Moping Melancholy and Moonstruck Madness
Ihave been thinking a lot about the moon, The reason is that I was staggered by the sheer beauty and power of the radiance of the moon when I watched it from high above Lake Como recently. The night was balmy and dusk had just fallen when we dined by candlelight on the terrace. Suddenly the full moon shot up with impressive speed from behind the rocky serrated ridge of the mountains on the other side of the lake. As a rule the moon rises, crosses the meridian and sets about 48 minutes later each day. The smaller the angle between the moon's orbit and the horizon — when near the point of rising — the lower is this figure. Near the autumnal equinox the angle is at a minimum; hence what we call the 'harvest moon', when for several days the difference in time of rising is only 15 minutes or so. To enjoy the harvest moon more, we blew out the candles and switched off the lights in the house, then finished our supper by moonlight, rejoicing in the delight of the experience. The moon was golden-orange, its effulgence penetrating and almost strident, its domination of land and sky magisterial.
We do not give the moon sufficient scope in our modern world, In that marvellous first scene in Act V of The Merchant of Venice, Portia exclaims, 'How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world,' and Nerissa replies, 'When the moon shone, we did not see the candle.' Portia adds: 'So doth the greater glory dim the less.' Sixteenth-century candles, albeit of the finest wax, could not compete with harvest moons, but the concentrated illuminations of metropolitan lighting means that Londoners, for instance, are rarely aware that the 'visiting moon' is even calling, so they cannot bask in its incandescence. Even high in the Quantocks, in a night when the moon is high and full, the glow of nearby towns like Bristol. Bridgwater and Taunton turn what should be the dense velvety purple of the sky into a greyish canopy, so that the moon feels slighted — like a beautiful woman who has joined a party in resplendent dress but attracts no attention — and soon takes refuge in the clouds tumbling in from the south-west.
The spread and intensification of artificial lighting, and its wasteful perpetuation throughout the night, has marginalised
moonlight in the vocabulary of our senses, SO that poets now have little to say about it. Once, moonlight was a persistent and glowing, if silent, companion of their verses; Tacitae per arnica silentia lunae, as Virgil put it. The times when Shakespeare and Milton, our two greatest poets, switch on the moonlight are incalculable, the moon being a nightly companion to their thoughts, as in Ii Penseroso: ... I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven green.
To behold the wandering moon.
Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray Through the heaven's wide pathless way; And oft, as if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud.
Milton, I seem to recall, was fond of quoting The Song of Solomon, that sensuous poetic vision of deep antiquity, whose origins lie in the 10th century BC, with its mysterious evocation of female beauty: 'Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?' (the last simile being more like Bertie Wooster describing one of his aunts). Poets united in seeing the moon as female sovereign of a court of stars:
Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament With living sapphires: Hesperus that led The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon Rising in clouded majesty, at length Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light, And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.
I notice that there are some 86 entries, virtually all from verse, on moon, moonlight etc., in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, indicating the debt poets owe to the queen of the skies.
Musicians are, perhaps, not quite so fond of evoking moonlight. When Beethoven composed his piano sonata Op.27, no. 2 in C sharp minor, he marked it simply Sonata quasi una fantasia. However, a music critic called Rellstab wrote that the opening movement reminded him of moonlight on the Lake of Lucerne, and the name stuck. What the composer had to say about it is not recorded: he was not a moonlighty sort of man, though. On the other hand, Claude Debussy was — it is notable how many of his songs, piano pieces and dances have a nocturnal, moonish patina, implicit or hinted. His setting of Verlaine's 'Clair de Lune', composed in 1882 when he was barely 20, is a brilliant evocation of a sensitive text, recreating it in notes line by line, almost word by word. It is no accident that Debussy thought of becoming a writer (his Prose lyriques are musical settings of his own verses), and it is hard to think of a creative artist who, with his love of painters like Watteau and Fragonard, so successfully evokes all the fine arts in his work, with moonlight streaming through much of it.
With painting, of course, the problem of portraying moonlight revolves around what you can actually see. Goya lit little candles stuck into the brim of his big hat and drew thus illuminated, but I do not believe it is a practical device and I've never heard of an artist imitating it. I suspect that Samuel Palmer's moonlight scenes — he was particularly fond of harvest-mooning in the cornfields — were done more from memory than on the spot. But what about that most conscientious and meticulous marine artist Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-89), who was paid by the French government to paint all the principal seaports of France, and chose to do many of them by moonlight? Very good they are, and sensitive in the depiction of the subtle effects (and shadows) of moonlight on surfaces. They are sometimes dramatic, too, though gentle by comparison with the great Russian painter of moonlight, Ivan Aivazovs4, whose huge canvas 'The Black Sea' carries visual audacity to the limits of the credible.
Where did the noble Atkinson Grimshaw get his passion for moonlight from? He was a Leeds man, very much so, and selftaught, and came to moonlighting only slowly, after doing some magnificent Lake District scenes (Nab Scar' ranks with John Glover's `Ullswater' as the best oil ever done of the District). I think he may have been inspired by his fellow northerner Wright of Derby, who loved lunar landscapes, and he certainly, during the years he kept a studio in Chelsea, got ideas from Whistler, a nocturnal painter of genius. At all events, moonlight (especially over mansions on lonely lanes or docks in Liverpool, Glasgow and Hull) and Grimmers are synonymous, to the point where he almost ruined his market. It was said by his enemies that he painted over photos or used a machine to project moony images on his canvas. But who cares? It is all, to use a phrase of Carlyle's. 'Transcendental moonshine'.
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