Areopagus Volume LXXXIX

Welcome one and all to the eighty ninth volume of the Areopagus — and we're back! It has been two months since you last heard from me, an unplanned interlude that was the result of one happenstance after another. No longer. From now on you can expect the Areopagus on a far more regular basis.

There is much I might tell you about, plenty of exciting news, but for now there is only one update I should share: soon I will be moving the Areopagus to Substack, a different platform. Everything will remain the same and you will keep receiving the newsletter as usual; nothing on your end will change and there is nothing you need to do. Only, I think it is important that I mention this because there may be some slight changes to the formatting and suchlike.

Anyway, enough time has passed — there is a whole world out there waiting to be wondered at! So let us do some wondering together at last; another Areopagus begins...

I - Classical Music

Die Tote Stadt: Act III, Scene III

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1920)

Performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

In 1892 the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach published a novella called Bruges-la-Morte. It was inspired by Bruges, a place he had only visited but never lived in, and had as its goal turning the city itself into a sort of protagonist. Bruges was then a sleepy Medieval town, overshadowed by its long-lost Gothic splendour, and Rodenbach sensed in this ghostly atmosphere a wonderfully unique kind of sadness. He was a Symbolist, after all, and Symbolism was all about elusive, introspective, almost mystical storytelling, whether in painting or music or literature. Making the city of Bruges into a character, then, was a suitably Symbolist endeavour. To aid this Rodenbach made the unusual decision to include several dozen photographs of the city's streets and canals in his book; the image above is one such example.

Bruges-la-Morte worked; its author's reputation was sealed and the definitive Symbolist novel had been written. Rodenbach later tried adapting it for the stage, under the title Le Mirage, and this play was published posthumously in 1900. Two decades later, in 1920, the twenty-three year old Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold turned Le Mirage into an opera. Its title is Die Tote Stadt, meaning "The Dead City" in German, and what we hear now is its finale. The opera was a huge success, although certain critics said its style was rather too Romantic, and therefore too rousing and dramatic. Perhaps these critics were right. A more haunting, impressionistic style — think of Satie, Ravel, or Debussy — would surely have better suited Rodenbach's strange and melancholy story.

For you might sense that this finale, and Die Tote Stadt in its entirety, feels very cinematic. But this is no surprise: in 1934 Korngold left Europe for the United States, where he established himself as a successful and highly influential Hollywood composer, even winning two Oscars for his work on the films of Errol Flynn. So Die Tote Stadt does sound cinematic, but not because it was influenced by cinema. Rather, Korngold was an early pioneer of film music and his work, beginning with operas like this before he wrote for the silver screen, ended up shaping what we think of now as cinematic soundtracks. Just one more example, I suppose, of how difficult it is to draw any hard lines between classical music and the music of film.

What fascinates me about Die Tote Stadt, above all, is how it represents a city that became a feeling that become a novel that became a play that became an opera. Quite the journey — and one wonders how much of Rodenbach's original impression of Bruges has survived through these transformations. But so much music, and art in general, is like this, as feelings or moments move like ripples through successive peoples and times and artforms.

II - Historical Figure

Jean de Froissart

Medieval Tour Guide

Jean de Froissart is a man I have quoted before in the Areopagus, always in relation to other people. Time, perhaps, to give him some recognition of his own! He was born in the County of Hainault (in modern France) in 1337. What his origins were have always been a mystery, but we know at least that by the age of twenty four he had entered the court of Philippa of Hainault, wife of King Edward III of England. There he composed poetry and started work on an all-encompassing history of his age. Over the next four decades he spent time in the courts of countless more kings, queens, and dukes, both in Britain and on mainland Europe, working tirelessly on his grand chronicle.

Froissart's history focussed largely on the Hundred Years' War between England and France, but included much else besides, such as the Peasant's Revolt and the famous duel between Jacques le Gris and Jean de Carrouges, recently turned into a film by Ridley Scott. What made Froissart uniquely well-placed to write this chronicle was his constant travelling, his restless interviewing of eye-witnesses, and his familiarity with nobility all across the continent. Here he describes journeying to see the Count of Foix, on the border between Spain and France; a perfect example of Froissart's extensive connections and a curious insight into travel during the Middle Ages:

It was for his portrait of chivalry, above all, that Froissart's Chronicle enjoyed such enduring popularity right through to the 19th century. He explains with splendid clarity the nature of Late Medieval warfare and the codes of honour that governed knightly combat, along with colourful descriptions of tournaments and hunts and other events we now think of as typically Medieval. One of Froissart's most famous episodes relates to King Edward III's siege of Calais in 1347, when Edward said he would spare the city's population if six of its citizens, or burghers, surrendered to him. Froissart tells us what happened in the city:

