The Common Reader:
Second Series
by
Virginia Woolf
( First Series )
"...I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the
common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after
all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must
be generally decided all claim to poetical honours."—DR.
JOHNSON, Life of Gray,
Most of the following papers have appeared in the Times
Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Nation, Vogue, The New
York Herald, The Yale Review, and Figaro. For permission
to reprint two of them I have to thank the Oxford University Press
and Mr. Jonathan Cape. Some are now published for the first
time.
Contents
THE STRANGE
ELIZABETHANS
DONNE AFTER THREE CENTURIES
"THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE'S ARCADIA"
"ROBINSON CRUSOE"
DOROTHY OSBORNE'S "LETTERS"
SWIFT'S "JOURNAL TO STELLA"
THE "SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY"
LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON
TWO PARSONS—
I. JAMES WOODFORDE
II. JOHN SKINNER
DR. BURNEY'S EVENING PARTY
JACK MYTTON
DE QUINCEY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
FOUR FIGURES—
I. COWPER AND LADY AUSTEN
II. BEAU BRUMMELL
III. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
IV. DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
WILLIAM HAZLITT
GERALDINE AND JANE
"AURORA LEIGH"
THE NIECE OF AN EARL
GEORGE GISSING
THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH
"I AM CHRISTINA ROSSETTI"
THE NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY
HOW SHOULD ONE READ A BOOK?
There are few greater delights than to go back three or four
hundred years and become in fancy at least an Elizabethan. That
such fancies are only fancies, that this "becoming an Elizabethan",
this reading sixteenth-century writing as currently and certainly
as we read our own is an illusion, is no doubt true. Very likely
the Elizabethans would find our pronunciation of their language
unintelligible; our fancy picture of what it pleases us to call
Elizabethan life would rouse their ribald merriment. Still, the
instinct that drives us to them is so strong and the freshness and
vigour that blow through their pages are so sweet that we willingly
run the risk of being laughed at, of being ridiculous.
And if we ask why we go further astray in this particular region
of English literature than in any other, the answer is no doubt
that Elizabethan prose, for all its beauty and bounty, was a very
imperfect medium. It was almost incapable of fulfilling one of the
offices of prose which is to make people talk, simply and
naturally, about ordinary things. In an age of utilitarian prose
like our own, we know exactly how people spend the hours between
breakfast and bed, how they behave when they are neither one thing
nor the other, neither angry nor loving, neither happy nor
miserable. Poetry ignores these slighter shades; the social student
can pick up hardly any facts about daily life from Shakespeare's
plays; and if prose refuses to enlighten us, then one avenue of
approach to the men and women of another age is blocked.
Elizabethan prose, still scarcely separated off from the body of
its poetry, could speak magnificently, of course, about the great
themes—how life is short, and death certain; how spring is
lovely, and winter horrid—perhaps, indeed, the lavish and
towering periods that it raises above these simple platitudes are
due to the fact that it has not cheapened itself upon trifles. But
the price it pays for this soaring splendour is to be found in its
awkwardness when it comes to earth—when Lady Sidney, for
example, finding herself cold at nights, has to solicit the Lord
Chamberlain for a better bedroom at Court. Then any housemaid of
her own age could put her case more simply and with greater force.
Thus, if we go to the Elizabethan prose-writers to solidify the
splendid world of Elizabethan poetry as we should go now to our
biographers, novelists, and journalists to solidify the world of
Pope, of Tennyson, of Conrad, we are perpetually baffled and driven
from our quest. What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or
woman in the time of Shakespeare? Even the familiar letters of the
time give us little help. Sir Henry Wotton is pompous and ornate
and keeps us stiffly at arm's length. Their histories resound with
drums and trumpets. Their broadsheets reverberate with meditations
upon death and reflections upon the immortality of the soul. Our
best chance of finding them off their guard and so becoming at ease
with them is to seek one of those unambitious men who haunt the
outskirts of famous gatherings, listening, observing, sometimes
taking a note in a book. But they are difficult to find. Gabriel
Harvey perhaps, the friend of Spenser and of Sidney, might have
fulfilled that function. Unfortunately the values of the time
persuaded him that to write about rhetoric, to write about Thomas
Smith, to write about Queen Elizabeth in Latin, was better worth
doing than to record the table talk of Spenser and Sir Philip
Sidney. But he possessed to some extent the modern instinct for
preserving trifles, for keeping copies of letters, and for making
notes of ideas that struck him in the margins of books. If we
rummage among these fragments we shall, at any rate, leave the
highroad and perhaps hear some roar of laughter from a tavern door,
where poets are drinking; or meet humble people going about their
milking and their love-making without a thought that this is the
great Elizabethan age, or that Shakespeare is at this moment
strolling down the Strand and might tell one, if one plucked him by
the sleeve, to whom he wrote the sonnets, and what he meant by
Hamlet.
The first person whom we meet is indeed a milkmaid—Gabriel
Harvey's sister Mercy. In the winter of 1574 she was milking in the
fields near Saffron Walden accompanied by an old woman, when a man
approached her and offered her cakes and malmsey wine. When they
had eaten and drunk in a wood and the old woman had wandered off to
pick up sticks, the man proceeded to explain his business. He came
from Lord Surrey, a youth of about Mercy's own age—seventeen
or eighteen that is—and a married man. He had been bowling
one day and had seen the milkmaid; her hat had blown off and "she
had somewhat changed her colour". In short, Lord Surrey had fallen
passionately in love with her; and sent her by the same man gloves,
a silk girdle, and an enamel posy ring which he had torn from his
own hat though his Aunt, Lady W——, had given it him for
a very different purpose. Mercy at first stood her ground. She was
a poor milkmaid, and he was a noble gentleman. But at last she
agreed to meet him at her house in the village. Thus, one very
misty, foggy night just before Christmas, Lord Surrey and his
servant came to Saffron Walden. They peered in at the malthouse,
but saw only her mother and sisters; they peeped in at the parlour,
but only her brothers were there. Mercy herself was not to be seen;
and "well mired and wearied for their labour", there was nothing
for it but to ride back home again. Finally, after further parleys,
Mercy agreed to meet Lord Surrey in a neighbour's house alone at
midnight. She found him in the little parlour "in his doublet and
hose, his points untrust, and his shirt lying round about him". He
tried to force her on to the bed; but she cried out, and the good
wife, as had been agreed between them, rapped on the door and said
she was sent for. Thwarted, enraged, Lord Surrey cursed and swore,
"God confound me, God confound me", and by way of lure emptied his
pockets of all the money in them—thirteen shillings in
shillings and testers it came to—and made her finger it.
Still, however, Mercy made off, untouched, on condition that she
would come again on Christmas eve. But when Christmas eve dawned
she was up betimes and had put seven miles between her and Saffron
Walden by six in the morning, though it snowed and rained so that
the floods were out, and P., the servant, coming later to the place
of assignation, had to pick his way through the water in pattens.
So Christmas passed. And a week later, in the very nick of time to
save her honour, the whole story very strangely was discovered and
brought to an end. On New Year's Eve her brother Gabriel, the young
fellow of Pembroke Hall, was riding back to Cambridge when he came
up with a simple countryman whom he had met at his father's house.
They rode on together, and after some country gossip, the man said
that he had a letter for Gabriel in his pocket. Indeed, it was
addressed "To my loving brother Mr. G. H.", but when Gabriel opened
it there on the road, he found that the address was a lie. It was
not from his sister Mercy, but to his sister Mercy. "Mine Own Sweet
Mercy", it began; and it was signed "Thine more than ever his own
Phil". Gabriel could hardly control himself—"could scarcely
dissemble my sudden fancies and comprimitt my inward
passions"—as he read. For it was not merely a love-letter; it
was more; it talked about possessing Mercy according to promise.
There was also a fair English noble wrapped up in the paper. So
Gabriel, doing his best to control himself before the countryman,
gave him back the letter and the coin and told him to deliver them
both to his sister at Saffron Walden with this message: "To look
ere she leap. She may pick out the English of it herself." He rode
on to Cambridge; he wrote a long letter to the young lord,
informing him with ambiguous courtesy that the game was up. The
sister of Gabriel Harvey was not to be the mistress of a married
nobleman. Rather she was to be a maid, "diligent, and trusty and
tractable", in the house of Lady Smith at Audley End. Thus Mercy's
romance breaks off; the clouds descend again; and we no longer see
the milkmaid, the old woman, the treacherous serving man who came
with malmsey and cakes and rings and ribbons to tempt a poor girl's
honour while she milked her cows.
This is probably no uncommon story; there must have been many
milkmaids whose hats blew off as they milked their cows, and many
lords whose hearts leapt at the sight so that they plucked the
jewels from their hats and sent their servants to make treaty for
them. But it is rare for the girl's own letters to be preserved or
to read her own account of the story as she was made to deliver it
at her brother's inquisition. Yet when we try to use her words to
light up the Elizabethan field, the Elizabethan house and
living-room, we are met by the usual perplexities. It is easy
enough, in spite of the rain and the fog and the floods, to make a
fancy piece out of the milkmaid and the meadows and the old woman
wandering off to pick up sticks. Elizabethan songwriters have
taught us too well the habit of that particular trick. But if we
resist the impulse to make museum pieces out of our reading, Mercy
herself gives us little help. She was a milkmaid, scribbling
love-letters by the light of a farthing dip in an attic.
Nevertheless, the sway of the Elizabethan convention was so strong,
the accent of their speech was so masterful, that she bears herself
with a grace and expresses herself with a resonance that would have
done credit to a woman of birth and literary training. When Lord
Surrey pressed her to yield she replied:
The thing you wot of, Milord, were a great trespass towards God,
a great offence to the world, a great grief to my friends, a great
shame to myself, and, as I think, a great dishonour to your
lordship. I have heard my father say, Virginity is ye fairest
flower in a maid's garden, and chastity ye richest dowry a poor
wench can have...Chastity, they say, is like unto time, which,
being once lost, can no more be recovered.
Words chime and ring in her ears, as if she positively enjoyed
the act of writing. When she wishes him to know that she is only a
poor country girl and no fine lady like his wife, she exclaims,
"Good Lord, that you should seek after so bare and country stuff
abroad, that have so costly and courtly wares at home!" She even
breaks into a jog-trot of jingling rhyme, far less sonorous than
her prose, but proof that to write was an art, not merely a means
of conveying facts. And if she wants to be direct and forcible, the
proverbs she has heard in her father's house come to her pen, the
biblical imagery runs in her ears: "And then were I, poor wench,
cast up for hawk's meat, to mine utter undoing, and my friends'
exceeding grief". In short, Mercy the milkmaid writes a natural and
noble style, which is incapable of vulgarity, and equally incapable
of intimacy. Nothing, one feels, would have been easier for Mercy
than to read her lover a fine discourse upon the vanity of
grandeur, the loveliness of chastity, the vicissitudes of fortune.
But of emotion as between one particular Mercy and one particular
Philip, there is no trace. And when it comes to dealing exactly in
a few words with some mean object—when, for example, the wife
of Sir Henry Sidney, the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland,
has to state her claim to a better room to sleep in, she writes for
all the world like an illiterate servant girl who can neither form
her letters nor spell her words nor make one sentence follow
smoothly after another. She haggles, she niggles, she wears our
patience down with her repetitions and her prolixities. Hence it
comes about that we know very little about Mercy Harvey, the
milkmaid, who wrote so well, or Mary Sidney, daughter to the Duke
of Northumberland, who wrote so badly. The background of
Elizabethan life eludes us.
But let us follow Gabriel Harvey to Cambridge, in case we can
there pick up something humble and colloquial that will make these
strange Elizabethans more familiar to us. Gabriel, having
discharged his duty as a brother, seems to have given himself up to
the life of an intellectual young man with his way to make in the
world. He worked so hard and he played so little that he made
himself unpopular with his fellows. For it was obviously difficult
to combine an intense interest in the future of English poetry and
the capacity of the English language with card-playing,
bear-baiting, and such diversions. Nor could he apparently accept
everything that Aristotle said as gospel truth. But with congenial
spirits he argued, it is clear, hour by hour, night after night,
about poetry, and metre, and the raising of the despised English
speech and the meagre English literature to a station among the
great tongues and literatures of the world. We are sometimes made
to think, as we listen, of such arguments as might now be going
forward in the new Universities of America. The young English poets
speak with a bold yet uneasy arrogance—"England, since it was
England, never bred more honourable minds, more adventurous hearts,
more valorous hands, or more excellent wits, than of late". Yet, to
be English is accounted a kind of crime—"nothing is reputed
so contemptible and so basely and vilely accounted of as whatsoever
is taken for English". And if, in their hopes for the future and
their sensitiveness to the opinion of older civilisations, the
Elizabethans show much the same susceptibility that sometimes
puzzle us among the younger countries to-day, the sense that broods
over them of what is about to happen, of an undiscovered land on
which they are about to set foot, is much like the excitement that
science stirs in the minds of imaginative English writers of our
own time. Yet however stimulating it is to think that we hear the
stir and strife of tongues in Cambridge rooms about the year 1570,
it has to be admitted that to read Harvey's pages methodically is
almost beyond the limits of human patience. The words seem to run
red-hot, molten, hither and thither, until we cry out in anguish
for the boon of some meaning to set its stamp on them. He takes the
same idea and repeats it over and over again:
In the sovereign workmanship of Nature herself, what garden of
flowers without weeds? what orchard of trees without worms? what
field of corn without cockle? what pond of fishes without frogs?
what sky of light without darkness? what mirror of knowledge
without ignorance? what man of earth without frailty? what
commodity of the world without discommodity?
It is interminable. As we go round and round like a horse in a
mill, we perceive that we are thus clogged with sound because we
are reading what we should be hearing. The amplifications and the
repetitions, the emphasis like that of a fist pounding the edge of
a pulpit, are for the benefit of the slow and sensual ear which
loves to dally over sense and luxuriate in sound—the ear
which brings in, along with the spoken word, the look of the
speaker and his gestures, which gives a dramatic value to what he
says and adds to the crest of an extravagance some modulation which
makes the word wing its way to the precise spot aimed at in the
hearer's heart. Hence, when we lay Harvey's diatribes against Nash
or his letters to Spenser upon poetry under the light of the eye
alone, we can hardly make headway and lose our sense of any
definite direction. We grasp any simple fact that floats to the
surface as a drowning man grasps a plank—that the carrier was
called Mrs. Kerke, that Perne kept a cub for his pleasure in his
rooms at Peterhouse; that "Your last letter...was delivered me at
mine hostesses by the fireside, being fast hedged in round about on
every side with a company of honest, good fellows, and at that time
reasonable, honest quaffers"; that Greene died begging Mistress
Isam "for a penny pot of Malmsey", had borrowed her husband's shirt
when his own was awashing, and was buried yesterday in the new
churchyard near Bedlam at a cost of six shillings and fourpence.
Light seems to dawn upon the darkness. But no; just as we think to
lay hands on Shakespeare's coat-tails, to hear the very words
rapped out as Spenser spoke them, up rise the fumes of Harvey's
eloquence and we are floated off again into disputation and
eloquence, windy, wordy, voluminous, and obsolete. How, we ask, as
we slither over the pages, can we ever hope to come to grips with
these Elizabethans? And then, turning, skipping and glancing,
something fitfully and doubtfully emerges from the violent pages,
the voluminous arguments—the figure of a man, the outlines of
a face, somebody who is not "an Elizabethan" but an interesting,
complex, and individual human being.
We know him, to begin with, from his dealings with his sister.
We see him riding to Cambridge, a fellow of his college, when she
was milking with poor old women in the fields. We observe with
amusement his sense of the conduct that befits the sister of
Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge scholar. Education had put a great
gulf between him and his family. He rode to Cambridge from a house
in a village street where his father made ropes and his mother
worked in the malthouse. Yet though his lowly birth and the
consciousness that he had his way to make in the world made him
severe with his sister, fawning to the great, uneasy and
self-centred and ostentatious, it never made him ashamed of his
family. The father who could send three sons to Cambridge and was
so little ashamed of his craft that he had himself carved making
ropes at his work and the carving let in above his fireplace, was
no ordinary man. The brothers who followed Gabriel to Cambridge and
were his best allies there, were brothers to be proud of. He could
be proud of Mercy even, whose beauty could make a great nobleman
pluck the jewel from his hat. He was undoubtedly proud of himself.
It was the pride of a self-made man who must read when other people
are playing cards, who owns no undue allegiance to authority and
will contradict Aristotle himself, that made him unpopular at
Cambridge and almost cost him his degree. But it was an unfortunate
chance that led him thus early in life to defend his rights and
insist upon his merits. Moreover, since it was true—since he
was abler, quicker, and more learned than other people, handsome in
person too, as even his enemies could not deny ("a smudge piece of
a handsome fellow it hath been in his days" Nash admitted) he had
reason to think that he deserved success and was denied it only by
the jealousies and conspiracies of his colleagues. For a time, by
dint of much caballing and much dwelling upon his own deserts, he
triumphed over his enemies in the matter of the degree. He
delivered lectures. He was asked to dispute before the court when
Queen Elizabeth came to Audley End. He even drew her favourable
attention. "He lookt something like an Italian", she said when he
was brought to her notice. But the seeds of his downfall were
visible even in his moment of triumph. He had no self-respect, no
self-control. He made himself ridiculous and his friends uneasy.
When we read how he dressed himself up and "came ruffling it out
huffty tuffty in his suit of velvet" how uneasy he was, at one
moment cringing, at another "making no bones to take the wall of
Sir Phillip Sidney", now flirting with the ladies, now "putting
bawdy riddles to them", how when the Queen praised him he was
beside himself with joy and talked the English of Saffron Walden
with an Italian accent, we can imagine how his enemies jeered and
his friends blushed. And so, for all his merits, his decline began.
He was not taken into Lord Leicester's service; he was not made
Public Orator; he was not given the Mastership of Trinity Hall. But
there was one society in which he succeeded. In the small, smoky
rooms where Spenser and other young men discussed poetry and
language and the future of English literature, Harvey was not
laughed at. Harvey, on the contrary, was taken very seriously. To
friends like these he seemed as capable of greatness as any of
them. He too might be one of those destined to make English
literature illustrious. His passion for poetry was disinterested.
His leaning was profound. When he held forth upon quantity and
metre, upon what the Greeks had written and the Italians, and what
the English might write, no doubt he created for Spenser that
atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity spiced with sound learning
that serves to spur the imagination of a young writer and to make
each fresh poem as it is written seem the common property of a
little band of adventurers set upon the same quest. It was thus
that Spenser saw him:
Harvey, the happy above happiest men,
I read: that, sitting like a looker-on
Of this world's stage, doest note, with critic pen,
The sharp dislikes of each condition.
Poets need such "lookers-on"; someone who discriminates from a
watch-tower above the battle; who warns; who foresees. It must have
been pleasant for Spenser to listen as Harvey talked; and then to
cease to listen, to let the vehement, truculent voice run on, while
he slipped from theory to practice and made up a few lines of his
own poetry in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold
forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may
make his theories fit too tight to accommodate the formlessness of
life. Thus when Harvey ceased to theorise and tried to practise
there issued nothing but a thin dribble of arid and unappetising
verse or a copious flow of unctuous and servile eulogy. He failed
to be a poet as he failed to be a statesman, as he failed to be a
professor, as he failed to be a Master, as he failed, it might
seem, in everything that he undertook, save that he had won the
friendship of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney.
But, happily, Harvey left behind him a commonplace book; he had
the habit of making notes in the margins of books as he read.
Looking from one to the other, from his public self to his private,
we see his face lit from both sides, and the expression changes as
it changes so seldom upon the face of the Elizabethans. We detect
another Harvey lurking behind the superficial Harvey, shading him
with doubt and effort and despondency. For, luckily, the
commonplace book was small; the margins even of an Elizabethan
folio narrow; Harvey was forced to be brief, and because he wrote
only for his own eye at the command of some sharp memory or
experience he seems to write as if he were talking to himself. That
is true, he seems to say; or that reminds me, or again: If only I
had done this—We thus become aware of a conflict between the
Harvey who blundered among men and the Harvey who sat wisely at
home among his books. The one who acts and suffers brings his case
to the one who reads and thinks for advice and consolation.
Indeed, he had need of both. From the first his life was full of
conflict and difficulty. Harvey the rope-maker's son might put a
brave face on it, but still in the society of gentlemen the lowness
of his birth galled him. Think, then, the sedentary Harvey
counselled him, of all those unknown people who have nevertheless
triumphed. Think of "Alexander, an Unexpert Youth"; think of David,
"a forward stripling, but vanquished a huge Giant"; think of Judith
and of Pope Joan and their exploits; think, above all, of that
"gallant virago...Joan of Arc, a most worthy, valiant young
wench...what may not an industrious and politic man do...when a
lusty adventurous wench might thus prevail?" And then it seems as
if the smart young men at Cambridge twitted the rope-maker's son
for his lack of skill in the gentlemanly arts. "Leave writing",
Gabriel counselled him, "which consumeth unreasonable much
time...You have already plagued yourself this way". Make yourself
master of the arts of eloquence and persuasion. Go into the world.
Learn swordsmanship, riding, and shooting. All three may be learnt
in a week. And then the ambitious but uneasy youth began to find
the other sex attractive and asked advice of his wise and sedentary
brother in the conduct of his love affairs. Manners, the other
Harvey was of opinion, are of the utmost importance in dealing with
women; one must be discreet, self-controlled. A gentleman, this
counsellor continued, is known by his "Good entertainment of Ladies
and gentlewomen. No salutation, without much respect and
ceremony"—a reflection inspired no doubt by the memory of
some snub received at Audley End. Health and the care of the body
are of the utmost importance. "We scholars make an Ass of our body
and wit". One must "leap out of bed lustily, every morning in ye
whole year". One must be sparing in one's diet, and active, and
take regular exercise, like brother H., "who never failed to
breathe his hound once a day at least". There must be no "buzzing
or musing". A learned man must also be a man of the world. Make it
your "daily charge" "to exercise, to laugh; to proceed boldly". And
if your tormentors brawl and rail and scoff and mock at you, the
best answer is "a witty and pleasant Ironie". In any case, do not
complain, "It is gross folly, and a vile Sign of a wayward and
forward disposition, to be eftsoons complaining of this, or that,
to small purpose". And if as time goes on without preferment, one
cannot pay one's bills, one is thrust into prison, one has to bear
the taunts and insults of landladies, still remember "Glad poverty
is no poverty"; and if, as time passes and the struggle increases,
it seems as if "Life is warfare", if sometimes the beaten man has
to own, "But for hope ye Hart would brust", still his sage
counsellor in the study will not let him throw up the sponge. "He
beareth his misery best, that hideth it most" he told himself.
So runs the dialogue that we invent between the two
Harveys—Harvey the active and Harvey the passive, Harvey the
foolish and Harvey the wise. And it seems on the surface that the
two halves, for all their counselling together, made but a sorry
business of the whole. For the young man who had ridden off to
Cambridge full of conceit and hope and good advice to his sister
returned empty-handed to his native village in the end. He dwindled
out his last long years in complete obscurity at Saffron Walden. He
occupied himself superficially by practising his skill as a doctor
among the poor of the neighbourhood. He lived in the utmost poverty
off buttered roots and sheep's trotters. But even so he had his
consolations, he cherished his dreams. As he pottered about his
garden in the old black velvet suit, purloined, Nash says, from a
saddle for which he had not paid, his thoughts were all of power
and glory; of Stukeley and Drake; of "the winners of gold and the
wearers of gold". Memories he had in abundance—"The
remembrance of best things will soon pass out of memory; if it be
not often renewed and revived", he wrote. But there was some eager
stir in him, some lust for action and glory and life and adventure
that forbade him to dwell in the past. "The present tense only to
be regarded" is one of his notes. Nor did he drug himself with the
dust of scholarship. Books he loved as a true reader loves them,
not as trophies to be hung up for display, but as living beings
that "must be meditated, practised and incorporated into my body
and soul". A singularly humane view of learning survived in the
breast of the old and disappointed scholar. "The only brave way to
learn all things with no study and much pleasure", he remarked.
Dreams of the winners of gold and the wearers of gold, dreams of
action and power, fantastic though they were in an old beggar who
could not pay his reckoning, who pressed simples and lived off
buttered roots in a cottage, kept life in him when his flesh had
withered and his skin was "riddled and crumpled like a piece of
burnt parchment". He had his triumph in the end. He survived both
his friends and his enemies—Spenser and Sidney, Nash and
Perne. He lived to a very great age for an Elizabethan, to
eighty-one or eighty-two; and when we say that Harvey lived we mean
that he quarrelled and was tiresome and ridiculous and struggled
and failed and had a face like ours—a changing, a variable, a
human face.
When we think how many millions of words have been written and
printed in England in the past three hundred years, and how the
vast majority have died out without leaving any trace, it is
tempting to wonder what quality the words of Donne possess that we
should still hear them distinctly today. Far be it from us to
suggest even in this year of celebration and pardonable adulation
(1931) that the poems of Donne are popular reading or that the
typist, if we look over her shoulder in the Tube, is to be
discovered reading Donne as she returns from her office. But he is
read; he is audible—to that fact new editions and frequent
articles testify, and it is worth perhaps trying to analyse the
meaning that his voice has for us as it strikes upon the ear after
this long flight across the stormy seas that separate us from the
age of Elizabeth. But the first quality that attracts us is not his
meaning, charged with meaning as his poetry is, but something much
more unmixed and immediate; it is the explosion with which he
bursts into speech. All preface, all parleying have been consumed;
he leaps into poetry the shortest way. One phrase consumes all
preparation:
I long to talke with some old lover's ghost,
or
He is starke mad, whoever sayes,
That he hath beene in love an houre.
At once we are arrested. Stand still, he commands,
Stand still, and I will read to thee
A Lecture, Love, in love's philosophy.
And stand still we must. With the first words a shock passes
through us; perceptions, previously numb and torpid, quiver into
being; the nerves of sight and hearing are quickened; the "bracelet
of bright hair" burns in our eyes. But, more remarkably, we do not
merely become aware of beautiful remembered lines; we feel
ourselves compelled to a particular attitude of mind. Elements that
were dispersed in the usual stream of life become, under the stroke
of Donne's passion, one and entire. The world, a moment before,
cheerful, humdrum, bursting with character and variety, is
consumed. We are in Donne's world now. All other views are sharply
cut off.
In this power of suddenly surprising and subjugating the reader,
Donne excels most poets. It is his characteristic quality; it is
thus that he lays hold upon us, summing up his essence in a word or
two. But it is an essence that, as it works in us, separates into
strange contraries at odds with one another. Soon we begin to ask
ourselves of what this essence is composed, what elements have met
together to cut so deep and complex an impression. Some obvious
clues lie strewn on the surface of the poems. When we read the
Satyres, for example, we need no external proof to tell us
that these are the work of a boy. He has all the ruthlessness and
definiteness of youth, its hatred of the follies of middle age and
of convention. Bores, liars, courtiers—detestable humbugs and
hypocrites as they are, why not sum them up and sweep them off the
face of the earth with a few strokes of the pen? And so these
foolish figures are drubbed with an ardour that proves how much
hope and faith and delight in life inspire the savagery of youthful
scorn. But, as we read on, we begin to suspect that the boy with
the complex and curious face of the early portrait—bold yet
subtle, sensual yet nerve drawn—possessed qualities that made
him singular among the young. It is not simply that the huddle and
pressure of youth which out-thinks its words had urged him on too
fast for grace or clarity. It may be that there is in this clipping
and curtailing, this abrupt heaping of thought on thought, some
deeper dissatisfaction than that of youth with age, of honesty with
corruption. He is in rebellion, not merely against his elders, but
against something antipathetic to him in the temper of his time.
His verse has the deliberate bareness of those who refuse to avail
themselves of the current usage. It has the extravagance of those
who do not feel the pressure of opinion, so that sometimes judgment
fails them, and they heap up strangeness for strangeness' sake. He
is one of those nonconformists, like Browning and Meredith, who
cannot resist glorifying their nonconformity by a dash of wilful
and gratuitous eccentricity. But to discover what Donne disliked in
his own age, let us imagine some of the more obvious influences
that must have told upon him when he wrote his early
poems—let us ask what books he read. And by Donne's own
testimony we find that his chosen books were the works of "grave
Divines"; of philosophers; of "jolly Statesmen, which teach how to
tie The sinewes of a cities mistique bodie"; and chroniclers.
Clearly he liked facts and arguments. If there are also poets among
his books, the epithets he applies to them, "Giddie fantastique",
seem to disparage the art, or at least to show that Donne knew
perfectly well what qualities were antipathetic to him in poetry.
And yet he was living in the very spring of English poetry. Some of
Spenser might have been on his shelves; and Sidney's
Arcadia; and the Paradise of Dainty Devices, and
Lyly's Euphues. He had the chance, and apparently took
it—"I tell him of new playes"—of going to the theatre;
of seeing the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare acted. When he went
abroad in London, he must have met all the writers of that
time—Spenser and Sidney and Shakespeare and Jonson; he must
have heard at this tavern or at that talk of new plays, of new
fashions in verse, heated and learned discussion of the
possibilities of the English language and the future of English
poetry. And yet, if we turn to his biography, we find that he
neither consorted with his contemporaries nor read what they wrote.
He was one of those original beings who cannot draw profit, but are
rather disturbed and distracted by what is being done round them at
the moment. If we turn again to Satyres, it is easy to see
why this should be so. Here is a bold and active mind that loves to
deal with actual things, which struggles to express each shock
exactly as it impinges upon his tight-stretched senses. A bore
stops him in the street. He sees him exactly, vividly.
His cloths were strange, though coarse; and black, though
bare;
Sleevelesse his jerkin was, and it had beene
Velvet, but t'was now (so much ground was seene)
Become Tufftaffatie;
Then he likes to give the actual words that people say:
He, like to a high stretcht lute string squeakt, O Sir,
'Tis sweet to talke of Kings. At Westminster,
Said I, The man that keepes the Abbey tombes,
And for his price doth with who ever comes,
Of all our Harries, and our Edwards talke,
From King to King and all their kin can walke:
Your eares shall heare nought, but Kings; your eyes meet
Kings only; The way to it, is Kingstreet.
His strength and his weakness are both to be found here. He
selects one detail and stares at it until he has reduced it to the
few words that express its oddity:
And like a bunch of ragged carrets stand
The short swolne fingers of thy gouty hand,
but he cannot see in the round, as a whole. He cannot stand
apart and survey the large outline so that the description is
always of some momentary intensity, seldom of the broader aspect of
things. Naturally, then, he found it difficult to use the drama
with its conflict of other characters; he must always speak from
his own centre in soliloquy, in satire, in self-analysis. Spenser,
Sidney, and Marlowe provided no helpful models for a man who looked
out from this angle of vision. The typical Elizabethan with his
love of eloquence, with his longing for brave new words, tended to
enlarge and generalize. He loved wide landscapes, heroic virtues,
and figures seen sublimely in outline or in heroic conflict. Even
the prose-writers have the same habit of aggrandisement. When
Dekker sets out to tell us how Queen Elizabeth died in the spring,
he cannot describe her death in particular or that spring in
particular; he must dilate upon all deaths and all springs:
...the Cuckoo (like a single, sole Fiddler, that reels from
Tavern to Tavern) plied it all the day long: Lambs frisked up and
down in the vallies, kids and Goats leapt to and fro on the
Mountains: Shepherds sat piping, country wenches singing: Lovers
made Sonnets for their Lasses, whilst they made Garlands for their
Lovers: And as the Country was frolic, so was the City merry...no
Scritch-Owl frighted the silly Countryman at midnight, nor any Drum
the Citizen at noon-day; but all was more calm than a still water,
all husht, as if the Spheres had been playing in Consort: In
conclusion, heaven lookt like a Pallace, and the great hall of the
earth, like a Paradise. But O the short-liv'd Felicity of man! O
world, of what slight and thin stuff is thy happiness!
—in short, Queen Elizabeth died, and it is no use asking
Dekker what the old woman who swept his room for him said, or what
Cheapside looked like that night if one happened to be caught in
the thick of the throng. He must enlarge; he must generalize; he
must beautify.
Donne's genius was precisely the opposite of this. He
diminished; he particularized. Not only did he see each spot and
wrinkle which defaced the fair outline; but he noted with the
utmost curiosity his own reaction to such contrasts and was eager
to lay side by side the two conflicting views and to let them make
their own dissonance. It is this desire for nakedness in an age
that was florid, this determination to record not the likenesses
which go to compose a rounded and seemly whole, but the
inconsistencies that break up semblances, the power to make us feel
the different emotions of love and hate and laughter at the same
time, that separate Donne from his contemporaries. And if the usual
traffic of the day—to be buttonholed by a bore, to be snared
by a lawyer, to be snubbed by a courtier—made so sharp an
impression on Donne, the effect of falling in love was bound to be
incomparably greater. Falling in love meant, to Donne, a thousand
things; it meant being tormented and disgusted, disillusioned and
enraptured; but it also meant speaking the truth. The love poems,
the elegies, and the letters thus reveal a figure of a very
different calibre from the typical figure of Elizabethan love
poetry. That great ideal, built up by a score of eloquent pens,
still burns bright in our eyes. Her body was of alabaster, her legs
of ivory; her hair was golden wire and her teeth pearls from the
Orient. Music was in her voice and stateliness in her walk. She
could love and sport and be faithless and yielding and cruel and
true; but her emotions were simple, as befitted her person. Donne's
poems reveal a lady of a very different cast. She was brown but she
was also fair; she was solitary but also sociable; she was rustic
yet also fond of city life; she was sceptical yet devout, emotional
but reserved—in short she was as various and complex as Donne
himself. As for choosing one type of human perfection and
restricting himself to love her and her only, how could Donne, or
any man who allowed his senses full play and honestly recorded his
own moods, so limit his nature and tell such lies to placate the
conventional and the decorous? Was not "love's sweetest part,
Variety"? "Of music, joy, life and eternity Change is the nursery",
he sang. The timid fashion of the age might limit a lover to one
woman. For his part he envied and admired the ancients, "who held
plurality of loves no crime":
But since this title honour hath been us'd,
Our weak credulity hath been abus'd.
We have fallen from our high estate; the golden laws of nature
are repealed.
So through the glass of Donne's poetry, now darkly clouded, now
brilliantly clear, we see pass in procession the many women whom he
loved and hated—the common Julia whom he despised; the
simpleton, to whom he taught the art of love; she who was married
to an invalid husband, "cag'd in a basket chair"; she who could
only be loved dangerously by strategy; she who dreamt of him and
saw him murdered as he crossed the Alps; she whom he had to
dissuade from the risk of loving him; and lastly, the autumnal, the
aristocratic lady for whom he felt more of reverence than of
love—so they pass, common and rare, simple and sophisticated,
young and old, noble and plebeian, and each casts a different spell
and brings out a different lover, although the man is the same man,
and the women, perhaps, are also phases of womanhood rather than
separate and distinct women. In later years the Dean of St. Paul's
would willingly have edited some of these poems and suppressed one
of these lovers—the poet presumably of "Going to Bed" and
"Love's Warr". But the Dean would have been wrong. It is the union
of so many different desires that gives Donne's love poetry not
only its vitality but also a quality that is seldom found with such
strength in the conventional and orthodox lover—its
spirituality. If we do not love with the body, can we love with the
mind? If we do not love variously, freely, admitting the lure first
of this quality and then of that, can we at length choose out the
one quality that is essential and adhere to it and so make peace
among the warring elements and pass into a state of being which
transcends the "Hee and Shee"? Even while he was at his most fickle
and gave fullest scope to his youthful lusts, Donne could predict
the season of maturity when he would love differently, with pain
and difficulty, one and one only. Even while he scorned and railed
and abused, he divined another relationship which transcended
change and parting and might, even in the bodies' absence, lead to
unity and communion:
Rend us in sunder, thou cans't not divide,
Our bodies so, but that our souls are ty'd,
And we can love by letters still and gifts,
And thoughts and dreams;
Again,
They who one another keepe alive
N'er parted be.
And again,
So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,
Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
Such hints and premonitions of a further and finer state urge
him on and condemn him to perpetual unrest and dissatisfaction with
the present. He is tantalized by the sense that there is a miracle
beyond any of these transient delights and disgusts. Lovers can, if
only for a short space, reach a state of unity beyond time, beyond
sex, beyond the body. And at last, for one moment, they reach it.
In the "Extasie" they lie together on a bank,
All day, the same our postures were,
And wee said nothing, all the day...
This Extasie doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe,
Wee see, we saw not what did move: ...
Wee then, who are this new soule, know,
Of what we are compos'd, and made,
For, th' Atomies of which we grow,
Are soules, whom no change can invade.
But O alas, so long, so farre
Our bodies why doe wee forbeare? ...
But O alas, he breaks off, and the words remind us that however
much we may wish to keep Donne in one posture—for it is in
these Extasies that lines of pure poetry suddenly flow as if
liquefied by a great heat—so to remain in one posture was
against his nature. Perhaps it is against the nature of things
also. Donne snatches the intensity because he is aware of the
change that must alter, of the discord that must interrupt.
Circumstances, at any rate, put it beyond his power to maintain
that ecstasy for long. He had married secretly; he was a father; he
was, as we are soon reminded, a very poor yet a very ambitious man,
living in a damp little house at Mitcham with a family of small
children. The children were frequently ill. They cried, and their
cries, cutting through the thin walls of the jerry-built house,
disturbed him at his work. He sought sanctuary naturally enough
elsewhere, and naturally had to pay rent for that relief. Great
ladies—Lady Bedford, Lady Huntingdon, Mrs. Herbert—with
well-spread tables and fair gardens, must be conciliated; rich men
with the gift of rooms in their possession must be placated. Thus,
after Donne the harsh satirist, and Donne the imperious lover,
comes the servile and obsequious figure of Donne the devout servant
of the great, the extravagant eulogist of little girls. And our
relationship with him suddenly changes. In the satires and the love
poems there was a quality—some psychological intensity and
complexity—that brings him closer than his contemporaries,
who often seem to be caught up in a different world from ours and
to exist immune from our perplexities and swept by passions which
we admire but cannot feel. Easy as it is to exaggerate affinities,
still we may claim to be akin to Donne in our readiness to admit
contrasts, in our desire for openness, in that psychological
intricacy which the novelists have taught us with their slow,
subtle, and analytic prose. But now, as we follow Donne in his
progress, he leaves us in the lurch. He becomes more remote,
inaccessible, and obsolete than any of the Elizabethans. It is as
if the spirit of the age, which he had scorned and flouted,
suddenly asserted itself and made this rebel its slave. And as we
lose sight of the outspoken young man who hated society, and of the
passionate lover, seeking some mysterious unity with his love and
finding it miraculously, now here, now there, it is natural to
abuse the system of patrons and patronage that thus seduced the
most incorruptible of men. Yet it may be that we are too hasty.
Every writer has an audience in view, and it may well be doubted if
the Bedfords and the Drurys and the Herberts were worse influences
than the libraries and the newspaper proprietors who fill the
office of patron nowadays.
The comparison, it is true, presents great difficulties. The
noble ladies who brought so strange an element into Donne's poetry,
live only in the reflection, or in the distortion, that we find in
the poems themselves. The age of memoirs and letter-writing was
still to come. If they wrote themselves, and it is said that both
Lady Pembroke and Lady Bedford were poets of merit, they did not
dare to put their names to what they wrote, and it has vanished.
But a diary here and there survives from which we may see the
patroness more closely and less romantically. Lady Ann Clifford,
for example, the daughter of a Clifford and a Russell, though
active and practical and little educated—she was not allowed
"to learn any language because her father would not permit
it"—felt, we can gather from the bald statements of her
diary, a duty towards literature and to the makers of it as her
mother, the patroness of the poet Daniel, had done before her. A
great heiress, infected with all the passion of her age for lands
and houses, busied with all the cares of wealth and property, she
still read good English books as naturally as she ate good beef and
mutton. She read The Faery Queen and Sidney's
Arcadia; she acted in Ben Jonson's Masques at Court; and it
is proof of the respect in which reading was held that a girl of
fashion should be able to read an old corrupt poet like Chaucer
without feeling that she was making herself a target for ridicule
as a bluestocking. The habit was part of a normal and well-bred
life. It persisted even when she was mistress of one estate and
claimant to even vaster possession of her own. She had Montaigne
read aloud to her as she sat stitching at Knole; she sat absorbed
in Chaucer while her husband worked. Later, when years of strife
and loneliness had saddened her, she returned to her Chaucer with a
deep sigh of content: "...if I had not excellent Chaucer's book
here to comfort me", she wrote, "I were in a pitiable case having
as many troubles as I have here, but, when I read in that, I scorn
and make light of them all, and a little part of his beauteous
spirit infuses itself in me". The woman who said that, though she
never attempted to set up a salon or to found a library, felt it
incumbent on her to respect the men of low birth and no fortune who
could write The Canterbury Tales or The Faery Queen.
Donne preached before her at Knole. It was she who paid for the
first monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey, and if, when she
raised a tomb to her old tutor, she dwelt largely upon her own
virtues and titles, she still acknowledged that even so great a
lady as herself owed gratitude to the makers of books. Words from
great writers nailed to the walls of the room in which she sat,
eternally transacting business, surrounded her as she worked, as
they surrounded Montaigne in his tower in Burgundy.
Thus we may infer that Donne's relation to the Countess of
Bedford was very different from any that could exist between a poet
and a countess at the present time. There was something distant and
ceremonious about it. To him she was "as a vertuous Prince farre
off". The greatness of her office inspired reverence apart from her
personality, just as the rewards within her gift inspired humility.
He was her Laureate, and his songs in her praise were rewarded by
invitations to stay with her at Twickenham and by those friendly
meetings with men in power which were so effective in furthering
the career of an ambitious man—and Donne was highly
ambitious, not indeed for the fame of a poet, but for the power of
a statesman. Thus when we read that Lady Bedford was "God's
Masterpiece", that she excelled all women in all ages, we realise
that John Donne is not writing to Lucy Bedford; Poetry is saluting
Rank. And this distance served to inspire reason rather than
passion. Lady Bedford must have been a very clever woman, well
versed in the finer shades of theology, to derive an instant or an
intoxicating pleasure from the praises of her servant. Indeed, the
extreme subtlety and erudition of Donne's poems to his patrons
seems to show that one effect of writing for such an audience is to
exaggerate the poet's ingenuity. What is not poetry but something
tortured and difficult will prove to the patron that the poet is
exerting his skill on her behalf. Then again, a learned poem can be
handed round among statesmen and men of affairs to prove that the
poet is no mere versifier, but capable of office and
responsibility. But a change of inspiration that has killed many
poets—witness Tennyson and the Idylls of the
King—only stimulated another side of Donne's many-sided
nature and many-faceted brain. As we read the long poems written
ostensibly in praise of Lady Bedford, or in celebration of
Elizabeth Drury (An Anatomie of the World and the
Progresse of the Soul), we are made to reflect how much
remains for a poet to write about when the season of love is over.
When May and June are passed, most poets cease to write or sing the
songs of their youth out of tune. But Donne survived the perils of
middle age by virtue of the acuteness and ardour of his intellect.
When "the satyrique fires which urg'd me to have writt in skorne of
all" were quenched, when "My muse (for I had one), because I'm
cold, Divorced herself", there still remained the power to turn
upon the nature of things and dissect that. Even in the passionate
days of youth Donne had been a thinking poet. He had dissected and
analysed his own love. To turn from that to the anatomy of the
world, from the personal to the impersonal, was the natural
development of a complex nature. And the new angle to which his
mind now pointed under the influence of middle age and traffic with
the world, released powers that were held in check when they were
directed against some particular courtier or some particular woman.
Now his imagination, as if freed from impediment, goes rocketing up
in flights of extravagant exaggeration. True, the rocket bursts; it
scatters in a shower of minute, separate particles—curious
speculations, wire-drawn comparisons, obsolete erudition; but,
winged by the double pressure of mind and heart, of reason and
imagination, it soars far and fast into a finer air. Working
himself up by his own extravagant praise of the dead girl, he
shoots on:
We spur, we reine the starres, and in their race
They're diversly content t' obey our pace.
But keepes the earth her round proportion still?
Doth not a Tenarif, or higher Hill
Rise so high like a Rocke, that one might thinke
The floating Moone would shipwracke there, and sinke?
Seas are so deepe, that Whales being strooke to day,
Perchance tomorrow, scarce at middle way
Of their wish'd journies end, the bottome, die.
And men, to sound depths, so much line untie,
As one might justly thinke, that there would rise
At end thereof, one of th' Antipodies:
Or again, Elizabeth Drury is dead and her soul has escaped:
she stayes not in the ayre,
To looke what Meteors there themselves prepare;
She carries no desire to know, nor sense,
Whether th' ayres middle region be intense;
For th' Element of fire, she doth not know,
Whether she past by such a place or no;
She baits not at the Moone, nor cares to trie
Whether in that new world, men live, and die.
Venus retards her not, to' enquire, how shee
Can, (being one starre) Hesper, and Vesper bee;
Hee that charm'd Argus eyes, sweet Mercury,
Workes not on her, who now is growne all eye;
So we penetrate into distant regions, and reach rare and remote
speculations a million miles removed from the simple girl whose
death fired the explosion. But to break off fragments from poems
whose virtue lies in their close-knit sinews and their
long-breathed strength is to diminish them. They need to be read
currently rather to grasp the energy and power of the whole than to
admire those separate lines which Donne suddenly strikes to
illumine the stages of our long climb.
Thus, finally, we reach the last section of the book, the Holy
Sonnets and Divine Poems. Again the poetry changes with the change
of circumstances and of years. The patron has gone with the need of
patronage. Lady Bedford has been replaced by a Prince still more
virtuous and still more remote. To Him the prosperous, the
important, the famous Dean of St. Paul's now turns. But how
different is the divine poetry of this great dignitary from the
divine poetry of the Herberts and the Vaughans! The memory of his
sins returns to him as he writes. He has been burnt with "lust and
envy"; he has followed profane loves; he has been scornful and
fickle and passionate and servile and ambitious. He has attained
his end; but he is weaker and worse than the horse or the bull. Now
too he is lonely. "Since she whom I lov'd" is dead "My good is
dead." Now at last his mind is "wholly sett on heavenly things".
And yet how could Donne—that "little world made cunningly of
elements"—be wholly set on any one thing?
Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vowes, and in devotione.
It was impossible for the poet who had noted so curiously the
flow and change of human life, and its contrasts, who was at once
so inquisitive of knowledge and so sceptical—
Doubt wisely; in strange way,
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong, is
—who had owned allegiance to so many great Princes, the
body, the King, the Church of England, to reach that state of
wholeness and certainty which poets of purer life were able to
maintain. His devotions themselves were feverish and fitful. "My
devout fitts come and goe away like a fantastique Ague." They are
full of contraries and agonies. Just as his love poetry at its most
sensual will suddenly reveal the desire for a transcendent unity
"beyond the Hee and Shee", and his most reverential letters to
great ladies will suddenly become love poems addressed by an
amorous man to a woman of flesh and blood, so these last divine
poems are poems of climbing and falling, of incongruous clamours
and solemnities, as if the church door opened on the uproar of the
street. That perhaps is why they still excite interest and disgust,
contempt and admiration. For the Dean still retained the
incorrigible curiosity of his youth. The temptation to speak the
truth in defiance of the world even when he had taken all that the
world had to give, still worked in him. An obstinate interest in
the nature of his own sensations still troubled his age and broke
its repose as it had troubled his youth and made him the most
vigorous of satirists and the most passionate of lovers. There was
no rest, no end, no solution even at the height of fame and on the
edge of the grave for a nature plaited together of such diverse
strands. The famous preparations that he made, lying in his shroud,
being carved for his tomb, when he felt death approach are poles
asunder from the falling asleep of the tired and content. He must
still cut a figure and still stand erect—a warning perhaps, a
portent certainly, but always consciously and conspicuously
himself. That, finally, is one of the reasons why we still seek out
Donne; why after three hundred years and more we still hear the
sound of his voice speaking across the ages so distinctly. It may
be true that when from curiosity we come to cut up and "survey each
part", we are like the doctors and "know not why"—we cannot
see how so many different qualities meet together in one man. But
we have only to read him, to submit to the sound of that passionate
and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste
of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any
of his time. Even the elements seem to have respected that
identity. When the fire of London destroyed almost every other
monument in St. Paul's, it left Donne's figure untouched, as if the
flames themselves found that knot too hard to undo, that riddle too
difficult to read, and that figure too entirely itself to turn to
common clay.
