¶ In Moby-Dick, the two “Knights and Squires” chapters. There’s a lot of Whitman here; it’s fashionable nowadays to find such manly gushing about manliness “homoerotic,” but I can’t abide the anachronism of it. Before you can desire something, you have to be able to imagine it, and I think it’s sounder to regard Ishmael’s admiration for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask as innocent — ignorant — than as somehow suppressed. I suppose it all comes down — how one reads these chapters — to whether one believes in the possibility of what Freud called “sublimation.”

But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! the centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

That is the flavor of Melville’s rapture.

¶ Chapter XXII of Don Quixote pits, more frontally than any previous encounter, our hero against the state. In Quixote’s medieval view of things, a king is someone who works justice personally, by means of individual gestures, acts, campaigns, or whatnot. The idea of systematic justice can’t occur to him, just as it must have proved rebarbative to many of Cervantes’s contemporary aristocrats. When the Don runs into the troop of galley slaves, he wants to know what the men have done to deserve their manacles.

One of the mounted guards responded that they were galley slaves, His Majesty’s prisoners who were condemned to the galleys, and there was nothing more to say and nothing else he had to know.

“Even so,” replied Don Quixote, “I should like to know the particular reason for each one’s misfortune.”

To these words he added others so civil and discreet to persuade them to tell him what he wished to hear that the other mounted guard said:

“Although we have the record and certificate of sentence of each of these wretched men, this is not the proper time to stop and take them out and read them; your grace may approach and question the prisoners, and they will tell you themselves if they wish to…”

The guards are authorized by documents that they carry but have no need to read. “Only following orders” is a verb beyond Quixote’s ken.

¶ In Squillions, Barry Day wraps up the chapter about Coward and other playwrights with a sweet account of Coward’s warm relations with Terrence Rattigan, who wrote, “There is no judgement I would rather have about a play than yours (except perhaps the public’s, which, I sincerely believe, you and I are the last 2 playwrights on earth to continue to respect)…

¶ A N Wilson writes about the Church of England between the wars, noting that if Disestablishment had ensued upon the Prayer Book crisis of 1928, Edward VIII might have gone on to king for life. And here I thought that that would have been a Bad Thing! The 1932 solemn defrocking of Reverend Harold Francis Davidson, an oddball who, like Gladstone, wanted to “save prostitutes,” but who wasn’t allowed to “get away with it” offers the stuffing of a proper novel, one ending in, of all places, a lion’s cage!

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