From The New York Times:

Over the past 10 years, Paul Berman has been exploring a theme: the repudiation by liberal intellectuals of their values and ideals. The theme has been elaborated in several books — “Terror and Liberalism,” “Power and the Idealists” and now “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Berman himself is a man who identifies “with the liberal left.”

…

Berman has two targets. First, he takes on the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, whom he contrasts with the admirable and courageous secularist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (Ramadan, a professor at Oxford, was recently permitted to enter the United States after being barred for six years under the Patriot Act.) And second, Berman challenges the commentators Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for their qualified endorsements of Ramadan and their disparagements of Hirsi Ali, noting the “tone of contempt that so frequently creeps across discussions” about her, the “sneering masculine put-downs of the best-known feminist intellectual ever to come out of Africa.”

In short, Berman finds the widespread admiration of Ramadan to be misplaced. Berman regards Ramadan as a sinister figure with a sinister agenda, and at the same time deplores the intimidation and violence directed at that “subset of the European intelligentsia — its Muslim free-thinking and liberal wing especially” — who “survive only because of bodyguards.” This, Berman concludes, has been unheard of in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. “Fear — mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology — has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life.”

More here.

No argument can fail to be enhanced by an Orwell quote. That's why he's become the authority of first resort for people who don't know what they're talking about.

Alastair Harper in Prospect:

Crudely put, George Orwell is anyone’s bitch. Whatever the topic, whatever the political position, he can be wheeled out in support to enunciate universal truths in a voice as compelling as the ghost in Hamlet. From voting reform to CCTV, from Trident to the debates, there’s a perfect Orwell quotation, apposite, terse and oracular, just waiting to be plucked out and flourished. I know because I’ve done it myself – writing about media interest in the death of a young British girl overseas, I used a handy line from “The Decline of the English Murder” to bolster my argument. If Saint George is with me, I need fear no controversy.

But why Orwell? Why not Dickens, George Bernard Shaw or some other safely dead and highly moral writer? Perhaps vanity has something to do with it: unlike other canonical writers, Orwell was a working hack. Take the “As I Please” essays he did for Tribune, where he talks about everything from immigration to comic books – he was no proud literary lion, but a typewriter for hire. He too would roll up his sleeves and scribble for money. Perhaps the struggling journalist invokes the saint with a faint, wistful hope that he too will be as useful to his scribbling descendants in a couple of generations.

Chiefly, though, Orwell’s ambiguity makes him useful.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Starts With A Bang:

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to the circus together. Someday, I vowed, I'll be strong, flexible, and stable enough to do the amazing hand-balancing tricks we saw. And all the while, the six-year-old girl behind us screamed her piercing, high-pitched scream, cheering the performers on. (This is totally appropriate behavior, IMO, and no children reading this should be discouraged from screaming at the circus.)

Now, one of us has better hearing than the other. And while one of us found the high pitched screaming to be a minor annoyance, the other was simply in agony. What's going on here?

It's going to take a little bit of biology and a little bit of physics to figure it out. First off: how does your ear work?

The sound waves — which are pressure waves — enter your ear and press up against the tympanic membrane, better known as your eardrum.

The vibrating eardrum causes the three little bones in there — the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, known collectively as the auditory bones — to vibrate as well. The last one, the stirrup, pushes against the cochlea, and this is where your hearing takes place. How? To get the simple answer, we need to know what the cochlea looks like on the inside?

Your cochlea is a spiral-shaped structure, like a snail's shell, that's filled with fluid and lined with tiny hairs known as cilia. The most sensitive cilia are the ones closest to the outside: only a tiny vibration is needed to set them in motion. These are also the most easily destroyed. So when you do things to damage your hearing like go to rock concerts without earplugs, listen to your headphones or stereos too loudly, fire a gun without protective gear, or have your “friend” scream in your ear, these sensitive cilia get destroyed.

The bad news? Once they're destroyed, they pretty much never grow back. So while a newborn baby can hear up to about 20,000 Hz, very few adults can. At age 31, my hearing stops somewhere around 13,000 Hz. There are a few sites out there to test your hearing, so I've stolen some sound files to allow you to find where your hearing, approximately, cuts out.

