SOME OLD MASTERS
Is there something they had, and we have lost, perhaps even without knowing what it is? Auden famously begins his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
As Icarus falls out of the sky, the ploughman goes on ploughing, the ship sails on. But of course this doesn’t just apply to suffering. The Old Master’s eye takes in everything. Only the petit-maître narrows his gaze and sticks to the matter in hand.
To the literal-minded, this juxtaposing of the tragic and the commonplace looks like a cheap trick. Voltaire, along with many others, could not be doing with the porter’s speech in Macbeth, which he denounced as ‘les plaisanteries de polichinelle’. In the eighteenth century the scene was often omitted or, as in Alexander Pope’s edition, relegated to the margin. How could you have a pissed porter wittering on about drink and lechery while the King was being murdered next door? The answer of course is that the porter was just as likely to be pissed on the night of Duncan’s death as any other night, and if his speech is squalid, it’s nothing to the physical and moral squalor of the murder.
The Old Masters do not blink. When Thomas Hardy went to see sixteen-year-old Martha Brown hanged in Dorchester, he noted what a figure she made against the misty rain and how the tight black silk gown set off her figure as she wheeled half-round and back. At the hanging of Mrs Manning, Charles Dickens too noticed the shape of her dress: ‘a fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance, as it slowly swung from side to side.’ Dickens went to another hanging, that of a valet named Courvoisier who had cut his master’s throat. By coincidence, Thackeray had been sent to report on Courvoisier’s hanging, but he was so sickened that he could not bear to look – which is why Dickens is an Old Master and Thackeray, much though I love his novels, is not.
Samuel Pepys was not an artist at all but a pushy bureaucrat, and so, strictly speaking, does not deserve to be included here, except that his diary is a work of art, precisely because he has that all-inclusive appetite for experience and that unblinking eye. In a single day, he goes from watching the hanging, drawing and quartering of Major-General Harrison at Charing Cross – ‘he looking as cheerfully as any man could in that condition’ – to eat oysters with some naval cronies at the Sun Tavern, then home to have a red-hot row with Elizabeth Pepys about her untidiness, in his anger kicking – and breaking – the little basket he had bought her in Holland. And he puts everything down.
We think of the Romantic poets as weaving rainbows out of gauzy, delicate stuff, but when you read the letters and notebooks of Keats and Coleridge, you find the same unexpurgated attention, the same hearty curiosity – about the filthy breakfast they serve in Kirkcudbright, or the correct derivation of the word ‘cunt’, or the idea of a washing machine, the quality of different sorts of opium, the colour of wet slates after rain at Ullswater. In Coleridge, this ravenous appetite for life slides into a sort of pantheism, as in his early poem, ‘The Eolian Harp’:
O the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere–
At the end of the poem, he fancies himself being recalled by his fiancée Sarah Fricker to orthodox Christianity from ‘these shapings of the unregenerate mind’. But the truth is that Coleridge, like most Old Masters, evades any such confining commitment. For the Old Masters don’t, in any profound sense, do God. They don’t like the competition. It is as though there is room for only one Creator at a time.
Hardy is the most explicit atheist, Keats the most overtly hostile to priests and churches, but Dickens too seems to prize Christian pity and kindness rather than Christian faith. He certainly despised the ecstasies of the nonconformists. As for Shakespeare . . . The question whether he was or was not a Roman Catholic seems to me not much more important than whether he was left-handed. Not a single one of his thirty-seven (or thereabouts) plays is a religious drama. The bishops and cardinals in them are strictly secular players. The themes of redemption and repentance have little specifically Christian content. If Shakespeare had a god at all, you feel that he would have looked more like Michel de Montaigne than the god of either the Old or the New Testament.
