Dachshunds, of course, are always serious and usually sentimental, but occasionally one has seen them shocked into abandon by a fleshy bone, a good smell, or an amiable tree. Not so the unbearable Kurwenal. Miss Barbanell writes that he had an ‘attractive personality and grand sense of humour’, but those words one uses of a dean who does – sometimes – unbend.
Kurwenal had a roguish sense of fun. The Baroness was given a very fine Roman rug for him on his birthday. Kurwenal said, ‘I find rug nice, will tear.’ Then he paused before he added with a sly look in his eye, ‘Not’.
If you accompanied Kurwenal on his walks you were more likely to be edified than amused. He was fond of discussing religion in a rather evangelical way. ‘On one of these occasions he said to the Baroness, “I often pray”. She asked, “What do you pray for?” Kurwenal answered, “For you.”’ Once, during tea, Professor Max Müller discussed with his hostess the slaughter of dogs for food. ‘He thought that the topic must be of particular interest to Kurwenal and asked the dog whether he had followed the conversation. “Yes,” replied Kurwenal. “Do you wish to say something about it?” “Yes,” answered the dog, and barked out the following: “The Christian religion prohibits killing.”’ Sometimes when I remember that all this was spoken in the German language I feel sorry even for the unbearable Kurwenal: to think of those constructions – that awful drift of guttural words – expressed with a sort of slow pedantry in barks. For Conversations with Kurwenal were quite as protracted as Conversations with Eckermann. With the same neurologist from Berne who was the victim of Kurwenal’s only breach of good manners the dachshund carried on a conversation lasting nearly an hour. One pictures him on a hard ornate chair facing the scientist across a salon table: I doubt if even the Baroness ever held Kurwenal on her knees (it would hardly have been proper and it certainly would not have been suitable). ‘When the scientist was about to leave, he turned to the dachshund and said, “I nearly forgot to ask you what you think about a dog’s soul.” “It is eternal like the soul of a man,” replied Kurwenal.’
Earnest, thoughtful, full of familiar quotations (he knew his Hamlet), his manner lightened very rarely by a touch of diocesan humour, this dachshund possessed as well the awful faculty of always saying – and doing – the right thing. There was the message he sent with his photograph to the Animal Defence Society in London: there was the emotional scene with the military widower.
The Baroness tells how she was visited by a friend, an army officer, who was very sad because his wife had recently passed on. Kurwenal said to his owner, ‘We must cheer him up.’ The dog approached the downcast man. ‘Do you want to say something to him?’ asked the Baroness. ‘Yes,’ replied Kurwenal.
‘You can make up such nice little poems now,’ she said. ‘Make one for him.’
Without much delay Kurwenal recited:
I love no one as much as you.
Love me too.
I should like you with me every day.
Of happiness a ray.
Touched by the intelligent dog’s sympathy, the depressed man’s spirits brightened considerably.
Kurwenal, I am heartlessly glad to say, has ‘passed on’. Otherwise he would probably have become a refugee, for his Christian principles would never have allowed him to support the Nazi party; around Bloomsbury therefore we should have heard continually his admonitory barks, barks about the great Teutonic abstractions – eternity, the soul, barks of advice, reproof, consolation. Strangely enough there is no record in a book crammed with séances, apparitions, invisible pawings, of the great dog’s return. Silence has taken him at last, but I for one feel no doubt at all that somewhere he awaits his mistress – no, that is not a word one can use in connexion with Kurwenal and the Baroness – his former companion, ready to lead the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven firmly among the group souls and the Red Indian ‘guides’, among the odd frequenters of the Kluski séances – the buzzard, the Eastern sage and his weasel, the Afghan with his maneless lion – into the heart of the vague theosophic eternity.
