Angelic and Satanic Mills is a meditation on added values, otherwise it is just a jumped-up set of footnotes. The greater the imported weight, the more it will spit out in rewards. In the end, it is what you bring to it. Maybe, after all, just a bag of corn.

1: Trouble at the Satanic Mill
2: The Floury Thumb
3: Millstones might Fly
4: Unmade by the Mill
5: A Story of O and Unsignalled Divisions
6: Turning Native
7: The Oxford Solar Myth
8: The Mill becomes Moral
9: Don Quixote
10: How a Partridge made a Swift prophet

 

Blake's work has never been more popular and the World Wide Web seems a perfect and democratic means of distribution for his beautiful illuminated books. He was a multimedia pioneer and it is a great pity that the tunes he improvised for his songs were never written down by some passing collector. The attractions of the work are matched by its difficulty, however and the kaleidoscopic worlds of Jerusalem or The Night of the Four Zoas tend to defeat all but the most highly motivated of readers. Yet, as in Mahler, the songs illuminate the larger structures and are in turn lit up by them. The Songs of Innocence and Experience and his other lyrics can be enjoyed by the most and least sophisticated of readers. There are two Blake images above all others which seem certain and unambiguous: the burning tiger and the satanic mills. His illustration of the tiger seems somewhat tamer than we would expect, as if the maker of the lamb really had a hand in it. We have no corresponding picture of the Satanic Mills but nearly every British reader thinks he knows what Blake meant.

Though Blake certainly would have deplored the imaginative deprivation of industrial life and knew enough about London poverty and squalor, he would not have seen or heard anything to make him feel that the conditions of the Industrial North of England were a new affront to human dignity. Marx and Engels, a generation or more later, would make Manchester the focus of concern for the conditions of the Working Class but Blake's Chariots and Spears are poetical devices derived from Biblical prophecy and so are his Satanic Mills. To drag the gloomy Victorian cotton mills into an ironic or wishful intimacy with Christ and the regenerated Jerusalem is a creative reading of the poem which has become the conventional one. Blake would extend and develop his spiritual topography in the long poem he actually entitled Jerusalem and his landmarks would define a spiritually regenerated London as the Holy City, surrounded by a sacred Isle of places whose spiritual resonances he had derived from antiquarian literature. It was left to Francis Thompson, a Northern poet and a Catholic, lost in London, to attempt to repeat the effects of Blake's most famous lines and have Christ walking "Not on Genazareth but Thames".

In the Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake does indeed use contemporary detail in the context of mythic material to startling effect. The dark Satanic Mills, however are an very literary concept, derived immediately from Milton and indirectly from the Bible. It is Samson, eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves, the chained Hebrew Hercules, who would shake the pillars of the presumed solid world. More specifically, as Blake's references to mills elsewhere in the prophetic books clearly show, the mill stood for the turning seasons of the stars and the fallen world of endlessly repeating generations. These were, for Blake, low vegetative cycles from which Man could free himself by his Divine Imagination. Even the greenness of the mountains on which the Holy Feet may have trodden is not, for Blake, a term of uncritical approval. He was anything but a Nature Poet.

Blake's poem, then, suggests the challenge of any regenerative act of imagination in the fallen world of cycles. The very physical image of an exotic Oriental city transplanted into the Northern landscape is not a misreading of the poem so much as a limitation of its tightly packed meanings.

The earliest mills were certainly small and hand-driven. Yet milling is a skill and efficiency called for larger stones and animal or slave labour. In the desert conditions of the Middle East, there was no waterpower, even if the technology had existed to harness it. The blinding of Samson may have had a counterpart in the blinding of asses to restrict their distraction from the task in hand. No more terrible image can be imagined of the fettered mind, though the character of Samson was never that of a model intellectual. For Milton, his reduction to a symbolically castrated beast meant the ultimate affront to human dignity.

The person of Samson had particular resonance for Milton, who saw in him his own blindness as well as his rebellious spirit. Blake's view of Milton was complex and required a poem for him to work out. He came closest of all the poets to Blake's Ideal but, in Blake's system, friends are spiritual enemies and he felt a strong need to distance himself from what he saw as Milton's fear of carnality. The poem "Milton" sees Blake attempting the rescue of John Milton's vision from his blind Spectre. It seems appropriate, therefore, that the poem we all know as "Jerusalem" cannot be found anywhere in the large poem he calls "Jerusalem" but emerges, untitled, from the prose Preface to the poem he calls "Milton". The poet's very name, which Blake breaks in two on his cloudy title page, contains words suggestive of weight and revolution. He is a rock on which Blake can build but also a stone rolled across the tomb. By cleaving the name in two, the later poet enters into the heart of the earlier to liberate his spirit from the weight of dead matter. He will put John Milton through the mill.

