Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  O Sir, don’t take that ‘orrid Necromancy;

  Whatever would your poor dear huncle say?

  I ‘ad a gent took Necromancy once

  And he was come for in his second year.

  O! such a turn it give me! and the mess

  And smell of sulphur in the furniture!

  It took me weeks on weeks to clean the rooms.

  But all in vain; for the undergraduate’s final appearance is in the palm of his tutor’s hand, as ‘a small piece of meat’.

  How far these leanings accompanied James into the serious scholastic side of his life and work as a palaeographer is difficult to assess. The Apocrypha is itself a somewhat twilight field, neither orthodox Biblical Studies, nor entirely medieval folklore, and it contains many strange presences, such as Solomon and the Demons. Several of James’s short studies suggest occult attractions, such as the monograph on the medieval bibliophile and necromancer John Dee (1921); the essay on the legend of St Stephen and the crowing capon (1902); the paper in the English Historical Review on twelve medieval Latin ghost-story fragments; and the curious passage on the ‘elixir of the palaeographer’ in an educational pamphlet on The Wanderings of Manuscripts (1919). James was also fascinated by the medieval bestiaries, and produced several scholarly editions for the Roxburghe Club of these rather ambiguous manuscripts, which are part treatises on morality, part zoological catalogues and part demonological romances. Some of his descriptive entries, both in their subject matter and in their understated style, have an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. Here, for example, is folio 156 Ms Ii 4.26 in the University Library Cambridge, published in 1928:

  Cocodrillus. Under three shallow arches: a plain pillar at each end. The beast has a ridged and serrated back and tail and legs, and tremendous talons, a tuft under its throat and a horned head. It faces right, and seizes a nude man in its great teeth, by the middle: he is writhing and crying out.

  When James was received back at Eton, the official honorific speech of welcome contained a list of his scholarly achievements and interests, which terminated with a pointed reference to ‘Lemuros istos’; at which phrase it is recorded that ‘a grim smile for a second curved the lips of the new Provost’.

  At the deeper emotional level, there can be even less certainty. It is possibly suggestive that the date of the first ghost-story, 1893, coincides with the arrival at King’s of Jim McBryde, a talented undergraduate, who later studied at the Slade. The close friendship which sprang up between James and McBryde was perhaps, outside his immediate family of whom we know so little, the most important in James’s life. McBryde’s sunny, sympathetic nature, his gifts as an illustrator and raconteur, seem to have done much to draw James out of himself and free his imaginative powers. It was McBryde’s naïve but extraordinarily evocative pen drawings which illustrated the first of James’s ghost collections in 1904, with a directness – not untouched by amusement – that has not been rivalled since. McBryde travelled on many of James’s cycling expeditions, and their trip to Scandinavia, together with another undergraduate, Will Stone, yielded ‘The Story of a Troll-Hunt’, a charming comic-strip essay about their attempt (successful) to capture a specimen of this legendary monster with the help of some alcohol and a parrot cage. Other, less direct consequences of this voyage seem to have been James’s ghost-stories, ‘Number 13’ and the gruesome ‘Count Magnus’, in which the victim’s face is sucked off his skull.

  One has the sense that Jim McBryde was in many ways James’s great emotional catalyst, and the friendship continued to blossom when he later married and settled in London. Then, suddenly and tragically, McBryde died at the age of thirty. Thereafter, James acted as the friend and adviser to his widow, Gwendolen, and as the guardian to his brilliantly pretty, golden-haired daughter, Jane. They, in turn, seem to have provided James with some of the steadiness and affection of a family.

  James’s wildly imaginative and amusing letters to Jane, especially when she was between the ages of six and twelve, are some of the most delightful and intimate things he ever wrote. They consist, very largely, in long dialogues between the Provost and the Provost’s cat on the subject of young Jane’s welfare. It was for Jane that ‘The Five Jars’, a unique and gentle piece of fairy-tale exorcism, was written in 1922.