1940
THE BRITISH PIG
THE pig in our literature has always been credited with qualities peculiarly British. Honest, a little stupid, commercially-minded perhaps, but with a trace of idealism in his love affairs, the pig’s best nature is shown in domestic surroundings at a period of peace and material comfort. ‘They led prosperous uneventful lives, and their end was bacon’. Miss Potter has written of Miss Dorcas and Miss Porcas, but the sentence might stand as the epitaph of the whole race. In the latest variant on the tale of the Three Little Pigs, published by the Walt Disney Studios, one notices that same serenity in the portraits of the older generation hanging in the house of the provident pig: ‘Mother’, an old-fashioned parent drawn tenderly in the act of suckling eight children; ‘Uncle Otto’, changed to a Rugby football, but a football at rest, unprofaned as yet by the clamorous, vulgar game; ‘Father’, uncarved, sporting his paper frill with the heavy dignity of a Victorian parent in a Gladstone collar. It is impossible to doubt this strong domestic affection when we find it noticed by an earlier and less sympathetic observer than Miss Potter. The Rev. W. Bingley, using the very terms in which foreign historians have so often described Englishmen, wrote, ‘Selfish, indocile and rapacious, as many think him, no animal has greater sympathy for those of his own kind than the hog.’
But perhaps the British quality of the pig has never been more thoroughly expressed than in the early poem: ‘This little pig went to market (one remembers the pride with which Englishmen have always repeated Napoleon’s jeer); This little pig stayed at home (‘O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!’; ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Well-Content’; ‘I love thee for a heart that’s kind – Not for the knowledge in thy mind’ – it is sometimes hard to remember that Dekker and Mr Davies are writing of men and not of pigs); This little pig had roast beef (no need to emphasize the parallel); This little pig had none; This litle pig cried wee wee wee all the way home.’ Perhaps no pig was more British than this last; a literary pig, for the mother-fixation, the longing for the womb has been the peculiar peril of our minor poets. ‘O mother quiet, breasts of peace’: Rupert Brooke is the obvious modern example, but all through the Georgian period one is aware of the patter of little hoofs along the dark road that leads back to the country sty, the roses round the door, the Mothering Sunday that goes on and on.
Sexual references, it will be noticed, are quite absent from this early poem, as they are from the rather cruel, politically-conscious story of the Three Little Pigs. It really seems that at this period of pig literature the bigger the litter the greater the inhibition, a situation closely paralleled in Victorian England. Miss Potter, I think, was the first to throw any real light on the Love Life of the Pig, and this she did with a delicacy and a psychological insight that recall Miss Austen. She drew for the first time in literature the feminine pig. Hitherto a pig had been just a pig; one usually assumed the sex to be masculine. But in Pig-Wig, whom Pigling Bland, it will be remembered, rescued from the cottage of the fatal Mr Peter Thomas Piperson, the female pig was revealed to be as completely British as the male: inquisitive, unromantic, demanding to be amused, fond of confectionery and admirably unselfconscious:
She asked so many questions that it became embarrassing to Pigling Bland.
He was obliged to shut his eyes and pretend to sleep. She became quiet, and there was a smell of peppermint.
‘I thought you had eaten them?’ said Pigling, waking suddenly.
‘Only the corners,’ replied Pig-Wig, studying the sentiments (they were conversation peppermints) by the firelight.
‘I wish you wouldn’t; he might smell them through the ceiling,’ said the alarmed Pigling.
Pig-Wig put back the sticky peppermints into her pocket. ‘Sing something,’ she demanded.
‘I am sorry . . . I have toothache,’ said Pigling much dismayed.
‘Then I will sing,’ replied Pig-Wig. ‘You will not mind if I say iddy t
iddity? I have forgotten some of the words.’
It is impossible to deny that this is a peculiarly English love scene; no other nation, except perhaps the Russian, would have behaved or written quite like this, and the sentiment of the ending, the luxurious indulgence in wistfulness and idealism: ‘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’ would be inconceivable to a race of pigs whose prosperity had been more precarious, to whom the struggle for existence had been more crudely presented. American pigs, for example, who meet their end, like so many other Americans, abruptly in Chicago, would have been at the same time more brutal and more soft-hearted.
Both these rather contradictory qualities appear in the Walt Disney Studios’ brilliant adaptation of Three Little Pigs (and I should like, before I forget in the fascination of the story, warmly to congratulate all those concerned in the production of this book: the chief electrician, the cameraman, the fashion designer, the art editor, the scenario writer, the director and assistant director, the producer, the author and the composer of the theme song). These pigs are no longer quite so British, which is to say that they are no longer quite so piggish. The curled tails, the improvident flutings, the house of straw and the house of twigs and the house of brick have never been more tenderly portrayed, but the wolf never more brutally. This is the wolf of experience, not of dream; Wall Street smashes, financiers’ suicides, the machine guns of the gangster are behind this wolf. Watch him outside the house of twigs, sitting in a basket, a sheepskin falling on either side of his ferocious muzzle like the wig of a Jeffreys: this is Justice conniving at unjust executions and letting the gangster free. And watch him again outside the house of bricks in a rusty hat, in an overcoat, in a false yellow beard: ‘I’m the Kleen-e-ze Brush man, I’m giving away free samples’: he is every share pusher personified, the man who knows of a new gold mine, a swell oil field.
