These dreary years of ineffective fighting provide obvious morals
for those who are judges long after the event. It seems obvious that,
though the longbows of yeomen could pierce the plate and mail of
French knights, a brilliant battle was no substitute for a sound
policy, and that, if archers had no target, campaigns became mere
marauding route marches. It seems obvious that if an expedition to
Brittany was compelled to attack via Calais, then the primary
essential to the success of the French war was a navy in unquestioned
command of the Channel. It seems obvious that divided forces were
dissipating the advantages of a ring of bridge-heads which included
Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bordeaux and Bayonne, and that there was no
hope of final victory without a large-scale and concentrated invasion.
But none of these deductions were drawn at the time, because
large-scale war required money, and the citizens who had the money
were not yet sufficiently at one with nobles and King to think their
money well spent in financing a ruling class which despised them. The
Commons were glad enough to enjoy the fruits of victory, they were not
so eager to advance the needs of dynastic or baronial wars or even to
provide the means for economic war, largely because it was not yet
established that those who supplied means should also have control of
ends.
In this cruel process which was hammering out nations on the
anvils of war, there was a constant stirring of those in authority to
find some simple way out of the complicated financial \6impasse
which always resulted, and in the story of the experiments and
expedients to which the Exchequer resorted is the story of the prelude
to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In appreciating this story, modern
conceptions of governmental duties must be set aside. A modern
government needs taxation not merely for defence and offence but for a
very wide range of social services. A mediaeval oligarchy needed
taxation in order to supplement the private wealth of the monarchy
(the royal income from the revenues of crown lands, the fees of
feudalism and the fines of justice) and to provide enough cash to meet
royal expenses, and especially the expenses of waging war. Social
service as a function of government was quite alien to mediaeval
thought- its substitute was the mutual self-help of communities,
whether those communities were monasteries, manors, townships, or
wards and guilds of a city. A mediaeval tax was therefore in essence
a forced payment whose return was the uncertain bounty of booty and
the vague advantages of military glory; it was therefore always
granted grudgingly and coupled with the vain hope that, in the words
of Parliament after Parliament, the King might 'live of his own
resources and carry on his war'. When 'his' war did not bring
victory and booty, a new group of Lords might oust the unsuccessful
leaders, and the Commons, who usually supplied the hard cash, might be
bold enough to demand the production of accounts, and even at times
the impeachment of the unsuccessful. But the Commons were not the
people, and even a full Parliament was not yet a true mirror of the
nation. The people- Langland's 'folk' and Gaunt's 'knaves'-
were villeins still tied to the feudal obligations of work or villeins
who had bought their release, free labourers who worked for the
highest bidders, free yeomen who had prospered enough to become
successful farmers, the artisans, craftsmen, journeymen and small
tradesmen of the towns, and the retainers and men-at-arms in the pay
of landed Lords. None of these classes, except the yeomen, paid or
expected to pay direct taxes.
During the fourteenth century, the traditional methods of
financing the Exchequer had become stabilized. When the King and his
Council required additional funds, they were usually granted an export
tax on the wool trade, collected by means of that 'staple' system
which ensured that prices, quality and tax could be efficiently
supervised and controlled, together with a subsidy or tax on all
movable property. There were two other sources of public revenue-
first, the Church, which wisely followed the lead of the Commons and
in its own Convocations granted equivalent contributions, and second,
the foreign merchants, with whom the King's officials had formerly
made private bargains at 'colloquies of merchants', and whose
payments were now authorized by parliamentary sanction at a rate
roughly fifty per cent in excess of the rate for native merchants. In
addition to these revenues, the King had the financial benefits of his
position at the head of the feudal system, as its chief landowner and
the recipient of the fines of royal justice.
It was, therefore, a complicated and not very satisfactory
financial system in which the borders between private and public purse
were as ill-defined as the borders between private and national war,
and in which the comparatively simple obligations of the feudal
pyramid were becoming hopelessly involved with the complex bonds of
trade and industry. Furthermore, it had ceased to provide sufficient
revenue for the needs of continental war. It was a problem which had
been worrying the servants of the royal household for some time-
including those political clergy whom Wyclif had denounced- and, in
the last year of Edward =3's reign, they had devised an experiment to
overcome their difficulties. They had invented the poll-tax. Every
adult- defined as over fourteen years of age- except the beggar, was
to pay a groat (4d.) to the royal Exchequer. From the point of view
of its inventors, it was a simple method of bringing the whole nation
within the obligation of contributing to the glory and stability of
the realm as a whole- or, as later centuries put it, 'broadening the
basis of taxation'. Its obvious injustice was that it assessed all
men equally- the poor paid exactly the same as the rich; but, as
hitherto the poor had never paid anything, and as the rich still
supplied the traditional revenues as well, there was a case for a tax
which took a little from everybody. On the other hand, there was the
more relevant objection that not everybody had consented to the tax-
the poor were not represented in Parliament. In the event, the first
poll-tax of 1377 (also called the 'tallage of groats') while
naturally rousing much resentment, produced but meagre returns- there
was as yet no trained bureaucracy to make tax collecting either fair
or productive.
Two years later, the inventors of the first poll-tax tried again.
In a Great Council held in February 1379, the Lords had adopted the
significant course of raising loans by compulsion on a large scale
from many of the landowners, monasteries and towns- so desperate were
the financial needs of the Exchequer. It was a drastic method of
which much more was to be heard in later years, and it was followed by
presenting the Parliament called to Westminster at Easter with the
necessity of repaying the loans. The anger of the Commons was only
appeased by the voluntary production of accounts which proved the
desperate need for funds, and as a result the second poll-tax was
agreed. 'Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur' was an
accepted legal maxim, but it was not yet carried to its logical
conclusion- the people were still to be taxed by the Commons. But
this time there was a very interesting attempt to apply a sliding
scale to the payments demanded. The definition of an adult was
altered to read 'over sixteen', and, where the poorest were to pay
a groat, the Duke of Lancaster and the Archbishops of Canterbury and
York were to pay ten marks, and between these two extremes a graduated
scale of payments was fixed for the different classes of laymen and
clerics. Again the resentment was widespread and the results
disappointing- a tax estimated to yield +50,000 in fact raised only
+27,000.
In the following year, 1380, the last and most notorious third
poll-tax was agreed by a Parliament which met at Northampton. There
were dark reasons for a meeting so far away from the capital in a town
with poor communications and not over supplied with hostelries and
lodgings. London was again in turmoil; but this time over a question
of trade rivalry. A rich merchant from Genoa had been murdered, and
John \de Kyrkby, a Londoner, was one of those charged with the crime.
It is clear from the chronicles that this was a sordid quarrel
between monopolists and interlopers. The city merchants were jealous
of foreign merchants who could tempt court and baronage with rarer
luxuries than those within the scope of English traders, and whose
prices could not be controlled in the interests of the city rings.
The chronicler Walsingham remarks that the Genoese's chief crime was
that he proposed to sell pepper at a mere 4d. the pound! At the
same time, the news of the war was disheartening- a Breton expedition
led by the Earl of Buckingham was not going well, and an expedition of
Gaunt to Scotland was as unpopular as Gaunt himself. At Northampton,
the Commons might be more amenable- they could be faced with the
realities of the financial situation, and urged to provide the means
for a solution. A sum of +160,000 was demanded- a staggering figure
to mediaeval eyes. It was determined that +100,000 was a fairer
target, and the Parliament agreed to find two-thirds of this sum
providing the clergy supplied the remainder. The method of assessment
to which the Commons agreed was that of the first poll-tax. The
manifest injustice of this method had been to a certain degree
corrected by the sliding scale of the second poll-tax, but this lesson
was ignored, and the injustice trebled in weight by a flat-rate tax at
treble the rate- every adult had to pay three groats, but this time
an adult was re-defined as anyone over fifteen. Trebling the rate was
arrived at by a simple arithmetic which argued that, as the first
poll-tax had supplied +22,000, a tax of three times the rate would
produce +66,000. The only concession made in view of the objections
to the first two poll-taxes was the suggestion that the rich should
help the poor- but this was only a pious hope because no machinery
was provided for carrying it into effect, and a subordinate clause
went far to nullify what small effects it had- no man and wife
together were to pay more than twenty shillings, a restriction which
applied to the generous rich as well as to the mean.
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They had long been preserved at Burley-on-the-Hill, the seat of the
Earl of Winchelsea, one of whose ancestors married a niece of Harvey.
It has, however, since been shown that they were much more likely to
have been the property of Sir John Finch, who was once a Professor of
Anatomy at Pisa, and seems to have had for an anatomical pupil one
Marchetti, who made 'tables of veins, nerves, and arteries, five
times more exact than are described in any author'.
John Evelyn in his Diary also refers to some tables which Sir
Charles Scarburgh had seen and was anxious that Evelyn should present
to the College. He only agreed to lend them for a short time for
Scarburgh's use in his lectures, and ultimately presented them to the
Royal Society. Evelyn had purchased these tables at Padua in 1646 and
had had them transported to England. They were then 'the first of
that kind ever seene in our Country, & for ought I know in the
World, though afterwards there were others'. The fact that
Scarburgh succeeded Harvey as Lumleian Lecturer in 1656 and refers to
these tables as 'unique' makes it unlikely that Harvey had used
anything of the kind; otherwise his friend Scarburgh would surely have
seen them and would not then have regarded Evelyn's as unique.
From 1616 to 1628 there were no objections at the College of
Physicians to Harvey's new ideas except on the part of Dr James
Primrose (whose date of decease is given by Munk as 1659, and who
accepted Galen as authoritative, one of his arguments being that in
the olden days patients were healed without the knowledge of the
circulation, and that therefore this doctrine, even if true, would be
useless. Lint, 1926). Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, while on 3
February 1618 Harvey was appointed Physician to King James =1, and on
7 May of that year was described in Pharmacopoeia Londinensis,
on the Committee dealing with which he had been serving, as
'Medicus Regius juratus'; in February 1620 he served with Sir
Theodore \de Mayerne (1573-1654/5) and William Clement on a Committee
to watch the surgeons, and in March 1625 he and his brother, John,
were admitted Members of Gray's Inn. In that month he attended King
James =1 in the latter's last illness which, in the accusation of the
Duke of Buckingham by the House of Commons in the following year, was
said to have been connected with a plaster and a posset, administered
in 'transcendent presumption' by the Duke. On Harvey's evidence,
however, there was nothing harmful in the posset, though he did not
advise the plaster because he did not know its ingredients. He was in
this year elected Censor of the College for the second time.
In the following year he was offered an official residence in the
precincts of Bart's, where many notable people lived, but refused it
and received instead an increase in annual salary from +25 to +33
6s. 8d. In 1627 he served on a Committee, appointed by
the College of Physicians at the request of the Privy Council, to
report on some alum works in St Botolph's, Aldgate, which the
Committee condemned as a nuisance. In November Harvey became an Elect
of the College \6vice Gwynne, deceased, after Mayerne had refused
because he was too constantly employed at Court.
The former's De motu locali animalium, 1627, written in
his own hand, had formed ff. 69-118 of the British Museum Manuscript
Sloane 486, and appears to be a previously unpublished notebook in
which he jotted down his thoughts with a view, eventually, to
publishing a book on animal movement. It was added to at intervals
without being finally drafted, and it is this incomplete synopsis
which was in 1959 published by the Cambridge University Press after it
had been edited, translated and introduced by Dr Gweneth
Whitteridge, Archivist to St Bartholomew's Hospital, for the Royal
College of Physicians. It appears that Harvey planned a treatise on
the movement of muscles even while he was preparing De motu cordis
et sanguinis. De motu locali animalium is the work mentioned in
Chapter =17 of the former's essay of 1628, and it shows, even if it
contains no new experimental observations, that Harvey's understanding
of muscle and of muscular contraction was sounder than that of his
predecessors and even of some of his successors.
In 1628, the year in which he turned fifty, he was elected
Treasurer of the College of Physicians and also published his first
book, entitled, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et
sanguinis. It seems reasonable to suggest that William Fitzer,
the English publisher of the book in Frankfurt, had been suggested by
Harvey's friend, Robert Fludd, or Robertus \de Fluctibus (1574-1637),
second son of Queen Elizabeth's one-time Treasurer of War, and the
MS. which he received has been described as 'the most important
medical work ever written', for it contained Harvey's 'new concept
of the heart's movement and function and of the blood's passage round
the body'; this he had confirmed in the presence of the President
(Dr Argent) and Fellows of the College of Physicians for more than
nine years past by numerous ocular demonstrations, and had freed from
the objections of learned and skilful anatomists. In so doing he had
surely shown the world 'the truth that is more beautiful than the
evening and the morning stars', and had raised himself effectively
from the ground and placed his head among the stars, as he had planned
to do in his days at Padua.
It is fitting before reading the 'libellus aureus' to cast
one's mind back over the efforts of the great men of the past in
physiology, and to realize what a supreme act of courage it must have
been on the fifty-year-old Harvey's part to challenge concepts
established over so many generations. One can understand how much his
colleagues at the College must have helped by their agreement with the
ocular demonstrations of those things for the reasonable acceptance of
which he once again so strongly pressed. 'Over many years a
countless succession of distinguished and learned men had followed and
illumined a particular line of thought, and this book of mine', he
said, 'was the only one to oppose tradition and to assert that the
blood travelled along a previously unrecognized circular pathway of
its own.' So he was very much afraid of a charge of
over-presumptuousness had he let his book, in other respects completed
some years earlier, either be published at home or go overseas for
printing unless he had first put his thesis before the Fellows and
confirmed it by visual demonstration, replied to their doubts and
objections, and received the President's vote in favour. He concluded
his words to the President and Fellows with a splendid passage worthy
of an Elizabethan, which by birth he was: 'It was, however, dear
Colleagues,' he said 'no intention of mine, in listings and
upturnings of anatomical authors and writers, to make display by this
book of my memory, studies, much reading, and a large printed tome.
In the first place, because I propose to learn and to teach anatomy
not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of
Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature. Secondly, because I
consider it neither fair nor worth the effort to defraud a predecessor
of the honour due to him, or to provoke a contemporary. Nor do I
think it honourable to attack or fight those who excelled in Anatomy
and were my own teachers. Further, I would not willingly charge with
falsehood any searcher after truth, or besmirch any man with a stigma
of error. But without ceasing I follow truth only, and devote all my
effort and time to being able to contribute something pleasing to good
men and appropriate to learned ones, and of service to literature.'
In an introduction to his short book of seventy-two pages, Harvey
shows the relative weakness of previous accounts of the movement and
function of the heart and arteries, for by reading what his
predecessors have written and by noting the general trend of opinion
handed on by them a man can confirm their correct statements and
'through anatomical dissection, manifold experiments, and persistent
careful observation emend their wrong ones.' At the end of his
introduction he wrote that 'from these and very many other arguments
it is clear that the statements made hitherto by earlier writers about
the movement and function of the heart and arteries appear incongruous
or obscure or impossible when submitted to specially careful
consideration. It will therefore be very useful to look a little more
deeply into the matter, to contemplate the movements of the arteries
and of the heart not only in man, but also in all other animals with
hearts; moreover, by frequent experiments on animals and much use of
our own eyes, to discern and investigate the truth.'
In Chapter One he gives his strong reasons for writing, beginning
by saying how difficult he found it to discover through the use of his
own eyes in living animals the function and offices of the heart's
movement so that he all but thought with Fracastorius, that it had
been understood by God alone. At length he propounded his new view on
the matter, and found it acceptable to some, to others less so. He
published so that, if something accrued to the republic of letters
through his work in this field, it might perhaps be acknowledged that
he had done rightly; also, that others might see that he had not lived
idly; or at least that others, given such lead and relying on more
productive talents, might find an opportunity to carry out the task
more accurately and to investigate more skilfully.
In Chapter Two he gauged the nature of the heart's movements from
the dissection of living animals, showing how these movements
alternate with rests and are seen best in cold animals or in flagging
warmer ones. At the time of its movement the heart becomes generally
constricted, its walls thicken, its ventricles decrease in volume and
it expels its content of blood, appearing paler in so doing in animals
such as serpents, frogs, and the like.
At one and the same time, therefore, occur the beat of the apex,
the thickening of the heart walls, and the forcible expulsion of their
contained blood by the contraction of the ventricles.
Going on in Chapter Three to the movement of the arteries,
likewise gauged from the dissections of living animals, Harvey noted
that contraction of the heart and the apex beat occur in systole,
simultaneously with dilatation of the arteries and of the artery-like
vein, and expulsion of the ventricular content. Arterial pulsation
disappears with cessation of ventricular contraction. During cutting
or puncture of the ventricles, there is often forcible expulsion of
blood from the wound.
Arterial diastole is thus synchronous with cardiac systole but,
when movement of blood through arteries is hindered by compression,
infarction or interception, the more distal arteries pulsate less
because their pulse is nothing other than the impulse of the blood
entering them.
Chapter Four dealt with the nature of the movement of the
ventricles and of the auricles, gauged from dissection of living
animals. [In four-chambered hearts] there are four movements which
are distinct in respect of place but not of time, the two auricles
moving synchronously and then likewise the two ventricles. With
everything more sluggish as the heart lies a-dying, and in fishes and
in relatively cold-blooded animals, the auricular and ventricular
movements become separated by an interval of inactivity so that the
heart appears to respond ever more slowly to the pulsating auricles,
and the order of cessation of beating is left ventricle, left auricle,
right ventricle, and finally (as Galen noticed) right auricle. 'And
while the heart is slowly dying, one can sometimes see it- so to
speak- rouse itself and, in reply to two or three auricular beats,
produce a single ventricular one slowly and reluctantly and with an
effort.'
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Yet in spite of the fact that his ideas did his business no good
George would never conceal them. He was a socialist and believed in
the right of the working class to control their own destiny, and said
so.
Being a craftsman and a skilled man, George won many prizes, and
though some people would have nothing to do with him, others would,
and the comrades helped in many ways.
When eventually the ovens were fixed at the new shop, the
tremendously hard work was if anything intensified. George used to
mix 100 stone of bread in 12 hours, and Kate served in the shop, which
was open from 8 o'clock in the morning to 12 o'clock at night. At
that time pastries and buns were sold at 32 pieces for one shilling.
On returning from school young George found many chores awaiting
him.
George, however, would find time to speak at meetings, no matter
what his commitments, to act as chairman, to speak at street corners.
In this Kate helped him a great deal, often taking the bread out of
the oven after he had gone out. Also his bakery was still a meeting
place where current problems were discussed, and working men argued
and clarified their ideas, thrashed out the issues of the day, where
they listened to George and his exposition of Marxist theory.
From its inception the British Socialist Party had carried out
intensive propaganda, not confining its activities to the City and the
East End but reaching out to the suburbs and outlying districts, the
main speakers being George H. Fletcher, Alf Barton, and A. E.
Chandler.
They conducted classes in economics, put up candidates for
elections, and held a number of meetings in support of the miner's
strike of 1912 for a minimum wage. (In this strike, as reported in
the Sheffield Guardian in March of that year, 1,000,000 men were
out a fortnight, disciplined and solid, when only 20 per cent of them
stood to gain anything from the strike and the other 80 per cent made
sacrifices for their fellow men; this remarkable strike raised the
question of a living wage and showed the worth of the common man.)
Propaganda efforts of a week's duration took place, demonstrations,
social events and field days.
In order to raise money for their manifold activities the
Sheffield British Socialist Party began the manufacture of razors,
knives, etc. There was the Revolutionist at 3s. 6d., the
Clarion at 2s. 6d., or just a common Proletarian at 1s.
6d., a Red Flag pocket knife being the same price. They were
made by local comrades who were 'little masters', and on the boxes
was a suitable inscription: 'Sharp enough to cut the throat of the
most hard-hearted Capitalist!'
Other methods of raising money were tried such as the Male Voice
Choir, which Charlie Grant worked particularly hard to bring into
being.
'Can you sing?' he asked Arthur Parkin. Arthur couldn't, but
he joined the Choir. Most of the members were unemployed at the time,
they had never sung a note in their lives, and hardly one of them had
a decent suit to wear. Uncompromising material, perhaps, but Charlie
Grant persevered and began by teaching them tonic sol fa. They paid
1s. 6d. a night for a room and rehearsed twice a week. Soon they
were good enough to sing at meetings.
One of the helpful by-products was that they were able to obtain
some respectable clothing, with which they wore a white tie and Red
Flag badge, thus presenting a much better appearance.
Later, on many a sunny Sunday evening, when George went to speak
at Malin Bridge, they would be there to begin the meeting. They sang
to get a crowd and save the speaker's voice. Many fine speeches were
delivered by George, who had become so well known and popular that if
he were announced to speak the week before, the crowd would be there
at the appointed time and place, ready and waiting. Collections of
30s. or so would be taken.
As they became known the Choir went to working-men's clubs, to
Conisborough on cheap trips to sing to the miners, and sang for other
organisations such as the Bakers' Union, for whom they went on
Saturday evenings to the Corner Pin Hotel, to rally the members.
The B.S.P. also rented pleasant rooms on West Street,
where a successful Sunday school was held. One of the students was
young George, and another the dark-haired little granddaughter of
Charlie Grant.
George often spoke at the Sunday school. He christened the
babies. Also, when called upon to do so, he would officiate at
funerals.
Religion was one of his pet subjects, for being well acquainted
with the Bible, which he had read in prison where it was the only book
they were allowed, he could debate on religion with anyone. Although
his ideas were diametrically opposed to those of parsons he got on
wonderfully well with them, particularly those who, like the Rev.
Conrad Noel, the eloquent leader of the Church Socialist League,
genuinely advocated socialism. With such men, who had the courage of
their convictions and their Christianity, common ground could be
found.
There was no abatement in political work. The British Socialist
Party endeavoured to get more socialist members sent to the Council,
and to Parliament, being determined and obdurate in their attitude
that their candidate must go forward in the elections. In the
Sheffield Trades and Labour Council meeting on October 16, 1912,
George had said, 'Mr. Barton would go to the poll. Just as the
Labour Party had fought the Liberals, they were going to fight the
Labour Party.'
This new party, the British Socialist Party, was not prepared to
accept the role of junior helper in the Labour movement, or of only
providing propaganda in order to increase the volume of socialist
thought in the city, but sought to create in the Labour movement a
more militant attitude capable of achieving socialism for the working
people. In its ranks were men steeled in the struggle, who for many
years had worked without stint to the best of their ability and
knowledge for the working people. Not all members, though, understood
the same thing by socialism or fully accepted Marxism. Hyndman, the
leader, had for some time been propagating a reactionary policy and
veering away from the rank and file. Alf Barton, who in 1911 was
presented with a book on the life of Marx, and a gold purse in
recognition of his work for the movement, was later known to say that
it was not necessary to understand Marxism in order to understand
socialism, though at this time he was a keen member of the
B.S.P.. George, however, never deviated from his belief that
it was the economic basis of society which needed to be changed, for
the conditions of the people were appalling, there being only slight
alleviations.
In 1908 5s. a week had been granted to the old people at 70.
The Lloyd George Insurance Act, based upon the principle of
Bismarck's legislation many years earlier, which principle was to make
the working people pay for their own benefits, had come into
operation, and eased but slightly the situation of some of the most
needy of the population. But now stagnation seemed to have set in.
Wages were pitifully low, particularly the wages of women. It was
reported in the Sheffield Guardian of November 1912, that women
employed in the holloware trade had had to strike for a wage of 2d.
an hour, whilst the wages of many other girls did not even reach this
pittance. In the printing trade the wage of a skilled woman worker
was only 10s. a week.
Endeavours were also made by the Amalgamated Union of Bakers and
Confectioners to improve the bad conditions of the bakers. Their
proposals were sent to the master bakers for signature but only eight
out of twenty-five conceded the terms of the men. Jack Hawksworth,
Secretary of the Bakers' Union, attended the Sheffield Trades and
Labour Council to appeal for support for the men, and a resolution was
passed to boycott the non-recognised shop in November 1912.
In this year the Sheffield Trades and Labour Council also passed
a resolution in favour of a general strike should war be declared, and
the Sheffield Guardian of September 27, 1912, went further and
declared itself in favour of passive resistance to all taxation. So a
reading was taken of the direction the wind was blowing, presaging a
world disaster, yet it was lost sight of in the immediate smaller
issues of the day. The Liberals claimed to be working for peace but
the drift towards war went on without hindrance. It was a readymade
solution to their problems of poverty and unemployment. Interest,
however, remained; and George continued his leading role. He acted as
chairman at a B.S.P. meeting in the Sheffield Corn Exchange
in January 1913, when a large audience expected Ben Tillett to be
there, but as George explained, he was unable to come on account of
illness. Jack Jones of London and Charles Lapworth, who three years
before had stood for Brightside, delivered speeches, and party songs
were sung by the Clarion Vocal Union.
Rather halting and reluctant steps were taken to bring about
agreement between the British Socialist Party and the Sheffield Trades
and Labour Council on the question of elections and affiliation.
These, however, did not have any immediate result, and the friction
which existed between these bodies was not resolved that year, to the
detriment of the labour movement.
Although the Sheffield B.S.P. had declared, as stated by
Mr. Chandler at a meeting the year before, that there were to be no
leaders in their movement, yet the need for correct and definite
leadership began to be urgently felt, as George was to point out in
conference later on.
In March, 1913, at a special meeting of the British Socialist
Party, they decided to adopt Comrade William Gee as Parliamentary
candidate, and the following resolution was carried unanimously:
'That this branch of the British Socialist Party adopt Mr.
Wm. Gee of Northampton as prospective Socialist Candidate for the
Brightside Parliamentary Division and pledges itself to use every
legitimate effort to secure his successful return.'
Events, however, were to decree otherwise.
At the B.S.P. Conference of that year the cleavage of
opinion became more evident. Hyndman's support of a strong navy
caused much hostility and he had to undertake to express such opinions
only in his private capacity, and not as a member of the Party. It
was also resolved that only Socialist candidates should be recognised,
and a resolution against an increase in armaments was carried.
In the matter of the municipal elections 1913 was a more
successful year for the labour movement, and at a meeting of the
Sheffield Trades and Labour Council in November, Mr. Rowlinson
referred with satisfaction to their success and stated there was no
reason why they should not have a big fighting force in the City
Council before long. But the City Council was again using repressive
measures to attack the labour movement of the city. They proposed to
prohibit public meetings at the traditional site of the Queen's
Monument, and this aroused the anger and indignation of the whole
labour movement, of all shades of opinion, throughout the city. On
February 17 a special conference was called which included
representatives of the Sheffield Independent Labour Party, British
Socialist Party, the Daily Herald League, the National Union of
Women's Suffrage Society, the Woman's Social and Political Union, and
the Trades Council. A decision was taken to organise a mass
demonstration of protest.
Subsequently, on Sunday, March 8, 1914, an orderly and
substantial procession with the banners of the British Socialist
Party, the Independent Labour Party and the trades unions flying made
its way from the Wicker to the Queen's Monument. Collectors went
alongside with petitions. Gathered at the Monument was a crowd of
4,000 people, many of whom had come long distances.
# 2015
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He very kindly accepted, adding in his letter that he would have a
friend staying with him on that day, and would like to bring him over
for the drive from Kennington. So at 3 p.m. the car drove up to
the Hall, and out of it stepped our Bishop with the Archbishop of
Canterbury! Dr. Davidson said he would go for a walk over the
fields while we attended to our business. To my amusement, when we
met at tea at the rectory after the Dedication, the Archbishop said he
had been stopped by a farmer in a field. He seemed rather indignant,
but we took the episode without a smile till afterwards.
The Hall proved most useful, especially in winter when the
distance to the church deterred many from coming to Sunday Evensong.
We managed to furnish a table with cross and candles, and the people
appreciated the Church Hall for worship as well as for more secular
purposes.
In 1910 Dr. Talbot was translated to Winchester, and Dr.
Hubert Burge became Bishop of Southwark. Meanwhile I had been asked
to do a bit of Diocesan work in connection with Higher Religious
Education, and to become the Southwark Secretary of the Church Reading
Union. This meant organizing lectures and courses of religious
instruction through the Diocese, and I also found myself a member of
the Diocesan Conference, where I remember introducing myself as the
incumbent of the highest church in the Diocese. There was a somewhat
shocked atmosphere in some quarters, until I explained that my church
was 800 feet high above the sea level!
The work was growing pretty heavy, and we managed to get a
stipendiary layman who could help among the children and young people.
It was while I was at Tatsfield that I first visited Oberammergau in
Bavaria to witness the Passion Play. The place and its people were to
play an important part in my life. For five years in succession till
war broke out in 1914, I spent my summer holidays there and became
very intimate with the people and the environs. Every year between
the Passion Plays, an interval of ten years, another play would be
performed at the small theatre in the village, when new talent would
be discovered and trained. After the First World War, 1914, I did not
visit Germany for ten years, by which time in 1924 I was in a
different parish in Surrey.
Towards the end of my five and a half years' incumbency I was
asked if I would start a village choral society and conduct it. This
opened up a new interest, and we plunged into it.
First of all simple part-songs: I found only one member who had
any idea of reading music. This was the village doctor who was an old
school friend at Clifton. He could sustain the tenor part quite well
and lead the others. As for basses and altos the conductor had to
teach by singing the parts with them. It was very amusing, and by the
end of a few months an enthusiastic choir of men and women could
render simple part-singing tolerably well.
Then we went to work on Coleridge Taylor's 'Hiawatha's Wedding
Feast.' Enthusiasm grew, and in a few more months we gave a concert
at which the accompanist was the village schoolmaster, and the tenor
solo 'Onaway awake' was sung by the Rector. Friends from
Limpsfield, in addition to the villagers, came up, and we were all
happy.
<=5>
IN 1913 Dr. Burge, Bishop of Southwark, asked me to go as
Vicar of St. Mark's, Woodcote, Purley, a new church built by the
well-known architect Mr. George Fellowes Prynne, who was to become a
very intimate friend, and I was later on joint executor of his estate
with his solicitor cousin. As Bishop Talbot had told me that I ought
not to spend many years in Tatsfield, we held great family
consultations. My eldest brother was then living in Limpsfield with
his family, and found a very suitable house nearby where my mother
settled, and eventually died in 1926 at the age of 92. Dr. Burge
was not able to be present at the Institution and Induction Service in
St. Mark's. This was taken by the Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich,
Dr. John Leake, who lived at Blackheath, and was a close friend of
ours.
But what a change from the dear little old church at Tatsfield to
the great modern church of St. Mark's at Purley. One felt at
Tatsfield that, small as the church was, it had its own atmosphere,
and for centuries had been a House of Prayer. I could not but feel
the chilliness of the new church, beautiful as it was and is. When we
had found a group of people who gladly co-operated, we made the little
side chapel a place of daily prayer. I suggested to the congregation
that it needed warming up by constant prayer and worship, and we found
many to help. Gifts of candlesticks and stained-glass lancet
windows- finally a new altar- helped to furnish the chapel as a
little sanctuary for prayer and quiet. In time we received similar
gifts for the High Altar, and large East and West windows. It was
very interesting to have the privilege of filling such a beautiful
building with suitable fittings; I made a rule that all gifts should
be submitted for approval to the architect, himself a fine artist. It
is quite possible to put beautiful things into a beautiful church and
yet spoil the building with ornaments unsuitable to the environs.
We also had a little Mission Hall leading off the Brighton Road,
in a street full of small houses. This was called Ellen Avenue when I
first went there, but was soon changed into the better-sounding name
of Lansdowne Road. There were lots of children there, and we had a
flourishing Sunday School and an evening service. I soon saw that the
parish needed more help both at the church and Mission district. The
Church Army Captain had done very good work in the Lansdowne Road
district, but I needed more help in the church for the full rota of
services on Sundays and weekdays. Most fortunately I was able to
engage the Rev. E. U. Evitt in 1913 soon after I had come, and
he organized the Mission district and got to know, and be known by,
many of the people of the parish.
A great blow disturbed all our efforts in the following year,
1914, when war broke out. Very soon Chaplains for the Forces were
urgently needed, and I felt clearly that one of us must volunteer.
The Bishop, Dr. Burge, did not wish me to go then, as I had barely
been in the parish for a year. Mr. Evitt, however, was much less
committed than his Vicar, and he was accepted at once and was very
soon in France where he did splendid work until his health broke down
and he had a bad attack of enteric fever. Meanwhile in Purley there
was much activity and much co-operation especially with the other
Christian communities. At a large public meeting we launched the
project known as the 'Coulsdon and Purley Patriotic Fund' in whose
counsels and committees I found myself deeply involved. At first, the
main work was to help wives and relations of the soldiers to get their
'Separation' allowances, but soon, alas!, as casualties began and
increased in the winter of 1914 and 1915 the matter of War Pensions
became very urgent, and I was asked to be Chairman of the Committee in
Coulsdon and Purley. Indeed, for the next seventeen years, during my
time at Purley, and from 1922 at Surbiton, I was continuously Chairman
of the local War Pensions Committee. This task involved a very great
deal of detailed work for the Committee. We had a splendid body of
local residents, and a series of excellent Honorary Secretaries. Our
Committee met once a week in the evenings, and included professional
men from every walk of life. Very soon we managed to get a hut in
Purley where soldiers were very welcome and the ladies organized a
canteen. Life was in those years more than busy. We now had a
vicarage next to the church, and I was most fortunate in having for
eight years a most able and devoted housekeeper whom I had known well
in Limpsfield where she had a house next to the church. On hearing
that I was to leave Tatsfield and come to Purley she offered to come
and look after me. She was a real treasure, of yeoman stock and
clever in all domestic things, a widow who knew how to look after the
'boy,' who was the only other occupant of the house when Mr.
Evitt had gone. I have now long lost sight of the 'boy,' but he
was lucky to be trained in domestic duties by Mrs. Everett.
And that brings me to say something about the children. While
the war dragged on and casualties increased, spreading sorrow into
many homes, there was a great solace and joy in the work among the
children. We gathered together a splendid Sunday afternoon service at
the church, each child being given a number which, as they came into
church, they could just whisper to the superintendent who filled in
the register at her own home. Each child had a picture given them and
the lesson was largely based on this. It was on a stamp which could
be stuck in their book, and there was quite a clamour for back stamps
if a child had to miss the Sunday Church from any cause which the
Vicar considered justifiable! It was quite amusing to see how much
the children enjoyed the service, and I heard of parents or faithful
nurses threaten any naughty child with the penalty of not being
allowed to come to the Children's Church on Sunday afternoon. I hope
the threat kept them good in the week, but anyway they were a most
delightful lot, and it is a great joy to meet them now fifty years
afterwards when so many are parents or even grandparents, and one of
the present churchwardens and several officials of the church still
remember those days.
Speaking of churchwardens and children leads me at once to
chronicle a most intimate and lasting friendship begun in 1913 in
Purley and continuing till old age to-day. When I went to St.
Mark's, the first contact I made was with the Vicar's Warden, Mr.
F. W. Charlton and his family, the youngest of whose three sons
was just coming into the world in this year of 1913. From then till
now the acquaintance ripened into a very deep friendship which I have
taken with me through all the many vicissitudes of a long ministry.
Mr. and Mrs. Charlton have been from the first difficult years of
war, when most lives were upset and some tempers were easily frayed,
the most loyal and devoted friends. Their homes- for since those
years they have lived on in Purley- have always been havens of rest,
and the welcome has never failed. Their three boys, now successful
men, were in our Children's Church from the outset, and when we don't
see one another we do not forget.
In those early years 1914-18, life was very full both in the
parish and in the wider war activities. The Bishop, knowing that I
spent my holidays in Bavaria, asked me if I would do something for two
wards at the Royal Herbert Hospital, full of war prisoners. I was
very glad to help in this way, and visited them frequently,
establishing at once a friendly contact with the Bavarian wounded who
were delighted to find someone who knew their native villages. I
could at once notice the great antagonism between the Bavarians and
the Prussians who openly scorned these more simple country folk.
# 2005
[192 TEXT G05]
For me, at any rate, this was all slightly ludicrous, almost
shame-making, but one had to take it as part of modern life. The
effect of make-believe was, if anything, heightened by the arrival in
the room of the German uniforms. Surely this must be fancy dress.
There was continuing unreality in the few verbal exchanges and the
multiple signatures of many documents and then suddenly, came a
heart-stirring display of such moral courage as one rarely meets. All
done, German General Alfred Jodl, some time Hitler's Chief of Staff
and now, with Admiral Friedeburg, co-signatory to his country's
defeat, leant across the table to General Bedell Smith, our Chief of
Staff, and in command of this little operation, asking in English for
permission to say a few words. Instinctively, somehow, permission was
given, whereupon General Jodl delivered in German a last-minute appeal
to the conquerors to acknowledge the sufferings of the German people
and to treat them with "\gna"digheit". It was of the very essence
of the German dilemma that this man, this fine soldier, who had
allowed himself to become the instrument of his country's destroyer,
should find himself capable, at this climax of his and his country's
disaster, of pleading with cogent eloquence on behalf of his
countrymen. I was able next day to confirm the impression of him as a
soldier of the highest efficiency when giving him our Supreme
Commander's orders as to the disposal of the forces remaining in being
under German command.
Within hours of this final act of surrender Admiral Friedeburg
had killed himself. We killed General Jodl later by hanging him in
Nuremberg Gaol.
There seemed to me to be an appropriateness in making the final
act of this, my second Great War, here at Rheims with its scars still
unhealed from thirty years before when the city had stood on the edge
of the four-year battle zone of that first great struggle. The lovely
cathedral still showed its wounds and it was still possible easily to
trace the lines of the old No-Man's Land of 1914 to 1918. This time,
mercifully, there had been little destruction but warlike atmosphere
was not entirely lacking since, through the town, ran one of the "Red
Ball Highways", those one-way highspeed supply routes along which by
day and night thundered the endless convoys of giant American supply
trucks carrying supplies from Normandy to the battle-fields. It was
seemingly not only humans that derived comfort from the roar of
engines, for it seemed to have positively intoxicating effect upon the
nightingales that appear to exist in Rheims in great profusion. It
was of our disjointed times that one should be kept from sleep by the
deafening chorus of a positive nuisance of nightingales. As a
counter-irritant almost I used to listen of nights to light music
broadcast from Deutchlandsender-Berlin in equally unbroken stream save
when the girl announcer would break in with air raid warning of "many
enemy aircraft in flight toward Germany." Until a night of no more
music when one realized, almost with regret, that the Russians must
have overrun the transmitter.
Not entirely to my regret, I was not of the party who flew to
Berlin there to re-enact the ceremony of surrender for the benefit of
Russian propaganda. From the garbled accounts given by the
participants on their return and restoration to normality it had
seemingly developed into an oriental orgy of monumental proportions.
Instead I organized for myself a personal celebration of victory and,
on the invitation of American General Maxwell Taylor, brilliant
commander of that crack 101st U.S. Airborne Division, I visited
Berchtesgaden. There I lodged in the Hotel suite that had until
recently been permanently reserved for the notorious Heinrich Himmler,
and was shown the local sights. Foremost among these, of course,
Adolf Hitler's famed "Eagle's Nest", that stupendous piece of
engineering leading up to the Alpine boudoir where so much mischief
had been hatched for all the world. In the madness of the whole
concept one could sense evil. One could imagine the follies of
grandeur that must have assailed the disordered mind as it rode the
storm up on those heights, surrounded by the tempests on which it must
have seemed that the Valkyries rode to greet the Wagnerian hero gazing
out over that wonderful vista of mountain, lake and plain.
Then down below was hidden away the vast Goring collection of art
treasures, the loot of all Europe. Herein was another testimony to
mental aberration. Was it perhaps that, deep down in the man's vast
depravity, there was a craving after beauty that had somehow gone
adrift and, nurtured on obscenity, put out freakish growth. I wonder
if he appreciated his ill-gotten possessions in the short time he had
them.
So on to Germany to confirm the great victory, this time without
equivocation- no mere armistice, no hanging back at the Rhine, no
haggling, not at any rate with our late enemies. Easy enough said but
to find a suitable location brought us up against considerable
difficulty. Thanks to the devastation wrought by our Air Force,
choices were few, it being necessary to find a place not only with
reasonable accommodation intact but whence good communications
radiated. The lot fell on Frankfurt on the Main where the great
I.G. Farben Industrie Head Office, surely one of the world's
most advanced functional buildings, was found to be reasonably intact.
Efficient fire-watching had kept within reasonable limits the several
fires that had obviously been started on the roofs by incendiary
bombing. Bazooka battles in the basement had failed to undermine the
fabric. The various temporary lodgers who must have streamed in and
out of the place had caused damage principally only to the vast
numbers of safes and strong rooms which had been burst open and
ransacked. Providence gave the solution of the biggest problem which
was that presented by the destruction of a large acreage of window
glass. By some freak of chance there was found to be surviving in the
devastated railway yard nearby a trainload of sheet glass, enough to
make a reasonable replacement job. Blocks of modern flats housed the
junior staff in some luxury while the seniors suffered no pain in the
palaces of the I.G. \Farben Directors up in the charming villages
of the Taunus Mountains only a few miles out of town- Konigstein,
Falkenstein and Kronberg with its imposing Victorian castle, its
sculptured likeness of Queen Victoria herself on the church tower.
Here at last we had found for ourselves an ideal lay-out, high
efficiency in the offices, great comfort in our billets- so,
inevitably one might say, there came the end of S.H.A.E.F.
The German surrender having disposed of the military problem,
it was no longer possible to ignore the inevitable consequences
thereof that demanded for their solution efforts that might be of a
different nature, but were none the less strenuous. So long as the
battles lasted they naturally took priority over all other activities
and thoughts and one tried to salve the conscience with the hope that,
victory won on the battlefield, the rest would be "all right on the
night". But, recovered from the excitements and tensions of those
few dramatic hours of "unconditional surrender", the partial
capitulations on the two flanks to Field-Marshals Alexander and
Montgomery and then the overall climax at Rheims with its repeat
performance in Berlin, one became immediately and horrifyingly aware
of the terrifying inadequacy of our preparations for what was now to
come.
So long ago as in the early C.O.S.S.A.C. planning days I
had earnestly sought for some definition of the ultimate object of the
whole great enterprise; whether, for instance, Germany was to be
destroyed, dismembered or reorganized. I had asked, in fact, for the
definition of some positive object to pursue. Here we were at the end
of the campaign still with no answer to my question. And, for the
majority, thought on the subject had been inhibited by the narcotic
effect of the terrific slogan "unconditional surrender" than which
nothing could be more negative. We had received the enemy's
unconditional surrender. So what?
To make it all doubly difficult, the end of battle had released
the unifying pressures that had bound the alliance so comparatively
intimately, and there became at once evident a pronounced tendency in
the other direction, a tendency to fly apart.
So that we were in the worst possible shape to deal with the
immediate task of trying to co-operate with the Russians who suffered
from no such disadvantages as did we.
History suffered dismal repetition. Back in 1918 the end had
also come with unexpected speed and had found the western alliance
infirm of purpose and lacking precision of aim. At the very heart of
the confusion the resolute but unbroken Germany, grievously wounded
but far from destruction, was able to lay the firm foundations for
military revival. So now in 1945 the Russians were quick to take
advantage of the all too evident disunity among those from whose
efforts they had, since 1941 only, been glad to benefit.
As a British officer of S.H.A.E.F., serving an American
Chief, I was well placed to watch the distressing drift apart, the
growing impatience on American part with British bombast and bland
assumption of superiority in so many fields. While on the British
side there appeared all the evidence of a growing inferiority complex,
jealousy of lavish American resources of all kinds and reluctance to
acknowledge the scale of American achievement.
The speed of events once the Rhine was crossed found both British
and Americans equally unprepared for what followed. We had
overestimated the degree of resistance to be put up by the Nazi party
and by the German people. We had given too much credence to German
propaganda, which had built up in our minds a picture of widespread
fanaticism that might well entail prolonged operations of a type that
would call for most careful handling. We foresaw a withdrawal by the
Nazi e?2lite with the cream of their surviving S.S. troops into
a well-chosen mountain fortress in the Tyrol, heavily fortified and
provisioned, that would necessitate difficult siege operations for its
reduction. Meanwhile we should have met the Russians head-on, in
mid-Germany, which might lead to anything. Even at this late stage
there was no working arrangement as to the details of this encounter.
It was bound to happen one day and from our side every conceivable
effort had been made to arrive at agreement on a procedure for the
avoidance of unfortunate accident in the heat of battle. Less than no
response from the Russian side led one to fear that the event might
well have the outcome that the Nazis evidently hoped might lead to
disaster. Then there had been much talk of the setting up among the
German population of a general system of "\francs-tireurs", to
be named "Werewolves". Arms were to be distributed widespread
among the civilian population, whose burning patriotism would inspire
them to wage a clandestine war of murder, sabotage and terror against
the hated conquerors.
As it turned out we were wrong on all accounts. Altogether we
had overestimated the hold of the Nazi party over the German people.
The Nazi fortress concept turned out to be nothing more than a
fantasy. Thanks to the good sense of the front line soldiers, the
meeting of East and West was marked by the use of no weapon more
lethal than vodka. And the effect on the German people of the first
ten years of the promised thousand of Nazi rule, so far from creating
a spirit of warlike frenzy, had produced universally a dull bewildered
apathy.
So far had our thinking led us in this matter of the
"Werewolves" that we had contemplated the necessity of very special
precautions to guard the lives of our airmen. Particular hatred, we
felt, was bound to be aimed at the representatives of those who had,
over the years, spread such ghastly havoc, destruction and death over
Germany, causing such wholesale slaughter among men, women and
children, old and young alike.
# 2021
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In mid-April Anglesey moved his family and entourage from Rome
to Naples, there to await the arrival of his yacht from England. The
beauty of the place quite exceeded his expectations.
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
'I am enchanted', he told Arthur Paget. 'Probably the
Element [the water] has not a little to do with it, but I admire
Vesuvius, which smokes and spits a little to please us, and altogether
the \6locale is certainly charming. I am now looking out in
earnest for the Pearl.... At present I am not in force. The fact
is Italian weather is a humbug and March is (barring Fogs) as bad
at Rome as in London. I fancy this place more. The Scene at least is
superb, and if it be too cold to go out, one may at least sit and
enjoy it behind the windows a?3 l'abri du vent, and with the
benefit of Sun, whereas at Home every house is constructed and placed
so as to have as little as possible of that very agreeable
companion.'
[END INDENTATION]
By the end of the month he still delighted in Naples. He told
Cloncurry that he enjoyed it as much as his health permitted him to
enjoy anything. 'The Pearl', he wrote, 'is arrived, which is
a great resource. Vesuvius seems to be tired; he is going out
fast.... What a gay, lively people, and what a busy town. At Rome,
every other man was a priest: here the priest is superceded by the
soldier- a favourable change in my eye, particularly as the troops
are very fine.'
When the sailing season was past, he sent Pearl back to
England, and returned to Rome for the winter. In late November, he
was 'suffering as usual', but hoped, he told Arthur, 'to find this
place agree with me better than Naples. The journey has been against
me, as there has been much rain and damp, but the temperature is high
& I have not yet thought of a fire.... By the by,' he added, 'what
good cooks the Neapolitans are. I have a very good one, but alas!
"tis all lost upon Maud!" The utmost extent of my eating is a
little macaroni, spinage & compote de pommes, with which,
however, I quite keep up my condition, altho' I sleep little & wake
constantly & in pain. A pleasant life truly!... It so happens that I
have an Italian who is perhaps the best Valet de Chambre that
ever was. But he has not one word of English.'
While he was writing this letter he heard of the fall of the
Whigs, and the temporary assumption of the government by the Duke of
Wellington. 'What a frightful event!' he wrote. 'I tremble!
What infatuation! Personally I am indifferent, but I really tremble
for my country! I may be mistaken, tho' I cannot but fear that the
exasperation of the People will be so great at the return of
Ultratoryism, that the Commons House upon a dissolution, which must be
had, will be a mass of Radicalism, & then God knows what may
happen.... God grant, however, that I may be a false prophet & that
all may go well. Sir R. Peel was here, I understand, but an express
took him off yesterday.'
While he was in Naples there had opened a new chapter in the
history of Anglesey's unceasing search for an effective alleviation of
his painful malady. None of the numerous conventional remedies to
which he had been subjected ever since the symptoms had first shown
themselves seventeen years before had had the slightest effect. Nor
is this to be wondered at, for even today, in the 1960s, no cure has
been found for the 6tic douloureux. As early as 1830, when
Anglesey believed himself to be on the point of death, the new German
curative method known as homoeopathy had been brought to his notice.
In April of that year his first wife's brother-in-law, the
diplomatist Lord Ponsonby, had written to advise Anglesey to give the
system a trial, adding that it was being cultivated with extraordinary
success in France and Italy, and that he himself was being treated
under a doctor who had studied under its founder, the aged Dr.
Samuel Hahnemann. This remarkable man of medicine, whom Sir Francis
Burdett described to Anglesey a year or two later as 'more like a God
upon earth than a human being', had an increasing number of
disciples among unorthodox medical men in the cities of Europe. One
of these was the Neapolitan, Dr Giuseppe Mauro, whom Anglesey
consulted in May 1834. Mauro's first action was to write to his
revered master at Ko"then, near Leipzig, asking for advice. In doing
so he described his distinguished patient and his symptoms. He told
Hahnemann that he found Anglesey a strong, energetic man with a gentle
and charming character, even-tempered and sedate, not easily
irritated, patient and persevering, 'but he appears to despair of
ever being cured.' Only the right side of his face was affected,
the pain extending from the corner of the mouth and the chin, up to
the eye socket and as far back as behind the ear. During an attack
the outer skin would become so sensitive that on being touched it felt
as if something red-hot were singeing it, and the acts of speaking and
swallowing became difficult in the extreme. North and east winds and
sudden changes in the weather generally provoked severe bouts of pain.
These were always accompanied by an irregularity of the pulse and
acute constipation. During a bad attack Anglesey would writhe in
silent agony, burying his head in his hands, the torment coming in
spasms every three or four minutes, over a longer or shorter period.
Hahnemann's reply to Mauro was to send off some medicines (which took
three months to reach Naples) and to write personally to Anglesey
stressing the need for continual outdoor exercise above all else.
In September, Sir James Murray was replaced as Anglesey's
personal physician by Dr Dunsford, an English disciple of
Hahnemann's. He at once took over the correspondence with Hahnemann,
but soon came to the conclusion that as soon as it was possible to
cross the Alps, Anglesey and his party should take up residence for a
period in Ko"then. Consequently, at the end of April 1835, Anglesey,
accompanied only by his son Clarence, Dr Dunsford and two servants,
arrived within hailing distance of the great Hahnemann himself. The
reason for taking Clarence, who was now a young man of twenty-three,
was that he too was in need of medical assistance. His complaints
were venereal, and Hahnemann refused to prescribe for him without a
personal examination. What success Hahnemann had in Clarence's case
is not known, but after a month's treatment at Ko"then, Anglesey
seemed to be well on the way to a cure. This happy but impermanent
state of affairs was brought about by a very careful application of
the homoeopathic system. At that date the doctrine that 'likes
should be treated by likes', which is its essence, was completely
revolutionary. The fact that homoeopathy utterly rejected the weapons
commonly used against disease, such as bleeding, mercurialism and
purgatives, ensured that 'every Apothecary', as Lord Ponsonby put
it, 'must be its determined foe.' But Hahnemann had had
extraordinary successes in curing diseases which had quite baffled the
conventional remedies, and in Anglesey's case, by experimenting with
selected medicines and meticulously noting their effects, he managed
to reduce the frequency and violence of the attacks very considerably
over a period of several months. This partial success may well have
been due less to the drugs than to the cessation of the debilitating
remedies hitherto employed. For instance, Hahnemann told Dunsford
that it was 'never necessary or useful to lessen the amount of blood
because it always means a lessening of energy and those forces whose
reactions are all the more beneficial the more they are kept
intact.' This \6diktat, and others like it, though universally
accepted today, sounded like treason in the ears of the orthodox
practitioners of the 1830s, but their application was clearly the
chief basis of Hahnemann's success. Anglesey was so impressed by what
seemed a miraculous cure, that he gave Dunsford permission to publish
an account of it. In this were detailed the various medicines tried
and their effects; Anglesey was pictured as having 'recovered the
stoutness, the vigour and the activity of a young man. For several
months he has not felt the coming on of the tic, and he has such
confidence in homoeopathy that no relapse can lessen it.' Though
this last statement was an exaggeration, Anglesey was certainly
grateful to Hahnemann for giving him the longest periods of freedom
from pain he had ever had. It was said that he looked ten years
younger and wherever he went praised the miracles which homoeopathy
had wrought in him. By June 1835, when he had returned to England and
re-established himself at Beaudesert, he felt that his sojourn abroad
had well served its purpose: what he called the 'wretched nerves'
of his face were at last quiescent, and he knew once again the
blessing of uninterrupted sleep.
Later in the year, the idea of some sort of public employment was
again in the air. Lady Cowper, for instance, told Princess Lieven on
September 25th that Anglesey was very much annoyed at not obtaining
the Admiralty in place of Lord Auckland, who had gone to govern India.
If there was any truth in this, Lord Melbourne's letter of the
following day, offering Anglesey the Government of Gibraltar, may have
been a sop. 'It is', he wrote, 'one of the best military
situations which the Crown has to bestow- the salary has been
settled... at five thousand pounds yearly, it being understood that
the Governor is not hereafter to be absent from his post. It has
struck me that altho' very improbable it is not quite impossible
that you might be willing to accept of this appointment.' The reply
was not bereft of asperity:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
'Beaudesert, Sept. 27, 1835
'Dear Melbourne,
'I have received your letter of yesterday.
'I am not prepared to spend the remainder of my life at
Gibraltar, & moreover (if even residence were not the condition),
having no taste for a sinecure, I have only to thank you for the offer
& to decline it.
'I remain, dear Melbourne, faithfully yours,
'ANGLESEY'
[END INDENTATION]
Soon after his return from Europe, Clarence Paget had become
seriously ill with a supposed abscess on the lungs. After months of
suffering, his life was almost despaired of when as a last resort it
was suggested that the patient should be taken to consult Hahnemann
once again. It was no longer necessary to go further than Paris, for
by this time the great man had been driven from his native Germany by
the antipathy of his orthodox brethren. The main difficulty was how
to make the expedition from England without killing the patient before
he completed it. The problem was overcome in an interesting manner.
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
'Fortunately,' wrote Clarence in after years, 'the King...
remembered there was a luxurious old bed travelling-carriage in the
royal coach-houses, which had carried his brother, George =4., and he
kindly placed it at the disposal of my father. Into it I was put,
more dead than alive, and we got across to Calais, and from thence by
easy stages to Paris... Dr Hahnemann was immediately summoned- a
little wizened old man of seventy [he was, in fact, over eighty], not
more than five feet high, with a splendid head, and bent double- with
him his wife, a remarkably intelligent French woman, who was very
plain, and much younger than the doctor. He gave one the idea of a
necromancer. He wrote down every symptom, examined me all over, asked
ever so many questions which I had scarcely strength to answer, and
took up his gold-headed cane to depart. My father hung upon every
word, but could get nothing from him.
[MIDDLE OF QUOTE]
# 2003
[194 TEXT G07]
When he saw Trelawny's printed letter, Lord Sidney wrote to
Douglas Kinnaird saying that it was incorrect throughout. He had no
sooner heard from Count Gamba and Fletcher that Byron would have
wished his body to return to England than that course was
'immediately carried into effect'- not in spite of himself and Sir
Frederick Stoven, but with their perfect concurrence, while ~'General
Adam was at Corfu the whole time and never interfered in the slightest
degree about the matter'.
His only reference to Trelawny by name in the course of several
communications to Hobhouse and Kinnaird about Byron's affairs is
satirical: 'I have not the honor of any acquaintance with Mr
Trelawny who seems to have had charge of the Mule when Count Gamba
accompanied the remains of our deceased friend to Zante....'
If Trelawny failed even to meet Lord Sidney and the British
Government's other representatives in the islands, while they warmly
welcomed Gamba to their counsels, it would go far to explain his
attempts to exalt himself at the young Italian's expense.
In his popular and acutely unreliable book on Byron and Shelley,
Trelawny implies that not only Gamba but Fletcher and Tita and the
steward, Lega Zambelli, failed to perform the most elementary duties
towards the dead. He pretends to have found everything in uttermost
disorder- 'tokens that the Pilgrim had most treasured, scattered on
the floor,- as rubbish of no marketable value, and trampled on'.
This was to give colour to his pretext for copying Byron's last
letter to his sister, which was that its chance of reaching its
destination had seemed slight. The collection of Pietro Gamba's
letters deposited among the Murray manuscripts show that the greatest
care was observed in gathering together all the possessions of a man
whose importance was fully recognized by everyone about him. 'I have
had put under Government seal his belongings, which will be opened by
Prince Alexander Mavrocordato in my presence and that of certain
Englishmen who are here. I have taken an exact inventory of them.'
Thus on April 21st, several days before Trelawny appeared, Gamba
wrote to Lord Sidney Osborne, and his inventory has been preserved.
The papers were reopened in the presence of leading Missolonghi
officials in order to make sure that no recent will was amongst them.
It may have been then that Trelawny contrived to do his copying.
Considering that Pietro was not above twenty-three years of age
when he undertook a load of heavy responsibilities, his conduct
reveals him as one of the most intelligent as well as the most
sympathetic of Byron's \6entourage in Greece.
With his good looks- for he 'carried the passport of a very
handsome person'- his good manners and his perfect lack of
pretension, he even succeeded in disarming Hobhouse's possessiveness
and making him forget how deeply he had disapproved, less than two
years ago in Italy, of the immoral way the Countess Guiccioli's family
accepted Byron as her lover.
Augusta Leigh too was favourably impressed, and wrote to Lady
Byron after she had received a visit from him:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
I have today seen Count Gamba- which was very distressing for
many reasons but quite unavoidable- he is a pleasing, fine looking
young man & spoke with great feeling.
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
The unfortunate Augusta was in one of her worst states of
confusion. She had loved Byron, but she had betrayed him, betrayed
him not twice, as he had betrayed her, but again and again over a long
span of time, fawning on his implacable wife, purveying to her in
secret the unguarded letters he never suspected any eye but her own
would see, feeding the stealthy fires of her animosity: and having
betrayed him, she had grown to fear and almost to hate him. She had
dreaded his outpourings of affection for her in poetry that he thought
would clear her and that only compromised her, and the headstrong
folly that tempted him to write on ever more daring themes, teaching
the world to guess what repentance and unrepentance preyed upon his
thoughts. She had dreaded still more that he might return to England,
overshadowing her again with spiritual and social peril.
But this kind of return was what she could never have foreseen...
that he should come back not voluble but silent, not beautiful but
defaced, not in obloquy but with his praises ringing! She could
remember now his exciting laughter, his almost filial love for her,
her almost maternal love for him. Above all she could remember the
anguish of their parting, and how he had been 'convulsed, absolutely
convulsed with grief'. So love revived, and in its most sentimental
form. While he lived she had lost touch in her perpetual alarms with
what was best in him; dead his memory became sacred to her.
She felt almost as strongly as Hobhouse about biographies. Quite
apart from the divagations of her 'poor brother'- so she
constantly referred to him- there were a hundred reasons why it would
be objectionable to have the family history exposed. Whatever
latitude she allowed in the warmth of her kindly nature to others- or
to herself- she believed implicitly in the moral code she had learned
from her good grandmother, the Countess of Holderness, living in a
well-ordered Derbyshire manor. She had no desire to see in print that
her mother, who was to have been a duchess, had been involved in a
scandalous and ruinous divorce, that her father, 'Mad Jack Byron',
was a profligate and a bankrupt who had squandered every penny two
successive wives had brought him and left the second on the verge of
destitution, and that he had died a drunkard and perhaps a suicide,
hiding in France to escape his creditors.
It was no more pleasant for the Hon. Augusta Leigh to share
this kind of story with the world than it would be for most
20th-century ladies moving in court circles and having children to be
settled advantageously in life. She had lived down the rumours which
had made the year of the Byron separation a nightmare to her, and she
had also succeeded, though with an increasing sense of effort, in
persuading her little world to avert its eyes from her husband, 'that
drone', as Byron called him, whose career of devotion to the turf
was reputed to have a certain shadiness. She had earned the right to
be left in peace.
Byron's fame was, of course, very wonderful, but it carried with
it too many reminders of his terrible indiscretions- the writing of
Don Juan, which she had never ceased to deplore, his shocking
blasphemies like the Vision of Judgement, his making friends with
the atheist known to her as 'that infamous Mr. Shelley', and his
mixing with really low and horrid people such as the subversive
journalist Leigh Hunt, whom one would never conceivably meet in decent
society.
She was most emphatically opposed to the production of sheer
indelicacies, and that was the light in which she saw the proposed
book by Dallas. Letters between a mother and a son- a son so
outspoken and a mother so far from suitable to be paraded before the
public! And brought out by that seedy poor relation, Dallas! Could
anything be in worse taste? The ill-mannered man had not even had the
common courtesy to write to her about it, but had sent her a verbal
message through a niece of his simply informing her that it was his
intention to bring out the book. It was a good thing she had Mr
Hobhouse to depend on.
There had been a time when she had shared Annabella's detestation
of Mr Hobhouse- had agreed with her that he was a bad influence,
one of the 'Piccadilly crew' who encouraged Byron to drink and
behave outrageously. She was far too diplomatic to have let him
suspect the scornful terms in which she was referring to him in her
daily letters to Annabella when the marriage was breaking up; and this
was fortunate because he had turned out to be a powerful friend to
her.
No one had done more to silence the whisperings which connected
her, so untruly and unfairly, with the Separation. He was not, after
all, the godless debauchee he had once seemed but a serious-minded
person who felt exactly as she did about Byron's poetical defiances,
and who had the same passionate desire to protect his memory. He was
generous too, and although his expenses as a Member of Parliament were
heavy and he depended on an allowance from his father, he had
renounced for her sake Byron's legacy of a thousand pounds. Hanson,
the solicitor, was naturally remunerated for his services, but all
Mr Hobhouse's duties as executor were performed without reward. And
now there was more trouble brewing with those unbearable Dallases.
Dallas senior was detained in Paris by severe illness, but Dallas
junior was full of fight and applying for the injunction to be lifted.
He had gone to Byron's cousin, now 7th lord, and had got him to
compose an affidavit to the effect that, whereas he had formerly been
reluctant to approve the publication unless it had first been examined
by the relatives and friends of his predecessor, he had now read the
book and was content for it to be issued without that precaution.
There were few things in Augusta's whole life, full of calamities
though it was, that hurt her more than this contemptuous slight from
George Anson Byron, whom she had loved with an unswerving loyalty, and
had looked on as her intimate friend. Moreover, he was without the
right to make such pronouncements: he had inherited nothing from her
brother but his title, whereas she was not only of nearer
consanguinity but the chosen recipient of his property.
These, if she had only known it, were precisely the reasons why
her cousin took pleasure in the opportunity of annoying her. Lady
Byron did not like Augusta to have intimate friends, and in every
instance where the occasion was granted her, she managed to find some
excuse for bestowing, in whole or in part, those confidences which
never failed to leave her audience agape with wonder at her
magnanimity and Augusta's wickedness.
George Anson Byron had seen enough of the poet's atrocious
conduct as a husband to be aware that Augusta, so far from being
responsible for the collapse of the marriage, had been Lady Byron's
greatest support and comfort at the time; but it had been deemed
necessary all the same to enlighten him as to the suspicions in the
background, and he had repeated them to his newly married wife. Their
friendship for Augusta became rather hollow, and the news that Byron
had left her practically all his money caused it to crumble to
oblivion.
Though Lady Byron knew perfectly well that Byron, as early as the
year of their wedding, 1815, had made a will in Augusta's favour, she
had evidently not passed on that information; and it came as an
appalling surprise to Captain Byron that he had been left without the
fortune that would keep up the title. Why he should have cherished
expectations it is difficult to see, considering that a nearer
relative was poor and in debt, and that he had been on bad terms with
Byron since the Separation, in which he had whole-heartedly and with
courage allied himself with the opposite side; but that he suffered a
shock his letters poignantly show, and the disappointment must have
been all the worse because the will was not produced until nearly
seven weeks after he had learned of his succession.
'Respecting the will', he wrote to Byron's widow a few days
after hearing its contents, 'the very thought of it is painful to me.
What Mary has said about it is too true.'
What Mary, the new Lady Byron, had said about it was written on
the first half sheet of the same paper:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
My dearest Annabella,
The more we consider the most prominent subject in your letter,
the more we are convinced of the truth of that dreadful history
connected with it.
[MIDDLE OF QUOTE]
# 2020
[195 TEXT G08]
All friends in the India Office emphasised Ritchie's humanity,
'the revelation that anyone in his position could spare time and
thought for the younger members of the office', 'his continual
kindness, generosity and public spirit', together with 'social
pre-eminence as one of the very few witty Englishmen'; while the
Indian Press dwelt on 'the load of personal additional
responsibility, due to the Secretary of State's illness' (in March
1911 he had a fainting fit and was ordered two months' rest) 'and to
his leadership of the House of Lords, which broke down the Permanent
Under Secretary'; and observed too that Ritchie was 'more human,
genial and considerate than his reticent and aloof predecessor, Lord
Kilbracken'.
There is a true story, connected with another branch of the
Service, regarding an official, who, having represented his country
abroad for some ten years in an obscure post in a distant country,
came home on leave and, summoning all his courage in the hope of
getting a transfer, telephoned to the head of his Department and said:
~'This is H.M. Representative in-', to which the head of the
Department replied: ~'Christ!' and hung up the receiver. In this
delicate art of handling subordinates, Ritchie adopted a different
method. A high-spirited young Indian Political Officer, Terence
Keyes, brother of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, V.C., and uncle of
Colonel Geoffrey Keyes, V.C., came home on furlough from the
North-East frontier and expounded to Ritchie some local objections to
the frontier policy of the Government. A few days later Ritchie was
infuriated to find the same objections, obviously communicated by
Keyes in his nai"ve inexperience, and lapped up with delight by the
Treasury, in a letter supporting some financial objections of their
own. At a subsequent reception at the India Office Ritchie pitched
into the Treasury officials present for what he called 'their Chinese
methods', and then into Keyes, whom he nevertheless invited to a
talk at the Office, later repeating the invitation several times in
writing, until Keyes eventually came, and Ritchie was able to explain
that, though it did not matter to him personally, he realised the
feelings of young officials home from India about 'old buffers'
like himself, and had been afraid he had put a young fellow on a wrong
path. Keyes left the office, not only reconciled to his drubbing, but
convinced that Ritchie was the only Englishman never resident in India
who understood the East, and was the best Government official in his
experience.
