He seems to have been a serpent of serpents in the bosom of all the nineties. That in itself endears him to one. The way everyone dropped him with a shudder is almost fascinating.
He died about 1912, when he was already forgotten: an outcast and in a sense a wastrel.
We can well afford to remember him again: he was not nothing, as so many of the estimables were. He was a gentleman of education and culture, pining, for the show’s sake, to be a priest. The Church shook him out of her bosom before he could take orders. So he wrote himself Fr. Rolfe. It would do for Frederick, and if you thought it meant Father Rolfe, good old you!
But then his other passion, for medieval royalism, overcame him, and he was Baron Corvo when he signed his name. Lord Rook, Lord Raven, the bird was the same as Fr. Rolfe.
Hadrian the Seventh is, as far as his connexion with the Church was concerned, largely an autobiography of Frederick Rolfe. It is the story of a young English convert, George Arthur Rose (Rose foi Rolfe), who has had bitter experience with the priests and clergy, and years of frustration and disappointment, till he arrives at about the age of forty, a highly-bred, highly-sensitive, super-aesthetic man, ascetic out of aestheticism, athletic the same, religious the same. He is to himself beautiful, with a slim, clean-muscled grace, much given to cold baths, white-faced with a healthy pallor, and pure, that is sexually chaste, because of his almost morbid repugnance for women. He had no desires to conquer or to purify. Women were physically repulsive to him, and therefore chastity cost him nothing, the Church would be a kind of asylum.
The priests and clergy, however, turned him down, or dropped him like the proverbial snake in the bosom, and inflamed him against them, so that he was burned through and through with white, ceaseless anger. His anger had become so complete as to be pure: it really was demonish. But it was all nervous and imaginative, an imaginative, sublimated hate, of a creature born crippled in its affective organism.
The first part of the book, describing the lonely man in a London lodging, alone save for his little cat, whose feline qualities of aloofness and self-sufficiency he so much admires, fixes the tone at once. And in the whole of literature I know nothing that resembles those amazing chapters, when the bishop and the archbishop come to him, and when he is ordained and makes his confession. Then the description of the election of the new pope, the cardinals shut up in the Vatican, the failure of the Way of Scrutiny and the Way of Access, the fantastic choice, by the Way of Compromise, of George Arthur Rose, is too extraordinary and daring ever to be forgotten.
From being a rejected aspirant to the priesthood, George Arthur Rose, the man in the London lodging, finds himself suddenly not only consecrated, but elected head of all the Catholic Church. He becomes Pope Hadrian the Seventh.
Then the real fantasy and failure begins. George Arthur Rose, triple-crowned and in the chair of Peter, is still very much Frederick Rolfe, and perfectly consistent. He is the same man, but now he has it all his own way: a White Pope, pure, scrupulous, chaste, living on two dollars a day, an aesthetic idealist, and really, a super- Protestant. He has the British instinct of authority, which is now gloriously gratified. But he has no inward power, power to make true change in the world. Once he is on the throne of high power, we realize his futility.
He is, like most modern men, especially reformers and idealists, through and through a Protestant. Which means, his life is a changeless fervour of protest. He can’t help it. Everything he comes into contact with he must criticize, with all his nerves, and react from. Fine, subtle, sensitive, and almost egomaniac, he can accept nothing but the momentary thrill of aesthetic appreciation. His life-flow is like a stream washing against a false world, and ebbing itself out in a marsh and a hopeless bog.
So it is with George Arthur Rose, become Pope Hadrian the Seventh, while he is still in a state of pure protest, he is vivid and extraordinary. But once he is given full opportunity to do as he wishes, and his raison d’etre as a Protestant is thereby taken away, he becomes futile, and lapses into the ridiculous.
He can criticize men, exceedingly well: hence his knack of authority. But the moment he has to build men into a new form, construct something out of men by making a new unity among them, swarming them upon himself as bees upon a queen, he is ridiculous and powerless, a fraud.
