Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

Edmund J. Sullivan's depiction of Mr Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is deemed by many to be the great masterpiece of philosophical English in the XIXth century and a work of surpassing profundity. It is, in any case, Mr Carlyle's personal masterpiece; strange, dense, cryptic, convoluted, but the essential Carlyle. It is among the numerous obscure works listed as Out of Phase reading in the relevant section of this web journal, see here. The present author relates there that he attempted to read Sartor Resartus in his teens but found the task overwhelming. It is a strange book, indeed; one like no other. Even for a mature and educated reader it poses a considerable challenge. For a start, the narrator - an anonymous English reviewer of uneven temper - affects a so-called 'German' style and much of the book is supposedly being translated from the German. The XXIst century reader has no way of knowing that, in Carlyle's time, 'German' was an exact synonym for 'mysterious' and to write English in the 'German' style was meant to impart a tone of mystery and deliberate obscurity to a text. 

So here we have a work, written by Thomas Carlyle in Carlylean prose - which is to say, already torturous and obscure and florid as it is - affected to be 'German' since Mr Carlyle was by then Britain's greatest admirer of the Germanic arts and intellect. Today, this makes the style of Sartor Resartus especially inaccessible and perplexing. Carlyle is dense: Carlyle affecting an early XIXth century German English - with all things 'German' understood to be beyond understanding - is exceedingly tricky. 

Why bother? Because this is an extraordinary work of philosophical fiction. The title means 'Tailor Patched' - the text as a patchwork of woven cloth - but the title also introduces the central philosophical metaphor throughout, namely clothes as the forms which the Spirit weaves and wears in manifestation and by which,"it both conceals itself in shame and reveals itself in grace." Carlyle has written a novel in which clothes are a metaphysical symbol. The reader needs to understand this from the outset. It is a book about clothes - or rather a book about a book about clothes. (Carlyle - master of the metanarrative!) And clothes are a symbol of the many forms (appearances) taken by the incarnate spirit of man. The spirit clothes itself in matter. The whole work is an exploration of that metaphor.

Nevertheless, it is not an easy book to appreciate. They say it is autobiographical. The plot: the hero is rejected in matrimony which provokes a spiritual crisis in him and so he sets out to travel and reflect and thereby frames his philosophy of life. This was Carlyle's fate in a romance prior to his marriage. But the autobiography is buried deep under layers of narrative devices and distancing. Mrs Carlyle does not seem to have noticed that it concerns the author's loss of a love prior to her, and after reading it is reported to have said, "It's a work of genius, dear." Others agreed. In the United States it was embraced enthusiastically by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England Transcendalists and published under their auspices.

The work, deep with satire, consists of three parts, three books. An English reviewer, the narrator, considers a work by a German philosopher on the philosophy of clothes. In the first part the narrator gives an account of this philosophy but admits to finding it perplexing. In the second part, the narrator, hoping that the biography of the author might shed light on this philosophy, gives an account of the life of the German philosopher concerned. In the third part, returning to the format of the first part, the narrator reconsiders the philosophy in light of the philosopher's life. 

The second part, then, is autobiographical in relation to Carlyle, while the first and third sections give an account of his philosophy. In this it is not systematic: it is, as the title intimates, a patchwork, like a garment patched by a tailor. What we are given here is the philosophy of a man who had once been crushed in love and who thereafter wandered in the world in sorrow and contemplation. Importantly, the work grows as it is told. The Editor (narrator) becomes engrossed in this case and pursues it further and further.

There are many curious complexities to the work. For example, in the final chapter of the first book the narrator receives material concerning the person of the German philosopher (Who's name is Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.) It arrives in a set of bags arranged according to the signs of the Zodiac and in the bags are scraps of paper on which the philosopher has scribbled loose, unconnected pieces and fragments of autobiography. The biography of the philosopher that makes up the second book is thus assembled from these fragments. Thus does Carlyle supply readers with a marvellous cosmology. Its precedent is in the relevant articles of Plato's Timaeus where the elements of matter are said to be "stoicheon" (letters of the alphabet) and so the cosmos is compared to a written text. The Zodiac supplies bags of text which constitute a lived life. Mr Carlyle's symbolism reaches far and deep. Text as 'woven cloth' is a symbolism as old as the Vedas, integral to the Indo-European mind, even the source of 'surah' (weaving) as a name for the chapters of the Mahometan Koran. 

The novel begins in typical Carlyle style, replete in irony:

Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,—it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes.

