‘We’re waiting for a man to be murdered,’ he said simply, as one who describes a familiar function.
Surely at the start this man could write. If only he had cared enough. But the illegitimate child left with the Billingsgate family, the boy on the milk-run, had not dreamt of being a writer. He had dreamt of a fortune, a first-class suite in some great liner, of a racing stable; he had dreamt of escape, and the greatness of the debts when Wallace came to die represented fairly enough the greatness of the escape, for the bank manager in Tanner’s Hill would surely not have allowed even Wallace’s employer on the milk-run an overdraft exceeding ten pounds.
1964
BEATRIX POTTER
‘IT is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is soporific.’ It is with some such precise informative sentence that one might have expected the great Potter saga to open, for the obvious characteristic of Beatrix Potter’s style is a selective realism, which takes emotion for granted and puts aside love and death with a gentle detachment reminiscent of Mr E. M. Forster’s. Her stories contain plenty of dramatic action, but it is described from the outside by an acute and unromantic observer, who never sacrifices truth for an effective gesture. As an example of Miss Potter’s empiricism, her rigid adherence to what can be seen and heard, consider the climax of her masterpiece The Roly-Poly Pudding, Tom Kitten’s capture by the rats in the attic:
‘Anna Maria,’ said the old man rat (whose name was Samuel Whiskers), ‘Anna Maria, make me a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner.’
‘It requires dough and a pat of butter, and a rolling pin,’ said Anna Maria, considering Tom Kitten with her head on one side.
‘No,’ said Samuel Whiskers. ‘Make it properly, Anna Maria, with breadcrumbs.’
But in 1908, when The Roly-Poly Pudding was published, Miss Potter was at the height of her power. She was not a born realist, and her first story was not only romantic, it was historical. The Tailor of Gloucester opens:
In the time of swords and periwigs, and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets – when gentlemen wore ruffles and gold-lace waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta – there lived a tailor in Gloucester.
In the sharp details of this sentence, in the flowered lappets, there is a hint of the future Potter, but her first book is not only hampered by its period setting but by the presence of a human character. Miss Potter is seldom at her best with human beings (the only flaw in The Roly-Poly Pudding is the introduction in the final pages of the authoress in person), though with one human character she succeeded triumphantly. I refer, of course, to Mr MacGregor, who made an elusive appearance in 1904 in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, ran his crabbed earthmould way through Peter Rabbit, and met his final ignominious defeat in The Flopsy Bunnies in 1909. But the tailor of Gloucester cannot be compared with Mr MacGregor. He is too ineffective and too virtuous, and the atmosphere of the story – snow and Christmas bells and poverty – is too Dickensian. Incidentally in Simpkin Miss Potter drew her only unsympathetic portrait of a cat. The ancestors of Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca play a humanitarian part. Their kind hearts are a little oppressive.
In the same year Miss Potter published Squirrel Nutkin, It is an unsatisfactory book, less interesting than her first, which was a good example of a bad genre. But in 1904, with the publication of Two Bad Mice, Miss Potter opened the series of her great comedies. In this story of Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca and their wanton havoc of a doll’s house, the unmistakable Potter style first appears.
It is an elusive style, difficult to analyse. It owes something to alliteration:
Hunca Munca stood up in her chair and chopped at the ham with another lead knife.
‘It’s as hard as the hams at the Cheesemonger’s,’ said Hunca-Munca.
Something too it owes to the short paragraphs, which are fashioned with a delicate irony, not to complete a movement, but mutely to criticize the action by arresting it. The imperceptive pause allows the mind to take in the picture: the mice are stilled in their enraged attitudes for a moment, before the action sweeps forward.
Then there was no end to the rage and disappointment of Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca. They broke up the pudding, the lobsters, the pears, and the oranges.
As the fish would not come off the plate, they put it into the redhot crinkly paper fire in the kitchen; but it would not burn either.
It is curious that Beatrix Potter’s method of paragraphing has never been imitated.
The last quotation shows another element of her later style, her love of a precise catalogue, her creation of atmosphere with still-life. One remembers Mr MacGregor’s rubbish heap:
There were jam pots and paper bags and mountains of chopped grass from the mowing machine (which always tasted oily), and some rotten vegetable marrows and an old boot or two.
