The Paintings of James Tissot

Thanks to the Financial Times I discovered the works of James Tissot (1836-1902).  This Franco-British artist came from a background of textiles and ships, both of which feature in his works.  His painting verges on the impressionistic, but remains a tad too literalist to bear that label.

Tissot was born into a devout Catholic family, drifted away from the faith and into a liaison with an Irish divorcee, and eventually underwent a re-conversion to the religion of his youth.  His paintings display a vitality one might easily associate with either romantic liaison or sacramental reality, depending upon the circumstances.

Like so many of his contemporaries - from the Belgian Jan August Hendrik, Baron Leys (1815-1869) to the Anglo-Dutch Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) and the Turkish Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910) - Tissot tends to paint small groups of people in scenes which tell a story and take place in a setting which is itself a kind of secondary subject.  But unlike Leys or Alma-Tadema, who painted extensively from history, Tissot focused on contemporary scenes, except late in his life when Biblical themes predominated.

I'll not go so far as to claim that Tissot is a genius, an artist for the ages.  His works are charming, though probably not sublime.  Still, I am glad for having stumbled upon them.

Today's images come from the ever-ready Wikipedia.

St. Patrick's Day

Since St. Patrick's Day this year falls on a Sunday in Lent, we'll celebrate a day early. This year's topic is lilting.

Lilting is a way of singing dance tunes. Because dance tunes move so quickly, a lilter sings nonsense syllables, such as "diddle-dum," to keep the rhythm. Lilting had a couple functions. Often musicians used it as a way to learn tunes; when they were busy working they could lilt the tunes to themselves. In poor rural areas, though, where it was sometimes hard to come by the money for musical instruments or by skilled musicians, the only way to provide music for a dance was to lilt the tunes. And to overcome the noise of couples dancing on a hard floor, multiple lilters would sing together. The video below gives you an idea of how that sounds.

 

 Sometimes lilting is used as the refrain of a song, usually to add a humorous element. For instance, in the song that follows, Kevin Burke of the Bothy Band uses lilting to imitate the tune that was played by the piper who is the subject of his story.

 

Lilting has some close relatives in Scotland. In the Hebrides, speakers of Scots Gaelic have what they call puirt a beul, or "mouth music." These are also dance tunes, but instead of nonsense syllables, the singers use very simple words. The lyrics are very simple and often rather incoherent; of course, their function is generally just to keep a beat. Here is an example from Karen Matheson of the group Capercaillie:
 

Finally, the Scots Gaelic tradition also has a number of waulking songs, which set the rhythm for beating tweed to soften it. The final song is called Dheanainn Súgradh, as performed by Clannad (the relatives of Enya), in the original guise is an electric folk band (you have to wait for the solos on electric guitar and jazz flute), before they helped invent New Age.

 

The Enduring Interest of Germany

In his previous post, Aaron touches on one of the most fundamental points in our discussion: modern German history is a compression of all of modern Western history. But, there is one point I must add which makes German history even richer than its dramatic events already are by themselves: Germans not only made history, but they have also written history.

On the one hand, Germans have excelled at researching the minutiae of history. Although textual criticism had been around for some time (the Renaissance, for example, witnessed an upsurge in interest), it really took off in 19th-century Germany, particularly in the field of Biblical studies. But classical philology of all sorts in the 19th-century was dominated by Germans; the texts we use for reading the ancient Greek and Latin authors are in large part the texts we have inherited from German philologists. Without their painstaking scholarship, we would lack basic knowledge about many basic aspects of the ancient world. Of course, this focus on the minutiae of ancient texts, as necessary as it may be to produce an accurate text, led to a kind of scientific myopia in the German academy. Professors did not necessarily read ancient authors for their inherent interest or historical importance, but rather so they could resolve technical questions of text criticism. As a result, German professors were caricatured as pedants writing preposterously impenetrable prose both at home (e.g., Heine’s dream professor in Die Harzreise) and abroad (e.g., Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh and Henry Adams in Democracy).

But, there are other voices in the 19th-century German academic tradition. For instance, Nietzsche, whose essay on the Use and Abuse of History we have cited before, rebelled against this academic tradition by focusing on the literary and philosophical problems posed by the Greek authors he was ready. The Birth of Tragedy was an audacious essay for a young professor to write—instead of writing a technically correct but boring essay for specialists, he dared to reinterpret the Greek spirit. On a more theoretical level, Wilhelm Dilthey initiated much of German philosophy’s interest in hermeneutics.

Outside of the academy (at least partly so), German Romanticism brought a sense of history—and a sense of historical loss—to the common people. The work of Clemens Brentanto and Achim von Arnim in compiling the folk songs contained in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or the Grimm Brothers’ collection of folk tales—following Herder’s and Goethe’s lead—highlighted to the German people that their medieval past was still alive, yet in danger of being lost. Indeed, German Romanticism is one of the reasons for the widespread neo-medievalism throughout 19th-century Europe.

