1: Division Street: A Working Mill - in the mental sense

2: Ultima Thule

3: The Semaphore of a Magnified Man

4: Hammers and Chestnuts

5: A Skeleton and the Mice at the end of the Pier

6: Tigers of Inspiration

7: Muted Village Hephaistos

8: Retribution & Manufacturing Madness

Longfellow's Windmill had at least two musical settings, the first within five years of its publication. It was the later setting by Herbert H. Nelson, dating from 1897, which was recorded on a 1920s disc by the English bass Norman Allin. It is attractive yet absurd with a strong sense of a vanished world about it. Not just the vanished world of the windmill nor that of Longfellow's verses but a solid childhood world of personified and benign buildings and objects. It is hard to think of any parallel, at least from the respectable arts. Milhaud did set to music a catalogue of descriptions of agricultural implements and William Schuman set some department store advertisements but the intention in each case was half-parodic, half-celebratory and neither demanded that the singer impersonated the objects. The nearest relation to the Longfellow-Nelson Windmill would seem be a nonsense or action song from the nursery such as "I am a teapot, short and stout". The theme of the Windmill could almost justify the singer adding a few hand signals to his performance. The pictorial simplicity makes it resonate in memory yet its strange dignity seems surreal, like an old engraving waiting for a Max Ernst. As a poem, it is perfectly contained and calls for no exegesis, reflecting the four-square integrity of the Windmill itself. As a celebration of an ordered world, it seems a very long away from anything we expect Art to do these days: it stands gratuitously before us and tells us nothing we did not know before. The feelings are entirely ordinary, except that an inanimate object is speaking or singing. Was the aged poet returning to the simplicities of childhood or was there a story behind this hieroglyphic poem? Some suggestion of an answer might be gleaned if we trace the poem to its source in Longfellow's 1880 collection called Ultima Thule.

Beneath an obelisk in Johnson Square, Savannah lies the body of General Nathanael Greene. He died in 1786, full of honours as an American hero for his rôle as Washington's second-in-command during the Revolutionary War. Both his son and grandson were named George Washington Greene and it was the grandson who wrote a three volume life of the General, which he dedicated to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In turn the poet dedicated his penultimate collection "Ultima Thule" to "G. W. G." This was a pleasant gesture but Longfellow had done more pleasant things for his friend, such as buying him a house in 1866 at 144, Division Street, East Greenwich. And in 1870, considering the house lacked a windmill, he added one. It was a disused four-storey gristmill and inside it the poet and the historian each had studies. In the mental sense, it was a working mill. Whether Greene needed it is unclear: the large estates in North and South Carolina and Georgia granted to his grandfather may have been lost but G. W .G. had been Professor of Modern Languages at Brown University and the US Consul to Rome, also lecturing on American History at Cornell University. Probably he wasn't financially dependent on Longfellow so the gift tells us something of the twice-widowed poet's generosity. It also serves to remind us how very successful he was in his lifetime on both sides of the Atlantic: he is still the only non-English poet to be allowed his piece of masonry in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey.

"Thule, the period of Cosmography" is where the maps give up and a place more of the Imagination than the Earth. For the poet of Weelkes's madrigal it was Iceland, where Mount Hecla blazed incongruously in a land of ice, an emblem of his heart, alike freezing and frying with love. Thule is a place approached in dreams, as it is by Marguerite in Faust, for whom it seems like a mysterious premonition of her Fate. In Longfellow's collection, the eponymous dedicatory poem recalls the favourable winds that once wafted him to lands of golden promise. Now, battered by life's gales, the poet seeks to lower his sails and rest in the harbours of Thule. The second poem is a tribute to Bayard Taylor, fellow-poet and best known for his lively translation of Goethe's Faust. It does not seem to be Goethe so much as Blake who is recalled in verses such as:

Traveller! in what realms afar,
In what planet, in what star,
In what vast aerial space,
Shines the light upon your face?