The term Mill, applied to cotton manufacture was itself to become increasingly antique, but initially it was the fast-flowing streams of the Penines which supplied waterpower to the new factories. The term stuck as steam took over as the motive power. The rising class of factory-owners was drawn in the main from nonconformist stock, familiar with the Bible and quite capable of giving their own prophetic names to the factories. It was Jacob Bronowski's contention that the Industrial Revolution in England corresponded to the French and American Revolutions, a decadent and moribund centralized establishment giving way to the rising energies of builders and engineers from regional, nonconformist, non-university stock.

There are legends of magic mills from every continent and associated with maidens as their motive power. Grinding corn in the quern or hand-driven mill was from the earliest times women's work and the association of this female productivity with a more general fertility and plenty gave us this universal mythology of mills which magically produce the Earth and Sky and Sea.

The water-mill was introduced across Europe by the Romans but, although windmills seem to have been known in Persia as early as the fourth century, they do not begin to appear in the West until the eleven hundreds. They brought not one but two professions: millwrights and millers. Literature has little to say about the millwrights, a shadowy peripatetic band of technicians who seem to have been recruited from the fraternity of stonemasons: before he took to bridge and canal building, Thomas Telford had been a millwright. Millers, on the other hand, were among the earliest and most visible harbingers of a middle-class. They were regarded with suspicion by the peasants and the reputation for coarseness was the aristocratic view of what was the lowest class with whom they would deal directly. Chaucer put one of the coarsest of the Canterbury Tales in the mouth of his Miller. The "Golden Thumb" of these middle-men, transformers of grain, circulators of wealth, mediators between land and bread was not a complement to their skills but indicated the suspicion that the thumb had weighed heavily on the scale to the miller's advantage. There would not necessarily be any viable competition in the neighbourhood for a peasant who fell out with the miller. But the prospect of a Miller's daughter for a wife might well be such stuff as romantic or material dreams are made of.

The Prophecies of Paracelsus is a very curious book of engravings with mysterious mottos in which the Millstone may be a symbol of revolution, or at least of transformation and cyclical activity. The First Figure of the Prophecies features a millstone on top of a triple crown. It could symbolize the weight of responsibility upon the crown or suggest a crushing of the royal house. It is uncertain whether this book of emblems was actually the work of Paracelsus or a follower. References to toads becoming lilies may have its roots in the Heraldic symbols of the French royal house and the whole book may refer to tribulations France would face, but set in cryptic terms, rather like Nostradamus. These figures, capable of being seditious or innocent seem an appropriate sign of the times, looking back to a stability which was being lost and forward to a transformation which could hardly be grasped.

The Maid of the Mill in Wilhelm Müller's poem sequence which became Schubert's song-cycle is a figure without much substance. We learn almost nothing about her as a personality. She is essentially the excuse for a romantic binge by the poet or more correctly by the persona he adopts of a wayfaring miller. It is as if he is dazzled by the idea of romance and his feelings are essentially self-centred. When it comes to the crunch, his love is disabling. First he cannot declare his love, then he cannot sing, when a rival shows up, he cannot assert himself. Finally his death by drowning is like a narcissus overbalanced. I do not think, though, that the poet intended his readers to take a critical view of the protagonist.

For all but the last two songs, the singer is the wayfaring young miller; he has completed his apprenticeship, now as a journeyman, he is free to settle and find work wherever he likes. The penultimate song is a dialogue in which the Miller and the Brook converse. The last song is entirely in the person of the Brook, as it sings a lullaby. It may seem an odd connection to make but the cod-psychology of Hitchcock's Psycho comes to mind, where the disturbed young killer's personality is finally submerged in that of his dominant mother. The elusive Maid of the Mill is as mobile as the wheel, as uncertain as the miller's economic status. If she is associated with water, then he is associated with greenness and vegetation while his rival the huntsman offers a vision of red-blooded manhood. The stability and rest he yearns for is essentially infantile or deathly. In the course of the cycle, he experiences alienation from nature, exactly the same process as is echoed in Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and which is re-enacted orchestrally on a grander scale in the First Symphony.

