Nearing the end of 'The Madness of Crowds'' alchemists

Mackay makes it sound as if alchemists were more successful as time went on. Either because people's hopes were raised to a fever pitch, or the art of deception became so refined. 

Stories about people like Jean Delisle, a French alchemist from seventeenth century Provence, are a great example of both possibilities in action. 

Having already detailed alchemists' use of false-bottomed crucibles or wands filled with gold and stopped up with wax or butter, Mackay suggests that these were Delisle's tools of choice. And he insists that the man who was quite famous in his own day (having allegedly transmuted base metals into gold and silver hundreds of times in public places) was nothing more than a master of sleight of hand.

This stance makes a great deal of sense since Delisle refused to perform his transmutation before the king thrice. In fact, Delisle had to be drug to Paris. Even then he never performed before the king based on the excuse that he couldn't in fact make the Philosopher's Stone, but an Italian had given him what he had used before and had exhausted his reserves of it during his years in Provence.

Of course, being from a period of time closer to Mackay's, it's no surprise that so much more information about Delisle is available to him and thus he treats him with much more nuance than the earlier practitioners of alchemy.

It's also to be expected that being alive in the midst of the Victorian era, with its legions of genre writers (then largely called "hacks") and poets, Mackay points out the literary debt owed to the Rosicrucians' benevolent spirits (sylphs, undines, gnomes, salamanders) from their emergence in the seventeenth century up to his own day. Such creatures remain a steady inspiration even to today's fantasy writers and figure largely into the mythos of the incredible Tales of series of JRPGs. 

Mackay lets some alchemists slip through

It seems as though I need to reign in my criticism of Mackay. He remains entirely skeptical, but he's starting to admit that some of what alchemists have done is actually good either outright or simply through omission.

First, a case of his seeming to let an alchemist by simply through omission. In his coverage of Sendivogius (at work in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) he never calls the man out as a charlatan or fake. Mackay's finishing this entry with a quick variation of "need I say more?" definitely implies that he believes this to be the case. He also indirectly jabs at Sendivogius when he notes that tales of this alchemist's greatest deeds can be found in the work that his attendant wrote about him.

Mackay has worked through implication and omission before, sure. But what makes the case of Sendivogius stand out is that, according the the stories told about him, he actually possessed the Philosopher's Stone and regularly transmuted quicksilver into gold, though he covered his wealth with a show of poverty and infirmity. I suppose at this point in his miscellany of human error Mackay simply suspects that any discerning reader will read the fantastic story of Sendivogius and conclude for themselves that he was nothing but a fraud.

I guess I'm just not that discerning, in the end.

The other point that I've come across in which Mackay seems to soften in his treatment of alchemists is when he outright says that for all of their bluster and visionary nonsense, the seventeenth century Rosicrucians did some good. For, according to Mackay, they were the ones that changed alchemy into more of a spiritual exercise and they helped to do away with old superstitions about demons and imps being everywhere and at the root of all human ills. Interestingly, Mackay makes almost nothing of their replacing these superstitions with new ones about benevolent spirits being everywhere and eager to serve humanity.

There's just no popular madness like a seventeenth century popular madness.

Mackay's skepticism goes too far

As if it weren't already obvious, Mackay is a pure skeptic when it comes to alchemists. Though he's not deaf to their stories. In fact, he extracts Denis Zachaire's entire story from his own autobiography, a story that ends with Zachaire's reformation.

After a lengthy search for the Philosopher's stone Zachaire isolated himself to studying the alchemical classics rather than following the trends of his day. Then, as the climax of his story, he transmutes gold on Easter Sunday, thanking god before he decides to sell all he owns and disappears.

Now, transmuting gold on the most sacred day in the Christian calendar does seem very convenient. His solitary study leading up to and solitude during his transmutation also sounds like an embellishment. All of these details suggest that his success was the reward for some sort of increase in holiness.

Though, more than its being full of such embellishments, I think that Zachaire's story signals a shift in the culture of alchemy.

