Part 2. "The Moon takes up the wondrous tale" *

Galileo's first refracting telescope, in the Museo Galileo, Florence

The early telescopes were not perfect.  When  a founder member of the Royal Society,  Sir Paul Neale (or Neile) enthusiastically claimed to see a giant elephant on the Moon, it proved to be a mouse which had crept in between the tubes, along with gnats and insects, which were interpreted as Lilliputian armies.   These Royal Society virtuosi were duly mocked by Samuel Butler as:

 "learned men who greedily pursue,

Things that are rather wonderful than true."

He attacked their aims and their methods as they

"... grew distracted, whether to espouse,

The party of the Elephant or Mouse.

 Some held there was no way so orthodox

As to refer it to the ballot box".*

Samuel Butler, The Elephant in the Moon, c. 1670

Fortunately sense and the empirical method prevailed, and the telescope was taken apart to reveal the mouse.   [Maybe our politicians today should read Butler's poem.]

The early lunar romances were popular with the educated.  Before Bishop Godwin's flying swans, Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso, 1532, sends his hero, Astolfo, a knight of Charlemagne, flying around on a hippogriff, half eagle and half horse (as described in Virgil).

Contemporary wood engraving with hippogriff  for "Orlando Furioso",  (wikimedia commons)

Reaching Paradise, Astolfo is then sent to the Moon in Old Testament Elijah's flaming chariot, where he discovers mad Orlando's lost wits, for according to myth, everything lost or wasted on earth is found on the moon.  How prescient were these writers from antiquity?

The twentieth century American novelist, Herman Wouk, wrote a strange little Utopian journey to the moon in The Lomokome Papers in 1949.  A US. Naval astronaut crash-lands and is captured and taken down to a subterranean (sublunar?) world.  The story is pieced together from fragments of his log, found near the crash site, interspersed with sections of government reports of their findings.

As in other Utopias, the hero discovers the failings of the Lomokome system:  -- "All the Hydrogen Belongs to All the People" -- and their chilling Law of Reasonable War and Death Day, which "reduces a foolishly chaotic arrangement, which threatens our total destruction, to a sane, safe, workable process".

The Lomokome Papers, with haunting illustrations by Harry Bennett  

1968 edition © Herman Wouk

Interestingly, by 1967 Wouk is "sobered by the speed with which truth is overtaking my grim fiction", but thought that, "the moon voyage as a literary form, approaches total eclipse".

1956 Film Poster  (wikimedia commons)

Where it has blossomed of course is on the screen, whether based on existing novels, or created by directors and authors now writing screenplays.  The Forbidden Planet, of 1956, based by its original writers Irving Block and Allen Adler on Shakespeare's The Tempest, is regarded as the forerunner of the genre, which took off in the 1960s with many notable films and TV series.  

To mention just two, 1968 sees Kubrick's unforgettable 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke: 

Film still from Stanley Kubrick's  "2001: a Space Odyssey" (wikimedia commons)

and perhaps my favourite -- Silent Running, in 1972:

Film still from "Silent Running", with Bruce Dern and Huey,  1972 (wikimedia commons)

* from Joseph Addison's hymn, 1712

October: John Evelyn - home thoughts from abroad

Friday 1st October 1943

"A taxi motored me to Wotton House where I lunched and spent the afternoon.  Today it belongs to John Evelyn, just as it belonged to the diarist John Evelyn in the seventeenth century.

  Pen drawing of Wotton House, by Evelyn 1640.  © British Library, Evelyn Archive

It is a long rambling, untidy house.  The nucleus of it is Jacobean, and a few rich doorways of that period survive upstairs.  But the present Evelyn's grandfather spoilt the house in every conceivable way in the 1870s. In the hideous Ruskin-style library are many rare books, including some 200 of Evelyn's own; also royal seals, miniatures and nineteenth-century busts.  There are innumerable family portraits , including three of John Evelyn, of which the Kneller is the most remarkable.

John Evelyn, c.1687  by Sir Godfrey Kneller  © The Royal Society 

There is a table carved by Grinling Gibbons, whom Evelyn discovered, and an Italian ebony cabinet* in which Evelyn's manuscript diaries were found.  The army have occupied most of the house during the war.  They allowed a fire to blacken the original door cases, walls and ceiling of the dining-room.  Could Evelyn have called in Wren to design this room?.  The garden, now a wilderness, has a mound cut into terraces by Evelyn, and below it a temple on Doric columns, which he built.  All the trees are magnificent, and the beeches are said to have been planted by him."

