Dirda returns

There are a couple of books I am eagerly anticipating, although publication dates are uncertain. One is Alan Jacobs' biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. His Narnian, about C.S. Lewis, is my favorite book on CSL. The other is Michael Dirda's "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain." Dirda's "semi-retirement" was my biggest regret about subscribing to the Washington Post. Today, he returned as a guest columnist. He has been reading a lot, avoiding politics, and working on that book.

In it, I reintroduce many influential, if now too seldom read, classics of adventure, mystery, horror and romance. Some of my favorites include the three ornately written mysteries in M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, Richard Marsh’s astonishingly transgressive horror novel, The Beetle, J.M. Barrie’s multiverse play, Dear Brutus, and a shelf of swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, as well as E.F. Benson’s “spook stories” and Saki’s sardonic Beasts and Super Beasts. There are also long essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood, among others.

I'm particularly interested in what Dirda says about the authors referenced in the last sentence above.

Michael Dirda, "Disillusioned by politics, I read these books to get out of my slump," The Washington Post, May 9, 2025

“The age of the storytellers.”

Dirda again, this from a 2012 essay titled "Armchair Adventures":

Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read? A season’s blockbuster will come out—whether Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Stephen King’s 11/22/63—and the world will hurry off to the bookstores. More often than not, though, I dawdle, maybe stop for a coffee on the way. Sometimes I never get round to the book at all. ....

...I taught a course at the University of Maryland entitled “The Classic Adventure Novel: 1885-1915,” covering 10 books. Given those dates, you can probably guess half the titles on the reading list: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet; G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; A. Conan Doyle, The Lost World; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; and John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

If one were to characterize all these disparate works, one might settle for the phrase “comfort books.” Other descriptive clichés come to mind: ripping yarns, action-packed swashbucklers, escapist fantasies, boys’ books. All accurate designations, but I will make the case that such stories are as important to our imaginations as the more canonical classics.

To my delight, the class proved immensely popular. Students said that it reminded them of why they had majored in English: not because they could hardly wait to read the latest in literary theory, but because they loved stories. ....

This spring...I’m back discussing “The Modern Adventure Novel: 1917-1973.” Our reading list picks up where the previous one left off and includes: Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars; Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood; Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades; Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest; H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness; Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios; Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination; Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers; Charles Portis, True Grit; and William Goldman, The Princess Bride. ....

I could easily have doubled the number of books in both classes. And I still kick myself for forgetting about Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock. ....

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers. At a dramatic moment in Sabatini’s piratical masterpiece, the evil buccaneer Levasseur snarls: “You do not take her while I live!” To which Captain Blood coolly replies, as his blade flashes in the sunlight: “Then I’ll take her when you’re dead.” Writing—or reading, for that matter—doesn’t get any better than that.

Michael Dirda, "Armchair Adventures," The American Scholar," Feb 24, 2012.

"There is always something"

Michael Dirda, one of my favorite book reviewers, has returned after a lengthy "spring break" during which he was not exactly relaxing. Something he wrote yesterday is related to the recent debates about "updating" books:

.... Back around 2016, I signed a contract for an appreciation of popular fiction in Britain during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries — and badly miscalculated how much time the project would take. Moreover, writing the book grew unexpectedly tricky because several of the authors occasionally employed language or displayed attitudes that were, shall we say, of their period. Nonetheless, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit, H.G. Wells, Baroness Orczy, G.K. Chesterton, John Buchan, Rafael Sabatini and even Sax Rohmer, among a score of others, were — and are — thrilling storytellers, as well as the founders of our modern genre literatures. That’s why they deserve rediscovery and nuanced appreciation, despite their faults. Besides, if you live awhile and read a lot of history and literature, you come to recognize a harsh truth memorably enunciated in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. When Willie Stark wants to dig up dirt on a famously upright judge, he tells an incredulous Jack Burden: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

Michael Dirda, "Vacation’s all I ever wanted. But books were all the escape I needed," The Washington Post, April 19, 2023.

"We need all the escapism we can get"

Michael Dirda on "Why read old books?":

When I was young, I didn’t yearn to be rich, successful or famous but instead desperately wanted to feel at least halfway educated. To me, that meant gaining familiarity with history, art, music, languages, other cultures and the world’s literature. The foundations of learning, I quickly realized, were nearly all located in the past. Time had done its winnowing, and what remained were the works and ideas that shaped human civilization. ....

