In My Good Books Page 9

  A Victorian Misalliance

  The epic of the free speech and little things—so that heroic critic, the late G. K. Chesterton, described Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Here was a giant whom the great rescuer of giants in distress found irresistible. Twice as long as the Æneid, twice as long as Paradise Lost, twice as long as the Odyssey and one-third as long as the Iliad, Browning’s poem is obviously a great something, if only a great miscarriage. As epic, I think, despite Chesterton’s brilliant special pleading, it is not, and precisely for the reasons which he gives for the view. Epics deal with great things, not little things; they describe not humanity free but humanity bound by the primitive chains of Fate, ruled by some absolute tribunal of value or dogma. No such fixed or majestic background stands behind the Renaissance police-court story on which Browning based The Ring and the Book; on the contrary, the very nature of the search for Truth, which is Browning’s substitute, is that it is fluid, restless, uncertain, evolutionary. The stepping-stones by which we rise from our dead selves to higher things ascend into a mist and disappear from sight.

  What Browning did produce was a great Victorian novel or, more accurately, the child of a misalliance between poetry and the novel. The Franceschini murder was essentially a novelist’s subject; it was as much concerned with intrigues of property as it was with the aspirations and corruption of the soul. One’s mind wanders to another nineteenth-century writer who had also found his subject in the faits divers. Just as Flaubert patiently wrote out the dossier of a similar scandal from Rouen and added to it the alloy of his own love-affair with Louise Colet and made Madame Bovary, so Browning put something of Elizabeth Barrett into his seventeenth-century Pompilia, and from the memory of his unforgettable crisis of conscience at the time of the elopement—an adventure in which, he felt, he had been on the brink of murder—narrated that flight with Caponsacchi, the priest, which was to lead to Pompilia’s death. Poetry abstracts drama from the dossier; Browning reverses the process. Finding the drama concise and abstract in the famous yellow book picked up on the second-hand bookstall in Rome, he multiplied and analysed it into the point of view of every possible spectator of the case. Not only were the leading characters given their say, but he collected the common gossip of the streets and even parodied his own subject in the two books which describe the esoteric high jinks of the lawyers. The poem is clamorous with rival voices of people; real people with characters, coats, hats, trades, names and addresses. This impression was not lost on Henry James. The great rival collector of Italian curiosities saw that The Ring and the Book was a Henry James novel gone wrong—not long enough among other things!

  It is curious to note how these two Victorian connoisseurs moved instinctively towards a tale of scandal and spiritual corruption. The period’s growing interest in crime, its love of melodrama and its feeling for corruption have considerable social interest. The preoccupation grows stronger as the great bourgeois period becomes self-confident. Flaubert spent his life collecting objects of disgust; Henry James had the shocked expression of a bishop discovering something unspeakable in a museum; Browning, the casuist, becomes in Chesterton’s excellent words “a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves’ kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue.” (If one resents Browning’s optimism today it is because of this ingenious complacency; surely one should accuse thieves of being thieves.) To be more particular, the thieves’ kitchens were a traditional interest of the Browning family. They had delicate consciences which were awkwardly allied to exuberant natures. Suburban Camberwell had been unable to contain the imaginations of the Bank of England clerk or of his precocious son. Sunday strollers, as they passed the Browning villa, could not have suspected that, inside, a child and his father were re-enacting the siege of Troy with chairs and tables, spouting epics and medieval romances to each other, re-arguing the battles of forgotten pedants, revelling in the dubious intrigue, the passion and the poisons of the Continent, and all the time keeping up to the minute on the crime story of the week. A man of the eighteenth century and a clerk, Browning’s father easily kept this learned escapism cool. The heroic couplet, as practised by Pope, did a good deal to soothe his savage breast. But it was otherwise in the nineteenth-century son. Liberty was in the air, shape lost its symmetry, energy blew itself out into the sublime or the grotesque.