If it is true that there are books written to escape from the
present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it is certainly
true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw
the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street
and shade the glare and flicker of its lights—that is our
desire. There is then a charm even in the look of the great volumes
that have sunk, like the "Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia", as if by
their own weight down to the very bottom of the shelf. We like to
feel that the present is not all; that other hands have been before
us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt,
turning the pages until they are yellow and dog's-eared. We like to
summon before us the ghosts of those old readers who have read
their Arcadia from this very copy—Richard Porter,
reading with the splendours of the Elizabethans in his eyes; Lucy
Baxter, reading in the licentious days of the Restoration; Thos.
Hake, still reading, though now the eighteenth century has dawned
with a distinction that shows itself in the upright elegance of his
signature. Each has read differently, with the insight and the
blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally
partial. In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to
1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored.
But let us keep up the long succession of readers; let us in our
turn bring the insight and the blindness of our own generation to
bear upon the "Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia", and so pass it on
to our successors.
If we choose the Arcadia because we wish to escape,
certainly the first impression of the book is that Sidney wrote it
with very much the same intention: "...it is done only for you,
only to you", he tells his "dear lady and sister, the Countess of
Pembroke". He is not looking at what is before him here at Wilton;
he is not thinking of his own troubles or of the tempestuous mood
of the great Queen in London. He is absenting himself from the
present and its strife. He is writing merely to amuse his sister,
not for "severer eyes". "Your dear self can best witness the
manner, being done in loose sheets of Paper, most of it in your
presence, the rest, by sheets sent unto you, as fast as they were
done." So, sitting at Wilton under the downs with Lady Pembroke, he
gazes far away into a beautiful land which he calls Arcadia. It is
a land of fair valleys and fertile pastures, where the houses are
"lodges of yellow stone built in the form of a star"; where the
inhabitants are either great princes or humble shepherds; where the
only business is to love and to adventure; where bears and lions
surprise nymphs bathing in fields red with roses; where princesses
are immured in the huts of shepherds; where disguise is perpetually
necessary; where the shepherd is really a prince and the woman a
man; where, in short, anything may be and happen except what
actually is and happens here in England in the year 1580. It is
easy to see why, as Sidney handed these dream pages to his sister,
he smiled, entreating her indulgence. "Read it then at your idle
times, and the follies your good judgment will find in it, blame
not, but laugh at." Even for the Sidneys and the Pembrokes life was
not quite like that. And yet the life that we invent, the stories
we tell, as we sink back with half-shut eyes and pour forth our
irresponsible dreams, have perhaps some wild beauty; some eager
energy; we often reveal in them the distorted and decorated image
of what we soberly and secretly desire. Thus the Arcadia, by
wilfully flouting all contact with the fact, gains another reality.
When Sidney hinted that his friends would like the book for its
writer's sake, he meant perhaps that they would find there
something that he could say in no other form, as the shepherds
singing by the river's side will "deliver out, sometimes joys,
sometimes lamentations, sometimes challengings one of the other,
sometimes, under hidden forms, uttering such matters as otherwise
they durst not deal with". There may be under the disguise of the
Arcadia a real man trying to speak privately about something
that is close to his heart. But in the first freshness of the early
pages the disguise itself is enough to enchant us. We find
ourselves with shepherds in spring on those sands which "lie
against the Island of Cithera". Then, behold, something floats on
the waters. It is the body of a man, and he grasps to his breast a
small square coffer; and he is young and beautiful—"though he
were naked, his nakedness was to him an apparel"; and his name is
Musidorus; and he has lost his friend. So, warbling melodiously,
the shepherds revive the youth, and row out in a bark from the
haven in search of Pyrocles; and a stain appears on the sea, with
sparks and smoke issuing from it. For the ship upon which the two
princes Musidorus and Pyrocles were voyaging has caught fire; it
floats blazing on the water with a great store of rich things round
it, and many drowned bodies. "In sum, a defeat, where the conquered
kept both field and spoil: a shipwrack without storm or ill
footing: and a waste of fire in the midst of the water."
There in a little space we have some of the elements that are
woven together to compose this vast tapestry. We have beauty of
scene; a pictorial stillness; and something floating towards us,
not violently but slowly and gently in time to the sweet warbling
of the shepherds' voices. Now and again this crystallises into a
phrase that lingers and haunts the ear—"and a waste of fire
in the midst of the waters"; "having in their faces a certain
waiting sorrow". Now the murmur broadens and expands into some more
elaborate passage of description: "each pasture stored with sheep,
feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating
oratory crav'd the dam's comfort: here a shepherd's boy piping, as
though he should never be old: there a young shepherdess knitting,
and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her
hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music"—a
passage that reminds us of a famous description in Dorothy
Osborne's Letters.
Beauty of scene; stateliness of movement; sweetness of
sound—these are the graces that seem to reward the mind that
seeks enjoyment purely for its own sake. We are drawn on down the
winding paths of this impossible landscape because Sidney leads us
without any end in view but sheer delight in wandering. The
syllabling of the words even causes him the liveliest delight. Mere
rhythm we feel as we sweep over the smooth backs of the undulating
sentences intoxicates him. Words in themselves delight him. Look,
he seems to cry, as he picks up the glittering handfuls, can it be
true that there are such numbers of beautiful words lying about for
the asking? Why not use them, lavishly and abundantly? And so he
luxuriates. Lambs do not suck—"with bleating oratory [they]
craved the dam's comfort"; girls do not undress—they "take
away the eclipsing of their apparel"; a tree is not reflected in a
river—"it seemed she looked into it and dressed her green
locks by that running river". It is absurd; and yet there is a
world of difference between writing like this with zest and wonder
at the images that form upon one's pen and the writing of later
ages when the dew was off the language—witness the little
tremor that stirs and agitates a sentence that a more formal age
would have made coldly symmetrical:
And the boy fierce though beautiful; and beautiful, though
dying, not able to keep his falling feet, fell down to the earth,
which he bit for anger, repining at his fortune, and as long as he
could, resisting death, which might seem unwilling too; so long he
was in taking away his young struggling soul.
It is this inequality and elasticity that lend their freshness
to Sidney's vast pages. Often as we rush through them, half
laughing, half in protest, the desire comes upon us to shut the ear
of reason completely and lie back and listen to this unformed
babble of sound; this chorus of intoxicated voices singing madly
like birds round the house before anyone is up.
But it is easy to lay too much stress upon qualities that
delight us because they are lost. Sidney doubtless wrote the
Arcadia partly to while away the time, partly to exercise
his pen and experiment with the new instrument of the English
language. But even so he remained young and a man; even in Arcadia
the roads had ruts, and coaches were upset and ladies dislocated
their shoulders; even the Princes Musidorus and Pyrocles have
passions; Pamela and Philoclea, for all their sea-coloured satins
and nets strung with pearls, are women and can love. Thus we
stumble upon scenes that cannot be reeled off with a flowing pen;
there are moments where Sidney stopped and thought, like any other
novelist, what a real man or woman in this particular situation
would say; where his own emotions come suddenly to the surface and
light up the vague pastoral landscape with an incongruous glare.
For a moment we get a surprising combination; crude daylight
overpowers the silver lights of the tapers; shepherds and
princesses suddenly stop their warbling and speak a few rapid words
in their eager human voices.
...many times have I, leaning to yonder Palm, admired the
blessedness of it, that it could bear love without sense of pain;
many times, when my Master's cattle came hither to chew their cud
in this fresh place, I might see the young Bull testify his love;
but how? with proud looks and joyfulness. O wretched mankind (said
I then to myself) in whom wit (which should be the governor of his
welfare) become's the traitor to his blessedness: these beasts like
children to nature, inherit her blessings quietly; we like bastards
are laid abroad, even as foundlings, to be trained up by grief and
sorrow. Their minds grudge not at their bodies comfort, nor their
senses are letted from enjoying their objects; we have the
impediments of honour, and the torments of conscience.
The words ring strangely on the finicking, dandified lips of
Musidorus. There is Sidney's own anger in them and his pain. And
then the novelist Sidney suddenly opens his eyes. He watches Pamela
as she takes the jewel in the figure of a crab-fish to signify
"because it looks one way and goes another" that though he
pretended to love Mopsa his heart was Pamela's. And she takes it,
he notes,
with a calm carelessness letting each thing slide (just as we do
by their speeches who neither in matter nor person do any way
belong unto us) which kind of cold temper, mixt with that lightning
of her natural majesty, is of all others most terrible unto
me...
Had she despised him, had she hated him, it would have been
better.
But this cruel quietness, neither retiring to mislike, nor
proceeding to favour; gracious, but gracious still after one
manner; all her courtesies having this engraven in them, that what
is done, is for virtue's sake, not for the parties...This (I say)
heavenliness of hers...is so impossible to reach unto that I almost
begin to submit myself unto the tyranny of despair, not knowing any
way of persuasion...
—surely an acute and subtle observation made by a man who
had felt what he describes. For a moment the pale and legendary
figures, Gynecia, Philoclea, and Zelmane, become alive; their
featureless faces work with passion; Gynecia, realizing that she
loves her daughter's lover, foams into grandeur, "crying vehemently
Zelmane help me, O Zelmane have pity on me"; and the old King, in
whom the beautiful strange Amazon has awakened a senile amorosity,
shows himself old and foolish, looking "very curiously upon
himself, sometimes fetching a little skip, as if he had said his
strength had not yet forsaken him".
But that moment of illumination, as it dies down and the princes
once more resume their postures and the shepherds apply themselves
to their lutes, throws a curious light upon the book as a whole. We
realize more clearly the boundaries within which Sidney was
working. For a moment he could note and observe and record as
keenly and exactly as any modern novelist. And then, after this one
glimpse in our direction, he turns aside, as if he heard other
voices calling him and must obey their commands. In prose, he
bethinks himself, one must not use the common words of daily
speech. In a romance one must not make princes and princesses feel
like ordinary men and women. Humour is the attribute of peasants.
They can behave ridiculously; they can talk naturally; like Dametas
they can come "whistling, and counting upon his fingers, how many
load of hay seventeen fat oxen eat up on a year"; but the language
of great people must always be long-winded and abstract and full of
metaphors. Further, they must either be heroes of stainless virtue,
or villains untouched by humanity. Of human oddities and littleness
they must show no trace. Prose also must be careful to turn away
from what is actually before it. Sometimes for a moment in looking
at Nature one may fit the word to the sight; note the heron
"wagling" as it rises from the marsh, or observe the water-spaniel
hunting the duck "with a snuffling grace". But this realism is only
to be applied to Nature and animals and peasants. Prose, it seems,
is made for slow, noble, and generalized emotions; for the
description of wide landscapes; for the conveyance of long, equable
discourses uninterrupted for pages together by any other speaker.
Verse, on the other hand, had quite a different office. It is
curious to observe how, when Sidney wished to sum up, to strike
hard, to register a single and definite impression, he turns to
verse. Verse in the Arcadia performs something of the
function of dialogue in the modern novel. It breaks up the monotony
and strikes a high-light. In those snatches of song that are
scattered about the interminable adventures of Pyrocles and
Musidorus our interest is once more fanned into flame. Often the
realism and vigour of the verse comes with a shock after the drowsy
langour of the prose:
What needed so high spirits such mansions blind?
Or wrapt in flesh what do they here obtain,
But glorious name of wretched human kind?
Balls to the stars, and thralls to fortune's reign;
Turn'd from themselves, infected with their cage,
Where death is fear'd, and life is held with pain.
Like players plac't to fill a filthy stage...
—one wonders what the indolent princes and princesses will
make of that vehement speaking? Or of this:
A shop of shame, a Book where blots be rife,
This body is ...
This man, this talking beast, this walking tree.
—thus the poet turns upon his languid company as if he
loathed their self-complacent foppery; and yet must indulge them.
For though it is clear that the poet Sidney had shrewd
eyes—he talks of "hives of wisely painful bees", and knew
like any other country-bred Englishman "how shepherds spend their
days. At blow-point, hot-cockles or else at keels",—still he
must drone on about Plangus and Erona, and Queen Andromana and the
intrigues of Amphialus and his mother Cecropia in deference to his
audience. Incongruously enough, violent as they were in their
lives, with their plots and their poisonings, nothing can be too
sweet, too vague, too long-winded for those Elizabethan listeners.
Only the fact that Zelmane had received a blow from a lion's paw
that morning can shorten the story and suggest to Basilius that it
might be better to reserve the complaint of Klaius till another
day.
Which she, perceiving the song had already worn out much time,
and not knowing when Lamon would end, being even now stepping over
to a new matter, though much delighted with what was spoken,
willingly agreed unto. And so of all sides they went to recommend
themselves to the elder brother of death.
And as the story winds on its way, or rather as the succession
of stories fall on each other like soft snowflakes, one
obliterating the other, we are much tempted to follow their
example. Sleep weighs down our eyes. Half dreaming, half yawning,
we prepare to seek the elder brother of death. What, then, has
become of that first intoxicating sense of freedom? We who wished
to escape have been caught and enmeshed. Yet how easy it seemed in
the beginning to tell a story to amuse a sister—how
inspiriting to escape from here and now and wander wildly in a
world of lutes and roses! But alas, softness has weighed down our
steps; brambles have caught at our clothing. We have come to long
for some plain statement, and the decoration of the style, at first
so enchanting, has dulled and decayed. It is not difficult to find
the reason. High-spirited, flown with words, Sidney seized his pen
too carelessly. He had no notion when he set out where he was
going. Telling stories, he thought, was enough—one could
follow another interminably. But where there is no end in view
there is no sense of direction to draw us on. Nor, since it is part
of his scheme to keep his characters simply bad and simply good
without distinction, can he gain variety from the complexity of
character. To supply change and movement he must have recourse to
mystification. These changes of dress, these disguises of princes
as peasants, of men as women, serve instead of psychological
subtlety to relieve the stagnancy of people collected together with
nothing to talk about. But when the charm of that childish device
falls flat, there is no breath left to fill his sails. Who is
talking, and to whom, and about what we no longer feel sure. So
slack indeed becomes Sidney's grasp upon these ambling phantoms
that in the middle he has forgotten what his relation to them
is—is it "I" the author who is speaking or is it "I" the
character? No reader can be kept in bondage, whatever the grace and
the charm, when the ties between him and the writer are so
irresponsibly doffed and assumed. So by degrees the book floats
away into the thin air of limbo. It becomes one of those
half-forgotten and deserted places where the grasses grow over
fallen statues and the rain drips and the marble steps are green
with moss and vast weeds flourish in the flower-beds. And yet it is
a beautiful garden to wander in now and then; one stumbles over
lovely broken faces, and here and there a flower blooms and the
nightingale sings in the lilac-tree.
Thus when we come to the last page that Sidney wrote before he
gave up the hopeless attempt to finish the Arcadia, we pause
for a moment before we return the folio to its place on the bottom
shelf. In the Arcadia, as in some luminous globe, all the
seeds of English fiction lie latent. We can trace infinite
possibilities: it may take any one of many different directions.
Will it fix its gaze upon Greece and princes and princesses, and
seek as it might so nobly, the statuesque, the impersonal? Will it
keep to simple lines and great masses and the vast landscapes of
the epic? Or will it look closely and carefully at what is actually
before it? Will it take for its heroes Darnetas and Mopsa, ordinary
people of low birth and rough natural speech, and deal with the
normal course of daily human life? Or will it brush through those
barriers and penetrate within to the anguish and complexity of some
unhappy woman loving where she may not love; to the senile
absurdity of some old man tortured by an incongruous passion? Will
it make its dwelling in their psychology and the adventures of the
soul? All these possibilities are present in the
Arcadia—romance and realism, poetry and psychology.
But as if Sidney knew that he had broached a task too large for his
youth to execute, had bequeathed a legacy for other ages to
inherit, he put down his pen, midway, and left unfinished in all
its beauty and absurdity this attempt to while away the long days
at Wilton, telling a story to his sister.
There are many ways of approaching this classical volume; but
which shall we choose? Shall we begin by saying that, since Sidney
died at Zutphen leaving the Arcadia unfinished, great
changes had come over English life, and the novel had chosen, or
had been forced to choose, its direction? A middle class had come
into existence, able to read and anxious to read not only about the
loves of princes and princesses, but about themselves and the
details of their humdrum lives. Stretched upon a thousand pens,
prose had accommodated itself to the demand; it had fitted itself
to express the facts of life rather than the poetry. That is
certainly one way of approaching Robinson
Crusoe—through the development of the novel; but another
immediately suggests itself—through the life of the author.
Here too, in the heavenly pastures of biography, we may spend many
more hours than are needed to read the book itself from cover to
cover. The date of Defoe's birth, to begin with, is
doubtful—was it 1660 or 1661? Then again, did he spell his
name in one word or in two? And who were his ancestors? He is said
to have been a hosier; but what, after all, was a hosier in the
seventeenth century? He became a pamphleteer, and enjoyed the
confidence of William the Third; one of his pamphlets caused him to
be stood in the pillory and imprisoned at Newgate; he was employed
by Harley and later by Godolphin; he was the first of the hireling
journalists; he wrote innumerable pamphlets and articles; also
Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe; he had a wife and
six children; was spare in figure, with a hooked nose, a sharp
chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth. Nobody who has
any slight acquaintance with English literature needs to be told
how many hours can be spent and how many lives have been spent in
tracing the development of the novel and in examining the chins of
the novelists. Only now and then, as we turn from theory to
biography and from biography to theory, a doubt insinuates
itself—if we knew the very moment of Defoe's birth and whom
he loved and why, if we had by heart the history of the origin,
rise, growth, decline, and fall of the English novel from its
conception (say) in Egypt to its decease in the wilds (perhaps) of
Paraguay, should we suck an ounce of additional pleasure from
Robinson Crusoe or read it one whit more intelligently?
For the book itself remains. However we may wind and wriggle,
loiter and dally in our approach to books, a lonely battle waits us
at the end. There is a piece of business to be transacted between
writer and reader before any further dealings are possible, and to
be reminded in the middle of this private interview that Defoe sold
stockings, had brown hair, and was stood in the pillory is a
distraction and a worry. Our first task, and it is often formidable
enough, is to master his perspective. Until we know how the
novelist orders his world, the ornaments of that world, which the
critics press upon us, the adventures of the writer, to which
biographers draw attention, are superfluous possessions of which we
can make no use. All alone we must climb upon the novelist's
shoulders and gaze through his eyes until we, too, understand in
what order he ranges the large common objects upon which novelists
are fated to gaze: man and men; behind them Nature; and above them
that power which for convenience and brevity we may call God. And
at once confusion, misjudgement, and difficulty begin. Simple as
they appear to us, these objects can be made monstrous and indeed
unrecognizable by the manner in which the novelist relates them to
each other. It would seem to be true that people who live cheek by
jowl and breathe the same air vary enormously in their sense of
proportion; to one the human being is vast, the tree minute; to the
other, trees are huge and human beings insignificant little objects
in the background. So, in spite of the text-books, writers may live
at the same time and see nothing the same size. Here is Scott, for
example, with his mountains looming huge and his men therefore
drawn to scale; Jane Austen picking out the roses on her teacups to
match the wit of her dialogues; while Peacock bends over heaven and
earth one fantastic distorting mirror in which a tea-cup may be
Vesuvius or Vesuvius a tea-cup. Nevertheless Scott, Jane Austen,
and Peacock lived through the same years; they saw the same world;
they are covered in the text-books by the same stretch of literary
history. It is in their perspective that they are different. If,
then, it were granted us to grasp this firmly, for ourselves, the
battle would end in victory; and we could turn, secure in our
intimacy, to enjoy the various delights with which the critics and
biographers so generously supply us.
But here many difficulties arise. For we have our own vision of
the world; we have made it from our own experience and prejudices,
and it is therefore bound up with our own vanities and loves. It is
impossible not to feel injured and insulted if tricks are played
and our private harmony is upset. Thus when Jude the Obscure
appears or a new volume of Proust, the newspapers are flooded with
protests. Major Gibbs of Cheltenham would put a bullet through his
head tomorrow if life were as Hardy paints it; Miss Wiggs of
Hampstead must protest that though Proust's art is wonderful, the
real world, she thanks God, has nothing in common with the
distortions of a perverted Frenchman. Both the gentleman and the
lady are trying to control the novelist's perspective so that it
shall resemble and reinforce their own. But the great
writer—the Hardy or the Proust—goes on his way
regardless of the rights of private property; by the sweat of his
brow he brings order from chaos; he plants his tree there, and his
man here; he makes the figure of his deity remote or present as he
wills. In masterpieces—books, that is, where the vision is
clear and order has been achieved—he inflicts his own
perspective upon us so severely that as often as not we suffer
agonies—our vanity is injured because our own order is upset;
we are afraid because the old supports are being wrenched from us;
and we are bored—for what pleasure or amusement can be
plucked from a brand new idea? Yet from anger, fear, and boredom a
rare and lasting delight is sometimes born.
Robinson Crusoe, it may be, is a case in point. It is a
masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has
throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective. For
this reason he thwarts us and flouts us at every turn. Let us look
at the theme largely and loosely, comparing it with our
preconceptions. It is, we know, the story of a man who is thrown,
after many perils and adventures, alone upon a desert island. The
mere suggestion—peril and solitude and a desert
island—is enough to rouse in us the expectation of some far
land on the limits of the world; of the sun rising and the sun
setting; of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the
nature of society and the strange ways of men. Before we open the
book we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we
expect it to give us. We read; and we are rudely contradicted on
every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no
solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in
the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. We are told, that is
to say, that it was the 1st of September 1651; that the hero's name
is Robinson Crusoe; and that his father has the gout. Obviously,
then, we must alter our attitude. Reality, fact, substance is going
to dominate all that follows. We must hastily alter our proportions
throughout; Nature must furl her splendid purples; she is only the
giver of drought and water; man must be reduced to a struggling,
life-preserving animal; and God shrivel into a magistrate whose
seat, substantial and somewhat hard, is only a little way above the
horizon. Each sortie of ours in pursuit of information upon these
cardinal points of perspective—God, man, Nature—is
snubbed back with ruthless common sense. Robinson Crusoe thinks of
God: "sometimes I would expostulate with myself, why providence
should thus completely ruin its creatures...But something always
return'd swift upon me to check these thoughts." God does not
exist. He thinks of Nature, the fields "adorn'd with flowers and
grass, and full of very fine woods", but the important thing about
a wood is that it harbours an abundance of parrots who may be tamed
and taught to speak. Nature does not exist. He considers the dead,
whom he has killed himself. It is of the utmost importance that
they should be buried at once, for "they lay open to the sun and
would presently be offensive". Death does not exist. Nothing exists
except an earthenware pot. Finally, that is to say, we are forced
to drop our own preconceptions and to accept what Defoe himself
wishes to give us.
Let us then go back to the beginning and repeat again, "I was
born in the year 1632 in the city of York of a good family".
Nothing could be plainer, more matter of fact, than that beginning.
We are drawn on soberly to consider all the blessings of orderly,
industrious middle-class life. There is no greater good fortune we
are assured than to be born of the British middle class. The great
are to be pitied and so are the poor; both are exposed to
distempers and uneasiness; the middle station between the mean and
the great is the best; and its virtues—temperance,
moderation, quietness, and health—are the most desirable. It
was a sorry thing, then, when by some evil fate a middle-class
youth was bitten with the foolish love of adventure. So he proses
on, drawing, little by little, his own portrait, so that we never
forget it—imprinting upon us indelibly, for he never forgets
it either, his shrewdness, his caution, his love of order and
comfort and respectability; until by whatever means, we find
ourselves at sea, in a storm; and, peering out, everything is seen
precisely as it appears to Robinson Crusoe. The waves, the seamen,
the sky, the ship—all are seen through those shrewd,
middle-class, unimaginative eyes. There is no escaping him.
Everything appears as it would appear to that naturally cautious,
apprehensive, conventional, and solidly matter-of-fact
intelligence. He is incapable of enthusiasm. He has a natural
slight distaste for the sublimities of Nature. He suspects even
Providence of exaggeration. He is so busy and has such an eye to
the main chance that he notices only a tenth part of what is going
on round him. Everything is capable of a rational explanation, he
is sure, if only he had time to attend to it. We are much more
alarmed by the "vast great creatures" that swim out in the night
and surround his boat than he is. He at once takes his gun and
fires at them, and off they swim—whether they are lions or
not he really cannot say. Thus before we know it we are opening our
mouths wider and wider. We are swallowing monsters that we should
have jibbed at if they had been offered us by an imaginative and
flamboyant traveller. But anything that this sturdy middle-class
man notices can be taken for a fact. He is for ever counting his
barrels, and making sensible provisions for his water supply; nor
do we ever find him tripping even in a matter of detail. Has he
forgotten, we wonder, that he has a great lump of beeswax on board?
Not at all. But as he had already made candles out of it, it is not
nearly as great on page thirty-eight as it was on page
twenty-three. When for a wonder he leaves some inconsistency
hanging loose—why if the wild cats are so very tame are the
goats so very shy?—we are not seriously perturbed, for we are
sure that there was a reason, and a very good one, had he time to
give it us. But the pressure of life when one is fending entirely
for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter.
It is no crying one either. A man must have an eye to everything;
it is no time for raptures about Nature when the lightning may
explode one's gunpowder—it is imperative to seek a safer
lodging for it. And so by means of telling the truth undeviatingly
as it appears to him—by being a great artist and forgoing
this and daring that in order to give effect to his prime quality,
a sense of reality—he comes in the end to make common actions
dignified and common objects beautiful. To dig, to bake, to plant,
to build—how serious these simple occupations are; hatchets,
scissors, logs, axes—how beautiful these simple objects
become. Unimpeded by comment, the story marches on with magnificent
downright simplicity. Yet how could comment have made it more
impressive? It is true that he takes the opposite way from the
psychologist's—he describes the effect of emotion on the
body, not on the mind. But when he says how, in a moment of
anguish, he clinched his hands so that any soft thing would have
been crushed; how "my teeth in my head would strike together, and
set against one another so strong that for the time I could not
part them again", the effect is as deep as pages of analysis could
have made it. His own instinct in the matter is right. "Let the
naturalists", he says, "explain these things, and the reason and
manner of them; all I can say to them is, to describe the fact..."
If you are Defoe, certainly to describe the fact is enough; for the
fact is the right fact. By means of this genius for fact Defoe
achieves effects that are beyond any but the great masters of
descriptive prose. He has only to say a word or two about "the grey
of the morning" to paint vividly a windy dawn. A sense of
desolation and of the deaths of many men is conveyed by remarking
in the most prosaic way in the world, "I never saw them afterwards,
or any sign of them except three of their hats, one cap, and two
shoes that were not fellows". When at last he exclaims, "Then to
see how like a king I din'd too all alone, attended by my
servants"—his parrot and his dog and his two cats, we cannot
help but feel that all humanity is on a desert island
alone—though Defoe at once informs us, for he has a way of
snubbing off our enthusiasms, that the cats were not the same cats
that had come in the ship. Both of those were dead; these cats were
new cats, and as a matter of fact cats became very troublesome
before long from their fecundity, whereas dogs, oddly enough, did
not breed at all.
Thus Defoe, by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware
pot stands in the foreground, persuades us to see remote islands
and the solitudes of the human soul. By believing fixedly in the
solidity of the pot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other
element to his design; he has roped the whole universe into
harmony. And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why
the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not
satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all
his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and
tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?
It must sometimes strike the casual reader of English literature
that there is a bare season in it, sometimes like early spring in
our country-side. The trees stand out; the hills are unmuffled in
green; there is nothing to obscure the mass of the earth or the
lines of the branches. But we miss the tremor and murmur of June,
when the smallest wood seems full of movement, and one has only to
stand still to hear the whispering and the pattering of nimble,
inquisitive animals going about their affairs in the undergrowth.
So in English literature we have to wait till the sixteenth century
is over and the seventeenth well on its way before the bare
landscape becomes full of stir and quiver and we can fill in the
spaces between the great books with the voices of people
talking.
Doubtless great changes in psychology were needed and great
changes in material comfort—arm-chairs and carpets and good
roads—before it was possible for human beings to watch each
other curiously or to communicate their thoughts easily. And it may
be that our early literature owes something of its magnificence to
the fact that writing was an uncommon art, practised, rather for
fame than for money, by those whose gifts compelled them. Perhaps
the dissipation of our genius in biography, and journalism, and
letter- and memoir-writing has weakened its strength in any one
direction. However this may be, there is a bareness about an age
that has neither letter-writers nor biographers. Lives and
characters appear in stark outline. Donne, says Sir Edmund Gosse,
is inscrutable; and that is largely because, though we know what
Donne thought of Lady Bedford, we have not the slightest inkling
what Lady Bedford thought of Donne. She had no friend to whom she
described the effect of that strange visitor; nor, had she had a
confidante, could she have explained for what reasons Donne seemed
to her strange.
And the conditions that made it impossible for Boswell or Horace
Walpole to be born in the sixteenth century were obviously likely
to fall with far heavier force upon the other sex. Besides the
material difficulty—Donne's small house at Mitcham with its
thin walls and crying children typifies the discomfort in which the
Elizabethans lived—the woman was impeded also by her belief
that writing was an act unbefitting her sex. A great lady here and
there whose rank secured her the toleration and it may be the
adulation of a servile circle, might write and print her writings.
But the act was offensive to a woman of lower rank. "Sure the poore
woman is a little distracted, she could never bee soe ridiculous
else as to venture writeing book's and in verse too", Dorothy
Osborne exclaimed when the Duchess of Newcastle published one of
her books. For her own part, she added, "If I could not sleep this
fortnight I should not come to that". And the comment is the more
illuminating in that it was made by a woman of great literary gift.
Had she been born in 1827, Dorothy Osborne would have written
novels; had she been born in 1527, she would never have written at
all. But she was born in 1627, and at that date though writing
books was ridiculous for a woman there was nothing unseemly in
writing a letter. And so by degrees the silence is broken; we begin
to hear rustlings in the undergrowth; for the first time in English
literature we hear men and women talking together over the
fire.
But the art of letter-writing in its infancy was not the art
that has since filled so many delightful volumes. Men and women
were ceremoniously Sir and Madam; the language was still too rich
and stiff to turn and twist quickly and freely upon half a sheet of
notepaper. The art of letter-writing is often the art of
essay-writing in disguise. But such as it was, it was an art that a
woman could practise without unsexing herself. It was an art that
could be carried on at odd moments, by a father's sick-bed, among a
thousand interruptions, without exciting comment, anonymously as it
were, and often with the pretence that it served some useful
purpose. Yet into these innumerable letters, lost now for the most
part, went powers of observation and of wit that were later to take
rather a different shape in Evelina and in Pride and
Prejudice. They were only letters, yet some pride went to their
making. Dorothy, without admitting it, took pains with her own
writing and had views as to the nature of it: "...great Schollers
are not the best writer's (of Letters I mean, of books perhaps they
are)...all letters mee thinks should be free and easy as one's
discourse". She was in agreement with an old uncle of hers who
threw his standish at his secretary's head for saying "put pen to
paper" instead of simply "wrote". Yet there were limits, she
reflected, to free-and-easiness: "...many pritty things shuffled
together" do better spoken than in a letter. And so we come by a
form of literature, if Dorothy Osborne will let us call it so,
which is distinct from any other, and much to be regretted now that
it has gone from us, as it seems, for ever.
For Dorothy Osborne, as she filled her great sheets by her
father's bed or by the chimney-corner, gave a record of life,
gravely yet playfully, formally yet with intimacy, to a public of
one, but to a fastidious public, as the novelist can never give it,
or the historian either. Since it is her business to keep her lover
informed of what passes in her home, she must sketch the solemn Sir
Justinian Isham—Sir Solomon Justinian, she calls
him—the pompous widower with four daughters and a great
gloomy house in Northamptonshire who wished to marry her. "Lord
what would I give that I had a Lattin letter of his for you", she
exclaimed, in which he describes her to an Oxford friend and
specially commended her that she was "capable of being company and
conversation for him"; she must sketch her valetudinarian Cousin
Molle waking one morning in fear of the dropsy and hurrying to the
doctor at Cambridge; she must draw her own picture wandering in the
garden at night and smelling the "Jessomin", "and yet I was not
pleased" because Temple was not with her. Any gossip that comes her
way is sent on to amuse her lover. Lady Sunderland, for instance,
has condescended to marry plain Mr. Smith, who treats her like a
princess, which Sir Justinian thinks a bad precedent for wives. But
Lady Sunderland tells everyone she married him out of pity, and
that, Dorothy comments, "was the pittyfull'st sayeing that ever I
heard". Soon we have picked up enough about all her friends to
snatch eagerly at any further addition to the picture which is
forming in our mind's eye.
Indeed, our glimpse of the society of Bedfordshire in the
seventeenth century is the more intriguing for its intermittency.
In they come and out they go—Sir Justinian and Lady Diana,
Mr. Smith and his countess—and we never know when or whether
we shall hear of them again. But with all this haphazardry, the
Letters, like the letters of all born letter-writers,
provide their own continuity. They make us feel that we have our
seat in the depths of Dorothy's mind, at the heart of the pageant
which unfolds itself page by page as we read. For she possesses
indisputably the gift which counts for more in letter-writing than
wit or brilliance or traffic with great people. By being herself
without effort or emphasis, she envelops all these odds and ends in
the flow of her own personality. It was a character that was both
attractive and a little obscure. Phrase by phrase we come closer
into touch with it. Of the womanly virtues that befitted her age
she shows little trace. She says nothing of sewing or baking. She
was a little indolent by temperament. She browsed casually on vast
French romances. She roams the commons, loitering to hear the
milkmaids sing; she walks in the garden by the side of a small
river, "where I sitt downe and wish you were with mee". She was apt
to fall silent in company and dream over the fire till some talk of
flying, perhaps, roused her, and she made her brother laugh by
asking what they were saying about flying, for the thought had
struck her, if she could fly she could be with Temple. Gravity,
melancholy were in her blood. She looked, her mother used to say,
as if all her friends were dead. She is oppressed by a sense of
fortune and its tyranny and the vanity of things and the
uselessness of effort. Her mother and sister were grave women too,
the sister famed for her letters, but fonder of books than of
company, the mother "counted as wise a woman as most in England",
but sardonic. "I have lived to see that 'tis almost impossible to
think People worse than they are and soe will you"—Dorothy
could remember her mother saying that. To assuage her spleen,
Dorothy herself had to visit the wells at Epsom and to drink water
that steel had stood in.
With such a temperament her humour naturally took the form of
irony rather than of wit. She loved to mock her lover and to pour a
fine raillery over the pomps and ceremonies of existence. Pride of
birth she laughed at. Pompous old men were fine subjects for her
satire. A dull sermon moved her to laughter. She saw through
parties; she saw through ceremonies; she saw through worldliness
and display. But with all this clearsightedness there was something
that she did not see through. She dreaded with a shrinking that was
scarcely sane the ridicule of the world. The meddling of aunts and
the tyranny of brothers exasperated her. "I would live in a hollow
Tree", she said, "to avoyde them." A husband kissing his wife in
public seemed to her as "ill a sight as one would wish to see".
Though she cared no more whether people praised her beauty or her
wit than whether "they think my name Eliz: or Dor:", a word of
gossip about her own behaviour would set her in a quiver. Thus when
it came to proving before the eyes of the world that she loved a
poor man and was prepared to marry him, she could not do it. "I
confess that I have an humor that will not suffer mee to Expose
myself to People's Scorne", she wrote. She could be "sattisfyed
within as narrow a compasse as that of any person liveing of my
rank", but ridicule was intolerable to her. She shrank from any
extravagance that could draw the censure of the world upon her. It
was a weakness for which Temple had sometimes to reprove her.
For Temple's character emerges more and more clearly as the
letters go on—it is a proof of Dorothy's gift as a
correspondent. A good letter-writer so takes the colour of the
reader at the other end, that from reading the one we can imagine
the other. As she argues, as she reasons, we hear Temple almost as
clearly as we hear Dorothy herself. He was in many ways the
opposite of her. He drew out her melancholy by rebutting it; he
made her defend her dislike of marriage by opposing it. Of the two
Temple was by far the more robust and positive. Yet there was
perhaps something—a little hardness, a little
conceit—that justified her brother's dislike of him. He
called Temple the "proudest imperious insulting ill-natured man
that ever was". But, in the eyes of Dorothy, Temple had qualities
that none of her other suitors possessed. He was not a mere country
gentleman, nor a pompous Justice of the Peace, nor a town gallant,
making love to every woman he met, nor a travelled Monsieur; for
had he been any one of these things, Dorothy, with her quick sense
of the ridiculous, would have had none of him. To her he had some
charm, some sympathy, that the others lacked; she could write to
him whatever came into her head; she was at her best with him; she
loved him; she respected him. Yet suddenly she declared that marry
him she would not. She turned violently against marriage indeed,
and cited failure after failure. If people knew each other before
marriage, she thought, there would be an end of it. Passion was the
most brutish and tyrannical of all our senses. Passion had made
Lady Anne Blount the "talk of all the footmen and Boy's in the
street". Passion had been the undoing of the lovely Lady
Izabella—what use was her beauty now married to "that beast
with all his estate"? Torn asunder by her brother's anger, by
Temple's jealousy, and by her own dread of ridicule, she wished for
nothing but to be left to find "an early and a quiet grave". That
Temple overcame her scruples and overrode her brother's opposition
is much to the credit of his character. Yet it is an act that we
can hardly help deploring. Married to Temple, she wrote to him no
longer. The letters almost immediately cease. The whole world that
Dorothy had brought into existence is extinguished. It is then that
we realise how round and populous and stirring that world has
become. Under the warmth of her affection for Temple the stiffness
had gone out of her pen. Writing half asleep by her father's side,
snatching the back of an old letter to write upon, she had come to
write easily though always with the dignity proper to that age, of
the Lady Dianas, and the Ishams, of the aunts and the
uncles—how they come, how they go; what they say; whether she
finds them dull, laughable, charming, or much as usual. More than
that, she has suggested, writing her mind out to Temple, the deeper
relationships, the more private moods, that gave her life its
conflict and its consolation—her brother's tyranny; her own
moodiness and melancholy; the sweetness of walking in the garden at
night; of sitting lost in thought by the river; of longing for a
letter and finding one. All this is around us; we are deep in this
world, seizing its hints and suggestions when, in the moment, the
scene is blotted out. She married, and her husband was a rising
diplomat. She had to follow his fortunes in Brussels, at The Hague,
wherever they called him. Seven children were born and seven
children died "almost all in their cradle". Innumerable duties and
responsibilities fell to the lot of the girl who had made fun of
pomp and ceremony, who loved privacy and had wished to live
secluded out of the world and "grow old together in our little
cottage". Now she was mistress of her husband's house at The Hague
with its splendid buffet of plate. She was his confidante in the
many troubles of his difficult career. She stayed behind in London
to negotiate if possible the payment of his arrears of salary. When
her yacht was fired on, she behaved, the King said, with greater
courage than the captain himself. She was everything that the wife
of an ambassador should be: she was everything, too, that the wife
of a man retired from the public service should be. And troubles
came upon them—a daughter died; a son, inheriting perhaps his
mother's melancholy, filled his boots with stones and leapt into
the Thames. So the years passed; very full, very active, very
troubled. But Dorothy maintained her silence.
At last, however, a strange young man came to Moor Park as
secretary to her husband. He was difficult, ill-mannered, and quick
to take offence. But it is through Swift's eyes that we see Dorothy
once more in the last years of her life. "Mild Dorothea, peaceful,
wise, and great", Swift called her; but the light falls upon a
ghost. We do not know that silent lady. We cannot connect her after
all these years with the girl who poured her heart out to her
lover. "Peaceful, wise, and great"—she was none of those
things when we last met her, and much though we honour the
admirable ambassadress who made her husband's career her own, there
are moments when we would exchange all the benefits of the Triple
Alliance and all the glories of the Treaty of Nimuegen for the
letters that Dorothy did not write.
In any highly civilised society disguise plays so large a part,
politeness is so essential, that to throw off the ceremonies and
conventions and talk a "little language" for one or two to
understand, is as much a necessity as a breath of air in a hot
room. The reserved, the powerful, the admired, have the most need
of such a refuge. Swift himself found it so. The proudest of men
coming home from the company of great men who praised him, of
lovely women who flattered him, from intrigue and politics, put all
that aside, settled himself comfortably in bed, pursed his severe
lips into baby language and prattled to his "two monkies", his
"dear Sirrahs", his "naughty rogues" on the other side of the Irish
Channel.
Well, let me see you now again. My wax candle's almost out, but
however I'll begin. Well then don't be so tedious, Mr. Presto; what
can you say to MD's letter? Make haste, have done with your
preambles—why, I say, I am glad you are so often abroad.
So long as Swift wrote to Stella in that strain, carelessly,
illegibly, for "methinks when I write plain, I do not know how, but
we are not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug
...", Stella had no need to be jealous. It was true that she was
wearing away the flower of her youth in Ireland with Rebecca
Dingley, who wore hinged spectacles, consumed large quantities of
Brazil tobacco, and stumbled over her petticoats as she walked.
Further, the conditions in which the two ladies lived, for ever in
Swift's company when he was at home, occupying his house when he
was absent, gave rise to gossip; so that though Stella never saw
him except in Mrs. Dingley's presence, she was one of those
ambiguous women who live chiefly in the society of the other sex.
But surely it was well worth while. The packets kept coming from
England, each sheet written to the rim in Swift's crabbed little
hand, which she imitated to perfection, full of nonsense words, and
capital letters, and hints which no one but Stella could
understand, and secrets which Stella was to keep, and little
commissions which Stella was to execute. Tobacco came for Dingley,
and chocolate and silk aprons for Stella. Whatever people might
say, surely it was well worth while.
Of this Presto, who was so different from that formidable
character "t'other I", the world knew nothing. The world knew only
that Swift was over in England again, soliciting the new Tory
government on behalf of the Irish Church for those First Fruits
which he had begged the Whigs in vain to restore. The business was
soon accomplished; nothing indeed could exceed the cordiality and
affection with which Harley and St. John greeted him; and now the
world saw what even in those days of small societies and individual
pre-eminence must have been a sight to startle and amaze—the
"mad parson", who had marched up and down the coffee-houses in
silence and unknown a few years ago, admitted to the inmost
councils of State; the penniless boy who was not allowed to sit
down at table with Sir William Temple dining with the highest
Ministers of the Crown, making dukes do his bidding, and so run
after for his good offices that his servant's chief duty was to
know how to keep people out. Addison himself forced his way up only
by pretending that he was a gentleman come to pay a bill. For the
time being Swift was omnipotent. Nobody could buy his services;
everybody feared his pen. He went to Court, and "am so proud I make
all the lords come up to me". The Queen wished to hear him preach;
Harley and St. John added their entreaties; but he refused. When
Mr. Secretary one night dared show his temper, Swift called upon
him and warned him
never to appear cold to me, for I would not be treated like a
schoolboy...He took all right; said I had reason...would have had
me dine with him at Mrs. Masham's brother, to make up matters; but
I would not. I don't know, but I would not.
He scribbled all this down to Stella without exultation or
vanity. That he should command and dictate, prove himself the peer
of great men and make rank abase itself before him, called for no
comment on his part or on hers. Had she not known him years ago at
Moor Park and seen him lose his temper with Sir William Temple, and
guessed his greatness and heard from his own lips what he planned
and hoped? Did she not know better than anyone how strangely good
and bad were blent in him and all his foibles and eccentricities of
temper? He scandalised the lords with whom he dined by his
stinginess, picked the coals off his fire, saved halfpence on
coaches; and yet by the help of these very economies he practised,
she knew, the most considerate and secret of charities—he
gave poor Patty Rolt "a pistole to help her a little forward
against she goes to board in the country"; he took twenty guineas
to young Harrison, the sick poet, in his garret. She alone knew how
he could be coarse in his speech and yet delicate in his behaviour;
how he could be cynical superficially and yet cherish a depth of
feeling which she had never met with in any other human being. They
knew each other in and out; the good and the bad, the deep and the
trivial; so that without effort or concealment he could use those
precious moments late at night or the first thing on waking to pour
out upon her the whole story of his day, with its charities and
meannesses, its affections and ambitions and despairs, as though he
were thinking aloud.
With such proof of his affection, admitted to intimacy with this
Presto whom no one else in the world knew, Stella had no cause to
be jealous. It was perhaps the opposite that happened. As she read
the crowded pages, she could see him and hear him and imagine so
exactly the impression that he must be making on all these fine
people that she fell more deeply in love with him than ever. Not
only was he courted and flattered by the great; everybody seemed to
call upon him when they were in trouble. There was "young
Harrison"; he worried to find him ill and penniless; carried him
off to Knightsbridge; took him a hundred pounds only to find that
he was dead an hour before. "Think what grief this is to me!...I
could not dine with Lord Treasurer, nor anywhere else; but got a
bit of meat toward evening." She could imagine the strange scene,
that November morning, when the Duke of Hamilton was killed in Hyde
Park, and Swift went at once to the Duchess and sat with her for
two hours and heard her rage and storm and rail; and took her
affairs, too, on his shoulders as if it were his natural office,
and none could dispute his place in the house of mourning. "She has
moved my very soul", he said. When young Lady Ashburnham died he
burst out, "I hate life when I think it exposed to such accidents;
and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth, while
such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a
blessing". And then, with that instinct to rend and tear his own
emotions which made him angry in the midst of his pity, he would
round upon the mourners, even the mother and sister of the dead
woman, and part them as they cried together and complain how
"people will pretend to grieve more than they really do, and that
takes off from their true grief".
All this was poured forth freely to Stella; the gloom and the
anger, the kindness and the coarseness and the genial love of
little ordinary human things. To her he showed himself fatherly and
brotherly; he laughed at her spelling; he scolded her about her
health; he directed her business affairs. He gossiped and chatted
with her. They had a fund of memories in common. They had spent
many happy hours together. "Do not you remember I used to come into
your chamber and turn Stella out of her chair, and rake up the fire
in a cold morning and cry uth, uth, uth!" She was often in
his mind; he wondered if she was out walking when he was; when
Prior abused one of his puns he remembered Stella's puns and how
vile they were; he compared his life in London with hers in Ireland
and wondered when they would be together again. And if this was the
influence of Stella upon Swift in town among all the wits, the
influence of Swift upon Stella marooned in an Irish village alone
with Dingley was far greater. He had taught her all the little
learning she had when she was a child and he a young man years ago
at Moor Park. His influence was everywhere—upon her mind,
upon her affections, upon the books she read and the hand she
wrote, upon the friends she made and the suitors she rejected.
Indeed, he was half responsible for her being.
But the woman he had chosen was no insipid slave. She had a
character of her own. She was capable of thinking for herself. She
was aloof, a severe critic for all her grace and sympathy, a little
formidable perhaps with her love of plain speaking and her fiery
temper and her fearlessness in saying what she thought. But with
all her gifts she was little known. Her slender means and feeble
health and dubious social standing made her way of life very
modest. The society which gathered round her came for the simple
pleasure of talking to a woman who listened and understood and said
very little herself, but in the most agreeable of voices and
generally "the best thing that was said in the company". For the
rest she was not learned. Her health had prevented her from serious
study, and though she had run over a great variety of subjects and
had a fine severe taste in letters, what she did read did not stick
in her mind. She had been extravagant as a girl, and flung her
money about until her good sense took control of her, and now she
lived with the utmost frugality. "Five nothings on five plates of
delf" made her supper. Attractive, if not beautiful, with her fine
dark eyes and her raven black hair, she dressed very plainly, and
thus contrived to lay by enough to help the poor and to bestow upon
her friends (it was an extravagance that she could not resist) "the
most agreeable presents in the world". Swift never knew her equal
in that art, "although it be an affair of as delicate a nature as
most in the course of life". She had in addition that sincerity
which Swift called "honour", and in spite of the weakness of her
body "the personal courage of a hero". Once when a robber came to
her window, she had shot him through the body with her own hand.
