“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” So said Frederic Bastiat (1801-50), the French economist statesman and author, anticipating what a number of commentators seem to be saying about the way the world is currently organized. According to Alessio Rastani in a recent BBC interview “Governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

What is the ordinary citizen, unschooled in the complexities and duplicities of CDOs CDSs, and the rest of the economic alphabet soup to make of the apparent insolvency of banks throughout the Western world, and of the sovereign debt crisis? If the authorities and the experts appear to be frozen in the headlights of the oncoming train, what can he do to protect himself and his family? Stock up on pasta and tinned goods? Is that it?

Disagreeable though it may be, he surely has a duty to try and figure out for himself what has gone wrong, which, from the outside, would appear to be simple greed (or plundering in Bastiat’s terms) exacerbated by a failure of regulation on the one hand and on the other by the speed and complexity of electronic transactions in the market place. That some of this stuff is not exactly new will be familiar to students of history and literature. Those who are familiar with W.H. Auden’s poetry will know about his modern take on the fall of Rome:

Fantastic grow the evening gown

Agents of the fisc pursue

Absconding tax defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.

One wonders if that is where one is headed. Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now is (among other things) a cautionary tale about the hubris and self-destructiveness of a city of London financier. Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution traces with grim relish the path of greed, folly and financial mismanagement which led to the bonfire of vanities that was the Ancien Regime; he quotes Marquis Mirabeau – “Ah Madame, such Government by Blindman’s-buff, stumbling along too far, will end in the General Overturn (culbute generale).”

Whether there is to be another such “culbute generale” before the year is out remains to be seen. Exciteable commentators such as Max Keiser appear to think so – and for good measure Max thinks that the punishment for crimes against capital should be capital punishment. Mind you, he was in Paris when he said that, and perhaps got carried away…

These are certainly turbulent times for the market place, but, important though the market undoubtedly is, it does not, and never did, constitute the whole of human life and experience. That is why it is such a relief to get outside in the open air or stroll along a beach. Burying the head in the sand this may be. As may be burying your head in a book that reminds you in its low-key way of the attractions of the humdrum and the uneventful, of the world you remember – or think you remember – when you were younger. A book like William Trevor’s novel Love and Summer will do the trick, or even reading the opening lines of chapter 18:

The dog days of August came; Rathmoye was quiet. Small incidents occurred, were spoken of, forgotten. When there were races near by the bookies stayed at Number 4 – J.P. Ferris, Gangly McGregor from Clonmel. The priest of the parish catered for the faithful, heard sins confessed, gave absolution, offered the Host; the Church of Ireland’s skimpy congregation doggedly gathered for weekly worship. The tinker girls brought their babies to the streets from their wasteland caravans and tents. No crime of a serious nature had been committed in Rathmoye during the summer so far; none was now. In all, twenty-one infants had been born.

Let's raise a glass to Rathmoye.

Doomsday scenario. Was there ever a time in human history when there wasn’t a doomsday scenario? Persons of pensionable age, born either during or shortly after one of the most lethal wars in history, and brought up in the era of the Cold War era, will recall being chilled by the threat of Armageddon and spooked by the fear of nuclear holocaust. Just as now a younger generation is transfixed (chilled would clearly be the wrong word) by the prospect of climate change, global warming and environmental degradation.

These observations are thrown out not to discount the existence of impediments in the way of the human project, or to suggest that people are unduly susceptible to fancied dangers, but in order to put those anxieties in context. Man is a worrying animal. Woamn perhaps even more so. Whether they worry any more or less than members of the so-called brute creation is a moot point. Domestic animals and beasts of the field obviously have feelings, and can suffer stress and even communicable panic, but it’s not clear that they are subject to the same sort of chronic, existential worry that we do. Or many of us do.

Nowadays we don’t go in for animal fables as much as they used to, which is perhaps not entirely a bad thing – there is something patronizing in bestowing human attributes upon animals simply in order to illustrate and dramatise human ethics. Theriophily is a different matter - meditation on the apparent superiority of the non-human animal condition over that of the human species. Montaigne famously mused on the matter as he looked his cat in the eye, Swift noted that horses were devoid of hubris, and Walt Whitman wrote some memorable lines celebrating animals in general:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;

Not one is dissatisfied - not one is demented with the mania of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

Animals are evidently not the worrying kind, but worry seems to go with the territory of being human. Without it, indeed, our species would not have enjoyed the success and dominance that it does. Unless hazards, problems and impending catastrophes are conceived as likely to occur, then they are unlikely to be addressed. The number of human casualties on the roads is still pretty awful (3000 per annum in the UK?) but it pales into insignificance compared to the figures for rabbits, hedgehogs, foxes and badgers. Will they never learn? In fact some of these creatures do seem to learn from the adrenalin rush of escaping at the last moment, but learning from collective, transmitted experience as applied to a chronic, perceived hazard comes more readily to human beings than to those with four legs. Dogs occupy an intermediate position – some can be taught road safety (guide dogs being the outstanding example) – others are completely clueless.