An account may also be given of Ritchie's opinions of high
officials, for few of whom he cherished unbounded regard. For
Kilbracken indeed he had great admiration, but considered that he was
timid when it came to the crux.
Of Kitchener he used to say with humorous exaggeration: 'One
can do nothing with him. One must shoot him.' He added: 'There
are two or three people like that in our office. One can do nothing
with them. One must shoot them.' But he would have spared Lord
Morley, for Lady Minto recalled how, when her husband was Viceroy,
Ritchie once said to her, with a twinkle in his eyes, ~'There will
always be a few people who will know that it's Lord Minto who keeps
Lord Morley in order'- he was found 'very cranky and not
level-headed' by Lord Hardinge, the next Viceroy.
Of Lloyd George, on the day after his Mansion House speech of 21
July 1911, in which he gravely warned Germany that England would be no
mere spectator in the development of the Agadir affair, Ritchie said,
with amused contempt: 'He is so happy- he has at last been allowed
to talk about something important.'
Since his Eton days he had known Lord Curzon, who had always been
one of his admirers. To a colleague Curzon wrote far back in 1892:
'Ritchie's knowledge and experience are unrivalled in the Office.
His great ability and judgment enable him to take a large share of
responsibility, and in all Parliamentary points (questions, debates,
etc.) he is a better adviser than anyone here.' In 1909, on
Ritchie's appointment to the head of the Office, Curzon wrote:
'Hurrah. So at last you have climbed to the dizzy but inevitable
spot. It is good for you, but better for the India Office, and best
of all for India itself.' And he assured Lady Ritchie, after her
husband's death, that his good relations with Ritchie were never
affected by his difficulties with the India Office when Viceroy of
India, and a few days later, in order to defend before the House of
Lords the purchase of large amounts of sterling for the Government of
India through Messrs Samuel Montagu and Company instead of through
the Bank of England, he pointed out that the financial experts had
been fortunate enough to obtain, through the whole transaction, the
advice and concurrence 'of a gentleman of whom they all so deeply
deplored the loss- he meant his friend Sir Richmond Ritchie, the late
Permanent Under Secretary at the India Office.'
On his appointment as Viceroy Curzon had offered to Ritchie the
post of his Political Secretary, but Ritchie had declined, not
reciprocating Curzon's admiration. Before leaving for India, Curzon
came to Ritchie's room at the India Office, 'very affectionate and
cordial', as the latter wrote at the time, 'but in bad spirits and
rather doubtful about his health. We had a solemn farewell.
Existence officially will certainly be nicer with him safe in the far
distance.' Years later, on 14 July 1911, the Pop Centenary Dinner
was held at Eton. Curzon went, but Ritchie was too busy. A week
later, passing down the High Street at Eton, he paused to look at a
photograph of the Dinner, at which Curzon could be seen at the end of
the top table delivering a speech. 'He looks very well there', was
Ritchie's sole comment. 'Not too close.'
As Government documents covering the last fifty years are not
public, no full account can be given of Ritchie's actual achievements
at the India Office, but the Dictionary of National Biography
observed that, although the part which he played in the momentous
changes in Indian administration was confidential, 'it is believed
that he was responsible for the strict adherence to recorded
precedents which was an unexpected feature of Lord Morley's policy in
all questions relating to internal affairs of native states. He was
also closely connected with the negotiations with Tibet which followed
the armed mission of Sir Francis Younghusband to Lhasa in 1903-4, and
with those which resulted in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.'
The old India Office files contain the draft and counterdraft of this
Convention in his own handwriting, from which still emanates the aroma
of the tobacco which he had smoked over fifty years ago, poring day
and night over these papers.
This Anglo-Russian Convention regulated the relations of Great
Britain and Russia in Persia, removed the menace of Russian military
operations against India, and initiated the Entente with Russia which,
together with the British Entente with France, enabled Great Britain
to face the German danger in 1914. It was one of the landmarks and
turning points in British diplomatic history at the beginning of the
present century. In spite of very great difficulties due to the
prevalent Russian anti-British feeling, and to sharp and violent
political conflicts in Russian ruling circles, as well as to the
weakness of the Russian Government itself, the negotiations for this
Convention were carried out during 1906 and 1907 with the greatest
skill and success in Russia by Sir Arthur Nicolson (then British
Ambassador in St Petersburg, later Lord Carnock) and in London by
Sir Edward Grey (then Foreign Minister) and Sir Charles Hardinge (then
Permanent Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, afterwards
Lord Hardinge of Penshurst) on behalf of the Foreign Office, and on
behalf of the India Office by Lord Morley (then Secretary of State for
India) and Ritchie (although then only head of the Political and
Secret Department of the India Office). The Government of India,
which did not altogether approve, was left 'entirely out of
account', and only the Prime Minister and Lord Ripon were kept
informed, according to Sir Charles Hardinge's letter to Sir Arthur
Nicolson of 10 July 1907. This astonishing secrecy 6vis-a?3-vis
the Government of India was due, according to a later letter of
Valentine Chirol dated October 1907, to Lord Morley's 'fears' of
Lord Kitchener (then Commander-in-Chief India) and the 'weakness and
inefficiency' of Lord Minto (then Viceroy), whose ideas, as Lord
Morley complained, 'involved a complete subversion of the policy of
H.M.G.' If one may accept Lord Hardinge's estimate of Lord
Morley, mentioned above, it would seem hard to overestimate the role
played by Ritchie, and one may wonder whether it was adequately
rewarded by the award to him of a K.C.B. in the summer of
1907, the G.C.B. being at the same time awarded to Nicolson
in St Petersburg.
Later, after Ritchie's death, Hardinge, then Viceroy, wrote to
Crewe: 'I was very much shocked to get your telegram today
announcing the death of Ritchie. He was a man in whose judgment I
have learned to have great confidence. During the five years that I
was in the Foreign Office he and I worked together in very close
conjunction, and he made things go very smoothly between the India
Office and the Foreign Office. I always looked upon him as one of my
best friends and as a most loyal coadjutor. If he and I had not been
on such good terms together, I think there might have been more
difficulties in connection with the conclusion of the Anglo-Russian
agreement.'
Reference may also be allowed to Pope-Hennessy's recent biography
of Lord Crewe, from which it emerges that from 1905 to 1910, when Lord
Minto was Viceroy and Lord Morley Secretary of State for India, even
if 'very cranky and not level-headed', 'the power of the Secretary
of State in London increased gradually but imperceptibly, so that by
the end of Minto's rule the Secretary of State for India had more
control over Indian affairs than had ever been the case before', and
that after 1910 the Viceroy was Lord Hardinge who 'lacked Lord
Minto's enterprise, and was in every way a more conventional and less
imaginative man', while the Secretary of State was Lord Crewe, much
absent from the India Office on account of ill health and other duties
in the House of Lords. Ritchie was permanent head of the India Office
during most of this time, and it is not surprising that Sir Mackenzie
Chalmers (see page 19) considered that it was only through Ritchie's
great ability and devotion that the Government of India was enabled to
pull through the serious difficulties of those years; that Sir Henry
Dobbs (see page 19) wrote that Ritchie had very great influence on
affairs in India and saved the Government from many mistakes; that Sir
J. R. Dunlop Smith (see page 20) considered Ritchie's death a
blow to India not easy to measure; and that Lord Crewe himself (see
page 17) admitted that Ritchie could in no way be replaced.
Nevertheless, anybody able to wade through the enormous mass of
correspondence between the India Office and the Foreign Office, or
between the former and the Government of India during the vital busy
years covering the Anglo-Russian Convention, the Minto-Morley reforms
and the Delhi Durbar, will be struck by the relatively small quantity
of letters or memoranda from Ritchie. That was typical of how he
worked. As he himself had once written to a young authoress: 'One
never accomplishes anything outright, but as a result of one's
exertions, things end by happening to a certain extent as one would
wish.' At the India Office he worked through successive
Secretaries of State and Viceroys, and they knew his value. To Lord
George Hamilton Ritchie, then forty, was 'his right hand man', to
Lord Morley he was 'the ablest man in the Civil Service', and Lord
Crewe leaving for the Delhi Durbar in 1911 recommended the
Parliamentary Under Secretary Montagu, who remained behind, in
everything 'to consult Ritchie'.
# 2026
[196 TEXT G09]
There was no change in my working life except, as the years
went on, for better positions and more money. But there was a great
change in my social life, as complete as that from school to the
nursery garden. Cut off from my old acquaintances, and Slough's mad
round of spurious gaiety, I groomed myself for the country life. To
do this, I threw in my lot (about +12) with my sister's, who had
always been so horsey that she might have been a Sellars and Yeatman
original. With the help of Bertie Barnwell, an old acquaintance of my
mother's from Pytchley, we bought a hunter, saddle and bridle for
+25.
With a slit in the back of my coat and a straw between my teeth,
standing with my feet in the fifth position, smelling faintly of
ammonia, I could soon talk horse until the cows came home. I could
talk of the Italian forward seat, the uselessness of hunter classes at
horse shows, the vagaries of scent, and I could quote Surtees,
Beckford, and the Badminton Library books on hunting and driving, and
the Horse and Hound, as if the opinions I expressed were my own.
My best line was whether it were better to ride to hunt or hunt to
ride. I was for the former, on account of the fact that I was never a
brilliant horseman.
I read Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man in full, and after that
there was no holding me- not with snaffle, gag, pelham, curb, bridoon
or universal (all done from memory, nothing up my sleeve). I hunted
on Saturdays in the winter and went to horse shows in the summer. I
stopped earths, built fences, dug badgers, schooled ponies, drove
traps, and became the complete 'unspeakable in pursuit of the
uneatable'. I lost touch with my old friends and their narrow
outlook, making new ones with a narrower. The local Hunt was the
Staff College Drag, which hunted fox on two days a week and ran a drag
line for another two. What with this and preparing for their annual
pantomime, it is surprising that we were as well prepared for war in
1939 as we were. But this military atmosphere, and the example of
some of my old friends in Slough, persuaded me to apply for a
commission in the Territorial Army, and I was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant
in the 5th Battalion, the Queen's Royal Regiment, in 1936, one of the
800 officers to have his commission signed by King Edward =8.
This was all part of the act. I was beginning to put on the
agony of the squire, the yeoman farmer, the old A. G. Street
romantic stuff. I found out that my family had lived in Chobham (the
parent village to West End) for over 350 years and that we had been
honoured in the district, at some time in the dim past, by having a
local common (Street's Heath) named after us. Students of Surtees
will now readily understand that a latent cynicism made me decide then
that if ever I should write enough to need a pseudonym, it would be
'Stephen Dumpling'.
The act was good, but it lacked the necessary backing. I soon
realized that in spite of my attention to my uncle and aunt I had no
hope of joining them at the Nursery during my uncle's lifetime. My
only possible expectation was that it would be left to me after his
death, with some provision for my aunt. As they were then aged
respectively seventy-four and sixty-eight, it seemed as if I might not
have to wait so very long, at that. Not that I didn't work hard:
almost every evening I would call on my uncle at the Nursery, after I
had bathed and changed, to have a chat with him. I took them both to
church. Regularly, Sunday in and Sunday out, I went to church at
eleven o'clock, to Matins, the service of respectability. Nothing so
common as Evensong (the service for the servants after a day's work on
the day of rest) or anything so extravagant and Romish as a regular
attendance at the eight o'clock Communion Service. Going to church
continued to be a habit, one that included a walk round the Nursery
with my uncle- and the constant hope that he would drop a hint about
my future prospects.
My uncle had been People's Churchwarden for so long that no one
could remember anyone else. When he gave up, I followed him. It was
Trollope, Jane Austen, Angela Thirkell, the lot. But I was, in fact,
only a correspondence clerk on a nursery. Because of my family
connections (everyone assumed that one day I should go into the
business) I could only obtain promotion if it were impossible to find
anyone else to do the job. I might leave at any moment and take my
knowledge and ability to my uncle. So, at twenty-two, I settled down
to wait, as a Dead End Kid, having learnt all that it seemed necessary
to learn to step into my uncle's shoes and a ready-made business.
Quite apart from this thwarting situation, growing rhododendrons
and azaleas seemed, in 1939, to be a futile occupation. Munich and
its aftermath made gardening a trap more than an escape, to a young
man of twenty-two. Even hunting was beginning to pall, and in March
1939 I attended what I thought would be the last meet of the Staff
College Draghounds. My energies were now directed to the Territorial
Army and my reading matter became Field Service Regulations 1927,
Volume =2, and 'Cassandra' of the Daily Mirror.
William Connor, who began that column in 1935, is my favourite
journalist. My secret ambition was to write a similar column but with
a right-wing slant. Before the war I seldom agreed with what Connor
wrote, but I was lost in admiration for the way it was written. And
once, about this time, he was so very wrong. He wrote a bitter,
brilliant piece tearing to bits, with every tooth and claw in his
magnificent vocabulary, the comment of some woman in America that, to
people doing a routine job, war could be a welcome relief. She was
right. He was wrong. For it was a relief to me. And if I had still
been hoeing, it would have been more so.
In peace-time I was a single young man waiting for a dead man's
shoes: in war I should be a keen young officer with a flying start in
training and seniority. But I never heard a shot fired in anger,
which accounts for a lot- particularly for my mental attitude today.
I was in the war, but out of it. My experience is no more than that
of the Angry Young Men.
In 1941 I was dangerously ill with pneumonia in Leeds Castle
Hospital, near Maidstone. Andrew Smith, a subaltern with me in the
same company before the war, was stationed in the town and looked
after my mother when she came to visit me as the result of a dramatic
telegram. Let me be quite fair; it was Harold Fennell who made all
the arrangements for her journey, even providing her with a hired
car- not easy in those days. It would probably be unkind, I think,
to suggest that his motives were no better than mine when I was so
regular in my attendance at church together with my uncle and aunt.
After coming to see me, and learning that I was not reacting to
drugs, Mother was sitting in her room at the hotel, feeling sad and
close to tears. Andrew came to cheer her up.
'Don't worry, Mrs Street. You'll see. John will get better,
they'll send him home, he'll meet some nice girl, get married, while I
may well be killed.'
For some ten days I was very ill, out under morphia most of the
time. I was well nursed- it makes all the difference in the world
when they fill in your next-of-kin as 'Mother' and not 'Wife'.
But the drugs were not having the right effect. Once more, I do not
expect you to believe what follows. I do not even defend what I am
about to tell you. I am quite prepared to listen to rational
explanations, to be told that it is coincidence, self-persuasion, a
triumph of the human will. But what happened to me during that long
illness must be told, plainly and simply.
On the second Sunday that I was in hospital, during my morning
period of consciousness, just after I had been washed, the hospital
Chaplain came to my bed and asked if I would like to make my
Communion. I said I would. The screens were brought round. The
Chaplain administered the Sacrament. He prayed for my recovery and,
as far as I was able, so did I.
Almost at once, I began to get better. And all the argument in
dialectic materialism or progressive humanism or applied psychology
will not convince me that I was not cured by a near-miracle.
I had just gone through a bad patch of selfishness and disbelief.
And I was still a stout Protestant, with no great faith in the
mystery of the Eucharist. In fact, only a few days before I was taken
ill, I had been deliberately offensive to Father Stevenson, the Roman
Catholic priest attached to my Company mess. I had tried to provoke
him about the Anglo-Catholic church in the town where we were
stationed. Now that it is too late I regret my pride and bad manners
and my narrow sectarian insolence. But Father Stevenson had more
influence on me than he will ever know- coupled with my personal
miracle at Maidstone.
Daily, hourly, I grew stronger. As soon as I was fit to be
moved, I was transferred to a room on [SIC] my own, and my eating
utensils all had a piece of elastoplast stuck to them. The nurses
would only answer my questions with tactful evasions. 'It's rather
noisy for you in the ward.' 'It's easier for us to attend to
you.' 'There is a larger night staff up here.' But none of them
convinced me.
So it was no great shock when the senior physician told me that I
had a spot on my lung, the result of the pneumonia, and that I was to
be transferred to the British Legion Sanatorium at Preston Hall. Yet
it was still bad enough. The Army was now my life: I had even been
accused of out-soldiering the soldiers. I had enjoyed every minute,
from wet hours in a slit trench to foot-stamping on a barrack square.
The thought that I might have to leave the Army in 1941, with the war
only half fought, was unbearable.
In bed all day, on complete rest, I only caught an occasional
glimpse of hollow-cheeked men who lived all the year in open huts in
the grounds- men who knew only too well that phosgene smelt of musty
hay, and mustard gas of garlic. For three months I lay on my back
with nothing to do but look forward to the morning injections, and
pray that I would not be discharged from the Army. Then I began to
think. Not just vaguely reminiscing, or idly speculating, but serious
constructive thinking about all sorts of problems. A cousin sent me
The Weekend Book, and I read poetry for pleasure for the first
time. And it made me think again. Then I began to write
spasmodically- odd descriptions of things I had seen, little
experiences, brief character sketches of people I had known. It was
an important time for me, those three months in bed, more important
than I have made it seem. It showed me that I had, within my own
mind, a source of pleasure that had been stamped on in the past by
rugger boots or riding boots or 'Boots, brown, Officer's pattern'.
# 2002
[197 TEXT G10]
<27>
A GERMAN PRISONER OF WAR CAMP CAME TO THE VILLAGE. QUIET,
gaunt young men, they gave no trouble. They tamed and made pets of
grey squirrels and field mice and kept the camp in a beautiful state
of order. Garden patches surrounded by whitened stones sprung up
where there had been nothing but rubble and old tins. If all
fraternising had not been strictly forbidden, the village maidens
would gladly have obliged.
Some of the men were allowed to take outside work in the
afternoons, which was how I got Willi. He came as part-time gardener
in place of Ron, transferred to another Home Guard.
When I first saw Willi I thought him a middle-aged man. He was
gaunt and angular and already going grey. I was surprised to discover
he was only twenty-three. What it had taken Ron a whole day to do,
Willi achieved in an hour, leaving everything ship-shape and in order
it was good to see. He was embarrassingly humble and self-effacing,
bitterly ashamed of what he could do nothing about. There were many
children coming about the place and he would stop for a moment and
lean on his spade and watch them. Especially a small blonde girl.
One day he told me she was just the age of his own small daughter.
"I also have a son, but him I have not seen."
As we got to know Willi better, he told me he had been taken away
from his farm, shortly after he left school, turned into a soldier and
packed off.
"I worked with agriculture and knew little about politics. I
was not very clever. I did not know very well what it was all about.
Only that I who wished to be a farmer, must be a hero. In the
country we hear [SIC] talk of Hitler and this and that. It did
not seem to have anything to do with us." It had been so much my
own position at the start of it all that I understood well enough.
A General in full rig came down one day to lunch with me. He
came across Willi in the garden. Willi went very white, half
expecting, I think, a sword would be drawn and he would be cut down on
the spot. The General took out a cigarette case and offered him one.
"It is not like that with us," Willi said afterwards, and he
shook his head, sad and bewildered.
He worked for me for two years. I gave him tea on his afternoons
at the cottage, with boiled eggs and coffee, things he had not seen
for years. He asked if he might take the used coffee grounds back to
his friends. He never did anything without first asking permission,
always a little shamefaced, as if fearing he presumed. Before he left
he made a doll for the little girl he called Blondie, and came shyly
to ask might he be permitted to give it to her. There was nothing
arrogant or bumptious about him, and nothing servile. Only
excessively humble and any kindness or consideration that came his way
obviously caused him immense surprise.
Willi went back to Germany when peace came. His home was now in
the Russian zone.
"Here in my own country," he wrote me, "I am less free
than I was as a prisoner of war in England."
His ambition was somehow to save enough to get his family and
himself out, and at one time it had seemed within his grasp. Then a
change in the currency laws reduced his savings to nothing.
I have not heard from Willi for some time. The last news I had
of him was from someone who had got out and gone to America and wrote
me from there saying Willi had asked him to inform me he had not
forgotten us but life was not easy, and please when I wrote him would
I be very careful what I said, because letters to foreign countries
and from foreign countries were carefully watched.
"No one" wrote the man in America "can realise what
these poor people must go through and suffer. The houses are broken
and there is not wood or nails to mend them, and now since these new
laws, much of his saving money is also gone."
I did not get my usual Christmas card last year. The box of
clothes I sent for his children was not acknowledged.
<28>
TO VISIT AMERICA JUST AFTER THE WAR WAS LIKE WAKING FROM A
bad dream to find oneself suddenly in Aladdin's Cave, with all the
jewels edible. We were mostly undernourished, in England, grown
accustomed to empty shops and dreary plaster mock-ups of trifles and
iced cakes, and of a sudden here was the real thing. Fruit piled
man-high in the supermarkets. Ice creams we had forgotten about.
Great steaks that looked like a dinner for eight, were a portion for
one.
I remember I had to buy a good bit of soda mint to tide me over.
The toys made even greater impact. We hadn't seen a toy for
years. At Saks Fifth Avenue there was a whole window devoted to Teddy
Bears- pink and blue and the conventional buff. Teddy bears with
lovable coloured velvet and chamois leather soles to their feet-
leading a domestic life in Teddy-sized houses.
My scanty dollars did not run to buying any of them, but looking
was free.
People were so kind. I felt like a shipwrecked mariner who had
been rescued by a luxury liner. Strangers pressed boxes of chocolates
on me. The Lift Man in one of the big shipping companies, previously
known to me, gave me a large supply of candy bars, saying "Sister,
you sure look peaked." I saw Oklahoma with its original cast,
before it had been watered and slowed down as someone appears to think
American plays have to be for English audiences (but they are wrong).
That was a little interlude worth facing the rigours of the journey
out and back for- and they were many. I went out on a Liberty ship.
There was a rumour going about that they frequently came apart in the
middle. The weather was so bad the tin biscuits were never out of the
portholes. Four women, one of them desperately seasick all the way
(not me), were closeted together in a small cabin for eight days. But
there was any amount of drink on board- to us amazingly cheap- and
the other three stood me cocktails, and even champagne, to encourage
me to recite poetry, or tell them stories. Over all that trip hangs a
golden alcoholic haze.
I came back in "luxury" on the Queen Mary. She was still
a trooper and there were not enough chairs for everyone to sit down in
the lounge at the same time, so they never had a chance to cool off.
Four of us shared a cabin for sixteen- hence the luxury. One was a
woman I could not place. She tried to smuggle in a fifth- a dog-
but the numbers were against her, and him we packed off to the
butcher- traditional cherisher of hounds aboard ship. She wore
slacks and a jumper, and went to bed by simply undoing one button when
the whole caboodle fell off on the floor. Usually half seas over, she
had glasses of whisky standing around at vantage points, to which she
put her lips when so disposed. These we emptied out of the window or
down the loo when we got a chance. Nightly she staggered in, undid
the vital button and went to bed smoking a cigarette. Presently it
fell from her nerveless fingers on to the bunk beneath which was piled
high with life jackets marked HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE.
Why more Atlantic Liners did not, and still do not, go up in
flames, I often wonder, what with lit cigarette ends blowing about the
decks- lit cigarettes thrown away to windward taking a short cut into
the handy portholes. However, we got our wayward belle, in the face
of fearful odds, safely ashore. She was discouraged because we would
not allow her gentlemen friends in to visit her in the cabin.
England looked drab and shabby, the autumn colours faded and
wishy-washy after the Connecticut Fall. I returned to troubles
galore, but so pepped up with square meals I felt I could face
anything.
My Mother-in-law was getting old. She had seen plenty of trouble
and finally succumbed to the buffetting of fate and retired to bed for
good. This was a very sensible idea, except for the fact she had no
one to look after her save Redman the Gardener. That same patient
soul who had been bombarded with Shakespeare in the asparagus beds.
He had been wielding trays and goodness knows what else until I
arrived. Accustomed to Eastern servants in her young days, my
Mother-in-law had never been able to accustom herself to the
I-don't-mind-if-I-do attitude of domestic workers at home. They in
their turn would have none of her autocratic ways. So she was all
alone.
"I knew you would fix something when you got back, dear," she
said, with touching confidence. The situation was complicated by
Redman himself collapsing.
I finally got her rooms and attendance in a large country house
nearby, where from her windows she would see much the same scenery as
from her own home. Old ladies are crotchety and hard to please. She
kept me busy one way and another, and it seemed strange that I- the
only one who had ever stood up to her- was the one she turned to now.
No other member of the family was available or mobile, or within
reach. Or they had young children of their own, or they had married a
wife and could not come. Old age can be frightening in these days
when the young people have all been brought up to please themselves
only. Forgetting that for them also a time will come...
There was no snow that year until March. Ron, newly demobbed
from the Home Guarding, gladly laying his rifle aside, built me a
fruit cage for the raspberries and gooseberries. It looked like an
elephant \keddah.
Mrs. X, the carpenter's wife, died. There were two Mrs.
X's in the village. Rumour at first reported the wrong one, at which
Mr. X, the carpenter, was deeply incensed.
"It's my wife \2wot's died. Surely I ought to know," he said,
standing in his yard full of statuary which for some reason he
collected. (Warriors in strange uniforms, angels off tombs, elves and
toads.)
"It was ever such a surprise," said Mr. X in an injured
voice, as though resentful of the fact she had not given him proper
warning. He said he hoped I'd come and take a look at her when he got
her all proper and laid out. I could not face it, but passed the
invitation on to my Home Help, in whose day disaster was ever a bright
flag.
Although it was common knowledge that Mr. X had never paid much
attention to Mrs. X while she was mobile, he was immensely proud of
her now she was dead. His arrangement of screens, and flowers and
pieces of rich embroidery purchased at sales (perhaps against this
very day) was, said my Home Help, tearfully, a real treat. The
funeral was not to be for a whole week.
"He does not want to part with her," she said, wallowing, and
shedding a further tear.
"Maybe he'll stuff her and keep her," I said, trying to
introduce a lighter note. This conjured up a life-like picture of
Mrs. X neatly stuffed (for everything Mr. X does is meticulous),
wearing her dolman and toque, propped up in his yard amongst the rest
of the statuary. I wrote to June in America saying, "Don't have
me stuffed, pettie, when I die. Unless you think I could be useful
standing in the hall holding a tray for cards- like bears in Scots
Baronial homes."
# 2019
[198 TEXT G11]
Did his audience know anything of land hunger? They ached for
allotments and smallholdings. Did they know of the effects of land
monopoly on the life of a village? A Tysoe man would never take a job
that meant living in a closed village. No! He'd go to Birmingham,
rather, or cross the ocean. Did they know how wealth from over-large
estates gets misused? They'd heard of great estates being enclosed in
the past by removing villages (there was an old example not so far
away): of Compton House being emptied and the old place in danger of
being pulled down to pay for bribes and oceans of beer at an election.
Did not the old folk know of starvation and crime here in the old
days? Those had not been due to lack of corn in England. In a
certain chapter of Irish Realities they would read the proof that
deaths in the so-called potato famine in Ireland were not due to lack
of food in the country. The food was there- the deaths were due to
the impassable gulfs between classes and to a 'governing class'
which did not know how to govern and was not in a position to find
out; and yet would not let the people learn to manage their own
affairs. In Ireland the gulfs were deeper than they had ever been
here- conqueror ruling conquered still.
Now there was the Home Rule Bill to let the Irish improve their
own country, take their own problems in hand. There were to be
safeguards and compensation. Those were right enough: over-sudden and
over-drastic changes meant trouble and loss always.
Joseph held up the book again. It had been printed seventeen
years before, yet conditions were still the same. Why? What stood in
the way? Who stood in the way of Tysoe's small desires for
betterment? Who whittled down the Allotments Bills? Who threw out
bills to give farmers security of tenure? And all the bills ever
drawn up to allow a village to have a real village school? Who
prevented villages two years ago from gaining a reasonable court of
appeal from decisions of Feoffees of Town Lands and the like? The
House of Lords! And the House of Lords would throw out the Home Rule
Bill.
Let Tysoe men never forget it: what worked for well-being in
Tysoe would work in other communities. What went seriously wrong here
would go wrong there. You can't, he said, turn the Home Rule Bill
into an Act: but it was the duty of all village wiseacres to vote for
it.
THE main subject of this chapter was too plain a tale, too
little lightened by any humour or success ever to be told as a whole
in a family circle. But though I never heard the story in full I
gathered its outline; its events affected the childish lives of myself
and my brothers and sisters. They helped, for one thing, to form our
economic background. They must also have had a certain influence on
my father's outlook- not too large an effect on a mind so naturally
large, but they must have sharpened its political edge. Locally, the
events had their publicity. By 1896 my father was writing occasional
notes for the Warwick Advertiser and counted its editor among his
very friendly acquaintances. Mr Lloyd Evans was a Radical and a
warm-hearted spectator of village struggles. So it came about, I
infer, that Tysoe affairs were well ventilated in the county paper.
In the election just passed, of 1885, Gladstone had been returned
to power but, as everybody foresaw, his Home Rule Bill was thrown out
by the House of Lords. As a consequence, there was another election
in 1886 and this time a Conservative majority was returned to the
Commons- but the Tysoe labourers had the satisfaction of knowing that
their spirited member, the Radical Mr Cobb, still represented the
Rugby Division.
The Liberal programme had included the promise of an Allotments
Act and now there was no chance of it. True, the new government
hastened to promise an Act with the same title but it would not have
the same nature. It would permit and even encourage ten-pole
allotments, which the Vicar already permitted, and would do Tysoe no
good.
Two years earlier Joseph had thought the Labourers' Allotment
Committee a waste of effort; it would be better, he had thought, to
wait in the hope of new legislation which would enjoin upon local
charities and perhaps upon vestries the duty of providing allotments
when they were demanded. He had known also that the needs of weekly
wage-earners were not the only ones. Thatchers, hauliers, carpenters
were all trying, and of course failing, to get an acre or two,
sometimes to grow wheat and animal feed, in some cases to pasture a
horse, or for a cow and pigs. The times were discouraging and yet at
Southam, not so many miles away, an Allotments Association had been
successful in getting a good acreage. It was a larger and luckier
village, the folk more varied. A doctor had grasped that starvation
made for ill-health and allotments for good food, and had given help
and support. Whatever the handicaps, Tysoe men must try again. So at
Christmas 1886 a new start was made. Eighty-six signatures were
obtained to a statement of the need for small parcels of land and a
public meeting was held early in the next year, fifty men present.
The Tysoe Allotments and Smallholdings Association was formed and
soon had seventy-five members, an extraordinary number, representing a
high proportion of the village, but perhaps some were young men living
with their parents.
One may suppose my father's part in all this to have been a large
one, possibly indispensable. It was the constant calls of members of
the Association interrupting the kneading of her bread or causing her
to drop the scissors at a crucial point in cutting out her children's
clothes that made my patient mother agree that we needed more space.
But Joseph was far from being the only effective member: the
inclusion of tradesmen brought in a greater vigour and resilience and
more 'know-how'. Then also, the Lower Townsmen joined, and in a
tough fractious spirit. They were sometimes a roughish party, liking
to stand apart a little from the other Towns. But now they had a
story of frustration all their own, and brought power to the common
effort.
Joseph became the first Secretary of the Association and held the
office for many years- until all its main objects had been attained
and its affairs reduced to routine. In these early days he urged his
Committee to get influential support from outside the village; it
might be possible to shame obstructors as they had been shamed in the
matter of wages, fifteen years before. Get the local papers to regard
their claim as news, get a well-known president, he urged. But to
please the old Labourers' Association their President was adopted.
Mr Daniel Fessey was a notable Tysonian- the only one I ever heard
of who made a fortune. He was a member of a poor unfortunate family,
one of whose members had been charged with manslaughter after the last
crude boxing match. I remember him well; he decorated our early
childhood. He had been the inventor of curious gadgets, for example a
new stirrup which was adopted by cavalry regiments. With his small
fortune he was undergoing a change into a dapper and mannered
exquisite, reminding one of Shakespeare's Frenchmen. By the time I
knew him his clothes were of the finest; his speech fantastically
precise and his manner to man, woman and child elaborate- but as full
of friendliness as of formality. Just as he was never ashamed of
those disreputable ancestors so he sympathised with the poor and stood
by their small movements.
The Committee thought it best to await the publication of the
Government's Allotments Bill before moving far, so they drew up
regulations for their non-existent holdings, visited the Southam
Association and corresponded with the agent of the Compton estate,
stating their needs and asking for a first refusal of land. When the
Bill became law Tysoe's would-be cultivators gave it a sardonic
attention. Under the Act, if no land were available after elaborate
inquiries and other processes, the Sanitary Authority was given power
to propose a special Act of Parliament to compel some owner or owners
to sell land. What a strange body to choose! It neither could nor
would use such powers, said the Tysoe Association. They were right:
in all England only one of these Acts was ever proposed.
Meanwhile there was the Queen's jubilee. Why should men grudged
by a government a scrap of land to dig celebrate the long reign of its
head? Majuba and Khartoum and the new imperialism were sharpening the
atmosphere. Many sensing future trouble looked back thankfully over
fifty years of comparative peace. Fifty years on the throne, and a
woman!- the Queen could be acclaimed. So the village was at one in a
mild rejoicing. In May the village made ready- a committee was
chosen to plan celebrations. The Managers of the School hung up a
huge picture of the old Queen with her grey hair, her solemn face and
wide blue Garter Ribbon; and on each side of her, smaller pictures of
the neatly bearded Prince of Wales and of Princess Alexandra with a
wall of tight yellow curls along her brow; another of the Queen was
hung in the Reading Room, a full-length portrait with a profile of her
face and of stout, gathered skirts sloping far back behind her, and
yet another in the Peacock, flanked by Disraeli and Gladstone.
The great day was the twentieth of June. After the service in
the church, an oak tree was planted on the green by the Vicar's wife,
who was that rare thing, a woman of intellectual interests. Her
speech stressed the hope for village unity. Two hundred and thirty
years earlier had died, she said, a venerable Vicar of the Parish.
After forty-nine years of service he had gone- said an entry in the
Parish Register for 1654- 'to enter on his eternal Jubilee'. In
the seventeenth century England had known fifty years of doctrinal
quarrels and civil war; clergymen had been turned from their cures,
and churches irreverently used. But while in other parishes there had
been bitter discord, John Stevenage and another Stevenage, his nephew,
had quietly continued their duties in the old peaceful way. Let all
take example by John Stevenage. Let all pray for peace- peace for
the nation and within the nation, peace in Tysoe. Then the Vicar
pointed to the trees, young and old, that had been planted on the
green, witnessing to other occasions when the village had been at
one- the William and Mary elm, celebrating the coming of that man of
peace, the Prince of Orange; the tree of constitutional liberty (the
'Franchise Tree'); and now this sapling, the tree of loyalty.
It was always the same; all Tysonians felt that the village ought
to be at one. Those who opposed the Vicar were mischief-makers,
disturbers of the peace; on the other hand he and his missus brought
from inferior parishes notions that no self-respecting folk could put
up with. The different patterns of community at the back of minds,
the needs, the passions, the fantasies- these though doubtless
understood in part were never made plain in the discussions.
The Jubilee interval was over. In October the Vicar invited the
holders of the ten-pole allotments to a tea-party and made a speech to
them on their duties. Allotments, he said, might be rightly
cultivated by them, under certain conditions. They must have the
necessary leisure to till them; they must apply manure; the produce
must be consumed at home (which meant they were not free to sell it).
A sixteenth of an acre was the right extent. Possibly if a man had
no garden at all, it might not be wrong to have two sixteenths.
# 2029
[199 TEXT G12]
[MIDDLE OF QUOTE]
The Captain, however, forbade it.' I honestly do think that a
captain of one of H.M. ships seldom finds himself criticized in
an official document requiring his signature. Brock, as usual,
ignored the impertinence- for the moment.
On the other hand I find a cutting from a Naval and Military
Record of December 14th pasted into my diary which reads: 'Sir-
In your issue of the 30th ult. there was a letter signed "Naval
Officer" complaining that our main fleets spend too much time at sea
and that on this account there is a grave discontent among the
personnel. As an officer of more than a couple of years' standing I
have discovered none of these terrible grievances. In fact I am
perfectly satisfied with my lot, and do not find my ship in the least
stuffy, nor do I mind putting to sea in her. These views are shared
by everyone I have spoken to. Does "Naval Officer" want our fleets
to lie alongside the home ports, Gibraltar or Malta, for nine months
in the year? It is not every naval officer who is afraid of battle
exercises, or manning and arming ship, or of sea trips between nice
places. If "Naval Officer" chooses to present one side of the case
to the British public, surely the views of the majority may have a
hearing also. N. O.' Of course no one penetrated my anonymous
signature. Brock would have been puzzled at such a letter coming from
me!
It was about now that I took action against Their Lordships
themselves in the matter of the yearly Examination in French of Junior
Officers Afloat. My diary simply records: 'French exam. Had hoped
to do well but they asked what were the pronouns which correspond to
the adjectives "ce, cette, ces, son, nos, leurs." Got
furious with the question and wrote down "\Ce, \ces and \cette
are not adjectives; \son, \nos and \leurs are pronouns."
So don't expect much Kudos.' Their Lordships' reply was in the
shape of a +5 silver stop watch by S. Smith & Son, 9 The Strand,
London, inscribed: "Admiralty Prize Junior Officers Afloat, 1905,
French, Midn. O. M. Frewen, R.N.", an unusually gracious
admission of defeat probably due to a printer's error. The watch,
admittedly not worn continuously, fell into disrepair just fifty-two
years later, and it seemed to me natural to go to the address printed
on its face to ask the makers to overhaul it. By 1957 London traffic
had become something of a nightmare to rural drivers so that my wife
parked our little Morris car in the taxicab sanctuary of Charing Cross
'just for a moment' while I walked west to No. 9- and found it
not, not on the south side anyway, where stand the other low odd
numbers. After much research, and in an indignation equal to that of
Midn. Frewen at his French exam, I crossed the road and demanded of
a shop-owner opposite where were S. Smith & Son? 'Never been in
the Strand,' he answered. 'Well, here's their address on the face
of my watch,' I retorted. 'Well, I can only say that I've been
here twenty-five years and they've never been here in my time'
closed the discussion, but not the enquiry: he kindly produced a
London Telephone Directory which directed us to 179 Great Portland
Street, W.=1, with more and worse traffic jams, including a
succession of 'No Entry' streets negatively barring our car's
access to the Promised Land. We eventually walked there and my
watch- 'her speed she reneweth again'. The taxi drivers at
Charing Cross had also shown the courtesy one has come to expect of
them.
I had loved the idea of coming to sea, to cruise and see the
world, but my diary entry in December 1905 reads: 'Have now done 90
days- in Malta.' Ninety Days' Detention was a stereotyped
punishment for major offences by lower deck ratings. And we had
another six weeks to come before again sailing the seas.
<8>
CHRISTMAS DAY, 1905, was my first one in a ship, 1903 and
1904 having been spent on leave. I think my diary entry may be of
interest for a typical account. It reads: 'Turned out 7.30. After
breakfast read Last Days of Pompeii till Divisions. Skipper had
everybody aft and told them in a good short speech that the C.-in-C.
would have gone rounds had the ship not been in dockyard hands. Then
Church. After Church I had meant to take Holy Communion but, being
ordered up there by the Commander, I got very angry and refused to go.
Then went round the Mess Decks, taking various savoury meats from
various nicely decorated messes, notably the Chief Stokers'. The
Skipper and Warrant Officers then came into the gunroom. After lunch
got into \de Burgh's knickers, my blue jacket, brother Hugh's
stockings, and brown boots. Went ashore with Ritchie and \de Burgh;
went up to Admiralty House and found Gibbs, who promptly offered me
the loan of his riding-boots. Wore them. Went back to Calcara Steps
and mounted. My G. a most spirited one. He kept galloping away
from the rest the whole way to St. Paul's Bay, where we had tea,
twenty-four of us; the C.-in-C., his wife, nine officers and
thirteen snotties. (Hervey left his G. behind and turned up in a
carrotze.) Started back about 4.30. Had a splendid series of gallops
and got back to Porta Reale about 5.30. Went to Admiralty House to
return my boots and Gibbs made me eat unheard-of chunks of ripping
cake. Then came on board. Had no dinner. Couldn't after Gibbs'
cake. Feeling rather sore but very bucked up with the afternoon's
work, though not exactly with things in general. Dominant fed-upness
of the day was that fool Commander stopping me going to Second
Service. He might have known that any self-respecting Englishman
would, in the first place, go; and in the second place refuse to be
ordered about on such subjects. And he thought he was doing right
too, I suppose. All hands stood off after Divisions.'
I was indeed so indignant over being ordered to Holy Communion
that I actually entered it in my official Journal for the Naval
Instructor's and Captain's signatures. Holy Joe sent for me and said
that if I did not erase it he would have to draw the Captain's
attention to it, so this I did. Whether as a Chaplain he considered
the incident reflected on the Commander, or whether as my Naval
Instructor he considered that it reflected on me for disobedience of
orders, I never knew. My Journal also says of my ride, 'No
casualties, although I was nearly thrown onto a donkey-cart and was
repeatedly not under control. Mr. Hervey came in a carrotze, being
unable to persuade his pony to keep up with the rest.' (Tactfully
put.) 'A very enjoyable afternoon, but it made me very stiff for two
or three days after.'
My Journal for December 31st states aggressively: 'Nothing of
note happened until 11.55 p.m. when I was turned out rather
forcibly and after witnessing Mr. Bennett strike "16 bells",
drank punch in the wardroom. Owing, however, to the Captain's not
caring for noise and singing we turned in again about 12.30. Thus
ended the year 1905.' To be fair to poor Osmond \de B. Brock, who
didn't attend the traditional ceremony of striking 16 bells, my diary
records that we 'went and struck about 32 bells', i.e. no
ceremony but just a cacophony on the ship's bell, and in the wardroom
the demure noise and singing is described 'sang 2Auld Lang Syne'.
Then Chichester as junior snottie attempted 'Clementine' and I
helped him through it. 'However, at the third verse the Skipper got
agribulgent, so we desisted and went and kicked up hell and the
sleepers in the chest flat. At last slept and lay in till 7.30. Then
worried Hardy by singing in the bathroom.'
The Captain responded to the aggression in my Journal, which he
inspected and initialled on Tuesday, by sending for me on Thursday to
tell me the sketch I had put in was not good enough 'for such a good
Journal as mine and would I improve it before going ashore'. In
fact, stopped my leave. I submitted my improvements the following
Tuesday 'and the old devil isn't satisfied yet! but let me have my
leave back'. I was also in trouble now with Gathorne-Hardy, who
ordered me to report myself, dressed, to him every morning, for not
being out of the chest-flat by 7.45. I turned out next morning at
5.30 to attend the daily 'Hands fall in', dressed and woke the
distinguished senior lieutenant and made my report by 6.15, which was
not well received.
News now came through that Mamma and sister Clare were going to
arrive on the 18th. I searched Valletta for rooms and, with a good
deal of trouble, finally managed to secure them in the Royal Hotel in
Strada Mercanti, not the best quarter of the city but the best I could
do. But Sir George Warrender, Bart., Captain of H.M.S.
Carnarvon, had also been on the lookout and found them grander
ones at the Lord Nelson, in Floriana. And with their arrival the
scallywag snottie was thrown back to his first few days at sea and
became the popular midshipman of the Bulwark, to be received by
admirals, captains (except him of the Bulwark), wardroom officers,
and even by the Rifle Brigade, then stationed at Pieta, whose major,
Tom Hollond, had been the Duke of Connaught's A.D.C. at Clare's
coming-out season in Dublin in 1903, when the Duke was
Commander-in-Chief.
My diary for the 18th records: 'Turned out 7.30 and dressed in
plain clothes. During breakfast got a signal from C.-in-C.
[cruising in H.M.S. Surprise, the C.-in-C.'s yacht in those
gracious days] asking when my people were coming. Told him, and then
went ashore. At 9.20 the General Chanzy arrived, and chartering a
nice dghaisa, I followed them up harbour. Bennett turned up with a
signal from the Admiral saying his barge and carriage were at Ma's
disposal. Found the carriage awaiting us at the Custom House and
drove to the Lord Nelson, and I had my second breakfast. Then Lula
(Tom Hollond's most charming wife) and Sir George looked in on us. At
4.30 we three went to Lula's and wandered round the garden till
Acheson turned up, when Clare and he wandered round together and Ma
and I kept out of the way. After tea Ma and Clare returned to their
hotel and I to the ship. Made an evolution of dressing, hurling the
innards of my sea-chest far and wide, and ended up with a flying leap
across the Schoolplace table in the middle of dinner to provide myself
with a gold stud. Then repaired to Sir George's and we had a good
dinner- in fact I ate too much. We then went on to the Opera, using
No. 13 box (Charlie B.'s). The opera was Rigoletto. All the
e?2lite were there. Gibbs turned up with a message from the
C.-in-C. and I introduced him. Clare went into ecstasies over him
and Ma thought him so nice and good looking. Gather I am not a
screaming success, especially with Mother. They stripped me of my
white waistcoat to send it to the wash, and lectured me on the need of
sucking up to my superiors, with the usual result. Then returned on
board 12.35 and turned in.'
Next morning, a Friday, 'asked the Commander for leave till
Feb. 5th. He said he would see the Captain about it, but did not
expect I would get it. Then seizing my fast-waning courage in both
hands and a tooth, asked could I go ashore now. He said if Parsoon
agreed, I could. Parsoon disagreed, so I did. Found Ma in her
chemise and Clare in her bed.
[MIDDLE OF QUOTE]
# 2001
[200 TEXT G13]
He was very proud to think that he had conceived the original
idea of a League of Nations; but as a matter of fact this reality
which he had produced was, in the opinion of Mr. Wells, something
much more practical and far reaching. It was not organised talk but
assembled knowledge. The International Institute of Agriculture,
sustained by subsidies from fifty-two governments and administered by a
permanent committee representing these governments, existed to compile
records, based on telegraphic reports from the Boards of Agriculture
of different countries, of the agricultural prospects throughout the
world. The intention was to provide such information about production
that the distribution could be adjusted to the probable demand.
In addition, the Institute had developed departments dealing with
meteorology and with the prevention of diseases in plants. David
Lubin was quite clear that as his "fabric of economic intelligence"
was built up, it would become evident that there must be a revision of
the conditions of international transport. The transport of the whole
terrestrial globe, he reckoned, could, if there was a centralised
control, be as well regulated as his mail order department.
This conception, in spite of its failure, aroused the curiosity
of Mr. Wells and appealed strongly to his imagination. The ultimate
intention was to obtain control of the food supply of the world and of
its distribution. Eventually in the interests of civilisation, the
activities of this Institute might have been extended to the control
of other things beside food stuffs. Just as the Hague Tribunal may be
thought of as the first faint sketch of an International Court of
Justice, so this International Institute of Agriculture might turn out
to have been a foreshadowing of the germ from which might spring not
only universal economic peace but an economic World State.
The Great War submerged this internationalism. In August 1914,
there was "a dismally sentimental little dinner," when the French,
German, Austrian and Belgian members of the Committee drank together
to the Peace of the Future. Then, talking of their immediate duty,
they dispersed "in a state of solemn perplexity" to serve each his
own belligerent country. What was left of the Institute, staffed by
women and by the mutilated and unfit, devoted itself to the problems
of the allied food supply. President Wilson ignored the Institute.
During the influenza epidemic of 1918 its founder died. In January
1919, the funeral of David Lubin passed disregarded through the
streets of Rome hung with bunting to welcome President Wilson.
David Lubin's International Institute was established at Rome, as
we have said. Very naturally, the reader may wonder why this city was
selected. The fact is that the King of Italy met Mr. Lubin more
than half-way. "That is why," said Mr. Wells, "in a not very
widely-known book of mine which represented a World State emerging out
of Armageddon, I made the first World Conference meet at Brissago in
Italian Switzerland under the presidency of the King of Italy."
Thus Mr. Wells was able to utilise one of his earlier
Anticipations, of "an intelligent monarch who might waive all the
ill-bred pretensions that sit so heavily on a gentlemanly king" and
come into the movement. On a similar occasion, Mr. Wells hinted at
an English monarch, a most admirable gentleman, who submitted to the
traditional trappings of royalty but who preferred to be incognito so
that he might pass as "plain Mr. Jones."
In spite of Mr. Wells's antipathy to monarchs, royalty does not
fare so badly in The World Set Free. Not only is the King of
Italy made to preside over the World State but another ruler is
favourably depicted. We mean, of course, the democratic Egbert,
sovereign of the most venerable kingdom in Europe. "He was a rebel
and had always been a rebel against the magnificence of his position.
In theory his manners were purely democratic. It was from sheer
habit and inadvertently that he was permitting his companion to carry
both bottles of beer." As a matter of fact, the king had never
carried anything in his life; and he had never noticed it.
H. G. WELLS was no Jingo. On the contrary, he considered
himself "an extreme Pacifist." In his opinion, "of all monstrous,
irrational activities, war is the most obviously insane." On no
conceivable ground is there any sense in modern war. It effects
nothing except the waste of much energy, the destruction of huge
quantities of material, the slaughter and mangling of many men.
Modern warfare changes nothing but the colour of maps, the design of
postage stamps, and the relationships of a few accidentally
conspicuous individuals.
There was not a man alive who could have told you of any real,
permanent benefit that would be obtained from war between England and
Germany. There was certainly nothing which counter-balanced the
obvious waste that must result, whether England shattered Germany or
whether she was overwhelmed.
On the other hand, Mr. Wells had no reason to be surprised when
war broke out in 1914; for, as far back as 1901, he had
"anticipated" that before Germany could "unify to the East" she
must fight the Russians, while "to unify towards the West" she must
fight the French and perhaps the English, for France was not likely to
have to fight alone; very probably she would have the support of the
British Empire.
"Writing in the midst of the turmoil of war," Mr. J. D.
Beresford was vividly aware that his mind had been prepared for what
had come by the romances of H. G. Wells. In The War in the
Air, particularly, "with just such exaggerations as are necessary
in fiction," which described what had now happened. No doubt we
would learn our lesson from experience but it might have been learned
from the fiction of H. G. Wells without paying such a fearful
price.
Mr. Wells considered himself to be very nearly an average man.
If he was at all abnormal, he supposed that it was "only by reason
of a certain mental rapidity." Be this as it may, the outbreak of
hostilities evoked much the same response in Mr. Wells as in many
other Englishmen. He was against the man who first took up arms. He
carried his pacifism beyond that ambiguous little group of British and
foreign sentimentalists in the Labour Leader who pretended "so
amusingly" to be Socialists and who later in 1916 would have made
peace with Germany at once, thus giving her a breathing space in which
to recover sufficiently to commit a fresh outrage. Mr. Wells did
not understand these people: he did not want to stop merely this war:
he wanted "to nail down war in its coffin."
As early as August 7th we find him writing about The War that
will End War. To him it was a war of Ideas. (He called chapter
eleven 'The War of the Mind.') All the realities of this war were,
in his opinion, things of the mind. The real task was to get better
sense into the heads of those Germans- and of people generally. We
must end the idea of war. Our business was to kill ideas: the
really important thing was propaganda.
Every sword that was drawn against Germany, was in his opinion,
"a sword drawn for Peace." Consequently Mr. Wells was heart and
soul behind the Allies. With his one lung and damaged kidney he was
not likely to go on active service. Even with the advent of
conscription, there was no chance for him. It is worth noting, by the
way, that Mr. Wells had always maintained that compulsory military
service followed almost as a corollary from the principles of
Socialism. He had always commended the advice of his friend, William
James, who used to urge that the youth of a nation might well be saved
from effeminacy by compulsory national service in places like mines
and sewers and the deep sea fisheries. If one ought to have
conscription for labour in Peace, why not conscription for war?
H. G. Wells, ahead as usual, was busy in July 1916 with the
problem of Reconstruction. His Elements of Reconstruction, with
an introduction by Viscount Milner, appeared in The Times during
July and August. The first chapter stated that the book was the work
of "two friends" and in the introduction Lord Milner referred to
the "authors" but as a matter of fact the whole series was written
by H. G. Wells.
In August, 1916, Wells was persuaded to make a tour of the
Western Fronts. One of the peculiarities of this "queer" war was
this "tour." After suppressing information for some months, during
which even the war correspondent was almost eliminated, both sides
discovered that opinion was playing a larger part than had been
expected. As a result, Wells one day found Mr Habokoff the editor
of The Retch, and Count Alexy Tolstoy, that writer of delicate
short stories, and Mr. Chukovsky the subtle critic, calling upon him
after braving the wintry seas to visit the British Fleet. M. Joseph
Reinach soon followed, upon the same errand.
Then our turn came; and Mr. Arnold Bennett was soon wading in
the trenches of Flanders while Mr. Noyes became "discreetly
indiscreet" about what he had seen among the submarines and Mr.
Hugh Walpole was with Mr. Stephen Graham "in the dark forest of
Russia." When H. G. Wells, in August 1916, arrived in Italy,
he found it "warm and gay" with memories of Hilaire Belloc, Lord
Northcliffe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Colonel Repington.
Some writers, Mr. Wells assured us, made their tour with very
great diffidence. He himself did not want to go at all. In fact, as
early as 1915 it had been suggested that he should go but he "evaded
the suggestion." "I travel badly," he tells us, "and I speak
French and Italian atrociously. I am an extreme pacifist and I hate
soldiering."
His reluctance to be a spectator at the Front was largely due to
a "fear of being swamped by the spectacular side." He knew that
the chances of being hit by a projectile were infinitesimal but he was
afraid of being hit by some vivid impression: he feared that he might
see some horribly wounded man or some decaying corpse that would so
scar his memory that he would be reduced to "a mere useless gibbering
stop-the-war-at-any-price pacifist." It appears that many years
before he had unexpectedly, one tranquil evening, come upon a drowned
body which so disturbed his mind that it was "darkened for some weeks
by a fear and distrust of life."
On the other hand, it seemed as if no man could claim to have
done his duty as a rational creature unless he had formed some idea of
what was going on "out there." It seemed necessary moreover to
obtain some conception of what this upheaval was going to produce. In
addition, it seemed as if one ought to have not only an idea of what
was going on but also some notion of how one wanted it to go.
To make a long story short, Mr. Wells went. One of the first
things he did in Italy was to meet the King- the first sovereign he
had ever met. He found the King of Italy in a drawing room very much
like that in which he had met General Joffre a few days before. As he
was handing his hat to the second of two servants standing by, a
"pleasantly smiling man," appearing at the study door, began to
talk in excellent English about Mr. Wells's journey. As they went
into the study it gradually became evident that this was the monarch
himself.
"Addicted as I am," said Mr. Wells, "to the particularly
sumptuous study furniture of the cinema, I found the appearance of
this royal study very simple and refreshing." The modern ruler
shows a disposition to intimate at the outset that he cannot help it.
# 2004
[201 TEXT G14]
There are those on the one hand who say, 'absolutely not. People
would panic and start pulling the communication cord. They might even
surge up the corridors and try to get on the engine themselves,
whereupon the whole vehicle would be brought into greater peril than
ever. Leave the men on the engine alone. With a large hatful of luck
they might get us somewhere without a smash-up. And if not, well,
that just goes to show that journeying through the world is a
hazardous business and it is a mistake to look for too much
security.' The people who take this view exist everywhere- in
Communist countries no less than in others. It was one of the reasons
why Stalin got left on the engine a long time after he was visibly
unfit to run the train. Others, and they, too, exist in millions
everywhere, are all for spreading the dire news among the passengers
as speedily as possible. They think these unfortunates have the right
at least to know what is going on up there at the head of the train.
Some of them think that just spreading that news, and pointing with
derision at the way the driver is acting, is all that they can
usefully do. They are satirical and unconstructive. They admit they
probably could not operate the engine any better themselves, while
claiming as credit to themselves that at least they are not even
pretending to. Some others are firm in the belief that once the
passengers know what is happening they will somehow find ways and
means to avert the threatened catastrophe- perhaps, somewhere in the
second class coaches, there are some real engineers. These call
themselves democrats, but as they have never yet got full control of
the footplate, nobody knows what their large claims amount to.
What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not,
unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power
or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly.
It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a
picture of themselves as so very, very deep-thinking, sagacious,
honest and well-intentioned. You cannot satirize a man who says
'I'm in it for the money, and that's all about it.' You even feel
no inclination to do so. In the 1930s it was easier, or perhaps
simply more stimulating, to satirize the leaders of the British
Government than to go to work on Hitler or Mussolini. For these
latter, at least in the eyes of other peoples than their own, were
creatures who roared out in public their bestial thoughts and
intentions. Hitler in particular, because he had the enthusiastic
support and spiritual concurrence of the vast majority of Germans, had
no need of that hypocrisy which Wilde described as the tribute vice
pays to virtue. He said he was going to persecute and murder the
Jews, and no sooner was it said than it was done. He proclaimed his
delinquent's contempt for civilization, and, to ensure that nobody
misunderstood him, organized such fe?5tes and galas as the 'burning
of the books.' He lied certainly- lied continuously. But his
lying was of a special kind- it did not, and could not by him have
been expected to, deceive anyone who did not secretly wish to be
deceived. In this he resembled the great confidence tricksters.
The confidence tricksters, it seems, consider it axiomatic that
no wholly honest man can be regarded as a likely victim of the
confidence trick. It is not the mere fools that the confidence men
successfully delude. It is, in their pregnant phrase, the 'larceny
in the blood' of the victim which results in his victimization. And
that was how Hitler operated- exploiting and using as his leverage
the 'larceny in the blood' of innumerable politicians in every
country who wanted to believe that here was a man who really had found
a way of making diamonds out of plastics; a way, that is to say, of
making a quick profit out of an illicit sale of the Western soul. You
cannot satirize a confidence trickster- the best you can do is expose
him, send for the police. But when you find a respectable citizen-
the victim- who, beneath his air of solid good sense and goodwill is
secretly hoping to turn a dishonest political profit by getting a
flashy-looking collection of goods labelled 'peace' or
'security' or 'the end of Bolshevism' for some minimal
down-payment in the way of a betrayal of the Jews, or the sacrifice of
a couple of small nations, then you have a subject which invites and
excites the attention of the satirist.
The satirist, as I have remarked, is certainly among those who
cannot bear that the passengers should be left for a moment longer in
ignorance of the incompetence of malignancy of the engine driver. He
is also likely to feel that having done that much his particular
function has been accomplished, and he is not apt to pay much heed to
those who keep asking him for his 'solution'. He will reply that
while he may, in some other capacity- as, say, a voter or a
magistrate or Trade Union secretary- feel able and bound to propose
and work towards 'solutions', as a satirist that is not his job.
Myself, I hold this to be a self-evident truth. And having,
during the early 1950s, had some particular opportunities of watching
at close range the way the wheels of neo-Elizabethan Britain went
round, together with the very great advantage of viewing the whole box
of tricks in the perspective of Ireland, I was more than happy to find
myself suddenly and, for me, startlingly in close collaboration with a
man whom, for many years, I had learned to regard as an incarnation of
the Devil.
<9>
I THINK it was a few months after the wind-up of Seven Days
that I got a letter in Youghal which surprised me not a little, for
it was an invitation to write an article for Punch. Not only
that, but it was signed by my friend Anthony Powell who, it
astonishingly appeared, had become Punch's literary editor. A
pleasure of living in Ireland is that you can, so to speak, turn
England on or off as desired, and at that time, having been a little
soured of London by the Seven Days episode, I had turned it off
altogether and become absorbed in whatever I was doing at the time. I
had thus had no knowledge of the volcanic disturbance which started to
shake Bouverie Street with the appointment of Malcolm Muggeridge as
editor of that publication. Furthermore, had I heard this bit of news
it would certainly not have occurred to me that it boded me any
particular good. True, I had no intention of writing for Punch,
but if I had, the appointment of Mr Muggeridge would have seemed
to me to rule out any possibility of successfully so doing. For
although we had never actually met I had hated him for years. Those
were, of course, principally my Communist years when Malcolm
Muggeridge had great prominence in our Rogues' Gallery of men who, for
example, had gone to Moscow to bless and stayed to curse; of hardened,
obstinate and vicious enemies of Truth and Progress; of particularly
able, and, therefore, particularly detestable and dangerous
journalistic and literary swordsmen in ranks of wickedness and
reaction. Nor was conflict with Muggeridge in those days restricted
to the battle of the typewriters. For he was often deadly active in
the affairs of the National Union of Journalists- his activity always
directed towards frustrating or defeating some vital activity of our
own.
At that time the National Union of Journalists was as a running
sore to the anti-Communists of the T.U.C. For the London
Branch, being by far the largest in the Union, was at most times able
to play a preponderant part in framing the policies of the Union as a
whole, and the London Branch, in its turn, was for long periods at a
time, dominated by the Communists for the sufficient reasons, first,
that the Communists were united in pursuit of various objectives
whereas the anti-communists were in general united only in their
anti-communism, and secondly, that the Communists were the only people
who held it as a holy though often irksome duty to attend the Branch
meetings. (These were usually held on Saturday afternoons at the St
Bride's Institute, in one of the lanes just south of Fleet Street.
There are not many drearier meeting halls in that part of London,
which is saying a good deal, and in any case Fleet Street on any
Saturday afternoon is one of the dreariest places anywhere. Add to
this that I personally detest meetings and speeches, and all the
business of resolutions and points of order. Naturally, I am entirely
aware that all this is of the absolutely indispensable essence of
democracy, and that when you attend such meetings you are seeing and
taking part in the true life and work of democracy. All the same, I
wished profoundly that it were possible for me personally not to have
to do that thing.) More than once it had happened to me that my
reason for asking to be excused attendance at St Bride's on a given
Saturday afternoon had been accepted as valid by the Communist Party
leaders, and then, just as I was rejoicing over such a release, the
word would come that Malcolm Muggeridge was going to attend that
particular meeting, was going to launch some major attack; in
consequence all 'leave' was cancelled, no excuses for
non-attendance were any longer to be deemed valid. On such Saturdays
I looked upon that man with more than ordinary political hostility. I
humanly loathed him. In a paradoxical manner he represented all those
disciplines of Communism and democracy which I had always found
excessively irksome. He embodied for the moment everything that could
make life vexatious, particularly on a Saturday afternoon in the
desert parts of London.
Knowing nothing of his appointment to the editorship, I was still
bewildered by the presence in the literary chair of Anthony Powell who
I had known since Oxford and whose novels, with their exquisite
sinuosities and profound risibility had enchanted me for years. What,
I had to ask myself, in God's name was he doing in that gale?3re?
And what, admitting that he personally was aboard the sluggish old
hulk, on earth made him suppose that my presence would be welcome?
Just making the matter more mysterious was a note in his letter- he
was asking for an article about Ireland- saying that he would like
the piece to be 'somewhat astringent'. If he were simply trying to
do me a good turn by arranging for me to get a small piece of money
out of Punch, surely, knowing my general line of literary brew, he
would instead have put in some cautionary note urging me to draw it
mild?
I certainly needed the small piece of money, so I wrote the
piece, signing it discreetly 'J.H.'- initials of James
Helvick, under which name I then principally wrote. Within an hour or
so of the earliest time the piece could have reached Bouverie Street
from Youghal, I had a telegram from Anthony Powell offering hearty
congratulations upon it, but asking had I any objection to signing
'in full'. I wired back to say he could certainly sign it James
Helvick. To this the response was equally prompt, and its contents
made me ask myself whether Tony had gone actually off his head. For
it emphatically urged me to sign 'Claud Cockburn'. Resignedly, I
telegraphed back that it was all right with me if he insisted. But to
myself I thought that this bit of \6be?5tise must inevitably mark
the end of my connection with Punch- surely it ought to have been
obvious to Tony that nobody in authority there was going to have a
person with my sort of reputation writing articles- 'astringent'
at that- in their paper?
# 2025
[202 TEXT G15]
Although he had a good knowledge of English, and a great admiration
for the British and their political tradition, his diffidence and his
conservative temperament made it virtually impossible for him to adapt
himself to the very different life of the British capital.
Anglo-Jewry, as indifferent in those days to Jewish learning as to
Jewish nationalism, was for him no better than a whited sepulchre, and
English Zionism, still dominated by Herzlian conceptions, had no
attraction. The "foreign" Jews of London, though not so
denationalised as the assimilated Anglo-Jews who despised and
patronised them, were scarcely less remote from him in the cultural
sense. He took life too seriously to have much time for its lighter
side, and his personal contacts were determined by his serious
interests, which were for practical purposes limited to the Jewish
national movement in the widest connotation of that term. It resulted
that throughout his London period he remained outside the Jewish
community, and made practically no new friends, with the exception of
a handful of young English Jews, who had been influenced by his
writings and broadly shared his outlook. There were in England a few
Russian Jews whom he had known while still in Russia- among them
Chaim Weizmann, who was a Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of
Manchester- and the society of those of them who lived in the
metropolis, and of old friends from elsewhere who visited London from
time to time, saved him from complete isolation. But he remained a
stranger in a strange land.
He had come to London with hopes of being able at long last to
retire from the field of Zionist controversy and from committee work,
and to devote his spare time to study in the Library of the British
Museum, and to writing a book on Jewish nationalism or the ethics of
Judaism, two subjects on which he was eminently qualified to make an
original contribution to Hebrew and Jewish literature. These hopes
were disappointed. He found the hubbub of the City of London, and the
strain of the daily underground journeys to and from it, nerve-racking
and exhausting, and sustained intellectual work after office hours was
seldom possible. He got so far as to map out the plan of a projected
work on Jewish nationalism, but no further. In the six years
preceding the summer of 1914, when the first world war broke out, he
wrote in all about a dozen pieces for publication, and these, together
with a few of earlier date, were included in the fourth and last
volume of At the Crossroads, which appeared in 1913; but he never
wrote a book.
The dozen pieces included two of his best-known essays, called in
their English translations Judaism and the Gospels and Summa
Summarum. The first of these, written in 1910, in the form of an
extended review of Claude Montefiore's Synoptic Gospels, is of
permanent value because of the original view which it propounds as to
the fundamental nature of the difference between the religious and
ethical standpoints of Judaism and Christianity. The well-worn
antithesis between Judaism as the religion of Justice and Christianity
as the religion of Love does not, in Ahad Ha-Am's opinion , go to the
root of the matter. "What essentially distinguishes Judaism from
other religions is its absolute determination to make the religious
and moral consciousness independent of any definite human form, and to
attach it without any mediating term to an abstract, incorporeal
ideal." Hence the Christian idea of a divine-human being, who
mediates between God and man, is one which Judaism can never accept;
and on the ethical side, Judaism rejects the Christian ideal of
altruistic self-sacrifice, and holds to the principle of abstract and
impersonal justice, according to which "the self" and "the
other" must be regarded with complete impartiality, and a man is
forbidden to satisfy his own selfish desires at the expense of his
neighbour, but is not called upon to place his neighbour's life or
interests before his own.
