Laudator Temporis Acti

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), The English Spirit: Essays in Literature and History, rev. ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1966), p. 36:

Really, besides sound scholarship, the professors need some knowledge of the facts of life.

Chaucer, "The Pardoner's Tale," Canterbury Tales VI, 549-564 (tr. Nevill Coghill):

Wine is a lecherous thing and drunkenness
A squalor of contention and distress.        550
O drunkard, how disfigured is thy face,
How foul thy breath, how filthy thy embrace!
And through thy drunken nose a stertorous snort
Like 'samson-samson' — something of the sort.
Yet Samson never was a man to swig.        555
You totter, lurch and fall like a stuck pig,
Your manhood's lost, your tongue is in a burr.
Drunkenness is the very sepulchre
Of human judgement and articulation.
He that is subject to the domination        560
Of drink can keep no secrets, be it said.
Keep clear of wine, I tell you, white or red,
Especially Spanish wines which they provide
And have on sale in Fish Street and Cheapside.

A lecherous thyng is wyn, and dronkenesse
Is ful of stryvyng and of wrecchednesse.        550
O dronke man, disfigured is thy face,
Sour is thy breeth, foul artow to embrace,
And thurgh thy dronke nose semeth the soun
As though thou seydest ay "Sampsoun, Sampsoun!"
And yet, God woot, Sampsoun drank nevere no wyn.        555
Thou fallest as it were a styked swyn;
Thy tonge is lost, and al thyn honeste cure;
For dronkenesse is verray sepulture
Of mannes wit and his discrecioun.
In whom that drynke hath dominacioun        560
He kan no conseil kepe, it is no drede.
Now kepe yow fro the white and fro the rede,
And namely fro the white wyn of Lepe,
That is to selle in Fysshstrete or in Chepe.

Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), Bitter Lemons, chapter 6:

Mr. Honey was another new acquaintance with marked idiosyncrasies. He was tall and lean and very shortsighted; and he walked about the village swaying gracefully and manipulating his long graceful hands in gestures which reminded one of a lady of fashion in the period of Madame Récamier. His long dark face with its glazed eyes betrayed a fond vague happiness. He was the grave-digger; but as nobody died in the village he had a lot of time free for self-examination, and since a man must eat he had turned his talents to the digging of cesspits at so much a cubic meter. He was the philosopher of main drainage. "What is the meaning of life?" he asked me once in a tragic slurring voice. "It all goes in here," raising a bottle of wine to his lips for a long swig; "and it all goes out there," pointing to the pit he was digging. "What does it all mean?" Poor Mr. Honey! I have often pondered on the subject myself.

Aristotle, Politics 7.4.13-14 (1326b; tr. H. Rackham):

But in order to decide questions of justice and in order to distribute the offices according to merit it is necessary for the citizens to know each other's personal characters, since where this does not happen to be the case the business of electing officials and trying law-suits is bound to go badly; haphazard decision is unjust in both matters, and this must obviously prevail in an excessively numerous community. Also in such a community it is easy for foreigners and resident aliens to usurp the rights of citizenship, for the excessive number of the population makes it not difficult to escape detection.

περὶ τῶν δικαίων καὶ πρὸς τὸ τὰς ἀρχὰς διανέμειν κατ᾽ ἀξίαν ἀναγκαῖον γνωρίζειν ἀλλήλους, ποῖοί τινές εἰσι, τοὺς πολίτας, ὡς ὅπου τοῦτο μὴ συμβαίνει γίγνεσθαι, φαύλως ἀνάγκη γίγνεσθαι τὰ περὶ τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὰς κρίσεις. περὶ ἀμφότερα γὰρ οὐ δίκαιον αὐτοσχεδιάζειν, ὅπερ ἐν τῇ πολυανθρωπίᾳ τῇ λίαν ὑπάρχει φανερῶς. ἔτι δὲ ξένοις καὶ μετοίκοις ῥᾴδιον μεταλαμβάνειν τῆς πολιτείας· οὐ γὰρ χαλεπὸν τὸ λανθάνειν διὰ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τοῦ πλήθους.

Homer, Odyssey 16.211-212 (tr. Richmond Lattimore):

And it is a light thing for the gods who hold wide heaven
to glorify any mortal man, or else to degrade him.

ῥηΐδιον δὲ θεοῖσι, τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν,
ἠμὲν κυδῆναι θνητὸν βροτὸν ἠδὲ κακῶσαι.

