Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  And here, in the sonnet, was a contemporary foreign poet smitten by the same astonishment: ‘G. R. Weckherlin,’ the anthology said: ‘1584–1653.’ I had never heard of him; nor had anyone else.

  In the German-speaking world, I learnt, Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, from Swabia, was thought second only to Martin Opitz, ‘the Father of German Poetry,’ and though some writers call him early Baroque, both of them really belong to a group of late Renaissance German poets akin to the Pléiade in France a couple of generations earlier, with Ronsard and Du Bellay as their brightest stars.

  He was also a scholar, a diplomatist and a courtier at the Duke of Wurtemberg’s palace at Stuttgart and travelled widely in France. Some time after 1602, he was three years at the Court of St James, and was sent on missions to central European states and the Empire. In England again in 1616, he must often have been under the same ceilings as Buckingham. He entered the royal service and accompanied Charles on his expedition against the Scots, and soon afterwards he married Miss Elizabeth Raworth, of Dover, and took root in England. He seems to have changed sides at the Commonwealth: he became Latin Secretary, then Secretary of Foreign Tongues, to the Joint Committee of the Two Kingdoms, and held both posts until he was replaced by Milton, perhaps because of ill health. Paradoxically, he often helped the older poet when his eyes began to fail; then he succumbed to his adopted country’s distemper and died of gout.

  He had been equally at home in German, Latin, French and English and almost certainly knew some Italian and some Greek. It was he who brought the sonnet and the sestina to Germany and he left a mass of poems, strongly influenced by his friend Samuel Daniel and his fellow-diplomatist, Sir Henry Wotton. (As I read about him a dignified figure began to take shape, with a kindly blue eye gleaming above a pale fog of beard and a wide collar fastened with tassels breaking over black broadcloth and silk: half-Van Dyck, half-Honthorst, lyrically wreathed, perhaps, in a chaplet of bays . . . )

  Completely English by now, his daughter Elizabeth married Mr William Trumbull of Easthampstead in Berkshire, whose deer park was part of the King’s Chase. He served in several diplomatic posts, most notably in the Low Countries; and his son, Sir William Trumbull, followed him in his career. Beginning as a youthful Fellow of All Souls, he made the Grand Tour with Christopher Wren, visited Tangier with Pepys, sat in Parliament for a Cornish borough, became Charles II’s ambassador at Constantinople, then Principal Secretary of State to William III, and retired at last to his Berkshire library and the company of his friends. It was Sir William who first prompted Dryden to translate Virgil, and he performed the same office for Pope by suggesting Homer. Kneller painted him and Pope wrote the verse epitaph on his fine tomb at Easthampstead, where he still reclines in his full-bottomed wig.

  I forgot all about them. But in The Times a few years ago, Miss Sarah Jane Checkland announced, with infectious alarm, the imminent sale of ‘the largest and most important collection of English state papers to be offered at auction this century.’ They were the Trumbull Papers! The archive included letters from James I, Charles I and II, Sir Francis Bacon, John Donne, Samuel Pepys, John Locke, John Dryden and Alexander Pope, twenty-nine letters from Philip II of Spain, secret correspondence about the Council of Trent and much concerning the British colonies in the New World.

  Perhaps the most exciting of all [the column went on, to my growing emotion] is the hitherto unrecorded series of papers belonging to William Trumbull’s relative, the German poet Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, Charles I’s secretary from 1624 until the Civil War. These include letters, signed but not sent, from Charles to Louis XIII, Gustavus Adolphus and Marie de Medici, as well as many Royalist letters intercepted during the Commonwealth. Finally, there is a beautiful calligraphic manuscript of a still unpublished verse-translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, which Sir John Harington, Elizabeth’s ‘witty godson,’ prepared and presented to James I, in 1604, for the young Prince Henry.

  (Harington was also the author of a racy disquisition on waterclosets that he punningly called The Metamorphosis of Ajax. When cross with him, the Queen used to catch him by the belt, even when he was grown up, and give him a good shake as she taxed him with his misdeeds.)

