The Strange Crime of John Boulnois

As our headlines proudly inform us, democracy continues to triumph in all pockets of mankind.  Maybe this is so because democracy is the natural way of things and maybe because after a while the aims of fairness and equality oddly dovetail with the aims of mediocrity.  Well actually, there is nothing odd about it.  Astute observers of humanity know that mediocrity in and of itself is a harmless banner for middle-class happiness and solidity, a euphemism for the bourgeois if there ever were one.  But they will also recognize the value of human achievement: that is to say, we may want everyone to have the same chances – only such a world may be deemed just – yet by definition we cannot all have the same degree of success.  Marx and his interpreters attempted to institutionalize precisely this nonsense and their slogans ended up adorning the walls of the most decadent and oppressive palaces.  It would then seem that a certain number would need to fail to use the opportunities provided, or just underperform enough to make us look better.  An appropriate introduction to this fine tale.  

Our protagonist is not the gentleman mentioned in the title, but an American journalist by the name of Calhoun Kidd.  I am not sure whether, strictly speaking, Calhoun Kidd can be a real name, but if it ever has been, it could only have belonged to a Yankee.  Like most Americans who glide through Chesterton's pages, Kidd is eager, not terribly cultured, a bit too literal for his own good, and not particularly observant of life's filigreed patterning, in short, a "curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness."  Kidd has found his way across the pond to interview John Boulnois, a "very unobtrusive Oxford man" who is also the author of a "series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution."  Darwin is a favorite of the modern mind, not because he was a top-notch naturalist – which, of course, he surely was – but because this very unobtrusive Cambridge man supplied a justification for the selfishness that so many privileged members of the world's elite have felt over the years.  To wit, if all the world is the product of natural selection, then those who are rich and powerful and handsome and famous deserve all those accolades.  And one man to whom those four adjectives seem to have always pertained is Sir Claude Champion.  We all know Claude Champion or, at least, a close facsimile:   

Kidd ... had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended to know) Sir Claude Champion, as 'one of the brightest and wealthiest of England's Upper Ten'; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and, above all, acting.  Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American eyes.  There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous culture and restless publicity: he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one.  There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by the word "dilettante."  That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun, gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire, or even a disease.  But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude – a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know – it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends.

I will spare the reader the details of Catastrophism, because such a label is designed to adhere to its subject without any further divulgence of what it could possibly mean.  But what we can conclude is that the movement of Catastrophism, which is unknown and does not require advenient inquiry, and Championism, which is what Sir Claude might have very well dubbed his monolithic movement of one, have extremely little in common.  And that is why, when Boulnois somehow gains the hand of a "beautiful and not unsuccessful actress," Champion rolls himself into an avalanche of charm to seduce the new Mrs. Boulnois, who lives with her very unobtrusive husband in a small house on the Lord's properly grand and sprawling estate.

What happens next will not shock the regular reader of Chesterton; for those who have not experienced much or any of this remarkable genius, I can only recommend that you overhaul your library.  The Father Brown tales are such splendid miniatures of moral truth that their dazzling artistry is often overlooked or even rejected by those who think Catholic priests to a man conceal nefarious intent beneath dark garb.  It will not be giving much away to rejoin that moral truth does not need to be uttered by a priest to be valid or by a dandy to be mocked and debased.  No, the fact that Claude Champion might covet the wife of his alleged friend John Boulnois seems regrettably normal given the web of adultery, betrayal, and concupiscence that has destroyed lives from time immemorial.  It is therefore when Kidd is abroad on the grounds of the estate that a discovery of a fantastic object changes the game: 

It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book.  For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep.  If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord.  Something happened such as would have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale.

The object is one of violence – we still need a crime or else why would this story have ever been devised?  Our small priest will get involved soon enough and have a tête-à-tête with Mrs. Boulnois during which he will famously denounce "a moral impossibility [as] the biggest of all impossibilities."  And we haven't even mentioned that lovely garden sundial.