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), The English Spirit: Essays in Literature and History, rev. ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1966), p. 17:

Any fool can criticise; but can he do the job? The world is full of people standing on the side-lines, offering their invaluable advice; but can they run a railway and create a great institution, manage a bank or a factory, or govern a country; can they paint the picture they talk so glibly about, or even write the book?

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 2.1.5-8:

                                  We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011), Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2006), p. 140 (in a lengthy digression on Crete):

Few of the old men could write or read, those in middle age found reading hard and writing a grind; the young were defter penmen, but, owing to their short time at school and the disorder of the war, they were not advanced in the craft, apart from an occasional student on the run from the underground in one of the towns. A by-product of this scholastic void was a universal gift for lively and original talk; the flow and style of their discourse were unhindered by the self-consciousness which hobbles and hamstrings the rest of us. They had astonishing memories. These often reached back to their great-grandfathers' day, and, by hearsay, far beyond. In an island of long lives, this made all the past seem recent: compelling proof of the continuity of history. It reduced the war to just another struggle, the worst and the most recent of many, with which we were perfectly able to deal, and, though the Germans had overrun Greece and driven the British back to El Alamein, win. "Never fear, my child," some greybeard would say, prophetically prodding the smoke with a forefinger like a fossil, "with Christ and the Virgin's help, we'll eat them." All agreed, and the conversation wandered to the First World War and Asia Minor and arguments about the respective merits of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, to Bismarck and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or the governments, constitutions and electoral systems of different countries. Then the level of this far-ranging chat, much of it far beyond the scope of their literate equivalents in England, might suddenly be reduced by another old man, simpler than his fellows, asking, and evoking general derision and amusement by his question, whether the English were Christians or, like the Moslems, polygamous....Intelligence, humour, curiosity, the rapid assimilation of ideas and their quick deployment, an incomparable narrative knack, arguments resolved by a sudden twist, the inability to leave facts and ideas undeveloped—they are objects to play with like nuggets—all these graces flowered in this stony terrain.

Id., pp. 144-145 (on the Cretan epic poem Erotókritos by Vincentios Cornaros):

In Crete, this tremendous metrical saga plays the part of the Homeric cycle in Dorian times. Everyone knows it, all can quote vast tracts, and, astonishingly, some of the old men in the mountains, though unable to read and write, could, and still can, recite the whole poem by heart; when one remembers that it is nearly a thousand lines longer than the Odyssey, this feat makes one scratch one's head with wonder or disbelief. They intone rather than recite it; the voice rises at the caesura and at the end of the first line of a couplet, and drops at the end of the second; now and then to break the monotony, the key shifts. During our winter vigils, it continued for hours; every so often another old man would take over; listening, I occasionally dropped off for an hour or two, and woke to find Erotókritos in the thick of yet another encounter with the Black Knight of Karamania. (He symbolized, at the time the poem first saw the light, the threat of the Ottomans; Turkey had already conquered the rest of Greece, and was soon to submerge Crete itself.) The rhythmic intoning might sway on till daybreak, with some of the listeners rapt, others nodding off or snoring; or until a runner broke in from the dark like a snowman in a gyre of flakes; the news of arrests in Herakleion, Retimo or Canea or the alarm of a mountain battalion advancing up the valley jerked us all into motion.

Related post: Talk.

Homer, Odyssey 16.129 (tr. A.T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock):

Yet these things truly lie on the knees of the gods.

ἀλλ᾿ ἦ τοι μὲν ταῦτα θεῶν ἐν γούνασι κεῖται.

Cf. also Odyssey 1.267, 1.400, Iliad 17.514, 20.435.

Mark W. Edwards on Iliad 17.514:

The image is from spinning (in a sitting position) the thread of fate (ὣς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι, 24.525), or less probably (pace Leaf) from laying offerings on the knees of seated statues...

Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought (1951; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 303-309, argues in favor of the explanation from spinning.

But M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 222-223, offers a different explanation:

There is, however, nothing in Greek myth or art to explain the phrase. 'In the gods' hands' would be easier to understand; why 'on their knees'? Babylonian poetry, while it does not possess a matching expression, nevertheless offers an attractive answer. There the future is determined by the so-called Tablet of Destinies, the ṭupšīmātu. Whoever possesses it controls the world. Its place is on its owner's knees, as we see from Anzu. After Ninurta has regained it from the usurper Anzu, Dagan Is advised:

'Send for him and let him come to you;
let him set the Tablet of Destinies on your knees.'¹²

This may plausibly be identified as the mythological concept that underlies the Homeric phrase.