Not quite sure where this argument is heading, but the initial pebble in the pond was an uneasy feeling of getting hooked on socio-economic worrying aka soothsaying and gloomsaying, particularly as expounded in highly articulate online forums such as Common Dreams, Information Clearing House, ZeroHedge etc etc, in intelligent blogs like that of David Malone (aka Golem XIV) and in quality newspapers such as the Guardian, a Saturday dose of which suffices, if not to give the proverbial aspirin a headache, then at least to keep the reader in low spirits for a week. And no, the self-serving whimsy of Simon Hoggart’s ostensibly humorous column only serves to confirm morosity, rather than dispel it.

That there is much to be gloomy about is not in doubt, and especially in the financial sphere. Global recession and a spiralling debt crisis, coupled with continuing population growth and finite resources, is not a happy scenario. But whether we are on the verge of a huge upheaval on the lines of the French Revolution - a kind of culbute generale, as the Marquis Mirabeau termed it – is open to question. Post quatorze juillet, revolutionary rhetoric is in favour at the moment; Polly Toynbee in Saturday’s Guardian writes “Rejoice! Bring on the tumbrils as another News Corporation head rolls.” Max Keiser (of the Keiser Report) is an engaging commentator on current woes, but perhaps got carried away by retrospective Francophilia when, interviewed in Paris the other day, he declared that the punishment for crimes against capital should be capital punishment! Calm down, Max! Actually, it’s not just greedy bankers – or banksters as they are now dubbed – that have an interest in maintaining the status quo, but an awful lot of people of more modest means. As for the 25 or so million “of haggard faces”, the starving peasants referred to by Carlyle in his classic study, they are absent from the present equation – at least as it affects the West.

The elephant in the room is what is to replace the current capitalist system, and all the admittedly deplorable fraud, racketeering, greed, hype, spin and media manipulation that have come to be associated with it. On va voir.

In conclusion, a couple of further quotes from Carlyle that provide food for thought:

1. It is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

2. The fool says in his heart, How shall not tomorrow be as yesterday; as all days, - which were once tomorrows? The wise man, looking on this France, moral, intellectual, economical, sees, ‘in short, all the symptoms he has ever met with in history’ – unabateable by soothing Edicts.

Some thoughts on silence. Allegedly it is golden. Carlyle quotes the Swiss inscription that reads Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden, which he prefers to gloss as Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity. Carlyle evidently did not take on board Blaise Pascal’s remark which suggests that eternal silence is scary rather than golden: “Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.”

Moreover there are circumstances in which silence plays a role that is far from golden, as when, for instance, information is deliberately withheld for the purposes of misleading or deceiving. Silence is perhaps the most economical way of being economical with the truth, a useful tool in the locker of those who for whatever reason would prefer not to tell it as it is. Better, indeed, to say nothing than to say something which one might later regret. This is a thought that had evidently occurred to General Franco, the Spanish dictator, who had a great many things to keep quiet about. According to Giles Tremlett, in the chapter entitled “Looking for the Generalissimo” in his book Ghosts of Spain (2006), “the Caudillo was… an expert at silence. ‘One is the master of what one does not say, and the slave of what one does’, he once warned his self designated successor-to-be, the then prince Juan Carlos. This was the opposite of another, much older, Spanish theory on silence. Alonso de Ercilla, in a heroic sixteenth-century depiction of the Chilean natives’ resistance to the Spanish conquistadores, La Araucana, noted the tactical usefulness of silence but added: ‘There is nothing more difficult, if you look closely, than discovering a necio, a fool, if he keeps his quiet.’

It’s not clear to me that these observations are opposed, though the perspectives admittedly are: Franco is advocating silence as policy, whereas Alonso de Ercilla is considering the matter from the point of view of what the silence might signify. And, regrettably, what silence sometimes signifies is that matters are not up for discussion, and that things are not as they should be. The openness and accountability that are supposedly valued in democratic societies are more compatible with speech than silence.