The History of Witchcraft

Twenty-two years ago or so I first ingested the very odd phrase "banned books."  Very odd not only because these were precisely some of the texts on our rather unambitious school curriculum, but also because the concept of prohibition was somewhat lost on me, a rather ambitious young thinker.  The list was long and quite varied, although even then one could detect an undercurrent of political deviance.  I shall not enumerate these works since, as it were, most of them were children of the moment, as topical then as they are forgettable now (with one remarkable exception of genius).  Why do such works fade into oblivion as quickly as they scorched our headlines?   Because it is not within the agenda of the daily news that art lurks.  When revolution occurs, it is inevitably succeeded by compromise and regression to a more palatable mean for the simple reason that true revolution takes place only in the human mind.  So when we look back on our happy lives and recall the works that meant the most to us, we will find them at junctures and crossroads of our thinking.  They will support or alter our beliefs so violently as to be milestones of our days.  This is not quite, however, how I feel about this seminal work.

What is dubbed here witchcraft may be generally understood as Satanism, since for the Christian little difference persists.  Our witches begin not before Judeo-Christianity but against the early adherents of these faiths, and their services and rituals seem consistently to portray hideous mockeries of what is sacrosanct – a point that cannot be overstated.  It is the common ignorance of the non-expert – and Summers's knowledge of the occult may never be surpassed – to think that the Abrahamic religions simply borrowed the rituals of the prior pagans and removed the bestiality, the polytheism, and the sacrifices, reducing Christianity and its cousins to solemn epigones.  Precisely the opposite argument is made on the pages of The History of Witchcraft: 

Witchcraft as it existed in Europe from the eleventh century was mainly the spawn of Gnostic heresy, and heresy by its very nature embraced and absorbed much of heathendom.  In some sense Witchcraft was a descendant of the old pre-Christian magic, but it soon assumed a slightly different form, or rather at the advent of Christianity it was exposed and shown in its real, foul essence as the worship of the Evil Principle, the Enemy of Mankind, Satan.

Is an argument for monotheism's primacy belied by this admission?  Does not evil appear to come first?  As in all his works, Summers's dazzling erudition will prove impenetrable to those who like everything in plain English with plain explanations – but these are not, shall we say, members of the target audience.  We are treated to copious details of exorcisms, the Sabbath until its more modern manifestations, worship and rituals of the witch and warlock, and the all-important familiars, usually small animals that serve as conduits to darker operators.  Admittedly perhaps a little too much is made of the portrayal of the witch in literature,  especially since the focus of the text is supposed to be facts as they are reported not interpreted by poets and dramatists.  Yet it is very true that our concepts of sorcery and its practitioners, for better or worse, stem from precisely their places in our arts, the ever-fickle popular imagination, and a hearty dose of folk tales, which unfortunately tend to emphasize the most ludicrous and overwrought elements (such as broom-riding, although this is clearly a modern addendum).  The anecdotes included are horrible and probably true to their last detail; the only debatable matter is the cause of these events.  The skeptic, of course, will immediately attribute them to natural maladies and worldwide Church-sponsored fraud, which brings us to a brief aside about books banned or otherwise disdained.

It is one thing when a controversial work is marketed as such, and quite another when an innocuous if opinionated text that would attract the attention of few is besmirched with scattered apologies for its existence.  Why then should it be published at all?  Such is the fate of The History of Witchcraft, branded dismissively on its back cover as furthering "a medieval viewpoint" (concocted by someone, doubtless, who thinks of the Middle Ages as a mindless wasteland of sword and sorcery) and prefaced by not one, not two, but three introductions.  The last, by Summers himself, succinctly outlines his project; the first, by a Christian admirer of the scholar, can be swiftly filed under what we have come to term fanmail; but the second by a Marxist ignorant of both languages and academe is the most ignominious.  Under the guise of an "enlightened" take on what Summers will so eloquently – and, it must be said, convincingly – describe, Morrow denounces the whole endeavor as some tribute to unprovable superstition, championing along the way this regrettable excuse for research once popular among the least imaginative of our species.  Murray's work, with which I am unfortunately acquainted, is not only lauded as "true scholarship" – evidently meaning that original thinking and fact-gathering are not permitted – but juxtaposed like some shabby, doddering hut against Summers's bright fortress of heavenly strength.  When Summers later relates a couple of likely spurious stories about the murders of Christian children at the hands of European Jews engaged in extralegal sacrifices, Morrow – who was Jewish and atheist – comments that "the intelligent reader need scarcely be told that the publisher abhors the author's views," and then cites the "reasons indicated in the foreword" as justification for the project.  Why would anyone bother with Murray's poppycock may be puzzling enough.  But why any publisher would essentially condemn his own book for the sake of being politically correct suggests derangement.  Summers writes at a level so much greater than that of the average reader that he is in no position to exert the malefic influence commonly incident to works of, for example, right-wing hatemongers who speak in plain words about bare and brutal emotions.  We do not see ourselves or our discontents in these pictures, nor do we have an easily absorbable text laden as it is with quotations in seven languages – and I think we shall end our litany of protest right about there.         

