By this time, too, Parkman had learned the value of bald narrative:
Noel Chabanel came later to the mission: for he did not reach the Huron country until 1643. He detested the Indian life – the smoke, the vermin, the filthy food, the impossibility of privacy. He could not study by the smoky lodge-fire, among the noisy crowd of men and squaws, with their dogs, and their restless, screeching children. He had a natural inaptitude to learning the language, and laboured at it for five years with scarcely a sign of progress. The Devil whispered a suggestion into his ear: Let him procure his release from these barren and revolting toils, and return to France, where congenial and useful employments awaited him. Chabanel refused to listen; and when the temptation still beset him he bound himself by a solemn vow to remain in Canada to the day of his death.
And to complete the marriage Parkman had learned to control on occasion his poetic prose with fine effect as in this picture of Indian immortality:
In the general belief, however, there was but one land of shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature as they had been in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving they sat all day in the crouching posture of the sick, and when night came, hunted the shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks; for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.
The last notebook Parkman kept contains an account of his desperate final battle against insomnia – the amount of sleeping draught, the hours of sleep gained. One column, A Half-Century of Conflict, had to be finished and raised in its place to complete the great architectural scheme. The hours of sleeping dropped as low as three and a half and only once in the three-year record rose above eight. In that bare mathematical catalogue there is something of the spirit of Chabanel. The historian had made his vow forty years before and it was kept.
1949
DON IN MEXICO
THIS is an account by a Cambridge professor of two trips to the tourist resorts of Mexico.*4 but it pretends to be rather more. The professor is a Spanish scholar – and that should have been an advantage; but he was handicapped by the unenterprising nature of his journey (the usual round-trip by way of Mexico City, Taxco, Cuernavaca, Puebla, Vera Cruz, Merida, Chichen-Itza), by his friendships with Spanish Republicans as strange to the country as himself, by his ignorance of and antipathy to the religion of the country, and by a whimsical prose style less successful in conveying the atmosphere of Mexico than that of Cambridge-jokes on the Trumpington Road, charades with undergraduates in red-brick villas, bicycles in the hall. His book is self-illustrated with little dark holiday snaps called ‘Puebla: Tiled House’, or ‘Mexico: Aztec Calendar Stone’, and like letters home his account is either very personal or else very guide-book at second-hand: ‘The remains at Chichen-Itza lie in three groups. Those so far described belong to North Chichen; the others are referred to as Middle Chichen and Old Chichen. Following the trail from North Chichen to Middle Chichen, the first building one comes to . . .’ and so on. But one can go to more accurate and comprehensive guide-books, and it is for the portrait of the Cambridge don abroad that this book will be read by the irreverent: the self-portrait of a middle-aged professor, one of ‘the cultured and civilized’, with a liking for weak tea and ‘amusing conversation’ on ‘the plane of ripe but frivolous scholarship’ – the authorship of The Young Visiters, for example.
In spite of the unconscious humour of many of the scenes, the book would not be worth attention if it were not symptomatic – symptomatic of the inhumanity of the academic brain, and its unreliability. Professor Trend, touring round the beauty spots, saw no sign of religious persecution. He noticed, it is true, a few religious colleges turned into libraries, but that to the nineteenth-century progressive mind was all to the good; apparently he did not notice in Mexico City the garages and cinemas that had once been churches. Anyway, there were plenty without these – ‘Mexico, like Spain, somewhat overbuilt itself in the way of churches.’ A church to the professor was an ‘interior’, a style of architecture: he was appalled in Puebla at ‘the religiosity of the place’; ‘tracts thrust into your hands, individuals standing at the church doors to take a collection even before you could look in to see whether the interior was worth looking at’. (One is reminded of the Mr Smith whom Parkman encountered at Palermo.)
