They just don’t make invective like they used to.
I am something of an insomniac, and one of my tricks to get back to sleep when those 4 a.m. broadcasts from KFKD* just won’t let go is to pull out at random a volume from my copy of the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s the last pre-World War I version, and it contains some truly brilliant Edwardian (and Victorian) prose. (See, for example, Swinburne’s entry on Mary, Queen of Scots.)
So on last Wednesday or Thursday night — or rather, on Thursday or Friday a.m., 0-dark-hundred — I found myself nose-deep in Volume V, Camorra to Cape Colony and came across this in the entry on Campbell, John Campbell, Baron, who in 1841 gained the post of Lord Chancellor of Ireland for a grand total of 16 days. The controversy that arose over that appointment cast him into mostly self-imposed political exile for most of the 1840s. As the Britannica entry put it, that was when “the unlucky dream of literary fame troubled Lord Campbell’s leisure.”
Now, y’all may know I enjoy the odd bit of invective. I may even have been called a bit harsh in some of my commentary on a few of our scribbling friends of the rightish persuasion. But I can only dream of scorching earth with the zeal, brio and sheer music of this, on Campbell’s project:
The conception of this work is magnificent; its execution wretched. Intended to evolve a history of jurisprudence from the truthful portraits of England’s greatest lawyers, it merely exhibits the ill-digested results of desultory learning, without a trace of scientific symmetry or literary taste, without a spark of that divine imaginative sympathy which alone can give flesh and spirit to the dead bones of the past, and without which the present becomes an unintelligable maze of mean and selfish ideas. A charming style, a vivid fancy, exhaustive research were not to be expected from a hard-worked barrister; but he must certainly be held responsible for the frequent plagiarisms, the still more frequent inaccuracies of detail, the colossal vanity which obtrudes on almost every page, the hasty insinuations against the memory of the great departed who were to him as giants, and the petty sneers which he condescends to print against his own contemporaries, with whom he was living from day to day on terms of apparently sincere friendship.
Smokin’. Just an orotund symphony of Victorian disdain. I love it.
And strangely, I just can’t place who amongst us this demolition of Campbell calls to mind….
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*Ann Lamott’s name for the radio station in your head
Image: English School, Mary, Queen of Scots, in Captivity, 1575
I believe you may consider this an open thread.
burnspbesq
Unable to get to sleep until quite late on Friday night, I got my first taste of the weekly Tavis Smiley/Cornel West radio show, which airs at 6:00 a.m. Saturday on WBGO.
Must be heard to be believed.
Villago Delenda Est
That is indeed a thing of beauty. A dissection in detail, with a loving caress in each stroke of the scalpel.
SiubhanDuinne
They just don’t make mug shots like they used to.
Svensker
The 11th edition is such fun. Those Brits had a lot of self confidence, didn’t they. No punches pulled.
What you doing reading/listening to wacky Christian ladies (in the nicest sense, I like Annie)?
PIGL
[raises hand, calls out excitedly]Sir, please, Sir,…does it weigh the same as a newt?
Mike in NC
Turned on the TV a little while ago to see that idiot Bob Scheiffer interviewing idiot Michelle Bachmann. WTF, Bob? Do you have a hangover or something?
J
I too own a copy of the 11th ed, and will be going straight to the Mary Queen of Scots entry. For invective, interspersed with suitably dry commentary, I doubt it gets any better Frank Muir’s ‘Thoroughly Irreverent Social History of Practically Everything (slightly different title in Britain). It contains, together with many other gems, what may be the single best piece of invective ever, Ruskin on Political Economy. (start with ‘The Science of Political Economy is a lie’ on this page: http://books.google.com/books?id=h15EAAAAIAAJ&pg=PR82&lpg=PR82&dq=Ruskin+Political+Economy+damnedest+pit&source=bl&ots=KBMQC1jYOi&sig=jcCkWNPjTqEPl_zZdgkSD-bLHT8&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Ruskin%20Political%20Economy%20damnedest%20pit&f=false
Also highly recommended for those who fancy invective Housman’s selected prose, though I end up sympathizing with those at the receiving end of his ire.
Jewish Steel
Hey, I just started your Newton and the Counterfeiter book. It’s great!
vernon
I share Dr Levenson’s taste. It’s easy to forget that, for all the innovations of the postwar fiction virtuosi, the Victorian-Edwardian era was the high water mark of all-purpose English prose. One of many proofs is that you can not only find, but expect to find, eviscerations of this quality in the Encyclopedia freaking Britannica.
scav
@PIGL: Why limit ourselves to one? It could very well serve as a group portrait.
James
A magnificent piece of invective. (Maybe later on this morning I’ll try to parse those two sentences.)
Fortunately for us modern invective-lovers, we have our own Charles Pierce, who can match Her Majesty clause by clause in exquisite elegance and breadth and depth of utter disdain, in my opinion. Just read Pierce on Gingrich. This, and only this, makes the whole campaign season not just survivable, but fun!
vernon
@James: No, no, no, no, no.
