French hostility toward the Anglo-Saxons

From a review by R. W. Johnson of Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America, 1945-2016 by R. T. Howard:

Johnson writes, “In De Gaulle’s view of history – a European history – England and France had struggled for supremacy for the best part of a thousand years.  For most of that time France had been the dominant power, but now its great empire wasn’t just overshadowed but outmatched by the even greater British Empire.  For De Gaulle France was not itself if it was not the leading power in Europe.  By 1941, however, the opponent was no longer Britain” it was ‘les Anglo-Saxons’.  Asked what was the most important international development of recent times, De Gaulle replied: ‘The fact that the Americans speak English.’”

I recall once French fellow in a forum years ago.  He owned a books store, can’t remember where, and can’t remember his name, but we used to argue about the relative merits of France and the U.S.  He knew English and was on an American forum, but he despised the U.S. and perhaps England as well, I don’t recall.  I had read an interesting article in Foreign Affairs and recommended it to him, implying that it would provide a more accurate view of the U.S. than he seemed to have.  He rejected the idea.  He had no wish to understand the U.S. more than he did.  He didn’t quite challenge me to learn more about France, but at some point he became disgusted with our forum and perhaps especially me and disappeared. 

The referenced review appears in the March 16, 2017 issue of the London Review of Books.  Johnson entitles his review, “Danger: English Lessons” and draws attention to De Gaulle’s and other’s interest in advancing French over English in the modern world.  “Howard quotes Gerard Prunier, an adviser to the French Government, who claimed that ‘the Anglo-Saxons want our death – that is, our cultural death.  They threaten our language and our way of life, and they plan our ultimate Anglo-Saxonisation.”

“When De Gaulle ordered US bases out of France, Lyndon Johnson angrily demanded to know if that meant digging up the graves of American soldiers who had died in the liberation.”  My impression is that many of the French at the time wouldn’t mind digging up the graves and sending the bones back to us.  Many French saw the second front that Stalin had been pleading for, Operation Overlord, as merely the occupation of France by a new set of oppressors.

In reading of these events, we perhaps don’t want to spend much time dwelling upon Churchill’s sadness over the loss of the British Empire, but De Gaulle was even more committed to reacquiring the French Empire.  I read histories of France’s pitiful efforts at Dien Bien Phu and in Algeria.  Many Americans, probably, would lose all sympathy for the French upon learning that Algeria after WWII would have been delighted to be considered part of France as equal citizens, but the Colons would not hear of it and so there was a war.  The Colons were driven out and Algeria eventually became independent. 

Perhaps here the French book seller would take offense at Americans who blithely assumed that democracy and equality ought to prevail throughout the world and that Britain and France ought to willingly give up their former colonies.  What right did the U.S. have to insist upon such a thing, especially when Eisenhower took up in Indo-China where the French left off not to preserve it as a colony, but to “prevent its becoming a Communist puppet.”  “As if,” the French scoffed and saw only hypocrisy. 

There is plenty of room to build a variety of arguments to support a variety of opinions.  After reading the above article in the LRB, I checked back through the recent editions of Foreign Affairs to see if there were any recent Gaullist-type efforts to advance French supremacy in Europe, but couldn’t find any.  And yet, I suspect, many of the French, even today are hostile toward Britain and the U.S. for reasons much like De Gaulle’s.  They don’t see the Vichy period in the same way we do.  De Gaulle, who spent the bulk of the War in Britain wanted to get past the Vichy period as quickly as possible.  Most Frenchmen, it seemed to be implied, were really in the resistance. . . but not so much anymore, becoming with Germany the “big two” in the EU – the EU whose capital is in French-speaking Belgium. 

Increased death toll when we moved from monarchies to democracies

Chapter two of Leonhard’s Pandora’s Box is entitled “Antecedents: Crises and Containment before 1914.”  Most interesting (and alarming) is his drawing attention to the sorts of wars princes engaged in during the period of the monarchies vs. what came later with democracies.  If a prince wanted to go to war with a neighboring prince, he would raise an army assign a commander and off it would go to do the prince’s bidding.  If the commander lost the army, he would not be given another. 

