Cardinal Manning

Cardinal Manning: A Biography by Robert Gray, 327 pages

Henry Manning did not set out to become a clergyman.  Financial pressures forced him away from a promising future in law and politics into a clerical career in the Church of England.  He did not set out to become a Catholic.  A long process led him from his upbringing in the heart of Evangelical piety into a more grounded, apostolic faith, and only a genuine crisis of conscience drove him out of Anglicanism.  Having become Catholic, however, and a Catholic priest, he did set out to take a leading position in the Catholic Church in England.  Conscious of his own considerable gifts, he was not reluctant to use them to guide the Church and society in the direction he thought best.

In his own time, Manning was highly esteemed.  Although his conversion cost him many of those dazzling friendships he had made in his youth, his tireless efforts for the working classes of England won for him an admiration far broader and no less genuine.  This was enhanced by his emaciated appearance, which seemed to be a visible record of long decades of prayer and fasting - Chesterton recalled seeing him in his cardinalatial robes looking like "a ghost clad in flames."  Subsequent generations were not so kind.  Comfortable secular scoffers had Lytton Strachey's infamous hackiograpy, which depicted Manning as an ambitious hypocrite.  Among Catholics, Manning's troubled relationship with St John Henry Newman caused his reputation to decline even as that of Newman grew.

Robert Gray's biography, then, is an important recovery.  For Gray's even-handed account of Manning's life, thought, and work reveals a man who was, indeed, ambitious and driven, yet fully aware of these tendencies in himself and determined to fight against them and, where possible, bend them towards good.  In the end, the reader is likely to echo the sentiment of the author, "if Henry Manning is not saved seventy times seven times, God help the rest of us."

Leonie Martin

Leonie Martin: A Difficult Life by Marie Baudouin-Croix, translated by Mary Frances Mooney, 157 pages

Leonie was born in 1863 to Ss Louis and Zelie Martin, the third of their six children, all daughters, who survived into adulthood.  All six eventually became nuns, with five joining the Carmelite monastery at Lisieux.  Leonie alone entered the Visitandine order at Caen, finally persevering on her third attempt.  Then again, Leonie had always been the difficult one, a sickly child, struggling with disobedience at home and failing in her studies at school, a trial and a worry to the mother who died when she was 14.  How she overcame these shortcomings, not alone but through the grace of God and her saintly intercessors, is the great theme of this short book.

Although Leonie Martin has not been canonized, Marie Baudouin-Croix's biography is unmistakably a hagiography.  It elides difficult, complex issues, notably the mental illness that afflicted Louis Martin in his later days, simplifying them into hardships to be overcome with the holy serenity of faith.  The problems this presents are more than compensated for by the author's evident understanding of, and sympathy with, the religion and religious life of the Martin family.  This is undoubtedly her story as Leonie herself would have liked it told.

Emperor of Japan

Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 by Donald Keene, 723 pages

When the 122nd Emperor of Japan ascended the Chrysanthemum throne in 1867 at the age of 14, no Japanese emperor had exercised real power for nearly seven centuries.  A year later, the last shogun resigned his position and the man who would be known as Meiji became the actual as well as symbolic ruler of Japan.  The country was dominated by a feudal aristocracy, educated according to Confucian principles, and threatened by the greed of the Western powers.  When Meiji died 45 years later, Japan had rapidly Westernized, adopted a parliamentary system, defeated China and Russia in successive wars, annexed Korea, and established itself as a major power on the global stage.  It had, however, lost something which is less tangible.

It is unclear how much influence the Meiji emperor actually exercised over the seismic changes that occurred in Japanese culture and politics during his reign.  Indeed, it is difficult to say much of anything about the personality of the emperor, given the reverential protectiveness of all those in a position to know him.  The few candid accounts of the man were provided by foreign dignitaries whose access was necessarily limited.  Understandably, then, Donald Keene's biography is as much a portrait of the era as of the emperor who gave the era its name, although discerning readers may sense the spirit of the man moving throughout.  Keene himself seems devoted to the fashionable cult of "progress", but his devotion does not become fanaticism, indeed, some of the most memorable passages concern Ulysses Grant's role in the preservation of No drama and the European derision of Western-style dance halls in Tokyo.  The result is a compelling, rich tale of an era of momentous change, both for better and for worse, told through the refracted image of the man who was its symbol.