The other essay, written in 1912, gives his impressions of
Zionist progress after a visit to the tenth Zionist congress and to
Palestine in the preceding year. It was written for once in a mood of
comparative optimism, which enabled its sceptical author to discern
encouraging signs both of new thinking in the Zionist camp, and of the
emergence of a new Hebrew type of life in Palestine. The grandiose
ideas which Zionism still professed officially seemed to him as remote
from reality as ever, but he was happy to see Palestine beginning to
develop into that "national spiritual centre" which the Jewish
people needed above all things.
Outside the literary field, he was, during the years immediately
preceding the war, an active member of the Board of Governors of the
Technical High School which it was proposed to establish at Haifa,
with money provided partly out of a charitable fund set up under
Kalman Wissotzky's will, and partly by the German-Jewish philanthropic
organisation known as Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden. Ahad
Ha-Am was appointed to the Board by the Wissotzky trustees, and along
with Shmarya Levin and Yehiel Tchlenov, two of his old friends who
were prominent in the Zionist Organisation, represented the Zionist
point of view against the assimilationists of the \Hilfsverein,
who held the whip hand because only they would have been able, if
the need arose, to finance the scheme out of their own resources. He
attached very great importance to the project both from the point of
view of the material progress of the \yishuv and from that of the
prestige of Jewish Palestine in the Middle East, and he patiently
acted as a moderating influence in the inevitable clashes of opinion
on the Board; but in spite of his efforts the uneasy partnership broke
up in 1913, when the erection of the school buildings was in progress.
The immediate cause of the rupture was the insistence of the
\Hilfsverein on making German the language of instruction for all
but Jewish subjects. The nationalist members of the Board, including
Ahad Ha-Am, resigned on that issue; and, in sympathy with their point
of view, the teachers of the already existing \Hilfsverein schools
in Palestine declared a boycott of all its educational institutions.
The outcome of this action was the establishment by the Zionist
Organisation of its own Hebrew school system, which marked a
turning-point in the history of the \yishuv. Ahad Ha-Am objected
in principle to the boycott weapon- it seemed to him not to differ
essentially from the \herem, or excommunication, which was a
dreaded weapon in the hands of religious bigotry- and he also had
grave doubts about the ability of the Zionist Organisation to find the
money for the upkeep of an efficient Hebrew school system; but the
activists had their way, and on this occasion the results did not
justify his fears. As for the Technical School project, the
\Hilfsverein's intention to implement it alone was frustrated by
the outbreak of war in the following year; and after the war, when
Palestine was placed under a British Mandate as the destined national
home of the Jewish people, the present Haifa Technion was established
under Zionist auspices.
The outbreak of the first world war in 1914 put an end to Ahad
Ha-Am's literary career. He disdained to write for publication under
war conditions, in which censorship precluded the absolutely
unfettered expression of opinion; and the Hebrew-reading public waited
in vain for some indication of his views on the attitude to be adopted
by the Jewish people towards the war, or his expectations of what the
future might bring. Nor was it possible for him to find in wartime
the peace of mind which might have enabled him to retire into an ivory
tower and devote himself to philosophy or scholarship. The world war
meant for him a relapse into barbarism, which shook the foundations of
his implicit belief in the progress of humanity; and without that
belief he was like a lost soul. The massacre of the Jews in his
beloved Ukraine, and the uncertainty as to what might be the fate of
the \yishuv, intensified his unhappiness; and his \6malaise
adversely affected his physical health.
Paradoxically, it was during this period of acute distress that
he made for the first time a direct contribution to the shaping of the
policy of the Zionist Organisation. Thanks to his intimacy with Dr.
Weizmann, he was kept informed from the outset of the steps which were
taken during the war to win the sympathy of the British Government and
British public opinion for Zionism. He was throughout in close touch
with those who conducted the negotiations which ultimately led to the
issue of the Balfour Declaration of 2nd November, 1917, and was a
member of the small informal Political Committee which was set up to
advise Weizmann and Sokolow when those negotiations reached the
decisive stage. His great moral influence was consistently exercised
in the interests of realism and moderation in the formulation of
Zionist demands, both during the war and later, when the Zionist case
for the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 came to be prepared.
Taking, as always, the long view, he regarded the unequivocal
recognition by the civilised world of Jewish national rights in
Palestine as of greater value than the immediate establishment of a
Jewish state, for which in his opinion neither Palestine nor the
Jewish people was as yet prepared. The Balfour Declaration, designed
to create conditions in which the political future of Palestine would
be determined primarily by the amount of effort and sacrifice that
world Jewry was prepared to put into the task of developing the
country, was in line with his gradualist approach, and seemed to him
to go as far as could be reasonably expected at that time in the
recognition of Jewish national rights. He realised, however, as not
all Zionists did in those days, that there was an important difference
between "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people", which was what the British Government undertook to
support, and "the re-establishment of Palestine as the national home
of the Jewish people", which was the formula suggested on the
Zionist side. He looked forward to an era of steady expansion of the
\yishuv under British tutelage, and of the progressive
revitalisation of diaspora Jewry through the influence of the
"national spiritual centre", which for him was of greater moment
than any spectacular achievement in the political or economic sphere.
The end of the war, in 1918, found him a broken man,
psychologically even more than physically. He was still able to carry
on his duties as manager of the Wissotzky business in London for a
time, but he had no strength left for study or writing. A breakdown
of his health towards the end of 1919 necessitated months of
sanatorium treatment, and left him suffering from some deep-seated
nervous trouble, which defied precise diagnosis.
He now had only one desire, to spend his last years in Palestine,
where he hoped, and was encouraged by his medical adviser to hope,
that he might recover his health sufficiently to be able to make some
contribution to the life of the \yishuv. It had always been his
wish to settle in Palestine, but his passionate love of independence
had stood in the way of his seizing any of the opportunities of doing
so which had presented themselves at one time or another. Now, at the
age of 63, he felt that he had earned the right to retire on a pension
which would enable him to live in reasonable comfort in the land of
his dreams. For unknown reasons, over a year elapsed before the
necessary arrangements could be made; and it was not till the end of
1921 that he was able to leave London for Palestine, accompanied by
his wife and their son and daughter-in-law.
He preferred to live in Tel-Aviv, which was a creation of the new
spirit of Jewish nationalism, rather than in the Holy City of
Jerusalem, to which the aura of medievalism still clung; and the
Tel-Aviv Municipality built him a house next to the Gymnasia
Herzlia, the first all-Hebrew secondary school of modern times.
# 2051
[203 TEXT G16]
A second effort to romanticize Devon did no better. Fletcher,
with memories of Elizabethan England, spoke of local talent. Sidney
whinnied scornfully.
'Here it is. Us. We three. We're the only local talent within
fifty miles.'
And Fletcher, who had wanted masochistically to claim
Philistinism for America, clicked his tongue.
It took us a long time to discover anything about his private
life. Not till he announced one day gloomily, ~'I \2endoor
domesticity,' did we even know that he was married.
<=4>
My acquaintance with Basil Blackwell, my first publisher,
developed quickly into a friendship which, though we have not often
met since I left Oxford, has lasted and is based on real regard.
Presently, with an appetite sharpened by the American anthology, I
suggested to him that it would be a good idea for me to make an
anthology picked from the many poets he had published. He fell for
this idea, and the result was Eighty Poems, beautifully produced
at the Shakespeare Head Press. The book drew attention to the work
which he had done, and a most interesting bunch of poets were
represented. Turning the pages now, I find that quite a number of
poems still stand up with individuality and power, poems which I
should pick again today. There was Wilfred Childe's Recognition
and The Gothic Rose, which I put in another collection many
years later, and still admire; a happy conceit of Gerald Crowe, Ad
Sanctum Geraldum Pro Nautis Ejus: a short lyric, Still-Heart,
and two longer poems by that little-known poet Frank Pearce Sturm, a
friend of Yeats's. Their inclusion provoked an interesting
correspondence, and Sturm sent me a little ivory Chinese figure which
I have today. Roy Campbell contributed a delightful monkey poem,
Bongwi's Theology. The three Sitwells, Dorothy Sayers, Edgell
Rickword, Katharine Tynan, and Fredegond Shove were represented; Susan
Miles offered one of her village poems; Morley Roberts appeared in an
unfamiliar light; my Oxford poet friends all figured, and there was a
short lyric by Vincent Morris. In all, fifty-seven poets were
represented.
But the book's main importance for me was two friendships which
it brought. Among the poets published by Blackwell was Clifford Bax.
I was deeply impressed by his Traveller's Tale, and wrote to tell
him so. The result was an invitation to a meal, and at what was then
De Maria's restaurant at the foot of Church Street, Kensington, began
yet another friendship of the kind that absence or catastrophe has no
power to disturb. Clifford's charm and breadth of worldly and
other-worldly wisdom delighted and enthralled me. Still very much the
country bumpkin, for all my Oxford overlay, I admired the grace and
assurance which wealth, travel, and experience had given him. His
voice and smile emphasized the gentleness of his nature, and his
Buddhist faith confirmed it; yet there were delightful contradictions.
On the cricket field, for instance, Clifford flung the mantle of
contemplation aside and emerged as a man of unpredictable and decisive
action. The only thing that was safe to predict about an innings of
his was that the figure six would appear on the score sheet; how often
depended only upon how long he remained at the wicket. Sometimes he
was bearded, sometimes clean shaven, but this was his only variation.
I never saw him ruffled, much less out of temper, and while he had a
healthy appetite for gossip and was under no illusions about the
characters of the people he met, I cannot imagine him unkind in word
or deed.
Clifford was deeply interested in philosophy and religion, and
had an open mind with regard to supernatural phenomena. He and his
brother Arnold, to whom he presently introduced me, had been very
strongly drawn into the Irish Revival in the first years of the
century. Arnold wrote under the name of Dermot O'Byrne, and both
brothers were friends of A. E.; this friendship must have helped
to acclimatize Clifford's mind to aspects of experience towards which
he was by nature prone, but over which the social side of his life
might otherwise have drawn a glittering curtain.
It was characteristic of Clifford's generosity of spirit that he
never made me feel uncultivated. I felt so naturally, and blurted out
my feeling more than once, but he discounted it, showing me with a
very pleasant realism that, if I were as bad as I felt, this, that,
and the other person would not be able to endure my company. In sum,
he was one of the people who helped me with my growing pains, and I
shall always be grateful.
Another was Humbert Wolfe. I had met him for the first time when
he came to speak to a College society, where he was received with
especial honour as a Wadham man. He also was represented in the
Blackwell anthology, and this brought about a less impersonal meeting.
Commenting on its ineptitude as a setting for him, I gave him dinner
at the Philistines' Club, where his long drooping lock, loose bow, and
weary voice roused some astonishment. We were a party of four, and
with the utmost courtesy he set himself to please us. He presently
teased me because, when asked my opinion of certain people, I praised
their kindness.
'You seem to set particular store by this quality, Strong. Who
has kicked you? How did you acquire this abject attitude?'
I protested that it was not abject, and he conceded that instead
it might be the romantic faith of a provincial. He himself was
inclined to suspect kindness as a self-interested wish to please. He
was, as I was later to discover, extraordinarily kind, but hated
either to acknowledge or have it acknowledged. At any rate, he kept
to the end his accusation of romantic faith against me. Many years
later, he had to introduce Richard Church and me as successive
speakers at a dinner. Of Richard, he said, ~'Here now is Richard
Church, who has kept all his illusions'; and, when my turn came,
~'Here is Leonard Strong, who has no illusions, but many
delusions.'
Richard Church I met through the American anthology. He was at
this time a civil servant, much junior to Humbert, who used to mock
him affectionately when they ran into each other in Whitehall. Under
a shy and slightly myopic exterior Richard hid a needle-like
observation and a lightning wit. At his sharpest, he rivalled
Humbert, and that is saying a lot. His temperament has always been
warm and generous, and, particularly in these early days, it would
lead him into enthusiasms which sometimes brought him to the verge of
absurdity, where he was saved by his sharp wit. All his friends
pulled his leg about these enthusiasms, and Richard, sensitive to the
affection which prompted them, would beam and blush; but the glint in
the eyes behind the glasses would be steely sharp, as he mischievously
looked for a chance to hit back. Never strong physically, he was in
these days working far too hard, with the office all day, and his own
writing, and a great deal of reviewing. He and I got on well together
from the start, but I do not think either suspected how much we were
to be together in the future, and how often we would turn one to the
other for comfort and advice.
<=5>
My hunger for music, ignorant though I was, led me into several
friendships I must otherwise have missed. The sturdy John Ellis had
taken himself off, and gone to work on the railways at a job which he
kept until he died, of a congenital heart complaint, while still in
his early forties. He helped me more than I can say, and in many
ways. Above everything I owe him the return to comparative sanity and
balance after the disturbances caused by those soire?2es with
Schiller and Co. All my life I have been lucky in meeting the right
person at the time of need; and in no instance was this truer than
with John Ellis. Apart from this enormous service, he laid the
foundations of my musical education, both by his example and by his
comments on the gramophone records I would nai"vely play him:
unerringly selecting what was good, however unpromising its setting-
the anonymous violin in a trio on an eighteenpenny record, the
little-known baritone singing a song by a composer I had never heard
of- and screaming in falsetto derision at performances by artists far
better known, or merely vulgar.
Ellis's work was too sporadic to win the title of composer,
though he set a number of poems to music, and sometimes invited me to
write new words in place of the verses he had used. This I found I
could do with little trouble, having sung enough to have a sense of
word values and the possible duration of the various vowels.
The next musician whom I got to know well was a much younger man
whom I have already mentioned, Sidney Lewis. He had a long, equine
head and a jerky manner which was the product of an urgent inner life
and of energies too great for his thin asthenic frame. Sidney lived
in a blaze of activity, mental and psychic. His dream life had
sometimes a tragic intensity. I would not say that he had second
sight as Romer Wilson had, but rather that some of his perceptions
were dissociated in such a way as to give him uncomfortable, angular
glimpses of eternity; glimpses which sometimes comforted but more
often threw him into an agitation of all his powers.
Like many gifted people who have grown up in places where there
is hardly anyone for them to rub their wits against, Sidney was a
strange mixture of fantasy and practical horse sense. His shrewdness
was alarming. He could drive a perception like a steel nail into the
most imposing fac?6ade or the most complex situation. He had a great
power of enjoyment, and would go into convulsions of laughter so
violent that they could embarrass those who were with him in public
places. He had beyond a doubt a touch of genius, but of the kind
which is not destined to blossom in this world.
<=6>
Sidney had a number of older friends who had immediately
discerned his quality and treated him as if he were of their own age.
One of these was a Hindu who had come to Oxford to study Western
philosophy. He was of short, stocky, powerful build, with fiercely
curling black hair and eyes which immediately apprehended the
essential things around him. His name was Basanta Kumar Mallik.
The force of his mind and personality had made him many friends
at Oxford, and it is possible that I should have met him through
Robert Graves, or a Balliol man of great ability named Harries, if I
had not been introduced to him by Sidney. Sidney however was the
link, and this was important, since it was through Sidney's elder
sister Winifred that I later resumed the friendship interrupted by
Mallik's return to India and a gap of thirty years.
Mallik's philosophy was at this stage impenetrable to me, but I
could appreciate some of its practical conclusions. He was a very
lively companion, and among other things a superb maker of curries, a
gift which much endeared him to me. I liked his curries all the
better because they were not too hot: he explained that the very hot
kind were more for the taste of retired colonels and Indian civil
servants than for the Indian connoisseur. Few things pleased him more
than to be turned loose by a hostess with instructions to make curry
for her and her guests, but the joys of the meal would often be
followed by a rueful inventory of the larder, for Mallik would put in
everything he could lay hands on, including items which ninety-nine
English people out of a hundred would have thought immune.
# 2003
[204 TEXT G17]
The Varsity Regatta was always held at sea in boats which were
borrowed for the occasion, and quite unfamiliar to all the
competitors. The authorities had not yet been persuaded to award a
Half-Blue for sailing as is done now. Another member of that early
team- and a subsequent Captain- was Francis Usborne, now Secretary
of the Royal Yachting Association.
Stewart was always the principal spur. I was invited by his
parents to stay on the Broads in their beautiful converted wherry
Sundog; she moved from regatta to regatta with a string of racing
dinghies and one-designs towing astern, all superbly kept in trim by
Cubitt Nudd, one of the best 'paid hands' in all Norfolk. For
these holidays I was usually Stewart's crew, but when his new
fourteen-foot dinghy Clover was built for him by Morgan Giles in
beautifully selected teak, I wondered if I would be considered good
enough to crew him in important races. Much later, when I had crewed
in less expertly handled dinghies and finally graduated to my very own
fourteen-footer, I wondered if I would be good enough to beat Stewart?
Without this friendly rivalry over the years I should never have been
selected to represent Great Britain at the Olympic Games (with Stewart
as my spare man) in 1936; I should never have won a Bronze Medal
there- and likely enough I should never have become (quite
accidentally as it transpired) the President of the International
Yacht Racing Union.
Most of the races at Ely were sailed in deadly earnest, and it
was a good training ground, for in so narrow a river inches counted
and fine judgement could be cultivated. A well-rounded buoy passed
less than a foot away down the boat's side as a matter of standard
practice. A boat's length was to be gained when 'going about' by
shooting up along the bank before filling away on a new tack.
On occasion the sailing was more light-hearted. There was an
afternoon when an unofficial prize had been offered for the helmsman
who, sailing single-handed, contrived to capsize his boat first after
the starting gun had been fired. The Commodore had not been informed
of this plan; he walked up the bank with his megaphone, shouting
"Let the sheet go, you stupid boy, you'll have the boat over in a
moment if you're not careful." But his warning was of no avail and
a few seconds later I won the prize.
DURING our Christmas holiday on the Solway we had heard
rumours that very large numbers of geese assembled at the head of the
great estuary upon their first arrival from the Arctic in late
September. Between the River Esk and the River Eden is a vast merse
covered only by high spring tides and for a few years this was used as
an assembly point for what must have been at times something like
thirty per cent of the world's Pinkfooted Geese. Nowadays no such
concentrations of geese are to be found on Rockliffe Marsh as we saw
there in the autumns of 1929 and 1930. Great numbers of Pinkfeet
still come to the Solway, but not in any concentration until well into
October, and their headquarters is now ten miles further to the
westward around the Lochar mouth and the sanctuary provided for them
on the Kinmount Estate near Annan.
On 20th September, 1929, I set out from London alone in the
family's Austin Seven and arrived at Sark Bridge Farm, Gretna, eleven
hours later. Next morning I found that many thousands of geese had
already arrived at Rockliffe. All that day more were coming in. This
was the first time I had ever seen geese arriving on migration. There
were little bunches coming in high over the Metal Bridge, heading the
westerly wind and planing down on to the marsh- some in threes and
fours, some in groups of a dozen or twenty. The little parties were
scattered about the sky almost wherever you looked. It is a pattern I
have seen many times since, but never more impressively than on that
first day. I know now that the geese were coming from Greenland and
Iceland, but in those days Spitzbergen was thought to be the breeding
ground of most of the British Pinkfeet. But wherever they came from,
it was far away in Arctic or Sub-Arctic lands, and it added
immeasurably to the mysterious appeal of these wonderful birds.
Rockliffe Marsh was private shooting, but by crossing the Esk in
a boat it was possible to intercept the geese at the marsh edge, or
from 'lying-pits' out on the sand. In the week that I was there I
shot twelve geese and was vastly pleased with my success. More
recently I believe Manorial Rights extending to the river channels of
the Eden and Esk have been substantiated, but in 1929 this had not
been clarified and the sand was widely, if erroneously, held to be
free shooting.
Digging in on the sand is not now regarded as a wise procedure,
for if it is extensively practised on a goose roost it seems
eventually to drive the geese away. This may have been one of the
contributary causes of the abandonment by the grey geese of Wells and
Holkham, though I do not think it influenced their change of habits on
the Solway. But in that first autumn on the Solway digging lying pits
on the sand seemed only to be a practical if difficult method of goose
shooting, and a number of my geese were bagged while shooting from
their scanty cover.
For my last two days in Scotland I moved westward to Wigtown Bay
in order to go punting with Major Hulse- the Expert as we called him.
I joined him at Creetown and we spent the two days afloat in pursuit
of wigeon, which confirmed my earlier conclusion that punting was the
best that wildfowling had to offer. Our bag was meagre and the
occasion was chiefly memorable for my meeting with Adam Birrell and
for a stirring return journey in the punt in a gale of wind. I had
met Adam very briefly at the end of my previous day's punting with
Major Hulse, but now for the first time I recognised this was no
ordinary fisherman-wildfowler. He was a first-class naturalist, with
an astonishingly wide (self-administered) education. He was
delightful company whether on a fowling expedition or bird-watching or
fishing, and we remained in fairly regular communication thereafter
for a quarter of a century.
After the two days' punting I set off from Creetown in the Austin
Seven at a quarter to eight in the morning and arrived in London at a
quarter to eight in the evening, having stopped for half an hour in
Carlisle and three-quarters of an hour at Boroughbridge where I had
lunch. It is an interesting commentary on the Great North Road and
motoring conditions in 1929 that I was able to make the 380-mile
journey in a seven-horsepower car at an average speed of just over 35
miles per hour. It is also perhaps worth recording that my ten days
in Scotland had cost me almost exactly +10.
On the flood-waters of the Bedford Levels we had Penelope and
Grey Goose, but we still had no sea-going double punt for the
Wash, and this must clearly be remedied. Mr. Mathie, a boat-builder
in Cambridge, was commissioned to build one, based mainly on the
design and specifications of the Expert's punt. She was to be
twenty-four foot long, four-foot beam, with a twelve-foot cockpit, and
she was to be called Kazarka- the Russian name for the
Red-breasted Goose.
Kazarka was launched just below Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge
on 11th December, 1929. On the following day I set out with a
companion, David Lewis, to sail her to the coast. There was a
south-westerly wind which was very strong at times and we made good
progress until just before Ely, when there was a stretch which came
closer to the eye of the wind and the lee boards could not really cope
with it. But a passing sugar beet tug took us in tow as far as the
Ely beet factory. Thereafter we sailed without difficulty to Brandon
Creek which was to be our staging point for the day. There is a
fascination in the bareness of the Fenland river banks. Trees are few
and far between, and the river runs artificially straight or nearly so
for many a mile, broken only by an occasional bridge. From the punt
we had no view into the distance, for the high green banks rose
steeply on either side to the skyline at most fifty yards away. The
flat fenland fields, mostly below the level of the river, were hidden
from us; and yet I remember that the passage, the testing of our boat
on her maiden voyage, the anticipation of her arrival on the fowling
grounds of the Wash, the pleasure of spinning along under the small
sail, all added up to a sheer delight which I can clearly recall
today- just thirty years later. Christopher Dalgety came to meet us
at Brandon Creek, and we took David Lewis to Ely to catch a train
(which he missed) and then went on to the Globe Hotel at King's Lynn
which was our coastal headquarters.
Re-reading my shooting diaries in 1959 in the course of writing
this book I came upon the entry for the following morning, Friday,
13th December, 1929, which is of more interest than I realised at the
time. There was a moderate west-south-westerly breeze blowing as we
walked out along the old drove at Terrington (past a pole evidently
set up on the salting long ago as a landmark and known inevitably as
the North Pole) and out to the edge of the salting. "I was in
position at 6.40," says my diary, "'streak of dawn' having been
at 6.10. As it got light geese began honking all round. A lot of
mallards had been sitting at the edge of the mud as I came up and now
a lot more came over. I could have had several shots but the geese
were all round. At last I saw about eight geese coming straight
towards me. They sagged away on the wind and passed rather wide. I
had a shot but without success. The sound of the shot put up a big
lot of about 200 which had been sitting farther to the east. These
pitched again about 200-300 yards away. I looked at them and thought
that one on the left of the flock looked different. With the glass I
could see at once that it was a white goose. His head, neck and
breast were pure white and his back was dark brown, darker than the
surrounding Pinkfeet. From the fact that he was a head taller than
the rest (and longer in the leg) and also that his bill was very large
and thick, I felt no doubt that he was an albino Greylag. In general
size he was much larger than the Pinkfeet and was much more on the
alert. He had his head up the whole time- once when only three other
geese in the whole 200 had their heads up. After the flock had walked
towards me a little, they sat for a while, and then I think they must
have scented me, for away they went, crossing my creek further down
and joining some more geese on the mud to the west."
Well, there it is! There is the first record of the Blue Goose
for Europe. The description is perfect. We even know that he was the
rather less common form in which the white of the head extends on to
the breast and belly. I may have exaggerated the size a little, and I
gave him (and his fellow Pinkfeet) a sense of smell which I do not now
believe could have accounted for their departure.
# 2016
[205 TEXT G18]
Wesley often dined with him, sometimes with his other colleagues.
The Rector's brother, Sir Justinian, was an occasional guest whom
Wesley met at dinner on Christmas Day, 1732. Three days later, all
the fellows in residence had dinner and supper with the Rector and his
brother and played cards. A year later when Wesley's father was
staying in Oxford over Christmas, Isham invited John Wesley to read
prayers and later entertained them both. Both Isham and his brother
were among the subscribers to the projected work on Job, as were also
some of the fellows and former undergraduates. At times the Rector
was justifiably concerned at Wesley's indiscreet religious zeal, but
realized his merits, and on 28th June, 1734, made a donation to the
work of the Castle, a gesture by which Wesley was obviously touched.
Wesley had been recalled to act as tutor to the undergraduates,
and it was as a teacher and preceptor that he had returned into
residence in November, 1729. He was already well-read in the classics
and in divinity. These, together with logic, were the principal
subjects in which he had to guide his pupils. Like all his
contemporaries, he regarded Aldrich's textbook on logic,
Compendium Artis Logicae, with profound reverence; he
supplemented his teaching on logic and classics by reading Sanderson
and Langbaine. Long after he had left Oxford the imprint of the
syllogistic reasoning which he had learned and taught remained. 'For
several years', he wrote much later, 'I was Moderator in the
disputations which were held six times a week at Lincoln College in
Oxford. I could not help acquiring hereby some degree of expertness
in arguing; and especially in discerning and pointing out well-covered
and plausible fallacies.' He fulfilled his duty as Moderator by
lecturing or presiding over disputations in the College Hall at ten or
eleven on week-day mornings.
At first he seems not to have had a private pupil, though he
certainly gave his brother, Charles, and their mutual friend, William
Morgan, what could be called tutorials. With them he read Milton's
poetry, Lucas' popular devotional work, Norris' sermons, lives of
Bonnel and \de Renty and the warning tract known as the Second
Spira. The character of these books suggests that this reading may
have been part of that prescribed for the recently formed Holy Club.
In June, 1730, he noted proudly that he had his 'first pupil', in
all probability Joseph Green, the Bible clerk whom he had introduced
to the Rector on 10th June and whom he took to be matriculated two
days later. Green's father lived at Shipton, where Wesley often took
the service for his friend, the former Lincoln undergraduate, Joseph
Goodwin. It was probably through Wesley's efforts that Green came to
Lincoln. He was soon calling on Wesley, who lived in rooms just above
him in College, at ten every morning, presumably for tuition.
On 4th June, 1730, the Rector had allocated eleven men to Wesley,
John Westley, Jonathan Black, from Harringworth in Northamptonshire,
Thomas Waldegrave, a Lincolnshire boy from Londonthorpe, two
northerners, Thomas Hylton from Monkwearmouth and Robert Davison from
Durham, John Bartholomew from Dorchester, Dorset, John Sympson, almost
a neighbour, from Gainsborough, Edward Browne, a merchant's son from
St. Asaph, Richard Bainbridge from Leeds, and George Podmore from
Edgmond in Shropshire. None of these ever achieved great distinction,
but Bainbridge was later a fellow of Lincoln, while Thomas Waldegrave
was subsequently elected a fellow of Magdalen and was Edward Gibbon's
first tutor. It is one of the minor ironies of history that in going
through the plays of Terence with the precocious young man Waldegrave
was probably reproducing the notes which he had once learned from John
Wesley; but Gibbon thought the tutorials so unrewarding that he
resolved to absent himself from them. There were few days when Wesley
did not give up some hours, usually either at ten in the mornings or
two or five in the afternoons, to his pupils; even on Sundays and holy
days he noted in his diaries that he had seen his pupils, presumably
to give them religious instruction.
It is not very clear what the College tutor in the eighteenth
century was expected to teach outside the lectures in Hall where he
presided over disputations or commented on the Greek Testament.
Fortunately John Wesley has himself left a list of the books which he
read with his pupils. In 1730 he instructed them in Virgil's Aeneid,
Terence's plays, Horace's poems, Juvenal's Satires, Phaedrus, and
Anacreon. In English they studied Richard Lucas' Enquiry after
Happiness, Norris' Sermons, Stephen's Letters and half of
John Ellis' Defence of the Thirty-nine Articles. Next year he
read Gentleman Instructed and Charles Wheatley's The Church of
England Man's Companion with one pupil. With another he perused
Atterbury's sermons and Edward Welchman's Articuli =39 Ecclesiae
Anglicanae. With another he ended Cicero's De Natura Deorum
and read his Tusculan Disputations. With another he studied
Aldrich's Logic, but to so little effect that when they had
finished it they began all over again. Finally a fifth pupil read the
plays of Terence as well as Aldrich with him. He had evidently
acquired something of a reputation as a tutor in logic as three young
graduates of the College, William Smith, George Bulman, and Frederick
Williams were given tuition in the ubiquitous Aldrich.
He took his pupils' intellectual problems seriously, correcting
declamations for Edward Browne on 22nd September, 1730, and for Joseph
Leech on the afternoon of 28th February, 1733, and teaching Thomas
Greives an hour later that same day; earlier he had spent some time
thinking out syllogisms for an exercise in logic. On 26th June, 1732,
he wrote out a logical problem for Smith. In the winter of 1733 he
noted wearily that his pupils would not learn Hebrew and on the last
day of the year he was angry because they had failed to turn up.
His relationship with these young men was much more than that of
teacher and pupil. Hitherto his contacts at Lincoln had been with men
of comparatively senior status like William Cleaver, Matthew Horbery,
the son of a former vicar of Haxey, and a future fellow of Magdalen
and his neighbour, Robert Pindar, who matriculated as long ago as
1726. Now he was concerned with supervising younger men who had just
entered the College, and he certainly set out to take an interest in
them far beyond the obligations of a tutorial nature. He sat with
young Joseph Green at the Bear. In August, 1732, after calling on
Benjamin Holloway, son of the rector of Middleton Stoney, who was to
enter the college in the following November, he accompanied Richard
Bainbridge on an expedition to Cottisford and Rousham. He said later
that he made no attempt to persuade his pupils to become members of
the Holy Club, but he had too strong a personality to keep his
religious views in the background. His diary shows that he regularly
invited his pupils to breakfast and prayers, and those who showed any
interest in the activities of the Holy Club were subsequently brought
under close supervision and spiritual discipline. His first book, A
Collection of Forms of Prayers for Every Day in the Week, with
preface and questions for self-examination, was written for his pupils
and published in 1733.
It is possible that the Rector was increasingly and explicably
unwilling to entrust Wesley with the care of pupils because of his
close identification with the Holy Club. In August, 1733, Wesley told
his mother that he had as many pupils as he required. 'If I have no
more pupils after these are gone from me, I shall then be glad of a
curacy near you; if I have, I shall take it as a signal that I am to
remain here.' There were in fact only a small number of new entries
at Lincoln every year. Wesley seems to have been only on intimate
terms with his earlier pupils and either because of lack of time or
because the Rector was anxious about the recruitment of impressionable
young men his later pupils were few. This view is supported by
Richard Morgan's unfriendly picture of Wesley in a letter to his
father. Indeed, he wanted to be transferred to the other tutor of the
College, 'reckoned one of the best tutors in the University', and
of whom Lord Lichfield had so high an opinion that he thought to send
his eldest son to Lincoln. 'He has', he wrote, 'what few are in
college (except one Gentleman Commoner and two servitors who are Mr.
Wesley's pupils) under his tuition.' If Morgan was correct, then at
the beginning of 1734 Wesley had, presumably in addition to Morgan,
only three other pupils, probably Westley Hall (who was a gentleman
commoner), Matthew Robinson, and either Joseph Green or Joseph Leech,
all of whom were servitors. We should, however, be careful about
accepting Morgan's statement without qualification, and other evidence
would suggest that Wesley was at least being consulted on tutorial
matters by other members of the College.
His residence at Lincoln may have attracted a number of
undergraduates to the College. John Sympson, who was admitted as a
servitor in 1728, lived in Gainsborough; so did George and Thomas
Hutton, whose father was a local lawyer. Joseph Green, from Shipton,
probably entered the College as a Bible clerk partly through Wesley's
support. He certainly played a part in the admission of two of his
other prote?2ge?2s, Westley Hall and John Whitelamb. Westley Hall
was admitted as a gentleman commoner on 22nd January, 1731, and John
Whitelamb was admitted as a servitor on 10th April, 1731, and, much to
Wesley's satisfaction, was later given a scholarship. Hall, who came
from Salisbury, was related through his mother to John Westley, who
was already an undergraduate at Lincoln. His mother, who was a
daughter of a vicar of Imber, near Warminster, had married a clothier,
Francis Hall; his brother, Robert, later Lord Mayor of London, and
knighted in 1744, was the father of the Lincoln undergraduate; 'My
first cousin, John Westley being there ... John Wesley my tutor', as
Hall later commented. John Whitelamb, 'poor starveling Johnny',
was the son of humble parents (his father Robert, however, is described
in the matriculation book as Robert, gentleman of the parish of
Hatfield), who lived at Wroot, the dreary village where Wesley acted
as curate; and he had been employed by the elder Wesley as his
amanuensis. He was an intelligent young man, who entered the College
at the unusually late age of twenty-two; Wesley had great hopes of
Whitelamb, but as in the case of Westley Hall, they were steadily to
evaporate. Of the twelve young men who entered the College in 1731,
the one who was eventually to repay Wesley's tutorship most was in his
first year practically unknown to him; James Hervey, the son of the
curate of Collingtree.
Although Wesley was as far as possible rationing time to serve
the more serious pursuits of life, he neither withdrew from social
life nor ceased to take part in the normal recreations of Oxford.
Twice, on 10th March and 19th May, 1730, he went dancing. Genuinely
fond as he was of music, he seized such opportunities as Oxford then
presented, once attending a concert with Charles and William Morgan;
and in the summer he himself studied the gavotte from Otho,
'Non e si vago e bello'. He occasionally went on the river;
on 28th September, 1730, he gathered walnuts. Walking was his normal
exercise, with Charles and Morgan, to Binsey, round the Meadows, or in
Merton garden, once with Wilder and Dr. Grove.
He was now the proud possessor of a horse. This was in effect a
first necessity if he was to take services at the villages in the
neighbourhood of Oxford.
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
'Yesterday', he told his mother on 28th February, 1730, 'I
had the offer of another curacy to continue a quarter or half a year,
which I accepted with all my heart.
[MIDDLE OF QUOTE]
# 2006
[206 TEXT G19]
'All officers,' growled George from behind a cow, who had no
love of the War Ag., and proceeded to tell me a story far removed
from this present (as most of his stories were) of how in India, where
he had been a private in 1916, the cow was brought to the
householder's door each morning, and while it was milked consumed the
contents of the dustbin.
Actually this wartime farming of ours on Road Farm was a mixture
of ancient and modern. I had a modern rib-roller; but there was also
one made out of a trunk of a crab-apple tree, one hundred and fifty
years old, I should think, I found lying at the back of the
cart-lodge. And we used that one too, on some tender young beet.
It was also a mixed, cosmopolitan, ideological farming. Land
girls, Germans, Italians, succeeded one another in our fields as the
war went on. I had also a young Quaker, a pacifist who contradicted
everything I said, but he meant well.
And George Goforth plodded on, who had once had all this farm to
himself, knowledgeable in the handling of tackle, stoical; getting on
best, characteristically, with the least fortunate; the prisoners, the
enemy, lost to their own kindred, far from their own homes.
There was a shortage of implements at first on account of the
war. Scenes come to mind. There was the day when we missed being
able to borrow a neighbour's swath-turner by one minute. It had just
been lent to somebody else. It was a day on which hay demanded to be
turned. So the tractor which had returned without it was switched
off.
Larks sang: we could hear them suddenly, when the tractor
stopped, as we bared our arms for hard work. Six acres of swaths to
be turned before dewfall, and at four o'clock milking would deplete
our team. But it was the longest day. Bumblebees disturbed from the
swaths by our rakes zigzagged into the air before us. I glanced at
the roses in the hedge, at the buds that were more red than pink.
Someone was saying, 'There's one thing, every round gets shorter as
we move towards the middle.'
Round and round that field we walked all day. I came to know
that hay intimately, every ingredient of it; clover, rye-grass,
cocksfoot, and the occasional pallid corpse of a plant of chicory. I
was soon in that state belonging to my former unmechanized farming, of
mental stupefaction induced by repetitive manual movements. The
jumping teeth of my rake had a life of their own to my eyes, as they
snatched at the swath again and again, rolling it over like a small
wave, and the hay whispered like surf.
There was still plenty of the physical exhaustion of that former
farming, owing to the exigencies of the time. I walked behind a pair
of horses again, ploughing, before I got delivery of a tractor. But
the plough here in East Suffolk was an iron plough, having wheels. It
was known as the 'improved two-horse plough', which reminded me of
the name of my old-type of kitchen range at Creams: the 'New
Leader'. I doubt if I enjoyed any part of my wartime farming so
much as ploughing the stubble with Kitty and Boxer, days whose peace
was only broken by the sudden roar of an express train going by in the
cutting beside the field, which startled me, not the horses; they had
been used to trains since they were foaled here. I, too, got to know
the trains: I told the time by them.
I also had contract ploughing done for me by the War Ag. A
young man came with a crawler tractor and multiple-furrow plough. He
told me that his father was a small farmer, and that on Saturday
afternoons, having been ploughing with his crawler tractor all the
week, he took a pair of horses and ploughed for his father on his
small-holding. He enjoyed that: it was his recreation, he said.
The field which I ploughed so carefully with the horses, I
drilled with wheat by tractor. It was one of the first jobs my new
tractor did. And it was a horrible day. Fine when we started,
drizzle when we had done about two acres, downpour for the rest. The
tractor floundered, the drill kept gumming up with mud: it took one
man all his time to keep the spouts clear. We ended soaked to the
skin, in a field that was churned to a morass. And the wheat- oh
those beautiful straight drill-rows of our 1922 Cherry Tree Farm! How
unlike them when the corn showed were those of this first field I
drilled of my new farm. But it turned out to be the best crop of
wheat I ever grew.
I remembered then an old country saying I had heard about wheat:
'sow in the slop, and reap a good crop'.
There was also sugar beet, a crop which I had not grown before.
A gang of prisoners of war came to hoe them. They hoed up weeds
industriously all morning. At midday a pelting shower soaked the
ground: the thirty men moved off across the field to their dinner, and
as they went, every foot, treading on a hoed-up weed, planted it again
in the receiving earth.
And the cows. There was the blind cow whose name was Christmas,
because she was born on Christmas Day. She was not discovered to be
blind until one day heaps of manure were placed at intervals for
spreading on a pasture that the herd crossed, and Christmas tripped
over them. Ever since then Christmas preferred to walk beside the
hedge, making a detour from gate to gate. How did she know that she
was walking beside the hedge? Was it that a hedge has a peculiar
quality of scent? Or was there a sixth sense which told her that
something was there beside her? She walked holding her head up and a
little sideways, in a listening attitude. In former days it might
have been thought that Christmas, being born in an august hour, had
met with a blinding light. But the vet said, ~'Probably a
phosphorous deficiency,' and one had to accept that.
On the journey home to milking, along the green lane to the
farmstead, Christmas walked last. The other cows were purposeful;
knowing dairy cake awaited them. Let nothing get in their way: they
trotted. But Christmas dawdled in the lane, last, alone, safe from
hustling, and enjoyed a feast of her choice. All was safe here; there
were no ditches to fall into, but close on either side tall hedges
grew with shoots of many flavours. There were tips of bramble and
brier whose thorns were still tender: a wild rose was licked off its
stem by that muscular tongue, which encompassed in the same sweep a
dozen crab-apple leaves. There was hogweed, ground-ash, sallow. She
dragged at a spray of hawthorn, which embushed her head while she tore
at it.
Had there been time enough, there could have been nothing
pleasanter than to watch Christmas browsing, while one bore gently on
her rump in the act of coaxing her forward. But the milking waited.
Yet this pushing and this calling her by name seemed only to sweeten
her dalliance. She knew that she had nothing to fear from the human
presence, by these unhurtful urgings. Some movement forward was
required of her, and in time she would comply. In the meantime it was
like conversation to her, while she enjoyed her banquet of leaves in
the grassy lane.
She could not have known that there was any such phenomenon as
light in the world. Therefore, of course, there was no such thing to
her as darkness, only hours of a warmth beating down, and then hours
of stillness and a cool moisture. The hoot of the owl and the voice
of the blackbird perhaps indicated to her what was 'night' and what
was 'day'. Her chief privation was that she could not follow a
patch of shade as it moved with the sun. To her it was an arbitrary
and elusive area of coolness.
Christmas spent the night in a loose box by herself. She used to
walk straight to it from the milking shed, and waited before it, to be
steered into it. Once inside, she stood chewing the cud and gazing
(you would think) over the low wall like any other cow. Approached
from one side, she would turn her head and face you. If you put out
your hand she would put up her head to meet it, scenting its approach.
Sometimes she went into the meadow pond to drink, and having
drunk forgot that she had not turned round, and walked on into deeper
water. When it was up to her flank she realized that something was
wrong, and turned herself about. The other cows did not molest her
unless she was in a confined space with them. This situation she
learned to avoid.
Christmas was a lady of pedigree and a good milker. Her calvings
she managed for herself, although, of course, she had never seen her
calves. On the first occasion there was anxiety and sitting up at
night for her. But she calved by herself after all, in an interval
between the vigils. There she stood, her calf lying in the straw
behind her. She turned to it, lifted her front feet and placed them
accurately between its outstretched legs, and lowered her head and
licked it dry all over. In her world of darkness she never injured
any of her calves: she seemed to have an unerring instinct where to
tread.
Year by year the ploughing and the sowing and the hoeing. The
two Italian prisoners lived in an opera act of their own, grand or
comic according to their mood of the day. And the Quaker, who fancied
he had an ear for music, hoed at the farthest possible distance from
the Italians in the field, because he couldn't stand their
caterwauling, he said. And George Goforth (whose children were also
growing up) resolutely maintaining of every new machine I bought that
it would not work, and proceeding to work it, even as Bill Mould many
years back used to do. The type does not change much.
And the harvesting, and the Italians building waggon-loads of
sheaves, movable stages for their perpetual recitative. And the
difficult regulations about land girls not to be set to work beside
Italians, when all hands were needed round the threshing machine. The
threshing machine beat out the rhythm of the autumn day. Straw bales
in a long spasmodic caterpillar were pushed from the baler up a
slanted ladder and built like blocks of masonry. Similarly there had
been hay bales. Similarly now there were for us school trunks. Three
times a year I loaded school trunks on to the car and took them to the
station, and three times a year loaded them on the car and brought
them home from the station. Essentially bales of hay are trunks, in
shape and weight, packed trunks. In one small field I counted one
hundred and ninety-six bales. At six o'clock I said to Marjorie,
'I've loaded and unloaded more school trunks this afternoon than in
ten years of school terms, school trunks without handles.' Bales
are obstinate things, ungrippable, liable suddenly to slip one string
and then the thing turns into an enormous dissolving accordion in your
arms....
There was the thatching of the new corn stacks, and the Quaker
showing up suddenly as a better thatcher than George, and not letting
the fact be overlooked. Master's tactful handling needed there, in
between bouts of getting up steam in the dairy boiler.
There was the pleasant solitary task in September of taking a
second cut for hay. The days grew shorter, but given fine weather,
another crop could still be gathered.
# 2006
[207 TEXT G20]
It was in 1862, as King of the Belgians, that he made a confession
to the Archduke John:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
The Prince of Prussia has also written to tell me that you regret
I have tied myself to Belgium. I too sometimes regret that my part in
the East was taken from me. I fancy that I could have done much good
there, and though I know the disadvantages of the situation, it very
often gives me a kind of nostalgia. How strange my fate has been
since we were together in Brighton with the Regent! If I had taken
command of things in England in 1830, many things would have happened
differently, and what was bound to happen would have been more wisely
controlled.
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
In his old age, for personal and political reasons, Leopold
declared that only Greek interests had inspired his refusal of Greece;
and this was understandable, for when he 'corrected' Gervinus, the
throne of Greece was again on the market and he was considering it for
a Coburg nephew. Besides, since William =4 had lived to 1837, it was
a little ridiculous to admit that in 1830 they had quarrelled over his
corpse.
On May 21st, 1830, Leopold declined the throne of Greece.
'Leopold', snapped Mme \de Lieven, 'has played us a pretty
trick. It is a bad business... Who is going to take what Leopold has
refused?' Leopold's hesitations and problems and his final
rejection had created considerable ill-feeling; and Count Matuszewicz,
writing to Stockmar, declared that ~'Prince Leopold has shown so many
\6arrie?3re-pense?2es, so much bad faith, so much irresolution,
that I rejoice not to see him entrusted with the government of a
country in which he would have betrayed the confidence of the three
Courts... There is no difficulty which does not alarm him, no
obstacle which does not stop him, no gesture which does not prove that
he would have brought to Greece disgust, pusillanimity, and the
perpetual regret of having abandoned his so-called chances of the
eminent position of Regent of England. It is this Regency that he
will never obtain, above all now that he has crowned his shame like
this... Such a sovereign would have done damage to royalty.' And
this scorn and anger were echoed by the correspondent, quoted in the
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, who wrote to the Archbishop of Cologne:
'What does Your Eminence say to the behaviour of Prince Leopold? It
is quite in the character of the Marquis Peu-a?3-Peu, as King George
=4 christened him; instead of conquering difficulties, instead of
completing the work he had undertaken, he withdraws like a coward, and
calculates the possible chances which the approaching death of King
George =4 may throw in his way. A man of this weak character is
totally unfit to play a bold part in life.'
<13>
BY May 1830 it was sadly evident that George =4 was dying.
His private excesses had largely damaged his reputation among his
contemporaries, but after all, his excesses had been those of
virility, and his virtues, though less blatant, were very many. He
was the most civilized monarch that England had known since Charles
=2: perhaps, indeed, since Elizabeth. He had accepted the dedication
of Emma, he had patronized Hoppner and Lawrence, he had added
widely to the royal collections. He had inspired Nash to create the
classical splendour of Regent's Park. He had conjured up the
Coleridgean fantasies of Brighton; he had made (with his architect,
Wyattville) the alterations to Windsor that had turned it into the
epitome of castles; and he had built his own Nonesuch, Carlton House.
He had been the arbiter of fashion and of taste; and in all he did he
had been a superlative figure, larger than life. He was a born king,
and the Marquis Peu-a?3-Peu would be a king by training and ambition,
not by nature.
In May 1830 the jackals were impatient for the bulky, pathetic
recluse to die at Windsor; and Mme \de Lieven, of course, was among
the foremost. 'The most delicate question', so she wrote in eager
anticipation, 'will be raised by the death of the King. It will be
necessary to make provision for a regency in the case of the Princess
Victoria's minority. The Duke of Cumberland is caballing for it, and
Prince Leopold desires it. Most probably it will be assigned to the
Duchess of Kent, the Princess's mother, in which case it will be
Leopold who will rule.' And, since the Russian Ambassador's wife
was always sharp about Leopold, she continued briskly: 'He has given
us every reason for dissatisfaction and complaint on account of his
conduct in the matter of Greece, and the English Government would be
glad to follow our lead and to oppose the Prince's pretensions. This
is a line, however, which prudence warns us not to take. He will be
powerful some day, and indeed he is so already by the number of his
supporters.' Mr Creevey likewise shot a barb which touched the
truth: 'I suppose Mrs Kent thinks her daughter's reign is coming
on apace, and that her brother may be of use to her as \6versus
Cumberland...' George =4 was still clinging to life, William =4
(almost mad with excitement) was still waiting in the wings, but the
preparations continued gaily for the next reign but one. 'Lord
Durham', added Creevey, 'is now Prime Minister to the Duchess of
Kent and Queen Victoria, and they are getting up all their
arrangements together in the Isle of Wight for a new reign.'
At last, on June 26th, 1830, the reign of George =4 came to an
end, and there began the reign of the simple, genial Grand Admiral-
the most remarkable contrast to his brother that could be imagined.
England changed her allegiance overnight from a splendid sovereign to
an excited, bourgeois little king who could not get over the fact of
his accession. The gold-and-lacquer days of the Brighton Pavilion
were ended. 'There are', wrote Croly, the historian, 'few more
regular or temperate men in their habits than the present King. He
rises early, sometimes at six... At dinner he restricts himself
generally to one dish of plain boiled or roasted meat, drinking only
sherry, and that in moderation- never exceeding a pint.' 'A
quaint King indeed!' was Mme \de Lieven's acid contribution. 'A
bon enfant- with a weak head!'
William =4 was sixty-four, he suffered from chronic asthma, and
it was quite possible that he might die before May 24th, 1837; if he
did, if Queen Victoria (the title sounded well)- if Queen Victoria
came to the throne before her eighteenth birthday, there would have to
be a regency. There was only one move to be made now on the
chess-board, and Leopold of Coburg would be Prince Regent of the
United Kingdom: Regent, that is, in everything but name. The
accession to the regency now became quite as important as Victoria's
accession to the throne, and the candidates canvassed for it almost as
if they were canvassing in a general election. 'Prince Leopold and
his sister, the Duchess of Kent, are getting popularity in the
provinces,' snapped Dorothea \de Lieven in September. 'He is much
interested in the Regency question, and had a long talk with me about
it. Naturally, he wants it to be given to his sister, but the
Ministry wish it to pass to the Queen... After the King's death, the
Queen, so far as England is concerned, is only a foreigner. As for
the Duke of Cumberland,' finished Dorothea, 'he has no illusions
and puts forward no claim, clearly seeing that it would be useless.'
And for once Dorothea \de Lieven did not exaggerate. The Duke of
Cumberland knew quite well that he was by far the most unpopular royal
brother. The others might be more or less eccentric, but he was
credited with murder, incest and homosexuality. Cartoons (and they
were rough and ribald) did not spare him: Cumberland was the villain
of the age. Besides, if his niece became Queen of England, he would
receive a crown of his own, for she could not succeed to the Kingdom
of Hanover.
So Queen Adelaide patiently continued her carpet-work at Windsor,
and the Sailor King, understandably disconcerted to find his death
discussed before his coronation, continued to rule the country and
propose the Duke of Wellington for the Regency. Mrs Kent ('the
Swiss Governess', George =4 had called her), buxom and domineering,
with the little Leiningen regency behind her, was 'courted and sought
after as much as if she were already Regent', and Prince Leopold,
noted Mme \de Lieven, 'takes a gloomy view of all that is going on.
All the royal princes are opposed to the Duke of Wellington. The
King is alone in his determination to support him.'
The combination of the King and the victor of Waterloo was
enough, however, to alarm the most spirited opponents; and the Coburgs
needed to keep up a constant campaign. 'Prince Leopold and his
sister', wrote the usual observer, late in September, 'are
exploring the provinces in pursuit of popularity. The prince assumes
the air of a presumptive heir. The regency question will in all
probability be decided in favour of the Duchess of Kent...' And
since Dorothea never took her piercing eyes off the Coburg coalition,
she reported again on October 25th: 'The Duchess of Kent and her
brother hold themselves very high, as if the throne is to be theirs
tomorrow- and this is most unpleasant to the King. Leopold does not
show himself, but works silently underground.'
The Regency Act of 1830 settled, finally, that if the Queen were
to have a child and the King died before its majority, she should act
as its guardian and as regent; but that if she were childless and
Victoria ascended the throne at her uncle's death, the Duchess of Kent
should be her daughter's guardian and act as regent during her
minority. Most fortunately, at this moment Fate took a hand with the
chess game. In September 1830 revolution broke out in Brussels.
<14>
ON July 29th, revolution had burst out in Paris, Charles
=10 had fled, and Louis-Philippe, the ex-Duc \d'Orle?2ans, the exile
of Twickenham, had accepted the crown 'from the hands of the
people'. Events in France had had immediate repercussions on
Belgium: the repercussions which Leopold, and indeed every student of
history, had expected.
In 1792 the victory of Jemappes had put Belgium into French
hands; and French ideas had been imposed with effect. Division into
departments, centralization of government, the introduction of the
Code Napole?2on, the freedom of the Scheldt, had done much to
help the development of Belgium; and freedom of worship and civic
equality replaced the old principle of the nobles' supremacy. It was
not surprising that a considerable French party formed in Belgium; and
its influence only weakened when the Continental blockade began to
weigh heavily on the country. In 1815, when the Congress of Vienna
united the Belgians with the Dutch (whom they detested), the memory of
France grew strong again; and when William =1 of Holland attempted to
amalgamate his two peoples, Belgium thought only of separating from
Holland and rejoining France.
The effect of the French Revolution in July 1830 was therefore
immediate; the July days in Paris were followed by the August days in
Brussels. On August 24th, at the Brussels Opera House, Auber's
Masaniello was being performed. It dealt with the Neapolitan
rising against Spain; it was a work of revolution. And when the tenor
began to sing his famous aria, 'Des armes, des flambeaux!'
the audience swept out, drunk with the message, into the summer night.
Brussels was pillaged, and the Belgian Revolution had begun.
The spontaneous movement spread across the Belgian provinces, and
it took King William some time to organize forces to crush the
rebellion. Late in September, the Belgian National Congress voted the
separation of Belgium from Holland, and in October it declared Belgium
to be an independent state.
# 2012
[208 TEXT G21]
At any rate I found it quite difficult to shake my feelings free
from beliefs which my reason had rejected.
Fortunately for me my mother was unusually liberal-minded. I do
not recall her ever attempting to implant any kind of rigid doctrine
or fearful religious truth into her children's minds. Her aim was
that we should not have peculiar views and that we should grow up
mildly orthodox, so that at a later age we could discard as much or as
little of conventional religion as might suit us.
I suspect that my father had been a sceptic and certainly my
maternal grandfather was a convinced one.
Agnosticism, as Huxley called it, was becoming respectable, and I
welcomed that mental attitude of being free to think for myself.
It is not very surprising that presently I earned the family
nickname of the 'the youngest infallible', for I knew all the
answers though not, as yet, many of the questions. These came my way
later in life.
Perhaps because of my secret ambitions I was curious to see what
eminent people looked like. At Clifton College, I had often seen the
immortal W. G. Grace watching his son at the wicket, and I, like
other boys, had stared at the vast bearded celebrity, sometimes even
having the privilege of seeing him play on the Close and smiting the
ball for six. A heavenly spectacle!
At University College, the discoverer of argon, Sir William
Ramsay, looked disappointingly ordinary. We were often given tickets
to soire?2es of the Royal Geographical Society where we could feast
our eyes on great men and hear them talk; Sir William Crookes
lecturing on those magical tubes of his which produced X-rays, Stanley
on his African explorations, Nansen and his ship the Fram, George
Nathaniel Curzon who had just explored the Pamirs, and others famous
then but now forgotten.
It seemed to me that these celebrities were much like ordinary
folk to look at; why shouldn't I become one too?
During the first half of 1896 my mother was visiting her sisters
in New Zealand and I became a boarder in a relative's family in
Hampstead. It was very uncongenial and I was desperately unhappy
there, living in mental solitude without friends of any kind.
On my mother's return in the summer of that year a much brighter
prospect opened. She took a house in Cambridge and there I made a
fresh start as a non-collegiate student, with a view ultimately of
obtaining my medical degree.
The Medical Student at Cambridge took the Natural Science
Tripos (in Anatomy and Physiology) as the first stage of his training
but in those three years my chief interests lay in other directions.
I worked hard at studying dramatic technique and in seeing plays
whenever I could. In addition there were theological and
philosophical works to be read and then problems to be discussed with
anyone who would listen.
At eighteen it is easy to settle the affairs of this world and to
arrange those of the next to one's own satisfaction; but among
undergraduates there are so often some whose minds are fixed in error,
evidently afflicted by the sin of invincible ignorance, from which one
is oneself happily free.
In those years at Cambridge I was reaching the stage in
self-education where questions become more exciting than answers.
Sermons by eminent divines, preaching on Sundays in Great St.
Mary's, provided me with abundant specimens of theological conundrums;
and it was instructive too, in view of a possible political career, to
hear examples of oratory.
I found Father Maturin the most remarkable and Bishop Gore the
most profound. I also heard Bishop Temple (the great, not the less),
Archdeacon Farrar (of Eric or Little by Little), Mandel Creighton,
Scott Holland, and others who figured largely in the ecclesiastical
world of the nineties.
Yet in spite of them:
[BEGIN QUOTE]
~There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a veil past which I could not see.
[END QUOTE]
Among undergraduates my greatest friend was a theological
student with whom I argued interminably many a long evening; we had
nothing whatever in common and we remained intimate friends for fifty
years.
I had reached the age when sexual questions pester the
imagination and supply undergraduates with an absorbing topic for
discussion.
Nature demands information.
How to obtain it?
One heard vaguely that 'they order this matter better in
France', but aesthetic principles coupled with an element of
Puritanical shyness in my case, forbade practical experiments, and
happily an alternative source of knowledge was available, namely the
kind of literature which was commonly condemned as 'improper',
'pornographic' or 'obscene'.
I am amazed to recall how mild were the books which, in the
nineties, served to provoke a young man's furtive blush; the
Decameron, Contes Drolatiques and Zola's novels, in atrocious
translations; Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey and the like which I
suppose would today make schoolgirls yawn. Doubtless there are modern
equivalents which serve youth equally well as psychological sedatives,
satisfying for the time being those unruly impulses which might
otherwise interfere with scholarship.
I must not forget to remind myself that among other subjects at
Cambridge I studied Anatomy and Physiology as a preliminary stage to
medicine and as an exercise in viewing the naked truth without
flinching. For the English mind this is curiously distasteful.
It was the custom among us students to attend Addenbrooke's
Hospital to watch operations, as a hardening process. I found this
had the drawback that as soon as an operation had started I fainted;
the power of suggestion- or the dislike of the naked truth- was such
that eventually I even began to faint as I entered the hospital gates.
Clearly I should have to abandon all hopes of becoming a doctor. Or
was there a cure?
Making one more attempt, which I vowed should be the last, I went
early to the torture chamber, sat in the front row from which escape
was impossible, and spent the morning fainting and coming round over
and over again.
That effectively cured me; it also taught a useful lesson,
applicable to many things in life.
As a non-collegiate student I found myself meeting a range of
other undergraduates much more varied than at most of the colleges.
There were men of all ages, creeds and races. I recall a room full
of us, fourteen in number and no two of the same nation, all jabbering
English. We happened to mention how some English families boast of
Norman blood. Then a Greek claimed for his family a much longer
descent and then among those from the East the 'bidding' rose by
thousands, until an Icelander capped all by claiming direct lineal
descent from Odin.
Evidently Norman blood is mere 6vin ordinaire.
I seized the opportunity afforded by Cambridge of starting to
collect books; I still have my eighteenth-century editions of Swift,
Pope, Hudibras and the Spectator which I bought in 1897 off
Mr. David's famous stall in the Market Place.
Whilst at Cambridge I was taught by my mother to appreciate
Gothic architecture, a subject she had much studied, and during the
vac we visited the glories of Normandy. From her too I began to learn
something about pictures, especially those of the Old Italian Masters.
Names like Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi and Botticelli came to have
a friendly significance, filling a gap in my raw sceptical mind. I
was beginning to realize that it doesn't matter much whether a legend
is true so long as it is beautiful.
At the end of my time at the University I had learnt that a
properly trained aesthetic sensibility was a more reliable guide in
life than any system of theological dogmas, though I would admit that
this might not apply to all people. For me, however, aesthetics
seemed to be a more civilized mode of guidance than theology.
In order to develop aesthetic tastes it would be necessary to
familiarize oneself with as many forms of art as possible, but how in
the world could one do all this if one had to waste so much time
learning to become a doctor?
How much easier it would be to belong to some Puritanical sect
that stifles all expressions of beauty, hates arts and is the sole
possessor of the key which unlocks the Heavenly Gates! How simple
just to worship ugliness and call it God!
But as it was, Science and Art were making rival demands on my
time and thoughts; and it seemed that while Art added to the joy of
life, Science added only to its comforts.
I suppose it is common enough to look back later in life and to
say what was the most valuable of the gifts one gets from three years
at the University. In my case certainly, it was a keener appreciation
of the beauty of things, ranging from the pictures of \van Eyck which
I heard Professor Waldstein expound in lectures in the Fitzwilliam
Museum, to the shape of the buildings of the Colleges. Make your way
along the Backs on a May morning to the Wilderness, penetrate passages
and archways, cross bridges and gaze again and again at the Great
Court of Trinity: this, believe me, is what education means, real
education, for through appreciating the beauty of things you come in
time to appreciate the beauty of ideas.
After Cambridge, I entered at St. Bartholomew's Hospital,
London, at the beginning of 1900. My mother and I lived in the
suburbs and we were so fortunate as to have as a neighbour the late
J. W. Allen, lecturer (later Professor) in History at Bedford
College for Women.
He supplied me with what I most required at that phase of
development; he became a guide to my reading and an admirable critic
of my attempts to write plays; and he had enormous enthusiasm for good
literature.
I recall his lending me, one evening, the poems of D. G.
Rossetti.
I sat up all night until I had read the volume from cover to
cover. I have not read any of it since!
I received that night an exhilarating shock to my sensibilities
in appreciating the strange beauty words can present when arranged in
particular patterns.
If, with a taste for literature one happened to have grown up
about the beginning of this century, one almost certainly would be
conscious of that quality called 'style'. For then books were
admired chiefly for their 'style' and writers laboured in pursuit
of 6le mot juste.
As you read those slender greenish volumes of the Pseudonym
Library, pausing to discover the peculiar merits of Some Emotions
and a Moral, you felt that however obscure the meaning, the style
was superb.
There was, too, The Yellow Book, a veritable storehouse of
literary style and if one were in doubt what the word implied, there
was Walter Pater's essay on Style to settle the matter.
It was in fact a kind of literary 'class distinction', a
superior quality which only the select were capable of appreciating.
It was not the matter presented by the author so much as the manner
that counted.
The reader learnt to be sensitive to the shape of a sentence, to
the use of 'master words' round which an author like Stevenson
would build significant paragraphs; and to admire those splashes of
colour that were almost purple.
How gratifying to one's self-esteem to patronize an art so
exclusive! But alas!- already in those Edwardian years the hoofs of
democracy were trampling over the flower beds. A more plebeian mode
was in demand and authors proclaimed their views in loud, level tones.
About that time I experienced another shock at an exhibition of
Romney's portraits, many of Lady Hamilton. No one, I thought, could
ever have really looked as beautiful as that; it must be a trick. I
sat, watching that magical creature casting a spell over me,
extraordinarily exhilarating; but later came the shock of realizing
that this kind of knock-out blow might happen to me in real life some
day.
# 2022
[209 TEXT G22]
We had learnt about them in our daily scripture lessons. We found
Europe a very accommodating continent, with the easily recognized Italy
"boot", and a pink Russia taking up most of the space, where we
were only required to point out St. Petersburg and perhaps Moscow.
Like the Grecian urn and beauty, that was all we knew or needed to
know about Russia. When it came to nearer home, then prejudice and
patriotism had their stubborn way with us. All very well for England
to spread her patchwork quilt of counties before us. We viewed her
with unsympathetic eyes. But unroll the map of Scotland, and here was
Geography itself. What could a whole wilderness of maps display that
could beat this land of ours? Look to the West, and there was pink
Argyll, all broken up by long strips of blue sea, and lovely islands
with romantic Highland names. Over the sea to Skye with Prince
Charlie, and to Iona, where the long-ago saint built a shrine and
raised a cross. Back to the East, and there was Edinburgh.
And here were we, actually in a house in a street in Edinburgh!
Gleefully we pointed out the Firth of Forth, in which we had all
bathed and paddled at one or other of the little villages on its
coast. North Berwick, with the Bass Rock and Tantallon Castle, and
over in Fife, Aberdour, its woods lovely in Maytime with the blue of
wild hyacinths, and Largo, where Robinson Crusoe was born, Elie, with
Macduff's cave and the rubies on Ruby Beach, and grey St. Andrews,
with the links, the ruins, and the castle, and the echoes of the
long-ago lullaby:
[BEGIN QUOTE]
Hush thee, hush thee, do not fret thee,
The Black Douglas will not get thee.
[END QUOTE]
We chattered, we pointed out, and compared notes on beaches and
sand-castles and spades and shells, and jelly fish, and Miss Gray
joined in and told us stories of Macduff, and Macbeth, and the Black
Douglas. I had been to the Trossachs, and had seen Ben Lomond,
"Ellen's isle" and the "Silver Strand", so when the poetry
lesson was from The Lady of the Lake the pictures in my mind
flashed into unforgettable words. Lessons? These things were at the
heart of us, and Miss Gray was there with us. That's the sort of
person she was.
The same with History. History was for Miss Gray, and easily for
us, a pageant of heroes and splendour, of pity and even tears.
Scotland was of course our first love. Her history blazoned before
our eyes the bravery of Wallace, Bruce and his indomitable spider,
Bannockburn, Mary Queen of Scots and best of all, Bonnie Prince
Charlie, with tartans waving and banners flying....
