 years ago (I’m certainly glad my family did, and one notes that sensible people continue to walk or run or swim or fly out of Africa if they possibly can) but it is what their descendants produced afterwards in Europe, India, China, America and elsewhere that is the truly significant human story.

It’s almost as if MacGregor believes that no visitor should have his feelings hurt. Or thinks that everyone should feel better afterwards, and that the British Museum will have failed in its therapeutic duty unless that outcome is secured. Mind you, I have to say I understand the attitude. It’s exactly why I made a strategic detour around that glass case in the American Museum of Natural History fifty years ago. Because the story behind it was pretty grim and you didn’t want to go there — not if you had to deal with waiting parents afterwards. But the cowardice of a student in 1960 is I feel less excusable in a widely admired museum administrator in 2010.

From Kenneth Clark to Neil MacGregor

Amid so much that enlightens — from Nineveh to Byzantium, from Easter Island to the fabled Old Silk Road — one small additional cavil. Although the Preface tells us that the 100 objects chosen will “try to address as many aspects of human experience as possible”, connubial sentiment somehow goes missing in this two-million year survey, though room is found for the delights pictured on the sides of the Warren Cup, and in a Hockney etching, and suggested by a minute, vaguely obscene 9000-year-old curiosity known as the Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine. The author surprisingly describes this last as “one of the tenderest expressions of love that I know, comparable to the great kissing couples of Brancusi and Rodin,” though whether animals, vegetables, or minerals are here conjoined is hard to say. It may help to remember that at least since the triumph of Bloomsbury, Britain’s cultural elite has combined moral equivocation, patrician bohemianism, and an urbane complacency regarding the commercial world that pays its bills — not to mention the spendthrift economics, promoted by its most intellectually distinguished leader, that is destroying our fiscal arrangements today.

So is there anything new? Perhaps there is. When in 1970 Kenneth Clark put the Apollo of the Belvedere alongside an African mask that had belonged to Roger Fry, he felt able to say: “I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask.” That was then. Today, when on pages 501 and 502 Neil MacGregor rates the significance of Michelangelo, Donatello and Cellini alongside a collection of bronze plaques from Benin, he manages to insinuate that the bronzes prove that in the 16^th century, “Europe and Africa were able to deal with each other on equal terms.” Ah yes, now that reminds me — about those tusks… Inquiry confirms that they too are from the ancient West African city of Benin. You may read about them in a 1903 book by H. Ling Roth with the title Great Benin: its Customs, Art, and Horrors. Not for the faint-hearted. And not perhaps what you’d want to build an identity around. But let the reader judge.

It was a day when every book repels, when each title brings a sense of ennui. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution? I don’t think so: out of Mexico always the same thing. The Second Plane? No Martin we’ll give that a miss. What remains to be discovered: mapping the secrets of the universe, the origins of life, and the future of the human race? Not just now Sir John.

Then I had a bright idea — why not poetry? So reaching up I took down from my shelves an old Penguin with the following title: The Centuries’ Poetry: an anthology compiled by Denys Kilham Roberts. Volume 4, Hood to Hardy.

Denys Kilham Roberts

As one may see from the portrait Penguin Books conveniently provide of Mr Roberts, who was born in Cornwall in 1903 and died in 1976, there’s something about him less than reassuring. He looks directly and solemnly into the camera (does the clenched hand on which he rests his chin cover an old scar, or is that how you looked thoughtful in the 1940s?).

His expression suggests a dark or even tragic view of life, with distinct intimations of mortality, and perhaps that should have been a warning. Yet nothing prepared me for the catalog of suffering, misfortune, woes miscellaneous and woes particular, graves, cemeteries, and dismally prefigured endings that readers have to cope with here. More than half Mr Roberts’ poets seem more than half in love with easeful death.

The very first page (it is page 13) has a poem by Thomas Hood about autumn. Remember Keats? Remember those mists and mellow fruitfulness and swollen gourds and nice plump hazel shells? Rather jolly, no? I think so. Brings to mind peasants merrily treading a measure on the winnowing floor. In Keats, autumn rounds out the best summer any living bee can remember, with honey oozing out of the comb.

But now listen to Thomas Hood:

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn…

Forlorn! The very word is like a knell. If there’s anything that defines the tone of this lugubrious literary regiment that’s it. In Autumn, Hood mourns the passing of summer, the vanished flowers, the fallen leaves, the swallows that have flown. All that remains is teary and sunless, shadowy, fearful, and bare. Forlorn indeed!

But here the autumn Melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone…

There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,
Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

Sorry Tom, and I don’t want to interrupt, but what’s all this about earth’s “bitter fruits” and bowls full of “chilly droppings”? I don’t know what Hood had for breakfast the day he wrote this, but chances are it was porridge. Made from oats. Good stuff for feeding horses and poets, and part of the harvest a bountiful earth provides.

Talk about gratitude.

But enough of fear and shadowy despair and enough of Hood. Moving along to page 24 we find “Is Love a Fancy?”, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge. The eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hartley seems to have had problems with the bottle (he was once dismissed for ‘intemperance’) and more trouble with women.

“Is love a fancy or a feeling?” he brightly asks, but if you think this is going to be about lovers in the springtime, the only pretty ringtime, when birds do sing, hey ding a ding ding — forget it. Barely half way through we’ve got pensive gloom hovering o’er a tomb; suicide gets into the final couplet; and in his last line he describes Hope morosely as “a spectre in a ruin bare”. And with Hope in that condition, can Death be far behind?

