20 - White Horse II: Hill Carving
On the gnomic witness of the White Horse, True Detective 1.1-2, a sports report on the qualities of great sports managers, and Schubert's 8th and 9th Symphonies
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.
For the White Horse knew England
When there was none to know;
He saw the first oar break or bend,
He saw heaven fall and the world end,
O God, how long ago.
For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell to-day
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.
When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky
And whoso hearkened right
Could only hear the plunging
Of the nations in the night.
When the ends of the earth came marching in
To torch and cresset gleam.
And the roads of the world that lead to Rome
Were filled with faces that moved like foam,
Like faces in a dream.
And men rode out of the eastern lands,
Broad river and burning plain;
Trees that are Titan flowers to see,
And tiger skies, striped horribly,
With tints of tropic rain.
Where Ind's enamelled peaks arise
Around that inmost one,
Where ancient eagles on its brink,
Vast as archangels, gather and drink
The sacrament of the sun.
And men brake out of the northern lands,
Enormous lands alone,
Where a spell is laid upon life and lust
And the rain is changed to a silver dust
And the sea to a great green stone.
And a Shape that moveth murkily
In mirrors of ice and night,
Hath blanched with fear all beasts and birds,
As death and a shock of evil words
Blast a man's hair with white.
And the cry of the palms and the purple moons,
Or the cry of the frost and foam,
Swept ever around an inmost place,
And the din of distant race on race
Cried and replied round Rome.
And there was death on the Emperor
And night upon the Pope:
And Alfred, hiding in deep grass,
Hardened his heart with hope.
White Horse II – Hill Carving
It is tempting with Book I of Ballad of the White Horse to quote and discuss the strange and moving speech of Mary to Alfred – Mary here as the Star of the Sea, really, as she comes from the sea – but that developmental material, though important, returns later, and in fact the vital thematic material framing the whole poem gives us both a sense of the whole and of a recurrent poetic theme of the day.
Chesterton had a truly prophetic bent, in the sense of forthtelling rather than foretelling, of indicating the developing situation in moral and emotional terms, of staking out ground ahead of time. His gift at this – shared by his intellectual disciple Lewis – was not always matched with real personal judgement of contemporary events, though he usually came right in the end. He flirted with Mussolinism though not “Fascism”, for the same reason he liked to praise Jacobinism, but seeing the shape of things in Italy and the horrifying spectre rising in Germany, he repented of the business before his death. So here he can see the signs of the time but was only half-aware of how such meagre matters as actual contemporary politics and foreign policy played into them
The Ballad was published in 1911, and actually pre-empts Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (1920) and Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) by some margin. Those latter two are deeply pessimistic pieces. For Yeats, famously, things fall apart and the ceremony of innocence is to be drowned. The close of the Christian era is not just a sad fading roar as in Arnold – and indeed may not be ultimately all that “sad” – but it will be bathed in blood as an aeonic apocalypse, a revealing, occurs. Eliot is scarcely worried about any beast slouching to Bedlam, but knows too well – travelling from “Prufrock” and “Gerontion” – the pallid, slouching hopelessness of the best of his generation. The Wasteland addresses the themes of Fitzgerald very directly before Fitzgerald composed them, and Eliot answers despairingly – “Consider Phlebas…” Dick Diver could wait like Grant at Galena, but Phlebas is dead, and so shall ye be.
Chesterton says, look, the turn of the era has happened before. We’ve played this game before. He uses two main devices here in the thematic introduction and early exposition: the eponymous White Horse and the isolated figure of Alfred, counterpoised, the vasty mark on the landscape and the “real historical figure” who seems so tiny in comparison. These key figures travel through the whole poem, and are involved in the key moments of resolution at the ends of Books III, VII, and VIII, which ultimately communicate much of the dramatic and moral purposes of the whole poem.
The White Horse – “Before the gods that made the gods // Had seen their sunrise pass” – is not, for Chesterton, a pagan and dead symbol. It is mysterious, but its antiquity functionally purges it of any negative association. It is older than any petty gods, or might as well be. It was scoured from the chalk, and still is; it is a sentinel over England, and I suppose it is no coincidence for Chesterton that it is the horse that also ran in northern Europe on the banners of the wanderers Hengist and Horsa, the ancestors of Alfred, German chieftains or mythic godlings, founders of the nation.