Around Zachaire's time the spiritual dimension of alchemy was picking up, and so Zachaire's story makes sense. Plus, if there is a moral to the man's tale, it's that alchemy can only come to a true end if an alchemist practices without greedy intentions. When Zachaire was working up to his final transmutation he wasn't doing it for gold or any sort of gain - it was just to prove to himself that it could be done.

Mackay, in his blind skepticism, misses this. He obviously has made himself an observer of crowds' madnesses by making himself insensitive to them. His dismissing them all as ridiculous and the worst kind of folly. It may be a fine way to go about writing such a book as his, but being so skeptical is as bad as being entirely credulous.

On sorcerers and alchemists

From Mackay's collection of biographies it sounds like alchemists took a turn for the worst in the Late Middle Ages. From the late fourteenth through the fifteenth centuries in particular, the alchemists that he describes are truly deserving of his scorn. Specifically the child-murdering Gilles de Rais and coin debaser Jacques Cœur. 

Their crimes aren't exactly on par with each other, but both are terrible reprobates that hid their wrong doings behind a screen of being alchemists searching for the philosopher's stone. 

And this apparent state of things makes me wonder.

In the case of Roger Bacon, his grand intellect drew claims and accusations of sorcery. His contemporaries (and many later generations) regarded such claims as a great blow to his reputation. Currently though, and even in Mackay's day, people are much more able to regard Bacon's discoveries as quietly revolutionary, at least in so far as they ran far ahead of what science was doing in his time.

Now, turning to the groups of alchemists motivated by greed and a lust for power, covering themselves with the name "alchemist" (or, more accurately, "alchymist"), it's interesting how the same thing happened.

Most modern readers and Victorian skeptics like Mackay aren't fooled by such titles. Instead, they're able to see past them and to the bearer's crimes. Yet, it's not that the label "alchemist" has many negative connotations, it's that it has hardly any now. At least in the sense that anyone claiming to be an alchemist these days is likely to be dismissed out of hand (and the same could be said for someone claiming to be a "sorcerer").

And that's just what happened in both cases.

The negative label didn't turn into a positive one. Rather, it lost its adhesion and just fell off, revealing the terrible stain that it had been covering over.

Trying to save Roger Bacon's bacon

Mackay's survey of alchemists across the ages continues in The Madness of Crowds. Over the course of twenty pages he wends his way from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. And most of the alchemists he covers have their alchemical deeds neatly covered.

His coverage of England's own Roger Bacon, though, offers a curious case.

Mackay makes no attempt to hide his contempt of alchemists. Each and every biography thus far has included some sort of reference to the alchemists being misguided or having wasted their lives. Roger Bacon's entry in Mackay's collection includes this treatment but it comes primarily through an apologist lens.

No mention is made of Bacon's famed bronze head, imbued with life and the wisdom to answer any kind of question put to it. Neither is there any reference to Bacon's idea of walling up all of England through magical means. Instead, the bulk of this particular biography is all about Mackay lauding Bacon's intelligence and his claims that superstition rose around his reputation because his peers simply couldn't comprehend the extent of his genius.

In fact, rather than Bacon's alchemical deeds, Mackay chronicles his general scientific accomplishments (like his understanding of convex and concave lenses). Mackay's Victorian English pride certainly shines through.

The madness of alchemy

Mackay is quick to state that all alchemists through the ages are quacks of varying degrees. Though he also mentions the very important point that in their fumbling about for the philosopher's stone and elixir of life they made several important scientific discoveries.

After a little bit more of an introduction, he then proceeds to give a brief biography of every known alchemist from the earliest record to the most recent (as of the 1850s). As of twenty pages into this section, Mackay is up to the early thirteenth century and looking at Roger Bacon.

Though, having read the play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay which is about Bacon, it seems that it could have also been about Albertus Magnus and his apprentice Thomas Aquinas. Mostly because the play's centerpiece is Bacon's animated, question-answering bronze head and Magnus and Aquinas apparently brought a bronze statue to life. A living statue that the two men set to doing menial household tasks and that was, according to Mackay's report, so chatty that Aquinas smashed it to bits. I wonder if the statue ever shrugged and sarcastically remarked "It's a living" while it was up and about?