Most importantly, Germans have loved to theorize about history more than any other nation, and they have loved to apply their grand theories to the writing of history. They are the ones who taught us how to theorize about history at all. Some of the first great historians of the modern era came from the German lands, such as Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt (who was Swiss but studied in Germany). No matter what one’s opinion of Hegel is, no one can deny that his focus on history led us to look at historical processes and their “world-historical” meaning more carefully.

But the mention of Hegel inevitably leads to the dark side of German theorizing. Germany is the heartland of modern ideology. Marxism and Nazism in particular inflicted immense suffering on the 20th century. In Germany, ideology was more than just the occupation of a small coterie of fanatical professors and revolutionaries; it spread to the educated classes as a whole. Eric Voegelin, in one of his autobiographical notes, recalls how the students he taught in Munich in the 1950’s, were usually much better academically prepared for university students than the Americans he had met in the 1940’s (e.g., they read more languages), but they were also far more ideological than American students; because they were already exposed to competing theories of history, they could not keep an open mind when studying history.

Yet, in the end, Voegelin, who reacted against the German tradition, was in so many ways the finest product of that very tradition. He was an immensely learned man in many fields, who did not shrink from dirtying his hands with detailed textual criticism, but was also intimately familiar with philosophy throughout the ages. He combined the love of minutiae with the love of theory.

The enduring interest of Germany for the modern American, then, lies not necessarily in the lessons its recent history can teach us. Dictatorships of the masses are a danger even in America. But, Germany has not only given us exciting history to learn about and extremely relevant history to learn from, but it has also given us the lenses through which to view history.

Why the German Obsession?

A few weeks ago I was struck by the simple fact that this blog seems to have a German obsession. Much of the blame falls on my fellow blogger, Stephen, who has written about Ernst Jünger, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (as well as Goethe's father), Josef Pieper, Bl. Clemens August Graf von Galen, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Gottfried Benn, and Stefan Zweig (admittedly, an Austrian). Stephen is a self-professed Germanophile, but that merely pushes off the question; why does he possess such Germanophilia? And why have I, a self-professed Anglophile, written on Triumph of the Will, Claus von Stauffenberg, some of Hitler's other conservative opponents, and Hitler's election? Even Therese has written on Hannah Arendt. Why this obsession with Germany, its writers, and its history?

One answer is that many of these posts have had to do - directly or indirectly - with the rise of Hitler to power. This series of events is a real life Richard III, a morality tale about the failure of good men to stop evil (a parallelism not lost on Richard Loncraine). The history of the Third Reich also invites more specific questions about how democracy may be subverted by tyranny, what role philosophy and theology play in politics, and how Christians are called to resist political evils.

More generally, the history of Germany is a kind of compressed history of the modern West. From the Thirty Years War into the 19th century, Germany was a collection of small states on which the Great Powers waged their wars, a kind of Third World in the midst of Central Europe. But in the 19th century, two developments unfolded with great speed: industrialization and political unification. And so, in the span of a single century, Germany passed through changes which most other nations undertook much earlier and over far longer periods of time. Thus, modern Germany exemplifies in various and dramatic ways the social, political, cultural, and economic discomforts which, to some extent, can be found throughout all of Europe and indeed the world.


Need a print of today's image of the Brandenburg Gate? You can get one from fine art america!

America's Place in the World - Learning from History

Andrew Bacevich gave the 2012 George C. Marshall Lecture in Military History, and as one would expect from Bacevich, it was scathing, insightful, and a joy to read.

I would strongly recommend you simply click on the link above and read his comments, titled "The Revisionist Imperative: Rethinking Twentieth Century Wars." They are well worth the time. But for the sake of the discussion here, let me give the very brief summary: Bacevich argues that the US drew the wrong lessons from the 20th century because we look at the wrong bit of history. We focus major attention on the Second World War, and conclude that massive applications of American military power can defeat tyranny and restore justice. While Bacevich quibbles somewhat with this interpretation of World War II, his larger argument is that we forget lots of history which teaches different lessons.

I'd like to suggest that greater knowledge of the period prior to America's entry into the war might lend lessons which better suit the present day. America had only a limited presence in the wider world, much of it characterized by businessmen, journalists, and diplomats. Our power was far short of omnipotent. What could we do in Manchuria or Sudetenland? Very little.

This situation is well attested in that most popular of media: Hollywood. Think of Rick in Casablanca or, more recently, Mr. Jackson in The White Countess. From watching films such as these - rather than The Sands of Iwo Jima or the like - one learns that Americans are in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the complexity of foreign locales and the pace of events that happen there. Our American protagonists are not powerless to effect change, but their power is considerably circumscribed by events beyond their control. Moreover, men like Rick and Mr. Jackson bring about change only rarely through the power of the gun; more often their American dollars or their intimate knowledge of local cultures and politics carried the day.

