Educated Guesswork

Simon The Jester, by William J. Locke

Most will be familiar with the “Uncanny Valley” concept in robotics and computer animation, the hypothesis being that as the designed object nears more closely an actual human being a point is reached at which the resemblance is so near as to call up emotional responses, yet the distance between the created object and its real exemplar is still such that those responses will be eery distaste or confusion or off-putting weirdness. That this idea is merely a hypothesis with little or no scientific basis may be seen in the fact that the crowds of people (back when there were crowds) attending premieres of Marvel movies did not flee screaming from the theater in revulsion at the counterfeit humanity depicted therein.

But since we human beings are story-making, explanation seeking, pattern seeing animals, may I be permitted to posit a similar idea as pertains to works of literature? For I believe I have just experienced something like the “uncanny valley” as I finished an old (over a century old, as it was published in 1909) novel by a once-popular writer, the book Simon The Jester by William J. Locke. I found it to be a perfect novel, with perfect characters, perfect observations, perfect dialogue … up to a point. And at that point, something strange happened, and I had an out-of-novel experience which left me disoriented and nonplussed by the very book which up to its closing pages had seemed a rare work of genius, but now became a burlesque grotesquerie, an incomprehensible jamais vu construction that left me shaken and somewhat sorrowful. Call it the Uncanny Asymptote of Nearly Perfect Fiction.

On a murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-sudsy thing a mile away from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition call the sea. The interim is mud—oozy, brown, malevolent mud. Sometimes it seems to heave as if with the myriad bodies of slimy crawling eels and worms and snakes. A few foul boats lie buried in it.

Here and there, on land, a surly inhabitant spits into it. If you address him he snorts at you unintelligibly. If you turn your back tot he sea you are met by a prospect of unimagined despair. There are no trees. The country is flat and barren. A dismal creek runs miles inland—an estuary fed by the River Murgle. A few battered cottages, a general shop, a couple of low pubic-houses, and three perky red-brick villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you will, of Murglebed-on-Sea.

A fine description of a depraved landscape

Simon The Jester begins with the titular Simon de Gex, M.P., seeking the most God-forsaken place in all England, in which quest he is successful. He hies himself to this most baleful clime, there to dedicate himself to a life founded upon the principles of Marcus Aurelius, specifically to be a “happy man” by his devotion to “good inclinations of the soul, good desires, good actions.” Simon calls this concept ‘eumoiriety’, based on the Greek word translated above as “happy man”, εὒμοιρος. The neologism is not entirely euphonious, and its continual appearance is perhaps the one discordant element in the novel’s first two hundred and fifty pages, and indeed its appearance was so perplexing to Mr. Locke’s initial readers that a special note was added to a subsequent issue of the magazine in which the first episode of the novel was serialized, explaining the unfamiliar (and now quite reasonably forgotten) term.

Simon has deep reasons for seeking a state of … ahem … ‘eumoiriety’, which I shall leave for the reader to discover for him- or herself. Though it seems that he should be quite content with his very fortunate life, in which he occupies one of the highest places in the great pyramid of being which is the British Empire in the first decade of the 20th Century, he suddenly jumps his tracks and leaves all his previous ruts, and of the adventures which follow this novel is constructed.

“These things are no one’s fault,” I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked scraps of platitude I could collect—the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life—the door opened and the manager announced that the police had arrived.

Simon de Get is a true and wise philosopher, in spite of everything that happens

And what adventures they are. Recounted in wry and urbane reflections as a strange new world opens up before him, our Member of Parliament seeks to do good deeds, the first of which he sets himself is to remove his politic assistant Dale Kynnersley from the clutches of a gold-digging lion tamer, the fascinating Lola Brandt. But when he visits the femme fatale, Simon is peculiarly struck by the strangeness of her environs, her person, and her friend, the dwarf Anastasius Papadopoulos. This last strange figure trains cats—ordinary housecats—in feats of derring-do and mastery just as Lola once was mistress to a pride of trained lions.

The intersection of Simon’s world of privilege and wit with the demimonde of Lola and Professor Papadopoulos drives the novel into some strange and romantic places, though most of the action in Simon The Jester are the merest trifles. However, as Alexander Pope said, “Trifles themselves are elegant in him,” and that poet might have used Simon de Gex as the very model for this sentiment. For every page of Locke’s novel scintillates with sharp intelligence and trenchant insights. His narrator is the best of a rare breed, the true aristocrat, in the original sense of that word first needed Ancient Greece. Could such fine patriarchal British aristocrats have ever existed? One can only hope.