The other thing that's grabbed my attention from the first few alchemists that Mackay's covered is that he's pulled a lot of his information from French sources. I know that Orleans in France was a center for magical practices, but even so, is there some propensity towards the wondrous unknown in France?

A brief and prosperous trade in tulips

Mackay moves from stock schemes to tulips without batting an eyelash. The apparently unexplainable madness around tulips does relate to commerce, though. Specifically, throughout the middle of the 1630s the now iconic flower was a hot commodity in the Dutch market.

Mackay is sure to note his surprise that such mania could seize "so prudent a people as the Dutch" (93). A detail that once again dates his miscellany.

Nonetheless, moving past the Victorian English perspective of Mackay, The Madness of Crowds' value is made clear in this brief chapter.

This book's not just a relic of another century; this book is a memento of a Europe more extrinsically drawn in deep and differing colours.

Not to mention Mackay's propensity for flashing his vocabulary. I'd nearly forgotten about good old "repast," surrounded as we are in the everyday with the salt-less "meal."

Forget all the new corn that comes from old fields, sometimes that old almost forgotten corn from those same fields is even more interesting.

History's role revisited

So the problem with the South Pacific scheme in 1720s England wound up being one of demand outstripping supply.

The price of the company's stock, at a time when many of its holders were selling, was such that the country itself nearly ran out of cash. As a result, and unlike a similar situation with actual goods, England's credit was called into question - a state of affairs that's as perilous on the international level as it is on the personal.

What happened with the banking crash of 2008 wasn't as cut and dry as a single company over-valuing its stock, but the same greed, pride, and desire of the low to better their quality of life were at play. Not entirely rotten motivations, though the power players in both the 1720s and 2008 had no real need to improve their lot in life.

I'm not trying to say that history repeats itself, only that knowing about things like the South Pacific scheme show history's value. This Victorian miscellany of madnesses has got value.

And, running with Einstein's definition of insanity, there's the implication that humanity on the whole is a little insane.

A stock market warning from 1720

The Madness of Crowds (a convenient short version of the book's full title, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) verges on being a Victorian miscellany. I write "verges on" since it covers a lot of topics, but it gives quite a bit of space to each.

Reading about the stock market crazes of France and England in the 1710s/20s makes me wonder how the Western world has come to rely entirely on such markets for its economy. Times have definitely changed drastically since the eighteenth century and credit is a much stabler thing than it was when trade was nowhere near worldwide nor running through manifold channels.

But to read Charles Mackay assessing the people who fell for the "scheme" of early stock trading as "fools" makes it difficult to see how our world evolved from one so far removed from our own.

Yet, there's still some truth to what Robert Walpole, the one English member of parliament who spoke out against trading on credit alone, had to say against it: Having such a system "would divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry."

As big as the stock market is today, I can't help but wonder what those on Wall Street (and Bay Street, for Canadian readers) would be doing with their wits were it not for the draw of potentially immense, relatively easy wealth.

The Victorian eye for flow

I don't expect that much will change with Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It at first struck me as something vaguely tabloid-like and it's not really changed course.

The end of Law's saga has been revealed, but as I'd expected, little analysis has come with it. Mind, there has been some, but it comes across as more chatter rather than anything really substantial. All the same, The Madness of Crowds is quite readable. It has yet to be so pre-occupied with itself that it becomes choppy or ill-edited.

It seems, then, that even if they too often fell victim to sensationalism, the Victorians knew quality when it came to the appearance and flow of the printed word.

The Victorians *would* like a 728 page tabloid

Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds almost reads like a tabloid newspaper. Its first 24 pages are filled with anecdotes and recountenances written in an almost chatty style.

But, thus far there's almost no analysis to be found. There's been no look at what allowed John Law's Mississippi Scheme to succeed as it did aside from human greed.

