Rupert Preston Bell

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

Tuesday, 3 December 2024

When Beethoven met Mozart

Beethoven playing for Mozart - 19th Century artist unknown

It's fascinating to imagine how the music and the lives of Mozart (1756-91) and Beethoven (1770-1827), born just 14 years apart, would have interconnected, had Mozart not died so young. That Beethoven was inspired by and revolutionised what he learnt from Mozart’s music is well known. But as it is, we know of only one possible meeting between the two, in a short period early in 1787.

Beethoven was known to be a promising keyboard player as he grew up in Bonn. His father (also a musician) had made some efforts to promote him as a child prodigy, after hearing about Leopold Mozart’s success with the young Wolfgang. He progressed quickly, and by his mid-teens was employed as Court Organist.

Then, in the Spring of 1787, aged 16, Beethoven visited Vienna as he explored his prospects as a professional musician. Mozart, now 31, had been established in Vienna since leaving Salzburg in 1781 and was famous - at a productive and relatively successful stage of his life. The Marriage of Figaro had been warmly received in Vienna and Prague, and Don Giovanni would be a success the next year. If Beethoven did have a chance of meeting with him and receiving some tuition or recommendations, he would surely have taken it.

Accounts of the possible meeting differ, and scholars treat them with scepticism. The 19th-century biographer Otto Jahn said that he had it “on good authority” that Beethoven had played to Mozart and impressed him with his improvisation, but he gives no actual evidence for this. (More credible is his claim that Beethoven heard Mozart play, because Beethoven's student Carl Czerny told him that Beethoven had described Mozart’s keyboard style, saying he "had a fine but choppy way of playing, no ligato."

A more detailed account is given by the contemporary musician Ignaz von Seyfried, who could be considered an informed witness, given that he claimed to have been a pupil of Mozart’s and conducted the premiere of Beethoven’s Fidelio. His memoirs are considered reliable in other matters, but sadly this story isn’t considered infallible. For one thing, he places the meeting in 1790, which must be an error. Anyway, he wrote:

‘Beethoven made a short stay at Vienna, in the year 1790, whither he had gone for the sake of hearing Mozart, to whom he had letters of introduction. Beethoven improvised before Mozart, who listened with some indifference, believing it to be a piece learned by heart. Beethoven then demanded, with his characteristic ambition, a given theme to work out; Mozart, with a sceptical smile, gave him at once a chromatic motivo for a fugue, in which, al rovescio, the countersubject for a double fugue lay concealed. Beethoven was not intimidated, and worked out the subject, the secret intention of which he immediately perceived, at great length and with such remarkable originality and power that Mozart's attention was riveted, and his wonder so excited that he stepped softly into the adjoining room where some friends were assembled, and whispered to them with sparkling eyes: "Don't lose sight of this young man, he will one day tell you some things that will surprise you!" ‘

It sounds a little romanticised – perhaps too much the story we would want to be true. But it’s certainly very possible that they met, and, if so, Mozart would surely have recognised something special in the young man about whom people were already talking as a great talent - although one biographer (Maynard Solomon) speculates that Mozart heard Beethoven play but rejected him as a pupil because of his own preoccupations.

After some weeks in Vienna, Beethoven returned to Bonn to see his mother, who was in poor health and died in July. The next few years would be arduous for him as he helped support his family after his alcoholic father’s departure from court service.

Mozart’s fortunes worsened after 1787, although in his final years he produced some of his greatest works. He conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute in September 1791, but was dead of an illness by the end of the year.

Beethoven returned to Vienna in 1792 after getting to know Haydn, with whom he went on to study. His friend and supporter Count Waldstein wrote to him: "You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long-frustrated wishes ... With the help of assiduous labour you shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands."

See also:
When Proust met Wilde

When Wellington met Nelson

When Donne met Kepler
When Chekhov met Tolstoy
When Leonardo met Michaelangelo

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

Tuesday, 25 June 2024

When Proust met Wilde

“Ils s’entre-regardèrent avec une curiosité complexe”

The story goes that Marcel Proust met Oscar Wilde at a salon in Paris and invited him home afterwards, only for Wilde to turn on his heel and walk out the minute he saw Mme Proust’s furniture.

What a great anecdote it is, leaving us wondering what these two great aesthetes would have made of each other if they’d spent more time together. But is it true?

The tale comes from the French biographer Philippe Jullian, who put the meeting at the end of 1891. At this time, Proust was just 20, living with his parents, a young man trying to climb the social ladder, with little published but great aspirations. Wilde, meanwhile, was at the height of his popularity, in France as well as Britain. It was the year he wrote his French play Salome, to great acclaim in France (though it was banned in Britain as the depiction of Biblical characters on stage was forbidden at the time). He was so celebrated that, when he attended the Moulin Rouge earlier that year, the poet Stuart Merrill recalled that “The habitués took him for the prince of some fabulous realm of the North”. He made friends with Émile Zola and André Gide, and met Victor Hugo at least once.

Here is what Jullian says, based on what he heard many years later from the grandsons of the hostess in whose salon they were introduced.

C'est [Jacques-Emile Blanche] qui, chez Mme Baignères, réunit une fois encore Wilde et Proust. Wilde est très touché de l'enthousiasme que témoigne Proust pour la littérature anglaise, des questions si intelligentes qu'il lui pose sur Ruskin ou George Eliot, et accepte de bonne grâce un dîner chez Marcel, boulevard Haussmann. Le soir de ce dîner, Proust, retenu chez Mme Lemaire, arrive très essoufflé, deux minutes en retard : il demande au domestique : « Est-ce que le monsieur anglais est là ? - Oui, Monsieur, il est arrivé il y a cinq minutes; à peine est-il entré au salon qu'il a demandé la salle de bains et n'en est plus sorti. » - Marcel court au bout du couloir. - « Mr. Wilde, êtes-vous souffrant ? - Ah, vous voilà, cher monsieur Proust, - Wilde paraît majestueusement - non je ne suis pas souffrant le moins du monde. Je pensais avoir le plaisir de dîner en tête à tête avec vous, mais on m'a fait entrer dans le salon. J'ai regardé ce salon et, au fond de ce salon, il y avait vos parents, alors le courage m'a manqué. Adieu, cher monsieur Proust, adieu... » Proust, lui, devait raconteur que Wilde avait fait des remarques désagréables sur le mobilier du salon, disant, tout comme Robert de Montesquiou et le baron de Charlus : « Comme c'est laid chez vous. »

The account is colourful, but unfortunately doesn’t quite add up. It was written much later, and relies on third-hand evidence. Later biographers are inclined to think the story apocryphal, finding that Proust had not read either Ruskin or Eliot by that date, and that he didn’t live at the Haussmann address until 15 years later.

