A Peal Of Sullen Bells

I've been idly reading the Wordsworth book of Gothic Short Stories. It's a collection of dark and gloomy tales form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and it's amazing how formulaic they all are. Moreover, the formula always seems to involve bells.

The very first story, Sir Bertrand, starts with a noble knight riding on a lonely "heath" at sunset and hearing "the sullen toll of a distant bell". The second story, Captive of the Banditti, opens with the words "The sullen tolling of the curfew was heard over the heath", and who should hove into view but a noble knight.

And so on and bloody so forth. Nothing can happen in Gothic literature unless "the clock from the dungeon tower was heard to strike with unusual solemnity." It's rather like the distant barking of a dog in modern literature.

Three points occurred to me:

1) How can a chime be sullen? I mean, I know I'm being a trifle difficult here, but when you start to think about all these sullen bells, you do start to wonder.

2) "The castle bells rang out a merry [!] peal at the approach of a winter twilight" [The Spectral Bride] Again, I'm being a smidgen pedantic, but I know a bellringing fellow who absolutely insists that a peal of bells lasts for several hours. He has rung one peal of bells in his life and this is, apparently, a great achievement.

A bell tower contains a bunch of bells that can be rung in different orders. Each of these orders is called a change, hence ringing the changes (which has nothing to do with spot-the-difference puzzles). There are several thousand possible permutations and a peal of bells contains a minimum of five thousand changes. So a peal is a very long thing indeed. I don't know why anybody would want to ring five thousand changes, but bellringers' minds are funny places that probably shouldn't be investigated too thoroughly.

Originally, a peal was just any stroke on a bell. But by 1796 The Times was able to write that "The peal was divided into ten parts, or courses, of 504 each". So the anonymous author of The Spectral Bride was on the wrong side of pedantry. A peal, like a peck or a swathe, is one of those measurements that should be used with fear and trembling.

3) Bells are not always clichés. Literature contains some beautiful tintinnabulations. Here, in no particular order, are my favourite literary chimes. Obviously, there's the curfew tolling the knell of parting day in Gray's Elegy, but I prefer the The Waste Land, which has:

...each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

And there's John Donne's amazing feat of starting and ending a paragraph with phrases that entered the language whilst nobody can remember the middle:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

There's Falstaff's beautiful "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow," which Orson Welles used as the title for his film. But the best bell I know is Baudelaire's La Cloche Fêlée, which is incurably French but translates loosely as:

The Broken Bell

Sweet sadness on a winter night to hear,
While on the grate still burns one crackling log
And strange and distant memories appear,
The sound of church-bells singing through the fog.

So sweet a sound, so happy and so sure.
Old age cannot defeat that steadfast bell:
Its firm and faithful call so good, so pure:
The guardian of truth! God’s sentinel!

My soul is broken. Though I sometimes try
To chime triumphant through the freezing night,
Its feeble noises, if they sound at all,
Resemble more the crippled soldier’s sigh
Who, trapped beneath the corpses of the fight,
Must die because he is too weak to crawl.

There are several much better translations (and the original) here. I must go now: Time and the bell has buried the post.

The Inky Fool's new alarm clock

P.S. Does anyone remember Mr Clapper?

Pool, Pool And Throwing Stuff At Hens

I spent yesterday either in the swimming pool or playing pool. This strict regime was broken only by a delicious lunch of roast chicken. It occurred to me, even in my languorous and licentious state, to wonder whether there was any connection at all between the two pools. There is not.

The pool that I was swimming in is of Germanic extraction and relates only to places like Liverpool, which means muddy waters (there is some sort of pop music joke to be made here, but I can't think of it at the moment).

The pool that I was playing (or, if you're American, shooting) goes back to 1848. Before that it was a gambler's card game and the pool was the money to be won. This goes back to the French poule, meaning the pot of money to be won. This is a trifle odd as une poule is French for a hen (as in the English pullet).

So far as anybody can tell the reason for this is an old French game: le jeu de la poule. In Medieval France medieval frenchmen would thrown medieval french stuff at a hen, which would run around squawking. Whoever hit the hen won a prize: hence pool the card game and hence pool the variant of snooker and billiards.

Hence also, pool your resources or carpooling. This surprised me as I had always imagined that when you pooled your money you were putting it into the same... pond, as it were.

So it turns out that my pool-playing related more closely to my lunch than to my swimming. It also means that a gene pool is, etymologically, a race of chickens.

The Inky Fool's animal sanctuary soon went to the bad

Funambulatory

I'm not sure, dear reader (I never am), but the following may be the most beautiful paragraph to which the English language has ever given birth, or ever will.

Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulatory Track and narrow Path of Goodness: Pursue Virtue virtuously: Leven not good Actions nor render Virtues disputable. Stain not fair Acts with foul Intentions: Maim not Uprightness by halting Concomitances, nor circumstantially deprave substantial Goodness.