She looked straight in front of her, with parted lips, fingering her handkerchief and evidently pondering the entirely new suggestion. I thought it best to let her ponder. As a general rule, people will do anything in the world rather than think; so, when one sees a human being wrapped in thought, one ought to regard wilful disturbance of the process as sacrilege.

So courteous is de Gex that he will not interrupt even a silent woman

Simon The Jester is a novel I only read by accident, as it came to me as an unwanted (and unwonted) gift from a friend who that I “had a lot of books” and so naturally thought of me when she was getting rid of some old books. Besides the fact that I don’t read much in the way of hundred-year-old popular fiction, it also belongs to a genre I am hardly acquainted with, the romance. (The version I was gifted with includes as well four nice illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg, known today for creating Uncle Sam’s famous “I Want You!” poster.) But the suasive power of Locke’s beautiful language is remarkable, as each remark by the protagonist reveals a fine sense of propriety (in the best sense) and a very real understanding of the human condition.

In this age of flippancy and scepticism, if a human soul proclaims sincerely its faith in the divinity of a rabbit, in God’s name don’t disturb it. It is something whereto to refer his aspirations, his resolves; it is a court of arbitration, at the lowest, for his spiritual disputes; and the rabbit will be as effective an oracle as any other. For are not all religions but the strivings of the spirit towards crystallisation at some point outside the environment of passions and appetites which is the flesh, so that it can work untrammelled: and are not all gods but the accidental forms, conditioned by circumstance, which this crystallisation takes? All gods in their anthropo-, helio-, thero-, or what-not-morphic forms are false; but, on the other hand, all gods in their spiritual essence are true.

Deep thinking in a light trifle

And the sparkling insights of Simon accompany a pell-mell rush across colorful vistas of incident and romance, a journey through a world that is no more, and likely never was. Yet throughout the novel, Mr. Locke manages to make the most bizarre situations compelling fiction. Each crazed scene is more believable, more true than the last, until … until it is not.

And so we come to my crux with this novel, or perhaps with my reading. I have elided over most of the plot because Simon The Jester is worth reading on its own terms, and Locke provides continual surprise in his fine writing. But at some point very close to the end of the book, I became disengaged from the narrative world I’d effortlessly inhabited for the 250 or so prior pages. I can only liken it to an experience I had once of watching Terry Gilliam’s Brazil on network television, during the viewing of which I had become totally transfixed by the almost miraculous depiction of another world that is also our own, only to be shaken out of my dark reverie by the intrusion of an ad for foot odor products (or something like that). And though the poignant episodes of the last third of the book were some of the truest I have ever read of a man learning to care deeply for his fellow human beings, at some point the lines holding me tightly to the story slipped their moorings, or I slipped mine, and the end of the book slipped away from me like a bucket dropped down a well.

“Well, I’m damned!” said I, in my native tongue.

I don’t often use strong language; but the occasion warranted it. I was flabbergasted, bewildered, outraged, humiliated, delighted, incredulous, and generally turned topsy-turvy. In conversation one has no time for so minute an analysis of one’s feelings. I therefore summed them up in the only word.

Strong language indeed from our narrator

The question I have asked myself since completing this novel is whether the problem I found is within the book, or within myself. And I confess I have no final answer. As I say, I do not read romances as a rule, and perhaps my disdain for the novel’s climax is a dislike for the resolution of the romantic triangle. (There’s always a triangle.) However, I studied the idea of using the other leg of the triangle as the result, and am not sure that I should have liked that any better. It is also possible that Mr. Locke simply constructed a puzzle for which either solution was unacceptable—though as before, I cannot say whether ‘twould be unacceptable objectively, or to myself only. I leave the entire matter as a problem for the reader, telling you up front that I have no idea of the solution, if solution there be.

It is not so much the thing that is done or the thing that is said that matters, but the way of doing or saying it. In the commonplace pat on the hand, in the break in the commonplace words there was something that went straight to my heart. I squeezed her arm and whispered:

“Thank you, dear.”