Leopard

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 320 pages

Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salinas, would be perfectly content ruling over his large family, amusing himself with his mistress, indulging in his passion for astronomy, playing with his dog, and watching over his hereditary estates with benevolent indifference.  Unfortunately for him, history has other plans, as Garibaldi's revolutionaries lay siege to Palermo, with Fabrizio's own nephew, the dashing Tancredi, joining them in their effort to overthrow the monarchy.  Even in the security of his country estate at Donnafugata, the prince has to reckon with his eldest daughter Concetta's love for Tancredi and his nephew's growing affection for the bourgeois beauty Angelica.

The Leopard is a masterpiece.  It is not a dramatic novel - most of the major external conflicts are resolved without struggle or comment.  The real drama is social, historical, psychological, and, in the end, metaphysical.  Despite the sentimentality of its characters, it is a remarkably unsentimental work.  There is much to attract us in the passing world of the Sicilian nobility, but the novel does not romanticize them.  CS Lewis famously remarked that there is no "magic about the past.  People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we.  But not the same mistakes.  They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us."  So it is with The Leopard - the novel unfolds for the reader a universe of values which overlaps but significantly diverges from those of liberal modernity and allows him to judge between them.

Disraeli

Disraeli by Robert Blake, 766 pages

Benjamin Disraeli was born into a Jewish literary family, baptized into the Church of England at an early age, and educated at a second-rate school (or one he evidently felt was second-rate).  He was in turns a failure as a journalist, a middling success as an author, a greater success as a dandy, and then a brilliant success as a politician, twice serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and dominating the Conservative party during its first half century.  He was a romantic both by upbringing and inclination, undeniably an adventurer, disliked by the British establishment and yet an icon of Victorian Conservatism.

The definitive biography of Disraeli, begun by WF Monypenny in 1910 and finished by GE Buckle in 1920, runs to six volumes.  Robert Blake begins his biography by apologizing for its length, but pointing out that it isn't as long as Monypenny and Buckle.  Fortunately, his light touch makes even the intricacies of parliamentary politics amusing, if not always interesting.  This complements his subject, for as Blake demonstrates, throughout his career Disraeli approached politics as something of a game.  This playfulness has its attractive aspects, but also raises questions as to what, if any, principles he actually held, especially as the ideas he expounded in his political novels seem to bear little relation to the practical politics he pursued.  Yet Blake insists that despite - and, indeed, through - his flexibility, Disraeli consistently upheld the traditional, "irrational" divisions and institutions of England against the spectre of "centralizing Benthamite bureaucracy, however 'democratic'."  In this view, the central element of his playfulness was his rejection of the cant and cliche of "a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization."

Song of Bernadette

The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel, translated by Ludwig Lewisohn, 575 pages

Poor Bernadette Soubirous, gathering firewood in the dump at Massabielle, has a vision of a beautiful lady praying the Rosary.  The mysterious Lady asks her to return regularly.  Despite her efforts to keep her visions a secret, word soon gets out, dividing the townsfolk into believers and skeptics.  More ominously, the local authorities move against her, fearing that the sophisticates of Paris will write them off as backwards and superstitious.  In time all resistance will be overcome by that gentle Power which will transform humble Lourdes into the Lady's kingdom and little Bernadette into a saint.