  The Ring and the Book is one of those detective stories in which we are given the crime and the murderer at the beginning. We are given an event as we ourselves might read of it in the newspaper and the object is to discover what is true and what is false in everyone’s story and in the crowd’s conjecture. Browning’s method complicates and recomplicates the suspense, shifts us from one foot to the other in growing agitation and excitement before the mystery.

  Do we feel for Pompilia, still not dead, with twenty-five dagger-wounds in her? Very little. One is, of course, more moved than one is by the conventional corpse of a detective story; but not vastly more. The true incentive is to the brain, in watching this pile of evidence mount up and the next “point of view” undermine it. Now we are thrown into the common gossip of Rome and no one excels Browning in the rendering of rumour, scandal and the tunnellings of common insinuation:

  At last the husband lifted an eyebrow—bent

  On day-book and the study how to wring

  Half the due vintage from the worn-out vines

  At the villa, tease a quarter the old rent

  From the farmstead, tenants swore would tumble soon—

  Picked up his ear a-singing day and night

  With “ruin, ruin”—and so surprised at last—

  Why, what else but a titter? Up he jumps

  Back to mind come those scratchings at the grange,

  Prints of the paw about the outhouse; rife

  In his head at once again are word and wink,

  Mum here and budget there, the smell o’ the fox,

  The musk of the gallant. “Friends, there’s

  falseness here!”

  The case for Pompilia and her priests never quite recovers from the effectiveness of Franceschini’s defence. His story is a false one. He is as villainous as lago; all the better he draws his own character: the down-at-heel noble, rich in tradition, empty in purse—“a brainful of belief, the noble’s lot”—cynical no doubt, but look how he has been treated; can he be blamed for bitterly resenting the trick played on him by Pompilia’s ignoble parents?

  With the cunning of an excellent story-teller Browning gradually demolishes our credulity about Franceschini. We hear Caponsacchi, the priest. Can we believe that this handsome, cultivated, worldly young man, known for the slackness of his vows, came to desire the salvation and not the seduction of Pompilia? But we know our Browning by now, the “cosmic detective” nosing out virtue in our unlikeliest moments; and though Pompilia’s lawyer appears to be much fonder of his diction than careful of the interest of his client, we know that the unravelling of motive and evidence will eventually lead to her innocence. Her simple story comes from her own lips, artless and pathetic, as she dies. One more of those Victorian innocents, fragile, wraith-like, childish, affecting at their best, sickly at their worst, breathes her last in the Victorian phantasmagoria where ogre-like villains and corrupted worldings nudge and snarl together in the smoke. How they liked suffering in women.

  The realism, Browning’s eye for the physical, conveys an extraordinary excitement. He cannot describe an emotion or sensation without putting a hat and coat on it:

  Till sudden at the door a tap discreet

  A visitor’s premonitory cough,

  And poverty has reached him on her rounds.

  Or

  … Guido woke

  After the cuckoo, so late, near noon day

  With an inordinate yawning of the jaws,

  Ears plugged, eyes gummed together, palate, tongue

  And teeth one mud-paste made of poppy milk.

  Or

  The brother walking
misery away

  O’ the mountain side with dog and gun belike.

  His people live, their thoughts live physically; indeed they live so physically that in the metaphors they breed a crowd of other things and other people, cramming the narrative until the main theme is blocked and obscured. A stuttering demagogue, said Chesterton. A crowd of thoughts, arguments, theories, casuistries, images, doubts and aspirations, in physical shape, are trying to get to the point of Browning’s pen all at once and they reduce him to illegibility.

  The Ring and the Book of the seventies has become The Waste Land of to-day. The Browning bric-à-brac, the Browning personalities, the “points of view”, the arguments, have degenerated into a threadbare remnant:

  “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

  Shantih, shantih, the end of individualism and free speech. When one reads the heirs of Browning and especially the subjective, personal and obscure poets with their private worlds, their family jokes, their shop talk and code language, one sees what their work has lost in interest and meaning by the lack of that framework of dramatic realism which gives the cogency of event to Browning’s poems. There is a reason for this loss. Private life in the nineteenth century had its public sanction; nowadays private life is something which we live against the whole current of our time. For the moment.

