Notes & Queries: Amicable Collisions

Occasionally, upon reading a work of literature, one comes across a phrase, a sentence, or a thought that is particularly well-expressed, and gets echoed down the years in the works of other authors with whom it resonates. Sometimes it’s just that – an echo, so faint it might have come from somewhere else. Sometimes it’s clear as a bell, though even then the writer might not be fully conscious of its origin.

And sometimes, because the thought behind the phrase is commonplace – though perhaps never so well-turned – one is apt to wonder whether it was the original invention of that author, or whether he had cribbed it from someone else (again, perhaps unconsciously).

There is a line in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), which struck me the first time (of many) that I read it:

“All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision” (Vol. I, p. 64).

I would not go out of my way to argue that the thought is original to Shaftesbury. But one finds it in many later writers, expressed in words so similar, that there can be no mistaking the provenance. Here are a few examples:

“I like the description of your pic-nic, where I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your Symposion intended more to promote conversation than drinking. Such an amicable collision, as Lord Shaftesbury very prettily calls it, rubs off and smooths those rough corners, which mere nature has given to the smoothest of us.” Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son (29 October 1748).

(No mistaking that one; it’s a direct citation.)

“The genius of a people where nothing but the monarchy is salique, having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally to the women – by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and sizes from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles shook long together in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their asperities and sharp angles…” Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), p. 54.

“It was those Meetings in particular [i.e. of the Select Society], That Rub’d off all Corners as we call it, by Collison [sic.], and made the Literati of Edin^r. Less Captious and Pedantick than they were Elsewhere.” Alexander Carlyle (1722-1805), Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, p. 150n.

From the above fairly obvious allusions, we descend to the less obvious. Here, they tend to fall into two classes: a) they either borrow Shaftesbury’s idea and express it in different words, or b) they borrow Shaftesbury’s imagery to express a thought somewhat different. The next example is Samuel Johnson’s verbose but elegant expansion of (what I believe to be) his source in Shaftesbury:

“In cities, and yet more in courts, the minute discriminations which distinguish one from another are for the most part effaced, the peculiarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bodies and uneven surfaces lose their point and asperities by frequent attrition against one another, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity.” Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 138 (13 July 1751).

Although the wording is quite different from Shaftesbury’s, the thought is very similar. Except that here, Johnson puts his own typically pessimistic spin on it: Yes, liberty enables us to rub off our rough corners in a sort of amicable collision, but we get polished down to a sameness in the process; there is a loss of individuality and variety. Politeness leaves little room for eccentricity.

In the next example, from Herder (1744-1803), Shaftesbury’s idea is extended from individuals to polities:

“[S]o many edges had first to be worn down with force before that round, smooth, well-behaved thing which we are could appear!… Behold how these great state-bodies, within which mankind is no doubt best cared for, are now rubbing against one another without destroying each other, and cannot ever destroy each other!” Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774), §2

The next two examples are of interest for their authors’ genealogical proximity to Shaftesbury. In a very Shaftesburean philosophical dialogue, his nephew James Harris (1709-1780) offered up this line:

“My Reproaches produced a sort of amicable Controversy.” Three Treatises (1744), in The Works of James Harris, Esq. (1801), Vol. I, pp. 25-26:

One cannot help but think that Shaftesbury’s more famous descendent, the 7^th Earl, had this passage of his ancestor’s in mind when, in the preface to his a collection of his speeches, speaking of the mental life of the agricultural labourer, as contrasted with the urban industrial labourer, he wrote:

“He has not, of course, the acquirements and acuteness of the urban operative; his labour is passed in comparative solitude, and he returns to his home at night, in a remote cottage or a small village, without the resource of clubs, mechanics’ institutes, and the friction of his fellow-men” [italics added]. Speeches… upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class, (1868), p. viii.

I assuming throughout here that the third Earl’s phrasing was original (corners and rough sides, amicable collision, etc.), if not the idea itself.

QUERY: Was it? Is there a predecessor whom Shaftesbury was imitating, much like the above authors imitated him?

Though not identical, here is a candidate:

“Moreover, thanks to the prizes which a republic offers, an orator’s intellectual gifts are whetted by practice, burnished, so to speak, by friction, and share, as is only natural, the light of freedom which illuminates the state.” Longinus, On the Sublime, 44.3.

*          *          *          *          *

Bibliography

CHESTERFIELD, Philip Dormer, 4^th Earl of. Selected Letters of Lord Chesterfield. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.

HARRIS, James. The Works of James Harris, Esq. (2 vols.). London: F. Wingrave, 1801 (facsimile, Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003).

HERDER, Johann Gottfried. Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

JOHNSON, Samuel. Works (12 vols.). London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1823.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 volumes). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001. 

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7^th Earl of. Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G. upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868. 

STERNE, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, to which are added The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance. Ian Jack (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

 

Notes & Queries: Eric Roop

 

Updating my previous post, I can now say that I have finished reading Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t intended to plough through it so quickly, but it was just that enjoyable.

