Old Peter Daniel is writing to Felix:
The death of your dear Father on the 20th instant ends for me a long life of intimacy and friendship; I first made his acquaintance on the benches of the Classical school of the Royal Academy, and on Saturday, 23rd Dec. I reached my 90th year. He was a few years my junior, tho’ as a distinguished man he was always my senior and I always looked on him as such. In fact I felt distinguished by his recognition of me.
I regret therefore that I cannot be present at the last sad scene to do honour to his memory. For years now bodily weakness will not permit me to venture into the streets or even into our little garden.
They put Henry in Highgate Cemetery, grave number 19216, SQ 109, which grave to be maintained for the cost of 10/6 yearly payable to the London Cemetery Company; but costs have gone up since then, and the London Cemetery perhaps does not even know, any more, where to send the bill.
•
After his death, museum officials fell into squabbles about his possessions. Sir C. Hercules Read, Keeper of the British Museum, writes to Felix:
Dear Mr. Wallis,
. . . I was a little surprised, though I had no cause to complain, that I had heard nothing of his death. As I dare say you are aware, I was a very old friend, of something near to forty years’ standing, and I think he confided in me as much as he did in anyone. I knew, moreover, that at the time of his death he had a good number of things in his possession that he would have liked to remain in this country, if possible. This made me anxious to know what was likely to become of this branch of his estate. . . .
And Bernard Rackham of the South Kensington (or Victoria and Albert) Museum by the following September, is writing crossly to Sir Hercules:
27th September, 1918.
Dear Sir Hercules,
. . . I understood from Hobson that the fine turquoise vase with black inscriptions from Rakka (fig. 8. in “the Oriental Influence”) is one that you would be glad to have for the British Museum. It is also a thing I should like to see kept here, but it is not essential to us, as we have already fairly good pieces of that type. The blue and white hexagonal vase, on the other hand, I feel to be highly desirable for us to exhibit side by side with our panels of hexagonal tile from the Great Mosque in Damascus, many of which came to us through Henry Wallis several years ago. It also has a great value, as a splendid type of industrial art, from the special point of view of this Museum. There are further reasons I should like to put before you which, may I say candidly, in my opinion strengthen our claim to this vase. . . .
I hope therefore you will not mind if he sells us the blue and white vase. We should in return be willing (the Director agrees to this) to waive our claim to the turquoise vase from Rakka.
Yours sincerely
Bernard Rackham
•
They are all dead now—all the Peacocks, all the Merediths. Mary Ellen’s little boys, Arthur and Harold, and their sister Edith, and George Meredith, and Henry Wallis and Edward Nicolls, and all their children, and all the people they knew. And Sir C. Hercules Read, and Bernard Rackham, too. Hands that held needles, paintbrushes, pens. The potter who drew, with a fine brush, across the face of the handsome majolica platter he has made, the smiling gods at their earthly pleasures.
The books by George Meredith in fine bindings line shelves. In the cupboard in a velvet case lies a drawing from the hand of another young lover, of a beautiful, large-eyed woman smiling a little, demure in her bonnet. Perhaps the artist is saying something that causes her to forget, for a moment, some bitter things she has learned. His enamored pencil does not catch, perhaps, a certain fated expression in her eyes. Kisses, from whomever, have left no imprint on the pretty lips. The young lover sees only his own kisses there. She will die soon. He will grow old. All this is more than a hundred years ago now. “Earthly love speedily becomes unmindful but love from heaven is mindful for ever more,” it was to have said on her tombstone. No one knows where her grave is now.
Painters, writers, potters—all are dead. The greater lives along with the lesser. Things remain. Mary Ellen’s pink parasol lies in a trunk in a parlor in Purley. Henry’s drawings lie in the boxroom upstairs. Henry’s little painting of George as Chatterton hangs in the Tate Gallery, properly humidified. The hair from Shelley’s head that Peacock gave to Henry, hair from the sacred head of Shelley, Henry had put into a little ring, and people always kept it safe, but thieves broke into the house in Purley a year or two ago and stole it, and who can say where it is now? The turquoise vase from Rakka is safe in the museum; but I don’t know what happened to the majolica platter.