About Summers much has been said but the records remain inevitably crooked.  Summers was probably a priest, but not an ordained Catholic one; he was not trained in any field in particular, but exhibited that uncanny brand of genius that can absorb information from variegated sources and explain it in its own words – a much undervalued and glorious skill; and his belief in the evils he so gladly recounts should not detract or enhance our understanding that he is interested in their imaginary consequences as much as their physical.  That is to say, while Summers probably did wholly believe in things such as vampires or witches, he perceived them first and foremost as immoral phenomena.  As he states:

In truth he who accepts the spiritual world is bound to realize all about him the age-long struggle for empery of discarnate evil ceaselessly contending with a thousand cunning sleights and a myriad vizardings against the eternal unconquerable powers of good.  Nature herself bears witness to the contest; disease and death, cruelty and pain, ugliness and sin, are all evidences of the mighty warfare, and it would be surprising indeed if some were not wounded in the fray – for we cannot stand apart, each man, S. Ignatius says, must fight under one of the two standards – if some even did not fall.

He knew that someone who prizes the world's gold over the world's goodness, someone who cares little if innocents suffer for his own benefit, and someone who thinks war is a necessary method for eliminating anyone who stands in the way of one's might and money can be undeniably charged with leaguing with the blackest of forces.  He also was possessed of an almost boundless imagination that allowed him to ponder such a question abroad in the coolness of the evening: knowing what I know of the horrors of man, of what evil he has shown himself capable, can I imagine that these beings could not exist in humanly guise?  Could there not be some who truly adhere to some Satanic agenda in barter for materialist advantage?  Alas, what has lured great minds to madness is still fodder for those who find faith in something benevolent a little boring.  And if we come to laugh at evil, we should ask ourselves what on earth we could possibly think of good.

Kierkegaard, "A Worthwhile Engagement" (part 2)

The concluding part of a selection from a work by this Danish man of letters. You can find the original in this volume.

Now I am in legal possession of Cordelia.  Now I have her aunt's approval and blessing and the congratulations and well wishes of her friends and relatives.  All this should hold up.  Now the difficulties of the war have past and freedom's blessings may begin.  What folly!  As if her aunt's blessing and her friends' well wishes could make me possess Cordelia at an even more profound level!  As if love distinguished between peacetime and war!  No sooner does love exist as it announces itself in battle however different the weapons might be.  The difference in fact may reside in what we call cominus – hand-to-hand battle – and eminus – battle from a stone's or spear's throw.  The more a love affair has been fought eminus, the more worrisome it will be and all the more insignificant will be the actual scuffle.  To the scuffle belongs a squeeze of the hand and a touch with the foot, something that Ovid famously recommends as much as he jealously resents, not to mention a kiss or an embrace.  He who fights eminus generally has only his eye to rely upon; and yet if he is an artist, he will know how to use this weapon with such virtuosity as almost immediately to achieve his end.  He will know how to let his eye linger on a girl with desultory tenderness, which has an effect similar to that of accidentally touching her.  With his eye he will be in a position to seize her as tightly as if he held her encircled by his arms. 

It would be, however, a mistake and misfortune to go on forever in this way, to fight eminus for too long, because such a struggle is but a designation not a pleasure.  When one fights cominus is when everything assumes its true significance.  When there is no fight in love it has ceased to exist.  I have almost never fought eminus, and so it is not from the conclusion but from the beginning that I draw my weapons.  I am in possession of her, that much is true, that is to say, in the legal and petty bourgeois understanding of possession; but there is nothing of consequence to this and my notions of her are even purer.  She is engaged to be married to me, that much is true; but if I were to conclude therefrom that she loved me, that would be a disappointment because she does not love me in the least.  I am in legal possession of her and yet I am not in possession of her in the way I could be in possession of a girl without being in legal possession of her:

Upon secretly reddened cheek [Auf heimlich erröthender Wange]
Shall glow the heart's desire [Leuchtet des Herzens Glühen].