The image of the huntsman by the river reappears in Das Lied von der Erde, but here the masculine principal is glimpsed at a distance and remains only in memory. Here, a reflected pagoda is an image of the fragile structures of the social world. Maids of the Mill were to become a common subject for genre-painters and popular ballads throughout the nineteenth century. As the years wore on and water gave way to steam as a motive power, the picturesque water-mill would become a nostalgic dream, a memory-picture of a time when nature and manufacture briefly lived in harmony.

Moving from the work of Wilhelm Müller and Schubert to an anonymous English ballad called The Miller's Daughter we might expect to be moving from complexity and sophistication to artless simplicity. Perhaps the music was less rich than Schubert's but the words of this folksong are neither artless nor simple. It appears in The Penguin Book of Ballads where it is reprinted as an example of the collecting of A. L. Lloyd. Lloyd's own writings treat folksong seriously as art and have never had a wide appeal among folk-singers and listeners. Unlike some earlier collectors he did not seek to disguise the ambiguities and complexities of a true folksong. Composers have tended to look to folk-idioms for their sturdy simplicity and authentic feeling, presumably finding what they expected and ignoring whatever did not fit the model. Poets adopted the ballad form and to some extent appreciated its capacity for ironies and a creative way with uncertainties. Yet some of these traditional words are so unexpected that we respond to the ambiguity by supposing it to have come from much handling of the coin, eroding some more expected or common symbol.

If a poem is anonymous, we all feel entitled and some have felt obliged to deny any specific intended meaning. Certainly in some cases, the earlier collectors were not too scrupulous about concocting Frankenstein ballads out of bleeding chunks, though this was often a move towards closure and smoothness. In other cases, lost verses may have added enigmas to mysteries but there is no doubt that abrupt transitions, evasions and undermining our expectations were skills these anonymous poets had in abundance: the elusiveness of the ballads is not artless. Reference to accounts, deeds, wills and other writings does not encourage the view that people of earlier times had a less certain grasp of material realities than we have. In any case, the antiquity of the ballads is not so great as we may casually assume: Geoffrey Grigson suggests the great bulk of them were a product of the age of Shakespeare. We might expect folksong to record the general or run-of-the-mill experience but a song like the following seems to relish subverting our expectations of a simple piece of bawdy:

The interruptions of the refrain with its sexual suggestiveness create gaps in the narrative which are not explained and allow us to supply different motivations to the characters. O on the page is a very hieroglyph or open mouth of surprise, the receptive refrain into which we can empty our own intentions, like the ever-available heroine of Pauline Réalge's novel. Yet in this anonymous ballad lies a sexual world more mysterious and perverse than any self-consciously sado-masochistic game. Feelings have to be conjectured from the described events. Is the young man impotent, indifferent, scared, misogynistic? He is said to start up, suggesting that coupling has taken place so it might be thought that female appetite has scared him. There is a strong suggestion in the last verse that unpaid bondage to a master is preferable to being under any woman's sway. Yet by pleading to the miller for protection from his own daughter, many of the more expected endings are discarded.

The young man has served his apprenticeship and is presumably free to escape, so the ballad is not simply about fear of commitment. The daughter must have waited seven years to make her feelings so very clear, though it is the young man who bars the door. This detail is puzzling unless a stanza has been lost in which the Miller himself leaves for town and insists they bar the door. All the sexual intention is ascribed to the female and if we are to believe the events as described, she performs a striptease. It might be an over-subtle reading to suppose that the imagined sexual overtures of the miller's daughter are in the young man's head and that a rape is followed by guilt, confession and a penalty suggested by the guilty party. To fit the ballad into this psychological pattern would involve an unsignalled division of the lines into objective events and subjective imaginings, which would tell us more about our own age than the ballad. Nor does it really open itself more easily if we apply the rule of "anon. was a woman" - the girl's striptease is something we are invited to ogle with a very male eye and she seems like the very stuff of male fantasy.

There could well be two ballads here that have become joined for in the first stanza the male is identified only as a young man and his trip to the mill suggests he is a customer who is encountering the miller's daughter for the first time with his sack of corn to grind. The mill on the hill would be a windmill and their trip together, like Jack and Jill, could be to a facility which would be opened as customers required, not a dwelling. Against that, there is the finding of the miller walking up and down, suggesting that he is in the town for the market or on other business rather than the owner of a house there. We seem to have the ending of a different ballad about a young miller who is solicited by the undesirable daughter of his boss, though it then becomes mysterious why a free man would want to tie himself another seven years to the same situation. If inconsistencies are to be explained by grafting then there would seem to be so many grafts as to amount to a constructional principle rather than a series of accidents of transmission. Applying studies of contemporary folk traditions where songs are spread without being written down, composition by committee or accretion seems extremely unlikely. In these cultures a song is always composed by an individual and then adopted and disseminated by others who recognize its quality.