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The finest edition of Sartor Resartus is that featuring some seventy-eight illustrations by Edmund J. Sullivan. This was Mr Sullivan's greatest undertaking as an illustrator. He had illustrated other works, but not of such high repute. The original publication of the book was in Fraser's Magazine where it was serialised and presented without any indication to readers that it is a work of fiction. The work's first readers, that is, were under the impression that the entire account is true. The original full edition of Sartor Resartus sold some 30,000 copies - a huge readership at that time. Edmund J. Sullivan's 1898 edition also sold in great numbers. It is remarkable that such a work, once so celebrated, is now rated as irredeemably obscure. Carlyle is reviled; Sartor Resartus is forgotten.

Reproductions of Mr Sullivan's illustrations follow:

The Schoolmaster of the Future

The Bedlam of Creation

The Everlasting Yea

Chaos

Attorney Logic

The Old Adam and Eve

The Aboriginal Savage

A Fool's Paradise

Teufelsdröckh's Reverence for Empty Clothes

Blumine

According to the scraps of paper with autobiographical notes supplied to the narrator, in his circles of German nobility, the hero Teufelsdröckh encounters a beautiful woman named Blumine, a name meaning Goddess of Flowers. The tragic tale of Herr Teufelsdröckh has him smitten, giving up his teaching post in order to pursue her, and then to be rejected for a British aristocrat named Towgood. In this crisis, Teufelsdröckh flees and wanders around Europe, but even there - tormented - he encounters Blumine and her new husband on their honeymoon.

The philosophical adventure described in Sartor Resartus goes in three stages: the hero comes first to the Everlasting No. He eventually escapes this place of despair and comes to the Centre of Indifference. Then, finally, he accomplishes affirmation; he comes to the Everlasting Yea. It is a philosophy with a happy ending. 

The most interesting illustration by Edmund J. Sullivan is this one, above, entitled The Real and Its Ideal. In a philosophy where clothes are the central metaphor nakedness must therefore have a special significance. It is an interesting illustration because it violates the conventions of the nude. Here we see a naked woman with her nakedness juxtaposed with clothing. The classical nude, though, is an abstraction kept apart from the reality of clothing. This illustration by Sullivan raised eyebrows because the female figure is not 'nude' but 'naked', as indicated by the contrast of the clothing. What does the caption 'The Real and Its Ideal' do to the illustration? What exactly is being said about nakedness and clothing - reality, appearance, purity, exposure, society, convention, nature? Such is the symbolical and altogether indirect manner by which Mr Carlyle imparts his philosophy in this quite extraordinary work. 

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Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

A Grammar of Ornament

      

Among the important technical works written by XIXth century Orientalists in the English tongue, none has had such a deep and lasting influence as The Grammar of Ornament (see here) by the architect Owen Jones. Published in the 1850s it is a work that had a pervasive influence upon all aspects of design in England and beyond right through into XXth century, and even today it continues to influence designers in sundry fields. It is the classic work of its type: a systematic account of the principles and modes of ornament across a range of styles, periods and cultures. Principally, it gives the classic account of oriental styles of ornament with special attention to the Persians, ancient Egyptians, the Arabs, Greeks and Italians, as well as attention to the art of savages and primitive motifs. 

It was written during a time when the British Empire was fascinated with and eager to imitate and acquire oriental styles. Victorian era design - whether carpets, wallpapers, book covers, furnishings - adopted strong elements of oriental ornamentation. This was in large measure due to this book. The Grammar of Ornament collects, systemises and refines oriental decoration with the express mission of bringing oriental beauty, with its sense of pattern and geometry, to industrial production. Jones was strongly of the view that decoration is the necessary complement to architecture and that, on this account, the Empire needed to develop its own contemporary style based on oriental models instead of the increasingly old fashioned Neo-classical style then standard in English design. The purpose of the book, that is, was to set down the rules and framework - the grammar - for this new style. In the course of pursuing this purpose Mr Jones developed bold new theories of flat patterning and was a pioneer of colour theory. 

It is remarkable that, in his pursuit of a defining XIXth century style, Mr Jones turned naturally to oriental patterns and especially those of the Mahometan world. This was not in any sense an act of collusion with a cultural enemy, as anti-Mahometan sentiment would have it in today's context. This is a measure of the degree to which  things have changed. For Jones, drawing upon the patterned decorations of Islaam was an act of appropriation made from within the security of the British Empire. Rather than a measure of cultural capitulation made through a weakened sense of self, Jones looked to appropriate oriental design from a position of cultural confidence. Confident cultures engage with and appropriate from 'others'. Weak and weary cultures don't appropriate, they surrender to and are absorbed by the 'other', they apologise for their past, or else they over-compensate with vocal xenophobia, always a bad sign. The position of the West (and Britain) is different today. The encounter with the orient is torn and problematic. When we look at the Mahometan East now we do not see a world of sumptuous patterns and geometric beauty to be admired and desired, as did Mr Jones; instead we have reverted to the counter vision, the narrative about the bloodthirsty pretender and his satanic hordes. Pro-Mahometan opinion in the West, against this age-old reservoir of hostility, is insincere, uniformed, sentimental, self-hating and grows out of cultural exhaustion, not a confident encounter. It is pathological. There was no such pathology in the deeply sympathetic encounter Owen Jones and his fellow orientalist made with the East. 