It would be funny – the whimsicality, the self-importance, the ignorance – if it were not so heartless. However strong the detestation of the Cambridge don for the Roman Catholic Faith, he might have remembered that those who held it were human. Shoot them and they bleed as copiously as a Republican. Starve them . . . He may have observed in Mexico City the number of priests exercising their religious duties; he made no inquiries, or he would have learnt that in Mexico City, as in other tourist centres, the law is winked at, so that priests who are forbidden to say Mass in their own States and are, therefore, without means, flock to the capital to escape starvation. The professor visited Orizaba in 1939: the churches were certainly open. He did not ask the reason or he would have learnt how only two years before a child had been murdered by police officers on her way from a Mass house, and how the peasants in retaliation had broken the churches open throughout the State of Vera Cruz. He was in Mexico in 1938, too, and flew over Tabasco on his way to Yucatan. He did not alight from his plane at Villa Hermosa, or he might by some lucky chance have been present when the police fired on a crowd of peasants, men, women and children, who were setting up an altar in the ruins of a church. But, of course, no one interested in ecclesiastical architecture would have visited Tabasco, for there were no churches left in the State.
Blithely, whimsically, from his Cambridge study the professor writes: ‘As to religious persecution, it is (so far as my experience goes, and as far as I have been able to find out by inquiry mostly imaginary.’ His inquiries must have been as limited as his experience, and any writer who describes conditions of which the professor prefers to remain in ignorance he styles a ‘propagandist’. He has all the suspicion of a provincial holiday-maker afraid of being ‘had’, and I shall probably be suspected of all sorts of dishonest motives if I assure him that in the very year he was in Mexico he had only to travel a little farther afield to discover States where the churches were either destroyed or locked, where priests were forbidden to say Mass, and where the sacraments of their Faith could be taken by the people only in secret. Propaganda? But I have attended these secret Masses myself in Chiapas. I doubt if my assurance will carry conviction, for as the professor writes, ‘My Mexico is not like that’, and on another page, ‘I have always had a preference for legends rather than for more sober history.’
1940
[3]
SAMUEL BUTLER
ONE knows the man well in his suit of scrubby black, his stained greenish felt hat, with his umbrella, his boots, the odour of tobacco on his clothes: he leans over the bookstall fingering the ugly cheap reprints of the Rationalist Press or remains for a long while absorbed by the Kensit literature in a small dingy shop near St Paul’s. Greeting him one is embarrassed by his inability to tell polite untruths. ‘Good morning.’ ‘The morning is nothing of the kind.’ He will not stoop to the medieval superstition of ‘Good-bye’. He is an Honest Man and rather conscious of the fact, but he has gained little stature from his emancipation. One is instinctively aware in his past of an ugly, crippling childhood, attics and blackbeetles, and some grim grammar school, and sadistic masters. His favourite author is Samuel Butler, and one remembers Butler’s idea of immortality, the desiccated sentiment of:
Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.
Here, in the dry deformed aggressive spirit, is Samuel Butler’s life everlasting. Few others will be found to swallow whole The Fair Haven and Life and Habit, Evolution Old and New and God the Known and God the
Unknown, or even the notebooks, of which this second selection has just appeared.*1 Out of the nineteen volumes of the collected works most people pick and choose, read The Way of All Flesh for the savour of hatred, Erewhon for the brilliant reporting of the opening chapters. But this would never have satisfied Butler who wanted to stuff himself neck and crop between the teeth of time.
These notebooks witness it. He never overtly made clear quite why he copied and re-copied these random jottings into the carefully bound, dismally designed volumes ‘in half black roan, with dark green pin-head cloth sides and shiny marbled end-papers’; it was not primarily as material for his books – ‘I greatly question the use of making the notes at all. I find I next to never refer to them or use them’; if we are to believe him, ‘they are not meant for publication’, though a few lines later he writes, ‘Many a one of those who look over this book – for that it will be looked over by not a few I doubt not – will think me to have been a greater fool than I probably was’, but the motive is really obvious enough. These notes were to present to posterity the whole man in his wisdom, his wit, his hate, and even his triviality. There is something rather tryingly ‘rough diamond’ about the approach – ‘You must take me just as you find me’ – but alas, one finds him in these notes deep buried under the late Victorian rational dust. One digs and digs and is occasionally rewarded by the genuine gold glitter of a cuff-link.
