The Growlery (February 2004)
Essays by
Michael Gilleland
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The Growlery (February 2004)
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When President Bush delivered his State of the Union speech in January, 2004, news clips showed senators from Massachusetts (Kennedy) and New York (Clinton) squirming in their seats, rolling their eyes, and grimacing. This reminds me of an eyewitness account of President Lincoln's State of the Union message in 1863, reported by Noah Brooks and printed in Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, vol. 2 (NY: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1939), p. 485:
During the delivery of the Message the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts [Charles Sumner] exhibited his petulance to the galleries by eccentric motions in his chair, pitching his documents and books upon the floor in ill-tempered disgust.Of course Kennedy is not in the same league as Sumner, any more than Bush is in the same league as Lincoln.
In its infinite wisdom, the Minnesota Legislature recently passed a law allowing bars to stay open until 2 AM (the previous limit was 1 AM). Now we're seeing the first fruits of the new law, in the form of increased public urination outside Minneapolis taverns after the 2 AM closings. One could say that that the offenders literally can't hold their liquor. The best description of these yobs is Milton's "sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine" (Paradise Lost, 1.501-502). In response to their incontinence, the Downtown Minneapolis Neighborhood Association is launching a new $10,000 ad campaign, with the catchy slogan "Go before you go." Maybe instead they should spend the money on Depends undergarments, to be distributed to patrons at closing time.
Some lexicographers are slow to recognize the meaning of the first "go" in that slogan. The college edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1979) lists over thirty definitions of the little word, but not "empty the bladder or bowels". Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1980) has the definition, though.
Mark Twain's description of the silver boom in Nevada during the 1860s (Roughing It, chapter 44) applies equally well to the dot com boom of the late 1990s:
Every one of these wild cat mines -- not mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines -- was incorporated and had handsomely engraved "stock" and the stock was salable, too. It was bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day. You could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there was no lack of them), put up a "notice" with a grandiloquent name in it, start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars.
My compatriot, Maine native Benjamin Bubar, used to run for the United States presidency as a candidate of the Prohibition Party. The party hasn't had much success in elections lately -- the current standard-bearer, Earl Dodge, won only 208 votes in the 2000 election. By temperament I'm a supporter of underdogs and lost causes, but the Prohibition Party would regard me as a backslider -- I'm too fond of hard cider and that sovereign remedy for a sore throat, hot buttered rum. I feel a cough coming on right now.
I'm paying about $150 more per month for health insurance this year than last, for the same coverage. My mother gave me the hospital bill which itemizes the costs for bringing me into this world -- $138.50 total. She was in the hospital for over a week, her room was $8 per day, and the nursery was $1.50 per day. Dr. Maurice J. Dionne charged $40 for the delivery.
Abraham Lincoln on Phineas Densmore Gurley (minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church):
"I like Gurley. He don't preach politics. I get enough of that through the week, and when I go to church, I like to hear the gospel." Quoted in Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 138-139.Amen.
Mark Twain on choir singing:
The choir always tittered and whispered all through service. There was once a choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was now. It was a great many years ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in some foreign country. (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter 5)
I said:Anyone who has ever sung in a church choir will tell you how profoundly accurate these two passages are.
"Come, now, George, don't improvise. It looks too egotistical. It will provoke remark. Just stick to 'Coronation,' like the others. It is a good tune -- you can't improve it any, just offhand, in this way."
"Why, I'm not trying to improve it -- and I am singing like the others -- just as it is in the notes."
And he honestly thought he was, too. (The Innocents Abroad, chapter 4)
They say you can't judge a book by its cover, and that's true about one book in my collection, which states on the cover, Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Poems and Selected Prose. Edited by Bertram H. Bronson, published by Rinehart & Co. Rasselas isn't in the book.