The great books are great because they speak to us, generation after generation. They are things of beauty, joys forever — most of the time. Of course, some old books will make you angry at the prejudices they take for granted and occasionally endorse. No matter. Read them anyway. Recognizing bigotry and racism doesn’t mean you condone them. What matters is acquiring knowledge, broadening mental horizons, viewing the world through eyes other than your own. ....

For several years now, I’ve been exploring popular fiction published in Britain between 1880 and 1930. I started doing this because of my fondness for Arthur Conan Doyle’s books and my subsequent discovery that the creator of Sherlock Holmes flourished in an age of wonderfully entertaining novels and stories. Imagine how poor our imaginative lives would be without Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, H. Rider Haggard’s She and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, without Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, without John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste. ....

Today, most of these works are in the public domain and readily available from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive or in cheap reprints. I discovered many of them simply by asking friends about what books they loved. That’s how I learned about Georgette Heyer’s historical romances. Titles I didn’t already recognize I looked for online or when I visited a bookshop. For the various genres I’m interested in, such as the ghost story and the detective novel, I long ago bought standard critical histories, then studied them closely, especially their bibliographies. .... Anthologies are also immensely useful: For instance, Dorothy L. Sayer’s 1929 Omnibus of Crime and its two sequels are packed with stunning but often little-known mini-classics of horror and detection. Obviously, too, if you like one story by an author, you’ll probably enjoy others. ....

...[T]he books of the past, besides adding to our understanding, offer something we also need: repose, refreshment and renewal. They help us keep going through dark times, they lift our spirits, they comfort us. Which means that I also strongly agree with the poet John Ashbery, who once wrote, “I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.” ....

Michael Dirda, "Why read old books?," The Washington Post, Nov. 17, 2022.

"You’ll be a Man, my son!"

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...
Kipling, "If"

David French:

.... Ever since I’ve been alive, our culture has been in a conversation about male emotions. My entire adult life there have been voices urging men to “open up,” to be more emotional—to avoid the “toxic” male trait of emotional restraint. ....

In moments of crisis or trouble, do you look to the people who are losing their minds? Or do you find yourself immediately gravitating to those who remain calm? ....

In the furious battle over masculinity, both sides have won in the worst way. The emotionalists have triumphed, but so have the aggressors. In other words, all too many modern men have indulged both their aggression and their emotion, and the result is our modern discourse, a discourse plagued by hysteria, threats, and malice.

This is the cardinal characteristic of much of the culture of the new right. It is considered a sign of strength to be constantly turning the volume to 11, constantly forecasting doom, and constantly chasing the latest fads to “fight back.” ....

But don’t for a moment think aggressive emotional hysteria is confined to the men of the new right. It’s a standard form of discourse in deep woke America. The only real distinction is that it’s not defended as distinctly masculine, but it’s present nonetheless. ....

And when we survey the American political and cultural landscape—a landscape that is awash with male emotion and male aggression—perhaps it’s time to rediscover a dash of male stoicism. Keep your head, strive for the proportionate response, and don’t let anyone blame you for refusing to lose your calm. .... (more)

David French, "Stoics Needed: Can’t we repress our emotions just a tiny bit?" The Dispatch, April 26, 2022.

Good reads

Ben Shapiro argues "that if you want boys to read, you have to give them material that excites them, that fascinates them, that rivets them" and offers "11 Books Every Boy Should Read" (girls, too, I should think). Shapiro gives reasons for the choices at the site, but you may have to subscribe to read them.

The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas

Shane, by Jack Schaeffer

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne

The Man Who Would Be King, by Rudyard Kipling

Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien

The Chronicles of Narnia, by CS Lewis

The Once and Future King, by TH White

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

I am somewhat envious of those who read books like these for the first time.

Ben Shapiro, "11 Books Every Boy Should Read," The Daily Wire

When there is no hope

I think I'll order this book. Sounds like a good read. A couple of the reviews quoted at Amazon:

“An unrelenting and rousing account of one of humanity’s most laudable wartime phenomena, and a book that hurls a gauntlet at the feet of a contemporary culture which, despite our living in a world that is still violently challenging, fails to find nobility in self-sacrifice. It engages in the very best sense: every reader will find something to agree with and something to argue against in these pages―but isn’t that the true meaning of 'provocative?' Walsh wanders through his comprehensive roster of quixotic military adventures with youthful enthusiasm, lyrical style, and academic ease; and Last Stands is a promise to heroism fulfilled.”
―Caleb Carr, New York Times bestselling author of The Alienist and Surrender, New York

