April 23, 2016 marks the 400^th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.  Professional critics will devote tons of ink and lightning bolts worth of electrons to the anniversary.  I hope a few words from an amateur will do no harm.

The date may also mark his 452^nd birthday.  No record confirms the date of birth because there was no birth registry in Stratford at that time.  April 23 has been the date favored by English traditionalists as his birthday because it is the name day of St. George, the patron saint of England.  We do know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564.  His death notice states that he was in his fifty-third year when he died on April 23^rd   He had to have been born on or before April 23, but not too much before in light of the baptism on the 26^th.  Samuel Schoenbaum tells us that the rule in the 1560s was to baptize an infant no later than the Sunday or other holy day following birth.  A child born on Sunday, April 23, 1564 would have been baptized on April 25, St. Mark’s Day.

The exact date of his birth will remain unknown.  April 23 lends symmetry to a notable life that it should have begun and ended on the same day on the calendar.  However, Professor Schoenbaum reminds us that “other considerations usually determine these events”.

How William Shakespeare ended up working on the London stage is the bigger puzzle.

John Shakespeare, William’s father, was a prominent citizen of Stratford during his son’s early childhood.  He was an alderman and served a one-year term as mayor[1].  He was a prosperous glover and dealer in hides and wool.  Stratford had a grammar school.  No attendance records survive; possibly they were not kept in the first place.  We can’t know whether William was a student, but it is likely that the son of a prominent citizen would have attended the local school.  Historians have dug up the standard curriculum of English grammar schools of that time, so we know what he would likely have learned had he in fact attended.  The standard course of study included Latin and English grammar.  Older students would read classical Roman plays in Latin.

We know that William married when he was 18.  There is a marriage license dated November 27, 1582.  The bride, Anne Hathaway, was seven or eight years older than the groom.  Scholars have had to deduce her age; there were no baptismal records kept in Stratford at the time of her birth.  Their first child, Susanna, was born in May 1583 (ahem) six months after the wedding.  In February 1585, less than two years later, the couple had twins (a boy and a girl).

So, here we have William Shakespeare, two months shy of his twenty-first birthday with a wife and three children to see to.  He is a resident of a small town some 100 miles northwest of London.  At some point in the 1580s he left Stratford, traveled to London, and started working in the theater.  By 1592 he was well enough established in London to have been attacked in a pamphlet by the writer and playwright Robert Greene as an “upstart crow”.  Greene was near death as he wrote.  According to the pamphlet’s title page, Greene’s dying request was that it be published.  So, by 1592 Shakespeare had earned a reputation, a bad one as far as Mr. Greene was concerned, as an actor and writer.

How far in advance of Mr. Greene’s death in 1592 would Shakespeare have begun working in London?  The first plays might have been written as early as 1589 or as late as 1591.  It’s hard to imagine that a theater company would hire him as a playwright off the street, so he must have started working in the theater some years before the first play was performed.  It would have taken time to gain the confidence of a theater company and to have awakened the ire of Robert Greene.

How did this happen?  In 1585, Shakespeare was a young townsman of Stratford with a wife and children.  Some five years later, he was writing plays that are performed, read, enjoyed, studied, and argued over more than four centuries later.  And he was writing sonnets and narrative poetry as well.

The short answer is that we don’t know and we aren’t going to know, ever.  The mystery is so complete, so profound, that it has given rise to the fascinating controversy that has been brewing for some 200 years over the identity of the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare[2].  The nearly blank pages of the poet’s early years have created opportunities for speculation.

Scott McCrae in The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Controversy[3] makes the point that the seeds of the dispute were sown shortly after Shakespeare’s death, although they did not germinate until later.  The early legend was that Shakespeare was a child of nature, that his writing displayed little learning or sophistication, and that the plays and poems are the expression of an untutored genius.  That view invited the devaluation of Shakespeare’s biography.

The problem is that later study showed that the author of the Shakespeare canon must have been far more learned than his early critics thought.  For example, scholars have measured the size of his vocabulary by counting each different word in the canon.  Shakespeare’s vocabulary was twice as large as that of his nearest contemporary.  It’s not just a matter of vocabulary, needless to say.  His command of English, his power of expression, are monumental.

It became increasingly difficult to reconcile the imagined country bumpkin with the sophisticated mind that produced the canon.  The author of the plays, sonnets, and other works could not have come from the modest background that legend had created for him.  So, he must have been a university graduate?  This is what I find so fascinating about the authorship controversy.  It discloses biases that might otherwise have remained unexamined.  Only those with university degrees know how to string together a powerful English sentence?  Let’s stop while we count all the owners of advanced degrees who have written great literature.

There is some spoken French here and there in the works.  Where could the fellow from Stratford have picked it up?  What about the knowledge of law displayed by the author?  There are many claims (mostly by lawyers) that he must have been trained in the law.

Or, think of all the Shakespeare plays that are set in Italy.  I’m not going to look at a list, but off the top I can think of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet.  If you wanted to throw in Julius Caesar, go ahead.  The author of the plays must have traveled in Italy to be able to write about the place, no?

We have no reason to think that William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, ever traveled outside of England.  Yet, the argument goes, the person who wrote these plays must have spent time in Italy.  Therefore, the man from Stratford could not have written the plays.  Q.E.D.

But how much does the author of the plays know about Italy?  McCrae suggests that Shakespeare’s Italy is not very Italian; it is more like England in the summertime.  He believes that most of the Italy plays do not demonstrate any particular sense of place.  For example, the two plays set in Venice don’t mention the canals.  His characters placed in Verona never mention the brick wall encircling the city that was constructed in the 1530s.

Here’s a telling example.  In Two Gentlemen of Verona there are several references to travel by sea.  The action begins in Verona.  In the early scenes, each of the two gentlemen makes a voyage to Milan, each with his servant.  It is clear that the trip will be made by water.  Characters are urged to hurry to catch their ship, and not just a ship but the “flood” (i.e., the tide).  This opens the door to a pun-fest using the words “tide” and “tied”.  But look at a map of northern Italy.  Verona is perhaps 60 miles inland and Milan is another 100 or so miles from the Adriatic.  The only sensible way to travel from Verona to Milan is over land.  In theory, you could take a river trip from Verona down the Adige River to its mouth, then coast southward to the mouth of the Po and fight the current for 150 miles or so to get close to Milan.  You could then use a system of canals, still in existence, to take you the rest of the way.

Some have argued that northern Italy had a more intricate system of canals in the sixteenth century.  On this view, the existing canals that connect Milan to the Po River are just a small part of a much larger system that connected Milan to Verona.  The author of the plays knew what he was talking about after all.  People of Shakespeare’s time would have traveled from Verona to Milan and back by water[4].

But, where are the canals?  The ones connecting Milan to the Po still have water in them.  Where is the magnificent system of canals connecting the two cities?  Some who believe William Shakespeare could not have written the plays and poems conclude that the old canals have been filled in and are no longer visible.  Also, that no record of them survives[5].

So, we start with the assumption that the author had to have known Italy.  We end with the conclusion that there must be a network of canals buried beneath the soil east of Milan, canals of which no historical or archeological record exists.  It’s a remarkable piece of reasoning, symptomatic of the belief that these great works could not have been produced by a small-town fellow with a 16^th century grammar school education.  Because that kind of thing doesn’t happen.

Which leads to the question: why is there an authorship controversy over the works of William Shakespeare but not over any of his contemporaries?  Is there an authorship controversy surrounding Cervantes (who died April 22, 1616 – it was a tough week for great writers)?  Everyone seems to be sure that John Donne wrote the poems attributed to him.  Donne is one of the great figures of English literature.  If you watch the Emma Thompson film “Wit” you learn that some Donne scholars think their man is a better poet than Will.  Could the reason be that Donne was held in low regard during most of the time between his death in 1631 and the early 20^th century?  As an underappreciated master, he was not worth the trouble of an authorship controversy.

Shakespeare was recognized as a fine poet and dramatist by his contemporaries, but it was only in the late eighteenth century that his status was elevated to “greatest writer of the English language.”  True “bardolatry,” as it was called, came into vogue.  And it was only after Shakespeare had been widely considered the greatest writer in the English language that questions about the provenance of his works began to emerge.

What is it about the works of Shakespeare that makes the doubters want to attribute them to someone else?  Why, in their minds, could the fellow from Stratford not manage it?

Let’s agree that it can’t be due to any special facility with plotting.  Entire subplots are introduced and then dropped without further mention in Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night.  In As You Like It, we are given as much story as is required to get the characters off to the Forest of Arden where they can frolic.  Are there characters in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, etc. that you are not fond of?  Just be patient, they will soon be dead.

It’s not the plot, it’s the poetry.  Part of his power lies in his ability to show rather than tell, to put images before our minds.  Consider an almost trivial example.  In the first scene of Henry IV, Part 1 the King is waiting in London for news from a battle in a place called Holmedon.  A messenger has arrived, one Sir Walter Blunt, and the author wants us to know that so conscientious and devoted is Sir Walter that he has ridden straight through to bring the news.

How to convey this information in the most compelling way?  “He rode without rest.”  That doesn’t say much.  “He rode hell for leather.”  Thanks, but there are enough clichés in Shakespeare’s work already[6].   “He left a trail of dust behind him for miles.”  Better, but that takes our attention away from the present scene and puts it out on the road somewhere.  “He is caked with mud from his ceaseless riding.”  Now we have the rider and some mud standing in front of us, so that’s an improvement.  Here is Shakespeare’s answer:

Here is a dear, a true industrious friend,

Sir Walter Blunt, new lighted from his horse,

Stain’d with the variation of each soil

Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours; 

It’s an elegant solution.  We can picture the man and the horse covered in mud of different shades.  Why are they so covered?  Because they did not stop but rode straight through as the landscape and topography changed under them.  We aren’t told what the man and horse did.  Instead, an image is placed before our eyes, but our brains have to work to make sense of it.

And this is purely a throw-away line.  Nothing in the play turns on whether Sir Walter rode fast or far.  The lines are part of the web that draws us into the world that the poet has created for our entertainment or amusement or edification, depending on the particular play or scene within it.