  What a haul! And what a tragedy if such an Aladdin’s cave were to be ransacked! The contents had come down in a direct line of a dozen generations from Weckherlin and the Trumbulls to their present-day descendant, the Marquis of Downshire. The heritage lobby was in despair. There had been talk of a private sale to the nation; now it seemed that the open sale was to go ahead. The total price predicted—two million pounds—sounded enormous, but it was very little more than the damages which had been awarded in the recent Cossack libel action. If—albeit ludicrously—ordinary people were thought to be capable of forking out sums like this, there ought to be some public fund or government organization to deal with such emergencies; but there isn’t, and things looked black. ‘In a few days’ time,’ the article had said, ‘this unique and wonderful collection comes under the hammer at Sotheby’s. Once split up, it will be scattered to the winds.’

  At this point I was overcome, as though by an onslaught of heady gas, by dreams of grandeur. I would try to help save the Papers! After all, not every millionaire was an illiterate philistine. My mind’s eye evoked a rich, unknown and hypothetical humanist, steeped in concern for the country’s treasures. As he was only conjectural, the approach would have to be indirect.

  Emulating Miss Checkland, I wrote two stirring pages and sent them to a famous weekly (this one, indeed) which I felt sure the unknown saviour was bound to see; on publication morning, kind fate and my wishful thoughts would waft him up the steps of clubland and lead him to the table where the weeklies were spread, and then guide his hand. Next, this not impossible he would be deep in an armchair with his glance halted at the right page. He would finish the piece with a pensive ‘H’m’; and a few minutes later my mind’s ear would detect a finger riffling through the telephone directory; then dialling: ‘Lord Downshire? Good morning, this is—I’m so sorry to bother you. Could you spare me a few minutes, if I came round?’

  It all ended happily, and fast, but not at all as it was planned. News suddenly came that the owner had solved the whole problem with impeccable generosity and public spirit, and all the treasures were safe. The piece, of course, never came out, the putative benefactor dissolved into the shadows and I suffered from a touch of the flatness Raleigh might have felt if the Queen had preferred a convenient plank. The anticlimax, bit by bit, gave way to exhilaration at the thought of the brimming deed-boxes, the crackling tiers of parchment, the faded pink tape, the hundreds of broken seals and all the mystery and the dust. The improper jokes of Harington cheered the air, and Buckingham’s ruffling plumage, and the thought of classical tags bandied by candlelight round Sir William’s table. I was buoyed up, above all, by adumbrations of Weckherlin, backed by youthful memories of the arcaded castles of bookish Stuttgart, and the vineyards and the ricks and the beetling oakwoods of Swabia: the landscape, after all, of the earliest sonnets and sestinas ever to be heard beyond the far bank of the Rhine and to the north of the Black Forest and the Danube.

  Traum: von dem H. von B.

  Ich sah in meinem Schlaf ein Bild gleich einem Gott,

  Auf einem reichen Thron ganz prächtiglich erhaben,

  Auf dessen Dienst und Schutz, zugleich aus Lust und Not,

  Sich die törichte Leut stets haufenwies begaben.

  Ich sah, wie dieses Bild, dem wahren Gott zu Spott,

  Empfing—zwar niemals satt—Gelübd, Lob, Opfergaben,

  Und gab auch wem es wollt das Leben und den Tod

  Und pflag sich mit Rach, Straf und Bosheit zu erlaben.

  Und ob der Himmel schon oftmal, des Bilds Undank Zu strafen, seine Stern versammlete mit Wunder,

  So war doch des Bilds Stimm noch lauter dann der Dunder,

  Bis endlich, als sein Stoltz war in dem höchsten Schwang,

  Da schlug ein schneller Blitz das schön
e Bild herunder,

  Verkehrend seinen Pracht in Kot, Würm und Gestank.

  Under the Bim, Under the Bam

  Review of Maurice Bowra, Primitive Song (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), The Spectator, 6 July 1962

  Saying what song the sirens sang is as hard as any of Donne’s hypothetical tasks. But it seems almost easy compared to the question Sir Maurice Bowra asks himself and then sets about answering. He leads us back through airy millennia, far beyond the singing sirens on their mythological rocks, to the earliest detectable traces of song, to the conditions which made it likely and incubated its shaggy genesis. Those sounds, slow to emerge and long silent now, were the first harbingers of verse; and could we miraculously tune in and equally miraculously understand them, or guess at their nature by analogy or deduction, we would possess most precious knowledge of the impulse and inspiration which lead to poetry and the pristine workings of the human mind; knowledge, indeed, of urgent relevance to the world’s entire poetic achievement, which, in its most elevated, sophisticated or recondite flowering, has been the author’s lifelong study. This new aspect of his theme, which is no less than a bold and sustained assault on the primitive mysteries, gives special importance to an absorbing and most unusual book.

