Areopagus Volume XC

Welcome one and all to the ninetieth volume of the Areopagus. No wordish prelude this week; let us get on with the show! Another seven short lessons, altogether promptly, begins...

I - Classical Music

Plaisir d'Amour

Jean-Paul-Égide Martini (1784)

Performed by Isabelle Poulenard & Jean-François Lombard;
Harp: Sandrien Chatron; Violin: Stéphanie Paulet; Flute: Amélie Michel
​The Feast of Love by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1719)

Jean-Paul-Égide Martini (a fabulous Francisation of his original name, Johann Paul Aegidius Martin) is not a composer you will likely recognise; this song, however, is. He was born in Bavaria in 1741 and, having moved to France in his twenties, became a successful composer at the royal court, even directing concerts for Marie Antoinette. But, like so many of his generation, Martini was caught up in the French Revolution and forced to adapt. He found work under the new regime wherein, among other things, he composed music for Napoleon's wedding. Then, after Napoleon's fall, he was installed as Superintendent of the King's Music under Louis XVIII. A fascinating life, then, and one marked by a constant and well-received musical output. But all that is really a footnote to Martini's singular, lasting contribution to the world of classical (and popular) music — this little romantic song, called Plaisir d'Amour, meaning "Pleasures of Love".

If it sounds familiar then that's because it almost certainly is; Martini's melody from Plaisir d'Amour was the basis of Our God Loves Us, a well-known hymn, and — most famously of all — Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling in Love. It had been popular ever since Martini first published the song, and singers from Paul Robeson to Placido Domingo have had their turn at recording it. I have included two versions here. The first is performed on contemporary instruments, as Martini originally composed it, and the second is an arrangement for orchestra by Jacques Offenbach. Of all Martini's work — including, as stated, operas and royal commissions — this song was surely not the one he could have predicted would grace his name with immortality. Such, however, are the wonderful wiles of art and history.

II - Historical Figure

Sir Philip Sidney

England's Last Knight?

Sir Philip Sidney led a strange, almost paradoxical, and gorgeously fascinating life; unpicking the real man from the myth that has grown up around him may even be a fool's errand. Some have called him England's last real knight, a perfect fusion of the chivalric Medieval quester and scholarly Renaissance gentleman, at once erudite and romantic, noble and artful together. And these are not modern imaginings. He was famed, even during his own lifetime, for precisely these reasons, and soon after his young life was cut short such mythos only increased.

So: Philip Sidney was born in 1554, just before Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne. He was a grandson of the Duke of Northumberland and therefore born to the upper echelons of English society, destined for a decent life come-what-may. His father was also Lord President of Wales and his uncle, Robert Dudley, was as the Earl of Leicester Elizabeth's closest advisor. Philip was educated like all young gentlemen of his background, and at the age of eighteen embarked on a three-year tour of continental Europe. The purpose of this trip was, along with improving his Latin, French, and Italian, to introduce him to the politics of Europe and prepare him for a career as a statesman and soldier. During these travels, at the age of just eighteen, Sidney witnessed the infamous St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris — when thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by a Catholic mob.

Upon returning to England in 1575 Sidney officially joined the court of Elizabeth. One of his more interesting duties in this period was to serve as an ambassador to Germany and investigate the possibility of creating a continental Protestant League. This may have come to nothing, but Sidney continually busied himself with the life of an Elizabethan courtier, ever engaging with foreign statesman, going on diplomatic missions, and even serving as a Member of Parliament on two occasions. His political achievements amounted to little, however, in comparison with his personal reputation; Sidney became renowned far and wide for his horsemanship, manners, and learning. Along with performing gallantly at tournaments, Sidney was a notable patron of the arts. Writers across Europe sought his patronage and at least forty different works, on topics as varied as divinity, poetry, and medicine, were dedicated to him.

But Sidney could never quite settle. The life of adventure he so desired was not to be found, and with his political career progressing slowly, he turned to poetry. He worked with his beloved sister — Mary Sidney, who had married and become the Countess of Pembroke — on a versification of the Psalms. To her he also dedicated his Arcadia, a lengthy and incredibly ambitious prose romance, not wholly unlike a novel. In 1581 het met Penelope Devereux, with whom he fell in love but was never to marry, and for her (or, at least, one theory goes) he wrote a remarkable sequence of sonnets known as Astrophil and Stella. They together tell the story, elusively and delicately, of a man captivated by deep love and struggling against submitting to it. Consider, from Number 41, as the narrator reveals why he performed so well in a tournament:

Or, from Number 14, where Sidney touches on the moral quandaries of his love:

Or Number 90, shortened here, among the most wonderfully moving of the sequence:

Or, a personal favourite, from Number 99, where Sidney writes of staying awake all the night:

Astrophil and Stella is one of England's greatest and most influential sonnet sequences. The 16th century had seen a slow but sure development of the English language, and Sidney has rightly taken his place alongside the likes of Edmund Spenser as part of that generation who shaped the foundations of English literature and brought it to maturity, right before William Shakespeare climbed its highest heights.

