A Very Fine Cat Indeed

There are great books that for reasons that escape me, people have simply stopped reading.  I am talking about classics that anyone with a liberal education always read a half century ago.  Books that were frequently discussed, referenced in magazine articles and movies….and then just stopped being read by all but a few academics specializing in a narrow field.  

The Education of Henry Adams, Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Flowers in the Attic, Oliver Twist, and on and on and on.  If you find someone who has actually read one of these books, the reader invariably sighs, “because we had to in school”, followed with the obligatory “hated it”.  (I could have added The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the list, but I refuse to believe that anyone who has not read Twain’s opus is either literate or an adult.)

Something is killing literacy in adults.  Can we blame movies?  Online media?  Processed cheese?  Rap Music?  I have no idea, but the trend seems to be both universal and irreversible.  How many people do you know who have bookshelves bigger than their television?  Or even a comfortable chair with a good lamp for reading?

The apparently forgotten book that prompted this rant is The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell—the book that set the standard for future biographies.   One of the great joys of owning this book is the opportunity to open to a random page and read a stirring passage.  Without fail, every time I leaf through the book, I end up reading several chapters.  And without a doubt, my favorite part of the book is Chapter 14, in which Boswell describes Johnson playing with his cats, Lily and Hodge.  Hodge, as Boswell infamously recorded, was “a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”  (And if you want to read the book, you can find it for free here.)

Boswell admits to being far from an ailurophile (someone who completely understands the joys of befriending a harmless, necessary cat).  Still, he marveled that Dr. Johnson would venture out daily to buy fresh oysters for Hodge, afraid to give the task to his servants lest they begin to resent his favorite cat.  (And before you think this was an extravagant meal for a cat, oysters were so plentiful along the shores of Great Britain at that time that they were considered standard fare for the poor.)

The love affair between Dr. Johnson and his cats was so famous that it is fairly hard to find a reference to the famous writer and lexicographer that does not mention Hodge, his favorite feline.  Johnson himself referenced the cat frequently in his writings.  When Hodge passed away at home, lovingly cared for by Dr. Johnson, two different poets and friends of the famous writer, wrote elegies in the cat’s honor.

When Marion Chesney wrote the Agatha Raisin mystery books, she gifted her heroine with two cats, named Hodge and Boswell, without bothering to explain the origin of the names.  I guess the author believed anyone smart enough to read her books was probably well read enough not to need an explanation, which also explains why the television show with the same name did not originally include the felines in the cast.

Over the centuries, Hodge has become famous in his own right as writers have written poetry about him, have included him in stories, and in one case, featured him in a work of science fiction in which the cat is catnapped from 18th century London by a time traveler.  A google search for “bookstore and Hodge” shows that there are dozens of bookstores worldwide that have cats named in honor of Hodge.  Even the Church of England has been smitten:  the new mouser adopted by Southwark Cathedral in London has been christened Hodge. Supposedly, more visitors come to see the cat than the cathedral’s architecture.

As I have noted in the last couple of weeks, London has so many statues and monuments that it is not surprising that even Hodge has one.   In 1997, the Lord Mayor of London unveiled a bronze statue of Hodge in front of Gough House, the home that Dr. Johnson, Lily, and Hodge shared.  The cat is seen sitting atop a copy of Johnson’s dictionary, with a pile of empty oyster shells in front of him.  The statue’s inscription, of course, says “a very fine cat indeed”.

What the monument does not say, however, is that no one has a clue what the original Hodge looked like.  Boswell’s notes for his biography span 18 volumes, but he never wrote a single work describing the cat’s appearance.  And while Dr. Johnson had his own portrait painted several times, he was wise enough not to try to pose with Hodge in his lap.  (Boswell did record that Hodge preferred sitting on his shoulder.)

When the sculptor, Jon Bickley, created the work, he took a little artistic license.  Bickley used his own cat, Thomas Henry, as the model.  Still, no one can prove that the statue doesn’t look like Hodge.