But just because the whole story is more realistic than the English version, the American mind shrinks from the ruthless logical denouement. The two improvident pigs are not swallowed by the wolf, they escape and take refuge with their brother in the brick house, and even the wolf escapes with a scalding. The wolf’s escape, indeed, is the most American aspect of this transplanted tale. How often one has watched the methods of justice satirized upon the screen with a realism that would be impossible in England; yet nothing is done about it, the wolf escapes. The English story is the better one, to sacrifice two pigs that the third may live in safety, to sacrifice the improvident pigs that the provident pig may be remembered for ever in his famous aphorism: ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’
1934
GEORGE MOORE AND OTHERS
A SUNK railway track and a gin distillery flank the gritty street. There is something Victorian about the whole place – an air of ugly commercial endeavour mixed with odd idealisms and philanthropies. It isn’t only the jumble of unattractive titles on the dusty spines, the huge weight of morality at six-pence a time; even the setting has an earnestness . . .. The public-houses are like a lesson in temperance.
It isn’t all books by any means in the book market: a dumb man presides over the first stall given up to paint-brushes and dividers; we pass wireless parts, rubber heels, old stony collections of nuts and bolts, gramophone records, cycle tyres, spectacles (hospital prescriptions made up on the spot under the shadow of the gin distillery), a case of broken (I was going to say motheaten) butterflies – privet-hawks and orange-tips and red admirals losing their antennae and powder, shabby like second-hand clothes. One stall doesn’t display its wares at all: only labels advertising Smell Bombs, Itching Powder, Cigarette Bangs – Victorian, too, the painful physical humour reminding us of Cruickshank on the poor and Gilbert on old age.
And then at last the books. It is a mistake to look for bargains here, or even to hope to find any books you really want – unless you happen to want Thackeray, Froude, or Macaulay on the cheap. Those authors are ubiquitous. No, the book market is the place for picking up odd useless information. Here, for instance, is Dibdin’s Purification of Sewage and Water, published by the Sanitary Publishing Company, next to Spiritual Counsel for District Visitors, Submarine Cables, and Chicago Police Problems, published – it seems broadminded – by the Chicago University Press. Of course, there are lots of folios called View of the Lakes or of Italy, Switzerland, the Tyrol, as the case may be; and one can buy, in pale-blue paper parts, Bessemer on Working Blast Furnaces. Doll Caudel in Paris seems to be part of a series and looks a little coarse.
Somebody had left a book open on a stall, and I read with some amazement: ‘George Moore had a great idea of duty. “If I have one thing,” he says in his diary, “it is an imperative sense of duty.” He was always possessed with the full sense of ‘doing his duty.’ He wished to do it; and he prayed to God to help him do it. But what duty?’ What, indeed? Of course, one remembers the scene in Salve, when Moore said a prayer with Mr Mahaffy and was presented with a prayer-book, but this emphasis on duty seemed a little odd until I found the title-page and the author – Samuel Smiles, LL.D. This George Moore was not a writer, but a wholesale merchant and a philanthropist, and here, perhaps, is the real delight of the book market – nowhere else would one be likely to find the life of a Victorian draper. And it is rewarding. Smiles deserved his popularity; there is a bold impressionist vitality about his style; he roughs in very well the atmosphere of commercial travelling: the astute offer of a favourite snuff, the calculated jest, the encounters in hotel rooms – the Union Hotel, Birmingham, and the Star at Manchester, the seedy atmosphere of benevolence, what he calls ‘Mr Moore’s labours of love’: the hospital for incurables, the penny bank, the London Porters’ Benevolent Association, the Kensington Auxiliary Bible Society, the Pure Literature Society (Mr Moore’s favourite book, unlike his namesake’s, was The Memoirs and Remains of Dr M’Cheyne). His oddest philanthopy perhaps was ‘in marrying people who were not, but who ought to have been, married’ – or else his attempt to introduce copies of the Bible into the best Paris hotels. But Dr Smiles had more than vigour; he had a macabre if ungrammatical imagination, as when he describes the end of the first Mrs Moore. ‘Her remains were conveyed to Cumberland. On arrival at Carlisle, Mr Moore slept in the Station Hotel. It seemed strange to him that while in his comfortable bed, his dead wife should be laying cold in the railway truck outside, within sight of the hotel windows.’