Yet the story has considerable allure, and the reference to them meeting “once again” is itself suggestive; if they frequented the same salons they might have bumped into each other even if this anecdote isn’t true.

And indeed there’s another mention of a possible meeting between Wilde and Proust, in the memoires of the poet Fernand Gregh. He wrote that they both attended the salon of Mme Arman de Caillavet: “je me rappelle un mot spirituel et exact de Mme Arnan qui l'avait reçu à dîner en même temps que Marcel Proust (ils s’entre-regardèrent avec une curiosité complexe)…”

Somehow, this seems more authentic. And the similarities between the lives and writings of the two suggests they would have been intrigued by each other. Proust references Wilde’s writing in later life, although rather disparagingly. And he alludes to Wilde in A la recherche du temps perdu, though not by name. It’s generally accepted that he based the haughty homosexual character Charlus partly on Wilde. And when Proust introduces Charlus, he writes: "He was staring at me, his eyes dilated with extreme attentiveness." Fancifully, we might even attribute this to a memory of the supposed meeting.

After his imprisonment and disgrace, Wilde fled back to France, ending up in Paris, where he subsided in poverty, sex and alcohol. There were rumours that Proust paid secret visits to Wilde at the Hôtel des Beaux Arts where he spent the last weeks of his life, but of this there is no evidence.

References

William C Carter: Marcel Proust, A Life. Yale University Press, 2000.
Emily Eells. “Proust and Wilde: "Une curiosite complexe" - Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui, vol. 7, 2009, pp. 89–106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44869708
https://proustproject.blogspot.com/2010/07/days-after-edmund-whites-proust.html
https://proust-personnages.fr/les-personnages-de-la-recherche/personnages/charlus/
https://francetoday.com/travel/paris/oscar-wilde-in-paris/
https://glreview.org/article/prousts-sources/

See also:
When Wellington met Nelson

When Donne met Kepler
When Chekhov met Tolstoy
When Leonardo met Michaelangelo

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

Friday, 1 March 2024

When Wellington met Nelson

One of many copies of a lost painting
by John Prescott Knight,
imagining the famous meeting

I used to think of Nelson and Wellington as brothers in arms – Britain’s two preeminent military leaders of the Napoleonic wars, working together to defeat Napoleon on land and at sea. But in fact their careers barely overlapped, with Wellington serving abroad while Nelson was becoming famous at home, and a whole decade between Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815).

And they met only once.

This chance meeting took place on the 12th of September 1805, when Lord Castlereagh, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, had invited Nelson and Wellington (then Major General Wellesley, not yet a Duke) for consultations. The two men could easily have missed each other, but Castlereagh was running late and as they waited for their separate appointments they enjoyed a profitable conversation – though only after an embarrassing start.

Britain at this time was at the height of anxiety. 160,000 French troops were massed just across the Channel and had been threatening invasion for some time. A few weeks before, Austria had re-entered the war to join the alliance against France, but no-one in Britain yet knew that this had persuaded Napoleon to postpone the invasion.

Wellesley had recently returned from India, having distinguished himself by his success in several battles against India forces sympathetic to the French. Like Nelson, he was personally brave and had learned the value of decisive aggression against the enemy, even when outnumbered. He was also known to be meticulous in his planning. But he was nine years younger and not yet a household name.

Wellesley recognised Nelson easily enough. But he later recounted how Nelson had no idea who he was. This account was made by Wellington in later life, in 1834, in conversation with John Wilson Croker, who wrote: “We were talking of Lord Nelson, and some instances were mentioned of the egotism and vanity that derogated from his character”.

Croker goes on to quote Wellington's response as follows:

“I am not surprised at such instances, for Lord Nelson was, in different circumstances, two quite different men, as I myself can vouch, though I only saw him once in my life, and for, perhaps an hour. It was soon after I returned from India. I went to the Colonial Office in Downing Street, and there I was shown into a little waiting room on the right hand, where I found, also waiting to see the Secretary of State, a gentleman, whom from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognised as Lord Nelson.

"He could not know who I was, but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversations, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me.

"I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man both in manner and matter. All that I had thought of charlatan style had vanished and he talked of the state of the country and of the aspect and probability of affairs on the continent with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects at home and abroad that surprised me... In fact he talked like an officer and a statesman.

"The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly for the last half or three-quarters of an hour I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.”

We don’t know what insights Nelson may have given that were of such interest to Wellington, although in her biography of Wellington, Elizabeth Longford asserts that “Nelson undoubtedly helped to form the future Duke of Wellington’s ideal of the great captain who could see far beyond his own flagship or headquarters”. According to another account of the meeting, published in the Edinburgh Review of 1838, the two men exchanged compliments. Wellesley congratulated Nelson on his recent decisive victories, and Nelson said he hoped Wellesley would be given the opportunity lead an expedition against the French on the continent.

And Nelson left no record of what he thought about the encounter. He took to sea again the very next day, and they never had the chance to meet again, of course, because six weeks later he lay dying on the deck of his flagship, HMS Victory, having just won the Battle of Trafalgar.

So, their meeting was a stroke of luck. Croker quotes Wellington (who was keen on talking about the hand of Providence) as saying: “Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior person.”