"Last Stands is a thoroughly original study of doomed or trapped soldiers often fighting to the last man, from Thermopylae to the Korean War. But Michael Walsh’s book is more than a military history of heroic resistance. It is also a philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed. A much needed essay on why rare men would prefer death to dishonor, and would perish in the hope that others thereby might live."
―Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars

"In Last Stands, Michael Walsh examines ferocious truths―about war and human nature, about men in battle, about courage in the face of hopelessness, about honor, duty, sacrifice, and the profound respect that masculinity may command. Last Stands, a work of scholarship and fine storytelling, is a grimly riveting study of the realities of Horace's Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
―Lance Morrow

Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost

Cigars

Sat outside under shelter this afternoon. Rain, straight down, warm, April showers, (in May), global warming, I guess, except a month later. Smoked a very good cigar. I first smoked cigars in graduate school in Virginia (1969-1970), cigarillos with plastic tips, I think.  A friend, now a pastor, later introduced me to Jamaican cigars — a considerable upgrade. Later, in the UK I purchased a packet of Cubans legally. They were unavailable here because of the boycott JFK imposed on Cuba (but only after he arranged to buy lot for himself). I enjoy them. A friend, who did, too, and whose wife didn't object, can't smoke anymore because of precarious health, and has stopped. Another friend, also stopped because they no longer gave him pleasure. Life can be unfair. I was reminded of this Kipling poem from 1922:

OPEN the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout, For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out. We quarreled about Havanas—we fought o’er a good cheroot, And I know she is exacting, and she says I am a brute. Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a space; In the soft blue veil of the vapour musing on Maggie’s face. Maggie is pretty to look at—Maggie’s a loving lass, But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass. There’s peace in a Laranaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay; But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away— Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown— But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o’ the talk o’ the town! Maggie, my wife at fifty—grey and dour and old— With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold! And the light of Days that have Been the dark of the Days that Are,   And Love’s torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar— The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket— With never a new one to light tho’ it’s charred and black to the socket! Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a while. Here is a mild Manilla—there is a wifely smile Which is the better portion—bondage bought with a ring, Or a harem of dusky beauties fifty tied in a string? Counselors cunning and silent—comforters true and tried,  And never a one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride? Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes, Peace in the hush of the twilight, balm ere my eyelids close,

This will the fifty give me. When they are spent and dead, Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead. The furrows of far-off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main, When they hear my harem is empty will send me my brides again. I will take no heed to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal, So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall. I will scent ’em with best vanilla, with tea will I temper their hides, And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides. For Maggie has written a letter to give me my choice between The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o’ Teen. And I have been servant of Love for barely a twelvemonth clear, But I have been Priest of Cabanas a matter of seven year; And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light Of stumps that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight. And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove, But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o’-the-Wisp of Love. Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire? Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire? Open the old cigar-box—let me consider anew— Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you? A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke; And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke. Light me another Cuba—I hold to my first-sworn vows. If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for Spouse!

That's not me. If I had married I would have given up the habit if it would have pleased her (whoever would have had me), but in my bachelor existence cigars have given a lot of pleasure.

"As surely as Water will wet us..."

On the anniversary of Kipling's birth, re-posted:

I have several collections of Kipling's poems including A Choice of Kipling's Verse selected and edited by T.S. Eliot in 1941. Toward the back of the book Eliot includes two that I particularly liked for the lessons they deliver.

DANE-GELD
(AD. 980-1016)

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation To call upon a neighbour and to say:— 'We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight, Unless you pay us cash to go away.'
And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:— 'Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away.'
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say:—
'We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!'

And the penultimate poem in the book:

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS 1919
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place; But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch. They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings. So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'Stick to the Devil you know.'
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'The Wages of Sin is Death.'
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work you die.'
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew, And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four— And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
*    *    *
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man— There are only four things certain since Social Progress began That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

A Choice of Kipling's Verse Made By T.S. Eliot with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling, Faber & Faber, 1941.