The present writer, as many of these pages show, loves synergies and fusions of East and West, but the most fruitful of these were never made on equal terms. It is a case of occidental civilisation extending itself into alien worlds, usually after their military or economic subjugation. Cultures and civilisations do this all the time in history. It is one of the motors of civilizational history. Strong cultures absorb and integrate outside influences without feeling the 'other' as a threat. And appropriation is an act of humanising, because instead of being the vile styles of savages and heathens, the appropriation of cultural wealth involves giving that which is appropriated value.  Imitation, as they say, is a form of flattery. The fact is, that the orientalist admired the Mahometans and wanted to appropriate and integrate the best of Mahometan ways. The fact that this was done largely through the imagination - Europeans projected aspects of themselves upon the Mahometan 'other' - is not a fault in the project but rather one of its most beautiful features as a movement of cross-cultural fertilisation and historically exceptional. 

Those who would ponder the present vexed state of Mahometan/European encounter - the so-called 'Clash of Civilisations' - would acquire new and deeper context to their inquiries if they viewed Jones' Grammar of Ornament and asked what mode of culture can produce such a rich fusion? And what has changed? What has gone wrong? It is important to position the 'Clash of Civilisations' in this way. This is exactly what leftist post-colonial narratives - Edward Said etcetera - prevent. Poisoning the past is no foundation for its study. There is much to be learnt through the study of Owen Jones. The Grammar of Ornament is a key work of East/West synergy from a richer and less dangerous era. 

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SAMPLES

The standard editions of Grammar of Ornament feature extensive colour plates. The following are some examples:

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The Grammar of Ornament is prefaced by a series of eighteen propositions or axioms that set out the principles and philosophy of ornamentation as Mr Jones conceived it. This is an important declaration of objective principles, and it served to guide Victorian and early XXth century styles in all facets of decoration. Its wise principles can be applied to the arts in general. The text of the eighteen propositions follows:

GENERAL PRINCIPLES IN THE ARRANGEMENT OF FORM AND COLOUR IN ARCHITECTURE AND THE DECORATIVE ARTS

EIGHTEEN PROPOSITIONS

1.The Decorative Arts arise from, and should properly be attendant upon, Architecture.

2. Architecture is the material expression of the wants, the faculties, and the sentiments, of the age in which it is created. Style in Architecture is the peculiar form that expression takes under the influence of climate and materials at command.

3. As Architecture, so all works of the Decorative Arts, should possess fitness, proportion, harmony, the result of all which is repose.

4. True beauty results from that repose which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect, and the affections, are satisfied from the absence of any want.

5. Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed. That which is beautiful is true; that which is true must be beautiful.

6. Beauty of form is produced by lines growing out one from the other in gradual undulations.

7. The general forms being first cared for, these should be subdivided and ornamented by general lines; the interstices may then be filled in with ornament, which may again be subdivided and enriched for closer inspection.

8. All ornament should be based upon a geometrical construction.

9. As in every perfect work of Architecture a true proportion will be found to reign between all the members which compose it, so throughout the Decorative Arts every assemblage of forms should be arranged on certain definite proportions: the whole and each particular member should be a multiple of some simple unit.

Those proportions will be the most beautiful which it will be most difficult for the eye to detect.

Thus the proportion of a double square, or 4 to 8, will be less beautiful than there subtle ratio of 5to 8; 3 to 6, than 3 to 7; 3 to 9, than 3 to 8 3 to 4, than 3 to 5.

10. Harmony of form consists in the proper balancing, and contrast of, the straight, the inclined, and the curved.

11. In surface decoration all lines should flow out of a parent stem. Every ornament, however distant, should be traced toitsbranchandroot. Oriental practice. 

12. All junctions of curved lines with curved or of curved lines with straight should be tangential to each other.

13. Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the in- tended image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate.

14. Colour is used to assist in the development of form, and to distinguish objects or parts of objects one from another

15. Colour is used to assist light and shade, helping the undulations of form by the proper distribution of the several colours.

16. These objects are best attained by the use of the primary colours on small sur- faces and in small quantities, balanced and supported by the secondary and ter- tiary colours on the larger masses.