Longford suggests that “it is by no means impossible that Castlereagh did it on purpose”, to bring the two men together.

References

- Saul David: All the King’s Men, Penguin 2013
- Elizabeth Longford: Wellington: Years of the Sword, Literary Guild 1969
- The Croker Papers, Vol II p.35

See also:
When Donne met Kepler
When Chekhov met Tolstoy
When Leonardo met Michaelangelo

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

Thursday, 1 February 2024

When Donne met Kepler

On 23rd October 1619, the poet John Donne, newly in holy orders and taking part in his first and only overseas diplomatic mission, dropped in on the astronomer Johannes Kepler on his way to Vienna. Two of the great and ingenious thinkers of their generation, the two men really had little in common, but they shared a natural curiosity and a restlessness about bringing order to their understanding of the universe.

We have evidence that they talked about Kepler’s latest discoveries. But perhaps the most curious thing about this meeting is what they did not talk about.

Astronomy at this time was at its most controversial. Kepler was among those whose work called into question the orthodox view that the universe was a fixed and perfect creation. He demonstrated that planets move in ellipses, not circles, and he wrote about his observations of the creation of new stars (supernovas).

Meanwhile, Galileo’s pioneering use of telescopes was gathering evidence that supported Copernicus’ theory that the sun, and not the earth, was at the centre of the known universe. But in 1615, the Inquisition pronounced the Copernican theory heretical, and books that favoured it, including Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, were banned.

Donne knew about Kepler and had read his book De Stella Nova (Of New Stars), published in 1606. We know this because two years later Donne mentions it in Biathanatos, a tract arguing that committing suicide is not necessarily a sin. Donne used Kepler’s description of supernovas as evidence that medieval and classical authorities, such as Aristotle who had said that stars were immutable, could be wrong.

Now, knowing of King James I’s interest in astronomy (James had visited Kepler’s predecessor as Imperial Mathematician, Tycho Brahe, in Denmark thirty years earlier), Kepler was keen to meet the English delegation that had appeared on his doorstep. He wanted their help promoting his new book to the King. This latest work, Harmonia Mundi (Harmony of the World) mentions his discovery of a connection between the length of time it takes a planet to complete an orbit and its average distance from the sun.

Donne by this time was at a turning point in his life. His wife, whom he’d married for love and at great social disadvantage, had recently died, and now as a priest he was reluctantly accompanying James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, in a delicate diplomatic mission to Bavaria.

Passing through Linz, he had an unmissable opportunity to exchange some ideas with the famous astronomer. But what did they talk about?

Donne and Kepler were very different characters. Kepler, a man of empirical rigour, was physically frail and not the man of the world that Donne had been in his youth; a Lutheran, he refused to convert to Catholicism when that would have been advantageous, while Donne famously abandoned his Catholic upbringing. And one way of looking at their meeting could be as a clash of faith vs reason, because Donne did express disquiet with new science. In An Anatomy of the World, he wrote that "new philosophy calls all in doubt… Freely men confess that this world's spent When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new... Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone". And yet this is too neat. Donne loved nothing more than playing with ideas and metaphor, ingeniously adopting scientific ideas in his poetry.

Perhaps Donne’s speculative nature was brought down to earth, as it were, by Kepler’s academic scruples. But the only surviving evidence that the meeting took place at all shows only that they talked about Kepler’s book and his desire to promote it.

This is a letter written by Kepler to a relation in England, asking for help in this task. The letter says: “I have talked with a Doctor of Theology named Donne, who was travelling with His Royal Majesty's envoy, Mr. Doncastre [sic], -and appeared here on October 23… I told him that I had ordered the dedication copies [presumably of Harmonia Mundi dedicated to King James], and added that, because I had seen the envoy here, I wanted to ask his Grace to convey and commend the work.”

That’s it. It’s all we know about their conversation, except that it’s likely to have been undertaken in Latin, the usual lingua franca. But we can be sure they did not talk about an odd way in which their intellectual paths had crossed already.

This concerned Kepler’s Somnium (The Dream), a work featuring an imagined voyage to the Moon, which was circulating in manuscript. In the book, the mother of the narrator summons a demon, and Kepler became very upset that gossip began to spread identifying this character with Kepler’s own mother, who was in fact accused of witchcraft.

Kepler was so sensitive to this that he took offence at even slight provocations. One instance is in a later revised version of Somnium, in which he wrote: "If I am not mistaken, the author of that insolent satire called Ignatius, His Conclave, got hold of a copy of this little work of mine; for he stings me by name at the very beginning”.

The remark in Ignatius in question is a sceptical jibe at scholars’ employment of reason without faith. It refers first to Galileo “who of late hath summoned the other worlds, the Stars to come neerer to him, and give him an account of themselves" and then Kepler “who (as himselfe testifies of himself)…that no new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge”.

What Kepler can’t have known, was that Donne was the author. Ignatius, His Conclave was published anonymously in 1611 and Donne’s authorship not recognised until after his death.

As it was, Donne sailed on to Vienna, arriving in early November. Doncaster’s mission to help negotiate peace between Catholic and Protestant factions on the continent was unsuccessful, and Donne never took part in anything similar again, becoming Dean of St Paul’s in 1621. But it’s interesting that in the meantime, in 1620, Donne’s friend Sir Henry Wotton visited Kepler, to try to persuade him to move to England.

Kepler’s mother died in 1621, shortly after an official accusation of witchcraft, which she continued to deny. Kepler and Donne died within a few months of each other in 1630/31.