For a book from 1841 (second edition printed in 1852) such a shallow tone is odd. Especially considering that this book is non-fiction. But then, I've never really read anything that could be called a miscellany before. Especially not one of the Victorian ilk.

In fact, considering its length of 728 pages, I wonder if The Madness of Crowds was more of a conversation piece. Obviously it was a popular book if it went through two editons, but it doesn't strike me as something people would sit down to read cover to cover. Perhaps Mackay's voice and tone are attempts to encourage that, though.

Regardless of its original purpose I'm in it for the long haul. No doubt there'll be a pleasant surprise or two along the way.

Liberty over nationalism

Somehow I feel like I missed something from earlier in The Idea of Nationalism. The penultimate section of Kohn's final chapter was about Russia, and it wasn't until this that I realized that Kohn wasn't working on countries at random but rather sweeping from west to east (unless this is just how nationalism spread chronologically). 

The final chapter wraps everything up and works as a peak from which Kohn proclaims his conclusions. Surprisingly, and spoilers lay ahead, Kohn doesn't consider nationalism as the ultimate thing that humans strive for. Instead, he believes that liberty is the virtue that all people interested in helping humanity strive to reach and spread. Nationalism is just an expression of this drive for independence and self-sufficiency. 

Overall, Kohn's book deserves the high praise it has on its cover. It is a study of incredible breadth and some considerable depth. So much breadth in fact, that there are a few points at which I wish Kohn's project gave him more space to go further in depth. 

This book's also a little dated. I feel like Kohn's work on the ancient and medieval worlds is more evergreen, but his stuff about countries even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is probably a bit frayed. It has been 70 years since this book was first published, after all. 

But that shouldn't keep fans of history books from checking out Hans Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism. 

An unexpected contributor to nationalism

It's strange just how different the first two thirds of the twentieth century are from the final third. Really pointing to this difference is Kohn's constant reference to the peoples wedged between Russia and Western Europe as Slavs.

I've heard the term before, sure. I'm pretty confident that it's still in use today as well. But the way Kohn uses it, it sounds as if the lands stretching from Germany to Russia were occupied by loose groupings of people that were without any sense of being part of something bigger than themselves or their town.

Czechoslovakia and Serbia are the two countries Kohn's treats with as his book nears its end. And they're both rather exceptional. Czechoslovakia because they were able to follow the Western European model much more easily (being so close to Germany) and Serbia because hog exporters played a major role.

Yes. Hog exporters. It's right there on page 549.

Of course, Kohn points this detail out because it was these exporters who were the first to venture to other lands and to get the view of other countries, other nascent nations, that seems necessary to bring that sense of unity back home.

As exceptional as that little detail is, though, there's something even more exceptional still.

Kohn writes very little about the role of women in countries awakening to nationhood.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women weren't exactly sitting in parliaments or heading newspapers, but surely Kohn omits some key contributions in missing any mention of the fairer sex.

More on Poland'd be nice

Kohn's tour of countries that became nations takes him to Eastern Europe in the latest lag of his book (pages 518-543). Having some Polish heritage, but knowing next to nothing about the country, this has made these pages of Kohn's some of the most interesting for me.

However, by Kohn's assessment, things didn't really work out for Poland. Unlike nations like Italy or Greece or Sweden, it didn't quite awaken as a nation just yet. Instead, it weakened itself through its stirring and was ultimately swallowed up by Russia and Prussia only to emerge again later on.

Through implication while he's discussing Hungary, Kohn notes that things didn't work out for that country either because its nobility regarded itself as the nation and discounted those of lesser rank. But as far as I can tell that wasn't the case with Poland. If anything, actually, Poland's problem during this century of national awakenings was trying too hard and aiming too high.

Again, while discussing Hungary, Kohn mentions that the reason that nation and Poland failed to launch into a true era of nationalism in the eighteenth century is that they both put too much stock in past achievements.