Little Arthur's England brought us good King Alfred and
Harold after a page or two of blue-painted Britons with Druids and
mistletoe- and so on to the lion-hearted Richard and his brave
Crusaders, and the sad tale, with a pathetic picture, of the little
princes in the Tower. And, of course, that hero of heroes for all
little girls, the glorious and adorable Sir Walter Raleigh, cloak and
all. We learnt the names of the wives of Henry =8, we loved Charles
=1 and hated Cromwell, and after being a little bored by Queen Anne
and the Georges, we ended up comfortably with our own Queen Victoria,
and she, in our childish loyalties, was and would be ever the one and
only heroine of the National Anthem.
Little Arthur's England- I have it still. I remember how I
would open it and read the first words: "You know, my dear little
Arthur" and then turn to the last page and read the last words: "I
hope it will help you to understand bigger and better histories bye
and bye." I don't know if it was "Little Arthur", but most
certainly it was little Miss Gray who helped me to that understanding,
awaking in me, sublimely unconscious, interest and energy for tackling
these "bigger and better histories" in later years.
One of our lessons was to read aloud.
I do not know what children read in school these days, but the
people who compiled our reading books must have been as deeply
concerned about what we read as about how we read it- for our
books were made up of extracts from great writers, interspersed with
poetry from the great poets. I remember being charmed and amused by
the Sir Roger \de Coverley papers from the Spectator, while
the translation of Pliny's letters to Tacitus describing the eruption
of Vesuvius, and the lava pouring down on Pompeii and Herculaneum,
must have made so deep an impression that it was still clear at the
back of my mind when, many years later, I saw the smoke of Vesuvius
above the Bay of Naples, and stood among the ruins of the cities.
Of all the valuable things we learnt in those early days in "the
little Schoolroom" nothing, I think, was more valuable than the
poetry, which we not only got by heart, but, stirred by Miss Gray's
enthusiasms, also took to heart, laying the foundations of a love of
poetry which has ever remained with me. Can I ever forget the
stimulating joy of standing up and reciting:
[BEGIN QUOTE]
~Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them,
Volleyed and thundered.
[END QUOTE]
and all the time seeing in my mind's eye that brave Brigade,
galloping, galloping into immortal glory? "Theirs not to reason
why!" Neither was it mine- the splendour and the tragedy were all
in all.
And "The Schooner Hesperus!" with the ache in my heart for the
skipper's little daughter lying on that forsaken beach,
[BEGIN QUOTE]
The salt sea frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eye.
[END QUOTE]
And the appeal of the incorruptible Casabianca, standing alone
amid the flames, preferring death to disobedience! Oh, the pity of
it! I felt it, Miss Gray felt it, we all felt it.
I think we regarded the "Queen of the May" rather in the light
of a distinguished stranger, for no Queens of May ever reigned in
Scotland, but we liked her, and sympathised with her eager desire to
be up and doing- the lilt of her lines was easy to learn, and she
lilted so many touching and interesting things that we could only
rejoice when she, having "thought to pass away before" went on
living and lilting for quite a page or two longer. Then for
rollicking fun, could anything beat "John Gilpin and his Spouse",
and that gay picnic at the "The Bell" at Edmonton, and the
screaming from the balcony when the wigless John went flashing by on
his run-away steed?
And surely there was no resisting the charm of the dashing
"Young Lochinvar" and his fair Ellen? "One touch to her hand, and
one word in her ear" (and couldn't one just see the glint in his
eye!) and in a trice they're off and away, all the wedding guests
coming helter-skelter behind them! Then ho! for the "racing and
chasing on Cannobie Lee!" How we all laughed! How Miss Gray
laughed! In gentler strain, could anything be sweeter than that dear
little brook telling its own story and how it came "from haunts of
coot and hern", chatter-chattering its way to "join the brimming
river"? I knew quite a lot of chattering brooks myself. And I
think that even we, young as we were, felt the strain of music linked
with infinity in the haunting refrain:
[BEGIN QUOTE]
For men may come and men may go.
But I go on for ever.
[END QUOTE]
Many another poem could I speak of which sang itself into my
heart and memory. But for me, best of all, the ever delightful
blacksmith in his smithy "under a spreading chestnut tree".
Best for me, because I actually knew a blacksmith, just like
Longfellow's, minus the chestnut tree, who lived on Tweedside in a
jewel of a tiny village called Clovenfords, where I was taken every
spring. My father and my brothers put up at the Inn, where Hogg the
Ettrick Shepherd, and Sir Walter Scott, had put up before them- but
Louis and I and Ann lived in the village blacksmith's cottage, with
the smithy next door, and through the wall we could hear the bellows
blowing and the horses stamping. My blacksmith too, had "large and
sinewy hands"- "swiney" as one of my own children misread it-
and often did I stand and watch him shoeing a horse, and was allowed
to put my small hands on the bellows and help blow the fire. So it is
of my Clovenfords blacksmith, dark-eyed and black-bearded, in his
smithy among the hills, that Longfellow brings back the memory.
At ten o'clock Miss \de Dreux rang the big brass bell in the
hall. She did this every hour until two o'clock, when the day-girls
went home. At the sound of the bell, doors would open and release
girls talking and laughing; feet ran to and fro, as we all changed
rooms for different classes. Each hour, silence changed to noise, and
noise again to silence. A memory stays with me, of arriving late one
morning to find all doors closed against me, like the gates of doom.
The ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner seemed an echo of
my anxiously beating heart. I could hear the voice of Mr. Robertson
in the salle a?3 manger, and perhaps the German tones of
Madame Kunz in the grande salle with the Senior German class.
Upstairs and down I heard the muffled sound of pianos, hesitating
scales, or stumbling sonatas, and the guttural German voices of Miss
Wehle and Miss Javrova the music teachers- all very awe-inspiring for
an anxious culprit.
In the grande salle, from ten to eleven o'clock, Mr.
Robertson taught writing and arithmetic. Seated at one of the long
desks, I had my first thrill with real ink and a quill pen. Oh, the
spluttering of that pen! And the messiness of the thin pink
papier buvard that soaked up the blots! And the pages of
alphabetical moral maxims we scratched and blotted in out copy-books!
For our sums we used slates, and slate-pencils, which would often
give out a horrible screech as our small hands slipped on a line or
figure, and this would be echoed by a screech of agony from everybody
in the room. We did a great deal of rubbing out with the \torchon,
helped by a lick from a finger.
Mr. Robertson had a long red beard and whiskers which tickled
my neck as he bent over me correcting my sums....
We had out first French lessons from Miss \de Dreux. Hall's
First French Course, all masculines and feminines, troublesome
conjugations, and exercises to write at home. Before very long we
were reading Un Philosophe sous les Toits- I cannot remember
the author, but I know I had a sort of affection for that old
philosopher and his meditations under his roofs.
It was dear Miss Bogen who gave us our first German lessons, only
vocabulary, no books. She was a sweet, kind creature and we all loved
her. Later on, when Madame Kunz took us over, German became
important, with Weisse's Grammar, Schiller, Goethe's "Faust" and
Heine's poetry. But even in these early days we were growing daily
more familiar with speech both in French and German.
Then of course, there was music. There were two piano
mistresses, both German, both very plain, both admirable teachers,
though severe, both trained at Leipzig Conservatoire, which in those
days was considered the last word for training "in all kinds of
musick". Miss Javrova, who taught us little ones, had a very long
nose. Though she was strict, she was kind and appreciative of effort.
I was a nervously conscientious child, and took my practising
seriously. "You must play this ten times over", Miss Javrova would
say, pointing with relentless fingers to a jumble of crotchets and
quavers.
# 2003
[210 TEXT G23]
Again there was a long pause. 'We're mates,' he said at last;
that was all, yet I felt there was something more to it.
I sent for the sergeant of the platoon both men were in and asked
him to try to find out discreetly what lay behind this. It did not
take him long. Rifleman A had a secret; he was illiterate, or very
nearly so. Rifleman B was teaching him to read and write in private.
It had cost A a great effort to confess his secret to his mate and he
could not face confiding in somebody else; they wanted to complete the
tuition. I took B off the draft and eventually sent them on another
one together.
A disproportionate amount of my time seemed to be taken up with
delinquency, military or civil. Apart from the daily 'crime sheet'
there were occasional courts martial, appearances in the police courts
of neighbouring towns as 'prisoner's friend', and even, on one
occasion, which I shall describe in another connection, a journey to
London to give 'evidence of character' in a case against a
rifleman.
The first time I appeared at a court martial I took infinite
pains with my case for the defence. I interviewed the prisoner- a
deserter- in the guardroom several times, sorted out the obvious lies
from the more plausible parts of his story and, discovering that the
essence of desertion lies in the intention not to return, built up an
elaborate argument to show that the man had intended to come back, or
at least that he could not be proved to have intended otherwise. This
last became difficult when it emerged belatedly, via the civilian
police, that he had flogged- that is, sold- every stitch of his
military clothing and every piece of his equipment.
My case got off to a bad start. The President of the Court asked
me if I was making a plea in mitigation and seemed rather impatient
when I said no, I had a complete defence to offer. The Court fidgeted
and seemed bored; the Judge Advocate looked, to me at least, half
amused and half contemptuous. A sense of injustice spurred me on, and
there is no doubt that it spurred me too far and too long.
The sentence was 112 days' detention. Leaving the court I met
an officer of another company who had been very helpful to me; he had
once been the commandant of a military prison. He put his hand on my
shoulder and said something to the effect that that was quite a speech
I had made. It was nice of him to say so, I replied unhappily, but it
hadn't had much effect, had it? Oh yes, he said. A considerable
effect. 'How?' I asked, irritably. 'Well,' he said
thoughtfully, 'I've seen a lot of those cases, you know, and I would
say that without your speech he would probably have got fifty-six
days.'
If I defended that prisoner too much there was one I defended too
little, indeed not at all. He was a camp hospital orderly, summoned
to a police court about six miles away. I was particularly busy on
the morning of the case and sent a message to the hospital that the
rifleman should report to the Company Office and I would drive him
into town. My idea was that he could tell me the facts on the way.
But a message came back that the rifleman had already left. I
realised I had cut everything rather fine and left at once. But by
the time I reached the court my man was already in the dock and there
was no chance of consulting him. I was in time to hear the charge,
which was that he had taken a motor bicycle without the owner's
permission and ridden it without a licence; also that he had stolen a
blanket and a groundsheet. He pleaded not guilty.
The Chief Constable took him through the story to the point where
it was established that he had, in fact, taken the articles. Why?
asked the Chief Constable. And why did he plead not guilty?
The rifleman was a regular soldier with a row of service
chevrons. He stood like a ramrod in the dock, head slightly raised,
looking ahead and upward over the Bench, and he spoke as if delivering
a well-rehearsed recitation. 'Well, sir,' he said, 'it was like
this, sir. There was a dance at the camp that night, sir. I wanted
to take a girl home, sir.'
The Chief Constable asked patiently what that had to do with the
charge. Why had he taken the articles in question? 'Well, sir. It
was like this, sir. There was a dance at the camp that night, sir. I
wanted to take a girl home, sir.'
All right, said the Chief Constable. He wanted to take the girl
home; that was why he took the bicycle, believing the owner would have
lent it if asked. But why did he take a blanket and a groundsheet?
'Well, sir. It was like this, sir...'
The whole routine came out again, not an inflection varied. The
Chief Constable interrupted. 'Why,' he asked wearily, 'did you
take a blanket and a groundsheet?'
Suddenly the soldier relaxed his rigid posture, looked down at
the Chief Constable, and in a totally different voice full of
challenging contempt for his interrogator's obtuseness, he said,
'\2y'wouldn't like me to tell you, \2wouldya?'
All I did in that case was pay the five-pound fine which was
quickly imposed and arrange for it to be deducted from his pay.
When I wasn't being an ineffective lay lawyer I was often an
employment agent. The company's roll included a number of men who
were drawing specialist rates of pay but for whom we had no job in
their specialised line. When a specialist was wanted anywhere the
application came to me. One day the Adjutant telephoned that a cook
was required urgently at a Stately Home some miles away which had been
requisitioned as a high level military headquarters. I consulted the
Sergeant-Major; we went over our lists of cooks and chose one. He was
sent for and seemed a very presentable man. I gave instructions for
him to be driven, with his kit, to his new and cosy-sounding job.
That evening, passing a bunch of soldiers in a camp road way, I
thought I saw the cook, then decided I must be mistaken. But the
thought persisted and I sent for the Sergeant-Major. Oh, no, he said,
I must be mistaken. He had personally seen the cook off in a truck
with all his kit. I told him to enquire. Half an hour later he
reported back. I was right. Our cook was home again. The
Sergeant-Major asked him what had happened. 'I don't know,' the
man said, looking genuinely puzzled. 'I'd only just got there and I
was in the kitchen and a sergeant came down and said the General
wanted tea. He had company up in the drawing room. Wanted it right
away. Well, when I took the pail up...'
Nobody had ticked him off. He had simply and immediately been
ordered back to where he came from. He probably established a record
for short tenure as a General's cook, but I should like to have been
present at the moment in the drawing room when tea was served.
It was ironic that while I was trying to deal with the problems
of the 'employed' men I had also to cope with a less constant but
trying problem of unemployed men. The main body of the company was
fully engaged in a training programme but there were at times quite
large numbers of men who had completed their training and were waiting
to be drafted overseas.
No soldier is more difficult to handle than the idle soldier, and
none is quicker to realise when duties or training are designed more
to prevent boredom or to keep him out of mischief than to further his
proficiency. The draftee is restless, impatient, and apt to see no
reason why he shouldn't be on embarkation leave until it is time for
him to go abroad. When, as sometimes happened, a man had had
embarkation leave twice and was still hanging about a camp in England,
his morale was unpredictable, even from day to day.
One sternly devised further training programmes and tried to
stress their importance, but the scepticism was palpable. It was
better to be unorthodox- so long as higher authority didn't find
out- and intersperse their days with what were frankly games. When
influenza struck down several platoon commanders I was reduced to
putting bodies of these men under one NCO and offering a packet
of cigarettes to the first man to reach the top of a nearby hill-
stressing, of course, the need for maintaining a high pitch of
physical fitness- or sending them out in pairs in 'initiative
tests', which amused them, gave them some freedom, and at least got
them out from under my feet.
All the trained men had qualified in D and M (driving and
maintenance) and when I was given two buses for use in the company's
defensive ro?5le in the event of invasion I packed off whole groups
to practise bus driving. I discovered that men who had driven even
heavy vehicles for years took some time to get the knack of handling a
bus and, though their military careers were unlikely to call for such
a skill, this again kept them busy on something a little off the
beaten track of routine.
Nearly all the men were Londoners, and home was only a couple of
hours hitch-hiking away; so absenteeism became rife. It was coolly
calculated. They knew that if they had a few days at home and were
put in the guardroom when they returned they would be released if the
draft movement order came through, so what had they to lose?
When Christmas came we had a mass of unauthorised departures. A
pale-faced corporal reported one night that his entire barrack room
was deserted. He had found a packet of cigarettes on his pillow with
a message attached- 'Happy Christmas, Corp'- and signed by all
the missing men. The temptation to take no action, knowing they would
all be back as soon as the holiday was over, was great, but one could
not take that easy way. I had the local police of each man's home
district informed, and a sufficient number of them spent their
Christmas in civilian cells to serve as a warning to others.
The various invasion alarms were almost a relief in that they
called for action which at least approximated to war, though nothing
in fact happened. The company's task was to guard the perimeter of an
airfield a few miles away. When the alarm stand-by was received our
curious caravan set off- two buses, a couple of jeeps, and two
dispatch riders.
We were assigned our ro?5le only when the first of these alarms
was received, so we arrived at the airfield in the dark. Two World
War =1 soldiers, now ground defence officers in the RAF,
greeted us. My first question was as to the extent of the
perimeter. It was nine miles. My training told me that you should
never spread men thinly, so I split my force into two small mobile
units (each with a bus) and proposed to hold them in a central
position while pickets covered the perimeter. But the RAF men
would have none of this and it was made clear to me that once on their
premises I came under their orders. So I had the ridiculous task of
spreading my men- about 120 of them- along a nine-mile line. The
RAF men supervised my placing of them and apparently approved.
When dawn came I found that most of them had a field of fire which
could have caused them only to shoot up the anti-aircraft gunners on
the rising ground around us.
# 2017
[211 TEXT G24]
By and large, the Citroen was a remarkably good car. Like most
French machines, it always did what you expected it to do, and you
never felt insecure driving it, no matter what the circumstances might
be. Both the steering and the change mechanism were rather heavy, but
one got used to this. There were times, too, when I longed for a
fourth gear, particularly in hilly Devonshire country, I remember,
when I was often caught between ratios and felt quite helpless.
Characteristic of its country of origin, you always knew that
there were only four cylinders working for you under the bonnet, and I
should have liked to try the Big 6, which must be a very pleasant
handful of a motor car. The cornering and the road-holding on the
Citroen were astonishingly good, as anyone knows who has driven one,
and the manner in which it remained glued to the ground going round
corners, no matter what the road surface might be, was most endearing.
But best of all was the Citroen's gluttony for work. It seemed to
relish being driven hard, and flat-out driving all day appeared to
leave it refreshed and longing for more.
Sometimes that pleasant Citroen used to be subject to a minor
vibration period when cornering fast on lock. This was only a slight
nuisance, and was caused by the Carden shaft overrunning the engine at
certain times and not at others, creating a non-constant velocity. I
mention this only because the same thing, in a much more extreme form,
cropped up at Lagondas when we were testing the prototype 2 1/2-litre
Lagonda at Staines immediately after World War =2.
For a long time we could not understand why, when travelling
slowly in top with practically no throttle, the engine appeared to
miss. This was all the more curious because when carrying only one
passenger under identical circumstances we had no trouble with the
engine at all.
I don't know how long we all wasted on this annoying snag before
the answer suddenly occurred to us. Of course, we at last reasoned,
with the extra weight at the rear, the angle was altered between the
bevel-box and the wheels and we might be subjecting the Carden shaft
to a non-constant velocity. At last our reasoning was right, the
vibration occasioned giving an almost identical impression to that
caused by a missing engine.
At that time I believe there was only one foreign firm making
constant velocity joints, and as it was quite impossible to get
supplies, we 'faked-up' this vibration period, quite successfully,
too. I don't know whether Alec Issigonis and his team met this same
trouble with the prototype Mini-Minor, but I was interested to see,
when the specification of this car was published, that the design
included a constant velocity joint. It would be interesting to know
if any other design teams have met the same trouble, and have been as
mystified as we were with the Lagonda.
I think now that I ought really to have driven more cheap
'bread-and-butter' cars during my active years as a designer, and
indeed it was not even my choice that I drove one model almost daily
for several years. It came about in this way.
After I had been 'bought' by Rolls-Royce and told to hand over
to Jack Barclay my own 8-litre car, I found myself in the unusual
position of being without personal transport. This was the first time
since about 1910, when cars were still comparatively rare anyway, that
I had not had one. It was a curious feeling. I had to use buses and
Tubes, and I didn't like this much, so I took to walking instead,
which was probably better for me, but rather slow. At that time I
could barely have afforded the down payment on the cheapest on the
market, and though I hope I didn't tell anyone my dilemma, Billy
Rootes must have divined the reason behind my curious and
uncharacteristic new habit of tramping from point to point about
London.
Billy Rootes (now Lord Rootes, of course) had been an active and
successful agent for Bentleys, and I knew him quite well by then; well
enough, anyway, for him to be able to ask me, without so much as a
blush, whether I wouldn't mind doing him a favour. 'I'd be very
grateful if you'd try this car,' he told me on the telephone one
day. 'I want your honest opinion on it.'
The car in question was one of the new Hillman Minxes, and for
that particular week-end, and for almost every weekend for months
afterwards, a Minx or one of their larger cars used to be made
available to me. This was not only a great convenience, but I could
quite honestly tell him that I thought the Minx was a very nice little
car.
I have never forgotten this kindly and thoughtful gesture of
Rootes at a time when things were not going so well for me. He has
not only deserved all the success he has had, but has reached his
present distinguished position by honesty and integrity as well as
kindness. I should doubt if he has any enemies.
Some months later I was able to purchase a Minx for myself, on
the specially favourable terms Rootes offered me, and from then until
the beginning of the war I was never without one, although they were
really my wife's cars.
I must say, though, that I was rather doubtful about going to the
South of France in a Hillman Minx after always doing the journey
previously in somewhat swifter and more robust machines. However, I
was lucky to have a car at all, and set out with my wife, a
considerable weight of luggage and some nervousness. But I was soon
surprised at how game and robust the Minx was, and how effortlessly
one could drive 350 miles in a day in it. It was hardly a grand
tourer, but the only trouble we had was with tyres, suffering five
punctures by the time we reached Le Mans, where I purchased some more
suitable ones.
A Standard 8 scarcely seemed a suitable machine for the long trek
to the sun, either; but, like the Minx, it surprised me by its
willingness and ability to slog along all day at a reasonable average.
I had one of these for a short time after the war, and did many
thousands of miles in it. The road-holding was hardly brilliant, and
of course it was never intended to suffer the liberties I took with it
on one hurried return from the South of France, but it was quite a
good little car.
The only car I drive regularly now is the nice little Morris
Minor, of which more later.
<2>
THE four-wheeled vehicle with its internal combustion engine
that we call the motor car has given me much pleasure, as well as pain
and disappointment. But I am not sure now whether I do not resent the
manner in which it has intruded, filling far too much of my life and
leaving me with insufficient time to explore so many other fields in
which I am interested, like meteorology and wireless telegraphy.
Perhaps I regret now a little that I made the motor industry my
profession, if only because for so long the machines filled my life to
the exclusion of almost everything else. I sometimes wonder if I
should not have stuck to those fine, powerful and friendly things-
locomotives.
The locomotive started it all for me, and if the railways had
provided me with a living to the standards I considered necessary, I
should probably have stuck with them. But it was a sad parting, and I
always missed them through the years of aero-engine and car designing.
It was, in fact, while I was working on locomotives at Doncaster that
I became a motor-bicycling enthusiast; and I certainly got more pure
fun out of the motor bicycle than I ever got from any of my cars,
although I willingly accept that sport on two wheels is essentially
for the young, and for me it was only a sport, with no commercial
purpose behind it.
I look back now with great affection on those days of
motor-bicycle competition in Edwardian times, before I was afflicted
by the car 'bug'. All the events run by the Auto Cycle Union and
Motor Cycling Club possessed an excellent spirit of friendly,
co-operative, uncommercialized competitiveness. I do not remember a
single hill-climb, sprint, trial or Brooklands race in which this
spirit was not present. It was not unusual to see competitors helping
one another by the roadside, or making last-moment adjustments to one
another's machines just before a race.
I discovered very sharply just how tough competition work was
when, without any previous experience, I entered my 3-h.p.
Quadrant for the London-Edinburgh Trial. This Quadrant, with its
surface carburettor, was rather like an unreliable and uncomfortable
present-day motorized bicycle to drive. Any healthy young man today
would gladly take his motorized bicycle from London to Edinburgh; that
would be no great achievement, if quite hard work pedalling up some of
the steeper hills. But we had to do this journey to a tight schedule
on roads that in places seemed not to have been touched since they
broke up after the Roman occupation. It took a day and night to
accomplish, and the only food was at the control points; but I was
always too late at these to have time to eat and did the trip on
apples and chocolate as I went along. To my astonishment, I got a
gold medal, too!
I did a lot of these endurance trials after this, enjoying both
the spirit behind them and the sense of independent competitiveness
out on the open road that they inspired. I did them mostly on Rexs
and Indians; London to Exeter, London to Land's End and back several
times, London to Plymouth and back; and each was a really testing
challenge to your endurance and your aptitude, for, of course,
breakdowns were frequent.
Some of the hill-climbs, too, were really devastating, and the
competition very close, with a fifth of a second often separating the
three or four fastest times. Events I remember particularly were
those run at Kop Hill near Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire and at
Sharpenhoe near Luton, and of course those great runs up Snaefell in
the Isle of Man after the Tourist Trophy races. As these became more
popular their importance became recognized by the factories, and works
teams began to appear.
Naturally these works teams soon dominated the hill-climbs, and I
had great sport as an independent trying to beat them. With
experience I began to get the hang of tuning my 5-h.p. Indian,
lightening the pistons and putting up the compression and generally
fiddling, until I began to put up faster times than the works riders,
which gave me more pleasure than anything. In fairness I should add
that I got every sort of help from the factory, who were quite happy
so long as an Indian won!
Motor-bicycle racing at Brooklands was a tame business after the
T.T. and hill-climbs. Brooklands races were usually short
sprints or one-hour events, with the results depending less on the
riders than the machines. There was not much finesse involved in
racing on Brooklands, except perhaps in avoiding the worst bits of
surface. I have never believed that Edge's run on the Napier soon
after it was opened was responsible for the poor surface from which
Brooklands suffered. This was always worse towards the top of the
bankings, and I don't think that the builders ever succeeded in
satisfactorily blending this top section. Even in the earliest days
they always seemed to be mending parts of the tracks, and this was not
always as well done as it could have been, with the consequence that
it never got over this roughness.
# 2008
[212 TEXT G25]
I know I felt I had to put into few words everything that I had
been brought up to believe in throughout my life. This seemed an
impossible and almost a ridiculous task. I wrote very little and very
quickly. 'I am a lifelong vegetarian'- 'I believe in the
biblical injunction "thou shalt not kill"'- 'I believe man
is a rational being'- I said I was willing to do any sort of work
in the Red Cross or St. John Ambulance Brigade, but that I was not
willing to serve in the Army, even in the R.A.M.C., where I
should be under military discipline.
I shall not describe my feelings as a few weeks later I appeared
before the Northampton Tribunal in the Town Hall, except to say that I
was very shy and quite inexperienced in words. My father went with
me. I sat on a chair in a gangway opposite The Tribunal members with
a large number of the public on either side. The proceedings were
brief and simple: I was questioned on what I had written in my
application form and about the work I was doing; my father supported
my views; and the member of The Tribunal who asked me about my pay
appeared satisfied that it was 1/6d. a day. There was no hectoring
and no bullying.
I was given exemption conditional upon my continuing my work. I
asked no more. I was not asking for a logical world.
But there was the world without as well as the world within. For
the first time in my life I was living in the country where I could
see the beauty of the trees in winter and the slow coming of spring.
I had seen spring before but never the changes day by day in the
countryside: I was moved by the awakening of the elms, the budding of
the oaks, and the tracery of the beeches; and I found a communion with
Nature greater than that with man, and I saw that man could not
disturb Nature's harmony or even separate himself entirely from that
harmony.
On my half-days I explored the countryside on foot or on my
bicycle; I visited Castor and Wansford in England; I saw Oundle and
the great church at Fotheringhay, and the quiet stone of Stamford
beside the magnificence of Burghley. I thought of John Clare as I
cycled through Helpstone, and from the narrow Fen roads I had distant
views of Ely in the setting sun. I saw my native countryside as I had
never seen it before.
But if the work of Nature suggested harmony, I saw little harmony
in the world of man at war. But I lived in the companionship and
friendliness of common soldiers in the little hospital community. I
ate with them, I talked with them and I took them out in their chairs.
They were Regulars, Reservists, Territorials and Kitchener's Men. I
learnt the names and badges of the regiments, I heard the different
accents, I heard of rivalries and quarrels.
I saw the wounded men arrive, recover, and get their ticket: they
told me what John Bull said, as if Bottomley were a Biblical
prophet; I was in a literary world of Elinor Glyn, Marie Corelli and
Victoria Cross; I learnt to distinguish Roman Catholics by the
forthrightness and foulness of their language; and I learnt something
of the simplicity and the credulity of the common soldier.
I lived in a world of Army slang- of char, burgoo and pawnee, of
mush and rooti, and of pozzywallahs and squarepushing; and I also met
a rich Anglo-Saxon world of words and experiences that had no meaning
for me.
As I wrote letters for some of the illiterate ones, or read
letters which they had received, I felt lost in the simple world of
sex in which they lived. I remember my blushes when a young soldier
asked me to read a letter to him; it was from a servant girl,
addressed from 'the Precincts, Peterborough' and started quite
simply 'I wish I was in bed with you'. I was shown the little
cottage across the fields where a local prostitute lived, heard of her
technique for keeping her husband away and I knew her likely customers
among the troops. I was introduced to what I had never really
believed existed when the tough-looking Irish Reservist with the
smashed elbow, the doorkeeper of a Dublin Hotel, showed me his
notebook with the list of prostitutes' names and addresses for his
hotel guests.
The Easter Rebellion in Ireland brought a tense atmosphere, the
Irish soldiers became centres of interest with small groups in excited
conversation or argument and there was quarrelling among the
washers-up over their extra beer. A few sat alone in their suffering.
I heard of life at the Front from men who had been in the
Expeditionary Force. An old Regular Soldier sat talking to me one
day. His experiences of war had not shocked him or embittered him,
but they had made him see something else in human nature, something
that he had not realized existed before. He had invented a word to
describe some of the things he had seen: it was brutalitarianism.
As I lived with the wounded men I found a friendship and a
kindness that I had never met before and a sympathy that bridged our
differing attitudes to war.
There is the picture of the Long Gallery as I saw it the first
evening in the soft lighting of the oil-lamps and the little lamps on
the lockers, with the blue uniforms, the Steinway Grand and the
paintings.
Then there is another picture in the morning light when the wards
are tidied for the doctor's round, the nurses are busy, the men are in
bed or standing by their lockers, and the talk is of lead-swinging and
of tickets. The regular visits by Dr. Walker and the inspections by
Colonel Openshaw or Medical Red Hats from London or Cambridge, or by
Harvey Reeves and his staff from Northampton, all mean extra care in
sweeping floors and polishing boilers.
Some of the surgeons never speak to the men but look at the
tortured flesh as though it were a bone dug up from the London Clay.
One morning a red-hatted gentleman calls for a pair of scissors as he
examines the front of a soldier's thigh, and without explanation
plunges the scissors into the wound, making a great gash in the flesh,
and the soldier shrieks and bounds into the air.
I cannot separate the men from their wounds and suffering. The
faces of the men, the wounds they bore, the beds they slept in and
even names still come back to me.
There was the garrulous Bracey with the red face, monotonous
voice, and stiff knee covered with wounds, who sat on the bed and told
his story: he said that every anaesthetic took six months off a man's
life; he had already had sixteen, so that meant he had lost eight
years- and there were still more operations to come; yet that was
better than being like Cain or Thompson who had each had a leg off, or
better still than the little Canadian whom I often carried about in my
arms because he had lost both his legs.
But it was Max the tall Irish Guardsman with his thin waxen face
and black hair who distressed me more than any of the others, as he
stooped and coughed as he walked about. He had a huge wound in his
chest which the sisters washed out with long tubes and hissing fluid,
and then he coughed and spat as he tried to get his breath. When
things were bad he sat alone in a corner of the sitting-room, looking
beaten and exhausted, a shadow of what he had been. He was like a
Saint from El Greco. Sometimes Max played billiards with the other
men, or had a short walk with his friend Mason or with one of the
nurses, or a quarrel would flare up and his Irish voice would be heard
shouting and swearing round the billiard table. When the news of the
Irish Rebellion came he sat silent and alone.
In the end of the Long Gallery was the pale-faced man- was it
the one called Manchester?- who limped about with something called
phlebitis, a word that carried a threat of disaster. In the second
bed by the window was the Gordon Highlander with the gaping cavity in
his calf. One summer evening after an operation, something happened,
the bed was soaked in blood and the wounded man lay there still and
white, whilst the sisters got tourniquets and dressings and I ran to
the other side of the golf course for Matron as the sun was setting.
By the coke-boiler was the old man who looked so cadaverous and
infinitely weary, and sometimes shuffled about the ward racked with
pain in his stomach. When Sister Dean said, ~'It's easy to see
what's wrong with him,' I was too distressed to confess my
ignorance. I was in the theatre a little later when Dr. Alec
operated but could do nothing. He found what Sister Dean had
expected.
There was the severe-looking man who went about with the heavy
plaster round his neck, looking a little sinister as he stiffly turned
his body to talk. The machine-gun bullet had entered his neck,
smashed up his spine and had come out through his open mouth. It
could hardly be believed. He carried an aura of fear and curiosity
because we all wondered what would have happened had his mouth been
shut.
Matron seems to enjoy herself as the men parade for their
medicines each day on the landing by the Long Gallery, and for a
moment the tired-looking Madonna even smiles, but I often wonder if
the medicines do any good as I think of my mother's words to the
maidservant, and I was still not quite certain that it had been the
outside drain that was meant.
The wounded men come in and we learn to know them. Then a day
comes when the doctor or the inspecting surgeon gives them their
discharge and they go off to other hospitals or to their Depots. The
procession goes on and on... Black Watch, Royal Fusiliers, Royal Horse
Artillery, Irish Guards, Bedfordshires, Northamptonshires,
K.O.Y.L.I., Manchesters, Lancashires, Gordon Highlanders....
It goes on and on.... The faces, the wounds, the badges.
As spring was turning into summer, an incident occurred which
momentarily brought the inner and outer world together. One Saturday
night there was a noisy crowd of men round the billiard table, pockets
bulging with flasks after a visit to Peterborough, and there were
oaths and swearing and cries of 'pot the red'. I was leaving the
Pillared Hall with the trolley when Mac lurched up to me, cue in hand,
and shouted, 'It's buggers like you who should be in the
trenches'. There were cries of 'shut up' to Mac as he staggered
back to the table. All was quiet when I returned.
On Sunday morning when I came down there was a letter for me on
the desk in the orderlies' room addressed in very childish writing.
It was a note from Mac asking forgiveness for what he had said the
night before. Would I please understand that he had been drunk and
had not meant it? My eyes filled with tears and the beauty of the
trees outside disappeared as I read the uneducated little note from
the Irish Guardsman.
That afternoon Mac and I walked slowly by the lake together,
stopping from time to time because of his coughing.
Soon afterwards Mac went to the Depot at Northampton, and whilst
there went to tea with my mother. Afterwards he sent her a photograph
of a group at the Fe?5te on June 1st, with Mrs. Fitzwilliam,
Thompson auctioning a bunch of flowers, an unknown figure in a
billycock hat, and Mr. Fitzwilliam looking on benevolently.
# 2012
[213 TEXT G26]
At last coming to terms with life, the rawness of the jungle I
mastered reduced the bible to a reassuring proportion in the
perspective of my destructive activity; and I was now fit for the
cathedral of the stable's calm- the light splitting through the
cracks in the door, the silence, and then the faint scratching that
might be a mouse, a rat, or leaves idly swinging, or else imagination.
After a time I heard the positive sound of my sister approaching,
and then she stood in the doorway, looking for me in the shadows, not
seeing me but knowing I was there, complaining to the darkness that I
might have waited for her. But I was too busily engaged on the
process of rehabilitation to want her company, and she was a woman-
suspect as such, and further suspect owing to her happy association
with holy writ that linked her with my father. It was not till the
middle of the week that I began to welcome her, caring for her until
Saturday night. Then, with the sound of the first church bell on
Sunday morning, all women were suspect again; and as the hour in the
box-pew remorselessly approached- the hour of avoiding looking at
Milly, at the same time trying to reconcile her with my visual world-
I knew it would only lead to the hour of afternoon when the sunlight
froze on the tops of the trees, immobilized as I by the bible.
Sometimes, instead of to the stable, I went upstairs to my
mother's room. As I opened the door I was aware of causing an
interruption, for my mother had the faculty of gazing beyond people
into space inhabited by other and more exciting ones than those who
were actually in the room. These people, whom I knew by the names
under drawings and verses in her autograph books- people my mother
had met in the heaven of foreign hotels- dwelt with her in her
loneliness still, so that the continued pleasure of their company was
denied her by my entry; or rather, I felt that if I had not banished
them, both they and I had lost something of our corporeality by being
in the room together. Yet the sense of a romantic past my mother
perpetuated in the face of the church peering in through the window,
brought back colour which (although it was divorced from any
discernible form) was more tangible than the bible I had escaped from.
My father was disappointed with me, I reasoned, on purely
technical grounds when he saw my failure to understand his teachings
as a lack of spirituality; whereas my mother found, not so much myself
as my lack of years, a source of chagrin. For the two years which
separated me from my elder brother were an insupportable barrier that
gave him greater access to her mind. And I believed my brother
somehow knew the members of the ski-ing party- the women in their
large hats and veils, the men posed against mountains as immovable as
their moustaches- that, in their 6passe-partout mount, broke
the faded roses on the wall. As I approached my mother I wished the
two dividing years could evaporate, and perhaps this afternoon I would
get to know the far-off friends who hovered towards her, and whom I
was ready to meet half-way. But although her recognition of me was
moderately welcoming, she was still looking beyond me, and whom-ever
she was considering appeared more like the gap between me and my
brother than a real personage.
What a ghastly thing was the length of a life, starting at random
and never catching up with another life that also started at random.
No life ever drew nearer another life, and the gaps between lives
remained the same, inflicting, as far as I could see, endless
childhood on me. There was no escape from age, and as my mother
opened a book to show me the pictures in it, I decided to abandon the
struggle to grow up.
The book was always the same book. It was called Alpine
Flowers and Gardens. My mother so treasured it she would not let me
look at it on my own, turning the pages over for me, protected by
tissue paper. The plates depicted flowers, yet the artist had painted
mountains, rocks, and glaciers behind some of them, and in one picture
had even added a chamois in the middle distance. Although it was
interesting to reach the chamois, I found the introduction of this
animal rather \6outre?2, for after all, the book, as it said on
the cover, was on alpine flowers and gardens, which should have surely
satisfied the artist. When we had passed the chamois, I wanted to
tell my mother something of my defeat over the Day of Atonement or the
parable of the mustard seed, but she did not pay attention as her
whole mind was now focused on the Edelweiss, Gentian, or Christ's
Thorn we had come to. So I too concentrated in forgetting my troubles
in the flowers.
Or, as a substitute for Alpine Flowers and Gardens, my mother
would open a portfolio of water-colours and become lost in her former
life- the full measure of a past that their contours described for
her especially. Here again I felt the presence of a veil separating
me from them in the same way as from the photograph of the ski-ing
party. The silver water of a lake caught in the shifting light of an
anonymous morning, a chalet perched on a slope smothered in flowers,
were fully credible- but the fact that my mother had actually stood
by the lake, had actually climbed up to the chalet, made them entirely
hers. And the countries her paintings translated into personal
property were more remote than those in the atlas- described once and
for all, and equally for everyone.
On the whole I preferred looking at Alpine Flowers and Gardens
which mollified the remains of the afternoon for me, if not with the
theatrical intensity of decapitating the cow-parsley that guarded the
entrance to the stable. And although we sought different rendezvous-
my mother hankering for the past, and I the future- there was a
voiceless understanding, and also something conspiratorial in our
activity. For my father treated my mother's horticultural interests
with gruff contempt, and thus, as she slowly continued to turn the
pages, the book seemed to speak for her, and to gainsay my father and
his bible.
Yet the two books, although they suggested a clear-cut issue
between my parents, in reality furthered my bewilderment. For why, I
asked myself, since my father scoffed at my mother's interest in
flowers, did he encourage mine in insects and birds. I was sure he
had little concern for natural history himself, yet he made a special
journey to Douglas to buy me books on the subject, and encouraged me
to enter my observations in a notebook. I could only conclude he was
so mystified I displayed any enthusiasm whatever that he welcomed
natural history as a possible path to the salvation he desired for me.
The grass in the top field was brittle and brown, silvered by a
soft wind that went through it like a comb and made it nod and sway
with the very essence of summer. It was summer at last, an endless
summer of drifting pollen and gleams and flashes in lazy trees that
surrounded the field and cast their jangled shadows, drowsy and
unnumbered across it. A cloud stood in the sky, and there was no
reason for it; so it gently left it. The field spoke and murmured in
its sleep, and the sharp cries of birds were reminders of things to do
and things which could be just as well left undone, for the sense of
time had stopped.
My sister and I had given up looking for the corn-crakes whose
tantalizing cries, sounding so near and so far, were deceptive as the
grass itself and the tremors that turned it to a sea where the fins of
fishes darted, hither and thither, confusing the whereabouts of the
birds. So we sat on the wall at the top of the field, surveying this
sea that hid their calls till they became but a part that accompanied
the general noise of summer. The corn-crake was fabulous and its
voice had ceased to issue from the throat of a particular bird,
exactly and tersely described in the book of birds, with its name in
Roman letters followed by its Latin name in italics. Yet, the next
morning the voice was still in the field and surely to-day we would
see the corn-crakes. But we never did, and day after day the birds
hid from view, and their voices tantalized.
Then on a Monday when the 'get ready gong' had been forgotten
and (because it was Monday) my father sat in double gloom, the
corn-crakes- as though at the lifting of a magic wand- appeared in
the garden itself. The male, barred with brown and buff (correct as
in the book), stood on a stump at the top of the daffodil bank, now
sear and yellow with summer. The female and a family of chicks pecked
in the grass below him, and, as we watched in silence at the window,
there was something foreordained in the unexpectedness of their
presence.
The unfortunate meal was over, the plates had been cleared away;
and we became happy partners in a terrific conspiracy of silence, with
the figure of the boy Samuel doing his best to suppress the ticking of
the clock in the shadow at the back of the room. My father and mother
stood at one side of the open window, and the rest of us at the other,
grouped around my grandmother who was needlessly holding her finger to
her lips. For our silence was natural, and we shared the easy
attachment that united the corn-crake family. The naturalness had
turned us into a picture opposite a picture, and our separate
characteristics had ceased to exist, harmonized in a shared interest.
It seemed to me rather like waiting for the Bishop, but now there
was no sense of anxiety, and no sense of searching for spirituality-
for the corn-crakes were beyond criticism. How long would this
sublime moment last? How long could the birds be undisturbed in their
task of arresting time? To-day was to-day, and yesterday was
yesterday. Yesterday had ordained to-day. I was with my father,
walking to Mrs. Kissack who lived in the farm beyond the fun-fair.
She had broken her leg, and when we got to the farm my father went up
the steps and I stayed in the road. Gorse flared like the headlights
of cars on the hills. A lark was singing high up, out of sight.
There was cow-dung on the road, goose-dung in the yard. (A flock of
geese was a gaggle of geese.) Two dogs with their tongues out were
lying in the shade of a wall where nettles sprang from the dust. A
man in a brown waistcoat was working in a brown field. Then he
stopped working and the lark stopped singing, the world stilled to one
piece- as now. Then he spat on his hands and took up his scythe
again, all of them busy again- the man working, the lark singing, the
dogs panting. On the way back my father had said something about the
harvest festival, but I couldn't remember what....
The male bird lifted his beak from his chest and cocked his head
in the air. Wind was ruffling the grass, and the corn-crakes (as I
knew they would have to) sensed danger, and then scuttled into the
field with the clumsy chicks tumbling over themselves as they followed
as best they could.
It was swiftly over. The garden, broken up into formal shapes
and levels, was ordinary again; and the church spire, coming to life
as it jutted through the trees, frowned at the triviality of our
preoccupation.
# 2019
[214 TEXT G27]
<7>
What actually developed was so much in the interests of all the
three that we may be pretty certain that it was contrived, rather than
that it developed naturally out of the situation. Catherine having
been cast out, Georgina reigned in her stead undisputed queen of the
home, the children, and all official social affairs, as though indeed
she were the official wife, while Ellen held any emotional sway over
Charles himself, in the background. So the reputations of all three
were safeguarded, and the convenience of all three met to a nicety.
Georgina was quite clever enough to appreciate the difficulties
of Charles, herself and Ellen, and to solve them in the way this
clever arrangement smoothed them out for all parties. Forster, too,
that prudent man of the world and of business, while deploring the
situation that had arisen, might discreetly advise on the same lines.
For the continued success of Dickens as a household saint writing
virtuous books, divorce and re-marriage was out of the question;
besides, Georgina would not connive at her own deposition, while Ellen
might well recoil from becoming stepmother to girls of her own age and
a gang of young boys.
On this question Georgina and Forster may well have thought
alike. She drummed it into the children, as did Dickens, that "their
father's name was their best asset",- which was true enough. It
was virtually their only asset, and hers too. The welfare of the
children- and her own- was dependent upon that good name. And to
write his best both Forster and Georgina knew that Dickens needed a
quiet mind; freedom from care and worry; an efficiently-functioning
household; emotional and aesthetic satisfactions and companionships-
all that poor Catherine, in her miserable inadequacy, had failed in
providing.
When the storm broke, Georgina seems to have felt no qualms over
assisting actively in the sacrifice of her sister's happiness, or in
consolidating her own usurpation of her sister's husband, home and
children. In justice to her and in mitigation of her conduct, it
should be said that according to Dickens' emphatic testimony, for many
years she had striven to keep husband and wife together, in face of
Mrs. Dickens' expressed desires to leave her husband. But a wife's
expressed intention to desert her husband when jealous or annoyed is
common form, and is seldom taken too seriously, being regarded by most
husbands as meaning Mrs. Micawber's frequent declaration: "I never
will desert Mr. Micawber."
There is no reason to disbelieve Dickens' story of Georgina as a
mediator in the past; there may have been cogent reasons for her doing
her best to prevent a rupture in previous years. The failure of her
goodwill for her sister may have been a plant of gradual growth. For
a long time she may have believed, as Dickens did, that the fight (as
he unhappily called it) could only go on to the end of one or other of
the contestants, being released by death from the marital torments of
an irksome yoke. It may be that she needed time to consolidate her
own position both with Dickens and in the household generally, that
until her own place was established as supreme and unassailable she
did not want poor Kate to leave. It may [SIC] that once that was
secured she was willing, and even eager to see her go.
The cuckoo in the nest once firmly settled, and she having
ejected the mother-bird, one by one the baby-birds must be pushed out,
too. That is precisely what happened.
<8>
It is true that the eldest boy Charley was of an age to be
flying off and building a nest of his own. Both he and his father
agreed that he should go to the new nest of his mother to take care of
her. But there is less excuse for hustling out the second boy,
Walter, who at the age of sixteen, became a cadet in India, in the
service of the East India Company. His health could not stand the
climate, and he soon died in Calcutta.
The third son, Frank, after failing in attempts to be a doctor, a
farmer, a business-man, a lawyer and a journalist, left the country
for the Bengal police. The fourth, Alfred, was sent off to Australia.
The fifth boy, Sydney, left for the Navy and died after entering upon
unsatisfactory courses which Georgina said would bring him to certain
misery in this world, quite apart from what might be expected to
happen to him hereafter- on which question his affectionate aunt did
not commit herself. The sixth son, Henry, resisted all attempts to
dislodge him, and managed to maintain his position in the nest by
winning scholarships at Cambridge and keeping a steady inclination to
seek call to the Bar. But the youngest boy Edward, known to the
family as "Plorn," was also exiled in Australia like Alfred, though
there was especial weeping and gnashing of teeth over his emigration.
Except for Henry, the boys did little good.
Dickens had openly regretted the births of his later children,
saying- as we have seen- that they were compliments from their
mother that he could well have dispensed with, and even humorously
suggesting a special service of intercession at St. Paul's Cathedral
that he might be considered as having done enough towards the increase
of his country's population. His allusions to his wife's later
pregnancies were only too often in questionable, not to say, downright
bad, taste.
Fond as he was of very young children, the boys, as they became
older, were in his eyes decided encumbrances, and we can be pretty
certain that Georgina thought so too. Their cost and charges, he
declared, made his hair stand on end. Exile of one after another soon
relieved the pressure; and at last Gad's Hill was no longer "pervaded
by boys, every boy having an unaccountable and awful power of
producing himself in every part of the house at every moment,
apparently in fourteen pairs of creaking boots", according to the
distracted author. This, too, in spite of the most stringent home
discipline which the father personally enforced.
Father and Aunty Georgy having proved equal to the boys, the two
girls Mamie and Katey were less difficult. Mamie was more tractable
than her mother had been both to her father and her aunt; she cleaved
to them and deserted her mother from the first. Kate, as we have
seen, had more than a touch of her father's independence of spirit,
and had a concealed distrust of her virtuous aunt. She felt for her
mother and visited her in her affliction, though she was too much awed
by her father to protest or fight. But uncomfortable under the new
\6re?2gime, she left home as soon as she could, though it
involved making a loveless marriage with a young consumptive
bridegroom, her first husband Charles Alston Collins, the brother of
Wilkie.
So triumphed the cuckoo in the nest. Her nest at last!
Thereafter, for Georgina Hogarth, undisputed mistress of the
Dickens \6me?2nage, life was tranquil at Gad's Hill. Mamie
relieved her of much domestic duty, and there was a staff of servants
to do what was required. Social invitations to Dickens now almost
always included Georgina- Dickens saw to that- and she went about
with him a good deal, and since Mamie was fond of parties, she too,
was sometimes included. As to social invitations from Dickens, who
remained as social and convivial as ever, these were, of course
pre-eminently Georgina's administrative affair. In such matters, she
acquitted herself to perfection always.
As time went on, the scandal about her gradually died down. The
decorum of the Gad's Hill household over the years played a great part
in killing it. But that it was not forgotten is shown by the fact
that although Queen Victoria received both Dickens and Mamie at Court,
there was never any Court invitation for Georgina.
<9>
When Dickens, ageing beyond his years, worn by incessant toils,
anxieties and the financial burdens of helping relatives and friends,
and in declining health, rushed about the country and even went to
America again to give "readings" from his books to large and wildly
enraptured audiences to the vast enrichment of his banking-account,
Georgina stayed at home and received vivid letters recounting his
adventures and triumphs. Catherine gone, and most of her children
also, she was able to live quietly and comfortably while keeping a
steadying influence upon the great man who was everything to her in
life.
As the years rolled by, her influence over her brother-in-law
strengthened still more, as indeed one might expect, knowing the force
of habit. His welfare was her sole and constant preoccupation; no
wife or mother could have been more solicitous. When he was absent
from home, every fluctuation in his health was faithfully recounted to
her, and Georgina and the children were ever upon his pen as once Kate
and the children had been. And his "pair of petticoats" for public
inspection, though there might be another petticoat in the emotional
background, were now Georgina and Mamie- and what could be more
outwardly respectable?
It was they who went to the great farewell dinner held in London
when, in 1867, he was invited to visit America for the second time.
His visit was a tremendous success, and it was they who welcomed him
back to Gad's Hill upon his return.
Georgina was not in the company of Dickens when he met with his
first railway accident at Staplehurst, as were Ellen Ternan and her
mother. But when Dickens was reading in Ireland he had taken Georgina
and Mamie on the excursion with him. When the return train from
Belfast met with an accident, they were all three in it, and flung
themselves on the floor of their carriage to avoid injury. It was a
horrid experience, and must have reminded Georgina of adventure in
Italy long, long ago.
Then as Dickens' health worsened owing to his long-continued
exertions and the strain of giving public readings, and it became
clear that he might be on the verge of a stroke, his doctors insisted
on his giving up these exhausting public appearances. Realising his
position, as his health obliged him to do, he made his will.
In this remarkable document, his high opinion of, and his care
for, Georgina are clearly revealed. He left his "grateful
blessings" and more money to her than to anyone else, namely +8,000
free of legacy duty, as well as most of his personal jewellery,
household trinkets, and private papers. She was made an executrix,
her partner in carrying out the will being the indispensable Forster.
His wife Catherine was left only the interest on +8,000 and could
not touch the principal, whereas Georgina's legacy was an absolute
one; and instead of grateful blessings, there was implied reproach for
the wife. As to Ellen Ternan, who as Dickens' supposed mistress might
perhaps have been expected to have done better for herself than
Georgina, she, though named first in the will, was left merely
+1,000.
In addition, Georgina was the subject of a whole-hearted
panegyric in the will as "the best and truest friend man ever
had"- which contrast [SIC] sharply with silence about Ellen
(which however upon any theory is understandable) and cold complaint
as to the past expensiveness of his wife Catherine and their children.
Further, he left Georgina to the care of his children in
pontificatory words as follows:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
"I solemnly enjoin my dear children always to remember how much
they owe to the said Georgina Hogarth, and never to be wanting in a
grateful and affectionate attachment to her, for they know well that
she has been, through all the stages of their growth and progress
their ever useful, self-denying and devoted friend."
[END INDENTATION]
Tribute could hardly be more emphatic. But if the debt to
Georgina was so obvious, it would seem desirable to spare Georgina's
blushes over her superiority to her sister, the children's mother.
However, one or two of the children such as Mamie and Harry certainly
heeded their father's injunction, but after his death there came a
time when even Mamie failed in devotion to her "Aunt Georgy".
# 2041
[215 TEXT G28]
Opera, symphony, all sorts of instrumental and vocal music but not
chamber music. His reading was considerable in classical and English
and French literature. He knew Dickens by heart, but ranked "Vanity
Fair" of Thackeray the greatest English novel of his period. He was
sceptical of contemporary writing as he was of the latest composition.
I guessed that in politics he was a conservative- with freedom to be
against the Government whatever its colour or party. He loved good
food and good wine, and his cigars, but not to excess. No alcohol had
power over his quick balanced mind. I was taken aback when he
reflected one day on his career: "Do you know, I sometimes wonder if
I haven't wasted myself to some degree by giving myself almost wholly
to music. For music does not ever encourage abstract thinking or
pungency of comment or dialectical agility. Perhaps I was really born
for the legal profession."
I pointed out that in music he was an absolutist, that he had no
patience with music which carried extra-musical significances, and
that also he had no patience with conductors, or any other performer,
who found an argument, a dialectic or the faintest hint of a
metaphysic in music. He didn't seek beyond the notes and the forms of
music for some inner meaning. Often he gave me the impression that he
was not so much the "possessed" artist in music as the connoisseur,
collecting composers as he collected his furniture and plate. He
fondled music, handled it carefully and dotingly- unless it was of
the sort that protested too much, assaulted fastidiousness of taste
and sensitivity. "Mahler? Wagner? Bruckner?" he would say,
cross-examining me. "They are not civilised. Mahler exposes his
self-pity; Wagner, though a tremendous genius, gorged music, like a
German who overeats. And Bruckner was a hobbledehoy who had no style
at all. All three of them knew nothing about poise or modesty. Even
Beethoven thumped the tub; the Ninth symphony was composed by a kind
of Mr. Gladstone of music."
All that doesn't imply that he was at all short of masculinity,
red corpuscles. He could ride roughshod over his dislikes, people or
compositions. Given the impulse from the right source, his musical
energy- (his physical energy too!)- concentrated into artistic and
proportionate shapes. His interpretation of the "Requiem Mass" of
Berlioz has seldom been equalled for emotional intensity and
sure-minded control of the outlines. His temperament and intelligence
responded more readily to Latin than to German stimulations, aesthetic
or other. Sometimes he gave his conscience a holiday. At Liverpool
an inordinately heavy programme was goading the orchestra to open
rebellion, especially as Sir Thomas prolonged the interval. The
concert was taking place on the eve of the world's greatest
steeplechase. When Sir Thomas returned to the platform he immediately
sensed the temper of his players- and the next work to tackle was the
"great C major" symphony of Schubert. Sir Thomas extended his
arms, the baton militant. "Now, gentlemen," he said, "now for the
Grand National." The performance was magnificent. One gust of his
humour dispersed all animosities.
He was not, as I say, liked or admired by everybody while he was
the spruce disdainful Mr. Thomas Beecham. He was suspected of
Dandyism and, in fact, he was the last of the Dandies. He kept
audiences waiting at his concerts. In Manchester, during one of his
opera seasons there, he kept the audience waiting half an hour for a
performance of Isidore \de Lara's "Nai"l." In those years his
manners at a symphony concert did not appeal to the taste of the
Establishment of British music. The music critic of the "Manchester
Guardian"- Samuel Langford- took him to task on account of his
acrobatic gestures as he conducted. At one concert his baton flew
from his hand and nearly impaled the first trombone. Moreover, he was
suspected of "amateurism"- long before Toscanini actually called
him an "amateur." A complex character!- Falstaff, Puck and
Malvolio all mixed up, each likely to overwhelm the others. Witty,
then waggish; supercilious, then genial, kindly, and sometimes cruel;
an artist in affectation yet somehow always himself. Lancashire in
his bones, yet a man of the world. Rachmaninoff told a friend that he
was unhappy about a forthcoming concert. "The conductor-
so-and-so- he has no temperament. It is always so in England. Too
many the English \3gentlemens." "But," his friend pointed out
"last year you said your concert with Sir Thomas Beecham was one of
the best and happiest of your life." "Ah," rejoined
Rachmaninoff, "but Sir Thomas is not one of your English
\3gentlemens."
In the prime of his life and career, Sir Thomas was as closely
associated with Manchester as with London or anywhere else. During
the 1914-1918 war he kept the city's music alive by the sparkle,
vivacity, and sway of his personality. His concerts with the Halle?2
Orchestra and his opera productions in Quay Street elevated the city
far above provincial levels. Until he dominated the scene
Manchester's music was mainly of German extraction, as we have noted
already and will probably note again. Richter had not served
Manchester in a backward-looking way. He conducted all the symphonic
poems of Richard Strauss in one season at a time when- 6mirabile
dictu!- Strauss was considered as "modern," iconoclast and
unmusical as any later Scho"nberg, Webern, or Boulez. Stanford went
so far as to compose a musical satire of Strauss- "An Ode to
Discord." Ernest Newman abjured us to listen to Strauss
"horizontally" while the battle-section of "Ein Heldenleben"
was played. It is nowadays generally forgotten that Strauss came to
renown or notoriety in this country exclusively on the strength of his
symphonic poems. Outside London "Der Rosenkavalier,"
"Salome" and "Elektra" were little known here.
But Richter's enterprise ended with the "progressive German
composers." It is true that he was the first conductor to put Elgar
on the musical map, the reason being, I fancy, that in Elgar he heard
here and there the echo of his own native musical language. To a
deputation of Manchester's youthful 6avant garde, demanding
some representation at the Halle?2 Concerts of modern French music,
Richter replied, "3Zthere iss no mod'n F-french Musik."
Beecham brought pagan allurements to the Halle?2,
non-"classical"- Scene =4 of Act =2 of Delius's "A Village
Romeo and Juliet," Stravinsky's "Firebird" suite, Borodin's
"Polovtsian Dances," all in the same programme. Between the two
wars he naturally modulated to a conversation indicative of the fact
that he was now old enough to put behind him childish things. But
never would he desert Delius. On the "classical" side he
discovered Haydn for English ears. He even proposed introducing to
Manchester Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps"; but the
orchestral parts went astray. The Halle?2 Concerts Committee asked
for a substitute piece at short notice. Beecham suggested a Beethoven
symphony. No; already the season's programme had included enough
Beethoven. They asked Sir Thomas to conduct Mendelssohn's
"Italian" symphony. "Impossible," replied Sir Thomas, "quite
impossible, with only two rehearsals." "But," argued the
committee, "you were content with two rehearsals for 'Le
Sacre.'" "Quite so," said Sir Thomas blandly, "I could play
'Le Sacre' well enough after two rehearsals. For the
'Italian' symphony five at least is absolutely necessary."
His creation of the London Philharmonic Orchestra absorbed him
and his time in the 1930s; consequently his appearances in Manchester
became intermittent. After the resignation of Sir Hamilton Harty in
1933 as the permanent conductor of the Halle?2 Concerts, the
orchestra declined in its ensemble. Another permanent conductor was
needed, but the Halle?2 Society were reluctant to appoint one for
fear of losing Sir Thomas's presence altogether. And Sir Thomas
scared the society by attacking the B.B.C., forecasting that
broadcasting would keep people away from concerts. As critic of the
"Manchester Guardian," in Manchester in the 1930s, I pointed out
week by week the falling away of the orchestra in unity of style. But
my friendship with Sir Thomas, resumed soon after our argument about
his "cuts" in "Der Rosenkavalier," was now apparently
unclouded. I was vastly surprised and amused to learn from Michael
Kennedy's history of the Halle?2 Concerts that in 1937 Sir Thomas
wrote to the society stating "that he refused to conduct any concert
to which Mr. Neville Cardus was invited." 6Et tu, Sir
Thomas! And all the time I imagined my notices were generously kind
about him. Never did he refer to this letter to the Halle?2 Society,
demanding my excommunication, at any of my subsequent meetings with
him, not even during our day by day, night by night expressions of
brotherly love in Australia.
It was round about 1931 that he told me he was about to form a
new orchestra in London. "But where," I asked, "where do you hope
to find the players?- the B.B.C. Orchestra has taken the
best." "Maybe," he admitted "the B.B.C. has indeed
attracted the best known instrumentalists of Great Britain. But
you'll see!" In 1932 the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra played for
the first time at the Queen's Hall. The performance of the
"Carnaval Romain" overture of Berlioz was staggeringly
brilliant. A highly finished performance of Mozart's "Prague"
symphony almost jerked me from my seat when Sir Thomas brought in the
D major principal theme, after the introduction, at the same adagio
tempo, instead of allegro. My notice next day called for some
explanation of this curious treatment or maladjustment. In his flat
in Hallam Street, and while he was still in bed, working on a score,
he took away my breath (not for the first or the last time) by
assuring me that his tempo for the main theme after the introduction
was authentic. "You are probably acquainted only with the published
score... but I have seen the original manuscript written by Mozart's
own hand..." All the same, the next time he conducted the
"Prague" symphony the theme in question was allegro all right and
unmistakably. He was in a word, capable de tout!
Apart from some piano lessons in boyhood he was self-taught.
He states the contrary in his biography, "A Mingled Chime," where
he writes, "In public accounts of my career has frequently appeared
the assertion that I am almost entirely self-taught and, beginning as
a rank amateur, have attained a professional status with some
difficulty after a long and painful novitiate. Nothing could be more
remote from the truth. It is possible that at the age of twenty I
might have failed to answer some of the questions in an examination
paper set for boys of sixteen in a musical academy; but probably I
should fail with equal success to-day; and I venture to say that a
tolerable number of my most gifted colleagues would do no better. On
the other hand, owing to my travels abroad and wider associations with
musicians here and there, my miscellaneous fund of information was
much more extensive than that of others of my age." For Sir Thomas,
this is positively nai"ve. There was music of sorts in his St.
Helens home; his father practised music "as a hobby." Sir Thomas
substantially educated himself, as Elgar did, and Ernest Newman and
Delius, perhaps the most cultured and influential figures in our
music's history since Purcell.
He came down from Oxford after only a year or so there because,
as he explained to me, "there was no musical life broad and humane
enough. As for the rest of my studies at Oxford, they were not
attractively conducted. And I could discover no mind or intelligence
among my fellow undergraduates which didn't indicate permanent
adolescence. In those days, even to-day in fact, the average
University-educated Englishman is a case of arrested development,
emotionally, aesthetically and sexually."
His own capacity for deep feeling was not often or obviously
hinted at in his studied deportment away from the concert platform or
desk at the opera. He gave unmistakable proof of it in my company
only once, during one of the last evenings I spent with him alone a
few months after Lady Betty's sudden death.
# 2011
[216 TEXT G29]
<[=1]>
Helen Keller was born in 1880 in Alabama. Until she was
nineteen months old she enjoyed a perfectly normal infancy. At the
age of six months she amused people by greeting them with ~"How
\2d'ye", and delighted her proud parents by shouting ~"TEA, TEA,
TEA". Her face wore smiles for everyone. In her cot she wriggled
and squirmed and chuckled when anyone spoke to her, and the sight of
birds, flowers, butterflies, or the sun glinting through overhanging
trees in the summertime, sent her into shrieks of happiness. She
loved bright objects and pleasant sounds, including that of her own
voice. She began to walk at the age of twelve months when she
unexpectedly slipped down from her mother's lap after she had been
lifted out of the morning tub, and ran to catch patterns of sunlight
dancing on the bathroom floor. She ran until she lost her balance,
staggered and fell; but, to her delight, she tumbled right into the
focus of the sunbeam.
At the age of nineteen months, this adorable, fascinating child
had a mysterious illness, which they called acute congestion of the
stomach and brain, which left her blind, deaf and dumb. Without a
moment's warning, her bright world was blotted out and she was plunged
into a darkness as black and silent as the grave.
Only by a great and painful effort of the imagination can we
begin to understand the next five years in Helen's life. Although she
says little about it, that terrible period will never be erased from
her memory. She remembers the dry, hot painfulness of her eyes when
she first lost her sight, the agony and bewilderment of waking and
being unable to see, of tossing, half-asleep, in pain and fretfulness;
the tenderness of her mother's hand trying to soothe her, but the
utter desolation of being unable to hear her mother's voice or see her
face, and the terrible frustration of being unable to make her wants
known. The reader should pause and try to enter into the plight of a
child of nineteen months suddenly plunged into such a perplexing and
frightening situation.
During the next five years Helen tried times without number to
establish some sort of contact with the outside world but all in vain.
It was like being thrust into the dark, silent, innermost dungeon of
a prison with no hope of visitors and no possibility of escape. She
tried to free herself from the impenetrable silence and darkness which
held her captive, but to no effect. Her deep frustration often threw
her into tempests of passion which, during those five years recurred
more and more frequently, until they were convulsing her daily,
sometimes hourly, driving her at times almost beside herself. And
often after such tempests, she would feel her way around the garden to
hide her hot face in the flowers she could not see, or creep into her
mother's loving arms and sleep from sheer emotional and physical
exhaustion.
One day when she was six years and nine months old, Helen vaguely
felt that something unusual was afoot in her home, as though some
special visitor was expected. During recent weeks her moods had been
nearly all anger and bitterness. The wordless cry of her soul for
human communication, which she could make no one understand, reduced
her to a feeling of utter misery and helplessness. Of course she did
not understand her own condition, or her fundamental frustrations; she
felt only her maddening inability to communicate with her parents,
while they, on their side, were broken-hearted that they could find no
way of talking to their child, no way of getting a single word into
Helen's mind or heart.
But this day, as Helen stood on the steps at the front entrance
to their home, she felt the touch of a new hand, and a stranger
embraced her.
It was Anne Sullivan.
The tremendous debt which Helen and blind people the world round
owe to Anne Sullivan is beyond computation. For it was Anne who
rescued Helen from her world of darkness and misery, and enabled her
to bring deliverance to countless fellow sufferers.
Anne was born in poverty, and her eyes were infected from birth.
Her mother died when Anne was eight years old, leaving three children
who were placed in the workhouse. It was here that Anne spent the
next four years of her life, being allowed no social contacts save
that of fellow paupers. One of them told her that blindness entitled
her to go to a special school, but no one was interested in the
education of a blind pauper child until Anne literally threw herself
at the feet of the chairman of the visiting committee and pleaded "I
want to go to school." The plea was heard. At fourteen she was
sent to the Perkins Institution for Blind Children in Boston. While
there she had two surgical operations which partially restored her
sight. She remained in the Perkins Institution for six years, and was
still there when the Director received a letter from Helen's parents
describing Helen's condition, and asking if he could supply a teacher
for her. Anne, twenty years of age, was sent.