References
- Katherine Rundell: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Faber, 2022.
- Jeremy Bernstein: ‘Heaven’s Net: The Meeting of John Donne and Johannes Kepler’. The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 2, 1997 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41212614.
- R. Chris Hassel, Jr: ‘Donne's "Ignatius His Conclave" and the New Astronomy’. Modern Philology. Vol. 68, No. 4 (May, 1971), https://www.jstor.org/stable/436567

See also:
When Chekhov met Tolstoy
When Leonardo met Michaelangelo

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

References
https://russianlife.com/the-russia-file/when-chekhov-met-tolstoy/
https://russianlife.com/the-russia-file/cycling-with-the-count/
https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/326317-7-renowned-russian-bike-riders
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy/Fiction-after-1880
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/11/tolstoy-thought-chekhov-worse-than-shakespeare

Monday, 11 December 2023

When Chekhov met Tolstoy

Chekhov and Tolstoy at a subsequent meeting, in Gaspra in 1901

It’s a curious and entertaining picture. The first meeting of these two giants of Russian literature taking place, on 8th August 1895, up to their necks in water at Tolstoy’s estate, with Tolstoy’s beard floating out in front of him on the water.

Chekhov caught a cold while he was there. Could it have been because the two men had their first conversation while bathing? This is the story told by one Aleksei Ivanovich Yakovlev, who as an impressionable student visited Chekhov two years after the incident. He recounted (some years after both writers’ deaths) that “on their arrival (Chekhov was not alone, this was early morning), [Tolstoy] brought him to bathe, and their first conversation happened up to their necks in the water”.

There’s an entertaining essay about this meeting in Russian Life, in which the author quotes the biographer Elif Batuman: “… Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chin-deep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.”

Alas, Russian Life suggests that “Chekhov was kidding young Yakovlev”. It seems not to match other first-hand accounts. According to the article: “Chekhov mentioned his visit a handful of times in letters over the next two months of 1895, and he didn’t recount bathing with Tolstoy then, and he seems never to have mentioned it to anyone else. Neither did Tolstoy…” So the beard-floating episode probably didn’t happen.

But cyclist-watching did. Later that day, we learn, Tolstoy suggested to his various guests they should join him in walking up to the main road “to see how our young people bicycle to Tula”, a city nearby. Why? Cycling was still something of a novelty and not entirely respectable, but Tolstoy was an enthusiast and had recently taken it up as a hobby. In his diary of that year he wrote: "I began to learn how to ride the bicycle at the [Moscow] Manège. It's very strange that I am attracted to this… I don't feel ashamed. On the contrary, I feel that this is a form of natural idiocy, that I don't care what people think, that it is sinless and fun in a childlike way." 25 April, 1895

Chekhov had recently bought a country estate not too far away, and was in the middle of a creative period in which he was writing short stories. We know the two writers talked about the novel Tolstoy was writing at the time, Resurrection. And Chekhov was able to correct a factual detail about prison sentences. During the visit, Tolstoy also asked Chekhov for help in getting accommodation for an old soldier who had gone blind.

It certainly seems that the meeting was friendly, with Chekhov no doubt expressing his admiration for the older writer (Tolstoy was 67 and Chekhov 35). They enjoyed mutual respect, and in due course Tolstoy was said to love Chekhov dearly, though they disagreed on certain issues. They would meet several more times. But Tolstoy remained the dominant father figure, tormenting Chekhov at what might have been their last meeting with a famously damning comment. According to an account by Chekhov of a visit to Tolstoy in Gaspra, “He was bedridden due to illness. Among other things, he spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, 'Kiss me goodbye.' While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man's voice, 'You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.'"

See also:
When Leonardo met Michaelangelo

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

https://nicofranz.art/en/leonardo-da-vinci/anonimo-magliabechiano-the-life-of-leonardo-da-vinci-1545

Saturday, 11 February 2023

When Leonardo da Vinci met Michaelangelo

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the established genius and Michelangelo (1475-1564) the young prodigy when their working lives overlapped. But rivalry led to mutual dislike, and they kept their distance.

Their relationship has been talked about ever since. How often did they meet? Were they so very different? But there is just one account of a meeting between the two. It shows them barely on speaking terms.

Things were certainly not going to go well after 1504, when they were put in direct competition with each other. In 1503, Leonardo had been commissioned to paint a battle scene - The Battle of Anghiari – in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. He was immensely famous by this stage (the Mona Lisa was recently finished), and was the obvious choice for a project. But the young and rather dashing Michaelangelo began to muscle in. Leonardo had had to take part in a committee decision about where to place his famous sculpture, David, and it ended up in prime position on the square right outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Then the governing officials decided to invite Michaelangelo to paint another scene - The Battle of Cascina - for the very same room in the Palazzo.

The artist Giorgio Vasari gives us an insight into the relations between the men in his Life of Leonardo, written in around 1560. He tells us: “There was great dislike between Leonardo and Michelangelo, and the competition between the two was to blame for Michelangelo leaving Florence... When Leonardo heard this, he also left and went to France, where the king owned several works of his and was very fond of him.”

Vasari’s might seem to suggest that the artists fled from each other. In fact, Michaelangelo was invited by the Pope to work in Rome in 1505, and the next year Leonardo was summoned to return to Milan. But they may have jumped at the chances nonetheless. And their joint project remained unfinished.

It seems to have been before this time, however, in Florence, that our meeting took place, (according to Jonathan Jones in his book The Lost Battles). The single source for the story is an anecdote in a manuscript known as the Codice Magliabecchiano, apparently written in the 1540s and attributed to Bernardo Vecchietti, which contains surveys of the lives of famous artists, old and new.

We are in a public meeting place at the Palazzo Spini Feroni, near Santa Trinita. Leonardo and his friend Giovanni di Gavina arrive on the scene, encountering a gathering of men, who are discussing a passage in Dante. According to the account: They called Leonardo over and told him to explain it to them. And when Michelangelo happened to pass by and was called by one of them, Leonardo replied, "Michelangelo will declare it himself." Michelangelo, thinking that he had said this to mock him, replied angrily, "You too should be able to explain it, for you made a drawing of a model to cast it in bronze, and could not cast it, and out of shame left it alone." And having said this, he cut them off and left, whereupon Leonardo remained, blushing.