Kipling, again

The first selection in "Five Best: H.S. Cross on Novels About Boarding School" is a Kipling I haven't read:

Stalky & Co.
By Rudyard Kipling (1899)

Each chapter of “Stalky & Co.” narrates a discrete episode in the adventures of Stalky, McTurk and Beetle. The three friends attend “the ‘Coll,’ ” a fictionalized version of Rudyard Kipling’s own boarding school, and have no use for school spirit, prefects, athletics or any ideals the school story was designed to promote. Instead the trio values cleverness, humor, poetic justice and loyalty. No one understands irony quite like Kipling, and mixed with young Stalky’s meticulous revenge schemes, the tone is hard to resist. When a master kicks the three out of their study, Stalky engineers the destruction of the master’s study: He shoots rocks at a drunk school servant, who imagines he is being harassed by the master himself; the servant retaliates, hurling rocks into the study and causing the master to use “strange words, every one of which Beetle treasured.” The Victorian-school story never recovered from its savaging by Kipling’s pen, and no later work has approached it in humor, descriptive beauty and unsentimental characterizations.

Stalky & Co. at Gutenberg.

Five Best: H.S. Cross on Novels About Boarding School - WSJ

The brave new world

The final verses of Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919):

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Poems - 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings'

Time travel

Kevin Williamson's post at NRO led me to an interesting essay at The New York Times. Williamson introduces it:

Brian Morton, who is the director of the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Starting Out in the Evening, has a useful essay in the New York Times. In it, he considers the problem of young people who refuse to read or engage with great works of literature because they morally disapprove of the authors. .... (more)

From Brian Morton, "Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!":

.... When they discover the anti-Semitism of Wharton or Dostoyevsky, the racism of Walt Whitman or Joseph Conrad, the sexism of Ernest Hemingway or Richard Wright, the class snobbery of E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, not all of them express their repugnance as dramatically as the student I talked to, but many perform an equivalent exercise, dumping the offending books into a trash basket in their imaginations. ....

.... It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.

As the student had put it, I don’t want anyone like that in my house.

I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around. ....

When we imagine that writers from the past are visiting our world, it subtly reinforces our complacence, our tendency to believe that the efforts at moral improvement made by earlier generations attained their climax, their fulfillment, their perfection, in us. The idea that we are the ones who are doing the time-traveling doesn’t carry the same implication.

If, whenever we open old books, we understand from the get-go that their authors have motes in their eyes regarding important ethical or political questions, it might help us understand that the same thing could be said of us today. ....

Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite! - The New York Times

Spies

Today CrimeReads provides "A Brief History of Spy Fiction." The essay is actually the introduction to The Folio Society's new edition of The Spy’s Bedside Book (1959) edited by Graham Greene and his brother Hugh. The introduction is by Stella Rimington, former Director General of MI5.

.... What really is a spy story? Is John Buchan’s Greenmantle, which supplies the anthology’s first tale, truly a spy story or is it merely a ripping good yarn, a pure adventure story about a gang of Scottish, South African and American swashbucklers who persuade themselves, and us, they are English patriots, prior to sloshing a beastly Prussian called Von Stumm and stealing his motor car? Aren’t the coded messages, the hidden journeys, the secret rendezvous and all the stuff about the jihad and the fire sweeping from the East to combust the dry leaves of European civilisation, merely what spies call “chickenfeed,” information intended to attract and puzzle the recipient? In fact, like Kipling’s Kim before it and so many spy stories after it, it was based in reality and has, as T.E. Lawrence observed, “more than a flavour of truth.” ....

.... Nothing, save only the Cold War, ever gave the genre such a boost as did, successively, Russian covetousness for India, and Kaiser William’s designs on England. The two most influential of all spy stories were published at the beginning of the twentieth century, and both were British—Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), and The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Erskine Childers’ story about preparations for a clandestine German invasion across the North Sea. Selling, reportedly, over three million copies, The Riddle of the Sands not only influenced public attitudes but also demonstrated the profitability of the new genre. The only comparable masterpiece of spy fiction before the Cold War and le Carré is Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), inspired by an older world of international conspiracy and terrorism, springing from anarchist and revolutionary movements. If you put together the twentieth-century forces of national rivalry and the nineteenth-century forces of revolutionary conspiracy, you have most of the springs of the “classical” spy story (and arguably of the modern profession of intelligence). .... (more)

A Brief History of Spy Fiction | CrimeReads

"Real evil still haunts the world..."