NOTES
1.Holman Hunt remembers her as a “dashing horsewoman” in his memoirs. Sir Edmund Hornby says, in his Autobiography, “there are only three poets whose poetry I can appreciate, and they are Pope, Dryden, and Oliver Goldsmith. Tennyson, Swinburne, Morris & Co. I simply do not understand. Perhaps Mrs. Meredith, the wife of George Meredith, was right when she declared I had a ‘Manchester mind.’” Clodd says in his Memories that those “who knew her say she was charming, with intellectual gifts far above the average.”
2.The belongings described here were carefully kept by Henry Wallis after Mary Ellen’s death. Fireside Reverie, like many of Wallis’s important paintings, seems to have disappeared.
3.We are so used to the paradigm of family conflict in the modern family—conservative parents and radical children—that it is hard for us to remember that in the mid-nineteenth century the situation was almost exactly reversed. That is, the hard-working, serious, earnest, increasingly proper young people must have sometimes been scandalized by the wicked and irreverent older generation, with its eighteenth-century heritage of individualism, atheism, freedom, and defiance. The Victorian Mr. L’Estrange, for example, wrote to Peacock’s granddaughter in 1875 that Peacock’s dear old friends, “the Shelley group were ‘a rum lot,’” and that old T. J. Hogg was one of the “monsters of the male sex.” “But let these riff-raff rest.” What the granddaughter, Edith Nicolls, thought, who had been bounced on the knees of this kindly riff-raff, is not recorded. It is easy to see Mary Ellen having more in common with them than with her own generation—being born too late, perhaps, rather than having been born too early, though in many ways she was a modern woman. Her conflict with George Meredith, then, can be seen as a conflict between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of life, whose tragic outcome ironically had the effect, via Meredith’s novels, of in some degree influencing social theory to return to values that she would have found more comprehensible.
4.This obituary of Mrs. Love is printed in K. N. Cameron’s Shelley and His Circle (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 284–285. The same volume also contains Dr. Eleanor Nicholes’s useful short biography of Peacock, to which, together with Edith Nicolls’s “Biographical Notice” in the Cole edition (1875), and the “Biographical Introduction” in the Halliford edition (1924–1934) of Peacock’s works, I am chiefly indebted for details of Peacock’s life. The principal biography of Meredith is Lionel Stevenson’s The Ordeal of George Meredith. Because all of these biographies are standard and easily available, I have not burdened the text with specific sources.
I do refer in the text, however, to a hypothetical composite figure, the Biographer, who is responsible for handing down traditional biographical information. Without meaning to impugn individual real biographers, I am sometimes severe upon the Biographer, for he is the purveyor of received attitudes and accepted traditions that often turn out to be misinformed or even willfully benighted. This is usually a function of his imprisonment in a curious set of Victorian attitudes, which seems to plague modern biographers as well as Victorian ones.
5.Here, for instance, the Biographer is actually Mr. L’Estrange, mentioned above, and to whom we will return later.
6.We might ask here what, if any, are the special problems and responsibilities of the Biographer?
Biographies of literary figures seem fraught with special perils because they do have an obligation to literary criticism. Some literary critics would deny this; in an effort to avoid the obvious pitfalls of the “biographical fallacy” and its tendency to make facile connections, especially reductivist, Freudian ones, criticism has exerted a great deal of effort to develop ways of looking at literature and leaving the writer out of it. Biographers of literary figures have often erred in the opposite direction, revealing that at such-and-such a time the writer was engaged in such-and-such a work, without imagining that there was much connection between that work and the writer’s ongoing life experiences, except when the subject matter of the work is too autobiographical to be ignored—as in Meredith’s Modern Love. But this is wrong, and Mr. L’Estrange (see here and here) was on the right track when he inquired of Edith Nicolls whether “the Disappointment you speak of might explain the querulous tone of the greater part of his [Peacock’s] prose. Does it do so?” Very likely. Disappointments affect tone. The people the writer knows may affect or alter the controlling themes and metaphors of his works. That they do so is really the ultimate reason for concerning ourselves with the lives of writers at all, and would be the ultimate justification for books such as this one.