The trouble is, he was not an artist. He remarks in one of the notes, ‘I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.’ To have thought twice about the words he used, to have tried to refine his language in order to express his meaning with greater exactitude, this would have been, in his view, to blaspheme against the essential Samuel (‘You must take me just as you find me’). Better far to stick down everything as it came to mind, even when the note was as trivial as:
THE RIDICULOUS AND THE SUBLIME
As there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, so also there is but one from the ridiculous to the sublime;
as cheaply smart as:
CHRIST
Jesus! with all thy faults I love thee still;
as meaningless as:
EVERYTHING
should be taken seriously, and nothing should be taken seriously.
There is a great deal of this kind of thing in the second selection from the notebooks: a great many exhibitions of rather cocky conceit in his own smartness – ‘So and so said to me . . . I said to him,’ the smartness which makes Erewhon so insignificant beside Gulliver, many superficial half-truths in the form of paradoxes which have become aggravatingly familiar in the plays of his disciple; and always, on whatever subject he treats, the soreness of the unhealing wound. The perpetual need to generalize from a peculiar personal experience maimed his imagination. Even Christianity he could not consider dispassionately because it was the history of a Father and Son. In The Way of All Flesh he avenged a little of his childhood’s suffering, but he was not freed from the dead hand. His most serious criticism has the pettiness of personal hate, and how will posterity be able to take with respect attacks on Authority (whether it be the authority of God, Trinity College, or Darwin) when the mask it wears is always the cruel, smug, unimportant features of Theobald Pontifex?
1934
THE UGLY ACT
THE wide and indiscriminating territory of literature, with all its range of human authorship, surely contains few figures less agreeable than W. E. Henley. His reputation would hardly have survived into a centenary year on the strength of such poems as Out of the Night with its bombast and muddled thought (although Mr Connell*2 finds them in all ‘respectable anthologies’ – odd epithet), and the fame of an editor must always be short lived. Only a biographer has time to look through the files of a dead review, listing the faded names of contributors that once, vivid with promise, seemed to cast a lustre over their leader – David Hannay, G. S. Street, Katherine Tynan, Marriott Watson, T. E. Brown, and the like. And yet, in some strange way, this ill-tempered cripple does still live in literary history: we cannot quite forget him; he glares out at us from the shadows of the last century, breathing heavily through his big beard, his fist ready like Long John Silver with his crutch, arousing our attention by the venom of his quarrels, by his ignobility and violence and the long-drawn-out malignity of his character, that elephantine quality which ensured his never forgetting what he considered an injury, although he was always ready to extend the warm hearty palm of forgiveness to a victim when the injury had been inflicted by himself.
The most famous of his quarrels was, of course, that with Stevenson, and the most long lived, for Henley nursed his memory of it nearly twenty years, before at last he had his say about his dead friend in the famous Pall Mall Magazine review of Graham Balfour’s biography. Of that review Henry James wrote, in a letter that Mr Connell might have quoted if he had taken a more impartial view of Henley:
It’s really a rather striking and lurid – and so far interesting case – of long discomfortable jealousy and ranklement turned at last to post-humous (as it were!) malignity, and making the man do, coram publico, his ugly act, risking the dishonour for the assuagement . . . the whole business illustrates how life takes upon itself to give us more true and consistent examples of human unpleasantness than expectation could suggest – makes a given man, II mean, live up to his ugliness.
Mr Connell, however, one must admit, is impartial enough for us to see Henley living up to his ugliness in a yet more extreme form. Wilde, unaffected by the attacks on Dorian Gray that had appeared under Henley’s editorship, had written to him on the death of his daughter a letter of gentle and perceptive sympathy.
I am very sorry indeed to hear of your great loss – I hope you will let me come down quietly to you one evening and over our cigarettes we will talk of the bitter ways of fortune, and the hard ways of life. But, my dear Henley, to work – to work – that is your duty – that is what remains for natures like ours. Work never seems to me a reality, but as a way of getting rid of reality.