Such, then, was the influence which worked on Swift as he wrote;
such the presence that mingled with the thought of his fruit trees
and the willows and the trout stream at Laracor when he saw the
trees budding in St. James's Park and heard the politicians wrangle
at Westminster. Unknown to all of them, he had his retreat; and if
the Ministers again played him false, and once more, after making
his friend's fortunes, he went empty-handed away, then after all he
could retire to Ireland and to Stella and have "no shuddering at
all" at the thought.
But Stella was the last woman in the world to press her claims.
None knew better than she that Swift loved power and the company of
men: that though he had his moods of tenderness and his fierce
spasms of disgust at society, still for the most part he infinitely
preferred the dust and bustle of London to all the trout streams
and cherry trees in the world. Above all, he hated interference. If
anyone laid a finger upon his liberty or hinted the least threat to
his independence, were they men or women, queens or kitchen-maids,
he turned upon them with a ferocity which made a savage of him on
the spot. Harley once dared to offer him a bank-note; Miss Waring
dared hint that the obstacles to their marriage were now removed.
Both were chastised, the woman brutally. But Stella knew better
than to invite such treatment. Stella had learnt patience; Stella
had learnt discretion. Even in a matter like this of staying in
London or coming back to Ireland she allowed him every latitude.
She asked nothing for herself and therefore got more than she
asked. Swift was half annoyed:
...your generosity makes me mad; I know you repine inwardly at
Presto's absence; you think he has broken his word, of coming in
three months, and that this is always his trick: and now Stella
says, she does not see possibly how I can come away in haste, and
that MD is satisfied, etc. An't you a rogue to overpower me
thus?
But it was thus that she kept him. Again and again he burst into
language of intense affection:
Farewell dear Sirrahs, dearest lives: there is peace and quiet
with MD, and nowhere else...Farewell again, dearest rogues: I am
never happy, but when I write or think of MD...You are as welcome
as my blood to every farthing I have in the world: and all that
grieves me is, I am not richer, for MD's sake.
One thing alone dashed the pleasure that such words gave her. It
was always in the plural that he spoke of her; it was always
"dearest Sirrahs, dearest lives"; MD stood for Stella and Mrs.
Dingley together. Swift and Stella were never alone. Grant that
this was for form's sake merely, grant that the presence of Mrs.
Dingley, busy with her keys and her lap-dog and never listening to
a word that was said to her, was a form too. But why should such
forms be necessary? Why impose a strain that wasted her health and
half spoilt her pleasure and kept "perfect friends" who were happy
only in each other's company apart? Why indeed? There was a reason;
a secret that Stella knew; a secret that Stella did not impart.
Divided they had to be. Since, then, no bond bound them, since she
was afraid to lay the least claim upon her friend, all the more
jealously must she have searched into his words and analysed his
conduct to ascertain the temper of his mood and acquaint herself
instantly with the least change in it. So long as he told her
frankly of his "favourites" and showed himself the bluff tyrant who
required every woman to make advances to him, who lectured fine
ladies and let them tease him, all was well. There was nothing in
that to rouse her suspicions. Lady Berkeley might steal his hat;
the Duchess of Hamilton might lay bare her agony; and Stella, who
was kind to her sex, laughed with the one and grieved with the
other.
But were there traces in the Journal of a different sort
of influence—something far more dangerous because more equal
and more intimate? Suppose that there were some woman of Swift's
own station, a girl, like the girl that Stella herself had been
when Swift first knew her, dissatisfied with the ordinary way of
life, eager, as Stella put it, to know right from wrong, gifted,
witty, and untaught—she indeed, if she existed, might be a
rival to be feared. But was there such a rival? If so, it was plain
that there would be no mention of her in the Journal.
Instead, there would be hesitations, excuses, an occasional
uneasiness and embarrassment when, in the midst of writing freely
and fully, Swift was brought to a stop by something that he could
not say. Indeed, he had only been a month or two in England when
some such silence roused Stella's suspicions. Who was it, she
asked, that boarded near him, that he dined with now and then? "I
know no such person," Swift replied; "I do not dine with boarders.
What the pox! You know whom I have dined with every day since I
left you, better than I do. What do you mean, Sirrah?" But he knew
what she meant: she meant Mrs. Vanhomrigh, the widow who lived near
him; she meant her daughter Esther. "The Vans" kept coming again
and again after that in the Journal. Swift was too proud to
conceal the fact that he saw them, but he sought nine times out of
ten to excuse it. When he was in Suffolk Street the Vanhomrighs
were in St. James's Street and thus saved him a walk. When he was
in Chelsea they were in London, and it was convenient to keep his
best gown and periwig there. Sometimes the heat kept him there and
sometimes the rain; now they were playing cards, and young Lady
Ashburnham reminded him so much of Stella that he stayed on to help
her. Sometimes he stayed out of listlessness; again he stayed
because he was very busy and they were simple people who did not
stand on ceremony. At the same time Stella had only to hint that
these Vanhomrighs were people of no consequence for him to retort,
"Why, they keep as good female company as I do male...I saw two
lady Bettys there this afternoon." In short, to tell the whole
truth, to write whatever came into his head in the old free way,
was no longer easy.
Indeed, the whole situation was full of difficulty. No man
detested falsehood more than Swift or loved truth more
whole-heartedly. Yet here he was compelled to hedge, to hide, and
to prevaricate. Again, it had become essential to him to have some
"sluttery" or private chamber where he could relax and unbend and
be Presto and not "t'other I". Stella satisfied this need as no one
else could. But then Stella was in Ireland; Vanessa was on the
spot. She was younger and fresher; she too had her charms. She too
could be taught and improved and scolded into maturity as Stella
had been. Obviously Swift's influence upon her was all to the good.
And so with Stella in Ireland and Vanessa in London, why should it
not be possible to enjoy what each could give him, confer benefits
on both and do no serious harm to either? It seemed possible; at
any rate he allowed himself to make the experiment. Stella, after
all, had contrived for many years to make shift with her portion;
Stella had never complained of her lot.
But Vanessa was not Stella. She was younger, more vehement, less
disciplined, less wise. She had no Mrs. Dingley to restrain her.
She had no memories of the past to solace her. She had no journals
coming day by day to comfort her. She loved Swift and she knew no
reason why she should not say so. Had he not himself taught her "to
act what was right, and not to mind what the world said"? Thus when
some obstacle impeded her, when some mysterious secret came between
them, she had the unwisdom to question him. "Pray what can be wrong
in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? I can't imagine."
"You have taught me to distinguish," she burst out, "and then you
leave me miserable." Finally in her anguish and her bewilderment
she had the temerity to force herself upon Stella. She wrote and
demanded to be told the truth—what was Stella's connexion
with Swift? But it was Swift himself who enlightened her. And when
the full force of those bright blue eyes blazed upon her, when he
flung her letter on the table and glared at her and said nothing
and rode off, her life was ended. It was no figure of speech when
she said that "his killing, killing words" were worse than the rack
to her; when she cried out that there was "something in your look
so awful that it strikes me dumb". Within a few weeks of that
interview she was dead; she had vanished, to become one of those
uneasy ghosts who haunted the troubled background of Stella's life,
peopling its solitude with fears.
Stella was left to enjoy her intimacy alone. She lived on to
practise those sad arts by which she kept her friend at her side
until, worn out with the strain and the concealment, with Mrs.
Dingley and her lap-dogs, with the perpetual fears and
frustrations, she too died. As they buried her, Swift sat in a back
room away from the lights in the churchyard and wrote an account of
the character of "the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend,
that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with". Years
passed; insanity overcame him; he exploded in violent outbursts of
mad rage. Then by degrees he fell silent. Once they caught him
murmuring. "I am what I am", they heard him say.
Tristram Shandy, though it is Sterne's first novel, was
written at a time when many have written their twentieth, that is,
when he was forty-five years old. But it bears every sign of
maturity. No young writer could have dared to take such liberties
with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety and the
longstanding tradition of how a novel should be written. It needed
a strong dose of the assurance of middle age and its indifference
to censure to run such risks of shocking the lettered by the
unconventionality of one's style, and the respectable by the
irregularity of one's morals. But the risk was run and the success
was prodigious. All the great, all the fastidious, were enchanted.
Sterne became the idol of the town. Only in the roar of laughter
and applause which greeted the book, the voice of the simple-minded
public at large was to be heard protesting that it was a scandal
coming from a clergyman and that the Archbishop of York ought to
administer, to say the least of it, a scolding. The Archbishop, it
seems, did nothing. But Sterne, however little he let it show on
the surface, laid the criticism to heart. That heart too had been
afflicted since the publication of Tristram Shandy. Eliza
Draper, the object of his passion, had sailed to join her husband
in Bombay. In his next book Sterne was determined to give effect to
the change that had come over him, and to prove, not only the
brilliance of his wit, but the depths of his sensibility. In his
own words, "my design in it was to teach us to love the world and
our fellow creatures better than we do". It was with such motives
animating him that he sat down to write that narrative of a little
tour in France which he called A Sentimental Journey.
But if it were possible for Sterne to correct his manners, it
was impossible for him to correct his style. That had become as
much a part of himself as his large nose or his brilliant eyes.
With the first words—They order, said I, this matter better
in France—we are in the world of Tristram Shandy. It
is a world in which anything may happen. We hardly know what jest,
what jibe, what flash of poetry is not going to glance suddenly
through the gap which this astonishingly agile pen has cut in the
thick-set hedge of English prose. Is Sterne himself responsible?
Does he know what he is going to say next for all his resolve to be
on his best behaviour this time? The jerky, disconnected sentences
are as rapid and it would seem as little under control as the
phrases that fall from the lips of a brilliant talker. The very
punctuation is that of speech, not writing, and brings the sound
and associations of the speaking voice in with it. The order of the
ideas, their suddenness and irrelevancy, is more true to life than
to literature. There is a privacy in this intercourse which allows
things to slip out unreproved that would have been in doubtful
taste had they been spoken in public. Under the influence of this
extraordinary style the book becomes semi-transparent. The usual
ceremonies and conventions which keep reader and writer at arm's
length disappear. We are as close to life as we can be.
That Sterne achieved this illusion only by the use of extreme
art and extraordinary pains is obvious without going to his
manuscript to prove it. For though the writer is always haunted by
the belief that somehow it must be possible to brush aside the
ceremonies and conventions of writing and to speak to the reader as
directly as by word of mouth, anyone who has tried the experiment
has either been struck dumb by the difficulty, or waylaid into
disorder and diffusity unutterable. Sterne somehow brought off the
astonishing combination. No writing seems to flow more exactly into
the very folds and creases of the individual mind, to express its
changing moods, to answer its lightest whim and impulse, and yet
the result is perfectly precise and composed. The utmost fluidity
exists with the utmost permanence. It is as if the tide raced over
the beach hither and thither and left every ripple and eddy cut on
the sand in marble.
Nobody, of course, stood more in need of the liberty to be
himself than Sterne. For while there are writers whose gift is
impersonal, so that a Tolstoy, for example, can create a character
and leave us alone with it, Sterne must always be there in person
to help us in our intercourse. Little or nothing of A
Sentimental Journey would be left if all that we call Sterne
himself were extracted from it. He has no valuable information to
give, no reasoned philosophy to impart. He left London, he tells
us, "with so much precipitation that it never enter'd my mind that
we were at war with France". He has nothing to say of pictures or
churches or the misery or well-being of the countryside. He was
travelling in France indeed, but the road was often through his own
mind, and his chief adventures were not with brigands and
precipices but with the emotions of his own heart.
This change in the angle of vision was in itself a daring
innovation. Hitherto, the traveller had observed certain laws of
proportion and perspective. The Cathedral had always been a vast
building in any book of travels and the man a little figure,
properly diminutive, by its side. But Sterne was quite capable of
omitting the Cathedral altogether. A girl with a green satin purse
might be much more important than Notre-Dame. For there is, he
seems to hint, no universal scale of values. A girl may be more
interesting than a cathedral; a dead monkey more instructive than a
living philosopher. It is all a question of one's point of view.
Sterne's eyes were so adjusted that small things often bulked
larger in them than big. The talk of a barber about the buckle of
his wig told him more about the character of the French than the
grandiloquence of her statesmen.
I think I can see the precise and distinguishing marks of
national characters more in these nonsensical minutiae, than
in the most important matters of state; where great men of all
nations talk and stalk so much alike, that I would not give
nine-pence to chuse amongst them.
So too if one wishes to seize the essence of things as a
sentimental traveller should, one should seek for it, not at broad
noonday in large and open streets, but in an unobserved corner up a
dark entry. One should cultivate a kind of shorthand which renders
the several turns of looks and limbs into plain words. It was an
art that Sterne had long trained himself to practise.
For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically that
when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way;
and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three
words had been said, and have brought off twenty different
dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and swore
to.
It is thus that Sterne transfers our interest from the outer to
the inner. It is no use going to the guide-book; we must consult
our own minds; only they can tell us what is the comparative
importance of a cathedral, of a donkey, and of a girl with a green
satin purse. In this preference for the windings of his own mind to
the guide-book and its hammered high road, Sterne is singularly of
our own age. In this interest in silence rather than in speech
Sterne is the forerunner of the moderns. And for these reasons he
is on far more intimate terms with us today than his great
contemporaries the Richardsons and the Fieldings.
Yet there is a difference. For all his interest in psychology
Sterne was far more nimble and less profound than the masters of
this somewhat sedentary school have since become. He is after all
telling a story, pursuing a journey, however arbitrary and zigzag
his methods. For all our divagations, we do make the distance
between Calais and Modena within the space of a very few pages.
Interested as he was in the way in which he saw things, the things
themselves also interested him acutely. His choice is capricious
and individual, but no realist could be more brilliantly successful
in rendering the impression of the moment. A Sentimental
Journey is a succession of portraits—the Monk, the lady,
the Chevalier selling pâtés, the girl in the
bookshop, La Fleur in his new breeches;—it is a succession of
scenes. And though the flight of this erratic mind is as zigzag as
a dragon-fly's, one cannot deny that this dragon-fly has some
method in its flight, and chooses the flowers not at random but for
some exquisite harmony or for some brilliant discord. We laugh,
cry, sneer, sympathize by turns. We change from one emotion to its
opposite in the twinkling of an eye. This light attachment to the
accepted reality, this neglect of the orderly sequence of
narrative, allows Sterne almost the licence of a poet. He can
express ideas which ordinary novelists would have to ignore in
language which, even if the ordinary novelist could command it,
would look intolerably outlandish upon his page.
I walked up gravely to the window in my dusty black coat, and
looking through the glass saw all the world in yellow, blue, and
green, running at the ring of pleasure.—The old with broken
lances, and in helmets which had lost their vizards—the young
in armour bright which shone like gold, beplumed with each gay
feather of the east—all—all tilting at it like
fascinated knights in tournaments of yore for fame and love.
There are many passages of such pure poetry in Sterne. One can
cut them out and read them apart from the text, and yet—for
Sterne was a master of the art of contrast—they lie
harmoniously side by side on the printed page. His freshness, his
buoyancy, his perpetual power to surprise and startle are the
result of these contrasts. He leads us to the very brink of some
deep precipice of the soul; we snatch one short glance into its
depths; next moment, we are whisked round to look at the green
pastures glowing on the other side.
If Sterne distresses us, it is for another reason. And here the
blame rests partly at least upon the public—the public which
had been shocked, which had cried out after the publication of
Tristram Shandy that the writer was a cynic who deserved to
be unfrocked. Sterne, unfortunately, thought it necessary to
reply.
The world has imagined [he told Lord Shelburne] because I wrote
Tristram Shandy, that I was myself more Shandean than I
really ever was...If it (A Sentimental Journey) is not
thought a chaste book, mercy on them that read it, for they must
have warm imaginations, indeed!
Thus in A Sentimental Journey we are never allowed to
forget that Sterne is above all things sensitive, sympathetic,
humane; that above all things he prizes the decencies, the
simplicities of the human heart. And directly a writer sets out to
prove himself this or that our suspicions are aroused. For the
little extra stress he lays on the quality he desires us to see in
him, coarsens it and over-paints it, so that instead of humour, we
get farce, and instead of sentiment, sentimentality. Here, instead
of being convinced of the tenderness of Sterne's heart—which
in Tristram Shandy was never in question—we begin to
doubt it. For we feel that Sterne is thinking not of the thing
itself but of its effect upon our opinion of him. The beggars
gather round him and he gives the pauvre honteux more than
he had meant to. But his mind is not solely and simply on the
beggars; his mind is partly on us, to see that we appreciate his
goodness. Thus his conclusion, "and I thought he thank'd me more
than them all", placed, for more emphasis, at the end of the
chapter, sickens us with its sweetness like the drop of pure sugar
at the bottom of a cup. Indeed, the chief fault of A Sentimental
Journey comes from Sterne's concern for our good opinion of his
heart. It has a monotony about it, for all its brilliance, as if
the author had reined in the natural variety and vivacity of his
tastes, lest they should give offence. The mood is subdued to one
that is too uniformly kind, tender, and compassionate to be quite
natural. One misses the variety, the vigour, the ribaldry of
Tristram Shandy. His concern for his sensibility has blunted
his natural sharpness, and we are called upon to gaze rather too
long at modesty, simplicity, and virtue standing rather too still
to be looked at.
But it is significant of the change of taste that has come over
us that it is Sterne's sentimentality that offends us and not his
immorality. In the eyes of the nineteenth century all that Sterne
wrote was clouded by his conduct as husband and lover. Thackeray
lashed him with his righteous indignation, and exclaimed that
"There is not a page of Sterne's writing but has something that
were better away, a latent corruption—a hint as of an impure
presence". To us at the present time, the arrogance of the
Victorian novelist seems at least as culpable as the infidelities
of the eighteenth-century parson. Where the Victorians deplored his
lies and his levities, the courage which turned all the rubs of
life to laughter and the brilliance of the expression are far more
apparent now.
Indeed A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit,
is based upon something fundamentally philosophic. It is true that
it is a philosophy that was much out of fashion in the Victorian
age—the philosophy of pleasure; the philosophy which holds
that it is as necessary to behave well in small things as in big,
which makes the enjoyment, even of other people, seem more
desirable than their suffering. The shameless man had the hardihood
to confess to "having been in love with one princess or another
almost all my life", and to add, "and I hope I shall go on so till
I die, being firmly persuaded that if ever I do a mean action, it
must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another". The
wretch had the audacity to cry through the mouth of one of his
characters, "Mais vive la joie...Vive l'amour! et vive la
bagatelle!" Clergyman though he was, he had the irreverence to
reflect, when he watched the French peasants dancing, that he could
distinguish an elevation of spirit, different from that which is
the cause or the effect of simple jollity.—"In a word, I
thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance."
It was a daring thing for a clergyman to perceive a relationship
between religion and pleasure. Yet it may, perhaps, excuse him that
in his own case the religion of happiness had a great deal of
difficulty to overcome. If you are no longer young, if you are
deeply in debt, if your wife is disagreeable, if, as you racket
about France in a post-chaise, you are dying of consumption all the
time, then the pursuit of happiness is not so easy after all.
Still, pursue it one must. One must pirouette about the world,
peeping and peering, enjoying a flirtation here, bestowing a few
coppers there, and sitting in whatever little patch of sunshine one
can find. One must crack a joke, even if the joke is not altogether
a decent one. Even in daily life one must not forget to cry "Hail
ye, small, sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road
of it!" One must—but enough of must; it is not a word that
Sterne was fond of using. It is only when one lays the book aside
and recalls its symmetry, its fun, its whole-hearted joy in all the
different aspects of life, and the brilliant ease and beauty with
which they are conveyed to us, that one credits the writer with a
backbone of conviction to support him. Was not Thackeray's
coward—the man who trifled so immorally with so many women
and wrote love-letters on gilt-edged paper when he should have been
lying on a sick-bed or writing sermons—was he not a stoic in
his own way and a moralist, and a teacher? Most great writers are,
after all. And that Sterne was a very great writer we cannot
doubt.
When Lord Mahon edited the letters of Lord Chesterfield he
thought it necessary to warn the intending reader that they are "by
no means fitted for early or indiscriminate perusal". Only "those
people whose understandings are fixed and whose principles are
matured" can, so his Lordship said, read them with impunity. But
that was in 1845. And 1845 looks a little distant now. It seems to
us now the age of enormous houses without any bathrooms. Men smoke
in the kitchen after the cook has gone to bed. Albums lie upon
drawing-room tables. The curtains are very thick and the women are
very pure. But the eighteenth century also has undergone a change.
To us in 1930 it looks less strange, less remote than those early
Victorian years. Its civilisation seems more rational and more
complete than the civilisation of Lord Mahon and his
contemporaries. Then at any rate a small group of highly educated
people lived up to their ideals. If the world was smaller it was
also more compact; it knew its own mind; it had its own standards.
Its poetry is affected by the same security. When we read the
Rape of the Lock we seem to find ourselves in an age so
settled and so circumscribed that masterpieces were possible. Then,
we say to ourselves, a poet could address himself whole-heartedly
to his task and keep his mind upon it, so that the little boxes on
a lady's dressing-table are fixed among the solid possessions of
our imaginations. A game at cards or a summer's boating party upon
the Thames has power to suggest the same beauty and the same sense
of things vanishing that we receive from poems aimed directly at
our deepest emotions. And just as the poet could spend all his
powers upon a pair of scissors and a lock of hair, so too, secure
in his world and its values, the aristocrat could lay down precise
laws for the education of his son. In that world also there was a
certainty, a security that we are now without. What with one thing
and another times have changed. We can now read Lord Chesterfield's
letters without blushing, or, if we do blush, we blush in the
twentieth century at passages that caused Lord Mahon no discomfort
whatever.
When the letters begin, Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield's
natural son by a Dutch governess, was a little boy of seven. And if
we are to make any complaint against the father's moral teaching,
it is that the standard is too high for such tender years. "Let us
return to oratory, or the art of speaking well; which should never
be entirely out of our thoughts", he writes to the boy of seven. "A
man can make no figure without it in Parliament, or the Church, or
in the law", he continues, as if the little boy were already
considering his career. It seems, indeed, that the father's fault,
if fault it be, is one common to distinguished men who have not
themselves succeeded as they should have done and are determined to
give their children—and Philip was an only child—the
chances that they have lacked. Indeed, as the letters go on one may
suppose that Lord Chesterfield wrote as much to amuse himself by
turning over the stores of his experience, his reading, his
knowledge of the world, as to instruct his son. The letters show an
eagerness, an animation, which prove that to write to Philip was
not a task, but a delight. Tired, perhaps, with the duties of
office and disillusioned with its disappointments, he takes up his
pen and, in the relief of free communication at last, forgets that
his correspondent is, after all, only a schoolboy who cannot
understand half the things that his father says to him. But, even
so, there is nothing to repel us in Lord Chesterfield's preliminary
sketch of the unknown world. He is all on the side of moderation,
toleration, ratiocination. Never abuse whole bodies of people, he
counsels; frequent all churches, laugh at none; inform yourself
about all things. Devote your mornings to study, your evenings to
good society. Dress as the best people dress, behave as they
behave, never be eccentric, egotistical, or absent-minded. Observe
the laws of proportion, and live every moment to the full.
So, step by step, he builds up the figure of the perfect
man—the man that Philip may become, he is persuaded, if he
will only—and here Lord Chesterfield lets fall the words
which are to colour his teaching through and
through—cultivate the Graces. These ladies are, at first,
kept discreetly in the background. It is well that the boy should
be indulged in fine sentiments about women and poets to begin with.
Lord Chesterfield adjures him to respect them both. "For my own
part, I used to think myself in company as much above me when I was
with Mr. Addison and Mr. Pope, as if I had been with all the
Princes in Europe", he writes. But as time goes on the Virtues are
more and more taken for granted. They can be left to take care of
themselves. But the Graces assume tremendous proportions. The
Graces dominate the life of man in this world. Their service cannot
for an instant be neglected. And the service is certainly exacting.
For consider what it implies, this art of pleasing. To begin with,
one must know how to come into a room and then how to go out again.
As human arms and legs are notoriously perverse, this by itself is
a matter needing considerable dexterity. Then one must be dressed
so that one's clothes seem perfectly fashionable without being new
or striking; one's teeth must be perfect; one's wig beyond
reproach; one's finger-nails cut in the segment of a circle; one
must be able to carve, able to dance, and, what is almost as great
an art, able to sit gracefully in a chair. These things are the
alphabet of the art of pleasing. We now come to speech. It is
necessary to speak at least three languages to perfection. But
before we open our lips we must take a further precaution—we
must be on our guard never to laugh. Lord Chesterfield himself
never laughed. He always smiled. When at length the young man is
pronounced capable of speech he must avoid all proverbs and vulgar
expressions; he must enunciate clearly and use perfect grammar; he
must not argue; he must not tell stories; he must not talk about
himself. Then, at last, the young man may begin to practise the
finest of the arts of pleasing—the art of flattery. For every
man and every woman has some prevailing vanity. Watch, wait, pry,
seek out their weakness, "and you will then know what to bait your
hook with to catch them". For that is the secret of success in the
world.
It is at this point, such is the idiosyncrasy of our age, that
we begin to feel uneasy. Lord Chesterfield's views upon success are
far more questionable than his views upon love. For what is to be
the prize of this endless effort and self-abnegation? What do we
gain when we have learnt to come into rooms and to go out again; to
pry into people's secrets; to hold our tongues and to flatter, to
forsake the society of low-born people which corrupts and the
society of clever people which perverts? What is the prize which is
to reward us? It is simply that we shall rise in the world. Press
for a further definition, and it amounts perhaps to this: one will
be popular with the best people. But if we are so exacting as to
demand who the best people are we become involved in a labyrinth
from which there is no returning. Nothing exists in itself. What is
good society? It is the society that the best people believe to be
good. What is wit? It is what the best people think to be witty.
All value depends upon somebody else's opinion. For it is the
essence of this philosophy that things have no independent
existence, but live only in the eyes of other people. It is a
looking-glass world, this, to which we climb so slowly; and its
prizes are all reflections. That may account for our baffled
feeling as we shuffle, and shuffle vainly, among these urbane pages
for something hard to lay our hands upon. Hardness is the last
thing we shall find. But, granted the deficiency, how much that is
ignored by sterner moralists is here seized upon, and who shall
deny, at least while Lord Chesterfield's enchantment is upon him,
that these imponderable qualities have their value and these
shining Graces have their radiance? Consider for a moment what the
Graces have done for their devoted servant, the Earl.
Here is a disillusioned politician, who is prematurely aged, who
has lost his office, who is losing his teeth, who, worst fate of
all, is growing deafer day by day. Yet he never allows a groan to
escape him. He is never dull; he is never boring; he is never
slovenly. His mind is as well groomed as his body. Never for a
second does he "welter in an easy-chair". Private though these
letters are, and apparently spontaneous, they play with such ease
in and about the single subject which absorbs them that it never
becomes tedious or, what is still more remarkable, never becomes
ridiculous. It may be that the art of pleasing has some connection
with the art of writing. To be polite, considerate, controlled, to
sink one's egotism, to conceal rather than to obtrude one's
personality, may profit the writer even as they profit the man of
fashion.
Certainly there is much to be said in favour of the training,
however we define it, which helped Lord Chesterfield to write his
Characters. The little papers have the precision and formality of
some old-fashioned minuet. Yet the symmetry is so natural to the
artist that he can break it where he likes; it never becomes
pinched and formal, as it would in the hands of an imitator. He can
be sly; he can be witty; he can be sententious, but never for an
instant does he lose his sense of time, and when the tune is over
he calls a halt. "Some succeeded, and others burst" he says of
George the First's mistresses: the King liked them fat. Again, "He
was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables." He
smiles: he does not laugh. Here the eighteenth century, of course,
came to his help. Lord Chesterfield, though he was polite to
everything, even to the stars and Bishop Berkeley's philosophy,
firmly refused, as became a son of his age, to dally with infinity
or to suppose that things are not quite as solid as they seem. The
world was good enough and the world was big enough as it was. This
prosaic temper, while it keeps him within the bounds of impeccable
common sense, limits his outlook. No single phrase of his
reverberates or penetrates as so many of La Bruyère's do.
But he would have been the first to deprecate any comparison with
that great writer; besides, to write as La Bruyère wrote,
one must perhaps believe in something, and then how difficult to
observe the Graces! One might perhaps laugh; one might perhaps cry.
Both are equally deplorable.
But while we amuse ourselves with this brilliant nobleman and
his views on life we are aware, and the letters owe much of their
fascination to this consciousness, of a dumb yet substantial figure
on the farther side of the page. Philip Stanhope is always there.
It is true that he says nothing, but we feel his presence in
Dresden, in Berlin, in Paris, opening the letters and poring over
them and looking dolefully at the thick packets which have been
accumulating year after year since he was a child of seven. He had
grown into a rather serious, rather stout, rather short young man.
He had a taste for foreign politics. A little serious reading was
rather to his liking. And by every post the letters
came—urbane, polished, brilliant, imploring and commanding
him to learn to dance, to learn to carve, to consider the
management of his legs, and to seduce a lady of fashion. He did his
best. He worked very hard in the school of the Graces, but their
service was too exacting. He sat down half-way up the steep stairs
which lead to the glittering hall with all the mirrors. He could
not do it. He failed in the House of Commons; he subsided into some
small post in Ratisbon; he died untimely. He left it to his widow
to break the news which he had lacked the heart or the courage to
tell his father—that he had been married all these years to a
lady of low birth, who had borne him children.
The Earl took the blow like a gentleman. His letter to his
daughter-in-law is a model of urbanity. He began the education of
his grandsons. But he seems to have become a little indifferent to
what happened to himself after that. He did not care greatly if he
lived or died. But still to the very end he cared for the Graces.
His last words were a tribute of respect to those goddesses.
Someone came into the room when he was dying; he roused himself:
"Give Dayrolles a chair," he said, and said no more.
TWO PARSONS
JAMES WOODFORDE
One could wish that the psycho-analysts would go into the
question of diary-keeping. For often it is the one mysterious fact
in a life otherwise as clear as the sky and as candid as the dawn.
Parson Woodforde is a case in point—his diary is the only
mystery about him. For forty-three years he sat down almost daily
to record what he did on Monday and what he had for dinner on
Tuesday; but for whom he wrote or why he wrote it is impossible to
say. He does not unburden his soul in his diary; yet it is no mere
record of engagements and expenses. As for literary fame, there is
no sign that he ever thought of it, and finally, though the man
himself is peaceable above all things, there are little
indiscretions and criticisms which would have got him into trouble
and hurt the feelings of his friends had they read them. What
purpose, then, did the sixty-eight little books fulfil? Perhaps it
was the desire for intimacy. When James Woodforde opened one of his
neat manuscript books he entered into conversation with a second
James Woodforde, who was not quite the same as the reverend
gentleman who visited the poor and preached in the church. These
two friends said much that all the world might hear; but they had a
few secrets which they shared with each other only. It was a great
comfort, for example, that Christmas when Nancy, Betsy, and Mr.
Walker seemed to be in conspiracy against him, to exclaim in the
diary, "The treatment I meet with for my Civility this Christmas is
to me abominable". The second James Woodforde sympathised and
agreed. Again, when a stranger abused his hospitality it was a
relief to inform the other self who lived in the little book that
he had put him to sleep in the attic story, "and I treated him as
one that would be too free if treated kindly". It is easy to
understand why, in the quiet life of a country parish, these two
bachelor friends became in time inseparable. An essential part of
him would have died had he been forbidden to keep his diary. When
indeed he thought himself in the grip of death he still wrote on
and on. And as we read—if reading is the word for it—we
seem to be listening to someone who is murmuring over the events of
the day to himself in the quiet space which precedes sleep. It is
not writing, and, to speak of the truth, it is not reading. It is
slipping through half a dozen pages and strolling to the window and
looking out. It is going on thinking about the Woodfordes while we
watch the people in the street below. It is taking a walk and
making up the life and character of James Woodforde as we go. It is
not reading any more than it is writing—what to call it we
scarcely know.
James Woodforde, then, was one of those smooth-cheeked,
steady-eyed men, demure to look at, whom we can never imagine
except in the prime of life. He was of an equable temper, with only
such acerbities and touchinesses as are generally to be found in
those who have had a love affair in their youth and remained, as
they fancy, unwed because of it. The Parson's love affair, however,
was nothing very tremendous. Once when he was a young man in
Somerset he liked to walk over to Shepton and to visit a certain
"sweet tempered" Betsy White who lived there. He had a great mind
"to make a bold stroke" and ask her to marry him. He went so far,
indeed, as to propose marriage "when opportunity served", and Betsy
was willing. But he delayed; time passed; four years passed indeed,
and Betsy went to Devonshire, met a Mr. Webster, who had five
hundred pounds a year, and married him. When James Woodforde met
them in the turnpike road he could say little, "being shy", but to
his diary he remarked—and this no doubt was his private
version of the affair ever after—"she has proved herself to
me a mere jilt".
But he was a young man then, and as time went on we cannot help
suspecting that he was glad to consider the question of marriage
shelved once and for all so that he might settle down with his
niece Nancy at Weston Longueville, and give himself simply and
solely, every day and all day, to the great business of living.
Again, what else to call it we do not know.
For James Woodforde was nothing in particular. Life had it all
her own way with him. He had no special gift; he had no oddity or
infirmity. It is idle to pretend that he was a zealous priest. God
in Heaven was much the same to him as King George upon the
throne—a kindly Monarch, that is to say, whose festivals one
kept by preaching a sermon on Sunday much as one kept the Royal
birthday by firing a blunderbuss and drinking a toast at dinner.
Should anything untoward happen, like the death of a boy who was
dragged and killed by a horse, he would instantly, but rather
perfunctorily, exclaim, "I hope to God the Poor Boy is happy", and
add, "We all came home singing"; just as when Justice Creed's
peacock spread its tail—"and most noble it is"—he would
exclaim, "How wonderful are Thy Works O God in every Being". But
there was no fanaticism, no enthusiasm, no lyric impulse about
James Woodforde. In all these pages, indeed, each so neatly divided
into compartments, and each of those again filled, as the days
themselves were filled, quietly and fully in a hand steady as the
pacing of a well-tempered nag, one can only call to mind a single
poetic phrase about the transit of Venus. "It appeared as a black
patch upon a fair Lady's face", he says. The words themselves are
mild enough, but they hang over the undulating expanse of the
Parson's prose with the resplendence of the star itself. So in the
Fen country a barn or a tree appears twice its natural size against
the surrounding flats. But what led him to this palpable excess
that summer's night we cannot tell. It cannot have been that he was
drunk. He spoke out too roundly against such failings in his
brother Jack to be guilty himself. Temperamentally he was among the
eaters of meat and not among the drinkers of wine. When we think of
the Woodfordes, uncle and niece, we think of them as often as not
waiting with some impatience for their dinner. Gravely they watch
the joint as it is set upon the table; swiftly they get their
knives to work upon the succulent leg or loin; without much
comment, unless a word is passed about the gravy or the stuffing,
they go on eating. So they munch, day after day, year in, year out,
until between them they must have devoured herds of sheep and oxen,
flocks of poultry, an odd dozen or so of swans and cygnets, bushels
of apples and plums, while the pastries and the jellies crumble and
squash beneath their spoons in mountains, in pyramids, in pagodas.
Never was there a book so stuffed with food as this one is. To read
the bill of fare respectfully and punctually set forth gives one a
sense of repletion. Trout and chicken, mutton and peas, pork and
apple sauce—so the joints succeed each other at dinner, and
there is supper with more joints still to come, all, no doubt, home
grown, and of the juiciest and sweetest; all cooked, often by the
mistress herself, in the plainest English way, save when the dinner
was at Weston Hall and Mrs. Custance surprised them with a London
dainty—a pyramid of jelly, that is to say, with a "landscape
appearing through it". After dinner sometimes, Mrs. Custance, for
whom James Woodforde had a chivalrous devotion, would play the
"Sticcardo Pastorale", and make "very soft music indeed"; or would
get out her work-box and show them how neatly contrived it was,
unless indeed she were giving birth to another child upstairs.
These infants the Parson would baptize and very frequently he would
bury them. They died almost as frequently as they were born. The
Parson had a deep respect for the Custances. They were all that
country gentry should be—a little given to the habit of
keeping mistresses, perhaps, but that peccadillo could be forgiven
them in view of their generosity to the poor, the kindness they
showed to Nancy, and their condescension in asking the Parson to
dinner when they had great people staying with them. Yet great
people were not much to James's liking. Deeply though he respected
the nobility, "one must confess", he said, "that being with our
equals is much more agreeable".
Not only did Parson Woodforde know what was agreeable; that rare
gift was by the bounty of Nature supplemented by another equally
rare—he could have what he wanted. The age was propitious.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—they follow each other and each
little compartment seems filled with content. The days were not
crowded, but they were enviably varied. Fellow of New College
though he was, he did things with his own hands, not merely with
his own head. He lived in every room of the house—in the
study he wrote sermons, in the dining-room he ate copiously; he
cooked in the kitchen, he played cards in the parlour. And then he
took his coat and stick and went coursing his greyhounds in the
fields. Year in, year out, the provisioning of the house and its
defence against the cold of winter and the drought of summer fell
upon him. Like a general he surveyed the seasons and took steps to
make his own little camp safe with coal and wood and beef and beer
against the enemy. His day thus had to accommodate a jumble of
incongruous occupations. There is religion to be served, and the
pig to be killed; the sick to be visited and dinner to be eaten;
the dead to be buried and beer to be brewed; Convocation to be
attended and the cow to be bolused. Life and death, mortality and
immortality, jostle in his pages and make a good mixed marriage of
it: "...found the old gentleman almost at his last gasp. Totally
senseless with rattlings in his Throat. Dinner to-day boiled beef
and Rabbit rosted." All is as it should be; life is like that.
Surely, surely, then, here is one of the breathing-spaces in
human affairs—here in Norfolk at the end of the eighteenth
century at the Parsonage. For once man is content with his lot;
harmony is achieved; his house fits him; a tree is a tree; a chair
is a chair; each knows its office and fulfils it. Looking through
the eyes of Parson Woodforde, the different lives of men seem
orderly and settled. Far away guns roar; a King falls; but the
sound is not loud enough to scare the rooks here in Norfolk. The
proportions of things are different. The Continent is so distant
that it looks a mere blur; America scarcely exists; Australia is
unknown. But a magnifying glass is laid upon the fields of Norfolk.
Every blade of grass is visible there. We see every lane and every
field; the ruts on the roads and the peasants' faces. Each house
stands in its own breadth of meadow isolated and independent. No
wires link village to village. No voices thread the air. The body
also is more present and more real. It suffers more acutely. No
anaesthetic deadens physical pain. The surgeon's knife hovers real
and sharp above the limb. Cold strikes unmitigated upon the house.
The milk freezes in the pans; the water is thick with ice in the
basins. One can scarcely walk from one room to another in the
parsonage in winter. Poor men and women are frozen to death upon
the roads. Often no letters come and there are no visitors and no
newspapers. The Parsonage stands alone in the midst of the
frost-bound fields. At last, Heaven be praised, life circulates
again; a man comes to the door with a Madagascar monkey; another
brings a box containing a child with two distinct perfect heads;
there is a rumour that a balloon is going to rise at Norwich. Every
little incident stands out sharp and clear. The drive to Norwich
even is something of an adventure. One must trundle every step of
the way behind a horse. But look how distinct the trees stand in
the hedges; how slowly the cattle move their heads as the carriage
trots by; how gradually the spires of Norwich raise themselves
above the hill. And then how clear-cut and familiar are the faces
of the few people who are our friends—the Custances, Mr. du
Quesne. Friendship has time to solidify, to become a lasting, a
valuable possession.
True, Nancy of the younger generation is visited now and then by
a flighty notion that she is missing something, that she wants
something. One day she complained to her uncle that life was very
dull: she complained "of the dismal situation of my house, nothing
to be seen, and little or no visiting or being visited, &c.",
and made him very uneasy. We could read Nancy a little lecture upon
the folly of wanting that 'et cetera'. Look what your 'et cetera'
has brought to pass, we might say; half the countries of Europe are
bankrupt; there is a red line of villas on every green hill-side;
your Norfolk roads are black as tar; there is no end to 'visiting
or being visited'. But Nancy has an answer to make us, to the
effect that our past is her present. You, she says, think it a
great privilege to be born in the eighteenth century, because one
called cowslips pagles and rode in a curricle instead of driving in
a car. But you are utterly wrong, you fanatical lovers of memoirs,
she goes on. I can assure you, my life was often intolerably dull.
I did not laugh at the things that make you laugh. It did not amuse
me when my uncle dreamt of a hat or saw bubbles in the beer, and
said that meant a death in the family; I thought so too. Betsy Davy
mourned young Walker with all her heart in spite of dressing in
sprigged paduasoy. There is a great deal of humbug talked of the
eighteenth century. Your delight in old times and old diaries is
half impure. You make up something that never had any existence.
Our sober reality is only a dream to you—so Nancy grieves and
complains, living through the eighteenth century day by day, hour
by hour.
Still, if it is a dream, let us indulge it a moment longer. Let
us believe that some things last, and some places and some people
are not touched by change. On a fine May morning, with the rooks
rising and the hares scampering and the plover calling among the
long grass, there is much to encourage the illusion. It is we who
change and perish. Parson Woodforde lives on. It is the kings and
queens who lie in prison. It is the great towns that are ravaged
with anarchy and confusion. But the river Wensum still flows; Mrs.
Custance is brought to bed of yet another baby; there is the first
swallow of the year. The spring comes, and summer with its hay and
strawberries; then autumn, when the walnuts are exceptionally fine
though the pears are poor; so we lapse into winter, which is indeed
boisterous, but the house, thank God, withstands the storm; and
then again there is the first swallow, and Parson Woodforde takes
his greyhounds out a-coursing.
THE REV. JOHN SKINNER
A whole world separates Woodforde, who was born in 1740 and died
in 1803, from Skinner, who was born in 1772 and died in 1839.
For the few years that separated the two parsons are those
momentous years that separate the eighteenth century from the
nineteenth. Camerton, it is true, lying in the heart of
Somersetshire, was a village of the greatest antiquity;
nevertheless, before five pages of the diary are turned we read of
coal-works, and how there was a great shouting at the coal-works
because a fresh vein of coal had been discovered, and the
proprietors had given money to the workmen to celebrate an event
which promised such prosperity to the village. Then, though the
country gentlemen seemed set as firmly in their seats as ever, it
happened that the manor house at Camerton, with all the rights and
duties pertaining to it, was in the hands of the Jarretts, whose
fortune was derived from the Jamaica trade. This novelty, this
incursion of an element quite unknown to Woodforde in his day, had
its disturbing influence no doubt upon the character of Skinner
himself. Irritable, nervous, apprehensive, he seems to embody, even
before the age itself had come into existence, all the strife and
unrest of our distracted times. He stands, dressed in the prosaic
and unbecoming stocks and pantaloons of the early nineteenth
century, at the parting of the ways. Behind him lay order and
discipline and all the virtues of the heroic past, but directly he
left his study he was faced with drunkenness and immorality; with
indiscipline and irreligion; with Methodism and Roman Catholicism;
with the Reform Bill and the Catholic Emancipation Act, with a mob
clamouring for freedom, with the overthrow of all that was decent
and established and right. Tormented and querulous, at the same
time conscientious and able, he stands at the parting of the ways,
unwilling to yield an inch, unable to concede a point, harsh,
peremptory, apprehensive, and without hope.
Private sorrow had increased the natural acerbity of his temper.
His wife had died young, leaving him with four small children, and
of these the best-loved, Laura, a child who shared his tastes and
would have sweetened his life, for she already kept a diary and had
arranged a cabinet of shells with the utmost neatness, died too.
But these losses, though they served nominally to make him love God
the better, in practice led him to hate men more. By the time the
diary opens in 1822 he was fixed in his opinion that the mass of
men are unjust and malicious, and that the people of Camerton are
more corrupt even than the mass of men. But by that date he was
also fixed in his profession. Fate had taken him from the lawyer's
office, where he would have been in his element, dealing out
justice, filling up forms, keeping strictly to the letter of the
law, and had planted him at Camerton among churchwardens and
farmers, the Gullicks and the Padfields, the old woman who had
dropsy, the idiot boy, and the dwarf. Nevertheless, however sordid
his tasks and disgusting his parishioners, he had his duty to them;
and with them he would remain. Whatever insults he suffered, he
would live up to his principles, uphold the right, protect the
poor, and punish the wrongdoer. By the time the diary opens, this
strenuous and unhappy career is in full swing.
Perhaps the village of Camerton in the year 1822, with its
coal-mines and the disturbance they brought, was no fair sample of
English village life. Certainly it is difficult, as one follows the
Rector on his daily rounds, to indulge in pleasant dreams about the
quaintness and amenity of old English rural life. Here, for
instance, he was called to see Mrs. Gooch—a woman of weak
mind, who had been locked up alone in her cottage and fallen into
the fire and was in agony. "Why do you not help me, I say? Why do
you not help me?" she cried. And the Rector, as he heard her
screams, knew that she had come to this through no fault of her
own. Her efforts to keep a home together had led to drink, and so
she had lost her reason, and what with the squabbles between the
Poor Law officials and the family as to who should support her,
what with her husband's extravagance and drunkenness, she had been
left alone, had fallen into the fire, and so died. Who was to
blame? Mr. Purnell, the miserly magistrate, who was all for cutting
down the allowance paid to the poor, or Hicks the Overseer, who was
notoriously harsh, or the alehouses, or the Methodists, or what? At
any rate the Rector had done his duty. However he might be hated
for it, he always stood up for the rights of the down-trodden; he
always told people of their faults, and convicted them of evil.
Then there was Mrs. Somer, who kept a house of ill-fame and was
bringing up her daughters to the same profession. Then there was
Farmer Lippeatt, who, turned out of the Red Post at midnight, dead
drunk, missed his way, fell into a quarry, and died of a broken
breastbone. Wherever one turned there was suffering, wherever one
looked one found cruelty behind that suffering. Mr. and Mrs. Hicks,
for example, the Overseers, let an infirm pauper lie for ten days
in the Poor House without care, "so that maggots had bred in his
flesh and eaten great holes in his body". His only attendant was an
old woman, who was so failing that she was unable to lift him.
Happily the pauper died. Happily poor Garratt, the miner, died too.
For to add to the evils of drink and poverty and the cholera there
was constant peril from the mine itself. Accidents were common and
the means of treating them elementary. A fall of coal had broken
Garratt's back, but he lingered on, though exposed to the crude
methods of country surgeons, from January to November, when at last
death released him. Both the stern Rector and the flippant Lady of
the Manor, to do them justice, were ready with their half-crowns,
with their soups and their medicines, and visited sick-beds without
fail. But even allowing for the natural asperity of Mr. Skinner's
temper, it would need a very rosy pen and a very kindly eye to make
a smiling picture of life in the village of Camerton a century ago.
Half-crowns and soup went a very little way to remedy matters;
sermons and denunciations made them perhaps even worse.
The Rector found refuge from Camerton neither in dissipation
like some of his neighbours, nor in sport like others. Occasionally
he drove over to dine with a brother cleric, but he noted
acrimoniously that the entertainment was "better suited to
Grosvenor Square than a clergyman's home—French dishes and
French wines in profusion", and records with a note of exclamation
that it was eleven o'clock before he drove home. When his children
were young he sometimes walked with them in the fields, or amused
himself by making them a boat, or rubbed up his Latin in an epitaph
for the tomb of some pet dog or tame pigeon. And sometimes he leant
back peacefully and listened to Mrs. Fenwick as she sang the songs
of Moore to her husband's accompaniment on the flute. But even such
harmless pleasures were poisoned with suspicion. A farmer stared
insolently as he passed; someone threw a stone from a window; Mrs.