Still, the language of this book—trifle though it be—is so excellent, so powerful, that it succeeds even where I may perceive some small failings at the end. So I cannot recommend Simon The Jester wholeheartedly, nor can I recommend it highly enough. William J. Locke is a fantastic writer, famous for what it’s worth in his own time. And his is a century-old voice well worth listening to. I’ll report after I read another of his novels, which I shall.

Candide, by Voltaire

(We’ll get back to the other stories another time)

Trigger Warnings: Bestiality, Cannibalism, Rape, Violence, Murder, Torture, Slavery, Sexual Slavery, Cavity Searches, Child Genital Mutilation, STDs, Religion, Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Gardening

Voltaire’s Candide is justly famous, a brilliant and searing evisceration of the world’s mores and our feeble attempts to make sense of it all. You should read it. End of report.

But for those who need a little more, and who are not turned away by the Trigger Warnings above, I can sum up Candide by telling you two jokes. The first joke is usually told in some sorts of ‘up yourself’ movements, like recovery speakers or those life coaching or TED talkers or maybe the kind of ‘Christian’ churches where they’ll tell little stories they grabbed from some book of uplifting stories, maybe from that ‘road less travelled’ guy or the ‘traveller’ or something like that. Anyway, if you hang out with a certain sort of person who likes uplifting stuff, and you listen to any of it, you’re likely to hear this first joke, or maybe it’s just a ‘story’, though it’s obviously a constructed artifact, perhaps somebody can do a deep dive on its history, à la Robert K. Merton’s On The Shoulders Of Giants. I like to think of it as part of the late-20th-century ‘philosophy’ I call “The Banality of Feeble”. In any event, here is the joke:

Once upon a time in China, there was an old man who owned a beautiful white stallion. One day, the horse leapt over the rude fence around the old man’s property, and dashed away into the woods, and was lost.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him moaning and crying, saying, “Oh, how sad! You have lost your beautiful white horse. What a bad thing to happen to you!”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a bad thing. I only know that my white stallion has run away.”

A short time later, the white stallion returned to the old man’s simple farm, and when he came back he was accompanied by five other beautiful wild white horses, whom the old man was able to place in his corral.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him, laughing and shouting, “What great fortune! Your white horse has come back and has brought your stable five more beautiful horses. What a good thing to happen to you!”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a good thing. I only know that my white stallion has returned and has brought five more horses with him.”

Then the old man’s son was thrown by one of the new wild horses as he was trying to tame it, and when he fell his arm was broken.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him moaning and crying, saying, “Oh, how sad! Your son has broken his arm, and you should curse the day those wild horses came to your farm. What a bad thing to happen to you!”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a bad thing. I only know that my son’s arm has been broken.”

Then the army came to the old man’s small village, seeking soldiers for the emperor’s army. They took away every able-bodied young man in the hamlet, but the old man’s son was left behind when the army departed, as the boy’s arm was still incapacitated from being broken.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him, laughing and shouting, “What great fortune! Your son has been spared by the army, because his arm is broken. It was a good thing that he was thrown by that horse.”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a good thing. I only know that …

Well, you get the idea.

So, it’s not really a joke at all, unless the joke is that this sort of thing just (one assumes) goes on like this forever and ever, and that, after all, is the deep, deep spiritual meaning behind the … joke, or story, or tale, or whatever.

The teller will usually say at the end, just before I wrote “Well, you get the idea”, that the story just goes on like that. I have yet to hear the version where the army passing over his son because of the broken arm causes something objectively bad to happen. But there you go, in one nutshell: Candide.

Of course, that’s not all. Not by a long shot. Voltaire was no New Age follower turned pro in this ‘greatest nation in the world’. He had a lot more depth and nuance than that. And to capture this in this book report, we need another joke. Now this one is actually a joke, though there may be many out there who will not find it very funny. That’s okay, because you might want to avoid Candide if you are one of those people. Here’s the joke:

A priest was walking along a seaside cliff one morning, enjoying the brisk wind from the ocean, when he heard a plaintive cry. Rounding a boulder between the road and his path, he saw a very young boy weeping pitiably, sunk to his knees at the edge of the cliff, blubbering and sobbing, his whole body shaking and racked by his crying.

“Dear boy,” said the priest. “Whatever is the matter?”

“Oh, father,” said the boy, wiping away the tears with a tiny fist, “my mommy and daddy and me were driving in the car, and the tire blew, and we spun off the road, hitting this rock, and I was thrown clear, but mommy and daddy and the car went over the cliff and I think they’re dead!” The boy began to sob again.