Draping a funereal coverlet over Thomas Lovell Beddoes and “Death’s Jest-Book”, pages 27–29 — Bare as Death’s shoulder… For the King of the grave… Our nest is queen Cleopatra’s skull… — (Beddoes’ voice sounds like a crow cawing over a cadaver) we come on page 33 to the jollifications of Edgar Allan Poe:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne (he tells us, describing some lost city in the sea)
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason, moral, political, or religious, that the city has fallen, with its time-eaten shrines and palaces and towers. But Poe likes the idea of fallen things, dying things, decomposition and desuetude: he sniffs the historical wind and it smells of decay; he imagines long-forgotten sculptured ivy and stone flowers and sees disintegration with a sickly joy — all of it under the vast inescapable doom wheeled in for his conclusion:

While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

Will it fall on us? Devour us? Kill us with its monstrous gaze? Or is it just another pointless example of Poe’s Gothic fantasizing? Of course few poets except Poe have only one song to sing. Poor sick Poe. But I suppose it must be said in the editor’s favour that when on page 36 Mr Roberts comes to John Clare, he does wait a little before trying to make one’s day worse (with a contribution by Clare from the Northampton County Asylum).

Before that ordeal, however, we are allowed a thrush singing hymns to sunrise, warping the moss to form a nest, laying eggs like heath-bells gilt with dew. Or there’s First Sight of Spring with its hazel blooms in threads of crimson and the yet-to-arrive whitethorn leaves. Or the squirrel sputtering up the powdered oak:

With tail cocked o’er his head, and ears erect,
Startled to hear the woodman’s understroke;
And with the courage which his fears collect,
He hisses fierce half malice and half glee,
Leaping from branch to branch about the tree,
In winter’s foliage, moss and lichens, deckt.

That reminds me — I must find out some time the right way to pronounce “lichens”. Like, or litch? Still a bit vague about that. Anyway, with Clare’s poem there’s none of that skull beneath the skin business where breastless creatures lean backward with lipless grins, or the rest of Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service about death by water or the sprouting of the corpse that was planted last year in the garden or dead men’s bones in the rat’s alley or white leopards that have fed to satiety on legs and liver and that which had been contained in the hollow round of my skull.

Poor sick poets. Plato knew a thing or two. Too self-regarding. Too many words and not enough Dinge an sich. Anyway I’ve done with reading. Done with poets. Today I was walking over a headland where swifts swoop and a small downy-breasted hawk hung in the wind’s updraft. Saw a whale steaming along too.

Bruce Parry and Friend, Bhutan

Of course in 1922 the film-maker didn’t have an anthropologist along with him in Hudson Bay, and that may have influenced things. To begin with, anthropologists are mostly serious chaps who have been to college, whereas tribal people are tough chaps who have not — and to speak plainly, the serious chaps and the tough chaps have little in common. Robert Flaherty himself was a robust and hearty prospector who had spent some years looking for iron ore. One of the tough. He was fully accepted by the Inuit, whom he admired for their indestructible good humour, while the Inuit in turn took to Flaherty as someone able to handle Arctic hardships smilingly day after day.

Most anthropologists are rather different. As romantics (and anthropology is the home of academic romanticism) they incline to a tragically moralistic view of life the opposite of their hosts. Hunters learn to expect misfortune and bad days, but whatever happens you have to get on with it. A moping hunter who sat around complaining that life wasn’t fair would be dead in a week.

Again, where Flaherty was fully accepted as an equal long before shooting his film, your average anthropologist yearns for a social acceptance that is always uncertain, and even after years of fieldwork may never arrive. A creature of the seminar room whose mentality has been formed by the ambiguous pleasures of university life, his own tribe is incurably academic. Abroad, he tiptoes through the forests of alien cultures fearful of solecism and hardly daring to laugh at all.

There are other problems too. The academic outlook in Brian Moser’s distinguished Disappearing World series in the 1970s was both pedagogic and high-minded, and high-mindedness comes at a price. Tribal humour was never intended for classroom use. Granada’s editorial guidelines ensured that in one place after another, all over the world, an entire comic universe of ribaldry and sexual taunting and obscene hilarity was hardly glimpsed.

A ceremony I myself filmed in Central Australia at around the same time featured a much-loved priapic hero, Wadaingula. During his dance he carried a phallic emblem six feet long, with other dimensions to match, and after white feathers had been stuck onto it with human blood it was menacingly waved about. Bush flies in Central Australia are not just a nuisance, they’re a curse, and imaginary flies that landed on the sacred emblem were indignantly brushed off by the dancer, while the audience howled with delight. But in Canberra the whole event was considered unfortunate: the film was solemnly locked away and has not been seen since.

Multiculturalism reinforced this bowdlerising. It ensured that a proper respect was shown during editing and that disagreeable customs were either unmentioned, euphemised, or cut. Cannibalism was certainly unmentionable. Whipping rituals designed to harden women and children against pain were likely to be suppressed. And in one Disappearing World production clitorodectomy among the Masai was actually compared to “a white wedding”.

In such an atmosphere humour suffocates and laughter dies. And that’s why the recent BBC series Tribe is so refreshing. Everywhere indigenes are seen joking, teasing, and generally enjoying themselves. The rationale for the show was that Bruce Parry, a self-described “explorer” and “expedition leader”, should step out of his aircraft and walk straight into the homes of Siberian reindeer herders or Papuan forest hunters, eating raw liver, drinking blood from the communal calabash, and living “as one of the tribe”. But how on earth can you live as one of a tribe whose language you don’t speak, whose most ordinary routines are unfamiliar, and whose food — from rats’ intestines to sago grubs — you find disgusting? Yet in a roundabout and unintended way it works, triumphantly restoring laughter to men and women we have rarely seen laughing before.