Jarrett clearly concealed some evil purpose behind her cordiality.
No, the only refuge from Camerton lay in Camalodunum. The more he
thought of it the more certain he became that he had the singular
good fortune to live on the identical spot where lived the father
of Caractacus, where Ostorius established his colony, where Arthur
had fought the traitor Modred, where Alfred very nearly came in his
misfortunes. Camerton was undoubtedly the Camalodunum of Tacitus.
Shut up in his study alone with his documents, copying, comparing,
proving indefatigably, he was safe, at rest, even happy. He was
also, he became convinced, on the track of an important
etymological discovery, by which it could be proved that there was
a secret significance "in every letter that entered into the
composition of Celtic names". No archbishop was as content in his
palace as Skinner the antiquary was content in his cell. To these
pursuits he owed, too, those rare and delightful visits to
Stourhead, the seat of Sir Richard Hoare, when at last he mixed
with men of his own calibre, and met the gentlemen who were engaged
in examining the antiquities of Wiltshire. However hard it froze,
however high the snow lay heaped on the roads, Skinner rode over to
Stourhead; and sat in the library, with a violent cold, but in
perfect content, making extracts from Seneca, and extracts from
Diodorum Siculus, and extracts from Ptolemy's Geography, or
scornfully disposed of some rash and ill-informed fellow-antiquary
who had the temerity to assert that Camalodunum was really situated
at Colchester. On he went with his extracts, with his theories,
with his proofs, in spite of the malicious present of a rusty nail
wrapped in paper from his parishioners, in spite of the laughing
warning of his host: "Oh, Skinner, you will bring everything at
last to Camalodunum; be content with what you have already
discovered; if you fancy too much you will weaken the authority of
real facts". Skinner replied with a sixth letter thirty-four pages
long; for Sir Richard did not know how necessary Camalodunum had
become to an embittered man who had daily to encounter Hicks the
Overseer and Purnell the magistrate, the brothels, the ale-houses,
the Methodists, the dropsies and bad legs of Camerton. Even the
floods were mitigated if one could reflect that thus Camalodunum
must have looked in the time of the Britons.
So he filled three iron chests with ninety-eight volumes of
manuscript. But by degrees the manuscripts ceased to be entirely
concerned with Camalodunum; they began to be largely concerned with
John Skinner. It was true that it was important to establish the
truth about Camalodunum, but it was also important to establish the
truth about John Skinner. In fifty years after his death, when the
diaries were published, people would know not only that John
Skinner was a great antiquary, but that he was a much wronged, much
suffering man. His diary became his confidante, as it was to become
his champion. For example, was he not the most affectionate of
fathers, he asked the diary? He had spent endless time and trouble
on his sons; he had sent them to Winchester and Cambridge, and yet
now when the farmers were so insolent about paying him his tithes,
and gave him a broken-backed lamb for his share, or fobbed him off
with less than his due of cocks, his son Joseph refused to help
him. His son said that the people of Camerton laughed at him; that
he treated his children like servants; that he suspected evil where
none was meant. And then he opened a letter by chance and found a
bill for a broken gig; and then his sons lounged about smoking
cigars when they might have helped him to mount his drawings. In
short, he could not stand their presence in his house. He dismissed
them in a fury to Bath. When they had gone he could not help
admitting that perhaps he had been at fault. It was his querulous
temper again—but then he had so much to make him querulous.
Mrs. Jarrett's peacock screamed under his window all night. They
jangled the church bells on purpose to annoy him. Still, he would
try; he would let them come back. So Joseph and Owen came back. And
then the old irritation overcame him again. He "could not help
saying" something about being idle, or drinking too much cider,
upon which there was a terrible scene and Joseph broke one of the
parlour chairs. Owen took Joseph's part. So did Anna. None of his
children cared for him. Owen went further. Owen said "I was a
madman and ought to have a commission of lunacy to investigate my
conduct". And, further, Owen cut him to the quick by pouring scorn
on his verses, on his diaries and archaeological theories. He said
"No one would read the nonsense I had written. When I mentioned
having gained a prize at Trinity College...his reply was that none
but the most stupid fellows ever thought of writing for the college
prize". Again there was a terrible scene; again they were dismissed
to Bath, followed by their father's curses. And then Joseph fell
ill with the family consumption. At once his father was all
tenderness and remorse. He sent for doctors, he offered to take him
for a sea trip to Ireland, he took him indeed to Weston and went
sailing with him on the sea. Once more the family came together.
And once more the querulous, exacting father could not help, for
all his concern, exasperating the children whom, in his own crabbed
way, he yet genuinely loved. The question of religion cropped up.
Owen said his father was no better than a Deist or a Socinian. And
Joseph, lying ill upstairs, said he was too tired for argument; he
did not want his father to bring drawings to show him; he did not
want his father to read prayers to him, "he would rather have some
other person to converse with than me". So in the crisis of their
lives, when a father should have been closest to them, even his
children turned away from him. There was nothing left to live for.
Yet what had he done to make everyone hate him? Why did the farmers
call him mad? Why did Joseph say that no one would read what he
wrote? Why did the villagers tie tin cans to the tail of his dog?
Why did the peacocks shriek and the bells ring? Why was there no
mercy shown to him and no respect and no love? With agonising
repetition the diary asks these questions; but there was no answer.
At last, one morning in December 1839, the Rector took his gun,
walked into the beech wood near his home, and shot himself
dead.
I
The party was given either in 1777 or in 1778; on which day or
month of the year is not known, but the night was cold. Fanny
Burney, from whom we get much of our information, was accordingly
either twenty-five or twenty-six, as we choose. But in order to
enjoy the party to the full it is necessary to go back some years
and to scrape acquaintance with the guests.
Fanny, from the earliest days, had always been fond of writing.
There was a cabin at the end of her stepmother's garden at King's
Lynn, where she used to sit and write of an afternoon till the
oaths of the seamen sailing up and down the river drove her in. But
it was only in the afternoon and in remote places that her
half-suppressed, uneasy passion for writing had its way. Writing
was held to be slightly ridiculous in a girl; rather unseemly in a
woman. Besides, one never knew, if a girl kept a diary, whether she
might not say something indiscreet—so Miss Dolly Young warned
her; and Miss Dolly Young, though exceedingly plain, was esteemed a
woman of the highest character in King's Lynn. Fanny's stepmother
also disapproved of writing. Yet so keen was the joy—"I
cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts at
the very moment, and my opinion of people when I first see
them"—that scribble she must. Loose sheets of paper fell from
her pocket and were picked up and read by her father to her agony
and shame; once she was forced to make a bonfire of all her papers
in the back garden. At last some kind of compromise seems to have
been arrived at. The morning was sacred to serious tasks like
sewing; it was only in the afternoon that she allowed herself to
scribble—letters, diaries, stories, verses in the look-out
place which overhung the river, till the oaths of the sailors drove
her in.
There was something strange in that, perhaps, for the eighteenth
century was the age of oaths. Fanny's early diary is larded with
them. "God help me", "Split me", "Stap my vitals", together with
damneds and devilishes, dropped daily and hourly from the lips of
her adored father and her venerated Daddy Crisp. Perhaps Fanny's
attitude to language was altogether a little abnormal. She was
immensely susceptible to the power of words, but not nervously or
acutely as Jane Austen was. She adored fluency and the sound of
language pouring warmly and copiously over the printed page.
Directly she read Rasselas, enlarged and swollen sentences
formed on the tip of her childish pen in the manner of Dr. Johnson.
Quite early in life she would go out of her way to avoid the plain
name of Tomkins. Thus, whatever she heard from her cabin at the end
of the garden was sure to affect her more than most girls, and it
is also clear that while her ears were sensitive to sound, her soul
was sensitive to meaning. There was something a little prudish in
her nature. Just as she avoided the name of Tomkins, so she avoided
the roughnesses, the asperities, the plainnesses of daily life. The
chief fault that mars the extreme vivacity and vividness of the
early diary is that the profusion of words tends to soften the
edges of the sentences, and the sweetness of the sentiment to
smooth out the outlines of the thought. Thus, when she heard the
sailors swearing, though Maria Allen, her half-sister, would, one
believes, have liked to stay and toss a kiss over the
water—her future history allows us to take the liberty of
thinking so—Fanny went indoors.
Fanny went indoors, but not to solitary meditation. The house,
whether it was in Lynn or in London—and by far the greater
part of the year was spent in Poland Street—hummed with
activity. There was the sound of the harpsichord; the sound of
singing; there was the sound—for such concentration seems to
pervade a whole house with its murmur—of Dr. Burney writing
furiously, surrounded by notebooks, in his study; and there were
great bursts of chatter and laughter when, returning from their
various occupations, the Burney children met together. Nobody
enjoyed family life more than Fanny did. For there her shyness only
served to fasten the nickname of Old Lady upon her; there she had a
familiar audience for her humour; there she need not bother about
her clothes; there—perhaps the fact that their mother had
died when they were all young was partly the cause of it—was
that intimacy which expresses itself in jokes and legends and a
private language ("The wig is wet", they would say, winking at each
other); there were endless confabulations, and confidences between
sisters and brothers and brothers and sisters. Nor could there be
any doubt that the Burneys—Susan and James and Charles and
Fanny and Hetty and Charlotte—were a gifted race. Charles was
a scholar; James was a humorist; Fanny was a writer; Susan was
musical—each had some special gift or characteristic to add
to the common stock. And besides their natural gifts they were
happy in the fact that their father was a very popular man; a man,
too, so admirably situated by his talents, which were social, and
his birth, which was gentle, that they could mix without difficulty
either with lords or with bookbinders, and had, in fact, as free a
run of life as could be wished.
As for Dr. Burney himself, there are some points about which, at
this distance of time, one may feel dubious. It is difficult to be
sure what, had one met him now, one would have felt for him. One
thing is certain—one would have met him everywhere. Hostesses
would be competing to catch him. Notes would wait for him.
Telephone bells would interrupt him. For he was the most
sought-after, the most occupied of men. He was always dashing in
and dashing out. Sometimes he dined off a box of sandwiches in his
carriage. Sometimes he went out at seven in the morning, and was
not back from his round of music lessons till eleven at night. The
"habitual softness of his manners", his great social charm,
endeared him to everybody. His haphazard untidy
ways—everything, notes, money, manuscripts, was tossed into a
drawer, and he was robbed of all his savings once, but his friends
were delighted to make it up for him; his odd adventures—did
he not fall asleep after a bad crossing at Dover, and so return to
France and so have to cross the Channel again?—gave him a
claim upon people's kindness and sympathy. It is, perhaps, his
diffuseness that makes him a trifle nebulous. He seems to be for
ever writing and then rewriting, and requiring his daughters to
write for him, endless books and articles, while over him,
unchecked, unfiled, unread perhaps, pour down notes, letters,
invitations to dinner which he cannot destroy and means some day to
annotate and collect, until he seems to melt away at last in a
cloud of words. When he died at the age of eighty-eight, there was
nothing to be done by the most devoted of daughters but to burn the
whole accumulation entire. Even Fanny's love of language was
suffocated. But if we fumble a little as to our feeling for Dr.
Burney, Fanny certainly did not. She adored her father. She never
minded how many times she had to lay aside her own writing in order
to copy out his. And he returned her affection. Though his ambition
for her success at Court was foolish, perhaps, and almost cost her
her life, she had only to cry when a distasteful suitor was pressed
on her, "Oh, Sir, I wish for nothing! Only let me live with you!"
for the emotional doctor to reply, "My Life! Thou shall live with
me for ever if thou wilt. Thou canst not think I meant to get rid
of thee?" And not only were his eyes full of tears, but, what was
more remarkable, he never mentioned Mr. Barlow again. Indeed, the
Burneys were a happy family; a mixed composite, oddly assorted
family; for there were the Aliens, too, and little half-brothers
and half-sisters were being born and growing up.
So time passed, and the passage of the years made it impossible
for the family to continue in Poland Street any longer. First they
moved to Queen Square, and then, in 1774, to the house where Newton
had lived, in St. Martin's Street, Leicester Fields; where his
Observatory still stood, and his room with the painted panels was
still to be seen. Here in a mean street, but in the centre of the
town, the Burneys set up their establishment. Here Fanny went on
scribbling, stealing to the Observatory as she had stolen to the
cabin at Lynn, for she exclaimed, "I cannot any longer resist what
I find to be irresistible, the pleasure of popping down my thoughts
from time to time upon paper". Here came so many famous people
either to be closeted with the doctor, or, like Garrick, to sit
with him while his fine head of natural hair was brushed, or to
join the lively family dinner, or, more formally, to gather
together in a musical party, where all the Burney children played
and their father "dashed away" on the harpsichord, and perhaps some
foreign musician of distinction performed a solo—so many
people came for one reason or another to the house in St. Martin's
Street that it is only the eccentrics, the grotesques, that catch
the eye. One remembers, for instance, the Ajujari, the astonishing
soprano, because she had been "mauled as an infant by a pig, in
consequence of which she is reported to have a silver side". One
remembers Bruce, the traveller, because he had a
most extraordinary complaint. When he attempted to speak, his
whole stomach suddenly seemed to heave like an organ bellows. He
did not wish to make any secret about it, but spoke of it as having
originated in Abyssinia. However, one evening, when he appeared
rather agitated, it lasted much longer than usual, and was so
violent that it alarmed the company.
One seems to remember, for she paints herself while she paints
the others, Fanny herself slipping eagerly and lightly in and out
of all this company, with her rather prominent gnat-like eyes, and
her shy, awkward manners. But the gnat-like eyes, the awkward
manners, concealed the quickest observation, the most retentive
memory. As soon as the company had gone, she stole to the
Observatory and wrote down every word, every scene, in letters
twelve pages long, for her beloved Daddy Crisp at Chessington. That
old hermit—he had retired to a house in a field in dudgeon
with society—though professing to be better pleased with a
bottle of wine in his cellar and a horse in his stable, and a game
of backgammon at night, than with all the fine company in the
world, was always agog for news. He scolded his Fannikin if she did
not tell him all about her fine goings-on. And he scolded her again
if she did not write at full tilt exactly as the words came into
her head.
Mr. Crisp wanted to know in particular "about Mr. Greville and
his notions". For, indeed, Mr. Greville was a perpetual source of
curiosity. It is a thousand pities that time with her poppy dust
has covered Mr. Greville so that only his most prominent features,
his birth, his person, and his nose emerge. Fulke Greville was the
descendant—he must, one fancies, have emphasised the fact
from the way in which it is repeated—of the friend of Sir
Philip Sidney. A coronet, indeed, "hung almost suspended over his
head". In person he was tall and well proportioned. "His face,
features, and complexion were striking for masculine beauty." "His
air and carriage were noble with conscious dignity"; his bearing
was "lofty, yet graceful". But all these gifts and qualities, to
which one must add that he rode and fenced and danced and played
tennis to admiration, were marred by prodigious faults. He was
supercilious in the extreme; he was selfish; he was fickle. He was
a man of violent temper. His introduction to Dr. Burney in the
first place was due to his doubt whether a musician could be fit
company for a gentleman. When he found that young Burney not only
played the harpsichord to perfection, but curved his finger and
rounded his hand as he played; that he answered plain "Yes, Sir,"
or "No, Sir," being more interested in the music than in his
patron; that it was only indeed when Greville himself thrummed
pertinaciously from memory that he could stand it no longer, and
broke into vivacious conversation—it was only when he found
that young Burney was both gifted and well bred that, being himself
a very clever man, he no longer stood upon his dignity. Burney
became his friend and his equal. Burney, indeed, almost became his
victim. For if there was one thing that the descendant of the
friend of Sir Philip Sidney detested it was what he called
"fogrum". By that expressive word he seems to have meant the
middle-class virtues of discretion and respectability, as opposed
to the aristocratic virtues of what he called "ton". Life
must be lived dashingly, daringly, with perpetual display, even if
the display was extremely expensive, and, as seemed possible to
those who trailed dismally round his grounds praising the
improvements, as boring to the man who made it as to the
unfortunate guests whose admiration he insisted upon extorting. But
Greville could not endure fogrum in himself or in his friends. He
threw the obscure young musician into the fast life of White's and
Newmarket, and watched with amusement to see if he sank or swam.
Burney, most adroit of men, swam as if born to the water, and the
descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney was pleased. From
being his protégé, Burney became his confidant.
Indeed, the splendid gentleman, for all his high carriage, was in
need of one. For Greville, could one wipe away the poppy dust that
covers him, was one of those tortured and unhappy souls who find
themselves torn asunder by opposite desires. On the one hand he was
consumed with the wish to be in the first flight of fashion and to
do "the thing", however costly or dreary "the thing" might be. On
the other, he was secretly persuaded that "the proper bent of his
mind and understanding was for metaphysics". Burney, perhaps, was a
link between the world of ton and the world of fogrum. He
was a man of breeding who could dice and bet with the bloods; he
was also a musician who could talk of intellectual things and ask
clever people to his house.
Thus Greville treated the Burneys as his equals, and came to
their house, though his visits were often interrupted by the
violent quarrels which he managed to pick even with the amiable Dr.
Burney himself. Indeed, as time went on there was nobody with whom
Greville did not quarrel. He had lost heavily at the
gambling-tables. His prestige in society was sunk. His habits were
driving his family from him. Even his wife, by nature gentle and
conciliatory, though excessive thinness made her seem fitted to sit
for a portrait "of a penetrating, puissant and sarcastic fairy
queen", was wearied by his infidelities. Inspired by them she had
suddenly produced that famous Ode to Indifference, "which had
passed into every collection of fugitive pieces in the English
language" and (it is Madam D'Arblay who speaks) "twined around her
brow a garland of wide-spreading and unfading fragrance". Her fame,
it may be, was another thorn in her husband's side; for he, too,
was an author. He himself had produced a volume of Maxims and
Characters; and having "waited for fame with dignity rather than
anxiety, because with expectation unclogged with doubt", was
beginning perhaps to become a little impatient when fame delayed.
Meanwhile he was fond of the society of clever people, and it was
largely at his desire that the famous party in St. Martin's Street
met together that very cold night.
II
In those days, when London was so small, it was easier than now
for people to stand on an eminence which they scarcely struggled to
keep, but enjoyed by unanimous consent. Everybody knew and
remembered when they saw her that Mrs. Greville had written an Ode
to Indifference; everybody knew that Mr. Bruce had travelled in
Abyssinia; so, too, everybody knew that there was a house at
Streatham presided over by a lady called Mrs. Thrale. Without
troubling to write an Ode, without hazarding her life among
savages, without possessing either high rank or vast wealth, Mrs.
Thrale was a celebrity. By the exercise of powers difficult to
define—for to feel them one must have sat at table and
noticed a thousand audacities and deftnesses and skilful
combinations which die with the moment—Mrs. Thrale had the
reputation of a great hostess. Her fame spread far beyond her
house. People who had never seen her discussed her. People wanted
to know what she was like; whether she was really so witty and so
well read; whether it was a pose; whether she had a heart; whether
she loved her husband the brewer, who seemed a dull dog; why she
had married him; whether Dr. Johnson was in love with
her—what, in short, was the truth of her story, the secret of
her power. For power she had—that was indisputable.
Even then, perhaps, it would have been difficult to say in what
it consisted. For she possessed the one quality which can never be
named; she enjoyed the one gift which never ceases to excite
discussion. Somehow or other she was a personality. The young
Burneys, for instance, had never seen Mrs. Thrale or been to
Streatham, but the stir which she set going round her had reached
them in St. Martin's Street. When their father came back from
giving his first music lesson to Miss Thrale at Streatham they
flocked about him to hear his account of her mother. Was she as
brilliant as people made out? Was she kind? Was she cruel? Had he
liked her? Dr. Burney was in high good temper—in itself a
proof of his hostess's power—and he replied, not, we may be
sure, as Fanny rendered it, that she was a "star of the first
constellation of female wits: surpassing, rather than equalising
the reputation which her extraordinary endowments, and the splendid
fortune which made them conspicuous, had blazoned
abroad"—that was written when Fanny's style was old and
tarnished, and its leaves were fluttering and falling profusely to
the ground; the doctor, we may suppose, answered briskly that he
had enjoyed himself hugely; that the lady was a very clever lady;
that she had interrupted the lesson all the time; that she had a
very sharp tongue—there was no doubt of that; but he would go
to the stake for it that she was a good-hearted woman at bottom.
Then they must have pressed to know what she looked like. She
looked younger than her age—which was about forty. She was
rather plump, very small, fair with very blue eyes, and had a scar
or cut on her lip. She painted her cheeks, which was unnecessary,
because her complexion was rosy by nature. The whole impression she
made was one of bustle and gaiety and good temper. She was, he
said, a woman "full of sport", whom nobody could have taken for a
creature that the doctor could not bear, a learned lady. Less
obviously, she was very observant, as her anecdotes were to prove;
capable of passion, though that was not yet visible at Streatham;
and, while curiously careless and good-tempered about her dues as a
wit or a blue-stocking, had an amusing pride in being descended
from a long line of Welsh gentry (whereas the Thrales were
obscure), and drew satisfaction now and then from the reflection
that in her veins ran the blood, as the College of Heralds
acknowledged, of Adam of Salzburg.
Many women might have possessed these qualities without being
remembered for them. Mrs. Thrale possessed besides one that has
given her immortality: the power of being the friend of Dr.
Johnson. Without that addition, her life might have fizzled and
flamed to extinction, leaving nothing behind it. But the
combination of Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale created something as
solid, as lasting, as remarkable in its way as a work of art. And
this was an achievement that called for much rarer powers on the
part of Mrs. Thrale than the qualities of a good hostess. When the
Thrales first met Johnson he was in a state of profound gloom,
crying out such lost and terrible words that Mr. Thrale put his
hand before his mouth to silence him. Physically, too, he was
afflicted with asthma and dropsy; his manners were rough; his
habits were gross; his clothes were dirty; his wig was singed; his
linen was soiled; and he was the rudest of men. Yet Mrs. Thrale
carried this monster off with her to Brighton and then domesticated
him in her house at Streatham, where he was given a room to
himself, and where he spent habitually some days in the middle of
every week. This might have been, it is true, but the enthusiasm of
a curiosity hunter, ready to put up with a host of disagreeables
for the sake of having at her house the original Dr. Johnson, whom
anybody in England would gladly pay to see. But it is clear that
her connoisseurship was of a finer type. She understood—her
anecdotes prove it—that Dr. Johnson was somehow a rare, an
important, an impressive human being whose friendship might be a
burden but was certainly an honour. And it was not by any means so
easy to know this then as it is now. What one knew then was that
Dr. Johnson was coming to dinner. And when Dr. Johnson came to
dinner one had to ask one's self who was coming too? For if it was
a Cambridge man there might be an outburst. If it was a Whig there
would certainly be a scene. If it was a Scotsman anything might
happen. Such were his whims and prejudices. Next one would have to
bethink one, what food had been ordered for dinner? For the food
never went uncriticised; and even when one had provided him with
young peas from the garden, one must not praise them. Were not the
young peas charming, Mrs. Thrale asked once? and he turned upon
her, after gobbling down masses of pork and veal pie with lumps of
sugar in it, and snapped, "Perhaps they would be so—to a
pig". Then what would the talk be about—that was another
cause for anxiety. If it got upon painting or music he was apt to
dismiss it with scorn, for both arts were indifferent to him. Then
if a traveller told a tale he was sure to pooh-pooh it, because he
believed nothing that he had not seen himself. Then if anyone were
to express sympathy in his presence it might well draw down upon
one a rebuke for insincerity.
When, one day, I lamented the loss of a cousin killed in
America: "Prithee, my dear," said he, "have done with canting: how
would the world be the worse for it, I may ask, if all your
relations were at once spitted like larks, and roasted for Presto's
supper?"
In short, the meal would be strewn with difficulties; the whole
affair might run upon the rocks at any moment.
Had Mrs. Thrale been a shallow curiosity hunter she would have
shown him for a season or so and then let him drop. But Mrs. Thrale
realised even at the moment that one must submit to be snubbed and
bullied and irritated and offended by Dr. Johnson
because—well, what was the force that sent an impudent and
arrogant young man like Boswell slinking back to his chair like a
beaten boy when Johnson bade him? Why did she herself sit up till
four in the morning pouring out tea for him? There was a force in
him that awed even a competent woman of the world, that subdued
even a thick-skinned, conceited boy. He had a right to scold Mrs.
Thrale for inhumanity, when she knew that he spent only seventy
pounds a year on himself and with the rest of his income supported
a houseful of decrepit and ungrateful lodgers. If he gobbled at
table and tore the peaches from the wall, he went back punctually
to London to see that his wretched inmates had their three good
meals over the week-end. Moreover, he was a warehouse of knowledge.
If the dancing-master talked about dancing, Johnson could out-talk
him. He could keep one amused by the hour with his tales of the
underworld, of the topers and scallywags who haunted his lodgings
and claimed his bounty. He said things casually that one never
forgot. But what was perhaps more engaging than all this learning
and virtue, was his love of pleasure, his detestation of the mere
bookworm, his passion for life and society. And then, as a woman
would, Mrs. Thrale loved him for his courage—that he had
separated two fierce dogs that were tearing each other to pieces in
Mr. Beauclerc's sitting-room; that he had thrown a man, chair and
all, into the pit of a theatre; that, blind and twitching as he
was, he rode to hounds on Brighthelmstone Downs, and followed the
hunt as if he had been a gay dog instead of a huge and melancholy
old man. Moreover, there was a natural affinity between them. She
drew him out: she made him say what without her he would never have
said; indeed, he had confessed to her some painful secret of his
youth which she never revealed to anybody. Above all, they shared
the same passion. Of talk they could neither of them ever have
enough.
Thus Mrs. Thrale could always be counted on to produce Dr.
Johnson; and it was, of course, Dr. Johnson whom Mr. Greville most
particularly wished to meet. As it happened, Dr. Burney had renewed
his acquaintance with Dr. Johnson after many years, when he went to
Streatham to give his first music lesson, and Dr. Johnson had been
there, "wearing his mildest aspect". For he remembered Dr. Burney
with kindness. He remembered a letter that Dr. Burney had written
to him in praise of the dictionary; he remembered, too, that Dr.
Burney having called upon him, years ago, and found him out, had
dared to cut some bristles from the hearth broom to send to an
admirer. When he met Dr. Burney again at Streatham, he had
instantly taken a liking to him; soon he was brought by Mrs. Thrale
to see Dr. Burney's books; it was quite easy, therefore, for Dr.
Burney to arrange that on a certain night in the early spring of
1777 or 1778, Mr. Greville's great wish to meet Dr. Johnson and
Mrs. Thrale should be gratified. A day was fixed and the engagement
was made.
Whatever the day was it must have been marked in the host's
calendar with a note of interrogation. Anything might happen. Any
extreme of splendour or disaster might spring from the meeting of
so many marked and distinguished characters. Dr. Johnson was
formidable. Mr. Greville was domineering. Mrs. Greville was a
celebrity in one way; Mrs. Thrale was a celebrity in another. Then
it was an occasion. Everybody felt it to be so. Wits would be on
the strain; expectation on tiptoe. Dr. Burney foresaw these
difficulties and took steps to avert them, but there was, one
vaguely feels, something a little obtuse about Dr. Burney. The
eager, kind, busy man, with his head full of music and his desk
stuffed with notes, lacked discrimination. The precise outline of
people's characters was covered with a rambling pink haze. To his
innocent mind music was the universal specific. Everybody must
share his own enthusiasm for music. If there was going to be any
difficulty, music could solve it. He therefore asked Signor Piozzi
to be of the party.
The night arrived and the fire was lit. The chairs were placed
and the company arrived. As Dr. Burney had foreseen, the
awkwardness was great. Things indeed seemed to go wrong from the
start. Dr. Johnson had come in his worsted wig, very clean and
prepared evidently for enjoyment. But after one look at him, Mr.
Greville seemed to decide that there was something formidable about
the old man; it would be better not to compete; it would be better
to play the fine gentleman, and leave it to literature to make the
first advances. Murmuring, apparently, something about having the
toothache, Mr. Greville "assumed his most supercilious air of
distant superiority and planted himself, immovable as a noble
statue, upon the hearth". He said nothing. Then Mrs. Greville,
though longing to distinguish herself, judged it proper for Dr.
Johnson to begin, so that she said nothing. Mrs. Thrale, who might
have been expected to break up the solemnity, felt, it seemed, that
the party was not her party and, waiting for the principals to
engage, resolved to say nothing either. Mrs. Crewe, the Grevilles'
daughter, lovely and vivacious as she was, had come to be
entertained and instructed and therefore very naturally she, too,
said nothing. Nobody said anything. Complete silence reigned. Here
was the very moment for which Dr. Burney in his wisdom had
prepared. He nodded to Signor Piozzi; and Signor Piozzi stepped to
the instrument and began to sing. Accompanying himself on the
pianoforte, he sang an aria parlante. He sang beautifully,
he sang his best. But far from breaking the awkwardness and loosing
the tongues, the music increased the constraint. Nobody spoke.
Everybody waited for Dr. Johnson to begin. There, indeed, they
showed their fatal ignorance, for if there was one thing that Dr.
Johnson never did, it was to begin. Somebody had always to start a
topic before he consented to pursue it or to demolish it. Now he
waited in silence to be challenged. But he waited in vain. Nobody
spoke. Nobody dared speak. The roulades of Signor Piozzi continued
uninterrupted. As he saw his chance of a pleasant evening's talk
drowned in the rattle of a piano, Dr. Johnson sank into silent
abstraction and sat with his back to the piano gazing at the fire.
The aria parlante continued uninterrupted. At last the
strain became unendurable. At last Mrs. Thrale could stand it no
longer. It was the attitude of Mr. Greville, apparently, that
roused her resentment. There he stood on the hearth in front of the
fire "staring around him at the whole company in curious silence
sardonically". What right had he, even if he were the descendant of
the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, to despise the company and absorb
the fire? Her own pride of ancestry suddenly asserted itself. Did
not the blood of Adam of Salzburg run in her veins? Was it not as
blue as that of the Grevilles and far more sparkling? Giving rein
to the spirit of recklessness which sometimes bubbled in her, she
rose, and stole on tiptoe to the pianoforte. Signor Piozzi was
still singing and accompanying himself dramatically as he sang. She
began a ludicrous mimicry of his gestures: she shrugged her
shoulders, she cast up her eyes, she reclined her head on one side
just as he did. At this singular display the company began to
titter—indeed, it was a scene that was to be described "from
coterie to coterie throughout London, with comments and sarcasms of
endless variety". People who saw Mrs. Thrale at her mockery that
night never forgot that this was the beginning of that criminal
affair, the first scene of that "most extraordinary drama" which
lost Mrs. Thrale the respect of friends and children, which drove
her in ignominy from England, and scarcely allowed her to show
herself in London again—this was the beginning of her most
reprehensible, her most unnatural passion for one who was not only
a musician but a foreigner. But all this still lay on the laps of
the gods. Nobody yet knew of what iniquity the vivacious lady was
capable. She was still the respected wife of a wealthy brewer.
Happily, Dr. Johnson was staring at the fire, and knew nothing of
the scene at the piano. But Dr. Burney put a stop to the laughter
instantly. He was shocked that a guest, even if a foreigner and a
musician, should be ridiculed behind his back, and stealing to Mrs.
Thrale he whispered kindly but with authority in her ear that if
she had no taste for music herself she should consider the feelings
of those who had. Mrs. Thrale took the rebuke with admirable
sweetness, nodded her acquiescence and returned to her chair. But
she had done her part. After that nothing more could be expected
from her. Let them now do what they chose—she washed her
hands of it, and seated herself "like a pretty little Miss", as she
said afterwards, to endure what yet remained to be endured "of one
of the most humdrum evenings that she had ever passed".
If no one had dared to tackle Dr. Johnson in the beginning, it
was scarcely likely that they would dare now. He had apparently
decided that the evening was a failure so far as talk was
concerned. If he had not come dressed in his best clothes he might
have had a book in his pocket which he could have pulled out and
read. As it was, nothing but the resources of his own mind were
left him; but these were huge; and these he explored as he sat with
his back to the piano looking the very image of gravity, dignity,
and composure.
At last the aria parlante came to an end. Signor Piozzi
indeed, finding nobody to talk to, fell asleep in his solitude.
Even Dr. Burney by this time must have been aware that music is not
an infallible specific; but there was nothing for it now. Since
people would not talk, the music must continue. He called upon his
daughters to sing a duet. And then, when that was over, there was
nothing for it but that they must sing another. Signor Piozzi still
slept, or still feigned sleep. Dr. Johnson explored still further
the magnificent resources of his own mind. Mr. Greville still stood
superciliously upon the hearth-rug. And the night was cold.
But it was a grave mistake to suppose that because Dr. Johnson
was apparently lost in thought, and certainly almost blind, he was
not aware of anything, particularly of anything reprehensible, that
was taking place in the room. His "starts of vision" were always
astonishing and almost always painful. So it was on the present
occasion. He suddenly woke up. He suddenly roused himself. He
suddenly uttered the words for which the company had been waiting
all the evening.
"If it were not for depriving the ladies of the fire", he said,
looking fixedly at Mr. Greville, "I should like to stand upon the
hearth myself!" The effect of the outburst was prodigious. The
Burney children said afterwards that it was as good as a comedy.
The descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney quailed before
the Doctor's glance. All the blood of all the Brookes rallied
itself to overcome the insult. The son of a bookseller should be
taught his place. Greville did his best to smile—a faint,
scoffing smile. He did his best to stand where he had stood the
whole evening. He stood smiling, he stood trying to smile, for two
or perhaps for three minutes more. But when he looked round the
room and saw all eyes cast down, all faces twitching with
amusement, all sympathies plainly on the side of the bookseller's
son, he could stand there no longer. Fulke Greville slunk away,
sloping even his proud shoulders, to a chair. But as he went, he
rang the bell "with force". He demanded his carriage.
"The party then broke up; and no one from amongst it ever asked,
or wished for its repetition."
Are you curious to know what sort of person your neighbour is in
a deck-chair on Brighton pier? Watch, then, which column of The
Times—she has brought it, rolled like a French roll, and
it lies on the top of her bag—she reads first. Politics,
presumably, or an article upon a temple in Jerusalem? Not a bit of
it—she reads the sporting news. Yet one could have sworn, to
look at her—boots, stockings, and all—that she was a
public servant of some sort; with an Act of Parliament, a blue-book
or two, and a frugal lunch of biscuits and bananas in her bag. If
for a moment she basks on Brighton pier while Madame Rosalba,
poised high on a platform above the sea, dives for coins or
soup-plates it is only to refresh herself before renewing her
attack upon the iniquities of our social system. Yet she begins by
reading the sporting news.
Perhaps there is nothing so strange in it after all. The great
English sports are pursued almost as fiercely by sedentary men who
cannot sit a donkey, and by quiet women who cannot drown a mouse,
as by the booted and spurred. They hunt in imagination. They follow
the fortunes of the Berkeley, the Cattistock, the Quorn, and the
Belvoir upon phantom hunters. They roll upon their lips the
odd-sounding, beautifully crabbed English
place-names—Humblebee, Doddles Hill, Caroline Bog, Winniats
Brake. They imagine as they read (hanging to a strap in the
Underground or propping the paper against a suburban teapot) now a
"slow, twisting hunt", now a "brilliant gallop". The rolling
meadows are in their eyes; they hear the thunder and the whimper of
horses and hounds; the shapely slopes of Leicestershire unfold
before them, and in imagination they ride home again, when evening
falls, soothed and satisfied, and watch the lights coming out in
farmhouse windows. Indeed the English sporting writers, Beckford,
St. John, Surtees, Nimrod, make no mean reading. In their slapdash,
gentlemanly way they have ridden their pens as boldly as they have
ridden their horses. They have had their effect upon the language.
This riding and tumbling, this being blown upon and rained upon and
splashed from head to heels with mud, have worked themselves into
the very texture of English prose and given it that leap and dash,
that stripping of images from flying hedge and tossing tree which
distinguish it not indeed above the French but so emphatically from
it. How much English poetry depends upon English hunting this is
not the place to enquire. That Shakespeare was a bold if erratic
horseman scarcely needs proving. Therefore that an Englishwoman
should choose to read the sporting news rather than the political
gossip need cause us no surprise; nor need we condemn her if, when
she has folded up her paper, she takes from her bag not a blue-book
but a red book and proceeds, while Madame Rosalba dives and the
band blares and the green waters of the English Channel sparkle and
sway between the chinks of the pier, to read the Life of Jack
Mytton.
Jack Mytton was by no means an estimable character. Of an old
Shropshire family (the name was Mutton once; so Brontë was
Prunty), he had inherited a fine property and a large income. The
little boy who was born in the year 1796 should have carried on the
tradition of politics and sport which his ancestors had pursued
respectably for five centuries before him. But families have their
seasons, like the year. After months of damp and drizzle, growth
and prosperity, there come the wild equinoctial gales, a roaring in
the trees all day, fruit destroyed and blossom wasted. Lightning
strikes the house and its roof-tree goes up in fire. Indeed, Nature
and society between them had imposed upon the Mytton of 1796 a
burden which might have crushed a finer spirit—a body hewn
from the solid rock, a fortune of almost indestructible immensity.
Nature and society dared him, almost, to defy them. He accepted the
challenge. He went shooting in the thinnest silk stockings, he let
the rain pelt on his bare skin, he swam rivers, charged gates,
crouched naked on the snow, but still his body remained obdurate
and upright. He had his breeches made without pockets; wads of
bank-notes were picked up in the woods, but still his fortune
survived. He begot children and tossed them in the air and pelted
them with oranges; he married wives whom he tormented and
imprisoned until one died and the other snatched her chance and ran
away. While he shaved, a glass of port stood by his side, and as
the day wore on he worked through five or six bottles of wine and
sopped them up with pound upon pound of filberts. There was an
extremity about his behaviour which raises it from the particular
to the general. The shaggy body of primeval man, with all his
appetites and aptitudes, seemed to have risen from his grave under
the barrows, where the great stones were piled on top of him, where
once he sacrificed rams and did homage to the rising sun, to
carouse with tippling fox-hunters of the time of George the Fourth.
His limbs themselves seemed carved from more primitive materials
than modern men's. He had neither beauty of countenance nor grace
of manner, yet he bore himself, for all his violence of body and
mind, with an air of natural breeding which one can imagine in a
savage stepping on his native turf. When he talked, says Nimrod,
which he did sparely, he said, in a very few words, things which
made everybody laugh; but, unequally gifted as he was, acute in
some senses, dull in others, he had a deafness which made him
unwieldy in general society.
What, then, could a primeval man do, who was born in England in
the reign of George the Fourth? He could take bets and make them.
Was it a watery winter's night? He would drive his gig across
country under the moon. Was it freezing? He would make his
stable-boys hunt rats upon skates. Did some moderately cautious
guest admit that he had never been upset in a gig? Mytton at once
ran the wheel up the bank and flung them both into the road. Put
any obstacle in his way and he leapt it, swam it, smashed it,
somehow surmounted it, at the cost of a broken bone or a broken
carriage. To yield to danger or to own to pain were both
unthinkable. And so the Shropshire peasantry were amazed (as we see
them in Alken's and Rawlins's pictures) by the apparition of a
gentleman setting his tandem at a gate, riding a bear round his
drawing-room, beating a bulldog with naked fists, lying between the
hoofs of a nervous horse, riding with broken ribs unmurmuring when
every jar was agony. They were amazed; they were scandalised; his
eccentricities and infidelities and generosities were the talk of
every inn and farmhouse for miles; yet somehow no bailiff in the
four counties would arrest him. They looked up at him as one looks
at something removed from ordinary duties and joys—a
monument, a menace—with contempt and pity and some awe.
But Jack Mytton himself—what was he feeling meanwhile? The
thrill of perfect satisfaction, the delight of joys snatched
unhesitatingly without compunction? The barbarian surely should
have been satisfied. But the by no means introspective mind of
Nimrod was puzzled. "Did the late Mr. Mytton really enjoy life
amidst all this profusion of expenditure?" No; Nimrod was of
opinion that he did not. He had everything that the human heart
could desire, but he lacked "the art of enjoyment". He was bored.
He was unhappy. "There was that about him which resembled the
restlessness of the hyena." He hurried from thing to thing,
determined to taste and enjoy, but somehow blunted and bruised his
pleasures as he touched them. Two hours before his own exquisite
dinner he devoured fat bacon and strong ale at a farmhouse, and
then blamed his cook. Still, without an appetite, he would eat;
still he would drink, only instead of port it must be brandy to
lash his flagging palate into sensation. A "sort of destroying
spirit egged him on". He was magnificent, wasteful, extravagant in
every detail. "...it was his largeness of heart that ruined Mr.
Mytton", said Nimrod, "added to the lofty pride which disdained the
littleness of prudence."
By the time he was thirty, at any rate, Jack Mytton had done two
things that to most men would have been impossible: he had almost
ruined his health; he had almost spent his money. He had to leave
the ancestral home of the Myttons. But it was no primeval man,
glowing with health, bristling with energy, but a
"round-shouldered, tottering old-young man bloated by drink" who
joined the company of shady adventurers whose necessities obliged
them to live at Calais. Even in that society his burden was upon
him; still he must shine; still he must excel. No one should call
him Johnny Mytton with impunity. Four horses must draw Mr. Mytton
the three hundred yards to his rooms or he preferred to walk. And
then the hiccough attacked him. Seizing his bedroom candle, he set
a light to his shirt and staggered, burning and blazing, to show
his friends how Jack Mytton cured the hiccough. What more could
human beings ask of him? To what further frenzies would the gods
dare their victim? Now that he had burnt himself alive, it seemed
as if he had discharged his obligation to society and could lay the
primeval man to rest. He might perhaps allow that other spirit, the
civilised gentleman who was so incongruously coupled with the
barbarian, to come to the surface. He had once learnt Greek. Now as
he lay burnt and bloated in bed he quoted Sophocles—"the
beautiful passage...wherein Oedipus recommends his children to the
care of Creon". He remembered the Greek anthology. When they moved
him to the seaside he began to pick up shells, and could hardly sit
out dinner in his eagerness to be at the work of brushing them
"with a nail brush dipped in vinegar". "He to whom the whole world
had appeared insufficient to afford pleasure...was now completely
happy." But alas, shells and Sophocles, peace and happiness, were
whelmed in the general dissolution which could not be delayed. The
King's Bench prison seized him, and there, corrupt in body, ruined
in fortune, worn out in mind, he died at the age of thirty-eight.
And his wife cried that she could not "help loving him with all his
faults", and four hourses drew him to the grave, and three thousand
poor people sobbed for the loss of one who had somehow acted out
for the benefit of the crowd an odious, monstrous part, laid on him
by the gods, for the edification of mankind and their pleasure too,
but for his own unutterable misery.
For the truth is we like these exhibitions of human nature. We
like to see exalted above us some fox-hunter, like Jack Mytton,
burning himself alive to cure the hiccough, some diver like Madame
Rosalba, who, mounting higher and higher, wraps herself about in
sacking, and then, with a look of indifference and satiety as if
she had renounced and suffered and dedicated herself to some insane
act of defiance for no pleasure of her own, dives into the Channel
and brings up a twopenny-halfpenny soup-plate between her teeth.
The lady on the pier feels gratified. It is because of this, she
says, that I love my kind.
It must often strike the reader that very little criticism
worthy of being called so has been written in English of
prose—our great critics have given the best of their minds to
poetry. And the reason perhaps why prose so seldom calls out the
higher faculties of the critic, but invites him to argue a case or
to discuss the personality of the writer—to take a theme from
the book and make his criticism an air played in variation on
it—is to be sought in the prose-writer's attitude to his own
work. Even if he writes as an artist, without a practical end in
view, still he treats prose as a humble beast of burden which must
accommodate all sorts of odds and ends; as an impure substance in
which dust and twigs and flies find lodgment. But more often than
not the prose-writer has a practical aim in view, a theory to
argue, or a cause to plead, and with it adopts the moralist's view
that the remote, the difficult, and the complex are to be abjured.
His duty is to the present and the living. He is proud to call
himself a journalist. He must use the simplest words and express
himself as clearly as possible in order to reach the greatest
number in the plainest way. Therefore he cannot complain of the
critics if his writing, like the irritation in the oyster, serves
only to breed other art; nor be surprised if his pages, once they
have delivered their message, are thrown on the rubbish heap like
other objects that have served their turn.
But sometimes we meet even in prose with writing that seems
inspired by other aims. It does not wish to argue or to convert or
even to tell a story. We can draw all our pleasure from the words
themselves; we have not to enhance it by reading between the lines
or by making a voyage of discovery into the psychology of the
writer. De Quincey, of course, is one of these rare beings. When we
bring his work to mind we recall it by some passage of stillness
and completeness, like the following:
"Life is Finished!" was the secret misgiving of my heart;
for the heart of infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest
wisdom in relation to any capital wound inflicted on the happiness.
"Life is Finished! Finished it is!" was the hidden meaning
that, half-unconsciously to myself, lurked within my sighs; and, as
bells heard from a distance on a summer evening seem charged at
times with an articulate form of words, some monitory message, that
rolls round unceasingly, even so for me some noiseless and
subterraneous voice seemed to chant continually a secret word, made
audible only to my own heart—that "now is the blossoming of
life withered for ever".
Such passages occur naturally, for they consist of visions and
dreams, not of actions or of dramatic scenes, in his autobiographic
sketches. And yet we are not made to think of him, De Quincey, as
we read. If we try to analyse our sensations we shall find that we
are worked upon as if by music—the senses are stirred rather
than the brain. The rise and fall of the sentence immediately
soothes us to a mood and removes us to a distance in which the near
fades and detail is extinguished. Our minds, thus widened and
lulled to a width of apprehension, stand open to receive one by one
in slow and stately procession the ideas which De Quincey wishes us
to receive; the golden fullness of life; the pomps of the heaven
above; the glory of the flowers below, as he stands "between an
open window and a dead body on a summer's day". The theme is
supported and amplified and varied. The idea of hurry and
trepidation, of reaching towards something that for ever flies,
intensifies the impression of stillness and eternity. Bells heard
on summer evenings, palm-trees waving, sad winds that blow for
ever, keep us by successive waves of emotion in the same mood. The
emotion is never stated; it is suggested and brought slowly by
repeated images before us until it stays, in all its complexity,
complete.
The effect is one that is very rarely attempted in prose and is
rarely appropriate to it because of this very quality of finality.
It does not lead anywhere. We do not add to our sense of high
summer and death and immortality any consciousness of who is
hearing, seeing, and feeling. De Quincey wished to shut out from us
everything save the picture "of a solitary infant, and its solitary
combat with grief—a mighty darkness, and a sorrow without a
voice", to make us fathom and explore the depths of that single
emotion. It is a state which is general and not particular.
Therefore De Quincey was at odds with the aims of the prose-writer
and his morality. His reader was to be put in possession of a
meaning of that complex kind which is largely a sensation. He had
to become fully aware not merely of the fact that a child was
standing by a bed, but of stillness, sunlight, flowers, the passage
of time and the presence of death. None of this could be conveyed
by simple words in their logical order; clarity and simplicity
would merely travesty and deform such a meaning. De Quincey, of
course, was fully aware of the gulf that lay between him as a
writer who wished to convey such ideas and his contemporaries. He
turned from the neat, precise speech of his time to Milton and
Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne; from them he learnt the roll
of the long sentence that sweeps its coils in and out, that piles
its summit higher and higher. Then followed a discipline exacted,
most drastically, by the fineness of his own ear—the weighing
of cadences, the consideration of pauses; the effect of repetitions
and consonances and assonances—all this was part of the duty
of a writer who wishes to put a complex meaning fully and
completely before his reader.
When, therefore, we come to consider critically one of the
passages that has made so deep an impression we find that it has
been produced much as a poet like Tennyson would produce it. There
is the same care in the use of sound; the same variety of measure;
the length of the sentence is varied and its weight shifted. But
all these measures are diluted to a lower degree of strength and
their force is spread over a much greater space, so that the
transition from the lowest compass to the highest is by a gradation
of shallow steps and we reach the utmost heights without violence.