But with the American Civil War all that changed.  With everyone a citizen, the armies that could be raised were limited only by a nation’s population.  More soldiers were killed in America’s Civil War than in all the subsequent wars America was engaged in.  Grant set the standard for Haig.  If you had more soldiers your enemy,  you could trade with him in battle after battle, confident that your enemy would run out of them before you did. 

Princes were indeed involved in WWI’s beginning, but they had lost much of their power.  Ordinary people were citizens and had rights.  They could also be drafted into armies.  But in 1914 it wasn’t just nations that were contending, it was empires.  Britain, in splendid isolation could draw upon the manpower of an empire larger than anyone else’s. 

Nevertheless the German’s thought they could whip the British and French.   The war degenerated into a trench-warfare stalemate.  The Germans decided to sink the American ships bringing aid to the allies and when they did that America declared war on Germany.  American armies were subsequently assembled.  Initially, Germany wasn’t too worried. It would take America a long time to get their armies to Europe, but when the war dragged on longer than expected, and when the American armies started arriving . . . it was sort of like a chess game.  The Germans seemed to be doing okay, but its best thinkers could see several moves ahead and with larger and larger numbers of Americans arriving, they stood no chance of winning, so they resigned. 

Poorer thinkers later on challenged that decision.  Germany wasn’t properly defeated, they told each other, so they resolved to play the game again and this time all the way to the end.

Leonhard didn’t say all the above.   I have taken the liberty of reasoning from what he has said.  His book is a bit overwhelming – as overwhelming as House of Government, but much more interesting in my opinion.  I have read several books about WWI in the past, but have never encountered much of what Leonhard is presenting, e.g., the increased death-toll of war when we moved from monarchies to democracies.

1918 Spanish flu and WWI deaths

I just began Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, and as it happened during my researching “The Spanish Flu,” I ran across the following in Wikipedia:

“This increased severity has been attributed to the circumstances of the First World War.^[95] In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches, natural selection was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus. The second wave began, and the flu quickly spread around the world again. Consequently, during modern pandemics, health officials pay attention when the virus reaches places with social upheaval (looking for deadlier strains of the virus).^”

And, “Academic Andrew Price-Smith has made the argument that the virus helped tip the balance of power in the latter days of the war towards the Allied cause. He provides data that the viral waves hit the Central Powers before the Allied powers and that both morbidity and mortality in Germany and Austria were considerably higher than in Britain and France.”

And, “Also, the outbreak coincided with the deaths and media focus on the First World War.^[126] Another explanation involves the age group affected by the disease. The majority of fatalities, from both the war and the epidemic, were among young adults. The number of war-related deaths of young adults may have overshadowed the deaths caused by flu.^[85]
 
“When people read the obituaries, they saw the war or postwar deaths and the deaths from the influenza side by side. Particularly in Europe, where the war's toll was high, the flu may not have had a tremendous psychological impact or may have seemed an extension of the war's tragedies.^[85] The duration of the pandemic and the war could have also played a role. The disease would usually only affect a particular area for a month before leaving. The war, however, had initially been expected to end quickly but lasted for four years by the time the pandemic struck.”

COMMENT:  Over the years, I’ve read of World War I and attributed the huge number of British deaths to the ineptitude and insensitivity of General Haig.  Now we know that the Spanish flu played a significant role.  How large a role perhaps no one is prepared to guess.  But the large death toll of all the participants (and all were affected by the Spanish Flu) induced many, especially in France and Britain to become pacifists, unilaterally intending to not go to war and to handle all military threats by negotiation.  Seeing these two nations, as well as the Isolationist U.S. as militarily weak, Germany and Japan saw their chance and pounced.   I can’t recall the statistics but my impression is that the total deaths of WWII far exceeded those in WWI.  

