Dalrymple on historian A. L. Rowse:

For many years before [his death]… he was eaten by a resentment that he no longer had a motive to conceal. He believed he had solved the problem of the identity of the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but not everyone agreed, and in book after book he inveighed against their stupidity, their envy, their obtuseness, their blindness caused by social prejudice against someone such as he who had not been born with the silver spoon in his mouth…

[H]e was much in advance of his time. I am not thinking of his self-advertised combination of scholarship and intuition, but rather that of his resentment and boastfulness which seems so prevalent today.

Read the rest at The Hilarious Pessimist

Note: This piece has since been renamed “Rowse and the Worm that Gnaweth”.

There are some names that do not seem suited to ring down the ages with literary fame, however worthily their possessors write, and Percy Robinson probably is one of them. But his play, To What Red Hell, first performed in 1926, was successful and twice made into a silent film, one of them with Sibyl Thorndyke in a starring role.

It is a melodrama concerning the death penalty. In the prologue, the body of a woman is found in a boarding house. At first she appears to have gassed herself, but the policemen who are called eventually twig to the fact that she has been strangled. The gas has been left on to mislead people into thinking she has killed herself.

She is what the char-lady calls, in stage Cockney, ‘a painted ’arlot.’ A young Irishman called Tim Nolan who has befriended her and against whom there is a lot of circumstantial evidence is arrested, charged, found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. But the real culprit is Harold Fairfield, a middle class young man who, disappointed in love, takes to drink and prostitutes and strangles the young woman while drunk. In the end he prevents a miscarriage of justice by shooting himself after having written a letter of confession to the Home Secretary, and Nolan is reprieved at the last moment.

Fairfield gives an account of what happened that will be familiar to anyone who has prepared a medical report on the average murder:

I don’t remember much what happened… All the damned drink I’d been taking must have got to me head! I just remember her lighting the gas when we got in. After that, everything seems – hazy. I don’t know whether we quarrelled – or what. Then there’s a sudden blank altogether.

But later, a little while before he shoots himself, Fairfield has the satisfaction of learning that, while he might actually have killed the young woman, he was not morally responsible for having done so. His uncle asks him whether he remembers the fainting fits he had as a child, and then continues:

They weren’t – fainting fits – but – another kind – seizures. We all thought you’d grown out of them, but – you hadn’t! You killed that girl in one… So you needn’t blame yourself as you’re doing, you weren’t responsible for what you did!

Unfortunately this could not be proved in a court of law because the doctor who diagnosed the seizures had died in the meantime. Nor does it explain why he left the gas on to mislead people as to the cause of death.

Harold Fairfield decides that there is no alternative to suicide because, if he strangled one person in the course of an epileptic fit, he might strangle another.

In those days, medical diagnosis was obviously a somewhat inexact affair. In one of the scenes of the play a general practitioner by the name of Barton – whose daughter has refused the hand of Harold Fairfield, thus driving him to drink – is called away from a dinner party (where, incidentally, he hasn’t done so badly for drink himself, despite being on call) to a patient, ‘an infernal woman’ who ‘persistently gives birth to twins,’ thereby getting double value for money for attendance at a confinement, but who luckily turns out to have only ‘a chill on the liver:’ for then Dr Barton can resume his drinking where he left off.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple reacts to a recent speech by the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, in which the good reverend takes aim at an easy target (loan sharks) and announces a new policy Dalrymple finds a little ridiculous:

…the Archbishop, acceding to the cliché, decreed that henceforward all church wardens, bell ringers, organists, flower-arrangers and the like should undergo a check by the Criminal Records Bureau (the organization that keeps all British criminal records), failing agreement to which they will not be permitted any longer to perform their voluntary duties.

It is timely, then, to ask the really important question: did the Archbishop himself have a CRB check before he was elevated to Canterbury, and if not, why not?

After all there is no reason to suppose that archbishops are less prone to paedophilic tendencies than flower-arrangers, indeed rather the opposite, in so far as flower-arrangers tend to be women and archbishops, even nowadays, tend to be men. And let us not forget that the Archbishop is a former oil trader, and therefore suspect ex officio as it were.

Read it here

Ugo Betti (1892 – 1953) was the son of a doctor who was the director of the hospital in Parma, and is widely considered to have been the second most important Italian playwright of the modern era after Pirandello. In 1955 three of his plays were to be seen on the London stage, though he seems to have been largely forgotten today.

He was a jurist by profession and worked as a judge throughout the Fascist era, though he was accused by the Fascists of being an opponent. After the war, he was accused by the anti-Fascists of having been a fascist but was cleared of all charges.

His outlook was largely pessimistic and he tackled such questions as that of collective, or societal, guilt, for example in his play, Landslide. First performed in 1932, it portrays an investigation into the causes of an industrial catastrophe that reveals moral failings at every level of society. It has something in common with J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, first performed thirteen years later.