The White Horse has seen “the end of the world” before. There is a historical perspective on events that transcends the individual, but which does not become airily abstract. The chalk speaks to us, as the bird-booming rocks at Skellig Michel and the deep desert of St Antony speak to us. Thus Chesterton preaches to Yeats and Eliot ahead of their time, and this was the lesson that Eliot took and transmuted to pure genius in the Quartets.
I mentioned in my St George essay on Chesterton that Chesterton sought to identify the “English people” as a culture – conveniently Roman Catholic, for Chesterton – that spanned many tribal groups and many migrations. The White Horse, much more ancient than the Celtic invaders and genocidaires – whither the Beaker People? – watches them all and binds them all by a strange static witness, preserved by generation after generation of proceeding Englishmen. If I scour the grass away, I somehow tie myself to the Saxon and Roman and Gaul, and to the strange unthought-of menhir raisers and horse carvers, who might be Atlantean or Elvish for all we know.
I tie myself to a past world’s end, whether I scour the White Horse in fact or in thought. Worlds end all the time; nothing so common. The most glorious era of Chinese life ended scant years after an epochal clash with the Arabs in the Tarim, in An Lushan’s rebellion. The Doge at the gates in 1204 ended more than one world, though some of those worlds were downstream by hundreds of years. The Mayans allowed the calendar to peacefully end certain worlds for them, as they abandoned cities to the tall grass and calmly migrated elsewhere.
When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky
And whoso hearkened right
Could only hear the plunging
Of the nations in the night.
When the ends of the earth came marching in
To torch and cresset gleam.
And the roads of the world that lead to Rome
Were filled with faces that moved like foam,
Like faces in a dream.
As Cavafy has it, perhaps those people became bored. Certainly they were plagued and struggled to grow food and settled their foederati on the land to do the fighting they could not do. Those last days had defiant bonfires in the encroaching night – Majorian, that Emperor who sought to catch the flying stars and pacify them and save the world; Arthur, Dux Bellorum, or whoever it was who held a kingdom for two generations between Tintagel and mid-Somerset on the undeniable archaeological record; the reformed Visigothic Kings who sought to build a Germano-Romano-Carthaginian-Hispanian civilization in the face of the most relentless and courageous invasion imaginable – and succeeded! – well, yes, those days had their last lights. But the world ended, and other barbarians, like the Visigoths, began to realize what power might hide amidst the giant-built ruins, what flame might still flicker ready to be sheltered and stroked.
A sea of chaos swept to Rome from the east and north, Chesterton says, but some – the men of the horse banner, the men who took up the dragon banner – ended up defending that which they had nine-parts-destroyed. Alfred, hiding in the grass, is one such.
Worlds can end over quite a long period. Did Roman Britain end with the legions withdrawing, or with the fall of the Gallic Empire which kept up a tenuous link across the continent, or with the fall of Rome, or the fall of the Goths or the ultimate failure of Justinian’s reconquests to salvage Italy, or the disaster at Catraeth, or – when? When can the end of that old British world be said to have ended, in turn – at one of those set points, or when Alfred won at Ethandune and set a decisive national course, or when his grandson took the English throne – or when? Suns, we are told, tend to die off over billions of years, though no-one’s been around to see this; petty human worlds sometimes die suddenly, but usually take quite long periods of time, and for a lot of that time most of the punters are quite certain nothing is happening.
Chesterton knew “all evil things // Under the twisted trees”, and wanted to offer – quite bafflingly, to an era which has seen so keenly the fallacies of hope as ours has – a course forward. Yet more bafflingly, he did not base this on “hope” or “technology” or any steady programme of sensible reform. To understand why the silent White Horse and the hiding Alfred are symbols of the only route to a new age – and we, most of us, know that we await the dawning of the new age, whether with trembling or with foiled hope – I do need to quote one passage of Mary’s word to Alfred in the marsh:
"I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
"Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?"
These are Mary’s last words. They seem, and are, paradoxical: the Christian does not have faith without hope, after all, and no ordinary man in the streets of any creed would buy into a literally aimless faith or belief. Yet Mary implies that this is what Alfred and the English need.