Taylor had died suddenly in his library in Berlin, where he was American Minister. Years of intense labour as a travel-writer, essayist, storyteller and poet had taken their toll. His death, surrounded by books, appears to have affected Longfellow as emblematic. In fact, the valedictory note in the collection begins with the dedication which bears an epigraph from Horace. Lines from the Ode to Apollo, XXXI of the First Book of Odes, are quoted as follows:

The Latin poet was famed for his love of good living and was jocularly referred to by the Emperor Augustus as a little pint pot. As a poet he was almost as famous for his long silences as for his poems and he made a spirited defence of his right to be idle. He would appear the polar opposite of Longfellow, who was to go on to write a further volume of verse before his death in 1882. Yet there was nothing casual in his choice of this Horatian Ode to Apollo. On the surface the poem is a simple prayer to the Sun-God Apollo to grant the poet nothing more than health and sanity to enjoy an honoured old age solaced by poetry and music. It is a plea for the simple life in which the poet somewhat luxuriously spells out the shopping list of material things for which he is not entreating the God:

Greene would have appreciated the cereal reference. The grist to their own mill was intellectual matter as the corn-grinding parts of the mill were not transferred to the house. Longfellow's mill is of the smock design, so-called because it resembled the garment of the countryman or an apron. Both Longfellow and Greene translated Dante and a comparison of their renderings of the opening thirty-one lines of the Inferno has been the subject of an academic paper.

Satan and Windmills have an association which comes from the opposite end of the Inferno - the thirty-fourth Canto. Here, the approaching banners of Satan, or Dis, are compared to a windmill. When the Devil himself manifests himself it is as a hideous three-faced giant, devouring Judas, Cassius and Brutus:

At every mouth his teeth a sinner champed,
Bruised as with ponderous engine
. . . fierce rending, whence oft-times the back
was stript of all its skin.

Meanwhile the massive bat-like wings send freezing winds through the underworld. This is a Devil of denials and betrayals, even Hell itself proves to be cold in his vicinity. Like a windmill, he is fixed like a geographical feature and, from his navel, or omphalos, Dante and Virgil have to ascend into the Southern Hemisphere. Day and Night are reversed so that even the time they have spent in Hell is denied, they arrive in Purgatory at half past seven on the morning of Holy Saturday, a day which they must relive.

A Native American source is also suggested in the stoic stanza of the mill standing to face the winds from all quarters. Native Americans had their own tradition of Lodges where men would assemble from related tribes and celebrate their culture in competitive song. The Bureau of American Ethnology, a department of the Smithsonian Institution, published forty-seven annual reports, transcribing some of this material, from 1881 to 1932, rather too late for them to be the source for Longfellow, but his interest in Native American lore was real enough and the resemblance to this sample seems strong:

Song on Applying War Paint

At the center of the earth
I stand,
Behold me!
At the wind center
I stand,
Behold me!
A root of medicine
Therefore I stand,
At the wind center
I stand.

The bold challenge of the windmill accepting its fate as a son of Nature is somewhat mitigated by the final stanza with its Christian sentiment. But the mill is a half-breed, partaking of Nature and the Human world. There is some justification for the surprising anthropomorphic notion of the sails folding like arms at rest: there was a Language of the Mill, known in small communities, where the position of the sails would indeed communicate holidays and bereavements to the surrounding countryside.

From the Fifteenth Century onwards, the windmill was a feature of the Dutch landscape. It was not primarily the grinding of corn that produced this great national enthusiasm for the windmill. They were harnessed to water-pumps for the reclamation of the Polders, a process which required a continuous battle against Nature. It is Faust's compulsion to reclaim lands from the sea which marks his dotage but the Dutch windmills were a sign of a vigorous youthful economy. Before the arrival of steam, a wide range of Dutch industries were wind-driven but it was in the nature of developing industry to seek separation from Mother Nature with her moods.

However, while the windmill prevailed, its arms were used for a language of the mill, conveying messages to the local community. There was a Joy or Coming Position, where the sails were halted just before the highest point. A Going Position, just past the peak, signalled sadness or bereavement. If halted at the peak, work would start again soon while the X Position signalled a longer rest. This participation of the windmill in Nature and human life was celebrated in Longfellow's poem. Though a giant, anchored to the rock, this is no Quixotic enemy but an anthropomorphic vision of human labour. This giant is a magnified man, extending his reach and glorifying God by his labours and his rest. It may not be too far-fetched to see in the arms of the windmill some similarity to the famous images of Man within the square and circle associated with Vitruvius and Da Vinci.

