Edward Greenly.

Do men improve with the years – as W.B. Yeats seems to suggest in a poem of that name? http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/men_improve_with_the_years.html The poem itself undermines the notion of “improvement”, focusing as it does on the poet’s own bitter experience of ageing. Maybe we get wiser as we get older, but what price wisdom? What person in his right mind would choose the kind of dessicated sagesse that can only be acquired with age and experience? As for the Enlightenment notion that men improve over succeeding generations, the poet doesn’t seem to think much of that, either, judging by his other poems. Twentieth century Dublin or London is not conspicuously wiser or more heroic or nicer than Renaissance Ferrara, or more given to joy and creativity than twelfth century Byzantium. Optimism about the human prospects took a substantial nose dive in the twentieth century, and it can hardly be said to have bounced back in the first decade of the twenty first, either.

These cheerful thoughts prompted by reading the first volume of Edward Greenly’s autobiography, A Hand Through Time – Memories – Romantic and Geological: Studies in the Arts and Religion; and the grounds of Confidence in Immortality. Greenly (1861-19 51) was an interesting character, a dedicated geologist – who more or less single handed did the field work which bore fruit in the beautiful Ordnance Survey geological maps of Anglesey which bear his name. Largely self taught, his career was one of remarkable industry and dedication, and he obviously thought there was no substitute for first-hand observation – preferably done with pencil and sketch pad rather than with the camera.

“However great the value of the photographic camera, it should never displace the pencil, since to draw an object is to learn it.”

But there was a lot more to Greenly than first class professionalism, nor were his remarkable powers of observation confined to geology. He was artistic, watercolouristic, keenly responsive to natural beauty, especially mountain scenery, appreciative of quirky individuality, a lover of poetry and music of an elevating kind, physically active, vegetarian, and not afraid to try new things. He learned to drive when he was 75. Undeniably, from the vantage point of 2010 his spirituality and high-mindedness look about as dead as the dodo. Is there anyone, nowadays, who talks about “the earnest work of life”? It gets worse. He had, as he puts it “a worshipful attitude to Womanhood.” Capital W. As much as anything A Hand Through Time is an act of homage to the author’s wife, Annie Barnard. He writes to her in Quakerish fashion with “thees” and “thous” and puts her on a pedestal in a sort of late Victorian manifestation of courtly love. Not surprisingly Tennyson – after Dante – seems to have been the couple’s favourite poet. The poets of “impetuous and ungoverned passion” held no appeal for them: “Byron, for instance, we never looked at.” Ibsen is “horrid”.

But before dismissing Greenly as an overly gentle, idealizing, highfalutin and therefore fraudulent Victorian - “confident in immortality” (despite having lost his faith in the supernatural inspiration of the Bible) it might be worth pondering the proposition that habitual exposure to nasty things tends to make people nasty. Is there not a kernel of wisdom in his remarking, after a visit to the site of the massacre at Culloden: “Let men realize the proximity of barbarism, lest they do or say something which might rouse it into life again.”

“The proximity of barbarism” is a memorable phrase. Almost as good as Robert Lowell’s comment on modern civilization – “A savage servility slides by on grease.” One can only guess at what Greenly would have made of the god-forsaken, twittering, flickering, tweeting electronic rubbish dump that now commands so much of people's attention …. Almost certainly it would not have been on the lines that “men improve with the years.”

Apparently Greenly was buried in the churchyard at Llangristiolus, near Llangefni– though I’ve not been able to find the grave.

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