Ancestral Voices   James Lees-Milne 

John Evelyn travelled extensively in France and Italy as a young man during the Civil War.  In his Diary he records (exhaustively) all the palaces, gardens, churches and art treasures he saw in France and the great cities of Italy:  visiting Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Leghorn, Rome and Naples. Full of interesting insights, describing the people and customs,  he only occasionally mentions the food and weather, unless it affected his progress. He travelled by coach, on horse-back, and felucca (subject to storms) and by horse-drawn barge and boat from Bologna and Ferrara along the Po marshes to embark for Venice.  From Venice he journeyed home via Switzerland (he was ill with smallpox in Geneva) and France, where he married the English ambassador's young daughter, Mary Browne, in June 1647.  He left Paris for Calais at the end of September 1647, where he had first arrived four years before, and reached London late on 2nd October.

John Evelyn in 1648  by Robert Walker  © National Portrait Gallery

Having only just returned myself from Bologna airport, after several long days of amazing sightseeing in the Emilia-Romagna, I was struck by this poem Evelyn wrote in Naples in February 1645, well before his travels were ended.  Was he remembering the tranquil family home and its gardens at Wotton? 

"I left this Ode, …as the Non ultra of my Travells; sufficiently sated with rolling up and downe, and resolving with my selfe to be no longer an Individuum vagum, if ever I got home againe;...

Happy the man who lives content
With his own Home, & Contintent:
Those chiding streames his banks do curb
Esteemes the Ocean to his Orb;
Round which when he a Walke dos take,
Thinks t'have perform'd as much as Drake:
For other tongues he takes no thought
Then what his Nurse or Mother taught:
He's not disturb'd with the Rude Cries
Of the Procaccio's Up & Rise;
But being of his Faire possess'd
From Travelling sets up his rest:
In her soft armes no sooner hurl'd
But he enjoys another World,
Scornes Us who Travell Lands & Seas,
Thinkes there's no countries like to his:
If then at Home, such Joyes be had,
Oh, how un-wise are We, how Mad!"

Diary of  John Evelyn  edited E.S. De Beer

*I wrote about Evelyn's Italian ebony cabinet in an earlier blog (Jan 2016): see  "A Collector's Cabinet"

"And a few friends, and many books,…" Abraham Cowley

Abraham Cowley,  Sir Peter Lely, 1666-67
© National Portrait Gallery

Highly regarded in the seventeenth century, there are portraits of Cowley in several Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, and he was buried in pomp in Westminster Abbey. His reputation as a poet dwindled in later centuries, but he should also be remembered for his influence amongst those who founded the Royal Society; his Proposition for the Advancement of Learning was published in 1661 and he and his friend John Evelyn shared their interest in botany. 

THE WISH

"Well then! I now do plainly see

This busy world and I shall ne'er agree.

The very honey of all earthly joy

Does of all meats the soonest cloy;

And they, methinks, deserve my pity

Who for it can endure the stings,

The crowd, and buzz, and murmurings,

Of this great hive, the city.

"Ah, yet, ere I descend to the grave,

May I a small house and large garden have;

And a few friends, and many books, both true,

Both wise, and both delightful too!

And since love ne'er will from me flee,

A Mistress moderately fair,

And good as guardian angels are,

Only beloved and loving me.

"O fountains! when in you shall I

Myself eased of unpeaceful thoughts espy?

O fields, O woods!  when, when shall I be made

The happy tenant of your shade?

Here's the spring-head of Pleasure's flood:

Here's wealthy Nature's treasury,

Where all the riches lie that she

Has coin'd and stamp'd for good.

"Pride and ambition here

Only in far-fetch'd metaphors appear;

Here naught but winds can hurtful murmurs scatter,

And naught but Echo flatter.

The gods, when they descended, hither

From heaven did always choose their way:

And therefore may we boldly say

That 'tis the way too thither.

"How happy here should I

And one dear She live, and embracing die!

She who is all the world, and can exclude

In deserts solitude.

I should have then this only fear: 

Lest men, when they my pleasures see,

Should hither throng to live like me,

And so make a city here." 

Abraham Cowley,  1618-1667.  

Cowley was a staunch Royalist, carrying secret letters between Henrietta-Maria from exile in France and Charles I.   Having lived through the political and religious upheaval under Charles I, Cromwell  and Charles II, it is not surprising that Cowley echoes Virgil and Horace in his picture of a quiet rural life (although he never married).  But for the modern reader, Andrew Marvell says it so much better.   

"Sylva, (….to which is annexed Pomona)"

"I this day delivered my Discourse concerning Forest-trees to our Society upon occasion of certain Queries sent us by the Commissioners of his Majesties Navy: being the first Booke that was Printed by Order of the Society, & their Printer, since it was a Corporation:  "  Diary, 15 October 1662

John Evelyn, author of Sylva, by Godfrey Kneller  c. 1687

© The Royal Society