The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  It has often been said that the decay of our interest in problems of conscience is a major cause of the feebleness of the modern novel; but there have been many poor novels stuffed tight with conscience. Might we not say more justly that the problems of conscience have changed? Our habit is to weigh man against society, civilisation against man or nature; individuals against groups. The greatness of The Heart of Midlothian arises, first of all, in the scope that the problem of conscience gave to Scott’s imagination. He was not arguing in a void. His argument was creating real people and attracting real people to it. He made the story of Effie’s murdered baby a national story. And then how wide his range is! The scenes in the Tolbooth are remarkable, and especially those that are built about the figure of Ratcliffe when the governor is working to turn him into an informer. Scott had the eighteenth-century taste for rogues, and their talk is straight from nature.

  “Why, I suppose you know you are under sentence of death, Mr. Ratcliffe?” replied Mr. Sharpitlaw.

  “Ay, so are a’, as that worthy minister said in the Tolbooth Kirk the day Robertson wan off; but naebody kens when it will be executed. Gude faith, he had better reason to say than he dreamed of, before the play was played out that morning!”

  “This Robertson,” said Sharpitlaw, in a lower and something like a confidential tone, “d’ye ken, Rat—that is, can ye gie us ony onkling where he is to be heard tell o’?”

  “Troth, Mr. Sharpitlaw, I’ll be frank wi’ ye: Robertson is rather a cut abune me—a wild deevil he was, and mony a daft prank he played; but except the Collector’s job that Wilson led him into, and some tuilzies about run goods wi’ the guagers and the waiters, he never did ony thing that came near our line o’ business.”

  “Umph! that’s singular, considering the company he kept.”

  “Fact, upon my honour and credit,” said Ratcliffe, gravely. “He keepit out o’ our little bits of affairs, and that’s mair than Wilson did; I hae dune business wi’ Wilson afore now. But the lad will come on in time; there’s nae fear o’ him; naebody will live the life he has led, but what he’ll come to sooner or later.”

  “Who or what is he, Ratcliffe? You know, I suppose?” said Sharpitlaw.

  “He’s better born, I judge, than he cares to let on; he’s been a soldier, and he has been a playactor, and I watna what he has been or hasna been, for as young as he is, sae that it had daffing and nonsense about it.”

  “Pretty pranks he has played in his time, I suppose?”

  “Ye may say that,” said Ratcliffe, with a sardonic smile, “and” (touching his nose) “a deevil amang the lasses.”

  “Like enough,” said Sharpitlaw. “Weel, Ratcliffe, I’ll no stand niffering wi’ ye; ye ken the way that favour’s gotten in my office; ye maun be usefu’.”

  “Certainly, sir, to the best of my power—naething for naething—I ken the rule of the office,” said the exdepredator.

  Then there is Scott’s power of describing a crowded scene. I am thinking of the long narrative about the crowd’s storming of the Tolbooth and the killing of Porteous. Scott has looked it all up, but his own version is so alive, so effortless, so fast moving. Every detail tells; the very pedantry of it is pedantry washed down by the rough wine of life. Everything is carried off with the authority of a robust and educated style, the style of a man fit to understand, master and govern, a man endlessly fair and excitingly patient in his taste for human nature. He understands popular clamour. He understands the mysteries of loyalty—all the diverse loyalties of a man’s life and trade.

  And after that Scott has the story-teller’s ability to build a great scene and to make a natural use of it. I’m thinking of the search in the dark on Salisbury Crag when the police have persuaded Ratcliffe to help them catch Robertson, and Ratcliffe has brought Madge Wildfire with him to show them all the way. Madge is semi-lunatic, and Ratcliffe has to use all his guile to keep her to the job. He knows her mind is stuffed full of old wives’ tales, and he reminds her of a notorious murder that was done on the Crag years before—a story the reader has already been prepared for: Scott’s antiquarian asides ought never to be skipped—but Ratcliffe’s cunning is turned against him at the moment of its success by the madness of the woman. She accuses him of being as bad as the murderer.

  “I never shed blood,” he protested.

  “But ye hae sauld it, Ratton—ye hae sauld blood mony a time.”