Sure, I can see why trying to revive the past could lead to ruin. Conditions and variables change and more often than not can't be reset to just where they were when great things were done. But what bothers me is that Kohn doesn't give these two countries more depth of coverage.

Concentrating on Poland or Hungary's not his purpose in writing about nationalism so broadly, but a close study of some failures might have made all of the successes he's written about truly stand out.

Patterns in nationalism

Kohn's whirlwind coverage of countries that wakened into nations continues with Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

Gathered together like this, patterns among the ways in which nationalism emerges are starting to appear.

Generalizing broadly, it seems that the nations of Europe awoke either through poetry and drama or through the political work of individuals. Sometimes these two also worked in concert.

More often than not though (at least with the nations Kohn's covered so far), everything is sparked by a single individual's efforts. Not always while that person is alive, however, or in vogue.

In the case of Italy Vittorio Alfieri got people thinking about nationalism, but in an incredibly insular way. Alfieri decried the influence of anything from outside of Italy as such things threatened to corrupt the pure Italian-ism that had fostered the Roman Empire.

As much as nationalism is a matter of a collective ego (with all the negative and positive connotations of that word) another trend that's come out is that almost every nation that Kohn has chronicled draws inspiration to awaken to nationalism thanks to inspiration from another country. The French Revolution was just such an inspiration to Italy, much to Alfieri's chagrin.

Another 60 pages remain, and so I'll see about how these patterns carry forward.

Nationalism, "patriot," and language

From Ireland and Wales, Kohn has moved on to write of Holland, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. At this point I'm wondering if he'll get over to Asia at all. Though that seems especially unlikely.

What strikes me as the most dated feature of Kohn's writing, though, is his constant use of the word patriot.

When The Idea of Nationalism was first printed, in the 40s, the word stood for something to strive toward. A patriot was someone who expressed a desire to better the entire world through bettering his or her home nation. In modern usage, however, at least in North America, the word's gathered too many negative connotations to be taken seriously. Or to be regarded as a positive.

There's the infamous Patriot Act in the United States. And the general sense that a "patriot" isn't someone who stands up for some national good but who's fanatical about his or her country the same way that a football fan who paints himself and screams the whole game through is seen as fanatical about his team. In this age of irony where sincerity is seldom expressed, "patriot" is too strong a word to be of any good use.

Of course, that's not to say that there were no egos involved in the early nationalism that Kohn writes on. It seems like that's all it was - a country's population coming together to say "this country of ours sure is much greater than all those others."

In the case of Spain, for example, Spanish nationalism was fostered on the idea that Spanish literature was the only truly original European literature. Further, that the rest of Europe owed Spain a great deal in the literary field.

It was also thought that a country's language had to be pure for it to unite as one.

Given the way that English has fractured, maybe even to the point where "proper" English is where Latin was 100 years ago, it seems unlikely to unite anything much. Yet the bible, the book used to legitimize languages in the past, is being translated into LOLCat.

Kohn on Celts

Well, surprise of surprises, Kohn's final chapter isn't about Germany. Yet.

Instead,the chapter called, in part, "Toward the Great Awakening" has been about Wales and Ireland. Kohn's treatment of the growth of nationalism in these countries has been similar to his approach to Germany and Prussia.

Of course, by this point in The Idea of Nationalism the important historical trends and figures of the eighteenth century are well tread. As a result, Kohn is able to skim through the context of important events. This allows him to keep his discussions streamlined and is quite appreciated.

However, Kohn does drop names without giving them context. As far as I can tell, "Grattan" is used several times but Kohn never refers to him as Henry Grattan. 

That Kohn is able to freely drop names like this suggests that The Idea of Nationalism was written for a specialist audience. Yet, Kohn's smooth but dense prose is much more welcoming than a textbook's.

Given the breadth of his coverage so far, at the very least Kohn covers a wide range of emerging nations.

Kohn finally delivers on promise of folklore

At long last the chapter called "Folklore of the Past" talks of folklore. After spending nearly the whole chapter writing of trends and thinkers in German nationalism, Kohn spends the last 24 pages on Johann Gottfried Herder.

