English Eccentrics: a Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women

Edith Sitwell

Description

Eccentricity exists particularly in the English, states Dame Edith Sitwell, because of “that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and the birthright of the British nation.” Originally published in the 1930s, The English Eccentrics has lost none of its vitality and wit. We find hermits, quacks, mariners, indefatigable travelers, and men of learning. We meet the amphibious Lord Rokeby, whose beard reached his knees and who seldom left his bath; the irascible Captain Thicknesses, who left his right hand, to be cut off after his death, to his son Lord Audley; and Curricle Coats, the Gifted Amateur, whose suit was sewn with diamonds and whose every performance ended in uproar.  This is a glorious gallery of the extremes of human nature, portrayed with humor, sympathy, knowledge, and love.

Sujets

• Form
• Humor
• Quotations
• Anecdotes

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643990
• Langue: English

Extrait

English Eccentrics: a Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women
by Edith Sitwell

First published in 1933
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
ENGLISH ECCENTRICS
Dame Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, thesister of Sir Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, andeducated privately. In 1916 she became the editorof Wheels , an annual anthology of modern verse.She received honorary degrees for her poetry frommany universities, including Oxford, Sheffield,and Durham, and she was an honorary associateof the American Institute of Arts and Letters.In 1951 she was the Visiting Professor at the Instituteof Contemporary Arts and in 1958 she wasthe Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.In 1963 she was made a Companion ofLiterature.
Among Dame Edith’s other publications were her Collected Poems (latest edition 1957), AlexanderPope (1930), Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934), Victoria of England (1936), A Poet’s Notebook (1943), Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946), The Canticleof the Rose (1949), and The Outcasts (poems,1962).
Dame Edith, whose greatest pleasures werelistening to music and silence, died in 1964.
English
Eccentrics

a Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women



EDITH SITWELL

To
DR AND MRS H. LYDIARD WILSON
with my affection
Author’s Note
The author would like to express her indebtednessto the biographers of her Eccentrics, and to thoseother collectors of Eccentricity whose works she hashad an opportunity of consulting. Acknowledgementsto the many titles have been made in the textwherever possible.