 One thing I noticed is that from time to time, Davies has a touch of that donnish love of wordplay and anagram. For example, in the third book in the trilogy, World of Wonders, Magnus Eisengrim, the narrator for most of the book, tells the following anecdote about his dining experience on the Canadian Pacific Railway while touring with a theatrical troupe:

“There were bottled sauces too. Commercial stuff I learned to hate because at every meal that dreary utility actor Jim Hailey asked for Garton’s; then he would wave it about saying, ‘Anybody want any of the Handkerchief?’ because, as he laboriously pointed out, if you spelled Garton’s backward it came out Snotrag; poor Hailey was that depressing creature, a man of one joke.”

In the second book in the trilogy, The Manticore, the narrator, David Staunton, describes how, upon his wealthy father’s death, his stepmother Denyse intended to commission a statue of him, as well as a biography:

“What she wanted now was a monument for my father, and she had decided that a large piece of sculpture by Henry Moore would be just the thing. Not to be given to the Art Gallery or the City, of course. To be put up in the cemetery. I hope that gives you the measure of Denyse. No sense of congruity; no sense of humour; no modesty. Just ostentation and gall working under the governance of a fashionable, belligerent, unappeasable ambition.

“Her second great plan was for a monument of another kind; she announced with satisfaction that my father’s biography was to be written by Dunstan Ramsay. She had wanted Eric Roop to do it — Roop was one of her proteges and as a poet he was comparable to her dentist friend as a sculptor — but Roop had promised himself a fallow year if he could get a grant to see him through it. I knew this already, because Roop’s fallow years were as familiar to Castor as Pharaoh’s seven lean kine, and his demand that we stake him to another had been circulated to the Board, and I had seen it.”

“Castor” here is not the character of mythology, but rather the name of the charitable foundation set up by his father. It seems that Eric Roop the poet is one of those starving artist types who is allergic to hard work and has made a habit of resorting to the Castor well for grants to support his accustomed standard of leisure.

Here is what makes this example worthy of a Notes & Queries post: knowing about Davies’ love of anagrams, I can’t help but wonder whether he was playing with us here, and that the poet’s name ought really to be “Crie Poor”.

 

Notes & Queries: Pargetter of Balliol

I don’t know whether any of you is familiar with Notes and Queries? It is a publication, founded in 1849, that publishes small facts of a philological, genealogical, or antiquarian nature. If, for example, one finds an instance of a word that antedates the OED’s earliest citation. Such a discovery, though a small triumph in its way, is too small to spin a full-length scholarly article out of. What to do with these tiny factual tidbits? Get them published in Notes and Queries. Or, if you have some nagging little scholarly question, you may pose it in the pages of Notes and Queries in the hopes that one of its legion of pedantic readers has the answer.

In honour of this humble yet fascinating and long-lived high Victorian publication, I have decided to steal its concept for this blog. I will give certain posts the label “Notes & Queries”, using them to share little facts which I am inordinately proud of discovering, facts which I may be the only person on earth interested in, facts which I absolutely must do something with or I will go mad. This is one of those posts. 

*          *          *          *

I have long been ashamed as a Canadian for never having read anything by Robertson Davies. Somehow, he did not end up on the reading list in my high school Can Lit course, and I just never got around to him. So I have decided to read his “Deptford Trilogy” (Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders). I just finished The Manticore last night.

In it, the narrator, a wealthy alcoholic lawyer named David Staunton has gone to Switzerland for Jungian psychoanalysis. He recounts the various events of his life, including his time studying law at Oxford. There, he fell under the influence of his tutor, Pargetter, who is introduced thus: “He was a great law don, a blind man who nevertheless managed to be a famous chess-player and such a teacher as I had never known.” Although it is not stated directly, it seems that Pargetter’s specialty was criminal law, as this is the line that Staunton would go on to practice in. Much of Staunton’s education under Pargetter revolved around analysis of evidence and cross-examination to get at the facts of a case: “But Pargetter had honed his mind to a shrewd edge, and I wanted to be like Pargetter. I wanted to know, to see, to sift, and not to be moved.” Pargetter is frank in his advice to his student, has a keen interest in the moral aspects of law and its practice, and does not suffer fools gladly.

An Oxford law don, specializing in criminal law and evidence, expert chess player, blind, not suffering fools gladly. Based on this very particular profile, I immediately surmised that Pargetter was based, at least partly, on a real person: Sir Rupert Cross (pictured, 1912-1980). I have no idea whether Davies knew Cross personally, but they were only a year apart in age, and their time at Balliol College did overlap during the 1930s.

The coincidences are too many to ignore. However, Cross didn’t begin teaching until the 1940s and would have been a student rather than a tutor while Davies was at Balliol. Interestingly, there was a law tutor at Balliol at the time named Theo Tyler, who was also blind. He tutored Cross. A cursory search brings up little on Tyler, and I have found no indication that he was an expert chess player (whereas during the 1930s Cross was one of Britain’s top twelve players). So perhaps Pargetter is an amalgam of Tyler and Cross? In any case, I seem to be the only person to have noticed this connection, worthy of a place in The Spectacled Avenger’s “Notes & Queries”.