This tragic and altogether heroic scene was recreated in bronze by the great Auguste Rodin in the 1880s:

But, of course, the Chronicle is not all chivalry and questing and acts of public good; Froissart's description of the Jacquerie — a sort of peasant's revolt in France in 1358 — is particularly harrowing, and elsewhere he does not shy away from the more brutal happenings of Medieval life. You also get a keen sense of Medieval politics (for want of a better word) from Froissart. Because society then was not like it is now — the State was not nearly as powerful or centralised, and kings instead relied on loyalty from their frequently unruly nobility, whose allegiances often changed. Froissart's command of narrative is impressive, and his battle scenes are rightfully regarded as among the most vivid accounts of warfare during the Middle Ages. Here is one glimpse from the Revolt of Ghent in 1386:

Though he has been accused of having a broadly "aristocratic" bias, Froissart was clearly sympathetic to the common people. As when he relates, for example, what the preacher John Ball said in the lead-up to the Peasant's Revolt — only somebody who at least understood such grievances could have written or been willing to record them:

Froissart never finished his grand history, but it proved mightily popular even during his lifetime and in the century that followed. Dozens of lavishly illustrated manuscripts of Froissart's Chronicle have survived, largely created in the 15th century for aristocrats who wanted to read his dazzling accounts of battle, marvel at the deeds of famous knights, and learn the politics or tales of far-off lands. These endlessly delightful illustrations are themselves wonderful works of art, and though not strictly contemporaneous with Froissart they do help us imagine his narratives with more colour and texture.

One must read Froissart judiciously, of course, and not accept as hard fact everything he tells us. But of what writer is that not true? If you want to learn about the Middle Ages then Jean Froissart and his Chronicle are unavoidable; he was an inquisitive and garrulous man, and he will make for wonderful company if you wish to journey through that strange and distant 14th century.

III - Painting

Autumn Leaves

Yokoyama Taikan (1931)

Art in 19th century Japan was at a crossroads: should it pursue the methods and motifs of Western art, recently introduced to the country, or should it remain loyal to local tradition? Artists who took the former route were part of a movement known as yōga, while those who choose the latter formed a movement known as nihonga. Below, on the left, is a typical yōga painting by Fujishima Takeji; on the right a nihonga painting by Yokoyama Taikan. You can see the radical difference in stylistic approach, I trust.

So Yokoyama Taikan — who continued working into the 20th century — was a nihonga artist. But he was not only interested in cleaving blindly to tradition. Taikan, rather, wanted to infuse Japan's historical styles of painting with a new life. He was happy to modernise art, but he wanted to modernise it without losing the fundaments of what had made Japanese art so special over its many centuries of development. If we look at a 17th century Japanese byōbu — a painted folding screen, just like Taikan's Autumn Leaves — by Kanō Einō, I suspect you can see the similarity with Taikan's style. In which case the appropriate term to describe his approach, and nihonga more broadly, might be something like "neoclassical".

All of that is, essentially, a background to Autumn Leaves. For Autumn has arrived — in the northern hemisphere, at least! — and despite it being painted so often either as drab or diffused in a hazy-golden light, Taikan's byōbu goes for something else entirely. What he captures, above all, is the unique and delightful crispness of Autumn. Perhaps because Summer has just passed, and the memory of humid or sultry days is still lingering, the sudden coldness of an autumnal day somehow feels bright and clear. The painting is long and thin — as are most byōbu — and therefore rather difficult to look at on a computer or phone. Here is the painting in three sections, so you can get a closer look at its details. Notice (for example) the handful of maple leaves that have fallen into the river. And, of course, Taikan's use of colour is glorious; such precise, vivid, glittering colours perfectly convey that uniquely autumnal crispness.

The paintings of Taikan are all worlds wherein I desperately want to wander. There is something gorgeously dreamlike about them; it isn't that they are unreal at all, but that they are somehow more essentially real than what we see with our own eyes. But such had always been the aim of traditional Japanese art! This was the ancient approach Taikan wanted to preserve — and, we may say, he was successful.

IV - Architecture

Hallgrímskirkja

Architecture as Emotion

This church, rising like a wave of concrete from the streets of Reykjavík, is the second-tallest building in Iceland. It was started in 1945 and not finished until 1986, forty-one years later. Hallgrímur Pétursson, a 17th century Icelandic poet, is the church's namesake. So much for the basic facts... but what about its startling appearance? Because the Hallgrímskirkja is somehow and strangely both ancient and futuristic at once, sitting at a sort of fantastical midpoint between Gothic and Brutalist, either awe-inspiring or terrifying from one moment to the next.