Pasquier, in his Recherches sur la France , is givingan account of the Queen of Scotland’s execution;he says, the night before, knowing her body mustbe stripped for her shroud, she would have her feetwashed, because she used ointment to one of themthat was sore. I believe I have told you, that in avery old trial of her, which I bought from LordOxford’s collection, it is said that she was a largelame woman. Take sentiments out of their pantoufles,and reduce them to the infirmities ofmortality, what a falling off there is!
HORACE WALPOLE to GEORGE MONTAGU
18 May 1749
1 ‘Goose-Weather’
In this strange ‘goose-weather’, when even the snow and theblack-fringed clouds seem like old theatrical properties, deadplayers’ cast-off rags, ‘the complexion of a murderer in abandbox, consisting of a large piece of burnt cork, and acoal-black Peruke’, and when the wind is so cold that itseems like an empty theatre’s ‘Sea, consisting of a dozenlarge waves, the tenth a little bigger than ordinary, and alittle damaged’, [1] I thought of those medicines that were advisedfor Melancholy, in the Anatomy of this disease, ofmummies made medicine, and of the profits of Dust-sifting.
Each tenth wave of the wind blew old memories likemelting snowflakes in my face. ‘The Battlebridge Dust andCinder-Heap’, it is said, existed since the Great Plague andthe Great Fire of London. This mountain of filth and cindersafforded food for hundreds of pigs. Russia, hearing in someway of the enormous dust-heap, purchased it for the purposeof rebuilding Moscow after it had been burned. The side ofthe mountain of dust is now covered by thoroughfares whosenames were derived from the popular ministers of that day.And again: ‘Descending the hill, you will find yourselfat Battlebridge, among a people as characteristic and lookingas local as if the spot had been made for them, and they forthe spot. At a glance you will perceive what are the distinctionswhich make the difference between them and thepopulation you have just passed through . . .’
Here comes another memory, colder still, and melting likethe snow. ‘The ground on which the Battlebridge Dust-Heapstood, was sold to the Pandemonium Theatre Company. They built a theatre, where that cloud-kissingdust-heap had been. Come, I’ll enter. The interior is somewhatfantastic, but light and pretty too; and filled withBattlebridge beaux and belles. There was no trace of anydustman there.’
There have, too, been humbler profits from the dust. Anold woman named Mary Collins, a dust-sifter, giving evidencebefore a judge, answered when he expressed surprisethat she should possess so much property: ‘Oh, your worship,that’s nothing . . . we find them among the dust. It isdustman’s law. I have raised houses from my profits madeamong the dust.’
Whether the inhabitants of those thoroughfares near thedust-heap, from which those who believe in the destiny ofmankind were to rebuild Moscow, listened, in the earlydawn, to the far-off sounds of what songs the sirens sang, Iknow not. Perhaps, instead, they listened to the little hopefularticulations rising from the dust—the lip-clicks of theearthworms which are, it may be, amongst the earliest originsof our language. ‘The clicking noises made by earthwormsrecently discovered by the physiologist, O. Mangold, do notconcern us,’ we are told by Herr Georg Schwidetzky, in aprofoundly interesting recent book, [2] ‘for though the ancientrace of earthworms can claim kinship with us, our ownwormlike ancestors were water animals, and at present weknow nothing of their noises. Still, there is a possibility thatcertain lip-clicks were derived from the noises made byworms.’
Shall we find our cure for Melancholy in this thought ofthe origin of the kiss between loved one and loved one,mother and child, or in that other statement made in thesame book: ‘The Latin word “Aurora” (dawn) can withoutdifficulty be derived from an earlier “ur-ur”, supplemented in two places by A. The changes are, of course,always later editions. Now, phonetically “ur-ur” is the remainsof a lemur word, and is a sound characteristic of thewhole genus. When we seek information about the lives ofthese lemurs (who live, today, in the tropics, and especiallyin Madagascar), we learn to our surprise that they indulgein a kind of morning worship. They sit with raised hands,their bodies in the same position as that of the famous Greekpraying boy, warming themselves in the sun. . . . It is thereforenot unwarrantable to assume that Aurora, the Romangoddess of dawn, has her ultimate origin in the morningexercise of a lemur.’
We may find some cure for Melancholy in the contemplationof this, or in the reason given by some scientist fordistinguishing Man from Beast. ‘Man’s anatomical preeminence’,we are told, ‘mainly consists in degree ratherthan in kind, the differences are not absolute. His brain islarger and more complex, and his teeth resemble those ofanimals in number and pattern, but are smaller, and form acontinuous series, and, in some cases, differ in order of succession.’
We have, indeed, many causes for pride and congratulation,and amongst these is the new and friendly interestthat is shown between nations. ‘Richard L. Garner’ (againI quote from Herr Schwidetzky) ‘went to the Congo in orderto observe gorillas and chimpanzees in their natural surroundings,and to investigate their language. He took awire cage with him, which he set up in the jungle andfrom which he watched the apes.’ Unfortunately, the wirecage, chosen for its practical invisibility to imaginative andidealistic minds, always exists during these experiments.‘Garner, however, tried to teach human words to a littlechimpanzee. The position of the lips for the word Mammawas correctly imitated, but no sound came.’ This is interesting, because a recent psycho-analyst has claimed that thereason for the present state of unrest in Europe is that everyman wishes to be the only son of a widow. We can see,therefore, that if imbued with a few of the doctrines andspeeches of civilization, the innocent, pastoral, and backwardnations of the Apes will become as advanced, as ‘civilized’,as the rest of us. Who knows that they may not even cometo construct cannon?
To go further in our search for some antidote againstMelancholy, we may seek in our dust-heap for some rigid,and even splendid, attitude of Death, some exaggeration ofthe attitudes common to Life. This attitude, rigidity, protest,or explanation, has been called eccentricity by those whosebones are too pliant. But these mummies cast shadows thatdo not lie in their proper geometrical proportions, and fromthese distortions dusty laughter may arise.
Eccentricity exists particularly in the English, and partly,I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledgeof infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of theBritish nation.
This eccentricity, this rigidity, takes many forms. It mayeven, indeed, be the Ordinary carried to a high degree ofpictorial perfection, as in the case I am about to relate.
On the 26th of May, 1788, Mary Clark, aged twenty-six,and the mother of six children, was delivered of a child inCarlisle Dispensary. I will not enter into the medical details,but it seems that this interesting infant was ‘full grown, andseemed in perfect health. Her limbs were plump, fine andwell proportioned, and she moved them with apparentagility. It appeared to the doctors that her head presented acurious appearance, but this did not trouble them much,for the child behaved in the usual manner, and it was notuntil the evidence of its death became undeniable, at the ageof five days, that these gentlemen discovered that there was not the least indication of either cerebrum, cerebellum, orany medullary substance whatever.’
Mr Kirby, from whose pages I have culled this story,