Franz Werfel wrote The Song of Bernadette to fulfill a vow he made while fleeing the fall of France.  It is a novel, not a biography, and is therefore obviously fictionalized, but Werfel's inventions are largely confined to reasonable extrapolations and the creation of ancillary characters as commentators on events.  These last rarely interact with the main characters, inhabiting a social and intellectual world far removed from that of the Soubirous family.  At the same time, their thoughts on the seemingly inexplicable events, their vain attempts to psychologize or mythologize the unexpected - and mostly unwelcome - irruption of the miraculous into their personal worlds, is perhaps the most profound part of the novel.  Perhaps this is because Werfel himself is amongst their company, attempting to more subtly smooth the sharp edges of reality.

Last Samurai

The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori by Mark Ravina, 214 pages

In 1877, Saigo Takamori died in battle against the army of the Emperor of Japan, an army he had once commanded and an emperor to whom he had pledged his life in service.  Even before his end, he was already popularly portrayed as a semi-divine figure transcending mere politics, and after his death he would continue to be celebrated by generations of Japanese romantics and reactionaries dissatisfied with the march of modernity.

Yet in Mark Ravina's telling Saigo had a crucial role in that march.  Not only was Saigo a key player in the overthrow of the shogunate after Progress was brought to Japan in the mouths of American cannons, he was central in the subsequent disempowerment of the daimyo, including his own liege lord, who had backed the ousting of the shogun.  Although it is impossible, at least from the material Ravina provides, to know exactly what Saigo believed would follow, it is difficult in hindsight to imagine anything other than a bourgeois democracy filling the resulting vacuum.  This is consistent with a view of Saigo's character that sees him as addicted to the grand gesture, the type of man who could sway the fortunes of a nation with a dramatic action at a pivotal moment, but who is uninterested in the minutiae of actually governing a modern state.  It is possible to judge this as foolishness or even indiscipline, or imagine it to be the disinterested pursuit of virtue and the selfless leadership of a true hero.  Whether deliberately or by accident, Ravina leaves that decision to the reader.

Disraeli's Reminiscences

Disraeli's Reminiscences by Benjamin Disraeli, 148 pages

During the 1860s, Benjamin Disraeli, with the best part of his career still ahead of him, began jotting down notes towards a future autobiography that, as things turned out, was never actually written.  The notes survive, however, in this loosely arranged series of brief anecdotes and scraps of narrative.  

Some of the bits and pieces are amusing, and the personality of Disraeli shines through clearly.  Those hoping for insight into his life or the political and social world he inhabited are likely to be somewhat disappointed, however, especially since, as the editors take care to note, the author was hardly above embroidery and invention.

Culture and Anarchy

Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, 212 pages

In the seminal essays that make up Culture and Anarchy, originally published serially in 1869, Matthew Arnold attempted to convince his hardheaded English countrymen, who prided themselves on practicality and efficiency, of the value of culture.  For Arnold, the cult of efficiency amounts to an idolatry of machinery, a confusion of ends and means, and a worldview closed to the "sweetness and light" that make life worth living.  In the process, Arnold famously distinguishes two rival tendencies in Western civilization, which he dubs the Hebraic and the Hellenic - the former demanding faithful action, the latter rational thought.  Both pursue the same goal of human perfection, but that goal is unattainable by either alone.

It is easy to criticize Arnold's scheme as overly simplistic and reductive, although the notion of a rivalry between Athens and Jerusalem can be traced back at least as far as Tertullian.  It is equally easy to point out its weaknesses - to ask, for example, whether Hellenism is not just as likely to lead to the kind of radical individualism Arnold deplores as Hebraism, or whether other forms of Hebraism beyond Puritanism might not admit sweetness and light as readily as Hellenism.  To do so, however, would be to fundamentally misunderstand what Arnold means by Hebraism and Hellenism, to imagine the former as simply religious and the latter as purely secular.  Arnold wants contemplative philosophers, not scientific administrators, true intellectuals, not chattering policy wonks.  Indeed, the latter are the vanguard of the mechanical anti-culture he abominates.