Herder's major contribution to the discussion about German nationalism is the notion that each peoples' nationalism is the way that they express humanity. All peoples express humanity in their own way, and so that method of expression reflects their national character. Folklore comes into this formulation since it is, to Herder, the essential expression of a national character.

All of this discussion of folklore is well and good. But it really could have stood on its own.

The pages upon pages of jumping around in time and across different thinkers and theories could have been organized in a more direct way. Or it could have been dropped all together. Cutting everything from this chapter but the discussion of Herder's ideas and work would have made it a mere 24 pages among chapters that are at least double that length, but still.

At least it would have only been about what it was advertised as being about.

Given where "Folklore of the Past" went, I'm confident that "Toward the Great Awakening" will continue to concentrate on Germany and its struggle with nationalism. Also, given Kohn's ending "Folklore of the Past" with a clear reference to Germany's assertion of its national pride, I'm confident that the World Wars will come up within the book's last chapter.

The Idea of Nationalism should then continue to be an interesting, if over lengthy, read.

The painful irony of historical nationalism

The more I read Kohn's history of German nationalism (that's what The Idea of Nationalism has become, these last hundred or so pages), the more nervous I become.

Kohn's well aware of this thing that makes me nervous, though he just juts his chin out towards it as painfully ironic sentiments come up. Sentiments found in statements along the lines of 'Germany is a great nation and a protector of the weak,' or Goethe's own "the Germans are like the Jews, they can be oppressed but not annihilated" (415).

It's statements like these that really set the stage for Germany in the twentieth century. And that make me squirm as I read. Writing in 1947, it's clear that they make Kohn nervous as well.

Nonetheless, at the time the comparison between the Jews and Germans was yet another manifestation of an Anglo/Saxon people seeing themselves as the wandering chosen. I swear there's some sort of history- and society-spanning complex there.

Getting back to the matter of nationalism. The late eighteenth century saw this movement take off in Germany, as the people began to take an interest in claiming a nation of their own. One man in particular, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstop, even went so far as to dedicate his life to writing Germany's national epic poem. It was a project that took him twenty seven years to complete.

Kohn dwells quite a bit on the poetry of the time at this point in his discussion. Particularly, he's emphasizing the contemporary idea that poetry needs to be accessible to urbanite an ruralite alike. Hopefully this discussion of poetry is gradually bringing him to the promised folklore.

Over-intellectualizing nationalism?

Turning back to the eighteenth century, Kohn looks at philosophers and the influence of classical Greece on German nationalism. The latter of these turns contemporary intellectuals away from any notion of a specific German nationalism and toward something more universal.

At the time, Germany was a collection of regions, each ruled by its own monarch. Thus, some of the intellectuals considered Germany the ideal example for the rest of the world to follow when it came to a single political entity being made of several smaller kingdoms.

However, that's just what the intellectuals were thinking.

This approach to a history of something as broad as "nationalism" bothers me.

Earlier in the book, Kohn dismissed much of the German peasantry as being characterized by an overpowering desire to obey and avoid making waves. So they're discounted.

He's written of the princes of Germany and how they were more concerned with their own power and its continuation than anything like the idea of nationalism.

Now, hearing about people like Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller is fine, but incredibly limited. It wouldn't bother me quite so much if Kohn tried to connect their ideas to events or movements that happened after their deaths (when it's reasonable that anything cutting edge had become mainstream or simply accepted), but he doesn't. In these last few sections, his focus has been almost entirely on individual thinkers and their own ideas of nationalism and where Germany should go in regards to it.

This current chapter, "Stirrings in the Old World: The Folklore of the Past" still has another 38 pages in which Kohn could look at the after effects of these thinkers' ideas. Alternatively, the next chapter "Stirrings in the Old World: Toward the Great Awakening" could be about just that entirely. If either is the case, then Kohn's book stands a good chance of truly being a great work of historical political science.