The magic comes when a series of these images and metaphors are arranged together and cascade through our minds as we read or listen.  To take an almost random example (from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1):

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife

Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;

Blood and destruction shall be so in use,

And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold

Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:

And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,

With Ate by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Now perhaps that’s an unfair example.  Once Mr. S gets going on the subjects of blood, death, war, and mayhem, he puts that little bit extra into his work that makes such a difference.  The example really was chosen nearly at random.  We have a 1936 first edition of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare[7]” that belonged to my mother-in-law.  It is some 1500 pages thick.  I opened to the middle and then went forward and back by twenty or so pages until I found something suitable on the fourth try.

It would be easy enough to find hundreds if not thousands of other examples.  There is John of Gaunt’s speech in Act 2, Scene 1 of Richard II (“This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle . . . .) or Leonato’s lines at the beginning of Act 5 of Much Ado About Nothing where he refuses to be calm and philosophical while he rages over what he believes, wrongly we know, to be the death of his daughter (“For there never yet was philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently,”) or the gentle post-courtroom scene in Merchant of Venice when, after the trial that condemned Shylock, the characters who are destined for happiness reflect on the beauty that surrounds them (“Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold[8]”).

I’m not quoting these passages at length since they and countless others can be found in books or online.  Their power and beauty are augmented by the cascading effect of a series of potent metaphors.  We have barely absorbed one when the author starts to unfold the next one.  The effect can be dizzying, spellbinding.

It isn’t just the poetry, as potent as that is.  His people are so believable, even though we know that they are characters in a story.  And the range of personalities is staggering.  Think of the evil SOBs – Iago, Cassius, Richard III, or Lady Macbeth (a DOB) – each of them evil in his or her own special way.  The clowns, fools, and comics form their own regiment.  There are cadres of kings, legions of lovers, not to mention warriors, rustic innocents, raging drunkards, sympathetic priests, and the occasional self-important official.

A particularly congenial group are the women who spend time disguised as men (Viola, Rosalind, Portia, with apologies to those I overlooked).  This trope reaches a peak in Twelfth Night, where the young woman (Viola) masquerades as a young man (Cesario).  She falls in love with her employer, a Duke who is himself in love with a neighbor, Olivia.  Olivia falls in love with Cesario.  The tangle entertains us for five acts.  The resolution leaves the main characters as fully blinded by their emotions as they were at the beginning, but in new relationships.

Perhaps one characteristic common to many of Shakespeare’s characters is that they don’t explain themselves.  They act out who they are.  There is no exposition of their motives.  The purely evil SOBs, the innocent lambs, the furious fathers, the doting mothers, the masquerading women, none of them undergoes psychoanalysis – we see who they are.  How they got that way is rarely an issue[9].

So many of the jokes are still funny centuries later.  A lot of Shakespeare’s humor devolves from the plain meaning of words.

Viola:     [D]ost thou live by thy tabor[10]?

Clown: No, sir[11], I live by the church.

Viola:     Art thou a churchman?

Clown: No such matter, sir: I do live by the church; for I do live at my house, and my house doth stand by the church.    Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 1

Glendower:        I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur:               Why, so can I, or so can any man;

                                But will they come when you do call for them?  Henry IV, Part 1 Act 3, Scene 1

And a last, more complicated example, from Sir John Falstaff (again in Henry IV, Part 1), who saves his life in battle by pretending to be dead and then, when he is alone, rises to explain to himself and to us the wisdom of what he has done:

I am no counterfeit: to die, is to be a counterfeit; for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.

In Twelfth Night, there is a subplot in which Malvolio, Olivia’s self-important chief of staff, is ensnared by a set of characters that he considers his moral inferiors.  As he starts to fall victim to their plan, one of them, Fabian, says, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”  The two times I’ve seen the play, he steps outside the action, comes to the edge of the stage, and addresses the audience directly.  The theater erupts with laughter.  The same thing must have happened when the line was spoken on the stage during the first known performance in 1602.  I’d bet a steak dinner that audiences have laughed out loud at that line every time it has been spoken.  There are forces at work that would outlaw laughter if they could.  Unless they achieve a complete victory, that line will be shaking the rafters a century from now, when our grandchildren and great-grandchildren commemorate the 500^th anniversary of the Bard’s death.

I know that I have barely touched what sets this work apart.  Whole libraries could be, have been, filled with books by scholars who have analyzed individual works or particular aspects of them.  I enjoy learning about the sources that Shakespeare was likely to have used for his plays, the place of the stage in the urban life of his time, the structure of his metaphors, the political implications of the plays.  It is sobering to think of the tens of thousands of scholars who have each devoted decades of study to better understand, and to help us better understand, the work of one individual.

And it is staggering to think that one individual could have a mind so profound and the ability to translate his thought into language of such depth and power that tens of thousands of scholars more will still be improving their understanding of his work and the understanding of our remote descendants centuries from now.

Does any of this establish that the mind in question could not have belonged to the man from Stratford?  Is there some known ingredient to genius operating at this level that we know Shakespeare lacked?  Can it be said honestly that, given a man with the mind of Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere or any of the other leading candidates, of course you would expect works of this quality?  It’s only when we stoop to a fellow like Will Shakespeare that we have trouble seeing how he could do it.  The fact is that it is difficult to understand how anyone, of whatever level of education, birth, or experience, wrote these works.

It’s a little like the assertion that life had to have been created because it’s impossible to imagine that it could have evolved through a natural process.  Without deciding that question, we have to acknowledge that the failure of our collective imaginations is not evidence of anything other than the bluntness of the instrument that is the human mind.  We can’t imagine how someone in his early twenties walked out of a mid-sized town and ended up a few years later writing the greatest works in the English language.  The mystery would not be resolved if we had reason to think that the author held a degree from a university, or had traveled widely, or held a hereditary title of nobility.  How would that explain anything?  No one else possessed of those characteristics has demonstrated that those are the keys that allow us to unlock the mystery.

To repeat myself, we don’t know how he decided to pursue his career or how he got his start, and we aren’t going to know.  But we do owe a debt to someone who has provided his audience with so much entertainment, inspiration, and stimulation.  We can’t repay him but I would like to make a small gesture toward acknowledging the debt by remembering the author on the four hundredth anniversary of his death.

[1] The official title was High Bailiff.

[2] To be clear, and for what it is worth, I believe there is no reason to doubt that William Shakespeare is the author of the plays and poems that are attributed to him.

[3] The title is optimistic.

[4] But even if there were such a system, all the jokes about floods, tides, and drowning would not fit a voyage via canal barge.

[5] There are German maps of the 1500s that view northern Italy as seen from the Alps. They show the area covered by rivers.  Those rivers don’t exist, never existed.  As McCrae points out, some remains of the supposed canals would have survived had they been in the ground.  Four hundred years is not enough time to have erased the archeological record.

[6] Joke.  Sorry.

[7] No longer complete.  It predates the discovery that The Two Noble Kinsman is at least partly the work of W.S.

[8] What an enchanting image, that we are looking up at the floor of heaven.  The original glass ceiling.

[9] Richard III is perhaps an exception.  Possibly his hyper-self-consciousness is a source of his evil power.  It would be natural to emphasize this characteristic in a play about the last Yorkist king written for an audience accustomed to cheer for the Lancastrians.

[10] I believe this would be a tambourine or similar instrument.

[11] Viola is disguised as a young man.

There was once a positive and affirming tradition in retailing.  After the customer paid, the seller would say “Thank you” and the customer would reply “Thank you”.  Those “thank-you”s were full of meaning.  The customer was saying, “Thank you for having the goods and services I wanted ready and available for me at a price I thought was reasonable.  No one compelled you to do it, and I genuinely appreciate it.”  The retailer was saying, “Thank you for choosing this store to meet your needs when you have so many alternatives.  It means a lot that you freely chose us.”

It’s a fitting moment to acknowledge that we are making a voluntary exchange that benefits us both.  They know that I don’t have to shop there and I know that they don’t have to make sure that my favorite brand of salsa is on the shelf.  We have both sought each other out for mutual aid.

I notice that in the South, where courtesy is much more a part of everyday life than it is in other parts of the United States, people will substitute “Y’all come back and see us, now.”  I believe this is just as good as “Thank you”.  It underscores the voluntary nature of the momentary association between buyer and seller.  It encompasses the notion that the customer is free to go somewhere else and therefore an effort should be made to welcome him or her to return.

This moment of mutual acknowledgment has gone missing in the corner of the world I live in.  Usually, what I hear at checkout is “Have a nice day.”  This reminds me of the joke about how many New Yorkers it takes to screw in a light bulb.  The answer: None of your damn business.  How many Californians does it take?  None of your damn business, but have a nice day.

When I hear, “Have a nice day” I am tempted to say “You should be saying thank you.”  What I say instead is “You too.”  The expression has no sense of momentary voluntary association, no sense of mutual benefit, only a robotic wish that nothing will happen that will disturb you, but only for the rest of the day.

I have learned from my dear wife how important it is to acknowledge other people when they do something positive or when they demonstrate a character trait that is noteworthy.  I had a positive experience in my local QFC grocery a couple of weeks ago when an employee unexpectedly re-introduced the “thank you” tradition.  I went out of my way to acknowledge the action.

Gabriel was bagging my groceries.  I doubt he is more than 20 years old.  His lightly accented English suggests to me that he immigrated from east Africa as a teenager, although that’s a guess.  The cashier, an assistant manager no less, finished ringing me up and said “Have a nice day.”  But Gabriel said, “Thank you for shopping with us.”  I made a point of telling Gabriel how much I appreciated that he had said that.  He smiled.  I smiled.

A week later, I was back at my neighborhood QFC.  I avoided the line of the slowest, most inaccurate checker in the store and glided into the line of what turned out to be the second slowest checker in the store.  But the compensation was that Gabriel was there, bagging groceries like mad.  I looked forward to our mutual recognition of the voluntary beneficial exchange in which we were participating.  As he finished he said to me, “Have a nice day.”  There is still work to do.