   - Thomas Browne, Christian Morals

And when I formed that opinion I didn't even know what funambulatory meant. I didn't care either. Sense can often mar the wonder of a word and meaning murders beauty. It turns out that funambulatory means "like a tightrope walker". So you, ambitious reader, can use it yourself in phrases such as "That finance meeting was a bitch: trying to play off the CEO and the CFO and that guy from HR... I tell you, my morning's been bloody funambulatory. Fancy a pint?"

But you will never write a sentence as sweet as Browne's.

I still haven't worked out what concomitances are.

Mrs Malaprop commuting to work

Aux Armes, etc

Today is Bastille Day. So here, for your political edification, is a history of the French Revolution done entirely in terms of when words first appeared in the English language. All of them, of course, imported from the French. 

1789
Aristocrat

1790
Sans Culotte

1791

Capitalist, Functionary

1792
Regime, Commune, Emigre

1793

Demoralise (meaning to corrupt) , Disorganise, Guillotine

1795
Terrorism

1798

Tricolour

There's a fantastic Blake poem called The French Revolution, but I can't find it on the web.

The Oxford Comma

When Americans write lists they tend to do it like this:

The Inky Fool is always floating, gloating, thinking, stinking, and winking.

Those who never felt the need to waste tea in Boston Harbo(u)r tend to write it like this:

The Inky Fool is always floating, gloating, thinking, stinking and winking.

The English do not usually insert the comma before and. However, a chap called F.H. Collins insisted that you should, and it therefore became the house style of the Oxford University Press. So it's called an Oxford Comma*. There are myriad arguments for and against the Oxford comma. People cite authority, precedent, Fowler, ambiguity, concision(,) and almost everything else. These are not my concern.

I would merely like to point out that lists with an Oxford comma seem to build to a climax. The comma sets off the final noun and gives it emphasis.

You are my PA, my friend, my lover, and my god.

The commaless list, on the other hand seems more reasonable and less exciting.

Every Tom, Dick and Harry.

I would choose my punctuation based not on some rule, but on the way in which I would like you, mysterious reader, to read the sentence.

Now watch this:



*Or, sometimes, a serial comma.

P.S. There's an immemorial superstition that if you sleep with a book under your pillow the information therein will somehow seep into your brain. I have no idea whether this can be scientifically proved, but I used to live above the Oxford University Press Bookshop.

Some Winds

In 1274 Kubla Khan tried to invade Japan. He got an awful lot of soldiers and had just landed them and was getting ready for a nice battle when it started to rain and the wind began to blow. So, rather than risk their being marooned, the troops were ordered back into the boats. This was a mistake because the wind was very strong indeed and all the ships sank.

Not to be deterred Kubla tried again in 1281 and this time an even bigger typhoon raged for two days straight and spoiled everything. The Japanese were now convinced that Japan was being saved from invasion by "Divine Winds". The Japanese for divine was Kami and the Japanese for wind was Kaze and so the defenders of Japan in the 1940s were called Kamikazes.

Kubla was forced to return to the mainland and concentrate on pleasure domes.

The Chinook helicopters, of which the RAF do not seem to have enough, are named after a spring breeze that blows in North Western America and melts the snow away.

The Mistral blows southward through Provence. It's name comes from the Latin magister, meaning master, for this is a dominant wind. It gives you a headache and (I once heard but cannot confirm) that in Medieval French law if the mistral had blown for three days that would be considered a defence for murdering your wife.

The Simoom (which is alluded to in Edgar Allen Poe's Berenice) is an Arabic wind, formed on the uplands and driven down to the lowlands where the pressure increases its temperature in quite incredible and incomprehensible ways. In 1859 there was a simoom in Santa Barbara, California. The morning was a pleasant twenty-something (70s F) degrees and then at noon the temperature shot up to 54 degrees, or 133 degrees Fahrenheit, where it remained for the next few hours.

The people hid in their houses. The animals died on their feet.

It can be hot in the Lake District, damned hot

Prose in Quotation

This is another of my index posts. The following is from the back of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations:

all for prose and verse                      CAREW

All that is not prose is verse              MOL

as well written as prose                    POUND
differs in nothing from prose            GRAY
for discourse and nearest prose        DRYD
Good prose is like a window-pane    ORW
I love thee in prose                              PRIOR

moderate weight of prose                 LAND

Not verse now, only prose                 BROW
Of a prose which knows no reason   STEP
other harmony of prose                    DRYD
pin up my hair with prose                 CONG
Poetic souls delight in prose             BYRON
prose and the passion                       FORS
prose is verse, and verse                  BYRON

Prose is when all the lines                BENT

prose run mad                                     POPE
Prose was born yesterday                FLAU
Prose = words in their best              COL

speaking prose without knowing it  MOL

They shut me up in a prose                 DICK
unattempted yet in prose or rhyme  MILT

That is all. Incidentally, anybody who has read the wonderful Me Cheeta, should study the index closely.