Hence the difficulty of stressing the particular quality of any
single line as in a poem and the futility of taking one passage
apart from the context, since its effect is compound of suggestions
that have been received sometimes several pages earlier. Moreover,
De Quincey, unlike some of his masters, was not at his best in
sudden majesty of phrase; his power lay in suggesting large and
generalised visions; landscapes in which nothing is seen in detail;
faces without features; the stillness of midnight or summer; the
tumult and trepidation of flying multitudes; anguish that for ever
falls and rises and casts its arms upwards in despair.
But De Quincey was not merely the master of separate passages of
beautiful prose; if that had been so his achievement would have
been far less than it is. He was also a writer of narrative, an
autobiographer, and one, if we consider that he wrote in the year
1833, with very peculiar views of the art of autobiography. In the
first place he was convinced of the enormous value of candour.
If he were really able to pierce the haze which so often
envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action and
reserve, there cannot be a life moving at all under intellectual
impulses that would not, through that single force of absolute
frankness, fall within the reach of a deep, solemn, and sometimes
even of a thrilling interest.
He understood by autobiography the history not only of the
external life but of the deeper and more hidden emotions. And he
realised the difficulty of making such a confession: "...vast
numbers of people, though liberated from all reasonable motives of
self-restraint, cannot be confidential—have it not in
their power to lay aside reserve". Aerial chains, invisible spells,
bind and freeze the free spirit of communication. "It is because a
man cannot see and measure these mystical forces which palsy him
that he cannot deal with them effectually." With such perceptions
and intentions it is strange that De Quincey failed to be among the
great autobiographers of our literature. Certainly he was not
tongue-tied or spellbound. Perhaps one of the reasons that led him
to fail in his task of self-delineation was not the lack of
expressive power, but the superfluity. He was profusely and
indiscriminately loquacious. Discursiveness—the disease that
attacked so many of the nineteenth-century English
writers—had him in her coils. But while it is easy to see why
the works of Ruskin or Carlyle are huge and formless—every
kind of heterogeneous object had to be found room for somehow,
somewhere—De Quincey had not their excuse. The burden of the
prophet was not laid upon him. He was, moreover, the most careful
of artists. Nobody tunes the sound and modulates the cadence of a
sentence more carefully and more exquisitely. But strangely enough,
the sensibility which was on the alert to warn him instantly if a
sound clashed or a rhythm flagged failed him completely when it
came to the architecture of the whole. Then he could tolerate a
disproportion and profusion that make his book as dropsical and
shapeless as each sentence is symmetrical and smooth. He is indeed,
to use the expressive word coined by his brother to describe De
Quincey's tendency as a small boy "to plead some distinction or
verbal demur", the prince of Pettifogulisers. Not only did he find
"in everybody's words an unintentional opening left for double
interpretations"; he could not tell the simplest story without
qualifying and illustrating and introducing additional information
until the point that was to be cleared up has long since become
extinct in the dim mists of the distance.
Together with this fatal verbosity and weakness of architectural
power, De Quincey suffered too as an autobiographer from a tendency
to meditative abstraction. "It was my disease", he said, "to
meditate too much and to observe too little." A curious formality
diffuses his vision to a general vagueness, lapsing into a
colourless monotony. He shed over everything the lustre and the
amenity of his own dreaming, pondering absent-mindedness. He
approached even the two disgusting idiots with their red eyes with
the elaboration of a great gentleman who has by mistake wandered
into a slum. So too he slipped mellifluously across all the
fissures of the social scale—talking on equal terms with the
young aristocrats at Eton or with the working-class family as they
chose a joint of meat for their Sunday dinner. De Quincey indeed
prided himself upon the ease with which he passed from one sphere
to another: "...from my very earliest youth", he observed, "it has
been my pride to converse familiarly, more Socratico, with
all human beings, man, woman, and child, that chance might fling in
my way". But as we read his descriptions of these men, women, and
children we are led to think that he talked to them so easily
because to him they differed so little. The same manner served
equally for them all. His relations even with those with whom he
was most intimate, whether it was Lord Altamont, his schoolboy
friend, or Ann the prostitute, were equally ceremonial and
gracious. His portraits have the flowing contours, the statuesque
poses, the undifferentiated features of Scott's heroes and
heroines. Nor is his own face exempted from the general ambiguity.
When it came to telling the truth about himself he shrank from the
task with all the horror of a well-bred English gentleman. The
candour which fascinates us in the confessions of
Rousseau—the determination to reveal the ridiculous, the
mean, the sordid in himself—was abhorrent to him. "Nothing
indeed is more revolting to English feelings", he wrote, "than the
spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers
and scars."
Clearly, therefore, De Quincey as an autobiographer labours
under great defects. He is diffuse and redundant; he is aloof and
dreamy and in bondage to the old pruderies and conventions. At the
same time he was capable of being transfixed by the mysterious
solemnity of certain emotions; of realising how one moment may
transcend in value fifty years. He was able to devote to their
analysis a skill which the professed analysts of the human
heart—the Scotts, the Jane Austens, the Byrons—did not
then possess. We find him writing passages which, in their
self-consciousness, are scarcely to be matched in the fiction of
the nineteenth century:
And, recollecting it, I am struck with the truth, that far more
of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed
combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as
involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences
incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly
and in their own abstract shapes...Man is doubtless one by
some subtle nexus, some system of links, that we cannot
perceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated
dotard: but, as regards many affections and passions incident to
his nature at different stages, he is not one, but an
intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew; the unity of man,
in this respect, is co-extensive only with the particular stage to
which the passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love,
are celestial by one-half of their origin, animal and earthly by
the other half. These will not survive their own appropriate stage.
But love which is altogether holy, like that between two
children, is privileged to revisit by glimpses the silence and the
darkness of declining years...
When we read such passages of analysis, when such states of mind
seem in retrospect to be an important element in life and so to
deserve scrutiny and record, the art of autobiography as the
eighteenth century knew it is changing its character. The art of
biography also is being transformed. Nobody after that could
maintain that the whole truth of life can be told without "piercing
the haze"; without revealing "his own secret springs of action and
reserve". Yet external events also have their importance. To tell
the whole story of a life the autobiographer must devise some means
by which the two levels of existence can be recorded—the
rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single
and solemn moments of concentrated emotion. It is the fascination
of De Quincey's pages that the two levels are beautifully, if
unequally, combined. For page after page we are in company with a
cultivated gentleman who describes with charm and eloquence what he
has seen and known—the stage coaches, the Irish rebellion,
the appearance and conversation of George the Third. Then suddenly
the smooth narrative parts asunder, arch opens beyond arch, the
vision of something for ever flying, for ever escaping, is
revealed, and time stands still.
FOUR FIGURES
COWPER AND LADY AUSTEN
It happened, of course, many years ago, but there must have been
something remarkable about the meeting, since people still like to
bring it before their eyes. An elderly gentleman was looking out of
his window in a village street in the summer of 1781 when he saw
two ladies go into a draper's shop opposite. The look of one of
them interested him very much, and he seems to have said so, for
soon a meeting was arranged.
A quiet and solitary life that must have been, in which a
gentleman stood in the morning looking out of the window, in which
the sight of an attractive face was an event. Yet perhaps it was an
event partly because it revived some half-forgotten but still
pungent memories. For Cowper had not always looked at the world
from the windows of a house in a village street. Time was when the
sight of ladies of fashion had been familiar enough. In his younger
days he had been very foolish. He had flirted and giggled; he had
gone smartly dressed to Vauxhall and Marylebone Gardens. He had
taken his work at the Law Courts with a levity that alarmed his
friends—for he had nothing whatever to live upon. He had
fallen in love with his cousin Theodora Cowper. Indeed, he had been
a thoughtless, wild young man. But suddenly in the heyday of his
youth, in the midst of his gaiety, something terrible had happened.
There lurked beneath that levity and perhaps inspired it a
morbidity that sprang from some defect of person, a dread which
made action, which made marriage, which made any public exhibition
of himself insupportable. If goaded to it, and he was now committed
to a public career in the House of Lords, he must fly, even into
the jaws of death. Rather than take up his appointment he would
drown himself. But a man sat on the quay when he came to the
water's edge; some invisible hand mysteriously forced the laudanum
from his lips when he tried to drink it; the knife which he pressed
to his heart broke; and the garter with which he tried to hang
himself from the bed-post let him fall. Cowper was condemned to
live.
When, therefore, that July morning he looked out of the window
at the ladies shopping, he had come through gulfs of despair, but
he had reached at last not only the haven of a quiet country town,
but a settled state of mind, a settled way of life. He was
domesticated with Mrs. Unwin, a widow six years his elder. By
letting him talk, and listening to his terrors and understanding
them, she had brought him very wisely, like a mother, to something
like peace of mind. They had lived side by side for many years in
methodical monotony. They began the day by reading the Scriptures
together; they then went to church; they parted to read or walk;
they met after dinner to converse on religious topics or to sing
hymns together; then again they walked if it were fine, or read and
talked if it were wet, and at last the day ended with more hymns
and more prayers. Such for many years had been the routine of
Cowper's life with Mary Unwin. When his fingers found their way to
a pen they traced the lines of a hymn, or if they wrote a letter it
was to urge some misguided mortal, his brother John, for instance,
at Cambridge, to seek salvation before it was too late. Yet this
urgency was akin perhaps to the old levity; it, too, was an attempt
to ward off some terror, to propitiate some deep unrest that lurked
at the bottom of his soul. Suddenly the peace was broken. One night
in February 1773 the enemy rose; it smote once and for ever. An
awful voice called out to Cowper in a dream. It proclaimed that he
was damned, that he was outcast, and he fell prostrate before it.
After that he could not pray. When the others said grace at table,
he took up his knife and fork as a sign that he had no right to
join their prayers. Nobody, not even Mrs. Unwin, understood the
terrific import of the dream. Nobody realised why he was unique;
why he was singled out from all mankind and stood alone in his
damnation. But that loneliness had a strange effect—since he
was no longer capable of help or direction he was free. The Rev.
John Newton could no longer guide his pen or inspire his muse.
Since doom had been pronounced and damnation was inevitable, he
might sport with hares, cultivate cucumbers, listen to village
gossip, weave nets, make tables; all that could be hoped was to
while away the dreadful years without the ability to enlighten
others or to be helped himself. Never had Cowper written more
enchantingly, more gaily, to his friends than now that he knew
himself condemned. It was only at moments, when he wrote to Newton
or to Unwin, that the terror raised its horrid head above the
surface and that he cried aloud: "My days are spent in
vanity...Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no
more." For the most part, as he idled his time away in pleasant
pastimes, as he looked with amusement at what passed in the street
below, one might think him the happiest of men. There was Geary
Ball going to the "Royal Oak" to drink his dram—that happened
as regularly as Cowper brushed his teeth; but behold—two
ladies were going into the draper's shop opposite. That was an
event.
One of the ladies he knew already—she was Mrs. Jones, the
wife of a neighbouring clergyman. But the other was a stranger. She
was arch and sprightly, with dark hair and round dark eyes. Though
a widow—she had been the wife of a Sir Robert
Austen—she was far from old and not at all solemn. When she
talked, for she and Cowper were soon drinking tea together, "she
laughs and makes laugh, and keeps up a conversation without seeming
to labour at it". She was a lively, well-bred woman who had lived
much in France, and, having seen much of the world, "accounts it a
great simpleton as it is". Such were Cowper's first impressions of
Ann Austen. Ann's first impressions of the queer couple who lived
in the large house in the village street were even more
enthusiastic. But that was natural—Ann was an enthusiast by
nature. Moreover, though she had seen a great deal of the world and
had a town house in Queen Anne Street, she had no friends or
relations in that world much to her liking. Clifton Reynes, where
her sister lived, was a rude, rough English village where the
inhabitants broke into the house if a lady were left unprotected.
Lady Austen was dissatisfied; she wanted society, but she also
wanted to be settled and to be serious. Neither Clifton Reynes nor
Queen Anne Street gave her altogether what she wanted. And then in
the most opportune way—quite by chance—she met a
refined, well-bred couple who were ready to appreciate what she had
to give and ready to invite her to share the quiet pleasures of the
countryside which were so dear to them. She could heighten those
pleasures deliciously. She made the days seem full of movement and
laughter. She organised picnics—they went to the Spinnie and
ate their dinner in the root-house and drank their tea on the top
of a wheelbarrow. And when autumn came and the evenings drew in,
Ann Austen enlivened them too; she it was who stirred William to
write a poem about a sofa, and told him, just as he was sinking
into one of his fits of melancholy, the story of John Gilpin, so
that he leapt out of bed, shaking with laughter. But beneath her
sprightliness they were glad to find that she was seriously
inclined. She longed for peace and quietude, "for with all that
gaiety", Cowper wrote, "she is a great thinker".
And with all that melancholy, to paraphrase his words, Cowper
was a man of the world. As he said himself, he was not by nature a
recluse. He was no lean and solitary hermit. His limbs were sturdy;
his cheeks were ruddy; he was growing plump. In his younger days
he, too, had known the world, and provided, of course, that you
have seen through it, there is something to be said for having
known it. Cowper, at any rate, was a little proud of his gentle
birth. Even at Olney he kept certain standards of gentility. He
must have an elegant box for his snuff and silver buckles for his
shoes; if he wanted a hat it must be "not a round slouch, which I
abhor, but a smart, well-cocked, fashionable affair". His letters
preserve this serenity, this good sense, this sidelong, arch humour
embalmed in page after page of beautiful clear prose. As the post
went only three times a week he had plenty of time to smooth out
every little crease in daily life to perfection. He had time to
tell how a farmer was thrown from his cart and one of the pet hares
had escaped; Mr. Grenville had called; they had been caught in a
shower and Mrs. Throckmorton had asked them to come into the
house—some little thing of the kind happened every week very
aptly for his purpose. Or if nothing happened and it was true that
the days went by at Olney "shod with felt", then he was able to let
his mind play with rumours that reached him from the outer world.
There was talk of flying. He would write a few pages on the subject
of flying and its impiety; he would express his opinion of the
wickedness, for Englishwomen at any rate, of painting the cheeks.
He would discourse upon Homer and Virgil and perhaps attempt a few
translations himself. And when the days were dark and even he could
no longer trudge through the mud, he would open one of his
favourite travellers and dream that he was voyaging with Cook or
with Anson, for he travelled widely in imagination, though in body
he moved no further than from Buckingham to Sussex and from Sussex
back to Buckingham again.
His letters preserve what must have made the charm of his
company. It is easy to see that his wit, his stories, his sedate,
considerate ways, must have made his morning visits—and he
had got into the habit of visiting Lady Austen at eleven every
morning—delightful. But there was more in his society than
that—there was some charm some peculiar fascination, that
made it indispensable. His cousin Theodora had loved him—she
still loved him anonymously; Mrs. Unwin loved him; and now Ann
Austen was beginning to feel something stronger than friendship
rise within her. That strain of intense and perhaps inhuman passion
which rested with tremulous ecstasy like that of a hawk-moth over a
flower, upon some tree, some hill-side—did that not tensify
the quiet of the country morning, and give to intercourse with him
some keener interest than belonged to the society of other men?
"The very stones in the garden walls are my intimate acquaintance",
he wrote. "Everything I see in the fields is to me an object, and I
can look at the same rivulet, or at a handsome tree, every day of
my life with new pleasure." It is this intensity of vision that
gives his poetry, with all its moralising and didacticism, its
unforgettable qualities. It is this that makes passages in The
Task like clear windows let into the prosaic fabric of the
rest. It was this that gave the edge and zest to his talk. Some
finer vision suddenly seized and possessed him. It must have given
to the long winter evenings, to the early morning visits, an
indescribable combination of pathos and charm. Only, as Theodora
could have warned Ann Austen, his passion was not for men and
women; it was an abstract ardour; he was a man singularly without
thought of sex.
Already early in their friendship Ann Austen had been warned.
She adored her friends, and she expressed her adoration with the
enthusiasm that was natural to her. At once Cowper wrote to her
kindly but firmly admonishing her of the folly of her ways. "When
we embellish a creature with colours taken from our fancy," he
wrote, "we make it an idol...and shall derive nothing from it but a
painful conviction of our error." Ann read the letter, flew into a
rage, and left the country in a huff. But the breach was soon
healed; she worked him ruffles; he acknowledged them with a present
of his book. Soon she had embraced Mary Unwin and was back again on
more intimate terms than ever. In another month indeed, with such
rapidity did her plans take effect, she had sold the lease of her
town house, taken part of the vicarage next door to Cowper, and
declared that she had now no home but Olney and no friends but
Cowper and Mary Unwin. The door between the gardens was opened; the
two families dined together on alternate nights; William called Ann
sister; and Ann called William brother. What arrangement could have
been more idyllic? "Lady Austen and we pass our days alternately at
each other's chateau. In the morning I walk with one or other of
the ladies, and in the afternoon wind thread", wrote Cowper,
playfully comparing himself to Hercules and Samson. And then the
evening came, the winter evening which he loved best, and he dreamt
in the firelight and watched the shadows dance uncouthly and the
sooty films play upon the bars until the lamp was brought, and in
that level light he had out his netting, or wound silk, and then,
perhaps, Ann sang to the harpsichord and Mary and William played
battledore and shuttlecock together. Secure, innocent, peaceful,
where then was that "thistly sorrow" that grows inevitably, so
Cowper said, beside human happiness? Where would discord come, if
come it must? The danger lay perhaps with the women. It might be
that Mary would notice one evening that Ann wore a lock of
William's hair set in diamonds. She might find a poem to Ann in
which he expressed more than a brotherly affection. She would grow
jealous. For Mary Unwin was no country simpleton, she was a
well-read woman with "the manners of a Duchess"; she had nursed and
consoled William for years before Ann came to flutter the "still
life" which they both loved best. Thus the two ladies would
compete; discord would enter at that point. Cowper would be forced
to choose between them.
But we are forgetting another presence at that innocent
evening's entertainment. Ann might sing; Mary might play; the fire
might burn brightly and the frost and the wind outside make the
fireside calm all the sweeter. But there was a shadow among them.
In that tranquil room a gulf opened. Cowper trod on the verge of an
abyss. Whispers mingled with the singing, voices hissed in his ear
words of doom and damnation. He was haled by a terrible voice to
perdition. And then Ann Austen expected him to make love to her!
Then Ann Austen wanted him to marry her! The thought was odious; it
was indecent; it was intolerable. He wrote her another letter, a
letter to which there could be no reply. In her bitterness Ann
burnt it. She left Olney and no word ever passed between them
again. The friendship was over.
And Cowper did not mind very much. Everybody was extremely kind
to him. The Throckmortons gave him the key of their garden. An
anonymous friend—he never guessed her name—gave him
fifty pounds a year. A cedar desk with silver handles was sent him
by another friend who wished also to remain unknown. The kind
people at Olney supplied him with almost too many tame hares. But
if you are damned, if you are solitary, if you are cut off from God
and man, what does human kindness avail? "It is all vanity...Nature
revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more." He sank from
gloom to gloom, and died in misery. As for Lady Austen, she married
a Frenchman. She was happy—so people said.
BEAU BRUMMELL
When Cowper, in the seclusion of Olney, was roused to anger by
the thought of the Duchess of Devonshire and predicted a time when
"instead of a girdle there will be a rent, and instead of beauty,
baldness", he was acknowledging the power of the lady whom he
thought so despicable. Why, otherwise, should she haunt the damp
solitudes of Olney? Why should the rustle of her silken skirts
disturb those gloomy meditations? Undoubtedly the Duchess was a
good haunter. Long after those words were written, when she was
dead and buried beneath a tinsel coronet, her ghost mounted the
stairs of a very different dwelling-place. An old man was sitting
in his arm-chair at Caen. The door opened, and the servant
announced, "The Duchess of Devonshire". Beau Brummell at once rose,
went to the door and made a bow that would have graced the Court of
St. James's. Only, unfortunately, there was nobody there. The cold
air blew up the staircase of an Inn. The Duchess was long dead, and
Beau Brummell, in his old age and imbecility, was dreaming that he
was back in London again giving a party. Cowper's curse had come
true for both of them. The Duchess lay in her shroud, and Brummell,
whose clothes had been the envy of kings, had now only one pair of
much-mended trousers, which he hid as best he could under a
tattered cloak. As for his hair, that had been shaved by order of
the doctor.
But though Cowper's sour predictions had thus come to pass, both
the Duchess and the dandy might claim that they had had their day.
They had been great figures in their time. Of the two, perhaps
Brummell might boast the more miraculous career. He had no
advantage of birth, and but little of fortune. His grandfather had
let rooms in St. James's Street. He had only a moderate capital of
thirty thousand pounds to begin with, and his beauty, of figure
rather than of face, was marred by a broken nose. Yet without a
single noble, important, or valuable action to his credit he cuts a
figure; he stands for a symbol; his ghost walks among us still. The
reason for this eminence is now a little difficult to determine.
Skill of hand and nicety of judgment were his, of course, otherwise
he would not have brought the art of tying neck-cloths to
perfection. The story is, perhaps, too well known—how he drew
his head far back and sunk his chin slowly down so that the cloth
wrinkled in perfect symmetry, or if one wrinkle were too deep or
too shallow, the cloth was thrown into a basket and the attempt
renewed, while the Prince of Wales sat, hour after hour, watching.
Yet skill of hand and nicety of judgment were not enough. Brummell
owed his ascendency to some curious combination of wit, of taste,
of insolence, of independence—for he was never a
toady—which it were too heavy-handed to call a philosophy of
life, but served the purpose. At any rate, ever since he was the
most popular boy at Eton, coolly jesting when they were for
throwing a bargee into the river, "My good fellows, don't send him
into the river; the man is evidently in a high state of
perspiration, and it almost amounts to a certainty that he will
catch cold", he floated buoyantly and gaily and without apparent
effort to the top of whatever society he found himself among. Even
when he was a captain in the Tenth Hussars and so scandalously
inattentive to duty that he only knew his troop by "the very large
blue nose" of one of the men, he was liked and tolerated. When he
resigned his commission, for the regiment was to be sent to
Manchester—and "I really could not go—think, your Royal
Highness, Manchester!"—he had only to set up house in
Chesterfield Street to become the head of the most jealous and
exclusive society of his time. For example, he was at Almack's one
night talking to Lord ——. The Duchess of ——
was there, escorting her young daughter, Lady Louisa. The Duchess
caught sight of Mr. Brummell, and at once warned her daughter that
if that gentleman near the door came and spoke to them she was to
be careful to impress him favourably, "for", and she sank her voice
to a whisper, "he is the celebrated Mr. Brummell". Lady Louisa
might well have wondered why a Mr. Brummell was celebrated, and why
a Duke's daughter need take care to impress a Mr. Brummell. And
then, directly he began to move towards them, the reason of her
mother's warning became apparent. The grace of his carriage was so
astonishing; his bows were so exquisite. Everybody looked
overdressed or badly dressed—some, indeed, looked positively
dirty—beside him. His clothes seemed to melt into each other
with the perfection of their cut and the quiet harmony of their
colour. Without a single point of emphasis everything was
distinguished—from his bow to the way he opened his
snuff-box, with his left hand invariably. He was the
personification of freshness and cleanliness and order. One could
well believe that he had his chair brought into his dressing-room
and was deposited at Almack's without letting a puff of wind
disturb his curls or a spot of mud stain his shoes. When he
actually spoke to her, Lady Louisa would be at first
enchanted—no one was more agreeable, more amusing, had a
manner that was more flattering and enticing—and then she
would be puzzled. It was quite possible that before the evening was
out he would ask her to marry him, and yet his manner of doing it
was such that the most ingenuous debutante could not believe that
he meant it seriously. His odd grey eyes seemed to contradict his
lips; they had a look in them which made the sincerity of his
compliments very doubtful. And then he said very cutting things
about other people. They were not exactly witty; they were
certainly not profound; but they were so skilful, so
adroit—they had a twist in them which made them slip into the
mind and stay there when more important phrases were forgotten. He
had downed the Regent himself with his dexterous "Who's your fat
friend?" and his method was the same with humbler people who
snubbed him or bored him. "Why, what could I do, my good fellow,
but cut the connection? I discovered that Lady Mary actually ate
cabbage!"—so he explained to a friend his failure to marry a
lady. And, again, when some dull citizen pestered him about his
tour to the North, "Which of the lakes do I admire?" he asked his
valet. "Windermere, sir." "Ah, yes—Windermere, so it
is—Windermere." That was his style, flickering, sneering,
hovering on the verge of insolence, skimming the edge of nonsense,
but always keeping within some curious mean, so that one knew the
false Brummell story from the true by its exaggeration. Brummell
could never have said, "Wales, ring the bell", any more than he
could have worn a brightly coloured waistcoat or a glaring necktie.
That "certain exquisite propriety" which Lord Byron remarked in his
dress stamped his whole being, and made him appear cool, refined,
and debonair among the gentlemen who talked only of sport, which
Brummell detested, and smelt of the stable, which Brummell never
visited. Lady Louisa might well be on tenter-hooks to impress Mr.
Brummell favourably. Mr. Brummell's good opinion was of the utmost
importance in the world of Lady Louisa.
And unless that world fell into ruins his rule seemed assured.
Handsome, heartless, and cynical, the Beau seemed invulnerable. His
taste was impeccable, his health admirable, and his figure as fine
as ever. His rule had lasted many years and survived many
vicissitudes. The French Revolution had passed over his head
without disordering a single hair. Empires had risen and fallen
while he experimented with the crease of a neck-cloth and
criticised the cut of a coat. Now the battle of Waterloo had been
fought and peace had come. The battle left him untouched; it was
the peace that undid him. For some time past he had been winning
and losing at the gaming-tables. Harriette Wilson had heard that he
was ruined, and then, not without disappointment, that he was safe
again. Now, with the armies disbanded, there was let loose upon
London a horde of rough, ill-mannered men who had been fighting all
those years and were determined to enjoy themselves. They flooded
the gaming-houses. They played very high. Brummell was forced into
competition. He lost and won and vowed never to play again, and
then he did play again. At last his remaining ten thousand pounds
was gone. He borrowed until he could borrow no more. And finally,
to crown the loss of so many thousands, he lost the sixpenny-bit
with a hole in it which had always brought him good luck. He gave
it by mistake to a hackney coachman: that rascal Rothschild got
hold of it, he said, and that was the end of his luck. Such was his
own account of the affair—other people put a less innocent
interpretation on the matter. At any rate there came a day, 16th
May 1816, to be precise—it was a day upon which everything
was precise—when he dined alone off a cold fowl and a bottle
of claret at Watier's, attended the opera, and then took coach for
Dover. He drove rapidly all through the night and reached Calais
the day after. He never set foot in England again.
And now a curious process of disintegration set in. The peculiar
and highly artificial society of London had acted as a
preservative; it had kept him in being; it had concentrated him
into one single gem. Now that the pressure was removed, the odds
and ends, so trifling separately, so brilliant in combination,
which had made up the being of the Beau, fell asunder and revealed
what lay beneath. At first his lustre seemed undiminished. His old
friends crossed the water to see him and made a point of standing
him a dinner and leaving a little present behind them at his
bankers. He held his usual levee at his lodgings; he spent the
usual hours washing and dressing; he rubbed his teeth with a red
root, tweezed out hairs with a silver tweezer, tied his cravat to
admiration, and issued at four precisely as perfectly equipped as
if the Rue Royale had been St. James's Street and the Prince
himself had hung upon his arm. But the Rue Royale was not St.
James's Street; the old French Countess who spat on the floor was
not the Duchess of Devonshire; the good bourgeois who pressed him
to dine off goose at four was not Lord Alvanley; and though he soon
won for himself the title of Roi de Calais, and was known to
workmen as "George, ring the bell", the praise was gross, the
society coarse, and the amusements of Calais very slender. The Beau
had to fall back upon the resources of his own mind. These might
have been considerable. According to Lady Hester Stanhope, he might
have been, had he chosen, a very clever man; and when she told him
so, the Beau admitted that he had wasted his talents because a
dandy's way of life was the only one "which could place him in a
prominent light, and enable him to separate himself from the
ordinary herd of men, whom he held in considerable contempt". That
way of life allowed of verse-making—his verses, called "The
Butterfly's Funeral", were much admired; and of singing, and of
some dexterity with the pencil. But now, when the summer days were
so long and so empty, he found that such accomplishments hardly
served to while away the time. He tried to occupy himself with
writing his memoirs; he bought a screen and spent hours pasting it
with pictures of great men and beautiful ladies whose virtues and
frailties were symbolised by hyenas, by wasps, by profusions of
cupids, fitted together with extraordinary skill; he collected Buhl
furniture; he wrote letters in a curiously elegant and elaborate
style to ladies. But these occupations palled. The resources of his
mind had been whittled away in the course of years; now they failed
him. And then the crumbling process went a little farther, and
another organ was laid bare—the heart. He who had played at
love all these years and kept so adroitly beyond the range of
passion, now made violent advances to girls who were young enough
to be his daughters. He wrote such passionate letters to
Mademoiselle Ellen of Caen that she did not know whether to laugh
or to be angry. She was angry, and the Beau, who had tryannised
over the daughters of Dukes, prostrated himself before her in
despair. But it was too late—the heart after all these years
was not a very engaging object even to a simple country girl, and
he seems at last to have lavished his affections upon animals. He
mourned his terrier Vick for three weeks; he had a friendship with
a mouse; he became the champion of all the neglected cats and
starving dogs in Caen. Indeed, he said to a lady that if a man and
a dog were drowning in the same pond he would prefer to save the
dog—if, that is, there were nobody looking. But he was still
persuaded that everybody was looking; and his immense regard for
appearances gave him a certain stoical endurance. Thus, when
paralysis struck him at dinner he left the table without a sign;
sunk deep in debt as he was, he still picked his way over the
cobbles on the points of his toes to preserve his shoes, and when
the terrible day came and he was thrown into prison he won the
admiration of murderers and thieves by appearing among them as cool
and courteous as if about to pay a morning call. But if he were to
continue to act his part, it was essential that he should be
supported—he must have a sufficiency of boot polish, gallons
of eau-de-Cologne, and three changes of linen every day. His
expenditure upon these items was enormous. Generous as his old
friends were, and persistently as he supplicated them, there came a
time when they could be squeezed no longer. It was decreed that he
was to content himself with one change of linen daily, and his
allowance was to admit of necessaries only. But how could a
Brummell exist upon necessaries only? The demand was absurd. Soon
afterwards he showed his sense of the gravity of the situation by
mounting a black silk neck-cloth. Black silk neck-cloths had always
been his aversion. It was a signal of despair, a sign that the end
was in sight. After that everything that had supported him and kept
him in being dissolved. His self-respect vanished. He would dine
with anyone who would pay the bill. His memory weakened and he told
the same story over and over again till even the burghers of Caen
were bored. Then his manners degenerated. His extreme cleanliness
lapsed into carelessness, and then into positive filth. People
objected to his presence in the dining-room of the hotel. Then his
mind went—he thought that the Duchess of Devonshire was
coming up the stairs when it was only the wind. At last but one
passion remained intact among the crumbled debris of so
many—an immense greed. To buy Rheims biscuits he sacrificed
the greatest treasure that remained to him—he sold his
snuff-box. And then nothing was left but a heap of disagreeables, a
mass of corruption, a senile and disgusting old man fit only for
the charity of nuns and the protection of an asylum. There the
clergyman begged him to pray. "'I do try', he said, but he added
something which made me doubt whether he understood me." Certainly,
he would try; for the clergyman wished it and he had always been
polite. He had been polite to thieves and to duchesses and to God
Himself. But it was no use trying any longer. He could believe in
nothing now except a hot fire, sweet biscuits, and another cup of
coffee if he asked for it. And so there was nothing for it but that
the Beau who had been compact of grace and sweetness should be
shuffled into the grave like any other ill-dressed, ill-bred,
unneeded old man. Still, one must remember that Byron, in his
moments of dandyism, "always pronounced the name of Brummell with a
mingled emotion of respect and jealousy".
[NOTE.—Mr. Berry of St. James's Street has courteously
drawn my attention to the fact that Beau Brummell certainly visited
England in 1822. He came to the famous wine-shop on 26th July 1822
and was weighed as usual. His weight was then 10 stones 13 pounds.
On the previous occasion, 6th July 1815, his weight was 12 stones
10 pounds. Mr. Berry adds that there is no record of his coming
after 1822.]
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Great wars are strangely intermittent in their effects. The
French Revolution took some people and tore them asunder; others it
passed over without disturbing a hair of their heads. Jane Austen,
it is said, never mentioned it; Charles Lamb ignored it; Beau
Brummell never gave the matter a thought. But to Wordsworth and to
Godwin it was the dawn; unmistakably they saw
France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.
Thus it would be easy for a picturesque historian to lay side by
side the most glaring contrasts—here in Chesterfield Street
was Beau Brummell letting his chin fall carefully upon his cravat
and discussing in a tone studiously free from vulgar emphasis the
proper cut of the lapel of a coat; and here in Somers Town was a
party of ill-dressed, excited young men, one with a head too big
for his body and a nose too long for his face, holding forth day by
day over the tea-cups upon human perfectibility, ideal unity, and
the rights of man. There was also a woman present with very bright
eyes and a very eager tongue, and the young men, who had
middle-class names, like Barlow and Holcroft and Godwin, called her
simply "Wollstonecraft", as if it did not matter whether she were
married or unmarried, as if she were a young man like
themselves.
Such glaring discords among intelligent people—for Charles
Lamb and Godwin, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft were all
highly intelligent—suggest how much influence circumstances
have upon opinions. If Godwin had been brought up in the precincts
of the Temple and had drunk deep of antiquity and old letters at
Christ's Hospital, he might never have cared a straw for the future
of man and his rights in general. If Jane Austen had lain as a
child on the landing to prevent her father from thrashing her
mother, her soul might have burnt with such a passion against
tyranny that all her novels might have been consumed in one cry for
justice.
Such had been Mary Wollstonecraft's first experience of the joys
of married life. And then her sister Everina had been married
miserably and had bitten her wedding ring to pieces in the coach.
Her brother had been a burden on her; her father's farm had failed,
and in order to start that disreputable man with the red face and
the violent temper and the dirty hair in life again she had gone
into bondage among the aristocracy as a governess—in short,
she had never known what happiness was, and, in its default, had
fabricated a creed fitted to meet the sordid misery of real human
life. The staple of her doctrine was that nothing mattered save
independence. "Every obligation we receive from our
fellow-creatures is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom,
and debases the mind." Independence was the first necessity for a
woman; not grace or charm, but energy and courage and the power to
put her will into effect, were her necessary qualities. It was her
highest boast to be able to say, "I never yet resolved to do
anything of consequence that I did not adhere readily to it".
Certainly Mary could say this with truth. When she was a little
more than thirty she could look back upon a series of actions which
she had carried out in the teeth of opposition. She had taken a
house by prodigious efforts for her friend Fanny, only to find that
Fanny's mind was changed and she did not want a house after all.
She had started a school. She had persuaded Fanny into marrying Mr.
Skeys. She had thrown up her school and gone to Lisbon alone to
nurse Fanny when she died. On the voyage back she had forced the
captain of the ship to rescue a wrecked French vessel by
threatening to expose him if he refused. And when, overcome by a
passion for Fuseli, she declared her wish to live with him and been
refused flatly by his wife, she had put her principle of decisive
action instantly into effect, and had gone to Paris determined to
make her living by her pen.
The Revolution thus was not merely an event that had happened
outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood. She had been
in revolt all her life—against tyranny, against law, against
convention. The reformer's love of humanity, which has so much of
hatred in it as well as love, fermented within her. The outbreak of
revolution in France expressed some of her deepest theories and
convictions, and she dashed off in the heat of that extraordinary
moment those two eloquent and daring books—the Reply to
Burke and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which
are so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in
them—their originality has become our commonplace. But when
she was in Paris lodging by herself in a great house, and saw with
her own eyes the King whom she despised driving past surrounded by
National Guards and holding himself with greater dignity than she
expected, then, "I can scarcely tell you why", the tears came to
her eyes. "I am going to bed," the letter ended, "and, for the
first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle." Things were
not so simple after all. She could not understand even her own
feelings. She saw the most cherished of her convictions put into
practice—and her eyes filled with tears. She had won fame and
independence and the right to live her own life—and she
wanted something different. "I do not want to be loved like a
goddess," she wrote, "but I wish to be necessary to you." For
Imlay, the fascinating American to whom her letter was addressed,
had been very good to her. Indeed, she had fallen passionately in
love with him. But it was one of her theories that love should be
free—"that mutual affection was marriage and that the
marriage tie should not bind after the death of love, if love
should die". And yet at the same time that she wanted freedom she
wanted certainty. "I like the word affection," she wrote, "because
it signifies something habitual."
The conflict of all these contradictions shows itself in her
face, at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so
intelligent, and beautiful into the bargain with its great coils of
hair and the large bright eyes that Southey thought the most
expressive he had ever seen. The life of such a woman was bound to
be tempestuous. Every day she made theories by which life should be
lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other
people's prejudices. Every day too—for she was no pedant, no
cold-blooded theorist—something was born in her that thrust
aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh. She acted
upon her theory that she had no legal claim upon Imlay; she refused
to marry him; but when he left her alone week after week with the
child she had borne him her agony was unendurable.
Thus distracted, thus puzzling even to herself, the plausible
and treacherous Imlay cannot be altogether blamed for failing to
follow the rapidity of her changes and the alternate reason and
unreason of her moods. Even friends whose liking was impartial were
disturbed by her discrepancies. Mary had a passionate, an
exuberant, love of Nature, and yet one night when the colours in
the sky were so exquisite that Madeleine Schweizer could not help
saying to her, "Come, Mary—come, nature-lover—and enjoy
this wonderful spectacle—this constant transition from colour
to colour", Mary never took her eyes off the Baron de Wolzogen. "I
must confess," wrote Madame Schweizer, "that this erotic absorption
made such a disagreeable impression on me, that all my pleasure
vanished." But if the sentimental Swiss was disconcerted by Mary's
sensuality, Imlay, the shrewd man of business, was exasperated by
her intelligence. Whenever he saw her he yielded to her charm, but
then her quickness, her penetration, her uncompromising idealism
harassed him. She saw through his excuses; she met all his reasons;
she was even capable of managing his business. There was no peace
with her—he must be off again. And then her letters followed
him, torturing him with their sincerity and their insight. They
were so outspoken; they pleaded so passionately to be told the
truth; they showed such a contempt for soap and alum and wealth and
comfort; they repeated, as he suspected, so truthfully that he had
only to say the word, "and you shall never hear of me more", that
he could not endure it. Tickling minnows he had hooked a dolphin,
and the creature rushed him through the waters till he was dizzy
and only wanted to escape. After all, though he had played at
theory-making too, he was a business man, he depended upon soap and
alum; "the secondary pleasures of life", he had to admit, "are very
necessary to my comfort". And among them was one that for ever
evaded Mary's jealous scrutiny. Was it business, was it politics,
was it a woman, that perpetually took him away from her? He
shillied and shallied; he was very charming when they met; then he
disappeared again. Exasperated at last, and half insane with
suspicion, she forced the truth from the cook. A little actress in
a strolling company was his mistress, she learnt. True to her own
creed of decisive action, Mary at once soaked her skirts so that
she might sink unfailingly, and threw herself from Putney Bridge.
But she was rescued; after unspeakable agony she recovered, and
then her "unconquerable greatness of mind", her girlish creed of
independence, asserted itself again, and she determined to make
another bid for happiness and to earn her living without taking a
penny from Imlay for herself or their child.
It was in this crisis that she again saw Godwin, the little man
with the big head, whom she had met when the French Revolution was
making the young men in Somers Town think that a new world was
being born. She met him—but that is a euphemism, for in fact
Mary Wollstonecraft actually visited him in his own house. Was it
the effect of the French Revolution? Was it the blood she had seen
spilt on the pavement and the cries of the furious crowd that had
rung in her ears that made it seem a matter of no importance
whether she put on her cloak and went to visit Godwin in Somers
Town, or waited in Judd Street West for Godwin to come to her? And
what strange upheaval of human life was it that inspired that
curious man, who was so queer a mixture of meanness and
magnanimity, of coldness and deep feeling—for the memoir of
his wife could not have been written without unusual depth of
heart—to hold the view that she did right—that he
respected Mary for trampling upon the idiotic convention by which
women's lives were tied down? He held the most extraordinary views
on many subjects, and upon the relations of the sexes in
particular. He thought that reason should influence even the love
between men and women. He thought that there was something
spiritual in their relationship. He had written that "marriage is a
law, and the worst of all laws...marriage is an affair of property,
and the worst of all properties". He held the belief that if two
people of the opposite sex like each other, they should live
together without any ceremony, or, for living together is apt to
blunt love, twenty doors off, say, in the same street. And he went
further; he said that if another man liked your wife "this will
create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation, and we
shall all be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse a very
trivial object." True, when he wrote those words he had never been
in love; now for the first time he was to experience that
sensation. It came very quietly and naturally, growing "with equal
advances in the mind of each" from those talks in Somers Town, from
those discussions upon everything under the sun which they held so
improperly alone in his rooms. "It was friendship melting into love
...", he wrote. "When, in the course of things, the disclosure
came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to
the other." Certainly they were in agreement upon the most
essential points; they were both of opinion, for instance, that
marriage was unnecessary. They would continue to live apart. Only
when Nature again intervened, and Mary found herself with child,
was it worth while to lose valued friends, she asked, for the sake
of a theory? She thought not, and they were married. And then that
other theory—that it is best for husband and wife to live
apart—was not that also incompatible with other feelings that
were coming to birth in her? "A husband is a convenient part of the
furniture of the house", she wrote. Indeed, she discovered that she
was passionately domestic. Why not, then, revise that theory too,
and share the same roof. Godwin should have a room some doors off
to work in; and they should dine out separately if they
liked—their work, their friends, should be separate. Thus
they settled it, and the plan worked admirably. The arrangement
combined "the novelty and lively sensation of a visit with the more
delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life". Mary admitted
that she was happy; Godwin confessed that, after all one's
philosophy, it was "extremely gratifying" to find that "there is
someone who takes an interest in one's happiness". All sorts of
powers and emotions were liberated in Mary by her new satisfaction.
Trifles gave her an exquisite pleasure—the sight of Godwin
and Imlay's child playing together; the thought of their own child
who was to be born; a day's jaunt into the country. One day,
meeting Imlay in the New Road, she greeted him without bitterness.
But, as Godwin wrote, "Ours is not an idle happiness, a paradise of
selfish and transitory pleasures". No, it too was an experiment, as
Mary's life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to
make human conventions conform more closely to human needs. And
their marriage was only a beginning; all sorts of things were to
follow after. Mary was going to have a child. She was going to
write a book to be called The Wrongs of Women. She was going
to reform education. She was going to come down to dinner the day
after her child was born. She was going to employ a midwife and not
a doctor at her confinement—but that experiment was her last.
She died in child-birth. She whose sense of her own existence was
so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, "I cannot bear to
think of being no more—of losing myself—nay, it appears
to me impossible that I should cease to exist", died at the age of
thirty-six. But she has her revenge. Many millions have died and
been forgotten in the hundred and thirty years that have passed
since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to
her arguments and consider her experiments, above all, that most
fruitful experiment, her relation with Godwin, and realise the
high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the
quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is
alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and
trace her influence even now among the living.
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
Two highly incongruous travellers, Mary Wollstonecraft and
Dorothy Wordsworth, followed close upon each other's footsteps.
Mary was in Altona on the Elbe in 1795 with her baby; three years
later Dorothy came there with her brother and Coleridge. Both kept
a record of their travels; both saw the same places, but the eyes
with which they saw them were very different. Whatever Mary saw
served to start her mind upon some theory, upon the effect of
government, upon the state of the people, upon the mystery of her
own soul. The beat of the oars on the waves made her ask, "Life,
what are you? Where goes this breath? This I so much alive?
In what element will it mix, giving and receiving fresh energy?"
And sometimes she forgot to look at the sunset and looked instead
at the Baron Wolzogen. Dorothy, on the other hand, noted what was
before her accurately, literally, and with prosaic precision. "The
walk very pleasing between Hamburgh and Altona. A large piece of
ground planted with trees, and intersected by gravel walks...The
ground on the opposite side of the Elbe appears marshy." Dorothy
never railed against "the cloven hoof of despotism". Dorothy never
asked "men's questions" about exports and imports; Dorothy never
confused her own soul with the sky. This "I so much alive"
was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass. For if she
let "I" and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its
suffering get between her and the object, she would be calling the
moon "the Queen of the Night"; she would be talking of dawn's
"orient beams"; she would be soaring into reveries and rhapsodies
and forgetting to find the exact phrase for the ripple of moonlight
upon the lake. It was like "herrings in the water"—she could
not have said that if she had been thinking about herself. So while
Mary dashed her head against wall after wall, and cried out,
"Surely something resides in this heart that is not
perishable—and life is more than a dream", Dorothy went on
methodically at Alfoxden noting the approach of spring. "The sloe
in blossom, the hawthorn green, the larches in the park changed
from black to green, in two or three days." And next day, 14th
April 1798, "the evening very stormy, so we staid indoors. Mary
Wollstonecraft's life, &c., came." And the day after they
walked in the squire's grounds and noticed that "Nature was very
successfully striving to make beautiful what art had
deformed—ruins, hermitages, &c., &c.". There is no
reference to Mary Wollstonecraft; it seems as if her life and all
its storms had been swept away in one of those compendious et
ceteras, and yet the next sentence reads like an unconscious
comment. "Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the
valleys according to our fancy." No, we cannot re-form, we must not
rebel; we can only accept and try to understand the message of
Nature. And so the notes go on.
Spring passed; summer came; summer turned to autumn; it was
winter, and then again the sloes were in blossom and the hawthorns
green and spring had come. But it was spring in the North now, and
Dorothy was living alone with her brother in a small cottage at
Grasmere in the midst of the hills. Now after the hardships and
separations of youth they were together under their own roof; now
they could address themselves undisturbed to the absorbing
occupation of living in the heart of Nature and trying, day by day,
to read her meaning. They had money enough at last to let them live
together without the need of earning a penny. No family duties or
professional tasks distracted them. Dorothy could ramble all day on
the hills and sit up talking to Coleridge all night without being
scolded by her aunt for unwomanly behaviour. The hours were theirs
from sunrise to sunset, and could be altered to suit the season. If
it was fine, there was no need to come in; if it was wet, there was
no need to get up. One could go to bed at any hour. One could let
the dinner cool if the cuckoo were shouting on the hill and William
had not found the exact epithet he wanted. Sunday was a day like
any other. Custom, convention, everything was subordinated to the
absorbing, exacting, exhausting task of living in the heart of
Nature and writing poetry. For exhausting it was. William would
make his head ache in the effort to find the right word. He would
go on hammering at a poem until Dorothy was afraid to suggest an
alteration. A chance phrase of hers would run in his head and make
it impossible for him to get back into the proper mood. He would
come down to breakfast and sit "with his shirt neck unbuttoned, and
his waistcoat open", writing a poem on a Butterfly which some story
of hers had suggested, and he would eat nothing, and then he would
begin altering the poem and again would be exhausted.