¹² Anzu III 38 f.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for shedding yet more light on the phrase "swallowers of formulas."

He points out that the phrase "swallower(s) of formulas" occurs several times in Thomas Carlyle's essay "Memoirs of Mirabeau," London and Westminster Review, No. 8, January, 1837, reprinted as "Mirabeau" in his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. V (London: Chapman & Hall, Limited, 1888), pp. 201-268.

P. 221:

Be this as it can, Col d'Argent came alive again, by 'miracle of surgery;' and, holding his head up by means of a silver stock, walked this earth many long days, with respectability, with fiery intrepidity and spleen; did many notable things: among others, produced, in dignified wedlock, Mirabeau the Friend of Men; who again produced Mirabeau the Swallower of Formulas; from which latter, and the wondrous blazing funeral-pyre he made for himself, there finally goes forth a light, whereby those old Riquetti destinies, and many a strange old hidden thing, become noticeable.

P. 239:

Once after a thousand years all nations were to see the great Conflagration and Self-combustion of a Nation, — and learn from it if they could. And now, for a Swallower of Formulas, was there a better schoolmaster in the world than this very Friend of Men; a better education conceivable than this which Alcides-Mirabeau had?

P. 245:

Rumour blows, — to Paris as else whither: for answer, on the 26th of June, 1774, there arrives a fresh Sealed Letter of more emphasis; there arrive with it grim catchpoles and their chaise: the Swallower of Formulas, snatched away from his wife, from his child then dying, from his last shadow of a home, even an exiled home, is trundling towards Marseilles; towards the Castle of If, which frowns-out among the waters in the roadstead there!

P. 262:

With 'a body of Noblesse more ignorant, greedier, more insolent than any I have ever seen,' the Swallower of Formulas was like to have rough work.

P. 266:

Supreme Usher De Brézé enters, with the King's renewed order to depart. "Messieurs," said De Breze, "you heard the King's order?" The Swallower of Formulas bellows-out these words, that have become memorable: "Yes, Monsieur, we heard what the King was advised to say; and you, who cannot be interpreter of his meaning to the States-General; you, who have neither vote, nor seat, nor right of speech here, you are not the man to remind us of it. Go, Monsieur, tell those who sent you, that we are here by will of the Nation; and that nothing but the force of bayonets can drive us hence!"

Variations on the phrase also occur in a couple of Carlyle's letters.

To his brother John (February 23, 1836):

Most so-called Christians (I believe I should except the worthy Mr. Dunn) treat me instead with jargon of metaphysic formulas, or perhaps shovel-hatted Coleridgean moonshine. I admire greatly that of old Marquis Mirabeau (though he means it not for admiration): Il a HUMÉ toutes les formules! A man should "swallow" innumerable "formulas" in these days; and endeavour above all things to look with eyes.

To Ralph Waldo Emerson (June 15, 1838):

But, on the whole, men ought in New England too to "swallow their formulas"; there is no freedom till then: yet hitherto I find only one man there who seems fairly on the way towards that, or arrived at that. Good Speed to him.

Sophocles, Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. Edited and Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994 = Loeb Classical Library, 20), pp. 466-467 (Oedipus Tyrannus 1360/1-1362/3):

νῦν δ᾿ ἄθεος μέν εἰμ᾿, ἀνοσίων δὲ παῖς,
ὁμογενὴς δ᾿ ἀφ᾿ ὧν αὐτὸς ἔφυν τάλας.

But now I am abandoned by the gods, the child of unholy parents, a sharer in my father's marriage bed.

Lloyd-Jones' translation ("sharer in my father's marriage bed") doesn't correspond with the Greek text that he prints. "Sharer in my father's marriage bed" is a translation of Meineke's conjecture ὁμολεχὴς.

P.J. Finglass in his edition of Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) prints (p. 155) the same Greek text as Lloyd-Jones but translates accurately (p. 582):

As it is, I am abandoned by the gods, the child of unholy parents, and jointly engendering with the person from whom I was sprung in my misery.

Finglass comments (id.):

The usual sense of ὁμογενής, 'of the same γένος, related', would not work here: it is unremarkable, and certainly not a sign of pollution or wickedness, that Oedipus should be related to one of his parents. The context makes the otherwise unattested active sense inescapable; for a similarly creative use of a compound adjective ending in –γενής cf. Eur. Her. 798–800 ὦ λέκτρων δύο συγγενεῖς | εὐναί, θνατογενοῦς τε καὶ | Διός (cited by Pearson (1929b) 175), where the bed is συγγενής because it represents a marriage in which Alcmene was jointly engendered by Zeus and Amphitryon. There is thus no need for ὁμολεχής (coni. Meineke (1843) 314) or ὁμόγαμος (coni. Musgrave, notes).