More here. [I could hear the 12KHz tone clearly, the 14K just barely, and the 15K not at all.]

Eyal Press in Foreign Policy:

Until recently, displays of disobedience in the Israeli army were mainly carried out by so-called “refuseniks” on the left who risked being branded traitors (and sent to prison) to avoid serving in the occupied territories. The refuseniks making noise today come from Israel's religious right, and they want to preserve the occupation, not end it. “Today, over a quarter of young officers wear skullcaps,”an Israeli general recently told the International Crisis Group, which devoted part of a July 2009 report to the trend. “In the combat units, their presence is two or three times their demographic weight. In the Special Forces it's even higher.”

Some of these soldiers enter the military after attending pre-army Torah colleges, state-funded preparatory schools where high school graduates enroll for one year of “spiritual fortification” before joining their peers. Others go to places like the Birkat Yosef Hesder Yeshiva, a religious academy funded by the government under a formal arrangement with the Ministry of Defense, where roughly 250 students divide their time between Torah instruction and military service over a five-year period. The first hesder yeshiva opened its doors in 1965: around 50 such institutions are spread across Israel and the West Bank today.

More here.

Cassirer was brought up on the poetry of Goethe and the anthropology of Herder, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Humboldt. He shared the romantic opposition to eighteenth-century rationalism for degrading our “sensuous, emotional life to the level of a biological residue, a passive stuff to be overcome.” These thinkers defined the essence of humanity not as reason but rather our capacity for self-expression, manifest in not only science and mathematics, but also language, religion, art, and myth. The ways in which we articulate and organize the world are irreducibly plural. Cassirer learned from them that our relationship with the world is not dominated exclusively by the demand for “objective knowledge,” but must also answer to the human thirst for meaning, how we shape the world into patterns, our various activities of symbolic formation. “The critique of reason becomes, in Cassirer’s famous declaration, the critique of culture.” He did not, however, share the Romantics’ disdain for science. Rather, “Cassirer’s ultimate purpose was to reveal science as an expression of the same symbolic capacity underlying language, art, and myth, thereby acquitting it of the common charge of coldness and inhumanity. His philosophy is an attempt to exploit the ambiguous energies of German romanticism on behalf of enlightenment.”

more from Emily Grosholz at The Hudson Review here.

Serious people have been apologizing for Nathanael West since he began to write. His first novel, the story of a man who crawls into the anus of the Trojan horse and wanders its intestines, was described by Harold Bloom as “an auspicious technical essay, marred by grandiose overreaching.” Miss Lonelyhearts, his second, lacks “psychologically rounded” characters by design, Jonathan Lethem tells us. Elizabeth Hardwick called West’s third book “wasteful brilliance.” His fourth, some believe, is the best Hollywood novel ever. “[O]nce we understand that The Day of the Locust is intended as high comedy,” Norman Podhoretz wrote, “this apparently weird, disjointed book begins to assume a meaningful shape.” Behind this advocacy looms the sense that West’s pursuits are less than what a novelist’s should be—that writing slim and peculiar books, then moving to L.A. to churn out B movies and shoot animals for fun (and not wild beasts, like Hemingway, but small birds, mostly doves), is not enough to vindicate an inconsistent oeuvre. West’s “failure to get the best out of [his] best years,” said Edmund Wilson, who was his friend, “may certainly be laid partly to Hollywood, with its already appalling record of talent depraved and wasted.” Readers, in other words, should blame the neighborhood.

more from Nathan Heller at Slate here.