 

Well-deserved congratulations to those of us who watched every episode of Downton.  Those who missed a few episodes might consider a visit to the gift shop.  You could buy a brightly colored T-shirt with the legend:  My Friends Watched Downton Abbey and All I Got Was This Stupid Shirt.

I think it was a mistake for Mr. Fellowes to announce beforehand that this would be the last season.  Had he kept both audience and writers in the dark, both groups might have gotten more out of this final season.  As early as the first episode, I did not feel that we were getting the writers’ best work.  Who can blame them?  They had to keep an eye on monster.com and then go running off for interviews with the BBC and ITV.  These are not conditions likely to produce really gripping dramatic material week to week.  And we in the audience began to lower our expectations accordingly.  It became clear early on that the writers were just arranging pieces on the board in order to maneuver as many happy endings as time would allow.

And with a two-hour finale, there was time enough for happy endings out to the horizon.  When the lovely editor caught Edith’s bouquet just moments after Tom openly flirted with her, I felt I was approaching my limit for treacly sentimentality.  The only slight shadow is Mr. Carson’s infirmity[1], but even his happiness will be accommodated by a cottage on the estate, a pension, and the honor of being the advisor to family and staff on matters that come within his deep, although not very broad, knowledge and experience.

The whole episode reminded me of a movie I have mentioned before, The Secret Life of Bees.  That story is set in the Jim Crow South.  A pre-adolescent girl, white, ends up at a farm run by an African-American woman who keeps bees and lives in the eye of the segregationist storm that surrounds her.  In fact, in her capacity to dispense folk wisdom, she is very much like Mr. Mason except that he is male, white, and English where she is female, black, and American.  But other than that.  They are both deeply rooted to the soil – pigs, bees – which enables them to see into the future, counsel those around them, and maintain a cheerful outlook on life in all circumstances.

It wasn’t just that connection that put me in mind of the Bees movie.  It was the cheerful way everyone interacted with everyone else.  Atticus spies Tom and Henry talking about the changes they plan to make and says with a deep back-bending chuckle, “But I like you just the way you are!”  Ditto Robert and Cora, Violet and Spratt, Rose and the downstairs staff, and practically everyone else involved in this episode.

In the Bees movie, there is one moment when the Jim Crow system intrudes into the story.  The pre-teen adolescent white girl and a pre-teen adolescent black boy are sweet on each other.  They go to a movie theater to hold hands, but of course they have to go to the “Colored” area up in the balcony.  The kids don’t mind, but the evil killjoy segregationists spot them and break up their date.

We have a similar faux dark moment in this final episode when Robert, Cora, and Edith present themselves for inspection by Bertie’s redoubtable mother.  She has laid down the law that Bertie’s tenure is to be dedicated to a restoration of public morals, following the disgraceful trips to Tangiers by Bertie’s predecessor.  But it turns out that she is but a gingerbread moralist.  Edith discloses the Marigold story to her hoped for future mother-in-law, who adopts an attitude more typical of us Americans than of the British of the day.  Edith’s courage, honesty, and authenticity wipe away her fall from grace.  By confessing and (we assume, the scene was not shown to us) throwing herself on the mercy of Bertie’s mother (forgot her name), Edith has expunged the sin of “antenuptial fornication”.

But if Bertie’s mom is such a stern moralist, why does confession get Edith out of hot water?  (And if she is worried about appearances, little Marigold is going to have to be explained somehow.)  It appears that Bertie’s cousin, the Marques before him, didn’t try to hide his sexual orientation.  Why did his authenticity not earn him forgiveness?  Answer: We are going for happy endings here, thank you.

The choice of 1925 as the year in which to end the story is consistent with the general tone of happiness being ladled into overflowing cups.  The TV series that most closely resembles Downton is Upstairs, Downstairs, which ran in the 1970s.  According to Wikipedia, the series consisted of 68 episodes, starting in 1903 and ending with the stock market crash in 1929.  Downton must have had some 50 episodes (six seasons of eight or nine episodes each) and runs a shorter span, from the sinking of Titanic in 1912 to the last day of 1925.

The older series ended on a very dark note.  The heir of the family, James, has invested his own money heavily in the stock market.  One of the servants, Rose, trusted him to invest her savings as well.  He lost everything.  In the final scene, we hear a gunshot and see him lying face down on his bedroom floor.

Upstairs, Downstairs had far less action than Downton.  It was more like a stage play than a TV series.  Most of the action took place in the family’s drawing room or in the kitchen or servants’ quarters.  Even so, the glimpses we got of the family via the drawing room and the kitchen gave the viewer a better sense of the life of that time than did Downton.  Perhaps because the series touched on the lives of its characters more realistically than did Downton Abbey, the creators of Upstairs, Downstairs ended the series in the most dramatic way possible at a historic turning point for Britain.  The decade that began in 1930 was the beginning of a steep downhill slide for the British.

Possibly the same reasoning was at work in the Downton series for the opposite reason.  The more lighthearted orientation of Downton lent itself to a riot of happy endings brought to a close at a moment of peace and prosperity.  In 1925, the British Empire was in its Indian Summer, although that is apparent only with hindsight.  What happened in the following fifteen years shows how quickly a nation’s place in the world can change.  In the 1920s, Britain had the largest empire the world has ever known, if you add up the Commonwealth, the dominions, colonies, protectorates, etc., and it included about one in four people then living.  It was more than five times the size of the Roman Empire at its peak.  It was half again as large as the Soviet empire, including the eastern European Warsaw Pact countries on the Soviet side of the ledger.

Sitting comfortably at the hub of such a powerful enterprise, the residents of Downton Abbey and their fellow Britons might look back with pride on the accomplishments that they and their forebears in empire had achieved.  Britain abolished slavery voluntarily.  It abolished its own slave trade and took aggressive steps to suppress participation by other nations in that sickening commerce.  It advanced free trade and used the balance of power to maintain peace and calm, relatively speaking, in Europe for the century after Waterloo.  It has to be admitted that they did not always treat their colonies well and the Irish, the Indians, and the Africans can find much to complain of.  Even so, as Lord Merton might have put it, they had a good innings.  And in 1925, they had every reason to think that the progress and prosperity they had enjoyed would continue indefinitely.

So, as the story ends, Britain is just below the crest of the wave.  The horrors of the World War are fading into the past.  Everyone is as happy as his or her station in life permits as 1925 fades away.  Nearly everyone is paired up.  Those who aren’t – Violet, Denker, Spratt, Bertie’s Mom – are well satisfied with their situations.  Mr. Barrow is another exception but he at least has full time employment in his adopted home.  Robert can speak of the future as something to be faced with hope and the expectation of better things to come.  But how quickly things changed!  Only fifteen years after the story’s end, British cities would be in flames as bombs fell on them from German planes flying overhead.  Despite the peace and prosperity into which they were born, every child we have met in this story will come of age at a time when Britain’s continued existence as an independent nation will be in peril.

Well, we know what’s coming but there is no reason to spoil their pleasure.  Let them enjoy themselves while they can and as they can.  As Spanky said (and as Our Gang agreed) Sunday will never be the same.

[1] A loyal reader asked me to research Mr. Carson’s condition.  I entered his symptoms into WebMD.  They think he has “essential tremor”.  I understand that “essential” in this case means “not caused by an identified disease” such as Parkinson’s.  WebMD adds the helpful note that the condition can be treated through medication or brain surgery.  Consult your physician.

I’ll begin with an apology.  When I wrote out my thoughts about Episode 7, I thought that Episode 8 was the end of the series.  Had I realized that there was still one more episode to come, I might have drawn different conclusions on one or two subjects.  In my defense, when I looked at “Scheduled Recordings” on my DVR, I saw that Episode 8 was longer than a standard episode — some 80 minutes, including the Viking Cruise commercials – and I also saw that the recording for the following Sunday was a “Making of Downton” program.  That seemed to confirm my understanding that Episode 8 was going to be the end.  I drew the wrong conclusion.  In compensation, this commentary is offered free of charge except for a small fee for handling.

With so many story lines needing to be tied off, it is just as well that we have one more episode.  Looking back with now perfect hindsight, I can see that it was too much to hope for that both Mary and Edith could accept their respective fiancés and celebrate their respective weddings within the span of a single episode.  Mary needed most of Episode 8 to get to the altar.  Fresh from the tearful phone call that concluded Episode 7, she sent off a confirming letter of rejection and then sent off Henry himself when Tom maneuvered him to Downton’s front door.

Henry presents so many issues for Mary that we can take pot luck.  He is not Mary’s financial equal and will be of significantly inferior financial and social status to his stepson.  He will spend his married life living in someone else’s house.  If he and Mary have children, they will be relative paupers compared to their half-brother.  But most important, Henry will walk past the Grim Reaper, nodding his head to a familiar acquaintance, every time he goes to his job, never knowing whether this day is the one when the G.R. decides to ride with him.

It’s that last problem that sends Mary into tears.  Fortunately, Violet reappears after Tom sent for her.  I should have known that she would not abandon the audience before the finale.  She adopts a novel attitude, completely devoid of the financial and dynastic calculations she made when we last saw her discussing Henry with Lady Shackleton a few episodes back.  Now she is the Mr. Mason of the upper classes and counsels Mary to follow her heart and throw caution to the winds (I think two clichés are enough).  And so Mary says Yes.

I would also say that Henry, a fellow who is scraping along with no money to speak of, manages to appear in each scene with perfectly tailored clothing appropriate for each occasion and with elegant and expensive transportation whenever he needs to travel.  He does well for a man without any money.

As busy as Mary was on her emotional shuttle, she still found time to wound those around her.  She was able to blame her father for Barrow’s attempted suicide in the time it took to pour a cup of tea.  And she was able to wreck Edith’s chances for happiness in less time than it took to butter a piece of toast.  Of course, it was idiotic for Edith to think of keeping Marigold’s parentage from Bertie.  One of the reasons the British upper classes gave, probably still give, for their place in society was that they set an example.  It should have been clear as crystal to Edith from the beginning what the right thing was to do.  Not only that, but no one could expect to build a marriage with a deception sitting right at the heart of it.  And there is the practical problem that the truth always does come out eventually.  In this case, the truth’s appearance came early, aided by a heartless and vindictive sibling, but it was only a matter of time.