To understand the insult thrown by Michaelangelo, we need to go back to an incident by then a few years old, that was obviously still a talking point. Leonardo was known for numerous unfinished projects – as Vasari comments: “He would have achieved great things as a scholar in the sciences if he had been less fickle and changeable. But he undertook many things and very soon abandoned those he had begun” – but on this occasion, circumstances went beyond his control.

Leonardo was commissioned to provide a bronze equestrian monument for Ludovico Sforza in Milan in the 1480s, and he planned something grand – and huge. The finished piece would be 20 ft high and bigger than any bronze statue had ever been. Leonardo worked on different designs and models for years, and by 1493 had produced a full-size model. But he never had the chance to finish it, because with the French threatening invasion, the Sforzas used the bronze that Leonardo has stockpiled to make cannons for the defence of the city. In the event, the French did invade in 1499, and had fun using the model horse as target practice.

This very public failure must have become a touchy subject for Leonardo, so the insult was telling (if not very original). Vasari remarks: “as envy often causes people to judge maliciously, there were those who thought that Leonardo had begun it like other of his works so that it would not be completed.”

But that wasn’t quite the end of the encounter. The manuscript’s account then goes on to say that Michaelangelo threw one more insult as he left, along the lines of: “and to think you were believed by those castrated Milanese cockerels!”

So much can be, and has been, read into these few lines of manuscript. Jonathan Jones interprets this last insult as a reference to Leonardo’s ambiguous sexuality. And in order to explain Michaelangelo’s anger, novelist Stephanie Storey imagines an earlier encounter when she has Leonardo pointedly humiliate him in public, for no apparent reason other than that he dresses scruffily.

Anyway, after 1506 Leonardo returned to visit Florence at least once but he never lived there again. He and Michaelangelo couldn’t avoid each other for good, though. In 1513 Leonardo went to Rome to work for the Pope at a time when both Michelangelo and Raphael were there as well. There is no specific record of them meeting again, but presumably they remained well aware of each other’s work, and Leonardo will have had the opportunity to enter the Sistine Chapel and inspect – perhaps with grudging appreciation - its fresh new ceiling.

https://nicofranz.art/en/leonardo-da-vinci/vasari-biography-of-leonardo-da-vinci

https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-michelangelo-rivalry-inspiration-artists/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/25/lost-battles-jones-michelangelo-davinci

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25898723-oil-and-marble

See also:

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

Sources include
https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/locations/netherlands/leiden/meeting-with-freud/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23439545/
https://www.npr.org/2010/07/02/128192566/a-composer-on-the-couch-mahler-meets-freud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler

When Shaw met Kipling

Thursday, 19 January 2023

When Mahler met Freud

In 1910, at a desperate time in his life, though at the height of his fame, Gustav Mahler decided to seek the advice of the equally celebrated Sigmund Freud.

He had returned to Europe after an exhausting tour of America, just before which he had suffered the devastating loss of his daughter Maria, and he had been diagnosed with a form of heart disease.

And that Summer he discovered that his wife was involved with another man.

After a couple of cancellations – perhaps he was wary of what he would learn – Mahler eventually arranged to meet Freud in Leiden in Holland, on 26 August.

Freud and his family were on holiday and staying nearby, but were about to leave for Italy. So this was Mahler’s last chance. Freud took the tram into town, and they spent four hours together, meeting at The Gilded Turk café and walking through the botanical gardens until late in the evening.

It seems they found an immediate rapport. Indeed, despite Freud lacking much interest in music, they had much in common, with their Viennese backgrounds and being of a similar age (Mahler was 50 and Freud 54). Freud had also travelled to America. They were pre-eminently deep thinkers.

Freud apparently said he’d never met anyone who so quickly understood the nature of psychoanalysis.

Various accounts of this meeting speculate on how Freud would have analysed Mahler, and what advice he might have offered. We know that Mahler told his life story – plenty enough to occupy the four-hour walk. He would have related episodes from his emotionally traumatic childhood: his violent father, the untimely death of his brother Ernst, and, we can assume, the incident he related elsewhere when he rushed from the house to escape hearing his parents quarrel, and was stopped short by the music of a barrel organ playing, incongruously, an amusing folk melody - an experience that he drew on in juxtaposing extremes of emotion and context in his music.

Recent events would also have occupied them. Mahler had had to leave his post at the Vienna Opera, and, the main reason for the meeting, his wife Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius. (After Mahler’s death, Alma and Gropius would marry, and he went on to found of the Bauhaus school of architecture after the war.)

Psychoanalysts agree that Freud would have identified a mother fixation. For Mahler, Alma Mahler had become a mother figure, whom he could not bear to lose. Throughout their life together, he and Alma had wild, obsessive swings from being utterly devoted to desperately needing to get away from each other. Notoriously, Mahler wrote her a letter before their marriage, explaining that her life would have to be committed and subordinated entirely to his in order for him to achieve his musical vocation: "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner”, he wrote, demanding that she abandon her own musical ambitions, including composing. We know that Freud told Mahler that this was damaging, and after the meeting Mahler did encourage Alma to compose. He also dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her – it received a triumphant first performance in Munich in September that year.

However, Alma kept up her relationship with Gropius, albeit discreetly. The meeting with Freud seems to have been helpful, but the two never met again. Mahler died just eight months later, in May 2011.

When Shaw met Kipling

Friday, 10 June 2022

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich

There are two female English religious figures of the middles ages who are famous above all others because their writings survive them: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. And it’s rather wonderful to know that, despite their very different stories, in around 1413 they actually met.

Their encounter is described by Margery, in her autobiographical work now known as The Book of Margery Kempe.

Julian of Norwich, famously author of Revelations of Divine Love with its best-known lines “All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well”, received many visitors while living the life of an urban hermit. She was an anchoress, living a secluded life of prayer in a small cell attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich. This peculiar form of monasticism was fairly widespread in the middle ages. Anchorites or anchoresses were expected to live alone but also to be part of their community. They would see people who came to seek advice, in the way that they have of oracles and holy people since ancient times.