  The First and Last of Hardy

  How little a novelist’s choice of story and character widens or changes between his first book and his last. In an obvious way there seems to be no kinship between Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree and Jude the Obscure, but reading these books again we see their differences are on the surface. Only age separates the youthful pastoral from the middle-aged tract. One is the sapling, pretty in its April leafage, the other is the groaning winter oak, stark with argument; but the same bitter juice rises in both their stems. Sue Bridehead is one of the consequences of being Fancy Day, Jude is a Dick Dewy become conscious of his obscurity; the tantalised youth has become the frustrated man and, according to such biographical notes as I have seen, all is a variation on the theme of Hardy’s first marriage. What has changed, of course, is the stretch of the scene. After the Greenwood Tree, we are always struck by the largeness of the panorama and by the narrowness of Hardy’s single, crooked, well-trodden path across it. And if the path is narrow, so is the man. He stands like a small, gaitered farmer in his field, dry, set, isolated and phlegmatic, the most unlikely exponent of human passion, but somehow majestic because he is on the skyline.

  There have been dozens of English rural novels like Under the Greenwood Tree, there have been none at all like the rest of Hardy’s work. He is the only English novelist who knows what the life, speech and values of the cottager really are and who knows them from the inside. Unlike the urban novelists he is not secretly laughing at the countryman, nor blatantly poeticising him. From an urban point of view, indeed, Hardy is totally unpoetic. His verse, his prose and what poetic feeling he has, are as awkward as the jerking and jangling of plough and harrow. Where, to the urban writer, the poetry of the countryside and the countryman lies in the sight of natural beauty and a feeling that here life is as sweet and sound as an apple, to Hardy the beauty is as bitter as grass. The native reek of shag and onions seems to come off his people’s breath. You have the sense that these people work and work for wages. And they speak like peasants, too, a speech which is not pure decorative dialect—the weakness of the poetic novelists who have tried to do for England what Synge did for the West of Ireland—but a mixture of dialect and the trite, sententious domestic phrase.

  In rescuing the dying peasant of the empty and derelict countryside from cultured sentiment, Hardy put him where Burns and Piers Plowman had found him. Yet Hardy did not achieve this by giving up all outside standards and by attempting to merge spiritually with the peasant in the manner of modern mystical writers like Giono. So far from doing this, Hardy is even something of the Victorian antiquary who smacks of the local museum. His view of man is geological. What he did was not to merge but indeed to step aside from his subject and to look at the peasant again from the point of view of the characteristic thought of his day. Hardy is unique among Victorian novelists in this sense: he is not our first novelist to be influenced by scientific ideas—there was Swift—but he is the only Victorian novelist to have been influenced by them. He seems to be the only English novelist to have read his Darwin and, like Zola who had also done so, to have had his imagination enlarged, not by the moral conflicts which Darwinism started among English writers, but by the most striking material contribution of Darwinism to our minds: its enormous widening of our conception of time. A huge and dramatic new vista was added to the years and an emancipated imagination was now free to march beyond the homely Christian fables on to the bleak and endless plain of human history. Where other writers were left to struggle with their religious faith and were gradually to lose it or to compromise in the rather woolly world of ‘Christian values”, Hardy’s imagination was stimulated to re-create the human ritual. Only in Jude, at the end of his career as a novelist, do we see that he, too, may have had his moral struggle with orthodox Christianity, but it seems quickly to have been settled. The very timidity of Hardy’s nature, so obvious in every page, gave him a personal loneliness, an instinct to go more than half-way to accept the worst, and these readily made acceptable the great indifferent It and the long empty, frightening Eons of It’s life. In the competitive stampede of Victorian liberty the peasant was left behind, he was not the fittest to survive; under the iron stamp of Hardy’s Victorian determinism, he became fixed, lonely and great.