It is extraordinary how blind he is, with all his keen insight. He no more “gets” his cardinals than we get the men on Mars. He can criticize them, and analyse them, and reject or condone them. But the real old Adam that is in them, the old male instinct for power, this, to him, does not exist.
In actual life, of course, the cardinals would drop a Hadrian down the oubliette, in ten minutes, and without any difficulty at all, once he was inside the Vatican. And Hadrian would be utterly flabbergasted, and call it villainy.
And what’s the good of being Pope, if you’ve nothing but protest and aesthetics up your sleeve? Just like the reformers who are excellent, while fighting authority. But once authority disappears, they fall into nothingness. So with Hadrian the Seventh. As Pope, he is a fraud. His critical insight makes him a politician of the League of Nations sort, on a vast and curious scale. His medievalism makes him a truly comical royalist. But as a man, a real power in the world, he does not exist.
Hadrian unwinding the antimacassar is a sentimental farce. Hadrian persecuted to the point of suicide by a blowsy lodging- house keeper is a bathetic farce. Hadrian and the Socialist “with gorgonzola teeth” is puerile beyond words. It is all amazing, that a man with so much insight and fineness, on the one hand, should be so helpless and just purely ridiculous, when it comes to actualities.
He simply has no conception of what it is to be a natural or honestly animal man, with the repose and the power that goes with the honest animal in man. His attempt to appreciate his Cardinal Ragna — probably meant for Rampolla — is funny. It is as funny as would be an attempt on the part of the late President Wilson to appreciate Hernan Cortes, or even Theodore Roosevelt, supposing they were put face to face.
The time has come for stripping: cries Hadrian. Strip then, if there are falsities to throw away. But if you go on and on and on peeling the onion down, you’ll be left with blank nothing between your hands, at last. And this is Hadrian’s plight. He is assassinated in the streets of Rome by a Socialist, and dies supported by, three Majesties, sublimely absurd. And there is nothing to it. Hadrian has stripped himself and everything else till nothing is left but absurd conceit, expiring in the arms of the Majesties.
Lord! be to me a Saviour, not a judge! is Hadrian’s prayer: when he is not affectedly praying in Greek. But why should such a white streak of blamelessness as Hadrian need saving so badly? Saved from what? If he has done his best, why mind being judged — at least by Jesus, who in this sense is any man’s peer?
The brave man asks for justice: the rabble cries for favours! says some old writer. Why does Hadrian, in spite of all his protest, go in with the rabble?
It is a problem. The book remains a clear and definite book of our epoch, not to be swept aside. If it is the book of a demon, as the contemporaries said, it is the book of a man-demon, not of a mere poseur. And if some of it is caviare, at least it came out of the belly of a live fish.
The Origins of Prohibition, by J. A. Krout
This is a book which one may honestly call “an excellent piece of work.” Myself, I feel I have done a more or less excellent piece of work, in having read it. Because it wearied me a little.
But then, I am not an American, and have never, to my knowledge, had a single relative in the United States. And I am a novelist, not a scientific historian. All the American names mean nothing to me, and to this day I don’t know where Rhode Island is. So there are limits to my sympathy.
Yet I have read the book, and realize it is a sound piece of work: an attempt to convey, dispassionately, the attitude of the American people to alcoholic drinks, since the early days of the colonies. This is not, strictly, an inquiry into the origins of pro
hibition. For that, one would have to go deeper. It is a record of the development of the prohibitionist feeling: almost, a statistical record. There are copious notes, and an extraordinary bibliography: good scholarship, but, on the whole, flat reading.