17. The primary colours should be used on the upper portions of objects, the secondary and tertiary on the lower.

18. The primaries of equal intensities will harmonise or neutralise each other in the proportions of 3 yellows, 5 red and 8 blue - integrally as 16. The secondaries in the proportions 8 orange, 13 purple, 11 green - integrally as 32. The tertiaries, citrine (compound of orange and green), 19; russet (orange and purple)—, 21; olive (green and purple) 24 - integrally as 64.

It follows that:

Each secondary being a compound of two primaries is neutralised by the remaining primary in the same proportions: thus - 8 of orange by 8 of blue, 11 of green by 5 of red, 13 of purple by 3 of yellow.

Each tertiary being a binary compound of two secondaries is neutralised by the remaining secondary, as 24 of olive by 8 of orange, 21 of russet by 11 of green, 19 of citrine by 13 of purple.

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As well as the Grammar, Jones wrote numerous other works, include the 1869 illustrated book The History of Joseph and his Brethren. Jones produced the illustrations. He used the work to demonstrate the practical application of the principles set out in the Grammar. Examples follow below:

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

  

Marine Le Pen Unveiled

The previous posting to these pages (here) regarded matters related to feminine attire and especially the so-called heejab worn by Mooselmen women. The concerns of the post, let us reiterate, were primarily aesthetic - we lamented the decline of the feminine in the West, the degradation of the vestimentary arts generally, the masculinisation of women (and the corresponding feminisation of men), and so forth, and noted that the Mahometan woman has retained a feminine elegance that, regardless of other factors, is admirable and attractive. Readers were invited to compare any well-dressed Mooslima with Hillary Clinton as evidence that the Muslim woman is often less degraded by the dissolute agents of modernity than her Western sisters.

Nevertheless, there are other factors, and one of them is the context of reckless mass immigration promoted by globalists and self-vandalising multiculturalists, while another is the plain fact that Mahometan women are under repressive strictures and enforced compulsion in matters of attire as well as in other aspects of life. Heejab may be elegant but there is no gainsaying the fact that Mahometan social codes are oppressive. They need not be in theory, but they are in practice. The present writer might find the veil attractive in the right context, and certainly has no sympathies for feminism, but he is not about to apologise for the stoning of adulteresses in Saudi Arabia. 

In the meantime, pertinent to this, the leader of the French National, Madame Marine Le Pen, on a visit to the Lebanon, cordially declined to wear the heejab as a requirement for an audience with the Grand Mufti of the Sooni sect. As she says in the video of the encounter (below) there was no such requirement from the Grand Mufti of Al-Azaar University in Cairo who is the notional head of the Soonis worldwide. Quite properly, given that, Madame Le Pen resisted this gesture of humiliation in Beirut. Her stance underlines yet further the acute polarisations between Islaam and the West at this present time. 

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In his study of the cult and mythos of the goddess Athena, the German mythographer Karl Karenyi makes the observation that there are two great feminine archetypes active in the European soul: one is the Virgin Mary, maternal and compassionate, and the other is Athena, combative, intellectual, heroic, wise, severe. In general, he surmises, the former is more deeply rooted in southern Europe and the latter in the north. These are two contrasting modes of the female typical of the Western tradition.

There can be no doubt that Marine Le Pen - her Marian first name notwithstanding - is a manifestation of the second of these types. Indeed, she is one of the most strongly Athenan women to emerge in European politics in recent times. There were certain Athenan qualities one might identify in Mrs Thatcher - the appellation 'Iron Lady' distinctly alludes to Athena, the warrior goddess, clad in her armour - but in other respects Mrs Thatcher falls short of the type and was probably more Nordic or at least Wagnerian. Frau Merkel, who has opened her arms to countless refugees and engineered the immigration crisis that now besets Europe, is, it seems, some beastly perversion of the Marian archetype: Europeans will be gagging on the bitter milk of her teats of succour for decades to come. 

The true Athena type is both attractive and formidable. The male gods of Olympos are attracted to her beauty, but she can beat any of them in battle if she is ever assailed. Mrs Thatcher was formidable, but no one could ever accuse her of being beautiful. Marine Le Pen is a very attractive woman, but one knows that, true to type, it is not a beauty to be messed with. She is not maternal, by any means, and is, in fact, somewhat masculine - exactly the characteristics of the goddess Athena. Athena represents a certain potentiality in the European soul. More than any other female politician of recent times, Madama Le Pen is the warrior maiden. It is a type with deep roots in the French psyche, of course. Joan of Arc is the pure type, but it is not an accident that the French erected temples to the goddess Athena after the Revolution. It is a strongly Gallic archetype deliberately counteracting the Marian archetype in French Catholicism. 

