Tuesday 27 August 2013

The rescue

With a fearful symmetry, Bubonic Plague is back where it started, in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, reminding humans, just as the Icelandic volcano did a few years ago, that for all our big ideas and vainglory, we are puny and ineffectual, mere blaggers in the universe.

One of my favourite pictures from childhood, along with illustrations to E. Nesbit, and Tolkein, and Narnia, was from a 1930s children's history book that edified impressionable young minds in the days of Empire. Along with When did you last see your father, and Millais' two beautiful doomed boys, the Princes in the Tower (the elder, staring out from the darkness of captivity on the page with poetic prescience, his blond curls tumbling over his black velvet suit, was destined to be my husband, I knew in my eight-year old heart), my imagination was fired by a naked young girl's rescue from the window of an elegant Restoration mansion during the Great Plague of London.


Now the picture horrifies me more than the pestilence itself, a sickly Victorian excess of sentimental romanticization and sublimated paedophilia, the imagery of soft porn applied to social and medical history.

Before we pass sentence on our 19th century ancestors for lapping up this sort of mass-marketed fantasy, born out of the conviction that humans are the progressive conquerors of evil, and that the best way to secure ourselves against the return of a powerful enemy is by trivializing it, we should remember our own smugness, our own self-deluded race away from reality, our odd taste for sensationalism and tweeted voyeurism, our ambition to live longer and longer while poverty and inequality and cruelty and conceit infect the world. 

Who cares, so long as we can share a photo.

Thursday 8 August 2013

Among Tigers and Panthers

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.”
SARAH SIDDONS by Lawrence
Portrait by Thomas Lawrence; Tate Gallery, London. Photo: Tate, London 2011 
The Tragic Muse of Neoclassicism and prophetess of Romanticism in a portrait of 1804, when she was nearing fifty, in which her lifelong friend, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769 -1830), displayed her powerful physique and brooding presence with such panache that she looks like a bruiser about to step forward and knock you out....  

Sunday 4 August 2013

Romantic fictions and casualties

“I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…” 

 
The Art of Loving or The Pleasant Lesson, furnishing fabric,
Favre Petitpierre et Cie (possibly, maker), ca.1785-1790, detail © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
PART ONE
One autumn long ago, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, and was rejoicing at the Royal Navy’s victory under Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, which thwarted Napoleon's ambitions to conquer the Middle East as he had done mainland Europe, and Irish rebels with French help were fighting their English oppressors, when Jenner had recently published his findings on small-pox vaccination, while a new poetry in Lyrical Ballads was being read for the first time, and a new kind of woman had appeared in a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft called Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse renounced forever the man she loved. 

He was a charming young artist who painted everyone as if he was in love with them. His pencil, chalk and brush had the power of Cupid's arrows to pierce men and women with the flushed, breathless heat of desire. When he looked at someone, however dull they had felt the moment before, they saw the reflection of beauty in his eyes.

He was....