All the historians I’ve read on the subject assert that had it not been for WWI, there would have been no WWII.  But perhaps we could also say that had it not been for the Spanish flu, the death tolls among British and French soldiers in WWI would not have been so outrageously high.  Perhaps the numbers would have been reasonable enough to prevent the large numbers of important British and French politicians from becoming pacifists. 

The U.S. wasn’t overtly pacifistic after WWI, but by returning to their prewar isolationism, what they became was similar.  They returned to George Washington’s advice, “avoid foreign wars,” they saw no need to maintain a large army.  Roosevelt had a background with the Navy and saw to it that it was larger and more potent than many realized, and did engage in “lend lease” in order to supply weapons to Britain and the USSR, but the picture the U.S. presented to both Germany and Japan was that of a militarily weak nation that could be taken advantage of.  

“Yes, the U.S. has the ships of a potent Navy,” Yamamoto argued, “but we can wipe out most of it, especially the carriers at Pearl Harbor.  I have a plan to do that.”  He had a good plan, but the carriers didn’t happen to be at Pearl Harbor when he carried it out.  “Not to worry,” he thought.  “They aren’t a military nation.  We can sink their carriers later on. . . long before they can change their impressive industrial system into a war machine.”

There were lots of misunderstandings rising out of World War One.  We Americans, British and Russians have learned from the mistakes of WWI and WWII and now practice the old adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum. . . at least so far. 

On linguistic and genetic uncertainty

I’ve been reading The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain by Stephen Oppenheimer, in Kindle, and ran across a comment that may pertain to something someone said a while back – I only recall the strangeness of the comment, something along the lines of a statement or an argument must mean one thing and one thing only.  No doubt I misunderstood the context (now that I think more about it, I suspect the context may have had to do with philosophy and not linguistics), but I believe the opposite of that, that almost everything is ambiguous and probably means something different to everyone who reads or hears it – not utterly different in most cases, but marginally so, that is “not quite what the speaker intended.” 

Oppenheimer in location 1656 writes, “There are basic differences between the disciplines of archaeology and linguistics on the one hand, and sciences such as geology and biology on the other.  In their attitude to the scientific method, some linguists seem to misunderstand the meaning or, or are unable to accept, uncertainty.  They interpret the scientific method as implying authority, rigour and certainty, while scientists accept that, in many situations, comparisons have to be made using measurements that have some degree of error and theories of classification with a degree of uncertainty.  A statistical approach has to be used to handle such uncertainty.  Unlike disagreements between academic authorities, there are standard methods of dealing with sources of observational error and of uncertainty.  Archaeologists, in contrast to linguists, have learnt through experience that if a method such as carbon dating gives inaccurate results at first, it should not be thrown out of the window, but attempts should be made to sort out the problems of error and improve it. 

Comment:  The context of Oppenheimer’s comment was in regard to dating celtic-language splits.  The mathematical approach to language diversity is called lexico-statistics and the dating method glottochronology, and as one might suspect disagreements amongst the archeologists, linguists, geneticists, and geologists are rife. 

I was hoping for a bit more certainty than I’ve found in Oppenheimer thus far.  I mentioned some place that I had my DNA checked on Ancestry.com a couple of years ago.  Interestingly, though a DNA check sounds scientific; my results have changed over time.  Instead of something like 60% British Isles and 20% Scandinavian (probably from the Viking colonies in Britain) I am now something like 60% Western European and 20% Irish.  No Irish has ever been mentioned or seen in my family tree (begun by one of my grandfathers). 

In the Ancestry.com definitions, one can find British (which I find in my genealogic tree) under Western Europe and Scottish (also in my genealogic tree) under Irish.  And that ambiguity can be found in recent studies such as Oppenheimer’s; so perhaps the Ancestry people are updating results as new arguments are advanced.  There is no consensus on the reasons for the difference between the Scots and the Irish, for example, or whether they originally came from central Europe as many have believed or through Southern France and Spain as Oppenheimer and later scholars now believe. 

Having read Collingwood and Gadamer I am used to and accepting of ambiguity in written and spoken language, but like the linguists Oppenheimer complains of I have difficulty with so much ambiguity in (primarily) genetics.