Terror

The Terror by Dan Simmons, 766 pages

The year is 1848.  Over a hundred men are spending their second winter trapped in their two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, off the coast of King William Island.  They are surrounded by ice, wind, and darkness.  They are running low on food, rum, and coal.  Worst of all, they are being hunted by a preternatural creature strong enough to tear a man in half and clever enough to sneak onto the very decks of their ships.  Nearly as mysterious is the young Esquimaux woman the crew call Lady Silence, who may or may not know something about these men and their fates, but whose tongue was bitten off at the root by someone or something long ago. 

The Terror falls prey to some of the cliches of historical fiction.  There's an extended passage in which a character expounds on the as yet unpublished theories of Darwin with which he is implausibly (though not impossibly) familiar, and Simmons only barely avoids turning his Inuit into noble savages.  The monster, being an unstoppable killing machine with an unknown origin and purpose, is unavoidably reminiscent of similar figures in Simmons' science fiction novels.  In another novel the monster would be a center of tension, something that can be directly faced and overcome in a way that cold and darkness cannot, but Simmons establishes fairly early on that nothing the sailors can do will more than temporarily inconvenience the creature.  When answers are provided, it is in the form of an exposition dump that could have been copy-pasted from some alternate universe's Dictionary of Inuit Mythology.  Nor do the characters provide much interest, for while a few are genuinely memorable, they have little to do except suffer through hundreds of pages of detailed descriptions of frostbite and scurvy, and the reader is invited to suffer alongside them.

And yet.

The final hundred pages are compelling in a way they could not have been without the long tale of thwarted adventure and dreary survival that preceded them.  It could perhaps have been more artfully done, but that it was done at all is a marvel and a gift.

Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido

 The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido by Keisai Eisen, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Sebastian Izzard, 157 pages

Nineteenth century Japan saw an intense interest in travel, and a corresponding market for travel books and prints, whether sold as guides, mementos, or as objects of art.  Among the main routes for travel was the Kisokaido, a highway running down the center of Honshu from the Tokugawa capital of Edo to the imperial capital of Kyoto.  The artist Keisai Eisen was commissioned to create a series of prints depicting the route, but he only completed 24 prints before abandoning the project, which was then handed over to Utagawa Hiroshige, whose fame as a master of ukiyo-e was destined to eclipse that of Eisen.

The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido collects the best reproductions of the original prints and offers both an opportunity for aesthetic appreciation and a vicarious journey through 19th century Japan.  Izzard offers his guidance for each of these paths, commenting on the sites depicted and on the history of the prints themselves.  Whatever the motive, the journey is certain to be a rewarding one.  

John Ruskin

 John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye by Robert Hewison, 212 pages

Midway through his life's journey, Ruskin wrote, "Once I could write joyfully about beautiful things, thinking to be understood; - now I cannot any more; for it seems to me that no one regards them."  Ruskin was, in fact, one of the most famous public intellectuals in the Anglophone world, but it was not fame he sought but understanding, and he had failed to gain many adherents for his more radical ideas, as he complained in another place: "I can get no soul to believe that the beginning of art is in getting our country clean, and our people beautiful."  Instead, Victorian England remained the prisoner of its own "greed for money, lust for food, pride of dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics last announced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by the chemist..."

Robert Hewison's task, then, is to facilitate a real understanding of the totality of Ruskin's thought, not as it stood at any one time as a complete, coherent doctrine, but as it changed and developed through what Ruskin himself admitted were a series of contradictions.  In Hewison's view, such understanding begins with the recognition that Ruskin was a visual thinker whose lifelong mission was to teach others how to see what he saw.  As such, his ideas are allusive and derive their power from analogy rather than logic.

Tissot

Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot 1836-1902 by Christopher Wood, 155 pages

Tissot was a very financially successful painter in his own lifetime - first as a portraitist and painter of society life in London, later as a religious painter in Paris - and yet even then he was always something of an outsider - in exile he was a bit too French for the English and upon his return a little too Anglicized for the French.  Critically, too, he is slighted as a minor painter who borrowed everything interesting about his work, or remembered fondly but passingly for his depictions of Victorian elegance. 