A doctor is one of the principal characters in Summertime, first performed in Italy in 1937, and in England in 1955 with Dirk Bogarde as Alberto.

Alberto is a charming but worthless, frivolous and not very intelligent young man who cannot make up his mind between two women, Francesca who was his childhood playmate and Noemi who is the sister of the director of the bank in which he hopes to be given a good post.

The doctor, aged 30, is also courting Francesca after his fashion, which is a very dull one. He is so aware of his professional status that throughout he allows nothing but clichés and platitudes to escape from his mouth, and possibly to enter his mind. He treats the world as if it were one large bedside. At the climax of the play, when finally asking for Francesca’s hand (having first cleared it with her maiden aunt), he tries to entice her by offering her his mackintosh because it is damp outside. That is the nearest he can come to a romantic flight of imagination.

He cannot break his habit of pompous and platitudinous solemnity even when, at the last minute, Francesca chooses Alberto rather than him. When she points to Alberto, who coughs nervously, she asks the doctor whether the cough could be anything serious. His is the final speech before the curtain comes down:

As a general rule, such coughs are of but little moment. Nonetheless and unfortunately, one can occasionally begin by having a slight cough… and that slight cough can quickly lead to the grave.

He courteously lifts his hat to Francesca and then concludes:

And should that happen in this case, Miss Francesca, if you would like me to… then I will, all patiently, wait.

I am reminded of the uncle of a friend of mine whose conversation was so dull (for example, on seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time he would immediately wonder out loud how it was kept clean) that at home his wife turned up the volume of the wireless to drown out the sound of what he was saying.

Are doctors, because of their need to be so frequently on their best behaviour, more prone than others to utter oracular banalities? The doctor comments on the weather as if it were his patient with a doubtful diagnosis of some severity:

The wind has changed. We can no longer exclude the possibility of a storm, I fear.

Or is the doctor only Ugo Betti’s father?

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

In this New English Review piece that we missed last month, Dalrymple examines the implications of the idea that crime is genetic and its ensuing prescription, eugenics:

Eugenics, I suspect, was in reality a symptom of a growing impatience of intellectuals with the intractability of the human condition, with the fact that that Man was irredeemably imperfect. And this impatience grew because of a decline in the religious understanding of life (it was no coincidence that Chesterton, who saw so easily through the pretensions of eugenics, should have been firmly Christian, while none of his opponents was). In the 1920s sterilization of the unfit would do for humanity what psychopharmacology is now supposed to do: render it happy because perfect.

At the New English Review, Dalrymple writes on the “intelligent but undemanding” work of Sir Edmund Gosse, a forger who nonetheless (and ironically) wrote honestly and truthfully about sincerity and originality.

Read it here

One of Dalrymple’s main characteristics, obvious to anyone who has paid any attention at all to him, is his seemingly boundless curiosity. So it says a lot about the man that he still chides himself for not developing more of an interest in this or that subject. In this new piece for the New English Review, he writes of his regret for not developing more of an interest in nature. (Meaning, nature generally. Human nature is probably the chief interest of his life.) Take those butterflies that flit across his lavender bushes…

Why… did the question of where they went after dark never occur to me before?

…The reason is that I simply took the way things were for granted, without thinking why they were as they were. Of course we have to do this for most of our lives: we cannot be paralysed by curiosity. And yet the opposite extreme, the habit of taking everything for granted, never wondering about anything, is one of the worst fates that can befall a man (if taking everything for granted can be called a fate rather than a decision). To walk in a world devoid of mystery is to embark on a voyage that is as tedious as it will appear long.

At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple criticizes a recent speech by Pope Francis in which the Pope blames the West for the drowning deaths of Africans migrating across the Mediterranean to Europe.  The refugees deserve our compassion, says Dalrymple, but by blaming the West for their deaths, the Pope elevates sentimentality and spiritual pride above reason:

By elevating feeling over thought, by making compassion the measure of all things, the Pope was able to evade the complexities of the situation, in effect indulging in one of the characteristic vices of our time, moral exhibitionism, which is the espousal of generous sentiment without the pain of having to think of the costs to other people of the implied (but unstated) morally-appropriate policy. This imprecision allowed him to evade the vexed question as to exactly how many of the suffering of Africa, and elsewhere, Europe was supposed to admit and subsidize (and by Europe I mean, of course, the European taxpayer, who might have problems of his own). I was reminded of a discussion in my French family in which one brother-in-law complained to another of the ungenerous attitude of the French state towards immigrants from the Third World. ‘Well,’ said the other, ‘you have room enough. Why don’t you take ten Malians?’ To this there was no reply except that it was a low blow: though to me it seemed a perfectly reasonable response.

Read the rest here