We may expect to find a folksong rooted in the earth but this one, at least, seems writ in water with its realities shifting from stanza to stanza. Like music, it modulates so the notes or objects stay the same but their tonality is shifted. Meanings do not resolve themselves into either a vase or two faces; we experience the words like the music as a world of burgeoning possibilities more akin to a fantastic animation than a series of realistic snapshots. It does seem an offence against the nature of such a song to explore it on the dissecting table but it may be permissible to go just so far as we have to show how its apparent simplicity is anything but. This is no run-of-the-mill song.

Only four years were allowed the young Friedrich Max Müller for learning at his father's knee, for Wilhelm died at the age of thirty-three in 1823. The early death of the poet of Die Schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise was overshadowed by that of their composer five years later at the even earlier age of thirty-one. Ever-increasing praise has been heaped upon the composer whose simplest utterances are regarded as evidence of the highest genius while apologies are made for the naïveties of his chosen poet. The highest praise allowed Wilhelm Müller is that his lyrics have attained widespread acceptance as virtual folksongs in Germany, so rendering the poet invisible and confusing his intentional simplicities with the sublime ambiguity of the truly anonymous.

The works of Max Müller, highly influential in their day, have been eclipsed by later writers in the fields of linguistics and comparative religion. His academic career was based in England and his writings show his mastery of the language. Max Müller's largest project was the translation of the sacred writings of the East, including the Rig Veda and other works from the Sanskrit. Though the earliest intimations that the classical languages and Sanskrit had evolved from a common source emerged from the British occupation of India and specifically from Sir William Jones who had published this suggestion as early as 1786, Müller's personal identification with the subject matter and natural sympathy with the East was such as to render him highly suspect. It seems likely that his failure to secure the Boden professorship at Oxford was due to his widely-rumoured espousal of Hinduism. Following in the footsteps of Jakob Grimm, Müller was highly excited by the concepts of using language to reconstruct the phases of human development. The notion of a universal language had existed as an occult study for many years and there were Adamic or Enochian adepts who promised to restore the language of angels which had been shattered by the fall of Babel. The new comparative philology, which would develop into modern linguistics, was based on the migrations of the great human family from its African home, each branch developing characteristic deformations of the original common tongue.

It was Müller's hope that close attention to the transformation of words could illuminate texts which were obscure, especially ancient mythological writings, which were felt to belong to a specific period before Literature as such emerged. Like Francis Bacon before him. he was repelled by the apparent stupidity and violence of the Greek myths, which seemed so much at odds with the civilization which followed. He saw them as corruptions of philosophical and natural wisdom which had made perfect sense in the Aryan and pre-Aryan languages from which Greek itself had derived. The systematizing tendency led Müller to see all religion as one, stemming from the universal worship of the sun. This approach to comparative religion, especially as developed by J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough, was always hedged around with assurances that Christianity was somehow a phenomenon quite beyond its range. In fact, the birth, death and resurrection of Christ was probably the most glaringly obvious example of a sun-myth to readers for whom Tammuz and Adonis were not exactly household names.

Max Müller did more to advance understanding of Indian culture than anyone else in the nineteenth century. More or less unique among the scholars of his time, he did not regard Indian culture as essentially of a lower order than that of the West. In taking this stance, he was widely considered to have gone native in his enthusiasm and therefore as fair game for satire. One of the more entertaining pieces of scholarly humour was an 1870 essay which came out of Trinity College, Dublin. Written by Dr. R. F. Littledale, The Oxford Solar Myth, dedicated, without permission to the Rev. G. W. Cox, a somewhat over-enthusiastic disciple of Müller, nicely parodied the linguistic method by applying it to the person of Max Müller himself. The result reads a little bit like those pieces of over-enthusiastic pieces of detective work which get published today, in which authors seek to persuade us how the tomb of Christ can be found by drawing geometrical figures on a few famous paintings and other such mind-boggling notions.

Here is a brief sample of Littledale, considering Max's parentage:

"Wilhelm is simply Will-hælm, the 'helmet of force" or of strength . . . the 'cap of darkness' (tarnkappe) worn . . above all by Sigfrit in the Niebelungen Lied. It is thus simply the covering of clouds and obscurity which overspreads the heavens when the Sun has disappeared. . . . Night is typified as a poet because all sounds are heard so clearly and distinctly during its course."