  But the subject of cats, who always played an ambivalent role in James’s imagination, leads back remorselessly and inevitably to the various beasts and monstrosities of that darker world. James’s ghost-stories as a whole may be said to form a kind of malign bestiary of the scholar’s heart, for their fiends invariably show themselves in some furious sub-animal form which clutches rapaciously at the exposed weaknesses of a man who is alone. This bestial manifestation can be observed most literally in ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, where the guilty prelate is first beginning to feel the presence of his familiar as he dozes in the choir at Evensong.

  During the Magnificat … my hand was resting on the back of the carved figure of a cat which is the nearest to me of the three figures on the end of my stall. I was not aware of this, for I was not looking in that direction, until I was startled by what seemed a softness, a feeling as of rather rough and coarse fur, and a sudden movement as if the creature were twisting round its head to bite me … I must have uttered a suppressed exclamation, for I noticed that Mr Treasurer turned his head quickly in my direction.

  In the ‘Diary of Mr Poynter’, the catlike creature is not identified with such certainty. But the progressive materialization of a physical presence, with that particular feline viciousness so characteristic of James’s notion of the terrible, and with the corresponding wince of revulsion from physical contact, is given one of its most subtle presentations.

  As he dashed into the baize door that cut the passage in two, and – forgetting that it opened towards him – beat against it with all the force in him, he felt a soft ineffectual tearing at his back which, all the same, seemed to be growing in power, as if the hand, or whatever worse than a hand was there, were becoming more material as the pursuer’s rage was more concentrated.

  From the feline, one moves through the catalogue of James’s bestial aggressors towards the unavoidable notion of the feminine. Here I think one may be close upon the central horror. There are several specifically female apparitions in the ghost-stories. Noticeable among them are the flapping, goose-like shape of Anne Clark in ‘Martin’s Close’ as she rises from the pond on the moor to take revenge upon her lover; and the ghastly, antiquated lump of Mrs Sadleir in ‘The Uncommon Prayer Book’, who like ‘a great roll of shabby white flannel’, falls from a dark cupboard on the neck of the luckless antiquarian, ‘more like a ferret going for a rabbit than anything else’, as a Cockney witness observes, at a mercifully safe distance, through a glass partition.

  But it is the unspecifically feminine, the stiffening ectoplasm of feminality which seems to carry in the end the maximum emotional charge in James’s fiction. The long, darting, dress-like sheet and ‘intensely horrible face of crumpled linen’ belonging to the occupant of the empty bed in the moonlit hotel room of ‘O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, which was so grimly caught by McBryde in his last illustration, is one of the nastiest and most unforgettable of these vengeful apparitions. ‘It leapt towards him upon the instant, and the next moment he was halfway through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own.’

  Yet there remains one which is still more climactic. The ultimate intention of physical seizure and possession becomes explicit in the soft, dank, fleshly thing of ‘The Treasure of Abbott Thomas’. The scholar investigator has located his prize at the bottom of a gloomy well, and momentarily separated from his bluff manservant, he gropes for it in a deep cavity in the brickwork. ‘Just give me a glass of cognac, Brown, I’ll go on in a moment … Well, I felt to the right, and my fingers touched something curved, that felt – yes – more or less like leather; dampish it was, and evid
ently part of a heavy, full thing. There was nothing, I must say, to alarm one. I grew bolder, and putting both hands in as well as I could I pulled it to me, and it came. It was heavy, but moved more easily than I had expected. As I pulled it towards the entrance, my left elbow knocked over and extinguished the candle … I went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck.’

  The italics belong to the Provost James, not to me. At this point, I think, the purely literary commentator calls a halt. The psychologist may wish to deploy certain comforting dictums of Freud. The sociologist will want to study the evolution of Cambridge away from an elite celibate, Victorian stronghold of great genius and great prejudice. The historian of education will perhaps trace the advent of women’s degrees (which James voted against in the Senate House during the riot of 1897), and the graceful arrival of women dons and undergraduates, who have, incidentally, been officially resident at King’s College since 1972. The ghost-story writer will merely nod, and reach once more for his quill.