It is strange how vividly all this is brought before us,
considering that the diary is made up of brief notes such as any
quiet woman might make of her garden's changes and her brother's
moods and the progress of the seasons. It was warm and mild, she
notes, after a day of rain. She met a cow in a field. "The cow
looked at me, and I looked at the cow, and whenever I stirred the
cow gave over eating." She met an old man who walked with two
sticks—for days on end she met nothing more out of the way
than a cow eating and an old man walking. And her motives for
writing are common enough—"because I will not quarrel with
myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it when he
comes home again". It is only gradually that the difference between
this rough notebook and others discloses itself; only by degrees
that the brief notes unfurl in the mind and open a whole landscape
before us, that the plain statement proves to be aimed so directly
at the object that if we look exactly along the line that it points
we shall see precisely what she saw. "The moonlight lay upon the
hills like snow." "The air was become still, the lake of a bright
slate colour, the hills darkening. The bays shot into the low
fading shores. Sheep resting. All things quiet." "There was no one
waterfall above another—it was the sound of waters in the
air—the voice of the air." Even in such brief notes one feels
the suggestive power which is the gift of the poet rather than of
the naturalist, the power which, taking only the simplest facts, so
orders them that the whole scene comes before us, heightened and
composed, the lake in its quiet, the hills in their splendour. Yet
she was no descriptive writer in the usual sense. Her first concern
was to be truthful—grace and symmetry must be made
subordinate to truth. But then truth is sought because to falsify
the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with
the spirit which inspires appearances. It is that spirit which
goads her and urges her and keeps her faculties for ever on the
stretch. A sight or a sound would not let her be till she had
traced her perception along its course and fixed it in words,
though they might be bald, or in an image, though it might be
angular. Nature was a stern taskmistress. The exact prosaic detail
must be rendered as well as the vast and visionary outline. Even
when the distant hills trembled before her in the glory of a dream
she must note with literal accuracy "the glittering silver line on
the ridge of the backs of the sheep", or remark how "the crows at a
little distance from us became white as silver as they flew in the
sunshine, and when they went still further, they looked like shapes
of water passing over the green fields". Always trained and in use,
her powers of observation became in time so expert and so acute
that a day's walk stored her mind's eye with a vast assembly of
curious objects to be sorted at leisure. How strange the sheep
looked mixed with the soldiers at Dumbarton Castle! For some reason
the sheep looked their real size, but the soldiers looked like
puppets. And then the movements of the sheep were so natural and
fearless, and the motion of the dwarf soldiers was so restless and
apparently without meaning. It was extremely queer. Or lying in bed
she would look up at the ceiling and think how the varnished beams
were "as glossy as black rocks on a sunny day cased in ice". Yes,
they
crossed each other in almost as intricate and fantastic a manner
as I have seen the underboughs of a large beech-tree withered by
the depth of the shade above...It was like what I should suppose an
underground cave or temple to be, with a dripping or moist roof,
and the moonlight entering in upon it by some means or other, and
yet the colours were more like melted gems. I lay looking up till
the light of the fire faded away...I did not sleep much.
Indeed, she scarcely seemed to shut her eyes. They looked and
they looked, urged on not only by an indefatigable curiosity but
also by reverence, as if some secret of the utmost importance lay
hidden beneath the surface. Her pen sometimes stammers with the
intensity of the emotion that she controlled, as De Quincey said
that her tongue stammered with the conflict between her ardour and
her shyness when she spoke. But controlled she was. Emotional and
impulsive by nature, her eyes "wild and starting", tormented by
feelings which almost mastered her, still she must control, still
she must repress, or she would fail in her task—she would
cease to see. But if one subdued oneself, and resigned one's
private agitations, then, as if in reward, Nature would bestow an
exquisite satisfaction. "Rydale was very beautiful, with
spear-shaped streaks of polished steel...It calls home the heart to
quietness. I had been very melancholy", she wrote. For did not
Coleridge come walking over the hills and tap at the cottage door
late at night—did she not carry a letter from Coleridge
hidden safe in her bosom?
Thus giving to Nature, thus receiving from Nature, it seemed, as
the arduous and ascetic days went by, that Nature and Dorothy had
grown together in perfect sympathy—a sympathy not cold or
vegetable or inhuman because at the core of it burnt that other
love for "my beloved", her brother, who was indeed its heart and
inspiration. William and Nature and Dorothy herself, were they not
one being? Did they not compose a trinity, self-contained and
self-sufficient and independent whether indoors or out? They sit
indoors. It was
about ten o'clock and a quiet night. The fire flickers and the
watch ticks. I hear nothing but the breathing of my Beloved as he
now and then pushes his book forward, and turns over a leaf.
And now it is an April day, and they take the old cloak and lie
in John's grove out of doors together.
William heard me breathing, and rustling now and then, but we
both lay still and unseen by one another. He thought that it would
be sweet thus to lie in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of
the earth, and just to know that our dear friends were near. The
lake was still; there was a boat out.
It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and
sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood,
so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the
daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in
prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into
poetry. But one could not act without the other. They must feel,
they must think, they must be together. So now, when they had lain
out on the hill-side they would rise and go home and make tea, and
Dorothy would write to Coleridge, and they would sow the scarlet
beans together, and William would work at his "Leech Gatherer", and
Dorothy would copy the lines for him. Rapt but controlled, free yet
strictly ordered, the homely narrative moves naturally from ecstasy
on the hills to baking bread and ironing linen and fetching William
his supper in the cottage.
The cottage, though its garden ran up into the fells, was on the
highroad. Through her parlour window Dorothy looked out and saw
whoever might be passing—a tall beggar woman perhaps with her
baby on her back; an old soldier; a coroneted landau with touring
ladies peering inquisitively inside. The rich and the great she
would let pass—they interested her no more than cathedrals or
picture galleries or great cities; but she could never see a beggar
at the door without asking him in and questioning him closely.
Where had he been? What had he seen? How many children had he? She
searched into the lives of the poor as if they held in them the
same secret as the hills. A tramp eating cold bacon over the
kitchen fire might have been a starry night, so closely she watched
him; so clearly she noted how his old coat was patched "with three
bell-shaped patches of darker blue behind, where the buttons had
been", how his beard of a fortnight's growth was like "grey
plush". And then as they rambled on with their tales of
seafaring and the press-gang and the Marquis of Granby, she never
failed to capture the one phrase that sounds on in the mind after
the story is forgotten, "What, you are stepping westward?" "To be
sure there is great promise for virgins in Heaven." "She could trip
lightly by the graves of those who died when they were young." The
poor had their poetry as the hills had theirs. But it was out of
doors, on the road or on the moor, not in the cottage parlour, that
her imagination had freest play. Her happiest moments were passed
tramping beside a jibbing horse on a wet Scottish road without
certainty of bed or supper. All she knew was that there was some
sight ahead, some grove of trees to be noted, some waterfall to be
inquired into. On they tramped hour after hour in silence for the
most part, though Coleridge, who was of the party, would suddenly
begin to debate aloud the true meaning of the words majestic,
sublime, and grand. They had to trudge on foot because the horse
had thrown the cart over a bank and the harness was only mended
with string and pocket-handkerchiefs. They were hungry, too,
because Wordsworth had dropped the chicken and the bread into the
lake, and they had nothing else for dinner. They were uncertain of
the way, and did not know where they would find lodging: all they
knew was that there was a waterfall ahead. At last Coleridge could
stand it no longer. He had rheumatism in the joints; the Irish
jaunting car provided no shelter from the weather; his companions
were silent and absorbed. He left them. But William and Dorothy
tramped on. They looked like tramps themselves. Dorothy's cheeks
were brown as a gipsy's, her clothes were shabby, her gait was
rapid and ungainly. But still she was indefatigable; her eye never
failed her; she noticed everything. At last they reached the
waterfall. And then all Dorothy's powers fell upon it. She searched
out its character, she noted its resemblances, she defined its
differences, with all the ardour of a discoverer, with all the
exactness of a naturalist, with all the rapture of a lover. She
possessed it at last—she had laid it up in her mind for ever.
It had become one of those "inner visions" which she could call to
mind at any time in their distinctness and in their particularity.
It would come back to her long years afterwards when she was old
and her mind had failed her; it would come back stilled and
heightened and mixed with all the happiest memories of her
past—with the thought of Racedown and Alfoxden and Coleridge
reading "Christabel", and her beloved, her brother William. It
would bring with it what no human being could give, what no human
relation could offer—consolation and quiet. If, then, the
passionate cry of Mary Wollstonecraft had reached her
ears—"Surely something resides in this heart that is not
perishable—and life is more than a dream"—she would
have had no doubt whatever as to her answer. She would have said
quite simply, "We looked about us, and felt that we were
happy".
Had one met Hazlitt no doubt one would have liked him on his own
principle that "We can scarcely hate anyone we know". But Hazlitt
has been dead now a hundred years, and it is perhaps a question how
far we can know him well enough to overcome those feelings of
dislike, both personal and intellectual, which his writings still
so sharply arouse. For Hazlitt—it is one of his prime
merits—was not one of those noncommittal writers who shuffle
off in a mist and die of their own insignificance. His essays are
emphatically himself. He has no reticence and he has no shame. He
tells us exactly what he thinks, and he tells us—the
confidence is less seductive—exactly what he feels. As of all
men he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence,
since never a day passed without inflicting on him some pang of
hate or of jealousy, some thrill of anger or of pleasure, we cannot
read him for long without coming in contact with a very singular
character—ill-conditioned yet high-minded; mean yet noble;
intensely egotistical yet inspired by the most genuine passion for
the rights and liberties of mankind.
Soon, so thin is the veil of the essay as Hazlitt wore it, his
very look comes before us. We see him as Coleridge saw him,
"brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange". He comes shuffling
into the room, he looks nobody straight in the face, he shakes
hands with the fin of a fish; occasionally he darts a malignant
glance from his corner. "His manners are 99 in 100 singularly
repulsive", Coleridge said. Yet now and again his face lit up with
intellectual beauty, and his manner became radiant with sympathy
and understanding. Soon, too, as we read on, we become familiar
with the whole gamut of his grudges and his grievances. He lived,
one gathers, mostly at inns. No woman's form graced his board. He
had quarrelled with all his old friends, save perhaps with Lamb.
Yet his only fault had been that he had stuck to his principles and
"not become a government tool". He was the object of malignant
persecution—Blackwood's reviewers called him "pimply
Hazlitt", though his cheek was pale as alabaster. These lies,
however, got into print, and then he was afraid to visit his
friends because the footman had read the newspaper and the
housemaid tittered behind his back. He had—no one could deny
it—one of the finest minds, and he wrote indisputably the
best prose style of his time. But what did that avail with women?
Fine ladies have no respect for scholars, nor chambermaids
either—so the growl and plaint of his grievances keeps
breaking through, disturbing us, irritating us; and yet there is
something so independent, subtle, fine, and enthusiastic about
him—when he can forget himself he is so rapt in ardent
speculation about other things—that dislike crumbles and
turns to something much warmer and more complex. Hazlitt was
right:
It is the mask only that we dread and hate; the man may have
something human about him! The notions in short which we entertain
of people at a distance, or from partial representation, or from
guess-work, are simple, uncompounded ideas, which answer to nothing
in reality; those which we derive from experience are mixed modes,
the only true and, in general, the most favourable ones.
Certainly no one could read Hazlitt and maintain a simple and
uncompounded idea of him. From the first he was a twy-minded
man—one of those divided natures which are inclined almost
equally to two quite opposite careers. It is significant that his
first impulse was not to essay-writing but to painting and
philosophy. There was something in the remote and silent art of the
painter that offered a refuge to his tormented spirit. He noted
enviously how happy the old age of painters was—"their minds
keep alive to the last"; he turned longingly to the calling that
takes one out of doors, among fields and woods, that deals with
bright pigments, and has solid brush and canvas for its tools and
not merely black ink and white paper. Yet at the same time he was
bitten by an abstract curiosity that would not let him rest in the
contemplation of concrete beauty. When he was a boy of fourteen he
heard his father, the good Unitarian minister, dispute with an old
lady of the congregation as they were coming out of Meeting as to
the limits of religious toleration, and, he said, "it was this
circumstance that decided the fate of my future life". It set him
off "forming in my head...the following system of political rights
and general jurisprudence". He wished "to be satisfied of the
reason of things". The two ideals were ever after to clash. To be a
thinker and to express in the plainest and most accurate of terms
"the reason of things", and to be a painter gloating over blues and
crimsons, breathing fresh air and living sensually in the
emotions—these were two different, perhaps incompatible
ideals, yet like all Hazlitt's emotions both were tough and each
strove for mastery. He yielded now to one, now to the other. He
spent months in Paris copying pictures at the Louvre. He came home
and toiled laboriously at the portrait of an old woman in a bonnet
day after day, seeking by industry and pains to discover the secret
of Rembrandt's genius; but he lacked some quality—perhaps it
was invention—and in the end cut the canvas to ribbons in a
rage or turned it against the wall in despair. At the same time he
was writing the "Essay on the Principles of Human Action" which he
preferred to all his other works. For there he wrote plainly and
truthfully, without glitter or garishness, without any wish to
please or to make money, but solely to gratify the urgency of his
own desire for truth. Naturally, "the book dropped still-born from
the press". Then, too, his political hopes, his belief that the age
of freedom had come and that the tyranny of kingship was over,
proved vain. His friends deserted to the Government, and he was
left to uphold the doctrines of liberty, fraternity, and revolution
in that perpetual minority which requires so much self-approval to
support it.
Thus he was a man of divided tastes and of thwarted ambition; a
man whose happiness, even in early life, lay behind. His mind had
set early and bore for ever the stamp of first impressions. In his
happiest moods he looked not forwards but backwards—to the
garden where he had played as a child, to the blue hills of
Shropshire and to all those landscapes which he had seen when hope
was still his, and peace brooded upon him and he looked up from his
painting or his book and saw the fields and woods as if they were
the outward expression of his own inner quietude. It is to the
books that he read then that he returns—to Rousseau and to
Burke and to the Letters of Junius. The impression that they
made upon his youthful imagination was never effaced and scarcely
overlaid; for after youth was over he ceased to read for pleasure,
and youth and the pure and intense pleasures of youth were soon
left behind.
Naturally, given his susceptibility to the charms of the other
sex, he married; and naturally, given his consciousness of his own
"misshapen form made to be mocked", he married unhappily. Miss
Sarah Stoddart pleased him when he met her at the Lambs by the
common sense with which she found the kettle and boiled it when
Mary absentmindedly delayed. But of domestic talents she had none.
Her little income was insufficient to meet the burden of married
life, and Hazlitt soon found that instead of spending eight years
in writing eight pages he must turn journalist and write articles
upon politics and plays and pictures and books of the right length,
at the right moment. Soon the mantelpiece of the old house at York
Street where Milton had lived was scribbled over with ideas for
essays. As the habit proves, the house was not a tidy house, nor
did geniality and comfort excuse the lack of order. The Hazlitts
were to be found eating breakfast at two in the afternoon, without
a fire in the grate or a curtain to the window. A valiant walker
and a clear-sighted woman, Mrs. Hazlitt had no delusions about her
husband. He was not faithful to her, and she faced the fact with
admirable common sense. But "he said that I had always despised him
and his abilities", she noted in her diary, and that was carrying
common sense too far. The prosaic marriage came lamely to an end.
Free at last from the encumbrance of home and husband, Sarah
Hazlitt pulled on her boots and set off on a walking tour through
Scotland, while Hazlitt, incapable of attachment or comfort,
wandered from inn to inn, suffered tortures of humiliation and
disillusionment, but, as he drank cup after cup of very strong tea
and made love to the innkeeper's daughter, he wrote those essays
that are of course among the very best that we have.
That they are not quite the best—that they do not haunt
the mind and remain entire in the memory as the essays of Montaigne
or Lamb haunt the mind—is also true. He seldom reaches the
perfection of these great writers or their unity. Perhaps it is the
nature of these short pieces that they need unity and a mind at
harmony with itself. A little jar there makes the whole composition
tremble. The essays of Montaigne, Lamb, even Addison, have the
reticence which springs from composure, for with all their
familiarity they never tell us what they wish to keep hidden. But
with Hazlitt it is different. There is always something divided and
discordant even in his finest essays, as if two minds were at work
who never succeed save for a few moments in making a match of it.
In the first place there is the mind of the inquiring boy who
wishes to be satisfied of the reason of things—the mind of
the thinker. It is the thinker for the most part who is allowed the
choice of the subject. He chooses some abstract idea, like Envy, or
Egotism, or Reason and Imagination. He treats it with energy and
independence. He explores its ramifications and scales its narrow
paths as if it were a mountain road and the ascent both difficult
and inspiring. Compared with this athletic progress, Lamb's seems
the flight of a butterfly cruising capriciously among the flowers
and perching for a second incongruously here upon a barn, there
upon a wheelbarrow. But every sentence in Hazlitt carries us
forward. He has his end in view and, unless some accident
intervenes, he strides towards it in that "pure conversational
prose style" which, as he points out, is so much more difficult to
practise than fine writing.
There can be no question that Hazlitt the thinker is an
admirable companion. He is strong and fearless; he knows his mind
and he speaks his mind forcibly yet brilliantly too, for the
readers of newspapers are a dull-eyed race who must be dazzled in
order to make them see. But besides Hazlitt the thinker there is
Hazlitt the artist. There is the sensuous and emotional man, with
his feeling for colour and touch, with his passion for
prizefighting and Sarah Walker, with his sensibility to all those
emotions which disturb the reason and make it often seem futile
enough to spend one's time slicing things up finer and finer with
the intellect when the body of the world is so firm and so warm and
demands so imperatively to be pressed to the heart. To know the
reason of things is a poor substitute for being able to feel them.
And Hazlitt felt with the intensity of a poet. The most abstract of
his essays will suddenly glow red-hot or white-hot if something
reminds him of his past. He will drop his fine analytic pen and
paint a phrase or two with a full brush brilliantly and beautifully
if some landscape stirs his imagination or some book brings back
the hour when he first read it. The famous passages about reading
Love for Love and drinking coffee from a silver pot, and
reading La Nouvelle Héloïse and eating a cold
chicken, are known to all, and yet how oddly they often break into
the context, how violently we are switched from reason to
rhapsody—how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon
our shoulders and demands our sympathy! It is this disparity and
the sense of two forces in conflict that trouble the serenity and
cause the inconclusiveness of some of Hazlitt's finest essays. They
set out to give us a proof and they end by giving us a picture. We
are about to plant our feet upon the solid rock of Q.E.D., and
behold the rock turns to quagmire and we are knee-deep in mud and
water and flowers. "Faces pale as the primrose with hyacinthine
locks" are in our eyes; the woods of Tuderly breathe their mystic
voices in our ears. Then suddenly we are recalled, and the thinker,
austere, muscular, and sardonic, leads us on to analyse, to
dissect, and to condemn.
Thus if we compare Hazlitt with the other great masters in his
line it is easy to see where his limitations lie. His range is
narrow and his sympathies few if intense. He does not open the
doors wide upon all experience like Montaigne, rejecting nothing,
tolerating everything, and watching the play of the soul with irony
and detachment. On the contrary, his mind shut hard with egotistic
tenacity upon his first impressions and froze them to unalterable
convictions. Nor was it for him to make play, like Lamb, with the
figures of his friends, creating them afresh in fantastic flights
of imagination and reverie. His characters are seen with the same
quick sidelong glance full of shrewdness and suspicion which he
darted upon people in the flesh. He does not use the essayist's
licence to circle and meander. He is tethered by his egotism and by
his convictions to one time and one place and one being. We never
forget that this is England in the early days of the nineteenth
century; indeed, we feel ourselves in the Southampton Buildings or
in the inn parlour that looks over the downs and on to the high
road at Winterslow. He has an extraordinary power of making us
contemporary with himself. But as we read on through the many
volumes which he filled with so much energy and yet with so little
love of his task, the comparison with the other essayists drops
from us. These are not essays, it seems, independent and
self-sufficient, but fragments broken off from some larger
book—some searching enquiry into the reason for human actions
or into the nature of human institutions. It is only accident that
has cut them short, and only deference to the public taste that has
decked them out with gaudy images and bright colours. The phrase
which occurs in one form or another so frequently and indicates the
structure which if he were free he would follow—"I will here
try to go more at large into the subject and then give such
instances and illustrations of it as occur to me"—could by no
possibility occur in the Essays of Elia or Sir Roger de
Coverley. He loves to grope among the curious depths of human
psychology and to track down the reason of things. He excels in
hunting out the obscure causes that lie behind some common saying
or sensation, and the drawers of his mind are well stocked with
illustrations and arguments. We can believe him when he says that
for twenty years he had thought hard and suffered acutely. He is
speaking of what he knows from experience when he exclaims, "How
many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and intense,
often pass through the mind in only one day's thinking or reading!"
Convictions are his life-blood; ideas have formed in him like
stalactites, drop by drop, year by year. He has sharpened them in a
thousand solitary walks; he has tested them in argument after
argument, sitting in his corner, sardonically observant, over a
late supper at the Southampton Inn. But he has not changed them.
His mind is his own and it is made up.
Thus however threadbare the abstraction—Hot and
Cold, or Envy, or The Conduct of Life, or The
Picturesque and the Ideal—he has something solid to write
about. He never lets his brain slacken or trusts to his great gift
of picturesque phrasing to float him over a stretch of shallow
thought. Even when it is plain from the savagery and contempt with
which he attacks his task that he is out of the mood and only keeps
his mind to the grindstone by strong tea and sheer force of will,
we still find him mordant and searching and acute. There is a stir
and trouble, a vivacity and conflict in his essays as if the very
contrariety of his gifts kept him on the stretch. He is always
hating, loving, thinking, and suffering. He could never come to
terms with authority or doff his own idiosyncrasy in deference to
opinion. Thus chafed and goaded the level of his essays is
extraordinarily high. Often dry, garish in their bright imagery,
monotonous in the undeviating energy of their rhythm—for
Hazlitt believed too implicitly in his own saying, "mediocrity,
insipidity, want of character, is the great fault", to be an easy
writer to read for long at a stretch—there is scarcely an
essay without its stress of thought, its thrust of insight, its
moment of penetration. His pages are full of fine sayings and
unexpected turns and independence and originality. "All that is
worth remembering of life is the poetry of it." "If the truth were
known, the most disagreeable people are the most amiable." "You
will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from
London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the
undergraduates or heads of colleges of that famous University." We
are constantly plucked at by sayings that we would like to put by
to examine later.
But besides the volumes of Hazlitt's essays there are the
volumes of Hazlitt's criticism. In one way or another, either as
lecturer or reviewer, Hazlitt strode through the greater part of
English literature and delivered his opinion of the majority of
famous books. His criticism has the rapidity and the daring, if it
has also the looseness and the roughness, which arise from the
circumstances in which it was written. He must cover a great deal
of ground, make his points clear to an audience not of readers but
of listeners, and has time only to point to the tallest towers and
the brightest pinnacles in the landscape. But even in his most
perfunctory criticism of books we feel that faculty for seizing on
the important and indicating the main outline which learned critics
often lose and timid critics never acquire. He is one of those rare
critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with
reading. It matters very little that Hazlitt had read only one poem
by Donne; that he found Shakespeare's sonnets unintelligible; that
he never read a book through after he was thirty; that he came
indeed to dislike reading altogether. What he had read he had read
with fervour. And since in his view it was the duty of a critic to
"reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a
work", appetite, gusto, enjoyment were far more important than
analytic subtlety or prolonged and extensive study. To communicate
his own fervour was his aim. Thus he first cuts out with vigorous
and direct strokes the figure of one author and contrasts it with
another, and next builds up with the freest use of imagery and
colour the brilliant ghost that the book has left glimmering in his
mind. The poem is re-created in glowing phrases—"A rich
distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a
golden cloud envelops it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction
encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula". But since the
analyst in Hazlitt is never far from the surface, this painter's
imagery is kept in check by a nervous sense of the hard and lasting
in literature, of what a book means and where it should be placed,
which models his enthusiasm and gives it angle and outline. He
singles out the peculiar quality of his author and stamps it
vigorously. There is the "deep, internal, sustained sentiment" of
Chaucer; "Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded
in the still life of tragedy". There is nothing flabby,
weak, or merely ornamental in his criticism of Scott—sense
and enthusiasm run hand in hand. And if such criticism is the
reverse of final, if it is initiatory and inspiring rather than
conclusive and complete, there is something to be said for the
critic who starts the reader on a journey and fires him with a
phrase to shoot off on adventures of his own. If one needs an
incentive to read Burke, what is better than "Burke's style was
forked and playful like the lightning, crested like the serpent"?
Or again, should one be trembling on the brink of a dusty folio,
the following passage is enough to plunge one in midstream:
It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to
have some great name at hand, besides one's own initials always
staring one in the face; to travel out of one's self into the
Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters; to have the palm-trees
waving mystically in the margin of the page, and the camels moving
slowly on in the distance of three thousand years. In that dry
desert of learning, we gather strength and patience, and a strange
and insatiable thirst of knowledge. The ruined monuments of
antiquity are also there, and the fragments of buried cities (under
which the adder lurks) and cool springs, and green sunny spots, and
the whirlwind and the lion's roar, and the shadow of angelic
wings.
Needless to say that is not criticism. It is sitting in an
armchair and gazing into the fire, and building up image after
image of what one has seen in a book. It is loving and taking the
liberties of a lover. It is being Hazlitt.
But it is likely that Hazlitt will survive not in his lectures,
nor in his travels, nor in his Life of Napoleon, nor in his
Conversations of Northcote, full as they are of energy and
integrity, of broken and fitful splendour and shadowed with the
shape of some vast unwritten book that looms on the horizon. He
will live in a volume of essays in which is distilled all those
powers that are dissipated and distracted elsewhere, where the
parts of his complex and tortured spirit come together in a truce
of amity and concord. Perhaps a fine day was needed, or a game of
fives or a long walk in the country, to bring about this
consummation. The body has a large share in everything that Hazlitt
writes. Then a mood of intense and spontaneous reverie came over
him; he soared into what Patmore called "a calm so pure and serene
that one did not like to interrupt it". His brain worked smoothly
and swiftly and without consciousness of its own operations; the
pages dropped without an erasure from his pen. Then his mind ranged
in a rhapsody of well-being over books and love, over the past and
its beauty, the present and its comfort, and the future that would
bring a partridge hot from the oven or a dish of sausages sizzling
in the pan.
I look out of my window and see that a shower has just fallen:
the fields look green after it, and a rosy cloud hangs over the
brow of the hill; a lily expands its petals in the moisture,
dressed in its lovely green and white; a shepherd-boy has just
brought some pieces of turf with daisies and grass for his young
mistress to make a bed for her skylark, not doomed to dip his wings
in the dappled dawn—my cloudy thoughts draw off, the storm of
angry politics has blown over—Mr. Blackwood, I am
yours—Mr. Croker, my service to you—Mr. T. Moore, I am
alive and well.
There is then no division, no discord, no bitterness. The
different faculties work in harmony and unity. Sentence follows
sentence with the healthy ring and chime of a blacksmith's hammer
on the anvil; the words glow and the sparks fly; gently they fade
and the essay is over. And as his writing had such passages of
inspired description, so, too, his life had its seasons of intense
enjoyment. When he lay dying a hundred years ago in a lodging in
Soho his voice rang out with the old pugnacity and conviction:
"Well, I have had a happy life." One has only to read him to
believe it.
Geraldine Jewsbury would certainly not have expected anybody at
this time of day to bother themselves about her novels. If she had
caught one pulling them down from the shelf in some library she
would have expostulated. "They're such nonsense, my dear", she
would have said. And then one likes to fancy that she would have
burst out in that irresponsible, unconventional way of hers against
libraries and literature and love and life and all the rest of it
with a "Damn it all!" or a "Confound it!" for Geraldine was fond of
swearing.
The odd thing about Geraldine Jewsbury, indeed, was the way in
which she combined oaths and endearments, sense and effervescence,
daring and gush: "...defenceless and tender on the one hand, and
strong enough to cleave the very rocks on the other"—that is
how Mrs. Ireland, her biographer, puts it; or again:
"Intellectually she was a man, but the heart within her was as
womanly as ever daughter of Eve could boast". Even to look at there
was, it would seem, something incongruous, queer, provocative about
her. She was very small and yet boyish; very ugly yet attractive.
She dressed very well, wore her reddish hair in a net, and
ear-rings made in the form of miniature parrots swung in her ears
as she talked. There, in the only portrait we have of her, she sits
reading, with her face half-turned away, defenceless and tender at
the moment rather than cleaving the very rocks.
But what had happened to her before she sat at the
photographer's table reading her book it is impossible to say.
Until she was twenty-nine we know nothing of her except that she
was born in the year 1812, was the daughter of a merchant, and
lived in Manchester, or near it. In the first part of the
nineteenth century a woman of twenty-nine was no longer young; she
had lived her life or she had missed it. And though Geraldine, with
her unconventional ways, was an exception, still it cannot be
doubted that something very tremendous had happened in those dim
years before we know her. Something had happened in Manchester. An
obscure male figure looms in the background—a faithless but
fascinating creature who had taught her that life is treacherous,
life is hard, life is the very devil for a woman. A dark pool of
experience had formed in the back of her mind into which she would
dip for the consolation or for the instruction of others. "Oh! it
is too frightful to talk about. For two years I lived only in short
respites from this blackness of darkness", she exclaimed from time
to time. There had been seasons "like dreary, calm November days
when there is but one cloud, but that one covers the whole heaven".
She had struggled, "but struggling is no use". She had read
Cudworth through. She had written an essay upon materialism before
giving way. For, though the prey to so many emotions, she was also
oddly detached and speculative. She liked to puzzle her head with
questions about "matter and spirit and the nature of life" even
while her heart was bleeding. Upstairs there was a box full of
extracts, abstracts, and conclusions. Yet what conclusion could a
woman come to? Did anything avail a woman when love had deserted
her, when her lover had played her false? No. It was useless to
struggle; one had better let the wave engulf one, the cloud close
over one's head. So she meditated, lying often on a sofa with a
piece of knitting in her hands and a green shade over her eyes. For
she suffered from a variety of ailments—sore eyes, colds,
nameless exhaustion; and Greenheys, the suburb outside Manchester,
where she kept house for her brother, was very damp. "Dirty,
half-melted snow and fog, a swampy meadow, set off by a creeping
cold damp"—that was the view from her window. Often she could
hardly drag herself across the room. And then there were incessant
interruptions: somebody had come unexpectedly for dinner; she had
to jump up and run into the kitchen and cook a fowl with her own
hands. That done, she would put on her green shade and peer at her
book again, for she was a great reader. She read metaphysics, she
read travels, she read old books and new books—and especially
the wonderful books of Mr. Carlyle.
Early in the year 1841 she came to London and secured an
introduction to the great man whose works she so much admired. She
met Mrs. Carlyle. They must have become intimate with great
rapidity. In a few weeks Mrs. Carlyle was "dearest Jane". They must
have discussed everything. They must have talked about life and the
past and the present, and certain "individuals" who were
sentimentally interested or were not sentimentally interested in
Geraldine. Mrs. Carlyle, so metropolitan, so brilliant, so deeply
versed in life and scornful of its humbugs, must have captivated
the young woman from Manchester completely, for directly Geraldine
returned to Manchester she began writing long letters to Jane which
echo and continue the intimate conversations of Cheyne Row. "A man
who has had le plus grand succès among women, and who
was the most passionate and poetically refined lover in his manners
and conversation you would wish to find, once said to me ..." So
she would begin. Or she would reflect:
It may be that we women are made as we are in order that they
may in some sort fertilise the world. We shall go on loving, they
[the men] will go on struggling and toiling, and we are all alike
mercifully allowed to die—after a while. I don't know whether
you will agree to this, and I cannot see to argue, for my eyes are
very bad and painful.
Probably Jane agreed to very little of all this. For Jane was
eleven years the elder. Jane was not given to abstract reflections
upon the nature of life. Jane was the most caustic, the most
concrete, the most clear-sighted of women. But it is perhaps worth
noting that when she first fell in with Geraldine she was beginning
to feel those premonitions of jealousy, that uneasy sense that old
relationships had shifted and that new ones were forming
themselves, which had come to pass with the establishment of her
husband's fame. No doubt, in the course of those long talks in
Cheyne Row, Geraldine had received certain confidences, heard
certain complaints, and drawn certain conclusions. For besides
being a mass of emotion and sensibility, Geraldine was a clever,
witty woman who thought for herself and hated what she called
"respectability" as much as Mrs. Carlyle hated what she called
"humbug". In addition, Geraldine had from the first the strangest
feelings about Mrs. Carlyle. She felt "vague undefined yearnings to
be yours in some way". "You will let me be yours and think of me as
such, will you not?" she urged again and again. "I think of you as
Catholics think of their saints", she said: "...you will laugh, but
I feel towards you much more like a lover than a female friend!" No
doubt Mrs. Carlyle did laugh, but also she could scarcely fail to
be touched by the little creature's adoration.
Thus when Carlyle himself early in 1843 suggested unexpectedly
that they should ask Geraldine to stay with them, Mrs. Carlyle,
after debating the question with her usual candour, agreed. She
reflected that a little of Geraldine would be "very enlivening",
but, on the other hand, much of Geraldine would be very exhausting.
Geraldine dropped hot tears on to one's hands; she watched one; she
fussed one; she was always in a state of emotion. Then "with all
her good and great qualities" Geraldine had in her "a born spirit
of intrigue" which might make mischief between husband and wife,
though not in the usual way, for, Mrs. Carlyle reflected, her
husband "had the habit" of preferring her to other women, "and
habits are much stronger in him than passions". On the other hand,
she herself was getting lazy intellectually; Geraldine loved talk
and clever talk; with all her aspirations and enthusiasms it would
be a kindness to let the young woman marooned in Manchester come to
Chelsea; and so she came.
She came on the 1st or 2nd of February, and she stayed till the
Saturday, the 11th of March. Such were visits in the year 1843. And
the house was very small, and the servant was inefficient.
Geraldine was always there. All the morning she scribbled letters.
All the afternoon she lay fast asleep on the sofa in the
drawing-room. She dressed herself in a low-necked dress to receive
visitors on Sunday. She talked too much. As for her reputed
intellect, "she is sharp as a meat axe, but as narrow". She
flattered. She wheedled. She was insincere. She flirted. She swore.
Nothing would make her go. The charges against her rose in a
crescendo of irritation. Mrs. Carlyle almost had to turn her out of
the house. At last they parted; and Geraldine, as she got into the
cab, was in floods of tears, but Mrs. Carlyle's eyes were dry.
Indeed, she was immensely relieved to see the last of her visitor.
Yet when Geraldine had driven off and she found herself alone she
was not altogether easy in her mind. She knew that her behaviour to
a guest whom she herself had invited had been far from perfect. She
had been "cold, cross, ironical, disobliging". Above all, she was
angry with herself for having taken Geraldine for a
confidante. "Heaven grant that the consequences may be only
boring—not fatal", she wrote. But it is clear
that she was very much out of temper; and with herself as much as
with Geraldine.
Geraldine, returned to Manchester, was well aware that something
was wrong. Estrangement and silence fell between them. People
repeated malicious stories which she half believed. But Geraldine
was the least vindictive of women—"very noble in her
quarrels", as Mrs. Carlyle herself admitted—and, if foolish
and sentimental, neither conceited nor proud. Above all, her love
for Jane was sincere. Soon she was writing to Mrs. Carlyle again
"with an assiduity and disinterestedness that verge on the
superhuman", as Jane commented with a little exasperation. She was
worrying about Jane's health and saying that she did not want witty
letters, but only dull letters telling the truth about Jane's
state. For—it may have been one of those things that made her
so trying as a visitor—Geraldine had not stayed for four
weeks in Cheyne Row without coming to conclusions which it is not
likely that she kept entirely to herself. "You have no one who has
any sort of consideration for you", she wrote. "You have had
patience and endurance till I am sick of the virtues, and what have
they done for you? Half-killed you." "Carlyle", she burst out, "is
much too grand for everyday life. A sphinx does not fit in
comfortably to our parlour life arrangements." But she could do
nothing. "The more one loves, the more helpless one feels", she
moralised. She could only watch from Manchester the bright
kaleidoscope of her friend's existence and compare it with her own
prosaic life, all made up of little odds and ends; but somehow,
obscure though her own life was, she no longer envied Jane the
brilliance of her lot.
So they might have gone on corresponding in a desultory way at a
distance—and "I am tired to death of writing letters into
space", Geraldine exclaimed; "one only writes after a long
separation, to oneself, instead of one's friend"—had it not
been for the Mudies. The Mudies and Mudieism as Geraldine called
it, played a vast, if almost unrecorded, part in the obscure lives
of Victorian gentlewomen. In this case the Mudies were two girls,
Elizabeth and Juliet: "flary, staring, and conceited,
stolid-looking girls", Carlyle called them, the daughters of a
Dundee schoolmaster, a respectable man who had written books on
natural history and died, leaving a foolish widow and little or no
provision for his family. Somehow the Mudies arrived in Cheyne Row
inconveniently, if one may hazard a guess, just as dinner was on
the table. But the Victorian lady never minded that—she put
herself to any inconvenience to help the Mudies. The question at
once presented itself to Mrs. Carlyle, what could be done for them?
Who knew of a place? who had influence with a rich man? Geraldine
flashed into her mind. Geraldine was always wishing she could be of
use. Geraldine might fairly be asked if there were situations to be
had for the Mudies in Manchester. Geraldine acted with a
promptitude that was much to her credit. She "placed" Juliet at
once. Soon she had heard of another place for Elizabeth. Mrs.
Carlyle, who was in the Isle of Wight, at once procured stays,
gown, and petticoat for Elizabeth, came up to London, took
Elizabeth all the way across London to Euston Square at half past
seven in the evening, put her in charge of a benevolent-looking,
fat old man, saw that a letter to Geraldine was pinned to her
stays, and returned home, exhausted, triumphant, yet, as happens
often with the devotees of Mudieism, a prey to secret misgivings.
Would the Mudies be happy? Would they thank her for what she had
done? A few days later the inevitable bugs appeared in Cheyne Row,
and were ascribed, with or without reason, to Elizabeth's shawl.
What was far worse, Elizabeth herself appeared four months later,
having proved herself "wholly inapplicable to any practical
purpose", having "sewed a black apron with white
thread", and, on being mildly scolded, having "thrown herself on
the kitchen floor and kicked and screamed". "Of course, her
immediate dismissal is the result." Elizabeth vanished—to sew
more black aprons with white thread, to kick and scream and be
dismissed—who knows what happened eventually to poor
Elizabeth Mudie? She disappears from the world altogether,
swallowed up in the dark shades of her sisterhood. Juliet, however,
remained. Geraldine made Juliet her charge. She superintended and
advised. The first place was unsatisfactory. Geraldine engaged
herself to find another. She went off and sat in the hall of a
"very stiff old lady" who wanted a maid. The very stiff old lady
said she would want Juliet to clear-starch collars, to iron cuffs,
and to wash and iron petticoats. Juliet's heart failed her. All
this clear-starching and ironing, she exclaimed, were beyond her.
Off went Geraldine again, late in the evening, and saw the old
lady's daughter. It was arranged that the petticoats should be "put
out" and only the collars and frills left for Juliet to iron. Off
went Geraldine and arranged with her own milliner to give her
lessons in quilling and trimming. And Mrs. Carlyle wrote kindly to
Juliet and sent her a packet. So it went on with more places and
more bothers, and more old ladies, and more interviews till Juliet
wrote a novel, which a gentleman praised very highly, and Juliet
told Miss Jewsbury that she was annoyed by another gentleman who
followed her home from church; but still she was a very nice girl,
and everybody spoke well of her until the year 1849, when suddenly,
without any reason given, silence descends upon the last of the
Mudies. It covers, one cannot doubt, another failure. The novel,
the stiff old lady, the gentleman, the caps, the petticoats, the
clear-starching—what was the cause of her downfall? Nothing
is known. "The wretched stalking blockheads", wrote Carlyle,
"stalked fatefully, in spite of all that could be done and said,
steadily downwards towards perdition and sank altogether out of
view." For all her endeavours Mrs. Carlyle had to admit that
Mudieism was always a failure.
But Mudieism had unexpected results. Mudieism brought Jane and
Geraldine together again. Jane could not deny that "the fluff of
feathers" whom she had served up, as her way was, in so many a
scornful phrase for Carlyle's amusement, had "taken up the matter
with an enthusiasm even surpassing my own". She had grit in her as
well as fluff. Thus when Geraldine sent her the manuscript of her
first novel, Zoe, Mrs. Carlyle bestirred herself to find a
publisher ("for", she wrote, "what is to become of her when she is
old without ties, without purposes?") and with surprising success.
Chapman & Hall at once agreed to publish the book, which, their
reader reported, "had taken hold of him with a grasp of iron". The
book had been long on the way. Mrs. Carlyle herself had been
consulted at various stages of its career. She had read the first
sketch "with a feeling little short of terror! So much power of
genius rushing so recklessly into unknown space." But she had also
been deeply impressed.
Geraldine in particular shows herself here a far more profound
and daring speculator than ever I had fancied her. I do not believe
there is a woman alive at the present day, not even Georges Sand
herself, that could have written some of the best passages in this
book...but they must not publish it—decency forbids!
There was, Mrs. Carlyle complained, an indecency or "want of
reserve in the spiritual department", which no respectable public
would stand. Presumably Geraldine consented to make alterations,
though she confessed that she "had no vocation for propriety as
such"; the book was rewritten, and it appeared at last in February
1845. The usual buzz and conflict of opinion at once arose. Some
were enthusiastic, others were shocked. The "old and young
roués of the Reform Club almost go off into hysterics
over—its indecency". The publisher was a little
alarmed; but the scandal helped the sale, and Geraldine became a
lioness.
And now, of course, as one turns the pages of the three little
yellowish volumes, one wonders what reason there was for approval
or disapproval, what spasm of indignation or admiration scored that
pencil mark, what mysterious emotion pressed violets, now black as
ink, between the pages of the love scenes. Chapter after chapter
glides amiably, fluently past. In a kind of haze we catch glimpses
of an illegitimate girl called Zoe; of an enigmatic Roman Catholic
priest called Everhard; of a castle in the country; of ladies lying
on sky-blue sofas; of gentlemen reading aloud; of girls
embroidering hearts in silk. There is a conflagration. There is an
embrace in a wood. There is incessant conversation. There is a
moment of terrific emotion when the priest exclaims, "Would that I
had never been born!" and proceeds to sweep a letter from the Pope
asking him to edit a translation of the principal works of the
Fathers of the first four centuries and a parcel containing a gold
chain from the University of Göttingen into a drawer because
Zoe has shaken his faith. But what indecency there was pungent
enough to shock the roués of the Reform Club, what genius
there was brilliant enough to impress the shrewd intellect of Mrs.
Carlyle, it is impossible to guess. Colours that were fresh as
roses eighty years ago have faded to a feeble pink; nothing remains
of all those scents and savours but a faint perfume of faded
violets, of stale hair-oil, we know not which. What miracles, we
exclaim, are within the power of a few years to accomplish! But
even as we exclaim, we see, far away, a trace perhaps of what they
meant. The passion, in so far as it issues from the lips of living
people, is completely spent. The Zoes, the Clothildes, the
Everhards moulder on their perches; but, nevertheless, there is
somebody in the room with them; an irresponsible spirit, a daring
and agile woman, if one considers that she is cumbered with
crinoline and stays; an absurd sentimental creature, languishing,
expatiating, but for all that still strangely alive. We catch a
sentence now and then rapped out boldly, a thought subtly
conceived. "How much better to do right without religion!" "Oh! if
they really believed all they preach, how would any priest or
preacher be able to sleep in his bed!" "Weakness is the only state
for which there is no hope." "To love rightly is the highest
morality of which mankind is capable." Then how she hated the
"compacted, plausible theories of men"! And what is life? For what
end was it given us? Such questions, such convictions, still hurtle
past the heads of the stuffed figures mouldering on their perches.
They are dead, but Geraldine Jewsbury herself still survives,
independent, courageous, absurd, writing page after page without
stopping to correct, and coming out with her views upon love,
morality, religion, and the relations of the sexes, whoever may be
within hearing, with a cigar between her lips.
Some time before the publication of Zoe, Mrs. Carlyle had
forgotten, or overcome, her irritation with Geraldine, partly
because she had worked so zealously in the cause of the Mudies,
partly also because by Geraldine's painstaking she was "almost
over-persuaded back into my old illusion that she has some sort of
strange, passionate...incomprehensible attraction towards
me". Not only was she drawn back into correspondence—after
all her vows to the contrary she again stayed under the same roof
with Geraldine, at Seaforth House near Liverpool, in July 1844. Not
many days had passed before Mrs. Carlyle's "illusion" about the
strength of Geraldine's affection for her proved to be no illusion
but a monstrous fact. One morning there was some slight tiff
between them: Geraldine sulked all day; at night Geraldine came to
Mrs. Carlyle's bedroom and made a scene which was "a revelation to
me, not only of Geraldine, but of human nature! Such mad,
lover-like jealousy on the part of one woman towards another it had
never entered into my heart to conceive." Mrs. Carlyle was angry
and outraged and contemptuous. She saved up a full account of the
scene to entertain her husband with. A few days later she turned
upon Geraldine in public and sent the whole company into fits of
laughter by saying, "I wondered she should expect me to behave
decently to her after she had for a whole evening been making love
before my very face to another man!" The trouncing must have
been severe, the humiliation painful. But Geraldine was
incorrigible. A year later she was again sulking and raging and
declaring that she had a right to rage because "she loves me better
than all the rest of the world"; and Mrs. Carlyle was getting up
and saying, "Geraldine, until you can behave like a gentlewoman
..." and leaving the room. And again there were tears and apologies
and promises to reform.
Yet though Mrs. Carlyle scolded and jeered, though they were
estranged, and though for a time they ceased to write to each
other, still they always came together again. Geraldine, it is
abundantly clear, felt that Jane was in every way wiser, better,
stronger than she was. She depended on Jane. She needed Jane to
keep her out of scrapes; for Jane never got into scrapes herself.
But though Jane was so much wiser and cleverer than Geraldine,
there were times when the foolish and irresponsible one of the two
became the counsellor. Why, she asked, waste your time in mending
old clothes? Why not work at something that will really employ your
energies? Write, she advised her. For Jane, who was so profound, so
far-seeing, could, Geraldine was convinced, write something that
would help women in "their very complicated duties and
difficulties". She owed a duty to her sex. But, the bold woman
proceeded, "do not go to Mr. Carlyle for sympathy, do not let him
dash you with cold water. You must respect your own work, and your
own motives"—a piece of advice that Jane, who was afraid to
accept the dedication of Geraldine's new novel The Half
Sisters, lest Mr. Carlyle might object, would have done well to
follow. The little creature was in some ways the bolder and the
more independent of the two.
She had, moreover, a quality that Jane with all her brilliancy
lacked—an element of poetry, a trace of the speculative
imagination. She browsed upon old books and copied out romantic
passages about the palm trees and cinnamon of Arabia and sent them
to lie, incongruously enough, upon the breakfast table in Cheyne
Row. Jane's genius, of course, was the very opposite; it was
positive, direct, and practical. Her imagination concentrated
itself upon people. Her letters owe their incomparable brilliancy
to the hawk-like swoop and descent of her mind upon facts. Nothing
escapes her. She sees through clear water down to the rocks at the
bottom. But the intangible eluded her; she dismissed the poetry of
Keats with a sneer; something of the narrowness and something of
the prudery of a Scottish country doctors daughter clung to her.
Though infinitely the less masterly, Geraldine was sometimes the
broader minded.
Such sympathies and antipathies bound the two women together
with an elasticity that made for permanence. The tie between them
could stretch and stretch indefinitely without breaking. Jane knew
the extent of Geraldine's folly; Geraldine had felt the full lash
of Jane's tongue. They had learnt to tolerate each other.
Naturally, they quarrelled again; but their quarrels were different
now; they were quarrels that were bound to be made up. And when
after her brother's marriage in 1854 Geraldine moved to London, it
was to be near Mrs. Carlyle at Mrs. Carlyle's own wish. The woman
who in 1843 would never be a friend of hers again was now the most
intimate friend she had in the world. She was to lodge two streets
off; and perhaps two streets off was the right space to put between
them. The emotional friendship was full of misunderstandings at a
distance; it was intolerably exacting under the same roof. But when
they lived round the corner their relationship broadened and
simplified; it became a natural intercourse whose ruffles and whose
calms were based upon the depths of intimacy. They went about
together. They went to hear The Messiah; and,
characteristically, Geraldine wept at the beauty of the music and
Jane had much ado to prevent herself from shaking Geraldine for
crying and from crying herself at the ugliness of the chorus women.
They went to Norwood for a jaunt, and Geraldine left a silk
handkerchief and an aluminium brooch ("a love token from Mr.