One wonders if anything should try to be so angelically dispassionate: anything except an adding-up machine. Reading the chapters about excise laws, and political campaigns, a deep depression comes over one. There are gleams of warmth and vividness elsewhere. The very words malmsey, and sack, and pale sherry, cheer one up a bit. And the famous cycle molasses — rum — slaves — molasses- rum — slaves — makes one pause: as does the glimpse of Washington’s army getting its whisky rations. As soon as we catch sight of an actual individual, like Dr. Rush, we prick up our ears — but Dr. Rush turns out rather boring. The Washingtonians, with the Cold Water Army, and Hawkins and Gough, might really have been lively; while to step into the sobbing literature of teetotalism is a relaxation. But the author is inexorable. He won’t laugh, and he won’t let us laugh. He won’t get angry, and he prevents our getting angry. He refuses to take an attitude, except that of impartiality, which is the worst of all attitudes. So he leaves us depressed, not wanting to hear another word about temperance, teetotalism, prohibition. We want to relegate the whole business into the class of “matters indifferent,” where John Knox put it.
We can’t, quite, since prohibition has us by the leg. So perhaps it is as well to read the book, which helps us to come to a decision. For myself — dropping all pretence at impartiality — it makes me regret that ardent spirits were ever discovered. Why, oh, why, as soon as the New World waved the sugar-cane, did it start turning molasses into rum? And as soon as the wheat rose in the colonies, why did it disappear into whisky? Apparently, until the time of the Renaissance and the discovery of America, men actually drank no liquors — or very little. Beer, cider, wine, these had kept the world going, more or less, till the days of Columbus. Why did all Europe and America suddenly, after the Renaissance, demand powerful liquor? get drunk quick? It is a mystery, and a tragedy, and part of our evolution.
That distilled liquor has been more of a curse than a blessing to mankind, few, surely, will deny. It is only the curse of whisky which has driven wine and beer into disrepute. Until a few decades ago, even the temperance societies had nothing to say against beer. But now it is the whole hog.
In the conclusion, which is cautiously called “A Summary View,” the author finds that prohibition in America was inevitable: firstly, because a self-governing people must be self-responsible. “Intemperance might be tolerated in a divine-right monarchy, but in a republic it endangered the very existence of the state. No popular government could long endure, unless the electorate was persuaded or forced to follow the straight and narrow path of sobriety.” — ”It was ridiculous to talk of the will of the sovereign people, when intoxicated citizens were taken to the polls.”
This is confused thinking. How can the electorate of a popular government be forced to follow the straight and narrow path? Persuaded, an electorate may be. But how, and by whom can it be forced?
The answer is, by itself: an electorate forcing itself to do a thing it doesn’t want to do, and doesn’t intend to do, is indeed making a display of the sovereign will of the people.
But this is the anomaly of popular government. Obviously America failed to persuade herself, or to be persuaded, into the straight and narrow path of sobriety. So she went one worse, and forced herself.
And this is the dreary, depressing reality. A republic with a “popular government” can only exist honourably when the bulk of the individuals choose, of their own free will, to follow the straight and narrow path necessary to the common good. That is, when every man governs himself, responsibly, from within. Which, say what we may, was the very germ of the “American idea.”
The dreary and depressing fact is that this germ is dying, if not dead. Temperance reformers decided, after long experience, that America was not to be persuaded. Her citizens could not, or would not control themselves, with regard to liquor.
Therefore they must be coerced. By whom? By the electorate itself. Every man voting prohibition for his neighbour voted it for himself, of course. But somewhere he made a mental reservation. He intended, himself, to have his little drink still, if he wanted it. Since he, good citizen, knew better than to abuse himself.
The cold misery of every man seeking to coerce his neighbour, in the name of righteousness, creeps out of these pages and makes depressing reading.
The second reason why prohibition was inevitable — because it is advantageous to industry — is sound as far as economics go. But how far do national economics go, even in America, in the ordinary individual? And even then, it is temperance, not prohibition, which is truly advantageous to industry.
One is chilled and depressed. The saloon was bad, and is best abolished. Myself, I believe that. But in prohibition one sees an even worse thing: a nation, knowing it cannot control itself from the inside, self-responsibly, each man vindictively votes to coerce his neighbour.
Because surely, seeing the state of things, a great number of the voters voting for prohibition must have reserved for themselves the private right to a drink, all the same.
A man may vote from his honourable national self: or he may vote from his vindictive herd self. Which self voted, you will only know by the smell, afterwards.