This is not because our explorer cuts an impressive figure — quite the reverse. It works because he’s an unimpressive figure, the butt of children’s jokes, who should at times be wearing a jester’s cap and bells. In Outer Mongolia he’s keen to ride, but after losing his saddle bag he manages to lose his horse. In Ethiopia’s Omo Valley young Suri men joust ferociously, trying to disable each other with long pointed hardwood sticks. Parry plans to show his mettle. But the Suri King, used to hot-heads, foresees disaster and intervenes — though not before the tyro’s clumsy efforts bring gales of laughter from a delighted audience. Everywhere Parry is eager to join the hunt. Hunting is manly action and he wants in. But his presence hinders. He disturbs the quarry. He can’t keep up. So he’s often treated as a backward child and told to stay home with the women.

But this is all for the best. Among these women we meet some splendid characters and discover what the word “unflinching” truly means. In Ethiopia a smiling Suri girl is cicatrised on her breasts, and banters with Parry as her blood streams down (he himself, to much amusement, gaspingly suffers a single cut). Among the nearby Dassanech an elder named Abanesh forthrightly defends female genital mutilation, and shows why cultural change will always be slow. Abanesh does not persuade this viewer that FMG is acceptable, and she doesn’t convince Parry, but her warmth and wisdom are memorable.

Anthropologists are unimpressed. They say that Parry is academically unqualified, that he only speaks English, that his stays in the field are short, that he makes no reference to previous anthropological research. All of which is no doubt true.

But like others of his temperament Parry is game for anything. Just as Flaherty’s hosts admired his adventurous spirit, Parry’s hosts find this admirable too. Among the Hamar he leaps over a dozen cows stark naked, in New Guinea he runs barefoot along thorny trails, in South America he ingests narcotic potions that bring on delirium and have to be vomited up.

Only when he finds himself hit on at night by a male admirer in the romantic setting of a tree house, and has to firmly decline, does he feel that life as one of the tribe might have its limits. In his own brash way he is faithful to the father of participant observation, Malinowski himself. “It is good for the ethnographer”, wrote the author of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, “to put aside camera, notebook and pencil, and join in himself in what is going on… Though the degree of success varies, the attempt is possible for everyone.”

It would be absurd to regard Tribe as a substitute for Disappearing World. An ordinary viewer with a taste for realism however may reasonably regard the two as complementary. Struggling to down bowls of semi-coagulated gore for breakfast in Africa, or helpings of rat pudding in Assam, he provides a nice mixture of blood and laughter for millions — and more importantly, brief intervals of welcome entertainment for the tribal peoples themselves. Considering their trials and tribulations (and on this matter the series contains poignant material from both the Akie of Tanzania and from Sarawak’s pitifully besieged Penan) they deserve some compensation. But if Parry wants to go on like this he may need to be more careful what he eats.

The cow bawled all night long. Well, from 1.00am to be exact, and since the distance from her yard to my bedroom window was less than 50 meters I didn’t get much sleep. In between the vigorous tromboning of the cow you could hear the piccolo woe of a calf half a kilometre away. First the cow, then the calf, over and over.

With a pillow on your head you hoped each bellow from the cow would be the last, but as soon as the calf answered, their dialog began again: the distant cry of distress far off in the night; the cow’s reassuring “I’m here” closer at hand. Eventually, at dawn, farmhand Hugh got on a quad-bike and brought the calf in and the noise and misery stopped.

A spontaneous feeling for the misery of others—a feeling of sympathy and concern—was the foundation of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, and by 6.00am I’d spent five hours listening to its bovine equivalent. Of course ruminants are more inclined to chew the cud than ponder moral rules. But if sympathetic emotions underlie moral sentiments, and maternal attachment is the basic social bond, then here was audible proof of Smith’s “sympathy”.

Normally the calf would have come skipping back through the fields to its mother as soon as she called. But it was four months old, and growing adventurous, and had wriggled its way through a fence and got stuck on the far side.

I suppose if the cow had been a bad mother it would have just yawned and gone on chewing its cud. But it was obviously a good mother—if it hadn’t been a good mother the calf would never have survived. How sensible though is it to use moral language about animals? Driven by the need for its mother the calf sung out. Driven by the need for its calf the cow responded. They did what they did because cows and calves can’t do anything else, and some would describe their world is simply amoral. In contrast, we say that human mothers “ought” to look after their children because they enjoy the freedom to think, and reason, and act—responsibly or irresponsibly as the case may be.

Primates and Philosophers

How we got from being supposedly amoral animals to moral beings with rights, duties, and responsibilities, is the subject of Frans de Waal’s new book Primates and Philosophers, How Morality Evolved. It irks him to be told that human morality is special, superior, and quite different from the rest of the animal kingdom—a cultural “veneer” laid over irredeemable selfishness. In de Waal’s view men like Hobbes, T. H. Huxley and Freud presented morality as

A thin crust underneath which boil antisocial, amoral, and egoistic passions. This view of morality as a veneer was best summarized by Ghiselin’s famous quip: “Scratch an ‘altruist’, and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed.”