Anne arrived at Helen's home with eyes red through overmuch
crying on the journey. She did not want the job of teaching a girl
who was blind, deaf and dumb. But she had no other job, and she was
without money; economic necessity compelled her to accept this
unwanted post.
But if Anne was despondent on arrival, she very soon forgot
herself in her new work. From the moment she embraced Helen on the
front porch, she devoted all the energy of her mind and body to the
service of her stricken charge. In complete self-effacement, sweeping
all self-pity aside, she gave herself to Helen, working tirelessly to
open lines of communications between the imprisoned child and the
world of people and nature about her.
<[=2]>
It was the day after Anne Sullivan's arrival that Helen learned
the finger language for the word "doll". Anne spelt it into her
hand very slowly and deliberately, and got Helen to imitate. Helen
did not know then that "doll" was the name of the gift Anne had
brought her the day before from the blind children in the Perkins
Institution; she thought she was learning some finger game, and played
it repeatedly until she could do it correctly. Then she felt her way
downstairs to show her mother the game. Other simple words were
taught her in the same manner during the following days- such words
as pin, hat, cup, sit, stand, walk- but as yet she had no idea what
they meant; no inkling that the finger work which spelt "pin" was
the name of the object, or that fingering which meant sit or stand had
any reference to those actions. The power of associating word with
object or action had not yet awakened in her.
A whole month passed in this way before Helen began to associate
the letters spelt into her hand with objects. The association came at
the end of a lesson in which Anne had tried to make Helen understand
that the word mug meant the object which she held, and water meant
that which the mug contained. But Helen simply could not understand,
and as Anne persisted, she grew annoyed and gave expression to her
annoyance by dashing her mug to the floor, smashing it to pieces. She
felt the broken fragments with her feet, and experienced a measure of
relief in doing so. The lesson was adjourned and they went out into
the sunshine. As they passed the well-house someone was drawing
water, and Anne placed Helen's hand into the stream pouring from the
spout of the pump, and spelt into her other hand the word water,
water, water. Anne continued to do this, at first slowly and then
rapidly, until it suddenly dawned on Helen's mind that water meant the
cool something flowing over her hand.
"That living word awakened my soul," said Helen many years
after, "gave it light, hope, joy, set it free." She now knew that
things had names, and she wanted to learn them all at once. "As we
returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver
with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange new
sight that had come to me." She learned many new words that same
day, including mother, father, sister, teacher. She felt that she was
at last in contact with the outside world.
She went to bed that night but was too happy to sleep.
During the following summer Anne took Helen on exploration walks,
discovering plants, flowers, and trees; Helen handling them, learning
their names, inhaling their scent, feeling them against her hand and
her face. Sitting in a field on the warm grass Anne described through
their sign language the countless things which Helen could not see.
With the new freedom of that summer Helen took to tree climbing,
and loved it. But one day Anne left her sitting aloft in the branches
of a cherry tree, while she returned to the house to fetch lunch.
While Anne was away the weather suddenly changed, breaking into a
violent thunderstorm. Helen tells how she felt the warmth go out of
the atmosphere, by which she knew clouds had come over the sun, how
she smelt the strange earth odour that precedes thunderstorms. She
was alone and she felt afraid. A sense of absolute isolation gripped
her. She felt cut off from friends; severed from the firm earth. Her
terror increased until she was in a state bordering on hysteria.
"There was a moment of sinister stillness, and then a
multitudinous stirring of the leaves," she says. "A shiver ran
through the tree, and the wind sent forth a blast that would have
knocked me off had I not clung to the branch with might and main. The
tree swayed and strained. The small twigs snapped and fell about me
in showers. A wild impulse to jump seized me, but terror held me
fast. I crouched down in the fork of the tree. The branches lashed
about me. I felt the intermittent jarring that came now and then, as
if something heavy had fallen and the shock had travelled up till it
reached the limb which I sat on. It worked my suspense up to the
highest point, and just as I was thinking the tree and I should fall
together, my teacher seized my hand and helped me down. I clung to
her, trembling with joy to feel the earth under my feet once more".
For some time after this the thought of climbing a tree alarmed
her, and she did not fully overcome her fear until the next spring.
Then as she was sitting alone one morning in the summer house, she
became aware of a beautiful fragrance filling the air. She recognised
it as the scent of the mimosa tree. She knew where that mimosa tree
stood- at the end of the garden near the fence at the turn of the
path, and she felt her way to it. She found it, "all quivering in
the warm sunshine, its blossom-laden branches almost touching the long
grass ...
"I made my way through a shower of petals to the great trunk,
and for one minute stood irresolute; then, putting my foot in the
broad space between the forked branches, I pulled myself up into the
tree.... I had a delicious sense that I was doing something unusual
and wonderful, so I kept on climbing higher and higher, until I
reached a little seat which somebody had built there so long ago that
it had grown part of the tree itself.
"I sat there for a long time, feeling like a fairy on a rosy
cloud. After that I spent many happy hours in my tree of paradise,
thinking fair thoughts and dreaming bright dreams."
# 2006
[217 TEXT G30]
On the day of the funeral I had to be awoken at seven a.m.
in order to arrive punctually at the church. Several streets in the
vicinity had been closed by police. They feared a repetition of the
extravagant scenes that had occurred when Valentino's embalmed body
was laid out in full evening dress for the public to visit. Thousands
had thronged Broadway. Children had been separated from their
parents, scores of people bruised and trampled. Several police
charges were made. Plate-glass windows were shattered by the pressure
of the crowd. Finally the mortuary doors had to be closed.
Fortunately on the morning of the funeral everything was quiet. I
arrived safely at The Little Church Around the Corner.
Ben Lyon was in charge of the ushers. We had little to do as the
church filled so quickly.
At the last minute Pola Negri arrived dressed from head to toe in
black. She was followed by two florists carrying an enormous blanket
of white violets. In purple violets was inscribed the message:
'With love from Pola.'
This tribute was placed upon the coffin, almost hiding it from
view. The coffin in question was a prodigious, ornate affair of
bronze. Outweighing its occupant by some 500 lb., it had cost
$10,000. The spectators were upset by the outsize wreath. On all
sides audible whispers of protest broke out: 'We can't see the
casket.'
The service was beautiful. Augmented by the chorus of the
Metropolitan Opera Company, the choir was led by the singing of
Benjamino Gigli, then at the height of his power.
Sobs could be heard over the entire church as the eight bearers
carried the casket from the altar. As they made their way down the
aisle, a young girl sprang from her seat, throwing herself in front of
them.
When they were almost at the door, the interruption was
repeated- this time by a little man, prostrating himself with a cry
of ~'I loved him more than anybody.'
A pathetic, jarring tribute to Valentino's extraordinary
universal popularity.
As an usher I was unable to sit with my wife. As I was slowly
making my way out of the church Mr Frank Campbell, owner of the
famous Campbell's Funeral Parlour which had handled all the
arrangements, sent a message asking me to meet him.
'Your wife has expressed a desire to see the Gold Room where
Valentino lay in state. Would you care to accompany us?'
By that time having had my fill of flowers, crowds, mourning, and
music, I replied rather tersely that that was the last thing I wanted
to do.
'If Madam wants me for anything important, I shall be lying in
state myself- at the Racquet Club.'
I had just finished my third martini when I was summoned to the
telephone by Mr Campbell.
'There has been a most unfortunate accident... regrettable piece
of carelessness on the part of my staff- '
'What happened?' I interrupted, anxiously.
'On throwing open the doors of the Gold Room for your wife,
which automatically turned on the lights, we came upon the naked
embalmed body of a man lying on the floor. He was awaiting the
assistant's return from lunch.'
Not altogether surprisingly, my wife had fainted.
Mr Campbell wanted to know what I was going to do about the
matter? I explained that I was hardly in a position to do anything at
all.
'My wife, you say, is in the Gold Room. I am here at the
Racquet Club.'
Several miles separated us.
'Are you still there, Campbell? Tell her that when she is well
enough to join me, she'll find me patiently waiting for her at the
bar.'
Though this was not exactly the last we saw of each other, it was
a definite prelude to our parting, when Constance decided to go alone
to the coast while I returned to Scotland.
<12>
Luigi, Ralph, Peto. Back
to America. The Tucker car. Queen Mary's Dolls' House. My father's
retirement.>
THE episode of our marriage was ending, as it were, by mutual
agreement, but the statutory requirements of British divorce in that
period demanded adultery. The evidence I set about supplying. This
proved more difficult than anticipated. However, my friend Wilfred
Egerton assured me it was really no problem at all, despite the lack
of a prospective co-respondent.
'I've just the girl for the job,' he said, 'charming and
attractive.'
The following Saturday afternoon I hired a Daimler with
chauffeur, despatching them to the lady's address. From there they
were to call for me at the club and we would set off for our
transitory liaison. The car was on time. Nimbly I nipped down the
steps of White's, only to stop dead in my tracks at a glimpse of the
lady. No! With her it would be quite impossible!
Taking a deep breath and summoning my politest manner, I opened
the car door, explaining that I was unavoidably detained. Would she
mind returning in about a quarter of an hour?
Dashing back into the Club, I searched out Rod Wanamaker, who
fortunately was there at the time. Explaining that Wilfred had landed
me with a woman of whom I could not stand even the sight, I begged Rod
to come as well.
'I can't bear it alone!'
He responded to my cry for help. The pair of us spent the night
in our sitting-room playing backgammon while the lady languished alone
next door. For the purpose of evidence I put in a pyjamaed appearance
at breakfast, when the waiter took due notice. Leaving an adequate
sum on the sitting-room mantelpiece plus a railway ticket for her
return to London, Rod and I caught the next train back to town.
Wilfred told me of the lady's subsequent comments over the
telephone. She asked why she had been sent on the trip at all.
'I don't think your friend Mackintosh knows a woman when he sees
one. Him and his boy-friend, they ought to be locked up!'
That being as it were that, it is not necessary here for me to
say anything further, except that the divorce went through and my
marriage to Constance ended without rancour upon either side. Indeed,
we have remained very good friends. She is still very much alive and
married to Walter Giblin, living in New York.
Probably I was too much of an individualist to make a success as
a star's husband. Whatever the reasons, which after all concerned
only ourselves, it was a romantic experience I shall never regret...
Being once more footloose and fancy free in London, I began to search
round for a fresh interest. This was to be the Embassy Club.
There will never again be a club like it. It was a Bond Street
annexe to Ascot's Royal Enclosure, as famous in its day as the '21'
club in New York, 'Le Jardin de Ma Soeur' in Paris, and the
Everglade's in Palm Beach.
In one way or another the Embassy featured in all my old friend
Michael Arlen's earlier novels. When his famous The Green Hat
appeared, at one single lunchtime at the Embassy there were no less
than five ladies in Chapeaux Verts, doubtless anxious to be
believed the inspiration of 'Iris Fenwick'. Quite as successful as
the book was the play of the same title which opened on September 2nd,
1925, starring Tallulah Bankhead.
Though the Embassy was open for lunch it was usually described as
a night-club. Unlike its forerunners it was eminently respectable.
Of course there were ladies whose reputations may have disturbed
certain matrons, but the said ladies had an elegance which added
lustre to the establishment.
How did I come to be connected with the Embassy Club?
One Bob Hornby suggested Wilfred Egerton, myself, and some others
taking over the 400 Club in Bond Street. It was being run by Arthur
Kelly, Charles Chaplin's London agent, who was finding the two
assignments over-much for one man.
Accordingly we formed a syndicate to buy the place, decorating it
in conservative style. Admission price was low; so was the annual
subscription. Success became instantaneous.
We renamed it the Embassy to suggest luxury. A great asset was
that one went from the street straight into the restaurant with its
dance floor, surrounded by comfortable banquette tables. The bar
downstairs was always crowded.
The real success of the place was due to the 6mai?5tre
d'hotel, Luigi Naintre. He had long been in charge of Romano's
and the Criterion. He came as managing director, our largest
shareholder. He was far more than just a restaurant manager; he was
an ambassador, a man of astonishing ability and tact.
Another notable feature was the music provided by Ambrose, who
was at the height of his fame.
From the prestige angle the Club was helped by the frequent
visits of the Prince of Wales and his brothers, the Dukes of York and
Kent. It was, I think, the first night-club to be frequented by
Royalty.
We had a subsidiary company called the Embassy Wine and Spirit
Company, supplying both the club and the public. Luigi's aptitude may
best be illustrated by the following anecdote. I was dining in the
club when Lord Sefton and his son, Hugh, came in and sat at the
opposite end of the room. Luigi talked to them while taking their
order for dinner.
When he came back to my table he said: 'You will be glad to
hear that I have just sold +10,000 worth of champagne to His
Lordship.'
How indefatigable Luigi was! He would leave for home at two in
the morning, rise again at five, in order to go to market and choose
everything himself. Twelve-thirty would find him back at the club,
suave, debonair, ready for the busy lunchtime session.
Embassy shareholders made a hundred per cent annual profit over a
period of some five years. We only sold out when compelled to do so
by Luigi's death. This was an occasion of great sorrow for us. His
was an impressive funeral at St Anne's, Soho. Thousands from every
sphere of life attended, and five Daimlers were required to carry the
flowers from the church to the cemetery.
Our club chef had a particular reputation for the way in which he
cooked \Gefu"lter fish- a Jewish dish, mixture of chopped
whiting, herring, halibut, cod, and mackerel, mixed with egg and
breadcrumbs. So much did one American, Jefferson Cohn, appreciate
this dish that when he was over in Paris he would have \Gefu"lter
fish flown over to him every Saturday!
Before finishing with the Embassy Club let me say a few words
about one of our most eccentric members, Ralph Peto. He came in one
morning before lunch with a polo boot on one foot and a slipper on the
other. Had he been unable to make up his sartorial mind or merely
forgotten to put on the second boot?
He talked to a horse-coper in the club bar. Ralph Peto owed the
man +5000 already and was abusively demanding an additional +500.
His language was not merely explosive, it was obscene. Wilfred
Egerton rebuked him mildly:
'Please, Ralph, don't talk like that. I can't bear dirt.'
Ralph bowed and apologized, only to come out with an appallingly
personal comment that so scared its recipient, a young lady, that she
left her cocktail untouched.
It is recorded also that in some outburst of domestic tension
Ralph burned all his mother-in-law's clothes in the middle of
Manchester Square garden. Another time when an invitation to dinner
with the Princess Polignac at her palace in Venice was not
forthcoming, he jumped into a gondola. While the gondolier was
delivering Ralph's letter of indignation, Ralph went to the Princess's
kitchen, dismembered the stove with a coal-hammer and threw the dinner
into the Grand Canal.
The Embassy Club was by no means my sole adventure in property
dealings. Always they have fascinated me. I longed, for instance, to
buy the Ritz Hotel.
# 2008
[218 TEXT G31]
Travellers from abroad and incoming mail set gossip
circulating. The stories gained in effect from the surrounding
secrecy. Correspondents wrote home to ask why the lurid reports were
not being officially denied and disposed of.
It was not long before all Mayfair was gossiping. In every club
there was an indignant member spluttering against the indignity done
to the Crown. It was an outrage. And who was this Mrs. Simpson,
anyhow?
On their way back to England the King and she paused in Vienna
for some pleasant hours of dancing. The reporters were still
following. The headline told the tale- 'Edward rumbas with
Wally'.
In Paris Mrs. Simpson saw for the first time a few examples of
what folks were reading about her back home in the States. She was
aghast. She telephoned 'her alarm' to London. The King was
comforting- he had been through all this publicity himself before; it
would wear itself out. He pointed reassuringly to the silence of the
British press.
Nevertheless as he sat down to dinner with his mother at
Buckingham Palace, he wondered how much Queen Mary was aware of what
America was saying. She gave no indication that anything out of the
ordinary had reached her. In tones of polite enquiry she asked about
his holiday.
'Didn't you find it terribly warm in the Adriatic,' she
innocently enquired.
She was, of course, fully informed and highly indignant about the
publicity her son's association was causing. But her reserve remained
unbroken and another occasion for a confidential talk between mother
and son went by, the opportunity lost.
The King had missed the Twelfth and the grouse, but he
sufficiently conformed with custom to spend the last two weeks of
September in the Highlands. His house-party was not formed of members
such as had been gathered about them by Queen Victoria or King George
=5. Statesmen were conspicuously absent- Mrs. Simpson
conspicuously present.
Her arrival was the occasion for growing feeling against the King
in circumstances in which he was not at fault. It chanced that the
day she reached Aberdeen station was also the occasion for the opening
of Aberdeen's Royal Infirmary. While the King was driving across from
Balmoral to meet her, his brother, the Duke of York was performing the
opening ceremony at the hospital. Earlier in the year the King had
decided that because of court mourning he could not perform the
ceremony in person and had asked his brother to deputize. These facts
were not known to the Aberdonians and there was an outcry that His
Majesty should have neglected the hospital so that he might be free to
meet his guest. It was a baseless charge, but it was spread around
and gained wide acceptance before the truth caught up with rumour and
scotched it. By that time harm had been done to King Edward's
reputation amongst his Scottish subjects.
There were happy days amongst the heather and in the evenings the
King in his kilt played the laird in his castle. Mrs. Simpson was
fascinated, enjoying every moment. But the King's brothers in their
Scottish retreats nearby felt themselves neglected, shut out of his
confidence. Bertie (Duke of York) in particular, considered himself
'to have lost a friend (in his father) and to be rapidly losing one
in his brother'.
As September ran out the royal guests departed, leaving Balmoral
to the grouse and the deer. The King turned south to face the future
and its complications. He came back to a London that was agog with
gossip and concern over the wretched reports from the United States.
By that date it was Mrs. Simpson all the way in every American
paper, headlines, story and pictures. 'Palace Car at Wally's
Disposal', 'King Chooses Clothes To Match With Wallis'- there
was no aspect of life untouched. Imaginations made good when facts
ran out. One paper scurrilously described how Edward was neglecting a
bereaved mother to dance attendance on Wally. Another told how
Premier Baldwin sent for the Monarch to lecture him on his carryings
on.
British residents were sorely tried by the daily barrage of the
news-hounds. It was disconcerting enough to learn that their
Sovereign was in love with an American lady already twice married.
The accompanying scurrilities made the plain fact odious. In Canada
there was dismay at what was reported across the border. In their
concern writers discharged their indignation in letters home to King,
Prime Minister or Archbishop- indeed to any person with influence on
affairs- Ministers of the Crown, Bishops, M.P.s, parsons,
editors. The inevitable effect was to raise opinion against the
author of these mischiefs. How could he expose himself, his Crown and
his Country to ridicule and contempt? Of course the worst of the
reports were exaggerations and inventions, but, they were a scandal
arising from the same source. The captain was letting down the side.
There can be no exaggerating the effect produced. Long enough
before the crisis broke the king's position had been undermined
amongst the pillars of the establishment.
Much of the scandal had flowed from the Nahlin cruise and
once again one thinks of the prudent man who would have foregone the
hours of pleasure afloat to promote his prospects in the future.
Instead, a prolonged stay in the Highlands, at home amongst the
family and 'his \2ain folk', might have helped him towards
realizing his hopes. He could have used the time to entertain and
captivate members of his Cabinet. He related afterwards, almost with
self-approbation, that he had of design omitted to invite the
succession of Ministers, Bishops, Admirals and Generals who had filled
the Balmoral guest list since Queen Victoria's time. But a prudent
king would have seen the benefit to himself in bringing the softening
influence of hospitality to bear upon those forming the pillars of his
throne.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Simpson prepared herself for the hearing of her
suit for divorce. By a device common enough at the time by those
seeking to avoid the publicity of a London hearing, it was arranged
for the petition to be filed for the Suffolk Assizes. To this end the
petitioner had to acquire a residential qualification, and so Mrs.
Simpson moved into a house she had taken by the sea at Felixstowe. So
effective had been the silence of the British press that the townsfolk
remained completely unaware of the presence of a notability in their
midst, who across the Atlantic was hailed as the most talked-of woman
in the world. Felixstowe had scarcely heard of Mrs. Simpson and
certainly did not recognize her when she passed down the street of a
morning to buy her paper. When she walked by the sea she 'might as
well have been in Tasmania' for all the notice that was taken. A
little while was to pass and she would be looking with envy on those
tranquil days of her obscurity.
At last the date was fixed for the court hearing- October 27.
It acted as a goad on the various interested persons. After weeks of
inaction something, at last, must needs be done.
<9>
YORK: Vex not yourselves, nor strive with your breath,
For all in vain comes counsel to his ear.
[END QUOTE]
THE King's Matter- how convenient the phrase- now
occupied the attention of the pillars of the establishment. Hitherto
it had been the King's emotional complication and his own concern.
With divorce impending there were graver implications.
The Archbishop of Canterbury contemplated the possibilities and
was dismayed. Divorce spelled the possibility of marriage, and the
wife of a king became a queen. Would he, the Primate of all England,
be faced with the ultimate harrowing possibility of officiating at the
coronation of a sovereign married to a woman with two previous
husbands? Thus to participate would mean a surrender of the Church's
principles on one of the cardinal points of its teaching. It was
unthinkable, but it seemed it might come to pass. What was his duty
as Primate? He concluded that for the present the wiser course was to
take no action. But would not the Government intervene?
Ministers of the Crown began to look with distaste at the
contents of their postbags. Every delivery added to the letters from
correspondents anxious about the King's reputation. There was the
generally expressed opinion that something ought to be done, something
of course by the Government. The plaguy divorce suit would add a new
urgency to the letters and the need for action.
Queen Mary viewed the possibilities with her sharp, clear vision
unclouded by the concern and anger she felt. She had given no
expression to her feelings when she met her son- there was always the
chance his affections might cool. But divorce- she grew indignant at
the thought of what might be contemplated. That a woman with two
husbands alive should become the wife and consort of her son the King,
was out of the question. Action was essential before the divorce case
came up for hearing and she urged that the Government should take it.
Characteristically she placed what she considered to be her
obligations to the British Monarchy before her affection for her son.
So Mr. Baldwin took the front of the stage, which he was to
share with the King, others, in the background, till the play was
done, for, as His Majesty phrased it, they were to settle the matter
alone.
It is the King who serves as ceremonial figure-head for his
country. It falls to his Prime Minister to speak on behalf of
England. Not long afterwards another man was to speak for England in
another mood in the voice of Winston Churchill giving the lion's roar,
voicing the might and power of the British Commonwealth. Stanley
Baldwin in his wistful musings pictured another England- a country of
hill and valley and meadowlands, the rolling Cotswolds- and the
silver serpentining Severn, of the perfection of England seen from the
Malvern heights looking towards the Marches of Wales, an England of
quiet country-folk, pipe-smoking farmers, decent townspeople and
factories where old men could sit about on barrows. These quiet
scenes showed him the England that he loved, but for all his wistful
brooding Stanley Baldwin, by some curious twist of character, was as
shrewd a politician as ever reached Ten Downing Street.
He drew his strength, perhaps, from his understanding of the
English folk of his brooding, not only the yeomen and the squires, but
also those sent to Westminster to represent their fellows. It was his
boast that his worst enemy would not say of him that ~'I did not know
what the reaction of the English people would be to any course of
action'. No man was more sensitive than he to the changing moods of
the House of Commons. Of late he had gone astray over the carve-up of
Abyssinia and his health was failing, indeed, he had continued in
office only to see the new King established, for he shared the doubts
of those who questioned whether Edward would rise above the handicaps
of his character and his upbringing.
For the weeks, whilst the House was up, Baldwin had complied with
his doctor's orders, for absolute rest. He returned to Number Ten to
face the problem of the King's future. Mrs. Simpson, divorce,
marriage- the sequence seemed to point to one inevitable conclusion
and a decree granted in October, he noted would become absolute about
the date of the Coronation in May.
Queen Mary was pressing for intervention- but what was a Prime
Minister empowered to do? A king could regulate the marriage of his
children but the Statute Book makes no provision for regulating the
marriage of a king. No one had ever thought of defining the
eligibility of women to be queen. Nor was there precedent to fall
back on, for no Premier had ever faced this problem before.
He shared Queen Mary's repugnance, but as to thinking the King's
marriage out of the question- there he disagreed. All his
information pointed to the contrary conclusion.
# 2015
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No better way of doing this can be found than through the
medium of his autobiography, The Course of My Life, written
during the last months of his life when he had reached the age of
sixty-one and was able to survey, with the peculiar clarity that
sometimes comes with age, his early years, the gradual development of
his own powers and the varied influences that came to him through the
many friends into whose orbits he was attracted.
The warmth of his nature and his lively interest in his fellow
human beings is apparent in all his descriptions of the men and women
that he met- whether in the charmed circles of the literary world of
Vienna in the 'eighties, or in the near-Utopian cultural climate of
Weimar, where he worked in the Goethe Institute, or in the rough and
tumble of journalistic life in Berlin, where he edited the Magazin
fu"r Literatur. He did not find agreement in opinion a necessary
condition for friendship: "I loved the many-sidedness of life", he
said.
The book was never finished, for his illness and death intervened
while he was in the course of writing it. But it carries his story to
the early years of this century and gives a comprehensive picture of
all that led up to his life-work.
Rudolf Steiner was born at the little village of Kraljevec in
Southern Austria on the border between Hungary and Croatia. His
parents both belonged to the Lower Austrian forest region, north of
the Danube, and in the small town of Geras his father had passed his
childhood and youth in close association with the seminary of the
Premonstratensian Order, where he was instructed by the monks. Later
he became a gamekeeper to Count Hoyos on his estate at Horn but on his
marriage changed this occupation and took the job of telegraphist on
the Southern Austrian Railway. He remained a countryman at heart and
the new work was uncongenial but he was soon promoted to be
Station-master of Pottschach in Lower Austria. At this little railway
station, with the magnificent scenery of the Styrian Alps before him,
Rudolf Steiner spent the formative years from two to eight. He was
much absorbed, as any other small boy would be, in the daily business
of the railway. His father taught him his letters and his own
insatiable curiosity about the world and its ways taught him many
other things, such as the complete process of milling which he learnt
from constant visits to the local mill. But there were many problems
that exercised his active mind. "I was filled with questions", he
says, "and I had to carry these questions about with me unanswered.
It was thus that I reached my eighth year".
During this year the family moved to Neudorff in Hungary, and
here they remained until Rudolf Steiner was seventeen. The Alps were
now visible only in the distance but near at hand were mountains
easier to climb and great forests where the peasants gathered wood.
With his parents, his sister and his brother, Rudolf walked and
climbed, bringing back wild fruits for supper. But he preferred to
walk alone, and to talk to the peasants that he met. With them, he
took part every year in the vintage and with their children he went to
the village school.
It was through the assistant master at this school that the first
great event of his life took place- an event that, he believed,
influenced the whole course of his development and of his future work;
it was the discovery, in his teacher's room, of a text book on
geometry. He was allowed to borrow it and through it he felt the
deepest satisfaction he had yet known, for by this science he found
justification for his own assumption that the reality of the unseen
world is as certain a fact as the reality of the physical world. It
seemed to him to be a form of knowledge which man appeared to have
produced but which had a significance quite independent of man. He
had found unaided something that gave confirmation of the "unseen"
world, a world of which he had been aware even before his eighth year
and in which he longed to live. Had not the seen received light from
the unseen he would, he said, have been forced to feel the physical
world as if it were a kind of darkness around him.
Another outstanding event that took place in his tenth year, and
that was to bear fruit in later life, was his introduction, through
the local priest, to the system of Copernicus. Astronomy became as
absorbing a study to him as the mechanism of the railway had once
been. He had now formed an attachment to the priest and also to the
Church, where he was a server and a chorister. He entered into his
duties with sensitive participation, and found in the sonorous beauty
of the Latin liturgy "a vital happiness". It was to him a means of
mediation between his two worlds. But it was not a soporific, for
through the music and in contemplation of the ritual he saw the riddle
of existence rising before him in "powerful and suggestive
fashion". He makes the rather sad little comment that in the matter
of this early religious experience he was "a stranger in his father's
house", for his father had temporarily shed his piety and become a
"free-thinker".
Rudolf Steiner's home could offer him no cultural background.
His father, a warm-hearted, quick-tempered, gregarious man felt no
need for books and loved nothing better than a political argument with
the local worthies under the lime trees on a summer evening, with the
mother, a good Hausfrau, sitting beside him with her knitting and the
children playing around. Rudolf Steiner was indebted to the local
doctor for his introduction to German literature. Pacing up and down
beside the station, the tall, enthusiastic doctor opened up a new
world to the eager little boy. For the first time he heard of Goethe,
with whose conception of nature his own future was to be so closely
linked, and of Schiller, from whose letters a few sentences were to
wake the train of thought that led him to the perception that man has
the possibility of changing his state of consciousness.
The doctor's literary influence happily continued when the boy
was sent to the Realschule in Wiener-Neustadt, a secondary school
where prominence was given to science and modern languages. This
school was chosen because the father had determined that his promising
son should become a civil engineer. The boy himself was indifferent
as to what school he attended provided he could get some satisfactory
answers to the vital questions he bore within him on "life and the
world and the soul". Rudolf Steiner devotes a chapter of his book
to this period of his school-days and it is evident that his powers of
thought were far in advance of those of the average boy, and that the
scientific method of approach to the problems of existence- an
approach which later he came to regard as essential for modern man-
was his by natural proclivity.
When he was barely eleven he read a paper published by his
head-master on "Attraction Considered as an Effect of Motion".
Though he understood but little of it, for it began with higher
mathematics, he derived sufficient meaning from certain passages to
build a bridge between it and what he had learnt from the priest of
Neudorff on the creation of the world. He then saved his pocket money
until he could buy a book by the same author on The General Motion
of Matter as the Fundamental Cause of All the Phenomena of Nature.
The study of these two works, combined with his studies in
mathematics and physics, took him through his third and fourth year
and finally brought him to the conclusion that he must go to nature in
order to win a standing place in the spiritual world. This spiritual
world he consciously perceived lying before him. Further, he said to
himself: "One can take the right attitude towards the experience of
the spiritual world by one's own soul only when the process of
thinking has reached such a form that it can attain to the reality of
being which is in natural phenomena".
He then discovered Kant. He had never heard of him but saw the
Critique of Pure Reason in a shop window and could not rest until
he had bought it, for he longed to know what the human reason could
achieve in gaining genuine insight into what he called "the being of
things". "How does one pass", he asked himself, "from simple
clear-cut perceptions to concepts in regard to natural phenomena?"
Sometimes he would read one page of the Critique twenty times
over in order to arrive at a definite decision as to the relation
sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature. But he
made no advance through Kant. The study was by no means valueless,
however, for he was already subjecting himself to that severe
discipline in thinking that was sustained throughout his life and
which he demanded of his pupils. He wished so to construct thought
within himself that every thought could be objectively surveyed,
without any identification with feeling. Thus he was no mystic.
From his earlier emotional reaction to the beauty of the liturgy
he now tried to establish within himself a harmony between objective
thinking and the dogma and symbolism of religion. This attempt, he
said, in no way diminished his reverence and devotion. His relation
to the teachings of religion was determined, he states, "by the fact
that to me the spiritual world counted among the objects of human
perception. The very reason why these teachings penetrated so deeply
into my mind was that in them I realized how the human spirit can find
its way consciously into the supersensible". It was a natural
result to arrive at the question: "to what extent is it possible to
prove that in human thinking real spirit is the agent?" And,
furthermore, to debate from this basis the possible scope of human
thinking. With these problems uppermost in his mind Rudolf Steiner
entered the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, and at once proceeded to
buy a large number of books on philosophy. He had now decided to
become a teacher, and had already done a certain amount of coaching.
He enrolled for mathematics, natural history and chemistry, and was
fortunate in having as his lecturer in physics Edmond Reitlinger, the
author of Freie Blicke. He could not accept the prevailing
mechanical theory of heat nor the wave theory of light, and through
them was driven to a study of theories of cognition. The Darwinian
theory of evolution seemed to him fruitful in so far as the higher
organisms derive from the lower, but to reconcile this idea with what
he knew of the spiritual world was immeasurably difficult, for he
conceived of the "inner man" as dipping down from the spiritual
world and uniting with the organism in order to perceive and to act in
the physical world.
He had now come to realize, through his own struggles to win
concepts in natural science, that the activity of the human ego must
be the sole starting point for arriving at true knowledge. Previously
he had worked from the opposite premise, first observing the phenomena
of nature in order to derive from them a concept of the ego. Now he
saw that he must penetrate nature's process of "becoming" from the
activity of the ego. He was now about nineteen, an age when the sense
of the ego begins to assert itself more fully, and from this time
onwards he was gradually to expand his understanding of the spiritual
and the eternal nature of man's ego and its relation to the evolution
of his consciousness.
# 2001
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It came as a gift, generously and unexpectedly. The sun slanting
across the valley lent a liquid softness to the depths below us. We
might have been looking into an unruffled lake, 2,000 feet of clear
water. A mile distant, where the valley dropped away, the Esera made
an elbow turn to the south, thus giving the valley-head its secrecy.
As so rarely happens in nature, we looked on a work of art. The very
perfection was strange; such things do not normally come about. We
felt for the first time that unreality, that sense of a landscape
under spell, which travellers have repeatedly noted in these Pyrenees.
An alpine valley would have been groomed and put to use,
beautiful in a different way: pastures subdivided into toy-like
rectangles and rhomboids, tousled mops of hay drying on ash poles,
ruminating cattle, brown chalets. Here there seemed no sign of life
or husbandry, until our muleteer indicated, among the boulders on the
opposing mountain-side, the hut to which Don Miguel had secured the
key, and drew our attention to a curious brown blotch on the pastures
below. "Mares," he said.
We descended knee-deep through feathery grasses. They parted
easily and we walked, scattering myriads of grass seeds, as through
green foam. There were Turk's head lilies and patches of iris,
islands of brilliant blue set capriciously in the green sea. Quail,
unusual at such altitude, flushed at our feet but their straight
brusque flight, as always, lacked determination and they collapsed
into the grass fifty yards away. We were silent. One talks in a hut
or by a fire in the open, but not much when walking or climbing: one
is either too preoccupied, or too happy. Going down to the Val
\d'Esera we were happy.
Approaching the valley bottom we remarked that the hundreds of
horses pasturing there did not stray. The brown blotch they made
extended no more than a quarter-mile, as though they were confined
within this area by a mysterious social tie. They varied from cream
to black and these colours were seen against sward, the curve of each
back outlined against the green. They were not mere quadrupeds, for
they had the presence of the animals that obsessed Piero \di Cosimo.
Though sharing with the valley the permanence of art- and here again
was strangeness- they seemed to wheel in continual movement about an
invisible centre. This was the more surprising for when one looked
closely, narrowing vision to ten square yards, one detected only a
shaken mane, a lifted hoof, an occasional arbitrary turn. Our route
brought us to the fringes of the herd and, as we threaded our way
among them, I was glad that they disregarded us. They had grown
larger, as landowners do on their own estates, and we seemed to reach
only their withers. They were the aborigines of the valley, the
proper owners, and intruding on their gathering we were lucky not to
be challenged in an unknown language. We trod delicately among the
cropping beasts, who so generously ignored us. They had, we found, a
herdsman; that he, in his rags and with domed mud-hovel, could perform
some useful office for these noble creatures seemed improbable. Here
at the headwaters of the Esera to be human was a disadvantage. Less
confident than his herd, the man jumped to his feet and held a great
staff like a barrier towards us. We spoke from a distance and he was
still watching uncertainly (though of the herd not a head was lifted)
as we moved from the soft nap of the valley to the boulder-strewn
slopes of the Aneto. In half an hour we had reached the hut.
There is pleasure in an untenanted hut; in disposing one's gear
methodically; in finding employment for hook, table, and bench,
perhaps long unused; in starting a fire and creating warmth. The
process offers the satisfaction of moving into a new house, but is
accomplished in an hour. It is a satisfaction rarely to be enjoyed in
the Spanish Pyrenees. We little realised that we slept that night in
comfort such as existed nowhere else in Aragon at 7,000 feet. In an
area which knew little of climbing history, of guides, guide-books, or
huts, the Aneto and the Rencluse Hut were exceptional. As the highest
point of the Pyrenees, the Aneto had been attempted in the eighteenth
century. It had been climbed in 1842 and, though lying well in
Spanish territory, had for decades been a popular ascent. The logical
approach was from Luchon; the frontier was crossed, and the Esera
gained, by a dramatic notch in the watershed, the Port \de Benasque, a
passage between rock walls at some 8,000 feet. Before the first hut
was built, people made their bivouac and lit their fires in a
cave-like shelter, '\la Rencluse.' Later a cabin was built nearby,
where the amiable and rugged Madame Sayo, whose reputation has long
outlived her, ministered to mountaineers. Time passed. With the
Civil War the frontier was closed and those who found their way into
the region did not come to climb. When the authorities regained
control of the area, after 1945, the Rencluse was in ashes. It had
been rebuilt by Jose?2 Abadias, whom we were later to meet, patriarch
and innkeeper at Benasque, six hours down the Esera valley. Thus we
slept under a roof.
We woke to storm and wind, but even these can be acceptable in a
quiet hut, if days are not too precious. There is a frayed rope-end
to re-bind and crumpled flowers to identify. Beside the stove we
pored over maps; we talked of other mountains and augured hopefully
from other storms on other occasions; we dozed over our books; we
slept. Intermittently we questioned the barometer and from the window
looked at the struggle above, watched the battle sway as the peaks
threw off the assaulting cloud or went down fighting, blotted out.
When it cleared towards evening, our spirits lifted like the vapour.
We stepped out buoyantly to find the air deliciously clear, rinsed by
the departed rain and wind. Jumping like children from boulder to
boulder, we raced along the mountainside. Above us the peaks, hidden
all day, had returned firm and confident to their stations. The
valley glistened, no longer obscured by veils of driving rain. The
mares in their formal circle were grazing unconcerned as ever, and the
herdsman was fishing on the bank of the stream. Beside him an
enormous white Pyrenean sheep-dog sat on its haunches.
That evening we would not have been elsewhere at any price.
Though the weather was perhaps a little too warm, the stars were out.
Tomorrow we should climb the Aneto. In itself the climb was nothing,
un nada as someone had airily remarked in the cafe?2 at Le?2s.
But here in Aragon there were no reassuring tracks, no guide-books or
maps as the modern climber knows them. Imagination was free to play
on our 11,000-foot mountain. We were back in the nineteenth century
and this constituted the very point of our expedition. Having set the
alarm clock for three-thirty, we should have crawled early into our
sleeping bags, but already the morning was with us in anticipation,
making sleep difficult. We poured more wine and sat talking at the
trestle table, while the stove purred. Naturally we talked of the
Aneto, the inelegant but convincing massif that couched above us in
the dark. Draped with glaciers it stretched three miles from the Pic
\d'Alba to the Pic \des Tempe?5tes, and its backbone dropped nowhere
below 10,000 feet. The crux of the climb was the Pont \de Mahomet,
the airy granite ridge that led to the summit. Presumably the name
was derived from the rope known to Muslim theology which stretches
over hell and which the righteous alone can cross to attain Paradise.
The name is no stranger than that of the adjoining Maldetta, the
Accursed Mountain. 'Accursed' they say because Christ wandering in
this wilderness, and meeting with fierce herdsmen and fiercer dogs,
turned the latter to stone. Christ, Mahomet, such are the names that
shepherds here have long invoked.
To talk of the Aneto was also to talk of the two friends to whom,
in a sense, the massif and much of the Pyrenees rightfully belong. We
envisaged them, clad in Norfolk jackets, perhaps wearing the
new-fangled balaclava helmets, on the skyline or straddling the Pont
\de Mahomet. By the wheezing stove in the Rencluse it was a duty to
remember them, for no mountain chain has been so lovingly pioneered as
were the central Pyrenees by Packe and Russell. They discovered most
of the region nearly a century ago. Having no maps, with no guide but
observation and a compass, year after year they navigated like sailors
among the unknown reefs and glaciers. Their first ascents are
numberless; it was their country. Perhaps for this reason, their
expeditions were not assaults. They did not conquer peaks to possess
and leave them, as do mountain philanderers. Their climbs were not a
battle and a parting: they cherished their mountains and returned.
Packe climbed the Aneto six times; Russell, who made at least five
ascents, once spent a night on the summit and at dawn noted the snow
blood-red where the first sun struck, but deep blue in the shadows.
Though friends, they were different, representing two approaches
to the mountains on which mountaineering has much depended, the
scientific and the romantic. Charles Packe was geologist, botanist,
cartographer, and scholar (climbing with Horace in his pocket). He
was also the squire of Stretton Hall, the Leicestershire gentleman who
found the Pyrenees more exciting than the hunting field. Much of this
was concealed by a brusque manner, for though a modest man he was not
an easy one. He began his systematic exploration of the chain in
1859. When a companion was killed on the Pic \de Sauvegarde in the
same year, while no doubt perturbed, he was clearly not deflected.
Noting Jurassic limestone, greensand, names of rare flowers,
barometric pressures and making in the uncharted country expedition on
expedition, he accumulated knowledge. It found expression in his
first guide-book to the central Pyrenees and the first map of the
Maladetta area. At this remove the methodical explorer allows a
single welcome glimpse of the eccentric squire: on solitary
expeditions he roped with Ossou"e and Azor, his great Pyrenean
sheep-dogs. Thus a hundred years ago, but surely in misplaced
confidence, he crossed a frozen tarn, and perhaps negotiated the
icefields of the Aneto.
'Mon ami Packe,' the phrase recurs throughout the writings
of Count Henri Patrick Marie Russell-Killough. The latter's was an
affectionate and generous character. Born in France, and heir to a
papal title, Russell was an Irish catholic. These facts were less
important to him than the works of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and
Byron, and the mountains which he always saw in some part through
their eyes. His life was a late but heroic expression of the romantic
era. From that era both his literary style- for he had weird but
considerable talent as a writer- and his attitudes derived much of
their bravura. Charm, passion, eccentricity, created his legend;
there have been many less well founded. As a young man he wrote
verse, played the fiddle, and would dance all night ("effre?2ne?2
valseur" they said) before starting on a thirty-mile walk at dawn.
His romantic daemon sent him briefly and disastrously to sea, and led
him in his early twenties happily across Siberia, to Australia, to New
Zealand (where he was lost for three days in the Alps alone and
without food), to the Americas, and even to within sight of Everest.
On his return in 1863, at the age of twenty-nine, he first climbed
the Aneto and met Packe. The rest of his life was, quite simply,
devoted to the Pyrenees.
The range brought him something like European fame. He made at
least sixteen first ascents, and it is in character that many of them
should have been solitary.
# 2013
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<=3>
IN the opening paragraphs of his already famous Rede Lecture for
1959, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge
University Press), Sir Charles Snow discloses some of the personal
accidents that led him to move, at an impressionable age, between
those two cultures the separation of which forms the main theme of his
essay. 'By training,' he says, 'I was a scientist: by vocation I
was a writer.' He continues: 'There have been plenty of days when
I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at
night with some literary colleagues.' It so happened that while
Snow was thus employed I was an undergraduate at his college
(Christ's), spending my own working hours in and around the English
Tripos and some of my happiest evenings in Snow's rooms. I may even
have been, though his junior in years and status, one of these
'literary colleagues' to whom he refers.
I notice that I have dropped at once into the old habit of
calling my friend 'Snow' rather than 'Charles'. His old friends
call him Snow: only his new friends call him Charles. I wonder why?
I think it must be because he seemed to us in those days to be less a
man than a conglomeration of qualities. We went to him for
judgements, and watched our own opinions first drawn out and then
appraised. 'I think you are probably right', he may nowadays
say with immense and even hearty graciousness; but when he delivered a
Cambridge judgment he would say, firmly and quietly, 'There is no
doubt'. This serene abstraction caused us, personally devoted as we
were, to think of him nevertheless as a little other than human.
(However fond one might have been of Dr. Johnson, one would not
have called him 'Sam'.) But now that C. P. Snow has impinged
on the public scene at many points- now that he is at once novelist,
knight, critic, administrator, business man, lecturer, husband,
father, seer- he has embodied his manifold abstractions and has
become a baptized human being called 'Charles'. A pity. To those of
us who first knew him at Christ's, the word sounds strangely formal.
For many undergraduates of my own generation, Snow figured as the
great emancipator. Emancipator from what, it is difficult to say.
From shyness, I think. His work was mainly, in those days, in
molecules; his talk, without the slightest trace of donnish
moderation, sprayed over life, love, politics, Proust... All his
friends were Snows, all his geese were Swanns. Let a member of the
circle open his mouth in song, and he would be a Caruso; let another
string a short story together, and we were bidden to see in him
another Proust. It was all, at times, like a Verdurin party. And
although most of the Snow circle have indeed come to occupy places of
considerable eminence, some of them still show traces of his early
boisterousness- as when one \6habitue?2 splendidly announced, in
the midst of wartime privations: 'My landlady has four thousands
hens.' (The landlady's name was Rothschild.) Others have merely
retained an undergraduate tendency to refer to public personages by
their Christian names- as though in reaction to their habit of
calling their private friend by his surname. Yet all these minor
quirks are far less important than the fact that their young talents
had been encouraged to flower, at exactly the appropriate time, in the
sun of Snow's approval.
The very carelessness of Snow's approach was salutary to us, in
those days. It mattered less, to our personal growth, that Snow spoke
rudely of The Book of Kells, than that he should have scattered
his own books and papers all over the floor, should talk away into the
night while playing like a kitten with a ping-pong ball, or even that
he should show an Olympian ineptitude for the simple business of
keeping his coal fire alight. There was nothing prim about him or
about his friends, and it was important for a somewhat priggish
undergraduate to learn, at that stage of his development, that
neatness is not a major virtue.
It is not difficult for his friends to detect in the present-day
Sir Charles, the Rede Lecturer, those same qualities which in C.
P. Snow the scientific research-worker might seem to have indicated
a fixed temperamental opposition to the very kind of prestige he now
enjoys. For 'moral vanity' has always been, and still is, his
favourite Aunt Sally at which to shy coconuts. He has never pretended
that self-interest was a higher manifestation of moral philosophy, nor
has he ever held it a virtue to 'do a man down', as he says, 'in
his own best interests'. Even his enjoyment of fame, to those who
know him well, remains one of his modest and disarming
characteristics.
Snow was much given to headstrong gnomic pronouncements such as:
'In many Irish houses, several kinds of bread are eaten.' Torn
from their context, they were even more impressive than the set-piece
Johnsonian broadsides- as, of Oxford Group house-parties, the
comment: 'It seems to me a pity that frankness about one's private
life has come to mean the public confession of things that never
happened.' Now, this kind of thing invites parody; but it has
preserved among older fiends a certain cosmic cosiness. Yet if,
because of his broad generalizations and his imperviousness to tinsel
compliments, we used to think him unworldly, we were at once
overestimating and underestimating him. For he has shown- and it is
why the Rede Lecture has such an authoritative ring- a fine grasp of
the realities of power. It is one reason, too, why in his novels the
pictures of closed societies, clubs or departments are so horribly
accurate. In his Cambridge days, he used to display a corresponding
indifference to the outward appearance of power. In recent years, to
be sure, like many others who have specialized in the study of the
power behind the throne, Snow has come to feel that it might be rather
fun to sit upon it too. Thus, while engaged upon the cycle of novels
on which he pedals towards the G.O.M.-ship of English fiction,
Snow has had the energy to sponsor a complementary critical movement.
And as that sensible steam-roller of sensible criticism got under
way, it may have seemed to some people in the literary world that Snow
was intolerant. That is not quite true. There are, it is true, two
things he cannot tolerate: one is pretentiousness and the other is
intolerance. He can still lodge a humble protest as well as deliver a
critical ukase, and the phrase ~'It's a bit much!' is ever on his
lips. I have heard him say, ruefully, 'I shall never be as good as
Dostoievski'. His similes were even less self-indulgent during the
war when he lived for a time in Pimlico attended by a troglodyte
couple named Moon: he would amble, in his Teddy-bear totter, to the
head of the basement stairs and call out, always with modest
incredulity, ~'Oh, Mr. Moo-oon; oh, Mr. Moo-oon!' and return
with woeful countenance to face his guests: 'I feel more and more
like a nigger minstrel.'
<=2>
The relevance of these rather impudent personal asides will
appear, I trust, when one or two of my friend's recent dicta are
examined against the background of my own knowledge of and admiration
for his personality. It would have been pointless- and, indeed,
uncivil- to make use of that knowledge without passing on to my
audience at least a thumb-nail caricature of the man.
You might suppose, when I introduce my second Cambridge figure of
the 1930's, Dr. F. R. Leavis, that my aim is to add to the list
of examples in the Rede Lecture of mutual incomprehensibility between
modern arts and modern science. Far from it. My aim is to suggest
that the kinds of attitude to life represented by these very different
teachers may be complementary, mutually comprehensible, and together
have an influence making for both breadth and depth of thought and
sensibility. As an undergraduate, I myself was such a prig that I had
to learn to respect both Snow and Leavis before I could learn from
them both how to set decent bounds to my own unfashionable tendency to
respect. If Leavis needed to teach me a healthy disrespect for a good
number of poems in the Oxford Book of English Verse before he
could demonstrate just why the other poems in it were worth
reading, so Snow's impetuous scoffing at certain political and
literary windbags would be clearing a space in my mind for Tolstoi.
From the few tales I have been telling out of school it should be
evident that an evening of talk in Snow's room at Christ's College
provided a very healthy complement to the English Tripos. There we
were able to learn, without being told in so many words, that it can
be dangerous to become too exclusively sensitive to purely verbal
discriminations. A literary sensibility can be accepted as an
important faculty in life, but it is safe to admit this only in
accordance with one's readiness to agree that it is not the only
equipment for life- or, for that matter, for literature. At the same
time I was learning at Cambridge, most notably from Dr. Leavis, how
much a particular kind of trained sensibility can enrich the quality
of one's response.
It is certainly necessary to pick words very carefully here,
for it would be impertinent (and incorrect) to suggest that Leavis
and Snow were not each at home in the other's territory. But the
young undergraduate who sees too much of one type of mentor and
nothing whatever of the other may easily become too impatient a
disciple to keep steady a sense of balance such as the master himself
has learned to hold. 'What is the use of a wide outlook if the
quality of vision is poor?' 'What on earth are you going to do
with all your sensibility?' The masters themselves are safe
enough. Leavis knew precisely why discrimination was important, and
we, his pupils, respected him because we saw, so to say, that in the
veins of his sensibility flowed blood, not ink. Snow's mental
generosity was equally apparent, but we could accept it as the
application to wide issues of a personality of quality- it was not
just splashy enthusiasm.
The masters, then, are safe. What of their pupils? It is all
very well to scoff at H. G. Wells because much of his writing
betrays a perky mediocrity, if you yourself have a vision of life not
indeed identical with his but somewhat comparable in scope. It is all
very well to swallow H. G. Wells more or less whole in tribute to
his breadth of outlook, if you yourself can detect shoddy thinking and
shoddy expression. But with no such correctives, the submission of
undergraduate minds exclusively to one or other of these enthusiasms
can provide unlovely results. Which is the sadder sight: a puny
intellect dismissing Edmund Spenser on the grounds that he isn't John
Donne (a thing Leavis himself would never do), or another puny
intellect confidently predicting the next move of the Kremlin- a
thing Snow himself would never do?
After the war, Snow left Cambridge and the academic life. He has
been expressing himself in many powerful ways- via the review
columns, via his own steady output of novels, via his literary
partnership with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, via the Civil
Service Commission and the English Electric Company, via television
and a dozen other channels. Yet, oddly enough, although Snow has
expressed decided views and has presumably collected his own share of
literary antagonists, it is nevertheless the more retired figure of
Dr. Leavis that has drawn the arrows of outraged opposition. This
is largely because he has acquired a quite undeserved label as a
detractor.
# 2006
[222 TEXT G35]
<(N) CHARLES GREGORY FAIRFAX, 9TH AND LAST VISCOUNT FAIRFAX OF
EMLY. (?-1772)>
The last Lord Fairfax was almost certainly educated at
Lambspring. His life was full of domestic anxieties and tragedies.
As a young man, before 1719, he had been living in poverty abroad,
vainly trying to get employment. The period from 1720 to 1722, of
succession to the estate, was marred by the sudden death of his first
wife and his father's troubles. 1722 to 1736 was perhaps the happiest
part of his life. His second marriage, to all appearances, originally
a 6mariage de convenance, turned out well and happily. He
desperately wanted male heirs and now he had three sons and three
daughters living. The family's fortunes seemed assured and he took to
rebuilding Gilling Castle. But all this collapsed like a house of
cards between 1736 and 1741. Two smallpox epidemics carried off his
sons, his wife also died and financial troubles returned in a far more
menacing form. From 1742 to 1760 he was occupied in trying to save
the estates and to marry off his two surviving daughters- one of whom
died in 1753. The last twelve years of his life were financially more
easy, but he was now burdened with the care of his neurasthenic
daughter Anne, his sole heiress, with his own poor health, and with
the certainty that the family would come to an end and the estate and
his daughter become, at his death, the prey of a host of impecunious
and quarrelsome poor relations.
Up to the later 1750's he lived most of the year in London. At
first he moved restlessly from lodging-house to lodging-house. Then
he settled as a paying guest in the houses of his Bredall and Pigott
relations. Finally, when his sister Alethea Pigott had left London
for Brussels he leased a house in Kensington from 'Gerard Anne
Edwards Esq.' To furnish the house, furniture was shipped from
Gilling by Hull. Gilling servants were sent down in a batch by
coach- including even a boy, who was put to school in London at
Fairfax's expense. In the spring and summer the family went north to
Gilling. Occasionally they took the waters at Harrogate or
Knaresborough. But Fairfax, perhaps because of its unpleasant early
associations for him, avoided Bath. When his ailing wife and daughter
Elizabeth went there in 1740, they went alone.
The Fairfaxes had frequented York for centuries. In the middle
ages and the sixteenth century they had a regular town house-
probably on the Ouse Bridge. In the seventeenth century the Denton
family had a large town house in Micklegate, but the Gilling family
had sold all its York property and relied on lodgings or leased
houses. In the 1750's Fairfax leased a house in Petergate. After
1760 he devoted himself to the care of Anne, built her a fine new
house in Castlegate and ceased to winter in London.
He was always a townee. The traditional way of life of the
Yorkshire Catholic gentry was defended strongly by Francis Cholmeley
in 1722 and maintained even more strongly by Stephen Tempest of
Broughton in his printed letter to his son of 1720. For them a
landowner must strike a happy mean between a country and a town life,
with the balance inclining heavily towards the former. He must avoid
becoming a mere rustic, a farmer of his own lands. There is every
reason why he should have a home farm, but otherwise he should live by
rents. On the other hand he should not haunt London and its expenses.
A house in York for the winter season and an occasional visit to town
are quite enough. But this sober idea can never have satisfied the
wealthier Catholic gentry. There were always Catholic rustics, like
Edward Haggerston of Ellingham, with his vilely spelt and illiterate
letters and his constant preoccupation with farm and hunt topics. But
even they had often been educated abroad. Education at Douai,
Dieulouard, Lambspring or St. Omer in itself might rarely implant
intellectual ambitions. But the wealthier Catholics had always
rounded off school with a Grand Tour, and now 'finishing schools'
were appearing- at St. Edmund's, Paris, and in the academies in
France and Northern Italy. There young men acquired liberal tastes in
art and architecture, natural philosophy and mechanics, literature and
politics. They returned to England with little desire to immerse
themselves totally in estate management. There were degrees of
absorption in the polite arts. Thus Cuthbert Constable seems to have
lived at home. But he was passionately interested in the rebuilding
of his house and especially in the problems of mechanics involved, for
instance, in laying on a piped water supply. Then there was Sir
Marmaduke Constable of Everingham, who became so absorbed in the life
of polite society abroad that a visit abroad for his health's sake was
prolonged into half a lifetime's voluntary exile abroad in France and
Italy. Yet, by post, he still controlled in minute detail his estate
and kept abreast of local gossip fortnightly. Then a further extreme
was Sir Edward Gascoigne of Parlington who lived for years in a house
alongside the convent at Cambray with his wife and family, devoting
himself to reading- physics, chemistry, mechanics, philosophy,
political theory- leaving the oversight of the Parlington and Saxton
estates to his agent and Lord Irwin.
Lord Fairfax was of this generation and type- with some
differences. The lists of books he bought, though moderately long,
reveal little of the intense intellectual curiosity of Sir Edward
Gascoigne, his brother-in-law. Fairfax was interested in current
affairs, politics and history, though it is likely that the five huge
volumes of Chambers' Encyclopaedia of the Arts and Sciences which his
chaplain, Fr. Anselm Bolton later brought away from Gilling had
belonged to his patron. Fairfax could write and read French easily
and bought a small number of current French works of literature,
mostly memoirs, but including Rousseau. He never showed any desire to
revisit the Continent. It is likely that his second wife visited
Paris once, but, if she did so, he did not accompany her. Nor did he
go to France with his daughter Anne in 1768.
He was passionately interested in building, in interior
decoration, furniture and landscape gardening. But there is no
evidence that he was the master-mind in the design of his building
projects. Again, he was not entirely without interest in estate and
agricultural matters. He took Edward Pigott to a village feast and
spoke to the farmers of grain prices. He dined with Sterne to discuss
turnpike matters. He was a patron of Hambleton and York races. But
the family papers of his time seem to be empty of references to
hunting and shooting and agricultural improvement. The latter meant
to him merely the raising of rents.
In London Fairfax moved mainly in Catholic circles. His closest
friends were a Catholic merchant, Thomas Mannock, Mr. Metcalfe, a
Catholic surgeon in Bromley Street, and the Bellasis family. He rode
out to Whitton to visit the Pigotts and dined with the Petres, and
Stapyltons, Dormers, Barnewells and Dillons, Lady Westmoreland, Sir
Edward Smythe, the Hornyholds. His non-Catholic acquaintances in town
do not seem to have been very numerous. All were relations of
Yorkshire neighbours. The accounts of Lady Fairfax's visit to Bath
show that she also moved in Catholic circles- Mr. Errington, Doctor
Bostock, Doctor Jerningham, Mr. Odonory, Lord Molyneux, Bishop York,
the Misses Langdale, Mrs. Pitt (a Bellasis, the Earl of Chatham's
Catholic aunt). Her protestant friends were few- the Mildmays and
Mrs. Worsley.
Life in York brought them into contact with all Yorkshire society
at race meetings, town houses and the Assembly Rooms (to the building
of which Fairfax was a generous subscriber). The Fairfaxes of Denton
had sold up in England by the 1750's and departed to Virginia, but
Fairfax family solidarity still meant something. American Fairfaxes
still visited Lord Fairfax in York and the Fairfaxes of Steeton (now
of Newton Kyme) occasionally wrote or left cards. From York or
Gilling the family made rounds of visits. The more extensive rounds
covered the Vavasours at Hazelwood, Lord Irwin at Temple Newsam, the
Lawsons at Brough. Immediately round Gilling there was a thick
concentration of Catholic neighbours and relations, the Bellasises at
Newbrough, the Widdringtons at Nunnington, the Cholmeleys at Brandsby,
and, to the early 1750's, the Crathornes of Ness. Around them lay
Protestant neighbours, the Duncombes at Helmsley, Mrs. Thompson at
Oswaldkirk Hall, the Carlisles at Castle Howard, where one dined on
occasion. Visitors to Gilling were much less frequent than in the two
previous centuries and came usually for several weeks at a time- Lady
Fairfax's Weld cousins from Lulworth, Sir Edward Gascoigne and his
family from France, the Langdales from Houghton, Thomas Clifton of
Lytham come to court Miss Fairfax, shoals of poor nephews and nieces,
and the Catholic family lawyer from London, Mr. Wilmot, who faced
the coaches up the North Road with such trepidation that he much
preferred not to come unless the business were very urgent.
Lord Fairfax took a keen outsider's interest in politics. He
took five or six newspapers, bought the current Debates of the Commons
and all the latest political squibs and pamphlets. A typical bill
from Ward & Chandler, newsagents, for 1743 runs-
[LIST]
During the Seven Years War Fairfax bought large cloth-backed maps
of all the principal theatres of war. His own political views can
only be guessed. In 1745 the family had a strong Jacobite reputation
in the county. In September 1745 Fairfax was bound in +100 to appear
before the North Riding Justices at Hovingham to take the oath of
allegiance. He appeared and refused the oath. On September 15th the
Archbishop of York, Herring, wrote to the Secretary of State, Lord
Hardwicke-
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
'Lord Falconbridge dined with me yesterday... He offered a sort
of security for the honour and innocence of his relation and
neighbour, Lord Fairfax of Gilling and intimated to lodge a deposition
with me. I told him that was a matter of some nicety but whatever I
saw in favour of Lord Fairfax, notwithstanding my good opinion of him,
must rest upon his authority.'
[END INDENTATION]
In the last week of September rumours suddenly spread in York
that Fairfax was about to rise in arms. The Rector of Gilling,
Nicholas Gouge wrote to Lord Irwin, the Lord Lieutenant, on October
1st-
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
'Yesterday Lord Fairfax sent down his coachman (who is a
Protestant) to me with compliments, and to acquaint me that one of our
Town (his Lordship's tenant too, a most bigotted Papist) had given out
that there was a private room within Gilling Castle where 40 men might
be conceal'd and nobody cou'd find them out and his Lordship
desir'd the person might be brought before me and punish'd as the
Law directs: and further his Lordship desir'd that I would send the
Constable... to search his castle whether there was any such room or
not... (the searchers went there and) saw the place at the end of the
Ale Cellar... not two yards square... The Lord's Coachman assured me
that of late there had been no company excepting Mr. Cholmondly and
his wife.'
[END INDENTATION]
The Rector concluded that the alarmist had spread the tale to
gain credit for himself. He confined himself to telling 'the two
best Protestants' in the man's family that the matter had been
reported to the authorities, and he himself published a refutation of
the rumour in the York papers.
But another search party had been to Gilling, from York.
Archbishop Herring wrote to Irwin on October 2nd-
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
'I believe Mr. Frankland and myself took the thing too high,
but the recorder was frightened and the fright caught the city. Lord
Fairfax found out the reason of the alarm, and, I am assured, was
pleased with the opportunity of justifying himself. He treated Mr.
Dunbar (who went with the search warrant) at dinner and drank King
George's health.'
[END INDENTATION]
To Hardwicke Herring wrote that he was now convinced that Fairfax
was the King's friend.
# 2010
[223 TEXT G36]
The reader is now in possession of all the facts needed to
determine what has happened to the aliens, and I hope not to be
pointing out the obvious if I explain that the clue is in the apparent
speeding-up of their television broadcasts. They don't speed them up,
which means, for instance, that when they walk around their space-ship
they can change direction in something of the order of
one-ten-thousandth of a second while moving at 30,000 miles an hour.
No humanoid frame could stand that, unless its mass were very tiny.
The aliens, then, are on the airfield all right, but their space-ship
is sinking into a muddy heelprint or whatever. Apart from the effects
of awe and amazement produced by the description of the pulpy monsters
and so on, what we have here is a strong puzzle interest that is
widespread in science fiction as a minor aspect and not uncommonly
central, as in this case. I have already mentioned the biological
puzzle- problems of determining an alien life-cycle and the like- as
an important sub-category; another involves the question of finding
the weak point in some apparently invulnerable monster or hostile
alien or badly behaved human artifact of the robot sort. The
solutions to these may be progressively revealed rather than shown as
deduceable, but they need not be, and ~"Pictures Don't Lie" is not
an isolated example of the approach that offers what are valid clues,
even if they are only seen as such in retrospect. Although interests
of this kind can hardly be classed among the most lofty, it seems
legitimate to call them as literary as any other. Certainly science
fiction appears to be on the point of taking over some of the
functions of the traditional detective story, currently I believe in
grave disrepair, though with a large audience, in England at any rate,
nurturing itself on reprints and the more problem-posing kind of
thriller. I cannot believe that the Anglican parson and the Oxford
classics don, those alleged archetypes of the Agatha Christie fan,
would bring themselves to look through the files of Astounding
Science Fiction in search of a story like Isaac Asimov's "Little
Lost Robot," but they would be the losers by their reluctance, for
the science-fiction deduction problem, while to some tastes inferior
to the detective story in its weaker connections with the world we
know, is superior to that tiny motive-means-opportunity system in its
range of both problems set and kinds of answer proposed.
To take the commercial aspect: some partial merger between the
publics of the two modes does seem eventually possible, as Anthony
Boucher, the most level-headed of science-fiction commentators,
foresaw some years ago. I have already mentioned the tendency of the
more full-time writers to have a foot in both camps: Boucher himself
doubles as the whodunit reviewer of the New York Times, and
although I cannot personally confirm his assertion that
science-fiction elements have recently become perceptible in some
detective stories, the opposite process is clearly under way. A
recent story by Poul Anderson, "The Martian Crown Jewels," gives us
a brilliantly clever and inventive synthesis of the two media, with a
Martian detective called Syaloch who affects a \tirstokr cap, a
locked-space-ship problem, and a completely fair presentation of clues
ingeniously disguised as technological patter. Even the most hardened
Baker Street Irregular would be captivated by the story- if he ever
learnt of its existence. Elsewhere, science fiction has been combined
with what we are accustomed to distinguish as thriller or mystery
ingredients rather than specifically deductive ones. All of these
make some appearance in Chad Oliver's novel Shadows in the Sun.