Some parallels become obvious between The Windmill and The Village Blacksmith, probably Longfellow's most parodied production. Both celebrate the seasons of human activity and the dignity of labour. The windmill and the water-mill seem to represent a stage in the development of technology where the human scale has not been lost. Longfellow's is an Angelic Mill, somewhat sentimental and unfashionable for retaining a resemblance to the human form. The poem has been more or less forgotten while the Satanic Mills of Blake have been remembered in a fuller physical incarnation than they ever had for the poet.

On the one hand we have Longfellow as the poet of optimism, international sympathies, humane instincts and a sort of super-tourist and antiquarian mentality. Verse we are told poured from him as from a spring. Yet there is a more shadowy vein which is never absent for long: a sympathy with darkness, unorthodox spiritualist tendencies, a haunted feeling that can make even his emptiest landscapes seem peopled with ghosts. Edgar Allen Poe became obsessed with the notion that Longfellow had plagiarized his City under the Sea in his depiction of Bruges. Poe's lurid nightmares are a long way off but in Longfellow's journal we learn of his intentional dreaming on subjects. Whether he meant daydreaming or actual dreams is unclear but an object in which he detects a possible poetic subject is frequently referred back, as it were, to the unconscious mind to gather more associations. This mental mill or rolling stone was, against the proverb, specifically trying to attract moss. The attraction of old masonry and haunted places was the legacy of Walter Scott but in Longfellow a certain stillness prevails as the foreground is less likely to be occupied by melodramatic events.

Longfellow deliberately aimed his poetry at the widest possible audience but at least two of his poems underwent a further popularization. The somewhat mysterious ballad Excelsior became the subject of a delightful cartoon sequence by James Thurber as well as a campfire song with the chorus Upidee, while the first line of the Village Blacksmith spawned a gestural game-song of which there are many variants. As a community-song, Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree had two higher-brow consequences. The Czech-born, US-naturalized composer Jaromir Weinberger was impressed by the sight of the English King joining in this action-song at a boys' camp, when he saw a newsreel film of it in France. It seemed a symbol of National unity and order as Europe edged uneasily towards war. His orchestral variations on Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree of 1936 achieved a great many performances across Europe and in the United States before and during the war. The extent to which orchestral concerts were eagerly attended by all classes during that period, when the culture seemed under threat is in some danger of being forgotten now they are once again attacked as being irrelevant and élitist. Weinberger's variations have each a literary or historical association. Pickwick as depicted by Beardsley and commemorated by Debussy is a figure suspected of a secret life invisible to his fellow-countrymen. The last variation is dedicated to the memory of Astraea, daughter of James I, whose wedding to the Emperor Palatine was supposed to reconcile Protestant England with the Catholic continent after the Thirty Years War. The occult resonances of this alchemical marriage were so far-reaching that Dame Frances Yates devoted an entire book to the subject. John Huss is also recalled as a bond between the Czech and English Nations. Weinberger's choice of English subjects throughout is slightly off-kilter, crediting the English with a longer National memory than they have ever been pleased to admit or allow.

The Chestnut was to become a poisonous fruit in George Orwell's 1984. The Chestnut Tree Café is described as a raffish and bohemian venue where revolutions were once hatched. Now it has become a place of suspicion and surveillance. Orwell's variant of the song "I sold you and you sold me" is a bitter commentary on the war and pre-war atmosphere of morale-boosting and social engineering. It seems unlikely that Orwell alias Eric Blair's reputation as a plain-speaker and plain-dealer will survive his exposure as a British Intelligence informant, relaying information on his supposed colleagues on the British Left to the public-school establishment he affected to despise.

The Old Mill at Newport is the subject of a long footnote which Longfellow appended to his Gothic ballad The Skeleton in Armour. This ancient round tower had been cited as evidence of European settlement in North America before Columbus and its exact age and purpose continues to divide opinions. A skeleton, which had been found on a New England beach, became associated in Longfellow's mind with a Viking romantically escaping a feud to find the New World. In recent years, the armoured body has been identified as a Native American warrior. Wherever we find towers and mills and lighthouses and belfries we find the age-old theme of builders directing the gaze and the progress of the human race. The nineteenth century was remarkable for the number of artists whose achievements and success enabled them to create their own monuments. If Wagner and Walter Scott are the most obvious examples, there are many tens of others for whom heavy masonry symbolized the materialization of their ideas and ideals.