As one of the first American journalists to arrive in Berlin after the end of the Second World War, John Dos Passos was embarrassed by the devastation the American B29s had inflicted. At Stettiner Station he saw large crowds of bewildered people, their skin hanging on their bones ‘like candle drippings’. Berlin, he recalled, was not ‘just one more beaten-up city: there the point had been reached where the victims were degraded beneath the reach of human sympathy’. When Malcolm Muggeridge arrived in the same city, he was astonished by what he found. By then the Russians had fought their way into the streets, house by house. The friezes and columns had been torn away from the Brandenburg Gate, from which the most warlike nation in Europe had once dispatched its armies in triumph. The trees along Unter Den Linden had been cut down for firewood or charcoal. The subway had been flooded on the order of Hitler himself, leaving people floating in black icy waters. The city presented a barren landscape permeated by the sour smell of rotting corpses and the occasional glimpse of the 50,000 or so orphans who’d been made deranged by both the bombing and the ferocity of the final ground attack. Did all this, Muggeridge asked, represent the triumph of good over evil? The world both writers saw was born from some of the moral compromises the Western allies had to make to win the war. That Hitler had to be defeated and Nazism crushed was the one moral certainty that sustained them. Churchill, Michael Burleigh reminds us in this magisterial work, gave a talk at the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce in Leeds in 1937 in which he told his audience that he had resolved never to visit the ‘Arctic or Antarctic regions in geography or politics’. ‘Give me the temperate zone. Give me London, or Paris, or New York. Let us keep to our faith and let us go somewhere and stay there where your breath is not frozen on your lips by the secret police.’ Within three years he had to reverse this view, expressing a pragmatic willingness to sup with the devil in order to defeat Nazism – a figure of speech that reflects his abhorrence for the Soviet system. (The grim reality was that if the USSR had not been Stalinist, it might never have survived the war at all.)

more from Christopher Coker at Literary Review here.

Marissa Calligeros in the Sydney Morning Herald:

It has taken the keen eye of a Queensland University of Technology physicist to spot a 99-year-old mistake in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The error may be slight, but it's an error nonetheless, Stephen Hughes said.

Dr Hughes claims he has discovered that the dictionary's definition of the word “siphon” has been incorrect since 1911.

The definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, and many other dictionaries, stated that atmospheric pressure was the force behind a siphon.

But in fact it is the force of gravity at work.

“It is gravity that moved the fluid in a siphon, with the water in the longer downward arm pulling the water up the shorter arm,” Dr Hughes said.

When Dr Hughes stumbled across the mistake he alerted the dictionary's revision team, which had just completed revising words beginning with the letter “R”.

“I thought, 'Oh good, just in time,' because S is next,” he said.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in Newsline:

The Saudi Arabia of our imagination is an ancient place, not much different from the way the second Caliph Omar might have found it on one of his nightly rounds. It’s a place where shopkeepers leave their shops open when they go to the mosque to pray. It’s a place of zero crime where a lone woman dressed in all her finery can go from one end of the kingdom to the other end, juggling gold coins, and nobody would dare give her a second glance. Here, justice is swift and transparent. The thieves get their hands chopped off in public, large crowds of believers gather to watch spectacular beheadings. Here, even wild camels are well behaved. The Saudis have followed Allah’s law in letter and spirit and hence, they have been blessed with unimaginable wealth. Is it not a miracle that desert bedouins are the world’s richest people? Is it not true that although hardly anything grows in those deserts but even if a dog goes hungry at night the ruler feels the responsibility?

There is enough evidence to suggest that it is all nonsense.

Saudi Arabia is a cruel place if you are not related to the ruling clan. If you are a foreigner, you might be living in the apartheid era in South Africa. If you are a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi, you can live there for three generations and still not get your basic rights as a citizen. If you are a girl student you can burn to death as the religious police stops firemen from entering your school. Saudi Arabia might pretend to conform to a 1,400-year-old tribal code, but they are also the world’s largest consumers of fast cars, luxury linen and flashy jewellery. They are the prized clients of the world’s richest casinos and upmarket brothels. Saudi Arabia keeps the American arms manufacturing industry in business, yet has no capacity to defend itself or any of the dozens of other Muslim countries that are not as blessed with American weaponry as Saudia. Here is a country which provided the most number of men for the 9/11 attacks yet nobody has ever suggested that the bombs that fell on Afghanistan and Iraq should have been directed towards Saudia. It has produced little except senile rulers with more wives than a Mormon could ever dream of. They have exported nothing but doomsday visionaries, who have been preaching and practicing the art of televised throat-slitting, mostly to and on their Muslim brothers.

More here.