The only indication in Two Bad Mice of a prentice hand is the sparsity of dialogue; her characters had not yet begun to utter those brief pregnant sentences, which have slipped, like proverbs, into common speech. Nothing in the early book equals Mr Jackson’s ‘No teeth. No teeth. No teeth.’
In 1904 too The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the second of the great comedies, was published, closely followed by its sequel, Benjamin Bunny. In Peter and his cousin Benjamin Miss Potter created two epic personalities. The great characters of fiction are often paired: Quixote and Sancho, Pantagruel and Panurge, Pickwick and Weller, Benjamin and Peter. Peter was a neurotic, Benjamin wordly and imperturbable. Peter was warned by his mother, ‘Don’t go into Mr MacGregor’s garden; your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs MacGregor.’ But Peter went from stupidity rather than for adventure. He escaped from Mr MacGregor by leaving his clothes behind, and the sequel, the story of how his clothes were recovered, introduces Benjamin, whose coolness and practicality are a foil to the nerves and clumsiness of his cousin. It was Benjamin who knew the way to enter a garden: ‘It spoils people’s clothes to squeeze under a gate; the proper way to get in is to climb down a pear tree.’ It was Peter who fell down head first.
From 1904 to 1908 were the vintage years in comedy; to these years belong The Pie and the Patty Pan, The Tale of Tom Kitten. The Tale of Mrs Tiggy Winkle, and only one failure, Mr Jeremy Fisher. Miss Potter had found her right vein and her right scene. The novels were now set in Cumberland; the farms, the village shops, the stone walls, the green slope of Catbells became the background of her pictures and her prose. She was peopling a countryside. Her dialogue had become memorable because aphoristic:
‘I disapprove of tin articles in puddings and pies. It is most undesirable – (especially when people swallow in lumps).’
She could draw a portrait in a sentence:
‘My name is Mrs Tiggy Winkle; oh yes if you please’m, I’m an excellent clear-starcher.’
And with what beautiful economy she sketched the first smiling villain of her gallery. Tom Kitten had dropped his clothes off the garden wall as the Puddle-Duck family passed:
‘Come! Mr Drake Puddle-Duck,’ said Moppet, ‘Come and help us to dress him! Come and button up Tom!’
Mr Drake Puddle-Duck advanced in a slow sideways manner, and picked up the various articles.
But he put them on himself. They fitted him even worse than Tom Kitten.
‘It’s a very fine morning,’ said Mr Drake Puddle-Duck.
Looking backward over the thirty years of Miss Potter’s literary career, we see that the creation of Mr Puddle-Duck marked the beginning of a new period. At some time between 1907 and 1909 Miss Potter must have passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the character of her genius. It would be impertinent to inquire into the nature of the ordeal. Her case is curiously similar to that of Henry James. Something happened which shook their faith in appearance. From The Portrait of a Lady onwards, innocence deceived, the treachery of friends, became the theme of James’s greatest stories. Mme Merle, Kate Croy, Mme de Vionnet, Charlotte Stant, these tortuous treacherous women are paralleled through the dark period of Miss Potter’s a
rt. ‘A man can smile and smile and be a villain,’ that, a little altered, was her recurrent message, expressed by her gallery of scoundrels: Mr Drake Puddle-Duck, the first and slightest, Mr Jackson, the least harmful with his passion for honey and his reiterated. ‘No teeth. No teeth. No teeth’, Samuel Whiskers, gross and brutal, and the ‘gentleman with sandy whiskers’ who may be identified with Mr Tod. With the publication of Mr Tod in 1912, Miss Potter’s pessimism reached its climax. But for the nature of her audience Mr Tod would certainly have ended tragically. In Jemima Puddle-Duck the gentleman with sandy whiskers had at least a debonair impudence when he addressed his victim:
‘Before you commence your tedious sitting, I intend to give you a treat. Let us have a dinner party all to ourselves!