Hobbes’ vision of Pre-Contract Man as permanently at “Warre”, Huxley’s view of amoral nature red in tooth and claw, Freud’s image of the superego as a citadel of order dominating a violent and unruly human psyche—all of these portray animal nature and moral man as deeply and unalterably opposed. For Robert Wright, author of the award-winning 1994 book The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, man is at best a hypocrite cultivating a self-flattering moral illusion:

The pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence. We dress ourselves up in tony moral language, denying base motives and stressing our at least minimal consideration for the greater good; and we fiercely and self-righteously decry selfishness in others.

Wright’s disdainful view of the matter in this passage reminds me a little of an anthropology seminar I attended in 2007 where the speaker had the temerity to describe the moral principles of old-time Aboriginal society. The first member of the audience to respond could barely contain his exasperation. Morality! In grinding tones evidently haunted by an early and unsatisfactory encounter with the Irish Church, this senior academic made the very notion of any kind of morality—Aboriginal, western, or whatever—seem abhorrent. To speak of morality was not merely hypocritical; it was in some way evil itself.

The moral continuum

Frans de Waal, by contrast, “views morality as a direct outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other animals… Morality is neither unique to us nor a conscious decision taken at a specific point in time: it is the product of evolution.” Mankind along with many other mammals is anatomically, neurologically, and ethically continuous with the rest of creation—more evolved, but evolved from the same stuff. As for the primates, when we climbed up from the apes certain moral sentiments came with us, and these provided a foundation for social life. In arguing this case de Waal aligns himself firmly with Adam Smith, David Hume, and Charles Darwin.

Smith’s observations on animal behavior in his treatise are few, but at one point he remarks that resentment in animals prompts justifiable retaliation. (We might express this by adapting the French witticism as follows: “Cet animal n’est pas méchant, quand on l’attaque, il se défend.”) For his part Hume was consistently uniformitarian—we’re all animals together. Though our four-legged friends may not alas speak English, from external resemblances we deduce internal similarities: “When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both,” adding that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.”

As for Charles Darwin, de Waal strongly argues—in this agreeing with Ernst Mayr—that T. H. Huxley wholly misrepresented Darwin’s view of the evolution of morality and its relation to animal behavior. Darwin allowed for the development of both altruistic and sympathetic tendencies, explaining them by a form of group selection, and emphasized continuity with animals in the moral as well as the anatomical domain. He wrote in The Descent of Man (1871):

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

Edward Westermarck

But in de Waal’s view, even more important to understanding the role of sentiment in matters moral was the Swedish Finn Edward Westermarck (1862-1939), author of The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908) who provides an epigraph at the start of Chapter One:

We approve and we disapprove because we cannot do otherwise. Can we help feeling pain when the fire burns us? Can we help sympathizing with our friends?

Though Westermarck’s thoughts on the origins of the family are well-known in social anthropology, de Waal believes that he was under-appreciated during his lifetime, and this because his ideas “flew in the face of the Western dualistic tradition that pits body against mind and culture against instinct.” Emotion and sentiment had a central place in Westermarck’s ethical thinking, where he distinguished moral from non-moral emotions. Gratitude and resentment, for example, directly concern one’s own interests and how one wants to be treated, and in themselves are too egocentric to be more than a starting point in moral evolution.

The moral sentiments of the more evolved ethical systems of human society, in Westermarck’s words, “differ from kindred non-moral emotions by their disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavour of generality.” They embody Adam Smith’s idea of the “impartial spectator” who represents and endorses principles of fairness and justice that can be applied to all. One might say they aspire to the detached condition of universally applicable golden rules.

Nevertheless emotions of gratitude and resentment, prompted by deep intuitions of what is an appropriate reward for help or an appropriate retaliation for injury, are at the foundation of much moral psychology—as any reader of Adam Smith will quickly find. Whole chapters of The Theory of Moral Sentiments discuss resentment in various ways, and though he regards it as “the most odious, perhaps, of all the passions” (V.II.I) he considers that for anyone not to respond with justifiable anger to abuse and injury is a fault in itself. If God himself could be justifiably enraged, why shouldn’t Man?

We sometimes complain that a particular person shows too little spirit, and has too little sense of the injuries that have been done to him; and we are as ready to despise him for the defect, as to hate him for the excess of this passion.

The inspired writers would not surely have talked so frequently or so strongly of the wrath and anger of God, if they had regarded every degree of those passions as vicious and evil, even in so weak and imperfect a creature as man. (V.II.I)

Forgiveness, dogs, and Roger Scruton

In the December 14 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement Roger Scruton reviewed Forgiveness—A Philosophical Exploration by Charles Griswold. In the course of discussing resentment Scruton takes a stick to the evolutionary biologists who “are producing one phoney account (of human nature) after another, designed to show that human societies are constructed from the same ingredients as the tribes of apes”, a view he disapproves. Unlike dogs, he writes, man can forgive because he is a “free and accountable being.”

Dogs don’t forgive, because dogs don’t resent. Forgiveness is unique to rational beings, and is a gift of metaphysical freedom.

I admire Roger Scruton as a cultural sage but I wonder if he isn’t overstating the case? And while he knows all about metaphysics does he know about cats and dogs? Only this morning I aroused in our cat the strong expectation of being promptly fed—an expectation frustrated as I absent-mindedly made myself a cup of tea—and received a sharp nip on the heel. That is how he regularly reminds me of my duty.