“There, there,” said the priest, looking over the cliff. “Hush, now.”

The boy stopped crying once more, and looked up with pitiable mien, and now saw the priest had removed his coat, and was now taking off his belt.

“Son,” said the priest, “this just isn’t your day.”

The Moral of the story being: Every cloud has a silver lining … for someone. At least, that seems to be a theme in Candide.

These two jokes, taken together, sum up Candide pretty well.

Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes, by R. Austin Freeman

The impossibly insightful detective is, of course, a staple of the mystery genre, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation being the archetype, though the lineage runs back to Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” in which the mental magic is performed by C. Auguste Dupin. Such a superhuman investigator always manages to combine eidetic memory and near-perfect perception and apperception with the ability to retrieve from an encyclopædic knowledge of facts legal, scientific, sociological, and trivial just those items of moment which have salience to the particular case being investigated. And the medico cum lawyer Dr. John Thorndyke is a fairly famous exemplar of such a masterful detective, created by the writer R. Austin Freeman over a hundred years ago, in 1907, while Conan Doyle was still maundering his creation through the post-resurrection tales which are problematic to many Holmesians (or Sherlockians, à votre goût). Combining medical knowledge with a fine legal mind, Thorndyke also brings to bear a distinctly scientific bent to each problem, aided by his ever-faithful assistant, Polton. Many recognize R. Austin Freeman as the creator of perhaps the first ‘scientific’ investigator of crime, the progenitor of that lineage which ended up in the CSI franchise.

Mr. Freeman also claimed credit for what he called the ‘inverted’ mystery story, which TV viewers of an earlier age will recognize as ‘what they did on Columbo‘, that is, where the actual crime is detailed up front, and the detective story arises from the actions taken by the investigator to unmask the criminal, already known to the reader/viewer. Generally, in his writing, Freeman plays fair with the reader, though he uses one or two tricks of the trade to hide his ‘clues’ in plain sight. For example, he will use the most arcane scientific jargon to describe a substance, trusting that few of his readers will know the abstruse term. (He lived blissfully unaware of the Internet’s power to make the recondite a mere excuse for endless Wikipedia Talk: pages.) Another peculiarity of the author is to always cast events not including his detective into a neutral omniscient third person narrative, while Dr. Thorndyke’s actions are always related by his amanuensis, the easily puzzled Jervis, a lawyer working in the same rooms as the detective. In either voice, Freeman writes with urbane and dry wit, if not always with humor.

“Yes,” said the constable, closing his note book, “he seems to have been a good deal like other people. They usually are. That’s the worst of it. If people who commit crimes would only be a bit more striking in their appearance and show a little originality in the way they dress, it would make things so much more simple for us.”

Even the Bobby on the street takes time to dryly note the monotonous dullness of the criminal type, perhaps made less noticeable by the extraordinary detectives pursuing them

The plot of Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes is fairly complex, fairly difficult to briefly recap, and perhaps best left for the reader to take as it comes. My own edition (an A. L. Burt reprint of the 1933 original published by Dodd, Mead) includes a précis on the page before the frontispiece which manages paradoxically both a) to give away much of the plot, and b) to misstate egregiously the plot (in spirit if not in detail). I thus read the mystery waiting for certain facts revealed in that ‘flapple’ (as my mother always called that material usually presented on the flaps of a book’s dust jacket) while struggling to follow the ins and outs of the actual narrative. Put very simply, for those who must be told what a book is about before reading a book to discover what the book is about, an American goes to England to assert a claim to a peerage, becomes a witness to a strange contretemps in a luggage room, engages a somewhat shady solicitor to advance his case, which case involves Dr. Thorndyke as a potential legal expert, and from that point the tightly wound up plot begins to spin in various epicycles that would have delighted Ptolemy, though different readers may have different reactions. This reader enjoyed it, though it’s a bit of a muddle at points. It seemed like the author sketched out his idea for the crimes he was to relate, and then found it fairly tricky to reveal them to the reader without just saying, “and this odd thing happened as well, which meant that that guy I mentioned had to do this other thing, which meant …”, etc., etc. There are at least four ‘mysteries’ intersecting within the pages of Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes, and though the intersection leads in some entertaining directions, perhaps one less plot line would have done the book some good, just as L.A Confidential was helped in its transition to the movie screen by dropping one of its threads.