On the Theodosian Code

[from Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, pages 124-5]  “On Christmas Day 438, a new compendium of recent Roman Law, the Theodosial Code (Codex Theodosianus), was presented to the assembled senators in the old imperial capital.  All senatorial meetings were fully minuted and the minutes passed on to the emperor. . . The Praetorian Prefect of Italy, Glabrio Faustus, who presided, and in whose palatial home the senators had gathered, opened the meeting by formally introducing the text to the assembly.  After reminding the audience of the original edict that had established the law commission, he presented the Code to them.  In response, the assembled senators let rip at the tops of their voices:

‘Augustuses of Augustuses, the greatest of Augustuses!’  (repeated 8 times)

‘God gave You to us!  God save Your for us!’ (27 times)

‘As Roman Emperors, pious and felicitous, may you rule for many years!’ (22 times)

‘For the good of the human race, for the good of the Senate, for the good of the State, for the good of all!’ (24 times)

‘Our hope is in You, You are our salvation!’  (26 times)

‘May it please our Augustuses to live forever!’  (22 times)

‘May You pacify the world and triumph here in person!’  (24 times)”

“. . . The great and good of the Roman world were speaking with one voice in praise of their imperial rulers in the city that was still its symbolic capital.  Only slightly less obvious . . . is the second message: the confidence of the senators in the Perfection of the Social Order of which they and their emperors were symbiotic parts.  You can’t have complete Unity without an equally complete sense of Perfection. . . And, as the opening acclamations make clear, the source of that Perfection was, straightforwardly, God, the Christian deity.  By 436, the Senate of Rome was a thoroughly Christian body.  At the top end of Roman society, the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world. 

“The same message was proclaimed at similar ceremonial moments all the way down the social scale, even within Church circles. . . Many Christian bishops, as well as secular commentators, were happy to restate the old claim of Roman imperialism in its new clothing.  Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea was already arguing, as early as the reign of Constantine, that it was no accident that Christ had been incarnated during the lifetime of Augustus, the first Roman emperor.  Despite the earlier history of persecutions, went his argument, this showed that Christianity and the Empire were destined for each other, with God making Rome all-powerful so that, thorough it, all mankind might eventually be saved. 

“This ideological vision implied, of course, that the emperor, as God’s chosen representative on earth, should wield great religious authority within Christianity.  As early as the 310s, within a year of the declaration of his new Christian allegiance, bishops from North Africa appealed to Constantine to settle a dispute that was raging among them. This established a pattern for the rest of the century: emperors were not intimately involved in both the settlement of Church disputes and the much more mundane business of the new religion’s administration.  To settle disputes, emperors called councils . . .”

Comment:  This code is shot through with what the Reformers later would see as heresy.  You do not trust in a political leader for salvation. The book of Ephesians indeed says that Christ “gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service . . .”   I don’t find any precedent in the New Testament for this sort of devotion to an emperor, but this is part of the age-old debate between Protestants and Catholics.  Protestants won’t believe it unless they can find it in the Bible, but Catholics rely upon tradition as well as Scripture and since their tradition has grown up in Rome, the investiture of the Pope with great authority seems only fitting.

Theodosus II was of course the Eastern emperor, but Heather assumes that the same sort of thing was going on in Valentinian III in the west.  It is called the Theodosian code rather than something more all-encompassing because only this one example has survived. 

What about “the Holy Roman Empire”?  There is this interesting from Wikipedia:  The precise term Holy Roman Empire was not used until the 13th century, but the doctrine of translatio imperii ("transfer of rule") was fundamental to the prestige of the emperor, the notion that he held supreme power inherited from the emperors of Rome.  The office of Holy Roman Emperor was traditionally elective, although frequently controlled by dynasties. The German prince-electors, the highest ranking noblemen of the empire, usually elected one of their peers as "King of the Romans", and he would later be crowned emperor by the Pope; the tradition of papal coronations was discontinued in the 16th century. The empire never achieved the extent of political unification formed in France, evolving instead into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, principalities, duchies, counties, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains.  The power of the emperor was limited, and while the various princes, lords, and kings of the empire were vassals and subjects who owed the emperor their allegiance, they also possessed an extent of privileges that gave them de facto sovereignty within their territories. Emperor Francis II dissolved the empire in August 1806 after its defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz.”