Critics have attacked presidential candidate Howard Dean for the battle cry he uttered during a speech after his third-place showing in the Iowa caucuses in January, 2004. Some have called it Dean's "I Have a Scream" speech, after Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
My theory is that Dean was looking ahead, beyond the New Hampshire primary, to the contest in South Carolina. Dean once said that the Democrats need to broaden their appeal to Southern white males who have Confederate flag decals on their pickup trucks. Maybe Dean was just practicing his rebel yell.
The invention of photography made the sights of the Civil War real to us in a way that no previous war can be, but in the absence of a time machine we can't really recover the sounds of that epic conflict, and we must rely mostly on descriptions of the rebel yell. William Howard Russell, war correspondent for the London Times, described it as a "shrill ringing scream with a touch of the Indian war-whoop in it," and an 1885 novel, On Both Sides by Frances C. Baylor, called it "a shriek, sky-rending, blood-curdling, savage beyond description." It put courage into the hearts of the yellers, fear into their enemies.
Here are a few references to the rebel yell:
You can actually listen to recordings of the rebel yell made by Confederate veterans, one from a newsreel of the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg, and another performed in 1935 by Pvt. Thomas N. Alexander of the 37th North Carolina Regiment. But as Bell Wiley points out, "Old voices were too weak and incentive too feeble to create again the true battle cry."
If it's difficult to recapture the sound of the rebel yell, how much more difficult to imagine what an ancient Greek battle cry sounded like. Xenophon, who was present at some of the battles he describes, says, "They uttered the sort of cry they yell to Enyalios" (Anabasis 1.8.18; cf. 5.2.14 and his Cyropaedia 7.1.26). Enyalios is an epithet of the Greek god of war, Ares. Xenophon uses the verb "elelizo," from the apparently onomatopoeic noun "eleleu" (variant "alala"). The similar Greek verb "ololyzo" was used mostly of the cries of women. From the Latin "ululo" comes our English verb "ululate". What all of these words have in common is the reduplication of a vowel plus liquid sound, like "ool-ool". I would have guessed that English "howl" and "yell" are related to all these words. "Howl" might be, but apparently "yell" isn't -- see the appendix of "Indo-European Roots" in The New American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, under "ghel" and "ul".
Whatever the exact sound of an ancient Greek battle cry, there is no doubt about its effect, if we can judge from a passage in Homer's Iliad (5.859-863, tr. Richmond Lattimore):
Then Ares the brazen bellowed
with a sound as great as nine thousand men make, or ten thousand,
when they cry as they carry into fighting the fury of the war god.
And a shivering seized hold alike on Achaians and Trojans
in their fear at the bellowing of battle-insatiate Ares.
A Greek word for shouting, especially in battle, is "boe" (pronounced bo-ay), and the Homeric epithet "boen agathos" (literally "good at shouting" but usually translated "of the loud war cry") is common in the Iliad, describing the Greek warriors Menelaus and Diomedes especially. But "Howard of the loud war cry" is an incongruous epithet for the Democratic candidate most outspoken in opposition to the war in Iraq.
Update: Dave Shiflett beat me to the punch in comparing Howard Dean's scream to a rebel yell. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
I grew up on a street named after a soldier and scholar, Joshua Chamberlain (1828-1914), who left his teaching position at Bowdoin College to accept a commission as lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Twenty-four battles later, at the end of the Civil War, he resigned with the rank of major general. It was Chamberlain who accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The following photo of Chamberlain looks a bit like my son Adam:
I recently read with great interest a book about another soldier and scholar who fought on the opposite side of that epic struggle -- Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War, edited by Ward W. Briggs Jr. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). In the 1970s, I studied Greek and Latin at the University of Virginia, where Gildersleeve taught Greek a century before, from 1856 to 1876. Gildersleeve served in the Confederate Army during the summer hiatus. As he put it (p. 362), "The right to teach Southern youth for nine months was earned by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers at the front for three."