Out of this night came forth Max, who is identified with the Sun. Towards the end, Littledale gives an example of a solar hymn, "as still chanted by children in the mystic rites of the gynæceum:-

There was a jolly Miller
Lived on the river Dee . . ."

It would be unfair to finish without a sentence or two from Max Müller himself. English was a language he made his own:

"Without this sympathy, history is a dead letter, and might as well be burnt and forgotten; while, if it is once enlivened by feeling, it appeals not only to the antiquarian but to the heart of every man . . . To know the part we have to act ourselves, we ought to know the character of those whose place we take."

This internationalist and non-Christian, though often pragmatic, agenda was a very progressive manifestation of an enlightenment agenda which was ascendant among scholars and artists for much of the nineteenth century. The story of its eclipse cannot properly be told but the chill was soon to be obvious in both Art and History. Aspects of this agenda would later be perverted in ways undreamed of by Max Müller, whose works did much to promote understanding of the East. Yet it is from Müller that the ancient Indian sun-symbol, the swastika, was brought to the attention of German scholars and the obsession with the Aryan branch of the universal human family can be traced back, in part, to his influence.

In Alarcón's El sombrero de tres picos, most celebrated in the ballet by Falla, the miller and his wife are regarded as a stable social unit. They are depicted at the very start of the ballet watering their plants and picking grapes in exactly the kind of direct relation with the soil which millers traditionally did not have. Here their honest labours are seen as giving them a moral authority sufficient to toss a Corregidor in a blanket. His jurisdiction over the miller and his wife is seen as abusive and will be demonstrated in sexual terms. He is a arbitrary usurper of their natural rights with an absurd hat the symbol of his authority, like the tyrant in William Tell. The original title was El Corregidor y La Molinera. A similar shift in the moral status of the miller can be seen in Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet Major,where life in a windmill is seen as a symbol of enduring country life, in a country suffering the vicissitudes of the Napoleonic period. Hardy, an architect by training, became increasingly pessimistic and atheistic but The Trumpet Major is less doom-laden than much of his work. He often looked back to the Napoleonic era almost as a Golden Age where the external threat of invasion from France mobilized the country and prevented brooding on more existential matters.

In the tone-poem Don Quixote by Richard Strauss, the addled old Knight's vision is directed against the endless cycles and directed towards the regeneration of the Knightly Ideal. He is defeated and knocked to the ground. Though Quixote is most associated with windmills, in Variation VIII, his watery-adventure ends with a battering from a waterwheel. Either Cervantes was repeating his effects or he sensed a particular enmity between these early machines and the world of the Imagination.

Even his enthusiasts admit that a significant body of Strauss's work amounts to proficient note-spinning. He embodies the composer as supreme professional, scaling peak after peak of virtuosity. No composer has ever stood further away from the philosophy that less means more. Well-meant attempts to enliven his biography by accusations of Nazism have never succeeded in redeeming it from the charge of terminal dullness. Del Mar's three volumes leave the reader with a feeling that maybe there was something to be said for Ken Russell. Most often quoted or paraphrased is Del Mar's bemused comment on those bad girls Salome and Elektra. His end-of-term report reads like a headmistress who suspects that a patina of evil may not terminally damage a girl's prospects in a fallen world.

It was the speed at which the Straussian machine could turn from poison to chocolate manufacture which made many regard his plush packages of soft centres with circumspection. We could turn the Schoenberg benefit-of-the-doubt argument on its head and suggest that the creator of youthful monsters had earned the right to foist on audiences a succession of bovine, menopausal Hausfraus. Or we could compare his journey from Salome to Der Rosenkavalier with Aubrey Beardsley's development from the same starting point to the morbid intricacies of The Rape of the Lock. The degree of dissonance in Der Rosenkavalier is not much lower than that of Elektra but colour and dynamics are everything.

Del Mar classifies the terrible twins Salome and Elektra as Operatic Tone Poems. With the possible exception of personifications of a Nation, the characters depicted in Tone Poems will tend to be figures with an elastic view of reality. The transformation of themes predisposes the composers to choose subjects prone to chameleon habits and eventual disintegration. So we have the pranks of Till Eulenspiegel, the amatory adventures of Don Juan and the mirage-chivalry of Don Quixote. In Quixote, Strauss employs solo instruments to characterize the protagonist and his servant, a move towards the separation of voices from the orchestra in the tone poems with voices.