Resistance against Rome and several other nations

We used to have someone from France on a forum I was on.  He ran a bookstore if memory serves me.  He once took offense at my suggesting that France was a “client” of the U.S. after WWII.   It is perhaps natural that we think “my country, right or wrong,” and try to make excuses for its weakness if we lived through Vichy France, and for its excesses if we were like Heidegger, living in Nazi Germany.   I was happy to be part of the U.S. which defended Western Europe against Nazi Germany, but the aforementioned Frenchman didn’t like my attitude, nor no doubt the attitude of the arrogant Americans who swept into France in 1945 like conquerors.  In the meantime (not quite but nearly) Heidegger bemoaned the fact that the Germans hadn’t relied upon “tradition” in quite the manner he had hoped. 

I’ve been reading David Mattingly’s An Imperial Possession, Britain in the Roman Empire.  I recall reading Tacitus not especially critically eons ago, but Mattingly is noticeably critical:  In regard to the “resistance” of 47 A.D.  he writes, “Tacitus says the Briton’s chosen field of battle was a defended enclave, which illustrates the character of this so-called revolt.  Far from being on the rampage, some part of the Iceni had refused to hand over arms, and retreated into a defended site.  They only ‘chose’ the field of battle in the sense that that was where the Roman army found them.”

But when the Icenian leader, Prasutagus died, “Roman centurions and imperial slaves plundered the kingdom. . .”  Prasutagus’ widow Boudica “was flogged, her daughters raped . . .”  Tacitus implied that responsibility for this rested with minor officials abusing their power.  Only at the end of this section of his account did he reveal the key information that these events had taken place in the context of the annexation of the kingdom and its incorporation into the province.”   The enraged Boudica caused a huge force to be fielded in retaliation against the Romans and Mattingly speculates about the “Total Roman and provincial dead” was around 40,000.

In regard to the war with the Silures, Tacitus notes that the loss of several senior officers and well over 1,000 casualties were major setbacks.  “Tacitus speculated that either Rome had reduced the vigour of its operations believing the war to be over, or the Britons had been moved by some strange passion to avenge Caratacus.  The more likely scenario is that Roman pacification measures in Silurian territory misjudged the preparedness of the Silures to lay down their arms. The construction of forts, the seizure of crops and animals by foraging parties, and the pillaging of Silurian settlements were provocative acts.  After these two major actions, the Silures mainly reverted to hit-and-run tactics, although two Roman auxiliary units, incautiously engaging in pillage, were cut off by a larger-scale attack.  Roman frustration with this obdurate resistance was such that they evidently declared their intent to exterminate the people or transport them – the extreme reaction of an imperial power to unremitting resistance.”

What happened to the Silures?  The governor fighting them died and it wasn’t until 57 that Quintus Veranius resumed Rome’s offensive against the Silures.  Tacitus wasn’t impressed with Veranius, but the “Silures disappeared from the pages of Tacitus at a stroke and the policy seems to have been continued against the Ordovices by his successor.  “Suetonius Paullinus, another military careerist . . . conquered Ordovician territory within two years and at the start of his third season of campaigning stood facing the island of Anglesey (Mona) across the Menai Straits.  The island’s population was swelled by a large number of refugees (or fugitives to use the Roman terminology).  Tacitus gave the Roman view of the enemy lined up on the opposing shore: armed men, fanatical women bearing torches and druids invoking terrible curses.  From a Roman perspective these were the remaining dregs of British resistance, further tainted by their barbaric religious practices such as human sacrifice.  They could expect no quarter now they had nowhere else to run.  In a well-planned amphibious assault, Suetonius Paullinus led his army across the Straits to ‘cut down all the men’.  There is little doubt that this was a massacre, followed up by the destruction of sacred groves.”