Barlow") in the hotel and a new silk parasol in the waiting-room.
Also Jane noted with sardonic satisfaction that Geraldine, in an
attempt at economy, bought two second-class tickets, while the cost
of a return ticket first class was precisely the same.
Meanwhile Geraldine lay on the floor and generalised and
speculated and tried to formulate some theory of life from her own
tumultuous experience. "How loathsome" (her language was always apt
to be strong—she knew that she "sinned against Jane's notions
of good taste" very often), how loathsome the position of women was
in many ways! How she herself had been crippled and stunted! How
her blood boiled in her at the power that men had over women! She
would like to kick certain gentlemen—"the lying hypocritical
beggars! Well, it's no good swearing—only, I am angry and it
eases my mind."
And then her thoughts turned to Jane and herself and to the
brilliant gifts—at any rate, Jane had brilliant
gifts—which had borne so little visible result. Nevertheless,
except when she was ill,
I do not think that either you or I are to be called failures.
We are indications of a development of womanhood which as yet is
not recognised. It has, so far, no ready-made channels to run in,
but still we have looked and tried, and found that the present
rules for women will not hold us—that something better and
stronger is needed...There are women to come after us, who will
approach nearer the fullness of the measure of the stature of a
woman's nature. I regard myself as a mere faint indication, a
rudiment of the idea, of certain higher qualities and possibilities
that lie in women, and all the eccentricities and mistakes and
miseries and absurdities I have made are only the consequences of
an imperfect formation, an immature growth.
So she theorised, so she speculated; and Mrs. Carlyle listened,
and laughed, and contradicted, no doubt, but with more of sympathy
than of derision: she could have wished that Geraldine were more
precise; she could have wished her to moderate her language.
Carlyle might come in at any moment; and if there was one creature
that Carlyle hated, it was a strong-minded woman of the George Sand
species. Yet she could not deny that there was an element of truth
in what Geraldine said; she had always thought that Geraldine "was
born to spoil a horn or make a spoon". Geraldine was no fool in
spite of appearances.
But what Geraldine thought and said; how she spent her mornings;
what she did in the long evenings of the London winter—all,
in fact, that constituted her life at Markham Square—is but
slightly and doubtfully known to us. For, fittingly enough, the
bright light of Jane extinguished the paler and more flickering
fire of Geraldine. She had no need to write to Jane any more. She
was in and out of the house—now writing a letter for Jane
because Jane's fingers were swollen, now taking a letter to the
post and forgetting, like the scatter-brained romantic creature she
was, to post it. A crooning domestic sound like the purring of a
kitten or the humming of a tea-kettle seems to rise, as we turn the
pages of Mrs. Carlyle's letters, from the intercourse of the two
incompatible but deeply attached women. So the years passed. At
length, on Saturday, 21st April 1866, Geraldine was to help Jane
with a tea-party. Mr. Carlyle was in Scotland, and Mrs. Carlyle
hoped to get through some necessary civilities to admirers in his
absence. Geraldine was actually dressing for the occasion when Mr.
Froude appeared suddenly at her house. He had just had a message
from Cheyne Row to say that "something had happened to Mrs.
Carlyle". Geraldine flung on her cloak. They hastened together to
St. George's Hospital. There, writes Froude, they saw Mrs. Carlyle,
beautifully dressed as usual,
as if she had sat upon the bed after leaving the brougham, and
had fallen back upon it asleep...The brilliant mockery, the sad
softness with which the mockery alternated, both were alike gone.
The features lay composed in a stern majestic calm...[Geraldine]
could not speak.
Nor indeed can we break that silence. It deepened. It became
complete. Soon after Jane's death she went to live at Sevenoaks.
She lived there alone for twenty-two years. It is said that she
lost her vivacity. She wrote no more books. Cancer attacked her and
she suffered much. On her deathbed she began tearing up Jane's
letters, as Jane had wished, and she had destroyed all but one
before she died. Thus, just as her life began in obscurity, so it
ended in obscurity. We know her well only for a few years in the
middle. But let us not be too sanguine about "knowing her well".
Intimacy is a difficult art, as Geraldine herself reminds us.
Oh, my dear [she wrote to Mrs. Carlyle], if you and I are
drowned, or die, what would become of us if any superior person
were to go and write our "life and errors"? What a precious mess a
"truthful person" would go and make of us, and how very different
to what we really are or were!
The echo of her mockery, ungrammatical, colloquial, but as usual
with the ring of truth in it, reaches us from where she lies in
Lady Morgan's vault in the Brompton cemetery.
By one of those ironies of fashion that might have amused the
Brownings themselves, it seems likely that they are now far better
known in the flesh than they have ever been in the spirit.
Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant,
eloping—in this guise thousands of people must know and love
the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry. They have
become two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and
animated company of authors who, thanks to our modern habit of
writing memoirs and printing letters and sitting to be
photographed, live in the flesh, not merely as of old in the word;
are known by their hats, not merely by their poems. What damage the
art of photography has inflicted upon the art of literature has yet
to be reckoned. How far we are going to read a poet when we can
read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.
Meanwhile, nobody can deny the power of the Brownings to excite our
sympathy and rouse our interest. "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is
glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once
a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she
escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one September
morning; how she met health and happiness, freedom, and Robert
Browning in the church round the corner.
But fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody
reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her
place. One has only to compare her reputation with Christina
Rossetti's to trace her decline. Christina Rossetti mounts
irresistibly to the first place among English women poets.
Elizabeth, so much more loudly applauded during her lifetime, falls
farther and farther behind. The primers dismiss her with contumely.
Her importance, they say, "has now become merely historical.
Neither education nor association with her husband ever succeeded
in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form." In short,
the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is
downstairs in the servants' quarters, where, in company with Mrs.
Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold,
and Robert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast
handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.
If, therefore, we take Aurora Leigh from the shelf it is
not so much in order to read it as to muse with kindly
condescension over this token of bygone fashion, as we toy with the
fringes of our grandmothers' mantles and muse over the alabaster
models of the Taj Mahal which once adorned their drawing-room
tables. But to the Victorians, undoubtedly, the book was very dear.
Thirteen editions of Aurora Leigh had been demanded by the
year 1873. And, to judge from the dedication, Mrs. Browning herself
was not afraid to say that she set great store by it—"the
most mature of my works", she calls it, "and the one into which my
highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered". Her letters
show that she had had the book in mind for many years. She was
brooding over it when she first met Browning, and her intention
with regard to it forms almost the first of those confidences about
their work which the lovers delighted to share.
...my chief intention [she wrote] just now is the writing
of a sort of novel-poem...running into the midst of our
conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, "where
angels fear to tread"; and so, meeting face to face and without
mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth of it out
plainly. That is my intention.
But for reasons which later become clear, she hoarded her
intention throughout the ten astonishing years of escape and
happiness; and when at last the book appeared in 1856 she might
well feel that she had poured into it the best that she had to
give. Perhaps the hoarding and the saturation which resulted have
something to do with the surprise that awaits us. At any rate we
cannot read the first twenty pages of Aurora Leigh without
becoming aware that the Ancient Mariner who lingers, for unknown
reasons, at the porch of one book and not of another has us by the
hand, and makes us listen like a three years' child while Mrs.
Browning pours out in nine volumes of blank verse the story of
Aurora Leigh. Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete
self-confidence—these are the qualities that hold us
enthralled. Floated off our feet by them, we learn how Aurora was
the child of an Italian mother "whose rare blue eyes were shut from
seeing her when she was scarcely four years old". Her father was
"an austere Englishman, Who, after a dry lifetime spent at home in
college-learning, law and parish talk, Was flooded with a passion
unaware", but died too, and the child was sent back to England to
be brought up by an aunt. The aunt, of the well-known family of the
Leighs, stood upon the hall step of her country house dressed in
black to welcome her. Her somewhat narrow forehead was braided
tight with brown hair pricked with gray; she had a close, mild
mouth; eyes of no colour; and cheeks like roses pressed in books,
"Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom, Past fading
also". The lady had lived a quiet life, exercising her Christian
gifts upon knitting stockings and stitching petticoats "because we
are of one flesh, after all, and need one flannel". At her hand
Aurora suffered the education that was thought proper for women.
She learnt a little French, a little algebra; the internal laws of
the Burmese empire; what navigable river joins itself to Lara; what
census of the year five was taken at Klagenfurt; also how to draw
nereids neatly draped, to spin glass, to stuff birds, and model
flowers in wax. For the aunt liked a woman to be womanly. Of an
evening she did cross-stitch and, owing to some mistake in her
choice of silk, once embroidered a shepherdess with pink eyes.
Under this torture of women's education, the passionate Aurora
exclaimed, certain women have died; others pine; a few who have, as
Aurora had, "relations with the unseen", survive and walk demurely,
and are civil to their cousins and listen to the vicar and pour out
tea. Aurora herself was blessed with a little room. It was
green-papered, had a green carpet and there were green curtains to
the bed, as if to match the insipid greenery of the English
countryside. There she retired; there she read. "I had found the
secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father's name,
Piled high, packed large, where, creeping in and out...like some
small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon" she read and
read. The mouse indeed (it is the way with Mrs. Browning's mice)
took wings and soared, for "It is rather when We gloriously forget
ourselves and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's
profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—'Tis
then we get the right good from a book". And so she read and read,
until her cousin Romney called to walk with her, or the painter
Vincent Carrington, "whom men judge hardly as bee-bonneted Because
he holds that paint a body well you paint a soul by implication",
tapped on the window.
This hasty abstract of the first volume of Aurora Leigh
does it of course no sort of justice; but having gulped down the
original much as Aurora herself advises, soul-forward, headlong, we
find ourselves in a state where some attempt at the ordering of our
multitudinous impressions becomes imperative. The first of these
impressions and the most pervasive is the sense of the writer's
presence. Through the voice of Aurora the character, the
circumstances, the idiosyncrasies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
ring in our ears. Mrs. Browning could no more conceal herself than
she could control herself, a sign no doubt of imperfection in an
artist, but a sign also that life has impinged upon art more than
life should. Again and again in the pages we have read, Aurora the
fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual.
The idea of the poem, we must remember, came to her in the early
forties when the connexion between a woman's art and a woman's life
was unnaturally close, so that it is impossible for the most
austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his eyes
should be fixed upon the page. And as everybody knows, the life of
Elizabeth Barrett was of a nature to affect the most authentic and
individual of gifts. Her mother had died when she was a child; she
had read profusely and privately; her favourite brother was
drowned; her health broke down; she had been immured by the tyranny
of her father in almost conventual seclusion in a bedroom in
Wimpole Street. But instead of rehearsing the well-known facts, it
is better to read in her own words her own account of the effect
they had upon her.
I have lived only inwardly [she wrote] or with sorrow,
for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was
secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the
world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society,
than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the
country—I had no social opportunities, had my heart in books
and poetry, and my experience in reveries. And so time passed and
passed—and afterwards, when my illness came...and no prospect
(as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room
again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness...that I
had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—that I
had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth
were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or
river, nothing in fact...And do you also know what a disadvantage
this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live on and yet do not
escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under
signal disadvantages—that I am, in a manner as a blind
poet? Certainly, there is compensation to a degree. I have had
much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness
and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the
main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this
lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some
experience of life and man, for some ...
She breaks off, with three little dots, and we may take
advantage of her pause to turn once more to Aurora
Leigh.
What damage had her life done her as a poet? A great one, we
cannot deny. For it is clear, as we turn the pages of Aurora
Leigh or of the Letters—one often echoes the
other—that the mind which found its natural expression in
this swift and chaotic poem about real men and women was not the
mind to profit by solitude. A lyrical, a scholarly, a fastidious
mind might have used seclusion and solitude to perfect its powers.
Tennyson asked no better than to live with books in the heart of
the country. But the mind of Elizabeth Barrett was lively and
secular and satirical. She was no scholar. Books were to her not an
end in themselves but a substitute for living. She raced through
folios because she was forbidden to scamper on the grass. She
wrestled with Aeschylus and Plato because it was out of the
question that she should argue about politics with live men and
women. Her favourite reading as an invalid was Balzac and George
Sand and other "immortal improprieties" because "they kept the
colour in my life to some degree". Nothing is more striking when at
last she broke the prison bars than the fervour with which she
flung herself into the life of the moment. She loved to sit in a
café and watch people passing; she loved the arguments, the
politics, and the strife of the modern world. The past and its
ruins, even the past of Italy and Italian ruins, interested her
much less than the theories of Mr. Hume the medium, or the politics
of Napoleon, Emperor of the French. Italian pictures, Greek poetry,
roused in her a clumsy and conventional enthusiasm in strange
contrast with the original independence of her mind when it applied
itself to actual facts.
Such being her natural bent, it is not surprising that even in
the depths of her sick-room her mind turned to modern life as a
subject for poetry. She waited, wisely, until her escape had given
her some measure of knowledge and proportion. But it cannot be
doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her irreparable
damage as an artist. She had lived shut off, guessing at what was
outside, and inevitably magnifying what was within. The loss of
Flush, the spaniel, affected her as the loss of a child might have
affected another woman. The tap of ivy on the pane became the
thrash of trees in a gale. Every sound was enlarged, every incident
exaggerated, for the silence of the sick-room was profound and the
monotony of Wimpole Street was intense. When at last she was able
to "rush into drawing-rooms and the like and meet face to face
without mask the Humanity of the age and speak the truth of it out
plainly", she was too weak to stand the shock. Ordinary daylight,
current gossip, the usual traffic of human beings left her
exhausted, ecstatic, and dazzled into a state where she saw so much
and felt so much that she did not altogether know what she felt or
what she saw.
Aurora Leigh, the novel-poem, is not, therefore, the
masterpiece that it might have been. Rather it is a masterpiece in
embryo; a work whose genius floats diffused and fluctuating in some
pre-natal stage waiting the final stroke of creative power to bring
it into being. Stimulating and boring, ungainly and eloquent,
monstrous and exquisite, all by turns, it overwhelms and bewilders;
but, nevertheless, it still commands our interest and inspires our
respect. For it becomes clear as we read that, whatever Mrs.
Browning's faults, she was one of those rare writers who risk
themselves adventurously and disinterestedly in an imaginative life
which is independent of their private lives and demands to be
considered apart from personalities. Her "intention" survives; the
interest of her theory redeems much that is faulty in her practice.
Abridged and simplified from Aurora's argument in the fifth book,
that theory runs something like this. The true work of poets, she
said, is to present their own age, not Charlemagne's. More passion
takes place in drawing-rooms than at Roncesvalles with Roland and
his knights. "To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry
out for togas and the picturesque, Is fatal—foolish too." For
living art presents and records real life, and the only life we can
truly know is our own. But what form, she asks, can a poem on
modern life take? The drama is impossible, for only servile and
docile plays have any chance of success. Moreover, what we (in
1846) have to say about life is not fit for "boards, actors,
prompters, gaslight, and costume; our stage is now the soul
itself". What then can she do? The problem is difficult,
performance is bound to fall short of endeavour; but she has at
least wrung her life-blood on to every page of her book, and, for
the rest "Let me think of forms less, and the external. Trust the
spirit...Keep up the fire and leave the generous flames to shape
themselves." And so the fire blazed and the flames leapt high.
The desire to deal with modern life in poetry was not confined
to Miss Barrett. Robert Browning said that he had had the same
ambition all his life. Coventry Patmore's "Angel in the House" and
Clough's "Bothie" were both attempts of the same kind and preceded
Aurora Leigh by some years. It was natural enough. The
novelists were dealing triumphantly with modern life in prose.
Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Richard Feverel
all trod fast on each other's heels between the years 1847 and
1860. The poets may well have felt, with Aurora Leigh, that modern
life had an intensity and a meaning of its own. Why should these
spoils fall solely into the laps of the prose writers? Why should
the poet be forced back to the remoteness of Charlemagne and
Roland, to the toga and the picturesque, when the humours and
tragedies of village life, drawing-room life, club life, and street
life all cried aloud for celebration? It was true that the old form
in which poetry had dealt with life—the drama—was
obsolete; but was there none other that could take its place? Mrs.
Browning, convinced of the divinity of poetry, pondered, seized as
much as she could of actual experience, and then at last threw down
her challenge to the Brontës and the Thackerays in nine books
of blank verse. It was in blank verse that she sang of Shoreditch
and Kensington; of my aunt and the vicar; of Romney Leigh and
Vincent Carrington; of Marian Erle and Lord Howe; of fashionable
weddings and drab suburban streets, and bonnets and whiskers and
four-wheeled cabs, and railway trains. The poets can treat of these
things, she exclaimed, as well as of knights and dames, moats and
drawbridges and castle courts. But can they? Let us see what
happens to a poet when he poaches upon a novelist's preserves and
gives us not an epic or a lyric but the story of many lives that
move and change and are inspired by the interests and passions that
are ours in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.
In the first place there is the story; a tale has to be told;
the poet must somehow convey to us the necessary information that
his hero has been asked out to dinner. This is a statement that a
novelist would convey as quietly and prosaically as possible; for
example, "While I was kissing her glove, sadly enough, a note was
brought saying that her father sent his regards and asked me to
dine with them next day". That is harmless. But the poet has to
write:
While thus I grieved, and kissed her glove,
My man brought in her note to say,
Papa had bid her send his love,
And would I dine with them next day!
Which is absurd. The simple words have been made to strut and
posture and take on an emphasis which makes them ridiculous. Then
again, what will the poet do with dialogue? In modern life, as Mrs.
Browning indicated when she said that our stage is now the soul,
the tongue has superseded the sword. It is in talk that the high
moments of life, the shock of character upon character, are
defined. But poetry when it tries to follow the words on people's
lips is terribly impeded. Listen to Romney in a moment of high
emotion talking to his old love Marian about the baby she has borne
to another man:
May God so father me, as I do him,
And so forsake me, as I let him feel
He's orphaned haply. Here I take the child
To share my cup, to slumber on my knee,
To play his loudest gambol at my foot,
To hold my finger in the public ways ...
and so on. Romney, in short, rants and reels like any of those
Elizabethan heroes whom Mrs. Browning had warned so imperiously out
of her modern living-room. Blank verse has proved itself the most
remorseless enemy of living speech. Talk tossed up on the surge and
swing of the verse becomes high, rhetorical, impassioned; and as
talk, since action is ruled out, must go on and on, the reader's
mind stiffens and glazes under the monotony of the rhythm.
Following the lilt of her rhythm rather than the emotions of her
characters, Mrs. Browning is swept on into generalization and
declamation. Forced by the nature of her medium, she ignores the
slighter, the subtler, the more hidden shades of emotion by which a
novelist builds up touch by touch a character in prose. Change and
development, the effect of one character upon another—all
this is abandoned. The poem becomes one long soliloquy, and the
only character that is known to us and the only story that is told
us are the character and story of Aurora Leigh herself.
Thus, if Mrs. Browning meant by a novel-poem a book in which
character is closely and subtly revealed, the relations of many
hearts laid bare, and a story unfalteringly unfolded, she failed
completely. But if she meant rather to give us a sense of life in
general, of people who are unmistakably Victorian, wrestling with
the problems of their own time, all brightened, intensified, and
compacted by the fire of poetry, she succeeded. Aurora Leigh, with
her passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist
and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true
daughter of her age. Romney, too, is no less certainly a
mid-Victorian gentleman of high ideals who has thought deeply about
the social question, and has founded, unfortunately, a phalanstery
in Shropshire. The aunt, the antimacassars, and the country house
from which Aurora escapes are real enough to fetch high prices in
the Tottenham Court Road at this moment. The broader aspects of
what it felt like to be a Victorian are seized as surely and
stamped as vividly upon us as in any novel by Trollope or Mrs.
Gaskell.
And indeed if we compare the prose novel and the novel-poem the
triumphs are by no means all to the credit of prose. As we rush
through page after page of narrative in which a dozen scenes that
the novelist would smooth out separately are pressed into one, in
which pages of deliberate description are fused into a single line,
we cannot help feeling that the poet has outpaced the prose writer.
Her page is packed twice as full as his. Characters, too, if they
are not shown in conflict but snipped off and summed up with
something of the exaggeration of a caricaturist, have a heightened
and symbolical significance which prose with its gradual approach
cannot rival. The general aspect of things—market, sunset,
church—have a brilliance and a continuity, owing to the
compressions and elisions of poetry, which mock the prose writer
and his slow accumulations of careful detail. For these reasons
Aurora Leigh remains, with all its imperfections, a book
that still lives and breathes and has its being. And when we think
how still and cold the plays of Beddoes or of Sir Henry Taylor lie,
in spite of all their beauty, and how seldom in our own day we
disturb the repose of the classical dramas of Robert Bridges, we
may suspect that Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true
genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here,
where we live and work, is the true place for the poet. At any
rate, her courage was justified in her own case. Her bad taste, her
tortured ingenuity, her floundering, scrambling, and confused
impetuosity have space to spend themselves here without inflicting
a deadly wound, while her ardour and abundance, her brilliant
descriptive powers, her shrewd and caustic humour, infect us with
her own enthusiasm. We laugh, we protest, we complain—it is
absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a
moment longer—but, nevertheless, we read to the end
enthralled. What more can an author ask? But the best compliment
that we can pay Aurora Leigh is that it makes us wonder why
it has left no successors. Surely the street, the drawing-room, are
promising subjects; modern life is worthy of the muse. But the
rapid sketch that Elizabeth Barrett Browning threw off when she
leapt from her couch and dashed into the drawing-room remains
unfinished. The conservatism or the timidity of poets still leaves
the chief spoils of modern life to the novelist. We have no
novel-poem of the age of George the Fifth.
There is an aspect of fiction of so delicate a nature that less
has been said about it than its importance deserves. One is
supposed to pass over class distinctions in silence; one person is
supposed to be as well born as another; and yet English fiction is
so steeped in the ups and downs of social rank that without them it
would be unrecognizable. When Meredith, in The Case of General
Ople and Lady Camper, remarks, "He sent word that he would wait
on Lady Camper immediately, and betook himself forthwith to his
toilette. She was the niece of an Earl", all of British blood
accept the statement unhesitatingly, and know that Meredith is
right. A General in those circumstances would certainly have given
his coat an extra brush. For though the General might have been, we
are given to understand that he was not, Lady Camper's social
equal. He received the shock of her rank upon a naked surface. No
earldom, baronetage, or knighthood protected him. He was an English
gentleman merely, and a poor one at that. Therefore, to British
readers even now it seems unquestionably fitting that he should
"betake himself to his toilette" before appearing in the lady's
presence.
It is useless to suppose that social distinctions have vanished.
Each may pretend that he knows no such restrictions, and that the
compartment in which he lives allows him the run of the world. But
it is an illusion. The idlest stroller down summer streets may see
for himself the charwoman's shawl shouldering its way among the
silk wraps of the successful; he sees shop-girls pressing their
noses against the plate glass of motor-cars; he sees radiant youth
and august age waiting their summons within to be admitted to the
presence of King George. There is no animosity, perhaps, but there
is no communication. We are enclosed, and separate, and cut off.
Directly we see ourselves in the looking-glass of fiction we know
that this is so. The novelist, and the English novelist in
particular, knows and delights, it seems, to know that Society is a
nest of glass boxes one separate from another, each housing a group
with special habits and qualities of its own. He knows that there
are Earls and that Earls have nieces; he knows that there are
Generals and that Generals brush their coats before they visit the
nieces of Earls. But this is only the ABC of what he knows. For in
a few short pages, Meredith makes us aware not only that Earls have
nieces, but that Generals have cousins; that the cousins have
friends; that the friends have cooks; that the cooks have husbands,
and that the husbands of the cooks of the friends of the cousins of
the Generals are carpenters. Each of these people lives in a glass
box of his own, and has peculiarities of which the novelist must
take account. What appears superficially to be the vast equality of
the middle classes is, in truth, nothing of the sort. All through
the social mass run curious veins and streakings separating man
from man and woman from woman; mysterious prerogatives and
disabilities too ethereal to be distinguished by anything so crude
as a title impede and disorder the great business of human
intercourse. And when we have threaded our way carefully through
all these grades from the niece of the Earl to the friend of the
cousin of the General, we are still faced with an abyss; a gulf
yawns before us; on the other side are the working classes. The
writer of perfect judgement and taste, like Jane Austen, does no
more than glance across the gulf; she restricts herself to her own
special class and finds infinite shades within it. But for the
brisk, inquisitive, combative writer like Meredith, the temptation
to explore is irresistible. He runs up and down the social scale;
he chimes one note against another; he insists that the Earl and
the cook, the General and the farmer shall speak up for themselves
and play their part in the extremely complicated comedy of English
civilized life.
It was natural that he should attempt it. A writer touched by
the comic spirit relishes these distinctions keenly; they give him
something to take hold of; something to make play with. English
fiction without the nieces of Earls and the cousins of Generals
would be an arid waste. It would resemble Russian fiction. It would
have to fall back upon the immensity of the soul and upon the
brotherhood of man. Like Russian fiction, it would lack comedy. But
while we realize the immense debt that we owe the Earl's niece and
the General's cousin, we doubt sometimes whether the pleasure we
get from the play of satire on these broken edges is altogether
worth the price we pay. For the price is a high one. The strain
upon a novelist is tremendous. In two short stories Meredith
gallantly attempts to bridge all gulfs, and to take half a dozen
different levels in his stride. Now he speaks as an Earl's niece;
now as a carpenter's wife. It cannot be said that his daring is
altogether successful. One has a feeling (perhaps it is unfounded)
that the blood of the niece of an Earl is not quite so tart and
sharp as he would have it. Aristocracy is not, perhaps, so
consistently high and brusque and eccentric as, from his angle, he
would represent it. Yet his great people are more successful than
his humble. His cooks are too ripe and rotund; his farmers too
ruddy and earthy. He overdoes the pith and the sap; the
fist-shaking and the thigh-slapping. He has got too far from them
to write of them with ease.
It seems, therefore, that the novelist, and the English novelist
in particular, suffers from a disability which affects no other
artist to the same extent. His work is influenced by his birth. He
is fated to know intimately, and so to describe with understanding,
only those who are of his own social rank. He cannot escape from
the box in which he has been bred. A bird's-eye view of fiction
shows us no gentlemen in Dickens; no working men in Thackeray. One
hesitates to call Jane Eyre a lady. The Elizabeths and the Emmas of
Miss Austen could not possibly be taken for anything else. It is
vain to look for dukes or for dustmen—we doubt that such
extremes are to be found anywhere in fiction. We are, therefore,
brought to the melancholy and tantalizing conclusion not only that
novels are poorer than they might be, but that we are very largely
prevented—for after all, the novelists are the great
interpreters—from knowing what is happening either in the
heights of Society or in its depths. There is practically no
evidence available by which we can guess at the feelings of the
highest in the land. What does a King feel? What does a Duke think?
We cannot say. For the highest in the land have seldom written at
all, and have never written about themselves. We shall never know
what the Court of Louis XIV looked like to Louis XIV himself. It
seems likely indeed that the English aristocracy will pass out of
existence, or be merged with the common people, without leaving any
true picture of themselves behind.
But our ignorance of the aristocracy is nothing compared with
our ignorance of the working classes. At all times the great
families of England and France have delighted to have famous men at
their tables, and thus the Thackerays and the Disraelis and the
Prousts have been familiar enough with the cut and fashion of
aristocratic life to write about it with authority. Unfortunately,
however, life is so framed that literary success invariably means a
rise, never a fall, and seldom, what is far more desirable, a
spread in the social scale. The rising novelist is never pestered
to come to gin and winkles with the plumber and his wife. His books
never bring him into touch with the cat's-meat man, or start a
correspondence with the old lady who sells matches and bootlaces by
the gate of the British Museum. He becomes rich; he becomes
respectable; he buys an evening suit and dines with peers.
Therefore, the later works of successful novelists show, if
anything, a slight rise in the social scale. We tend to get more
and more portraits of the successful and the distinguished. On the
other hand, the old rat-catchers and ostlers of Shakespeare's day
are shuffled altogether off the scene, or become, what is far more
offensive, objects of pity, examples of curiosity. They serve to
show up the rich. They serve to point the evils of the social
system. They are no longer, as they used to be when Chaucer wrote,
simply themselves. For it is impossible, it would seem, for working
men to write in their own language about their own lives. Such
education as the act of writing implies at once makes them
self-conscious, or class-conscious, or removes them from their own
class. That anonymity, in the shadow of which writers write most
happily, is the prerogative of the middle class alone. It is from
the middle class that writers spring, because it is in the middle
class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual
as hoeing a field or building a house. Thus it must have been
harder for Byron to be a poet than Keats; and it is as impossible
to imagine that a Duke could be a great novelist as that
Paradise Lost could be written by a man behind a
counter.
But things change; class distinctions were not always so hard
and fast as they have now become. The Elizabethan age was far more
elastic in this respect than our own; we, on the other hand, are
far less hide-bound than the Victorians. Thus it may well be that
we are on the edge of a greater change than any the world has yet
known. In another century or so, none of these distinctions may
hold good. The Duke and the agricultural labourer as we know them
now may have died out as completely as the bustard and the wild
cat. Only natural differences such as those of brain and character
will serve to distinguish us. General Ople (if there are still
Generals) will visit the niece (if there are still nieces) of the
Earl (if there are still Earls) without brushing his coat (if there
are still coats). But what will happen to English fiction when it
has come to pass that there are neither Generals, nieces, Earls,
nor coats, we cannot imagine. It may change its character so that
we no longer know it. It may become extinct. Novels may be written
as seldom and as unsuccessfully by our descendants as the poetic
drama by ourselves. The art of a truly democratic age will
be—what?
"Do you know there are men in London who go the round of the
streets selling paraffin oil?" wrote George Gissing in the year
1880, and the phrase because it is Gissing's calls up a world of
fog and four-wheelers, of slatternly landladies, of struggling men
of letters, of gnawing domestic misery, of gloomy back streets, and
ignoble yellow chapels; but also, above this misery, we see
tree-crowned heights, the columns of the Parthenon, and the hills
of Rome. For Gissing is one of those imperfect novelists through
whose books one sees the life of the author faintly covered by the
lives of fictitious people. With such writers we establish a
personal rather than an artistic relationship. We approach them
through their lives as much as through their work, and when we take
up Gissing's letters, which have character, but little wit and no
brilliance to illumine them, we feel that we are filling in a
design which we began to trace out when we read Demos and
New Grub Street and The Nether World.
Yet here, too, there are gaps in plenty, and many dark places
left unlit. Much information has been kept back, many facts
necessarily omitted. The Gissings were poor, and their father died
when they were children; there were many of them, and they had to
scrape together what education they could get. George, his sister
said, had a passion for learning. He would rush off to school with
a sharp herring bone in his throat for fear of missing his lesson.
He would copy out from a little book called That's It the
astonishing number of eggs that the tench lays and the sole lays
and the carp lays, "because I think it is a fact worthy of
attention". She remembers his "overwhelming veneration" for
intellect, and how patiently, sitting beside her, the tall boy with
the high white forehead and the short-sighted eyes would help her
with her Latin, "giving the same explanation time after time
without the least sign of impatience".
Partly because he reverenced facts and had no faculty it seems
(his language is meagre and unmetaphorical) for impressions, it is
doubtful whether his choice of a novelist's career was a happy one.
There was the whole world, with its history and its literature,
inviting him to haul it into his mind; he was eager; he was
intellectual; yet he must sit down in hired rooms and spin novels
about "earnest young people striving for improvement in, as it
were, the dawn of a new phase of our civilization".
But the art of fiction is infinitely accommodating, and it was
quite ready about the year 1880 to accept into its ranks a writer
who wished to be the "mouthpiece of the advanced Radical Party",
who was determined to show in his novels the ghastly condition of
the poor and the hideous injustice of society. The art of fiction
was ready, that is, to agree that such books were novels; but it
was doubtful if such novels would be read. Smith Elder's reader
summed up the situation tersely enough. Mr. Gissing's novel, he
wrote, "is too painful to please the ordinary novel reader, and
treats of scenes that can never attract the subscribers to Mr.
Mudie's Library". So, dining off lentils and hearing the men cry
paraffin for sale in the streets of Islington, Gissing paid for the
publication himself. It was then that he formed the habit of
getting up at five in the morning in order to tramp half across
London and coach Mr. M. before breakfast. Often enough Mr. M. sent
down word that he was already engaged, and then another page was
added to the dismal chronicle of life in modern Grub
Street—we are faced by another of those problems with
which literature is sown so thick. The writer has dined upon
lentils; he gets up at five; he walks across London; he finds Mr.
M. still in bed, whereupon he stands forth as the champion of life
as it is, and proclaims that ugliness is truth, truth ugliness, and
that is all we know and all we need to know. But there are signs
that the novel resents such treatment. To use a burning
consciousness of one's own misery, of the shackles that cut one's
own limbs, to quicken one's sense of life in general, as Dickens
did, to shape out of the murk which has surrounded one's childhood
some resplendent figure such as Micawber or Mrs. Gamp, is
admirable: but to use personal suffering to rivet the reader's
sympathy and curiosity upon your private case is disastrous.
Imagination is at its freest when it is most generalized; it loses
something of its sweep and power, it becomes petty and personal,
when it is limited to the consideration of a particular case
calling for sympathy.
At the same time the sympathy which identifies the author with
his hero is a passion of great intensity; it makes the pages fly;
it lends what has perhaps little merit artistically another and
momentarily perhaps a keener edge. Biffen and Reardon had, we say
to ourselves, bread and butter and sardines for supper; so had
Gissing; Biffen's overcoat had been pawned, and so had Gissing's;
Reardon could not write on Sunday; no more could Gissing. We forget
whether it was Reardon who loved cats or Gissing who loved barrel
organs. Certainly both Reardon and Gissing bought their copies of
Gibbon at a second-hand bookstall, and lugged the volumes home one
by one through the fog. So we go on capping these resemblances, and
each time we succeed, a little glow of satisfaction comes over us,
as if novel-reading were a game of skill in which the puzzle set us
is to find the face of the writer.
We know Gissing thus as we do not know Hardy or George Eliot.
Where the great novelist flows in and out of his characters and
bathes them in an element which seems to be common to us all,
Gissing remains solitary, self-centred, apart. His is one of those
sharp lights beyond whose edges all is vapour and phantom. But
mixed with this sharp light is one ray of singular penetration.
With all his narrowness of outlook and meagreness of sensibility,
Gissing is one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the
power of the mind, who makes his people think. They are thus
differently poised from the majority of fictitious men and women.
The awful hierarchy of the passions is slightly displaced. Social
snobbery does not exist; money is desired almost entirely to buy
bread and butter; love itself takes a second place. But the brain
works, and that alone is enough to give us a sense of freedom. For
to think is to become complex; it is to overflow boundaries, to
cease to be a "character", to merge one's private life in the life
of politics or art or ideas, to have relationships based partly on
them, and not on sexual desire alone. The impersonal side of life
is given its due place in the scheme. "Why don't people write about
the really important things of life?" Gissing makes one of his
characters exclaim, and at the unexpected cry the horrid burden of
fiction begins to slip from the shoulders. Is it possible that we
are going to talk of other things besides falling in love,
important though that is, and going to dinner with Duchesses,
fascinating though that is? Here in Gissing is a gleam of
recognition that Darwin had lived, that science was developing,
that people read books and look at pictures, that once upon a time
there was such a place as Greece. It is the consciousness of these
things that makes his books such painful reading; it was this that
made it impossible for them to "attract the subscribers to Mr.
Mudie's Library". They owe their peculiar grimness to the fact that
the people who suffer most are capable of making their suffering
part of a reasoned view of life. The thought endures when the
feeling has gone. Their unhappiness represents something more
lasting than a personal reverse; it becomes part of a view of life.
Hence when we have finished one of Gissing's novels we have taken
away not a character, nor an incident, but the comment of a
thoughtful man upon life as life seemed to him.
But because Gissing was always thinking, he was always changing.
In that lies much of his interest for us. As a young man he had
thought that he would write books to show up the "hideous injustice
of our whole system of society". Later his views changed; either
the task was impossible, or other tastes were tugging him in a
different direction. He came to think, as he believed finally, that
"the only thing known to us of absolute value is artistic
perfection...the works of the artist...remain sources of health to
the world". So that if one wishes to better the world one must,
paradoxically enough, withdraw and spend more and more time
fashioning one's sentences to perfection in solitude. Writing,
Gissing thought, is a task of the utmost difficulty; perhaps at the
end of his life he might be able "to manage a page that is decently
grammatical and fairly harmonious". There are moments when he
succeeded splendidly. For example, he is describing a cemetery in
the East End of London:
Here on the waste limits of that dread east, to wander among
tombs is to go hand-in-hand with the stark and eyeless emblems of
mortality; the spirit fails beneath the cold burden of ignoble
destiny. Here lie those who were born for toil; who, when toil has
worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath
and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the brief twilight
of a winter's sky between the former and the latter night. For them
no aspiration; for them no hope of memory in the dust; their very
children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units in
the vast throng that labours but to support life, the name of each,
father, mother, child, is but a dumb cry for the warmth and love of
which fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow
tenements; the sandy soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has
fallen, is a symbol of the great world which absorbs their toil and
straight way blots their being.
Again and again such passages of description stand out like
stone slabs, shaped and solid, among the untidy litter with which
the pages of fiction are strewn.
Gissing, indeed, never ceased to educate himself. While the
Baker Street trains hissed their steam under his window, and the
lodger downstairs blew his room out, and the landlady was insolent,
and the grocer refused to send the sugar so that he had to fetch it
himself, and the fog burnt his throat and he caught cold and never
spoke to anybody for three weeks, yet must drive his pen through
page after page and vacillated miserably from one domestic disaster
to another—while all this went on with a dreary monotony, for
which he could only blame the weakness of his own character, the
columns of the Parthenon, the hills of Rome still rose above the
fogs and the fried-fish shops of the Euston Road. He was determined
to visit Greece and Rome. He actually set foot in Athens; he saw
Rome; he read his Thucydides in Sicily before he died. Life was
changing round him; his comment upon life was changing too. Perhaps
the old sordidity, the fog and the paraffin, and the drunken
landlady, was not the only reality; ugliness is not the whole
truth; there is an element of beauty in the world. The past, with
its literature and its civilization, solidifies the present. At any
rate his books in future were to be about Rome in the time of
Totila, not about Islington in the time of Queen Victoria. He was
reaching some point in his perpetual thinking where "one has to
distinguish between two forms of intelligence"; one cannot venerate
the intellect only. But before he could mark down the spot he had
reached on the map of thought, he, who had shared so many of his
characters' experiences, shared, too, the death he had given to
Edwin Reardon. "Patience, patience", he said to the friend who
stood by him as he died—an imperfect novelist, but a highly
educated man.
Twenty years ago1 the reputation of George Meredith
was at its height. His novels had won their way to celebrity
through all sorts of difficulties, and their fame was all the
brighter and the more singular for what it had subdued. Then, too,
it was generally discovered that the maker of these splendid books
was himself a splendid old man. Visitors who went down to Box Hill
reported that they were thrilled as they walked up the drive of the
little suburban house by the sound of a voice booming and
reverberating within. The novelist, seated among the usual
knick-knacks of the drawing-room, was like the bust of Euripides to
look at. Age had worn and sharpened the fine features, but the nose
was still acute, the blue eyes still keen and ironical. Though he
had sunk immobile into an arm-chair, his aspect was still vigorous
and alert. It was true that he was almost stone-deaf, but this was
the least of afflictions to one who was scarcely able to keep pace
with the rapidity of his own ideas. Since he could not hear what
was said to him, he could give himself wholeheartedly to the
delights of soliloquy. It did not much matter, perhaps, whether his
audience was cultivated or simple. Compliments that would have
flattered a duchess were presented with equal ceremony to a child.
To neither could he speak the simple language of daily life. But
all the time this highly wrought, artificial conversation, with its
crystallized phrases and its high-piled metaphors, moved and tossed
on a current of laughter. His laugh curled round his sentences as
if he himself enjoyed their humorous exaggeration. The master of
language was splashing and diving in his element of words. So the
legend grew; and the fame of George Meredith, who sat with the head
of a Greek poet on his shoulders in a suburban villa beneath Box
Hill, pouring out poetry and sarcasm and wisdom in a voice that
could be heard almost on the high road, made his fascinating and
brilliant books seem more fascinating and brilliant still.
1 Written in January, 1928.
But that is twenty years ago. His fame as a talker is
necessarily dimmed, and his fame as a writer seems also under a
cloud. On none of his successors is his influence now marked. When
one of them whose own work has given him the right to be heard with
respect chances to speak his mind on the subject, it is not
flattering.
Meredith [writes Mr. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel]
is not the great name he was twenty years ago...His philosophy has
not worn well. His heavy attacks on sentimentality—they bore
the present generation...When he gets serious and noble-minded
there is a strident overtone, a bullying that becomes
distressing...What with the faking, what with the preaching, which
was never agreeable and is now said to be hollow, and what with the
home counties posing as the universe, it is no wonder Meredith now
lies in the trough.
The criticism is not, of course, intended to be a finished
estimate; but in its conversational sincerity it condenses
accurately enough what is in the air when Meredith is mentioned.
No, the general conclusion would seem to be, Meredith has not worn
well. But the value of centenaries lies in the occasion they offer
us for solidifying such airy impressions. Talk, mixed with
half-rubbed-out memories, forms a mist by degrees through which we
scarcely see plain. To open the books again, to try to read them as
if for the first time, to try to free them from the rubbish of
reputation and accident—that, perhaps, is the most acceptable
present we can offer to a writer on his hundredth birthday.
And since the first novel is always apt to be an unguarded one,
where the author displays his gifts without knowing how to dispose
of them to the best advantage, we may do well to open Richard
Feverel first. It needs no great sagacity to see that the
writer is a novice at his task. The style is extremely uneven. Now
he twists himself into iron knots; now he lies flat as a pancake.
He seems to be of two minds as to his intention. Ironic comment
alternates with long-winded narrative. He vacillates from one
attitude to another. Indeed, the whole fabric seems to rock a
little insecurely. The baronet wrapped in a cloak; the county
family; the ancestral home; the uncles mouthing epigrams in the
dining-room; the great ladies flaunting and swimming; the jolly
farmers slapping their thighs: all liberally if spasmodically
sprinkled with dried aphorisms from a pepper-pot called the
Pilgrim's Scrip—what an odd conglomeration it is! But the
oddity is not on the surface; it is not merely that whiskers and
bonnets have gone out of fashion: it lies deeper, in Meredith's
intention, in what he wishes to bring to pass. He has been, it is
plain, at great pains to destroy the conventional form of the
novel. He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of
Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases
by which we have learnt to climb. And what is done so deliberately
is done with a purpose. This defiance of the ordinary, these airs
and graces, the formality of the dialogue with its Sirs and Madams
are all there to create an atmosphere that is unlike that of daily
life, to prepare the way for a new and an original sense of the
human scene. Peacock, from whom Meredith learnt so much, is equally
arbitrary, but the virtue of the assumptions he asks us to make is
proved by the fact that we accept Mr. Skionar and the rest with
natural delight. Meredith's characters in Richard Feverel,
on the other hand, are at odds with their surroundings. We at once
exclaim how unreal they are, how artificial, how impossible. The
baronet and the butler, the hero and the heroine, the good woman
and the bad woman are mere types of baronets and butlers, good
women and bad. For what reason, then, has he sacrificed the
substantial advantages of realistic common sense—the
staircase and the stucco? Because, it becomes clear as we read, he
possessed a keen sense not of the complexity of character, but of
the splendour of a scene. One after another in this first book he
creates a scene to which we can attach abstract names—Youth,
The Birth of Love, The Power of Nature. We are galloped to them
over every obstacle on the pounding hoofs of rhapsodical prose.
Away with Systems! Away with a corrupt World! Let us breathe the
air of the Enchanted Island! Golden lie the meadows; golden run the
streams; red gold is on the pine stems.
We forget that Richard is Richard and that Lucy is Lucy; they
are youth; the world runs molten gold. The writer is a rhapsodist,
a poet then; but we have not yet exhausted all the elements in this
first novel. We have to reckon with the author himself. He has a
mind stuffed with ideas, hungry for argument. His boys and girls
may spend their time picking daisies in the meadows, but they
breathe, however unconsciously, an air bristling with intellectual
question and comment. On a dozen occasions these incongruous
elements strain and threaten to break apart. The book is cracked
through and through with those fissures which come when the author
seems to be of twenty minds at the same time. Yet it succeeds in
holding miraculously together, not certainly by the depths and
originality of its character drawing but by the vigour of its
intellectual power and by its lyrical intensity.
We are left, then, with our curiosity aroused. Let him write
another book or two; get into his stride; control his crudities:
and we will open Harry Richmond and see what has happened
now. Of all the things that might have happened this surely is the
strangest. All trace of immaturity is gone; but with it every trace
of the uneasy adventurous mind has gone too. The story bowls
smoothly along the road which Dickens has already trodden of
autobiographical narrative. It is a boy speaking, a boy thinking, a
boy adventuring. For that reason, no doubt, the author has curbed
his redundance and pruned his speech. The style is the most rapid
possible. It runs smooth, without a kink in it. Stevenson, one
feels, must have learnt much from this supple narrative, with its
precise adroit phrases, its exact quick glance at visible
things.
Plunged among dark green leaves, smelling wood-smoke, at night;
at morning waking up, and the world alight, and you standing high,
and marking the hills where you will see the next morning and the
next, morning after morning, and one morning the dearest person in
the world surprising you just before you wake: I thought this a
heavenly pleasure.
It goes gallantly, but a little self-consciously. He hears
himself talking. Doubts begin to rise and hover and settle at last
(as in Richard Feverel) upon the human figures. These boys
are no more real boys than the sample apple which is laid on top of
the basket is a real apple. They are too simple, too gallant, too
adventurous to be of the same unequal breed as David Copperfield,
for example. They are sample boys, novelist's specimens; and again
we encounter the extreme conventionality of Meredith's mind where
we found it, to our surprise, before. With all his boldness (and
there is no risk that he will not run with probability) there are a
dozen occasions on which a reach-me-down character will satisfy him
well enough. But just as we are thinking that the young gentlemen
are altogether too pat, and the adventures which befall them
altogether too slick, the shallow bath of illusion closes over our
heads and we sink with Richmond Roy and the Princess Ottilia into
the world of fantasy and romance, where all holds together and we
are able to put our imagination at the writer's service without
reserve. That such surrender is above all things delightful: that
it adds spring-heels to our boots: that it fires the cold
scepticism out of us and makes the world glow in lucid transparency
before our eyes, needs no showing, as it certainly submits to no
analysis. That Meredith can induce such moments proves him
possessed of an extraordinary power. Yet it is a capricious power
and highly intermittent. For pages all is effort and agony; phrase
after phrase is struck and no light comes. Then, just as we are
about to drop the book, the rocket roars into the air; the whole
scene flashes into light; and the book, years after, is recalled by
that sudden splendour.
If, then, this intermittent brilliancy is Meredith's
characteristic excellence, it is worth while to look into it more
closely. And perhaps the first thing that we shall discover is that
the scenes which catch the eye and remain in memory are static;
they are illuminations, not discoveries; they do not improve our
knowledge of the characters. It is significant that Richard and
Lucy, Harry and Ottilia, Clara and Vernon, Beauchamp and
Renée are presented in carefully appropriate
surroundings—on board a yacht, under a flowering cherry tree,
upon some river-bank, so that the landscape always makes part of
the emotion. The sea or the sky or the wood is brought forward to
symbolize what the human beings are feeling or looking.
The sky was bronze, a vast furnace dome. The folds of light and
shadow everywhere were satin rich. That afternoon the bee hummed of
thunder and refreshed the ear.
That is a description of a state of mind.
These winter mornings are divine. They move on noiselessly. The
earth is still as if waiting. A wren warbles, and flits through the
lank, drenched branches; hillside opens green; everywhere is mist,
everywhere expectancy.