Mary sets Alfred into the final stage of his Dark Night: yes, there is no comfort. The sky grows dark, the sea rises. There is no way out of what comes next. You will be swamped and surrounded in darkness. So: do you still rejoice? Do you still trust and believe?
This is Mary’s vindication, the proof that joy and faith in darkness were right, and it is something the White Horse witnesses to, because the White Horse is still there and was there: This actually happened, and the floodtide of strong chaos swept all the way to one last boggy island, and Alfred won, and day dawned here and across Europe as the torchbearers carrying the sun came out one by one to build a new world.
True Detective Season 1, Episodes 1 and 2
This is a well-loved series, and it’s easy enough to see why. Immaculate vibes driven by distinctive cinematography and musical settings, career performances from the leads, a lot of culturally significant tropes executed with style. Is it good, though? Let’s consider, this far in.
True Detective is an anthology series now into its fourth iteration, each a different detective story “with a difference”. Here, starting in the relative “present”, we have two cops interviewing another cop (Woody Harrelson as Martin Hart) and an ex-cop (Matthew McConnaughey as Rustin Cohle, aka Rust) about an old case, or something connected to an old case. The majority of the action (so far, a quarter of the way in) then takes place in the past, but the “present” framing scenes are very much central.
An obvious “cult murder” is the pair’s first case together, as the obviously slightly unhinged Rust transfers to the Louisiana State Police from Texas. The victim is a prostitute, probably a drug user (or under the influence, either way), and recently involved in some sort of odd revivalist church. The murder is dramatic, in the stage sense – deer antlers atop her head, ritual posing, etc. Martin and Rust both seem (and I use the word seem intentionally; what is really going on is still very much up in the air) motivated by the case, one way or another. Martin is a respected good old boy on the force, a smart detective often taken for dumb, morally sensitive, but also a hypocritical Christian and adulterer; Cohle turns out to have spent a long time using whilst on Narcotics, is mentally a bit fried, is very very smart and given to bleak existential rants, all leading back to the death of his infant daughter in an accident.
The filming is nearly all in a desaturated but brightly lit style that emphasizes the grimy urban environments and wild, scraggly rural environments the pair drive around, following up leads. This does play up the procedural element heavily. The influence from LA Confidential seems clear, even down to the weird sex elements of the crimes. Yet there is a very different tone to Ellroy’s and Hanson’s (book and film, respectively): LA Confidential is tortured but redemptive, True Detective so far is menacing and fairly nihilistic. Perhaps this will shift – perhaps the obviously “beaten” framing of the cops in the nowadays is part of the road to redemption – but my first sense is that it is not. A pretty important theming set up is Cohle’s seemingly justified nihilism, depression, and cynicism in the face of a hypocritical world full of suffering, compared to the Governor wanting to set up a for-show task force to deal with “anti-Christian” crime, Martin’s hypocrisy, the Wire-like inefficiencies of the police force, and the rest. Yes, we’re meant to think that Rust’s apparent gratitude for his daughter’s exit from this vale of tears is a bit deranged, especially as we see Martin obviously love his two daughters (in the past), but given the brutal depictions of poverty and exploitation we’re seeing so far, who’s to say?
The leads are excellent. Even when dealing with exaggerated or unsubtle material, they offer both intensity and depth. The support cast (most importantly Michelle Monaghan and Alexandra Daddario, Martin’s wife and lover respectively) are strong. There are some very well-scripted sequences. The production-side triumph is probably the direction by Cary Joji Fukunaga, of course playing off of showrunner Nic Pizzolato’s scripts; the framing of shots is immaculate, the constant menace and mystery really starts from there.
If there is a material weakness, it is that some of the themes it wants to address and deconstruct are old hat now, and frankly were in 2012, even if they seemed bolder in the middle of Obama’s pomp. Ah, at last, someone criticising the Religious Right and traditional formulations of masculinity – a truly daring deed. Now, there is certainly scope for nuancing these positions, but when you even have good ol’ boy Martin rousting out his father-in-law for implicitly bigoted nostalgia, you know the show is setting the framing in a particular way.
“Enjoyable” is not quite the word – there are no moments of beauty or of courage or even, really, of poetry, though Rust’s dark soliloquys come close at times – but this is strong, despite the caveats. Each episode does seem to need its near-hour, though both have sections which seem long (and then seem to speed up), but at eight episodes long, I suppose this won’t really become an issue. Onwards.