The importance of reading history is an emphasis of several posts I've come across today. A film reviewer suggests that many of those viewing Dunkirk probably had no idea it was about an actual event. Myron Magnet at age nineteen learned for the first time about the Holocaust — "I never dreamed it possible, and learning that it had actually happened, in my own lifetime and to my own kinsmen, turned my worldview upside-down." In "See No Evil?" he worries:

Why am I telling you all this? Because I fear that, except for a few of us remaining graybeards and some immigrants from the world’s manifold tyrannies and anarchies, most Americans are too young to remember, even vicariously, the ills that the world can inflict and the effort it takes to withstand and restrain them. They have studied no history, so not only can they not distinguish Napoleon from Hitler, but also they have no conception of how many ills mankind has suffered or inflicted on itself and how heroic has been the effort of the great, the wise, and the good over the centuries to advance the world’s enlightenment and civilization—efforts that the young have learned to scorn as the self-interested machinations of dead white men to maintain their dominance. While young people are examining their belly buttons for micro-aggressions, real evil still haunts the world, still inheres in human nature; and those who don’t know this are at risk of being ambushed and crushed by it.

Slogans, placards, and chants won’t stop it: the world is not a campus, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler, the Israelis are not Nazis. Moreover, it is disgracefully, cloyingly naive to think—as the professor hurt in the melee to keep Charles Murray from addressing a Middlebury College audience recently put it in the New York Times—that “All violence is a breakdown of communication.” An hour’s talk over a nice cup of tea would not have kept Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine, or persuaded an Islamist terrorist not to explode his bomb. Misunderstanding does not cause murder, and reasoned conversation does not penetrate the heart of darkness.

Much as I revere Yeats, I do not share his theory that history is cyclical, with civilizations rising and decaying, until something new arises from the ashes. Perhaps it’s the ember of mid-century optimism still alive in me, but I can’t believe that “All things fall and are built again.” I don’t want to believe, with Conrad in his darkest moods, that “we live in the flicker,” that moments of enlightenment shine but briefly between the eras of ignorance and barbarism.

But who can deny that there are some truths that history has taught—the Copybook Headings, Rudyard Kipling calls them—that we ignore at our peril? Has not history’s recurring tale been, as Kipling cautions, that “a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome?” So beware of UN-style promises of perpetual peace through disarmament, which you’ll find will have “sold us and delivered us bound to our foe.” Beware of a sexual freedom that will end when “our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith.” Don’t believe that you can achieve “abundance for all,/ By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,” because the eternal truth is, “If you don’t work you die.” And the truth that history teaches is that when

the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Man is a believing animal. We live by some of those beliefs, made plausible by the labors of the good and the great to embody them, and of the wise to explain how they have created a freer, more prosperous, more just, and more fulfilling life for mankind. But other beliefs, the stock-in-trade of the world’s deluded or power-hungry demagogues and charlatans, will kill us. Our nation’s fate depends on relearning the difference. [more]

See No Evil? | City Journal

"Known but unto God"

The Atlantic has a "series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature." In the most recent entry Scott Spencer writes about a Kipling short story, "The Gardner." (The complete short story can be found here.) Spencer:

.... Helen, an upstanding woman, [raises] her own child out of wedlock, pretending to her English village that he, Michael, is her dead brother’s son. Throughout his life, the boy calls Helen “Auntie,” though he pleads with her, out of love and a sense of emotional, if not actual, truth, to let him call her “Mother.” Being an honest and pragmatic woman, she allows this only occasionally, and in private.

On his 18th birthday, Michael enlists in the British Army, and is slaughtered shortly after, his body covered over by debris and unable to be located. Much, much later Michael’s body is discovered and finally Helen is able to travel to his grave in a military cemetery in France to pay her last respects. The story, which is not very long, moves with the efficiency of a fable—years go by in a half sentence. The tone is almost matter-of-fact, but we are being set up by a master craftsman for the story’s devastating climactic scene. Helen wanders through a vast expanse of graves, all of them marked with a number, not a name, each individual soldier located only through a painstaking process of record-keeping. (It was Kipling who lifted the phrase “known unto God,” out of the Bible and into the cemeteries and the monuments for unknown soldiers.) Then, while searching the endless sea of crosses, helpless, Helen comes upon a gardener. Kipling describes the exchange this way:

[The gardener] rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: "Who are you looking for?"

"Lieutenant Michael Turrell—my nephew,” said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.

The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses.

"Come with me,” he said, "and I will show you where your son lies."

That’s a shocking—I would say incandescent—moment in a story that is steeped in irony and filled with lies, a world of conventions ruthlessly enforced and feelings buried or swallowed. But when the gardener lifts his eyes the story is swiftly brought to a sudden spiritual climax that is beautiful and satisfying.