Fans of Holmes may find they also enjoy Dr. Thorndyke, particularly if they enjoy the former’s pedantic recitation of facts, supercilious disdain of expressing opinions in the face of the unknown, and gleeful and arrogant superiority. Unlike Doyle’s creation, however, Dr. Thorndyke is not averse to spinning out theories of the case before all the facts are in, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes distracting to the (or this) reader. Thorndyke is a precise and legalistic speaker, and so will never speak of something as a verity in the absence of facts, but can go on for some time about hypotheticals. I was surprised a tad by this, as it is unclear who if anyone is paying Dr. Thorndyke for his services in this case, and I have met few lawyers willing to expound at length without an assured client to whom to invoice their billable hours. Perhaps things were different in 1921, when this book is set.

Another thing different a century ago comes across in the distinct class consciousness present in this work. Those who cannot stomach an almost innate belief in the ineluctable superiority of certain people due solely to accidents of their birth will find much to annoy them in Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes. To the reader of mysteries, much is too readily revealed when the good guys always wear white hats and the bad guys wear black, or, as is the case here, the good people are whiter than white with their fine character supposedly shown by every chiseled line of their faces.

Mistress Jenifer would have sustained the character of the earl’s daughter with credit even on the stage, where the demands are a good deal more exacting than in real life. In the typically “patrician” style of features, with the fine Roman nose and the level brows and firm chin, she resembled her redoubtable aunt; but she had the advantage of that lady in the matter of stature, being, like her father, well above the average height. And here it may be noted that, if the daughter reflected credit on the father, the latter was well able to hold his position on his own merits. Christopher J. Pippet was fully worthy of his distinguished womenkind; a fine, upstanding gentleman with an undeniable “presence.”

It was probably the possession of these personal advantages that made the way smooth for the two strangers on their arrival at the premises in which the inquest was to be held. At any rate, as soon as Mr. Pippet had made known his connexion with the case, the officiating police officer conducted them to a place in the front row

R. Austin Freeman knows very well the difference between patricians and plebeians, and I’m sure would be surprised that we don’t see it so clearly

So the novel, while engaging, has drawbacks which may prove insuperable for some readers. One issue I have not mentioned, as it may be a positive, a negative, or entirely neutral depending on one’s taste, is that much of the book takes place in various British courts, so that several whole chapters are filled with lawyers (sorry, barristers) and judges and witnesses going on in a very British legal way about this, and then that, and then one other thing. So the reader will learn some trifles about English law as it appeared last century between the wars. I also learned many other things besides the rules of inheritance and peers, such as peculiarities of the geology of southeastern England, scientific properties of dust, and the unexpected behavior of certain metals in specific chemical circumstances. Certainly the work is engaging enough, surprisingly so for a novel filled with a fair amount of pedantic prattling from puffed-up proponents of the patriarchy (not all of whom are characters in the book). However, I am not convinced by this first Dr. Thorndyke novel that I’ve read of his high place in the Pantheon of Detectives. (I have only read short stories featuring this earliest forensic detective heretofore.) I will essay another, perhaps earlier, book or two before I pass judgment.

St. Paul in Britain, or, The Origin of British Christianity, by The Rev. W. Morgan

and

The supposed Visit of St Paul to Britain: A Lecture Delivered In The University of Oxford, by Edward Cardwell

I remember watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island in the Before Time, and seeing the titular Gilligan beset by competing claims made by the Skipper and the Professor. Of course, I do not remember the actual statements made by those supporting characters who portrayed the Man of Common Sense and the Man of Science, respectively, in that mythic TV show, nor do I recall the actual plot. I suspect that it involved a chance to escape the tiny tropical island upon which the seven castaways were marooned, and that this time it seemed sure of success, although I have a further suspicion that some action (or inaction) on Gilligan’s part may have doomed their chance to return to civilization. Or maybe it was just a visit from Kurt Russell. Anyway…. What I do remember is the Professor and the Skipper, first one and then the other, explaining in each one’s peculiarly reassuring way just how such-and-such would work or should be done or whatever, the sticking point being that the views espoused by the Professor and the Skipper were diametrically opposed. After the Professor (let’s say) spoke to Gilligan, Gilligan said to himself, “The Professor’s right!” And then the Skipper cornered him and made his case, after which Gilligan said, “The Skipper’s right!” And so it went. Whoever spoke to Gilligan last was able to convince Gilligan completely. (Small aside: I once had a boss like this, whom it was very important to talk to just before he made his final presentation to his boss, else that complete project plan you’d made two days earlier would be overturned by offhand words dropped in his ear at lunch by a competing junior executive.) That peculiar Heisenberg Principle of Gilligan Certainty, combined with the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, explains much about my own pseudo-intellectual psychology, particularly when it comes to topics such as that presented by the Rev. R. W. Morgan in St. Paul in Britain.