Comment:  Bryan Sykes in his The Seven Daughters of Eve argues that all Europeans (meaning if memory serves me “western Europeans” ) are descended from seven mitochondrial “Eves” whose descendants immigrated to Europe between 10,000 and 45,000 years ago.  Perhaps there are more Eves than seven, but my impression is the Sykes arguments are generally accepted.  The point being that the Romans, who in Mattingly’s interpretations seem every bit as ruthless as German Nazis, Imperial Japanese, or Stalinist Communist are all part of the same mitochondrial groupings that we belong to (if we are genetically European).  Perhaps Rome early on sought to preemptively defeat cities or peoples likely to present a threat later on, but they became so good at it that their soldiers committed atrocities almost casually. 

Sykes also wrote Saxons, Vikings and Celts, the Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.  Unlike Mattingly, Sykes merely wants to know who we are genetically.  The British Isles have only been inhabited this last time (since the most recent ice age) for about 8,000 years.  So whichever Eve or Eves we descended from they were some place in Western Europe before then.  Y-Chromosome and Mitochondrial analyses did permit Sykes to distinguish between the Romans and those more “native” to the Islands (bearing in mind that invasions did occur prior to the Roman Invasion).  On page 287 Sykes writes “true Roman genes are very rare in the Isles.”   We might ask, if we could resurrect one of their British governors, “so what was the purpose?”  He would have his answer:  The glory of Rome, the protection of Rome against future incursions, the Roman need for food and supplies, etc.

“How would you like it if someone did that to you,” we might ask?  And he would answer, “that was done and many would have like to do it again.  That was why we became so martial in attitude.  We were forced into it.”

And as we know Hitler said something like that as did the Imperial Japanese and Stalin.  There are always reasons; which isn’t to say that none of them are legitimate, for who can determine that other than the leaders of the city state or nation in question.   It is difficult though not to sympathize with Queen Boudica after she was flogged and her daughters raped by representatives of Rome.  There seems a huge gap between the rationalizations of a British governor and the application of those rationalizations by the Roman soldiers.

T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and critics

I have recently read several critical essays that discuss Eliot. Edmund Wilson in his essay "The Historical Interpretation of Literature" for example; he begins by describing what he will not be discussing in his essay, and he uses T. S. Eliot as his example:

"To begin with, it will be worth while to say something about the kind of criticism which seems to be furthest removed from this. There is a kind of comparative criticism which tends to be non-historical. The essays of T. S. Eliot, which have had such an immense influence in our time, are, for example fundamentally non-historical. Eliot sees, or tries to see, the whole of literature, so far as he is acquainted with it, spread out before him under the aspect of eternity. He then compares the work of different periods and countries, and tries to draw from it general conclusions about what literature ought to be. He understands, of course, that our point of view in connection with literature changes, and he has what seems to me a very sound conception of the whole body of writing of the past as something to which new works are continually being added, and which is not thereby merely increased in bulk but modified as a whole – so that Sophocles is no longer precisely what he was for Aristotle, or Shakespeare what he was for Ben Jonson or for Dryden or for Dr. Johnson, on account of all the later literature that has intervened between them and us. Yet at every point of this continual accretion, the whole field may be surveyed, as it were, spread out before the critic. The critic tries to see it as God might; he calls the books to a Day of Judgment. And, looking at things in this way, he may arrive at interesting and valuable conclusions which could hardly be reached by approaching them in any other way. Eliot was able to see, for example – what I believe had never been noticed before – that the French Symbolist poetry of the nineteenth century had certain fundamental resemblances to the English poetry of the age of Donne. Another kind of critic would draw certain historical conclusions from these purely esthetic findings, as the Russian D. S. Mirsky did; but Eliot does not draw them.”