Disputes about antiquities have a way of being microcosmic storms fuelled by macrocosmic viewpoints in collision. Though the popularization of the Norse hypothesis was Longfellow's work, he did not originate it. His membership of the Northern Antiquities Society was either a symptom or cause of his increasingly preoccupation with buildings.

The Skeleton in Armour was set by Joseph Holbrooke and was first performed on New Brighton pier, under Granville Bantock in 1899. The orchestras that used to play in the spas and watering places of Old England were not entirely restricted to salon trifles. Holbrooke's father, also called Joseph, had been a music-hall performer of some repute and it was to distinguish himself from him that the younger Holbrooke spelled his name Josef. It was a bad move for two reasons: the critics never tired teasing the tetchy composer about his humble Cockney origins so another name entirely may have been wiser. Also the German spelling had became a liability by the time the First World War erupted. In fact, Holbrooke's main fascination, apart from Celtic myths was with Edgar Allen Poe, who inspired a number of his works. In London, for a period, Holbrooke lived on a floor above Havergal Brian in the same building, but it was not a windmill. Both wrote orchestral variations on Three Blind Mice and Brian's work merited notice in Tovey's Analytical Essays. This innocent little catch for three or four voices would appear to live a life beyond its apparent means. Both Brian and Holbrooke were taken up for a time by aristocratic patrons and both were left high and dry. The fate of composers such as Brian and Holbrooke demonstrates two things. Firstly how many of the better-known names were able to promote themselves by private wealth and secondly how little intervention would be required to influence a supposedly élite culture.

If Blake has developed an intellectual following which has made him more than a cult, then Longfellow appears to have faded. The only non-English poet with a place in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey, he was popular both sides of the Atlantic. It is only in the last thirty years or so that American schoolchildren have not been made to memorize the Ride of Paul Revere, though there are signs that individual readers rediscover him and find much to admire. The most striking thing about Longfellow is his immediate readability. He places no obstacles of vocabulary or syntax between the reader and the meanings he intends. He is the opposite of the metaphysical poets in that sense and his star waned about the time the modernists were rediscovering the joys of John Donne. There is far less room for the critic to intervene between poet and reader in Longfellow. True the very plainness and shortness of the lines could give rise to monotony. Run-on lines are relatively few in Longfellow and Hiawatha's metre was once the target of many parodies. Though among the most learned men of his age, Longfellow deliberately developed a craft to communicate with the widest possible readership. He was also prepared to reflect popular feeling rather than delineate fresh responses. The Village Blacksmith seems to many to be the archetypal Victorian poem, its fame spreading even wider by its famous musical setting by Weiss.

Yet the influence of Blake on Longfellow is palpable, most obvious in The Building of the Ship, where the Tiger is recast in a factory setting. Is is the Songs of Blake which were the most obvious influence and it is unlikely that Longfellow was much acquainted with the prophetic books. Description of these were easily available from around 1868, when Swinburne's critical essay appeared but otherwise Blake was represented by The Songs of Innocence and Experience and mainly as excerpts in anthologies.

The successful Longfellow and the obscure Blake may appear like opposites. Yet there are many signs that Longfellow was pursuing an agenda at least as mysterious as the English poet. Northrop Frye's view of poetry seems allied to the Jungian collective consciousness: he suggests an eternal repository of symbols which relate in an ordered way to all of human experience, so that similar moods bring forth similar images. Like most critics, he prefers to exercise his craft on the toughest nuts, such as Blake's prophetic books, so he has nothing to say about Longfellow. Yet the American poet appears to have been using a powerful set of mental tools, creating in his poetry a form of memory theatre derived from ancient models. There is a great deal in Longfellow which suggests he pursued a humanitarian and enlightenment ideal closely related to the sentiments expressed in Schiller's Ode to Joy. Unlike the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, the poems of Longfellow were carried into every household on the first waves of general literacy.

In the poem Keramos, Greek for The Potter, Longfellow created one of his most substantial celebrations of human industry, the work of making the world a better place. The potter is seen as a universal image of this redemptive power of working the wheel. The poem circles the globe, finding potters to be a universal brotherhood. On his imagined flight around the circle of the earth, the poet sees many windmills and watermills as landmarks on this progress. Longfellow did not take on the mantle of the inspired prophet, but brought the humanitarian message to the fireside, where it could sink quietly into the consciousness of the individual reader. If he is the poet of the windmill and the millstream, of the tower and the wall, of the belfry and the bells, he was above all the poet of the family circle.