Sports Report – Unai Emery’s Army
Last season, failed Arsenal chief Unai Emery was brought in to salvage Aston Villa’s season, where another relegation battle looked on the cards. Since then, a promising team with money behind it – though not recordbreaking by Premiership standards – first marched itself to sixth place and the third-tier European competition and now to fourth place and the first-tier European competition.
The team that made it back up into the Premiership, which survived relegation via coruscating form after the Covid break in 2020, which then trundled on for a season and a bit, was not an embarrassing or dull team, as the team that had gone down in 15/16 had been. Dean Smith, building on Steve Bruce’s work, had built an exciting, energetic, young team, which chiefly suffered – as far as I could tell – from being unable to defend fairly ordinary balls either crossed or driven into the centre of the pitch in the final quarter. As much as I love Tyrone Mings, I regularly laughed to hear that he was a reliable pick at centre-back for England. Great, challenging defender, contests the whole half, etc, but the number of comical errors he was involved in really beggared belief.
But there was, evidently, a ceiling for Smith’s work. A general belief, at least, is that managers have ceilings – no-one ever hired Alan Curbishley to manage a serious contender for Europe. A lot of respectable guys get brought in to rebuild a side, to manage a limited budget, to aim for a mid-table finish or to win out on a relegation battle. So maybe Deano had a ceiling. Certainly it felt like it – the talent was in the team, the money was available to improve, but Villa couldn’t press on. A short detour via Steven Gerrard followed, and was an actual disappointment. Gerrard got some good players in, a few early results looked good, and then the team sunk again to the lower-mid-table. Enter Emery.
Most of the key pieces to Emery’s success were already present: Martinez, Mings, Konsa, Cash, McGinn, Bailey, Luiz, Buendia, Watkins. Most had been successful for Smith, in fact, and then had been part of the team that had stalled. Perhaps it’s as simple as “a change being as good as a rest”. Perhaps the extra pieces (Kamara, Diaby, Digne, Tielemans, Pau Torres, Diego Carlos, Duran) made all the difference, though I doubt that. But something changed under Emery, and Villa has thrived.
What is it that marks one manager off from another, unless this is all luck? I don’t mean “basic ability” – I imagine the manager of the average seventh or eighth-tier (or tenth, eleventh, etc) football manager doesn’t just know more about football than me, but also understands vastly more about leadership, motivation, coaching tricks, etc. Dean Smith is a great manager, and so apparently is Unai Emery, but one has the juice to spur the other’s carefully-built team to glory.
Unai Emery is, probably, a man of vision. That is – probably – the difference. This is an intangible but something you see in leadership in any sector. Able leaders can build functional institutions, they can man-manage and coax team members on to better performance. Vision is a slightly different thing, and I think you catch it when you hear a manager or player talk. The talk can be rough and ready (Ferguson) or slightly obtuse (Wenger) or articulate and eloquent (Klopp), or it can be whatever Brian Clough was – maybe a bit of all three – but it’s there. The credible, intelligent, able managers come across well, whereas the visionary often does not (think Mourinho), but the difference is palpable in the listening. (Some players have this but could never transfer it to management, not seriously – listen to Eric Cantona and Roy Keane, and then recognize how loopy doopy they are, and you see what I mean.)
I know this is soft, or vague. But it’s there, isn’t it? We know how important systems are in modern, scientific sport. Sabermetrics in baseball, performance physio across all sports, safety equipment in gridiron (look at those new dumb hats). Tactics analysis is at a level it basically could not have been in the ‘90s. Tech has changed a lot. But we also see how day-to-day leadership decisions – Dusty Baker’s love affair with Martin Maldonado, to take a painful one in recent Astros memory – and how dressing room management affect things. We see how individual performances by players and individual insights by managers resurrect broken teams – compare England in the Windies in 2022 to *the very next match* under Stokes and McCullum.
Sports management – Unai Emery and his Army – seems to me to be a distinct proof of some version of Great Man Theory. Systems, after all, need parts, and the body needs the brain to direct it. If Unai Emery at Aston Villa is simply an inevitable structural result of the great engines of modern industrial soccer, I at least as a Villa fan thank the Machine Gods. But I suspect we are in the presence of something rather more special.