The following pictures offer views of the many faces of Madame Le Pen. Given the structure of the French electoral system, it is unlikely that she will succeed in her quest to become President of the Republic. No doubt she will excel in the first round of ballots, but in the second round the unholy alliance of the Left and the Centre-Right will collude to defeat her. It would be very surprising - the result of extraordinary events - for there to be any other outcome. C'est la vie.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Feminine Attire - Islam & the West

Vermeer. Western women once looked like this. 

Sentiment contrary to the Saracens is currently at fever-pitch in the West, although matched – strangely - by the recent embrace of the political Left for all things Mahometan. The present author – who lectured in Islamic/West relations for well over a decade – remembers very well the days when Leftists sneered at the Mooselmens for being patriarchial and sexist and anti-modern. But this was before the Left shifted to a globalist agenda and decided upon mass immigration and open borders and the dissolution of the nation state as the new progressive standard. The change was signalled by new fixtures in the Arts curriculum such as compulsory core subjects like ‘Transition to Globalism’ and similar. At the same time the Left abandoned the traditional working class and regrouped around a conglomerate of victim groups: homosexuals, feminists, refugees and so on. On the Right this polarisation has taken the form of a reinvigorated nationalism and a renewed sense of the Western tradition: unfortunately for Mahometans they are now deemed ‘Other’ and antithetical, a threat to the cogency of European civilization. With hindsight, these can be seen as inevitable reconfigurations of very old tensions and it was foolish to ever think that we had somehow by-passed those historical patterns. These are deep antipathies. There is going to be trouble. 

Anti-Saracen hostility takes an obvious form in campaigns against overtly Mooselman attire. Specifically, people are troubled by the burqa (full covering of the female) and to a degree by the heejab (the female head scrarf). It is widely felt that these norms of female garb for female Mahometans are out of place in European society and represent a specific refusal to integrate to European standards. This is an entirely understandable viewpoint and, these days, one with which the author has much sympathy. The failure – refusal – of Mahometans to adapt to Western norms invites hostility. Previous waves of immigrants (speaking of Australian society) integrated quite successfully, and without rancour, but the Mahometans are a different case. This is especially so among those who are now deeply infected by Wahhabi literalism, specifically Arabs but increasingly other ethnic groups as well. Mahometanism is totalizing. It presents itself as a “total way of life” in which a Divine Law (Sharia) governs every aspect of a Mooselman’s behaviour. No other group of immigrants (except perhaps ultra-orthodox Jews) present so many stubborn obstacles to the compromises required to find a commodious place in Western society. Mahometans set themselves apart and are treated with suspicion accordingly. Several matters make the problem acute, two especially: halal foods and religious attire. Halal food regulations mean that Mahometans cannot (will not) eat with others while also taking the form of a surreptitious food tax that is imposed upon the non-Mahometan community. Religious attire means that Mahometans, especially women, are conspicuous and, when it comes to the burqa, positively confronting. These are real barriers to constructive integration. Objections to them are not based merely in “racism” and xenophobia. They are matters of real substance. As intimated elsewhere on these pages, Islam is only an esoteric (occult) potentiality in Western civilization. It is entirely healthy if Western civilization finds the externalist manifestations of the Mahometan creed difficult to stomach and if “bigots” rebel against cultural surrender and rise up against the settlement of Mahometan ghettoes in Western cities. 

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Even so, they are not simple matters and as well as historical Islam/West tensions, and the Left/Right battles of universalism versus particular localisms, globalism versus nationalism, there are also issues that divide along the far deeper fault lines of tradition versus modernity. In this context, many of the criticisms made of the Mahometans are misplaced and often ill-conceived. This is so because in some important respects the Mahometans – though ossified by the Wahhabi heresy - remain closer to tradition than do their occidental counterparts who, for the most part, have been more thoroughly consumed by the decadence of modern deviationism. This is plain to see in the issue of feminine attire. We might sympathize with accounts of Mahometanism as ‘sexist’ and bemoan the downtrodden place of women in the Mahometan social order, but conversely the decadence of Western feminism is simply barbaric. The Mahometan order makes stark binary distinctions between men and women, but when we are confronted with the genderless perversity of the contemporary West we can only ask ‘What is wrong with that?’ In its supposed ‘backwardness’ there are ways in which the Mahometan order remains more integral and intact. 