Having said that, there are, and especially for those who participated in them, painful areas of human experience, which it is probably best to be silent about. Are we really honouring Daddy when we ask him to tell us what he did in the war, for instance? What those in authority required – and indeed require him – to do was more than likely some variation of what Ambrose Bierce described as beating out another gentleman’s brains with the butt of his rifle. Admittedly Bierce did not keep silent about the things he had witnessed, and it is not incumbent on the reader to be silent either, after he has gotten over the shock of reading “What I Saw of Shiloh”.

“This humble edifice, centrally situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of the battle. The fact of a Christian church - assuming it to have been a Christian church – giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral interest that would otherwise attach to it.”

Another interesting trip to Spain, driving south from Santander, and visiting the site of the battle known to the Brits as Salamanca, but to the Spanish as Arapiles, that being the name of the little village to the south east of Salamanca near the two rocky hills that figured so prominently in the engagement. There is now a small information centre devoted to the battle that is well worth a visit.

On the way back to Santander another historical diversion – to the little town of Medellin in Estremadura, birthplace of Hernan Cortes the conquistador of Mexico, the story of whose exploits can be read on Wikipedia. The suggestion that Cortes was a bit of a bandido in the manner of Pizarro (who was born up the road in Trujillo) was not well received at the tourist office. The story goes that Cortes massacred thousands of unarmed Aztec nobility at Tenochtitlan. Whether the Spaniards were any more cruel, exploitative and ruthless than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, and whether there is indeed something amounting to a black legend, or leyenda negra misrepresenting the situation and perpetuating a gringo cultural calumny is an interesting question. Clearly there were conflicting perspectives even at the time, as reflected in the Valladolid debate of 1550-51 between the humanistically inclined Bartolome de las Casas (author of the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) and Juan Gines de Sepulveda – who was of the opinion that native peoples were natural slaves.

Apart from the history, some kitesurfing enjoyed – though not as much as one would have liked, due to prevalence of the dreaded howling levante which (so Rafael assured me at the churreria) scrambles people’s brains by agitating the hairs on their head. Extraordinary how the storks seemed to cope, though, or rather those untidy looking nests they build on exposed roofs and telegraph poles. How come the most ferocious blasts don’t dislodge them?

Kiting in strong offshore levante winds is not for the faint hearted. On 14^th April watched Cesar Portas, the Spanish champion doing huge leaps on the Atlantic side of Punta Europa, along with Jo Castillas and the Brazilian Bruna Kajiya. Impressive stuff. Worth checking out the videos of these guys on Facebook.

Spanish studies didn’t advance as well as they might, due to having left dictionary at home. However, some little bits of colloquial Spanish taken on board, such as puto jefe and puto amo, epithets applied by the Barcelona coach, Pep Guardiola, to his Real Madrid counterpart, Jose Mourinho. In fact, the terms aren’t as offensive as they sound, and simply denote controlling personalities, as in the fairly neutral phrase “Ni Mourinho ni Guardiola. El puto jefe, el puto amo del derby, del futbol mundial, del universo, es Lionel Messi.” This (not surprisingly) from the Lionel Messi website.

To conclude on a sad note – learned of the untimely death of the Australian kiter Peter Toft – of a heart attack, apparently, aged only 46. Peter was a nice guy. Condolences to his family and friends.

If Ralph Waldo Emerson is to be believed, it’s not just the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse we should be worried about, i.e. Conquest, War, Famine and Death, but another one – not mentioned in the Apocrypha, namely Things.

The horseman serves the horse

The neat-herd serves the neat,

The merchant serves the purse,

The eater serves his meat;

Tis the day of the chattel

Web to weave, and corn to grind,

Things are in the saddle

And ride mankind.

There are two laws discrete

Not reconciled.

Law for man and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild

And doth the man unking.

The lines are from Emerson’s Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing – a poem not much read these days. But – and especially for those who live in consumerist societies - the lines about things being in the saddle and riding mankind are – arresting and thought-provoking. Which is no doubt why they are quoted from time to time in educated conversation – though rarely with certitude about the source.