Sidney also made his own direct contribution in prose to what was a self-conscious and ongoing 16th century debate in Elizabethan England about the nature of poetry. It is called A Defence of Poesy (or sometimes An Apology for Poetry), written in 1581 and perhaps the first serious work of literary criticism in English. It was prompted by the work of a man called Stephen Gosson, whose School of Abuse (mentioned previously in the Areopagus) was an attack on the contemporary stage. Sidney set his stall wider, however, and alongside commentary on the contemporary literary scene also tackled broader and more ancient questions. The essence of his argument is that poetry is our highest form of art, and that the poet is superior to both the philosopher and the historian in their service to humankind:

It is a stirring treatise, both learned and witty, and makes a splendidly convincing case for the right of poetry to be called our highest and noblest endeavour. We need not agree, of course, but such was Sidney's conviction that one is easily swept away. And in all of this we should remember that Sidney never allowed any of his works to be formally printed. They were written, copied, and circulated among his friends, but to have had them printed and thereby commercialised was considered unbecoming of a truly chivalric man. So, ever the gentleman, Sidney's work was not published until after his death and he could no longer prevent it.

In 1583 he was finally knighted, and that same year married Francis Walsingham, daughter of Elizabeth's secretary of state. Two years later, in 1585, the renowned and noble Sir Philip finally received what he had been waiting for — a call to action. He joined an expedition to the Netherlands to assist the Dutch in their revolt against Spain, and duly went to war... sort of. Because there was little fighting to be done, and Sir Philip spent the best part of his year in the Netherlands waiting around. Until, in September of 1586, he joined what was really a minor effort to relieve a beleaguered Dutch town and, during the skirmish, had his thigh shattered by a musket ball. One story, perhaps apocryphal though widely reported, is that the gravely injured Sir Philip gave away his water to a dying soldier who, being carried past on a stretcher, was crying out in thirst. Sir Philip never recovered from his wound and died twenty six days later; he was buried, the following year, in St. Paul's Cathedral.

Thus ended the life of Sir Philip Sidney, one of the Elizabethan Era's greatest poets, despite having never written all that much poetry, and the living ideal of a soldier-statesman, despite having never done all that much statecraft or fighting. No, Sidney's achievements did not match the praise he received nor the scale of his reputation; it is rather for the man himself, for his personal character and what he seemed to embody, that Sir Philip's name has endured. Edmund Spenser wrote a lengthy elegy called Astrophel in his memory and Fulke Greville — a childhood friend and fellow courtier-poet — wrote for him the following epitaph. They are, I think, suitable words with which to end our time with Sir Philip:

III - Painting

Late October

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1882)

Last time we had an autumnal painting by Yokoyama Taikan; this week we have one by the 19th century English artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. Both were working at a similar point in time — on different sides of the globe, though in an increasingly interconnected art world — but used totally different styles. From the highly stylised, supernaturally vivid colours of Taikan's byobu, dreamlike and essentialising, we shift to the scrupulously detailed, almost photoreal luminism of Grimshaw, evocative and picturesque.

This Grimshaw was a self-taught artist who had quit his job working for the local railway company to pursue a career as an artist. It took time but, sure enough and perhaps unsurprisingly, he succeeded. Grimshaw became famous, above all, for his paintings of the night. For if he did love autumn dusk, Grimshaw loved nocturnes even the more. I could show you dozens, and dozens that would delight you, but for the sake of brevity I offer only two, each of a general type Grimshaw was fond of painting. The first is called November and — like Late October — it is one his lonely night-time lanes. What was a thoroughly peaceful scene has turned into something rather more mysterious, even Gothic, what with those large, sombre houses looming behind the bare boughs of the trees.

Next, as an example of Grimshaw's second general type, is Liverpool Quay by Moonlight. Here, perhaps, Grimshaw was at his best — painting the urban rather than the rural night. He was fascinated by gas lamps, which had become widespread in his youth, and of the atmospheric contrast between their orange-gold glow, almost wispy, and the purple-dark of the night, of shadowy rooftops and the slender forms of chimneys or masts looming like ghosts through the smoggy Victorian skies:

It is difficult to categorise Grimshaw stylistically. He was a friend and supporter of James Whistler, that American-in-London both famous and infamous for his wildly experimental, quasi-abstract Nocturnes. Whistler's close attention to the effects of light, subsuming everything to them, shows up in Grimshaw's work; notice, in Late October, how the whole scene is diffused in a carefully crafted golden haze. Another of his major influences was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a rebellious group of British artists who tried to restore art to its Medieval energy: vivid colours, intense naturalism, and a close attention to the real details of the living world were their hallmarks. Grimshaw's detailing — especially his leaves and branches — are surely a byproduct of the Pre-Raphaelites. But, above all, it seems his heart lay with the Romantics and their love for moonlit moodiness. One small example is the "Rueckenfigur", a common motif of all, but especially Romantic art; it refers to a solitary person with their back turned to the viewer. You will notice this, of course, in Late October.