  We must picture Sir Maurice pondering the first hints of primitive song—for, as he proves beyond reasonable doubt, where there is sympathetic magic, mimicry of wish-fulfilment, ritual and dancing, song always breaks out—on the silent cave-walls of Altamira, Lascaux, Alpéra and Niaux. We see him turn from the leggy cavorting bowmen, chasing their dream-bison, with his brow locked in conjecture, but not in despair. For the Late Stone Age doings painted in these scattered grottoes, and those of Russia and the Arctic Circle—indeed, wherever they emerge and however far apart—all display similar data, closely related resulting phenomena and subconscious cosmological inklings; related, not by descent from a common source, but by the response of primitive man everywhere, regardless of latitude, climate and date, to the problem of survival. Invariably, too, up come the same rough-hewn metaphysics. What they all possess in common is far more striking than their marginal variation or their wide stylistic differences. Broadly speaking, like yin evoked like yang, and even more interestingly, like Jung. The same, moreover, is discernible today in those scattered and shrinking rock-pools of mankind which, by a random dispensation of history, still live a late Palaeolithic life. One glance at the paintings of the aborigines, the Veddas, the Eskimos, and the Bushmen of the Drakensberg, tells all.

  Here lies the secret and the Open Sesame: to guess at their nature by analogy or deduction . . . But in the new field which suddenly unfolds and the accompanying windfall of raw material for study, the need for guesswork goes. For here we have not only the paintings but, carefully recorded and classified, the songs themselves, and, in nearly every case, the singers; the contemporaries, in fact, in every way except the not very relevant dislocation of fifteen or thirty thousand years, of the cave-artists of Aquitania and the Pyrenees.

  There are a number of these Stone Age societies. The most apt for Sir Maurice’s purpose are the Gabon and Ituri Pygmies, the Bushmen and Dama of South-West Africa, the Semang of the Malayan jungle, the Veddas of Ceylon, the Andaman islanders, the many aboriginal groups of Australia, the Eskimos of the Arctic and the Selk’nam and Yamana of Tierra del Fuego. Some of these are perilously close to that deadline of extinction over which the Tasmanians preceded them, with a helping hand from us, in 1877. They live by hunting, fishing and gathering, sometimes in as humble a form as the search for molluscs, termites, edible grubs, roots, fruit and scaling cliffs for honeycombs. There is no cultivation or taming of animals except the keeping of dogs, which were already the familiars of Mesolithic huntsmen. Dependent, to keep alive, on the seasonal shifts of their animal and vegetable prey, they are of no fixed abode. Their social unit, sheltering in an igloo or a hut of leaves or skins, is the family. Some are so simple that, though they can keep a fire alight, they cannot kindle it. The taints of sophistication are slight and few. Here and there an iron arrowhead, obtained by barter, may replace the usual chipped stone; the Pygmies know how to buy iron and work it, but they are unable to smelt. The Semang have borrowed the blowpipe. Perhaps the most unsullied of all were the Kalang of Java, ‘the most ape-like of men’; but they have gone the way of the Tasmanians.

  As in the cave-paintings, the search for food dominates all. Pictures of the quarry and a simulacrum of its chase and capture, make success more likely: a pantomime involving dancing, shouts, cries and, in time, song; at first, perhaps, on the evidence of some groups, songs emancipated from any need for meaning. For instance, when two of the crew of HMS Beagle landed in Tierra del Fuego, the Yamana greeted them by seizing their hands and forcing them to jump up and down with them, a few inches a skip, singing, joyfully and interminably,

  Ha ma la ha ma la ha ma la ha ma la

  Ola la la la la la la la.