Chamberlain had six horses shot from under him during the Civil War, and was wounded several times, most seriously at Petersburg in 1864, when a Confederate Minié ball pierced both of his hip bones. In the same year, Gildersleeve was wounded at Weyer's Cave in the thigh by a Spencer bullet, so badly that he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
Soldier and Scholar consists of writings by Gildersleeve, edited with an introduction and copious notes by Ward Briggs. The learning required to edit a book of this sort is not to be underestimated. Not only is a deep knowledge of Greek and Latin needed, but the editor also requires an equally profound familiarity with the Civil War and miscellaneous ancillary subjects. Briggs is fully equal to the task. To read this book is to admire the broad-ranging scholarship and indefatigable industry of the man who collected the materials so carefully, organized them so coherently, and annotated them so richly.
The writings fall into three parts. First (pp. 31-112) are autobiographical essays, including sketches of Gildersleeve's early years, as a boy in Charleston, South Carolina, and as an undergraduate at Princeton, plus memories of student life in Germany, where Gildersleeve attended lectures at Bonn, Berlin, and Göttingen, before receiving his Ph.D. in 1853. The second and longest part of the book (pp. 113-339) is a series of editorials written by Gildersleeve for the Richmond Examiner from October 1863 to August 1864. Finally, there are some retrospective essays in which the mature Gildersleeve looks back at the Civil War and Reconstruction Era (pp. 341-413).
[According to the list of publications in Selections from the Brief Mention of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, edited by C.W.E. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), pp.xxx-liii, one period during which Gildersleeve wrote nothing for publication is July 1856 to October 1863, the first seven years of his professorship at the University of Virginia. Nowadays, when the rule is "publish or perish," this silence would have doomed his academic career.]
Most problematical for Gildersleeve's reputation are the hard-hitting Richmond Examiner editorials of 1863-1864, in which he discusses topics of the day with wit, learning, and extreme prejudice. Some of the most painful to read are those which attempt to defend the indefensible, that is, the "peculiar institution" of slavery ("Slaves vs. Mechanics," pp. 151-155, "Sambo the Ass," pp. 279-283, and "Miscegenation," pp. 291-294).
Equally painful are the attacks upon Jews, especially the following undeserved insult (p. 189): "They tell us themselves that they constitute a large proportion of the army, and perhaps it is their presence which makes our banners trail in the dust." A Jew, Jacob Bernays (1824-1881), taught Gildersleeve in Germany and suggested the topic for his Ph.D. dissertation (De Porphyrii studiis Homericis). In a letter (7 February 1858) to Emil Hübner, Gildersleeve wrote, "By the way give my best regards to him [Bernays] and assure him that I shall never forget his kindness to me in Bonn."
But I laughed in spite of myself at Gildersleeve's clever doggerel "Song of the Italians" (pp. 317-319), about a draft contingent of Italians, led by Alfred Pico, who dropped their weapons and ran away during the assault on Richmond by Phil Sheridan. The verses purport to be written by one Thomas Campkettle, and are a parody of Thomas Campbell's "Song of the Achaians," which starts with the lines
Again to the battle, Achaians!"Song of the Italians" opens like this:
Our hearts bid the tyrants defiance.
Sneak out of the battle, Italians!To move from the ridiculous to the sublime, Gildersleeve's editorial "Harmony" (pp. 234-237) is an eloquent defense of the idea that criticism of the government, far from being unpatriotic, can actually spring from deep love of country. It should be required reading for those in our own day (and they are legion) who regard any criticism of the current chief office holder or the party in power as treason and betrayal.
Born cowards are we and rascallions.
An essay which brought back memories to me is Gildersleeve's devastating dissection of the Latin style of a proposed inscription for Stonewall Jackson, written by Alexander Dimitry (pp. 354-358), in which almost every line is subjected to criticism and ridicule. It brought back memories because it reminded me of a class I took in Latin Prose Composition at the University of Virginia, taught by Arthur F. Stocker, whose own mastery of the dying art of writing correct, idiomatic Latin is unrivalled. Mr. Stocker used to point out the mistakes and infelicities of our poor efforts line by line (nay, word by word), in a way very reminiscent of Gildersleeve's analysis of Dimitry's composition. Once he described my style of composition as "Yankee Latin." Mr. Stocker was himself a Yankee by birth, I think, but by spiritual affinity and long residence below the Mason-Dixon line he qualified as a honorary Southerner.