  For myself, I shall call to mind only the view from the College Library, as the dark finally settles into the courts and very faintly the sound of Evensong drifts on the chill air in the sweet, harmonious voices of the King’s choristers and here and there a scholar twitches his curtains, sports his oak, and draws up his chair to the pool of light beneath his solitary, gazing lamp.

  JOHN STUART MILL

  ‘IT IS WHOLLY the life of a logic-chopping machine,’ pronounced Thomas Carlyle through his prophetic beard a few months after Mill’s death in 1873. ‘Little more human in it than if it had been done by a thing of mechanized iron. Autobiography of a steam engine …’ So it seemed to the Hero, besieged by an age of railways and foundries and stovepipe hats; and there did indeed appear something metallic, something patented and incorporated and water-cooled in the public life of John Stuart Mill.

  From his birth in 1806, Mill had been exclusively assigned to the Utilitarian inheritance, a product of the most celebrated cram of the nineteenth century – Greek at three, calculus at eight, political economy at twelve. Milton, it was said by admiring Benthamites, lisped in numbers; young Mill in syllogisms. From the ages of seventeen to fifty-two, Mill was an administrative piston of the East India Company, taking his boiled egg at ten sharp each morning, eventually rising to the post of Chief Examiner, and on resignation in 1858 being presented with a silver inkstand.

  Most of his active life was passed at the end of that 100-yard-long gaslit corridor in Leadenhall Street, behind a thick green baize door, in a high bare office smelling of coconut matting and ink and coal dust, inditing the sealed instructions of Imperial administration. He wrote erect at a mahogany lectern, and gazed through windows overlooking a brickwall yard, where a City clock could be heard but not seen. He dressed habitually in a black frockcoat of old-fashioned angular cut, with a black silk necktie pulled tight round a white cotton wing-collar. He was a tall, bony, slightly stooping figure who shook hands stiffly from the shoulder and was prematurely bald at the age of thirty. There was that indefinable ministerial quality of a dissenting clergyman.

  His face was small, dry and circumstantial, deeply lined from early age, nose chiselled out and lips hydraulically compressed and narrow, the mouth drawn down at the corners by the imponderable weights of Utility. Then there was one curious thing: the eyes were preternaturally bright and rapid, permanently dancing like sparks in that hard coaltip of a face, and the right eye – the right eye never stood still at all: there was a permanent, perceptible twitch flickering the lid and eyebrow like a heliograph; and above it, strangest of all, a large inexplicable bump, a sort of dome, as if something alien had taken up occupation.

  As a writer, Mill had always been intended to inherit the leaden mantle of the Benthamites, those great organizational rationalists of the turn of the nineteenth century, the Long Legged Scissor Men of Efficiency and Public Systems. Mill’s father – James Mill, the great disciple of Jeremy Bentham – had personally educated Mill at his own writing desk, first in Newington Green and later in Westminster; and he was for many years Mill’s immediate superior at India House. Mill senior was of Scots crofter stock, brilliant, severe and despotic; he had written a History of India in nine volumes and once projected a book to ‘make the human mind as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St Paul’s’.

  Mill’s own two magna opera were recognizably in this tradition: A System of Logic, Rationative and Inductive published at thirty-seven; and Principles of Political Economy produced four years later in 1848, the year of the liberal revolutions in Europe and of the Communist Manifesto. Both became standard university textbooks of the period: the former as a discussion of methodology for natural scientists (it ran to thirty-two editions before the end of the century), the latter as a reference work for economists. Even today there are enthusiasts who by partial selection still claim Mill as an authority on Sociological Method (Ronald Fletcher, 1971), on a so-called school of philosophical ‘Inductivism’ (Alan Ryan, 1970), and on the neo-Malthusian propaganda for a ‘steady state’ society (The Ecologist, 1972).