So Bertie has gone off to Tangiers without Edith.  But this is the benefit of having an entire additional episode, one that I did not budget for, in which to work out the problems that remain after the general roundup of Episode 8.  Does anyone doubt that Bertie and Edith will end up married?  How it will happen we cannot say.  Bertie may come back to Downton, or he and Edith will meet somewhere by chance, or Edith will write, or Tom will intervene, or Violet will be wheeled into action again.  A long-shot possibility is that Mary, experiencing remorse for the first time in her life, will contact Bertie on Edith’s behalf to make one final sisterly plea.   I remain confident that Bertie and Edith will wed however it may be arranged, and I’m sure that 90% of the viewing audience is of the same opinion.

Quite a number of other story lines were resolved in this episode, suggesting that the final episode (or The Final Episode if you prefer) will have enough slack to allow plenty of time for the tale that will bring Edith to the altar to be complicated and slow moving.  At each development, there are numerous characters who will want to talk about it among themselves: Robert, Cora, Rosamund, Violet, Isobel, Mary, Henry, and Tom, not to mention all of the downstairs staff who might spare a thought now and again for Mary’s less glamorous sister.

Two other characters who were settled in Episode 8 are Mr. Barrow and Mr. Molesley.  Barrow was another beneficiary of the additional episode that I failed to anticipate.  If the writers had only eight episodes to deal with, they might have been tempted to close the series with the shocking discovery of Mr. Barrow doing his best imitation of Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather Part II.  But with an episode in hand, there is time for Barrow to recover, to receive a restorative orange from Master George, and to be allowed to keep his job “if only for the time being” as Mr. Carson so cheerfully put it.

Molesley starts his new job as a teacher.  He gets off to a rough start when the students behave badly.  A bit of encouragement from Miss Baxter and from Daisy is all it takes to buck him up and he proves to be a natural, as Daisy says.  If he had been teaching in the same school today, he would probably have bled out from knife wounds on the first day.  Oh, and thanks to Mr. Carson for his words of encouragement to Mr. Molesley.  What a perfect antidote he provides to ambition and a desire for self-improvement.

Mr. Carson was not content to limit himself to discouraging Mr. Molesley.  As an equal opportunity pessimist, he was willing to paint a picture of ruin for Mrs. Patmore to contemplate.  You may recall that my first guess about Mrs. Patmore’s guests was that one of them was a co-responding witness.  That didn’t pan out, but my second guess did.  (The reader is respectfully invited to examine footnote 4 from the comment on Episode 7.)  This is enough to cause Mrs. Patmore’s cottage to become a “house of ill repute.”  Surely that phrase does not have the connotation in British English that it has in the United States.  Mrs. Patmore can hardly be expected to vet the marital status of each guest who books a visit to the cottage.  A “house of ill repute” is one whose purpose is to conduct the activity that gives it that reputation.

Whether the term is fairly applied or not, Mr. Carson helps to increase Mrs. Patmore’s sense of desperation.  He claims, falsely, that he always thought the house was a bad idea.  He announces that he is going to take steps to ensure that his investment is not ruined the way Mrs. Patmore’s has been.  To top things off, when the family agrees to rally to Mrs. Patmore and allow themselves to be photographed leaving her cottage after taking tea there, Carson tries to discourage them.  Like Denker down the road, he is more snobbish than the nobs themselves.  Mrs. Patmore’s immediate problem seems to be on its way to resolution.  The only missing element is her eventual union with Mr. Mason and again we are thankful for the extra episode (as I will continue to think of it) to give us time for that loose end to be knitted up, should Mr. Fellowes be so inclined.

The fate of Isobel and Lord Merton is also in Mr. Fellowes’s hands, acting through his agent Larry Grey (whom I have called Larry Merton in the past because I forget that these upper class people have a family name as well as one or more titled pedigrees).  Isobel seems to have decided that she will accept Lord Merton if Larry gives his blessing.  Presumably she wants to feel that she has his heartfelt assent.  It will not be enough for him merely to speak a form of words.  We shall see whether Larry is up to it.  My hope is that Isobel remains independent, but she hasn’t asked for advice.

I would like to add a note about Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  I agree with Samuel Johnson: “He who aspires to be a serious wine drinker must drink claret”[1].  There are some 10,000 producers of Bordeaux wine, so to sample even a small fraction would be the work of decades (for people who intend to be sober for at least part of their day).  Although I consume more than my share of the wine of Bordeaux, I had never tried or even heard of Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  I was intrigued by the name when it was mentioned a couple of episodes ago.  I decided to try it.  Total Wine had only one vintage, 2009, a very good year in Bordeaux and drinkable now, so I bought a couple of bottles.

The wine has a pleasant dark garnet color, but I thought the tannins were still too pronounced to enjoy the fruit.  I drank the first bottle over three days and I will put the second one away for a couple of years.

I remained curious about the unusual name of the wine.  There are numerous theories.  I mentioned that Lord Byron visited the chateau from which Chasse-Spleen was eventually hived and commented that the wine was a “remedy to chase away the spleen”, spleen meaning “the blues”.  But was he speaking of this particular wine or of wine in general?  Lord Byron was a man who enjoyed his wine and one can find many quotes attributed to him on the subject.  Not all of them were spoken while he was on this property.

Interestingly, the word “spleen” entered the French language via Lord Byron’s use of it.  The word “spleen” naming the digestive organ entered English via the French word “esplen” but “spleen” in the sense of melancholy or the blues entered French from English and specifically from Byron.  The poet Charles Baudelaire used the word “spleen” extensively and an entire section of his foremost work “Les Fleurs du Mal” or “The Flowers of Evil” is titled “Spleen et Idéal”.  Several of the poems in the series have the word Spleen in their title.  But what does this have to do with wine?

We get closer to an answer when we learn that Beaudelaire wrote another series of poems, he called them prose-poems, titled “Le Spleen de Paris” or “Paris Blues”.  This series was published in 1857, the year in which the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was published.  One of the poems is titled “Enivrez-vous” or “Get yourself drunk.”  It contains the lines: “Enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu a votre guise.”  A possible translation: “Be drunk all the time!  From wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose.[2]”

Those lines appear on the front label of each bottle of Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  What French winemaker would not want to name Charles Beaudelaire the national poet of France?

The final connection is that the artist Odilon Redon illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, apparently after Beaudelaire’s death in 1867.  Redon came from a town just down the road from Chasse-Spleen.  The suggestion that he proposed the name is plausible.  I feel the connection is complete.  There is no definitive explanation, but one can imagine how the name came to stick through a series of coincidences.  The surprising thing is that there are not more chateaux in Bordeaux using the name “Spleen”.  No one could be melancholy after a couple of glasses of good Bordeaux wine.

I realize that this digression may be of limited interest.  Possibly I can make it up to you by sharing two quotes about wine that I found when I was tracking down the background on Chasse-Spleen.  First, from an otherwise unidentified Spanish bishop: “I have enjoyed great health at a great age because every day since I can remember, I have consumed a bottle of wine except when I have not felt well. Then I have consumed two bottles.”  Second, from W.C. Fields: “I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food.”

Three final thoughts.  First, was it not a lovely thing that three of Mary’s closest relations – her father, sister, and brother-in-law – were able to take a turn unloading on her?  Her father gave her only a single sentence, but one dripping with contempt.  Tom lit into her more extensively and Edith delivered a quarter-century of pent-up resentment with a single word.  Very satisfying for those of us who are not fans of the elegant Lady M.

Second, Bertie’s description of his mother making “Mr. Squeers look like Florence Nightingale” is surely unfair.  The distinguishing feature of Mr. Squeers – the headmaster of a Yorkshire boarding school in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby” — was not that he was strict or maintained high standards.  He was sadistic and dishonest.  Bertie’s mother can’t be that bad!  I’m sure she and Edith will get along beautifully.  No doubt she will be delighted to welcome Marigold as well.

Finally, the name of Bertie’s new home, the place where we had the bird shooting last year, is Brancaster Castle.  P.G. Wodehouse is looking in on Downton once again.  At some point before he was employed by Bertie Wooster, Jeeves was the butler to Lord Brancaster.  I think these little coincidences are worth a smile if not an outright chuckle.

My glass of Chasse-Spleen is drained.  The blues are chased away, and I await the last episode of Downton the Sunday after next.

[1] Claret, to the British, is dry red Bordeaux wine.

[2] The label attributes the lines to Les Fleurs du Mal.  I hesitate to suggest a correction to a French winemaker on a point of French poetry, but I believe the label is incorrect on this small point.

The writers have dangled death in front of us in recent episodes.  Robert didn’t have a simple ulcer attack.  Instead, he had to worry us by shooting blood all over the tablecloth and any guests or family members who were within spitting distance (literally).  But he lived.  In Episode Seven, we have an auto race and right before the start, Henry gives Mary a kiss full of meaning and says that he’ll see her at the finish.  You might as well paint “Someone’s Going to Die” in place of all those Dunlop signs.

I thought Henry might be shipped out of the story, but he survived.  Minor characters often bear the brunt of these foreshadowings.  Fans of the old Star Trek TV show will recall that on those occasions when Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beamed down to a new planet and took a fourth person along — usually an ensign that we hadn’t seen before – that character was dead within minutes.  Same thing here.  I’m surprised the fellow lasted as long as he did.

Of course, this completely ruins Mary’s relationship with Henry.  He already had two strikes – lack of a title and lack of funds – but a career that invites death into the marriage every time Henry goes to his job, that’s a little too much, don’t you think?  Only kidding.  Mary clearly is going to end up with someone at the end of the series and it appears that there is only one more episode.  There isn’t time for anyone besides Henry[1].  Besides, he suits Mary.  He has the right tone, style, and manner.  He just lacks ready money.  I predict that she’ll come around.  I don’t say that they will live happily ever after, but I think they’ll make it past the end of Episode Eight.  After that, they are no longer our responsibility.