In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams
Mr. Williams quotes Poe’s distinction between “nationality in letters” and the local in literature. Nationality in letters is deplorable, whereas the local is essential. All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with a spirit of place.
The local, of course, in Mr. Williams’s sense, is the very opposite of the parochial, the parish-pump stuff. The local in America is America itself. Not Salem, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or New York, but that of the American subsoil which spouts up in any of those places into the lives of men.
In these studies of “American” heroes, from Red Eric of Greenland, and Columbus and Cortes and Montezuma, on to Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Williams tries to reveal the experience of great men in the Americas since the advent of the whites. History in this book would be a sensuous record of the Americanization of the white men in America, as contrasted with ordinary history, which is a complacent record of the civilization and Europizing (if you can allow the word) of the American continent.
In this record of truly American heroes, then, the author is seeking out not the ideal achievement of great men of the New World but the men themselves, in all the dynamic explosiveness of their energy. This peculiar dynamic energy, this strange yearning and passion and uncanny explosive quality in men derived from Europe, is American, the American element. Seek out this American element, O Americansl, is the poet’s charge.
All America is now going hundred per cent American. But the only hundred per cent American is the Red Indian, and he can only be canonized when he is finally dead. And not even the most American American can transmogrify into an Indian. Whence, then, the hundred per cent?
It is here that Mr. Williams’s — and Poe’s — distinction between the national and the local is useful. Most of the hundred per centism is national, and therefore not American at all. The new one hundred per cent literature is all about Americans, in the intensest American vernacular. And yet, in vision, in conception, in the very manner, it still remains ninety-nine per cent European. But for Ulysses and Marcel Proust and a few other beetling high-brows, where would the modernist hundred per centers of America have been? Alas, where they are now, save for cutting a few capers.
What then? William Carlos Williams tries to bring into his consciousness America itself, the still-unravished bride of silences. The great continent, its bitterness, its brackish quality, its vast glamour, its strange cruelty. Find this, Americans, and get it into your bones. The powerful, unyielding breath of the Americas, which Columbus sniffed, even in Europe
, and which sent the Conquistadores mad. National America is a gruesome sort of fantasy. But the unravished local America still waits vast and virgin as ever, though in process of being murdered.
The author sees the genius of the continent as a woman with exquisite, super-subtle tenderness and recoiling cruelty. It is a myth- woman who will demand of men a sensitive awareness, a supreme sensuous delicacy, and at the same time an infinitely tempered resistance, a power of endurance and of resistance.
To evoke a vision of the essential America is to evoke Americans, bring them into conscious life. To bring a few American citizens into American consciousness — the consciousness at present being all bastardized European — is to form the nucleus of the new race. To have the nucleus of a new race is to have a future: and a true aristocracy. It is to have the germ of an aristocracy in sensitive tenderness and diamond-like resistance.
A man, in America, can only begin to be American. After five hundred years there are no racial white Americans. They are only national, woebegone, or strident. After five hundred years more there may be the developing nucleus of a true American race. If only men, some few, trust the American passion that is in them, and pledge themselves to it.
But the passion is not national. No man who doesn’t feel the last anguish of tragedy — and beyond, that — will ever know America, or begin, even at the beginning’s beginning, to be American.
There are two ways of being American: and the chief, says Mr. Williams, is by recoiling into individual smallness and insentience, and gutting the great continent in frenzies of mean fear. It is the Puritan way. The other is by touch; touch America as she is; dare to touch her! And this is the heroic way.
And this, this sensitive touch upon the unseen America, is to be the really great adventure in the New World. Mr. Williams’s book contains his adventure; and, therefore, for me, has a fascination. There are very new and profound glimpses into life: the strength of insulated smallness in the New Englanders, the fascination of “being nothing” in the Negroes, the spell-bound quality of men like Columbus, De Soto, Boone. It is a glimpse of what the vast America wants men to be, instead of another strident assertion of what men have made, do make, will make, can make, out of the murdered territories of the New World.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1031