It is hard to uncover the source of Henley’s rage against Wilde. Perhaps Wilde’s very generosity – a quality in which Henley was deficient – called it out, in the same way that the money Henley regularly received from Stevenson, even after their friendship had ceased, made it all the more necessary for him to assert, however viciously, his independence. Perhaps it was simply the jealousy of a bad writer for his superior who had replied with such impervious wit and good humour to his critics in the National Observer. Wilde was not vulnerable to journalistic attack, and Henley seems to have felt a shabby delight at the thought that at least he was vulnerable to the law. And so again we have the sight of Henley exposing himself far more drastically than he exposed his victim in those ugly letters in which he kept Whibley in Paris posted on the news of the two trials.
Oscar at Bay was on the whole a pleasing sight . . . Holloway and Bow Street have taken his hair out of curl in more senses than one. And I am pretty sure that he is having a dam bad time . . .
As for Hosker, the news is that he lives with his brother, and is all day steeping, steeping himself in liquor, and moaning for Boasy! I am summoned to play the juryman next Monday (Je m’en fiche pas mal), and it isn’t impossible that I should have at least the occasion of sitting upon him. For, they say, he has lost all nerve, all pose, all everything; and is just now so much the Ordinary Drunkard that he has not even the energy to kill himself.
The depressing nature of the hero is emphasized by a certain drabness in his biographer. This is never at its best a well-written book, and Mr Connell show little power of discrimination in his choice of material. The letters to Whibley are, for the most part, incredibly tedious – repeated complaints of overdue articles, news of his own books, bluff out-dated slang. Here is one typical paragraph to stand for hundreds: ‘The book seems to be thriving no end. Nutt had ordered all the edition from the binder: and therewith the remainder of Ed. Sec
. of A.B. of V. So the oofbird may presently begin to flutter.’
1949
ERIC GILL
ROMAN CATHOLICISM in this country has been a great breeder of eccentrics – one cannot picture a man like Charles Waterton belonging to any other faith, and most of us treasure the memory of some strong individuality who combined a strict private integrity with a carefully arranged disregard of conformity to national ways of thought and behaviour. Eric Gill, with his beard and his biretta, his enormous outspokenness, his amorous gusto, trailing his family across the breadth of England with his chickens, cats, dogs, goats, ducks, and geese, belonged only distantly to this untraditional tradition; he was an intruder – a disturbing intruder among the eccentrics. He had not behind him the baroque internationalism of a great Catholic school, or the little primnesses of a convent childhood, to separate him from his fellow-countrymen along well-prepared lines, with the help of scraps of bizarre worldliness or the tag-end of peasant beliefs picked up in saints’ lives.
Gill’s father was a curate in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion in Brighton, who later conformed to the Anglican Church and became a different sort of curate in Chichester, doomed to bring up eleven children on £150 a year. ‘He was from a “highbrow”. intellectual, agnostic point of view, a complete nonentity; but he loved the Lord His God with all his sentimental mind and all his sentimental soul.’ What Gill gained from his parents was a sense of vocation; money was never the standard by which values were gauged. ‘They never complained about poverty as though it was an injustice. And they never put the pursuit of riches before us as an occupation worthy of good people.’ There were tradesmen in the family, and missionaries in the South Seas. There was even in a sense art, for Gill’s mother had been a singer in an opera company and his father read Kingsley and Carlyle and Tennyson’s poems, and called his son after Dean Farrar’s hero. It was all kindling-wood waiting for a fire – the grim Brighton railway viaduct with the huddled mean houses of Preston Park inserted between the railway lines, the small boy drawing engines and the father writing sermons, and the advertising sign of a machine-made bread against the sky, and a Mrs Hart whispering dreadfully, There was a black-beetle in it’ – and yet a sense of infinite possibility. ‘My favourite author at that time was G. A. Henty, and the only prize I ever got at school was Through the Sikh War. I remember walking home in the moonlight with my father and mother after the prize-giving and school concert in a daze of exaltation and pride.’ The kindling-wood is always there if only a flame be found. In Gill’s case Catholicism supplied the flame.
Collected Essays Page 27