The problem here is why a small town in Texas consists entirely of
recently arrived inhabitants and why these are all too average to be
believable. This is soon explained- the hero boards a flying saucer
on page 27- but the first three chapters are stuffed with 'tec tricks
of presentation and style, from verbless sentences and sinister
single-sentence paragraphs ~("He was afraid to go out" or ~"He
had to know") to the image of the hero, who is an anthropologist
but tough- the ordinary science-fiction hero needs no such apology
for his learning. This chap
[BEGIN QUOTE]
was a big man, standing a shade under six feet and pushing two hundred
pounds. His brown eyes were shrewd and steady. He was dressed in the
local uniform- khaki shirt and trousers, capped with a warped,
wide-brimmed hat at one end and cowboy boots at the other. His
Ph.D. didn't show, and he didn't look like the kind of a man who
had often been frightened,
[END QUOTE]
and as you might expect he soon takes up with Cynthia, who although
fresh off the flying saucer makes good Martinis and is cool and slim
and sets the hero's stomach feeling tight. These are recognisable as
importations into science fiction, which avoids that particular kind
of cheap-jack stuff and indeed deserves a small round of applause for
not trying to expand its audience by concessions to salacity. A less
inane (and more recent) example of attempted hybridisation is Richard
Matheson's A Stir of Echoes, described on the wrapper simply as
"a novel of menace" but in fact fusing science-fiction and 'tec
elements with some show of wholeheartedness to produce a murder
mystery with telepathic clues. The ability of a literary mode to
expand into others is often taken as a sign of vitality, and it is
true that between them fantasy and science fiction have gobbled up
most of what was left of the horror story without much injury, but I
cannot feel that the injection of these thriller ingredients is likely
to lead to much beyond blurring and dilution. It is not by capturing
more territory that science fiction will improve itself, but by
consolidating what it already has.
Such internal reconstruction would do well to start with an
attempt to bring sexual matters into better focus. Going easy on the
puritanism would be a commendable resolve, and so would a decision to
drop sex altogether where it is not essential rather than to decorate
a planetary survey or alien invasion with a perfunctory love interest
presented in terms borrowed from the tough school or the novelette.
What will certainly not do is any notion of turning out a
science-fiction love story. In the as yet unlikely event of this
being well done, the science fiction part would be blotted out,
reduced to irritating background noise- a dozen Venusian swamp-lilies
being delivered to the heroine's apartment, and so forth. A recent
effort, perhaps harmless in intention but unspeakable in execution,
has been made to introduce a women's angle into the field, whereby we
are introduced to a gallant little lady pretending to hate her man so
that he can push off to Mars without pining for her, and an equally
gallant little wife and mother uncomplainingly keeping up the
production of tasty and nourishing meals while the hydrogen missiles
are landing in the back garden. We can hope for more imaginative
treatments than that, but the role of sex in science fiction as a
whole seems bound to remain secondary. In the idea type of story it
can have almost no place; in the social utopia, it exceeds its warrant
if it is much more than illustrative or diversifying, although one
would not want to be decisive at what is still an early stage of the
medium's development. To view with aplomb the prospect of continuing
limitation of sex interest in science fiction is not the same thing as
to accept a damaging poverty in it, for we are dealing with a genre,
not a literature, and it is unnecessary to chide the Aeneid, for
instance, on the grounds of its taciturnity about daily life in
Augustan Rome. But I quite agree that almost nothing in contemporary
science fiction is more calculated to affront the tiro, nor to raise
more serious doubts of the medium's ability to come of age, than the
horrid lyricism or posturing off-handedness which seem to be the
regular procedures for handling these questions.
Similar doubts attend consideration of another, and I suppose,
related, weakness in the medium as at present conducted: lack of
humour and, far more than this, bad attempted humour. There is
undoubtedly a kind of priggish pomposity which can afflict even the
better writers, enough at times to subvert the moral tendency of what
they are saying, and I connect this with the parochial circuit of
mutual congratulation, leading in some cases to delusions of grandeur,
in which most of them are involved; this is a consequence, I feel, of
the history and general circumstances of science fiction itself. As
regards simple absence of humour, I like to think I'm as fond of a
good laugh as the next man, but I can stand doing without for long
periods when reading, having been trained in the Oxford English
school, and many of the best science-fiction stories, "The Xi
Effect," for example, distil a kind of horror hard to conceive of as
harmonising plausibly with anything comic. Some editors in the field,
however, seem to have picked up from their reading the notion that
humour is a sign of maturity, and compete with one another to fill
their pages with stories whose very titles are enough to chill the
blood: "The Cerebrative Psittacoid," for instance, or "The Gnurrs
Come from the Voodvork Out." There is even a whole mass of writing
consecrated to the defeats inflicted on learned but hidebound
scientists by a generic Midwestern \2Paw and \2Maw of great natural
wisdom (alleged) and hideous whimsicality (actual). The British are
not guiltless here either: a story called "When Grandfather Flew to
the Moon" married the concepts of space travel with traditional-
that is, false and folksy- Welsh humour, introducing characters
called Llewellyn Time Machine and Auntie Spaceship-Repairs Jones.
This outstanding case of unwanted originality won a prize in the
London Observer's science-fiction contest, which seems to have
been judged by non-addicts; it has been reprinted, with squeals of
editorial delight, in a leading American anthology.
However, the picture as a whole is not as grave as this. Humour
as a main interest will sometimes work in this medium, provided that
the comic notion is a valid science-fiction notion as well. One such
example is William Tenn's satire on mediocrity, "Null-P"; others
are to be found in the work of Sheckley, Pohl, and Fredric Brown.
Beside his contributions to the comic-inferno division in stories
like "A Ticket to Tranai," Sheckley has devised a sub-form of his
own, the comic problem. In "The Lifeboat Mutiny," two men strive
to outwit the mechanical intelligence which controls the boat; it was
programmed to meet the needs of an extinct, warlike, reptilian race
and is of a verbose, officious disposition. Finally the men sham dead
and the lifeboat ejects them into the sea, having read the alien
burial service over them. The comedy here arises from the
characterisation of the non-human protagonist as it lectures the men
on their patriotic duty, offers them food that looks like clay but
smells like machine oil, and when they refuse it, threatens them with
brain surgery. The solution to the problem, however, does not
approach the theorematical neatness and cogency of that propounded in
"One Man's Poison." Here, two other but similar men are starving
to death in a vast, isolated alien warehouse filled with various
outlandish goods, including food, poisonous substances, and a thing
called the Super Custom Transport, complete with fuel. The food turns
out to be poison and so does the poison, whereupon the men settle down
to dine off the Super Custom Transport, which proves to be an animal,
and its fuel, which is water. Better than almost any other, this
example of the science fiction of pure idea acts as a test case, in
that those learned in the medium will at once salute its ingenuity and
elegance, while those whose study is but little will complain of not
being illuminated, of being offered an unworthy escape from the
universe of man and fact, of being presented with a pseudo-question
instead of a question.
# 2033
[224 TEXT G37]
Conversely, there were other poets who from the very outset
hated and denounced the war, and yet got out of it something which was
both less and more than hatred. However fiercely they might condemn
it, it exerted a sinister hold over them. A striking case of this is
the Russian Futurist, Viktor Khlebnikov, who fought as a private
soldier on the eastern front from early in the war until the
dissolution of the Russian armies. A leading figure in the
6avant-garde of poetry, he experimented with words and images
in the hope of making his poetry tougher and harsher, and war provided
him with many opportunities for effects which suited his peculiar
tastes. It appealed to him by its elemental disorder, its reduction
of life to its lowest terms, its chaotic brutality which made him
believe that the earth had returned to the sway of savage, primeval
gods. His packed, forceful lines and his bold improvisations in
vocabulary reflected his isolation from other men and his
imperviousness to the common claims of humanity. His revolutionary
ardour was perfectly sincere and set him in principle against the war,
but in practice he displayed his feelings largely in his love of
rasping shocks and grim surprises. His imagination was set to work by
such themes as a dead man lying in a pond, soldiers caught in battle
as in a mouse-trap, the merciless torment of rain and snow and wind,
the flame and smoke of bombardments, the burning of villages and the
wreck of forests. In these he feels at home, because he sees in them
a reversion to a distant, disordered past for which his anarchic
temperament craves. He creates his own mythology for the battlefield
and likes to see in its routine survivals from pagan rites. So in
'1Trizna' ('Death-feast'), he presents in the cremation of
dead soldiers an ancient death-feast, in which modern military drill
is part of the ceremony. As soldiers stand in silence and watch the
pyre set alight, the smoke which rises from it recalls the flow of
great rivers, the Don and the Irtish, and symbolizes the overpowering
domination of nature when artificial restraints are removed. In
Khlebnikov's love of horrors there is a streak of perversity, but it
is none the less in character in a man who looked forward to the
collapse of his world. For him also war transforms what he sees, and
gives to it a fierce enchantment.
From his knowledge of war as it really is the poet may start
again towards a wider vision of it and try to see it in a fuller
perspective without reverting to the old abstractions and falsities.
It is impossible to present its illimitable chaos, but what counts is
the poet's selection from it of what really strikes or stirs him.
This is what Georg Trakl, who died on the eastern front in December
1914, does in 'Im Osten' ('On the Eastern Front'). He
applies to the whole shapeless panorama of battle his gift for images
which form a centre for a host of associations and must be taken at
their full value as each appears:
[POEM]
Here the individual elements are taken from fact and give a true
picture of war, but they gain a special significance because they also
point to something beyond themselves, of which they are both examples
and symbols. Trakl shows that the soldier-poet is fully capable of
seeing beyond his immediate situation with an insight denied to those
who have no experience of actual battle.
Though Trakl looks upon war from the anguished solitude of a
prophet, he draws no conclusions and makes no forecasts. Yet it was
not impossible for a fighting man to let his vision pierce beyond the
actual carnage and to divine with an apocalyptic clairvoyance its
meaning in the scheme of things. This was what Isaac Rosenberg did.
In the British army he had little in common with his fellow poets.
They were officers; he was a private soldier. They cherished a trust
in a privileged and happy England which had only to survive the war
and return to its old ways; he, brought up in poverty and frustration
and conscious of his alien origin, shared none of their romantic
dreams. For him the war was indeed a cosmic event, which he believed
to be needed to purge the injustices of society and to bring back
sanity to men. As such he welcomed it when it came, and as such he
continued to believe in it when others had lost their nerve on finding
that their vaulting hopes were false. He was convinced that the war
was an inevitable part of an historical process, in which England,
driven by a desire for self-destruction, by an 'incestuous worm'
eating into its vitals, was passing to the doom of Babylon and Rome.
He had something in common with the Russian revolutionaries, but he
differed from Mayakovsky in believing that the war was necessary to
attain what he desired, and from Khlebnikov in taking no pleasure,
however grim or perverse, in it. He did not deceive himself about its
actual cost, and hardly any poet has written with so unshrinking a
candour about the actual appearance of battle. As a human being
Rosenberg was racked by the agony and the waste which he saw, but he
steeled himself to endure it, because he believed that only through
such an ordeal could the injustices and falsities of his world be
discredited and destroyed. In his view England was paying a price for
her cruelties, and, though the price was indeed heavy, it must none
the less be paid. For this cause Rosenberg was ready to sacrifice
himself, and he fulfilled his pledge when he was killed in April 1918.
He spoke very much from his own point of view, but what he said is an
enlightening corrective both to those who saw nothing in the carnage
and to those who saw nothing beyond it.
A second matter on which there is a wide divergence between the
non-combatant and the combatant views of war is in their treatment of
death. Those who are not in constant contact with it cannot but be
deeply affected by it, and not only express their grief freely but see
in death much more than its immediate presence. Death in battle has
long had its own glory, and it is understandable that Rupert Brook,
who died before he had seen any fighting except at Antwerp, should
proclaim:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead.
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
But this was not how the average soldier treated it. So far as
the prospect of his own death was concerned, he usually observed a
private fatalism, which made speculation superfluous, and in the
deaths of others, however deeply he might feel a personal loss, he
knew that it was useless to lament or do anything but hide his
feelings in a situation where death came all the time and hardly
called for special remark. This of course did not deceive anyone, and
was not intended to do so; it was the dignity of silence in the face
of something on which there was nothing to say. The soldier has to
adjust his mind to death. He does so by treating it as nothing
unusual, and in his topsy-turvy world he is not wrong. This note of
superficial detachment is what Guillaume Apollinaire catches in
'\Exercice':
[POEM]
With solicitous understatement Apollinaire tells of the deaths of
four men behind the lines as if it were nothing unusual, and so indeed
it was. But behind this quiet exterior there is a real compassion at
the impartial cruelty of death which suddenly breaks into the
soldiers' routine and destroys them, when in their talk about the past
they pay no attention to the future, which suddenly falls upon them.
Apollinaire's art speaks for a whole order of human beings of whom he
is the representative, and presents these casual deaths in the spirit
in which any soldier would, in his inarticulate way, feel about them.
The paradox of death in war is that despite its presence life
must go on without interruption and that even the most gruesome relics
must not be allowed to break into the living soldier's hold upon
himself, which is at all times precarious but none the less the centre
of his sanity and his ability to act. The contrast between what he
feels or does and the surroundings in which he does it is one of war's
most violent discords, and in it we can see how the human spirit
adapts itself to the most horrifying circumstances simply because it
must exert itself and endure. Something of this kind is in the mind
of the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti in '\Veglia' ('Watch'):
[POEM]
In the struggle to maintain his individuality Ungaretti has to
resist any invasion of it by distress at the dead body. He is fully
aware of it, and his words are not in the least lacking in humanity.
He marks the horror of death in the snarl on the dead man's face and
is painfully conscious of the way in which the dead hands push towards
him, but he struggles against the horror, exerts a complete command
over himself- and writes love-letters. It is his escape from the
hideous unreality of war into the reality of his affections, and it
gains greatly in seriousness from the chilling circumstances in which
it all takes place.
A third matter on which the fighting soldier has his own ideas is
the enemy. At home enemies may be denounced as inhuman barbarians,
ready to destroy the hearths and shrines of lands more civilized than
their own. Therefore patriots, safely ensconced in the rear,
fulminate against them, but the average soldier soon sees that in this
there is little truth. Living in his own isolated world of the
trenches, he feels that the enemy are closer to him than many of his
own countrymen, and especially than the invisible commanders who from
a remote security order multitudes to a senseless death. On no point
is there a sharper contrast between home and front, and in England we
may mark the extremes, on one side by Kipling's
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
~It was not part of their blood.
~It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate,
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
and on the other side by Siegfried Sassoon's
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
~O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
In Germany no less pungent a contrast can be found between one
end of the scale with Littauer's 'Hymn of Hate' and another with
ordinary soldiers, who felt, almost despite themselves, the curious
brotherhood into which battle draws its antagonists. So in
'\Bru"der' ('Brothers'), Heinrich Lersch comes close to what
many men felt as he tells of a dead man hanging on the barbed wire in
front of his trench. He feels that this man is his brother, and at
night he thinks that he hears him crying. He crawls out to bring him
in and bury him, and then he sees that he is a stranger. He draws his
conclusion:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
Es irrten meine Augen. Mein Herz, du irrst dich nicht: Es hat
ein jeder Toter des Bruders Angesicht.
\2'Twas my eyes were mistaken. You, heart, were not misled;
There's the look of a brother on every man that's dead.)
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
In France we find similar contrasts. At one extreme we may put
Claudel's 'Derrie?3re eux', which in righteous anger denounces
the Germans for shedding innocent blood and foretells their defeat and
punishment by the implacable justice which they have aroused against
them. It has its own proud fury when Claudel elaborates how in the
end the Germans will be undone by the very forces which they have
themselves set in action:
[BEGIN QUOTE]
~Retranche-toi, peuple assie?2ge?2! e?2tends tes impassables
re?2seaux de fil
de fer!
~Fossoyeurs de vos propres battaillons, sans rela?5che faites
votre fosse
dans la terre!
[END QUOTE]
but it moves in too exalted and too personal an atmosphere to speak
for the common soldier.
# 2027
[225 TEXT G38]
He may chance to cut a poor figure in the eyes of posterity, for a
work which was mere commercial trash to the \conoscenti of one
generation might possibly become a classic to those of another. If,
on the other hand, he is guided by a contempt for the readers of such
books, then he is making a crude and unacknowledged use of my system.
It would be safer to admit what he was doing and do it better; make
sure that his contempt had in it no admixture of merely social
snobbery or intellectual priggery. My proposed system works in the
open. If we cannot observe the reading habits of those who buy the
Westerns, or don't think it worth while to try, we say nothing about
the books. If we can, there is usually not much difficulty in
assigning those habits either to the unliterary or the literary class.
If we find that a book is usually read in one way, still more if we
never find that it is read in the other, we have a 6prima facie
case for thinking it bad. If on the other hand we found even one
reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the
lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and
reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were
changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however
it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to
put it beyond the pale.
How risky the current method can be, I have some reason to know.
Science-fiction is a literary province I used to visit fairly often;
if I now visit it seldom, that is not because my taste has improved
but because the province has changed, being now covered with new
building estates, in a style I don't care for. But in the good old
days I noticed that whenever critics said anything about it, they
betrayed great ignorance. They talked as if it were a homogeneous
genre. But it is not, in the literary sense, a genre at all. There
is nothing common to all who write it except the use of a particular
'machine'. Some of the writers are of the family of Jules Verne
and are primarily interested in technology. Some use the machine
simply for literary fantasy and produce what is essentially
\Ma"rchen or myth. A great many use it for satire; nearly all the
most pungent American criticism of the American way of life takes this
form, and would at once be denounced as un-American if it ventured
into any other. And finally, there is the great mass of hacks who
merely 'cashed in' on the boom in science-fiction and used remote
planets or even galaxies as the backcloth for spy-stories or
love-stories which might as well or better have been located in
Whitechapel or the Bronx. And as the stories differ in kind, so of
course do their readers. You can, if you wish, class all
science-fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing
the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W. W. Jacobs together as
'the sea-story' and then criticising that.
But it is when we come to the second distinction, that made
among the sheep or within the pale, that my system would differ most
sharply from the established one. For the established system, the
difference between distinctions within the pale and that primary
distinction which draws the pale itself, can only be one of degree.
Milton is bad and Patience Strong is worse; Dickens (most of him) is
bad and Edgar Wallace is worse. My taste is bad because I like Scott
and Stevenson; the taste of those who like E. R. Burroughs is
worse. But the system I propose would draw a distinction not of
degree but of kind between readings. All the words- 'taste',
'liking', 'enjoyment'- bear different meanings as applied to
the unliterary and to me. There is no evidence that anyone has ever
reacted to Edgar Wallace as I react to Stevenson. In that way, the
judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement ~'This man
is not in love', whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more
like ~'This man is in love, but with a frightful woman'. And just
as the mere fact that a man of sense and breeding loves a woman we
dislike properly and inevitably makes us consider her again and look
for, and sometimes find, something in her we had not noticed before,
so, in my system, the very fact that people, or even any one person,
can well and truly read, and love for a lifetime, a book we had
thought bad, will raise the suspicion that it cannot really be as bad
as we thought. Sometimes, to be sure, our friend's mistress remains
in our eyes so plain, stupid and disagreeable that we can attribute
his love only to the irrational and mysterious behaviour of hormones;
similarly, the book he likes may continue to seem so bad that we have
to attribute his liking to some early association or other
psychological accident. But we must, and should, remain uncertain.
Always, there may be something in it that we can't see. The 6prima
facie probability that anything which has ever been truly read and
obstinately loved by any reader has some virtue in it is overwhelming.
To condemn such a book is therefore, on my system, a very serious
matter. Our condemnation is never quite final. The question could
always without absurdity be re-opened.
And here, I suggest, the proposed system is the more realistic.
For, whatever we say, we are all aware in a cool hour that the
distinctions within the pale are far more precarious than the location
of the pale itself, and that nothing whatever is gained by disguising
the fact. When whistling to keep our spirits up, we may say that we
are as certain of Tennyson's inferiority to Wordsworth as of Edgar
Wallace's to Balzac. When heated with controversy you may say that my
taste in liking Milton is merely a milder instance of the same sort of
badness we attribute to the taste that likes the comics. We can say
these things but no sane man quite fully believes them. The
distinctions we draw between better and worse within the pale are not
at all like that between 'trash' and 'real' literature. They
all depend on precarious and reversible judgements. The proposed
system frankly acknowledges this. It admits from the outset that
there can be no question of totally and finally 'debunking' or
'exposing' any author who has for some time been well inside the
pale. We start from the assumption that whatever has been found good
by those who really and truly read probably is good. All probability
is against those who attack. And all they can hope to do is to
persuade people that it is less good than they think; freely
confessing that even this assessment may presently be set aside.
Thus one result of my system would be to silence the type of
critic for whom all the great names in English literature- except for
the half dozen protected by the momentary critical
'establishment'- are as so many lamp-posts for a dog. And this I
consider a good thing. These dethronements are a great waste of
energy. Their acrimony produces heat at the expense of light. They
do not improve anyone's capacity for good reading. The real way of
mending a man's taste is not to denigrate his present favourites but
to teach him how to enjoy something better.
Such are the advantages I think we might hope [SIC] from
basing our criticism of books on our criticism of reading. But we
have so far pictured the system working ideally and ignored the snags.
In practice we shall have to be content with something less.
The most obvious objection to judging books by the way they are
read is the fact that the same book may be read in different ways. We
all know that certain passages in good fiction and good poetry are
used by some readers, chiefly schoolboys, as pornography; and now that
Lawrence is coming out in paperbacks, the pictures on their covers and
the company they keep on the station bookstalls show very clearly what
sort of sales, and therefore what sort of reading, the booksellers
anticipate. We must, therefore, say that what damns a book is not the
existence of bad readings but the absence of good ones. Ideally, we
should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or
compels' good reading. But we shall have to make do with 'permits
and invites'. There may indeed be books which compel a good reading
in the sense that no one who reads in the wrong way would be likely to
get through more than a few of their pages. If you took up Samson
Agonistes, Rasselas, or Urn Burial to pass the time, or for
excitement, or as an aid to egoistic castle-building you would soon
put it down. But books which thus resist bad reading are not
necessarily better than books which do not. It is, logically, an
accident that some beauties can, and others cannot, be abused. As for
'invites', invitation admits of degrees. 'Permits' is therefore
our sheet-anchor. The ideally bad book is the one of which a good
reading is impossible. The words in which it exists will not bear
close attention, and what they communicate offers you nothing unless
you are prepared either for mere thrills or for flattering daydreams.
But 'invitation' comes into our conception of a good book. It is
not enough that attentive and obedient reading should be barely
possible if we try hard enough. The author must not leave us to do
all the work. He must show, and pretty quickly, that his writing
deserves, because it rewards, alert and disciplined reading.
It will also be objected that to take our stand upon readings
rather than books is to turn from the known to the unknowable. The
books, after all, are obtainable and we can inspect them for
ourselves; what can we really know about other people's ways of
reading? But this objection is not so formidable as it sounds.
The judgement of readings, as I have already said, is twofold.
First, we put some readers outside the pale as unliterary; then we
distinguish better and worse tastes within the pale. When we are
doing the first, the readers themselves will give us no conscious
assistance. They do not talk about reading and would be inarticulate
if they tried to. But in their case external observation is perfectly
easy. Where reading plays a very small part in the total life and
every book is tossed aside like an old newspaper the moment it has
been used, unliterary reading can be diagnosed with certainty. Where
there is passionate and constant love of a book and rereading, then,
however bad we think the book and however immature or uneducated we
think the reader, it cannot. (By rereading I mean, of course,
rereading for choice. A lonely child in a house where there are few
books or a ship's officer on a long voyage may be driven to reread
anything faute de mieux.)
When we are making the second distinction- approving or
censuring the tastes of those who are obviously literary- the test by
external observation fails us. But to compensate for that, we are now
dealing with articulate people. They will talk, and even write, about
their favourite books. They will sometimes explicitly tell us, and
more often unintentionally reveal, the sort of pleasure they take in
them and the sort of reading it implies. We can thus often judge, not
with certainty but with great probability, who has received Lawrence
on his literary merits and who is primarily attracted by the \imago
of Rebel or Poor Boy Makes Good; who loves Dante as a poet and who
loves him as a Thomist; who seeks in an author the enlargement of his
mental being and who seeks only the enlargement of his self-esteem.
# 2043
[226 TEXT G39]
They were married on March 4th, 1880, at St. Matthias,
Dublin, and the bride wore a simple travelling dress of grey. It was
in every way more suitable, considering the bridegroom's age, and the
fact that she was still in mourning for her brother. But she
regretted it afterwards. 'The conventional dress of a widow has been
mine, but never the dress of a bride.'
His letter to Layard from Paris, a few days later, gives the
picture of a happy, teasing relationship between them. 'I am hardly
recovered as yet from the surprise which my marriage has caused me.
My wife, who was quite a student, is now plunged among \chiffons
and \modistes, and I am bound to admit that she bears the
infliction with a resignation which is rather alarming and ominous,
excusing her new-fangled interest in dress on the grounds of pleasing
me.' Evidently Cinderella got her finery after all.
Her welcome from the Layards was as warm as his had always been,
and for Enid Layard, her ideal of a hostess and great lady, she felt a
hero-worship which developed into the closest intimacy she ever had
with another woman. To Lady Layard's literary antecedents I will
return.
They were only just in time to see Sir Henry in his ambassadorial
glory, for his diplomatic career was coming to an abrupt end. A
confidential despatch, in which he gave his frank opinion of the
Sultan's incompetence and personal cowardice, was published by the
Foreign Office, whether through carelessness or treachery is not
known. Queen Victoria, a strong supporter of monarchical
trade-unionism, was scarcely less furious than the Sultan, and Sir
Henry was not only recalled, but lost his hope of a peerage, in which
matter, one is told, Sir William had been acting as intermediary.
However, the Layards were childless and comfortably off, and had some
years previously bought themselves a beautiful palazzo on the Grand
Canal in Venice, so that retirement was no great hardship to them.
The Gregorys would visit them there every spring.
To neither friend did retirement mean inactivity. They continued
their work for the National Gallery and their personal
picture-collecting, and Sir William continued to gratify what he calls
his insatiable appetite for travelling. Three times during his
marriage he returned as a visitor to his beloved Ceylon, on the second
occasion taking Augusta with him, and giving her a winter in India
first. Other winters were spent in Egypt; spring in Spain or Italy,
and then on to the Layards. He had, of course, no intention of
burying himself at Coole; it was a country house for a few weeks of
shooting in the late summer and early autumn. Nor did he take any
notice of Dublin, a place of provincial dowdiness to a man of the
world like himself, except to give a picture or two to its National
Gallery- nothing in comparison with what he did for London's. The
tall house in St. George's Place, London, was the nearest thing he
had to a settled home.
For the Cinderella of Roxborough, it was liberation indeed. It
was fulfilment not only as a woman, but as an intelligence. Now at
last she had someone to talk to; in fact she had the best company in
London to talk to, in the Jane Austen sense of 'the company of
clever, well-informed people who have plenty of conversation.' It
was frequently the best company in the social sense too; Sir William
numbered at least two duchesses among his intimates. 'Freed by my
own happy marriage from many family traditions'- so she describes
her escape from the Persse conservatism and prejudice. Sir William
may not appear much of a revolutionary from our standpoint, but from
theirs he was almost as much a rebel and traitor to his class as she
was to seem to the next Ascendancy generation. Moreover, he was a
great gentleman, with a nation-wide reputation and the grand manner,
and if he chose to be a rebel, nobody dared say him nay.
In May of 1881, their son William Robert was born in London, to
be the pride of his father's old age, and to his mother the dearest
thing on earth.
<3>
As far as the Galway remove went, only seven miles separated her
from Roxborough, but from the first, she says, 'there seemed to be a
strangeness and romance about Coole.' And it is not surprising, for
the two houses and their demesnes were different worlds. Roxborough
was open and windy, bustling and busy, a working estate; Coole was a
pleasure-house, a Sleeping Beauty palace in a thick forest. For by
his plantations the East India chairman, homesick perhaps for Asia,
had created an artificial jungle, quite against the grain of that
limestone country. His descendants had inherited his passion for
tree-planting. Sir William had turned the nut-wood north of the house
into a pinetum, putting, as he cheerfully admits, a great deal of
money into the nurserymen's pockets, since many of the rare species of
conifer introduced would not take to the limestone, and died. But
enough remained to create a handsome sub-Alpine gloom.
The drive was two miles long, and the last mile was first an
arching avenue of ilex, then a twisting forest track. The house
itself disappointed many (including, years later, Robert Gregory's
artist bride) by its architectural poverty. It was an oblong white
Georgian building with a plain little porch, the counterpart of
hundreds in Ireland. The principal living-rooms, library and
drawing-room, looked the other way, west towards the lake, through
undistinguished but serviceable bays. All the house's distinction lay
within.
Four cultivated generations had filled it with books, pictures,
statuary, records and mementoes of wide travel, all bearing the
imprint of personal taste and personal achievement. It was the house
of people who had never been afraid to use their brains.
As at Roxborough, there were rats; indeed, till Robert Gregory
married, and his wife persuaded him to pull down the creeper which
covered the outer walls, there were rats to a positively embarrassing
degree. A visitor of the creeper epoch recalls a rat in her bedroom
while she was undressing, a rat inside the mattress when she got into
bed, and unmistakeable signs that a rat had been before her when she
got down to breakfast next morning; after which she walked the three
miles into Gort, and sent herself a telegram, summoning herself home.
Ten minutes' walk along the edge of the paddock at the back of
the house brought one out- with a sense of relief if one were of a
claustrophobic tendency- on to the edge of a long meandering lake,
made even longer in winter by floods, since its waters, like those of
the Roxborough river, only reached the sea by an underground channel,
which was liable to get blocked. And round the lake lay more vast
woods; somewhere in their depths was a perched boulder which when
struck emitted musical notes, and could be caused to ring like a chime
of church bells. It was all very eerie, and not surprisingly, was a
favourite haunt of the Sidhe, those strange Beings, in appearance just
like ordinary people until They vanished or filled your pockets with
derisory gold, whom it is inadequate and misleading to describe by our
English word of Fairies. To the difficulty of finding your way about
the woods was added Their propensity for leading you astray, and
unwary visitors could be lost for hours, or even a whole night. In
later years Their most notable victim was to be Bernard Shaw.
Even in County Galway, the seven miles' removal meant a more
intellectual society. Sir William's chief friend in the district was
Count \de Basterot, a French traveller and litte?2rateur who had
inherited an estate on the Burren coast from the Irish side of his
family, self-exiled to France in the time of James =2. The Count
came to Duras for the summer and autumn, much as the Gregorys came to
Coole. While the next-door neighbour, at Tullira Castle, was an
old-maidish young man named Edward Martyn, heir and hope of one of the
rare Catholic landed families. He had literary ambitions which Sir
William had encouraged, and was in all directions talented, musically
and artistically too. Unfortunately, he was mother-dominated to an
extent which made it impossible for him to manage his life or get the
full value from his talents. To please his mother, he had Gothicised
his house at a cost of +20,000, though besought by Sir William not
to. He would do anything to please her but marry, and he lived like a
hermit in one of the towers, nourishing a hatred for the rest of
womankind. His position as a wealthy and cultivated Catholic later
gave him great importance in the Irish Renascence; he became a link
between the different sides of the movement; people got to know each
other through him, thereafter leaving him behind.
Three years after Lady Gregory's marriage, Dr (later Monsignor)
Jerome Fahy was appointed Vicar-General of Gort, the market town
nearest to Coole, and this brought into their circle another
intelligent man whom as Augusta Persse she would never have been
allowed to know. Sir William, it has been noted, was a friend to the
Roman Catholic religion, though perhaps not for what Catholics would
consider the right reasons. He had always been on good terms with the
Bishop and clergy of the Kilmacduagh diocese, and their support had
materially assisted his election as member for Galway. And the new
Vicar-General was no ordinary parish priest, but a historian and a man
of exceptionally enquiring mind.
On the lonely moorland of Kilmacduagh, about three miles
south-west of Gort, he found one of the most considerable groups of
ancient ecclesiastical ruins in Ireland: an abbey church, a monastery,
a cathedral, and a well-preserved Round Tower leaning two feet from
the perpendicular. The history of these monuments had been nearly
forgotten, but he made it his business to 'disinter the buried
treasure', as he puts it in the preface to his History and
Antiquities of the Diocese of Kilmacduagh, published in 1893. He is
writing, of course, from the standpoint of his faith, but much of what
he 'disinterred' was folklore, and he was collecting it in the
field, a decade before Lady Gregory and Yeats.
Nor did he limit himself to legends of St Colman, but as we
have seen, brought his story up to date with accounts of the reigning
Ascendancy families; dealing out censure vigorously, but giving credit
to those who had discharged their responsibilities fairly,
particularly to the Gregorys and the Verekers, the two families who
had made Gort such a well-liking [SIC] and prosperous little town.
<4>
The winter spent by the Gregorys in Egypt was an important one
for Augusta, for it was then that, as she puts it, she 'made her
education in politics'. The leaders of the English colony in Cairo
were the Sussex poet and landowner Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and his wife
Lady Anne, granddaughter of Byron. Blunt was a great taker-up of
causes. He was already disquieted by British administration in India,
and a few years later, in the Land League troubles, he was to claim
the honour of being the first Englishman to go to gaol for Ireland's
sake. He served a sentence in Galway Gaol for inciting Lord
Clanricarde's tenants to resist eviction, and while this was no doubt
awkward for Sir William Gregory, who was a friend of Lord
Clanricarde's, it gave him in Lady Gregory's eyes the status of a
hero.
All her life she was fascinated by stories of prisons and
prisoners, as indeed anyone with 'rebelly' leanings well may be.
From Blunt she learnt what it felt like to be inside the grim gaol at
which she had so often stared in awe when her elders came to Galway,
and which was to form the background to her two most famous short
plays.
# 2003
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FOR more than a 1,000 years Malaya's little courts and ports
were under the influence of Hindu and Buddhist India, which in fact
had created them. First Pallavas from the Coromandel coast imported a
mixture of the religions of Brahma, Shiva and Visnu and Buddhism; and
Sanskrit inscriptions of the 4th century of the Xtian era show that in
Kedah, Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism flourished side by side. From
the 6th to the 13th centuries, Northern Malaya was part of a Buddhist
empire, Sri Vijaya, that ruled the Malacca straits from Kedah and the
Sunda straits from Palembang in south Sumatra. And though the
conversion to Islam 600 years ago destroyed the Hindu alphabets and
any palm-leaf literature, there remain four times as many Sanskrit
loanwords even in Malay village verse as there are Arabic. The
Indians were too few in the land to introduce Prakrit or any Dravidian
tongue as the language of conversation, but the court Brahmins brought
religion and learning and furnished the primitive Malay with his first
abstract terms, terms still used by the Muslim Malay to denote
religion, fasting, heaven, sin, life, language, time, name, prince,
property, thing, a fine, work and so on. It is this background that
gave the Malay stories from the Jataka tales, Bidpai's fables and the
Katha Sarit Sagara or Ocean of story, carried down the centuries
per ora virum, until they were written down and published in
modern times. Most of these stories are known throughout South East
Asia and there is Buddhist influence in folktales. But the two chief
literary relics of the Hindu period are Malay versions of the Ramayana
and Mahabharata. The former, the Hikayat Sri Rama, is derived from
the oral tradition of the Javanese shadow-play and contains details
from the east, west and south-west of India. Some of the episodes are
not found in India before the 12th century. The Malay version in the
Perso-Arabic script would appear to date from the first half of the
15th century, when children in the streets of Malacca knew the story,
and Islamic romance had not yet ousted the Hindu epics. The Malay
versions of sections of the Mahabharata are derived from Javanese
versions of the 14th century and again may probably have been
translated in 15th century Malacca with its large Javanese quarter.
By 1634 Malays were instructed by a famous theologian writer in
Malay that the Ramayana might be condemned to the rubbish heap
provided the name of Allah did not occur in the manuscript. In the
Bodleian manuscript which goes back to the 16th century or earlier, it
is Nabi Adam who gives Ravana his kingdoms and Allah taala has
been substituted for the Hindu Trinity (dewata mulia raya).
One other strong pre-Muslim element in Malay literature was a
cycle of some forty tales enacted in the shadow-plays of Java, Bali,
Malaya, Siam and Cambodia, whose hero is a Javanese prince Sri Panji
and heroine Chandra Kirana, Moon-beam. Some are preserved in Kelantan
thanks to the shadow-plays. One Kelantan tale is typical. The god
Indra sentences a heavenly nymph guilty of an illicit love affair to
become a mortal and be murdered by a Javanese queen before she can
return to heaven. She descends and becomes incarnate in the wife of a
Javanese headman. A prince hunting sees her and weds her, though he
is betrothed to a princess. His mother mad with rage stabs the girl
in her sleep, whereupon she returns a nymph in heaven. As always
there is horse-play by the prince's followers who are deified
ancestors turned by Hinduism into clowns. The Panji cycle influences
the "Malay Annals" and inspired the only original Malay romance
before modern times, the story of Hang Tuah or the Lucky Captain whose
exploits are a mixture of myth and history found in Indian and
Javanese literature of this type and include an apochryphal trip to
Istanbul.
Virginia Woolf's analysis of Sidney's Arcadia fits exactly not
only the Panji tales but a number of Malay romances that are a jumble
of Hindu folklore and mythology, Panji episodes, allusions to the
heroes of the Shahnameh, incidents from the Alexander legend,
references to Baghdad, Medinah, Egypt and Byzantium and even
expositions of Sufi mysticism. "Sidney" writes Virginia Woolf,
"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 subtilty 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 to fill the sails. Who
is talking and to whom and about what, we no longer feel sure."
Some of the Malay romances, which apart from any Javanese additions,
all come from India, appear to have been translated in the 15th
century, others in the 16th and 17th. One, the Indraputra was
condemned to the rubbish heap in 1634 along with the Ramayana. The
two last romances of this type were translated early in the 19th
century. The modern Malay views them with the eye of Virginia Woolf
and today they are of interest only to the folklorist and the
linguist.
The first missionaries of Islam had to provide romances to take
the place of the Ramayana and Mahabharata and the popular Panji tales.
So the pseudo-Callisthenes story of Alexander the Great as a warrior
missionary of the faith of Abraham, the precursor of Mohamed, was
presented to the Malays in a translation almost with the advent of
Islam. There is a Megat Iskandar in 14th century Pasai and soon after
1400 the first Muslim ruler of Malacca changed his Hindu title of
Parameswara for Sultan Iskandar Shah. Several Malay manuscripts name
as the author of the Arabic version Al-Suri, who cites as his
authority Abdullah \ibn Al-Mustafa translator of the Pahlavi version
of the Kalila \wa Dimna. From its early date and the fact that it is
a compilation from Persian as well as Arabic sources, the Malay
Hikayat Iskandar may be derived from a Perso-Arabic source in India.
It seems probable that Malacca's first ruler, who died in 1424 knew
the Hikayat. The 15th century author of the "Malay Annals" borrows
anecdotes from it and also mentions the Hikayat Amir Hamza and Hikayat
Hanafiah, the former a direct translation from the Persian and the
latter having Shi'ah colouring and quoting a Persian verse. Another
Malay work of Persian origin is the story of Joseph and Zulaikha,
namely Potiphar's wife. An excellent Malay work is the Hikayat Bayan
Budiman, or story of the Wise Parrot, a cycle of tales in a frame
story, where every night the parrot dissuades his mistress from going
to meet a lover by diverting her with tales. Ultimately this cycle of
stories comes from the Sanskrit but the Malay version claims to be
from the Persian Tutinameh. Three times in the text the work is
ascribed to one Kadli Hassan and twice a date, A.D. 1371 is
given. Its excellent style suggests that it was done into Malay in
15th century Malacca and the "Malay Annals" tell us how the
daughter of a Malaccan Laksamana, or Admiral was named Sabariah
"Patience" almost certainly after a celebrated character in the
story of the Wise Parrot.
Another cycle of tales, called the Story of Bakhtiar was also
translated from the Persian. The original Persian work was written in
A.D. 1203 and later done into Arabic. From the Persian recension
are derived two Malay versions of the Hikayat Bakhtiar and from the
Arabic comes the Malay Hikayat Ghulam.
The fact that Malays could borrow so much from the Persian and
yet remain orthodox Sunnites of the school of Shafi'i is explained
from the Turkish and Mongol rulers of Persia between 1000 and 1500
being also Sunnites. And during that period the Persian influence on
Malay literature must have come not only from India but from Persians
themselves. In 1336 Ibn Batuta records the presence of several
Persians all Shafi'ites at the Pasai court. A tomb in that little
Sumatran state bears an inscription from Sa'di and half a century
later there were theologians living in Pasai who had come from
Transoxana and Khorassan.
The Malay version of the 1,000 Questions, the fullest version
extant of the book from which Europe got to know the Arab account of
Islam, is derived from two old Persian recensions and contains many
references to places round the Caspian sea. It has no Shi'ah
colouring.
When Persians became Shi'ahs, Sayids from Mecca and the Hadramant
gradually took their place in the Malay world, and we get a large
number of theological works translated from orthodox Arabic originals.
But Persian influence lingered. And there are four stories about the
Prophet with a Shi'ah tinge, namely the tale of the Nur Muhammad or
mystical light of the Prophet, the Splitting of the Moon, the
Prophet's shaving and his death. One manuscript of 1688 calls the
first an abridgement of a Persian Rauzat al-ahbab or Paradise of
Lovers.
After the capture of Malacca by the Portuguese in 1511 the
mastery of the Malay world passed to Acheh, which was frequented by
missionaries from Mecca, Yemen, Egypt and Syria whose names we know
and who found pupils eager to study Islamic mysticism. Works of pure
literature fell more and more out of fashion as Arab influence
supplanted Persian. But still Persian influence lingered. The
earliest Malay version of the Panchatantra or Bidpai's fables was
known to the Dutch historian Valentyn in 1726 and from its poor Malay
and Sumatran style it must have been translated at Acheh. It came
through some Indian original from the 12th century Persian recension
of Nasr Allah as amended in the 15th century by the author of the
Anwar-i Suhaili or Lights of Canopus.
There is an ethical treatise "The Crown of Kings" compiled at
Bokhara and done into Malay in 1603 and therefore almost certainly at
Acheh. The verses in this miscellany are all in the form of Persian
prosody. Among Persian works cited in it are the Siyar \ul Muluk
compiled by the famous Vizier Nizam \ul Muluk, a verse out of the
Secrets of Attar, the romances of Mahmud and Ayaz and Shirin, and
Yusuf and Zulaikha. The introduction acknowledges indebtedness to the
author of the Anwar \i Suhaili.
With the coming of Arabs from the Hadramant and with Malays
studying in Mecca and later in Cairo, Indo-Persian belles-lettres gave
way to theology, even the Arabian Nights not being translated until
the 19th century and then from the English. But Malay theology is too
vast a subject to handle here.
The example of Thucydides, Gibbon and Macaulay before us, we may
risk the contempt of so many of its modern practitioners and count
history a branch of literature. Certainly it is the most original and
best prosework of the Malays. And just as artistry has kept alive the
work of the three great historians I have mentioned when countless
others are forgotten or consulted only by specialists, so artistry
puts the Malay 15th century "Annals" above all other Malay
histories.
It was not the earliest Malay history. The earliest is a History
of the Rulers of Pasai (a small extinct Sumatran state) written after
there had been time for Arabic loan-words to be adopted into the Malay
language and containing one Arabic loan-word not met elsewhere in
Malay \asfa 'reef, gold reef.' Islam reached northern Sumatra
late in the 13th century and Pasai's first Muslim ruler died in 1297.
# 2003
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IN introducing Jocelyn Brooke's investigation of Proust and
Joyce, I shall not pick out the plums of the essay by naming the many
points which I enjoyed in it. These can be read in their proper
place. There are, however, aspects of Brooke's approach to which
attention should be drawn. In the first place, he is (like myself) a
warm admirer of both great writers. His criticism is that of love,
not hate. This makes it far more valuable. In the second place, he
writes in a manner that is completely informal. The views are
expressed just as if we were talking with him over the dinner table.
To write literary criticism in this way is not as easy as it looks.
To discuss writers in this easy, conversational style, dealing with
important topics at one moment, trivial at another, is a delightful
gift, and often gets to the core of a book in a way that more formal
articles never manage to attain.
I agree with almost everything Jocelyn Brooke says, except that I
think I should myself place a wider gulf between the two writers,
Proust seeming to me to possess greatly superior powers. The
essential gift of a novelist is that he should be interested in
people. Proust comes through this test with flying colours; Joyce
gets held up with his own special preoccupations. If Joyce does not
know about anything- and vast areas of human experience are
completely alien to him- he usually sneers at it. We may tire of
Proust's determination that in the end every character he writes about
should be homosexual or of his obsession with jealousy. In spite of
these King Charles's heads, one continues to feel that everything and
everybody fascinated him- perhaps at times too much.
Gissing used to ask ~'Has he starved?' when a novelist was
named, implying starvation to be a 6sine qua non of effective
writing. Joyce did, of course, starve; Proust did not, except when
the waiters at the Ritz were inattentive. Indeed, Proust is a good
example to prove the futility of Gissing's question. I myself should
prefer to ask: 'Does he put over what he sets out to say?' Here,
both Proust and Joyce must be admitted to be successful. How is this
done? Brooke maintains- and I cannot disagree- that Proust was a
'bad' novelist when it came to narrative, that Joyce had a dull
mind. In both cases Brooke's arguments and instances are undeniable.
At the same time no one can exactly say how certain things are 'put
over' in a novel. There exists the mystery of art. If the works of
Joyce and Proust were pruned of their obvious faults, would they
remain of equal stature?
Brooke observes that both writers were regarded thirty years ago
as immensely daring in their treatment of sex, as well as in their
innovations of style. There can be no doubt at all that their fame
owes something to this sexual emancipation of language. Indeed, one
might paraphrase Nietzsche by saying that a good novel in those days
justified some obscenity, but that good obscenity often justified a
very bad novel in the eyes of the highbrows. It is interesting to
consider how a novelist like Galsworthy would now be regarded, had
some sudden illness or accident produced a psychological change in
him, resulting in his treatment of subjects then regarded as
forbidden. Supposing in The Forsyte Saga instead of Irene leaving
Soames for Bosiney, Soames had left Irene on account of that same
young architect? What would have been the verdict of those who now
deplore, and no doubt rightly deplore, Galsworthy's lack of psychology
and his cardboard characters? Would he have been hailed as a novelist
who saw beneath the surface of things? It is an interesting question.
However, there we enter a world of vast speculation. I shall say
no more than to recommend Jocelyn Brooke's trial of Proust and Joyce
on the serious charge of chronic literary imperfection.
PROUST and Joyce: their names, even today, tend to be
bracketed together, and thirty-odd years ago the conjunction was
commoner still, chiefly I suppose because- for the generation which
grew up in the twenties- they were without question the dominant
literary figures of that period. To a later age, however, the
association may seem surprising, for surely no two writers could, on
the face of it, have been more dissimilar, either as artists or as
human beings. If Ulysses has little in common with A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu, still less has the lower middle-class
Dubliner, brought up in poverty and squalor, with the rich French
\6rentier, the \6prote?2ge?2 of the Faubourg Saint Germain.
So wholly disparate do they seem, indeed, that it comes as something
of a shock to remember that, on at least one occasion, the two men did
actually meet in the flesh, though the encounter seems to have been
anything but a success.
Yet for all their dissimilarity, Proust and Joyce have a good
deal more in common than one might suppose, and the tendency to
bracket their names together is less unjustified than appears at first
sight. Both, in the first place, were revolutionary writers, in the
sense that their work revealed new aspects of the human mind and of
man in relation to society. Both, too, were technical innovators,
though in the case of Proust his innovations were mainly in the sphere
of narrative and construction (for all his stylistic complexity, he
remained basically faithful to the traditions of French prose),
whereas Joyce, after a series of incredibly ingenious and daring
experiments, was compelled at last to invent a brand-new language of
his own.
Both Proust and Joyce, moreover, attempted to portray in their
works the totality of human experience: to write, in fact, a kind of
Come?2die Humaine; though Ulysses, I suppose, is the
Human Comedy seen through the wrong end of a telescope- or, as Aldous
Huxley's typewriter once brilliantly expressed it, the "Human
\5Vomedy". In both, however, this ambition was partially frustrated
by a shared egocentricity, a neurotic self-absorption hitherto
unparalleled among great writers. For Joyce as much as for Proust, it
was the "I", the \moi, with which he was ultimately concerned:
both were autobiographers for whom the objective world about them was
largely subordinated to their own specialized and highly subjective
mental attitudes. For both of them this intense self-absorption was
to result, finally, in a kind of partial insanity, aggravated in the
one case by chronic asthma, in the other by near-blindness and
alcoholism. With Proust, this insanity took the form of a maniacal
obsession with sexual jealousy; with Joyce (the purer artist of the
two), his reason foundered in a morass of over-elaborated verbal
techniques and private jokes.
Both, finally, were obsessed to an inordinate degree with the
past. With Proust, le temps perdu is the eponymous hero of
his novel; and as a human being, though remaining intellectually
alert, he virtually lost contact- save on a relatively superficial
level- with the outside world after the age of thirty-three. In
Joyce's case the retreat from present reality was earlier and even
more uncompromising: after the 16th of June, 1904 (when he was
twenty-two), his whole attention as an artist became concentrated,
exclusively and obsessively, upon the world of Dublin in the nineties
and the early nineteen-hundreds, with special reference to the naive
and limited preoccupations of his own boyhood and adolescence.
It would hardly, in fact, be going too far to say that the
similarities between Proust and Joyce, considered as psychological
types, outweigh their differences. Yet I think that the habitual
bracketing of their names had, a generation ago- and perhaps has
still- a more cogent and less respectable explanation: namely, that
both writers had acquired a reputation for obscenity and
"immorality."
To young people today this must seem scarcely credible, but it is
easy to forget how profoundly the climate of moral opinion has changed
during the last thirty years. In the case of Proust the charge of
"obscenity" must seem particularly surprising, for La
Recherche is seldom obscene in the crude sense of the term; yet
the fact remains that Proust was the first important novelist to deal
extensively and in detail with the then forbidden subject of
homosexuality, and in 1922, even in France, the publication of
Sodome et Gomorrhe was attended by something of a scandal. (In
England, Scott Moncrieffs' translation was delayed until 1929, when it
appeared in a limited edition, issued not by Chatto and Windus, who
had published the earlier volumes, but by the more courageous American
firm of Alfred Knopf.)
Joyce is another matter: it can scarcely be denied that
Ulysses- judged even by the far laxer standards of today- is
defiantly and in every possible sense obscene. Personally, if I were
Home Secretary, I would impose no restrictions whatsoever in such
matters, but if rules are going to be imposed at all, then Ulysses
must surely top the list in any Index Expurgatorius, and the
fact that it is now obtainable in this country (and has been for a
quarter of a century) makes nonsense of the existing regulations.
That its obscenity is aesthetically justified may be perfectly true,
though I think this a doubtful point; but obscene it undoubtedly is,
within the meaning of any act which attempts to define so equivocal a
term. On the other hand, Joyce is the least pornographic of writers:
nobody, I should imagine, has ever been thrown into transports of
sexual excitement by the "obscene" passages in Ulysses, though
one can never, of course, be sure, for almost any book, however
harmless by intention, is capable of provoking an erotic thrill in
somebody. (I know people who find Bulldog Drummond far more
exciting in this respect than Lady Chatterley's Lover; and did not
Lawrence himself profess to find Jane Eyre revoltingly
"pornographic"?)
If Joyce, in revising Ulysses, could have been persuaded to
omit the more flagrant obscenities (most of which, after all, are
incidental to the book, and do not form an integral part of it), we
should have been left with an experimental novel of great interest,
which would doubtless have created a considerable stir in
\6avant-garde circles at the time. But would Joyce's reputation,
in such circumstances, have survived his lifetime- and survived (one
might add) the publication of Finnegans Wake? Would Ulysses
and Finnegan have provided- as in fact is the case- a
perpetual and profitable stamping-ground for the writers of Ph.D.
theses? It is possible; but I, myself, rather doubt it.
Similarly, if Proust's treatment of sex had been as orthodox as
that of, say, Galsworthy, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu would
still remain a great novel; for that matter, when one compares Swann
and the Jeunes Filles- in which the theme of homosexuality
remains latent- with the shoddiness of the later volumes, one is
inclined to wonder whether it might not, in fact, have been even
greater. True, it is hard to imagine A la Recherche without
Charlus; yet it is at least arguable that, if Proust had made Charlus
a womanizer, and Albertine a perfectly normal heterosexual girl, the
novel would have been, \6qua novel, neither better nor worse than
it is. But would it, one wonders, have created quite so much stir as,
in effect, it did?
Once again, I have my doubts. Both writers- no doubt lacking
this adventitious appeal- would have enjoyed a certain \re?2clame
in literary circles, but neither, I feel, would have attained to the
celebrity which each, in fact, achieved during his lifetime, and which
survives to this day.
The twenties were a period of sexual emancipation, Havelock Ellis
and Freud had not done their work for nothing, and it went without
saying that enlightened persons should fly, from the highest motives,
to the defence of any serious writer who treated the subject of sex
with greater freedom than his predecessors.
# 2007
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They are not disparaged because they contain little that is unusual
in harmony or design, for Handel's best work is fully evident when the
general style of a movement looks conventional to the score-reading
eye. The few movements in Op. 3 which strike us as uniquely
Handelian are not those in the grand manner but the best dances. We
are glad to have Op. 3 for the charming movements rather than those
which the first audiences probably found impressive. Particularly
attractive are the sarabande which forms the middle movement of No.
1 (the only movement with flute), the gavotte and variations (not so
labelled) at the end of No. 2, and the minuets of No. 4.
The manuscripts of these works are lost, but not that of a fine C
major concerto called by Arnold '\6Concertante'. It bears the date
25th January 1736 and was known as 'The Concerto in Alexander's
Feast' after the first occasion when London heard it. It was the
first item in Walsh's fourth collection of Select Harmony, which
is thought to have been issued in 1741. The ripieno includes two
oboes but the concertino is the Corellian string trio. Walsh also
published two other Handel concertos which need not detain us here.
The student can find them all, as well as those of Op. 3, in a
handy volume of Lea Pocket Scores (New York).
Before doing homage to the most wonderful of all 6concerti
grossi we may take as a point of departure Chrysander's remark that
the Op. 3 concertos show 'a bewildering variety of form'. If
'design' and 'form' are regarded as synonymous, then any work
that is not epigonic should bewilder us, and Handel's Op. 6 should
serve a feast of bewilderment. Because words will no more describe
the form than the expression of music, for the form is the music,
we measure the parts of a musical design instead of learning a piece
by heart in order to judge its form. One artist does not excel
another because he has used a more complex design, but because his
form is more organic, which means that the ideas and their growth are
of the right quality and quantity for the expression. When equally
sensitive and intelligent judges of music have different opinions
concerning the quality of ideas and the forms into which they grow,
their argument often settles upon design- how many themes are used,
how many are germs for motivic growth, where and how contrast is made,
where and how it is avoided, whether the themes are curved or angular,
rightly or wrongly lacking in colour- and behind the description is
the implication that one design is superior to another, a fugue with
stretto superior or inferior to one that is as effective through
well-timed entries between non-derived episodes. Thus too often we
think of form as a relation of A to B, of a movement being fine if C,
instead of D, follows B at a certain point; sometimes this
pseudo-explanation may in fact support truth, but we grasp the symbols
of the truth instead of the truth itself.
Beethoven had neither the education nor the natural ability to
use words explicitly. On his deathbed, having no further need to
regret his limitation or to cure it, he pointed to the Arnold volumes
of Handel which had just arrived and said 'There is the truth'.
On a previous occasion Beethoven had said of Handel: 'He was the
greatest composer who ever lived. I would uncover my head, and kneel
before his tomb.' Among Beethoven's eccentricities we cannot number
that of seeking to impress company by aesthetic and musical
judgements. Men with the greatest insight into music use one life in
its pursuit and lack another in which to command words in a way that
effectively communicates their musical judgement. Beethoven's words
are often incoherent, but when we grasp their purport we find them
true. 'Ah, my dear Ries, he was the master of us all in this
art'- Beethoven was speaking of Mozart and the art of the piano
concerto. He did not flatter. Mozart was and still is the master in
that particular art. Beethoven did not say that Handel was the
greatest \Ku"nstler but the greatest \Komponist that had
lived, and he would have been right if the only existing proofs of the
fact were the Op. 6 concertos.
In each of these superb works the four, five or six movements
seem like facets of one personality; so we have twelve essays of an
integrity comparable with that of the best classical symphonies.
These concertos embrace most of the musical expression that belonged
to the concert room of their time and much that belonged to the
theatre, and they exclude only the morbid, bizarre, extremely tragic,
directly programmatic and religious- in short what was then reserved
to illustrate words or drama and to dignify worship. This
marvellously comprehensive expression would not make us willing to
doff and kneel with Beethoven unless it were conveyed in sublime
examples of almost perfect form, none bewildering unless we try to
explain it by the vocabulary of what should be called design. 'The
opening movement is a French overture fertilized in its slow
introduction by the Handelian sarabande-like sacred aria, and in its
fugato movement by the Italian sonata-allegro.' This tells no
intelligent musician anything about Handel's success or failure to
achieve form, yet a sympathetic listener who does not know the design
of a French overture may perceive Handel's achievement. The empty
grandiosity of certain items in Joshua or Judas Maccabeus
fulfils designs which, according to text books called 'Applied
Forms' and 'Applied Strict Counterpoint', ensure safety for any
composer who can invent or borrow ideas to suit the designs. The
opposite of 'applied' is 'organic', and because they are all
organic the Twelve 6Concerti Grossi are one of the greatest feats
of musical composition.
It has been well said that some of Handel's best movements defy
analysis because they are improvisatory- a word which can be
pejorative. We are not intended to listen more than once to an
improvisation. It satisfies us if we are pleased with the music as it
passes, and if it is congruous. Improvisation, however, is the first
stage in written composition, and if mechanical reproduction of an
improvisation forces us to listen a second and a third time we are
like the composer who scrutinizes his first draft and decides what
should be pruned and what extended. Sometimes we are dissatisfied not
with the unchecked fancy of the improviser but with our recognition of
pre-fabrications, 'applied forms', modulations and developments
introduced exactly as in other extemporizations. To extemporize from
a preconceived design or upon ideas given by an auditor is splendid
exercise, but at best only portions of the exercise can be significant
artistic expression- in short, form. When, however, a whole written
piece seems to have grown by impulse, and when both the ideas and
their growth are of superb quality, we can hardly praise it more
highly than to say that it sounds spontaneous throughout, and still
sounds so when we hear it for the hundredth time.
Comparatively late in his career Handel impressed shrewd judges
by his organ extemporizations, and though it is unthinkable that the
ideas and developments had the breadth of those in his published work,
Handel had more ability and experience than most musicians to
extemporize whole sections which, at one hearing, seemed organic
within a well-proportioned whole. How often in composing the Twelve
6Concerti Grossi he proceeded by deliberation and how often the
music welled forth without his conscious control we shall never know,
and that is one tribute to their greatness. They are said to have
been written in a few weeks of 1739, yet they contain no sign of
careless or hasty work. The borrowing of one opening from Cleopatra's
Piangero?3 la sorte mia and another from Semele's Myself I
shall adore does not negate the last assertion. Most of the
movements are an exception to the general criticism that few of the
greatest works of music are well composed throughout.
Conscientiousness cannot make them so; otherwise the form of Brahms's
long movements would be as wonderful as those of Handel's or
Beethoven's. Fortunately we do not measure greatness entirely by
achievement of form, but we rank the imperfect fulfilment of a noble
ambition above the perfect management of trivialities and musical
platitudes. Not a single movement in Handel's Op. 6 is pedestrian;
no concerto fails to suggest verve and joy in the process of
composition.
Even if the Op. 6 concertos lacked their distinguishing breadth
of conception and their splendid musical ideas they would still differ
from Corelli's for two main reasons: (a) some of them are dramatic in
the strict sense of the term- they are the work of a theatre
composer; (b) a great number of them come from the German-French
suite. It has been admitted that Geminiani, who was almost entirely
Corellian, occasionally achieved Handel's breadth of musical thought;
but he did this only when composing contrapuntally or by the Corellian
continuation technique without motive development. Handel achieves a
huge breadth of musical thought when composing almost mechanistically
in the least weighty of styles. (Ex. 83.)
This quotation illustrates a second point, as would almost any
extract of similar length from Op. 6. Into the light figuration of
the violins erupts a contrasting idea by the bass instruments. It may
have been introduced to give a touch of humour or purely for the sake
of the interruption- to prevent the development from being too simple
and mechanical; yet it is surely not accidental that, when the whole
flight reaches its conclusion in four bars of plain ripieno harmony,
the paragraph is clinched by the solid rhythm of this interruption.
Whether Handel planned it as he began the movement or whether it
occurred to him as when [SIC] improvising, this way of integrating
the movement was exactly right in this place, and sensible people may
call it a symphonic way.
The last phrase seems discourteous, but it seems justified while
critics spoil enthusiasm by asking us to value old music if its
methods anticipate later ones. Thus we are told that some passages by
Bach are almost atonal, and that they prefigure Scho"nberg.
Misinterpreted by ears and minds which inherit the work of both
composers, passages by Bach wherein 'horizontal' thinking
temporarily dominates the 'vertical' thinking of continuo harmony
remind us of atonal polyphony. We are delighted by the unusual
ascendance and stimulus of discord, the pleasure of which would have
been lost to Bach (and would seem incongruous to us) unless it brought
with it the pleasure of restored tonal bearings and ultimate concord.
The mere fact that we call it discord shows that there is little in
common between Bach and Scho"nberg except recourse to the devices of
counterpoint. Similarly we should be careful not to pretend that
Handel's movements are Beethovenian because they are often dramatic,
often include passages of motivic development and often show energy
and urgency that is rarely found before Beethoven.
'Handel points to Beethoven' is a meaningless comment. Tubal
Cain points to Sibelius. It is also accidental that Beethoven the
man, beneath the eccentricities which may have been caused by
misfortune, had some of the known characteristics of Handel, and that
like Handel he was in no way a wild or revolutionary artist. His
music and Handel's changed gradually from early acceptance of
inherited designs and styles. Without alteration they could not serve
their expanding ideas, and when we set their first forms beside their
last we observe a much larger change than between the first and last
work of most revolutionary composers. The important parallel between
Handel and Beethoven lies in their recognition of comparable, not
similar means of maintaining movements on a large scale, especially
when their materials suggested energy and urgency. These qualities in
Beethoven would
[ILLUSTRATION]
not have their peculiar effect if Beethoven had not been primarily a
musical architect with an innate sense of symmetry and poise.
# 2014
[230 TEXT G43]
It is quite a common belief among non-technical enthusiasts
that a theatrical producer is solely concerned with the movements of
the actors (together with some share in the lighting, when a
'lighting expert' is not employed). This may have been true to
some extent of the 18th-century stage-manager and is still often
partly true of the director for films or television, who has with him
a producer (which in this field denotes a managerial, not an artistic
functionary) to supervise, check and organize the heads of the various
departments and all the artists who contribute to the whole. But it
is certainly not true of the play-producer, who is probably even more
closely consulted on other matters by his organizing management than
his film or television counterpart; nor is it true of the
opera-producer. Indeed opera managements (to judge from those
countries where I have worked or of which I have had close
information) seem more inclined than ordinary theatre managements to
choose conductor, producer, designer, and so on, and then, having
given them the responsibility and authority, not to interfere or
supervise themselves.
I do not say that managerial interference is always to be
welcomed. (After all, 'interference' is a misleading word:
'practical interest' is a different matter.) But it is remarkable
that notable theatrical re?2gimes have all been inspired by the
personality and personal supervision of a manager (think of C. B.
Cochran and musical shows, Diaghilev and ballet, Mahler and opera,
Hugh Beaumont of H. M. Tennent Ltd in the present London
theatre). None of these managers- with the exception of Mahler-
took any active part in a production, but they were always at hand to
check on every detail and to solve any problems that might arise from
the various conflicting elements that had to be united to achieve a
satisfying artistic result.
In opera there are more conflicting elements than in any other
form of theatre entertainment- orchestral performance, vocal
performance (ranging from naturalistic speech-song to what are
practically concert performances of non-dramatic arias), straight
acting, 'melodrama' (in the technical sense) with atmospheric
music, ballet (at least in the sense of movement to, or in harmony
with, music) and mime, quite apart from scene-design, scene-building,
scene-shifting, costume-designing and costume-making, lighting,
furniture and properties. This means that all responsible should be
experts- the conductor, the orchestral players, the singers, the
designers, the painters, the scene-builders, the wardrobe-master, the
electrician, the property-master- and all should be ready with their
expert advice to contribute to the whole. Now most experts are
willing collaborators, but the danger with all experts is that they
are often not content to give of their best but insist on valuing
their own contribution higher than that of other experts: think of the
brilliant designer Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson's not unreasonable
attack on his conceit. That is where the Mahler or Diaghilev is
invaluable. Cochran, who checked every bit of material used in his
shows (like Bernard Delfont now), was always there to appeal to, and
was always watching from the background ready to step tactfully in to
prevent trouble. He used to say: 'Have whatever rows you like
inside the theatre over the job, so long as you can go and have a
drink together afterwards.' (Nowadays, alas, the tendency is for
any professional criticism to be taken as a personal affront.)
Now that entertainment has become an industry, and opera
managements (probably quite rightly) tend to concentrate on
organization rather than personal contact, the job of welding together
the various elements has become the duty of the producer. Of course
he is still responsible for the movements on the stage (which includes
arranging that the conductor can catch the eye of the singer at
necessary moments and that awkward positions are avoided for singers
during tricky vocal passages), but he also has to see that excellent
scene-designs are practical both for the stage and for the action,
that the lighting gives prominence to a character without either
falsifying the general effect or dazzling the singer's eyes
unnecessarily, and that striking touches of production do not distract
from a leading character or action. Moreover, he is responsible for
checking the construction and painting of the scenery and the choice
of materials, and the cutting and making of the costumes.
The opera producer is called in by the management at an early
stage of planning. He is consulted on the choice of the designer and
choreographer and on the casting of at any rate the minor roles.
Usually a management confronts him with an already decided casting of
the main roles (though I have known a producer refuse a commission
because of the employment of what he thought an unsuitable principal
singer). About changes of cast, when a production has once been taken
into the repertory, he is not consulted. In the budgeting of an opera
the producer has no say: he may be asked whether he would permit some
alteration in his planned staging for economy's sake, but I have
myself never known of a case where a producer's ideas have been flatly
turned down for financial reasons.
When practical work has begun, a producer has above all to be
able to give all the collaborating experts their heads when desirable,
and to check them gently but firmly- that is, tactfully- when
necessary. It is rather like driving a team of fine, high-mettled
horses: it is they who do the work, but, unless they are a team used
to working together, they may have to be guided. How often does an
excellent conductor wish to take a passage of music at an
'effective' pace that is unsuitable in the circumstances? The
co-operative conductor, like Beecham, will always listen and be
prepared to modify, as he did when he paced his study to get the right
tempo for the Guard's march in The Bohemian Girl- after I had
objected (as producer) that, at his original pace, the quaver was too
quick and the crotchet too slow for human steps without being comic.