These seem impressive achievements, to “have a very sound conception of the whole body of writing of the past” and to draw the connection esthetically between the French Symbolists and the metaphysical poetry of the nineteenth century. But perhaps at the same time, in the manner of our lowering our estimation of the skills of a magician once we learn how his trick was performed, is not our admiration of Eliot’s most famous poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock lessened by learning the “self-distrustful attitudes of Prufrock owe their definition largely to Laforgue, and there the technical debt shows itself; it shows itself in the ironical transitions, and also in the handling of the verse”?

The previous quote is from F. R. Leavis New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932. Leavis would disagree with my suggestion that Eliot’s having been influenced by Laforgue lessens the Prufrock achievement. He goes on to say that this Laforgue influence “has been made too much of by some critics: French moves so differently from English that to learn from French verse an English poet must be strongly original. And to learn as Mr. Eliot leant in general from Laforgue is to be original to the point of genius. Already in the collection of 1917 he is himself as only a major poet can be.”

Leavis seems more generous than Northrop Frye who in 1963 (T. S. Eliot) writes “Prufrock and Other Observations also appeared in 1917, showing the influence of Laforgue, most markedly in the lunar symbolism and the use of ironic dialogue.”

Which brings us to the “overwhelming question” why did Eliot who wrote this poem in 1915 present himself as an old man? He was only 37 or 38 at the time. The answer may be that the idea of an old man who had measured out his life with coffee spoons allowed him to present a dramatis persona as he thought Laforgue might, if Laforgue wrote in English.

Harold Bloom’s view, based on his A Map of Misreading might say that T. S. Eliot has nothing to be ashamed of and his readers ought not to think less of him for having been influenced by Laforgue. Every poet is influenced by some preceding poet – as far as we know – at least in modern times.   I think here of Edward Fitzgerald and his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, except in Fitzgerald’s case he never again did anything that measured up to his Rubaiyat whereas the critics I’ve read think despite its fame Prufrock doesn’t measure up to “The Wasteland” and “The Four Quartets.” 

Fitzgerald as well as Eliot might have balked at my comparison.  “Fitzgerald never claimed to be a poet.  ‘I have not,’ he confessed, ‘the strong inward call, nor cruel-sweet pangs of parturition, that prove the birth of anything bigger than a mouse.’”  But like Eliot he was also a critic: “. . . he thought himself a good judge of poetry and art.  As such, he did not ‘care for’ In Memoriam, classed The Ring and the Book ‘among the absurdist books ever written by a gifted Man’, and called it ‘a national Absurdity’ to devote a whole room in the National Gallery to pictures by Turner.  With such self-confidence in criticism, he became a bold improver of other people’s poetry.  He ‘distilled many pretty little poems out of long ones’ written by his friend Bernard Barton (1849), and having ‘sunk, reduced, altered, and replaced’ what he found unsatisfactory in Six Dramas of Calderon (1853), he applied similar treatment to the work of three Persian poets Jami, Attar, and Omar Khayyam (1856-9), and to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1865).”

In the above (from page 101 of Victorian Poetry, Drama, and Miscellaneous Prose 1832-1890 by Paul Turner) Fitzgerald sounds as bold as Ezra Pound, another irascible improver of other people’s poetry, judge of what is good and bad in poetry but perhaps not as perceptive about his own poetry’s worth.  Pound did claim to be a poet, but there are not many today who would agree with him – although G. K. Chesterton called Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, “a great poem.” [page 134 of New Bearings]  Leavis seems to agree with him, but he would add that pound never wrote anything else as good.  He call’s “Mr Pound’s [Cantos his] Ring and the Book.

"Ruling" in Austria and Syria

With Ian Morris’s term “rules” in mind – or more accurately not quite eliminated from mind I’ve been reading The Death of Sigmund Freud, Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism by Mark Edmundson.

On page 12 of his chapter “Vienna” Edmundson writes of Hitler’s confrontation with the Austrian chancellor, “’I have a historic mission,’ Hitler said, ‘and this mission I will fulfill because Providence has destined me to do so.  I thoroughly believe in the mission; it is my life . . . Look around you in Germany today, Herr Schuschnigg, and you will find that there is but one will.’  Hitler told the Austrian chancellor that his triumph was inevitable:  ‘I have made the greatest achievement in the history of Germany, greater than any other German.’  When Schuschnigg informed Hitler that France and England would not stand by and allow him to absorb Austria, the fuhrer laughed.”

