The Chafing Tide

Herewith a companion piece to the last post. This quote has a source too complicated to cite at the outset, but please note that the Dr. Johnson here is not named Samuel Johnson; that Dr. Johnson died before the nineteenth century dawned (in 1784).  First the picture:

…it was the wear and tear of early nineteenth century London life that … made a change of surroundings desirable and often mandatory. Dr. Johson’s own impressions upon his departure from the English metropolis in search of better climes present a graphic picture of a “modern” industrial capital. “As the carriage moved slowly up Shooter’s Hill, one fine autumnal morning, I turned round to take a parting look at Modern Babylon. My eye ranged along the interminable grove of masts that shewed her boundless commerce—the hundred spires that proclaimed her ardent piety—the dense canopy of smoke that spread itself over her countless streets and squares, enveloping a million and a half of human beings in murky vapour.”

     Inevitably there follows his nostalgic comparison with his first sight of London thirty years earlier, when it appeared calm and beautiful and promising of a peaceful life. But even then, the “chafing tide of human existence” made him feel annihilated, “lost like a drop of water in the ocean,” and he felt certain that there were “few who do not experience this feeling of abasement on first mixing with the crowd in the streets of London.” In this engulfment which, according to Dr. Johnson, first gives rise to ever-mounting tensions resulting in a condition of “body and mind, intermediate between that of sickness and health, but much nearer to the former” which is constantly felt “by tens of thousands in this metropolis, and throughout the empire.” Dr. Johnson considered this condition incurable, although he was sure that it added greatly to the practice of the doctors and of the undertakers.

The actual text appearing here came from an article by Ilza Veith, “The Wear and Tear Syndrome—1831,” appearing in Modern Medicine, September 4, 1961. The content is part of a review by Veith of a book, published in 1831, by Dr. James Johnson, Change of Air or The Pursuit of Health. In turn, I found this review in Karl A. Menninger’s book, The Vital Balance, published in 1963.

The Earlier Satanic Mill

What with the elevation of Hildegard of Bingen to the status of a Doctor of the Church, I was looking back to the times when she lived, the twelfth century. And it was a very interesting time. Some of the big names of that time, arranged here by year-of-birth, were Omar Khayyam, Hildegard, Thomas Becket, Frederick Barbarossa, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Maimonides, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Ibn el Arabi, and Francis of Assisi. In perusing these patterns, I also stumbled upon something striking. It was the “birth date,” so to say, of a precursor of industrialization. The Arsenal of Venice was founded in 1104. It was still around and thriving when Dante wrote his Inferno, and the following quote (from Canto XXI, Sayers translation) ranks it squarely among the satanic mills:

For as at Venice, in the Arsenal

In winter-time, they boil the gummy pitch

To caulk such ships as need an overhaul,

Now that they cannot sail—instead of which

One builds him a new boat, one toils to plug

Seams strained by many a voyage, others stitch

Canvas to patch a tattered jib or lug,

Hammer at the prow, hammer at the stern, or twine

Ropes, or shave oars, refit and make all snug —

So, not by fire, but by the art divine

A thick pitch boiled down there [in hell], spattering the brink

With vicious glue; I saw this, but therein

Nothing; only great bubbles black as ink

Would rise and burst there; or the seething tide

Heave up all over, and settle again, and sink.

The Arsenal was something quite unbelievable for its time. It could assemble a complete sailing ship in the space of a day—from uniformly fabricated components made in other parts of the facility in what amounted to an assembly-line manner. In that time, elsewhere, such ships took months to build. Up to 100 ships were at various stages of completion in the shipyard. The factory occupied more than 100 acres, was surrounded by a thick wall, and employed 1,600 people. It was also used for refurbishing old ships, as Dante indicates. It got its name from also manufacturing munitions. Come to think of it, shipbuilding at such a scale was next accomplished by the U.S.A. during World War II.

I note here that Venice was a Republic then. Its governance took that form in 697—and ended with Napoleon’s conquest of Venice in 1797. On that same date, the Arsenal of Venice also ceased to function. Republics and satanic mills? Do they go together? William Blake’s formulation of that label (in his poem, Jerusalem) dated to a time when London had been shrouded in smoke and pollution as the capital of the nascent Industrial Revolution. As for us, today, we mourn the passing of those mills but under the milder name of manufacturing. There they stand, those mills, abandoned; and the wind blows litter and plastic bags over vacant lots. Such is human fate. Love it and lose it. Wish it, get it, curse it, and mourn the idyllic past—but when it threatens to return, mourn that return in turn.

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As an addendum here, let me note that the average life span of the famous people named above was 67 years; the thinkers lived longer; the warriors passed earlier; the martyr, Becket, died at 52; perhaps the most intense of them all, Francis, only lived to be 45.  The three with the longest lives were Khayyam (83), Hildegard (81), and Ibn el Arabi (75).

Wondering About Rails

We watched The Railway Children last night, a Masterpiece Theatre production that originally aired in November 2000. We got our copy from Netflix. In the introduction to this rather charming story, Russell Baker, the columnist, who was for some time the host of Masterpiece Theater, sketched the history of rail. His account touched upon the so-called robber barons who caused the railroads to span the American continent—and in the process remembered the neglect of safety, the exploitation of labor, and the other wondrous concomitants that seemingly always accompany the tale of industrial development. This made me wonder. Had the development of railways in Continental Europe followed a different course? I say continental Europe because, it seems to me that England not only experienced but led what I think of as the dark kind of industrialization. I always think of satanic mills and Dickens’ London. Europe adopted these ways later. And, it seems, in continental Europe, much more centralized forms of government muted the brutalities of development, not least in the development of rails. The exception was Russia, where industrialization under communism managed to be as soul-less an enterprise as under the sway of capital. Rails absolutely dominated consciousness in Europe in my childhood. But neither then, nor later, did I ever hear either sagas of triumphant successes or tales of brutality as fixed in collective memory. Maybe we were simply sheltered from the truth… In any case, I’m disinclined to trade the boredom of backwardness for the excitements of constant innovation and limitless “enterprise.”