Edith has at last received a proposal of marriage from a man who is not (a) twice her age or (b) already married.  I think she will have to do more for Marigold than just ask whether the child can come along.  Possibly that is what she needs to think about.  If she turns this fellow down, the next most likely place to look for a beau would be where she works, in Fleet Street, where it will be difficult to find someone who is both temperamentally suitable and of her social class.  Also, Edith is operating under the same time constraints as Mary.  We have only one more episode to get this story line resolved.  I think we have to assume that Edith is going to tell Bertie about Marigold.  He’ll be fine, she’ll say yes, and we’ll have another Crawley settled.

There seemed to be no reason for the writers to bring the editor of Edith’s magazine to the auto race except to have her meet Tom.  He likes feisty, independent women.  She fits the bill, and as a dividend, when dining among the upper classes she does not goad her host into uncontrolled rage.  If that works out, there’s another Crawley settled, although I recognize that I am speculating.

One question I had about the editor was how she managed her change of clothing.  She couldn’t show up at Rosamund’s house for dinner wearing the togs she had on at the race.  Everyone else at dinner was staying at Rosamund’s, or possibly at the Crawley mansion in London, so they had a place to keep their dinner clothes and to change into them.  Did the editor pack a bag and bring it with her to Rosamund’s, or did she go home between entertainments, or what?  In an age when people had to wear exactly the right clothing for each of the varied events in their lives, how did someone who was not a member of the leisure class manage it?

It is good that we have unraveled the mystery of Larry Merton’s sudden change of heart.  Now that we know the truth – and thank you Violet for getting to the truth so quickly and efficiently – it’s obvious that the only person who could have been attracted to Larry Merton would be someone equally unpleasant.  I confess that I was taken in, but I’m glad that Violet was not.  If Isobel does decide to wed Lord Merton, she will do so with her eyes open.  I hope that she will retain her independence.  We shall soon know.

Violet is leaving to cruise the Mediterranean and then to spend “a month among the French”.  Someone pointed out to me that Maggie Smith made a movie in 2015 (The Lady in the Van), so it is possible that Violet left the story when she did to allow the actress to go to work on her new role[2].  We may not see her again.

When Mrs. Patmore and Mrs. Hughes – let’s stay with her professional name – put their heads together, they can solve any problem, even the problem of Mr. Carson.  Three pennies’ worth of bandages was all it took to effect a complete role reversal.  We can expect to see a more reasonable Mr. Carson at our next meeting, now that he appreciates the hard work it takes to organize a meal that will meet his standards.  And Mrs. Hughes was able to induce Mr. Carson to sit on the family’s own sofa!  Next, he’ll be discussing Wat Tyler and Karl Marx with Daisy.

When Mrs. Patmore first purchased her house, I got the idea that it was at some distance from Downton.  I think I remember Mr. Carson traveling with her to see it.  Now it turns out that the house is a short walk away from the Abbey.  She has had her first guests, a nice prosperous-looking middle class couple.  I am going to throw caution to the winds and speculate about the man waiting with a camera out in the lane.  I think the woman at Mrs. Patmore’s cottage may be what was called a professional co-respondent.  In those days, a divorce, even an amicable divorce, would be granted only for cause, and cause meant adultery.  One of the married pair would be supplied by counsel with a professional witness, a member of the opposite sex.  The two would spend a night in a hotel or a BnB and would arrange to have their picture taken for evidence[3].  If my guess is correct, Mrs. Patmore may find that her cottage will be used regularly by one half of an unhappily married couple and a hired witness.  Possibly not the respectable source of retirement income she was looking for, although it would be steady.  Again, I am guessing.  If it turns out I am wrong, I will come back and edit this paragraph out[4].

It’s nice to see that Mr. Molesley will be able to fulfill his destiny and become a teacher at the local school.  His performance on the general knowledge examination may have exceeded the schoolmaster’s expectations, but Mr. M’s fans in the audience knew that he would come through.  We were not surprised.  It’s not clear whether dear Miss Baxter will join Mr. Molesley as he moves ahead.  If the two of them end up together, it will be one more piece in the general pattern of pairing off all available hands above and below stairs.

Mrs. Patmore has brought Daisy around on the subject of Mr. Mason, and Andy and Daisy each know where to find each other, so the only odd man out seems to be Mr. Barrow.  And he seems to be in a very bad way.  He tries to sit with the Carsons to enjoy a quiet moment in the family’s own parlor, but Carson refuses him.  He has obviously made some progress with Andy’s reading, as Andy can sound out quite a few words in a text that is too difficult for a beginning reader.  However, Andy’s trouble has been exposed in front of the kindly schoolmaster (whose name I don’t recall), whose role in life seems to be to improve the members of the Downton staff one by one.  As a result, Mr. Barrow is now pushed out as Andy’s teacher.  To add to his troubles, whenever he sees Mr. Carson, all he hears are questions about when he will be gone.

But as he told us, Downton is the only place where he has put down roots.  We will soon know how this ends for Thomas, but I see two possible paths (assuming that a handsome stranger does not arrive in the village during Episode Eight).  One possibility is that Mr. Molesley’s good fortune will provide Thomas with the opportunity to stay at Downton.  He can accept a demotion to footman, or perhaps “under-butler”, and remain at Downton, hanging on to the place with his fingernails.  The other is that he reacts to the inexorable decline in his fortunes . . . badly.  I would appeal to Mr. Fellowes.  Thomas has served you well through six seasons.  He has not been an angel or even a particularly good person, but he has had a lot to deal with.  I hope for the best, but I think we should be prepared for the possibility of a dark ending.

But let us not predict.  Let us wait for developments, which are only days away.

[1] I suppose Evelyn Napier could be bussed in at the last minute.

[2] According to the movie’s website, her character is a homeless woman who lives in a van.

[3] I am not suggesting that they would have gotten up to anything.  Their time together was strictly for the purpose of providing evidence.  There is a Fred Astaire – Ginger Rogers movie that uses this plot, The Gay Divorcee (1934).  The song “The Continental” is featured in the movie.

[4] Another possibility is that the woman may not be a professional witness at all, and this may be actual adultery, the photographer being employed by the wronged spouse of one of them.  If that turns out to be the story, I may leave the paragraph in.  I hope people read the footnotes.

This week’s episode did not grab me by the collar.  My attention wandered.  I began thinking about what the characters might do with their time after the series ends.  I imagined a series of self-improvement books.

Team Building at Home and at Work by Charles Carson

Successful Succession Planning by Cora Crawley

Getting Started in Matchmaking by Daisy Mason

My Secrets for Attracting Upper Class Women by Evelyn Napier

101 Sick Room Entertainments by Robert Crawley

When the tour was in full swing, it was obvious that the three guides – Cora, Mary, and Edith – had never learned much about the grand and historic house in which they live.  On the other hand, Mr. Molesley was obviously ready to answer any of the questions that the visitors had, but as a lowly footman he went unnoticed.  If a weekly open house becomes a regular part of the business of the Abbey (which I believe is a common practice these days), perhaps Mr. Molelsey will be taken more seriously.  These chaps who are good at general knowledge, as Mr. Molesley is about to prove himself at the local school, often make serviceable docents as well.

One characteristic of Mr. Molesley’s that I find annoying is his willingness to offer advice to Baxter when he hasn’t been asked.  In this episode, Baxter receives a letter from the cad Coyle asking her to visit him in prison.  When she tells Molesley about it, he doesn’t ask her what she is thinking of doing or how she feels about it.  He tells her what to do and then repeats his advice later, again unsolicited.  Being good at general knowledge doesn’t turn you into Ann Landers, and even she waited for people to ask for advice.

Otherwise, the pairing off seems to be going along on schedule.  Mary and Henry, Edith and Bertie are both on the verge of a big commitment, each needing just one more plot point to be resolved.  Mary will have to get over her car phobia.  Really, just because your husband and the father of your child was killed while driving his favorite car is no reason to get all morbid about automobiles.  Edith will have to tell Bertie about Marigold.  I expect it will take her a while to work up to it, but I doubt it will put him off for an instant.  Once those two details are taken care of, the Crawley daughters will be nicely settled.

It appears that Isobel and Lord Merton will be able to wed now that Larry has been defanged by his new wife.  He is so unpleasant that it’s difficult to see how she is going to manage him, but she may have reserves of strength that were not evident during this episode.  It’s also possible that she is supplying the money.

Moving down the social scale, let us hope Mr. Mason and Mrs. Patmore will be able to overcome Daisy’s neurotic possessiveness so as to achieve their modicum of domestic happiness.  An episode or two ago, Andy gave Daisy a look that I thought had more than a hint of a twinkle, but he has not followed up, so perhaps that particular story line is not going to unfold for us.  Of course, it’s possible that Thomas has turned Andy’s head without even meaning to.  Perhaps Andy’s earlier attempts to avoid Mr. Barrow were masking an attraction that dared not speak its name.  Highly unlikely, naturally, and if there were anything to it, the Patmore-Carson axis would quickly end it.

Our congratulations to Mr. Napier on rejoining the story.  During his last appearance, he did not speak one complete line.  This time, he managed several sentences before being eclipsed by characters who have a stronger claim on our attention.  Still, a respectable showing.

What is the over-under on how long Mrs. Carson is going to put up with Mr. Carson’s passive-aggressive badgering?  I would not like to see the series end with their relationship in its current state.  Mrs. Hughes is not a woman to remain silent for too much longer.

Finally, the wine that Mr. Carson brought to Lord Grantham, secreted in a flask “for ease of carriage”, was Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  The legend is that Lord Byron visited the Chateau in 1821 and on tasting the wine declared “Quel remede pour chasser le spleen” or “What a remedy to chase away the spleen [i.e., melancholy].”  It’s a nice story, but in 1821 the vineyard that is now Chasse-Spleen was part of a larger property then known as Chateau Grand-Poujeaux[1].  It is possible that the owners wrote down the quote, planning to use it in the event that the vineyards were ever split up.  In fact, the process of splitting up began the next year, but it was several decades before the vineyard now known as Chasse-Spleen took that name.  Another theory is that the wine is named after the poem “Spleen” by Charles Baudelaire.  The difficulty with that story is that the poem does not mention wine.