(Beecham also let me have an extra stage rehearsal in place of a
scheduled orchestral rehearsal on the grounds that it does not matter
how good the music is if the stage is wrong.) But I have known a good
conductor insist on what was arguably a 'correctly' fast pace when
the singer was incapable of singing at that pace.
How often, again, does a designer create a beautiful set that is
unpractical? One distinguished architect's stage setting was a flat
picture background with extended frames for the sides which from
anywhere but centre auditorium merely looked flatly dull on one side
and non-existent on the other. One excellent artist objected to a
window in a room although Cherubino had to jump out of it, and another
designed brilliant perspective scenery which gained a round of
applause at curtain-rise but meant that the performers had to duck
under a steeply angled lintel to come through a door. I have known a
clever designer in another medium hope to use a film method of
lighting on a stage, and I have seen another so ingenious with moving
scenery that its repetition became a bore, especially as each new
result was similar. I learned in Milan that on one occasion
fashionable modern artists without stage experience designed sets that
could not be changed with ease.
A historical example of non-co-operation can be seen by comparing
the scene when Tosca places the candles by the dead Scarpia in the
original vocal score and in the usual vocal score. In the original
she does not get and place the candles until the long orchestral
passage ends on a soft, religious, tender note: the later and more
usual version makes her speak her comment on the dead power of Scarpia
in the sinister middle of the passage. Surely this means that in the
original production she had too far to go for the candles in the short
time allotted her, so Puccini transferred the line to the middle of
the music, thereby giving her longer time to fetch the candles. The
original version, however (which I am sure is more in key with
Puccini's intention with regard to Tosca's truly religious character),
is perfectly possible if the designer gives a reasonable position for
the candles, sufficiently near where the body is to lie. This I have
proved in my current Sadler's Wells production.
Again in Tosca there arises the problem of where Tosca is to
stand when the firing squad is assembling to shoot Cavaradossi. She
has to comment on him standing there, and later, when the soldiers
march away, has to tell him not to move yet- neither of which remarks
should be so obtrusive that the soldiers might notice them, but both
of which should be clearly heard by the audience. The first time I
produced Tosca I had her stand on a platform above and beyond the
soldiers- ludicrous on second thoughts, but accepted by myself and
others too tolerant of bad operatic tradition. But now at Sadler's
Wells I place her right down stage in one corner by the footlights,
apparently out of earshot of the soldiers but easily audible to the
audience. Yet she is sufficiently unobtrusive because she is more in
shadow than the soldiers and Cavaradossi, who should be- and cannot
help being- the focus of attention. This was only possible by
careful preliminary consultation with Paul Mayo, the designer, both as
regards structure and proposed lighting.
Ideally an opera producer should know stage technique, music both
vocal and orchestral, lighting, style of period, and the design and
making of costume and scenery, and should be able to weld all together
so that the whole is good without any detail being over-obtrusive.
Apart from the experts he has to deal with, he also- I am afraid-
has often to coax inexperienced artists to give better than their
best. Many soloists are nowadays chosen because of their superb (or
more often young and promising) voices, irrespective of their
experience of appearing in public or even walking a stage. One fine
vocalist I was asked to produce as Carmen, though she had only sung as
a solo recitalist on the concert platform, proved my dubious opinion
of her possibilities when, in the rehearsal of the Card Scene, she
declared herself unable to get her note while Frasquita and Mercedes
were singing.
Another brilliant young new singer engaged by one opera house,
when asked by a friend if she was having any stage coaching before her
first appearance on any stage, replied: 'There is no need: I am
singing.' (In every other profession and trade, apprenticeship is
either essential or regarded as the soundest step towards success.
Only opera-singers seem more and more able to dispense with it and to
rely on their God-given natural voice which is, after all, but part of
the equipment necessary for fine opera performances.) Nor must we
forget the great singer who insists on being centre-stage or who
shouts a top note even in spite of the composer's wishes, or who
'always crosses left on this line' as one guest-artist
Mephistopheles insisted to me until I told him that he would get his
teeth kicked in by the dancers on that spot.
But while it is the opera-producer's job to co-ordinate the work
of other experts (whether willing collaborators or superior
dictators), many producers also tend to be obtrusive themselves and to
show how clever they are with this bit of business or background
movement that is distracting. Although I try to avoid this, I have
unintentionally been guilty of this myself. Other producers are
careless about style of period (I recently saw Almaviva in the first
act of Il Barbiere di Siviglia with neither cloak nor hat),
and some from the straight theatre seem to have insufficient knowledge
of musical problems. One insisted on a singer lying full-length on
the ground while singing a top note- though with the singer's
approval it can be tried effectively, as I tried it once, only to
discard it.
# 2029
[231 TEXT G44]
Corneille's alexandrines, in point of fact, may be found to follow
the original text surprisingly closely, and Le Festin de Pierre
contrived to hold the stage successfully in competition with all but
the most popular of Molie?3re's plays until 1730 or thereabouts. It
reached the climax of its career in the year 1727, with the not
inconsiderable total of 11 performances; soon after this triumph,
however, the average number of performances per year dropped sharply
from about 7 to about 3, and after 1780 it disappeared almost
completely from the repertoire. It was not until 1813 that the 'lost
scenes' of the 'Amsterdam edition' were rediscovered and
published by the grammarian, M.-J. Simonnin; not until 1841 that
the original Dom Juan was restored to the stage at the
Ode?2on; and even then, not until some six years later that the
Corneille version was finally ousted from the Come?2die
Franc?6aise.
The date 1841, therefore, is usually taken to mark the critical
turning-point in the fortunes of Molie?3re's play. It would be
inaccurate, however, to think of this renewal of interest as an
unheralded and quasi-accidental effect, produced entirely by the
rediscovery of the missing portions of the original text. The very
fact that some 28 years were fated to elapse between the
'discovery' and the first performance of the restored original
suggests that the process of rehabilitation involved a slow and
gradual development. If the history of the play throughout the latter
part of the eighteenth century is monotonously uneventful, the same is
by no means true of the first half of the nineteenth century. The
restoration of Dom Juan was preceded by a revival of interest
in Le Festin de Pierre, and both plays, in fact, benefited
significantly from the fascination which their common hero was
destined to exercise upon the romantic imagination. In this
connection, the influence of Byron's Don Juan throughout the
eighteen-twenties is obviously of capital importance; but even before
this period- in fact, as early as 1805- we can trace the beginnings
of a new attitude, and a new receptiveness on the part of both critics
and public. Indeed, the year 1805 probably deserves rather more
attention than most historians of the play have been prepared to grant
it, since not only does it mark the first really striking revival
which had been enjoyed on the stage by the Corneille version since
1730, but the first serious renewal of interest in the original text,
and at the same time, the first sign of indirect influence on the
fortunes of Molie?3re's masterpiece through the creation of a later
work on the same theme: in this instance, Mozart's Don Giovanni.
If Molie?3re's heroic seducer was unfortunate in the manner of
his reception by the Parisian audience, his operatic counterpart was
scarcely less so; and the trials and tribulations of Don
Giovanni at the Grand Ope?2ra furnish an admirable
illustration of the obdurate tenacity of French musical conventions,
which, in the post-revolutionary period, were certainly as rigid as
those of the Come?2die Franc?6aise, and even more fettering to
would-be dramatists of the new generation. In this brief study,
however, what interests us is not the direct significance of these
musical conventions in themselves, but their indirect influence upon
the fate of Molie?3re's Dom Juan.
The musical public of Paris in 1800 was unable to digest German
opera in any form; any opera written in Germany had of necessity to be
'arranged' in the French, or, slightly later, in the Italian
tradition, if it was to succeed at all; and it was in fact the
eventual discovery that both Le Nozze di Figaro and Don
Giovanni, despite their having been written by a German composer,
were fundamentally Italian operas, and so might be thankfully
handed over to the 6opera buffa, that finally established
Mozart's operatic reputation in France. The one traceable attempt to
produce a Mozart opera (Die Entfu"hrung) in the German
tradition was so disastrous and lamentable a failure that not an echo
of it remains throughout the century. Die Entfu"hrung was
produced at the The?2a?5tre de la Cite?2 by a visiting German
company, the \Mozart-Theater, on 25 brumaire An =10. It was
repeated on 27 and 28 \brumaire, and never given again. The fiasco
was anything but unexpected: 'Les bouffons allemands se sont
arrange?2s, sans doute, pour n'avoir que des Allemands pour
auditeurs', remarked one critic, knowing perfectly well (as indeed
did all his \6confre?3res) that what mattered in opera was, of
course, the words, the de?2cor and the ballets- anything, in fact,
but the music:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
Nos Franc?6ais ne sont pas assez fous de musique pour aller
chercher, aux de?2pens de tous les autres agre?2mens, un degre?2 de
plus de fermete?2 et de pre?2cision dans l'exe?2cution de ces
sifflemens allemands...
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
A rigorous treatment at the hands of qualified French adaptors
was, therefore, the first essential: action, dialogue, vocal and
orchestral parts- everything had to be 'arranged' to meet the
conventional requirements. The first Mozartian opera to be subjected
to this curious treatment was Le Nozze, which appeared,
'arranged' by Notaris, at the Acade?2mie de Musique on 20
March 1793, and ran dispiritedly for five performances. Notaris,
obviously, had not 'arranged' enough, and too much Mozart had,
reprehensibly, been allowed to subsist; consequently, the next effort
set about remedying the fault. On 20 August 1801, Die
Zauberflo"te appeared at the The?2a?5tre de la Re?2publique
et des Arts in an unrecognizable version entitled Les
Myste?3res d'Isis, music by Lachnith, libretto by 'le citoyen
Morel, ci-devant Chedeville', and achieved a considerable success.
In 1805, this version was transferred to the Acade?2mie
Impe?2riale de Musique, where it was revived again in 1812, 1816,
1823 and 1826. To the honour of French music, it should perhaps be
added that, within a few years, these two 'fripons musicaux',
Lachnith ('le rapetisseur des grands hommes') and Morel
('ouvrier en marqueterie') had become synonymous with all that
was most reactionary and abysmal in the French musical tradition.
Les Myste?3res d'Isis, in fact, achieved its popularity by
discarding the original music almost entirely, and by incorporating
into the score- amongst other things- a substantial portion of a
Haydn symphony:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
On a change?2 le sentiment de la musique de la Flu?5te
enchante?2e, on en a ralenti les mouvemens pour approprier les airs
au style se?2rieux. Les paroles sont pitoyables... l'arrangeur a
coupe?2, taille?2, sabre?2 les plus beaux morceaux de cet ope?2ra,
qu'il trouvait sans doute trop long. Comment, avec tant de richesses,
n'a-t-on fait qu'une mise?2rable compilation?
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
Such was the situation when, on 17 September 1805, the
Acade?2mie Impe?2riale de Musique decided to experiment with
Don Giovanni. Obviously, the Grand Ope?2ra could no more
accept that masterpiece as written by Mozart and Da Ponte than the
The?2a?5tre Franc?6ais could countenance Dom Juan
without the '\adoucissements' introduced by Corneille. In this
instance, the task of making the necessary arrangements was entrusted
to one Christian Kalkbrenner, chorus-master at the Grand Ope?2ra.
The outcome of his labours, together with those of his collaborators
on the libretto, Mons. Thuring, 'ge?2ne?2ral de brigade',
and Mons. D. Baillot, 'sous-bibliothe?3caire de la
Bibliothe?3que Impe?2riale de Versailles', was a Drame
Lyrique en Trois Actes, which once again not merely altered
Mozart's music completely beyond recognition, but somehow made room
within the score for several arias of M. Kalkbrenner's own ingenious
composition, together with the usual lengthy passages of incidental
music to accommodate those full-scale interludes of ballet and mime
which the Parisian operatic audiences demanded as their right. Gardel
provided some excellent choreography; but the real 6pie?3ce de
re?2sistance was the de?2cor, with Mount Vesuvius in full
eruption at the back of the stage, and streams of lava pouring down
towards the auditorium. The few reputable music-critics who knew and
respected their Mozart protested as loudly as they knew how, but all
to no avail; and for many years, Kalkbrenner's Don Juan was
linked with Lachnith's Myste?3res d'Isis, and remained a
by-word, a glaring symbol of the depths to which French operatic taste
could descend. 'Les airs de basse-taille sont donne?2s aux
femmes, change?2s de ton, raccourcis, allonge?2s, d'un air on fait
un trio; enfin ce n'est plus que le simulacre de la musique de
Mozart...' wrote Fe?2tis some two years later, and as late as
1823, Castil-Blaze could still recall the incident with the acutest
indignation.
However, the reputable music-critics were not asked their
opinion. Public taste in music was guided exclusively by men of
letters, and, during the whole Napoleonic era, the major dramatic
critics were wont to look upon opera as their exclusive prerogative.
Above all, it was Julien-Louis Geoffroy, the feared and influential
oracle of the Journal des De?2bats, who could make or mar a
composer's reputation with a single article, although- as he
thankfully admitted- music was an art which he understood no more
than morris-dancing.
The story of the resplendent \6premie?3re, the gradual
disintegration and eventual catastrophic \6de?2ba?5cle of this
first French production of Don Giovanni can be followed in
detail through the reviews in the contemporary press. What appears
evident from the various comments which have survived is that
Kalkbrenner's manipulations of the score had put all the critics
except Geoffroy in a quandary. Geoffroy's position was simple and
unassailable. He was suspicious of Mozart's reputation (he despised
Germans, anyway) and heartily disliked whatever music of his he
happened to have heard. 'Cet Allemand', he pronounced, 'n'a
rien fait dans le genre de l'ope?2ra-comique' which could ever
rival Gre?2try, while his so-called 'serious' operas were pitiful
compared with 'les excellentes compositions de Gluck et de
Piccini'. To honour his professional obligations, however, he
attended the \6premie?3re of Don Giovanni. He found the
overture detestable ('pourquoi coudre une symphonie a?3 un
ope?2ra?'), compared the music of Act =2 bitterly and
unfavourably with Duni's Peintre amoureux de son Mode?3le and
with Paisiello's Re?3 Teodoro, elevated Kalkbrenner's
intercalated aria, 'O Nuit, sois favorable...' above
anything written by the original composer, protested loudly that, even
though the words were in French, the music was so insistent and
ill-disciplined that he could not hear them, and concluded dolefully:
'Il y a trop de musique dans Don Juan; c'est un festin ou?3
l'extre?5me abondance rassasie promptement... Les Allemands ont
ga?5te?2 notre Molie?3re'.
Less committed critics, however, were faced with two unpleasant
alternatives. Here was undoubtedly a bad opera; yet this opera was
supposedly by Mozart, and Mozart enjoyed 'une re?2putation
colossale' among the musical e?2lite. Either, therefore, they
had to condemn it, and thus denounce themselves musically as ignorant
philistines; or else obey the fashion and applaud what they knew
instinctively to be poor material, without having the necessary
knowledge (in the early stages, at any rate) to trace the evil to its
source- not Mozart at all, but Kalkbrenner. Thus, when it became
apparent, after two or three performances, that Gardel and the
lava-streams were not going to be enough, unaided, to keep this
extravagant (and expensive) venture afloat for long, there was
ill-disguised relief all round. 'Succe?3s incomplet',
announced the Journal de Paris, while Geoffroy moralised
contentedly: 'Si cet essai pouvait nous gue?2rir de notre
admiration exclusive pour les e?2trangers, il auroit produit un effet
tre?3s-heureux'. Quarrels and dissensions ensued among the cast,
most of whom hurriedly and shamefacedly handed over their parts to
understudies on various pretexts, and on November 10th, Don
Giovanni was quietly removed from the repertoire, and Les
Myste?3res d'Isis substituted. There was, admittedly, an attempt
to bring it back for an occasional Sunday performance shortly before
Christmas, but by March 1806, little remained of this ambitious and
unfortunate venture save a certain amount of smoke in the upper
regions of the stage: 'Ve?2suve va beaucoup mieux, il ne donne
pas tant de fume?2e; il n'y a que les acteurs qui vont de plus en
plus mal'.
'Les Allemands ont ga?5te?2 notre Molie?3re'. This is
the key-note of criticism in relation to Don Giovanni. On the
other hand, to say so was one thing, but to prove it was a rather more
hazardous business. In fact, it could only be done by putting on
simultaneously a production of Le Festin de Pierre, and by
letting the audience make its own comparison.
# 2022
[232 TEXT G45]
IS IT quite so odd that nearly the best of this particular
pride of art books- or shiny slabs of art- is the cheapest, the
least shiny, the least pretentious, on the worst paper? I do not see
that a publisher could better the directness of the book on Brueghel's
Hay-Making. A great objective painting is reproduced in colour:
then on a large scale two dozen sections of the painting are also
reproduced (in colour), and fitted to a brief account of Brueghel
addressed not to anxious culture-vultures all wanting their cut from
the fashionable but still queer wonders of art, but to adult
appreciators who already accept art as one accepts philosophy or
macaroni.
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
The example of Italy taught Brueghel to be sparing in expression,
to be concise and limit himself to essentials, due proportions and
things true to nature. He reduced human figures and everything else
to basic geometrical forms and made them serve his intentions. Every
close-up of scenes from Brueghel's Hay-Making adds to our
conviction that the basis of his use of abstraction was profound
understanding of nature, of the surface of the earth, its vegetation,
the animal world, men, and finally even of the objects fashioned by
human hands.
[END INDENTATION]
[END QUOTE]
Good. The enlarged details or close-ups left this reviewer more
astonished than ever and more delighted than ever by the quantity of
world absorbed by Brueghel, and the quality of absorption and then
of its ordering and rendering.
Artists' Prints in Colour, from Germany, introduced and
edited by Dr. Hans Platte of the Kunsthalle at Hamburg, is classy to
a degree. Again it is not a packaged slab, but a well-designed,
well-printed, well-introduced selection of sixty colour prints by
sixty artists, all made since the war. The first is by Matisse.
Others are by Moore, Jean Bazaine, Gustave Singier, Lynn Chadwick,
Nicolas \de Stae"l. The introduction is in part a sophisticated
comment on the abstract art of this century, from Kandinsky until now,
one of the best I have read. 'The important thing is to be quite
clear that the work of art can never come into being without some
connection with the environment... The question of the visible object
then loses its significance, since our world does not find its
fulfilment in the realm of the visible.' In part the introduction
comments on the shift in prints from black and white to colour, from
the graphic towards painting, and the way in which this shift is
related to our epoch's appetite for colour (including colour printing
by machine).
These two books and the next ones show some unhappy differences
between publishers' Europe and publishers' America- at any rate in
the popularisation of the arts. Indian Art in America slides at
once into the class of the shiny art slab. This may seem unfair: it
does inform, it does have a grown-up purpose, it does illustrate many
superb objects (seventy colour plates), such as the painted shield
covers of the Crow Indians. But it begins to buttonhole and brainwash
with prefabricated superlatives. Its standards are shaky (thin
Rackham-like confections by modern Indian watercolourists,
self-condemned in the splendid traditional company around them, are
just as highly praised). Also it is an atrocious piece of colour-book
composing, text against plate, or plate against text.
Art books often recall that distinction Berenson made (to a late
director of the Victoria and Albert Museum), that museum officials
were either pimps or eunuchs. The eunuch art-book often, at any rate,
retains the dignity of art: it leaves the peruser to judge on the
evidence. The pimping art-book has art to sell, insinuatingly, and
for a purpose, like The American Muse, which has in fact a
tradition to sell, and one which doesn't exist, in painting (how could
it ever have formed in a "new" country?). This brainwasher and
blinder depends on serving up the same tiresome primitives, the same
tiresome bits of sub-European \6kitsch by the Peales, the
Bierstadts, the Coles, the Washington Allstons, suitably followed in
this century by the celluloid rubbish of Marin, O'Keefe, Dove and many
others down (I should say myself with a firm defiance- though the
substance has changed from celluloid) to Jackson Pollock. Those who
are curious about the stuff and the attitude (which Americans would do
better to forget) will find a chilling eyeful in this American Muse,
allied to literary excerpts- Cotton Mather to Gertrude Stein- all
transferred from an exhibition in that rather brown or liquorice
public gallery, the Corcoran in Washington. It is another ugly piece
of ungraceful typography and book-making.
The German editor of the elegant book on colour prints remarked
that in the end (I should say at the beginning as well) the spectator
has to stand entirely alone in front of the picture. But not if Dr.
Bates Lowry gets him. If he does, the spectator will stand or sag in
front of the picture with The Visual Experience: An Introduction to
Art pressing down on his mind as if that mind were a particularly
soft and soggy galantine. This is another conditioner: Come and
learn about Art, Mr., Mrs. or Miss Home-Study. I will teach you
to reconcile Kurt Schwitters and Cotman, Sassetta and our Pollock, in
234 plates and 260 pages of long abstract words about recession and
planes and unity. 'In judging the quality of a work of art'-
attention, please- 'on the basis of the type of experience that it
offers us, we leave the relatively objective area of judgment that we
have defined as artistic ability and enter the more subjective area in
which we evaluate the significance of the artist's intuition.' At
which the statue- as in Daumier's cartoon- prodigiously yawns, and
then adds a raspberry as well.
An American wrap of this same nature entirely surrounds the
largest slipperiest slab of Picasso's Picassos. Without its
rhetoric or gloss, here you have a colour album of those paintings by
Picasso, from 1895 to 1960, which he keeps for himself. They have
been photographed by an American author-journalist-photographer, who
talks of 'the Maestro,' and treats Picasso in his text like a
super-goose who lays golden eggs, starting off his gossip-text by
saying (and if this doesn't justify him, what does?) that 'no painter
of this century's Midas-touched art world has seen more of his colours
and canvas change to gold.' A colour-photo as frontispiece depicts
the Maestro attitudinising in a Spanish cloak and a Scottish tweed
hat, by candlelight, and makes him look like a new Watts, OM,
or like God taking the part of Gladstone in a charade.
However, this frontispiece can be torn out, and with ingenuity
all of the journalistic slobbering over the paintings and personality
which journalists used to ridicule, can be cut away with a pair of
scissors- when there will be left for enjoyment in the normal
unpompous calm of the arts, 202 plates, various and bizarre, in which
Picasso's liberated shapes and excitingly applied and inventively
combined colours play some of their very sunniest compositions.
GEOFFREY GRIGSON
A VERY mixed batch, one would think, this latest trio from
the admirable 'Ancient Peoples and Places' series edited by Dr.
Glyn Daniel. A glance through the plates- around seventy per
volume- discloses odd family resemblances. Cousin to the Chinese
dragon seems the Viking sea-serpent. Half-Chinese, again, look the
Uighur faces staring from Seljuk reliefs. And everywhere lurk animals
in company with lengths of geometrical interlacery which might well
have crawled down from the Steppes. To run through the books in their
chronological sequence is to get a sharper perspective.
Mr. Watson, in his detailed archaeological survey of China
Before the Han Dynasty, follows the progress of \sinanthropus
through the stone-age centuries to the sudden flowering of an
unsurpassed bronze age under the Shang and the Chou. Whence came this
finesse in casting alloys, and iron, too, long before iron was forged
or wrought by the same people? What connection is there between the
spiral-painted urns of Kansu and the similar pieces from Turkestan and
the Caucasus? Archaeology cannot yet answer a number of outstanding
conundrums in this field. But it offers no support for older theories
that the early Chinese derived their ideas from as far west as the
Near East, or that they were essentially pacific and thereafter
static. As their weapons and vessels attest, they were addicted to
bloodthirsty sacrificial rites and were constantly armed to the teeth.
When they cribbed a socketed axe from Tomsk or a spearhead from
Minusinsk, they improved it. Of the Tartar bow they made a spring-gun
with a bronze trigger, to fire blunt-nosed bolts. But their exchanges
with the North-West, 'the region of horse-raising and fraternisation
of Chinese and nomad,' must often have been fruitful.
Among the nomads who harried the Shang were the Turkish-speaking
tribes whose later descendants, the Ghuzz, by the eighth century
AD controlled all Central Asia. Through Transoxiana their Seljuk
branch advanced from Samarkand and Bokhara upon Syria, Iraq and
Persia. In her history of The Seljuks of Asia Minor, Mrs.
Tamara Talbot Rice considers the achievements of the Islamised group
which settled in Rum, the Byzantine Anatolia. Again our old views
need reorienting. 'That the Seljuks brought nothing but chaos and
destruction to Asia Minor is not borne out by the facts.' Indeed,
under the Sultanate, claims Mrs. Rice, 'the Seljuks set out to
provide their country with a sound economy and elaborate social
services.' In this 'veritable welfare state' the arts
flourished. Her plates show the splendours of Seljukid architecture.
She also devotes several pages to Rumi and Sufism; but the reader
will search her index in vain for the name of the great Persian
Jelal-\al-Din, which appears here disguised in contemporary Turkish
orthography as 'the Mawla Celaleddin.'
In an earlier volume in this series, Mrs. Rice, who is Russian
by birth, took as subject the Scythians. Despite chronological
difficulties, it is they who have been suggested as the link between
the arts of Central Asia and the Steppes, and so ultimately with
certain traits in the Scandinavian and Celtic cultures. In his
geographical history of the Vikings, Professor Arbman shows how the
Rus, or the Swedes of Muscovy, traded in Black Sea ports and sent
caravans into Baghdad. The more familiar ventures of the Vikings in
Britain and Ireland, as well as their more controversial incursions
into the New World, are here made vivid. The introduction by Mr.
Alan Binns, who translated the Swedish original, is invaluable. Once
more we are urged to modify our traditional view of these pirates,
whose prowess as artists, whatever one thinks of the sagas, remains
far from negligible. The interlacery of the Jellinge pattern can have
no direct connection with interlacery remote from it by thousands of
years, thousands of miles. Horse-raisers think in terms of plaits and
straps as seafarers dream of ropes, hawsers and knots. These restless
rangers of the abstract wastes revivified the people they raided and
once settled, brought a new twist to the old strands of culture, craft
and art.
HUGH GORDON PORTEUS
Alan R. Taylor's Prelude to Israel, now published in this
country by Darton, Longman and Todd at 18s., was reviewed in the
Spectator in its original American edition on June 24, 1960.
IT is right that recording companies should attempt to make
their recordings of opera as dramatic as possible, and natural that
promoters should vaunt the realism that is achieved.
# 2007
[233 TEXT G46]
GEORGE ANNE BELLAMY, once a leading figure on the London
stage and in the fashionable society of her time, is today hardly
known except to students of theatrical history. Her life was on the
whole unfortunate, and her end sad; yet she was a fascinating
personality and a fine actress, while her life-story is highly
romantic. It is not easy to see why her memory should have faded,
especially as she wrote a most readable autobiography which went
quickly through several editions.
Recently, however, she has found a sympathetic biographer in Mr
Cyril Hughes Hartmann, whose delightful book Enchanting Bellamy
(Heinemann, 1956) puts her story within the reach of all and sorts
out a good many of the puzzles which face the reader of her own
narrative, now a very rare book, An Apology for the Life of George
Anne Bellamy, late of Covent Garden Theatre, Written by Herself
(London, 1785).
She was a sincere Catholic, notwithstanding the chronic disorder
of her matrimonial affairs, for which she was not altogether
responsible. For the Catholic reader part of the interest and
fascination of her Apology lies in the glimpses that she gives us
of Catholic life and personalities in eighteenth-century London. Mr
Hartmann, himself not a Catholic, and writing for the general reader,
has included in his own narrative only a selection of the episodes of
Catholic interest. Since Miss Bellamy's Apology is now so
difficult a book to obtain it seems worth while to attempt a short
survey of her life that will do justice to her adherence to the faith
in which she was brought up.
George Anne Bellamy was born at Finglas, near Dublin, on 23 April
1728. The name which her mother wished to give her, Georgiane, was,
through some blunder, entered in the baptismal register as George
Anne. Her mother, a Mrs Bellamy, was a Quakeress from near
Maidstone who had taken to the stage and entered on a liaison with
James O'Hara, Baron Kilmaine and second Lord Tyrawley (1690-1773),
Field Marshal and diplomat, Ambassador in Portugal and later in
Russia.
Lord Tyrawley was considered 'singularly licentious even for the
courts of Russia and Portugal'; he acquired three wives and fourteen
children during his Portuguese embassy alone. But he was a very able
man, possessed of considerable charm and some claim to polite
cultivation: qualities which George Anne would seem to have inherited
from him.
Lord Tyrawley was not a Catholic; but for some reason he had
George Anne brought up in the old religion, and she was sent to school
with the Ursulines at Boulogne. Her time there passed happily, and in
her Apology she always speaks with affection of the nuns.
Her mother was acquainted with many of the leading actors and
actresses of the day. When George Anne was eleven or twelve years old
she and her mother were invited to attend some amateur theatricals
held in a barn at Mrs Woffington's Thames-side residence at
Teddington. This was in 1744, and the performance was got up in
honour of Margaret Woffington's daughter Mary, aged sixteen, also just
home from her convent-school on the continent. The play was Ambrose
Phillips' The Distressed Mother. Garrick himself played Orestes,
with Mary (Polly) Woffington as Hermione and George Anne Bellamy as
Andromache. 'Though I was inferior in beauty to my fair rival,'
she tells us, 'and without the advantages of dress, yet the laurel
was bestowed upon me.'
She was seen at once to have unusual talent, and Garrick
encouraged her to take up a career on the stage. She was to have a
number of misunderstandings and disagreements with Garrick, who was
not always an easy man to deal with; but she admits in her memoirs
that her break with Garrick in 1753, largely out of pique on her
part, was the mistake of her life.
Some time in the year 1744, after the amateur theatricals at
Teddington, George Anne was taken on by John Rich, the patentee and
manager of Covent Garden Theatre, and made her de?2but as Monimia in
Otway's tragedy The Orphan. The leading man, James Quin, objected
to the introduction of this inexperienced child-actor in a principal
part, and Rich had a good deal of trouble with him and the rest of the
company as a result. Her appearance on the first night was very
nearly a fiasco, until, as she tells us, in the fourth act
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
to the astonishment of the audience, the surprise of the
performers, and the exultation of the manager, I felt myself suddenly
inspired. I blazed out at once with meridian splendour... Mr Quin
was so fascinated at this unexpected intervention that he waited
behind the scenes till the conclusion of the act; when lifting me up
from the ground in a transport he exclaimed aloud, 'Thou art a
divine creature, and the true spirit is in thee.'
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
At this time George Anne had two suitors: Lord Byron, 'a
nobleman who had little to boast of but a title and an agreeable
face', and a Mr Montgomery (who subsequently became, through a
change of name, Sir George Metham). There seems to have been a
half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt by Lord Byron to abduct her, as
a result of which she became seriously unwell. When she had recovered
she went down to Essex to stay with some relatives; but the visit did
not pass off too happily. On her way back to London she stopped for
dinner at an inn in the town of Ingatestone:
[BEGIN INDENTATION]
[BEGIN QUOTE]
During dinner [the landlady] informed me that Lord Petre had a
noble house and estate adjoining to that town; adding that his
Lordship's family was one of the worthiest in the world, although
they were Roman Catholics. I could not help smiling at this
reservation; which she observing, begged my pardon; saying, 'I fear,
Madam, you are one.' As I spoke, the starting tear glistened in my
eye, at the recollection of my remissness in the duties of the
religion I professed. I however smothered the upbraidings of my mind,
and enquired who lived at the farmhouse which was so pleasantly
situated at some distance from the town. She informed me that it
belonged to a rich farmer, but they were Papishes. I then
desired she would instruct me in the distinction between Roman
Catholics and Papishes, as she termed them. 'Lord, miss,'
answered she, 'sure you know the difference between a Hind and a
Lord?'
[END QUOTE]
[END INDENTATION]
In 1745 Bellamy rather unwisely deserted Rich and Quin and
accepted an offer from Tom Sheridan to play at the Smock Alley Theatre
in Dublin. Arrived in the Irish capital she went at once to call on
Miss O'Hara, Lord Tyrawley's unmarried sister, who welcomed her warmly
and introduced her into Dublin's fashionable society. In Dublin she
played Cleopatra in Dryden's All for Love, against Barry's Antony
and Sheridan's Ventidius, appearing also in Rowe's The Fair Penitent
and in The Provok'd Husband by Vanbrugh and Cibber, in which
Lord and Lady Townley were played by Garrick and George Anne. She
also had a great success as Portia in The Merchant of Venice.
While in Dublin she befriended a Mrs Gunning and her family, who
were involved in the deepest distress and were about to be turned out
of their house. Two of the children were later the celebrated
eighteenth-century beauties, the Gunning sisters, who became
respectively Countess of Coventry and Duchess of Hamilton.
From even before their arrival in Ireland George Anne's mother
had been trying to induce her to marry an Irish linen-draper called
Crump, a worthy but slightly ridiculous man with little to commend him
to her except his money. Her mother's insistence on this match, at
the urging of Lord Tyrawley who wanted to get his daughter off his
hands, seems to have been singularly stupid, and she was certainly a
good deal to blame for all the unhappiness that was to follow from
George Anne's refusal to consider so unattractive a suitor. Although
a Quaker, her mother was far too flighty and worldly to make the kind
of friend and adviser her brilliant daughter needed; and Lord Tyrawley
was an equally unsatisfactory parent. He certainly treated his
illegitimate children kindly, and even generously. They were admitted
to his own family circle as though by right, which says much for the
patience and large-heartedness of Lady Tyrawley, who was a thoroughly
good-natured soul. But his care for them was fitful and spasmodic,
largely because of his frequent absences abroad; and he was
ill-equipped to give them anything in the way of moral or religious
guidance. To the misfortune of her birth and her lack of a proper
home must be attributed in large part the misfortunes of George Anne's
life.
Back in London George Anne became the principal tragic actress in
Quin's company, appearing as Belvidera in Otway's Venice
Preserv'd, Statira in Lee's The Rival Queens, and other parts.
In comedy she was less successful: Mrs Ward had given way to her in
tragedy, but Peg Woffington was not to be supplanted as principal
interpreter of comedy. Still, George Anne made creditable appearances
as Harriet in Etherege's The Man of Mode: or Sir Fopling Flutter,
Lady Froth in Congreve's The Double-Dealer, and as Lady Fanciful
in Vanbrugh's The Provok'd Wife.
In 1749 George Metham was renewing his attentions to Miss
Bellamy. In the Lent of that year they were both attending the
Wednesday and Friday evening devotions at the Bavarian Embassy chapel,
one of the few places of worship available to the Catholics of London
since diplomatic privilege secured for it immunity from the penal laws
then in force. Originally attached to the Portuguese Embassy the
chapel, adjacent to Golden Square, is said to have been built soon
after the Restoration of 1660. Subsequently rebuilt and enlarged at
different periods it is now the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption
and St Gregory, Warwick Street, W.1.
When the Portuguese Ambassador removed to South Street, Mayfair,
in 1736, the Bavarian Embassy took over the house and chapel in Golden
Square. Mrs Bellamy (most actresses in the eighteenth century, once
over a certain age, were usually known as Mrs whether married or
not) became closely acquainted with the Bavarian Ambassador, Count
Franz \von Haslang, a nobleman of fine character who was to prove one
of her most faithful friends in all the distresses of her life. In
1780 the chapel was wrecked in the Gordon Riots. It is usually
assumed that the chapel was totally destroyed, but Bellamy's evidence
seems to show that this was not so. It appears more likely that the
furniture and appointments were destroyed and the fabric badly
damaged, but that the chapel was still able to be used for occasional
services, such as that held for the Count's funeral in 1783, until it
was rebuilt about the year 1787. If this is so, and there seems to be
no real reason for doubting it, then surely Warwick Street church can
claim the longest continuity of worship of any Catholic church in
England, apart from certain chapels belonging to noble houses or to
religious communities? Such, at any rate, is Mr Hartmann's opinion.
Among the clergy at Warwick Street when Mrs Bellamy knew it was
the Reverend John Darcy, who was there from 1748 to 1758 and who
appears to have been her confessor and spiritual director, as well as
her trusted friend. She mentions also the well-known Dr James
Archer, who had begun life as potboy at the Ship Tavern, near the
Sardinian chapel in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and whose sermons went
through several editions and were appreciated by Catholics and
Protestants alike. She also knew well the celebrated Franciscan
Arthur O'Leary, founder of the mission of St Patrick's, Soho Square.
To return to the year 1749: before long George Anne Bellamy
considered herself as virtually engaged to George Metham; but
unfortunately Lord Tyrawley intervened and expressed great displeasure
at her rejection of Mr Crump, whom he was still insistent on her
marrying.
# 2012
[234 TEXT G47]
IT irks the art teacher to have art regarded as a luxury item
on the school's bill of fare. For one thing no one likes to think of
his life's work as easily dispensable, and experience has shown that
when school money is scarce art is among the first activities to be
dispensed with. Nevertheless, fine and highly cherished objects are
regarded as luxuries, and one may question whether the attempt to
convince the public that art and music are as useful as arithmetic and
science would be wise strategy even if the claim could be justified.
The claim has dubious validity. That artistic activity produces
important results is true. Individual enjoyment is one such result
and social control or discipline is another. But the sort of art that
does this for most people most of the time is not the kind that has to
be studied in school. The popular arts via the mass media furnish
massive doses of enjoyment to the masses of people and likewise shape
their feelings with respect to what in our culture is to be cherished,
admired, loved and hated.
We learn how to feel about love, death, success, war and peace in
the movies, popular fiction, the top 20 tunes in the jukebox, the
advertising layouts in our magazines and newspapers. These arts
present in perceptual form images or models that objectify and exhibit
the current fashion in what is desirable and repulsive.
The popular arts of a people, whether they set out to do so or
not, celebrate the values of that people. When these values are put
into song and story they evoke feelings that become stylised and serve
to educate the young and the old alike. Advertisers use art media to
make the public yearn for their products; governments can, if they put
their minds to it shape the feelings of their people with respect to
leaders and their policies.
But to reiterate, this use of art demands no formal training on
the part of the young. Living in the group they will be controlled by
the arts forms of that group. The teaching of art in the schools
makes sense only if there is an art to which ordinary daily experience
does not give the pupil access; if access to it will give him
something not to be found in ordinary transactions with popular art,
and if this requires formal training.
Is there an art to which ordinary routines of life do not give
the pupil adequate access? In one sense the answer is no, because
anyone, if he tries hard enough, can visit museums and libraries;
listen to concerts and recordings. We are justly proud of the
accessibility of all types of art objects and the techniques of the
mass media deserve much of the credit for it.
In another sense, however, certain realms of art are effectively
closed off from many people. When considerable facility or
acquaintance with the methods of making or viewing an art object are
required for appreciation, ignorance is as effective a bar as a wall.
Poor readers cannot do much with Proust's novels and a lack of
familiarity with Greek mythology makes for a frustrating experience
with Milton's Paradise Lost.
That is one reason for the irritation of the untutored viewer
6vis a vis abstract painting. He looks for what is not there
and he does not know what to do with what is there. This irritation
is sometimes relieved by suggesting that the painting be viewed as a
piece of wall paper or floor covering. Hard as this is on the soul of
the artist, it does, however, halt the viewer's frantic search for
familiar themes and objects.
Serious art, by and large, does make demands that popular art
does not: sensitive discrimination, awareness of form, some
familiarity with technique, and, above all, an active and concentrated
attention. In so far as this is the case, serious art is not easily
accessible to the untutored.
Because facility with serious art requires skill and knowledge
not acquired incidentally, it makes sense for the school to offer a
programme of art education. But because such training entails effort
that the child may be reluctant to exert, to require it of everyone
calls for a promise to the child and to society. To the child must be
promised enjoyment and satisfaction above and beyond those afforded by
the popular arts; to society must be promised a strengthening of the
people's commitment to its ideals and aspirations, and what may be
even more important, a constant examination and evaluation of them.
There are two lines of argument that we can follow to justify
these promises. One is that in the experience of the race, epoch
after epoch has produced men who testify to the power and value of
serious art. Why one cannot predict that some of our children and
perhaps all of them will experience the same sort of reaction after
similar training is hard to understand, yet so convinced are educators
that aesthetic experience is no more than a capricious and individual
matter of taste that they find this sort of evidence unconvincing.
The other line of argument consists in putting forward a theory
that tries to show how art in general and serious art in particular
functions in man's attempt to achieve the good life.
From the days of Plato to our own times many have tried to
interpret what art does. For Plato himself, art by embodying harmony
and order in delightfully sensuous forms induced harmony and order
into the individual soul. So potent did he believe art to be that he
insisted on having the stories and poems taught to the young censored.
He was afraid lest certain types of music make boys effeminate. Nor
did he believe that stories depicting gods and heroes in immoral
escapades would do much for character education.
Susanne K. Langer speaks of art as shaping our inner life. Art
introduces order into the chaotic realm of our emotions by holding up
before us images of shaped feelings.
Freud and Sir Herbert Read, among others, see art as stemming
from man's struggle with his submerged animal impulses to love and
destruction. Art on this view somehow plumbs the nether region of the
unconscious and performs for us the rite of ennobling our unconscious
transactions with our primordial lusts. The artist, so to speak, is
our substitute for neurosis.
Gyorgy Kepes notes that we respond to the images of the artist
because their forms and harmonies touch us at various levels of our
being: sensational, rational, and emotional.
As the industrial revolution swept into high gear William Morris
warned that the rhythmic joy of work had been destroyed. Repeatedly
we have been told that everyday life in our times no longer provides
us with the models of wholeness and harmony that were once vouchsafed
to the peasant in his natural setting. Art is more and more relied
upon to restore the wholeness of human experience.
Summing it up, the theoretical justification for education in
serious art lies in the claim that it trains the feeling side of life
just as other studies train the intellectual side and still others
perfect bodily skills, and that it does so in a way that goes beyond
the educative effects of popular art.
Two problems seem to emerge if we take this line of persuasion
with school boards and parents. First, whether even with respect to
serious art the school need do more than provide an environment in
which the child's natural expressive impulses are allowed to manifest
themselves in paint, clay, etc., with a maximum of freedom and a
minimum of technical requirements. If this is the case, then it need
not require much more than time in the programme, a wide variety of
materials, and an encouraging teacher. The upsurge of Sunday painting
indicates that perhaps not even this much is a prerequisite for adult
artistic activity.
Casting doubt on this approach is the well-nigh universal
testimony of artists and connoisseurs in all fields that their
achievements do not come naturally. On the contrary, they complain
with almost tedious uniformity about the hard work their artistic
endeavours entail. Serious art on the producing or the appreciating
side is not for the lazy, nor presumably for the untrained. If,
however, there is nothing systematic to teach, no special way of
teaching it, and no effort required in learning it, the fuss about the
art programme is much ado about nothing.
The second point is that a programme of art education which
proposes to train pupils for the appreciation of serious art is not
innocuous; it can be dangerous.
Serious art presents us with models of feeling that are neither
so familiar nor so safe as those presented by the popular arts.
Popular art gives aesthetic form to the values that most of the
people are enjoying or would like to enjoy in a manner approved by the
social order. Just as there are standard ways of feeling about love,
war, marriage, death, home, etc. In the popular song, picture,
photograph, movie, and story the average man recognises his everyday
problems and the standard solutions.
Serious art, on the other hand, tries to disclose modes of
feelings that in our ordinary life we rarely experience, and would
probably prefer not to experience at all. Most of us do not want to
engage in heroic episodes of love, war, or politics, but in every
epoch a few works of art depict mankind in such heroic and convincing
roles that we see in them our species at its best. These works become
certified as "great" works of art, but not always by their
contemporary publics.
Contemporary art, when serious, criticises the values of its
culture. Sometimes this criticism is in the form of a protest; at
others, it simply experiments freely with emotions and their
expression in unusual forms.
Serious art, whether in its classical or contemporaneous form,
whether freely experimental or definitely idealistic, confronts the
child with models of experience and feeling that are not typical of
the life going on around him. The images it offers the child are not
mirrors of life but projections of what life might feel like. All
of these images are distortions. Some are interesting and important;
some border on the insane, and a few disclose visions of feeling that
haul mankind up another rung on the ladder of civilisation.
All of which means that when the school takes serious art
seriously it cannot expose the immature pupil to anything and
everything, and this in turn presupposes a high order of aesthetic
sophistication and competence on the part of all teachers who have a
part in the programme.
So conceived and defended a case can be made out for art
education as an integral part of general education. That school
boards and other appropriating agencies will be convinced is not so
certain. They represent the tension between the conventional and the
experimental that is never absent from a changing society. The
artistic experience is intermittent and celebrative; it gives meaning
and glow to life but it neither creates life nor sustains it. The
school must pay attention to all aspects of living- economic,
intellectual, moral, and social- and if it must make a choice between
preserving and sustaining life, on one hand, and making it glow, on
the other, there is no question as to what it will have to choose.
But we no longer face such a hard choice. If we did, we would not be
discussing art education at all.
As far as it is possible for me to do so I have acknowledged my
indebtedness to particular authors for particular information. Where
I may inadvertently have omitted to do so I hope that the authors
concerned will accept my general acknowledgment of the interest I have
sustained in their writings and for the help I have gained from them
in the fascinating study of mythology, fairy tale, and folk-lore.
# 2027
[235 TEXT G48]
"Henri Rousseau's art was born and formed on Sundays. Free
from work he could, with a cheerful heart, compose images while
listening to the songs of the Faubourg." The little book by the
Frenchman Roch Grey from which these simple words are taken was
published in the early twenties: my copy was published and, I suspect,
translated in Rome. Written in a mixture of intellectual
sententiousness and poetic sentimentalism peculiar to some French
writing about art, it is more often than not reduced to fantasy by the
literal translation- "product of the tendencies of nature working
outside every heritage on the part of some paradisical superfluity
treating of universal harmony, Henri lived a life without malice."
And yet, its earnest appreciation of his spirit, mingled with the
absurdity of its phrases, especially those used to describe a visit to
the deceased painter's studio, is an inextricable part of my knowledge
of the Douanier. Even today I cannot believe that "ugly, silent dogs
played in the middle of the street..." is not the title of one of
his pictures: and when, describing the climax of his hostile reception
in the Rue Perrel, M. Grey says, "another person was visibly
preparing to take part in the fray; striped like a mattress he
cried..." I visualize in the dusty summer street another version of
The Footballers. It is obviously a book to be enjoyed at
intervals. It came out this time because I had heard casually that
there was to be an exhibition of Rousseau's pictures in Paris, at the
Gallerie Charpentier in March and because I had recently seen the two
fine ones in the Hay Whitney collection. One of them, The Happy
Quartet, looks back in an odd way to Blake, not so much because of a
nai"ve belief in felicity as because Rousseau obviously derived
inspiration for the poses and for the cherubic child from looking, as
Blake did, at engravings of old masters.
Thinking about Rousseau leads one to ask why nai"ve painting has
such a hold upon our imagination today. In the painting of a
sophisticated artist there is always a discrepancy, a margin of
unattainable perfection, of rapture, between the intention and the
result. Although it is true to say that the greater the artist the
smaller that discrepancy- indeed, it often seems non-existent to the
spectator- it is also true that the greater the painter, the greater,
inevitably, the discrepancy, because of the soaring quality of his
vision. But no one today knows what kind of vision, or belief, or
intention even, lies in that region beyond the bounds of execution.
When artists painted for the church, or when they painted man the
perfectible being, the nature of the paradise they had lost, but could
through grace regain, was imaginable; at least its spiritual values
were known. Now they are not. For the true nai"ve painter, on the
other hand, there is no margin between his intention and his result:
he paints to the exact limit of his vision. It is exactly in his
humble capacity to be satisfied with this that his nai"vete?2 or lack
of sophistication lies. It is exactly in this that his appeal lies.
Rousseau once wrote to the mayor of his home town Laval, offering
to sell La Bohe?2mienne Endormie. He sent a description of
the picture: "A wandering negress, playing her mandolin, with her
jar beside her (a vase containing water), sleeps deeply, worn out by
fatigue. A lion wanders by, detects her and does not devour her.
There's an effect of moonlight, very poetic. The scene takes place
in a completely arid desert. The gypsy is dressed in oriental
fashion." The simple exactitude of his words matches the clarity
and finality of the picture. The confidence and satisfaction of the
painter shines out, as it does in these words from a biographical note
that he wrote upon himself: "He perfected himself more and more in
the original manner which he has adopted and he is in the process of
becoming one of the best realist painters." This absence of anxiety
in a person who is simple enough for it not to be a fault is a source
of repose and strength. Picasso, Braque, Max Jacob, Appollinaire and
many others in his lifetime were entertained by his absurdities, took
advantage of his susceptibility to hoaxes, loved his good temper and
dogged persistence in his work- and accepted his paintings as manna.
The blessing of an unassailable, because unquestioned, calm.
Things that are over are not always done with too, according to
timetable. Pictures and personalities that ought to be tidied away
after their airing occupy one's mind with images and questions and
memories. Toulouse-Lautrec is a particular sticker. Partly because
he can never finally be pinned down. Confronted with the variety and
the vitality of the subjects, the daring and the ingenuity of the
colour, the boldness and the total take-it-or-leave-it quality of the
compositions for the first time 6en masse at the Museum at
Albi some years ago, I felt as if he was an artist I had never seen
before. Reading Henri Perruchot's thorough and imaginative biography
(out last year) I feel, in spite of the picture books and the Moulin
Rouge film and the legends and the lithographs, that here is a man
that I have never known before. And then the memory of Albi, rosy but
fierce, dominating a countryside that can have changed very little
since medieval times and of that extraordinary collection of pictures
by a son of one of its most medieval minded families, took on a
marvellous new sharpness. It was good to be able to see many of the
works again at the Tate Gallery last month.
The most persistent question raised by M. Perruchot's book is
how far the artist Lautrec was the product of his crippled state.
There is only one record of a meeting between him and that other
classic example of the invalid whose disability turned him into an
artist, Marcel Proust. Someone at a restaurant described how
Lautrec's father, Count Alphonse, had watched an unknown woman
admiring a ring in a shop window, had marched into the shop, bought it
for 5,000 francs (+800 today) and handed it to her with a flourish.
"And they accuse me of extravagance," said Lautrec. A young man,
who was Proust, said that such gestures were not stupid, they even had
a certain usefulness for they asserted caste. Whereupon Lautrec
muttered something about middle-class stupidity, which was always
prepared to "admire an absurd gesture or a sunset." Proust and
Lautrec belonged to different worlds and it was precisely the
difference in their worlds that made Proust what he was. He was the
woman outside the window, able by the intensity of his desire and his
curiosity to possess the ring. To Count Alphonse it was a jewel worth
5,000 francs, to Proust it was the history of the Crusades, the Jockey
Club, eccentricity of the nobility, himself watching it, even
Lautrec's cutting comment, all epitomized in one little glittering
symbol. And something he could not possess except by being outside
it. For him the practice of observing and writing was not a
substitute for life and truth, it was the only life and truth he could
know. If he had not been ill he would have had to invent illness so
as to keep himself outside the window.
Not so Toulouse-Lautrec: he was a man of action, a French
aristocrat with a taste, developed in his family to the extent of
mania, for hunting, shooting, riding, falconry, racing. He loved it,
and had he been strong he would have embraced that life naturally and
violently. He would have drawn, as the rest of his family did, for
relaxation. The Counts of Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa had another
characteristic: absolute unselfconscious belief in themselves and,
therefore, a complete detachment. The energy that in so many people
is used up in doubt and insecurity was free in them to do exactly what
they wanted, how they wanted. This energy, coupled with an inherited
talent, the accident of Lautrec's deformity and weakness left him free
to use for art. But that does not explain why he was moved to tears
by a word of praise from De?2gas.
INTELLECTUAL clarity and the pure, forward-looking passions
aroused by it are always being betrayed by memory. Nowhere does this
show itself more clearly than in art. And nowhere more than in Italy
were artists more vociferous in their fierce desire to cut themselves
off from the past, to get rid of it: not merely to tease it with
incongruities like the moustache on the Mona Lisa, but to destroy it
and to reject it and so to free themselves from the insinuations of
memory and of association. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto was more
than an anarchist lark, it was a serious bid by the artists for
freedom, a serious proposal to blow up the sun-warmed golden prison of
walls and towers that threatened to be a barrier between them and
living, and to escape forever its benign warders: painted angels,
prophets, heroes, philosophers and Holy ones. This pious act of
rejection, though like a bloodless sacrifice it destroyed nothing,
did, by magic and belief set them free to participate in all the
modern movements of Europe, and later of America. The most consistent
centre of this freedom has always been Milan where a group of artists
has continued expanding and experimenting, looking to an imagined
future, which, faster and faster has become a material present,
leaving less and less than one foot on the ground, soaring into space,
moving or static, enveloping or enveloped, carved up, pierced,
martyred in four dimensions like modern art everywhere.
Rome has no such violent centre of activity. As a capital city
it offers what capital cities do: a temporary collection of Picassos,
the Henry Moore show that is travelling Europe, an exhibition of
French 18th and 19th century landscapes, luring one with its poster of
Corot's urn and view from the Pincio to abandon once and for all our
fragmentary age and to dwell in that arch of pellucid golden light
where a column is not a symbol of destruction, but of eternity. Then,
in the small commercial galleries, a desultory collection, out of the
tourist season, of Roman and other Italian artists fighting their
battle against what is expected of them or giving themselves up to an
illusory affair with some faded beauty-spot, and coming out of it
rather worse than such ill-advised lovers elsewhere.
What is instructive is to see the three aspects of modern art-
realist, abstract, and that curious cabalistic art of symbolism and
fantasy mixed that has no tidy name- in a new setting and a new
light. Certain things become very clear. The realism of Guttuso and
his followers, who have found their way out of the past by a different
route from the inheritors of futurism, bears much more directly on the
collective habits, needs and passions of the Italian people than the
idea of realistic painting produced by artists in other countries
ever could. In England, for instance, the dustpan, the baby or the
workman portrayed have a tendency to get confused with The Solitary
Reaper or The Idiot Boy: they are isolated for notice, a poetic
conception. But to watch those black Sunday suits converging into a
tight passionate black shadow on the warm cobbled square while the
high vertical lines of the buildings slice down into them, to see a
bar shaken by its frenzied customers or an old woman on the steps of a
church, taking upon herself, in her overwhelming exhaustion, the
motherhood of the whole working world, is to realise how Italy is
possessed by those swarming people and to see what it is that an
artist of Guttuso's convictions must express.
Then there is a collection of "abstract-concrete" work: the
fashionable all black canvas: or a Fontana slit into slithers of
darkness like a medieval castle.
# 2023
[236 TEXT G49]
THE train pulled into the platform at Leningrad at 22.31.
The Autumn leaves on the Finnish landscape on the journey from
Helsinki had been a memorable sight. Now, here in the dark of a
Russian night, the cold nip of approaching winter smacked the face.
On the platform, waiting for me, were three men. I immediately
recognised the tough face with the friendly smile. It was Vladimir
Vengherov, one of the Lenfilm directors, whose acquaintance I had
first made as we splashed together in the Adriatic during the Venice
festival a few months previously.
With him was a slight, fair-haired man (looking, I thought,
typically North Country). He was introduced to me as Alexei Gorin, a
scriptwriter for scientific films, the local representative of the
Soviet Film-Makers' Association- my hosts together with the editorial
board of Cinema Arts magazine- and a man with a surprising
knowledge of England as a result of a short visit during an
international congress of technical and scientific film-makers in
London a couple of years ago.
The third was a slender, dark haired youngster in an American-cut
pin stripe suit. He introduced himself as Vadim, Vadim Sazonov,
languages student at the Moscow University, who was to be my
interpreter during the next two weeks.
We drove in a comfortable, American-style taxi to the Europe
hotel and there, in an office-cum-bedroom (nothing could have been
more suitably arranged for my purpose) we sat far into the early hours
discussing what I wanted to see and who I wanted to meet in Leningrad.
I said I wanted to see many Soviet films under typical cinema
conditions. And I was a little shaken to be told I could start next
morning (or rather, that morning) at nine, when the cinemas opened
for the benefit of workers on night shift.
So that morning, Vadim, Gorin and myself set out on foot to
discover a typical Soviet cinema. I would have found it difficult to
find any cinema. All of them looked from the outside like a
Manchester Methodist church; but on closer inspection one could see a
small poster in a solo display frame announcing the programme details
and the times of performance. And a few cinemas added to the display
with one or two stills; but this was an exception.
The first cinema was typically Soviet... but the programme was
Great Expectations (a back-handed compliment to British Cinema
because during our trek we found three other theatres showing the same
"great British picture". I couldn't help thinking it was not all
that great.) By the time we had found the cinema showing a new Soviet
film, Man's Blood is Thicker than Water, the programme had already
begun; and in a nearby cinema the programme would not start until
eleven.
There was one alternative. Sightseeing. We walked down the main
shopping street (not unlike a South London high street on a Monday
morning), and plunged into a metro station which took my breath away
with its chandeliered opulence; like some grand palace in
pre-revolution France it was the last thing one would expect to find
in post-revolution Russia. The platform was clean enough for a
picnic. Gorin said such luxury had a beneficial effect on the working
man on his way to, and from, the factory. If a Billingsgate porter
found this at Monument, he'd probably get on his knees and pray!
The sun burst through the blue-grey clouds above the river and
splashed on the golden spire of the Peter-Paul fortress, the most
ancient symbol of this most ancient of Russian cities. For a moment
it was a reminder of former glories of St. Petersburg. Then past a
naval training school, using the very ship from which a gun was fired
to signal the start of the Revolution, past the Committee headquarters
seen in so many Eisenstein and other 'classics' (Potemkin,
Strike, October) and then into a taxi for the Institute of Arts.
At the Institute I was received by the secretary, Nina Volman and
by the head of the film branch, Nicholas Yemov. With them were a
number of students and a distinguished critic, Dr. Dobin, who is
shortly to publish a book on the poetry and prose of Cinema.
Mr. Yemov explained that the Institute has only been
functioning for two years. Its aims are to promote the serious study
of Cinema in and around the Leningrad area and it does not duplicate
the work of the larger Institute and archives in Moscow. At present
the Institute is completing a book dealing with the work of the
younger school of Soviet directors. Such men as Kozintsev, who made
the wonderful version of Don Quixote and who is now planning to
film Hamlet in colour and wide screen at the Lenfilm studios early
in 1961.
I was interested to learn what British films have most impressed
the members of the Institute. They are familiar with Richard =3,
Oliver Twist, The Horse's Mouth, Woman in a Dressing Gown, Geordie,
Genevieve, Room at the Top... and, of course, Great Expectations.
We debated the advantages and disadvantages of filming famous
classics and works originally intended for the theatre. The Russians,
I found, have an obsession for this, even though they have found that
when they film a novel it reduces rather than promotes the sale of the
book, which, I explained, is opposite to our experiences in the West.
And they seemed to accept my point that it is more important for the
Cinema that artists should concentrate on original work than
transpositions, no matter how well they are engineered.
I was anxious to find out what the Russians themselves regard as
the most significant trends in Soviet film-making of recent years.
Dr. Dobin summarised their views like this:
"We agree with you when you say that films like Ballad of a
Soldier, Destiny of a Man and Don Quixote have been important
new styles in Soviet film-making. We are living now through an
interesting period in the history of our Cinema. The whole pattern of
film-making is being changed. You see, the men who made the classics
of Soviet Cinema are no longer living- Eisenstein, Pudovkin,
Dovzhenko. Their tradition is carried on by directors like Kozintsev,
Romm and Heifetz.
"But it is the young men who are profoundly changing all our old
ideas. The pattern began to emerge when Chukhrai made The Forty
First, and it was consolidated in his more recent film, Ballad of
a Soldier. Although he has made only two films, he almost shows
himself more talented than the old gang. It is a very significant
fact.
"Sergei Bondarchuk, although he is not a young man is young
among the ranks of directors, and his first film, Destiny of a Man,
was recognised as an important contribution to Cinema in every
country where it was shown. Another film of significance has been
Serezha, made by Danelya and Talankin (which won a major award at
the Karlovy Vary festival).
"These films usher a new trend. Our film producers are creating
a new style that appeals to their audience without having to resort to
the ingredients of Western 'box-office', such as strip-tease. They
are searching for something good in the soul of Soviet man.
"The new film-makers portray what they see without trying to
improve people or embellish reality. This is important to realise.
The main concern of these film-makers is to show the truth of life,
even if it means showing the darker sides of life. Some time ago- in
the 'forties and 'fifties- there was a period of Soviet film-making
when the films were like posters, divorced from people and from
reality.
[END QUOTE]
"Western audiences may find of particular interest a film by
Heifetz, The Case of Roumantsyev. It is the story of an honest
young man who, in all innocence falls among thieves. He is arrested
by the Police and prosecuted for his part in crimes that he did not
commit. All the circumstantial evidence is against him. The
prosecutor is not concerned with him as an individual and is himself
quite convinced of his guilt. But in the end a friend is able to
prove the man's innocence to the satisfaction of the court officials.
"Many of our films now focus attention on the problems of
individuals. Ballad of a Soldier was a simple story of a pure
young boy and a pretty girl falling in love. It was something with
which audiences liked to identify themselves. Another film about
soldiers was called simply, Soldiers. It is the work of Ivanov
and, instead of concentrating on the battle, the political
consequences, it is a study of the every day life, the detail of how a
soldier lives; and the duty, the responsibility, forms the background.
"So you see, our young directors are coming closer and closer to
the realities of life."
The members of the Institute then took me to their small
projection theatre to see a musical film made in Leningrad in 1941 by
Alexander Ivanovski, Anton Ivanovich is Angry, which stars a
distinguished Soviet actor (who lives in the city), Pavel Kadochnikov.
It proved to be a Hollywood-style story, but instead of pop music the
conflict between an old professor who doted over his opera-singing
daughter and a young impressario [SIC] was based on a natural
conflict between the highbrows and the lowbrows in classical music.
Characterisation was ingenious enough, but I couldn't help feeling
the director was ill served by his scenarist.
Back at the Europe hotel we dined on caviar and baked sturgeon
(and if you think the Russians wallow in luxury you're wrong, it's as
common in Leningrad as fish and chips). And during our conversation I
began to realise that Vadim had a rather lop-sided view of British
history. I realised some of the snags inherent in communication with
the East during an interval at the concert that evening by the
Leningrad symphony (Haydn, Barber and Shostakovitch performed as well
as you would hear anywhere in the world, perhaps better). I asked
Vadim if he regretted the fact that he was not allowed to travel to
countries in the West when and as he wanted to do so: and he reminded
me of Nina, the little Russian visitor to London who found herself at
Bow Street. "No," he said, "it is not that we are not allowed to
visit the West, it is that we are protected from this kind of thing
being done to us."
The next day, on time, an Intourist car left us at a building
reminiscent of the Albert Hall. This was the Velika cinema. We were
to see a children's matinee of The Green Coach, a production of
the Odessa studios, directed by Gennardy Gabay. There were hundreds
of children, mostly boys in their grey military-style school hats,
clambering to buy ice cream beneath a white statue of a large man with
a dove in his left hand and a slogan behind: 'The World Wants
Peace.'
As we waited for the film to begin a stout lady with a jovial
face, who I understood to be the manageress, said the building was no
longer to be a cinema but would shortly become a theatre. I asked if
this was because television was causing fewer people to go to the
cinema and she replied no, it was because in Leningrad they had
already fulfilled their cinema attendance target so there was no need
for the building any longer to function as a cinema. I wanted to ask
for a fuller explanation of this cryptic statement, but we were
suddenly plunged into darkness and the film began.
It was an adventure yarn about the Revolution, with Red
Russians fighting White Russians, and gangs of criminals (also
Russians) in between. A small boy plays Sherlock Holmes. The gangs
of horse-stealers and illicit vodka distillers are brought to justice
and the Red Russians make life better for everyone.
# 2005
[237 TEXT G50]
THE score for the 1828 revival of La Fille mal
Garde?2e at the Paris \Ope?2ra was described on the playbills
for the first performance (see Fig. 1) as being "newly arranged by
M. Herold". Presumably, when the question arose of producing this
long-popular ballet at the \Ope?2ra, the original music, which still
accompanied performances of it at the Porte-Saint-Martin and other
theatres, was considered too light. The chorus-master, Ferdinand
Herold (1791-1833), who had already composed the music for three
ballets, was accordingly given the task of refurbishing the score.
Since the ballet was no doubt too well-known for the original music
to be discarded altogether, several of the best numbers were retained,
but Herold wrote a considerable amount of new music and inserted
several numbers borrowed from familiar sources.
Borrowings of this kind were common in ballet composition at this
time. The ballet composer regarded his task as part of his day's work
rather than as a serious artistic creation, and this practice greatly
lightened his burden. It was also considered that the interpolation
of a melody which the public would associate with the line of a song
appropriate to the action it accompanied was an aid to understanding
the situation.
Our knowledge of Herold's music for La Fille mal Garde?2e
is based on the full score preserved in the Library of the Paris
\Ope?2ra, which was used by John Lanchbery as the principal source in
arranging the music played today for the Royal Ballet. This score is
too clean to be the score used by the conductor, and it was probably
the fair-copy prepared by one of the \Ope?2ra's copyists from
Herold's original draft and perhaps used as the master for copying the
orchestral parts. It bears the inscription: La Fille mal
Garde?2e / Ballet en 2 actes / de Dauberval / mis en scene par Mr
Aumer, musique / nouvellement arrange?2e par Mr Herold /
represente?2 sur le the?2a?5tre de l'acade?2mie / Royale de
musique le lundi 8 de?2cembre / 1828. Why the score bears this
date, which is that of the seventh performance, instead of the date of
the first performance, November 17th, 1828 is a mystery. Did Herold
only have part of his score completed by November 17th, the complete
revised score not being ready until December 8th?
As is to be expected, the score is written for a typical
orchestra of the period. The music is mostly scored for two flutes,
the second usually playing piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, two pairs of horns, and strings. For the number "Pas de
Mr Albert" in Act =1 (No. 17), however, the orchestra is
augmented by harp, trumpets, trombones, drums and percussion
(triangle, bass drum and cymbals), while the Finales to Act =2
(Nos. 36 and 36a) and an occasional number here and there have parts
written for trumpets, trombones and drums. Further, there are various
places in the score where trombones and/or drums have been added in
another hand in a stave at the bottom of the page.