Strauss's boasts of orchestral realism provoked a critical backlash. He said he could depict a coffee-spoon in music, before T. S. Eliot introduced them into his poems. In fact we do not get the spoons if they are there, but we get the babies and the bathwater as well as most famously sheep and magic flights and jousts with windmills. The onomatopoeia is the easiest of all poetic devices to hiss. In music the resemblance between object and notes is often strained. The bleating of sheep is not exactly on a par with the Pre-Raphaelite near-photographic approach to the same animal. In fact, as Gombrich has pointed out, the relation of any object to its depiction in the form of blobs of paint on a page is a very problematic one. Our memory is stimulated to fill in the information which is missing. Often the less there is on the page, the greater the room for the imagination to reach towards the Ideal. There may be a lesson in this for sound recordings which are too often thought of in terms analogous to photography. Yet many old recordings, limited in range and dynamics, seem entirely satisfying in ways which modern digital marvels cannot rival. We should perhaps think of them as Old Masters.

Cervantes' classic book stands symbolically as the post mortem of the chivalric romance and the initiation of the realistic novel. Books themselves are blamed for turning the old knight's brain. In this late flowering, the armour-plated hero will be unhorsed and hurt time after time. His quests are delusional, being an old man, each episode is a trial he survives rather than a learning experience. In the end, his awakening comes when a friend participates in the delusion by becoming a "real" knightly opponent and defeating him. Quixote, like Strauss himself inverts the natural order, first tackling the moving but inanimate windmills which he perceives as giants, next the sheep which he perceives as an army, only then does he attack a human force in the shape of a group of pilgrims. Strauss's quest was not dissimilar, tackling the gigantic and the inanimate before moving on to human subjects.

Most music is not tied to specific external clues and any limitation of its meaning seems a violation. Even the best songs are often stimulated by mediocre poems precisely because there is room for the music to expand and make real what the poem hints at or leaves unfinished. Strauss's ingenious effects draw such attention to themselves that their larger significance often goes unnoticed. Strauss, consciously or not, was exploiting a diabolical paradox: if music observes no limits, if it cannot be constrained, then why should it not depict things, why should it not aim at the minutest and least spiritual things? In a very German and idealist philosophical sense Strauss was prepared to takes things to their absurd limits. He wanted his music to penetrate the unmusical world. As the greatest virtuoso of the National Art-form, he, Richard Strauss would dare to depict coffee-spoons. Sheep were a step along that inverted path to the spoon, their animal voices imitated by instruments are some sort of devilish response to the Beethovenian Idealism which could crown an instrumental symphony with human voices. In fact Strauss became distracted from his purist goal by the allure of the human diabolic. In making his own life the subject of Ein Heldenleben and the Symphonia Domestica, he outraged many commentators but he went on to contemplate calling his massive Alpine Symphony the Anti-Christian, representing Man renewing his own strength in Nature. His philosophical ideas may not have been new or notable as contributions to philosophy, but Richard Strauss deserves critics who will not be completely mislead by the skat-playing bourgeois mask.

Richard Strauss produced a vast assortment of monuments, not a single one of which pays even the remotest or most cursory lip-service to Christianity. Though he took the familiar "honest craftsman" approach to public relations, the life's work of this powerful and influential figure can be viewed as an assembly of sphinxes. Celebrations of his industry, for sure, and habitually excluded from much serious scrutiny by commentators who take at face value the inscrutable gestures of a first-rate craftsman. Don Juan deals with the life and death of a libertine while Till Eulenspiegel gives us graphic sound-picture of trickster, ending with his hanging. The historic Till was not hanged.

In the beginning, Isaac Bickerstaff was a name invented by Jonathan Swift for a swipe at astrology. John Partridge, 1644 - 1715, one of the numerous race of mystical cobblers, published from 1680 onwards an almanac of predictions entitled Merlinus Liberatus. On April Fools Day, 1708, Swift, using the fictitious name of Isaac Bickerstaff, published a parody in which he foretold the death of Partridge himself. It was foreseen to take place on March the twenty-ninth of the following year. On that appointed day, Swift continued the joke by publishing an Elegy to the deceased prophet. When Partridge protested that he was still alive, Swift replied with a Vindication of his original prophecy, insisting that Partridge was clearly a dead man, so asserting the world of the ideal against the real, the prophecy against the fact, the word against the flesh. Bickerstaff's writings made Partridge a laughingstock and he published no more almanacs for six years. The joke was extended by others and when Richard Steele launched the Tatler in 1709, he adopted the same pen-name. Bickerstaff's powers of prophecy were not taken seriously at this time by anyone, except by the Catholic Church in Portugal, which placed his writings on the list of banned books, probably not as a joke.