A foreign policy based on this set of historical memories - rather than on the Second World War - would not simply retreat from the world, but would choose its battles wisely. It would not abolish the use of military force, but rather than seeking to build fleets of aircraft, it would focus on diplomacy, intelligence, and the application of soft power, particularly through NGOs and businesses. It strikes me as precisely the kind of foreign policy the present age demands.

Containing China - The Historical Analogy with Japan

The following commentary comes from William D. O'Neil via H-War:

The irony of the hand-wringing over "containment" of China is that we've been here before, only no one seems to be able to remember.

As early as the 1890s, widespread alarm was evident in the United States over the specter of Japanese expansionism. This was a mixture of raw ethnocentrism and cold strategic calculation. At the same time, being the kind of country it was (and largely remains) there was no great unity in American views, and many unhesitatingly supported Japan's economic and political ambitions.

Both the Roosevelt (TR) and Wilson Administrations pursued policies of appeasement, while simultaneously building up the navy. The real departure point was the Twenty-One Demands affair of 1915. In the early 1920s the political elites in both countries attempted to build a basis for cooperative relationships, but the rise of very strongly ethnocentric groups in both nations undercut these efforts. Nevertheless, Japan and the United States managed to maintain reasonably productive relationships at many levels during the 1920s, notwithstanding some rather nasty clashes in China, and the ill-will generated by the laws excluding Japanese from American life.

Unfortunately for Japan, the military services fell under the leadership of extremely ethnocentric officers, and the Great Depression undermined those who wanted to advance Japan by economic means. The military came to power, teamed with neoconservative civilians. Japan was in a cycle in which the ethnocentrists would precipitate some expansionist action they saw as essential to national security, the west would respond negatively (even if only symbolically so), and this would evoke fears of "encirclement" (i.e., containment) leading to further expansionism to break out of the "iron ring." Thus even though the anti-Japanese ethnocentrist elements in the west did not hold particularly strong political positions in the 1930s, a self-amplifying positive feedback loop was established and maintained.

Eventually it was the external forcing function of Nazi aggressive expansionism at the other end of Eurasia that tipped Japan into war with the west. It is very possible that matters would never have reached such a pass absent the predominately exogenous shocks of the Great Depression and European War. At the same time, these shocks need not have been fatal had the ethnocentric elements not gained such dominance over Japan.

Despite many changes, the overall sociopolitical constitution of the United States remains much as it has nearly always been. There are both ethnocentric and cosmopolitan elements and neither is likely to be able to establish long-term dominance in the control of the nation's affairs. The United States will thus continue to act somewhat erratically within bounds determined by a broad consensus on basic economic and strategic interests -- which do not in themselves dictate any fundamental conflict with China.

The Chinese system, with its narrow leadership base and lack of regular mechanisms for turnover of power, gives an illusion of a steady hand on policy. But it is even more vulnerable to ethnocentric capture than its Japanese counterpart of the 1920s. Even if this takes place, even if it occurring right now, it need not have effects as terrible as those of World War II, but it would run a very uncomfortably great danger of doing so. The seeming prospect that China is contemplating its own replay of the Tsinan (Jinan) Incident over the Senkakus is anything but reassuring.

Some have objected that no military conflict could eventuate because of the threat of nuclear weapons, but these are not the words of anyone who knows or reflects on history. Ever since humankind has been fighting wars, for at least 100,000 years and very probably longer, unlimited conflicts have always threatened and frequently enough resulted in the destruction of both of the combatant societies. History says very clearly that such a threat may dampen the risks of war but cannot eliminate them. Indeed, the very fact that it is apologists for China (which by any rational calculation would inevitably suffer far more severely in any nuclear exchange) who invariably raise the nuclear specter speaks eloquently of the limited (albeit very great) power of the threat of annihilation.


This post first appeared on Statecraft & Security.

Microphones and the Mass

And while we are on the topic of technology and the sacred, I would like to pass on a short article from the most recent edition of First Things about "Marshall MacLuhan on How the Mic Transformed the Mass."

The article doesn't offer a definitive stance on whether microphones are good or bad for the Mass, but is rather an invitation to consider a phenomenon we normally ignore or are not even aware of. The article is sure to be met with glib objections by some (exhibit #1), but Professor White does a good job of pointing out why the change in the way Mass is celebrated was so momentous. For a religion such as Latin-rite Catholicism to go from observing the most solemn moment of the Mass in silence through clouds of incense to listening a man read the text from the Missal out loud is a huge change, which might not even have been considered in the 1960's.

And while we are on this topic, I should close with an even more shocking quotation from Ernst Jünger: "Where it identifies the dominion of technology with the dominion of Satan, the priesthood possesses a deeper instinct than where it places a microphone next to the Body of Christ."