Judging from the orchestration, which is markedly inferior to
that of Herold's operas, his score of La Fille mal Garde?2e
was hurriedly composed, and this perhaps lends support to the
conjecture made earlier that it may not have been quite finished in
time for the first performance. In it the strings play throughout,
resting for only ten out of the thousands of bars in this hour and a
half of music. Many of the numbers display great economy of effort by
doubling some instruments with others, a common practice of that
period. This method of scoring, of course, made it possible to
orchestrate a number in a fraction of the time that would be needed in
ballet-composing today, although it is still very much in use in the
field of commercial arrangement.
An example of this is to be found on page 381 of the full score
(see Fig. 2). Reading from the top, the first two staves are the
horns; then follow two staves for the oboes, which double the violins;
the next two staves are the bassoons, which double the cellos; then
come the first and second violins, the violas which also double the
cellos, the cellos, and finally the double basses which again double
the cellos. Thus, in eleven separate staves, there are only five
different voices.
Herold made no attempt to produce a modernized version of the
score in the way that Hertel was to do in 1864. He retained a
considerable amount of folky music in the Bordeaux score, to which he
added numbers of his own composition with an essentially French
melodic content, and several borrowings which one must allow are
excellently suited for their purpose. In fact, from the point of view
of orchestration, the borrowed numbers, in which the orchestration has
been left unchanged, are among the most effective parts of the score.
Herold fulfilled his task in a much more self-effacing and effective
way than Hertel. Herold's numbers are generally longer and more
developed than the equivalent numbers of the Bordeaux score, but his
score has less continuity than the original, in which one number
occasionally runs into the next without pause. Herold gave the music
greater characterization, wisely retaining note for note one or two of
the more pointed numbers in the Bordeaux score: an outstanding example
of this is the spinning number in Act =2, retained by Herold, but
discarded by Hertel in favour of a much less suitable number of his
own composition. This greater characterization which Herold injected
into the score was marked by a much more heightened dramatic content
in the music. In Herold's score there is a stronger predilection for
6/8 than in the Bordeaux score, where the preference is for fast 2/4.
As was the case with the Bordeaux version, there is a frustrating
lack of "landmarks" in the Herold score. Our only aids in fitting
the music to the scenario are the division of the score into the two
acts and a few written indications: "lever du rideau" in Act
=1, Scene =1; "Pas des Moissonneurs", "Pas de Mr
Albert", "Apre?3s le divertissement" and "\Orage" as
titles to four numbers in Act =1, Scene =2; and "Finale" as the
only title indication in the whole of Act =2. Again, as with the
Bordeaux score, it is much easier to wed the music to the action in
Act =2 than either scene of Act =1, the second scene of which is
particularly difficult because of two weaknesses inherent in the score
as a whole: a lack of any kind of thematic continuity, and the absence
of obvious mime scenes.
It would have been difficult to write an overture which better
set the scene than the number which Herold borrowed (No. 1). This
was the overture from Giovanni Paolo Martini's comic opera Le
Droit du Seigneur, in which it serves to describe a French
countryside scene at dawn. This was the very atmosphere needed for
the opening of La Fille mal Garde?2e, and Herold therefore
inserted it down to the last note of scoring, with its bird calls
imitated on the woodwind, and the slow legato melody played by the
first violins against a monotonous Alberti type of accompaniment from
the second violins.
The curtain having risen during No. 1, there follows (No. 2)
another borrowing for Lise's entrance: the opening chorus from
Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia ("6Piano,
pianissimo") chosen no doubt to illustrate an entrance on tip-toe
so that Lise's mother will not be awakened. The orchestration has not
been touched, and no attempt has been made to supply the chorus parts
of the original, which are of no musical content any way. At one
point, however, where sufficient music has been supplied for the
purpose, there is an abrupt termination, followed by a three-bar link
of the most primitive kind to give some kind of continuity.
Nos. 3 and 4 have their equivalent in Bordeaux No. 3. The
former is a very long \6allegretto number in 6/8, intended
undoubtedly to accompany Colas's entrance with the harvesters. So far
the music has been growing progressively louder: No. 2 brought in
two trumpets, and No. 4- a short, loud, dramatic and fast-moving
number, presumably for Simone's entrance- introduces three trombones,
and is scored throughout with every instrument playing except drums,
and marked \6fortissimo.
No. 5, to which Colas discovers Lise's ribbon, is identical
with Bordeaux No. 4, but transposed down a tone to make it fit.
For No. 6, which closely approximates Bordeaux No. 5, Herold
has composed a new tune which follows the original to the extent of
having not only the same time signature but even the same note values.
By present-day standards, this is rather feeble music for the scene
which it probably accompanies, Simone telling Colas to be off.
Herold also wrote a new number (No. 7) for the entrance of the
villagers, with the same time signature and speed as Bordeaux No. 6.
After a marking "plus vite", there is a sudden silent bar,
followed by four soft chords and a loud chord played in a slow tempo,
serving as a link to No. 8, which is exactly the same as Bordeaux
No. 7 with a few bars of tasteful coda added at the end. This
latter number is scored for strings alone, trumpets and trombones
having been silent since No. 4.
Not surprisingly, No. 9, the "playing at horses" number,
used most probably for the lovers' meeting, is precisely the same as
Bordeaux No. 8, even to the extent of reproducing a bowing
indication- a great rarity in the Herold score. At the end of this
number there is a pencilled sign
[ILLUSTRATION]
which is still used today by some continental conductors to indicate
the imminent entrance of drums.
Drums do indeed appear in the first bar of No. 10, a jolly 6/8
tune which in its context must be a continuation of the love scene.
It is of considerable length, and its lilt suggests a flirtation with
coy and playful exchanges. Its counterpart in the Bordeaux score was
cut considerably. At the end, however, there is no distant echo of
the melody heralding the approach of the village girls, as in the
original, but instead, the following number (No. 11), which follows
straight on without a break, opens with a sudden \6sforzando
chord. This is a surprisingly effective piece of orchestration: a
chord of the diminished seventh with three trombones high up and close
together and two oboes and two clarinets in their low reedy register,
while all the strings play \6tremolo. This number, written for
Colas's flight, begins in a bustling manner and then eases off in a
relaxation of the tension.
No. 12, a folky number in 6/8 written in simple
four-part harmony, with flutes strengthening the tune, accompanies the
entrance of the village girls who urge Lise to accompany them to the
harvest. Simone then appears to prevent Lise's departure to No. 13,
in which her anger is depicted by a striking piece of dramatic scoring
for strings only, in which much play is made of unison, fast-moving
phrases in the minor, syncopation, quick scales, crushed notes, and a
strong dotted rhythm.
The final number of the first scene, No. 14, introduces Thomas
and his half-witted son Alain, whom Simone plans to marry to her
daughter. A loud, majestic, march-like theme is undoubtedly the
accompaniment for the entrance of father and son. Then follows an
effective passage of soft \6staccato minor chords on strings and
clarinets only, which is probably the theme for the stumbling Alain.
A return to the major, with a joyous, animated 6/8 theme, and with
Alain's theme repeated, ends the scene with the proposed marriage
arranged and the departure of everyone to the harvest.
The absence of a clear break in the score at this point is
undoubtedly explained by the next number (No. 15) being intended to
accompany a changement a?3 vue to the harvest scene.
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Nor are there any linguistic barriers to this pastime; the same
bird is called \perdix in French, and one writer stated that it
was thus called because it regularly \perdit- 'loses' its
brood. Even the great are not exempt; Swift is said to have analysed
apothecary as from 'a pot he carries.' But who shall blame
them overmuch when we discover that a verb such as atone, with its
noun atonement- so obviously Latinate in appearance- is in fact
a compound of at and one.
Children are particularly and naturally prone to this kind of
etymologising. Continually coming across strange words, they strive
to make sense of them in terms of the vocabulary they already possess.
There was the child who thought that Wilhelmina was so called because
she was mean. A little boy, whose room overlooked a cemetery, was
overheard imitating part of the service with his teddy-bear- 'in the
name of the Father, the Son, and in the hole 'e goes.' There was a
little girl, wise perhaps beyond her years, who interpreted the wedded
state as 'wholly a matter o' money.' It is a sobering thought
that, although different in degree, some of the etymologies which even
our great dictionaries give may be popular etymologies; for when
information about early forms and meanings of words is scarce, we
cannot always be sure that our etymologies are valid. We still do not
know the origin of the word curmudgeon. An early nineteenth
century dictionary-maker's surmise that it is from French coeur
me?2chant, 'wicked heart,' is rightly suspect.
For the most part, this pastime has no permanent effect on the
language, but occasionally, so strong is the desire to make familiar
that which is strange, that a word is changed- either in whole or in
part- in accordance with the fancied etymology, and the changed form
is henceforth accepted. It is a change of this kind which is often
specifically intended by the use of the term 'folk etymology.' A
good example is a plant, proverbial for its bitter taste, namely
wormwood. Its Latin name is artemesia absinthium, hence
the name absinthe, borrowed from French, for a liqueur distilled
from wine and wormwood. Few of us would immediately connect this
Latin word with another, also taken by us from French, namely
vermouth, the aperitif consisting of white wine flavoured with
wormwood and other aromatic herbs. Both wormwood and vermouth
are from the same root, a Germanic word. The French borrowed
theirs, with but little adaptation, from the Old High German word
\wermuth, a close relative of which became Old English \wermod.
During the Middle Ages the latter was altered, the first part to
worm and the second to wood. It matters little to the
unlettered that neither worms nor wood appear to have anything to do
with the plant. The main object, assimilation to that which is
familiar, has been achieved.
Popular etymology shows, in fact, the operation of a widespread
and powerful linguistic process, analogy. We learn, recollect, and
become adept at using language by analogy, that is by recalling
likenesses of meaning, grammatical context, form or sound. We know
that cool, coolness, and even cold, are related to each other.
It is not surprising, therefore, that our ancestors, knowing that
\oecern (modern acorn) referred to the fruit of the \ac
'oaktree,' should assume a connection between the two and believe
that -cern should be changed to -corn. In fact, the word
\oecern is related to \oecer 'a field' (modern acre,
which has, however, become specialised in meaning), and originally
referred to the produce of the fields in general. It is not the
observation of likenesses which is at fault in popular etymology, it
is the fact that conclusions about the relationships of words, drawn
from comparisons, happen to be erroneous.
It is not, however, necessary for a whole word to be transformed
in order to satisfy the popular etymologist. The amateurs, the
unsophisticated, have been less exacting in this respect than learned
dilettantes. It is often sufficient for the former that one part of a
strange word should be given a comfortingly familiar form, e.g.
-room in mushroom, from French \mousseron, or -fish in
crayfish, from French \crevice (like vermouth, a borrowing
from Old High German, from \crebig, related to our crab). It
is not even necessary that the altered word should be obviously
meaningful in English, provided that it fits a familiar pattern; for
example, admiral- by analogy with the many Latin loanwords in
English beginning with ad- has been altered from Arabic \amiral
(via French), which in turn is from \amir, 'prince, lord,'
more familiar to us in the form Emir. Similarly an ending has
been transformed in syllable, from French \syllabe (ultimately
from Greek), by analogy with the many Latin loanwords ending in
-able.
At this point it may be asked what dictates that one word
should be altered and another passed over? It is not enough to say
'unfamiliarity' and leave it at that; familiarity and unfamiliarity
are relative terms. Many of the constituent elements of our
vocabulary are terms which we use every day. They are intimately
bound up with ordinary existence; we accept them automatically,
without enquiry. We rarely ask ourselves why a house is so called-
or a boy or a tree or a bird. As our education and experience grow we
accept other words, most of which we fit into a linguistic pattern
which we accept as belonging to our language. We go even further and
come to regard the patterns which our own language has assumed as
somehow normal, and consequently view words entering from a foreign
language with grave suspicion. The importance of folk etymology in
the development of the language stems largely from the influence it
exercises on foreign words when they are first introduced.
It is not surprising that a great many of these changes appear to
have taken place between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, a
period which saw the assimilation of the spate of French loanwords,
the floodtide of Latin loanwords and the beginning of a flow of words
from the more exotic languages of the world, either directly into
English or via other European countries, which had trading and
colonial interests in many parts of the world. English has no
monopoly of folk or popular etymology, but the phenomenon appears to
have been particularly widespread in our language. Our insularity may
account for it in part, but there is another possible explanation.
Our ancestors, like the Germans to-day, had a predilection for
compound words; although many of these disappeared in the course of
time, the expectation that the elements of a polysyllabic word could
and should be capable of resolution into meaningful elements may have
survived.
Men of learning have also made free with words, particularly
those of Latin origin. Abominable was from Latin \abominabilis,
'deserving imprecation,' which was a compound of \ab and
\omen and referred to the deprecation of an unfavourable omen.
From the time of Wycliffe up to the seventeenth century, however, it
was spelt abhominable, as if from ab homine, 'away from
man,' i.e. 'inhuman.' Modern scholarship has caused
restitution to be made here, but not in the case of arbour, a word
which goes back through Old French to Latin \herbarium, 'a green
retreat.' In Middle English it was spelt \herber, with the h
probably already lost in pronunciation in French. By a regular
sound change in Middle English, -er came to be pronounced -ar.
The way was now open for an erroneous association of the word with
Latin \arbor, 'a tree.' The spelling was first affected, but
latterly the meaning also. It is now a shady retreat with climbing
plants on a framework of wood- the two ideas have been amalgamated.
The mass of the people, unlettered and knowing no language but
their own, were also busy in their way, wrestling with the outlandish
forms of foreign words, quite oblivious of the fact that the meanings
of most foreign words could not possibly be made to yield satisfactory
sense on the basis of English roots. But it was generally sufficient
that a word be given English dress, even if this was not appropriate.
An apposite example is the word farthingale, denoting the
framework of hoops used for extending women's skirts. Here is a word
which has been subjected twice to the alterations of popular
etymologists, both in French and in English. The kernel of the word
is Latin \viridis, 'green,' which is to be found in Spanish
\verdugo, a young, pliable green twig; a framework of such twigs
was called a \verdugado. Borrowed by the French, it became
\verdugale. It was suggested that it was a safeguard of virtue,
as it was impossible to approach the lady except at arm's length. The
French form would become \fartugale in Middle English as a result
of the change of -er to -ar referred to above. But no-one
knows what ingenious associations led to the first element being
transformed to farthing. Many words are thus changed so as to
convey a meaning which, however inappropriate, sounds familiarly upon
the ear. Jerked beef, flesh dried in the sun, is a corruption of
Peruvian \charqui; compound, meaning 'enclosure,' is from
Malayan \kampung; Charterhouse from French \Chartreuse, a
Carthusian monastery; \kichshaws from French quelques
choses; battledore, a beetle used for beating washing, is probably
from Spanish \batidor, 'a beater.' Ember days have nothing
to do with the ashes of repentance; the word is from Old English
\ymbren, a compound word formed from \ymb, 'about, around,'
and \ryne, 'a recurring period.' In a fifteenth century homily
folk etymology can already be seen at work on this word.
Standard English is far from having a monopoly of this linguistic
phenomenon, which is to be found also in the dialects. A Hampshire
farmer had fowls of different breeds, including Dorkings; he
discriminated ingeniously between the 'dark \2'uns' and the 'white
\2'uns.' The bird name fieldfare may go back to an Old English
form \feldfare, deduced from an early twelfth century form
\feldware; but the first element may originally have been
\fealu, denoting the yellowish colour of its back, an element
changed in early Middle English to \felde. But in Cumberland,
folk etymology certainly seems to have taken place in its dialect
name, \2fell-faw, which is interpreted as 'mountain gypsy.'
More than irony is involved in the colloquial description of a place
which many of us have, a glory-hole. The first element of the
word is probably related to Scottish \2glaury, 'muddy, untidy.'
In Scotland and Northern England a three-legged stool was sometimes
known as a \2creepie, a corruption of French \tripied, 'three
feet.' This interchange between the sound groups [\5tr] and [\5kr]
is not uncommon; cf. English crane, Danish \trane, and
English huckleberry and hurtleberry.
Hackberry is a corruption of \2hag-/ \2heg- berry,
i.e. hedge berry, a Northern name for the bird-cherry,
prunus radus. An ingenious rationalisation of \2hegberry
emanated from Cumberland children who explained, 'we \2caw them
\2hegberries because they \2heg (i.e. set on edge) our teeth.'
There is the Lancashire corruption \2barley-men (also \2birley-
and \2burley-) from \byrlawmen, the petty officers of the
manorial courts in medieval times; a \byrlaw, cognate with our
bye-law, was made by a local court. Terms for marbles such as
\2all-plaister, \2yallow-plaister, \2alablaster and 2alley
blaster are corruptions of alabaster. An interesting
expression for a lean-faced person is \2chittyfaced, a corruption
of Old French \Chichevache (literally 'starving cow'), a
medieval monster fabled to devour only patient wives; being therefore
in a chronic state of starvation, it was made a by-word for leanness.
It is referred to in the closing stanzas of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale
of patient Griselda. It appears later to have been confused with
\2chit, \2chitty, 'a young child,' a dialect form of kitty,
and to have taken on the meaning 'baby-faced.' Popular
etymology, therefore, can result in change of meaning as well as in
change of form, as was also the case with arbour. A delightful
adaptation of a Latin word occurs in the Lancashire
\2goose-on-ten-toes, a goose claimed by husbandmen on the 16th
Sunday after Trinity, when the collect ended: 'ac bonis operibus
jugiter praestet esse intentos.'
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In many areas, particularly in India and Burma, the basic problems
to be solved before development can begin is that [SIC] of land
reform, involving the break-up of feudal ownership and the
establishment of co-operatives. Only by these means can there be any
hope of getting communities on the move.
We can do no better than turn back to India again to illustrate
these points. It is perhaps natural that I should gather together the
threads of the discussion by talking of this massive nation of over
400 million people. Its size and geographical position set it at the
centre of world politics. By the allegiance of its rulers to
socialism it provides a test case for Conservative principles. Above
all, it provides a perfect cross-section of all the stages of
development and their accompanying problems upon which we have touched
in this essay. Some areas and sectors are already far advanced and
are overripe for private domestic and foreign investment. Other
areas, mostly agricultural, remain in virtual stagnation, still
awaiting the application of knowledge and resources, and the reforms
and organisation which we have described. Across the whole economy
there is a lack of roads, drainage, education and health services, and
in the towns, even of telephones. The Indian planners have been
criticised for the rigidity of their plans and the emphasis which has
been given to Government investment in urban and already
industrialised sectors. They have been blamed for neglect of the
rural sector and for the resulting permanent food shortages and
inflation of food prices which this imbalance between agriculture and
industry creates. Whatever the truth in these accusations, as
Conservatives we would like to see the Indian Government pursue three
lines of development policy with far greater vigour than at present.
First, encroachment into the private sector should be replaced by
withdrawal and more overt encouragement to private domestic and
overseas enterprise. Secondly, the application of finance and
supervision to smallholders' agriculture, preceded where necessary by
land reforms, should be tackled with greater dynamism, and, thirdly,
these two policies should be combined with greater diligence in
carrying out the basic services and providing the facilities (which
will certainly require considerable Government expenditure) which we
regard as being rightly within the sphere of government. That we can
hope to see such policies pursued in India is doubtful. But it is
possible that we can have, over a period of time, some marginal
influence on the pattern of progress. To withhold aid is not the way
to exert this influence. On the contrary, more aid, better
administered, offers the best hope of success.
Aid is essentially a part of foreign policy. But it should be
seen as a contracting and not a permanent element of foreign policy,
for its aim should be to return predominantly to the sphere of private
initiative both the processes of economic development which it is
trying to assist and the processes of capital investment for which it
stands as a partial substitute. This must be the general objective.
To deny it makes the dispensation of all aid purposeless and
wasteful.
While development gathers momentum we shall have to condone a
variety of deviations from the principles which we support and would
see established. But if, amidst the many changes and expedients, we
can both provide aid and bring to bear some influence in line with our
general aim, then we stand a good chance of seeing thriving economies
growing up in the underdeveloped world, based on free enterprise and a
fine sense of friendship and unity with the already industrialised
countries. If not, then we run the risk of divorcing the poor half of
the world from the rich and of creating opportunities for all the
subversion, disruption and tyranny which that state of affairs can
bring.
In the second half of the twentieth century, amidst revolution
and turmoil, the British Commonwealth survives. Its continued
existence is of itself proof positive to Conservatives that the
institution works. But is there too much complacency about this? Is
interracial partnership, which is the hub of Commonwealth development,
possible today? The evidence of Africa in 1960 is that numbers matter
more than the quality of things. But the needs of Africa in 1970 show
that European, Asian and African must cooperate to sustain an
expanding economy, based on a representative system of government.
That the needs of 1970 are desirable political ends will be
denied by few British politicians. The hub of the argument- and this
affects the Commonwealth, and not merely British Africa- is that
Conservative principle will result in methods being applied that would
differ substantially from those of the Liberals who would maximise
freedom at the expense of order, and greatly from those of the Labour
Party which would prefer rapid, perhaps revolutionary, social change
to organic growth.
Conservatives, however, do not in their approach to the
Commonwealth, start with a clean plate. Their record is very much of
the species of the curate's egg. Some economic neglect, some
administrative tyranny has been shameful. But in other places, the
broad progress under a Conservative government has been startling, not
merely to indigenous Commonwealth peoples fed on the idea of Tory
bogeymen, but to Conservatives who found a good deal of practical
sense planted amongst those who have cooperated with them in Asia and
Africa. Conservatives today are cast in a liberalising mantle,
however much some of them may wish the garment to be thrown off.
In their approach to the Commonwealth, Conservatives bring three
political principles to bear. First they see the Commonwealth as a
whole. This needs a good deal of Tory self-reconciliation as the
reciprocity of material interests of Commonwealth countries declines.
Secondly, they accept that effective power which has passed cannot be
successfully recalled. This leads Tories sometimes to credit non-, or
not wholly, self-governing European communities with greater authority
than in fact such groups have. Thirdly, Conservatives accept the
value of an objective law free from administrative meddling- the rule
of Law. Now given these three working Conservative approaches a keen
supporter of the Government may well meet himself coming the other
way. He believes in the Statute of Westminster as a symbol of equal
power. But he also knows that racial discrimination will destroy the
unity of the Commonwealth. The translation of one nation abroad, as
has been spoken of by Mr Iain Macleod, is meaningless unless a stand
is made on racial discrimination (in whichever direction it operates).
The Conservative speaks up for impartial law but what of Hola?
And because he starts from this standpoint few speeches made in the
House of Commons during the previous Secretaryship of the Colonies
were in fact more effective than Mr Enoch Powell on Hola to an
unvigilant House of Commons at half past one in the morning. To stand
for the rule of law enables the colonial regime in its closing days to
help purge itself of its paternalist past. But when a newly
independent regime rejects the common law and substitutes rule by
executive, do some Conservatives wonder whether these political
principles are the playthings of academics rather than the medicine of
good government?
Conservatives in government are of course being carried forward
by the \6e?2lan of the nationalism of others and this overshadows
their concern for order which at best means a balanced advance,
putting emphasis on economic as well as political development. But to
define balance is to defy politics. Sometimes bread is more important
than votes, sometimes both are necessary. In some territories votes
can be given, but bread cannot be provided. The Conservative properly
brings an undogmatic approach to these problems. In being pragmatic
about his priorities he will rightly emphasise on the one hand, for
example, the political advance of Somalia, while arguing on the other
that a more complex set of constitutional checks and balances is
required in Northern Rhodesia. The jibe of Mr Mboya in attacking
the Lancaster House Conference that what Somalia required were
settlers was double-edged. Settlers might have retarded Somalia's
political progress, but they would have given it a much better
standard of living.
No Conservative in looking at the Commonwealth will underestimate
Britain's interests in preserving the Commonwealth as an institution.
To say this is not to suggest that Commonwealth relations are merely
an extension of foreign policy. Britain must analyse her interests
hard before she can determine in what way her contribution to the
Commonwealth may be effective and acceptable. The Commonwealth today
is largely a new institution. Sharpeville, the passing of
responsibility to the new coloured territories, the tremendous drive
to give economic aid to under-developed countries, the willingness of
Great Britain to prefer Commonwealth under-developed countries to
foreign under-developed countries as a priority for aid, and the need
of new Commonwealth countries for administrative and technical
assistance- all these have shifted the balance of subjects for
discussion amongst Commonwealth Prime Ministers from defence of the
free world and from inter-Commonwealth trade- as were the principal
subjects before the Second World War- to this new gamut of subjects
bound up as they are with a new psychological relationship between
Britain and the new members of the Commonwealth.
Now Britain's interests in the Commonwealth are four-fold.
First, in a world of large units, Britain is striving to maintain an
existing large institution, being enlarged as each year goes by,
without committing it strategically to Russia or America. Britain has
a double role to play in this respect. Some of the members of the
Commonwealth- Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand- are
bound up in defence pacts with the United States, which are devised as
a protection against the Sino-Soviet block. Britain nevertheless can
maintain, through the Commonwealth, peculiarly friendly relations with
countries that would not wish to be aligned in such a struggle.
Britain's second interest is to harness the power, both the political
power and the administrative skill, that lies in the Commonwealth to
the task of healing divisions in parts of the world- first, of
course, putting the house of the Commonwealth in order, and secondly
in assisting to maintain peace in countries adjacent to Commonwealth
countries. Thirdly, Britain's interest, although it may in truth be
said now to be a declining interest relative to Europe, is to expand
the trade of the sterling Commonwealth. It is a declining interest
because it must be recognised that the purchasing power of the
under-developed countries in the Commonwealth will rise slowly
compared with that of Europe. These areas, which are areas of primary
producing, will not show the most dramatic changes in consumption
during the next decade or so. For the dramatic expansion of its
trade, Britain will do better out of trade of manufactured made-up
goods with Europe and with some of the big countries of South East
Asia before it will see any great improvement in its trade with the
Commonwealth sterling area. But Britain's last interest is to assist
the countries of the Commonwealth to modernise rapidly by speeding
technical progress through an acceptable educational system.
These are not selfish aims, although they will rebound to the
benefit of the people of Britain in two ways. First, we shall have
friends in the world, at a time when negotiations of international
problems are resolved by larger and larger groups of nations. Friends
are necessary for the safe conduct of our affairs abroad. Secondly,
through the medium of the English language, through the influence of
our teachers and administrators, Britain's word can still be of value
in some parts of the world.
It would be arrogant to think only of Britain's role in the
Commonwealth. For some time the idea of the mother country has been
dwindling as the coloured races came to power in the new territories,
and the idea of London as being the centre of activities has shifted
from the American continent to Asia, and now, for the time being, to
Africa.
# 2001
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He has undoubtedly helped to fortify its already substantial
reputation for fairness and efficiency.
The position can, however, best be assessed by my readers for
themselves through my giving them some instances of the Danish
Ombudsman's activities in the sphere of his individual grievance work.
In its summer issue of 1959 the journal "Public Law" published
an article by Miss I. M. Pedersen, a Danish civil servant, in
which a detailed analysis of this aspect of the Ombudsman's work is
attempted. The picture which this article gives is so clear and
convincing that I am inserting it as an Appendix. I shall confine
myself here to describing one or two outstanding cases.
One of these was a complaint addressed to the Ombudsman by a
bookseller, who held that he had been penalized by publicity given by
the police to a charge brought against him for defrauding his
creditors. On investigation, it proved that his wife from whom he was
separated had been summoned to give evidence against him and that she
had been sent copies of the summons, which revealed the nature of the
alleged offence, to relations who thereupon stopped giving him
financial assistance. [SIC] The Ombudsman recommended that in
future summonses to witnesses should not show the nature of the
offence about to be tried and this recommendation has been embodied in
law. [SIC]
In the course of another inquiry the Ombudsman revealed that the
Danish Ministry of Agriculture had been acting 6ultra vires in
a certain matter for some twenty years. His activities have likewise
embraced such varying subjects as the right of certified mental
patients to have their consent asked before a leucotomy [SIC] is
performed on them and a complaint against the Copenhagen police for
alleged aggressive action over a car licensing offence. Equally,
various other matters, such as the calculation of damages in cases of
disablement, have been found to be beyond his practical competence.
There is no doubt that much of the success of the institution of
Ombudsman has derived from the skill and high reputation of Professor
Hurwitz, Denmark's first Ombudsman. In a country where academic
qualifications are highly valued, his distinction as a professor of
criminal science has stood him in good stead. In Britain, where high
academic appointments are not normally regarded as proof of
administrative or judicial wisdom, and where even the existence of
criminal science is a matter of dispute, Professor Hurwitz' success
might have been less outstanding. Here we should look to a judge or a
retired and senior Treasury official, or to Parliament, to provide
such services if they are required. What matters is that Denmark
appears to have found a way of satisfying what is 6prima facie
a legitimate public demand for protection against administrative
abuse without either paralysing administration or diminishing the
dignity and independence of the judicature. This, to say the least,
is a constitutional example worthy of scrutiny in the context of other
political and social circumstances which, however, include the
tendency towards ever-increasing administration noted by the advocates
of the Ombudsman in post-war Denmark.
Already, however, words have been used in this exposition which
demand much closer analysis. The respective spheres of justice and
administration, the precise difference between judicial and executive
acts, the relationship of the legislature to these other two branches
of government, and in particular the implications of the doctrine of
Parliamentary sovereignty cherished in Britain, are all matters which
must be examined more thoroughly before the relevance of the Danish
institution of the Ombudsman for this country's affairs can begin to
be judged.
IT IS OFTEN said that in England at the beginning of the
seventeenth century there were three competitors to sovereignty, King,
Parliament and the judges. After a while, the judges withdrew from
the contest and King and Parliament were left to fight it out between
themselves. The withdrawal of the judges was a crucial event, for it
imparted to the British system of government what has ever since
remained, at any rate in form, its dominant characteristic, the
institution of Parliamentary sovereignty. The doctrine that
Parliament is legally entitled to do whatever it chooses, that it is
the final authority before which all others must bow, now has general
acceptance here. It is not so elsewhere. Other countries, in
particular the United States of America, have sought to guarantee
liberty by laying down a fundamental law and entrusting its
guardianship to a Supreme Court. They have sought still further to
guarantee this system of law by a strict separation and balance of
powers between the executive and the legislature. In Britain, on the
other hand, it has been assumed that the welfare of society demands
the unquestioning and habitual acceptance of the supremacy of
Parliament, a Parliament which cannot limit its own competence and
cannot bind its successors.
No doubt it was in the seventeenth century that the decisive
steps in this direction were taken, but it would be a mistake to read
into the constitutional debates of those days the modern conception of
Parliamentary sovereignty which grew out of them. The truth is that
all three participants in the constitutional conflicts of Stuart times
in some degree accepted the notion of fundamental law and were largely
ignorant of the notion of sovereignty as it was later formulated.
King, judges and Parliament, in debating such matters as who had the
right to impose taxes, all appealed to an ill-defined system of
customs and principles which they assumed to constitute the immemorial
law of the land. The notion that Government existed to safeguard and
interpret this law was common to all of them.
There was indeed no clear distinction between legislation and
adjudication. Officially, Parliament, though it is normally regarded
as the legislator today, is still designated as a "High Court".
Its procedure still bears many of the marks of its origin as a place
where private grievances are aired and remedied. The very word
"enact" strictly means "interpret", and the notion of law making
as a creative process is something very novel indeed.
Down to the nineteenth century, the idea of the House of Commons
as an institution existing mainly for the defence and adjustment of
private rights was dominant. The great part of the business of the
eighteenth-century House of Commons concerned private and indeed
intimate affairs. If a man wanted to enclose a piece of common land
he could do so only by virtue of a private Act of Parliament; if a man
wanted a divorce he could get it only by means of such an Act.
The procedure for Private Bills still had an important place in
the business of Parliament down to the beginning of this century.
Much of what is now done by administrative act used to be
accomplished in this way. For instance, compulsory acquisition of
land for such purposes as the building of railways in the last century
was brought about by private Acts of Parliament. A Bill would be
prepared by a Member and, when it came up for Parliamentary
consideration, interested parties would send their lawyers to the Bar
of the House to plead their cause. No branch of the Bar was more
profitable or a quicker highroad to success until quite recent times
than this Parliamentary work. The most characteristic defence of the
complicated and irrational franchise on which the Commons was elected
before 1832 was that, for all its irregularities, it produced an
assembly well fitted to discharge the essential business of Parliament
as it was then conceived, the guaranteeing of private rights. It was
an assembly, the argument ran, where a man might plead his grievance
in the knowledge that it would be listened to by representatives of
every considerable interest in the land, and in the hope that the
conclusion which would emerge would represent something like the
national view of commonsense in the matter.
From 1832 onwards, however, this character has been radically
changed. The procedure for Private Bills is virtually extinct, though
there are some instances of its use, as in the recent case of the Esso
Petroleum Bill, when a private company sought powers of compulsory
purchase. It may now be safely said, with certain qualifications
regarding Question Time and Adjournment Debates, that the primary
business of the Commons has ceased to be the rectification of private
grievances and has become the enactment of public legislation. Large
and highly disciplined Parties emerged with organised followings in
the country, so that it is only on a minority of issues that the House
of Commons can formulate an independent view. Indeed, the best
contemporary exponents of the constitution, like Sir Ivor Jennings,
have no hesitation in holding that the real business of Parliament is
to sustain government in office. Public interest has largely shifted
away from Westminster to the Party conferences and the private
conclaves of Parliamentary Parties, each of which is supported by a
highly developed bureaucracy. It is at these places, after all, that
things really happen, that general plans of future legislation are
formulated, subsequently to be embodied in election programmes. A
victorious Party at an election tends to assume, often with little
justification, that it has been authorised to carry out in detail the
measures listed in its programme, measures conceived by Party
bureaucrats, born at Party conferences and designed less to reflect
the will of Members of Parliament or even that of the country at large
than to appease the Party zealots.
These changes in the functioning of Parliament have of course
been accompanied by similar changes in constitutional theory. The
constitution is no longer conceived as a system of private rights and
legislation is now regarded as a dynamic, not an interpretative,
process. The legislator's task is conceived as being that of
formulating general laws for the good of society rather than that of
adjusting private interests. Inevitably, of course, highly organised
interests within society have a great and, some would say, a growing
influence on law, but, even in the case of the trade unions with their
substantial representation in the Commons, it is an influence which is
commonly exercised outside Parliament. The delicate balances between
different religious denominations embodied in the Butler Education
Act, for instance, were the result of prolonged diplomacy exercised by
the Minister before the Bill was prepared. Almost all Acts of
Parliament today are preceded by negotiations of this kind, but the
theory of the legislative process takes no account of these pressures.
The doctrine is that a Parliament representing the general will
formulates general rules for society at large. The generality of the
rules is indeed inevitable as a result of the complexity of the
matters with which contemporary legislation deals and the numbers of
those affected by it, but it is also increasingly assumed to be a
necessary consequence of the rule of law. If the legislator addresses
himself with particularity to the interests of this or that man or
group his perception of the social good, it is believed, will perforce
be corrupted. Obviously, however, nothing could be further removed
from the tradition of Parliamentary government which had been handed
down to our early Victorian ancestors than the principle of the
necessary generality of the process of lawmaking.
Now, in whatever way government may be theoretically conceived,
it is in practice a matter of the adjustment of a multiplicity of
private interests. If the function of an Act of Parliament is to
establish general principles and rules, the details must be filled in
by someone, and it is to the civil service that the task of filling in
these gaps has fallen in modern times. Over the last half-century
Parliament has perforce delegated to Ministers and to subordinate
organs of the executive the task of devising the measures needed to
achieve the objects of its legislation, and the measures thus devised,
although they have lacked the direct consent of Parliament, have been
endowed with all the force of statutes. Some of these decrees have
themselves been very general in character, and the machinery for
reviewing them in Parliament has often been highly inadequate.
# 2020
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The market for this type of piece, bubbling with Mediterranean
6joie de vivre, and redolent of bougainvillaea and \6pizza,
remains pretty constant. In many countries, even the daily papers
devote columns to this kind of thing, and still come back for more.
The Germans in particular will take an indefinite wordage about the
land where the lemon blooms.
German correspondents can survey their public on St. Peter's
Square every Easter. They stand in pouring rain amid the puddles,
dressed in thin cambric blouses and astonishingly short shorts.
Between their chattering teeth they emit little cries of
\Wunderscho"n! and \Fantastisch! as they empty the water out
of their camera shutters.
The journalistic dog-days from May to September are a cruel
problem for the \professionisti, who are expected to offer their
employers something more substantial than the latest old-world customs
thought up by the Italian National Tourist Board. Not for them the
fragrant piece about wine running from fountains at some village
\festa.
But certain hardy perennials have been evolved to meet this
recurring crisis, though it is regarded as bad form to use most of
them before July. Safest, perhaps, is the one that comes in from Pisa
about 30th June each year: LEANING TOWER TOTTERING! JAPANESE EXPERT
INJECTS PLASTIC INTO FOUNDATIONS.
This story, in its numerous variants, is usually good for at
least ten lines on an inside page. It can be followed with another
ten lines the following day, about the \6de?2menti issued by the
Mayor of Pisa.
A little later, Venice comes in with a similarly useful item:
PALACES SINK INTO GRAND CANAL: BRIDGE OF SIGHS SUBSIDING. Even if
it should be decided to let this standby lie fallow for a season,
there is always a handy substitute about a strike of gondoliers. Bits
about gondoliers are always printed.
There has been some jealousy about these stories in recent years,
and Florence has retorted strongly with the White Ant Peril. This has
the advantage that it can be applied to almost any well-known
building: TERMITES UNDERMINE PITTI PALACE is perhaps the favourite
version.
Floods in the Po Valley and eruptions of Etna and Vesuvius are
usually well received, but snowfalls in the Alps are the safest
weather-stories any date after 15th May. They can be telephoned or
cabled with special confidence if they involve blocking of well-known
passes, particularly the St. Bernard. In the latter case, mention
should also be made of the Hospice and its dogs. It is customary to
state that all the latter are about to be destroyed, because (a) they
have gone raving mad and attacked travellers in distress, or (b) are
so enfeebled by inbreeding that they can hardly stand up.
Should snow occur anywhere within a hundred miles of Rome, it can
be reported that packs of famished wolves have been driven down from
the Abruzzi and have decimated flocks of sheep within sight of the
Colosseum. But this item is rarely printed much before Christmas.
However, an inspired variant of the Bitter Weather story recently
almost reached the heights of the Love-mad Major. It ran in several
papers simultaneously.
A postman named Giancarlo Peppino Dante Tagliabue had been
delivering letters for thirty years in a rural district near Aquila,
it seemed, and was proud of never having missed a day. Heavy
snowfalls had covered the rugged district with a deep, thick mantle,
interspersed with occasional drifts. Giancarlo strapped on his skis
nevertheless, and set off on his round.
At seven-thirty in the morning he was seen by a shepherd, gamely
negotiating a particularly tricky section of the mountain road to San
Doloroso. At about ten o'clock, linesmen working on a power cable
four kilometres from Monte Callifugo thought they heard howls and a
deep-throated baying. At four, when it was already growing dark, a
patrol of \carabinieri found Tagliabue's official cap halfway down
a snow-covered hillside. On the road above, half-buried in drifts,
were scattered twenty or thirty letters, five copies of the
Corriere dell' Aquila and an official receipt-book for
registered mail. Of Giancarlo nothing was left....
Several papers ran banner headlines: DEVOTED POSTMAN EATEN BY
WOLVES. A left-wing organ recalled that only the previous year
Tagliabue had received a scroll from the Postal Workers' Union. Two
agencies circulated smudgy photographs of his unattractive wife and
seven children. The Voce di Trastevere opened a nation-wide
subscription fund. It was not until several weeks later that
Tagliabue was detained by the Foggia police for simulating an offence.
He had been sweating up that snow-covered hillside, he explained,
reflecting that he would not be pensioned for another fifteen years.
He thought of his nagging wife and appalling brats, and it was just
too much for him. He threw down his letters and his hat into the snow
and took the first train to Foggia. He had been living there ever
since with a waitress from a local \trattoria. The only wolf he
had ever seen, he said, was in a travelling zoo.
However, I should not like to convey the impression that no
authentic news is transmitted from Italy. Many Rome reports are based
on the most solid facts- as witness the affair of the twenty-six
Yemeni concubines.
The Alban Hills south-east of Rome have been celebrated since
pre-classical days for the beauty of their countryside, and the
picturesque town of Frascati has been successively the headquarters of
Etruscan kings, Saracen pirates, Renaissance princes and German
field-marshals. But it is rare for buildings there to fly large red
flags emblazoned with scimitars and five-pointed stars.
When a rash of these exotic banners broke out in Frascati one
recent June, residents at first suspected another foreign occupation.
They were quickly reassured; the flags were in honour of sixty-five
year-old Imam Ahmed, King of the Yemen and self-proclaimed Suzerain of
Aden, who had arrived to undergo treatment at a local clinic.
The Royal Yemeni Embassy had originally rented merely an entire
hotel for the monarch and his suite, but at the last moment it was
learnt that the Imam himself would have to remain in the clinic for
medical attention. The second floor of the hospital was therefore
cleared of other patients, and additional flags were hung from the
windows. The arrival of the royal caravan from Ciampino Airport
created a certain stir. Some twenty Cadillacs disgorging nearly a
hundred persons gave the impression that a successful fancy-dress
party must be in progress.
After the Imam himself had been helped to his apartments, a
succession of wizened brown tribesmen, about five feet tall and clad
in bizarre mauve and orange suitings, emerged from the vehicles.
Lastly thirty-seven muffled figures, swathed in veils and wrappings
and attended by men with scimitars and muskets, scuttled from the
hindmost cars and vanished into the hotel. The two principal members
of the suite were brothers of the Imam. Two young sons of the Ruler
and numerous nephews made up the male section of the family party.
The female side was more extensive. It was headed by three of
the Imam's wives, twenty-six representative concubines, and eight
women slaves. In addition, there were the Imam's aides-de-camp,
senior officers of his personal escort, an adequate bodyguard armed
with scimitars, daggers and an assortment of firearms, a number of
eunuchs and male slaves, and four European doctors who practised at
the Yemeni court. Three of these were described as Italians, and the
fourth as Franco-Rumanian.
There was marked reluctance on the part of the ruler's attendants
to establish contact with the outside world, possibly because they
were anxious to retain the use of their extremities. Apart from
syphilis, the most noteworthy form of indisposition in the Yemen is
lack of hands or feet, of which it is customary to deprive those who
fall under official displeasure.
The complaints from which the Imam himself was suffering were
difficult to establish, despite a guarded statement that he was a
martyr to arthritis. Apart from his own physicians and the staff of
the clinic, the Ruler was visited by a continual stream of eminent
Rome specialists, including Professor Gozzano, Dean of the Faculty of
Neurology and Psychiatry, and Professor Bietti, a distinguished eye
consultant.
The Imam's section of the clinic was heavily curtained, and those
who caught a glimpse of the corridor beyond could report only the
presence of two sentries armed to the teeth and carrying drawn swords,
a number of parcels wrapped in newspaper, and a heavy odour of mutton
fat.
On the night of his arrival, the Imam had slept on the floor of
his room on a pile of fifty pillows. At the clinic, a procession of
porters removed all beds from the royal apartments, and mattresses
were distributed on the floors.
The wives, concubines and slaves quickly introduced a shift
system to enable them to satisfy the Imam's every want. Some of them,
possibly the ruler's favourites, seemed to put in a good deal of
overtime.
At the hotel, the management was wringing its hands; its catering
system had been gravely disorganized, and the rows of white-jacketed
waiters were forbidden to approach either the harem ladies or the
eight female slaves. The three wives and five senior concubines took
their meals in their rooms, but the other twenty-one, heavily
disguised with hoods and yashmaks, ate in a corner of the restaurant,
which had also been hung with curtains for the purpose. The barefoot
slave-girls shuffled back and forth with the dishes.
By this time, the Italian Press was sitting up and taking notice.
Relatively little interest attached to the health of the Imam, but
photographers from the illustrated weeklies were wild about the
concubines. Every tree in Frascati seemed to contain an active little
man from Catania or Palermo, armed with an eighteen-inch telescopic
lens.
Meanwhile, there was near-mutiny in the respective kitchens of
the hotel and the clinic, where local experts had been hovering
lovingly over Fettucine Tuscolo, Saltimbocca alla Romana, and
Cassata alla Siciliana. True, these delicacies were duly
consumed by the distinguished guests, or at any rate they were not
returned to the kitchens. But there was a distinct suggestion that
the ruler's court was being underfed.
The little men in mauve and orange suits, tailored no doubt in
the emporia of Steamer Point, flitted in and out with
newspaper-packets of strange vegetables, larger parcels stained with
blood and apparently containing lumps of goat, and earthenware
cooking-pots. Other ingredients were carried through the austere hall
of the clinic in large baskets, and at the end of a corridor two Negro
slaves were found constructing a spit over a bonfire of dry twigs.
It was, I believe, at about this stage that some of the
photographers fell foul of the bodyguard, while insinuating themselves
into favourable positions for a series of exclusive shots of harem
life. The photographers apparently came off worst in the encounters,
and retired complaining of blows with the flats of swords and damage
to their cameras. They left at once for police headquarters, to bring
charges of assault.
Meanwhile, odd rumours were coming in from the Imam's capital at
Taiz. No sooner had the ailing monarch departed for Italy, it was
learnt, than would-be modernizers had begun to loosen the bonds of
theocratic absolutism. The name of Crown Prince Mohammed \al-Badr was
bandied about, though it was far from clear whether he was an active
modernizer or not.
The word 'reform' in the Yemen is more or less equated with
'revolution'. Messengers were moving unobtrusively over the
jet-black mountain ranges, bearing confidential tidings from sheikhdom
to sheikhdom. According to exultant enemies of the ruler, he was
unlikely ever to set foot in his kingdom again.
They had, however, reckoned insufficiently with the therapeutic
qualities of a stay in Frascati. One day, after a short but bracing
trip to the seaside west of Rome, the ruler pronounced himself
fighting fit.
Leaving behind trusted agents to contest the naturally
considerable bills and fight any possible lawsuits, the Imam drove to
Rome airport. Embarking his wives, slaves, viziers, eunuchs,
aides-de-camp and concubines in a couple of airliners, he descended
like a thunderbolt on Arabia Felix.
# 2020
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He might receive another lecture at midnight, a third one at 2
a.m. and even a fourth later. If, in class, a man objected to
some statement he considered serious enough to justify this action,
the entire class was made to stand until he abandoned his objection.
Next day he had to apologize both to the class and to the instructor,
and for four or five days afterwards to repeat his self-criticism.
The class, ordered to criticize him, obeyed: then he had to criticize
his classmates. This was one of the principal methods of deliberately
causing chaos in a group's relations.
Dr Edgar H. Schein's article 'The Chinese Indoctrination
Process for Prisoners of War' gives a generalized picture of what
happened to the average soldier from capture to repatriation. Cruelty
deliberately imposed on civilians was on the whole far less severe in
the case of soldiers. In camp, prisoners were segregated by race,
nationality and rank. No formal organization was permitted: some
squad-leaders were appointed without consideration of rank, a method
of 'getting at' the individual. Young or inept prisoners were put
in charge of the squads, to remind everyone that former bases of
organization had been destroyed. All friendships, emotional bonds and
group activities were persistently undermined: all forms of religious
expression prohibited. Chaplains or others who tried to organize or
conduct religious services were ruthlessly persecuted. There is no
evidence that the Chinese used drugs or hypnotic methods, or offered
sexual objects to elicit information, confessions or collaboration.
Some cases of severe physical torture were reported, but their
incidence is difficult to estimate. Schein's conclusion is judicious:
'those who are attempting to understand "brainwashing" must
look at the facts objectively, and not be carried away by hysteria
when another country with a different ideology and with different
ultimate ends succeeds in eliciting from a small group of Americans
behaviour that is not consonant with the democratic ideology.'
In November 1956, the American Group for the Advancement of
Psychiatry met 'to clarify the differences between Orwell's fantastic
account and the real processes actually used in authentic cases'.
Dr Lifton said: 'Brain-washing for our purpose no longer means
anything specific, particularly in view of the manner in which it has
been used in this country.' Among all the people he interviewed in
Korea and Hong Kong no one who had been through the experience ever
used the term, unless he had first heard it from a Western source.
But the process of \szuhsiang-kai-tsao, translated as
'ideological remoulding', 'ideological reform' or 'thought
reform', is very much a reality.
There were three stages of 'thought reform':
(1) The 'Great Togetherness'. The individual soldier was
helped to identify himself with a group. To his astonishment the
newcomer was often welcomed warmly, with proffered handshakes and
cigarettes. The aim was to give the impression of a climate of
6esprit de corps and optimism. To 'mobilize' his thought,
lectures, followed by discussions, were given.
(Since the lectures lasted from two to six hours, a non-Chinese
university teacher, accustomed to a fifty minutes' limit, may wonder
how much the average listener absorbed. Sheer fatigue might increase
suggestibility.) There was, in the Chinese manner, much repetition.
Only about 5 per cent of the American army captives had received any
college education, one aim of which is the formation and examination
of concepts. At this stage, the prisoner was led to suppose that
coercive manipulations of his thinking were morally uplifting and
mentally harmonizing experiences.
(2) The Closing-in of the Milieu (particularly the mental
milieu). In (1) the prisoner's intellectual processes have been
worked upon; now comes the turn of the emotions. The object of study
is now the learner, not the Communist doctrine. He is made
increasingly aware that his chief activities must be criticism- of
others and of himself- and 'confessions':
'Not only his ideas, but his underlying motivations, are
carefully scrutinized. Failure to achieve the "correct"
"materialistic" viewpoint, "proletarian standpoint" and
"dialectical methodology" is pointed out, and the causes for this
deficiency carefully analysed.'
In time, students are infected by the compulsion to confess,
'vie to outdo each other in the frankness, completeness and luridness
of their individual confessions'.
An advisory \6cadre helps the emotionally-disturbed student,
by talking over his 'thought problems'. The diagnosis of bodily
troubles is apt to be 'reform-oriented' and 'psychosomatically
sophisticated'; 'You will feel better when you have solved your
problems and completed your reform.' And most students would need
relief from inner tension and conflict.
(3) 'Submission and Rebirth'. Group discussion produces a
thought-summary or final confession. It is to be a life-history,
including a detailed analysis of the personal effects of thought
reform, and of the confessor's class origin. Nearly always the father
is denounced, both as a symbol of the exploiting classes and as an
individual.
With the fair-mindedness of a good psychiatrist, Lifton comments
that in our own milieu-manipulations we should do well to retain a
certain degree of humility and to keep in mind the dangers of imposing
our own values and prejudices too forcibly.
In Britain and America, assertions are still made that the
psychiatrist's aim is the patient's social adjustment; even sometimes
that non-adjusters can be shown up, by tests, to be neurotic, or
worse. A report by the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund (News Chronicle,
June 25, 1958) arraigns 'the public lassitude that has accepted
without question an educational system dedicated mainly to turning out
good little conformist Americans who, as Stringfellow Barr puts it,
even when they have graduated from college (famous institutions) are
unfamiliar with the ideas that are the stock-in-trade of Western
culture'. The report warns of 'the dangers of an age of
conformity' and calls for the development of more creative
individuals.
We have seen that an important aim of working on the prisoner's
mind is to stir up guilt and shame, which help him to prepare a formal
confession. Guilt-anxiety, says Lifton, consists of feelings of evil
and sinfulness with expectation of punishment: of shame-anxiety,
feelings of humiliation and failure to live up to the standards of
one's peers or of one's internalized ego-ideal, with the expectation
of abandonment.
He suggests that we too might profitably examine some of our own
concepts of guilt and shame. Examples come readily to mind.
Diminution in the extent of clothing worn by both sexes in sports
reduces the shame which fifty years ago would have been 'normal'.
Since Hiroshima and the Nuremberg trials, 'war-guilt', which about
1922 weighed down many Germans too young to have fought in World War
=1, has now become the subject of cynical jokes.
In this connection Lifton discusses the relation between language
theory and behaviour. Terms used in 'thought reform' are morally
charged- either very good or very bad- and take on a mystic quality.
To psychologists attracted by the concept of 'patterns of
culture' the above account of thought reform is impressive because
it shows that in all social orders its elements are present in varying
degrees.
At the conference, Professor Edgar H. Schein spoke on
'Patterns of Reactions to Severe Chronic Stress in American Army
Prisoners of War of the Chinese'. He selected observations throwing
light on collaboration with the enemy. Typical experiences of an
American army prisoner of war were:
'The first phase, lasting one to six months, was capture, an
exhausting march to North Korea, and severe privation in inadequately
equipped temporary camps. The second was imprisonment for two or more
years in a permanent camp. Here, instead of the physical pressures in
the first phase, chronic "persuasion" was applied to make the
soldiers collaborate and to exchange existing group loyalties for new
ones.
'The men reacted with the feeling that for these experiences of
capture they had been inadequately prepared, both physically and
mentally. They were not clearly aware of the kind of enemy up against
them or, indeed, what they were fighting for. Expecting death,
torture or non-patriation, they were taken completely by surprise and
felt that inadequate leadership of the UN command was to blame.
Understandably, therefore, a prisoner was inclined to listen without
much scepticism to the Communist "explanation" that, since the
UN was an aggressor, having entered the war illegally, all
UN military personnel were in fact criminals and could be
summarily shot. The Chinese, however, considered the prisoner to be a
student, capable of learning the "truth". Yet if he did not
co-operate he could just be reverted to war-criminal status and shot.
So a chronic cycle of fear-relief-new-fear was set in motion.
'The one-two week marches caused increasing apathy, facilitating
systematical destruction of the prisoner's formal and informal
group-structure. Knowing that his own ranks contained spies and
actual or potential informers, a man might eventually feel that he
could trust nobody.'
Dr Schein considers that very few actual conversions to
Communism occurred, but that success in producing collaboration was
greater. Some collaborators perhaps believed- subsequent affirmation
of this belief may have been rationalization- that they were
infiltrating the Chinese ranks and obtaining information which, if
they were released, would be useful to the US Army.
It is interesting and valuable to compare with the above accounts
of army prisoners-of-war, a report by Professor Louis West on
prisoners from the US Air Force. These were even less prepared
for captivity, and their literal descent from the heavens into enemy
hands must have given unusual possibilities of shock and astonishment.
Often they were injured before capture. The Chinese considered these
as a distinct group, to be handled in ways differing from those
regarded as suitable for soldiers; e.g. after February 21, 1952,
responsibility for germ warfare was placed on airmen.
It is important to note that of the Air Force 'returnees', 53
per cent had received some college education, compared with 5 per cent
of army captives. As with the latter, the techniques employed
produced 'debility, despondency and dread'. But many airmen tried
to incorporate in their 'confessions' implausible material: details
of weapons, speeds, altitudes, etc, which the interrogator, whose
ignorance of technicalities they had estimated, would not detect but
which, to any informed person, would appear palpably false.
Many people are inclined to speak of all 'public relations' as
ballyhoo or propaganda, perhaps overlooking the early meaning of the
latter word; even the significance, in England, of the second initial
in 'S.P.G.'. They are invited to consider the facts that when
a prisoner's 'confession', or even his letter home, contained
'Commies', it was 'suggested' that 'Chinese People's
Volunteers' should be substituted, and the only address to which any
prisoner's relatives could send letters was 'c/o the Chinese
People's Committee for World Peace'.
Dr Lawrence E. Hinkle, in this symposium, suggests on the
basis of extensive study that these conclusions can be accepted:
'The methods of the Russian and satellite State-Police are derived
from age-old police methods, many of which were known to the Czarist
Okhrana, and to its sister organizations in other countries.
Communist techniques, when their background is studied, remain police
methods. They are not dependent on drugs, hypnotism, or any other
special procedure designed by scientists. No scientist took part in
their design, nor do scientists participate in their operation. The
goal of the KGB- the present designation for the Russian State
police- is a satisfactory protocol on which a so-called "trial"
may be based. The Chinese have an additional goal; the production of
long-lasting changes in the prisoner's basic attitudes and
behaviour.'
How could a prisoner-of-war resist such pressures? Hinkle offers
the following hints. Since an important factor of indoctrination is
the pupil's belief that his captor's control is omnipotent, he should
try to maintain a secret private sense of psychological superiority.
Inside his group, he should develop communication methods excluding
the captors and demonstrating their fallibility, e.g. by using
code words which appear complimentary- only to the guards; by
teaching them Western games- with absurd twists of the rules and
methods of play, and by inventing petty annoyances to guards forbidden
to inflict physical punishment. (It seems fair comment that for
complete success this assumes high intelligence in the prisoner and
obliging dimness in the guard.)
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While he was expounding on this subject he explains how the
first idea of the Celestial Bed came into his mind. When he was in
Philadelphia he 'speedily insulated a common bedstead and filled it
with copious streams of electrical fire conveyed by metal rods
enclosed in glass tubes through the partition, from the adjacent room
where the great globes were wrought... I recommended the trial of
this, then whimsical bed, to several of my medical, philosophical and
gay friends...' Later he states that after he had put them at ease
by means of a few drinks he went so far as to ask them for their
opinion of the bed. Delightedly he states that 'they talked not as
other men might have done of the critical moment- no, they talked
comparatively of the critical hour.'
Graham's audience obviously wanted information on aphrodisiacs.
He was dead against the popular Spanish Fly preparations.
Cantharides poisoning obviously occurred in the 18th as well as in
the 20th century. Graham's advice on the subject was to the point if
rather crude. Modern psychiatrists, including Dr Kinsey, talk of
voyeurism. This term merely means that sexual stimulation can occur
quite frequently as a result of visual stimulation. Graham recounts
the tale of how a hairdresser, who found himself impotent was suddenly
filled with sexual desire while he was dressing a particularly lovely
woman's hair. Imprudently, he downed tools and ran home to make his
wife happy. Such was the power of voyeurism in this case. Another
Graham anecdote on this subject is about an old debauched woman who
still desired masculine attention but who could not arouse a lover's
interest. Her cure, he says, was to take a lovely young woman to bed
with her. If her lover's ardour flagged the presence of his
mistress's companion was sufficient to restore the 6status quo.
This is about as far as Graham goes with regard to obscenity. A
great many of his contemporaries would have left him standing.
For the most part the lectures were good sound stuff. For
instance, he was keen on washing the body frequently. This was not a
particularly popular habit in the 18th century. Graham states, rather
poetically, that it is necessary to 'tune body and mind for the most
cordial and perfect enjoyment of prolific love.' To do this he said
it was necessary that the lovers should possess 'the sweetest,
freshest, and most personal cleanliness from the top of the head, to
the end of the most distant toe- at all times and under every
circumstance.' Graham was also very much against double beds. He
stated that there was 'nothing more unnatural, nothing more indecent,
than man and wife continually pigging together in one and the same
bed... and to sleep and snore and steam and do everything else
indelicate together 365 times every year!' Sleeping in double beds
was, according to Graham, a state of 'matrimonial whoredom.'
He was also a great advocate of fresh air, which must have been
pretty startling at the time. Sea voyages, an active and useful life,
taking exercise daily in free open air, were all recommended as
adjuncts to good health. His attitude towards alcohol was dogmatic.
Particularly he refers to 'that poisonous composition of sloes,
tartar, logwood, watery cider and brandy which is called port wine.'
Graham realised, nearly two hundred years ago, that alcohol
diminished physical, and more important to his audience, perhaps,
sexual performance.
Some of Graham's ideas seemed to sow the seeds of Victorianism as
far as sex was concerned. Masturbation and fornication he abhorred.
'I must speak plainly, gentlemen, every act of self-pollution, every
repetition of natural venery, with even the loveliest of the sex, to
which appalled and exhausted nature is whipped and spurred by lust...
is an earthquake, a blast, a deadly paralytic stroke to all the
faculties of both soul and body. Blasting beauty, chilling,
contracting and enfeebling the body, mind and the memory!' And yet
in other ways he was right up-to-date. Writing on the encouragement
of matrimony he advocated that the first step would be to 'suppress
all public prostitution,' as it 'destroys the vigour of the genital
parts, necessity tempting them to too frequent acts of venery.'
Some 180 years later, an Act of Parliament finally drove the majority
of prostitutes off the streets of Britain.
Another of Graham's ideas for encouraging matrimony was to 'give
certain rewards to the lower and middling class of people, and tax
those proportionate to their circumstances who did not marry.' He
also advised that parents should 'receive a small premium on the
birth of every child.' He thus foresaw modern income tax laws and
the National Insurance and the Social Security system operating in
this country. He advocated the control of certain hereditary diseases
by practical eugenics. 'Persons of certain descriptions, whose
constitutions are infected with inherent diseases, ought not to
marry... they ought to be tied back to old women... that are past
child-bearing.' Public opinion in this country has never really
supported ideas along these lines, but 28 States in America have laws
that permit or direct sterilisation for various causes. Since these
laws have been enforced, over 27,000 people have been sterilised in
the United States.
The year 1783 was the turning point in Graham's career. Until
that time everything he touched had gone right. But now it was
obvious that the Pall Mall establishment was losing money. Graham
attempted to increase his profits by lowering prices, always a
dangerous practice, especially for a Quack. Eventually creditors
pressed and the Temple was closed, its treasures, electrical machines
and even the Celestial Bed being sold up to pay bad debts. Graham
returned to his native land and was soon in trouble with the
magistrates of Edinburgh for giving a lecture 'deemed improper for
public discussions.' Apparently Scottish public opinion was not as
broadminded as its English counterpart for Graham repeatedly fell foul
of the law and was even imprisoned in the Tollbooth for 'his late
injurious publications in this City.'
During the years 1784 and 1785, Graham may have had some ideas of
becoming a regular physician for he attended lectures in Chemistry,
Anatomy, the practice and theory of Medicine and Materia Medica at
Edinburgh University. He never qualified, however. A little later he
showed signs that his former eccentricities were leading him along a
path that was to end in insanity. In 1788 he was sent off from
Whitehaven to Edinburgh, 'in the custody of two constables as this
unfortunate man had, for some days past, discovered such marks of
insanity as made it advisable to remove him.'
Graham had for some years been devoting more of his time to an
obsessional type of religious activity. His pamphlets and tracts at
this time demonstrate characteristics suggestive of schizophrenia, and
it has been put forward that Graham became a drug addict. In view of
the strong ideas that he held with reference to drugs, and there is
good evidence in his writing that he practised what he preached to his
dying day, this would seem to be unlikely. Whatever the precise
diagnosis, it is evident that Graham suffered from some form of mental
derangement which steadily and progressively dominated him. And yet
he had relatively lucid intervals.
During his more sensible periods James was up to all his old
tricks again. Before he had left London, after the Temple of Health
closed, he introduced a new craze in an exhibition in Panton Street,
Haymarket. Henry Angelo's description of this is worth while quoting
in full. 'I was present at one of his evening lectures on the
benefits arising from earth-bathing (as Graham called it), and in
addition to a crowded audience of men, many ladies were there to
listen to his delicate lectures. In the centre of the room was a pile
of earth in the middle of which was a pit where a stool was placed: we
waited for some time when much impatience was manifested, and after
repeated calls of ~"Doctor, Doctor!" he actually made his
appearance "en chemise." After making his bow he seated
himself on the stool. Then two men with shovels began to place the
mould in the cavity: as it approached to the pit of his stomach he
kept lifting up his shirt and at last took it entirely off, the earth
being up to his chin and the doctor being left in puris
naturalibus. He then began his lecture, expatiating on the
excellent qualities of the earth bath, how invigorating it was, etc.
Quite enough to call up the chaste blushes of the modest ladies.
Whether it was the men felt for the chastity of the female audience,
or that they had had quite enough of this imposing information, which
lasted above an hour, either the hearers got tired or some wished to
make themselves merry at the Doctor's expense and there was a cry of
~"Doctor, a song!" The Doctor nodded assent and after a few
preparatory Hems, he sang or rather repeated,
The fair married dames who so often deplore,
That a lover once lost is a lover no more.'
He gave various similar exhibitions about the country until 1790.
During the last few years of his life there is ample evidence that
Graham's mind was obsessed with religious mania and that he was
becoming, eventually, a victim of his own tomfoolery. In his last
pamphlet he signed an affidavit dated 3rd April, 1793, 'that from the
last day of December, 1792 to the 15th day of January, 1793 he neither
ate, drank, nor took anything but cold water, sustaining life by
wearing cut up turves against his naked body, and rubbing his limbs
with his own nervous ethereal balsam.' The latter was one of his
famous quack medicines originally dispensed at the Temple of Health.
This was a feeble attempt to get back into the public eye. His
health failed rapidly and he died at his house opposite the Archer's
Hall in Edinburgh on 26th June, 1794 from a sudden haemorrhage.
Getting such a flamboyant character as Graham into perspective is
not easy. That he was an out and out Quack is of course fairly
established. But he had qualities that distinguished him from the
majority of his brethren.
First of all he had great personal courage. There is the
evidence that he went as far afield as America to make his fortune in
times when travel was a hazardous adventure. He also had the courage
to gamble everything he had on what must have been a hunch when he
established his Temples of Health. Graham also had a first-class
brain. He could judge people and handle them adroitly. In London
anyway his judgement seldom failed him. Scottish public opinion,
incredibly enough he misjudged badly. Probably he had become too
anglicised by 1783 to be sound in his assessment of the minds of his
countrymen. Originality and foresight were well developed in Graham's
personality and his ideas and teaching on hygienic and social problems
were years ahead of his Age.
The opinion of orthodox medical practitioners on Quacks is always
interesting. Apparently Graham, although dubbed a charlatan by most
of the doctors, was much sought after for cures by members of the
profession itself. One example is the case of Dr Glen. This
Edinburgh character was a man not noted for his generosity. One of
his few actions of public spirit was to present a bell for the local
orphanage. (His fame was said thus to be sounded throughout the
City.) Dr Glen was rather at a loss to know what to give Dr
Graham in the way of a professional fee after he had cured him of an
eye complaint. Some members of the Edinburgh Faculty suggested asking
the 'good doctor' to dine at a fashionable tavern and presenting
him with a purse containing 30 guineas. Dr Glen was privately
assured that Graham would decline the gift. To his chagrin Graham at
once accepted it 'with a very low bow and graciously thanked him
kindly.'
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WHEN THE WOLFENDEN (Homosexual Offences and Prostitution)
Report appeared in 1957, interest was focussed mainly upon its
proposals for revision of the law, and especially that relating to
certain forms of criminal homosexualism.