  That chance shaft hits Ratcliffe’s conscience and wrecks the expedition. In a short chapter Scott has ingeniously extracted every kind of surprise and apprehension; and without any frivolity or artifice. This adventure could have happened; indeed, we say, if we had had eyes at the back of our heads, we would have known that it must have happened so, fabulous as it is. Scott’s knowledge gives a sense of necessity to his picture of life, and his freedom in mixing the comic with the serious, even at the most dramatic moments, adds to this pleasant sense. He is not overdriven by his imagination, whereas a writer like Dickens was. Scott, like Fielding, has both feet firmly on the ground.

  Rob Roy is admired—but for one or two scenes only when we examine the matter, and it is really a poor novel. At first sight the claims of Old Mortality are less emphatic upon the reader’s attention, and since Scott repeated himself so often one is tempted to neglect this novel. It should not be neglected. Into this book Scott put all his tolerance and civilisation, his hatred of fanaticism, and illuminated the subject of the religious wars in Scotland with all his irony, humour, all his wiriness of intellect and all his human sympathy. In Burley he drew the rise and the corruption of the fanatical character, and I do not know any other in Scott whose character grows and changes so convincingly. There is real movement here; elsewhere the sense of movement in his characters is more the result of Scott’s habit of dissertation than a real enacting of change. The portrait of Claverhouse is debonair, and the battle scene when the insurgents rout him is almost Tolstoyan; how much Scott owes to a sincere pleasure, even a joy, in the accoutrement of life. One can see how the Russians, like Tolstoy, Gogol and Pushkin first of all, must have been caught by Scott’s wonderful pictures of the eccentric lairds. The miser in Old Mortality, or the ridiculous, gaping laird in The Heart of Midlothian, must have fathered many a landlord in Dead Souls and other Russian stories. Where the Russians were to succeed and where Scott failed was in conveying the sense of an abiding destiny going on beyond the characters described. For Scott life is a book that one closes; to the Russians it is a book that one opens. And although one feels his animal zest for life, one feels it as a delightful recollection of hours that are ended, not as the perturbation or languor of the hour which has still to go by on the clock as we read.

  One looks up the critics. What did Scott add to the English novel? Is he just another Fielding, but planted in Scottish history? Has he simply added a change of scene and material? It looks like that at first glance: he is a writer from the outside looking in. But I think there is something else. I would like to argue that Scott is a complement to Richardson—an analytical and psychological novelist who describes to us the part of our motives formed by public events. He is certainly the first novelist to describe the political influence of religion and the peculiar significance of superstitions and legend in the mind; and he uses them to illustrate the promptings of unconscious guilt and fear. One sees this in the character of Ratcliffe in The Heart of Midlothian and in innumerable instances elsewhere; Scott does not use his apparitions and legends merely for the purpose of putting a shiver or a laugh in his story. They are there to convey hidden processes of mind. No English novelist has added to that sense of a general or public mind, and certainly no great novelist—Hardy is the atheistical exception—has used religion as Scott used it.

  (1946)

  CHARLES DICKENS

  EDWIN DROOD

  When lately I was reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood I felt extremely the want of some sort of guidance on the Victorian fascination with violent crime. What explains the exorb
itant preoccupation with murder, above all? In earlier periods, when life was cheaper, rape, seduction, incest were the crimes favoured by literature. If we look to literature rather than to life, it is certain the Victorian writers took over murder from the popular taste of the eighteenth century, and succeeded—against the outcry of the older critics—in making it respectable. But in the nineteenth century one detects, also, the rise of a feeling (so curiously expressed by a popular writer on the melodrama a few years ago, I have forgotten his name) that “murder is cleaner than sex.” There is a clue there, I think. There is a clue, too, in the fact that organised police forces and systems of detection were not established until the Napoleonic wars—we are bound to become fascinated by the thing we punish—and another more sinister clue lies in the relative freedom from war after 1815. A peaceful age was horrified and fascinated, for example, by the ritual murders of the Indian thugs. Where else can we look? To the megalomania that was a natural field for the Romantic movement? To the guilt that is deposited in the mind after a ruthless exertion of the will, such as the Victorians made at the time of the Industrial Revolution? To the social chaos before the Fifties, when tens of thousands were uprooted, and if they did not rise with the rising tide were left to sink into the slums or to stand out alone in violent rebellion? The more one reads of the unrest and catastrophes of the nineteenth century, in social or in private life, the more one is appalled by the pressure which its revolution applied to human beings. And when we read again the rant of the melodramas, when we listen to the theatre organ of Bulwer-Lytton in Eugene Aram, and read the theatrical pages of Dickens, we feel, after the first shock of distaste, that these people are responding to a pressure which is not exerted upon us in the same degree. The violence of the scene suggests a hidden violence in the mind, and we begin to understand how assuaging it must have been, in novels like Oliver Twist or The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to see the murderer’s conscience displayed in terms of nightmare and hysteria.