The burqa and purda are confronting – especially on the streets of London or Paris – but the heejab is only out of place because Western women have become masculinized and feminine attire has become inelegant and utilitarian. Indeed, the vestimentary arts in the West are generally in a state of advanced decay. Contemporary clothing is horrible, and – arguably – women’s clothing especially so. The decline is easily documented. While the styles of the 1940s maintained a timeless elegance and still spoke somewhat of an inherent nobility in the human form, subsequent styles drew further and further away from such ideals. The 1960s were an historical low-point and nothing has improved since then. Far from being a matter of small consequence, vestments speak directly of inner states; the decay of the modern West (spiritual, intellectual, political, social) is reflected most obviously in the decline in standards of public dress. The invasion of workwear and sportswear, denim and the T-shirt, into acceptable fashion speaks volumes. And today, designer fashion, like modern art, has gone beyond decadence into outright obscenity. 

The dowdy and masculinized state of Western women was especially noticeable to the present writer during his recent travels through the Hindoo sub-continent and Northern Asia. It is very evident that Western women are both hardened and drab compared to women of those other civilizations. They are coarse and unattractive, defeminized, by comparison. Even the hardworking low caste women of Asia have retained a greater share of feminine grace than the over-intellectualized women one sees among European tourists who are, as it were, hardened from the head down. One can see it in their unhappy eyes and the mechanical pallor of their faces, and above all in the tasteless vulgarity of their clothing. Compared to this, a Hindoo woman in her saffron sari, or a Nipponese woman walking the promenades of Kyoto in a kimono, or indeed a Mahometan woman in her heejab is a perfect delight. 

One is reminded that it was not always the case. There is nothing, in fact, distinctly Mahometan about the head scarf and the full-length standards of the heejab. In former times, Western women conformed to these same standards. These were not merely matters of public modesty and shame but rather a proper calculation of femininity in its essence. It is certainly wrong to think that the function of heejab – and other modes of traditional feminine attire – is to hide a woman’s beauty. One hears this said among modern Mahometans, but it is itself a decadent moralism. It is plainly untrue. On the contrary, the heejab enhances a woman’s beauty both in its accentuation of certain features – such as the eyes – and, above all, by imparting the qualities of mystery and interiority, qualities that are essential to woman but conspicuously lost in the modern ‘liberation’ of masculinization. In the heejab, that is to say, less is more. If it is designed to make women unattractive and uninteresting to men, it fails utterly, just as the overtly sexualized garments of the ‘liberated’ woman (all cleavage and mid-rift and legs with a painted face) very quickly becomes tawdry and cheap and off-putting to all but the most vulgar of men.

In Australia, a campaign by social engineers has introduced the barbarism of 'women's football' as a means of further masculinising women. (As if you could make Australian women more masculine than they already are!) 

Rather than berating Mahometan women for wearing a head scarf in public, therefore, it is a pity that the self-appointed defenders of ‘Western values’ were not more sensitive to the ways in which those ‘values’ have declined into barbarism, especially in the last fifty years or so. Why, one wants to know, are they attacking a Mooselmen lady for covering her hair rather than denouncing the sub-human antics of a celebrity who arrives at a public event clad in a garment made of raw meat? Which poses the greater threat to Western civilization? The truth of it is, as even a brief tour through the latest fashion pages will show, that there is real beauty in contemporary Islamic fashion design while Western fashions rapidly decline into the ludicrous and the ugly. 

Modern Western womanhood in all its glory. 

One factor in sartorial decline. 1940 to 1980. The intrusion of sportswear. 

The complete masculinization of woman is now a cultural project of the decadent West, just as men are being feminized and emasculated. There are many unpalatable and inappropriate aspects of Mahometan culture that are rightly resisted by those who seek to defend Western civilization from the ravages of mass immigration, but defined binary distinctions of the masculine and feminine, especially as presented in feminine attire, is not one of them. We are not talking here about the ‘black sack’ of the burqa. We are simply noting the fact that a great many Mahometan women are better dressed, more elegant and more beautiful than their Western sisters. They retain sartorial standards that it is a pity the West has lost. Again: this is not a question of standards of modesty (although the commercial sexualisation of Western women – and young girls, is a phenomenon in itself) but of aesthetic standards: beauty, charm, elegance, mystery, refinement, grace, pulchritude. 

Rather than concealing, traditional garments often accentuate. 

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Here is a simple exercise that readers might like to try:

The next time you are confronted by a Mahometan woman in heejab, in a shop, on a bus, on a train, take out your cell phone and, turning to Google, summon a photograph of Hillary Clinton in one of her ‘power suits’. Honestly, which would you prefer? 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Agatha Christie and the Latin Mass

The detective/murder story is arguably the most philosophical form of popular fiction. The sleuth, confronted with a set of clues that present themselves as a puzzle that baffles the ordinary man, must use his superior powers of reason, logic and deduction, as well as his insights into human nature - powers of the mind - to expose a hidden truth; it is an inherently intellectual enterprise. The genre is also deeply moral and even theological in as much as it concerns justice and the battle of good against evil. Murder is a primordial sin; the detective represents order, law and civilisation itself. Thou shalt not kill. Every whodunit concerns eternal themes of guilt and justice.