A Partridge was no match for a Swift in this flurry of feathers but the spirit of prophecy was to have her revenge by incarnating a flesh and blood writer called Isaac Bickerstaffe in Ireland in or around the year 1735. The final extra letter somehow makes the coincidence seem more piquant by pointing to another playwright whose name seemed to lose and gain vowels, as if unwilling to be fixed. Bickerstaffe's pedigree has been well-established and he definitely did not adopt a time-honoured nom-de-guerre as Steele did. The village of Bickerstaffe near Ormskirk in Lancashire is an ancient one and it seems likely it supplied the name to an Irish branch. Whether the literary associations were half-remembered when the child was christened Isaac or whether the growing boy was stirred to write when the associations of his name were mentioned to him, we will never know.

But the flesh and blood Isaac Bickerstaffe became a great success. He was the author of many opera libretti such as those for Arne's Love in a Village and Thomas and Sally, Dibdin's The Padlock and also of popular comedies, such as The Maid of the Mill, 1765. His works form a substantial part of that half-forgotten repertoire of English light operas, which survive, for the most part, in vocal score only. It is in Love in a Village, 1762, that the song of the Miller of Dee appears. Percy Scholes thought the words were traditional and were merely copied or varied by Bickerstaffe but many sources credit them to him.

The reference books say that Bickerstaffe fled England for the continent in 1772, suspected of a capital offence, thereby implying murder. In fact, at that date, capital offence could cover a multitude of sins and Nicky Bickerstaffe, as he was known to friends, was accused of soliciting a soldier. The St. James's Chronicle recorded his embarrassment as follows:

"A Gentleman grew enamoured, the other Night at Whitehall, with one of the Centinels, and made Love to him; the Soldier being of that rough cast, who would rather act in the Character of Mars than Venus, not only rejected the Lover's Suit, but seizing him, threatened to take him immediately to the Guard-Room. The Affrighted Enamorato, to avoid the consequences of Exposure, with the greatest Precipitation gave the Soldier his Watch, Rings, and other Valuables, for his Liberty."

This story of the soldier reporting Bickerstaffe's approaches after gaining all the loot suggests a slightly different scenario in which the amorous scribbler was "rolled" and dared to report the theft of his belongings. His downfall is gloatingly recorded in a satire on Samuel Foote, another playwright whose gay affairs made him vulnerable when his satires created powerful enemies. The anonymous poem Sodom and Onan of 1772 rejoices in dragging in other names to share in the mud:

Where is the Author of the village Love?
Sweet Isaac Bickerstaff, who never strove
To wipe away the ignominious stain,
Convinc'd that kicking 'gainst the Pricks was vain.
For Safety flown to soft Italia's shore,
Where Tilney, B&emdash;&emdash;l, Jones and many more
Of Britain's cast outs, revel uncontroul'd,
Who for their Beastial lust their Country sold,
Who dissipate Estates in Foreign Climes
To buy indulgence, for their darling Crimes.

The pillory was the usual means of punishment for attempted sodomy and the severity of the mob depended on the extent of their self-righteous fury. It was not a lenient sentence and life-threatening injuries were often inflicted, the victims being taken down only if death seemed near. A few hours in the pillory could break a man much faster than as many years of hard labour. Bickerstaffe did not stay to be tried and fled to the continent, a course which Oscar Wilde bravely and foolishly declined to take a hundred and twenty-three years later. Bickerstaffe is said to have died in Italy in 1812, but this is uncertain. He was in any case by then a forgotten man.

It was Love in the Village, 1762, however not The Maid of the Mill, 1765, which gave the world the words of the The Miller of Dee. The tune may of course be traditional, adapted like The Beggar's Opera or the songs of Thomas Moore. These entertainments have survived only as odd songs in anthologies, especially as they were taken up and sung in the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh. Occasionally they are re-orchestrated and recorded but there is no living tradition. It may be the grand term opera which leads to high expectations, for these were really plays with music, the songs and choruses being of a tuneful character but without the elaborate structure of continental opera. There was also a strong commercial pressure towards pasticcio, where popular numbers were reintroduced to spice up the current property. The music of Arne, Dibdin, Shield (whose Rosina, uniquely survives with orchestral parts and is considered by some to be the source of the tune for Auld Lang Syne) Hook and Bishop has never been entirely forgotten, though wholesale revival of their reliques seems as remote as ever. It is unlikely that modern audiences or players could tolerate too many Thomases and Sallies without adding a dose of modern camp to the mix.

