Lepanto

Alice K. Turner · 11 Jan 2005, 14:16 · from 2005-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: aturner6 at nyc.rr.com (Alice K. Turner)
Date: Tue Jan 11 14:16:56 2005
Subject: (urth) Lepanto
References: <20050111213008.84F1E985B7 at che.dreamhost.com>
Message-ID: <00c401c4f82b$3d580f80$d27cae44@akt>

Andrew Bollen:

>> I've never read Chesterton before, but his "Lepanto" (below) surely is
>> horrendously awful.

To which vizcacha replied:

> I wouldn't say it's _that_ bad. Like Kipling, if you encounter it at a
> certain age, it's quite thrilling. It also works better if you recite it 
> out
> loud; the alliteration and meter are stirring. Or at least I remember 
> these
> impressions from when I was a certain age. Check out _The Man Who Was
> Thursday_, or a light dose of Father Brown if you want something by
> Chesterton that you might enjoy more.

Oh, I agree completely. This kind of writing is completely out of fashion 
now, but "Lepanto" is actually a fine example of robust Victorian jingoism, 
or, from Orwell's point of view, admiration for Catholic conquistadores. But 
you really have to admire the nerve of:

Love-light of Spain--hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

At least when read aloud. Nobody mentioned, btw, what a splendid piece of 
invective prose the Orwell excerpt is, so I will.

-alga

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net