It is a great pity then that, in popular culture, the genre has now degenerated such that the detective is no longer the hero; instead he has been displaced by the forensic scientist, the man in the white coat, who solves the crime using not raw nous but rather the technology of the laboratory. Science has eclipsed philosophy. While the moral dimension remains (usually), it is less a theological quest and more a technocratic problem in which there is little sense of cosmic violation and even less of original sin.

In classic detective stories - those of Agatha Christie, for instance - the reader is always left reflecting on the mortal condition. The crime is solved but human imperfection remains. In the more recent TV crime shows we are left marvelling at the wonders of science instead. Science itself is the focus of such shows. The detectives are shallow and forgettable as characters and the crimes are either banal or unnecessarily perverse. The microscope is the hero.

This is a failing away into a tawdry secularism. In its classical form the genre is deeply religious - which is to say in most Western contexts, Christian. A story like Murder on the Orient Express is morally complex, and is so in a specifically Christian way. The background and assumptions of such a story are those of a Christian society. Not surprisingly, such stories are often decorated with overtly religious motifs and the genre has attracted strongly religious writers, Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries being an example. Christie herself is often cited as a distinctly Christian writer. As she admitted, her early stories took the form of simple Christian morality tales. As she grew in her craft her stories grew in complexity and became more morally nuanced, but there can be no doubt that they are all the product of a Christian moral sensibility.

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Officially, Agatha Christie - touted as the world's most read author following the Bible and Shakespeare - was an Anglican. Her parents baptised her an Anglican as a child and she remained in the Church of England throughout her life. According to their station in British society, they were of the so-called 'High' Church. Her mother, however, had broad spiritual interests and introduced her daughter to both Catholicism and some of the 'occult' traditions, theosophical and orientalist, that were then in fashion, especially among educated ladies. These more esoteric interests are reflected in Agatha's passion for archaeology and archaeological research into ancient and arcane traditions, these matters forming the background to some of her more exotic stories. Her Christianity took shape less in overt churchgoing than in the lifelong practice of reading Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ before going to sleep at night; it was, it is said, her constant bedside reading (a habit she passed on to one of her most famous literary creations, the spinster sleuth Miss Marple.) Her second husband Max Mallowan was a practising Catholic but as a divorcee he - and his wife - were forbidden from taking the sacrament at mass.

Despite this unquestionably Christian and indeed Anglo-Catholic background, it is nevertheless largely an incidental matter by which Agatha Christie's name has become associated with an important aspect of Christian sanctity. Almost by accident, she has become known for efforts to preserve the traditional liturgical legacy of the Catholic Church. It happened thus: In the wake of the deconstructive self-vandalism of the Second Vatican Council and the modernising papacy of Paul VI, especially the introduction of the 'New Order' 'hippie' mass in the vernacular, leading British intellectuals and public figures fought to retain the old Latin or Tridentine liturgy. A petition was presented to the pope urging him to reconsider the scope of his reforms. Here is a list of those who signed it:

Harold Acton, Vladimir Ashkenazy, John Bayler, Lennox Berkeley, Maurice Bowra, Agatha Christie, Kenneth Clark, Nevill Coghill, Cyril Connolly, Colin Davis, Hugh Delray, Robert Exeter, Miles Fitzalan-Howard, Constantine Fitzgibbon, William Glock, Magdalen Gofflin,, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Ian Greenness, Jo Grimond, Harman Grisewood, Colin Hardie, Rupert Hart-Davis, Barbara Hepworth, Auburn Herbert, John Jolliffe, David Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Cecil Day-Lewis, Compton Mackenzie, George Malcolm, Max Mallowan, Alfred Marnau, Yehudi Menuhin, Nancy Mitford, Raymond Mortimer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Iris Murdoch, John Murray, Seán Ó Faoláin, E. J. Oliver, Oxford and Asquith, F. R. Leavis, William Plomer, Kathleen Raine, William Rees-Mogg, Ralph Richardson, John Ripon, Charles Russell, Rivers Scott, Joan Sutherland, Philip Toynbee, Martin Turnell, Bernard Wall, Patrick Wall, E. I. Watkin.