At one time, Chasse-Spleen was classified as a Cru Bourgeois, the grade of Bordeaux wines lying between the 55 “classified” growths and “Bordeaux Supérieur”.  At some point, it lost that designation and is now Bordeaux Supérieur[2].  Hugh Johnson’s comment: “Good, often outstanding, long-maturing wine; classical structure, fragrance.”

I hope that Robert will once again be able to enjoy a glass of Chasse-Spleen before the series ends.

[1] http://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/bordeaux-wine-producer-profiles/bordeaux/haut-medoc-lesser-appellations/chasse-spleen/

[2] The Cru Bourgeois website does not list it, but some websites still refer to it as a cru bourgeois.

Robert has had his medical crisis and has lived.  We knew that the crisis was coming – leading characters don’t spend weeks clutching their abdomens for no reason – but I doubt that any viewers expected such a dramatic presentation of symptoms.  Fortunately, there was not only a doctor but also the Minister of Health in the house.  My concern was that the writers would kill Robert.  His funeral would have been one way to close out the series.  End of an era, changing of the guard.  Barring a surprise, Robert will be with us when the series closes.  I would prefer to say goodbye to him then.

Mr. Mason’s move into the Yew Tree Farm has caused far more ripples in the plot than his modest demeanor would have led us to expect.  He quickly establishes a small circle of friends.  Daisy and he are already on friendly terms, of course, as she is the widow of his son and they have remained close.  Mrs. Patmore brings a basket of food to welcome Mr. Mason to the farm.  I thought she might be sweet on Sergeant Willis, but there are signs that she is transferring her affections to Mr. Mason, and who can blame her?  Willis would probably have more interesting tales to tell about his work, but Mason has demonstrated wider interests.  He has that sparkle in his eye that suggests a warm heart and a sense of humor.

If Mrs. Patmore were to connect with Mr. Mason, it would help her to keep an eye on Daisy.  Mr. Mason plans to keep Daisy close to him, possibly even have her to live with him.  Daisy herself does not seem keen to share Mr. Mason with the other members of the Downton staff.  Odd that she would become so protective and defensive all of a sudden.  A few more hampers full of Mrs. Patmore’s cooking may be needed to fortify Mr. Mason, but eventually he will get across the narrow moat that Daisy is digging.

The only time since we met him that I recall seeing Mr. Mason get his back up was when Mary and Tom visited him in this episode and suggested that perhaps he was no longer up to the management of the pigs that are to be entrusted to his care.  For an instant, the curtain parted and we saw behind Mr. Mason’s cheerful exterior the hard man full of Yorkshire pride who can handle stoat, sow, and suckling as well as any man in the county and who resents anyone who suggests he can’t.  Tom and Andy save the situation.  Tom suggests that Mr. Mason’s confidence is evidence that he has already hired a helper and Andy steps up to say that he had just been in the process of signing up with Mr. Mason when Lady Mary and Mr. Branson arrived.

Andy leaves Yew Tree Farm with an armload of books on pig rearing.  The casual viewer might be surprised that there is such a wide literature on pigs, but those of us who have read P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books know that Lord Emsworth relied on The Care of the Pig by Augustus Whiffle (whose last name is sometimes given by Wodehouse as Whipple) to keep The Empress of Blandings in top form.  It’s definitely a reading person’s game.  However, it doesn’t matter how many books you carry or how hard you stare at them if you can’t read.  Andy has done a good job of hiding this problem until now, but he will not be able to join the pig keeper’s guild without the ability to read.  Thomas now has the chance to help young Andy.  It seems that he wants nothing more than honest friendship.  His actions as volunteer tutor will put that to the test.

He is not the only gay man in the story who has sublimated his desires.  Edith’s beau, the Agent, whose first name is Bertie, tells Edith, and us, about his cousin, the fellow who owns the castle where we had the bird shooting last year.  The cousin spends his time in Tunisia painting local young men.  Edith draws the obvious conclusion, but I think the reason the writers have tossed us this piece of information is to let us know that the cousin is not going to put any road blocks in the way of Bertie’s eventual succession to the title.  Bertie is about as close a relation to his cousin as Mathew was to Robert.   The only difference is that Mathew and Robert didn’t know each other.  I continue to believe that everything is going to work out for Edith.  Incidentally, Edith has had two romantic flings (not counting the farmer she kissed during the war and forgetting the older fellow who left her at the altar), both in the same apartment.  No doubt she will be more careful this time.

Mary’s path to an eventual marriage to Henry will be less straight.  As she and Tom are walking to their dramatic encounter with Mr. Mason, Mary explains that while she would not want to create the false impression that she is a snob, she won’t marry “down”.  Doesn’t sound a bit snobbish.  You just have to put it the right way.  But saying that to the man who was the family chauffeur before marrying her sister could come across as a little insensitive.  Tom is not the least put off by Mary’s comment.  He and Sibyl were equals, each bringing different advantages to the marriage, and he has enough self-regard not to mind Mary’s indelicacy, realizing that it is a by-product of her self-centered approach to life.

Throughout the episode, Tom acted as a catalyst, facilitating developments without himself undergoing change.  When he is sitting in the pub with Mary and Henry – he and Henry drinking pints of manly ale and Mary drinking possibly the first glass of sherry sold in the pub that year – he challenges them to cut through all of their fencing and just announce that they would like to spend more time together.  It’s not the way the British upper classes like to get on, but perhaps the chuckle that he gave them helped to move things in the right direction.  Incidentally, I thought that when Henry referred to Mary as “la belle dame sans merci” and Tom asked him what he meant, it was condescending for Henry not to explain himself.  Perhaps keeping Tom in the dark was a way for Henry to signal to Mary that he would maintain upper class solidarity.  I thought it was rude.

At the end of the episode, Tom acted as a catalyst with the Minister of Health, getting him to tell his secret.  Neville Chamberlain served as Minister of Health three different times.  In 1925, he would have been in the early part of his second tour of duty.  He was a cabinet minister almost continuously from 1923 through October 1940, when he resigned due to ill health.  In addition to his service as Minister of Health, he was twice Chancellor of the Exchequer.  He was a very capable and intelligent man, who evidently performed well in all of his government jobs until he became Prime Minister in 1937.  Now, of course, his name is associated with one of the great cases of diplomatic malpractice.  In fairness, it didn’t look that way to a lot of people at the time.  He was cheered when he got back from Munich.

Those events occurred well after the end of the Downton tale.  His little conversation with Tom was based on a considerable amount of historical fact.  Mr. Chamberlain married a woman named Anne de Vere Cole.  Her older brother, Horace, was a notorious prankster.  As related in the episode, he did persuade the commander of Britain’s most important capital ship, HMS Dreadnought, to give a tour to the visiting King of Abyssinia and his entourage, who were in fact Cambridge students in disguise.  On another occasion, he bought up a large number of tickets to a theatrical performance and handed them out to passersby in the street, seemingly at random, but only seemingly.  All the seats were in the orchestra level and all of the recipients of the tickets were bald men.  When they took their seats, someone viewing the orchestra level from the dress circle would have seen a four-letter Anglo-Saxon obscenity spelled out by the bald heads in the seats below.  Even the “i” was dotted.

The exploit that Chamberlain talks about with Tom was another accomplishment of Mr. Cole.  He organized a group of fellow pranksters dressed as workmen and dug a trench through Piccadilly right under the noses of the police.  However, there is no reason to think that Neville Chamberlain was among the participants.  But if he had been, is it likely that he would have told Tom about it?  He attended the dinner in order to ensure that his wife’s godfather’s widow would keep a secret.  To announce it to a new audience, a stranger with a pronounced Irish accent, would seem imprudent.  Well, the same malleability, the same unwillingness to call a bluff that Violet took advantage of in 1925 was also evident to the eventual Reichskanzler in 1938.

As Violet and Cora were leaving Downton to go to the hospital, Violet said something about Marigold.  I couldn’t make out what Cora said to put Violet onto that subject.  Perhaps the concern was how Marigold would be left in Robert’s will?  Whatever the reason for bringing Marigold into the conversation, Mary overheard it and will take no time at all to learn the truth.  She already knows that Anna is being sly on the subject, so it’s only a matter of winkling the truth out of her, or simply deducing it.  That will leave Molesley as the only character in our story who doesn’t know Marigold’s parentage.  I don’t anticipate that we will have a scene where the scales fall from Mr. Molesley’s eyes.

Denker has displayed the dangers of being more royalist than the king.  She is very good at making cutting remarks in private.  She should avoid making overtly insulting remarks in the street.  Fortunately, she has something to hold over Mr. Spratt (whose first name, we learn, is Septimus, right up there with Atticus) and he is able to leverage his powers of persuasion with Lady Grantham in order for Denker to keep her place.  If only Sergeant Willis had interviewed Denker and Spratt separately, as he ought to have done!

Finally, I would like to suggest to Mr. Carson that, while he may complain of the dull state of the dinner knives in his house, the day may be coming when he will be glad that they are no sharper than they are.

Last week, I mentioned Edmund Burke in a blog about Downton Abbey.  As a result, I dipped into his “Reflections on the Revolution in France”.  Burke was a man with a powerful mind and the ability to express himself in clear and robust English.  It is a pleasure to read him.

One remarkable thing about the Reflections is that the work was written when the French Revolution had barely begun and yet seems to anticipate what was to come.  Sometime in the summer of 1789, Burke received a letter from a young friend in France asking for Burke’s thoughts about what was then taking place across the Channel.  Burke wrote a reply that was ready to send in October 1789, but he held back on sending it “for prudential reasons”.  Ultimately, he wrote a longer response and then published the work in November 1790 as a single essay.

