Le chef-d'oeuvre d'un inconnu

Here's an odd one. In 1714 the scholar Chrisostome Matanasius published Le chef-d'oeuvre d'un inconnu (The Masterwork of an Unknown), an extensive analysis of a poem he had just discovered. So far nothing unusual except that the book is well over 300 pages of dense text and the poem itself a mere 40 lines.

You've probably guessed that the book was a hoax, a precursor to Nabokov's Pale Fire. It's stuffed with material - the prefaces alone are in French, Greek, Latin, English and Dutch, not to mention an introductory letter and an ode to the author. (One edition may have had fake Hebrew but not the one in the link.) It's a full-blown satire of scholarship. For instance, the "remarks" to the first stanza spend five pages just on the name Colin with an apparently irrelevant digression on Homer's choice of a nymph's name. As far as I can tell the book has never been translated into English.

The actual author was Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe (1684–1746), a writer, freethinker and bit of a libertine. He had a long dispute with Voltaire (the letters have been published), became a member of the Royal Society, translated Cervantes and Defoe, served as a cavalry officer (and was taken prisoner), and wrote a bestselling novel (The Story of Prince Titi which was translated into English).

https://archive.org/details/lechefdoeuvredu00hyagoog/page/n6/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater

More new public domain books!

Last post was Dirda's choice of newly PD books from 1923.  This list isn't my choice since I haven't read most of these but they all seem interesting in some way.  

Robert Henri - The Art Spirit (Google Books)

William Carlos Williams - The Great American Novel (Open Library)

Weird Tales - first issue (Archive.org)

Gertrude Atherton - Black Oxen (Open Library)

Rafael Sabatini - Fortune's Fool (Open Library)

E.K. Chambers - The Elizabethan Stage (Open Library)

Georgette Heyer - The Great Roxhythe (Open Library)

G.K. Chesterton - St. Francis of Assisi (Open Library)

Howard Carter - The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen (Archiveorg)

Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Moon Maid (Google Books)

Charles H. Haskins - The Rise of Universities (Google Books)

Rose Macaulay - Told by an Idiot (Google Books)

James Branch Cabell - The High Place (Google Books)

Frederick Treves - The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (Google Books)

New public domain books!

You may have seen articles that on January 1st of this year books from 1923 started entering the public domain.  The useful Michael Dirda at the Washington Post did an article about some of the titles he thought were interesting from that year.  (In case the link stops working search for his name and "1923 and me".)

One problem - not a single link actually went to a public domain source for the books.  So this piece corrects that.  Below is a list of his choices and where you can find the books, completely and legally free.

I expected that these books would appear in downloadable versions on the usual places early in the year but as of this writing many still haven't.  I don't really know how these things work and had thought that the sites would just change a parameter or maybe run a sub-routine but clearly it's not that simple.  So the list below is more of a hodgepodge than usual.

Willa Cather - A Lost Lady (Open Library, Google Books)

Aldous Huxley - Antic Hay (Google Books)

Ronald Firbank - The Flower Beneath the Foot (Open Library)

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan and the Golden Lion (Google Books)

Wallace Stevens - Harmonium (Archive.org)

Robert Frost - New Hampshire (Google Books)

H.G. Wells - Men Like Gods (Open Library)

E.V. Odle - Clockwork Man (HathiTrust, which sources the scan to Google but I can't find a downloadable version there)

Jean Toomer - Cane (Archive.org)

Ellen Glasgow - The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (Google Books)

May Sinclair - Uncanny Stories (Open Library)

Dorothy L. Sayers - Whose Body? (Open Library)

D.H. Lawrence - Studies in Classic American Literature (Google Books)

Edgar Wallace - The Green Archer (Google Books)

Walter de la Mare - Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages (Open Library)

Sherwood Anderson - Horses and Men (Open Library)

Algernon Blackwood - Episodes Before Thirty (Open Library)

P.G. Wodehouse - The Inimitable Jeeves (Google Books)

Status of the blog

Well, best-laid plans and so on but in case anybody is curious some personal situations came up that absorbed my time and consequently derailed the blog.  I still plan to continue but not for a bit longer, maybe starting back this summer.  Or in fact this may be the end - we'll see.

In the meantime, at least one more post follows today.

A Peculiar Literary Journal

Le Petit Journal des Refusées (1896)

Modernist Journals Project page


Despite its title Le Petit Journal des Refusées is both American and in English.  Appearing in San Francisco in 1896 it announced the launch of a new artistic journal that would accept only work rejected elsewhere.  This was the only issue.  Did it just fail to take off?  Was it a one-off joke?  A prank?  Almost certainly the latter two considering the advertisement in the image below (from January 1902 issue of The Literary Collector).

The contents aren't exactly what you might expect ("I'd love to hunt for angels / And shoot them on the wing") while physically the journal has an odd trapezoidal shape and most surviving copies are slightly different.  (The link above has three versions.)  There are hand-applied images to a few pages, changes in paper stock (wallpaper according to some sources), and even some with differing content.  Despite all the names attached to the various pieces it was actually done by one person.

There's very little background information (though why would there be?).  The most substantial appears to be a piece by Johanna Drucker but I can't find an accessible version and have only read the first couple of pages. 