The Needle

If we start at the very beginning, as historians are wont to do unless threatened with violence, we have to go back three thousand five hundred years to the quarry at Syené, famed for being the source of rose-colored granite.  Using an iron chisel to drill holes, the workmen pounded wooden wedges into the holes.  The wedges were soaked in water and slowly expanded, splitting off a long solid rectangle of seamless granite.  Though the unfinished stone weighed well over 250 tons, it will be moved by hand to the site where the artists will dress the stone and prepare it for display.

The stone was laboriously moved by ropes and wooden rollers to a tributary of the Nile River where a deep hole had been dug and a wooden barge had been built in the depression.  After the stone had been placed upon the barge, the sand between the pit and river was dug out, floating the barge that was then towed 600 miles to Heliopolis.  

Once the monolith reached the intended site, workmen began the lengthy job of cutting and polishing the stone.  Once prepared, a pit was dug under the base of the stone and thousands of men pulling with ropes were finally able to stand the 68-foot polished obelisk upright.  After it was firmly anchored, stone masons then carved hieroglyphs on two opposing sides honoring the pharaoh, Thutmose III.  I’d furnish a translation but it is mostly lots of lofty prose about how much Thutmose is the reincarnation of the sun god.  Rah! Rah! Ra!

While records of how long it took to finish cutting, polishing, and engraving the stone no longer exist, the records for similar monuments suggest that the process may have taken 20 years or more.  While this might seem like a excessive time, remember that all the work was done by hand and (so far) the work has lasted more than three and a half millennia.  Using the very best in modern machinery, my city has had to repave the street in from of my house roughly every eight years.

Two centuries later, Ramesses II took advantage of the two blank sides of the obelisk and added a little more prose about his own recent military victories.  Considering that it took two decades to erect your own obelisk, placing your ads on a billboard that was already standing is understandable.  Ramesses II did this to a lot of monuments, linking himself to respected, previous pharaohs, but electing to chisel out the references to other, less popular leaders.  

In 12 BC, the obelisk was one of two moved to Alexandria to decorate the Caesarium, designed by Cleopatra to honor both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, but this monument was not completed until after her death, during the reign of Caesar Augustus.  There, the two obelisks stood side by side for a long time.  No one is sure when our obelisk toppled over and was half buried by the blowing sands, but it was described as fallen by visitors repeatedly for centuries.  It was partially uncovered by the scientists who accompanied Napoleon after he conquered the fortified city on June 1, 1798.

Three years later, the obelisk was in view when Napoleon lost the Battle of Alexandria, ending the French occupation of Egypt.  In appreciation for that victory as well as Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile, Khedive Muhammad Ali Pasha gave the obelisk to the British Government in 1819.  Unfortunately, after decades of fighting the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Americans, and damn near everyone else on the planet, the British were just a little short of cash for shipping, so while grateful, they let the monolith just stay where it was.

As the blowing sands once again slowly covered the monument, all of Europe became increasingly fascinated with all things Egypt, in part fueled by all the great quantity of artifacts that Napoleon had stolen, only to have them liberated by England.  By liberating, I mean the British kept them safe in the British Museum in London.  

In 1877, Sir William James Erasmus Wilson, a London doctor, decided it was time for England to pick up its present.  Raising £10,000 (the equivalent of £1,000,000 in today’s money), Wilson began the arduous project of bringing the obelisk back to London.  Hoping for government support of the project, a more or less accurate wooden reproduction of the obelisk was erected in front of parliament, the location in which Wilson hoped to place the monument.

For the first time in almost two millennia, the stone was completely uncovered, and just in the nick of time, for the locals had forgotten the location of the obelisk and were in the process of building a house over it.  Working with railway engineers, the monument was enclosed in a watertight iron tube, 95 feet long and 16 feet in diameter.  The container, equipped with a keel, a rudder, and a platform for mounting sails, was constructed in London, shipped in pieces to Alexandria, and reassembled around the obelisk.  The resulting strange ship—technically a pontoon barge—was christened the Cleopatra, after the queen who probably never came anywhere near the stone in life.  This strange vessel was to be towed to England by the steamship Olga.