It may be fanciful to see in Bickerstaffe's Miller of Dee a man set apart from society, pursuing his own queer life. Yet the queerest thing about this writer is that his work had continental consequences in operas of a more lasting kind. There are two indirect links between Bickerstaffe and Mozart. Mozart derived the libretto for his Bastien et Bastienne from Rousseau's Le Divin de Village via a Viennese parody. Bickerstaffe's Love in the Village was an Anglo-Irish descendent of the same Rousseau play. The opening theme of this innocent pastoral was to pursue a life altogether freer in the Eroica Symphony, and it is possible it had an emblematic significance. Is there a hint that the symphony is as much a belated requiem for Brother Mozart as a commemoration of Napoleon?

Isaac Bickerstaffe also looms among the tangled sources of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, 1782. Gottlieb Stéphanie fashioned the libretto and most accounts stop there, vaguely gesturing to unnamed Italian and English models. Friedrich Bretzner had been the acknowledged source of Johann André's singspiel Belmonte und Constanze in 1781 and he placed an angry notice in a Leipzig newspaper, attacking Mozart for his appropriation of the idea. In fact, Bretzner had in turn derived his drama from Bickerstaffe's The Rescue.

One of the odder mysteries of the Mozart canon is his abandonment of an earlier Seraglio opera in 1779 &endash; the one which is now usually called Zaïde. This needed only a little extra work to be brought to completion and the similarity of the subject matter is remarkable. Yet, when he came to write Die Entführung, Mozart used none of the earlier-composed music and it was only rediscovered and performed after his death. Probably he did not have the score by him and it may have been as easy to compose fresh music. Both Bastien et Bastienne and Die Entführung would appear to have Masonic associations, long before Mozart's official initiation into the Craft.

The notion of a magnanimous Caliph links the Orient with the life-giving Sun while sexual curiosity about the harem made the Turkish theme a popular one. This rash of Turkish plays does not imply any vast continental conspiracy. Over and over again we see that landmarks bear the makers' marks and that communities organize themselves around them. If there was an agenda, it had only to be applied at the points of greatest leverage and talent-spotting does not always entail recruitment. Certainly the revival of the irrational and an interest in folk poems in the romantic period was a project in which some groups were especially active. A triangle of scholars with epicentres in Scotland, Germany and New England maintained a steady flow of old ballads into the public consciousness from the days of Sir Walter Scott to the more systematic collecting of Francis James Child.

There is a more direct link between Bickerstaffe and Beethoven. The Miller of Dee was among the tunes he arranged for the Scottish publisher George Thomson. Thomson was no scholar and the tunes he gathered as folksongs were not necessarily very old or authentic. What appears to be a very curious late outbreak of hack-work may have been prompted by a network of international connections as a means of channelling funds to the composer. Beethoven did indeed do the settings himself and he had a longstanding and genuine interest in English tunes, writing early sets of variations on Rule Britannia and God save the King. In the end, Beethoven argued with Thomson over his tinkerings and priced himself out of the Scotsman's reach. Those who have made a study of these folksong settings consider them to be a underrated body of work but they are problematic for several reasons. Firstly they fly in the face of our conception of Beethoven as a God creating music out of nothing, secondly they occupy the gap between high and low art and can be dismissed as ephemera, thirdly they are brief and difficult to programme except as encores. The irony is that far more people have heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony than have ever heard his arrangement of The Miller of Dee. Even its existence may surprise many.

Isaac Bickerstaffe is one of the less well-remembered Irishmen who have conquered the London stage. A century or more later and we could query the parentage of Dion Boucicault, the most successful playwright of the nineteenth century in London. His natural father was very likely Dionysius Lardner, an industrious Irish scientific author and academic, who became his guardian. Lardner's 1878 Astronomy, with its engravings on wood and stone, dates from before the time canals were found on Mars. These curious and imminent impressions of comets and nebulae predate by many years the supposed beginnings of abstract art in Leadbetter and Besant's Thought Forms of 1905. There is no reason to allow the objection that these astronomers thought they were dutifully recording facts, for so did the Theosophists. Bouciault shows how a later century, deprived of astrology, would contrive to hatch its bards from astronomy.

 © James Beswick Whitehead, 2001