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex. Edited by R.D. Dawe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 234:

ὁμολεχής: Meineke's effective alteration of ὁμογενής. To say that Oedipus slept with his mother takes us further up the scale of horror — which is precisely where we are going, as the next line makes clear — whereas ὁμογενής is merely drab. Of course Oedipus belonged to the same family as his mother; and it requires special pleading to urge that here ὁμογενής has the meaning 'having children born of the same wife as was married to his father'.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Katherine Frank, A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), p. 109, with notes on pp. 277-278:

During a visit to the parsonage, Mary Taylor recalled that one evening she told Charlotte and Emily how someone had pumped her for her religious views and she had retorted: '"that that was between God and me." Emily (who was lying on the hearth rug) exclaimed, "That's right."' It was all, Mary said, she 'ever heard Emily say on religious subjects'.¹⁶ Emily was the only Brontë daughter who was exempted from teaching Sunday school and who did not attend church regularly. And then we have Emily's own verdict on conventional religions in a poem written some years later:

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.¹⁷

16. Joan Stevens, Mary Taylor, p. 164.
17. Poems, p. 243.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), "Afternoon Service at Mellstock," Collected Poems (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1919), p. 403:

                   (Circa 1850)

On afternoons of drowsy calm
    We stood in the panelled pew,
Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm
    To the tune of "Cambridge New."

We watched the elms, we watched the rooks,
    The clouds upon the breeze,
Between the whiles of glancing at our books,
    And swaying like the trees.

So mindless were those outpourings!—
    Though I am not aware
That I have gained by subtle thought on things
    Since we stood psalming there.

"Tate-and-Brady psalm," i.e. from Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, New Version of the Psalms (1696). Here is John Randall's tune "Cambridge New," from John S. Stone, A Collection of Twenty Four Psalm Tunes, &c. For a Country Congregation, Arranged for the Harmonium (London: W. Blagrove & C^o, n.d.), p. 5:


In J.B. James, Selected Portions from the New Version of the Psalms, Arranged for Every Sunday of the Year (Islesworth: M. Adams, 1838), three Tate-and-Brady psalms are marked to be sung to the tune "Cambridge New," viz. 98 ("Sing to the Lord a new-made song," for the Third Sunday of Advent), 105 ("Seek ye the Lord, his saving strength," for Epiphany), and 118 ("O praise the Lord, for he is good," for Easter).

Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XVIII (Sancho Panza to Don Quixote; tr. Walter Starkie, with his note):

The best and wisest thing for us to do, in my humble opinion, is to go back to our village, now that it's reaping time, and look after our own affairs, and not go wandering from pillar to post and going from Ceca to Mecca, as the saying goes.

¹ Ceca was the name of the great mosque of Córdoba, which was looked upon as nearly equal in sanctity to Mecca. Andar de ceca en meca (to go from Ceca to Mecca) is still said of gadabouts.

Y lo que sería mejor y más acertado, según mi poco entendimiento, fuera el volvernos á nuestro lugar, ahora que es tiempo de la siega y de entender en la hacienda, dejándonos de andar de ceca en meca y de zoca en colodra, como dicen.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), The French Revolution, Part I, Book V, Chapter VI:

Down with it, man; down with it to Orcus: let the whole accursed Edifice sink thither, and Tyranny be swallowed up forever!

Id., Part I, Book VI, Chapter II:

Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), A Cornish Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), pp. 53-54:

I doubt if my parents had so much as heard the name of Shakespeare; nor were there any books in our house. (If you were to look at the present state of affairs, either at home or in my rooms at Oxford, a study full of books, two book-rooms, books in the bedrooms, books on the stairs, books on the floor, everywhere, even in the pantry, you would see that I have subsequently rather rectified this — perhaps over-compensated it, as the psychologists say.)

An auto-antonym is a word that can mean the opposite of itself. Perhaps we have an example in the rare Greek word κοπία. See Liddell-Scott-Jones, s.v. κοπία:

rest from toil, Hsch. (pl.); but, = Lat. labor, Serv.Dan. ad Virg.G.1.150.