When the voyage was almost complete, a storm arose in the Bay of Biscay.  In the rough seas, the long tube began rolling uncontrollably despite the best efforts of the crew, six of whom lost their life in the attempt.  When the Cleopatra began taking on water, the Captain of the Olga cut loose the pontoon and reported the vessel as ”abandoned and sinking”.

Four days later, a Glasgow steamer discovered the abandoned Cleopatra, still afloat, and towed her to Spain, immediately filing a salvage claim against the vessel.  After settling the claim, a British steam-powered paddle tug finished the job of towing the Cleopatra to London, finally arriving on January 21, 1878.  By now, the obelisk was generally believed to be cursed, so Parliament declined the honor of having the monument erected nearby, and the obelisk was finally erected at the Victoria Wharf on the Thames River.  

To honor the obelisk, large brass sphinxes was placed on either side of it.  If the two brass statues are to honor the obelisk they are technically supposed to face away from the monument, but when Queen Victoria said they would look better the other way around, the works were quickly rotated. 

At the dedication, the obelisk was named Cleopatra’s Needle.  The irony of the name was not mentioned at the dedication ceremony, nor did any of the newspaper accounts mention that the sphinxes actually predate the obelisk by a thousand years.  If you go to see the monument today, note the damage to the plinths supporting the brass statues.  The damage was done by a German bomb during World War I.  (Though almost all of the guidebooks claim it happened during the Blitz of World War II.)

Less well remembered is that under Cleopatra’s Needle is a time capsule containing a rather odd assortment of everyday items such as a box of cigars and children’s toys.  Five thousand years from now, when future archaeologists discover the remains of the monument and the time capsule is opened, they will find enclosed a large painting of the queen.  When they transport the obelisk home and put the monolith on display, doubtlessly they will name it Victoria’s Needle.

By the way, the other obelisk from Alexandria, the one that never fell down, was given by the Pasha to the people of America and is now standing in Central Park in New York.  But that is a story for another day.

How the Murillos Came to Dallas

This week was spring break and I took the opportunity to visit the Meadows Art Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.  If anyone asks, however, I was actually visiting my grandkids and the art museum was just a side trip.  I’m probably safe in revealing this since neither What’s-His-Name nor The-Other-One regularly reads this blog.

The Meadows collects Spanish Art, which is a favorite of mine.  While I did not get to see its collection of Goya etchings, I was pleasantly surprised to discover there was a special exhibition of paintings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, particularly the six-painting series telling the biblical story of the Prodigal Son.

Murillo is one of the artists from Spain’s Golden Age, and one of the very few who became famous during his lifetime.  By any measure, the years between 1580 and 1680 were remarkable for their artistic achievements.  Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, and artists such as Diego Velasquez, El Greco, and Murillo created their masterpieces.  These achievements were all the more remarkable because, politically, the wheels were coming off the wagon of the Spanish Empire.

Highly respected for his prodigious talents, Murillo became wealthy and respected, despite living in a world that was slowly collapsing around him.  While it is amazing that any of his paintings survive, today more than four hundred of his paintings do—more than twice as many as those of Velasquez and El Greco combined.  

Murillo was born just outside of Seville, and spent almost all of his productive life there.  Unfortunately, Seville, formerly the richest city in Spain, was in steep decline during the artist’s lifetime.   Early in the sixteenth century, the King of Spain had decreed that all ships traveling to and from the New World had to use the port of Seville, fifty-six miles up the River Guadalquivir from the coast.  The gold and silver that flowed into Seville made the city incredibly rich.  Unfortunately, by the seventeenth century, the river had started silting up, preventing the ever-larger sailing ships from making their way up the river, forcing them to offload their precious cargo at Cadiz.  This would be the modern equivalent if all of the theaters, banks, and financial institutions moved from New York to Philadelphia.

