Ancient and Modern Revised? Conflicting Values in A Laodicean

Abstract

Part of the young architect’s surprise at his first sight of Stancy Castle is the potent image of the telegraph wire and the arrow-slit. Though the age of this ‘fossil of feudalism’ (p. 22; 1.2) scarcely compares with the recurrent natural cycle of its protective mosses, it does contrast sharply with that ‘mark of civilization’ (p. 21; 1.2): the new electric telegraph. The coupling of a ‘hoary memorial of a stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas’, with a means of communication symbolizing cosmopolitan views involving the ‘intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind’ (pp. 22–3; 1.2), is unexpected. To redress the balance, the shortcomings of the modern: the ‘mental fever and fret which consumes people before they can grow old’, with its Keatsian echoes, are set against the positives of feudalism: ‘leisure, light-hearted generosity, intense friendships, hawks, hounds, revels, healthy complexions, freedom from care, and such a living power in architectural art as the world may never again see’ (p. 23; 1.2).

[George Somerset] could observe the walls of the lower court in detail, and the old mosses with which they were padded — mosses that from time immemorial had been burnt brown every summer, and every winter had grown green again. The arrow-slit and the electric wire that entered it, like a worm uneasy at being unearthed, were distinctly visible now. So also was the clock, not, as he had supposed, a chronometer coeval with the fortress itself, but new and shining, and bearing the name of a recent maker.¹