Bernard Cornwell's 'Agincourt'

"Historical Fiction" is not something that I've read very much of (or at all) since I was a pre-teen --but on my way through the check-out line at the library Thursday evening, I saw 'Agincourt' over in the large-type new-arrivals' bookcase....and "What the hell--How bad could a really colorful account of one of my very favorite battles be?" I said to myself. So I grabbed it, checked it out--and until this morning I've scarcely put it down. Golly is it gory--and absolutely wonderful! I notice that the quality of Historical Fiction Prose has much improved since the days that Sir Walter Scott and Thomas B. Costain were writing it. Cornwell's prose maybe lacks, shall we say, sonorous melody, but it is cleanly stuff--and vigorous, and vivid to a fault. Moreover, he quite adequately conveys the very essence of that mysterious je ne sais quoi of historicity, How Things Felt In Those Days: Lots of perfectly appropriate cussing, by those who did a lot of it, and a frankness about pooping and peeing that does not in the least disgust, because there's no other way that makes sense to describe whole populations of people afflicted with dysentery. So, I've made a little vow to myself: I'm going to read any and everything else that the peculiarly gifted Mr. Cornwell has written.

Adelaïde Labille-Guiard

So anyway, ruminating on the vast significance I had ignorantly missed in the sister of Louis l'Infortuné, and poking through history for added details, I discovered with wonderment that Mme. Elisabeth had had her portrait painted within the same Golden Decade by another female artist--of whom, somehow, I had never heard: Adelaïde Labille-Guiard...And, just to see, I Googled her...And: A veritable treasure-trove of art and peculiarly interesting curiosities: (1) Mesdames Le Brun and Guiard were both admitted to the French (Royal?--must've been) Academy on the same day, 31 May 1783--the same year, about three months before (if memory serves) the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air ballon ascended into the heavens in front of the ravished spectators at Versailles, among whom were Count Axel von Fersen and his Sovereign Gustav III. (2) "They were much compared, and declared rivals," said an eye-witness. (3) Actually, anybody with an ounce of taste and judgement can see that Mme. Labille-Guiard is by far the better, infinitely more accomplished artist; at the same time more "painterly" and, within the compass of any painting that she does, capable of doing a much greater variety of things than nice (but rather dull) Mme. Vigée Le Brun ever thought of doing: as witness her self-portrait with her pupils, her portrait of Mme. de Selve, her pastel portrait of the sculptor Le Moynes, and, consummately, her great, state portrait of Mme. Adelaïde--my god, look at the different textures! the play of light! and the triumphant, vivid super-realism of its portrayal of the impossibly, unpleasantly complex character of its subject, Mme. Adelaïde, Fille de France, and one of the principal authoresses of the French Revolution: This was the snobbery, the insufferable pride of race and lineage, that Marie Antoinette kept stubbing her trendy Hapsburg toe against--and which eventually pitched her into the dust.

And then there's Mme. Guiard's appallingly faithful portrait of that monster of cruelty and virtue, the sickening Robespierre--just as he was. Oh my God.

La Décennie d'Or

One of the very nicest things on the Net is the Mme. Vigée Le Brun portrait gallery hosted by (so help me) Bat Guano. Every so often I boot it up and, as it were, revisit that magical, elegant, sweetest of times, seeing it come alive in the wonderful speaking likenesses of Mme. Le Brun's deft, original, and polished portraiture. And nearly every time I return to it I discover something, "some one," in it that I had overlooked before--yet another gentle and gallant, brave and innocent soul doomed within but a few years of its representation here to a brutal and tragic fate in the pitiless horror of the revolution. Such as Mme. Elisabeth, sister of Louis XVI, whom we see here in the portrait painted by Mme. Le Brun in 1782--guillotined May 10, 1794.

At the scaffold they had the barbarity to to reserve her for the last. All the women, in leaving the cart, begged to embrace her. She kissed them, and with her usual benignity, said some words of comfort to each. Her strength never abandoned her, and she died with the resignation of the purest piety.

Thinking we Know what we Know we Think

How many people are there for whom music is, simply, nothing? As I poke and pry at the subject on the Worldwide Internet, I keep running upon a conservative 5% - 10% guesstimate--surprisingly, about twice as many girls as boys. Adorno, with his Freudian tilt, thinks that the few, totally "amusische" have been brutalized into it by their cruel fathers; which might account for Gertrude Stein's incurious indifference to music--and then again it might not. I, for one, am willing to call it a recessive gene, and let it go at that. But the fact is, there are such people, whose souls are dead to the Angelic Art, who are for the most part sublimely unaware that they're missing anything. One has to be on one's guard, particularly when one is reading about such peculiarly human concerns as culture, civilization, and the human condition--that these people, as authors, don't unconsciously intrude their psychic deficiency upon their subject matter; as color-blind persons, for example, are always hopelessly, unconsciously, misjudging the aims and effects of painting, porcelain, and jewelry. Miltonic criticism is especially rife with this sort of unconscious misapprehension, because Milton may well have been the most musical poet that ever lived: his poetry is saturated with music, in sound and sense. Even those of his critics who are capable of assessing the significance of the extraordinary collection of printed music that Milton brought back from Italy with him, are apt not fully to appreciate the importance of the music--and in especial, the singing--that we know him to have heard in Italy.

And so, reading John Addington Symond's introduction to the Havelock Ellis edition of Five Plays of Christopher Marlowe:

"...This drama, in its own original creation, stood to the English nation in the place of all the other arts. It became for us the embodiment of that Renaissance which had given sculpture, painting, architecture and a gorgeous undergrowth of highly-coloured poetry to the Italians."

My bold italic.