Well, it is a wonderful example of Expressionist architecture. This was a style that emerged in the 1920s, primarily in Germany. It was totally different to any historical styles that had come before, but (as you will see) it did not turn away from them entirely. In fact, Expressionism was almost like a response to the rise of modernist architecture, which had consciously turned away from the past. This new modernism was all about simple geometry and a clean, industrial aesthetic. Think of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, or Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, both from the 1920s:

Expressionist buildings, meanwhile, were defined by their unusual and often asymmetrical shapes, by their soaring peaks, heavily textured surfaces, and jagged edges. What was the reason for this? Expressionism in architecture — like Expressionism in art; think of Edvard Munch's The Scream — was all about human emotion, about our strongest, deepest, most primordial feelings. This architecture was supposed to be gripping and troubling, to evoke not an intellectual response but to ply our spirit and fill us with strange, new, even shocking emotions. Hence Expressionist architecture can so often make us feel uneasy; the Chilehaus in Hamburg, built in the 1920s, is surely a good example of that.

The Hallgrímskirkja itself was inspired by Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen, Denmark, which had been started in 1927 — at Expressionism's height — and completed in 1940. You can see the similarities, but what Grundtvig's Church suggested, the Hallgrímskirkja took to its conclusion.

As stated, Expressionism did not turn wholly away from the past. Gothic Architecture — a style defined by bold, soaring, even abstract shapes — was understandably one of its main inspirations. Notice, for example, the pointed window at the base of the Hallgrímskirkja's tower, complete even with a little tracery. So this church represents a wonderful infusion of old ideas with bold new energy. And the Hallgrímskirkja is also splendidly volcanic, rising a full seventy-four metres like it has been pushed up from the crust of the Earth, with its concrete wings specifically designed to imitate the basalt columns that form after lava flows. A thoroughly suitable motif for Iceland, of course, but a fabulously effective design choice anywhere in the world.

Its interior is also worth commenting on — a simplified, lofty Gothic nave of pointed arcades, clustered piers, and rib vaults. Nothing about this is Expressionist, but by its harmony with the church's exterior you can sense clearly the influence of Gothic Architecture on Expressionism. Looking at the façade, this interior does not feel out of place.

Expressionism proper was only a short-lived architectural movement, but it has had a startlingly successful revival these last few decades. Think of how skyscrapers built in the second half of the 20th century were largely box-shaped and had simple geometric forms. This was the peak of the "International Style", that type of modernist architecture invented in the 1920s and alluded to earlier. But this style has now gone into decline and rectangular towers have been replaced by the surprising, jarring, jagged forms of Expressionism.

Still, our modern form of Glass Expressionism (if I may so call it) is rather more playful than the almost neurotic Expressionism of the 1920s or the primordial Expressionism of the Hallgrímskirkja. Has any building ever embodied the principles of the style so successfully? It seems simple, and so one wonders why there aren't more buildings like it. But that, in the end, may just be testament to the genius of its architect, Guðjón Samúelsson, and the specially Icelandic inspiration that lay behind its design.

V - Rhetoric

Homer the Epithetic

The Iliad is an epic poem, composed by Homer over two and a half thousand years ago, about the legendary Trojan War. Anybody who reads it will be struck by, among other things, its proliferation of epithets. What is an epithet? An adjectival phrase that is attached to a certain person, place, object, or concept. Examples from the Iliad include:

• swift-footed Achilles
• wine-dark sea
• sickle-wielding Cronus
• ox-eyed Hera

Epithets have been a regular feature of oral poetry, all over the world, for centuries. This was partly because they helped poets in the act of creation. Being standardised, and thus having a set metre and rhythm, they served as blocks with which to build verses. Also, of course, with such a vast cast of mythological characters, epithets help listeners identify who they were hearing about.

But that's not all; epithets are not merely a technical trick. Rather, and in Homer's case particularly, the beauty of epithets is how they seem to essentialise a given place, person, or phenomenon. There are hundreds of them in the Iliad, and they each speak to an almost Platonic sense of what things really are. The goddess Athena, for example, is often given the epithet glaukopis. This is an Ancient Greek word which defies easy translation and has variously been translated as grey-eyed, bright-eyed, or owl-eyed. Regardless of which is right, the fact it was something about Athena's eyes that seemed to define her best does more than a wealth of other descriptions ever could to convey this goddess to us.

What distinguishes an epithet from other descriptive language is that it becomes attached. I might speak about the "joyful dawn", but that is just a one-off description. When Homer speaks of the "rosy-fingered dawn", and does so dozens of times, such that "rosy-fingered" and "dawn" become fused, that is an epithet. The most obvious examples are those names given to rulers and historical figures: Alfred the Great, Vlad the Impaler, Suleiman the Magnificent, Harald Bluetooth, and suchlike. You can see that epithets could be based on the physical attributes, personality, or achievements of an individual.