This delightful book is Wacko Done Right, a tasty blend of erudition, informed speculation, documentation, and plausible nonsense that makes good conspiracy theories just plain fun, and which is almost always absent from the modern product. Reading the words written a century-and-a-half ago by Richard Williams Morgan makes me almost believe that Saint Paul somehow continued on the journey begun on the road to Damascus to sojourn for a while in faraway Albion before returning to Rome for his second trial and eventual martyrdom. I am just ‘this close’ to being persuaded of this obvious untruth, and that is what is great about this book, and what is great about the best of Wacko Thought. The power to convince people of wrong-headed ideas is why men as smart as Samuel Clemens could believe that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays, why the Templars and the Illuminati can still move books off the shelves (in spite of the fact that one group became bankers after their military operations ceased and the other were just grifting dreamers and schemers who didn’t ever amount to anything), and why we will never, ever know just what did happen to JFK.

What is Morgan’s argument? He neatly summarizes his entire Wacko thesis:

Christianity was first introduced into Britain by Joseph of Arimathæa, A.D. 36-39; followed by Simon Zelotes, the apostle; then by Aristobulus, the first bishop of the Britons; then by St. Paul. Its first converts were members of the royal family of Siluria—that is, Gladys, the sister of Caràdoc, Gladys (Claudia) and Eurgen his daughters, Linus his son, converted in Britain before they were carried into captivity to Rome; then Caràdoc, Brân, and the rest of the family, converted at Rome. The two cradles of Christianity in Britain were Ynys Wydrin, ‘the Crystal Isle,’ translated by the Saxons Glastonbury, in Somersetshire, where Joseph settled and taught, and Siluria, where the earliest churches and schools, next to Ynys Wydrin, were founded by the Silurian dynasty. Ynys Wydrin was also commonly known as Ynys Avàlon, and in Latin “Domus Dei,” “Secretum Dei.”

Say what you want, at least Morgan doesn’t beat about the bush

Now don’t you worry, Rev. Morgan has plenty of evidence for each and every one of those statements, though the years since those words were published have not been kind to his arguments. And he is by no means a deceitful footnoter, like Arthur Butz, the (appropriately named) author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, who hides his use of the self-serving testimony of an SS officer on trial for his life to prove that the Holocaust never happened. No, Richard Williams Morgan fails not because he is a liar, but because he relies upon lying evidence, sources which either slant, bend, or distort the facts to bolster their own preferred arguments (such as those supporting Glastonbury’s claim to primacy among British churches), or sources which turned out to be blatant forgeries. Among the latter, the most blatant were the work of Edward Williams, whom Wikipedia deigns to call by his so-called ‘bardic name’ of Iolo Morganwg.*

Now this Edward Williams almost singlehandedly promoted a bizarre revisionist retelling of the lost mysteries of the ancient Druids, claiming that Welsh Bards preserved the ‘old ways’ against the brutalizing forces of the Roman conquest of Britain, merging their putatively peaceful spirituality with that of earliest Christianity, which remained in Britain truer to the original doctrines preached by the apostles and the Seventy. This last point is particularly important in the Reverend Morgan’s work, as it is in most proponents who promulgate the spiritual purity of the British Church in contradistinction to the (supposedly) adulterated version found in Rome. Much of Morgan’s book is spent demonstrating that the Christian Church in Britain was going gangbusters when Augustine, the future first Archbishop of Canterbury, showed up on a mission from the pope to convert the Kentish heathens and to bring the already extant churches under the sway of Rome. Morgan preaches that the churches of Britain were founded upon the true sources of Christian faith, direct from the earliest apostles and disciples, and that there was and is no reason to kowtow to some foreign prelate in matters of religion.