Whereas Blake's Los labours in Eternity to regenerate the fallen universe, Longfellow's blacksmith is situated in a village, working to feed his family and share the simple dignity of Sunday worship and social festivals. It is an exemplary portrait of self-reliance and order with the family as the fundamental building block of society. For many it became an image of complacency and stagnation and its unreality made it appear like a preacher's view of the world ordained by God so that some would labour uncomplainingly and others profit from their toil. As a celebration of work, Longellow's poem falls a long way behind some of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings with which it is contemporary. Its very lack of specific detail made it plain to admirers and detractors alike that we were being presented with a human type. It is as if the Blacksmith has been made the subject of a stained-glass window and the urge to throw stones is one response to such an image. This picture of simple piety is not in the final analysis religious at all: Longfellow is writing about the social order but it is not a social order he sees so much as an ideal. If it is held up as exemplary, then it must stand as a reproach to the idle rich as much as to the idle poor. The sentimental tear of the Blacksmith at church is ironically viewed as a part of his routine and not at all out of character for the physical type he represents: his seasons of joy and sadness come around with the same regularity as the blows of his hammer. This celebration was written at a time when village blacksmiths were under threat from a new world based on the railways and the steam engine. By the time it reached the height of its popularity, the poem had become an exercise in nostalgia, the memory of a human iron mill. Towards the end of his life, Longfellow was presented with a kind of bardic chair made from the wood of the tree, underneath which his blacksmith once had laboured.

Retribution, from the aphorisms of Friedrich von Logau, seventeenth century, translated by Longfellow: 

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.

Exactly which God Logau or Longfellow had in mind is unclear, though the first line at least has stayed in the memory of the general public who recognize something in the promise of delayed justice. Separation of the wheat from the chaff is indicated, though the process seems to involve a universal agony, unlike the parting of the sheep from the goats. The apocalyptic harvest and vintage imagery is here devoid of any sense of fruition and fulfillment; the threefold repetition of grind, grind, grinds and the emphasis on an approaching and inexorable fate seems more diabolical than Christian. This consuming God is not a long way from Dante's three-headed Dis.

Though today considered important and influential, August Strindberg's controversial and sexually frank plays outraged his fellow Swedes and by the early 1890s he had more or less given up writing drama. While Swedenborg had been a significant scientist before religious visions made him a mystic, Strindberg lived at a time when the separation of the arts and sciences had widened. Believing himself a colossus and attempting to bestride them, the playwright put himself on the rack. In the Antibarbarus of 1893, he set out a position which was at odds with the accepted scientific wisdom of the day, asserting, among other things, that Sulphur was not an element. Exiled in Paris, he joined a flourishing if marginal community of occultists and alchemists, obtaining some recognition among his peers for his papers in which he reported on his oppositional experiments.

Modern commentaries on alchemy have tended to concentrate on separating out the chemical and spiritual aspects of The Great Work, though it was the interpenetration of mind and matter which inspired the alchemists themselves. If we take the view that Strindberg was undergoing a mental crisis then he had been sane enough to gravitate to a city where it was estimated there were 50,000 alchemists and where the newspapers all carried occult material as a matter of course. The question of how mad he was is complicated by Strindberg's recognition that a crisis could also be turned into a commodity. By 1897, looking back on this breakdown from a period of relative calm, he was writing the book he called Inferno, drawing on his diaries. Yet, comparing the diaries with the Inferno, the diaries are always less luridly unbalanced than their later treatment. For example the dairies record his exploration of an attic, seeking the cause of mysterious noises. There he opens a chest and finds four sticks nearly making the symbol of a pentagram. He arranges them "better" according to the diary, presumably to make a better pentagram. In the Inferno, the arrangement of the black sticks is ascribed to tricksters and prompts questions as to its meaning.

There is no doubt that Strindberg was in an unusually intense and obsessive state of mind; he was finding significance in details that would normally be regarded as superficial coincidences. Applied to literature, this dissociative mindset can produce a density of punning meanings, such as we find in James Joyce but Strindberg would not or could not confine his revelations to the written word. The excitability of an artist in this state stems from the overlapping of inner and outer worlds. The grey world outside with its opacity, its imperviousness and indifference gives way to a coloured world which participates and pulses with a man's hopes and fears. It assists him with blessings or obstructs him with evil intentions. His success or failure becomes identified with the potential Redemption or Damnation of the world. Time and Labour and Knowledge are superseded by a direct revelation or apocalypse in which outward signs are evidence of design and in which the sensitized mind calls up answering correspondences from nature in the form of synchronicities. In this state of florid excitement, Strindberg maintained an acute self-consciousness, an awareness that others regarded him as mad. Yet the madness provided him with an insulation of sorts from the accusations of the sceptical fallen world.