So these three influences — the delicate light of Whistler, the scrupulous naturalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, the moody atmosphere of the Romantics — are all evident in Grimshaw. But no "movement" could ever paint a picture; only a human being can do that! And so we would be mistaken to reduce Grimshaw's work to a concoction of various other styles and artists. Here was a man who loved very particular things — the moon above a lonely lane; gas lamps on rainsoaked cobbles — and painted them lovingly for us.

IV - Architecture

Borobudur

A Monument Unlike Any Other

This remarkable structure is called Borobudur. It rises from a broad valley in central Java, Indonesia, and has done for well over one thousand years. Each side is over one hundred and twenty metres long and it is nearly forty metres tall. This is, then, quite the monument. It was built at some point in the late 8th and early 9th centuries AD under the relatively mysterious Shailendra Dynasty, who ruled the island of Java at that time. The Shailendras built dozens of Buddhist temples in central Java, Borobudur being their grandest, and it is by these temples that they are chiefly remembered. But by the 11th century they had left Java for Sumatra, and Borobudur seems to have fallen from use, a process accelerated by the arrival of Islam and decline of Buddhism in the centuries that followed. Thereafter it was covered by volcanic ash, consumed by the jungle, and — beyond occasional references to a mysterious temple hidden in the forests of Java — disappeared from history.

That changed in 1814, when it was investigated by order of the British governor of Java, Stamford Raffles, who had been told about it by local people. Over the next century Borobudur was gradually cleared and excavated, though it remained in a ruinous state, until between 1907-1911 a team of Dutch archaeologists restored the monument. Another major restoration, guided by UNESCO, took place from 1973 to 1983. This time Borobudur was essentially dismantled and rebuilt, stone by stone, with added drainage to ensure its survival.

Now, Borobudur is the largest purpose-built Buddhist temple in the world. Purpose-built, I say, because the colossal Angkor Wat in Cambodia was originally built as a Hindu temple. Still, it isn't really Borobudur's size — though that is impressive — so much as its design that makes Borobudur special. It has nine levels — nine being an important number in Buddhism — composed of a base, five square tiers, and three circular tiers. These are all concentric and they are crowned by a huge stupa. The stupa is a type of dome-shaped Buddhist shrine that contains relics associated either with the Buddha or other holy figures.

This plan, seen from above, is based on the mandala, a form of highly symbolic, geometric design sacred in Buddhism and Hinduism. There is no single layout or purpose to the mandala, but in the case of Borobudur it is seemingly based on mandalas that represent Buddhist cosmology. Borobudur also references Mount Meru, the holy mountain at the centre of all universes in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Countless temples have similarly, for this reason, been designed to imitate the form of a mountain. But, as stated, the scope of Borobudur is simply immense.

So, in short, Borobudur's design combines a multitude of richly symbolic forms; it is a comprehensive and scrupulously designed religious monument, impressive in both its ambition and execution. It was supposedly created by an architect called Gunadharma, but Borobudur — like the Shailendra Dynasty that built it — remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. And that's not all; the temple's design has even more to it! See, Borobudur is best understood as a network of pathways, each lined by walls and balustrades covered in literally thousands of sculptures. Pilgrims enter at the eastern side and walk a three mile route, gradually ascending clockwise, to the top. The sculptures that line these pathways are extensive, refined, and all have a clear purpose, either relating the Buddha's teachings, stories from his past lives, or Buddhist scripture. All told there are over 2,500 reliefs, along with (originally) over 500 statues of the Buddha.

The sculptures along the base — which are now partly concealed by additional foundations added after the temple was first built — represent "kamadhatu", or the realm of material desires. The sculptures along the next five tiers represent "rupadhatu", or the realm of forms, where material desires have been cast off but attachment to name and form remains. The three circular tiers then represent "arupadhatu", or the realm of formlessness, where there is neither form nor name nor any self at all — enlightenment. These circular tiers are lined by 72 miniature stupas, each of which contains a statue of the Buddha. And, as mentioned, at the heart of all this rises the huge stupa at the centre of Borobudur.

So the journey of a pilgrim — entering Borobudur at its base and rising slowly to its pinnacle — is supposed to be a physical, spiritual, and theological journey all at once, representing the path to enlightenment according to the principles of Mahayana Buddhism. And this is an experience surely enhanced by the remarkable views from the top of Borobudur.