[Briggs' notes on the proposed inscription are scanty. He doesn't translate it, and I presume that it was never actually engraved on any monument. There are Stonewall Jackson monuments in Virginia at Lexington, Chancellorsville, Richmond, and Charlottesville. More information on the hapless author, Alexander Dimitry (1805-1883), would have been welcome, too.]
Another essay which struck a chord was "Our Southern Colleges" (pp. 343-353), in which Gildersleeve claims that "an examination cheat would be drummed out of college by his indignant fellow-students." This tradition was very much alive in the honor system at the University of Virginia when I was a student there over a century later. The school newspaper occasionally ran a little black-bordered announcement on its front page, which ran something like this: "A third-year student, accused of cheating on a physics examination, has left the University without trial, thereby admitting his guilt." The honor system was administered entirely by the students in my day, and I hope that it is still alive in all its vigor.
In one of life's (or death's) cruel ironies, Gildersleeve's tombstone in Charlottesville is defaced by a mistake in the Greek, which is a quotation from the tragic poet Aeschylus meaning "Life's bivouac is over." The stonecutter engraved an English V instead of a Greek upsilon (p. 111, n. 19). There are a few minor Latin mistakes in the footnotes to Soldier and Scholar, which might cause an exact scholar such as Gildersleeve to turn over in his grave, and I hope it's not churlish or pedantic of me to point them out:
It would be impossible for Briggs to supply a note for every name or place mentioned in the book, but in a couple of spots (p. 193, n.6; p. 334, n.10) he confesses his inability to identify a recondite reference in Gildersleeve's highly allusive prose. If he was able to identify this allusion on p. 169, but declined to do so, I wish he had, because it's a complete mystery to me: "the last effusions of the Timbuctoo muse and the last novel of CHIN LING and MIEN FUN."
Briggs does a superb job of identifying passages from Biblical, classical, and English literature quoted by Gildersleeve, but he doesn't identify the following, perhaps because they're too well known:
Here is a bouquet of purple passages from Gildersleeve which struck my fancy as I read Soldier and Scholar:
We are content to stand aloof from the "spirit of progress" which is making such a sad hotch-potch of the elements of true civilization. (p. 305)
The Ionian Greeks would not rebuild the temples which their barbarian enemies destroyed; they allowed the ruins to remain as mute reminders of the injuries which they had suffered; as mute appeals to heaven for vengeance. Let us in like spirit refuse to efface these memorials of our savage foes. (p. 331)
[Note: To my mind, a simple plaque inscribed with these words, standing in front of the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York City, would be a more fitting memorial than what has been proposed for that hallowed ground.]
Take away this local patriotism and you take away all the color that is left in American life. That the local patriotism may not only consist with a wider patriotism but may also serve as a most important element in wider patriotism, is true. (p. 378)
It is perfectly possible to be persuaded in one's own mind without the passionate desire to make converts that animates the born preacher, and any one may be excused from preaching when he recognizes the existence of a mental or moral color-blindness with which it is not worth while to argue. There is no umpire to decide which of the disputants is color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degenerate into a wearisome reiteration of points which neither party will concede. (p. 380)
To those who have seen the midday sun darkened by burning homesteads, and wheatfields illuminated by stark forms in blue and gray, war is sufficiently concrete. The first dead soldier one sees, enemy or friend, takes war forever out of the category of abstracts. (p. 390)
[One final note. During the nineteenth century, individuals like Chamberlain and Gildersleeve, who followed both of these noble callings (soldier and scholar), were admired and respected, and rightly so. How much things have changed since those days is evident from a recent incident involving Peter N. Kirstein, professor of history at Saint Xavier University, and an unnamed cadet at the United States Air Force Academy. Kirstein responded to an polite email inquiry from the cadet with the outburst "You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics."]