If we are reluctant to recognize how indifferent to organized religion most of our greatest writers have been, we also do not dwell on the interesting fact they mostly came from nowhere much: Shakespeare was the son of a glover, Keats of an ostler, Dickens of a feckless navy clerk, Hardy of a stonemason. In their lifetimes, they were mocked for their low origins and for the lack of higher education: Shakespeare was an ‘upstart crow’, who ‘had small Latin and less Greek’; Keats ‘a Cockney rhymester’; Dickens ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’; Hardy ‘the village atheist’. It hardly needs noting that these sneers came from men who had been to public school and university, as I suspect do most of the nutters who refuse to accept that Will from Stratford could have written the works of Shakespeare. But this was precisely the luck of the Old Masters, that they had no connections to the great world. They were free to make their own.
THOMAS HARDY: THE TWILIGHT OF AFTERING
When Wessex, his adored wire-haired terrier, died at the age of thirteen, Hardy composed a farewell poem from the dog to his master and mistress:
Do you look for me at times,
Wistful ones?
It has to be said that few visitors to Max Gate would have recognized Wessex’s voice in these lines. When ringing the Hardys’ bell, one was well advised to be watchful rather than wistful. ‘The Famous Dog Wessex – Faithful, Unflinching’ Hardy had inscribed on his tombstone, but it was mostly other people who did the flinching. There was not much to choose between Wessex’s bark and his bite. He was one of those horrible, snappy, aggressive, attention-hungry little dogs who attract such inexplicable devotion from their owners. Yet the dog, like the region he was named after, has been prettified by posterity, and Wessex now slumbers in eternity at the hearthside of the bright-eyed old Master Countryman without an apparent ounce of malice in either of them.
Hardy himself is often eulogized by the Hardy industry as though he were a busy hon. sec. of the local branch of the CPRE. Mr Gordon Beningfield paints Hardy’s Wessex in an azure haze as a lost arcadia where never a drop of rain falls nor an hour of manual toil is performed. In his pleasant paintings and drawings of Dorset scenes, there is no sign anywhere of Tess and Marian hacking swedes in the driving rain on the stony uplands of Flintcomb-Ash. The sun always seems to shine on Egdon Heath, and the tombstones in the churchyard are so nicely weathered they look somehow dissociated from mortality.
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
Not in Mr Beningfield’s Wessex, it doesn’t.
Hardy was certainly sad to see the countryside of his youth disappearing, but he would have been appalled by the idea that he was destined to be remembered as a confectioner of quaint pastoral idylls. On the contrary, he regarded himself as a prime exponent of ‘the ache of Modernism’. And it is another of Life’s Little Ironies that his memory should be suffused by precisely the sort of sentimental glow he spent his life dispelling.
His own character has been tidied up too in the twilight of aftering, as he might have put it. In what is now the standard life of Hardy, Professor Michael Millgate of Toronto, editor of this selection as well as joint editor of the seven-volume collected letters (the selection is surely better value, Hardy was not the frankest or most flowing of letter-writers), is always eager to show Hardy in the least bad light. Even that bizarre deception by which Hardy published his autobiography under his wife’s byline is descr
ibed by Millgate as ‘a perfectly sensible down-to-earth undertaking’. Millgate excuses Hardy’s concentration upon his links with the more middle-class members of his family as an entirely natural interest in those few who had in some way departed from the otherwise monotonous pattern of employment and marriage within the inherited boundaries of place, caste and occupation. Well, snobbery is an entirely natural interest, but it is still snobbery. It seems strange, to put it no higher, that it is Hardy’s letters which are filled with doings and sayings of fashionable ladies but that it should be Emma, going a bit dotty down at Max Gate, who is denounced for her pretentiousness.
Perhaps Hardy was not quite such a creepy, secretive character as Robert Gittings’ earlier two-volume biography made him out to be, but I am not sure that it is any improvement to make him out as a good-humoured, normal sort of chap who just wanted to get on with his scribbling. Whatever else Hardy was, he was not ordinary.