Deepening my research into these matters over coffee at a Bondi latté bar, I asked a friend if dogs feel both anger and the lingering memory of injury resentment implies. He mentioned an amiable pooch of his acquaintance named Cosmo that was struck by a misdirected skateboard some months ago. The dog’s disposition had once been entirely sunny, but this changed his life. Cosmo has fiercely attacked skateboarders ever since.

Resentment is described in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “a strong feeling of ill-will or anger against the author or authors of a wrong or affront; the manifestation of such feeling against the cause of it.” It seems to me that corresponds pretty well to Cosmo’s feeling about skateboards, and de Waal’s discussion of similar matters reinforces this view. He writes that there are numerous stories regarding “delayed retaliation” in the zoo world, especially about apes and elephants, and goes on to relate Westermarck’s tale about a fourteen-year-old who viciously beat his camel whenever it loitered or turned the wrong way.

The camel passively took its punishment; but some days later “seized the unlucky boy’s head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground.”

Camels normally show remarkable forbearance: events of this kind are probably rare. It seems they are not rare however among chimpanzees, whose “revenge systems” for punishing those who inflict injury de Waal has written about elsewhere. Scruton’s dogmatic assertion about forgiveness is also a bit suspect. According to de Waal, Westermarck describes “turning the other cheek” as a universally appreciated gesture. Chimpanzees kiss and embrace after fights, says de Waal,

And these so-called reconciliations serve to preserve peace within the community. A growing literature exists on conflict resolution in primates and other mammals. Reconciliation may not be the same as forgiveness, but the two are obviously related.

David Hume and Adam Smith

Philosophers are over-inclined to take the meanings of words as a starting point, rather than reality itself, and it would be a mistake to get etymologically hung up on the mere words resentment and forgiveness. Neurologically, the reality is that the memory of injury persists somewhere in the brain as a disposition, an inclination to retaliate if and when opportunity offers. It may be just a niggle. It may be more. It may in the true paranoid become an all-consuming obsession.

Roger Scruton has a valid point about the uniquely detached ratiocination of the free intellect, but when David Hume tells us that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men”, he has a point too.

It is also worth bearing in mind that although moral reasoning of the more advanced kind may be the exclusive prerogative of homo sapiens, and of moral teachers from Christ to Kant who were able to put their thoughts into words, the neurological pattern of injury, anger, and retaliation (and reconciliation too) must long antedate any human reasoning about the matter.

The brains of many social animals would have been hardwired to act in this way defensively, instinctively, spontaneously, long before language was ever heard of—let alone the language of philosophers. The following passage, written in 1759, concentrates Adam Smith’s thoughts on instinct, the animal need for self-preservation, and the limited role of reason in the earliest formation of moral rules and behavior:

Self-preservation, and the propagation of the species, are the great ends which nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals. Mankind are endowed with a desire of those ends, and an aversion to the contrary; with a love of life, and a dread of dissolution; with a desire of the continuance and perpetuity of the species, and with an aversion to the thoughts of its entire extinction.

But though we are in this manner endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has not been entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason, to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts.

Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, V.II.I)

Words, words, words; speech, speech. George Steiner is the embodied speech act, a class act, a man, in his own phrase, “linguistically well-endowed”. Now, mindful of mortality, he has written seven books at one blow: exquisite little chapter-sized septuplets rather than just one big one.

Yet it appears he has always felt mortified by the proximity of original genius and would mortgage his intellectual kingdom for just one immortal line. Singular men endure such singular sufferings. His self-presentation emphasizes being bookish and Jewish, and therefore the perennial outsider.

Yet the CV he recites at length shows him haplessly condemned to wander from one élite university of the Western world to another, and bowed low with honours. He also lays proleptic claim to being an octogenarian, as though even Time’s winged chariot did not run fast enough for him.

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So many academic books are articles long drawn out, and a little library in short order, such as we have here, invites reflection on the nature of the academic exercise. One academic strategy is to mine intensively in a specialized field, say the music of Thomas Crecquillon or scattered tablets recording property relations in ancient Babylon, and acquire en route the necessary penumbra of linguistic, historical and technical skills.

George Steiner works in the reverse direction, though notionally focused on comparative literature and the interface of poetics and philosophy from Plato to Heidegger. He sprang fully armed into the world from a trilingual background, though the role of universal swordsman regularly incites other roving cavaliers to beat him over the head for insouciant sallies into their territory.

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Steiner is a kind of busy junction, a cortex or vortex of the academic mind. Book the Second, entitled “Invidia”, begins characteristically, “Not many today, I presume, read the words of Francesco degli Stabili, better known as Cerco D’Ascoli”. This particular Renaissance man was professor of astrology at Bologna, and in true Renaissance fashion dispensed and attracted poisonous envy.

Among other indiscretions, he may have gone so far as to cast Christ’s horoscope, so raising questions about God, freedom and determinism. He was also credited, or discredited, with having been lacerated by envy of Dante’s supremacy, and it is this theme of invidious comparison that Steiner might have treated at book length, had it not come “too near the bone”.

He is fascinated and horrified by the high-flyer incinerated by the intellectual sun. Of course, academics can always find satisfaction in “my station and its duties”, but George Steiner seeks out encounters where, as in mathematics or chess or artistic ability, one person decisively bests another.

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Some pages of his “book” on Zion are surprising in tone and content, given the acute treatments of religion in Steiner’s previous writing… There is so much dubious imputation here one is spoilt for choice, but I would have thought setting St Paul in the context of Jewish self-hatred not only anachronistic but flat contrary to the kind of authoritative analysis of Paul found in the work of E. P. Sanders.