At the time of writing, Louis XVI had not yet been tried for treason nor beheaded.  The Terror and the Thermidorean Reaction were years in the future.  Napoleon rose to power after Burke was already dead.  Yet, he saw the potential for all of it, even if he did not predict the particulars.

He did all this without the benefit of reports on the scene from a 24-hour-a-day news service.  He knew enough of France and of human affairs to generate a remarkably clear picture from the limited hard information available to him.  Consider this passage from the early pages of the work (and therefore I assume, without knowing, from his earliest impressions):

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. . . .

I thought of those words during the “Arab Spring” of 2011.  You will recall that the political and intellectual leadership of the West was head over heels crazy for the flowering of liberty and progress that was then opening before our eyes.  The journal “Foreign Affairs” summed up the American attitude this way: “President Barack Obama described the uprisings as “a historic opportunity” for the United States “to pursue the world as it should be.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed these comments, expressing confidence that the transformations would allow Washington to advance “security, stability, peace, and democracy” in the Middle East. Not to be outdone, the Republican Party’s 2012 platform trumpeted “the historic nature of the events of the past two years — the Arab Spring — that have unleashed democratic movements leading to the overthrow of dictators who have been menaces to global security for decades.””

Egypt deposed a military dictator and held free and fair elections as a result of which the electors returned a parliament two-thirds of whose members favored the imposition of Sharia law.  A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose long-term goal has been the implementation of Sharia, was elected president.  Yet, the news coverage had focused on the students and professionals who gathered in Tahrir Square, where not a single member of the Muslim Brotherhood was to be found.  (“Those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.”)

In neighboring Libya, coherent government, even by Libya’s loose standards, ceased.

Consider as Exhibit B, these comments on the Russian Revolution by Woodrow Wilson:

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.

Wilson was addressing a joint session of the United States Congress on April 2, 1917.  Having won re-election in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war” Wilson went to Congress less than thirty days after his second inauguration to ask for a declaration of war against Germany.  He was asking the Congress to send American troops to Europe, something that no American government had done.  Such an undertaking was justified on the grounds that the war would make the world “safe for democracy”.  The alliance of the liberal British and French democracies with Czarist Russia was inconsistent with this view.  The Provisional Government then nominally in control in Russia enabled Wilson to tie the Russian Revolution to his request for a declaration of war.

Wilson was one of the best-educated, most literate and knowledgeable men to hold the presidency.  When he made this statement, he was in possession of all the information held on the subject by the United States government.  Yet, before the year was over, Russia had fallen under the control of one of the darkest tyrannies in human history.  Perhaps he took solace from the fact that the summit of Russia’s new political structure “was not in fact Russian in origin”.  Karl Marx was German, after all.

At the other end of the dark history of the Soviet Union, we have this prediction from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the eminent historian, who told us in 1982: “Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”  I believe this comment was intended to put Ronald Reagan in his place.  When Reagan was asked about his desired outcome for U.S.-Soviet relations, he said “We win.  They lose.”  This lack of sophistication had to be answered, and Professor Schlesinger lent his prestige to remind us that a rube may become president but he is still a rube.  By the end of the decade, the Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union was no more.

The list could go on.  Eminent, learned individuals with access to the best available information allow their hopes or their agendas to cloud their vision.  And there sits Edmund Burke in his London room with a quill, an ink well, and some paper, turning limited but accurate information and a profound understanding of human affairs into insights whose depth we can still admire after 225 years.

Last week, we had a visit from P.G. Wodehouse.  This week, we receive Edmund Burke.  Molesley quotes the always quotable Burke, as he advises, or more accurately badgers, dear Miss Baxter: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”[1]  Miss Baxter is understandably reluctant to agree to go into court and admit publicly that she surrendered her good sense and her moral judgment to a procurer of crime who wore a pleasing face.  Molesley’s study of English history has not led him to an appreciation of the uses of prudence and he jumps to the conclusion that there is only one proper course for Miss Baxter.  It appears that she is going to come around eventually, but not because of Mr. Molesley’s moral certitudes.

Mr. Burke’s second appearance in the tale is not invoked by quotation.  Rather, Burke enters the story through his notion of civil society, that liberty is best preserved through the “little platoons”, the institutions that buffer the relationship between the individual and the state.  Possibly the last person we would expect to champion this notion is Lady Grantham, but there she is in the Crawley drawing room, invoking Magna Carta and sounding for all the world like the intellectual heiress of Edmund Burke as she rails against the intrusion of the national government into domains where local needs might be better served by local institutions, by a smaller platoon than the one to be sent from York, or, eventually, Westminster.

At this point she is grasping at straws, searching in vain for an ally in her battle to prevent the intrusion of the Royal Yorkshire Hospital.  Her first plan was to assemble a shield wall of local notables, including Dr. Clarkson and Lady Shackleton.  Clarkson has abandoned her in the face of Isobel’s piercing moral glare.  Lady Shackleton knows better than to take a firm stand on a subject where her knowledge is limited.  Left to fight alone, Violet enlists a political philosophy that she would not bear comfortably in normal circumstances.  Not that she is against little platoons in principle, as long as it is her platoon that controls things.  Her back to the wall, she invokes the Great Charter.  No doubt, her ancestors were present at Runnymede in 1215, so this is personal for her.  Still, I don’t like her chances.

A couple of episodes ago, when everyone was dancing to gramophone music to celebrate the final end to all suspicion against Anna in the case of Mr. Green, Mrs. Patmore was dancing with Sergeant Willis and it seemed possible that a relationship might develop.  It seems that Mrs. Patmore agrees.  When the good sergeant comes by to talk to Miss Baxter, Mrs. Patmore is hurt that she is sent away before Mr. Willis states his business.  Later, she complains that she, unlike the newly married Mrs. Carson, has not yet been introduced to the “mystery of life”.  The aim of this season seems to be to pair up anyone who is not completely ineligible (not thinking of Mr. Barrow, not at all), so perhaps Mrs. Patmore and Sergeant Willis are going to hit it off.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to mention Gwen, the house maid who learned to type and became a secretary, as an example of rising female characters.  I did not expect that we would see her again, but here she is, accompanying her fine upstanding husband, the treasurer of Hillcroft College, a man with the fine upstanding name of John Harding.  Before watching this episode, I had hit the “info” button on my Comcast remote, so I knew that a former female member of the staff was going to re-enter the story.  I confess that I did not think of Gwen.  I had hoped that this person would turn out to be Edna, of whom I like many superficial males in the audience have a fond memory.  However, it was a pleasure to see Gwen and to remember the enormous help that Sibyl gave her and to learn that she has used the skills she gained to her advantage and to that of her husband.

The reactions of Barrow and of Mary to Gwen both seem typical.  Barrow can’t stand the idea that this former house maid is now sitting as a guest in the dining room and that he is serving her lunch.  He goes out of his way to, as Robert put it, “catch her out.”  She handles the situation with grace and courtesy, but that doesn’t stop Mary’s inner snob from emerging.  From Mary’s standpoint, Gwen ought to have voluntarily laid her life story before the luncheon company so that her betters could appropriately measure their reaction to her.  They had been treating her as a quasi-equal: the wife of the treasurer of the college on whose board Rosamunde sits.  Mary will require some reflection before she can decide whether quasi-equality is the right fit for this situation.

Gwen gets the last laugh, though.  After lunch, Robert lets Barrow know that his behavior is below the standard expected of a Crawley family servant.  Meanwhile, after Gwen invokes the memory of Sibyl, Mary starts to question the direction and meaning of her own life.  She is actually pleasant to Edith, so Gwen’s magic is starting to work.

I have been waiting for the bird-shooting fellow from last season to show up, the one that Mary teased and insulted while he was trying to reduce the grouse population of Scotland.  When we learned that Lady Shackleton was visiting Downton along with her nephew, I (along with three quarters of the audience) was pretty confident he would turn out to be the same fellow and indeed he was.  He and Mary seem to share similar elegant tastes and light-hearted badinage in the style of Oscar Wilde[2].  They have each found their calling in life.  He will race fast cars, while she will manage the estate for the benefit of her son.  I think we have the start of a perfect relationship.

I was glad to see that we got Mr. Mason settled without having to send over to France for a guillotine.  We knew he was going to move into the Drews’ old place, but the story couldn’t run perfectly straight.  Fortunately, Cora’s feelings were not injured by Daisy’s planned insult, and Daisy’s employment was not disturbed by Cora’s likely reaction.  As someone said, all’s well that ends well.

Anna is with child, and has had the wee stitch that will allow her to carry Baby Bates to term, so that little sub-plot is working out.  We had to strain the British transportation system to its limits, but, again, all’s well.

I don’t know how many more episodes were made for this last season, but it appears that we are going to start pairing couples off in wholesale lots.  Mary and Henry for sure.  Edith and her agent/editor, undoubtedly.  Meanwhile, below stairs we have the potential for Andy and Daisy (that look from him was unmistakable), Mrs. Patmore and Sergeant Willis (just a hunch), possibly even Mr. Molesley and Miss Baxter.  I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that if Andy and Daisy get together, Mr. Mason will give away the bride, after dispensing a suitable amount of country wisdom, of course.  Would Mr. Fellowes’s generosity extend to allowing Mr. Molesley to find work as a teacher and Mr. Barrow to find a satisfactory place as a butler?  We shall see.

The one possible dark cloud is that Robert is experiencing a lot of abdominal pain.  One hopes that this is nothing more than decades of a rich upper class diet catching up to him.  I would hate to think that it could be anything more serious.  I would like to think that when we say goodbye to Downton in a few weeks, Robert will still be there.  He might be clutching his abdomen, but may he still be master of the house.

[1] The quote is attributed to Burke, and its elegance is worthy of his style, but he did not write it and he may not have spoken it.  Please see quoteinvestigator.com for more details.

[2]Perhaps the style of a first draft.

It seems that the various story lines are separating, each one going its own narrow way.  Could the rich tapestry of interwoven strands of plot be unraveling?