Admittedly, the present work carries the assumption about the relation of the writer and his work to its logical extreme by using literary works to comment upon lives with no qualifying commentary at all. This can be more easily justified on artistic grounds than as sound biographical methodology. Literary works are reality digested, not transcribed. But this work, really, has an axe to grind in the service of the Lesser Lives, and I have been more concerned to attend to its coherence as a work of art. I shall refer to biography considered as art, specifically fictional art, presently.
This is partly just an argument for attention by literary critics to what Frederick Crews has aptly called “a sense of historical dynamics,” or, more simply, plain sense about the realities of human nature and human experience, which must shape literary works. Literary critics are often colossally insensitive to even the most ordinary considerations—let us say chronological and spatial ones; a literary work must be composed somewhere, takes a certain amount of time to do, will turn out differently if written longhand or typed on a typewriter. This is not an argument for straightforward biographical criticism, whose problems are well known, but for requiring of literary critics that they be something of the psychologist, and more controversially, of the novelist.
Like the critic, the biographer should have in him something of the psychologist and the historian, and he should have something of the novelist in him too, which seems on the face of it to be a heretical remark, for everyone knows that the biographer cannot make anything up. A biography is not and should not be fiction, precisely because a balanced and accurate biography must be at the service of the literary critic who hopes correctly to discern the operative pattern of works, or groups of works. This view, of course, tends to see biography wholly as the tool of the critic and to ignore its artistic function, to which we will return.
The critic of literature, and especially of Victorian literature, is still largely at the mercy of the Victorian biographer whose prudery, reticence, and, from the twentieth-century point of view, lack of common sense are well known. This being the case, the extent to which biographical traditions established in the Victorian era are still upheld is truly astonishing. The Merediths are a case in point, but almost any Victorian figure is another. Peacock’s relationship with his wife, for example, has been left undisturbed by the reticent Biographer, who does not stop to inquire, say, into the emotional and physical probabilities of the behavior of a man only forty, a “pagan,” moreover, unconstrained by religion or Victorian mores—a worldly man whose wife became mad. Is it likely that he spent the next forty years in disappointed chastity? Is it important? Or, take the assertion of the biographical tradition, unchanged until the 1950’s, that Peacock never saw Mary Ellen again after her sexual adventure with Wallis. Its importance is easier to see: it has had the effect of ascribing to Peacock a completely different set of moral values than he in fact held, making the sophisticated, eighteenth-century gentleman into a Victorian Heavy Father because rigid unforgivingness was the only sort of behavior a Victorian biographer could imagine. And thinking of Peacock as being full of moralistic vindictiveness cannot but affect a critical evaluation of his works. (Peacock himself, it should be noted, was a firm believer in reticence in biography and would take great issue with these remarks. It is said he was vigorously indignant when Trelawney wrote about Byron’s deformity.)
The tradition of Peacock’s reticence provides another case in point. Reticence, vaguely equated with modesty, seems to be a quality attributed to all famous people by their biographers. Peacock’s, it is said, was so extreme that he would allow no one in his library. But a recent critic, Carl Dawson, in His Fine Wit, makes the sensible speculation, based on the poet Robert Buchanan’s disapproving remark that Peacock’s mind was a “terrible ‘thesaurus eroticus,’” that the library was full of dirty books—ribald classics, anyway—which Peacock was fully aware were not compatible with bourgeois Victorian notions of decency. (Mary Ellen, and later her daughter, Edith, were given full run of the place, in any case.)
Biographers, especially Victorian but modern ones too, favor reticence and inattention to emotional realities or probabilities—but they are also afflicted by the literary conventions operative when they are writing. This is the oddest part of all. We are familiar with the circular relation of life and art, and the difficulty sometimes in telling which is which. Although fictional characters ostensibly behave like real people the author has seen, people do sometimes behave like people in books they have read. It would be difficult to analyze the relationship among (1) Anne Brontë’s description of the death of her heroine, the wicked Lady Lowborough (see here or here), who after an elopement like Mary Ellen’s, “died at last . . . in penury, neglect, and utter wretchedness,” and (2) S. M. Ellis’s description of Mary Ellen’s end: “But the poor woman never found happiness, and her short, tragic life was nearing the end. . . . Ever restless, she wandered from place to place, seeking to drown bitter memories and regrets. . . .” And “all those who remember Mrs. Meredith in the last years of her life state that she was always sad and constantly in tears. Her warm, vehement nature could not meet sorrow with resignation or be softened by it. She would pace up and down the room in uncontrollable emotion,” and so on, straight down to the unmarked grave. Needless to say that Debt, that awful Victorian specter, was also present, and (3) Mr. Justin Vulliamy’s notion that the adulterous wife going home to live with her father, was “unaccountable,” inexplicable.