My political sympathies are entirely with Pierce and I’m glad he does what he does, but to compare him to the old writers is like comparing Frank Frazetta to, I dunno, John Singer Sargent.
scav
And I will take the opportunity to express my abject adoration of the word Orotund. A high-fat cutie of a word, with an magnificent mouthfeel over and above the subtle cutting edge it conceals. For crunchiness and empty calories I go for Zacatecas, or better still Zacatecas, Zacatecas which is a legitimate overindulgence for a geographer.
Doctor Science
OK, since this is an open thread: Am I the only one who sometimes gets the regular page layout, and sometimes gets a mobile layout?
I’ve now poked around in the code, I see that the issue is in the WordPress Mobile Pack. Further poking shows that the Mobile Pack is only compatible up to WP 3.05, but you’re currently using WP 3.2.1.
Please forward this info to the webmaster or whoever shoots this kind of trouble.
Marc
Tom, I just wanted to let you know that as a result of your posts here I picked up Newton and the Counterfeiter and I’m reading it right now. Great fun, and I’m glad to have found it.
Also, I don’t care what those other bastards say about you–no pretentious art douche would ever let his publishers plaster a picture of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben on his book about Isaac Newton.
gaz
I noticed there are a ton of skyrim players here so…
haz some questions…
I just restarted my character – went through the “tutorial” mission at the beginning. By repeatedly hacking and blasting away at my escort, I managed to emerge at the other end of that session @ level 8, 40 destruction, 30 single-handed.
(Best part to hack the bastard to pieces I’ve found is right after the spiders, before you approach the sleeping bear – cuz your man finally stays in one spot! – blast away!)
Anyway, the first thing I did when I left the tutorial, was find the treasure map outside of riverwood, defend myself against some bandits – took the horse they had (they didn’t need it anymore heh) and hightailed my happy ass to magic college. By happy accident, I knew the spell I was asked to cast to gain entrance.
Anyway, now that I’m there, anyone have any ideas on smurfing the college to get some easy level ups, etc.
I remember the college in oblivion was the lynchpin of nearly all decent smurfing in that game, so similarly, I’m thinking the college in this game may have some levelling goodies as well.
Anybody do anything clever at the college to get some easy levels, or some great spells or anything?
hitchhiker
Thanks, Tom
Love this so much:
Apparently nothing much has changed. Lazy, careless writers are still full of themselves. Makes me wonder about the genius writers of the Britannica . . . do we know their names?
I once worked in a school that had a set — not as old as yours but still terrific — that I used to noodle around in while waiting for my students to finish their calculus tests. There was a long, wondrous essay about Newton that inspired me to investigate his story, read his letters (bound in leather at the engineering library of our local university), visit his childhood home in Woolsthorpe, and draft an outline of a novel about his growing up.
All of which is to say, I’m a serious fan of your posts.
Recommended for those *KFKD nights is a podcast called In Our Time, which features rotating panels of mostly British academics discussing their areas of specialty in exhaustive detail. Science, ancient history, art, music . . . those plummy, detached voices either put me to sleep or educate me, every time.
serge
You want to get to sleep…? Just read Tacitus.
Comrade Mary
Tacitus the blogger or Tacitus the historian?
Marc
Tacitus has his moments. His critique of Rome, inserted in a speech by a Celtic general: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Tom Levenson
@Jewish Steel: @Marc:
Many thanks to you both! My your tribes ever increase. (And may I be forgiven for noting that books always make great Christmas/Kwanzaa/Chanukah gifts?)
Also, Marc: you cut me to the quick. Lost that battle with the hardcover design. Oy — nothing but nineteenth century artifacts in a latte 17th century story. The Brits got it right, and the American paperback edition is unobjectionable.
Much oy-ti-tude in that battle.
serge
@Marc…that is a most apt quote. My problem tending toward sleepiness, in a sixth form tutorial long ago, was finding in a given sentence the nominative, followed somewhere by the infinitive, and followed much later still by the
accusative, all the while sorting out the various adverbs and adjectives.
The subject was found on one page, the verb a couple of pages later, and the object in the next chapter…I was young and stupid, not to mention impatient.
Marc
Yeah, I figured as much–just couldn’t resist the tweak. And your book will be finding its way to my dad when I’m done…
(Not the same Marc as #20; no Latin here.)
James
@vernon: I agree that the styles are entirely different, the Edwardian style likely to pass through the New York Times moderated filter, and Pierce’s not. But still, for turn of phrase, number and value of dependent clauses, and sheer, thunderous invective, I think my guy Charles Pierce stands up well.
Schlemizel
I’m glad you gave us the background on that paragraph, I thought it was about Noot – sure has him down to “T”
Liberal Sandlapper
@tom levenson: Dude? Why are you hating on my ancestors?
grumpy realist
Serge, if you want to really, really fall asleep, read the MPEP. (Manual on patent examining procedure.) I thought I had hit the ultimate of verbal-sleepitude-on-a-page when reading Alexander David-Neel’s “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” (fascinating at the same time that it will cause your eyelids to droop), but MAN, nothing is more soporific than the MPEP. I think this is why so many would-be patent agents find it so difficult to pass the Patent Bar—they keep falling asleep during their studies. I know I did!
Paul in KY
Tom, read some of Mr. Wilde’s best invective. He could really waste em with words, in that Victorian style.
vernon
@James: Well, yeah, he’s no slouch.
SectarianSofa
Ah, the good old days.
Thanks, Tom L.