The idea that human beings have forfeited their freedom in pursuit of unworthy materialistic goals is to be found in the writings of other Americans of that era. A dominant theme in the writings of Emerson’s friend, Henry David Thoreau, is that the conditions of life in rural New England are not conducive either to human happiness or human goodness. With its advocacy of austere self sufficiency Thoreau’s Walden is a text that has resonance in a world in which the condition of economic stringency, if not servitude, seems set to be the new norm for so many people. But Thoreau’s take on it is unexpected and may indeed be unwelcome inasmuch as he holds the view that people – or at least his fellow townsmen of Concord - are largely to blame for their own economic and existential misfortunes. Those “serfs of the soil” as he calls them, live lives of quiet desperation, crushed by a kind of economic slavery they have brought on themselves. “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”

In spite of the fact that the popular press is quick to give anarchism a bad name, there is much to be admired in the stance of the American Transcendentalists who, far from being advocates of mindless violence and wanton destruction, were simply advocating a better way of life than that lived by people in general, a life (as Thoreau puts it) of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. The fact that those values are so rarely celebrated in modern culture doesn’t mean that they have been altogether superseded, or that they are not there. They cannot, however, be said to figure prominently in public spaces. Which is a pity but no doubt it was ever thus.

Other bits of Emerson’s ode to Channing are a bit more problematical, e.g. the following:

The over-God

Who marries Right to Might,

Who peoples, unpeoples,

He who exterminates

Races by stronger races,

Black by white faces,

Knows to bring honey

Out of the lion,

Grafts gentlest scion

On Pirate and Turk.

This sounds uncomfortably like an anticipatory vindication of the doctrine which was later to cause so much grief for those perceived as lesser breeds, i.e. eugenics. On the face of it it sounds like a casual and offhand kind of racism – but then that was how they tended to talk about race in those days. And for the record it must be noted that at the time of the American Civil War Emerson was clear and consistent in his opposition to slavery. “The South calls slavery an institution…. I call it destitution…. Emancipation is the demand of civilization."

“Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity: a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature and (of course) poetry: a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favourite dish – beefsteak-and-kidney-pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man. Such is C.S. Lewis, whom Magdalen College have now put up to recapture their lost monopoly of the chair of Poetry. “

This is a quotation from a letter of Hugh Trevor-Roper to a fellow historian, the American Wallace Notestein, and, depending on your point of view, a specimen of his satirical style at its best – or its worst. Laura Cumming, reviewing HTR’s Letters from Oxford to the art historian Bernard Berenson, has barely a good word to say for him. See her Observer article of 6th August, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/06/biography.historybooks

If Cumming is right, HTR has hardly a redeeming feature – other than apparently having written acutely about the differences between East and West Germany. He is variously described as exemplifying the viciousness of high-table Oxford, as being obsessed with status, as being parochial, philistine, grossly unobservant, patronizingly superior, gratuitously controversial, insufferably vain, humourless and entirely lacking in compassion, proportion, open-mindedness and a capacity for introspection. There is a grain of truth in this– HTR himself admitted to being a social snob – but he wasn’t that awful. A more balanced and intelligent appraisal is to be found in Neil Ascherson’s review, published last year in The London Review of Books, of Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n16/neal-ascherson/liquidator

Ascherson rightly focuses on HTR as stylist who felt a close kinship with the Enlightenment historians Hume and Gibbon, and admired the satirical and ironical style so dear to the eighteenth century. He had no time for Scots nationalism (not so many did, in the 50’s) but felt a natural affinity for the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment. In one of his letters to Berenson he deplores the shifting of the centre of Scotch life “from the clear, dry, skeptical, eighteenth century city of Edinburgh to the morose, metaphysical, fuliginous air of Glasgow”. This is consistent with his general advocacy of clarity, openness and reason, and his chronic impatience with all that betrays those values whether it came from right or left – political demagoguery as exemplified by Lloyd George and Nye Bevan, political muddle as exemplified in that “vain, ineffectual man of Blood” Anthony Eden – whose folly over Suez in 1956 was endorsed by “the half-baked semi-fascist lower middle class (represented by the Queen and half the aristocracy”.

The redeeming feature of HTR’s acerbic barbs, apart from their high value as sheer entertainment (see the passage on CS Lewis, above) is that they are distributed without fear or favour to all and sundry. The gruesomely reactionary dons at Peterhouse, Cambridge, discovered to their dismay that in appointing him master they had mistaken their man. (Those gentlemen apparently dressed up in black on the anniversary of Franco’s death). Years earlier, writing to Berenson, HTR had concluded “that there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance; who hate foreigners, especially if they come from ‘inferior’ races; and who, gratified with the spectacle of such violence against such people, even if it fails in its object, are prepared to shout, in unison, ‘il Duce ha siempre ragione’. In ordinary times, and given good politics by their leaders, these people remain below the level of public notice, quietly reading the Daily Telegraph and cultivating their gardens. But these are not ordinary times and the politics of our leaders are not good; and so out of frustration this extraordinary and disquieting spirit breaks forth.”