  Assuaging to the Victorians, but not to us. We are not driven by the same dynamo. Edwin Drood stands at the parting of the ways between the early Victorian and the modern attitude to murder in literature, and also, I suspect, at the beginnings of a change in Dickens himself. The earlier murders of Dickens belong to the more turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. By the late Fifties a calm had been reached; the lid had been levered back on to the pot of society and its seething had become a prosperous simmer. When Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone and Dickens, not to be outdone, followed it with Edwin Drood, we begin the long career of murder for murder’s sake, murder which illustrates nothing and is there only to stimulate our skill in detection and to distract us with mystery. The sense of guilt is so transformed that we do not seek to expiate it vicariously on the stage; we turn upon the murderer and hunt him down. Presently, in our time, the hunt degenerates into the conundrums of the detective novel which, by a supreme irony, distracts us from our part in the mass murders of two wars. One or two critics have suggested that the struggle with the unfamiliar technique of the hunt was too much for Dickens and that it killed him and his novel. We cannot know whether this is so; but both those who dismiss the book as the last leaden effort of a worn-out man, and those who observe that it is the most careful and private of Dickens’s novels, are agreed that it is pitched in a key he has never struck before.

  What is that key? Before I add my answer to the dozens that have been made, it seems important to define one’s own attitude to Dickens. I am totally out of sympathy with the hostile criticism of Dickens which has been made during the last twenty years, which has ignored his huge vitality and imaginative range and has done no more than to say he lacked taste and that he sacrificed a profound view of human nature to the sentimentalities and falsities of self-dramatisation. To me it is a perversion of criticism to suggest that you can have the virtues of a writer without his vices, and the discovery of Dickens’s failures does not make his achievement less. I swallow Dickens whole and put up with the indigestion. I confess I am not greatly interested in the literary criticism which tells me where he is good and where he is bad. I am glad to be instructed; but for us, at the present time, I think there is far more value in trying to appreciate the nature of his creative vitality and the experience that fed it—a vitality notably lacking in our own fiction. Now when we turn to Edwin Drood we do find some of the old Dickens. There is Mr Sapsea, for example, with his own account of his courtship, that beautiful shot plum in the middle of romantic love and Victorian marriage:

  “Miss Brobity’s Being, young man, was deeply imbued with homage to Mind. She revered Mind, when launched or, as I say, precipitated, on an extensive knowledge of the world. When I made my proposal, she did me the honour of being so over-shadowed with a species of Awe, as to be able to articulate only the two words ‘Oh Thou!’ meaning myself. Her limpid blue eyes were fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped together, pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged to proceed, she never did proceed a word further … She never did and never could find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps—too—favourable estimate of my intellect. To the very last (feeble action of the liver) she addressed me in the same unfinished terms.”

  That is the old Dickens, but a shadow is upon Mr Sapsea. The tomb of Mrs Sapsea is, we are told, to be used by Jasper, the murderer, for his own purpose. Durdles, the drunken verger, tapping the walls of the cathedral for evidence of the “old uns,” is to be roped in. The muscular Christian, Mr Crisparkle, sparring before his mirror in the morning, is marked down by the plot; and that terrifying small boy, the Imp or Deputy, who is employed by Durdles to stone him homewards when he is drunk, will evidently be frog-marched into the witness box. Dickens is submitting to discipline, and how fantastically severe it was may be seen in Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow. The background loses some of its fantasy, but the best things in Edwin Drood are the descriptions of the cathedral, the town and countryside of Rochester which are recorded with the attentive love one feels for things that are gracious and real. Chesterton thought that something of the mad, original Dickens was lost in this realism; other critics explain it as the influence of mid-Victorian settling down. Mr Edmund Wilson seems to suggest that in Edwin Drood one finds the mellowness and the bitterness of the man who sets out with some confidence equipped to master his devil and to dominate his wound. I do not find a loss in this picture of Cloisterham:

  Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in these summer days, that the cathedral and the monastery-ruin show as if their strong walls were transparent. A soft glow seems to shine from within them, rather than upon them from without, such is their mellowness as they look forth on the hot cornfields and the smoking roads that distantly wind among them. The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit. Time was when travel-stained pilgrims rode in clattering parties through the city’s welcome shades; time is when wayfarers, leading a gypsy life between hay-making time and harvest, and looking as if they were just made of the dust of the earth, so very dusty are they, lounge about on cool doorsteps, trying to mend their unmendable shoes, or giving them to the city kennels as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the bundles that they carry, along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands of straw. At all the more public pumps there is much cooling of the bare feet, together with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to spout on the part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham police meanwhile looking askant from their beats with suspicion, and manifest impatience that the intruders should depart from within the civic bounds, and once more fry themselves on the simmering high roads.

  The shocks in Edwin Drood come not from the sudden levelling of his fantasy and the appearance of realism. They occur when Dickens acts his realism—see the showdown between Jasper and Rosa—and we realise that it is really alien to Dickens’s gift that his people should be made to talk to each other. When he attempts this he merely succeeds in making them talk at each other, like actors. His natural geni
us is for human soliloquy not human intercourse.

  In criticism of the English novel and in appeals to what is called “the English tradition,” there has been a misunderstanding, I think, about this intrinsic quality of Dickens. One hears the word Dickensian on all sides. One hears of Dickens’s influence on the English novel on the one hand, and of the failure of the English novel to produce a comparable genius. While the word Dickensian lasts, the English novel will be suffocated. For the convivial and gregarious extravagance and the picaresque disorder which are supposedly Dickensian are not Dickens’s especial contribution to the English novel. They are his inheritance from Sterne, Smollett and, on the sentimental side, from Richardson, an inheritance which may be traced back to the comedy of Jonson. What Dickens really contributed may be seen by a glance at the only novelists who have seriously developed his contribution—in Dostoevsky above all and, to a lesser degree, in Gogol. (There is more of Dickens, to my mind, in James Joyce’s Ulysses than in books like Kipps or Tono Bungay.) For the distinguishing quality of Dickens’s people is that they are solitaries. They are people caught living in a world of their own. They soliloquise in it. They do not talk to one another; they talk to themselves. The pressure of society has created fits of twitching in mind and speech, and fantasies in the soul. It has been said that Dickens creates merely external caricatures, but Mr Sapsea’s musings on his “somewhat extensive knowledge” and Mr Crisparkle’s sparrings in front of his mirror are fragments of inner life. In how many of that famous congress of “characters”—Micawber, Barkis, Moddles, Jingle, Mrs Gamp or Miss Twitteron: take them at random—and in how many of the straight personages, like Jasper and Neville Landless in Edwin Drood, are we chiefly made aware of the individual’s obliviousness of any existence but his own? The whole of Dickens’s emotional radicalism, his hatred of the utilitarians and philanthropists and all his attacks on institutions, are based on his strongest and fiercest sense: isolation. In every kind of way Dickens was isolated. Isolation was the foundation not only of his fantasy and his hysteria, but also—I am sure Mr Edmund Wilson is correct here—of the twin strains of rebel and criminal in his nature. The solitariness of people is paralleled by the solitariness of things. Fog operates as a separate presence, houses quietly rot or boisterously prosper on their own. The veneer of the Veneerings becomes almost tangible, whipped up by the repetitions. Cloisterham believes itself more important than the world at large, the Law sports like some stale and dilapidated circus across human lives. Philanthropy attacks people like a humour or an observable germ. The people and the things of Dickens are all out of touch and out of hearing of each other, each conducting its own inner monologue, grandiloquent or dismaying. By this dissociation Dickens brings to us something of the fright of childhood, and the kind of realism employed in Edwin Drood reads like an attempt to reconstruct and coordinate his world, like a preparation for a final confession of guilt.