  This is said to be the weakness and not the strength of Hardy. And it is true that a novelist is usually ruined by his philosophy of life. Easily shown to be untenable, a philosophy is also easily shown to be the element by which an art and human nature are falsified. The world is not a machine. Knowing this and, under the influence of French and Russian novelists, and with the decline, too, of self-confidence in middle-class culture, the English novelist has tried letting life tell its own story or, as in the case of D. H. Lawrence, has made heavy borrowings from exotic cultures. When we compare the result of this with Hardy’s achievement, our position is humiliating. Whatever else the English novel may have achieved during the last thirty years, it has not described English life. It has described the sensibility of Western cosmopolitana and has been the work of people who have been, essentially, expatriates in their own country. There is, of course, a curious passage in Jude, after the murder of the children, when the doctor wonders whether the unrest growing in society has not awakened a universal wish for death, a passage which shows that the disintegrating ferment was working in Hardy himself. But his beliefs were cast in the sober, native moralistic mould. Since Puritanism we have always had this worried gravity and our moral instinct has been social and practical, not intellectual. When we open Hardy again we are back to worry and moral conflict, the normal condition of the English nature. The nerves relax as we prepare for what in our bones we understand: liberty loved chiefly when manacled to an inordinate respect for circumstance, the cry of passion almost silenced by windy ruminations over right and wrong. The very prose of Hardy, heavy with a latinity which suggests a Milton reborn to drive a steamroller along the Wessex roads, has the effect of pressing men down among their neighbours and into the hills and towns where they live. Around the “rages of the ages” assembles the rural district council and, beyond that body, a moral hierarchy of which the council is the awkward shadow. As in Ibsen, Fate works, with a revived gusto, among the sanitary engineers.

  In the pastoral realism of Under the Greenwood Tree there is a visual vividness, despite some old-fashioned phrasing, which is what we especially like today and the talk of the cottagers is taken, rich and crooked, as it comes from their mouths. If one discards the quaint scenes when the Mellstock worthies are together, there are passages which have the true, unpolished country look, in the plain comedy of Fancy’s wedding at t
he end. The tranter is speaking of his marriage:

  “Ay, ‘twas a White Tuesday when I committed it. Mellstock Club walked the same day and we new-married folk went a-gaying round the parish behind ’em. Everybody used to wear something white at Whitsuntide in them days. My sonnies, I’ve got the very white trousers that I wore at home in a box now. Ha’n’t I, Ann?”

  “You had till I cut ’em up for Jimmy,” said Mrs. Dewy.

  But long before Jude, the visual brightness had gone. There appeared instead that faculty of instant abstraction in Hardy’s eye, whereby the people, the towns, the country, became something generalised in the mind as if Time had absorbed them. The light catches the vanes of Christminster and they glint the more brightly because they are seen against an abstract foreground “of secondary and tertiary hues”. One is looking at things not seen by an eye but known by a mind, by tens of thousands of minds. If society in the mass could see, if a town or village could look, this is what they would see. Masses themselves, they would see beyond the surface to the mass beneath. The realism of Hardy is a realism of mass, you are aware all the time that hundreds of other people are passing and bumping into Jude and Sue Bridehead when they stand in the street or go to the train, carrying their passion with them. They are tired, not fired, by passion. It is something which has come out of the inherited human destiny, to use them. Jude confesses to his first marriage in a vegetable market, he is seen by his first wife in the crowd at an Agricultural Show. In streets, on railway platforms, in lodging houses, inns and empty churches, his tragedy is enacted. The fidelity of Hardy’s descriptions of love-affairs does not really lie in his evocation of love itself, which is not especially good, but of its circumstances. The characters of Hardy, being rural people, are always on small local journeys, trailing their lives about with them, printing their history fragmentarily as they go upon vehicles and roads. Where the modern novelist uses journeys as a device in which, perhaps, to go into his characters’ thoughts or to pick up scenes from the past, in Hardy the journeys themselves are tragic because they are bound into the business of his characters. The humdrum circumstance becomes a kind of social poetry. Hardy himself called it “the low, sad music of humanity”.