But Steiner’s ex cathedra style, without notes, holds at bay any scrutiny of an evidential base, even if that were possible with this kind of speculation. I revert to my initial comment about Steiner as a junction of ideas, constantly stimulating connections and mapping terrain.

A junction of ideas is not the same as a coherent government of them, and such government as Steiner exercises often occludes the nature of the terrain, especially when it falls within the unglamorous remit of the social sciences.

Perhaps the angle of his lens is too wide for proper focus. The darting aperçu comes all too easily, as do psychologistic insinuations operating slyly in the middle ground between analysis and taking the very high moral ground.

The above extracts are from David Martin’s review of George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008. Martin’s own books include Does Christianity Cause War?, 1997.

‘It’s not like you’re playing a fiddle with the bow, son!’ said Moss, taking the scythe to show him how it should be done. That’s how he came to be known as the Bo’son.

One day the Harvester didn’t show up. It was a fine morning. The dew had dried from the ground by breakfast and the ears of barley were crackling in the heat. But the silver Claes combine stood idle in the middle of Higgs’s Field. The men replaced damaged sections on the blade. They climbed onto the platform and folded clean sacks for the chutes. They cut lengths of binder twine for tying the sacks when they were filled. The Bo’son had gone underneath the combine and was greasing the nipples.

It was mid-morning. The Harvester still hadn’t showed. The men patted the dogs and lazed about. The Bos’on was sitting up on the driver’s seat. Suddenly the machine started into life. The engine revved and belts and flywheels began to turn. The worm rotated. Then the combine set off bouncing across the stubble ground. But ‘Son steered it round to face the uncut field. He lowered the blade into the standing barley.

The machine rumbled and shuddered from end to end. It coughed diesel smoke into the air and chaff flew from its tail. ‘Don’t just stand there gawping!’ my father roared. The men scrambled to grab hold of the platform ladder, while the grain from the open chutes rained about their heads.

— Maurice Riordan, “The Idylls”, The Holy Land, Faber and Faber 2007 ]]> http://www.rogersandall.com/idyll-six/feed/ 0 http://www.rogersandall.com/a-message-from-aeschylus/ http://www.rogersandall.com/a-message-from-aeschylus/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:22:16 +0000 Roger Sandall http://www.rogersandall.com/?p=800 (originally at Unleashed, June 2008)

Zimbabwe is not a happy place. The killing never ends (it only pauses) and the prevailing ethic is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Morgan Tsvangirai looks like a man who has better ideas than Robert Mugabe. But because he’d rather live than die he abandoned a dangerous election that might have seen a general massacre of his followers.

As for an eye for an eye—in 1982 Mugabe, a Shona, warned his enemies of the Ndebele tribe (also known as Matabele):

Some of the measures we shall take are measures that will be extra-legal. An eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate in our circumstances. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye.

Following Ismail Kadare, we might call this an explicit blinding order. Or official permit. A recipe for ruin.

Civil war in Africa

Anyway Mugabe is adamant he’d rather have civil war than yield to parliament. In fact he rather likes war, and has boasted that he “has a degree in violence.” War, and nothing remotely resembling parliamentary compromise, has been his theme for years. In 2000 he said “the Movement for Democratic Change will never form the government of this country, never, ever, not in my lifetime or even after I die.”

At a party conference in December 2001 he declared “What we are now headed for is real war, a total war. We should move like a military machine,” adding a warning for Morgan Tsvangirai: “Death to the tea boy!”

Pessimists foresee a possible genocide by Mugabe’s mainly Shona supporters against Tsvangirai’s Ndebele-based Movement for Democratic Change (in earlier pogroms against the Ndebele during the 1980s some 10,000 to 20,000 are said to have died). And of course Zimbabwe is not alone. In other parts of the world too, intransigently hostile groups reject any mechanism for reconciling their differences, achieving unity, and moving on. An eye for an eye rules.

Why is this?

The Athenian breakthrough

2,500 years ago the Greek city states were continually at each other’s throats. Each behaved toward the others in a solidary way solely concerned with its own members and its own cause.

Then Athens made a breakthrough. A number of thinkers arose—poets, artists, and legislators—who looked at larger matters than tribal self-interest and asked questions about the general nature of justice and injustice, good and evil, war and peace.

Perhaps the most astonishing of them all was Aeschylus. A poet and dramatist who knew about war and killing at first hand, he fought against Darius and the Persians at Marathon in 490BC and against Xerxes’ assault on Athens in 480BC.

He’d seen the cruelty of man-to-man combat and felt the pain of watching his comrades die. A raging thirst for retributive vengeance would have been only natural. An eye for an eye. But that’s not what happened. Instead, in the year 458BC, he wrote a memorable trilogy dramatizing humanity’s need to bring cycles of bloodshed to an end.

Agamemnon and Troy

It took the form of allegory. And like most Greek dramas of the time its characters were drawn from myth and legend— especially Homer’s story of Agamemnon and the fall of Troy.

The background story was this. Before sailing across the Aegean to attack Troy, Agamemnon’s fleet had been held up for months by unfavourable winds. A god warned that only if Agamemnon made an offering and sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia would the weather improve and carry his ships across.

And lo! After cutting his daughter’s throat the wind picks up, he sails for Troy, spends ten years away—and returns (with new girlfriend Cassandra) to face his wife Clytemnestra. After a decade grieving for Iphigenia it was now Clytemnestra’s turn.