As Michael Postan intimated, HTR is indeed more Whig than Tory, ever ready to take on entrenched orthodoxies, whether of the left or right, anti-clerical (in the Enlightenment manner), ever ready to prick the bubble of clerical mumbo-jumbo (denouncing Jesuit charlatanism or as on TV ironically consoling a young man assailed by religious doubts), or messianic self-esteem (as in the case of Arnold Toynbee). It’s altogether characteristic that after briefly dabbling with Freemasonry he should have dropped his Masonic kit off a bridge.

There’s no denying that HTR had a special line in vitriolic invective – though that invective is sometimes curiously reminiscent of earlier models, as when in the manner of Byron he complains about the slovenliness of the Portuguese compared with “the ancient gravitas of even the poorest Spanish peasant.” And his invective is more qualified and nuanced than Cumming would have us believe. Take his use of the epithet “provincial” as a term of abuse which he seems to dish out de haut en bas to the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh as if from the lofty elevation of the Oxford high table. Nor does he simply have it in for the Celtic fringe. Helsinki is “this miserable parochial peasant-come-to-town northern backwater”. The Estonians and the Letts are “I suppose a sort of Welsh of the Baltic shores.”

But then, on closer inspection, the stance is ambivalent. What does it say about Oxford when it excludes the work of the French historian Fernand Braudel and the Annales school? It says – or rather HTR says - that it is a retrograde provincial backwater. The invective, too, is qualified. Just as there are Edinburgh Scots and Glasgow Scots, so there are on the one hand “the Black Welsh” (demagogues like Lloyd George and Bevan) and the presumably un-black, like King Arthur, and the poets George Herbert and Henry Vaughan.

It appears then, though one would hardly guess it from reading Laura Cumming’s review, that HTR held certain figures in very high esteem – people like the economist JM Keynes, the historian Braudel, the Hispanophile Gerald Brenan, and of course Bernard Berenson himself. Whether he was right to do so is another matter - Keynes is on record as remarking that Berenson – whom Ascherson drolly describes as “the maestro of highly paid authentication” was “rather a bad man”. Whether he was or wasn’t, one can well imagine that Berenson’s reprise of de Maistre grated somewhat on Keynes:

“As for men in the lump, the mass, they are about as rational as a drove of oxen or a stampede of buffaloes, and woe to him who tries to lead them by means of intelligible speech instead of brutish sounds and the skilful use of the lasso.”

HTR was less despairing of intelligible speech. To say that he was overflowing with the milk of human kindness would be overstating it, but he was certainly possessed of gaiety, an ancillary quality that entitles even those who administer vitriol to associate membership of the human race. The remarks on CS Lewis may not be impartial, but when did fun ever have much to do with impartiality? One is reminded of HTR’s comment on Keynes’s essay on Lloyd George “which for sheer irresponsible gaiety and brilliant euphoria out-logans Logan”. Logan Pearsall Smith, that is. It is this very same gaiety and euphoria that make HTR himself such an entertaining letter writer, whether he is describing the contest for the Regius chair of history at Oxford (which he eventually won) or the contest some years later for the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford which was won by HTR’s candidate, Harold Macmillan.

What he had to say about that contest shows not only that HTR had a heart, but that his heart was in the right place.

“Altogether, I am convinced that the real division, as it worked out was not political: it was a battle between the Establishment and the Rebels, between, on one hand, the solemn, pompous, dreary, respectable Times reading world which hates elections (indeed, hates life) and thinks that everything should be left to the experts, the professionals, themselves and, on the other hand, the gay, irreverent, genial, unpompous world which holds exactly opposite views, the world of the educated laity who do not see why they should be excluded from politics because they are not politicians, nor from intellectual matters because they are not scholars, nor from the university because they are not academics.”

Last Friday visited the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, where they have seven sketchbooks by the eighteenth century English watercolour painter, John Robert Cozens. It so happened that the sketchbooks were being displayed in a glass case in an exhibition entitled The Land Between Us – place, power and dislocation but what was on display was well worth the trip – in particular an especially mouth-watering pencil and wash sketch of Vesuvius as glimpsed from the myrtle plantation at Sir William Hamilton’s villa at Portici, and dated August 18^th, 1782.