I’m assuming without having read further in Morris’s book that his view of “Ruling” is something like that of Niall Ferguson’s in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.  Regardless of whether Ferguson was correct in his evaluation of the U.S. there seems little disagreement that Britain once “ruled” a fair portion of the world up until the world wars of the 20^th century.  Schuschnigg was invoking Britain’s prestige, France’s also, in his debate with Hitler.  Perhaps not Britain alone, but surely Britain and France, the “rulers” of the West, would not tolerate Hitler’s aggression against Austria.   Hitler laughed because he knew that Britain and France could not stand in his way.  Whatever ability to “rule” they may have had in earlier times, they would not be able to stop the Anschluss. 

But Hitler was ultimately wrong about Britain.  In the near term Britain had neither the will nor the power to stop Hitler’s ambitions,  but Hitler failed to realize that Britain could marshal many of its colonies and former colonies and allies in its support – not over his aggression against Austria but Hitler’s “mission creep” would eventually provoke an assemblage of heroes reminiscent of the forces that set sailed toward Troy that would effect his destruction.  

So in a sense Britain did “rule” in 1938.  Hitler, if he were wise wouldn’t have defied her.  Years later we know that Churchill in a sense handed off this baton of “rule” to Eisenhower in Indochina, but did the U.S. really see this matter of “ruling” and “empire” the way the British did?   And don’t we even at this very moment see evidence that Britain hasn’t utterly relinquished this power?  I am thinking of the Parliamentary debates over whether to bomb Syria over Assad’s use of Chemical Weapons. 

I watched for a couple of hours and failed to hear anyone question Britain’s right to bomb Syria.  The debate didn’t pertain to this right but upon whether Assad himself authorized the use of Chemical Weapons and whether enough time was being given to the inspectors to verify their use.  Unlike what happened under Tony Blair in regard to Iraq, Britain was not going to wait for the U.S. who was more interested in the Far East.  Action would be taken solely by Britain after they heard back from the U.N. inspectors.  If Assad violated the earlier injunction against WMDs he would be held accountable by Britain. 

This Parliamentary debate strikes me as especially interesting because Britain wasn’t concerning itself with any other nation or power beyond letting the inspectors do their job.  No one was arguing that they had a “dog in the Syrian fight.”  They wanted to “spank” Syria for using WMDs and had the power to do so.  Britain was once again “ruling the waves” – sort of.

Moving to the “Clash of Civilizations” perspective, Britain can get away with its action to “spank” Syria with its missiles only because the Islamic “Civilization” has no “core” nation.  Huntington assumed that the U.S. was the “core” nation of the Western Civilization, but here is Britain getting ready to perform that function once again.  Russia, the Core nation of the “Orthodox Civilization” opposes action in Syria but apparently has no intention of opposing Britain.  Neither does the Core nation of the Sinic Civilization, China. 

Also interesting is the implication that if Britain takes action it will do so for “humanitarian” reasons.  Killing people with WMDs is morally wrong.  In the 19^th century, Britain was more interested in a “balance of power.”  If two potential enemies were not getting along that was fine with Britain as long as one didn’t utterly destroy the other.  It was all to the good for it they were fighting each other because while they were doing that they couldn’t fight against Britain.  The Realpolitik of “Balance of Power” if we were to introduce it into the British Parliament debate might be voiced as “they are killing each other off; so let’s stay out of their way and let them do it.” 

Hmmm.  I didn’t type fast enough.  The House of Commons had a vote and opposed military action.  Just what that means to David Cameron’s intentions I don’t know.  Can the executive branch of government ignore the House’s disagreement?  Of course there has to be another motion and another vote which will give Cameron time to present a stronger argument for action – if he has one.