This happened during the last days of Spanish rule by the Hapsburgs (a royal family that is the personification of why inbreeding is a very bad idea).  The Spanish Empire was in increasingly bad shape, the result of political and financial policies that were outmoded.  Bound by tradition, Spain could not change even as the rest of Europe surpassed it in every measurable capacity.  Perhaps the Mexican historian Carlos Fuentes said it best:  “The wealth that made Spain rich made Spain poor.”

Worse yet, in the middle of the century, the plague struck Seville, killing the eldest children of Murillo.  This was followed by the death of his beloved wife in childbirth.  Of the artist’s ten children, only three survived.  What would have ruined some men, just made Murillo work harder, and after the only trip of his life to Madrid to meet with Velasquez and to study the king’s collection of works by Titian (collecting Italian art was just about the only thing that the Hapsburgs got right), the artist’s work matured, and Murillo painted the best works of his life.

The series of six paintings by Murillo tells the story of The Prodigal Son from the gospel of Luke, chapter fifteen.  A haughty son goes to his father and demands his share of the inheritance.  When the father agrees, the son, dressed in his finest, leaves his family and travels to the city where he quickly squanders his fortune indulging himself in wine and women.  Now penniless, his new acquaintances scorn him, and he is reduced to living in rags, working as a swine herder and barely earning enough to survive.  Realizing his folly, he decides to return to his father and beg for a job working for the family he had turned his back on.  When he arrives, the father welcomes his son back, telling his other son to kill the fatted calf in celebration.  When the faithful son demands to know why the father is making such a fuss for someone so foolish, the father answers that his son, once lost, has returned from the dead to his family.  

Paintings with religious subjects were very common at the time, as many of the residents of Seville hoped that an act of piety might appease God and return a measure of success both to them and to their city.  Surprisingly, most of the details of the early history of the paintings are unknown.  They are obviously by the artist and the style is unmistakably that of the artist after his trip to Madrid, but who commissioned them and exactly when they were produced is still a complete mystery.

The only clues we have are from the paintings, themselves. The story, as depicted by Murillo, is slightly different from the biblical account, as Luke does not mention the prodigal son’s mother or sisters, figures clearly included by Murillo.  And while the inclusion of women who were obviously prostitutes in art was unusual for Spain during the Inquisition, it was perfectly acceptable for people from Flanders.  The unknown patron might very well have been a Dutch resident of Spain, someone who wanted a painting that more closely resembled his own family.  X-rays of the paintings show that both pictures that include the prostitutes were at one time rolled up, so that the resulting cracks in the underlying paint indicate that (for a while) the two paintings that might have been troublesome to the Inquisition were “hidden”.  Though several names have been suggested, we are unlikely to ever know who actually commissioned Murillo to paint the series.  

Additionally, we know nothing about who owned the paintings or where they were for over a century and a half.  In the late 18th century King Charles III outlawed the exportation of the works of several Spanish artists, including those of Murillo, so the paintings probably stayed in Spain.   The paintings were also probably among those stolen by the French under Napoleon, most of which probably never left Spain, but exactly what happened will never be known.  

What is known is that a Marquis, a director of the Prado, purchased a large number of paintings from the Prado early in the 19th century, which included the Murillo series.  Fifty years later, his family sold one of the paintings (the one portraying the prodigal son’s return) to Queen Isabella, who gifted it to Pope Pius IX.  To this day, the back of that painting displays wax seals indicating that it was part of the Vatican collection.  The remaining 5 paintings were sold in 1856 to Jose de Salamanca.  (To show how times had changed, the paintings depicting the prostitutes commanded the highest prices.)