And it’s at this point in the story that Aeschylus begins a trilogy where against all likelihood the fateful alternating violence of a traditional feud leads finally to judicial process, to the hearing of evidence, to the authority of legal judgment, and to at least the beginnings of inter-tribal peace.

The trilogy

The first play, Agamemnon, shows Clytemnestra luring her long lost husband into the palace where she stabs him to death in his bath, gloating afterwards over the bloodstained sheets and windings.

For this act of vengeance she in turn must die, and in the second play, The Libation Bearers, her own son Orestes kills his mother for killing his father. Now the Furies pursue him, hounding him to his doom in Hades, and it seems that his own fate is sealed…

But it isn’t. Because in the third play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, Aeschylus brings in the goddess Pallas Athena to adjudicate. She fears that if this sort of thing goes on and on — exactly as it does today in Zimbabwe and elsewhere today — then the suffering will never cease.

She speaks of the frightening prospect of civil war. No-one wants that. Speaking as the goddess of wisdom Pallas Athena says enough is enough: at her court in Athens she will listen to rival arguments in what she calls “the first murder trial”, after which the aggrieved parties must abide by her decision. From that day on law and judicial process replaces vengeance. Juries replace Furies. It all ends with the pacification of the Furies themselves, who are turned from agents of the underworld into models of good citizenship… and Orestes lives.

From Draco to Cleisthenes

This poetic interpretation generalises a long evolutionary process by which Athenian law developed from the days of Draco (who was draconian), to the reforms of Solon (who was wise, and made a first attempt to deal with Athenian tribalism) to the reforms of Cleisthenes (who made a second attempt, and sought to establish equality before the law regardless of descent or heredity).

But the point is this: the Athenians saw an internal political problem that had to be fixed. And they proceeded to fix it constitutionally in ways that were a lesson for mankind. There had to be established procedures for reconciling sharply opposed interests within the state, and for preventing blood feuds getting out of control. Otherwise there’d be civil war and unending anarchy.

Why is it so hard to get this message accepted today in places like Zimbabwe? In Sri Lanka? In the Balkans? In the Middle East? If somebody still has her number, would they please call Pallas Athena again.

In the arts you’re led to pointillisme, and the way Seurat and others used discontinuous dots to represent continuous planes and forms and colors. Within philosophy, there’s a connection with coordinate representation as it appears in Descartes: descriptions of matter reduce down and down through an infinity of locational points.

Neurobiology and the physiology of the eye throw up odd things about dots and spaces we see illustrated by the optical illusions circulating on the Web. And eventually one comes face to face with the grain of the universe: all things smooth and homogeneous are found on closer examination to be grainy and heterogeneous, right on down to subatomic levels.

Anyway, I recently discovered that what I’d written about constructing images from tesserae—the miniature tiles, pebbles, fragments of limestone and colored glass along with the gold leaf used as background in Byzantine mosaics—was the merest trifle alongside Ruskin’s description of the ceiling of St Mark’s in Venice.

He begins by providing the environmental and botanical background to a mosaic on one of the church’s cupolas. There we find the apostles on the Mount of Olives, each of them separated by an olive tree. The olive tree, Ruskin writes, is one of the most characteristic and beautiful features of all Southern scenery:

On the slopes of the northern Apennines, olives are the usual forest timber; the whole of the Val d’Arno is wooded with them, every one of its gardens is filled with them, every one of its gardens is filled with them, and they grow in orchard-like ranks out of its fields of maize, or corn, or vine; so that it is physically impossible, in most parts of the neighborhood of Florence, Pistoja, Lucca, or Pisa, to choose any site of landscape which shall not owe its leading character to the foliage of these trees.

The question he wants to examine is how an artist, working in mosaic (and high above the observer in the church), is to represent this foliage. There are problems of scale and color and form for the artist, and of available light for the viewer. The olive tree—

Has sharp and slender leaves of a greyish green, nearly grey on the under surface, and resembling, but somewhat smaller than, those of our common willow.

Its fruit, when ripe, is black and lustrous; but of course so small, that, unless in great quantity, it is not conspicuous upon the tree.

Its trunk and branches are peculiarly fantastic in their twisting, showing their fibres at every turn; and the trunk is often hollow, and even rent into many divisions like separate stems, but the extremities are exquisitely graceful, especially in the setting on of the leaves; and the notable and characteristic effect of the tree in the distance is of a rounded and soft mass or ball of downy foliage.

This botanical description brings us directly to the 11th century artist’s task: how to manage all this in the cupolas of St Mark’s. Ruskin notes that the old Byzantine mosaicist began his work with an enormous disadvantage. The artwork was

to be some one hundred and fifty feet above the eye, in a dark cupola; executed not with free touches of the pencil, but with square pieces of glass; not by his own hand but by various workmen under his superintendence; finally, not with a principal purpose of drawing olive-trees, but mainly as a decoration of the cupola.

There is to be an olive-tree beside each apostle, and their stems are to be the chief lines which divide the dome. He therefore at once gives up the irregular twisting of their boughs hither and thither, but he will not give up their fibres. Other trees have irregular and fantastic branches, but the knitted cordage of fibres is the olive’s own.

Again, were he to draw the leaves of their natural size, they would be so small that their forms would be invisible in the darkness; and were he to draw them so large as that their shape might be seen, they would look like laurel instead of olive…

Lastly, comes the question respecting the fruit. The whole power and honour of the olive is in its fruit; and, unless that be represented, nothing is represented. But if the berries were coloured black or green, they would be totally invisible; if of any other colour, utterly unnatural, and violence would be done to the whole conception.