There is a relationship among these three attitudes. Fictional endings are dictated by a sense of retributive justice; the interpretation of a real life, by both Mr. Vulliamy and the Biographer, appears to be influenced by notions of decorum and retribution, but also by fictional convention.
Biography, being affected by the fictional conventions with which it is contemporary, thus can be seen to have the same function as fiction, especially for the reader. In a sense it is fiction. Fiction, conversely, presents itself as “real,” as a version of reality. In either case the controlling vision or imaginative grasp of the writer in managing the materials of human experience will produce an effective (or ineffective) work of art, whose origins in the verifiable life of a historical figure, or in the same material controlled by the “imaginative” writer—put through his personal systems of defense and so on—are probably a matter of very little importance to the reader. As far as the reader’s responses are concerned, there is finally very little difference. It is in this sense that the biographer is after all a novelist, as far as his responsibilities, if not his powers, go—and in this sense that the critic must also be one. Like the biographer, the critic, in commenting upon fiction, must perform an empathetic (fictional) act.
This is especially demanded of a critic if he does not have at his service reliable biography: that is, undistorted by factual error or by a really unreliable sensibility on the part of the biographer. Good critics would no doubt be better off with mechanically compiled lists of “facts” from which to work, rather than with those persuasive, interpretive fictional biases that are often so hard to spy out.
But what, anyway, are the “facts” of a writer’s life? That George Meredith had an erring wife is a “fact,” but for him, the existence of those fictional heroines Mrs. Mount and Mrs. Lovell is also “fact.” The one is an external, the other an interior fact. The danger for the biographer, or critic, lies in mismatching external and interior equivalents. I suppose there is no safeguard against doing this except, one hopes, common sense and a (no doubt) suspect degree of empathy, especially with the “seamy” side of human nature; it is this side of himself the writer is likely to be in conflict about, and to find himself impelled to deal with—or to sedulously avoid dealing with—in his works. The writer is more likely to treat, directly or between the lines, his relationship with his wife than the one with his grocer. Which returns me to my point: the biographer must be a historian, but also a novelist and a snoop.
7.It seems, in fact, to have been Dr. Gryffydh’s neck which was almost broken. Here is Peacock’s story of his adventure in a letter to a friend.
The other day I prevailed on my new acquaintance, Dr. Griffith [sic], to accompany me at midnight to the black cataract, a favorite haunt of mine, about 2¼ miles from hence. Mr. Lloyd, whom I believe I have mentioned to you more than once, volunteered to be of the party; and at twenty minutes past eleven, lighted by the full-orbed moon, we sallied forth, to the no small astonishment of mine host, who protested he never expected to see us all again. —The effect was truly magnificent. —The water descends from a mountainous glen down a winding rock, and then precipitates itself, in one sheet of foam, over its black base, into a capacious bason [sic], the sides of which are all but perpendicular, and covered with hanging oak and hazel. —Evans, in the Cambrian Itinerary, describes it as an abode of damp and horror, and adds, that the whole cataract cannot be seen in one view, as the sides are too steep and slippery to admit of clambering up, and the top of the upper fall is invisible from below. —Mr. Evans seems to have labored under a small degree of alarm, which prevented accurate investigation, for I have repeatedly climbed this unattemptable rock and obtained this impossible view; as he or any one else might do with very little difficulty; though Dr. Gryffydh, the other night, trusting to a rotten branch, had a fall of fifteen feet perpendicular, and but for an intervening hazel, would infallibly have been hurled to the bottom.
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 20