  One can see how, once started, it might be difficult to stop; and the women still dance to the words:

  ma-las-ta xai-na-sa ma-las-ta xai-na-ta

  which, repeated ad infinitum, are quite unburdened by sense. It remains their only kind of singing. Before dispelling a curse, a xon, or medicine-man of the Selk’nam, intones for a long time wubwubwubwubmibwub; another xon, summoning a spirit, improvises with lolololo . . . hoiyoiyoiyoi . . . jeiyeiyeiyei. Though meaningless, these rhythmic cries with their cumulative iteration express a mood for the listeners as clearly as willow-waly or derry-derry-down in more sophisticated verse; or, for that matter, tararaboomdeeay and vododeeodo. Perhaps we may discern, at the other end of the poetical scale, a survival of the same need for spirited but, in the logical-positive sense, only partly meaningful utterance in T. S. Eliot’s words (which, indeed, seem obscurely apposite to the entire theme we are discussing):

  Under the bim

  Under the bam

  Under the bamboo tree.

  Primitive song may have begun like this and the poor Fuegians, almost extinct now, have not moved on. But it is not so with the other groups. Articulacy, the yoking of sound to meaning, and its elaboration have been at work for a very long time. The author locates its stimuli and traces its development from pure sound to actual statement, on to repetition, parallelism and variation and a mixture of both, to alliteration, intermittent and internal rhyme—both of them unplanned, but eagerly exploited when they crop up—to planning metre to fit music, the skilled use of onomatopoeia, the emergence of the refrain and the marshalling into stanzas or couplets. A single verse of a long hunting song of the Pygmies, a solo which the rest of the company clinches with a refrain, carries us a long way from Cape Horn:

  On the weeping forest, under the wing of the evening,

  The night, all black, has gone to rest happy;

  In the sky the stars have fled trembling,

  Fireflies which shine vaguely and put out their lights;

  On high the moon is dark, its white light is put out.

  The spirits are wandering.

  Elephant-hunter, take up your bow!

  Elephant-hunter, take up your bow!

  During his analysis of the composition, performance and method of primitive singers, and his scrutiny of their interpretation of nature and the human cycle, of imagination and myth and symbol, the author conducts us straight into their lives. It is an enthralling journey. We grasp the paramount status of the chase and of the supernatural apparatus that surrounds it, the evolution of gods, spirits, ghosts, demons, ancestors and totems, the velleities of religion, the often interchangeable roles of the shaman, the medicine-man, the singer, the xon. Attitudes to birth, childhood, puberty, nubility, marriage, old age and death run on strikingly similar lines among these groups, and give rise to songs which can readily be compared. We know that there have been less backward societies which have failed to put two and two together in the cases of coition and birth, old age and death (e.g. the Caribs three hundred years ago). These primitives, howeve
r, all seem abreast of these interdependences. Some of their love-songs, of which there are not a lot, are deeply touching and their dirges speak a language we can all understand.

  Prayer for help in their various undertakings—frightened, cajoling, imperative, comminatory—usurps a large part of their repertoire; magic, incantation and exorcism scarcely less. The supernatural world is so real, familiar and omnipresent, and so large a part in their lives is played by animals, birds, fishes, insects, trees, flowers, rivers and mountains that all these natural and supernatural elements mingle in song on equal and unquestioned terms with human beings. Sometimes they change places. Anthropomorphosis infects animals, humans become zoömorphic. Shamans tell in song how they have ravened as tigers and plunged as cormorants. Like Excalibur, Durandal and Notung in European myths, weapons assume names and personalities.

  But rather surprisingly, heroic poetry is rarer. Primitive peoples have all been involved in conflicts over game and epic hunts have stuck in their memories and their songs; but avoidance of trouble, a Boojum-like disappearance, has been their usual stratagem at the approach of strangers; an understandable one considering the short shrift they have received at the hands of white settlers and missionaries. Telling evidence of this reflex subsists in the songs of certain Australian aborigines driven from their coastal habitat generations ago by white settlement. Hundreds of miles inland now in the dry khaki interior, they still sing of the lost ocean that none of them has ever seen or will see.

  Nothing, the author warns us, could be farther from primitive songs, or from their forms of artistic expression, than art for art’s sake. Every syllable is a means to an end; they want results: food, luck, health, supernatural backing, pardon. Words, especially rhythmic words, are implements to bring the unintelligible into one’s power—to establish small areas of command in dark disorder. Even when their songs seem pure anodynes, they are tools for maintaining hope, without which the singers despair and die.