I do sometimes wonder what sorts of epithets certain people, be they politicians or sports stars or otherwise, might be given today. And even for my friends or familiar places I like to imagine what epithet Homer might have awarded them. Alas, we no longer seem to live in an age of epithets — but perhaps we should! What epithets might you give to your friends or bestow on public figures? It makes for awfully fun thinking, and the joy of searching for an epithet is that it asks us to decide what single quality best defines a person, place, or thing.

VI - Writing

Sheer Humbug

Charles Dickens wrote fifteen novels, dozens of short stories, numerous articles, and a handful of plays, altogether amounting to several million words. And across all those thousands of pages, despite narrating and discussing in some depth the darkest underbelly of 19th century Britain, Dickens never once used a swear word. From time to time there was language that might, in the most roundabout way, be described as coarse or even vaguely blasphemous. But, as far as rude words go, saying, "what the blazes?!" is magnanimously polite. And it goes beyond specific words; Dickens' work also tends to lack the gory and carnal specificity that fills modern literature, cinema, and television.

There are two ways to think of this. First, of course, we may simply say it was the consequence of Victorian morality. To use offensive language in print was regarded as inappropriate and therefore Dickens did not do it; a writer whose choices were, therefore, a product of his times. Such analysis is obviously true — but woefully reductive. The second way is to recognise that Dickens nonetheless painted a vivid portrait of his times — even its greatest evils — without needing vulgar language, and did so more effectively than had he used it. Impressive, no?

The best example is surely Scrooge, a character who (at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, at least) is so miserably unpleasant that his name has become a byword for misanthropy and bitterness. He is, simply, horrid, and rarely have readers been so roused to dislike a fictional character as they still are by Ebenezer Scrooge. But Dickens does not rely on brutality or violence, or vulgar language, to make him so despicable. The worst Scrooge says is, famously, "Bah! Humbug!" It is rather by his simple acts of meanness and miserliness, and by the impression they leave on the reader — impressions from which we can infer an awful lot more — that Scrooge seems so cruel, seems to embody the worst of Victorian hardheartedness.

How tempting, when describing something bad, to immediately choose the most vivid imagery or direct language. Dickens proves that we need not necessarily do so, and that it may not even be the best approach. Our imaginations are colossally powerful, and are often better left to "fill in the gaps" than be given something fully-formed, which is inevitably less vivid or impactful than what we are capable of feeling by implication. The lesson, in short, is that swearing does not make literature "gritty" or "realistic"; there are other, seemingly better ways of achieving that.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

The Best of this Kind

William Shakespeare is not a man whose opinions are easily deduced. Such was the fullness of his characters, each sketched dispassionately and in dramas without any obvious agenda, that we can never really tell what he thought about anything. In fact, he has even been criticised on these very grounds — Dr Johnson himself objected to the lack of a moral code in Shakespeare's plays. Any trace of religious, political, moral, or even aesthetic beliefs are wholly absent; the man himself remains, and always will, a closed book.

But there are some places where, very rarely, we can perhaps sense the voice of the playwright speaking through his characters. One such place is in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Theseus, the mythological founder of Athens, has just watched a rather pathetic play. Hippolyta, his bride, remarks on what a sorry show it was. Theseus responds:

Theseus commenting on the nature of drama, a play-within-a-play, does feel somewhat like Shakespeare obliquely remarking on his own craft. And what was Theseus' point? That art is only ever a shadow of, and therefore secondary to, real life — that art is always lesser than life. Love of art flows from love of life itself; the latter must always come before the former both in its making and appreciation. One simple example, say, is that the best paintings of flowers have surely been made by those who loved and knew flowers best — and that such paintings should, ultimately, help us love flowers better, rather than merely drawing us to love the art. Such at least was Theseus' belief, and may have been Shakespeare's also. In which case, I propose, it is nourishing food for thought — for this is an idea with profound implications for how art of all kinds should best be made and understood.

Question of the Week

The last question I asked you, all those weeks ago, was in fact a challenge:

Find an interesting roof and send in a photo — feel free to add your own commentary.

Here were some of your findings...

Jane L

Vitus M

Deborah G

Matthew L

John B

Jane S

Kurt P

And for this week's question, inspired by Theseus' lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Is there such a thing as bad art?

Email me your answers and I'll share them in next week's newsletter.

And that's all

Too long it has been; so long it shall not soon be again. How delightful to return to the Areopagus, and to you, my patient readers. I could write something long and explicative, or search out and share with you some evocative lines of verse — but these I shall not do. Few words, as ever, best suffice: it is, as they say, good to be back.

Yours,

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