Now by the tea table she sits on the sofa, I in a chair by her side.  Her posture suggests something confidential and yet instilled again with a nobility that distances her.  Such posture always has a remarkable effect on the observer, that is to say, on those who have an eye for such things.  Love has many positions, and this is the first.  How royally has nature equipped this girl: her soft, pure forms, her deep, womanly innocence, her translucent eyes – all of this intoxicates me.  I have greeted her.  As was her custom she came over to me in a happy if somewhat embarrassed and unsure state: an engagement to be married may indeed have rendered our relationship into something different, but she does not know just how different.  She took my hand, but not with a smile as was her custom.  I answered her greetings with a light, almost unnoticeable squeeze of the hand; I was mild and friendly without being sensual.  Now by the tea table she sits on the sofa, I in a chair by her side. 

An explicatory solemnity reigns over the situation, like the dawn's faint light.  She is silent and nothing breaks this stillness.  My eye glides gently over her without coveting what I see, in truth that would be too impertinent on my part.  A fine, fleeting blush sweeps over her like a cloud above a field, rising and falling.  And what does this blush signify?  Is it love, yearning, hope, or fear?  Is red indeed the color of the heart?  Not in the least.  She is puzzled, she is astonished – but not with regard to me, that would be a little too much to ask of her.  She is puzzled not with regard to herself but within herself: she is transforming into herself.  Such a moment demands quiet, so no reaction should disturb it, no hubbub of passion should interrupt it.  It is as if I were not present at all, and yet precisely my presence is the condition for her contemplative astonishment.  My being is in harmony with hers.  In such a state a young girl is grown and idolized in silence like a godhead.  

It is thus so fortunate for me that I have my uncle's house.   If I were to impart to a young man a taste for tobacco, I would take him into one or the other smoking-room at the Regents; if I were to impart to a young woman how to be engaged, it would behoove me simply to introduce her here.   As tailors seek out only other tailors at a guild's house, so does she look here for her betrothed.  This is dangerous company in which to be, and I cannot blame Cordelia if she is somewhat impatient.  When we are, I believe, all assembled together en masse we would be ten quiet pairs, in addition to the conquered battalions which come to the capital during major festival periods.  Those of us engaged to be married could then really enjoy the pleasures of our engagement.  I meet Cordelia standing at attention to receive a taste of these lovers' blows, the awkward acts of enamored workmen.  In the distance all through the evening one can hear a sound as if someone were going around with a fly swatter – this is the lovers' kiss.  In this house one is in possession of lovable unceremoniousness.   Corner pubs are not what one seeks, no!  No, here we sit at a round table.  I too pretend to treat Cordelia the same way.  By the end of all this I will perhaps have committed great violence to my person.  It would be really outrageous if I were to permit myself to nurture her deep femininity in this way.  I would reproach myself greatly whenever I deceive her.  In general I can assure a wholly aesthetic treatment to any girl who confides in me, but it shall end with my deceiving her.  And yet this is part of my aesthetic system, for either the girl deceives the man, or the man deceives the girl.  Nevertheless it would be interesting to conduct a study of fairy tales, legends, folk tales and mythologies to tally up the number of times the girl was unfaithful and how many times the man.

Kierkegaard, "A Worthwhile Engagement" (part 1)

The first part of a selection from a work by this Danish man of letters.  You can find the original in this volume.

Thus I am engaged to be married; so is Cordelia, of course, and that is nearly everything that she knows about the matter.  If she had a friend with whom she could speak properly and openly, she would say something like the following: "What all this means I really cannot fathom.  There's something about him which attracts me to him, but I cannot get wise to what that is.  He has some weird power over me, but love him I do not, and perhaps would never arrive at such a condition.  On the other hand, I could see myself living and even being quite blissful with him and our life together because if one can tolerate him he certainly does not ask for much."  My dear Cordelia!  Perhaps he is asking for more in exchange for less tolerance – and of all ridiculous things an engagement to be married must be the most ridiculous.  After all, marriage is a purpose even if the purpose discomforts me.  An engagement to be married, however, is purely a human invention and by no means does its inventor any honor.  It is neither fish nor fowl, and is to love what the rags a school groundsman wears are to a professor's gown.  Now I am a member of this hateful society.  This is not insignificant  for, as Trop says, only once you are an artist do you have the right to judge other artists.  And isn't a fiancé necessarily a deer park artist?    