And one of these visitors was Margery, who says in her book that she made the short journey from King’s Lynn to Norwich and spent “many days” in conversation with Julian. This suggests that they might have got on rather well – although we only have Margery’s word for it – despite having little in common.

In this essay Margery is described as “a medieval celebrity”, “brash, loud and unapologetic” and “a wife and woman about town, mother to at least fourteen children” who persuaded her husband to become celibate and made a number of pilgrimages, including to Jerusalem, after she started experiencing visions. She must have been a person of considerable determination and energy.

By contrast, Julian comes across in her delicate, mystical writing as rather more modest. She didn’t travel anywhere, living sealed up in her cell and meeting visitors through a small window.

It was Margery’s brushes with ecclesiastical authority that made her seek advice, as her habit of falling into fits of crying made people suspect she was possessed, and she had been accused of heresy. Were her visions godly or diabolic? She travelled from her home in King’s Lynn to Norwich and consulted first a priest who became her confessor, then a white friar, and then, she writes, she “was bidden by Our Lord to go to an Anchoress in the same city [Norwich], who was called Dame Julian” to be reassured that she was doing God’s will and not the Devil’s.

We only have her word for it, but Margery’s account is clear that each of her counsellors gave her the reassurance she was seeking, especially Julian. “The anchoress, hearing the marvellous goodness of our Lord, highly thanked God with all her heart for his visitation, advising this creature to be obedient to the will of our Lord and fulfil with all her might whatever he put into her soul, if it were not against the worship of God and the profit of her fellow Christians.” And Margery says Julian told her to “set all your trust in God and fear not the language of the world, for the more despite, shame and reproof that you have in the world, the greater is your merit in the sight of God”. Read Margery's full account here.

They might have made a peculiar duo, but Margery emphasises that their meeting lasted “many days… conversing in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ”. She says she came away feeling validated, strengthened to continue the idiosyncratic path she had chosen in celebrating her faith. Given her strong personality, it’s possible that Margery did most of the talking, and one wonders whether Julian was pleased or sorry to see her go.

The novelist Victoria Mackenzie has recently reimagined the lives of these two women in her book For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain.

References
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2017/08/25/milton-galileo-affinities-art-science/
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/milton-visiting-galileo-when-a-prisoner-of-the-inquisition-125949

Monday, 28 February 2022

Existential dread

There were just a few days between the lifting of the last legal Covid restrictions in England and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Happy days. Now, with Russian tanks bearing down on Kyiv and Putin talking about nuclear weapons, more than one commentator has remarked that as well as ‘living with the virus’ we are going to have to learn to live again with the 'existential dread' of East-West conflict and mutual incomprehension. I certainly recognise that from my childhood.

How did we live through all those years of Cold War, with the actual idea of a nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds, not knowing how things would end? I remember sitting in a history classroom at school - maybe in about 1980 - in an upper floor building where of course the windows were too high for you to gaze out of, with a map of Europe and a large facsimile of Picasso's Guernica at the front - thinking just that: how will things ever change? How could they ever, when opposing ideologies are so entrenched and propaganda so effective?

This is what the next generation may be entering, as another Iron Curtain threatens to fall across Europe, and it dawns on me not to patronise them with stories of how we soldiered on regardless. If they are scared, they have every right to be. They have lived through Covid. They saw democratic politics shaken by Trump. They expect they will live to find out whether we do manage to escape irreversible climate change by 2050. Now they have to live with global political upheaval, and the economic consequences of that at the least.

But perhaps they can look back on the Covid lockdowns to remember that solutions can be found and the unexpected does happen, in the same way that I can look back at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I am also heartened by reports of protests in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine – mostly by young people it seems, who are quickly arrested. They will not change anything now, but they show that Putin is a rogue actor, another Stalin, who does not speak for his nation, least of all its youngest members.

During most of my adult life, after the fall of Communism, we thought the world was heading in one direction - slowly and painfully, but inevitably - towards a greater unity and fellow-feeling; towards the Arthur C Clarke vision of a single planetary union, where barriers are broken down, racial differences are forgotten and wealth is more efficiently created and better shared. We witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and a reunited Europe, Nelson Mandela released and transforming South Africa, the first black American president, computing and the internet making communication instantaneous. And the brilliant, happy and unifying success of the 2012 London Olympics seems to represent that whole period of optimism.

But we ignored that fact that the wealth gap kept on growing and that people still believe in the myths of national superiorities in the same way as our ancestors believed in spirits in the woods. And the world was being pushed in unhappy directions by minority fanatics and opportunists who pretended to speak for ordinary people. For me and I think most people, that realisation came when we woke up that morning after the EU Referendum in 2016 and realised we were living in a different country.

I take heart from the values that the next generation hold to. They seem freer of the poison of prejudice. They didn’t want the UK to pull away from Europe. They are the ones motivated to act on climate change. They are on the streets in Russia right now.

It was well said by Billie-Jean King in a TV programme which I watched in 2019. Talking about the difference between her own and the next generation, she said: "This is a monumental moment in our history. I tell millennials - you're the greatest generation in history for inclusion. They don't care where you're from, what religion... they have an opportunity to take this world further than any other and make it a better place."

In the meantime, we have much to be happy about – more, perhaps, than we thought. If we were beginning to take for granted the liberties we are just regaining after Covid, then we had better look at those refugees starting to pour out of Ukraine and remember that we should never do so.

Saturday, 29 January 2022

When Milton met Galileo

The most recent account of this meeting is given in Joe Moshenska’s excellent book Making Darkness Light: the lives of John Milton.

In 1638, in a collision of such giants in their own worlds that their meeting is almost too good to be true, the young John Milton met Galileo at his villa in the hills outside Florence.