By 1867, the Earl of Dudley purchased the five paintings from Salamanca and began lobbying the Vatican to sell the remaining painting, to reassemble the series.  Eventually, the Vatican agreed, but demanded two equally valuable paintings and 2,000 gold Napoleon coins to part with its gift.  You would be correct in assuming that the Pope was a shrewd and somewhat mercenary negotiator.

In 1896, the Earl’s heirs sold the painting to Alfred Beit, the silent business partner of Cecil Rhodes and a governor of the De Beers diamond cartel.  Having made a fortune in the South African diamond fields, Beit could afford to surround himself with fantastic art.  Besides their other art, at one time the only people to personally own paintings by Vermeer were Beit and the King of England.  (Queen Elizabeth still has hers.)

Alfred Beit left his fortune, including the artwork, to his nephew, Alfred Beit, 2nd Baronet.  After becoming an honorary citizen of Ireland, Beit purchased the Russbourough House in County Wicklow, Ireland.  This is not exactly a country cottage:  the front of the castle is 690 feet long, and you could probably fit a bowling alley into the parlor.  Still, Beit needed a little room for all the art.

Unfortunately, this conspicuous lifestyle attracted the attention of an Irish Republican Army gang led by Rose Dugdale in 1974.  (Dugdale is the Irish equivalent of Patty Hearst, except while Hearst eventually saw the error of her ways and decided being rich was more fun than being an outlaw, Dugdale, now 81, is still a wild-eyed radical.)  Forcing their way into the castle, Dugdale pistol-whipped poor Beit and the gang made off with nineteen incredibly valuable paintings including a Goya, a Vermeer and a Gainsborough.  Fortunately, they decided the Murillos were too big and heavy and left them behind.

Though the paintings were eventually recovered, Beit decided to hang them all back up in the same castle, from which the IRA stole them again in 1986.  Once again, the Murillos were left behind because of their size.  Although all but two of the paintings were eventually recovered, Beit decided that he was tired of unannounced art patrons, and donated the majority of his collection, including the Murillos, to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1987.

I have no idea how the fine people of the Meadows Museum were able to convince the people of the National Gallery of Ireland to loan the paintings out for a while.  Maybe it was just to get them farther away from the IRA.

Death, the Father of Invention

In the news, there is a story about an enterprising young engineer working on a new design for a storage battery.  Unfortunately, the battery prototype exploded, killing the young man.  Truly a shame, not only for the young man and his family, but also because the choke point in our nation’s plan for alternative energy is the current lousy capability of storage batteries.

Unfortunately, such accidents with inventors and engineers are sort of the norm.  New technology has a history of biting its creators in the ass.  Perhaps this is nature’s feedback mechanism against an over-supply of mad scientists.

One of the earliest examples of this is Li Si, a Chinese philosopher, politician, and man of science during the Qin Dynasty (roughly 2200 years ago).  As a sort of Renaissance man before the Renaissance, Li Si was an enlightened advisor to the emperor.  Unfortunately, his enlightenment did not quite extend far enough to cover his inventions.  This was a time of harsh physical  punishments for crimes—some of which were known as the Five Pains, which included the amputation of hands, the cutting off of your nose, the amputation of all genital organs and finally—not to mention mercifully—the death of the unfortunate victim by decapitation or literally chopping the victim in half.

This gruesome process was as difficult as it was bloody, so Li Si developed a machine that would perform all the steps, one at a time, automating the torture and death of the prisoners.  After Li Si was convicted of treason, he was given the chance of observing the machine’s operation first hand (thankful, no doubt, for his machine’s smooth operating efficiency).

Being killed by your own invention happens more frequently than you might imagine, particularly in hazardous fields like aviation.   Frank Reichelt, a Parisian tailor, developed an overcoat that he believed could convert into a glider.  When he begged to be allowed to test his invention from the Eiffel Tower, skeptical authorities grudgingly granted permission, but required Reichelt to test the invention first on a life-sized dummy.  The inventor agreed, but once at the top of the tower, he decided that his hesitancy to test his invention himself might deter future investors.  In the end, Reichelt’s descent still discouraged future investors.  Permanently.  

