Morning Read:
Pastoral
¶ A N Wilson writes about the first great press baron, Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, and his (inadvertently) not-very-bright conduct of the Great War. He was, after all, out to sell newspapers.
Fireside chats with political leaders would, for many a decade to come, and perhaps for ever, be one way in which political deals were brokered, and power wielded. But the days in which the political class met in clubs and country houses, and could conduct their nation’s affairs without popular will or consultation, were over.
It was one thing for “the Press” to corral politicians. It seems to be quite something else when “the Media” try to do the same.
¶ Queequeg’s biography, as retailed by Ishmael, amps up the conceit of the noble savage to unsurpassable heights: the cannibal is compared to the Prince of Wales and to the young Peter the Great within two sentences.
But this fine young savage — this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the captain’s cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg didained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might haply gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen.
Come to think of it, it’s odd that the United States hasn’t produced its own Peter figure — the man of parts (and inherited wealth) who steals abroad as a common man, determined to smoke out the secrets of superior technology.
¶ In Don Quixote, an early pastoral of nymphs and shepherds, or at least of shepherds and shephardesses. Were there ever any real shepherdesses? I somehow doubt it, but welcome instruction on the subject. Our hero does little more than correct a goatherd’s malapropisms, until the fellow finally asks him to desist, in the interest of getting out the story of Marcela and Grisóstomo, two wealthy folk who have taken up wandering the countryside in bucolic drag. Actually, the gent has died of love! The mockery is clear, but as usual Cervantes isn’t bothering to ground it. While I got the humor of Sancho’s dreams of becoming rich on that magic balm a few chapters back, I’m not quite getting this.
¶ Another letter from Chesterfield to Townshend about the proposed marriage of the Prince of Orange to the Princess Royal, of interest to diplomatic historians no doubt but somewhat opaque at this juncture. It does provide the general reader with a stiff reminder that, even in the Eighteenth Century, and even between the two leaders of global trade (England and Holland), diplomacy was still very much a matter of wars and weddings.
¶ In Squillions, Coward has a bit of a breakdown, owing to the burning of candles at all ends, and resolves to cross the Pacific in search of peace and quiet.
I sall from San Francisco on Christmas Day and go to … Hong Kong, where I change boats and go on to Singapore where the Rajah’s [of Sarawak] yacht is sent for me. I shall stay at Sarawak for ten days…
He seems to have made it no further than Honolulu.