  Yet in reality, Mill’s two massive works are lost brontosauri of the early-Victorian intellect, and to rehabilitate them is a museum act of fond anachronism. In conception their whole universe is pre-Darwinian; they are largely innocent of the forces of class and economic production analysed by Marx; and they are irretrievably stranded beyond that black crack in consciousness that Freud’s work opened in the foundations of rationalism. Mill’s godson, Bertrand Russell, accurately summarized their position in 1953: ‘I do not think Mill ever imaginatively conceived of man as one among animals or escaped from the eighteenth-century belief that man is fundamentally rational … In the intellectual realm, James Mill continued to reign supreme over his son’s sub-conscious.’

  In the gardens to the east of Temple Station, between the Law Courts and the Thames Embankment, where the tramps doze fitfully in the summer rain, John Stuart Mill now sits encased in bronze, his metal hand welded to his metal book, fulfilling the judgement of his old friend and opponent Carlyle. And yet there were nightingales in his story.

  Today we are perhaps more familiar with the kind of schoolboy prodigy that Mill senior laboured to manufacture in his son. It produces chess champions, adolescent mathematics dons, sectarian fanatics, burnt-out business directors, breakdowns and suicides. Mill suffered all these harsh incarnations to a degree, and yet he is unique because he transcended each and left behind a written record so acute and morally sensitive, that, properly collated, it forms one of the greatest pieces of personal and philosophical literature produced during the nineteenth century. It is a record that will certainly stand by Dickens’s Hard Times, George Eliot’s Felix Holt or Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. In this achievement, and indeed as the condition of his very survival, Mill underwent an agonizing love affair and managed a sustained act of intellectual collaboration with a remarkable woman, the fruits of which were a moral and political manifesto of lasting value.

  Mill’s first breakdown came in a dreary November of 1826, at the age of twenty, for he was precocious in everything. He had just exhausted himself in editing Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, when he was seized by an overwhelming vertigo of despair. The passage in his Autobiography is well known: the sudden realization of the hollowness of the Benthamite ‘greatest happiness’ principle; the suicidal depression; the tirade against the ‘dissolving’ acids of intellectual analysis which seemed to wither all feeling from the bone; the desperate recourse to Wordsworth’s poetry, walks by the Thames, the ‘cultivation’ of new friends and sensations.

  Closer examination reveals the strong but apparently subconscious undercurrents of hatred for the father, a revulsive horror of the hard, dominating, systematized, patriarchal attitude of the Victorian male so perfectly expressed in the Benthamite doctrine, the doctrine of the Iron Men who built railway
s, capitalized financial empires and ruled inferior races.

  A small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoirs, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them – would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene came over me and I was moved to tears.

  What is less well known is the fact that Mill’s text is incomplete. It is based on a manuscript made in old age, but omitting much that Mill originally wrote. Very recently Mill’s original draft, made at the age of forty-seven, has come to light (Mill-Hollander MS 1853–5) and in a number of crucial and vivid sequences this has rendered the standard World Classics edition obsolete. Here are some of the passages that Mill so painfully set down, which not only enormously enhance the evident degree of his self-awareness, but slowly provide the reader with a key to the driving radicalism that came to characterize all his best writings.

  I was far longer than children generally are before I could put on my clothes. I know not how many years passed before I could tie a knot. My articulation was long imperfect; one letter, r, I could not pronounce until I was nearly sixteen. I never could nor can I now, do anything requiring the smallest manual dexterity … I was, my father continually told me, like a person who had not the organs of sense: my eyes and ears seemed of no use to me … both as a boy and as a youth I was incessantly smarting under his severe admonitions on the subject. He could not endure stupidity … He resembled almost all Englishmen in being ashamed at the signs of feeling, and by the absence of demonstration, starving the feeling themselves … I do not mean that things were worse in this respect than in most English families, in which genuine affection is altogether exceptional; what is usually found being more or less an attachment of mere habit, like that to inanimate objects, and a few conventional proprieties of phrase and demonstration … That rarity in England, a really warm hearted mother, would in the first place have made my father a totally different being, and in the second would have made the children grow up loving and being loved. But my mother with the very best intentions, only knew how to pass her life in drudging for them … I thus grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear: and many and indelible are the effects of this bringing-up, in the stunting of my moral growth … I grew up with an instinct of closeness … my conscience never speaking except by my father’s voice.