Nor were either of his marriages. Millgate asserts that ‘there is no criticism of Emma in any of Hardy’s surviving correspondence either before or after her death’. I must say that Hardy’s replies to letters of condolence do not wholly support this contention: ‘She was peculiar and difficult in some things, but in others she was so simple and childlike as to be most winning . . . in spite of the differences between us which it would be affectation to deny and certain painful delusions she suffered from at times . . .’
Wessex the dog surely got a better sendoff.
Dr Pinion in his collection of critical essays speaks repeatedly of Hardy’s ‘altruism’, by which he seems to mean capacity for sympathy. Yet one wonders, for example, how much the Rider Haggards can have appreciated Hardy’s letter of commiseration on the death of their only son at the age of ten: ‘To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.’ This letter scarcely reads any better when set beside the very different letter, full of fine condolences and elevated quotations, which he wrote much later to Sir Henry and Lady Hoare of Stourhead on the death of their only son. Can one honestly imagine the two letters being switched?
Hardy certainly did hate cruelty of all kinds, to animals, to women, to the poor and defenceless. Yet there is a certain distance about his compassion, as though from where he was sitting beside the President of the Immortals it was difficult to share too closely in the feelings of ‘a fly on a billiard table of indefinite length’ (Tess in the Valley of the Great Dairies) or ‘flies crawling over a brown face’ (Tess and Marian in the swede fields). He hated war passionately; and yet he tired out Emma walking her over the battlefield of Waterloo in order to work out every move in the battle. He hated hanging and yet could not resist rehearsing the memory of how he had seen sixteen-year-old Martha Brown hanged in Dorchester for the murder of her husband.
Hardy’s famous camera-eye technique now and then produces in the reader a sort of voyeur shudder – rather in the way Hitchcock sometimes makes you feel you have been lured to the scene by unscrupulous means and you ought not really to be there. It is this trembling on the verge of lubriciousness which makes his pessimism so vivacious and which thereby both unnerved and allured his contemporaries. In some of his novels, the contriving of visual violation is by far the strongest thing in the book. A Laodicean, for example, opens with the scene of a red-brick chapel at dusk: a young architectural enthusiast is peering in to see a tall young woman in a flowing white robe reluctantly descend the steps to the baptismal pool and then turn away shaking her head, refusing immersion, despite the entreaties of the minister. Then later on, we see the same young woman, Paula Power, the daughter of a great railway contractor, from behind the eyes of two cigar-smoking villains who are peering through a peephole in the gymnasium in the castle shrubberies where she is performing her exercises in a pink flannel costume, ‘bending, wheeling and undulating in the air like a gold-fish in its globe’ as the noonday sunlight pours down through the lantern, ‘irradiating her with a warm light that was incarnadined by her pink doublet and hose’. I forget the rest of the book.
These eerie, sensual, near-melodramatic tableaux seem to me to be the distinguishing magic of Hardy’s novels rather than the philosophical top-dressing or the pretentious literary allusions which so impress Dr Pinion. I do not, for instance, think it adds anything to the scene in the gymnasium that ‘it would have demanded the poetic passion of some joyous Elizabethan lyricist like Lodge, Nashe or Greene, to fitly phrase Paula’s presentation of herself at this moment of absolute abandonment to every muscular whim that could take possession of such a supple form’. What matters is what comes next: ‘The white manilla ropes clung about the performer like snakes as she took her exercise, and the colour in her face deepened as she went on.’
The finest, most unbearable moments in the novels are composed with great simplicity and no display of learning or metaphoric ingenuity – the discovery of the bodies of Jude’s children, Tess waking up at Stonehenge to find the police closing in. Indeed, it is the simplicity of the narration which puts to flight the shadow of melodrama. The memory is right to discard the ponderous parenthesis, ‘in Aeschylean phrase’, from the sentence about the President of the Immortals having ended his sport with Tess, although Hardy was keen to put it in, so as to share the blame for this grim view of life with a respectable dead Greek dramatist. At times, Hardy’s pessimism is hard to resist: ‘Well, what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe, the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be.’
