A Beaker Full of the Warm South
Further Reflections on our Relationship with History
(After the dissolution of the Most Serene Republic of Venice and its artistic looting at the hands of Napoleon) [...] one writer states, Venice became just ‘another sort of ruin to visit’ for British travellers, the liquidation of its political independence ‘a necessary precondition of the wistful Veneto-philia of Byron, Ruskin and other nineteenth-century observers’.1 The ending of Venetian statehood opened the way to that later concentration on the city’s stricken beauty so resonant amongst British Victorians and their cosmopolitan American cousins.2
Today, Venice is the most over-touristed city on earth and is counted among the most beautiful, so it was surprising to learn that during the era of the “grand tour” it was one of the less-favoured destinations in Italy for young British aristocrats. It makes sense on one level; versus Rome and Florence, Venice simply could not boast the same concentration of artistic wealth, classical, mediæval or early-modern. It also stuck out like a sore thumb as a city founded during the collapse of the Greco-Roman civilisation with which Britain and the West at large was so enamoured - one that lacked any architectural or even political remnant of those times. Although the Republic had been analogised to England as a fellow maritime and trading power defended by an indomitable navy,3 this strain of thought began to lose sway in the late eighteenth century as Britain’s empire grew beyond a series of trading outposts into a truly massive land empire. The only romantic allegory that would serve for this new, accidental empire4 was Rome, and Rome, past or present, was not to be found in Venice.
As the aristocracy scoured Italy and its dizzying abundance of culture, La Serenissima remained inscrutable as if shut behind a carnival mask.5 Venice was an adjunct to the rest of the experience - one favoured by “rakes” drawn by its decadent and loose reputation. Crucially it wasn’t visited primarily for cultural edification, even despite the allegorical significance it held with England in the post Glorious-Revolution and early Georgian eras. The antique splendour that we spoke about last time, which Italy had in droves, did not make itself present in quite the same way as elsewhere - that is until Napoleon forced the abdication of the Republic’s final Most Serene Doge, dismantling a state over 1,100 years old, and set to plundering much of its fine art. Then the “ruin”6 of Venice and her “stricken beauty” finally found their manageable nook in the British soul. In short, Venice had to die to be loved.
Robert Holland’s The Warm South explores the sustained influence of the Mediterranean world on the British imagination. One recurring theme is how notions rooted in the classical clash with the contemporary reality of the South. Indeed, the reality of the modern South and its contrast with ideas of the ancient reflects the conflict we explored last time between the pristine ideal of the classical world embodied in white marble sculpture and the warts-and-all reality preserved at Pompeii. That closest to now is felt to be lesser than the past; further in entropy. To reiterate from last time, the one comes to embody the “timeless reality” of myth - that is the always-already prior, not only in time but in closeness to the source of the universe - Mircea Eliade’s in statu nascendi.7 The latter is prosaic history. Our black and white image is given colour and vividity and we understand those in the past as men like ourselves. In the process we lose the mythic image of the past. We understand it, or attempt to, as if it were happening today.
The bent of this analysis is clear - let the white marble signify what it does and make no attempt to bring it out of monochromatic timelessness and into colour - except, this does not sit wholly well with me, as was perhaps clear from the ambiguity of the start of the last article. Are we really to enshrine inertness and death and shun the colourful present? That notion almost has echoes of gnosticism or some other metaphysical rejection of the world. I won’t look to discard either implication of this thread of thought, but instead to pursue each of them where they lead.
Just Another Ruin
Amid the “autumn consciousness” of Victorian intellectual life, John Ruskin’s comparison of Britain with Venice was explicitly as a fallen thalassocracy whose fate he foresaw his own country sharing.8 It was this image of Venice that captured the British imagination. It is argued in the opening quote that only a “dead” Venice could be valorised in this way: a Venice stripped of what remained of its being a true, living power on the international stage. Venice as “just another ruin” could be spun to many different narrative purposes; crucially it could come to represent an ideal that was comfortably removed from the mire of the world “in colour” - it could finally take on the same kind of meaning as Rome and Greece, its architecture and history a completed story that could be perused, museum-like. This remains somehow troubling, however.