Edward is beside himself with acrimony.  He's let his beard grow and hung up his black frock, which says a lot already.  He wants to talk to Cordelia and describe my subtlety to her.  Now this would be a shattering scene: Edward unshaven and in slapdash garb, speaking in high tones with Cordelia.  May he not jab me with his long beard!  In vain I attempt to bring him to reason; I explain that it was the aunt who set up the match, so to speak, with Cordelia still possibly harboring feelings for him, and me willing to step back if he can win her over.  For a moment he waffles as to whether he should let his beard stick out in some new way, whether he should buy a new black frock; then a moment later I find him scolding me.  Nevertheless, I try my best to maintain my best countenance.  However angry with me he may be, I am certain that he would not take a step without first consulting with me.  He cannot forget what a benefit it was to have had me as a mentor.  And why should I then wrest from him this final hope, why should I break with him?  After all, he is a good person who knows what can happen in time.

What I have to do now is twofold.  On the one hand, I must exert all efforts to have the engagement broken off so that I may assure myself of a lovelier and more meaningful relationship with Cordelia; on the other hand, I will need to use the time as profitably as possible so as to exult in all the grace and adorableness with which Nature has so superfluously equipped her.  I will also delight in the limitations and circumspection which impede anything from being understood.  Once I have made her learn what it means to love, and what it means to love me, so then will the engagement collapse like an incomplete form, and she will belong to me.  Other people get engaged at precisely this point, and have excellent prospects for a boring marriage for all of eternity.  That is up to other people.  

Everything is still in statu quo, but hardly could any fiancé on earth be happier than I, nor any miser who has just come across a gold coin.  I am intoxicated by the thought that she is in my power.  A pure, innocent femininity as transparent as the ocean and yet as profound as it as well, without a suspicion of love!  Now she will learn what kind of power love is.  Like a king's daughter raised from the dust that leads to her father's throne, she is then enshrined in the Royal house to which she has always belonged.  And that shall happen with me: because she will learn to love, she will learn to love me; because she will develop rules and successive paradigms will unfold, all these will become me; because in loving she will feel her entire meaning, she will apply this to loving me; and she will love me twice as much once she realizes that she has learned it from me.  The thought of my joy overwhelms me to such a degree that I almost lose consciousness.       

Her soul is neither bound nor eased by love's indefinite stirrings, something which leads many young women never to love, that is to say, never to love definitely, energetically or completely.  What they have on their consciences is a fuzzy everyday scene which shall become an ideal once the genuine article has been sampled.  From such halves comes something with which one can move through the world in a Christian way.  Since love now watches over her soul, I can see through it; from within her I can listen to it in all of love's voices.  I gain certainty as to how this has taken shape in her and pattern myself in that image.  And since I am already directly involved in the story, love runs through her heart and I meet her again halfway, as disappointingly as possible.   After all, a girl only loves once.      

Mallarmé, "Las de l'amer repos..."

A work ("So weary of my bitter rest ...") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

So weary of my bitter rest and sloth, 
What once as child I gloriously denied,
Adorable in woods of rosy froth, 
Beneath sky blue, far lazier am I

To cross in evening, as agreed, the void,
So new amidst my brain's cold hungry lands,
O merciless digger with sterile hands!
What would one say to Dawn and Dreams allòyed

To roses, when in fear of petals pale, 
This cemetery will join its empty moats?
I wish to leave this land's greedy ways
This cruel mockery of old reproach –

In short, my friends are genius and the past, 
My lamp who knows, truth told, my agony,
Like Chinese of clear mind and heartfelt glee, 
Whose purest joy remains our end to cast

On snowy cups beneath a gladsome moon
Of flower strange, perfuming limpid life, 
This flower grafted, found by child jejune,
Upon the soul's filigreed blue stripes.

And death becomes the sage's only dream, 
Serene amidst my choice of landscape new,
Which I, distrait, upon the cups would hue. 
If but a thin pale line of blue, it seems:

A lake beneath a naked porcelain sky,
This crescent now lost in the whiteness bare, 
Its placid horn adip ice waters' lie,
By three great emerald lashes, this reedy lair.