That is a description of a woman's face. But only some states of
mind and some expressions of face can be described in
imagery—only those which are so highly wrought as to be
simple and, for that reason, will not submit to analysis. This is a
limitation; for though we may be able to see these people, very
brilliantly, in a moment of illumination, they do not change or
grow; the light sinks and leaves us in darkness. We have no such
intuitive knowledge of Meredith's characters as we have of
Stendhal's, Tchekov's, Jane Austen's. Indeed, our knowledge of such
characters is so intimate that we can almost dispense with "great
scenes" altogether. Some of the most emotional scenes in fiction
are the quietest. We have been wrought upon by nine hundred and
ninety-nine little touches; the thousandth, when it comes, is as
slight as the others, but the effect is prodigious. But with
Meredith there are no touches; there are hammer-strokes only, so
that our knowledge of his characters is partial, spasmodic, and
intermittent.
Meredith, then, is not among the great psychologists who feel
their way, anonymously and patiently, in and out of the fibres of
the mind and make one character differ minutely and completely from
another. He is among the poets who identify the character with the
passion or with the idea; who symbolize and make abstract. And
yet—here lay his difficulty perhaps—he was not a
poet-novelist wholly and completely as Emily Brontë was a
poet-novelist. He did not steep the world in one mood. His mind was
too self-conscious, and too sophisticated to remain lyrical for
long. He does not sing only; he dissects. Even in his most lyrical
scenes a sneer curls its lash round the phrases and laughs at their
extravagance. And as we read on, we shall find that the comic
spirit, when it is allowed to dominate the scene, licked the world
to a very different shape. The Egoist at once modifies our
theory that Meredith is pre-eminently the master of great scenes.
Here there is none of that precipitate hurry that has rushed us
over obstacles to the summit of one emotional peak after another.
The case is one that needs argument; argument needs logic; Sir
Willoughby, "our original male in giant form", is turned slowly
round before a steady fire of scrutiny and criticism which allows
no twitch on the victim's part to escape it. That the victim is a
wax model and not entirely living flesh and blood is perhaps true.
At the same time Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as
novel-readers we are little accustomed. We are civilized people, he
seems to say, watching the comedy of human relations together.
Human relations are of profound interest. Men and women are not
cats and monkeys, but beings of a larger growth and of a greater
range. He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the
behaviour of our kind. This is so rare a compliment from a novelist
to his reader that we are at first bewildered and then delighted.
Indeed his comic spirit is a far more penetrating goddess than his
lyrical. It is she who cuts a clear path through the brambles of
his manner; she who surprises us again and again by the depth of
her observations; she who creates the dignity, the seriousness, and
the vitality of Meredith's world. Had Meredith, one is tempted to
reflect, lived in an age or in a country where comedy was the rule,
he might never have contracted those airs of intellectual
superiority, that manner of oracular solemnity which it is, as he
points out, the use of the comic spirit to correct.
But in many ways the age—if we can judge so amorphous a
shape—was hostile to Meredith, or, to speak more accurately,
was hostile to his success with the age we now live in—the
year 1928. His teaching seems now too strident and too optimistic
and too shallow. It obtrudes; and when philosophy is not consumed
in a novel, when we can underline this phrase with a pencil, and
cut out that exhortation with a pair of scissors and paste the
whole into a system, it is safe to say that there is something
wrong with the philosophy or with the novel or with both. Above
all, his teaching is too insistent. He cannot, even to hear the
profoundest secret, suppress his own opinion. And there is nothing
that characters in fiction resent more. If, they seem to argue, we
have been called into existence merely to express Mr. Meredith's
views upon the universe, we would rather not exist at all.
Thereupon they die; and a novel that is full of dead characters,
even though it is also full of profound wisdom and exalted
teaching, is not achieving its aim as a novel. But here we reach
another point upon which the present age may be inclined to have
more sympathy with Meredith. When he wrote, in the seventies and
eighties of the last century, the novel had reached a stage where
it could only exist by moving onward. It is a possible contention
that after those two perfect novels, Pride and Prejudice and
The Small House at Allington, English fiction had to escape
from the dominion of that perfection, as English poetry had to
escape from the perfection of Tennyson. George Eliot, Meredith, and
Hardy were all imperfect novelists largely because they insisted
upon introducing qualities, of thought and of poetry, that are
perhaps incompatible with fiction at its most perfect. On the other
hand, if fiction had remained what it was to Jane Austen and
Trollope, fiction would by this time be dead. Thus Meredith
deserves our gratitude and excites our interest as a great
innovator. Many of our doubts about him and much of our inability
to frame any definite opinion of his work comes from the fact that
it is experimental and thus contains elements that do not fuse
harmoniously—the qualities are at odds: the one quality which
binds and concentrates has been omitted. To read Meredith, then, to
our greatest advantage we must make certain allowances and relax
certain standards. We must not expect the perfect quietude of a
traditional style nor the triumphs of a patient and pedestrian
psychology. On the other hand, his claim, "My method has been to
prepare my readers for a crucial exhibition of the personae, and
then to give the scene in the fullest of their blood and brain
under stress of a fierce situation", is frequently justified. Scene
after scene rises on the mind's eye with a flare of fiery
intensity. If we are irritated by the dancing-master dandyism which
made him write "gave his lungs full play" instead of laughed, or
"tasted the swift intricacies of the needle" instead of sewed, we
must remember that such phrases prepare the way for the "fierce
situations". Meredith is creating the atmosphere from which we
shall pass naturally into a highly pitched state of emotion. Where
the realistic novelist, like Trollope, lapses into flatness and
dullness, the lyrical novelist, like Meredith, becomes meretricious
and false; and such falsity is, of course, not only much more
glaring than flatness, but it is a greater crime against the
phlegmatic nature of prose fiction. Perhaps Meredith had been well
advised if he had abjured the novel altogether and kept himself
wholly to poetry. Yet we have to remind ourselves that the fault
may be ours. Our prolonged diet upon Russian fiction, rendered
neutral and negative in translation, our absorption in the
convolutions of psychological Frenchmen, may have led us to forget
that the English language is naturally exuberant, and the English
character full of humours and eccentricities. Meredith's
flamboyancy has a great ancestry behind it; we cannot avoid all
memory of Shakespeare.
When such questions and qualifications crowd upon us as we read,
the fact may be taken to prove that we are neither near enough to
be under his spell nor far enough to see him in proportion. Thus
the attempt to pronounce a finished estimate is even more illusive
than usual. But we can testify even now that to read Meredith is to
be conscious of a packed and muscular mind; of a voice booming and
reverberating with its own unmistakable accent even though the
partition between us is too thick for us to hear what he says
distinctly. Still, as we read we feel that we are in the presence
of a Greek god though he is surrounded by the innumerable ornaments
of a suburban drawing-room; who talks brilliantly, even if he is
deaf to the lower tones of the human voice; who, if he is rigid and
immobile, is yet marvellously alive and on the alert. This
brilliant and uneasy figure has his place with the great eccentrics
rather than with the great masters. He will be read, one may guess,
by fits and starts; he will be forgotten and discovered and again
discovered and forgotten like Donne, and Peacock, and Gerard
Hopkins. But if English fiction continues to be read, the novels of
Meredith must inevitably rise from time to time into view; his work
must inevitably be disputed and discussed.
On the fifth of this December1 Christina Rossetti
will celebrate her centenary, or, more properly speaking, we shall
celebrate it for her, and perhaps not a little to her distress, for
she was one of the shyest of women, and to be spoken of, as we
shall certainly speak of her, would have caused her acute
discomfort. Nevertheless, it is inevitable; centenaries are
inexorable; talk of her we must. We shall read her life; we shall
read her letters; we shall study her portraits, speculate about her
diseases—of which she had a great variety; and rattle the
drawers of her writing-table, which are for the most part empty.
Let us begin with the biography—for what could be more
amusing? As everybody knows, the fascination of reading biographies
is irresistible. No sooner have we opened the pages of Miss
Sandars's careful and competent book (Life of Christina
Rossetti, by Mary F. Sandars. (Hutchinson)) than the old
illusion comes over us. Here is the past and all its inhabitants
miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to
look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little
figures—for they are rather under life size—will begin
to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all
sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought
when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as
they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings
which never struck them, for they believed when they were alive
that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But
once you are in a biography all is different.
1 1930.
Here, then, is Hallam Street, Portland Place, about the year
1830; and here are the Rossettis, an Italian family consisting of
father and mother and four small children. The street was
unfashionable and the home rather poverty-stricken; but the poverty
did not matter, for, being foreigners, the Rossettis did not care
much about the customs and conventions of the usual middle-class
British family. They kept themselves to themselves, dressed as they
liked, entertained Italian exiles, among them organ-grinders and
other distressed compatriots, and made ends meet by teaching and
writing and other odd jobs. By degrees Christina detached herself
from the family group. It is plain that she was a quiet and
observant child, with her own way of life already fixed in her
head—she was to write—but all the more did she admire
the superior competence of her elders. Soon we begin to surround
her with a few friends and to endow her with a few characteristics.
She detested parties. She dressed anyhow. She liked her brother's
friends and little gatherings of young artists and poets who were
to reform the world, rather to her amusement, for although so
sedate, she was also whimsical and freakish, and liked making fun
of people who took themselves with egotistic solemnity. And though
she meant to be a poet she had very little of the vanity and stress
of young poets; her verses seem to have formed themselves whole and
entire in her head, and she did not worry very much what was said
of them because in her own mind she knew that they were good. She
had also immense powers of admiration—for her mother, for
example, who was so quiet, and so sagacious, so simple and so
sincere; and for her elder sister Maria, who had no taste for
painting or for poetry, but was, for that very reason, perhaps more
vigorous and effective in daily life. For example, Maria always
refused to visit the Mummy Room at the British Museum because, she
said, the Day of Resurrection might suddenly dawn and it would be
very unseemly if the corpses had to put on immortality under the
gaze of mere sight-seers—a reflection which had not struck
Christina, but seemed to her admirable. Here, of course, we, who
are outside the tank, enjoy a hearty laugh, but Christina, who is
inside the tank and exposed to all its heats and currents, thought
her sister's conduct worthy of the highest respect. Indeed, if we
look at her a little more closely we shall see that something dark
and hard, like a kernel, had already formed in the centre of
Christina Rossetti's being.
It was religion, of course. Even when she was quite a girl her
lifelong absorption in the relation of the soul with God had taken
possession of her. Her sixty-four years might seem outwardly spent
in Hallam Street and Endsleigh Gardens and Torrington Square, but
in reality she dwelt in some curious region where the spirit
strives towards an unseen God—in her case, a dark God, a
harsh God—a God who decreed that all the pleasures of the
world were hateful to Him. The theatre was hateful, the opera was
hateful, nakedness was hateful—when her friend Miss Thompson
painted naked figures in her pictures she had to tell Christina
that they were fairies, but Christina saw through the
imposture—everything in Christina's life radiated from that
knot of agony and intensity in the centre. Her belief regulated her
life in the smallest particulars. It taught her that chess was
wrong, but that whist and cribbage did not matter. But also it
interfered in the most tremendous questions of her heart. There was
a young painter called James Collinson, and she loved James
Collinson and he loved her, but he was a Roman Catholic and so she
refused him. Obligingly he became a member of the Church of
England, and she accepted him. Vacillating, however, for he was a
slippery man, he wobbled back to Rome, and Christina, though it
broke her heart and for ever shadowed her life, cancelled the
engagement. Years afterwards another, and it seems better founded,
prospect of happiness presented itself. Charles Cayley proposed to
her. But alas, this abstract and erudite man who shuffled about the
world in a state of absent-minded dishabille, and translated the
gospel into Iroquois, and asked smart ladies at a party "whether
they were interested in the Gulf Stream", and for a present gave
Christina a sea mouse preserved in spirits, was, not unnaturally, a
free thinker. Him, too, Christina put from her. Though "no woman
ever loved a man more deeply", she would not be the wife of a
sceptic. She who loved the "obtuse and furry"—the wombats,
toads, and mice of the earth—and called Charles Cayley "my
blindest buzzard, my special mole", admitted no moles, wombats,
buzzards, or Cayleys to her heaven.
So one might go on looking and listening for ever. There is no
limit to the strangeness, amusement, and oddity of the past sealed
in a tank. But just as we are wondering which cranny of this
extraordinary territory to explore next, the principal figure
intervenes. It is as if a fish, whose unconscious gyrations we had
been watching in and out of reeds, round and round rocks, suddenly
dashed at the glass and broke it. A tea-party is the occasion. For
some reason Christina went to a party given by Mrs. Virtue Tebbs.
What happened there is unknown—perhaps something was said in
a casual, frivolous, tea-party way about poetry. At any rate,
suddenly there uprose from a chair and paced forward into the
centre of the room a little woman dressed in black, who announced
solemnly, "I am Christina Rossetti!" and having so said, returned
to her chair.
With those words the glass is broken. Yes [she seems to say], I
am a poet. You who pretend to honour my centenary are no better
than the idle people at Mrs. Tebb's tea-party. Here you are
rambling among unimportant trifles, rattling my writing-table
drawers, making fun of the Mummies and Maria and my love affairs
when all I care for you to know is here. Behold this green volume.
It is a copy of my collected works. It costs four shillings and
sixpence. Read that. And so she returns to her chair.
How absolute and unaccommodating these poets are! Poetry, they
say, has nothing to do with life. Mummies and wombats, Hallam
Street and omnibuses, James Collinson and Charles Cayley, sea mice
and Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Torrington Square and Endsleigh Gardens,
even the vagaries of religious belief, are irrelevant, extraneous,
superfluous, unreal. It is poetry that matters. The only question
of any interest is whether that poetry is good or bad. But this
question of poetry, one might point out if only to gain time, is
one of the greatest difficulty. Very little of value has been said
about poetry since the world began. The judgment of contemporaries
is almost always wrong. For example, most of the poems which figure
in Christina Rossetti's complete works were rejected by editors.
Her annual income from her poetry was for many years about ten
pounds. On the other hand, the works of Jean Ingelow, as she noted
sardonically, went into eight editions. There were, of course,
among her contemporaries one or two poets and one or two critics
whose judgment must be respectfully consulted. But what very
different impressions they seem to gather from the same
works—by what different standards they judge! For instance,
when Swinburne read her poetry he exclaimed: "I have always thought
that nothing more glorious in poetry has ever been written", and
went on to say of her New Year Hymn that it was
touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams,
tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach
of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of
heaven
Then Professor Saintsbury comes with his vast learning, and
examines Goblin Market, and reports that
The metre of the principal poem ["Goblin Market"] may be best
described as a dedoggerelised Skeltonic, with the gathered music of
the various metrical progress since Spenser, utilised in the place
of the wooden rattling of the followers of Chaucer. There may be
discerned in it the same inclination towards line irregularity
which has broken out, at different times, in the Pindaric of the
late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, and in the
rhymelessness of Sayers earlier and of Mr. Arnold later.
And then there is Sir Walter Raleigh:
I think she is the best poet alive...The worst of it is you
cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk
about the ingredients of pure water—it is adulterated,
methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. The only
thing that Christina makes me want to do, is cry, not lecture.
It would appear, then, that there are at least three schools of
criticism: the refluent sea-music school; the line-irregularity
school, and the school that bids one not criticise but cry. This is
confusing; if we follow them all we shall only come to grief.
Better perhaps read for oneself, expose the mind bare to the poem,
and transcribe in all its haste and imperfection whatever may be
the result of the impact. In this case it might run something as
follows: O Christina Rossetti, I have humbly to confess that though
I know many of your poems by heart, I have not read your works from
cover to cover. I have not followed your course and traced your
development. I doubt indeed that you developed very much. You were
an instinctive poet. You saw the world from the same angle always.
Years and the traffic of the mind with men and books did not affect
you in the least. You carefully ignored any book that could shake
your faith or any human being who could trouble your instincts. You
were wise perhaps. Your instinct was so sure, so direct, so intense
that it produced poems that sing like music in one's
ears—like a melody by Mozart or an air by Gluck. Yet for all
its symmetry, yours was a complex song. When you struck your harp
many strings sounded together. Like all instinctives you had a keen
sense of the visual beauty of the world. Your poems are full of
gold dust and "sweet geraniums' varied brightness"; your eye noted
incessantly how rushes are "velvet-headed", and lizards have a
"strange metallic mail"—your eye, indeed, observed with a
sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina
the Anglo-Catholic. But to her you owed perhaps the fixity and
sadness of your muse. The pressure of a tremendous faith circles
and clamps together these little songs. Perhaps they owe to it
their solidity. Certainly they owe to it their sadness—your
God was a harsh God, your heavenly crown was set with thorns. No
sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind
tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes. Death, oblivion,
and rest lap round your songs with their dark wave. And then,
incongruously, a sound of scurrying and laughter is heard. There is
the patter of animals' feet and the odd guttural notes of rooks and
the snufflings of obtuse furry animals grunting and nosing. For you
were not a pure saint by any means. You pulled legs; you tweaked
noses. You were at war with all humbug and pretence. Modest as you
were, still you were drastic, sure of your gift, convinced of your
vision. A firm hand pruned your lines; a sharp ear tested their
music. Nothing soft, otiose, irrelevant cumbered your pages. In a
word, you were an artist. And thus was kept open, even when you
wrote idly, tinkling bells for your own diversion, a pathway for
the descent of that fiery visitant who came now and then and fused
your lines into that indissoluble connection which no hand can put
asunder:
But bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death
And ivy choking what it garlandeth
And primroses that open to the moon.
Indeed so strange is the constitution of things, and so great
the miracle of poetry, that some of the poems you wrote in your
little back room will be found adhering in perfect symmetry when
the Albert Memorial is dust and tinsel. Our remote posterity will
be singing:
When I am dead, my dearest,
or:
My heart is like a singing bird,
when Torrington Square is a reef of coral perhaps and the fishes
shoot in and out where your bedroom window used to be; or perhaps
the forest will have reclaimed those pavements and the wombat and
the ratel will be shuffling on soft, uncertain feet among the green
undergrowth that will then tangle the area railings. In view of all
this, and to return to your biography, had I been present when Mrs.
Virtue Tebbs gave her party, and had a short elderly woman in black
risen to her feet and advanced to the middle of the room, I should
certainly have committed some indiscretion—have broken a
paper-knife or smashed a tea-cup in the awkward ardour of my
admiration when she said, "I am Christina Rossetti".
When we say that the death of Thomas Hardy leaves English
fiction without a leader, we mean that there is no other writer
whose supremacy would be generally accepted, none to whom it seems
so fitting and natural to pay homage. Nobody of course claimed it
less. The unworldly and simple old man would have been painfully
embarrassed by the rhetoric that flourishes on such occasions as
this. Yet it is no less than the truth to say that while he lived
there was one novelist at all events who made the art of fiction
seem an honourable calling; while Hardy lived there was no excuse
for thinking meanly of the art he practised. Nor was this solely
the result of his peculiar genius. Something of it sprang from his
character in its modesty and integrity, from his life, lived simply
down in Dorsetshire without self-seeking or self-advertisement. For
both reasons, because of his genius and because of the dignity with
which his gift was used, it was impossible not to honour him as an
artist and to feel respect and affection for the man. But it is of
the work that we must speak, of the novels that were written so
long ago that they seem as detached from the fiction of the moment
as Hardy himself was remote from the stir of the present and its
littleness.
1 Written in January, 1928
We have to go back more than a generation if we are to trace the
career of Hardy as a novelist. In the year 1871 he was a man of
thirty-one; he had written a novel, Desperate Remedies, but
he was by no means an assured craftsman. He "was feeling his way to
a method", he said himself; as if he were conscious that he
possessed all sorts of gifts, yet did not know their nature, or how
to use them to advantage. To read that first novel is to share in
the perplexity of its author. The imagination of the writer is
powerful and sardonic; he is book-learned in a home-made way; he
can create characters but he cannot control them; he is obviously
hampered by the difficulties of his technique and, what is more
singular, he is driven by some sense that human beings are the
sport of forces outside themselves, to make use of an extreme and
even melodramatic use of coincidence. He is already possessed of
the conviction that a novel is not a toy, nor an argument; it is a
means of giving truthful if harsh and violent impressions of the
lives of men and women. But perhaps the most remarkable quality in
the book is the sound of a waterfall that echoes and booms through
its pages. It is the first manifestation of the power that was to
assume such vast proportions in the later books. He already proves
himself a minute and skilled observer of Nature; the rain, he
knows, falls differently as it falls upon roots or arable; he knows
that the wind sounds differently as it passes through the branches
of different trees. But he is aware in a larger sense of Nature as
a force; he feels in it a spirit that can sympathize or mock or
remain the indifferent spectator of human fortunes. Already that
sense was his; and the crude story of Miss Aldclyffe and Cytherea
is memorable because it is watched by the eyes of the gods, and
worked out in the presence of Nature.
That he was a poet should have been obvious; that he was a
novelist might still have been held uncertain. But the year after,
when Under the Greenwood Tree appeared, it was clear that
much of the effort of "feeling for a method" had been overcome.
Something of the stubborn originality of the earlier book was lost.
The second is accomplished, charming, idyllic compared with the
first. The writer, it seems, may well develop into one of our
English landscape painters, whose pictures are all of cottage
gardens and old peasant women, who lingers to collect and preserve
from oblivion the old-fashioned ways and words which are rapidly
falling into disuse. And yet what kindly lover of antiquity, what
naturalist with a microscope in his pocket, what scholar solicitous
for the changing shapes of language, ever heard the cry of a small
bird killed in the next wood by an owl with such intensity? The cry
"passed into the silence without mingling with it". Again we hear,
very far away, like the sound of a gun out at sea on a calm
summer's morning, a strange and ominous echo. But as we read these
early books there is a sense of waste. There is a feeling that
Hardy's genius was obstinate and perverse; first one gift would
have its way with him and then another. They would not consent to
run together easily in harness. Such indeed was likely to be the
fate of a writer who was at once poet and realist, a faithful son
of field and down, yet tormented by the doubts and despondencies
bred of book-learning; a lover of old ways and plain countrymen,
yet doomed to see the faith and flesh of his forefathers turn to
thin and spectral transparencies before his eyes.
To this contradiction Nature had added another element likely to
disorder a symmetrical development. Some writers are born conscious
of everything; others are unconscious of many things. Some, like
Henry James and Flaubert, are able not merely to make the best use
of the spoil their gifts bring in, but control their genius in the
act of creation; they are aware of all the possibilities of every
situation, and are never taken by surprise. The unconscious
writers, on the other hand, like Dickens and Scott, seem suddenly
and without their own consent to be lifted up and swept onwards.
The wave sinks and they cannot say what has happened or why. Among
them—it is the source of his strength and of his
weakness—we must place Hardy. His own word, "moments of
vision", exactly describes those passages of astonishing beauty and
force which are to be found in every book that he wrote. With a
sudden quickening of power which we cannot foretell, nor he, it
seems, control, a single scene breaks off from the rest. We see, as
if it existed alone and for all time, the wagon with Fanny's dead
body inside travelling along the road under the dripping trees; we
see the bloated sheep struggling among the clover; we see Troy
flashing his sword round Bathsheba where she stands motionless,
cutting the lock off her head and spitting the caterpillar on her
breast. Vivid to the eye, but not to the eye alone, for every sense
participates, such scenes dawn upon us and their splendour remains.
But the power goes as it comes. The moment of vision is succeeded
by long stretches of plain daylight, nor can we believe that any
craft or skill could have caught the wild power and turned it to a
better use. The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are
lumpish and dull and inexpressive; but they are never arid; there
is always about them a little blur of unconsciousness, that halo of
freshness and margin of the unexpressed which often produce the
most profound sense of satisfaction. It is as if Hardy himself were
not quite aware of what he did, as if his consciousness held more
than he could produce, and he left it for his readers to make out
his full meaning and to supplement it from their own
experience.
For these reasons Hardy's genius was uncertain in development,
uneven in accomplishment, but, when the moment came, magnificent in
achievement. The moment came, completely and fully, in Far from
the Madding Crowd. The subject was right; the method was right;
the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective
man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which,
however fashions may chop and change, must hold its place among the
great English novels. There is, in the first place, that sense of
the physical world which Hardy more than any novelist can bring
before us; the sense that the little prospect of man's existence is
ringed by a landscape which, while it exists apart, yet confers a
deep and solemn beauty upon his drama. The dark downland, marked by
the barrows of the dead and the huts of shepherds, rises against
the sky, smooth as a wave of the sea, but solid and eternal;
rolling away to the infinite distance, but sheltering in its folds
quiet villages whose smoke rises in frail columns by day, whose
lamps burn in the immense darkness by night. Gabriel Oak tending
his sheep up there on the back of the world is the eternal
shepherd; the stars are ancient beacons; and for ages he has
watched beside his sheep.
But down in the valley the earth is full of warmth and life; the
farms are busy, the barns stored, the fields loud with the lowing
of cattle and the bleating of sheep. Nature is prolific, splendid,
and lustful; not yet malignant and still the Great Mother of
labouring men. And now for the first time Hardy gives full play to
his humour, where it is freest and most rich, upon the lips of
country men. Jan Coggan and Henry Fray and Joseph Poorgrass gather
in the malthouse when the day's work is over and give vent to that
half-shrewd, half-poetic humour which has been brewing in their
brains and finding expression over their beer since the pilgrims
tramped the Pilgrims' Way; which Shakespeare and Scott and George
Eliot all loved to overhear, but none loved better or heard with
greater understanding than Hardy. But it is not the part of the
peasants in the Wessex novels to stand out as individuals. They
compose a pool of common wisdom, of common humour, a fund of
perpetual life. They comment upon the actions of the hero and
heroine, but while Troy or Oak or Fanny or Bathsheba come in and
out and pass away, Jan Coggan and Henry Fray and Joseph Poorgrass
remain. They drink by night and they plough the fields by day. They
are eternal. We meet them over and over again in the novels, and
they always have something typical about them, more of the
character that marks a race than of the features which belong to an
individual. The peasants are the great sanctuary of sanity, the
country the last stronghold of happiness. When they disappear,
there is no hope for the race.
With Oak and Troy and Bathsheba and Fanny Robin we come to the
men and women of the novels at their full stature. In every book
three or four figures predominate, and stand up like lightning
conductors to attract the force of the elements. Oak and Troy and
Bathsheba; Eustacia, Wildeve, and Venn; Henchard, Lucetta, and
Farfrae; Jude, Sue Bridehead, and Phillotson. There is even a
certain likeness between the different groups. They live as
individuals and they differ as individuals; but they also live as
types and have a likeness as types. Bathsheba is Bathsheba, but she
is woman and sister to Eustacia and Lucetta and Sue; Gabriel is
Gabriel Oak, but he is man and brother to Henchard, Venn, and Jude.
However lovable and charming Bathsheba may be, still she is weak;
however stubborn and ill-guided Henchard may be, still he is
strong. This is a fundamental part of Hardy's vision; the staple of
many of his books. The woman is the weaker and the fleshlier, and
she clings to the stronger and obscures his vision. How freely,
nevertheless, in his greater books life is poured over the
unalterable framework! When Bathsheba sits in the wagon among her
plants, smiling at her own loveliness in the little looking-glass,
we may know, and it is proof of Hardy's power that we do know, how
severely she will suffer and cause others to suffer before the end.
But the moment has all the bloom and beauty of life. And so it is,
time and time again. His characters, both men and women, were
creatures to him of an infinite attraction. For the women he shows
a more tender solicitude than for the men, and in them, perhaps, he
takes a keener interest. Vain might their beauty be and terrible
their fate, but while the glow of life is in them their step is
free, their laughter sweet, and theirs is the power to sink into
the breast of Nature and become part of her silence and solemnity,
or to rise and put on them the movement of the clouds and the
wildness of the flowering woodlands. The men who suffer, not like
the women through dependence upon other human beings, but through
conflict with fate, enlist our sterner sympathies. For such a man
as Gabriel Oak we need have no passing fears. Honour him we must,
though it is not granted us to love him quite so freely. He is
firmly set upon his feet and can give as shrewd a blow, to men at
least, as any he is likely to receive. He has a prevision of what
is to be expected that springs from character rather than from
education. He is stable in his temperament, steadfast in his
affections, and capable of open-eyed endurance without flinching.
But he, too, is no puppet. He is a homely, humdrum fellow on
ordinary occasions. He can walk the street without making people
turn to stare at him. In short, nobody can deny Hardy's
power—the true novelist's power—to make us believe that
his characters are fellow-beings driven by their own passions and
idiosyncrasies, while they have—and this is the poet's
gift—something symbolical about them which is common to us
all.
And it is when we are considering Hardy's power of creating men
and women that we become most conscious of the profound differences
that distinguish him from his peers. We look back at a number of
these characters and ask ourselves what it is that we remember them
for. We recall their passions. We remember how deeply they have
loved each other and often with what tragic results. We remember
the faithful love of Oak for Bathsheba; the tumultuous but fleeting
passions of men like Wildeve, Troy, and Fitzpiers; we remember the
filial love of Clym for his mother, the jealous paternal passion of
Henchard for Elizabeth Jane. But we do not remember how they have
loved. We do not remember how they talked and changed and got to
know each other, finely, gradually, from step to step and from
stage to stage. Their relationship is not composed of those
intellectual apprehensions and subtleties of perception which seem
so slight yet are so profound. In all the books love is one of the
great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe; it
happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said
about it. The talk between the lovers when it is not passionate is
practical or philosophic, as though the discharge of their daily
duties left them with more desire to question life and its purpose
than to investigate each other's sensibilities. Even if it were in
their power to analyse their emotions, life is too stirring to give
them time. They need all their strength to deal with the downright
blows, the freakish ingenuity, the gradually increasing malignity
of fate. They have none to spend upon the subtleties and delicacies
of the human comedy.
Thus there comes a time when we can say with certainty that we
shall not find in Hardy some of the qualities that have given us
most delight in the works of other novelists. He has not the
perfection of Jane Austen, or the wit of Meredith, or the range of
Thackeray, or Tolstoy's amazing intellectual power. There is in the
work of the great classical writers a finality of effect which
places certain of their scenes, apart from the story, beyond the
reach of change. We do not ask what bearing they have upon the
narrative, nor do we make use of them to interpret problems which
lie on the outskirts of the scene. A laugh, a blush, half a dozen
words of dialogue, and it is enough; the source of our delight is
perennial. But Hardy has none of this concentration and
completeness. His light does not fall directly upon the human
heart. It passes over it and out on to the darkness of the heath
and upon the trees swaying in the storm. When we look back into the
room the group by the fireside is dispersed. Each man or woman is
battling with the storm, alone, revealing himself most when he is
least under the observation of other human beings. We do not know
them as we know Pierre or Natasha or Becky Sharp. We do not know
them in and out and all round as they are revealed to the casual
caller, to the Government official, to the great lady, to the
general on the battlefield. We do not know the complication and
involvement and turmoil of their thoughts. Geographically, too,
they remain fixed to the same stretch of the English countryside.
It is seldom, and always with unhappy results, that Hardy leaves
the yeoman or farmer to describe the class above theirs in the
social scale. In the drawing-room and clubroom and ballroom, where
people of leisure and education come together, where comedy is bred
and shades of character revealed, he is awkward and ill at ease.
But the opposite is equally true. If we do not know his men and
women in their relations to each other, we know them in their
relations to time, death, and fate. If we do not see them in quick
agitation against the lights and crowds of cities, we see them
against the earth, the storm, and the seasons. We know their
attitude towards some of the most tremendous problems that can
confront mankind. They take on a more than mortal size in memory.
We see them, not in detail but enlarged and dignified. We see Tess
reading the baptismal service in her nightgown "with an impress of
dignity that was almost regal". We see Marty South, "like a being
who had rejected with indifference the attribute of sex for the
loftier quality of abstract humanism", laying the flowers on
Winterbourne's grave. Their speech has a Biblical dignity and
poetry. They have a force in them which cannot be defined, a force
of love or of hate, a force which in the men is the cause of
rebellion against life, and in the women implies an illimitable
capacity for suffering, and it is this which dominates the
character and makes it unnecessary that we should see the finer
features that lie hid. This is the tragic power; and, if we are to
place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic
writer among English novelists.
But let us, as we approach the danger-zone of Hardy's
philosophy, be on our guard. Nothing is more necessary, in reading
an imaginative writer, than to keep at the right distance above his
page. Nothing is easier, especially with a writer of marked
idiosyncrasy, than to fasten on opinions, convict him of a creed,
tether him to a consistent point of view. Nor was Hardy any
exception to the rule that the mind which is most capable of
receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing
conclusions. It is for the reader, steeped in the impression, to
supply the comment. It is his part to know when to put aside the
writer's conscious intention in favour of some deeper intention of
which perhaps he may be unconscious. Hardy himself was aware of
this. A novel "is an impression, not an argument", he has warned
us, and, again
Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true
philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse
readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and
change.
Certainly it is true to say of him that, at his greatest, he
gives us impressions; at his weakest, arguments. In The
Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding
Crowd, and above all, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, we
have Hardy's impression of life as it came to him without conscious
ordering. Let him once begin to tamper with his direct intuitions
and his power is gone. "Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
asks little Abraham as they drive to market with their beehives.
Tess replies that they are like "the apples on our stubbard-tree,
most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted". "Which do we
live on—a splendid or a blighted one?" "A blighted one," she
replies, or rather the mournful thinker who has assumed her mask
speaks for her. The words protrude, cold and raw, like the springs
of a machine where we had seen only flesh and blood. We are crudely
jolted out of that mood of sympathy which is renewed a moment later
when the little cart is run down and we have a concrete instance of
the ironical methods which rule our planet.
That is the reason why Jude the Obscure is the most
painful of all Hardy's books, and the only one against which we can
fairly bring the charge of pessimism. In Jude the Obscure
argument is allowed to dominate impression, with the result that
though the misery of the book is overwhelming it is not tragic. As
calamity succeeds calamity we feel that the case against society is
not being argued fairly or with profound understanding of the
facts. Here is nothing of that width and force and knowledge of
mankind which, when Tolstoy criticizes society, makes his
indictment formidable. Here we have revealed to us the petty
cruelty of men, not the large injustice of the gods. It is only
necessary to compare Jude the Obscure with The Mayor of
Casterbridge to see where Hardy's true power lay. Jude carries
on his miserable contest against the deans of colleges and the
conventions of sophisticated society. Henchard is pitted, not
against another man, but against something outside himself which is
opposed to men of his ambition and power. No human being wishes him
ill. Even Farfrae and Newson and Elizabeth Jane whom he has wronged
all come to pity him, and even to admire his strength of character.
He is standing up to fate, and in backing the old Mayor whose ruin
has been largely his own fault, Hardy makes us feel that we are
backing human nature in an unequal contest. There is no pessimism
here. Throughout the book we are aware of the sublimity of the
issue, and yet it is presented to us in the most concrete form.
From the opening scene in which Henchard sells his wife to the
sailor at the fair to his death on Egdon Heath the vigour of the
story is superb, its humour rich and racy, its movement
large-limbed and free. The skimmity ride, the fight between Farfrae
and Henchard in the loft, Mrs. Cuxsom's speech upon the death of
Mrs. Henchard, the talk of the ruffians at Peter's Finger with
Nature present in the background or mysteriously dominating the
foreground, are among the glories of English fiction. Brief and
scanty, it may be, is the measure of happiness allowed to each, but
so long as the struggle is, as Henchard's was, with the decrees of
fate and not with the laws of man, so long as it is in the open air
and calls for activity of the body rather than of the brain, there
is greatness in the contest, there is pride and pleasure in it, and
the death of the broken corn merchant in his cottage on Egdon Heath
is comparable to the death of Ajax, lord of Salamis. The true
tragic emotion is ours.
Before such power as this we are made to feel that the ordinary
tests which we apply to fiction are futile enough. Do we insist
that a great novelist shall be a master of melodious prose? Hardy
was no such thing. He feels his way by dint of sagacity and
uncompromising sincerity to the phrase he wants, and it is often of
unforgettable pungency. Failing it, he will make do with any homely
or clumsy or old-fashioned turn of speech, now of the utmost
angularity, now of a bookish elaboration. No style in literature,
save Scott's, is so difficult to analyse; it is on the face of it
so bad, yet it achieves its aim so unmistakably. As well might one
attempt to rationalize the charm of a muddy country road, or of a
plain field of roots in winter. And then, like Dorsetshire itself,
out of these very elements of stiffness and angularity his prose
will put on greatness; will roll with a Latin sonority; will shape
itself in a massive and monumental symmetry like that of his own
bare downs. Then again, do we require that a novelist shall observe
the probabilities, and keep close to reality? To find anything
approaching the violence and convolution of Hardy's plots one must
go back to the Elizabethan drama. Yet we accept his story
completely as we read it; more than that, it becomes obvious that
his violence and his melodrama, when they are not due to a curious
peasant-like love of the monstrous for its own sake, are part of
that wild spirit of poetry which saw with intense irony and
grimness that no reading of life can possibly outdo the strangeness
of life itself, no symbol of caprice and unreason be too extreme to
represent the astonishing circumstances of our existence.
But as we consider the great structure of the Wessex Novels it
seems irrelevant to fasten on little points—this character,
that scene, this phrase of deep and poetic beauty. It is something
larger that Hardy has bequeathed to us. The Wessex Novels are not
one book, but many. They cover an immense stretch; inevitably they
are full of imperfections—some are failures, and others
exhibit only the wrong side of their maker's genius. But
undoubtedly, when we have submitted ourselves fully to them, when
we come to take stock of our impression of the whole, the effect is
commanding and satisfactory. We have been freed from the cramp and
pettiness imposed by life. Our imaginations have been stretched and
heightened; our humour has been made to laugh out; we have drunk
deep of the beauty of the earth. Also we have been made to enter
the shade of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its
saddest mood, bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, even
when most moved to anger, lost its deep compassion for the
sufferings of men and women. Thus it is no mere transcript of life
at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision
of the world and of man's lot as they revealed themselves to a
powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and
humane soul.
In the first place, I want to emphasise the note of
interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the
question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to
you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another
about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts,
to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is
agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few
ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter
that independence which is the most important quality that a reader
can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The
battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is
Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each
must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities,
however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them
tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we
read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of
those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and
conventions—there we have none.
1 A paper read at a school.
But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of
course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers,
helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to
water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and
powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the
first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is "the very
spot"? There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and
huddle of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memoirs,
dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men
and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the
shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump,
the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are
we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the
deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?
It is simple enough to say that since books have
classes—fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate
them and take from each what it is right that each should give us.
Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly
we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction
that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of
biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall
enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such
preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his
fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and
criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the
fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your
mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost
imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first
sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike
any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and
soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to
give you, something far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a
novel—if we consider how to read a novel first—are an
attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building:
but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and
more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to
understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read,
but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and
difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a
distinct impression on you—how at the corner of the street,
perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric
light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a
whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that
moment.
But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find
that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must
be subdued; others emphasised; in the process you will lose,
probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your
blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great
novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better
able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in
the presence of a different person—Defoe, Jane Austen, or
Thomas Hardy—but that we are living in a different world.
Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road;
one thing happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact
is enough. But if the open air and adventure mean everything to
Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room,
and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing
their characters. And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the
drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once
more spun round. The moors are round us and the stars are above our
heads. The other side of the mind is now exposed—the dark
side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that
shows in company. Our relations are not towards people, but towards
Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each is
consistent with itself. The maker of each is careful to observe the
laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may
put upon us they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so
frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into
the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to
another—from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope,
from Scott to Meredith—is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be
thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and
complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of
perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going
to make use of all that the novelist—the great
artist—gives you.
But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show
you that writers are very seldom "great artists"; far more often a
book makes no claim to be a work of art at all. These biographies
and autobiographies, for example, lives of great men, of men long
dead and forgotten, that stand cheek by jowl with the novels and
poems, are we to refuse to read them because they are not "art"? Or
shall we read them, but read them in a different way, with a
different aim? Shall we read them in the first place to satisfy
that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we
linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds
not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shows us a different
section of human life in being? Then we are consumed with curiosity
about the lives of these people—the servants gossiping, the
gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party, the old woman at
the window with her knitting. Who are they, what are they, what are
their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and adventures?
Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up
innumerable such houses; they show us people going about their
daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating,
loving, until they die. And sometimes as we watch, the house fades
and the iron railings vanish and we are out at sea; we are hunting,
sailing, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are taking
part in great campaigns. Or if we like to stay here in England, in
London, still the scene changes; the street narrows; the house
becomes small, cramped, diamond-paned, and malodorous. We see a
poet, Donne, driven from such a house because the walls were so
thin that when the children cried their voices cut through them. We
can follow him, through the paths that lie in the pages of books,
to Twickenham; to Lady Bedford's Park, a famous meeting-ground for
nobles and poets; and then turn our steps to Wilton, the great
house under the downs, and hear Sidney read the Arcadia to
his sister; and ramble among the very marshes and see the very
herons that figure in that famous romance; and then again travel
north with that other Lady Pembroke, Anne Clifford, to her wild
moors, or plunge into the city and control our merriment at the
sight of Gabriel Harvey in his black velvet suit arguing about
poetry with Spenser. Nothing is more fascinating than to grope and
stumble in the alternate darkness and splendour of Elizabethan
London. But there is no staying there. The Temples and the Swifts,
the Harleys and the St. Johns beckon us on; hour upon hour can be
spent disentangling their quarrels and deciphering their
characters; and when we tire of them we can stroll on, past a lady
in black wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and
Garrick; or cross the channel, if we like, and meet Voltaire and
Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and
Twickenham—how certain places repeat themselves and certain
names!—where Lady Bedford had her Park once and Pope lived
later, to Walpole's home at Strawberry Hill. But Walpole introduces
us to such a swarm of new acquaintances, there are so many houses
to visit and bells to ring that we may well hesitate for a moment,
on the Miss Berrys' doorstep, for example, when behold, up comes
Thackeray; he is the friend of the woman whom Walpole loved; so
that merely by going from friend to friend, from garden to garden,
from house to house, we have passed from one end of English
literature to another and wake to find ourselves here again in the
present, if we can so differentiate this moment from all that have
gone before. This, then, is one of the ways in which we can read
these lives and letters; we can make them light up the many windows
of the past; we can watch the famous dead in their familiar habits
and fancy sometimes that we are very close and can surprise their
secrets, and sometimes we may pull out a play or a poem that they
have written and see whether it reads differently in the presence
of the author. But this again rouses other questions. How far, we
must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer's
life—how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer?
How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and
antipathies that the man himself rouses in us—so sensitive
are words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are
questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we
must answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than
to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so
personal.
But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw
light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but
to refresh and exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an
open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to
stop reading and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its
unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement—the
colts galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at the
well, the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long,
acrid moan. The greater part of any library is nothing but the
record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and
donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap,
its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in
faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give
yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be
surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life
that have been cast out to moulder. It may be one letter—but
what a vision it gives! It may be a few sentences—but what
vistas they suggest! Sometimes a whole story will come together
with such beautiful humour and pathos and completeness that it
seems as if a great novelist had been at work, yet it is only an
old actor, Tate Wilkinson, remembering the strange story of Captain
Jones; it is only a young subaltern serving under Arthur Wellesley
and falling in love with a pretty girl at Lisbon; it is only Maria
Allen letting fall her sewing in the empty drawing-room and sighing
how she wishes she had taken Dr. Burney's good advice and had never
eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value; it is negligible
in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go through
the rubbish-heaps and find rings and scissors and broken noses
buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while the
colt gallops round the field, the woman fills her pail at the well,
and the donkey brays.
But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of
searching for what is needed to complete the half-truth which is
all that the Wilkinsons, the Bunburys, and the Maria Allens are
able to offer us. They had not the artist's power of mastering and
eliminating; they could not tell the whole truth even about their
own lives; they have disfigured the story that might have been so
shapely. Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very
inferior form of fiction. Thus the desire grows upon us to have
done with half-statements and approximations; to cease from
searching out the minute shades of human character, to enjoy the
greater abstractness, the purer truth of fiction. Thus we create
the mood, intense and generalised, unaware of detail, but stressed
by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is
poetry; and that is the time to read poetry...when we are almost
able to write it.
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment
there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What
profound depths we visit then—how sudden and complete is our
immersion! There is nothing here to catch hold of; nothing to stay
us in our flight. The illusion of fiction is gradual; its effects
are prepared; but who when they read these four lines stops to ask
who wrote them, or conjures up the thought of Donne's house or
Sidney's secretary; or enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past
and the succession of generations? The poet is always our
contemporary. Our being for the moment is centred and constricted,
as in any violent shock of personal emotion. Afterwards, it is
true, the sensation begins to spread in wider rings through our
minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to sound and to
comment and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The intensity
of poetry covers an immense range of emotion. We have only to
compare the force and directness of
I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,
Only remembering that I grieve,
with the wavering modulation of
Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands,
As by an hour glass; the span of time
Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it;
An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home
At last, and ends in sorrow; but the life,
Weary of riot, numbers every sand,
Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,
So to conclude calamity in rest,
or place the meditative calm of
whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be,
beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside—
or the splendid fantasy of
And the woodland haunter
Shall not cease to saunter
When, far down some glade,
Of the great world's burning,
One soft flame upturning
Seems, to his discerning,
Crocus in the shade,
to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make
us at once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into
character as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power
to condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever.
"We have only to compare"—with those words the cat is out
of the bag, and the true complexity of reading is admitted. The
first process, to receive impressions with the utmost
understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be
completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by
another. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous
impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard
and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to
settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk,
talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then
suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature
undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but
differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And
the book as a whole is different from the book received currently
in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places.
We see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pigsty, or a
cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare
building with building. But this act of comparison means that our
attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer,
but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as
friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not
criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they
not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers,
the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air
with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let
us compare each book with the greatest of its kind. There they hang
in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the
judgments we have passed on them—Robinson Crusoe, Emma,
The Return of the Native. Compare the novels with
these—even the latest and least of novels has a right to be
judged with the best. And so with poetry—when the
intoxication of rhythm has died down and the splendour of words has
faded, a visionary shape will return to us and this must be
compared with Lear, with Phèdre, with The
Prelude; or if not with these, with whatever is the best or
seems to us to be the best in its own kind. And we may be sure that
the newness of new poetry and fiction is its most superficial
quality and that we have only to alter slightly, not to recast, the
standards by which we have judged the old.
It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of
reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first—to
open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions.
To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one
shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with
enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and
illuminating—that is difficult; it is still more difficult to
press further and to say, "Not only is the book of this sort, but
it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad;
that is good". To carry out this part of a reader's duty needs such
imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any
one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most
self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in
himself. Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading
and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the
library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for
us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may
try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot
sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a
demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence
him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our
relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find
the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results
are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the
nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief
illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own
idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps
we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some
control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all
sorts—poetry, fiction, history, biography—and has
stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the
incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing
a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective. It will begin
to bring us not merely judgments on particular books, but it will
tell us that there is a quality common to certain books. Listen, it
will say, what shall we call this? And it will read us
perhaps Lear and then perhaps the Agamemnon in order
to bring out that common quality. Thus, with our taste to guide us,
we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities
that group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame
a rule that brings order into our perceptions. We shall gain a
further and a rarer pleasure from that discrimination. But as a
rule only lives when it is perpetually broken by contact with the
books themselves—nothing is easier and more stultifying than
to make rules which exist out of touch with facts, in a
vacuum—now at last, in order to steady ourselves in this
difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare writers
who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art. Coleridge
and Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the poets
and novelists themselves in their considered sayings, are often
surprisingly revelant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas
that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they
are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions
and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading. They
can do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority
and lie down like sheep in the shade of a hedge. We can only
understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our own and
vanquishes it.
If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for
the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may
perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it
is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of
reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We
must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that
belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we
have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The
standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and
become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.
An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never
finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well
instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great
value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books
pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting
gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and
aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for
tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes
his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If
behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there
was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for
the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with
great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve
the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become
stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth
reaching.
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are
there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in
themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this
among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of
Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen
come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels,
their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the
Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain
envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look,
these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have
loved reading."
Buy Virginia Woolf Books at Amazon
THE END
