The library! It's still there!

 

There have been days - weeks - months - when I've wondered if I'd ever get back into the British Library.  It's been - how long? - just about two years.  But it's still there!  And, wonderfully, there are so relatively few people in it that books turn up really fast.

I'm writing a piece about nineteenth century paintings termed "Idylls" - some classical, some very much not - and their relationship to temporality and environmental criticism - and wanted to lay my hands on a couple of things that are pretty elusive, one of them a volume of engravings and poems reprinted from the Quiver as Idyllic Pictures.  From the frontispiece, one would think that these are going to be "idyllic" in the loosely vernacular sense of the word - unbelievably quiet, pleasant, peaceful.

But in fact, most of them are "idylls" in the classical sense of the term (or the term adopted by Tennyson, Landor and others), meaning εἰδύλλιον [eidyllion], or “little image,” with a strong narrative component - more like a vignette, than anything.  So one finds gloomy melodrama:

Dead and alone,

By the trysting-stone

social realism colliding with sentimental pathos:

Oh, sir! don't pass like the rest, I pray

and my favorite, an illustration for D. P. Starkey's "Hassan," which suggests that the chilly streets are anything other than "idyllic," in the popular understanding of the word:

Flitting past in wintry wather,

    Lo, a poor Lascar in tears!

His swart eyebrows pinched together,

    Pendants shivering in his ears.

Weeping for his lost equator,

    For the sun as there it shone,

The bright eye whence the Creator

    Glows upon the torrid zone.

In my fancy I could hear him

    'Neath our Arctic skies bewail

Heavens he once believed so near him,

    Now so distant and so pale!

Paltry wares oppressed his shoulder,

    Flimsy rags about him flew;

Nothing than his garb looked colder -

    Nothing warmer than his hue.

Was it Vishtu thrust thee hither,

    For some worship left unpaid,

That thy tawny flesh might wither

    'Neath our hyperborean shade?

Back! poor pedlar, tramp, or juggler! -

    Back to thine own orient sphere;

God ne'er meant thee for a struggler

    With our wretched winters here.

Due art thou unto the Ganges,

    To the palms and plains of Ind, -

To the hills whose sunny ranges

    Reach from Arracan to Scinde.

Home! to dream amidst thy roses -

    Home! to bask beneath they sky!

Heaven itself the path discloses

    Did not Eden eastward lie?