Wood does little to dispel any of these views - in fact, he reinforces them.  He moves rapidly through his subject's life and work, pausing only briefly to consider a particular piece or moment in time.  Certainly, he never tries the patience of his readers, and he is quite candid about what he sees as Tissot's artistic shortcomings.  Less attractively, he is also rather determined about how we, as more-modern-than-moderns, ought to see Tissot's life and work.  It is no doubt for all these reasons that the chapter considering Tissot's famous illustrations of the Bible is quite abbreviated, and none of the relevant works are reproduced in color, a rather glaring contrast to the rest of the book.

Poems

 Poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne, 231 pages

He offers his tithe.

     The sea gives her shells to the shingle,

          The earth gives her streams to the sea;

     They are many, but my gift is single,

          My verses, the first fruits of me.

Swinburne has been called the "last of the giants", and indeed he stands tall at the end of Romanticism and the beginning of Decadence, willing to be damned for love's spite or sake.

     But you would have felt my soul in a kiss,

          And known that once if I loved you so well;

     And I would have given my soul for this

          To burn forever in burning hell.

Death has closed the circle on Swinburne's world of flesh, but delight has not yet yielded wholly to disgust, nor heartache to horror.

     Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,

          To think on things that are well outworn?

     Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,

          The dream foregone and the deed forborne?

British in India

The British in India: A Social History of the Raj by David Gilmour, 525 pages

For better than three hundred years, the British were in, and increasingly over, India, first in the form of the East India Company, later as direct representatives of the Empire.  Who they were, why they came, and how they lived are the subjects of David Gilmour's sweeping social history, a pointillist study which sketches the human face of the British presence on the subcontinent.

As a social history, this is not to be confused with a more conventional political or military history, and a basic knowledge of British and Indian history is required to make much sense out of it.  Gilmour admirably resists the natural temptation to put the more interesting oddities in the foreground while leaving the boring commonplaces in the background.  Even more remarkably, he largely abstains from value judgments, allowing the lives of his subjects to speak for themselves without authorial editorializing.  Unfortunately, this does nothing to moderate the at-times overwhelming amount of information Gilmour presents, but so many of the anecdotes he has uncovered are entertaining or enlightening that the reader is likely to find being lost amongst them a delight rather than a chore.

Mariner

Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Malcolm Guite, 430 pages

     It is an ancient Mariner

     And he stoppeth one of three

     'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

     Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?'

The initial idea behind The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a Gothic trifle, a simple spooky ghost story that could be easily sold for quick cash, but Coleridge's genius rapidly shaped it into something more.  Since it first appeared as the opening poem of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, the Rime, like the Mariner himself, has surprised and captivated readers with its poetic and prophetic power.  As Malcolm Guite explains in his study of the poem and its poet, the themes of sin and death, conversion and rebirth, played out as compellingly in the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as they did in his creation.

This is more than coincidence.  Rejecting approaches which separate Coleridge's early poetry from his later philosophical explorations, Guite describes his life's work as a concerted effort "to build a bridge between the dead but objective world of meaningless fact, on the one hand, and the world of rich subjective fancy with no claims to truth, on the other."  Coleridge found this bridge in Imagination, understood as that part of man which is closest to his Creator, and the faculty by which he begins to understand God's symbolic language of nature.  Human creativity is therefore an extension of the Divine, and it follows "that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation."

     He went like one that hath been stunned,

     And is of sense forlorn:

     A sadder and a wiser man,

     He rose the morrow morn.

Spiritual Life

The Spiritual Life and How To Be Attuned To It by St Theophan the Recluse, translated by Alexandra Dockham, 320 pages

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a young Russian woman in the grips of a profound spiritual crisis approached a holy monk for advice.  The resulting correspondence was preserved and collected in this book, which quickly became a Russian Orthodox classic.  St Theophan's balance of holy zeal and humane sympathy fully justifies this judgement of posterity.

For Latins, the obvious comparison is with St Francis de Sales, and indeed The Spiritual Life closely resembles the Introduction to the Devout Life in its attempt to chart a path to God for those living in the secular world.  If the Frenchman's work is more developed, the Russian's is more accessible, at least partially due to having been written two centuries closer to our own time.