They argued that the outright abolition of the Tridentine rite was ill-considered and impoverishing and that the old rite had a special historical significance for British Catholics, and they requested a disposition from Pope Paul to allow the old rite to be continued among those who preferred it. The modernising pontiff was notoriously impatient with those who wanted to cling to the old forms and who resisted his reforms, but it is reported that when he cast his eye over this petition and came to the name 'Agatha Christie' he stopped and said, "Oh. Agatha Christie!" and relented. The resulting indult (papal permission) that gave (limited) license to continue the Latin mass in England is accordingly known as the Agatha Christie Indult, and the original petition the Agatha Christie Letter, making her name synonymous with the struggle to preserve the traditional rite.

Aside from the undercurrent of Christian morality in her detective stories, and their concern for what are undoubtedly Christian themes, this - unwittingly - is the great contribution Agatha Christie made to the Christian faith. Her reputation, the import of her name on a petition, swayed a pope.

* * *

The story of the Agatha Christie Letter came up in conversation the present author was having with Catholic friends who regularly attend the Latin mass. Although she was not herself a Roman Catholic Dame Agatha (Lady Mallowan) is reported to have regarded the Mass of Paul VI (Novus Ordo) as a desecration and an abomination and an unwarranted deviation from tradition, as did the other non-Catholics who signed the petition. A great many Catholics feel the same. Since it was first introduced in 1969 the 'Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite' promulgated by Paul VI has been subject to withering criticism both within and beyond Catholic ranks.

It is no small matter. Liturgy is the great treasure of the Catholic tradition, just as music and song are the treasures of the Protestant tradition and iconography is the treasure of the Orthodox. No one questions the right of Popes and Councils to make appropriate revisions of the liturgy from time to time, and thus to maintain a living tradition that responds to the needs of changing circumstances, but the Mass of Paul VI was a comprehensive and radical break from tradition, a reform that did far more than revise and adjust: it completely overturned many of the norms of the Tridentine rite and all previous rites before it.

Leaving aside serious questions about its theological validity, it is artistically and aesthetically inferior, lacking in solemnity and devoid of the spiritual depth characteristic of the traditional liturgical forms. This is obvious to even a casual observer with no religious sensitivity at all. The 'new mass' is banal and uninspiring; it trades sanctity and solemnity for the cheap virtues of inclusiveness and accessibility.

Yet the old rites still have a dedicated following and, as the Agatha Christie Letter shows, have had since the time the changes were first made. There are traditionalists, and re-creationists (people not necessarily of the Catholic faith who love the liturgy for its historical and aesthetic qualities) preserving the old forms.

* * * 

Below is a video presentation of an historical re-creation prepared by a Swedish Dominican group of the Latin mass for 4th October 1450, the eighteenth Sunday after pentecost. The introduction in Swedish is as follows:

"Five hundred years ago, the universe seemed much more understandable than it does for us. All of existence was framed by a number of ceremonies and behavioral patterns which were a matter of course for people at the time. And the most important of them was the Holy Mass - that ring of charged words and actions which surround the central mystery in the Christian faith: That Jesus becomes man anew in the creatures of bread and wine. 

"We have reconstructed a High Mass from 500 years ago in an ordinary Swedish parish church, namely in Endre Church, one mile east of Visby in Gotland. We imagined ourselves to be participating in this high mass on an autumn Sunday in the middle of the 15th century. It is local people who are participating in clothes typical for the time, and we have tried as much as possible to reconstruct [something to do with (worship) services] in the Diocese of Linköping at that time - since Gotland belonged to that diocese. 

"The service is conducted in an incomprehensible language, a language incomprehensible to the people: Latin. Because church services at the time were not considered a medium for communicating information, except for silent prayers. Just as one cannot describe what is fascinating about a melody or a sight, one shouldn't be able to understand or describe the central mystery of the universe. The congregation waits for the central moment, when the bread and wine shall be transformed into the body and blood of Christ. 

"The priest was helped by a chorister, perhaps the [experienced?] youth whom [his soul has discovered?] and who with time would be sent to Linköping in order to attend the cathedral school. Songs, mostly from the Bible, were sung by the local cantor. We don't know exactly how the music went in the medieval churches. Maybe Endre Church had a specific order which required a qualified cantor like the one we shall see here. 

"The Sunday service began when the priest sprinkled Holy Water on the congregation. This was to remind them that they had become members of the Christian church through baptism. The Holy Water would drive away all the powers of evil. 

"Let us now place ourselves in the Middle Ages. Let us try to grasp the atmosphere in a normal Swedish parish church, in a time where man still believed himself cast out into an empty, cold existence, when Europe was still unified, and when the central mystery around which everything revolved was that Jesus Christ, had become man, had died, and risen again for all."

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black