“In this video, wooden balls roll up the slopes just as if they are pulled by a magnet. The behavior of the balls seems impossible, because it is against the gravity. The video is not a computer graphic, but a real scene. What is actually happening is that the orientations of the slopes are perceived oppositely, and hence the descending motion is misinterpreted as ascending motion. This illusion is remarkable in that it is generated by a three-dimensional solid object and physical motion, instead of a two-dimensional picture.”

Azra posted this article about the illusion a couple of days ago.

Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books:

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

If we want to understand what today’s populism is about, we first need to understand what it isn’t about. It certainly is not about reversing the cultural revolution of the Sixties. Despite the rightward drift of the Republican Party over the past decade, the budding liberal consensus on social issues I noted in the Nineties has steadily grown—with the one, complicated exception of abortion.²

Consider the following:

• Since 2001 the proportion of those favoring more religious influence in society has dropped by a fifth, while those wanting less influence rose by half.³

• Today a majority of Americans find single parenthood morally acceptable, and nearly three quarters now tolerate divorce.⁴ Roughly a third of adults who have ever been married have also been divorced at least once, and that includes born-again Christians, whose rate is roughly the national average.⁵

• Though opposition to gay marriage has declined over the past quarter-century, a majority still opposes it. Yet more than half of all Americans find homosexuality morally acceptable, and a large majority favors equal employment opportunities for gays and lesbians, health and other benefits for their domestic partners, and letting them serve in the military. A smaller majority now approves of letting them legally adopt children as well.⁶

Though there’s been a slight conservative retrenchment since the 2008 election, it’s clear that the Sixties principle of private autonomy is rooted in the American mind.

More here. [Image shows Maximilien Robespierre.]

From American Scientist:

Stephen Jay Gould was an immensely charismatic, insightful and influential, but ultimately ambiguous, figure in American academic life. To Americans outside the life sciences proper, he was evolutionary biology. His wonderful essay collections articulated a vision of that discipline — its history, its importance and also its limits. One of the traits that made Gould so appealing to many in the humanities and social sciences is that he claimed neither too much nor too little for his discipline. In his books, evolutionary biology speaks to great issues concerning the universe and our place in it, but not so loudly as to drown out other voices. He had none of the apparently imperialist ambitions of that talented and equally passionate spokesman of biology Edward O. Wilson. It is no coincidence that the humanist intelligentsia have given a much friendlier reception to Gould than to Wilson. Gould's work is appealing to philosophers like me because it trades in big, but difficult and theoretically contested, ideas: the role of accident and the contingency of history; the relation between large-scale pattern and local process in the history of life; the role of social forces in the life of science.

Within the life sciences, Gould is regarded with more ambivalence. He gets credit (with others) for having made paleobiology again central to evolutionary biology. He did so by challenging theorists with patterns in the historical record that were at first appearance puzzling; if received views of evolutionary mechanism were correct, Gould argued, those patterns should not be there. The first and most famous such challenge grew from his work with Niles Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium, but there were more to come. Despite this important legacy, Gould's own place in the history of evolutionary biology is not secure. In late 2009, I attended an important celebration of Darwin's legacy at the University of Chicago, in which participants reviewed the current state of evolutionary biology and anticipated its future. Gould and his agenda were almost invisible.

More here.

From Orion Magazine:

[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”

[2] NATURE WILL DECIDE what is sustainable; it always has and always will. The reflexive invocation of the term as cover for all manner of human acts and wants shows that sustainability has gained wide acceptance as a longed-for, if imperfectly understood, state of being.

[3] AN ACT, PROCESS, OR STATE of affairs can be said to be economically sustainable, ecologically sustainable, or socially sustainable. To these three some would add a fourth: culturally sustainable.

[4] NATURE IS MALLEABLE and has enormous resilience, a resilience that gives healthy ecosystems a dynamic equilibrium. But the resiliency of nature has limits and to transgress them is to act unsustainably. Thus, the most diffuse usage, “sensibly far-sighted,” is the usage that contains and properly reflects the strict ecological definition of the term: a thing is ecologically sustainable if it doesn’t destroy the environmental preconditions for its own existence.

More here.