In common with other great British watercolourists such as Francis Towne, Thomas Girtin, John Frederick Lewis, John Sell Cotman and Edward Lear – but with the notable exception of Turner - John Robert Cozens is a chronically under appreciated artist. Turner had the grace to say that had Tom Girtin lived he should have starved, and Constable paid a similarly handsome compliment to John Robert Cozens, calling him the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.

John Robert was fortunate to be the son of another artist of originality and distinction, Alexander Cozens, but less fortunate perhaps in his personal demeanour - “of a silent, hesitating disposition, and grave manners” as a contemporary described him. He visited Italy twice, firstly, in 1778, under the patronage of Richard Payne Knight, and secondly in the entourage of the “sensitive, spoiled and unconventional” writer, William Beckford, whose keen sensibility to the scenery and the artistic treasures of Italy were perhaps as much of a trial as an inspiration to the young Cozens. At all events Cozens’s friend the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (another highly original talent, though not in water colour) spoke of Beckford’s departure from Naples in September 1782 as having left Cousins (as he spells the name) “once more a free Agent and loosed from the Shackles of fantastic folly and Caprice.” Beckford later referred to Cozens as an ungrateful scoundrel, for what reason we do not know.

What distinguishes the Portici sketch is the entirely convincing way in which a huge panorama of mountain scenery and flat middle distance has been captured on two leaves of a sketchbook measuring about 18 inches by 9 – with the centrefold running down the middle. It consists of light pencil markings (including words like “woods” and “green & rock”) on laid paper, and then quickly washed over with a grayish wash. Part of its attraction is the speed with which it was evidently executed. There are no signs of erasures or corrections; this is the seemingly effortless work of a superb observer and executant at the top of his form.

If there was one word to describe this sketch it would be the epithet so beloved of the hippy generation, “cool”, a value which was well understood in the eighteenth century, though they preferred to speak in terms of irony, understatement and in general the classical pose of “nil admirari”. You come across it all over the place, in Swift, in Pope, in Fielding, in Gibbon, and in the cut and thrust of daily conversation: “Pray, Mr Quin, do you ever make love?” the Duchess of Queensberry asked the actor James Quin. “No, Madam, I always buy it ready made.”

Up until reading his observations about Cozens in his book Landscape and Memory I’d always been a bit of a fan of Simon Schama’s, but now I’m beginning to have reservations… Quite simply Schama’s version of John Robert is (in my view anyway) almost ludicrously overcooked and over elaborate. The artist comes across as transcendentally self-absorbed and angst-ridden, and his works seen as eerie, surreal, hallucinated, unearthly. Disorientation and the scrambling of perception is the key to it: “We have been pulled into a universe of representation where something has got in the way between art and its ostensible object.” To which the skeptical reader (as well as wondering what that something might be) is tempted to respond, “scrambling of perception, indeed.”

This kind of overheated language may be appropriate for the likes of that “bona fide ecstatic” as Schama terms Beckford, but it is not appropriate for J.R. Cozens – even when he is painting his stunning representations of the Alps, or his equally stunning caverns in the Campagna. Schama chooses to dwell on “creative disordering”, but the term “creative ordering” would appear to be just as appropriate. Schama himself is perhaps open to the charge of creative disordering by implying that the artist’s eventual succumbing to mental illness was a natural sequel of an alleged “sensory brinkmanship” brought on by staring into sublimity without wearing sunglasses.

“When John Robert actually faced the mountain summit from the ledges, the imperial prospect that ought to have been yielded up to any confident eighteenth-century enlightened mind rushed past him. His head swam. His brush floated vaporously over the page. His art soared. And when his masterpieces had been accomplished, he went mad.”

Here is vaporous brushwork with a vengeance. Or the kind of swaggering, overconfident verbal pyrotechnics that offer an entertaining caricature of Cozens as yet another unstable, tormented Romantic loony, rather than giving us the real artist who, as Constable said, "touched" landscape. Touched, not twisted be it noted.

By way of postscript it’s worth noting that when Cozens painted the Portici sketch he had just recovered from a bout of malaria. Only a week or two later that amiable and musical lady, Catherine, Sir William Hamilton’s first wife, died. Nine months later her body was brought back to Wales for burial on the family estate at Slebech.