Schubert’s 8th and 9th Symphonies
Herbert Blomsted conducts the Gewandhausorchester performing Schubcert’s final two significant symphonic pieces. A complication: Schubert didn’t finish the 8th (it is, indeed, the famous “Unfinished” Symphony), and in fact sketched another unfinished symphony between the 8th and 9th; and, indeed, he leaves us significant elements of four other unfinished symphonies. But the traditional numbering is useful for pointing us to relatively completeness, and the 8th is probably the most popular of the Symphonies.
This is, surely, for the reasons it is also called the “first Romantic symphony” (this is a clever way to distinguish Advanced Schubert-Chopinian Thought from the Primal Beethoven Power, largely on grounds of temper and expression). I don’t mean the subtle changes to the sonata form, but rather the fuzzy, emotive composition, the odd patternings, the use of time (the whole of the 8th is in triple meter). Beethoven is, plainly, the first Romantic Symphonist, but as a whole mode of thought, Schubert moves from an earlier Classical discipline – wholly shared by Beethoven – to something more interior and more direct. Ironically, of course, Classical music was supposed to be, at least, direct, much more direct than Bachian Baroque, but no revolution ends after the first movement (the 8th Symphony got so far as two and a half movements before dying out…), and Romanticism presses the priority of immediacy far beyond what C.P.E. or J.C. or W.G.M (work it out) could have imagined.
The 8th is about big sound, big effect – or at least that is part of what it is about. A rather cheap but accurate line can be drawn between, say, Beethoven’s 5th and the brooding soundscapes of Bruckner, stopping via this rather important Unfinished station. Now, there is a sweet pastoral flute which has earned some fame in the second movement, but this is of the nature of the pre-storm music in the Pastoral: it is set up, which leads to first dramatic and then enriched instrumentation, in which the gently dancing wind instruments slide in and out, first retreating and then advancing, to be joined by high and stressed strings backed by an almost tragic brass line. The effect is of a kind with key passages in Beethoven, in Chopin, in Grieg, in Mendelssohn; an imaginative presentation of the dual effect and reality of nature, red in tooth and claw as one Romantic had it, and in some sense divine in its balance and pattern, as another preferred.
The 9th is more settled and integrated, but quite as Romantic, if not more. The thematic material at the head of the first movement, with a restrained trumpet clarion followed by exposition and repetition, is perfectly “classical” to our ears, but even more experimental and controversial to contemporaries. There are hunting call returns which make one think of Mozart, but structurally it is rebellious, and instrumentally it is difficult (or, rather, was at the time). And it’s long! Aside from Beethoven, we rightly think of the “long symphony” as an event of the late 19th century, with Bruckner and Mahler as its chief though not only exponents, but Schubert’s 8th runs to an hour, and uses that space somewhat flamboyantly. It is all in sonata form, with stylistic differentiation in the third movement still fitting that form.
The sonata established itself as peculiarly important to the earlier Romantics, following upon Beethoven’s heels, and perhaps because of its somewhat recursive, self-referential nature; theme, development, recapitulation. There is an irony that this is not so different in one sense to the Baroque absorption with Variations, but the Baroque composer typically is demonstrating a musical and technical sense, a skill and an enlightened appreciation of beauty, where the Romantic composer seems to express something of themselves in the back-and-forth, echoing, returning sonata.
This is very much the shape of Schubert’s 9th, a majestic series of really rather spinning movements, tied to each other by certain motifs, of course, but more by an emotional unity, a sense of high things considered or, perhaps, more felt than considered. The Baroque often elevates the human soul by sublimating it in views of higher things, but the Romantic offers the interior experience of being so elevated. The latter is showier, usually more accessible and immediately enjoyable, perhaps less fine at its best, but rarely is it done more sweetly and boldly than in late Schubert, and the 9th is the apogee of this in turn, resolving in the playful, dancing 4th Movement which is Schubert at his most joyful, and that joy translates (and, indeed, it quotes Beethoven’s 9th, showing Schubert knew his aim clearly). Both the 8th and the 9th capture a moment – a lengthy moment – of experimentation in Schubert, and though the 8th is more popular now, the 9th is really the more finished piece in more than the obvious sense.