Today feels like a day for posting a poem. This one, by Hopkins, will have to do:
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
Slightly early, this week, because I’m going to Cambridge for a party tomorrow. A mask from Japanese Noh theatre, via the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art:
![[picture of a Noh mask]](https://www.ishibi.pref.ishikawa.jp/msm-2d/tn_detail/syozo/11/11003300.jpg)
Apparently, if you ask wine experts to match the tasting notes to the wine, not only are they unable to identify them on the basis of other people’s notes (beyond obvous things like ‘it’s a sauvignon blanc’ or ‘it’s oaky’), they are unable to identify them on the basis of their own tasting notes from a few months ago. In other words, all that stuff they come out with (“I’m getting a slight hint of candle-stubs and grass”) is too impressionistic to be really informative.
Presumably the same would apply to a lot of poetry reviews.
A couple of posts back I lumped The Charge of the Light Brigade in with Kipling and Newbolt as ‘populist poetry’, as contrasted with ‘literary poetry’. I’m still not wild about that distinction, because it seems to imply an inverse correlation between accessibility and merit. But it does seem to capture some sort of truth. Notice it’s nothing to do with being ‘avant garde’ – in the comments to that post I contrasted Kipling and Hardy, and Hardy was no modernist. Highbrow vs. middlebrow would be part of the distinction, but that’s not quite right either.
Anyway. The Charge of the Light Brigade is interesting in this respect because Tennyson also wrote poems like In Memoriam A. H. H., which are (clearly?) ‘literary’. And Browning, who was also a ‘literary’ poet, wrote things like The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It’s a very Victorian tendency, a thick streak of populism in serious art. All those awful narrative paintings with titles like Faults On Both Sides, and the shamelessly crowd-pleasing novels of Dickens. In some ways it’s very democratic, so it seems a pity that the results were so awful. All aspects of the visual arts (architecture, painting, fashion, design) seemed to produce abomination after abomination, it’s one of the weakest of all periods of poetry in England; only the novel seemed to do well on it.
Does populism lead to bad art? Or were they both symptoms of something else?
from halloween-mask.com:
EDIT: That picture now doesn’t seem to be working. So here’s an Alien Disco mask instead. Via thefunshop.net
![[Alien Disco mask]](https://thefunshop.net/Mask/Halloween/Comical/AlienDisco.jpg)
I went to see the ‘Stubbs and the horse‘ exhibition at the National. But first things first; the Alison Lapper statue works much better in the flesh then I expected.
For those of you who don’t know, at the corners of Trafalgar Square are four plinths to hold large statues. Three of them are occupied (by George IV, General Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock). But the fourth plinth remained empty from when it was built in 1841 until 1999, when campaigners from the Fourth Plinth project managed to persuade everyone involved to use it as a site for temporary artworks. Its position in front of the National Gallery gives it a natural connection to the world of art, but it’s also in an automatic dialogue with all the other statues in the Square – including Nelson, of course. The new occupant is a marble statue by Marc Quinn of disabled artist Alison Lapper pregnant. I haven’t got a photo of the actual statue in situ, but this is a model from the commissioning process:
What you don’t appreciate from that is the scale – 3.55m tall, apparently. That immediately ties it in with the other statues in the Square. It feels like a piece of official public art; it has something of that heavy blandness to it. But because of the unusual subject matter, that depersonalisation actually works in its favour; it makes it seem natural to have a huge marble statue of a pregnant naked woman with no arms.
The Stubbs on the other hand was less interesting. Horses, horses and more horses. What I liked most about them – a kind of stillness, a posed, statuesque simplicity – was, I suspect, due to Stubbs’s technical limitations rather than an aesthetic choice, because late in his career he did some action pictures of horses being attacked by lions, and they’re terrible.
There was something quite democratic about the paintings, though; it doesn’t matter if you’re the Duke of Portland or a stablehand, you’re still going to play second fiddle to the horse.