Macabre – but not quite so macabre as this other book which had lost half its title-page, but seems to be called The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death. Published in 1746, and illustrated with some grim little copper-plates, it contains ‘a great variety of amusing and well-attested Instances of Persons who have return’d to Life in their Coffins, in their Graves, under the Hands of the Surgeons, and after they had remain’d apparently dead for a considerable Time in the Water’. A scholarly little work, which throws some doubts upon the story that Duns Scotus ‘bit his own Hands in his Grave’, it carries in the musty pages some of the atmosphere of an M. R. James story – there is an anecdote from Basingstoke too horrible to set down here which might have pleased the author of O Whistle and I’ll Come to You. I was pleased to find a few more details of Ann Green, who was executed at Oxford in 1650 and was revived by her friends – about whose resurrection, it may be remembered, Anthony à Wood wrote some rather bad verses – and before laying the book back beside the battered brown tin trunk which carried the salesman’s stock, I noted this recipe for reviving the apparently dead: ‘We ought to irritate his Nostrils by introducing into them the Juice of Onions, Garlick, and Horse-radish, or the feather’d End of a Quill, or the Point of a Pencil: stimulate his Organs of Touch with Whips and Nettles; and if possible shock his Ears by hideous Shrieks and excessive Noises.’
Poor human body which must be clung to at all costs. There is very little light relie
f in the book market – an old copy of Three Men on the Bummel, that boisterous work, all sobs and horseplay, and a promising folio out of my reach called simply The Imperial Russian Dinner Service. The smell of mortality, morality, and thrown-out book go together – and the smell of the antiquated Metropolitan Line. Here is another moralist. In Posthuma Christiana (1712, price 6d.) William Crouch, the Quaker, laments the Restoration – ‘The Roaring, Swearing, Drinking, Revelling, Debauchery, and Extravagancy of that Time I cannot forget,’ and a few lines, as I turned the pages, caught the imagination as Blind Pew once did at the Benbow Inn. He is quoting an account of the Quakers, thirty-seven men and eighteen women, who were banished to Jamaica. ‘The Ship was called The Black Eagle, and lay at anchor in Bugby’s Hole, the Master’s name was Fudge, by some called Lying Fudge.’ They lay in the Thames seven weeks, and half of them died and were buried in the marshes below Gravesend. ‘Twenty-seven survived, and remained on board the Ship; and there was one other Person of whom no certain Account could be given.’
That is the kind of unexpected mystery left on one’s hands by a morning in the book market. A storm was coming up behind the gin distillery, and the man with the Itching Powder was packing up his labels – trade isn’t good these days for his kind of bomb. It was time to emerge again out of the macabre past into the atrocious present.
1939
AT HOME
ONE gets used to anything: that is what one hears on many lips these days,*2 though everybody, I suppose, remembers the sense of shock he felt at the first bombed house he saw. I think of one in Woburn Square neatly sliced in half. With its sideways exposure it looked like a Swiss chalet: there were a pair of skiing sticks hanging in the attic, and in another room a grand piano cocked one leg over the abyss. The combination of music and skiing made one think of the Sanger family and Constant Nymphs dying pathetically of private sorrow to popular applause. In the bathroom the geyser looked odd and twisted seen from the wrong side, and the kitchen impossibly crowded with furniture until one realized one had been given a kind of mouse-eye view from behind the stove and the dresser – all the space where people used to move about with toast and tea-pots was out of sight. But after quite a short time one ceased to look twice at the intimate exposure of interior furnishings, and waking on a cement floor among strangers, one no longer thinks what an odd life this is. ‘One gets used to anything.’
Collected Essays Page 35