‘May I ask you to bring up some herbs from the farm garden to make a savoury omelette? Sage and thyme, and mint and two onions, and some parsley. I will provide lard for the stuff – lard for the omelette,’ said the hospitable gentleman with sandy whiskers.
But no charm softens the brutality of Mr Tod and his enemy, the repulsive Tommy Brock. In her comedies Miss Potter had gracefully eliminated the emotions of love and death; it is the measure of her genius that when, in The Tale of Mr Tod, they broke the barrier, the form of her book, her ironic style, remained unshattered. When she could not keep death out she stretched her technique to include it. Benjamin and Peter had grown up and married, and Benjamin’s babies were stolen by Brock; the immortal pair, one still neurotic, the other knowing and imperturbable, set off to the rescue, but the rescue, conducted in darkness, from a house, ‘something between a cave, a prison, and a tumbledown pig-sty’, compares grimly with an earlier rescue from Mr MacGregor’s sunny vegetable garden:
The sun had set; an owl began to hoot in the wood. There were many unpleasant things lying about, that had much better have been buried; rabbit bones and skulls and chicken’s legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place and very dark.
But Mr Tod, for all the horror of its atmosphere, is indispensable. There are few fights in literature which can compare in excitement with the duel between Mr Tod and Tommy Brock (it was echoed by H. G. Wells in Mr Polly):
Everything was upset except thekitchen table.
And everything was broken, except the mantelpiece and the kitchen fender. The crockery was smashed to atoms.
The chairs were broken, and the window, and the clock fell with a crash, and there were handfuls of Mr Tod’s sandy whiskers.
The vases fell off the mantelpiece, the canisters fell off the shelf; the kettle fell off the hob. Tommy Brock put his foot in a jar of raspberry jam.’
Mr Tod marked the distance which Miss Potter had travelled since the ingenuous romanticism of The Tailor of Gloucester. The next year with The Tale of Pigling Bland, the period of the great near-tragedies came to an end. There was something of the same squalor, and the villain, Mr Thomas Piperson, was not less terrible than Mr Tod, but the book ended on a lyric note, as Pigling Bland escaped with Pig-Wig:
They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill, and across a short cut on level green turf at the bottom, between pebble-beds and rushes. They came to the river, they came to the bridge – they crossed it hand in hand –
It was the nearest Miss Potter had approached to a conventional love story. The last sentence seemed a promise that the cloud had lifted, that there was to be a return to the style of the earlier comedies. But Pigling Bland was published in 1913. Through the years of war the author was silent, and for many years after it was over, only a few books of rhyme appeared. These showed that Miss Potter had lost none of her skill as an artist, but left the great question of whither her genius was tending unanswered. Then, after seventeen years, at the end of 1930, Little Pig Robinson was published.
The scene was no longer Cumberland but Devonshire and the sea. The story, more than twice as long as Mr Tod, was diffuse and undramatic. The smooth smiling villain had disappeared and taken with him the pungent dialogue, the sharp detail, the light of common day. Miss Potter had not returned to the great comedies. She had gone on beyond the great near-tragedies to her Tempest. No tortured Lear nor strutting Antony could live on Prospero’s island, among the sounds and sweet airs and cloudcapt towers. Miss Potter too had reached her island, the escape from tragedy, the final surrender of imagination to safe serene fancy:
A stream of boiling water flowed down the silvery strand. The shore was covered with oysters. Acid-drops and sweets grew upon the trees. Yams, which are a sort of sweet potato, abounded ready cooked. The breadfruit tree grew iced cakes and muffins ready baked.
It was all very satisfying for a pig Robinson, but in that rarefied air no bawdy Tommy Brock could creep to burrow, no Benjamin pursue his feud between the vegetable-frames, no Puddle-Duck could search in wide-eyed innocence for a ‘convenient dry nesting-place’.
Note. On the publication of this essay I received a somewhat acid letter from Miss Potter correcting certain details. Little Pig Robinson, although the last published of her books, was in fact the first written. She denied that there had been any emotional disturbance at the time she was writing Mr Tod: she was suffering however from the after-effects of flu. In conclusion she deprecated sharply ‘the Freudian school’ of criticism.