Towards the end of the Inferno, Strindberg, reconciled with relatives at Klam, in the house of his mother-in-law and aunt, is given a volume of Swedenborg to read. The mystic's revelations about the exact topography and social organization of Heaven and Hell were the subject of Blake's corrections in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell but Strindberg was not in a critical frame of mind. He is convinced that Swedenborg was describing life on earth as Hell, moreover, when he takes a country walk, he believes himself to be in a landscape inhabited by Sweeps, those black spirits of Hell, described by the earlier Swede. This is a landscape filled with diabolic meanings. A low oblong shed with six oven doors makes him think of Dante's baking sinners, though on the earthly plain it is but a stinking pigsty. A huge Danish mastiff is perceived as Cerberus while a woman with the moon on her forehead turns out to be a hag. We are approaching the centre of this Hell:

"The waterfall and the mill-wheel made a noise that was just like the humming in my ears that had been with me ever since those first night of agitation in Paris. The mill-hands, white as false angels, handled the machinery like executioners, and the great paddlewheel performed its Sisyphean task of sending the water running down ceaselessly over and over again.

Further on was the smithy, with the begrimed naked smiths armed with firetongs, pincers, sledge-hammers, standing in the midst of fire and sparks and glowing iron and melted lead and a din that made my head whirl and my heart thump against my ribs.

Next came the sawmill and the huge saw, gnashing its teeth as it tortured the giant logs lying on the rack, while from them colourless blood trickled down on to the slimy ground."

The machinery by which Nature is humanized is turned nightmarishly into scenes of torture and hideous unending pain. In fact Strindberg's diary of the time is matter-of-fact about the walk but with a note to change the eight doored sty into a six doored one, for him a more ominous number. There was also a note to himself to refresh his reading of Dante, all of which suggests a very willed raising of the temperature for his finished account in the Inferno. The country walk is to be filtered through literary accounts of Hell to make the landscape correspond to the topography of Dante and Swedenborg. This manufacture of Hell from Nature is indicative of how far Hell was perceived as a saleable commodity in the eighteen nineties. The diabolic mills of the Inferno, whose purpose seems to be to make noise, to uselessly churn water and to create Hell on earth turn out themselves to be the product of a literary mill in which the distressed artist seeks to turn pain into bread.

In the fifteenth chapter of the Inferno, trying to make sense of all he had been through, Strindberg adds a Promethean gloss to the aphorism that Longfellow translated:

"These are the Mills of God, that grind slow but grind exceeding small &endash; and black. You are ground to powder and you think it is all over. But no, it will begin again and again and you will be put through the mill once more.

"Be happy. That is the Hell here on earth, recognized by Luther, who esteemed it a high honour that he should be ground to powder on this side of the empyrean.

Be happy and grateful."

Infernal machinery looms large in the nightmares of disturbed minds. The repetitive action of machinery seems to be an external correlative of the obsessive circular thoughts of distress. Purpose retreats from these vast nocturnal factories, as it does from the alienated worker. The rewards of industry, the added values of commerce are lost or invisible and these wheels are for torture of the inmates only. Here is Strindberg again in the attic where he finds the pentagram:

Woke up in the night and heard the village clock strike thirteen times. Instantly I became aware of the usual electric sensations, also of a noise in the attic above me.

Went up to investigate the attic, where I found a dozen spinning-wheels that made me think of electric machines.

The nightmarish possibilities of the spinning-wheel are familiar from many of the Grimms' Household Tales, though Erben's Czech version The Golden Spinning Wheel outbids them in grisly detail. A dozen spinning wheels seems a large number for a domestic attic but Strindberg's madness seems pale and literary when set beside the earliest book-length study of a mad man.