Via Bill Benzon over at The Valve, Andrew Goldstone in Arcade:

What is tvtropes.org (henceforth TVT)? TVT is an amazing wiki devoted to the “tropes” of television, film, fiction, and, potentially, everything. The organizing idea of the site is the trope, very loosely defined as any convention or pattern to be found in and around these cultural objects; or, as the wiki's own Trope entry puts it, “It can be a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type, a linguistic idiom… It's like porn; you know it when you see it.” The wry tone, by the way, is a regular feature of the site. As a wiki, the site can be edited by any interested party wanting to add to the huge number of encyclopedia-like entries devoted to tropes, though one feels that a core group of “tropers” superintend the process. A typical trope is something like A Hero Is Born, for the common method of beginning a story with the hero's birth; on the page devoted to the trope, we find a whimsical definition and an annotated list of examples.

One of the major sources of the site's appeal comes from these examples: they are wildly heterogenous, a record of the interests of whichever “troper” happened to add to the page for a particular trope. A Hero Is Born lists, among its examples, Bambi, the protagonist of Fallout 3, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro, and Tristram Shandy (with the comment “begins with the hero's conception.”) More typical of the site would be the examples in Setting Update, which includes four different anime updatings of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (including one “as a Lolicon parody”), a list of film versions of Shakespeare plays, and such literary entries as: “Reginald Hill's Pictures of Perfection is Pride and Prejudice Oop North IN THE 1990s! AS A GAY ROMANCE!”

I include the links in that last to show another essential feature of TVT: many TV programs, films and books have their own master pages, with whimsical summaries and lists of every trope on the site of which they furnish an example (for Pride and Prejudice, the wiki notes such tropes as Affably Evil [Wickham], Beta Couple [Jane and Mr. Bingley], Poor Communication Kills, and so on). This means it is possible to discover some book, film, or TV program listed among the examples for a trope, follow the link to the book, film, or TV program page, discover another trope, look at its list of examples, and follow further links, following the winds of convention and invention across a sea of culture. This is a completely mesmerizing process–or so, I hope, some readers of this post will discover!

(Oop North, by the way, refers to stereotyped ideas of the North of England. A certain number of British and Anglophile participants in the site delight in making their own cultural conventions intelligible to the presumably mostly American audience of the website. A pretty exhibition of the global potential in any wiki of this kind.)

The Moral of the Story

If you are still with me, you must be wondering why I have spent so long in an Arcade blog post describing a website devoted to a strange sort of obsessive television fandom. I want to propose that TV Tropes actually has a lot to tell us about modes of work in the humanities in the present moment–and the news is, unusually for me, more good than bad.

Nik Steinberg and Daniel Wilkinson in the NYRB:

For years, many believed that the last thing keeping the region’s democratic tide from sweeping across Cuba was the unique force of Fidel Castro’s character—the extraordinary combination of charisma and cunning with which he inspired and corralled his supporters, provoked and outmaneuvered his enemies, and projected himself onto the big screen of world politics. Under his leadership, Cuba had made impressive gains in health care, education, and the eradication of extreme poverty. But the promise of the Cuban Revolution had been undercut by years of chronic deprivation, exacerbated by the US embargo, and brought to the brink of collapse by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had propped up the island’s economy for decades. Democracy would come to Cuba—the thinking went—as soon as Fidel Castro was no longer standing in its way.

Then in June 2006, his health failing, Castro was forced to step down formally after nearly five decades in power. And nothing happened. No popular uprising in the streets, no Party shake-up, no coup. Instead, his younger brother, Raúl, took up power and, though lacking Fidel’s charisma, was able to keep the country running smoothly. Within months, it seemed clear that Cuba’s single-party system could continue without Fidel at the helm.

Some still held out hope that Raúl Castro would begin a process of political reform, a Cuban perestroika. Those looking for signs of an opening pointed to several of Raúl’s early actions, including state-sponsored public forums ostensibly aimed at encouraging criticism of government policies and the signing of the two major international human rights treaties.

But was Raúl Castro allowing genuine criticism of his government? Was the repressive machinery being eased or even dismantled? A year ago Human Rights Watch set out to answer these questions. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. The Cuban government welcomes tourists to the island, but has for years denied access to international rights monitors. Foreign journalists are followed around by undercover agents: their e-mails are monitored and their phones tapped. Those who publish in-depth stories on controversial issues face expulsion.

Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:

The $140 billion support package that the Greek government has finally received from its European Union partners and the International Monetary Fund gives it the breathing space needed to undertake the difficult job of putting its finances in order. The package may or may not prevent Spain and Portugal from becoming undone in a similar fashion, or indeed even head off an eventual Greek default. Whatever the outcome, it is clear that the Greek debacle has given the EU a black eye.

Deep down, the crisis is yet another manifestation of what I call “the political trilemma of the world economy”: economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible with national sovereignty only if we restrict globalization. If we push for globalization while retaining the nation-state, we must jettison democracy. And if we want democracy along with globalization, we must shove the nation-state aside and strive for greater international governance.

The history of the world economy shows the trilemma at work. The first era of globalization, which lasted until 1914, was a success as long as economic and monetary policies remained insulated from domestic political pressures. These policies could then be entirely subjugated to the demands of the gold standard and free capital mobility. But once the political franchise was enlarged, the working class got organized, and mass politics became the norm, domestic economic objectives began to compete with (and overwhelm) external rules and constraints.

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.

The two robots are the stars of two new papers that describe the latest advances in making independent, programmable nano-scale robots out of individual molecules. Such creations have featured in science-fiction stories for decades, from Michael Crichton’s Prey to Red Dwarf, but in reality, there are many barriers to creating such machines. For a start, big robots can be loaded with masses of software that guides their actions – no such luck at the nano-level.

The two new studies have solved this problem by programming the robots’ actions into their environment rather than their bodies. Standing on the shoulders of giants, both studies fuse two of the most interesting advances in nanotechnology: the design of DNA machines, fashioned from life’s essential double helix and possessing the ability to walk about; and the invention of DNA origami, where sets of specially constructed DNA molecules can be fused together into beautiful sheets and sculptures. Combine the two and you get a robot walker and a track for it to walk upon.

Frank Kermode in the LRB:

Tennyson was not a poet for whom T.S. Eliot professed much love, though he was judicious as well as cool in his appraisals: ‘He has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence.’ (He means ‘they must be like Dante.’) And ‘he had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton’ – an opinion that loses warmth when one recalls what Eliot said elsewhere about Milton. (Having a fine ear is not enough.) When Eliot attends to Tennysonian detail, for instance in Maud, he finds much to dislike, and pronounces ‘the ravings of the lover on the edge of insanity’ and the ‘bellicose bellowings’ to be ‘false’: they fail ‘to make one’s flesh creep with sincerity’. But In Memoriam is a different matter; there alone does Eliot find that Tennyson achieves ‘full expression’. He issues, quite insistently, his customary warning: the poem must be ‘comprehended as a whole’. Nevertheless it seems permissible to remember this part on its own:

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more –
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

‘This,’ Eliot says, ‘is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion related to a particular place; and it gives me the shudder that I fail to get from anything in Maud.’ ‘Shudder’ is a bit surprising coming from the stately Eliot, though the experience to which he refers may in some forms be common enough. He certainly experienced it, or something that puts him or us in mind of it. If the word is used as equivalent to ‘frisson’ (and lexicographers defining frisson seem unable to avoid ‘shudder’), we can propose a debt to the French, likely in these years when English poets were influenced, as Eliot was, by Baudelaire and others. Indeed Eliot, rejecting the 1890s reading of Baudelaire, had made himself the major exponent of that author as a fierce moralist as well as the poet of ‘l’immonde cité’, and Baudelaire’s book has its share of horrors, shudders and shadows. Huysmans, a disciple of Baudelaire, was admired by Eliot, and it might be said that his A Rebours would have to be shortlisted in any shuddering competition, especially as frémir lends support to frissonner. As an admirer of Huysmans, Oscar Wilde had recourse to the ‘shudder’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray. A high proportion of these instances occur in commonplace expressions such as ‘I shudder at the thought’ or ‘a shudder passed through’ whoever it was, examples which tend only to show that whatever its original force the shudder was susceptible to vulgarisation; but the word remained capable of describing the horror, or even the beauty, of a body’s response to violent stimulus.