Rossetti

Rossetti: His Life and Works by Evelyn Waugh, 227 pages

In this biographical study Evelyn Waugh seeks to understand both Dante Gabriel Rossetti's success and his failure.  The former, he concludes, demands a spiritual aesthetics that transcends formal analysis, while the latter is best explained by the artist's personal tragedies and character flaws.  Rossetti spent his career pursuing an ideal of the feminine, but was sabotaged by his own indiscipline and irresponsibility.

Rossetti was Waugh's first full-length book, but if his development is certainly not complete the voice is already unmistakable his.  Especially delightful are his account of Rossetti and Whistler's shared mania for blue china and the ethics of reviewing the books of one's friends, although equally characteristic is his vivid description of his subject's isolation, paranoia, and despair.

The Flame Is Green

The Flame Is Green by RA Lafferty, 245 pages

In the middle of the nineteenth century, poor Irish fisherman Dana Coscuin is drafted into a revolution.  Not the revolution of the radicals who are really superficial, not the revolution of liberals who are really quite close-minded, not the red revolution which claims to be new but is as old as Adam, but the green revolution, which is older still and yet ever new.   Although he only knows one song, Dana sings his way into a company of fighters who dance across Europe, from the Carlist hills to 1848 Paris to partitioned Poland, wrestling with principalities and powers as well as flesh and blood.

The Flame Is Green is set in a reenchanted world.  The characters consistently intuit future events, although not always accurately, and perform feats that are physically impossible or seemingly inexplicable.  Everything is connected, and even the greatest surprises are accepted graciously.  The novel will not be to everyone's taste, but no one will mistake it for anything else.

Ghosts of Gold Mountain

Ghosts of Gold Mountain: the epic story of the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad   by Gordon H. Chang,  312 pages

This is indeed an epic story of the Chinese who were primarily responsible for building the western and most challenging section of the U.S. transcontinental railroad which was completed about 150 years ago. Gordon Chang's story begins by describing the politics and life of the Guangdong province in southern China from which most of the railroad workers, young and male, were recruited and it ends with a description of Chinese women working in San Francisco brothels and Chinese people being driven from the western cities that they populated. Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR), financed by an act of congress, initially did not want to hire Chinese laborers but other workers deserted and the Chinese proved their skills, work ethic and willingness so they became the primary builders of the challenging western section of the railroad. 

The planned route required traversing steeper grades and than any other railroad previously built; it would involve more dynamite to blast tunnels through parts of the mountain, and great human risk to builders who packed and lit explosives and hammered chisels to cut beds into its cliffs. CPRR did not even keep a record of the names of its Chinese workers nor did they ever publicly acknowledge the death of a single railroad worker. But by drawing on reports of Chinese benevolent associations, newspapers, historical associations, reports of freight cars carrying remains from mass accidents, Chang fills in some silence from the railroad records and estimates that 1,200 of them died in the project. The railroad Chinese worked harder and faster than other crews but were paid less so, without a union, they organized a strike which approached parity in  wages along with recognition and  time to celebrate Chinese holidays. 

Railroad Chinese were not only killed by the engineering feat for which they worked, they were also killed by "the great purge" to rid the country of them: In October of 1871 a mob of 500 attacked the Chinese quarter in Los Angeles, burned buildings and lynched 18 Chinese in the streets: the largest lynching in American history. Twenty five people were indicted for murder but none were convicted. Five years later, the white citizens of Truckee, a town made possible by the railroad, formed a Caucasian League, burned the cabins of Chinese woodcutters and then shot them as they fled. Truckee citizens used violence, arson and intimidation to drive other Chinese citizens out until the town's 1900 census indicates that there were only two Chinese people left in town. Such were the bitter ironies of the Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroad. Their men were recruited to build the wealth of those who planned it and then their women were enslaved to satisfy the lusts of men.