Galileo, now in his seventies, had been living under house arrest since his conviction for heresy in 1633. His astronomical studies had eventually gone too far for the church hierarchy despite his best attempts for many years to avoid controversy. He was found to be sufficiently suspect of heresy in promoting the Copernican view that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, which was well-known as a theory by that time but not one that the church could officially countenance. He lived out his remaining days at his villa, receiving visitors and writing his book The Two New Sciences which summarised some of his earlier work. By the time Milton visited, he had recently gone blind and was suffering from a hernia, and he died in 1642.

The only account we have of this meeting is Milton’s own. He wrote that he had “found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought”. It’s a passing reference in his book Areopagitica, which was a defence of free speech – of the “liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience” - published in 1644. His intention was to use Galileo as an example of someone speaking out against authority, in the context of his argument that “Truth was never put to the worse in a free and open encounter.”

Because this account was inserted to illustrate an argument, and because there is no direct evidence of it, some scholars have doubted it took place, and perhaps the church would have tried to prevent Galileo from meeting a foreigner and a Protestant.

I think we can assume that they did meet. But what was Milton doing there?

This was on Milton’s only foreign tour, a visit to Italy via France in 1638-39. Aged 29 and with considerable reading under his belt, as well as mastery of the Italian language, Milton was an earnest academic in search of a purpose, and it was during this trip that his idea of writing an English epic poem began to crystalise. No doubt he was deeply influenced by the introductions he gained to many learned people and by his exposure to the southern European (and Catholic) ebullience of art and architecture. As a convinced Protestant, Milton was of course suspicious of the richness of the Catholic church, which he would later increasingly denounce, but he seems to have enjoyed his time in Italy, including in Rome itself, relishing an injection of intellectual and artistic novelty.

Galileo actually makes an appearance in Milton’s cosmic imagining of heaven, earth and hell in Paradise Lost. We see through the eyes of the angel Raphael: “As when by night the glass / Of Galileo, less assured, observes / Imagined lands and regions in the Moon”. Satan’s shield “Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views”. And there’s a reference elsewhere to an astronomer looking “through his glazed optic tube”. [PL 5.261, 1.287, 3.588]

Milton and Galileo would certainly have valued their conversation. While Milton was not yet famous, word was going round about him in Italy and he was well-known enough to pique Galileo’s interest. This was not just a passing encounter, but an arranged meeting that they would have anticipated keenly. Maybe Milton was shown and tried out Galileo’s telescope, and surely Milton would have asked about his observations, but cautiously as they touched on theological matters. And given that they had both grown up in musical households, they might have shared an enthusiasm for music. But Moshenska speculates that above all they might well have discussed poetry. Galileo was known as an excellent writer of prose and poetry himself. He had strong views on the relative merits of Ariosto and Tasso, the two preeminent Italian poets after Dante, and Milton was familiar with and took inspiration from all three.

Evidently Milton thought back to this encounter in later life, when he wrote Galileo into his great epic poem. And he may have imagined again the Tuscan sun on his back when he too was imprisoned for getting on the wrong side of the establishment, and when, by 1652, he had lost his own sight, “In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude” [PL 7.27-28].

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Saturday, 9 October 2021

When Lawrence of Arabia met Joseph Conrad

Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), 'Lawrence of Arabia', met Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) on one occasion, and they seem to have got on well. It was in the warm summer of 1920, on Sunday 18th July, at the home of the novelist Hugh Walpole.

And, thanks to Walpole’s diary, we have a glimpse of the meeting.

Aged 31, Lawrence was in the middle of re-writing his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, having lost the manuscript the year before. It wouldn’t be published until after he died. The exploits for which he was famous were over, and he was serving as an advisor to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office – a desk job he quickly got bored with.

Lawrence had recently become a household name as a result of the romantic dramatization of his role in the Arab revolt, in a theatre show first produced the year before by the impresario Lowell Thomas, who popularised his role. The show had just been relaunched, in early 1920, with Lawrence in a more prominent role than in the original production. He was later to regret it, but he willingly took part in promoting the show, posing for many photographs. He was in a sense the swashbuckling hero of jingoistic magazines of the time – he describes himself as a matinée idol.

Now, Lawrence was concerned to finish his book, wondering if his political ambitions for the Arabs he represented at the 1919 peace conference were going to come to anything.

The 64-year-old Conrad, suffering from rheumatism or gout, and prone to depression, was also in retrospective mood. He was looking back over his work, publishing some letters and notes on his books at around that time, and only slowly beginning another book. With an eye on his legacy, he harboured hopes of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but this never came about.

And it’s clear from Conrad’s letters of the time that he was not enjoying writing – he wrote very little in 1920 and was distracted by his wife Jessie being ill and his sons struggling to get on in life. He wrote that he felt “uncertain and directionless, like a ship whose crew has gone to land leaving all her sails in disarray”.

Each were at the peak of the fame they would experience in their lifetimes, and they perhaps shared a sense that this was passing: Lawrence in growing disillusion, and Conrad knowing that his best years were behind him.

Here is Walpole’s diary entry.

“Conrad very cheerful. Really has started the Napoleon novel. Showed me some of the second chapter and I was surprised to see how many foreign phrases that were in this first draft. I am thus the first person in the world, after his typist, to meet Cosmo and Henrietta. When I criticised Mrs Travers a little, he said: “Of course, mon cher, it is not very good. I did my best work long ago.” Cunningham Graham and Lawrence the Arab man came down. The latter mild, small, modest, with fine eyes. Said the legend about him all untrue. Talked of printing and the Crusades.”

And there are two more glimpses of the encounter. One is mentioned in a letter by the architect Sir Herbert Baker who knew Lawrence at around this time, who said that “when meeting Conrad he probed him on the methods of his craft; Conrad admitting but little conscious design. Lawrence would say that he himself had over-studied his own craftsmanship.”

The other is a description of Conrad by Lawrence years later, in 1935, in a letter to the artist Bruce Rogers: “What I shall always remember is his lame walk, with the stick to help him, and that sudden upturning of the lined face, with its eager eyes under their membrane of eyelid. They drooped over the eye-socket and the sun shone red through them, as we walked up and down the garden.”

