What I Did On My Vacation, Part 4

While I was in London, I found a couple of hours to slip into the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square.  It is not the greatest art collection in the world—the Louvre comes straight to mind—but for anyone who grew up in England, as I did, the collection is dearly beloved. On the wall of every classroom of the nation there is a copy of one of the paintings. The Leonardo Cartoon of the Virgin with St. Anne, something purchased by the whole nation’s contributions in 1962 when there was the threat of export; Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife (we all thought she was pregnant and that this is a wedding portrait, which gave it a rather nice frissance, but apparently her looks are an artifact of the style of the day and it is just a regular, everyday portrait); the Ambassadors, of course, by Hans Holbein the Younger (that distorted skull still gets to me as I twist myself by the painting to see the skull in a normal fashion); the great English paintings by John Constable (the Hay Wain and the fantastic picture of Salisbury Cathedral), J.M.W. Turner (all of them, and showing Turner’s fascination with Goethe’s rather odd theory of colors); the terrific horse painting (“Whistlejacket”) by George Stubbs; and the “Experiment on a Bird with an Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby. 

The one thing that marred this and previous visits was the fact that around just about every important or popular painting there were groups.  I don’t at all mind school kids sitting there on the ground, sketching away.  In fact, if every painting had such a class, I would be happy.  But I do rather resent having to stand on tiptoes to look over the heads of groups being lectured away to by earnest leaders, in languages that seem usually to collect all of the verbs at the end.  And they go on and on and on, reminding one of the joke about German philosophers who will never use a sentence when a paragraph will do.  I just don’t see why these visitors cannot get a headset like the rest of us, and view the pictures that way.  I know, I know, I am an old grump.  First the Beatles, now the tourists.  But that is just the way I am.  Last year, showing that I really am becoming a Colonel Blimp, I even wrote to the (London) Times about it.  

I don’t know which picture is my favorite.  I think I am most attached to “The Avenue at Middelharnis” by Meindert Hobbema, which was on the wall of my first classroom at grammar school.  I love anything and everything by Vermeer including the gallery’s “A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal.“  This time the painting that struck me most was Renoir’s magnificent “The Umbrellas.”  It is a fascinating painting for it was obviously reworked or completed after it was started.  The right side of the painting has the slightly unfocussed feeling of early Impressionism but the main figure on the left is painted much more crisply and clearly.  I don’t think any painting—or painter for that matter—quite gives the sense of young people and the joy of living.  It is just great to be a human being.  For us, it is just that much more poignant knowing how the world was to collapse in a few decades and that the innocence would be gone forever.

If of course there was ever any innocence.  Judged by many visits, my hunch is that the most popular painting in the whole collection is a rather sentimental effort by a comparatively unknown 19th-century French painter, “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” by Paul Delaroche.   Jane was put up on the English throne by the Protestant faction after the death of Edward the Sixth.  She was only Queen for nine days and then deposed by the rightful heir, Henry the Eighth’s oldest child, Mary Tudor.  She was Catholic and promptly started to earn her sobriquet of “Bloody” by having poor Jane’s head chopped off.  Actually I have a bit of a soft spot for Mary, because the school I attended mentioned above was founded in 1554 and named after her, Queen Mary’s Grammar School.  I believe ours was one of only two founded in her short reign (1553-1558).  

Without judging the rights of Jane’s claim to the throne—they were pretty thin actually—this makes for one of those days when I think Richard Dawkins and company have a good point.  Maybe Luther and Calvin were right about justification by faith, but why oh why do so many people have to suffer because other people want to impose their religious beliefs?  But then I swing around and see that there is so much more to the story.  On my visit to England I also dropped into Charles Darwin’s home, Down House in Kent.  It is incidentally now owned and run by English Heritage.  If you spent a sabbatical in England, make your first move—after you have paid for your television license of course—that of buying a pass to English Heritage.  They really do a fantastic job of looking after the properties for which they are responsible.  