John Haslam was the apothecary of Bedlam Hospital and his book "Illustrations of Madness" was published in 1810, detailing the case of one James Tilly Matthews an architect turned tea-merchant. Matthews background was colourful with some suggestions of Jacobin sympathies and European espionage at the period when English paranoia over French Revolutionary ideas was at its height. According to some accounts, this ferment is made yet more potent by references to Mesmerism and Freemasonry. Matthews' account of his persecution at the hands of a gang of ruffians describes a mind-control machine which seems at least a hundred years ahead of science-fiction let alone science itself. Matthews attracted the attention of the authorities when his letters warned the Government that this evil machine he called the "air-loom" was directed at their own minds as well as at his own. Its effects were far-reaching and terrible so he sought the protection of the Lord Mayor of London from the gang who were using the craft of "pneumatic chemistry" against him. In the account given in J. W. Wickwar's Handbook of the Black Arts, the description of his torments, though relayed without direct quotation, does seem to aspire to the condition of poetry:

"they could constrict the fibre of his tongue laterally so that he could not readily speak . . . they could spread a magnetic warp beneath his brain so that the sentiments of the heart could have no communication with the operation of the intellect . . they could at pleasure change the sense of the hearing to the leg or any other part . . . by means of the air-loom and magnetic impregnations they could introduce into the brain some particular idea .. . they could violently force fluids into the head, elongate or diminish the brain . . ."

Here is an authentic note of madness which points to unknown and powerful machines as violators of the person, as if the disorder felt within is being projected outwards onto a mysterious advanced technology. Matthews died in custody in 1815 but the pattern of his complaints has been echoed many times with less eloquence over the years and the nightmare technology he describes is no longer so far-fetched as it was. There is certainly no reason to think that Governments would not like such a capability, though they would entrust its development and deployment to the sort of ruffians who come with doctorates. All-powerful machines remain now as then remote and certainly computers deal no more cleverly with malfunctions than do human beings: they typically report errors by erroneous messages or scapegoat a blameless line of code as the cause of a crashing programme.

John Metcalfe is little read today but his tales of psychological horror haunt the mind long after others are long forgotten. His tale called the Bad Lands has nothing to do with America but describes the visit of a neurasthenic young man to a Norfolk resort town, where he discovers a path into an alternative reality. An old and crumbling tower on the dunes becomes a focus which fascinates him by its sheer futility. With its "white nightcap dome and its sides of pale yellow stucco" Ormerod finds it alternately funny and threatening. An evil white house he has seen in his dreams now materializes in these Bad Lands beyond the tower. He feels compelled to approach it and peer in through the window:

". . .In the centre of the floor was set the object that seemed to dominate the whole.

"This was a large and cumbrous spinning-wheel of forbidding mien. It glistened foully in the dim light, and its many moulded points pricked the air in very awful fashion. Waiting there in the close stillness, the watcher fancied he could see the treadle stir. Quickly, with beating heart, beset by sudden dread, he turned away. . ."

When we are beginning to accept the landscape as Ormerod's own internal world, he finds his experiences have been shared by a fellow-guest at the hotel or sanitarium. They also share the belief that the evil house should be burned and destroyed but in the event Ormerod alone goes on alone to perform the task with matches and a tin of oil. Reality reasserts itself as a concerned sister arrives like the cold light of dawn as her brother is arrested for setting fire to a barn. The fellow guest who had encouraged the crime expands on a theory of a parallel world superimposed on the landscape but is laughed at by those who know that "past that gate by the dunes is just old Hackney's farm and nothing else". The parallel world seems for a moment to be vindicated when one of the points of the spinning wheel is produced from the incendiary's pocket but it is identified as the handle of a patent separator, bearing Hackney's initials as a signature of the work-a-day world. Yet it is never the resolutions of such tales that haunt the mind so much as the moments of terrible vision when we too peer in the window and see the treadle stir on some foully glistening thing.

By the early twentieth century, the mill, whether water-powered or a windmill had become a nostalgic period-property. A song such as Down by the Old Mill Stream would associate the location with Darby and Joan sentiments of romance recollected in nostalgia. Victor Herbert's Red Mill of 1906 would turn out to have nothing whatever to do with Paris or the Moulin Rouge. True the heroine is imprisoned inside the mill for a spell but in operetta-land a fortune will materialize in time for a marriage without the trouble of labour and in accordance with rules which apply willy-nilly to Toyland or an imagined Amsterdam. A foully-glistening thing in its own way.

 

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© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001