In my reading of “The Gardener,” Helen is a character who has held onto her secret, to her one great love affair, for her entire life. Though she has called this boy her nephew for 18 years, the man in the cemetery, who looks at her for only one moment, says he’ll take Helen to her son. “When Helen left the cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.”

The story ends, at least in my edition, with an asterisk in the text that links to a line from the Bible, John 20:15: “Jesus saith unto her, ‘Woman, why weepest thou; whom seekest thou?’ She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, ‘Sir, if thou has borne him hence, tell me where thou has laid him.’”

By Heart: How Rudyard Kipling Turned His Guilt Into Fiction - The Atlantic, The Gardener, by Rudyard Kipling

"Judge of the Nations, spare us yet..."

Recessional by Rudyard Kipling (1897)

God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!	If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law*— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart: Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!	For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!

*Orwell: "The phrase 'lesser breeds' refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are 'without the Law' in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics. British as well as German."

A Choice of Kipling's Verse made by T.S. Eliot, Faber & Faber, 1941.

Santa Claus

Of all the portrayals of the modern St Nicholas — Santa Claus ("a right jolly old elf") — this is my favorite, from the cover of St. Nicholas magazine, December, 1916:

Kevin DeYoung on the real St. Nicholas.

The magazine itself:

St. Nicholas Magazine (1873-1941) was a successful American children's magazine, published by Scribner's beginning in November 1873, and designed for children five to eighteen. ....

From the outset St. Nicholas Magazine published work of the best contemporary illustrators: Charles Dana Gibson, Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle, all contributed to St. Nicholas and later, Ellis Parker Butler, Norman Rockwell and Livingston Hopkins.

"The best-known children's authors and illustrators contributed to St. Nicholas," according to a 2002 review on children's literature. Many children's classics were first serialized in St. Nicholas Magazine. Its first runaway hit was with "Little Lord Fauntleroy." Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys was serialized in the magazine, and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. ....

Scans of St. Nicholas magazine up through 1923 can be found here.

For a time I owned some bound collections of St. Nicholas from the 19^th century that had been discarded from the Milton College Library.

Savage wars of peace

I enjoy reading fiction, biography, and history about the century between Waterloo (1815) and World War I (1914), especially about Britain during that time.

Apart from brief conflicts mostly having to do with the growth of Prussian influence, Europe was largely peaceful. Britain was becoming the center of the empire "on which the sun never set." Byron Farwell's Queen Victoria's Little Wars introduced me to much of the history of the growth of that empire. From Chapter 1:

THERE was not a single year in Queen Victoria's long reign in which somewhere in the world her soldiers were not fighting for her and for her empire. From 1837 until 1901, in Asia, Africa, Arabia and elsewhere, British troops were engaged in almost constant combat. It was the price of empire, of world leadership, and of national pride—and it was paid, usually without qualms or regrets or very much thought.

Except for the final Boer War, all the military actions were small affairs by today's standards: little wars, military expeditions, rebellions, mutinies, only one of which, the Indian Mutiny, ever posed a threat to the Empire. Britain's little wars did not begin with Queen Victoria, but there were more of them during the sixty-four years of her reign than there had been in the previous two centuries. It was in the Victorian era that continual warfare became an accepted way of life—and in the process the size of the British Empire quadrupled. ....

Farwell explains in the Foreword:

This is the story of what Kipling called the 'savage wars of peace', and of the men who fought them. Scant attention is paid to the causes of the wars or the political manoeuvrings which preceded the hostilities. They are not of much importance. Reasons for going to war are continually being made available to great nations; the more far-flung their interests, the more pretexts for war present themselves. ....

The first conflict in Victoria's reign was a brief and unsuccessful rebellion against her rule in Canada. Soon there was trouble in Afghanistan (which would recur). Several chapters are devoted to the Indian Mutiny. And on though many more until the Boer War at the end of the Queen Empress's life.

The book covers much of the same history as do George MacDonald Frazier's very entertaining fictional adventures of Sir Harry Flashman.

Arsenic or cyanide?