Though the credited name is James Marrion that's actually a pseudonym for Gelett Burgess, a San Fransisco artist and poet with a decidely comic sensibililty.  I've posted some work of his on this blog before - Burgess Unabridged, The Burgess Nonsense Book and My Maiden Effort.  (He wrote the still remembered poem "The Purple Cow".)  His account of creating the journal is the last image below.

Miniature Painting

John Lumsden Propert - A History of Miniature Art (1887)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page

Dudley Heath - Miniatures (1905)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page

Charles William Day - The Art of Miniature Painting (1852)
Archive.org direct link 
Open Library main page

George Charles Williamson - Portrait Miniatures (1897)
Archive.org direct link 
Open Library main page

J.J. Foster - Chats on Old Miniatures (1908)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page


It's probably no surprise that miniature paintings are small paintings, largely portraits and according to these books most common from the late Renaissance through the Victorian era.  (There's another type of "miniature painting" which is still in existence and involves minature figures used for table-top games.)  Some of the work here goes into more detail about the artists than I would have expected was known but then they're focusing on court or society works.

The book by John Lumsden Propert (1834-1902) seems to be the standard work on the subject.  A quick search didn't find anything substantial that's more recent.  Propert was a London physician who collected art and appears to have created the interest in miniatures.  He claims to have written A History on slips of paper while making his medical visits.  The first bookplate Aubrey Beardsley designed was for Propert (and is included below).

Dudley Heath (1867-1945) was the son of a miniatures painter who later added photography to his business.  He followed in that career, also becoming an art historian and lecturer.  A more full biography is online.

Charles William Day (dates not found) was best known for a popular 1836 etiquette manual that went through many editions and was published in the US.  His book on miniatures is a how-to guide but seemed worth including.

George Charles Williamson (1858-1942) was a prolific author, usually on art history.  He studied at the University of London and later became the art editor at the publisher George Bell.  He contributed several entries to the 11th edition of the Britannica and to the Catholic Encyclopedia.  Some of his paperes are held at Boston College. 

In one of art's more curious developments there was a trend in the 18th century for miniature portraits of single eyes. (Of course there's a Wikipedia page.)  According to Hanneke Grootenboer's 2012 Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures, Williamson organized the first exhibition of these works in 1905.  (n53 on p188)

Joshua James Foster (1847-1923) was born in Dorchester and trained in art publishing.  He seems to have run the London Art Business, possibly a studio since a photo Foster made of Henry Irving is in the National Portrait Gallery.  Foster published several works on art topics.

Worshipping Snakes

Overview article in 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

Unknown (prob Hargrave Jennings) - Ophiolatreia (1889)
Archive.org direct link 
Open Library main page

Charles Frederick Oldham - The Sun and the Serpent: A Contribution to the History of Serpent-Worship (1905)
Archive.org direct link 
Open Library main page

John Bathurst Deane - The Worship of the Serpent Traced Throughout the World (1833)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page

Joseph Fayrer - On Serpent-worship and on the Venomous Snakes of India (1892)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page

Wilfrid Dyson Hambly - Serpent Worship in Africa (1931)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page

E.G. Squier - The Serpent Symbol, and the Worship of the Reciprocal Principles of Nature in America (1851)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page

John Samuel Phené - On Prehistoric Traditions and Customs in Connection with Sun and Serpent Worship (1875)
Archive.org direct link
Open Library main page


Some anthropologists and enthusiastic travellers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were fascinated by the sheer variety of religious practices, devoting a lot of time to collecting information and hypothesizing links.  The big idea, at least in my superficial understanding, was roughly that it's all of one big piece, not exactly that all religions are the same but that they're at least similar and it's worthwhile mapping a lot of links between them.  The Golden Bough is the best known result of this but there are plenty of others, if not quite so massive (or so entertaining). 

This week's post is a collection of books from this period about serpent worship.  Some are fairly straight forward accounts while others wade right into the comparative religion aspects that I suspect don't hold up today.

The first link is to the article from the famous 1911 edition of the Britannica because it gives a good overview and is mostly contemporary with the books.

Ophiolatreia was anonymously published but is considered to be the work of Hargrave Jennings (1817-1890), an esotericist and Rosicrucian who was obsessed with the idea that religion is basically phallic worship. Or maybe sun worship too - I'll admit to not being able to get very far into his stuff.

By contrast,  John Bathurst Deane (1797-1887) was a schoolmaster and Anglican clergyman.  He also married the daughter of John Lemprière (of the dictionary fame).  Deane ties serpent worship into Christian belief, probably not much more plausibly than Jennings.

Didn't find much about Charles Frederick Oldham except that he was a British naval surgeon serving in India during the 1870s.  The book is based on some of his experiences there and due to the date I'd guess was written during retirement.

Wilfrid Dyson Hambly (1886-1962) worked at the Field Museum and published several similar works, probably the most recognizable is The History of Tattooing which has been reprinted by Dover.

E.G. Squier (1821-1888) was a New York archaeologist and journalist who worked in the Mississippi Valley and Central America.  There's a 2005 biography of him by Terry A. Barnhart.

John Samuel Phené (1822-1912) was a British architect and antiquarian who published several pamphlets - this appears to be his most substantial work.  There's an interesting blog post with a photo of an amazing house he designed.  (Another image is here.)