Thus Reverend Morgan had the misfortune not only to write his work at the high tide of credence in the unsupported beliefs which gave rise to Neo-Celtic Christianity, but also to base his claims upon spurious documents, assiduous though he was to reference each and every source. (The book was written at a time when all literate people (mostly men, we assume) read and spoke Latin, and probably a little Greek as well, so many of the citations which he quotes in full were almost useless to this ignorant, benighted reader, malheureusement.) Reliance upon forgery is not his only failing, however, for his credulous nature makes him all too liable to blind himself to the most obvious motives in even his valid sources, as when he elides over the self-serving claims of the Church of Glastonbury to be founded by Joseph of Arimathæa. There are many such instances.

For our part, we cast aside the addenda and crescenda, the legends, poems, marvels which after ages, monk, troubadour, and historian piled high and gorgeously on the original foundation. That foundation must indeed have originally possessed no mean strength, depth, and solidity, to bear the immense superstructure which mediæval superstition and literature emulated each other in erecting above the simple tomb of the Arimathæan senator in the Avàlon isle.

In a striking prolepsis, Rev. Morgan discounts his opponents’ arguments by disclaiming all dependence upon myths and legends, all while also proclaiming those legends as heavy weights in the balance for his own case

Sadly, most of this chronology for the birth of the British Church was destroyed quite aptly almost a quarter century before Morgan’s St. Paul in Britain, by Edward Cardwell in The supposed Visit of St. Paul in Britain, an Oxford lecture published in 1837. In this remarkably brief (31 pages, including the 2-page introduction) pamphlet, Cardwell demolishes almost utterly the most fantastic claims later promoted by Rev. Morgan. Indeed, the tract seems almost an outline for the latter half of Morgan’s book, which the later author had only to invert to make the positive case which is reprinted in the first passage from St. Paul in Britain quoted above. Both, in fact, speak of their debt to the famous Bishop Usher, though Morgan’s debt is to the 17th-Century prelate’s researches tending to prove the apostasy of the Roman Church, while Cardwell references the creator of the famous chronology of The Bible as an incitement to speak up against the claims that Saint Paul ever sojourned in Britain.

Unfortunately, in the reaction to the most strident claims made in St. Paul in Britain, the debunkery succeeded so well in pooh-poohing the crazy idea in that book’s title that one of the most striking aspects of British Christianity is left unhallowed and unappreciated. I am speaking of the unquestioned early date at which Christian churches can be found in Britain. The mission of Aristobulus to the faraway isles is not seriously doubted, and there certainly seems strong evidence that Christian missions were present no later than the 3rd Century, much earlier than that of Augustine of Canterbury (as he was to become) in 597. The 7th-Century fights over such issues as the correct form of monastic tonsure prove how deeply rooted the Christian Church was already before the Roman mission supported by Pope Gregory. (Unlike the circle at the top of the head, the Celtic form involved shaving the head from ear to ear.) There is a fascinating tale still remaining to be told, which perhaps can never be truthfully told due to the lying lines of the so-called bard Morganwg. As for myself, I would have to do much more reading and research on the subject (and likely would have to learn at least Latin), all while avoiding the danger of autodidactylic uncertainty, in order to have a valid opinion about the veracity of each individual point raised by Reverend Morgan.

My copy of St. Paul in Britain, offered by the publisher of the works of E. Raymond Capt, the noted British Israelite, is a 1984 reprint of the abridged edition of 1860, for which I am grateful. I doubt that the fifty-six pages about the early Church cut from my version would have added much to my enjoyment of Rev. Morgan’s argument. And I definitely found the quick pace and sparkling reasoning truly captivating. All I ask from from Wacko literature—be it Conspiracy, Secret Society, or other weirdness—is that it a) make startling claims which are b) supported by intriguing evidence that c) almost makes me a convert. St. Paul in Britain succeeds on all three counts. Nowadays we live in a world in which pizza parlor basements are named as headquarters for private child sex smugglers to the rich and powerful, only to learn that the promoters of such theories neglected to learn that the libeled pizza parlor didn’t even have a basement. Reading these learned Wacko words from 160 years ago is like breathing fresh air after enduring the stinking miasma of our current polluted product.

* The best source I have read about Iolo Morganwg né Edward Williams is a not entirely brief chapter in John Michell’s wonderful book Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, which book I highly recommend. The wannabe Welsh bard has many sins to answer for, not least for his influence upon the balmy ideas of Gerald Gardner who gifted we Moderns and laters with the fictive Wicca movement.