One of the prized possessions on my mystery shelves is the Handbook for Poisoners (1951). The subtitle reads "A collection of great poison stories." And indeed it includes stories by great Golden Age mystery writers including Dorothy L. Sayers, E.C. Bentley, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, R. Austin Freeman, G.K. Chesterton, and earlier authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Rudyard Kipling. It is a good selection of stories but the most valuable section of the book for mystery lovers is the seventy-five page introductory essay by the editor, "A Preface: About Poisons and Poisoning." From the flyleaf:

...[L]eading the reader into this treasury of malevolence, is Raymond Bond's introduction — as exhaustive as it is entertaining. With lively authority, he discusses not only the great poisoners of history, but also nature's own — the snakes, fishes, insects, trees, plants, etc. And to sum it up, he lists twenty poisons common to fact and fiction, with symptoms of each.

He begins with snakes:

...[A]ll poisonous snakes may be classified on the basis of their venom. Broadly speaking, their poison is either neurotoxic and attacks the nerve elements of the body, or it is hemotoxic or hemolytic and breaks down the blood and the tissue. In many instances, the same venom seems to contain both toxins to some degree.

Snake venom, when freshly drawn, is a colorless or slightly yellow liquid, without taste or smell; it quickly deteriorates unless it is dried, when it lasts almost indefinitely. It is not affected by cold but heat destroys it, as will certain chemicals such as nitrate of silver and potassium permanganate. The yellow crystals of the dried poison are soluble in a weak salt solution and generally in distilled water. Chemically, snake venom is a combination of proteids, too complex for analysis. It may be taken into the mouth and stomach without harm, provided there are no cuts or abrasions in the tissue walls. The neurotoxic type of venom destroys and paralyzes the nerve centers, such as those controlling the respiratory system; the larger the concentration of this element in the venom, the sooner death results. This is in the poison of the cobras and the coral snakes and makes them far more dangerous, other factors being equal, than the rattlesnakes. Indeed, it has been estimated that if a western diamondback rattler were equipped with neurotoxic venom, it would carry a sufficient quantity to kill four hundred men. The rattlers, copperheads and moccasins of this country, however, are dangerous enough with their own supply of hemotoxic or hemolytic venom. This poison acts on the blood and cell walls, breaking them down much as our digestive juices break up meat tissues. An antifibrin element prevents the blood from clotting and adds to the destruction. It is this escaped and blackening blood which produces the swelling and discoloration so typical of the pit-viper's wound. ....

And so on....  Then he lists those poisons most often used by mystery writers with a brief description of each. An example:

ARSENIC (or arsenium) — A steel-gray brittle metal, odorless and tasteless, and found with the other metallic minerals in the older rocks. In combination with sulphur, arsenic occurs naturally as realgar and orpiment. Arsenic and its soluble compounds are exceedingly poisonous, as mystery-story readers have learned. In its various forms, it is used in the production of green pigments, in glass and wallpaper manufacture, in dyes, in insecticides such as Paris green, flypapers, fruit sprays, and in rodent poisons. Arsenious oxide, sometimes called white arsenic, has an astringent sweetish taste and is white or porcelainlike in color. In addition to its popularity in commercial poisons, it is used in medicine for treating skin diseases, in malarial fevers, neuralgia and asthma. Limited amounts of arsenic have been used by women for many years in cosmetics and by men as a stimulant to increase their power of endurance. Symptoms of arsenic poisoning appear within an hour—a burning in the throat, stomach pains, cramps, pallor, shallow breathing, thready fast pulse, coma, convulsions and collapse.

I assume all of this sort of information is available from many other sources. If not this would be a rather disturbing "handbook." But for someone who reads Christie, or Sayers, or any number of others, or watches crime films or TV, it provides interesting background. Unfortunately the book is out of print, although both used hardbound and paperback editions can be found online at Amazon and elsewhere.

"When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins"

Reviews of Disney's new Jungle Book set me thinking about Kipling again. I have several collections of his verse including A Choice of Kipling's Verse selected by T.S. Eliot in 1941. Toward the back of the book Eliot includes two that I like for the lessons they teach.

DANE-GELD
(AD. 980-1016)

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation To call upon a neighbour and to say:— 'We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight, Unless you pay us cash to go away.'
And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:— 'Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away.'
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say:—
'We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!'

And the penultimate poem in the book:

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS 1919
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place; But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch. They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings. So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'Stick to the Devil you know.'
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'The Wages of Sin is Death.'
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work you die.'
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew, And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four— And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
*    *    *
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man— There are only four things certain since Social Progress began That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

A Choice of Kipling's Verse Made By T.S. Eliot with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling, Faber & Faber, 1941.