There is but one conceivable means of showing them, namely, to represent them as golden. For the idea of golden fruit of various kinds was already familiar to the mind, as in the apples of the Hesperides, without any violence to the distinctive conception of the fruit itself. So the mosaicist introduced small round golden berries into the dark ground between each leaf, and his work was done.

I once had a room close by St Mark’s. It was winter and it rained. Water cascading from roofs fell splashing onto the pavings below, blending at night with the cries and singing of people returning from evenings out, and their quickly echoing steps, and the hourly striking of a bell. But to my shame I recall little of the basilica. Apparently I’m not alone. Ruskin comments on “careless travellers” who pass by unheeding and oblivious. I guess I was one of them. Don’t even remember Noah’s ark and the ducks.

In fact Le Guillerm’s whole impression is medieval. The acoustic lions roaring in his tent at the outset suggest the circus; but the shoes and their crashing rhythm and the darkness of the stage and the mad intensity of the man himself—jongleur, sword swallower, prestigidator, constructor, athlete, acrobat, escape artist, (whose repertoire of vocal utterances includes only a reptilian hissing “kaaaaaaaaa” from the back of the throat) more strongly suggest a deranged dungeon-keeper in Transylvania. A bullwhip with a hook on the handle helped.

There was derangement in the eyes. They shone with obsession. “Stand back,” they said, “inside this apparently innocuous canvas tent life is not what it seems.” The punk torture-chamber look of chainmail and bondage was vaguely Bashtchelik, a creature from a Serbian folk tale. In the story, Bashtchelik is confined like Prometheus, and once released will do dreadful things… “a man bound by all the bonds of the universe, his legs encircled with rusted bands of iron, his hips and loins bound with lead, with a copper girdle at his breast and a silver band enthralling his tongue and hands.” (The image at left shows Bashtchelik as imagined by Edmund Dulac.)

But to the matter of meter. Or sound in the ear. In the opening scenes Le Guillerm’s steel shoes had a distinctive thunderous rhythm. It was not an accidental effect. But were the deliberate striding crashes about the wooden stage iambic trimeters, anapaests, or what? If anapaests then there should have been two milder thumping footsteps followed by a crash; if iambic a single softer footfall and then the sound of the whole metal shoe uncoiling down to the lash of steel on the floor. Heavy cracks of the whip added menace. Once heard—never forgotten. His whip differed from the usual lion tamer’s weapon where the agon is between man and beast. Here the agon was between man and audience. The whip was meant for us. Lissen up, it said, and we did.

In Sydney recently for the 2008 Sydney Festival, Le Guillerm’s remarkable one-man circus show called “Secret” is an ensemble of astonishing pieces, and how they’re done is certainly mysterious—from the punctuative crashing of his opening act, to the gravely measured drama of the balancing books, to the spellbinding ingenuity of a massive plank and rope spiral tower at the end, this last being something that would impress Buckminster Fuller: “tensegrity” is partly what it’s about. As theatre, Le Guillerm’s performance travels intellectually from the physical to the mental; from the sensationally ominous to the cerebral muscularity of the close. Not to be overlooked is the music of Mathieu Werchowski and Guy Ajaguin. It’s as sharply original as everything else, and deepens the mad-punk-medieval mystery. Go. Catch Le Guillerm wherever he is. Even in Transylvania.

Then Handel’s Keyboard Suites, not excepting the exercises he wrote for one of George II’s daughters, Princess Louisa. The princess was lucky to have Handel as her music master, and anyone stuck bumper to bumper will be grateful for the calmly executed fingerwork of Sviatoslav Richter as he makes his way through Handel’s “Keyboard Suite for Princess Louisa in G Minor, HWV 452, No. 1.” Or numbers 2 or 3 for that matter. And if you tire of these try the minuet in Keyboard Suite #3 in D Minor, HWV 436.

In a historical sleeve note Robin Golding writes that much of Handel’s keyboard music was written for domestic use. A friend who lived near Handel in London named Mrs Delany (Mary Granville, later Pendarves) sent a letter to her sister describing a musical evening at her house in 1734 [orthography and emphasis in original]:

I must tell you of a little entertainment of music I had last week… Lord Shaftesbury begged of Mr Percival to bring Mr Coot, and being a profess’d friend of Mr Handel (who was also here) was admitted; I never was so well entertained at an opera!

Mr Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada [one of the favourite singers at the opera] and all the ladies that sang from seven o’the clock till eleven.

I gave them tea and coffee, and about half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled wine and biscuits. Everybody was pleased and seemed pleased, Bunny [her brother] staid with me after the company was gone, eat a cold chick with me, and we chatted till one o’the clock.

Robin Golding adds that Handel enjoyed such society and would probably have played some of his keyboard suites, or “lessons” as they were called. Some of these had in fact been written as teaching material:

Handel never had many pupils in London but he taught the three princesses Anne, Caroline and Louisa, daughters of George II, and they were all three devoted to their master. He was paid 200 pounds a year for his labours, as well as receiving a pension from the King making the sum up to 600 pounds.

On a manuscript copy, in the Royal Music Library, of the first two suites from the Third Collection of Lessons, Handel wrote: “Lessons for Princess Louisa”. She was fifteen in 1739 when Handel is thought to have written the pieces and, to judge by the music, she must have been quite a capable player for her age.