Hesychius s.v. κοπίαι (Moritz Schmidt, editio minor, 2nd ed., col. 902):

ἡσυχίαι

Servius auctus on Vergil, Georgics 1.150 (Georg Thilo, ed., p. 167):

'labor' autem, quam Graeci κοπίαν dicunt.

quam L: quem Pierre Daniel

Labels: auto-antonyms

John Buchan (1875-1940), Memory Hold-the-Door (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1940), p. 39:

Again, my philosophical reading left me with certain intellectual habits—a dislike of grandiose mechanical systems, and a distrust of generalities. Having only one or two strong convictions, which might well be called prejudices, I was inclined to be critical of a superfluity of dogmas. Arthur Balfour's Defence of Philosophic Doubt and Foundations of Belief which fell into my hands, increased this temperamental bias. I developed in most subjects, and notably in politics, a kind of relativism—a belief in degrees of truth and differing levels of reality—which made me judge systems by their historical influence and practical efficiency rather than by their logical perfections. I began to admire Carlyle's "swallowers of formulas." There were eternal truths, I decided, but not very many, and even these required frequent spring-cleanings. I became tolerant of most human moods, except intolerance. It was a point of view which I have since seen cause to modify, but it was perhaps a salutary one at that stage in my life.

I can't find "swallowers of formulas" in Carlyle. The sentence puzzles me. I can understand if Buchan admired the phrase (whoever said it), but not if he admired the swallowers themselves. Admire meaning regard with surprise is rare or obsolete in English.

---

From Kenneth Haynes:

Regarding your Buchan post ... can I point you to Carlyle's portrait of Mirabeau in The French Revolution (1.4.4)? "Swallowers" has the sense of "devourers," "destroyers."

But consider how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has "made away with (humé, swallowed, snuffed-up) all Formulas"—a fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and insights. A man nevertheless who will glare fiercely on any object; and see through it, and conquer it: for he has intellect, he was will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles; but with an eye! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there: a Reality not an Artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having struggled "forty years against despotism," and "made away with all formulas," shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same.

Carlyle translates in the quotation a phrase from a letter by Mirabeau's father about his son, "il a humé toutes les formules."

Kevin Muse and Joel Eidsath also identified the relevant passage.

George Steiner, After Babel (1975; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 24:

A true reader is a dictionary addict. He knows that English is particularly well served, from Bosworth's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, through Kurath and Kuhn's Middle English Dictionary to the almost incomparable resources of the O.E.D. (both Grimm's Wörterbuch and the Littré are invaluable but neither French nor German have found their history and specific genius as completely argued and crystallized in a single lexicon). Rossetti's geomaunt will lead to Shipley's Dictionary of Early English and the reassurance that 'the topic is capped with moromancy, foolish divination, a i7th century term that covers them all'. Skeat's Etymological Dictionary and Principles of English Etymology are an indispensable first step towards grasping the life of words. But each period has its specialized topography. Skeat and Mayhew's Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words necessarily accompanies one's reading of English literature from Skelton to Marvell. No one will get to the heart of the Kipling world, or indeed clear up certain cruces in Gilbert and Sullivan without Sir H. Yule and A.C. Burnell's Hobson Jobson. Dictionaries of proverbs and place-names are essential. Behind the façade of public discourse extends the complex, shifting terrain of slang and taboo speech. Without such quarries as Champion's L'Argot ancien and Eric Partridge's lexica of underworld usage, much of Western literature, from Villon to Genet is only partly legible.

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), A Cornish Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), p. 51:

But these old people had plenty of time on their hands: no cinemas, no wireless, no gadding about by bus and car. They had to provide their own amusements, and this they did heartily and with vivacity and inventiveness. I daresay they were the last generation in which the fullness of old Cornish customs and ways was maintained. For all these same songs were sung by my mother's parents, Granny and Grandfather Vanson; while the next generation, their children, were incapable of singing them. There was an unconscious change of taste and habit going on which let these old things die, so that by the next generation again, mine, they had practically completely gone and we never heard them.

So with the games and dressing-up and practical jokes, we did not find them so funny as they had: they derived amusement from them over years and would laugh till tears ran from their eyes when the old folk who remembered them got together and recalled the 'old days'. But then we had never taken part in them, and, I suppose, were affected unconsciously by the change of taste. The jokes were very elementary; we did not find them so amusing. But I have no doubt now that there was infinitely greater value, more character, variety and fun in the amusement which they provided for themselves and of their own inventiveness — genuine folk-creativeness in its own way — than in all the passive, provided amusements of cinemas, jazz-dancing, swing-music, theatre-organs (the most horrible invention of the human mind), in our own doped, decadent and rather despicable age.