The more recent life of the Venetian Republic brings into starker focus the flipside of our veneration of the past. As with a Roman sculpture, the paint fades and the colours run, vivid mortality is washed out in time and in its place only naked bones remain. The Venice of midnight intrigues among the canals and the Council of Ten fell in 1797 - the Carnival was abolished with it. Venice has been preserved in its unique beauty and attracts millions per year - but as what? A pretty rock onto which hordes of anonymised biomass are disgorged to swill around and spend money.
As frequently referenced on this blog, I’m reminded of Ted Kaczynski’s remarks on “wild nature” as opposed to the fully controlled nature-lite of parks and reserves.9 This modern overtourism crisis is of course unlike anything in the nineteenth century and breaks any frame of analysis in this essay for its nauseating excess, but to return to the “wistful-Venetophilia” of the Victorians, something remains troubling about the prerequisite of obsoletion and finality in our admiration of a place, in our “deference to classical deadness”10. Even long before anything like the modern crisis of mass tourism was occurring, many abhorred the drowsy adoration of the dethroned Venice and of the supine relics of the Mediterranean at large; that the former centre of global civilisation should be treated as a kind of antique shop to be perused. Our conclusions from last time were very much in line with the thinking of Victorians like Ruskin, to whom the maintenance of a classical standard of beauty in art helped to uphold the moral foundations of civilisation as a whole.
Non v'è più bellezza
As Ruskin’s antithesis, Holland posits one for whom “There is no more beauty except in struggle.”11 This voice came from the Mediterranean itself and had this to say about the world’s love of his country’s countless ruins.
“In the eyes of other countries, Italy is still a land of the dead, a vast Pompeii, white with sepulchres. But Italy is being reborn.”12
So spoke Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leading voice of Italian Futurism. The rebirth he sought meant a total obliteration of these decrepit ruins and the construction of a new Italy. “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,” he said. Nowhere in Italy drew his revulsion more severely than Venice. In a speech given to Venetians from the clock tower in Piazza San Marco, Contro Venezia Passatista, Marinetti
“[…] urged them (Venetians) to transform this ‘greatest bordello in history’ into a vibrant industrial port. Venice with its ‘leprous crumbling palaces’ and its gondolas, those ‘rocking chairs for cretins’, was the supreme denial of the modern Italian spirit: ‘ you want to prostrate yourself before all foreigners’, […] ‘your servility is repulsive!’”13
Notwithstanding instinctive revulsion at the notion of wilfully destroying the beauty of Venice, we must admit that there is something in what Marinetti was saying.
This preoccupation with the autumnal Venice in the grace of its decay was not generative - it was a symptom of conservative despair and twee nostalgia comparable to the fixation on placid pastoralism in British art that Marinetti likewise despised and attacked - suggesting that all of the works in the National Gallery ought to be dragged into Trafalgar Square and burned.14 It is hard to picture anyone whose ideas were more anathema to this violent radical modernism than G.K. Chesterton, but the issue of admiring the Mediterranean in its life rather than in its death was well put by Chesterton, regarding Robert Browning’s enduring love of Italy:
“There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop.”15
A century earlier, Lord Byron found himself in the middle of this when he took up the cause of Greek revolution against Ottoman rule. As encapsulated by the famous portraits of him draped in modern Greek attire, the aristocratic poet entered a Greece far removed from what he knew from Homer, Aristotle and the Parthenon. Descending the Acropolis and diving into a messy, living Mediterranean world, Byron was engaged in active history-making - or at least he was a spectator of the present and not the past, or some notion of the past - he was supporting the cause of a nation and not an old curiosity shop. Indeed, “He (Byron) took a particular dislike to the antiquity-loving virtuoso (or dilettanti) types he found amongst the English residents of the city (Athens), [...] to him antiquities were something to carve your name on, as he did at the temple of Sounion.”16
I wonder if anyone else is reminded here of the Varangian who irreverently scraped his name into the stones of the Hagia Sophia, in the barbaric runes of his far-off country. Neither the Varangian nor Byron showed the kind of sycophantic adulation towards the palatial splendour of the Mediterranean that would later appall Marinetti. Byron and “ᚼᛅᛚᚠᛏᛅᚿ” were likewise the barbarian - the bringer of new times and of living history. It was barbarians who had brought the hammer of history to Rome and eventually inaugurated the next phase of civilisation. This is in a sense what Marinetti himself aimed to be, though in a much more radical shape. Away from the distant sky-bound Apollonian ideal, the barbarian is immersed in the Dionysian Bacchanalia of the now; the at-the-earth. It does not show deference to the old and while it is destructive, it is this destruction that allows the rebirth of a new and vital civilisation. Were the Hellenes themselves not at first northern barbarians descending on the Warm South?