But he was like many pessimists, as he himself told Edmund Gosse, a cheerful soul: ‘The very fact of having touched bottom gives them a substantial cheerfulness in the consciousness that they have nothing to lose.’ Behind the scandalous merchant of despair, there was a resilient, flinty little old cove capable of cycling 24 miles over the Dorset hills at the age of seventy and giving as good as he got when anybody criticized his work.
It is his relentless vigour as an artist which seems to me to distinguish him from virtually all British-born writers of his time. And I think things have gone decidedly askew when Dr Pinion tries to present him to us as a solid sort of West Country George Eliot who occasionally wrote poetry as well. Dr Pinion’s loyalties are divided; he is a vice-president of the George Eliot Fellowship as well as of the Thomas Hardy Society, and it is, I fear, the drawback of these literary fan clubs that full marks have to be awarded all round. Thus we are told that Hardy’s rustics are ‘an unfailing source of humour’ and that, while George Eliot’s evocations of farm life are rich, Hardy’s rustic speech is ‘more selective, more artfully fashioned, at times comparable to Shakespeare’s’. Alas, Hardy had about as much sense of humour as a milk churn, and to say that he is more amusing than George Eliot is like saying that Mr Heath is a greater humorist than Mrs Thatcher. His yokel-speech sounds to me strictly ersatz Mummerset, and Dr Pinion’s contention that it must be first-rate because it is directly drawn from life is surely based on a muddled view of what makes dialogue genuine.
It is more bewildering still to find Dr Pinion claiming that Hardy usually conveys ‘a deeper, more imaginative and more memorable awareness of character at critical points in the action than a writer such as Henry James, who depends largely on the refinements of psychological analysis.’ He indignantly rejects those critics who think that taken as a bunch Hardy’s men and women show little individuality and who say they cannot tell which is Giles and which is Gabriel and whether the girl in the corner is Grace or Anne or Fancy or Elfridge. I am afraid I have the same trouble. James’s finicky ‘refinements of psychological analysis’ tend to stick longer in the mind, as do the quirks and tics of characters in Dickens or Surtees. Flicking through Dr Pinion’s excellent Hardy dictionary, I find that all but the most prominent characters are little more than names to me.
What we remember in Hardy are surely scenes rather than characters.
It is the sight of Bathsheba and
Gabriel working through the storm to save the corn which is engraved on the memory rather than what either of them is like as a person. I don’t think it will do to eulogize such brilliantly lit scenes as ‘psychological pictorialism’, as Dr Pinion does. What really matters is the picture itself rather than the simple character outlines which are implied and defined by the picture.
Hardy does seem to lack something of the novelist’s concrete differentiating power, that ability to make the reader say, only a sentence or two after the character has appeared, ‘Yes, I know him’ – not because he is just like a long-dead uncle or someone we met only last week but because we have a confident, instant, vivid sense of the person’s reality. By contrast, Hardy has in abundance the poet’s concrete universalizing gift. The scene, the plight, the moment – the highlight, in the precise meaning of the term – that is the essence. Character is secondary.
Unwittingly, Dr Pinion himself now and then goes halfway to admitting this, when, for example, he points out that in Hardy a man smoking a cigar is invariably up to no good. If you see a red coal glowing in the arbour at twilight, then evil is afoot. Alec D’Urberville, Wildeve in The Return of the Native, Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders, Baron von Xanten in The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid and the rotters in A Laodicean are all cigar smokers. Many have black moustachios as well. This crude symbolism may contribute to superb dramatic effects, but it scarcely counts as profound characterization.
It is only by admitting quite candidly how vapid, crude, melodramatic and sentimental the novels can be at their worst, especially the early ones, that we can begin fully to estimate the seriousness of Hardy’s determination to break out of his limitations. There is a lot to be said for Ezra Pound’s view that Hardy’s success as a poet was ‘the harvest of having written his novels first’, and so having got rid of a good deal of surplus baggage.
English Voices Page 27