You can see, then, that what makes Borobudur special is its mix of scale and planning; rarely have monuments of such size been so carefully ordered to craft a comprehensive religious experience. It is even believed by some that Borobudur, which is built on a hill, may have been surrounded by a lake that has since disappeared. Though disputed, there is evidence of at least some watercourse — and therefore, like a floating lotus, another layer of symbolism. True or not, it hardly matters, for this colossal monument is already a thing totally unique. And, what's more, centuries after its abandonment and decline Borobudur has now come back to life and been restored to its original purpose as a site of wonder and pilgrimage.

V - Rhetoric

Belly First!

We have mentioned Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy already — so it makes sense, I think, to look there for today's rhetorical lesson. As part of his argument that the poet is superior to the historian or philosopher, Sidney gives an example from Ancient Roman history. The context is the early days of the Roman Republic, when the plebeians — i.e. the common people — had collectively withdrawn from the city in protest at their treatment by the patricians — i.e. the aristocracy. Bewildered and unable to convince the people to return, the patricians turned to the wisest man in Rome, Menenius Agrippa, who went out to meet them. Sir Philip takes us from there:

Menenius Agrippa knew that "figurative speeches or cunning insinuations" — meaning a lengthy, overwrought, fancy speech — were inappropriate, and that any lofty, complicated philosophical arguments were equally out of place. Instead Agrippa chose to be honest and familiar, to explain with a simple but sound analogy why the actions of the plebeians were really not in their own interests. The meaning of this is twofold. First, that the first and vital task for any speaker is to know their audience and identify the best means of persuading them. Second, Sir Philip uses it to argue that simple and familiar tales, well told, are almost inevitably more convincing than any over-elaborately constructed argument which, as he said, would require the listener to learn geometry before they could understand it. This is really foundational rhetoric; but the foundations are, as their name suggests, really the most important. We would all do well to remember the lesson of Menenius Agrippa more often!

VI - Writing

Make it more... hyponymic

"What makes writing good?" Ah, a foolish question I have called foolish before — and shall so call countless times again. Many things can make writing good, and so often that which makes one writer's writing good would, applied to another, make it bad. A pickle, no doubt, and thus we must be wary of any advice that is too much like a rule. Principles, almost always, are better.

Still, there is something that has been on my mind recently, one thing that does seem to be present in a lot if, if not most, good writing — when it is hyponymic. What does this mean? A hypernym is a generic term, and a hyponym is a term that specifies something within that genre. So "tree" is a hypernym and "oak" is a hyponym. I'll give you some more examples; once grasped, this concept is easily and intuitively understood. Hypernyms are on the left and hyponyms on the right:

• Rock → Granite
• Cheese → Cheddar
• Fabric → Linen
• Flower → Tulip
• Window → Oriel Window

Of course, a term can be both at once; while "oak" is a hyponym of the hypernym "tree", "tree" is also a hyponym of the hypernym "plant". But this is much the fun of thinking in terms of hypernyms and hyponyms — that they are a sliding scale, that you can always find a more specific way of saying what you want to say. So, for example:

• Colour → Red → Scarlet
• Building → House → Bungalow
• Animal → Mammal → Dog → Alsatian
• Plant → Tree → Oak → Chestnut Oak

The value of a hyponym is that it helps us understand and imagine far more clearly what we are reading. As a result the writing will tend to have more texture and weight; that which is less generic always has more presence. It also asks the writer to think more carefully about what they are saying, to figure out if they really understand the thing they are trying to describe — because only when you know something well can you talk about it in more hyponymic terms. And this principle of hypernyms and hyponyms doesn't only apply to literature or poetry or suchlike; much writing, whether of emails or indeed messages to one's friends, surely stands to benefit from a greater precision of vocabulary. So, next time you write, don't forget to ask yourself, "is there a hyponym for this word?"

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Art Fair & Foul

Last time I asked you:

Is there such a thing as bad art?

Such were your answers that they demanded the seventh plinth. Over to you, then, my Dear Readers...

Wendy W

Linda E

Bruce R

Cassie M

NGB

Leonardo Z

Jane L

Thor

Sarit B

Blake H

James T

Jackie F

Michael H

Laurie S

Kitty Z

Question of the Week

And for this week's question, a broad one that you may take in any direction you like:

What is one thing that everybody should learn in school?

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

And that's all

At this moment, precisely — one wonders why! — it is the words of Christopher Marlowe that come to mind, like Sir Philip Sidney another member of those two or three wonderful generations of Elizabeth writers. From his Hero and Leander, a poem about two doomed lovers of Greek myth, I offer you these lines:

Words that, I think, neither need analysis nor ought to be followed by too much more of my chinwagging. Night falls, and I bid you all a bountiful weekend. Until next time... adieu!

Yours,

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