1933
HARKAWAY’S OXFORD
MY father used to have hanging on his bathroom wall a photographic group of young men in evening dress with bright blue waistcoats. They were, I think, the officials of an Oxford undergraduate wining club, but with their side-whiskers and heavy moustaches they had more the appearance of Liberal Ministers. Earnest and well-informed, they hardly seemed to be members of the same world as Jack Harkaway, whose adventures at Oxford were published in twopenny numbers – or bound together in two volumes at 6d. apiece – by the ‘Boys of England’ office some time in the early eighties. They seemed, sitting there on dining-room chairs, squarely facing the camera to hark back more naturally to that much earlier Oxford described by Newman, when Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian was a book to make the blood boil – ‘One of our common friends told me, that, after reading it, he could not keep still, but went on walking up and down in his room.’ But unless we are to disbelieve the literary evidence of Jack Harkaway at Oxford, the earnest moustache is deceptive: it is the bright blue waistcoat which is the operative image, and I like to imagine that my father’s photograph contained the whole galaxy – Tom Carden, Sir Sydney Dawson, Fabian Hall, Harvey, and the Duke of Woodstock – of what must have been known universally as a Harkaway year, for in 188— Harkaway succeeded in the then unprecedented feat of winning his Blue for rowing, cricket, and football and ending the academic year with a double-first. All this too in spite of the many attempts upon his life and honour engineered by Davis of Singapore whom he had baffled while still a schoolboy in the East. Their reunion at Sir Sydney Dawson’s ‘wine’ is an impressive scene – impressive too in its setting:
A variety of wines were upon the table with all sorts of biscuits and preserved fruits. Olives, however, seemed to be the most popular. A box of cigars, which cost four guineas, invited the attention of smokers. . . . Jack walked over to a tall, effeminate looking young man, with a pale complexion, and having his hair parted in the middle.
‘How do, Kemp?’ he said.
‘Ah, how do?’ replied Kemp, with a peculiar smile. ‘Allow me to introduce you to my friend, Mr Frank Davis of Singapore.’
Jack stared in amazement. Before him was his sworn and determined enemy. Davis had told him that he was going to England to complete his education at a University. He had added that wherever Jack was, he would still hate him, and seek for his revenge. . . . That it was Davis of Singapore he had no doubt. He had lost one ear.
Making a cold and distant bow, Davis replied – ‘Mr Harkaway and I have met before.’
‘Really?’ exclaimed Kemp. ‘I’m glad of that. It’s such a nuisance helping fellows to talk. Davis is not in our college. He’s a Merton man.’
/> It was unwise of Harkaway towards the end of this same ‘wine’ to transfix Kemp’s hand to the table with a fork when he detected him cheating at cards. The incident led directly to the corruption of Sir Sydney with drink so that he could not ride in the steeplechase against the Duke of Woodstock’s horse, Kemp up; to Jack’s imprisonment for debt on the eve of the Boat Race (but the Jew’s beautiful daughter Hilda, whom he had saved from drowning in the Cher, foiled that plot); to the kidnapping of Hilda and Emily, Jack’s betrothed, by Davis and the Duke of Woodstock (‘“Let’s have – aw – one kiss before we part,” said the Duke, with an amorous glance in Hilda’s direction. “Dash my – aw – buttons, but one kiss.” ’); to the foul attempt on Jack’s life in a railway train, and to Kemp setting Emily alight – a rather bizarre episode:
He approached Emily, who was standing with her back to him in her muslin ball dress, looking very gauzy and fairylike.
Drawing a wax match from his pocket, he struck it gently, and held it under her skirt lighting the inflammable material in three places.
Then he retired with the same snakelike, gliding manner.
The story is, of course, a sensational one (it isn’t often that an undergraduate arrives in Oxford with so teeming a past, and with a private tutor – Mr Mole – who had been secretly married to a black woman in the east), but its chief value, I think, lies in its incidentals: the still-life of an Oxford breakfast – ‘At ten o’clock a very decent breakfast stood on the table, consisting of cold game, hot fish, Strasbourg patties, honey in the comb, tea and coffee, with other trifles’; in the delightful turns of phrase:
Collected Essays Page 19