Like Hölderlin’s Dionysos who gives man his only access to the divine during the “world’s night” Weltnacht,17 the feast of present life might not have the absolute and lasting significance of the “hidden gods”, but it is a brief and wonderful fire that matters precisely because it is unlasting. As we saw earlier, “the now” is invariably judged as fallen in some respect from a time of greater unity with heaven, the origin of all things - this Bacchanalia of living history has the vitality and “colour” of the painted statue. It is one part of a story of the life of the universe that a preoccupation with its dead phase would forget, to the denigration of the whole.18
An Attempt at Reconciliation
Although I have to say I do not overly enjoy museums versus visiting ancient sites themselves, I am nonetheless glad for their preserving of valuable artefacts. Any modern person will take this attitude - we assiduously preserve and hold on to the treasures of the past in a way that is quite foreign to how our ancestors operated. They thought very little of bulldozing beautiful quarters of cities to build something new19 and would raid tombs for things that they could actually make use of - chucking out anything else. It’s an appalling attitude to us, but it tells us something about how the world appeared to our ancestors. The “living history” that adds its own chapter to an ongoing story and overwrites elements of the past is qualitatively different to an era that sees itself as hermetically sealed off from history, which it regards as finished - having arrived at its telos in modernity. Designating anything as “historical” or to be otherwise preserved necessarily robs it of a kind of dignity as actually existing in lived history, as if carting it off to a nursing home. It’s painful to see things this way and I do not advocate Futurism at all, but the refusal to allow things to die as they naturally would freezes them in a zombified state. Again, history in its living form is like Kaczynski’s Wild Nature, as opposed to its catalogued preservation in a museum - neutered of activity like the fallen Venice.
The reason that we - and I myself - are so desperate to preserve the relics of the past is because we realise that we make nothing to replace them. We do not have the confidence of our own time nor the connection to living history to accept losing any fragment of the past. On top of this, we try and understand the past as if it were happening today and so it is never allowed to become “the past”. This vast museum is crucially unlike the ruins that gave rise to that unpainted white marble ideal that began this whole enquiry. That society had collapsed beyond the grasp of certain knowledge - it became myth. Venice had no opportunity to do so. Venice is an enbalmed corpse on display, all of its “paint” still visible - restored in fact to make sure it never fades as it otherwise would. A kind of urban taxidermy has been performed - while it has the look of life, there is nothing behind its glass eyes. To return again to the last article - imagine if Aragorn did not fade into his effigy, but was dug up centuries later and genetically analysed so a 3D artist could render an accurate image of his face, his body dissected to better understand the diet and daily habits of the Gondorian nobility in the late Third Age. The “image of splendour” that he came to embody would evaporate.
What I am trying to say is that last time’s conclusion does not point to the same “deadness” and museification that we have explored in this article. The problem lies with the modern refusal to confront the reality of death and time. The Classical world means so much to us precisely because it was allowed to die properly, it took on the mask of death and in this dignity it is understood in the sense of a timeless reality beyond simple history. Venice cannot ever do this, nothing can until we undergo the same fate as Rome.
I am most definitely not saying that Venice ought to be turned into a carpark. Indeed I will not say that our attempts to conserve the past are bad in the slightest. As with today’s overtourism, modernity is so confused as to break tidy analyses. What one is to “do” in such a mire is always a question entirely unto itself. Often when you point to things that must happen (by nature or necessity), people interpret this as some ideological call for them to happen - like with the inevitable collapse of our present civilisation. It’s often put to me that a civilisational collapse would mean the destruction of our treasure trove of culture and art and history, as if collapse were some policy proposal I were making. How much loss does that entail? Perhaps these things are inescapable. Every thing, every civilisation, animal, species and nation is born, lives and dies. Many, many people want to forget that - and they want you to forget it too, because their projects for society depend on illusions of infinity. The fact is - in the state of tradition, history takes on mythical significance because the prosaic (to use Froude’s term) “painted” version of history necessarily subsides with distance to those events. Rather than a distortion, should we not see this as the natural and perhaps proper way for history to develop? That is a provocative conclusion, I am aware.