But as you all know, I am 70 now, so given that I am a gung-ho Darwinian I have started to think that perhaps I should cover my options—a sort of updated Pascal’s Wager as it were.  So now on my trips to England I try to get in at least one of the great medieval cathedrals.  Actually, this is neither a duty nor a new-found passion.  When I went away to school in 1953 (after two years at the grammar school), from my bedroom window across the rooftops you could see York Minster.  Among other things, it has the most and finest stained glass in England.  On this trip I got up to Ely Cathedral, the “ship of the fens,” standing up above the fields some few miles north of Cambridge.

It is not a large building but exquisitely beautiful, with a distinctive octagonal tower.  Parts of it are very old and in Romanesque style, although in England this is more commonly referred to as Norman style, because it dates from the time of the Normans.  (Ely was started in 1083).  It is a distinctive style because the arches are rounded, not pointed (which is the later Gothic style, as in York Minster). 

Mention of the Normans brings me to the last event on my trip, a visit to Hastings.  If I can, I always like to get in a trip to the seaside.  For nearly 40 years I lived close to the Great Lakes, but they just don’t do it for me.  Somehow they are dead and sterile compared to the ocean with its waves and tides.  Usually, I get down to Eastbourne because that is close to my stepmother’s home.  (Old music hall joke, based on the fact that Eastbourne is very much a retirement town—Thomas Henry Huxley ended his days there.  “Dover for the Continent.  Eastbourne for the incontinent.”)

This time I went to Hastings along the coast.  My goodness, what a poor, drab place it is.  The pier is closed for safety reasons.  The shops are tatty.  The beach is stony.  No wonder Brits these days take off for mainland Europe, either across (over or under) the Channel, or by cheap air flights to the South of Spain or further.  There, if my younger relatives are any guide, to burn themselves to crisps, to drink their faces off, and to sleep with as many non-spouses as is possible.  All a bit like a Saturday night faculty party in a David Lodge novel.  (Of course, we Canadians were all at home watching Hockey Night in Canada.)

I did however visit the just-inland village of Battle, so named after the big event in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings.  Edward the Confessor had died earlier in the year and Harold grabbed the throne, even though in respects Duke William of Normandy had the better claim.  England was invaded by the Vikings and so Harold had to dash up North, where he defeated them at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.  (The one thing we kids never forgot was that English victory involved a right good brogging of the Norwegians, from the river under the bridge.  And if you don’t know what brogging is, look it up because I am not going to tell you.)

Then Harold had to dash back down to the South Coast to meet Duke William and his army that had just sailed over from Normandy.  Mainly because his army was absolutely worn out (and not all got there on time), after an absolutely ferocious battle the Normans prevailed, Harold famously being killed by an arrow through his eye.  (Although that part of the story may be an artifact of the way it is shown in the famous Bayeux Tapestry of the event.)  Then the Normans marched up to London and by the end of the year William the Conqueror was crowned king and the Anglo-Saxon era was over.  

I confess that even though this all took place nearly a thousand years ago, as I walked around the battle field—wonderfully maintained by English Heritage—my emotions were those of regret and sadness.  It really was hard cheese on poor old Harold.  Of course, you can make all sorts of arguments about how the Normans brought civilization to Britain, but ultimately they were thieving thugs.  Within 20 years over 40 percent of England was owned by fifteen Normans.

(Incidentally, one of my all-time favorite movies is Ivanhoe, based on the novel by that name by Walter Scott.  It tells of an Anglo-Saxon knight who takes on the Normans at their own games.  The moment when Ivanhoe challenges all four Normans at a tournament is one of the great moments in cinema, as also is the moment when he throws down his gage and claims the right to defend Rebecca of York in mortal combat.  Elizabeth Taylor stars as Rebecca and she is transcendentally beautiful.  The only rival that Grace Kelly ever had.  Robert Taylor plays Ivanhoe but the real star is George Sanders as the Norman knight, Brian De Bois-Guilbert, desperately in love with Rebecca—she of course is in impossible love with Ivanhoe—but forced by his king to fight Ivanhoe in a contest where, if he wins, she will at once be burnt at the stake.)

I suppose I had better get over the Norman Conquest, but it is not easy.  One consolation is that, because of it, English is an amalgam of German words with French sentence structure.  And that is the reason why I am not now about to end my telling of my trip to England with a BP-like gush of about 50,000 verbs.