Aviation has been rather hard on inventors.  Otto Lilienthal might have beat the Wright Brothers in developing powered flight had he not crashed his glider.  Henry Smolinkski tried to develop a flying car, but unfortunately chose a Ford Pinto as the base for his futuristic vehicle.   Sheikh Ismail hoped to develop a simple helicopter so inexpensive that it would available for the common man—sort of a flying Volkswagen.  Unfortunately, during a test flight, the inventor perished when a main rotor blade malfunctioned and struck him in the head.

The auto industry has been equally unkind to innovators.  Francis Stanley died when he drove one of his Stanley Steamers into a wood pile.  And Fred Duesenberg, the developer of a car so beautiful that it inspired the phrase, “That’s a doozey!”, died while racing one of his cars.   Perhaps the strangest automotive death happened to Sylvester Roper, the developer of the first true powered motorcycle.  In 1896, while test-driving his latest steam-powered velocipede, he reached a speed sufficiently fast enough—roughly 40 mph—to give the inventor a fatal heart attack.

Inventors have fairly regularly gone down with their ships.  Thomas Andrews went down with his Titanic, Horace Hunley developed three different submarines for the Confederate Navy, all of which sank, the last of which was the first true combat submarine and was lost with the inventor on board.  Cowper Phipps Coles developed an innovative turret ship that promptly sank on its maiden voyage, killing all 480 on board, including Captain Coles.

If you work in the chemical industry, deaths relating to you work are damn near a job requirement.  Madam Curie died of anemia caused by the radium she discovered, the first of many such deaths that occurred to scientists attempting to use the material in luminescent paint.   Countless scientists died during the 20th century while trying to perfect chemical and biological weapons of war, with other details of some of these deaths just now coming to light.  And, of course, we still don’t know the name of the Chinese chef who perished oCovid  while attempting to perfect the recipe for Bat Tartare.  

There is one truly dark prince of the invention world, Thomas Midgley.  Probably a very nice guy who took care of his mother and had lots of friends…but his inventions definitely left the world worse off than before.  First, he was the guy responsible for developing tetraethyl lead, thus putting lead in gasoline, and while this made internal combustion engines run better, it also put enough lead in the environment to cause significant health issues including a measurable drop of IQ among urban dwellers.  Personally, I’m convinced that if enough research were done, we would probably find that this increased lead in the environment was responsible for the rise in reality television shows and New Coke.

When damn near everyone who understood the dangers of plumbism objected, Midgley (then an employee of General Motors) held demonstrations in which he poured bottles of tetraethyl lead over his hands, held the bottle under his nose while he inhaled deeply for more than a minute at a time, generally demonstrated the overall safety of his product.  He stopped doing the demonstrations after he took a leave of absence from General Motors to be treated for severe lead poisoning.

If that wasn’t enough, Midgley then developed an improved gas for refrigeration units, chlorofluorocarbon, commercially known as Freon.  You remember Freon—the gas responsible for depleting the ozone layer until a giant hole appeared in it over South Pole.  For the life of me I can’t remember all the details about exactly why this was so bad (something about it let in so much ultraviolet that it created a herd of blind sheep in Patagonia).  There was more to it than that, but there have been so many imminent catastrophic climate disasters looming on the horizon that I can’t keep track of them between leaded gas and Freon, even as I write this, there are environmentalists somewhere throwing darts at photos of Midgley, but they really need not bother, because just like the other inventors mentioned, Midgley eventually died at the hands of his own creation.  

After contracting polio as an adult, he created a  motorized system of wires and pulleys that would lift him out of bed and help him sit up up and be comfortable.  In 1944, the system malfunctioned and strangled the inventor.  

I have no idea what happened to Midgley’s pet, a blind sheep.