Ruskin hoped to preserve what modernity might corrode, Marinetti wanted to clear the path for its ascent. It appears to me that a beautiful future that we cannot control - indeed beautiful for this very reason - will be reborn by necessity out of the ruins of this society. Like all before us, we will see our vibrant, bustling corridor of life slide into the shelves of history. These things all have their time. The problem is not the myth or the life - it is the conflict that has emerged between them. Futurism reflects that same misstep I described in my essays Irreconcilable and A Tale of Two Churches - those who wish to import the spirit of the past into the machine. The machine is itself the negation of what they desire - in this case because a complex technical society is one that catalogues the past and collates a mechanical understanding of it, robbing it of proper death. The rebirth that the Futurists desired cannot come from some further development of industrial society - from some widening of the shallow ocean of contemporary civilisation. It must come as it always has from the termination of a moribund phase and the birth of a new one. Indeed - it is strange to think how “rebirth” could ever result in a technologically developed civilisation. How could the reborn world not be “young”? As in Lawrence’s The Rainbow:
Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.
And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.20
Conclusion
The book that inspired so much of this pair of articles, Robert Holland’s The Warm South is named for a line from John Keats’s poem Ode to a Nightingale:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:Vested in this sentiment of longing is the desire to capture the Mediterranean world as a “draught” or essence. For a “beaker full” - a sample of that warm place and of everything it means to the English, in our cold country. I will not say that what is desired is inherently a commodity, but definitely a kind of extract or quality that serves a personal purpose. Like how the harvested fruit is no longer engaged in the active life of the plant, the “beaker full” that we desire is a product of the warm South that we can control and make use of. Venice came to serve this purpose to the English and at present all the world is a vast series of draughts and “essences” marketed to suit every longing.
A “beaker full” of South Asia, or of chicken wings on deliveroo at 2 in the morning. The problem is not Keats’s desire, just as the problem is not with our natural desire to preserve our heritage in the form of conservation efforts. The problem is the unnatural degree to which we can satiate these desires. Longing is a natural part of life; the distance that exists in limitation-bound conditions. This natural limitation likewise creates distance between us and the past, which itself can become “longed for” and take on the meaning that it ought to under these circumstances; a beaker full means nothing if its substance is infinitely available on-tap. The beauty of Keats’s line is murdered in its utter fulfilment - the plugging of the gap where all of its beauty lay.
P.S.
These two articles have been two of my favourites that I have written on this blog. They have doubtlessly been departures from the usual focus to some extent, but in working through the implications of the issues at hand I found myself led back to the very familiar message of the prior works. This gives me encouragement that these articles will convey at least something of a coherent statement of thought.
I am going to Italy soon for the first time in three years and I am beyond glad to have read Robert Holland’s excellent book before going, it is thoroughly recommended - it changed my entire perspective regarding the Mediterranean and its role in British cultural consciousness.
My thanks for reading and I hope to see you here again. <3
Robert Holland. The Warm South, p61.
Eglin, J. Venice Transfigured, p8, 203.
Indeed, Englishmen have been enamoured with Venice going back to Shakespeare through to Evelyn Waugh. Having had the fortune myself of visiting it during the pandemic when it was nearly empty, I will say that I don’t know if there is a more beautiful city on earth.
“We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England, p12.
Robert Holland. The Warm South, p59. I feel I must credit Holland with that turn of phrase.
Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice.
Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane, p80.
Robert Holland. The Warm South, p134.
Theodore Kaczynski. Industrial Society and its Future, paragraph 183-4.
Robert Holland. The Warm South, p87.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Il Manifesto del Futurismo, p25.
Peter Nicholls. Modernisms: A Literary Guide, p88.
Peter Nicholls. Modernisms: A Literary Guide, p87.
Robert Holland, The Warm South, p218.
G.K. Chesterton. Robert Browning, p47-8.
Robert Holland. The Warm South, p87.
Martin Heidegger. “What are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p93.
This was somewhat of an abortive attempt to introduce another angle from Heidegger’s commentary on Hölderlin that definitely has a lot of relevant insights, but deserves its own time. I will revisit this thread later I am sure.
Lamented as long ago as the 1830s in Victor Hugo’s the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. A whole chapter is devoted to describing the architecture of Paris and mourning the loss of its Gothic streets.
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p580.