Mrs. Carson – Mrs. Hughes as was – got the wedding service she wanted where she wanted it, and she got a long way toward having the reception she wanted, too.  Mr. Carson was able to fit in a lovely speech, hitting just the right tone, and we were on the verge of tucking into an old-fashioned, although unfashionable, wedding breakfast, when who should show up but Tom Branson and little Sybbie.  It was thoughtless to turn up at that precise moment.  Had they appeared prior to the wedding service, no one could have complained.  After the reception would have been even better.  Right in the middle of the celebration seemed the wrong time for a reunion.

But then, Mr. and Mrs. Carson have to recognize that the light that shines upon them is reflected by the Crawley family, wherever that reflected light happens to fall, whether at Downton or at the local school makes no difference.  If the event had been held at Downton, would the Carsons have been expected to see to it that Mr. and Miss Branson were properly settled before seeing to their own wedding breakfasts?  Mr. Carson, at least, would have been pulled in that direction even if no one else suggested it.  Mrs. Carson’s wisdom in insisting on a service and reception ex Downton is confirmed.

By following Thomas Barrow on his hunt for new employment, we are getting a close-up view of the state of the Yorkshire market for stately homes in 1925.  Prior to the beginning of Thomas’s search, we saw a house that had been sold under duress.  Last week we saw a down-at-heels house where Mr. Barrow would have been asked to serve as footman, chauffeur, and valet.  This week, we visit a once great establishment now on the edge of ruin, its owner on the edge of insanity.  How many more such houses are in the neighborhood?

Where does this leave someone like Mr. Barrow?  He is clever enough to have maneuvered himself to a respectable position as a senior domestic servant in a stately home.  He might have achieved equal or greater success had he taken a different path in life.  He has demonstrated high-order social skills, even if they are often in the service of bad motives.  During the war, he used guile and an ability to ingratiate himself to move from the death sentence of the Western Front’s trenches to hospital service in Yorkshire.  Last season, it required a deep understanding of social relationships for him to devise and implement a plot that resulted in the arrival of Lord Sinderbey’s lady friend, child in hand, at the doorstep of Lord S.’s Yorkshire home.

Had he worked as a politician, an investment manager, a barrister, what might he not have achieved?  The English class system denied him those careers and he took what he judged to be the best available option in the “fat years of plenty” that preceded the First World War.  Now things have gotten leaner.  Several proprietors of great houses in the story have complained that wages had gone up so fast since the war that they can no longer afford to keep the required number of staff.

Why did this happen?  Part of the reason had to be the result of the World War.  About 750,000 British soldiers and sailors died in the war.  That figure does not include the Commonwealth or Empire.  Another two million were permanently disabled.  The British population at the start of the war was roughly 45 million.  If half of those were men, and the great majority of casualties were also men, the male workforce was reduced by perhaps 20% after we account for those too young and too old to work.  I have not tried to research this, but I would reckon that the last time anything like this happened in Britain was the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century.  A reduction in the number of available workers naturally increases the value of the labor of those who are left.

Add to that dynamic the continued industrialization of the economy.  Mechanization renders labor more productive and therefore more valuable.  Throw in a good measure of the inflation that was used to finance the war, and the price of an hour of labor whether employed in a factory or in setting out a tea service at Downton Abbey was bound to go up.  The income available to landed families was less likely to rise than were their costs.

But where does that leave someone like Thomas?  Tea services, wine cellars, silver platters and all the rest are what he knows.  They are the tools of his trade, but the market that could afford to be served in that way was shrinking in 1925 and would be under severe stress within the span of his working life.  It must have been a horrible situation for people who, it turned out, had painted themselves into a corner without realizing they were doing it.  Eventually, film stars, industrialists, and American millionaires would take over some of the great houses, but I wonder if they maintained staff at the levels that a family like the Crawleys would have required in the years of our story.

It’s nice to see that some of the Downton characters are on the road to happiness.  Edith and the “Agent” – didn’t catch his name – happened to meet as she was heading to the office.  Was it a meeting by chance, or was he waiting for her, having tracked down her address ahead of time?  I was sure they were going to hit it off when he smiled at her last season.  I remember thinking at the time that it would help him to woo Edith if he had a useful skill.  He would need to be able to get beyond shooting birds or sharking cards.

It turns out that he has the most useful skill a publisher could ask for when she has just sacked her editor.  He can help put together a late edition of a magazine.  When Edith, the Agent, and her assistant finished, I thought of the last scene in Casablanca – the start of a beautiful friendship, minus the Marseillaise and the bottle of Vichy water.

Mary did not like it at all when Robert praised Edith for her work in the publishing business.  Mary does not like people who work for a living.  She turned up her nose at Matthew when he was a working solicitor, although she put her snobbery aside in his case, eventually.  Nor is she happy to see Edith being praised for anything.  Put the two together and I won’t be surprised to see Mary do something unpleasant in the closing episodes.  However, if the wealthy bird-shooting fellow comes by, Mary may shelve her plans for Edith.  I think Edith has been through enough and it would be nice to see her story reach its close without further incident.

I confess that my attention has wandered some during the three episodes of Season Six that we have seen so far.  There were two details during the meeting between Edith and the Agent that have nothing to do with the story, but which drew my attention.  One is that in the distance, there was an “Underground” sign.  I understand that Holborn is the Tube station that serves Bloomsbury, but which Underground station are we seeing in the distance, and is the sign authentic to the period?  Also, the white building behind Edith and the Agent had the legend “T N.G.C. 1818” (with the T, minus the full stop, appearing above the other three letters) embossed on either side of the archway that is lined up with the Underground sign in the distance.  At the top of the arch, a smaller emblem shows T CTS 1848.  Again, the T appears above the other three letters.  I wonder what they stood for.  If anyone reading this happens to know, I would be grateful for the information.

I hope we will be able to add Mr. and Mrs. Bates and the good Mr. Mason to our list of characters whose fortunes might be looking up.  Anna appears to be pregnant and she is a train ride away from the London doctor who can keep her that way.  (That didn’t come out right.)  Mr. Mason would be the perfect tenant for the recently vacated Drew farm.  He can tend to the pigs and he can take up the slack in dispensing folk wisdom that will result from Mr. Drew’s relocation.  However, for some reason, Cora is reluctant to announce that this is her plan.  Possibly, Daisy has allowed her hopes and those of Mr. Mason to rise too high.

Cora has demonstrated that she can be rough with the servants when her normally placid emotional state is disturbed.  She almost put a cloud over the Hughes-Carson wedding when she struck out at the Hughes-Patmore-Bates triumvirate.  In her defense, she was entering her own room to relax after an unbelievably brutal day of travel and meetings – the strain would have been something the servants can hardly appreciate – and she did not expect to see three senior members of her staff going through her clothes.  And we can now put aside any thought that Mary was beginning to think of other people’s feelings in her daily dealings.  She could so easily have warned Cora about the distribution of Cora’s clothing that Mary had authorized.  But that would have required her to get out of her chair right in the middle of tea.

Naturally, Cora’s better nature emerges eventually and she goes the extra step of descending below stairs to offer a sincere apology to Hughes and Patmore.  (I don’t think Anna was in that scene.)  So, everything was all right finally, but how unfortunate that the three loyal servants had to be put through such distress on the day before the wedding.

We are learning that Mr. Spratt and Miss Denker each has hidden depths of guile.  Sergeant Willis pays a call to the back door of Violet’s house to question Mr. Spratt about his missing good-for-nothing nephew.  I would have thought that even in 1925 the “Constable’s Guide to Effective Interrogation” would have directed Sergeant Willis to question Spratt and Denker separately.  However, it saves the Sergeant’s valuable time if he questions them both together.  Besides, if he questions them separately, one of them will have to get out of his or her chair and go to a different room, something that everyone in Yorkshire, whether born high or low, seems reluctant to do.

The result is that Denker now knows Mr. Spratt’s tale and has something to hold over him.  Spratt, meanwhile, has kept the P.G. Wodehouse connection warm by hiding someone in the potting shed.  Where this will all lead is a question.  Mr. Spratt is hardly a master criminal, and if Denker stoops to blackmail, her objective will be some minor household privilege and not the thousand pounds that Miss Bevan sought from Mary in Episode 1.  I don’t think there is enough time left in this season for this particular story line to develop or to have much impact.  Let’s hope that Mr. Spratt’s nephew doesn’t commit some foul crime in the meantime.

Am I the only viewer who has had it with Isobel’s hectoring tone and moral certainty?  Among the admirable qualities of the English we must include reserve, tact, and the liberal use of irony and understatement.  Isobel seems to lack each and every one of these.  To her credit, she also lacks some of the vices of the English of that day, including class snobbery and mindless adherence to tradition.  Her attack on Dr. Clarkson struck me as un-English.  She attacked him directly and openly, in a scolding temper, on a question of his personal character, and she did so in a public setting.  It was, or ought to have been, humiliating to him and embarrassing to the rest of the company.  She does eventually apologize, but an insult made in public is never quite erased by an apology given in private.

It’s annoying that her ill manners worked to her advantage this time.  For one thing, Dr. Clarkson is a man of integrity and eventually realized that Isobel’s criticism of him was fair, although put to him in a manner that would have stiffened the back of a less reasonable man.  For another, Isobel is on the right side of the hospital question.  These hectoring people who adopt attitudes of moral superiority are occasionally right, like an out-of-date calendar, and the rest of us just have to put up with it.

One other story thread that may be pointing to a happy outcome is the tale of Mr. Molesley’s missed educational opportunities.  The master at the local school is impressed with Mr. Molesley’s efforts to lead Daisy into the groves of Academe.  Molesley is a man who can distinguish at a glance between the War of the Austrian, and that of the Spanish, Succession.  He might lack the proper credentials, but perhaps a way can be found to move him from footman to his proper role in life.

Finally, to come back to the Hughes-Carson wedding for a moment, I was glad to hear the sound of bagpipes as the service ended.  A bagpipe in the hands of a skilled piper can combine celebration, ceremony, and solemnity as can no other instrument.

I wonder if the short road ahead will run as straight as seems possible at the moment.  We shall see.