How curious that each man’s eyes are remarked on.

Of course they talked about writing, but perhaps while walking up and down the garden and not in Walpole’s hearing. Lawrence may have mentioned his admiration for The Mirror of the Sea, which he told people was his favourite Conrad book, on a par with Moby Dick. He received a signed copy from Conrad two years later. And Conrad may have mentioned his current project, Suspense, which is the Napoleon novel Walpole referred to. It was never finished, though. Instead, Conrad was soon working on what would be his final novel, The Rover. This is a story about age and retirement, with obvious autobiographical ideas in the tale of a retired sailor who questions his own purpose before being dragged into one last adventure.

Whatever else they might have discussed, beyond “printing and the Crusades”, they seem to have found each other good company.

And they did have some things in common. They both had an interest in the intelligence services, for example. Laurence had served in this capacity in the War, while of course Conrad had explored the subject in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. And the sort of ambiguous life that Lawrence had lived, in two cultures, with his increasing sympathy with the ‘native’ culture, is exactly the topic of The Heart of Darkness.

In the months following the encounter, Lawrence abandoned his efforts on behalf of the Arabs in the post-wat settlement, and he seems to have experienced a kind of mental breakdown, perhaps out of frustration or guilt. His life turned a corner soon after, when he joined the RAF under an assumed name, trying to escape his own fame.

In his memoir of his father, written in 1970, Conrad’s son Borys describes a man of old-fashioned values who discouraged displays of emotion in his family. Perhaps he was often reticent with visitors, especially when feeling as unsettled as he did around the time that Lawrence visited. Yet, as we read in Walpole’s diary, it was a good day: he was “very cheerful”. He enjoyed the meeting.

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The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938)

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 7, 1920–1922 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/247648/pdf

Joseph Conrad and T E Lawrence, Ton Hoenselaars and Gene M. Moore, Conradiana Vol. 27, 1 (Spring 1995)

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-349-09387-8_54.pdf

See also:

When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

Tuesday, 28 September 2021

When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

In 1773, while on his tour of the Hebrides, Samuel Johnson met the legendary Flora McDonald. And while he stayed in her house he slept in the bed that Charles Edward Stuart, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' (or the Young Pretender) had used while on the run after the Battle of Culloden.

Johnson's itinerary with Boswell was dictated by where they could stay - they hopped between the houses of the local gentry, who were invariably hospitable, and presumably sometimes curious to meet the famous Dr Johnson. So, for example, they were unable to visit the island of Muck because, although “this island well deserved to be seen, the Lairds’s absence afforded us no opportunity “. However, at Sky, they were well looked after.

"We came to Kingsborough, a place distinguished by that name, because the King lodged here when he landed at Port Re. We were entertained with the usual hospitality by Mr. Macdonald and his lady, Flora Macdonald, a name that will be mentioned in history, courage and fidelity be virtues, with honour. She is a woman of middle stature, soft features, gentle manners, and elegant presence."

It's a succinct account of the woman who had become famous after helping Charles Edward Stuart to escape capture, and Johnson is right that her name would be "mentioned in history": then she was well-known, but a century later she was elevated to heroic status by the Victorians.

In a letter to Mrs Thrale a little time later, Johnson repeats his favourable impression of Flora. He says she was: "of a pleasing person and elegant behaviour. She told me that she thought herself honoured by my visit; and I am sure that whatever regard she bestowed on me was liberally repaid."

To have only this much about their meeting would be only tantalising. But thankfully we also have Boswell's account. As usual, he is more gossipy in his description of the encounter, at the house of the "gallant highlander" Alan Macdonald.

"There was a comfortable parlour with a good fire, and a dram went round. By and by supper was served, at which there appeared the lady of the house, the celebrated Miss Flora Macdonald. She is a little woman, of a genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well-bred. To see Dr Samuel Johnson, the great champion of the English Tories, salute Miss Flora Macdonald in the isle of Sky, was a striking sight; for although somewhat congenial in their notions, it was very improbable that they should meet here."

Johnson retired early (though presumably after Flora had done so) and slept in the same bed that the Young Pretender had slept in nearly 30 years before. He was in a mood that Boswell describes as "quiescent".

Were they "congenial in their notions"? It seems so. There was some banter between them, as Flora explained that Johnson had been described to her as a "young buck", which he enjoyed hearing. At any rate, Johnson was impressed by the significance of the meeting, because, as Boswell tells us, "upon our table in the room I found in the morning a slip of paper, on which Dr Johnson had written with his pencil these words: 'Quantum cedat virtutibus aurum' ('with virtue weighted, what worthless trash is gold!') - presumably a reference to Flora's choice of allegiance over the financial reward of giving up the fleeing Jacobite.

So Flora lived up to Johnson's expectations, his Tory political convictions leading him to a certain sympathy with Jacobites as "true Britons", unlike the hated Whigs. (Although Flora had not been a Jacobite rebel, she always said, rather someone who had simply helped Charles out of compassion.)

In the morning, there was the opportunity for more relaxed conversation before the travellers moved on, and in fact Flora gave Johnson an account of the famous escapade. Boswell says that "perceiving Dr Johnson's curiosity, though he had delicacy enough not to question her, [she] very obligingly entertained him with a recital of the particulars that she herself knew of that escape" and Johnson "listened to her with placid attention".

The travellers departed after breakfast, taking leave of their hostess and escorted onwards by Macdonald for a few miles. Whatever their thoughts about the encounter at the time, it inspired Boswell to digress at length in his memoir about the rights and wrongs of the Jacobite cause.

Alan and Flora were soon to leave for a new life in America, as part of what Johnson described earlier in his journal as "this epidemical fury of emigration". They had to return after the venture failed and Flora died in 1790, aged 68.

Johnson and Flora were brought together again after death. A monument to her was erected at her grave in Kilmuir on Sky, and much later the epitaph was added using Johnson's own words: 'Her name will be mentioned in history and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour'.

See also: