In a capitalist society both culture and creativity are commodified. Is this a problem? Maybe it’s a bit weighty of a topic for you. It’s certainly something that consumes my thoughts for large spells of time but to wean you in to it gently, I’ll start this stage of the cultural revolution with an exemplar. Let me ask you to consider another question, and forgive me if you think I’m patronising you because the answer seems so obvious! If an author wants the most people possible to read his work (and most do) what should he/she do to achieve this? Simple answer: Make the book available as easily as possible to the widest number of people at the cheapest possible price. Ignoring the fact that even if you make a book available for free on every current ‘platform’ you aren’t guaranteeing readers - you can lead the reader to the book but you can’t make them read after all – it does seem a bit of a no-brainer that you do what you can to make the book available if you want people to read it. In a capitalist world of course you have to add on ‘make it appealing’ which takes us down a whole new path of commodification – I will not dwell on this here but return to it at a later date. The point I am trying to make is that if you want people to read books you should price them sensibly and make them easily available. So. Hold that thought. I wanted to read a book. The process starts: I have very limited funds and a ‘budget’ for book-buying of £10 a month. Yet I read probably 10 books a month at least including work and pleasure related texts. So where possible I try to find the books I want to read for free. I can rarely get the kind of books I want to read free online (though some use of Project Guthenberg and the online library can bear fruit). When I fail online I try to access the books I’m interested in free via libraries – I have maintained some academic online library privileges over the past decade (mainly by taking a wide range of Open University courses) and more recently the National Library of Scotland has opened up much of its digital archive. But plenty remains stuck behind the academic paywall. I am a life ‘friend’ of an academic library but they won’t let me access their digital collection. So, sometimes, I have to resort to buying books. I’ve been trying to get hold of a copy of R.D.S.Jack’s ‘Myths and the Mythmaker’ for five years. It was published in 2010 but it took me 2 years to find out it even existed (I was busy with other authors and Barrie had slipped off my radar for a time). Perhaps I didn’t try as hard as I might have in 2012– f the eye-watering price of £70 put me off – especially combined with a review that said most of the ground was covered in ‘The Road to Neverland’ (never trust reviews, it’s simply not true!) But since the death late last year of the author R.D.S.Jack who was perhaps Barrie’s greatest living advocate, I have felt increasingly uneasy about who will now carry the torch for Barrie into the future. There is some ‘interest’ in him from a range of quarters, but forgive my cynicism, most of them seem to be trying to shoe-horn Barrie into their own areas of research (feminism, modernism etc) and that does him a great dis-service. Barrie has been kicked enough over the centuries by the ignorant, the lazy and those with an axe to grind. He deserves much, much better. So I turned again to an attempt to purchase the book. Result: Myths and the Mythmaker: A Literary Account of J.M. Barrie's Formative Years. (SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language & Literature) 12 Nov 2010 by R. D. S. Jack Paperback £69.00Prime Eligible for FREE UK Delivery Only 1 left in stock - order soon. More buying choices £43.95used & new(9 offers) (In America it comes in at more than $100!!!) The publishers are cited as Rodopi, now owned by Brill – whom Google reveals to be large academic publishers of some repute. Their reputation suggests highwayman to me!
And allergic as I am to highway robbery, I felt I had to try to go down the cheaper route ( I use the word ‘cheap’ with something of a sneer.) I discovered I could get a ‘used like new’ one for £45. To me that’s still an obscene amount of money to pay for a book. I could eat for more than a week for that. I would need to eat less well for a number of weeks in order to pay for it. I didn’t buy it. I went online. I hunted it down via my online library access. After failing in 3 of my 4 possible options, I hit pay dirt. I was able to break through the paywall and offered the choice to read it online or download for a maximum of 21 days. All well and good. I started reading it online. I hate reading online. I downloaded it. I pretty quickly realised that this is a beezer of a book. One that I would need to refer to time and again. It’s an absolutely vital book for anyone with an interest in Barrie. (Mental note to self, write review on Amazon site to that effect!). And so, I ‘just clicked’ and bought it at £45. I held back my ire at the capitalist economic models of ‘supply and demand’ and smug comments of the cultural elitists who claim ‘the value of anything is the price anyone is willing to pay’ still ring in my ears. Let me make it clear, I have no reservations regarding the quality or value of the book (priceless) but it still really irks me to have to pay that sort of money. It’s a perfect example of the price of culture. It’s a salutary lesson and it is disgusting that a book so central to our Scottish cultural and literary heritage should be hidden from the general reader. But this is the price of a capitalist, hierarchical, elitist ‘canonical’ structure. And guess what. That’s kind of the point that Jack makes in the book. (okay he doesn’t mention capitalism but the rest is more or less consistent with his views.) Does that give you any idea why it is that you just can’t read this book unless you are an academic or pretty well heeled? Might I suggest there are three obvious reasons why a publisher would put out a book at a ridiculous price (given that there’s no way it can cost them this to publish – or if so, they shouldn’t be in business because Deveron Press can do it a lot cheaper – time to change the business model Brill!). The reasons are: 1) Naked Greed. 2) They don’t want people to read it. 3) They don’t think you should read it. I suggest it’s a combination of all three reasons. The publishers know the ‘academic’ market will bear the cost. It’s just the other end of the ‘Amazon free’ spectrum. Books are seen as ‘product’ in a ‘marketplace’, so while Brill clearly work on the basis that if you feign exclusivity you can hike up the price, Amazon work on the spread betting principle of hoovering up the odd penny/dime on every single purchase that goes through their site. We are simply cultural sheep disguised as consumers, waiting to be skinned one way or the other. So. Motive 1: Greed. Motive 3: they don’t want you to read it. There appears to be something of a ‘social cultural contract’ within the elite that says that as long as you are a) rich or b) part of academia and therefore by definition an intellecutal (?) you can gain access suggests that capitalism is at the heart of our academic model. I for one, have issues with this. It’s not enough to offer people ‘free’ tuition at higher education level (you’ll note this is only for undergraduate study not postgraduate study, that is a truly rarified intellectual arena – until which stage you are not considered ‘appropriate’ as a reader of books such as those published by the Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature. Unfair, I hear you cry. Undergrads can read those books too. Yes they can. If they are encouraged to. I have this nasty wee ‘impish’ voice in me that suggests that in Scottish academia it is the undergrads who help keep the postgrads and ‘true’ academics in their jobs – the classic hierarchical pyramid structure is alive and well in academia and this trickles down to Scots culture in general ( I will develop this point another time). For now I simply call them out. Shame on you publishers. Shame on you editorial boards (I know, you are simply soldiers following orders) and shame on you the Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature. I suggest all the above mentioned ‘they’s’ do not want you to know what Jack thinks about Barrie or Scottish Literature and culture. I suggest that his work doesn’t fit into their created dominant narrative and they don’t want you to read beyond the ‘canon’. This is the rather unpleasant side effect of the formerly stated motive 2. Even if ‘they’ think that Jack’s book is a good book for ‘them’ to read and write about, somehow ‘they’ don’t think that ‘you’ or ‘I’ or any of us outwith the hallowed halls of academe should have it made available to read. Are we too wee, too poor and too stupid? Did you never realise how political an issue culture is? Or how significant a role publishing and reading plays in our culture? It seems that our academic establishments and cultural bodies are in danger of selling us a Scotland where the general reader is not considered either capable of understanding or interested in engaging in Scots culture. Give us T2 Trainspotting and leave us to wallow eh? No offence Irvine Welsh, but I personally have more interest in the work of J.M.Barrie – and I’m not afraid to say it. So what of the ‘book’ itself? Here is the promotional blurb: J.M. Barrie's critical reputation is unusually problematic. Originally viewed as a genius to rank with Shaw and Wilde, Barrie soon fell victim to damaging psychological theories about his life and his patriotism. The few critics who have commented on Barrie have colluded with dominant myths about a figure who, like his most famous creation, never grew up, who abandoned Scotland and made light of his own people when serious social analyses of the nation's condition were called for, and who scorned the opportunities of University learning when at Edinburgh. Myths and the Mythmaker attempts to challenge these myths and offer a just revaluation of Barrie's genius. Through closely focused textual analyses, it dispels the popular images of Barrie as "escapist" writer and immature, mother-fixated artist. It seeks to replace the narrow prose canon on which the "Oedipal" and "Kailyard" myths are based with a thorough account of his Victorian apprenticeship. New research into Barrie's early work and criticism show the enduring influence of his Edinburgh education on his creative writing, his academic articles, and his own complex views on artistic genius. This is exactly the kind of book I want to read – and it doesn’t disappoint. I’ve read the downloaded version and I am hanging by the post box waiting for the delivery of my gold-plated paperback copy due for delivery by the time this month’s Gateway goes out. You haven’t heard the last of this book, or of Barrie, from the Orraman believe me! Oh, the good news is that for those of you who would now like to read some Barrie, even if you can’t afford to read about Barrie) and who are not averse to ereaders – you can pick up the COMPLETE J.M.BARRIE from Delphi Classics HERE for under a fiver. That’s 54 texts for about 9pence each. Might I suggest that if you want to join the cultural revolution, you start by reading the books they DON’T want you to read, rather than flocking to the ones they are pushing in your face on a daily basis – whatever the price. Let me end with a 'rif' on what is a currently popular/populist 'theme': Choose Books. Choose cultural freedom. Don’t allow anyone to tell you that Scotland is a pish, crap place where our cultural identity is revealed in any number of Trainspotting Generations. Sure Trainspotting has its place. I’m not suggesting we sanitise our view of our culture and ourselves. I’m just suggesting we don’t allow ourselves to be degraded by a cultural elite for whom we are so much cultural canon-fodder. When undergraduates are ‘taught’ Trainspotting’ over the works of J.M.Barrie I have to question quite where our cultural ‘head’ is at. Orraman THE TREATMENT OF ROBERT BURNS, WHAT IT WAS AND WHAT IT OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN. First published in the Peterhead Sentinel 1902. PART TWO I have said that the public paid Burns almost every species of homage except the practical homage of buying and reading his books. There was caprice in the homage; bit was by no means steadily paid; but paid it was at one time and another. One great hardship and unintentional injustice from which Burns suffered, however, was the lack of fit society. He might be said to have been born in the wrong century. The eighteenth century was, as already said, artificial and what I cannot otherwise describe than as ‘elegant.’ This word, almost out of use to us not save in the speech of drapers and milliners, was in Burns’s day applied to pictures, literature, music and, in short, to all that was best in nature and art. Now ‘beautiful’ we know, ‘handsome’ we know, ‘noble’ we know, ‘grand, sublime, magnificent, superb’ – all of these we know in art and nature; but ‘elegant’ is a word that we now apply only to dress, jewellery and the products of the cabinet-maker and the upholsterer, and not often to these. Yet this was a favourite word of the eighteenth-century critic, and it expressed the favourite conception which he seemed to entertain of what was most admirable in art and nature.
The eighteenth century is indelibly associated in our minds with what is stiff, stately, prim and affected. It was prolific of great inventors and workers in the practical arts of life; but in poetry, in philosophy, and the higher arts generally, in taste , and in the modes and manners of life, it was eminently a snobbish century. It, so to say, put its head in a wig, it carried it’s hat under its arm, it cased its calves in silk stocking and its feed in buckled shoes, and while it thus starved the extremities it sweated the trunk in enormous coats and manifold waistcoats. It was a century of crinolines, fans, farthingales, powder, patches, snuff-taking and general artificiality and perversity of taste. It was a century in which those most at home would be the footman, the confectioner, the landscape gardener, and the dancing master. Its poets were tied up to classic conventions; and cow-herds and milkmaids had to figure in its pastorals as Strephon and Phyllis and Chloris. Its stage was hampered by the absurd rules as to the ‘dramatic unities’ yet allowed the Roman Cato to appear in Court dress, including a full-bottomed wig. Shakespeare was, of course, at a discount. From the middle of the century when 80 per cent of the whole population still lived in the rural districts, a strong tide of migration set in towards the towns; and in turning their backs upon the country, it seemed as if the people had turned their backs upon Nature as a whole. Burns had the sense and taste to refuse to take on the character of his time. Following the example of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, he scorned the Strephons and Phyllises of Georgian verse and gave us Tams and Jeans and Johnnies and Megs and Maries. For unreal shepherds, ‘piping in the dale,’ he gave us kirns and communion services, crofters with their mattocks and their hoes, and all the real, stirring, throbbing life of a Scots countryside. He does indeed make rhymes about a ‘Chloris’ (whose proper name was Jean Lorimer); and the fascinating grass widow, Mrs Meiklehose, appears as ‘Clarinda, mistress of my soul,’ (he himself writing as Sylvander); while his letters reflect the stilted modes of expression belonging to the time. But in the bulk of his work, and certainly in all the best of it, Burns breaks clear away from the conventional models, the sugar –coated sentiment, and the pinchbeck rhetoric of his day. But while the poet could break away from the canons of his time, the man could not get away from the small-souled men and the conventions of his time. It is painfully evident that Burns was largely driven to unhappiness, to reckless scorn, and to dissipation by the boycott placed upon him in his later years by the Pharisees of Dumfries. Let us recall some of these incidents. It is right that the world should not be allowed to forget how it has treated the illustrious dead. It may in time be taught to appreciate geniuses in their lifetime. Because the poet favoured the Americans in the War of Independence, a fire-eating captain challenged him to fight. The immediate occasion of the challenge was the proposing by Burns of the toast ‘may our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.’ Surely Burns was right when he afterwards described this toast to one ‘that the most outrageous frenzy of loyalty cannot object to.’ Yet Lockhart, prig as he was, defends ‘a gentleman bearing the Kind’s commission in the army’ for desiring to murder the man who proposed it! The Dumfries Tories looked askance at Burns because he favoured the French Revolution, as all people of liberal sentiment did at the time. Lockhart tells us of how Burns’s friend Mr David M’Culloch, was bitterly grieved when, riding into Dumfries one summer evening he witnessed a sample of this boycotting process. Burns walked alone on the shady side of the street, while on the farther side groups of ladies and gentlemen lounged waiting for the opening of a ball, and none of them ‘appeared willing to recognise him.’ In Lockhart’s own words ‘The horseman dismounted and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to him to cross the street, said; ‘Nay my young friend – that’s all over now’ and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizel Bailie’s pathetic ballad: His bonnet stood ance fu’ fair on his brow His auld ane looked better than money ane’s new; But now he lets’s wear ony way it will hing, And casts himsel’ dowie upon the corn bing. O were we young as we ance had bee We suld had been galloping doun on yon green, And linking it ower the lily-white lee And wernea my heart light I wad die. It was little in Burns’s character [continues Lockhart] to let his feelings on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He immediately after citing these verses assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him with a bowl of his usual potation, and Bonnie Jeans’ singing of some verses which he had recently composed. The Lethe of forgetfulness was song and whisky punch. Who can say how often in Burns’s case similar slights were forgotten by the same means? Yet doubtless some of these same boycotting Pharisees, who made a difference of political opinion the occasion for a personal quarrel, would attend the poet’s funeral, subscribe to his monument, and profess to honour his genius and mourn at his death. Burns had next to nothing in common with that company. In fact, for the typical society of that century he could have nothing but scorn and repulsion. With many of those who even today profess to honour his memory he would promptly fall out. Society today would cold-shoulder Burns, not perhaps to the same extent as it did then, but cold-shoulder him more or less it certainly would. For Burns would be a non-conformist now as he was in his own day. We have become somewhat more tolerant in these days; but the odd man out has still to face th cross of suffering, the stake of petty martyrdom. The world is slow to learn – and in fact will probably never recognise in practice – that the truth resides in minorities; that on almost all new questions of great magnitude the majority are tolerably certain to be wrong; that ‘the demons of our sires become the saints whom we adore.’ The wild lawlessness of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ is Burns’s strenuous and perhaps exaggerated protest against the social conventions of his time; and we may be sure that the main reason why he sometimes kept company that was not gravely respectable was because in that sort of company he got away from the veneer and flunkeyism of polite society. He fretted away his ardent soul and ran into dissipation very largely because he found ordinary respectable society, especially in his day, so unspeakably dull and priggish. Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and many another still pass the same verdict upon society. The hankering of Burns for strong feelings frankly and warmly expressed, his desire for naturalness and the recognition of his powers, led him to associate with his inferiors in character and his equals in social station, because from these was he most likely to receive adequate respect. With these alone would his intercourse be free from the misgivings, the patronage, and the paltry controversial opposition which the Podsnaps of society must always show to the man of genius. In almost any large city today Burns would meet with hundreds of people who would sympathise with him and upon occasion ‘go one better.’ In provincial Scotland in the eighteenth century Burns very likely had not a single thoroughly kindly spirit. When we hear of prosy noblemen monopolising the conversation in a company where Burns was present, we are moved to disgust. On one such occasion Burns, glad to be rid of a noble bore, proposed ‘the health of the waiter who called his lordship from the room.’ When will people recognise in practice that it is the right of the wise to teach and the duty of the foolish to listen and learn? Yet how often must Burns, a man of genius in a humble social position, have had to put up with the prosy condescension of affluent nonentities and the slights of men who ought to have known better! We find him writing thus of his friend the Earl of Glencairn: There are few of the sore evils under the sun give me more uneasiness and chagrin, than the comparison of how a man of genius, nay of avowed worth is received everywhere with the reception which a mere ordinary character decorated with the trappings and futile distinctions of fortune meets. I imagine a man of abilities, his breast glowing with honest pride, conscious that men are born equal, still giving honour to whom honour is due. He meets at a great man’s table a Squire Somebody; he knows the noble landlord, at least, gives the Bard, or whatever he is, a share of his good wished, beyond, perhaps anyone at table; yet how will it mortify him to see a fellow whose abilities would scarcely have made an eightpenny tailor, and whose heart is not worthy three farthings, meet with attention and notice that are withheld from the son of genius and poverty? The noble Glencairn has wounded me to the soul her, because I dearly esteem, respect, and love him. He showed so much attention – engrossing attention – one day, to the only blockhead at table (the whole company consisted of his Lordship, dunderpate, and myself) that I was within half a point of throwing down my gage of contemptuous defiance. Burns was quite at his ease in whatever company he was; but while he could deal with overweening condescension, and assert his dignity without effort, his sensitive nature suffered many hurts. It was inevitable that it should. Jesus Christ, if he returned to the world, would not be able to secure respect in many companies of profession Christians if he did not wear broadcloth and a starched shirt. The sensitive man of genius gets tired of defending his dignity and of having his opinions discounted because of his social position. Conscious that he is worth listening to and learning from, he turns with scorn from men who gauge a man’s right to be heard by his acres, his bank account, the loudness of his tone, or the assertiveness of his manner. Burns, as we have seen, had his experience both of slights and patronage. We have him complaining; ‘I find I can win liking but not respect.’ The probability is that he was too free and perfervid in his conversation, wearing his heart too much on his sleeve, laying bare his mind too readily. It is to his credit that that which was thus laid bare was in the long-run thought so highly of. Competent observers declare that Burns’s conversation was the most remarkable thing about him, and one lady went so far as to declare that, in her opinion, poetry actually was not his strong point. On this head Carlyle, with his great gift of picturesque language, says :- High duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns – a strange feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at present, that this rustic with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others.’ Yes; but all this was too often forgotten. The ‘superior persons’ who wanted to mangle Burns’s poetry by ridiculous alterations, treated him with increasing coldness in his later Edinburgh days. That a ploughman should want to hold his own in conversation with them was permitted and even relished so long as the ploughman was a novelty; but when the original curiosity to hear him died out, his conversation appears to have more and more evoked the usual manifestations of ‘society’ disapproval. This would arise, not from his manners – though he could upon occasion be aggressive enough – but partly from the circumstance of his position, and still more from his opinions which were necessarily quite diverse from the drawing room sentiments of his day. Dr Lawrie said of Burns’s politics, for one thing, that they ‘always smelt of the smithy.’ But the legislation and the altered sentiment of posterity have proved that Burns’s politics were nearer right than Dr Lawrie’s. The result of this cooling in the reception accorded to Burns in ‘society’ was to make him turn from the Blairs and Stewarts and Lawries to men like William Nicol and Robert Heron, the former a reckless teacher who appropriately comes down to us as the Willie who brewed a peck o’ maut. Heron, himself neither prudent nor fortunate, testifies that Burns often resisted temptations to indulge in convivial excesses; and from this, as from other recorded circumstances in the poet’s career, it is evident that his indiscretions arose, as already claimed, not from love of drink – as might well have been, considering his physical infirmity – but from love of fellowship, and repulsion from the disfavour and stiffness of polite society. Had the right kind of associates fallen to his choice, or had Respectability worn an attractive face, Burns would undoubtedly have lived in greater happiness and dies in greater honour and prosperity. Looking over the poet’s career as a whole, one is obliged to conclude that all that was best in Burns he owned to his own inherent qualities, and that most of what was regrettable he owed to the society of his own day and its thoughtless treatment of him. It is a saddening thought that the public still does not know how to treat its great men; does not even recognise their greatness till the man himself is dead; till the ears that would have rejoiced at praise no longer hear either praise or blame; till regrets and honours and substantial rewards are alike unavailing. Socrates, Jesus, the Gracchi, Bruno, Gallileo, Savonarola, the De Wittes, Milton, Robert Burns – all raise in history their mute yet eloquent protest against the cruelty, neglect, or crass misunderstanding of the generations in which they lived and died. Even in our own day our Steads and Zolas cannot speak out for Truth and Justice but they must go to prison or fly their country to avoid the penalty of courage, integrity, and clearness of vision. Somebody asks: ‘When the true poet comes, how shall we know him?’ By reading his verse with what modicum of wit we possess, I would suggest. And having settled that your poet is indeed a true poet, I would further suggest that, for your own sake as for his, you make the most of him. It is a never increasing marvel that poetry should be discounted as a form of sentimental trifling. True poetry, dealing with the more universal things of life, is, if nothing else, one of the swiftest and most powerful forms of utterance. Would you have your speech emphatic, noble, or graceful; study your Shakespeare, Milton and Burns. Would you master epigrammatic brevity, blistering sarcasm, biting and sweeping invective, or the lip-labour and word passion of intense feeling; assimilate the verse of Swinburne, Clough, and Tennyson. Would you be subtly speculative or pensively reminiscent, read the poetry of Arnold, Browning and Keats. Would you see Nature throb with active life, would you penetrate somewhat of the innermost arcana of the problems of time, turn to your Shelley, your Morris, and again your Shakespeare. A true poet is one of the greatest gifts Nature can bestow upon a prosaic world. Her influence is more lasting than the hills. Since Homer and Solomon and David sang their songs, thousands of years have run their course and continents have changed their place. Yet to each succeeding generation their message is and will continue to be renewed. Kings, statesmen and warriors have lived and died, and all their work is as if it had not been. But the great poets of the world are in good sooth immortal. The winds and snows of winter do not more purify earth and air than the great poems purify and rejuvenate the races of men who receive and pay heed to them. Do not, then, our duty and our interest alike dictate that of our great poets we should make the most, thankful to receive so much where we had neither claims nor expectations? The great poet makes of himself – or is already fashioned and ordained to be – one great nerve, sensitised to respond to every impact and monition of the true and the beautiful in the life around him. He sees for us with his eyes, hears for us with his ears; he thinks and feels as creatures of a coarser clay cannot do, he communicates his thoughts and feelings in unforgettable language that gives to truth a new beauty and to beauty a new truth. If to acquire a language beyond our mother tongue be as the addition of another sense to those we already possess, them to know the poets is to refine and intensify all the senses. Poetry at its best is the highest wisdom in the best form of words. If the ape and tiger die out in man and he ascends higher in the scale or reason, feeling and grace, I know of no human agency that has more to do with the ascent than those who teach us in song what they have learned in the experience which is too often suffering. Of those who have suffered and sung, and, singing, taught, none deserves more at our Scottish hands than him who has seen the halo of poetry and the glamour of perennial human interest around our bare and sterile land; him who take him all in all, has shown our Scottish manhood at its supremest development. This article can be downloaded for free as an ebook On Burns – To see Oursel’s from www.unco.scot
The Treatment of Robert Burns What it was and what it ought to have been.
We have had lives of Burns by the score. We have had essays, lectures, articles, memoranda, and annotated editions by the hundred. But an appraisement, a more or less adequate estimate of the man, of the value of his writings and the meaning of his life – that has yet to be made. Currie has, perhaps unintentionally, misunderstood and misrepresented him. Gilfillan has come near vilifying him. Chambers, Cromek, Wilson, Walker and Morrison have accumulated further misrepresentations, Mackenzie and Lockhart have patronised him with a condescension which in the circumstances is absurd and annoying, and even Carlyle has perpetrated the patronage while making claims on behalf of Burns that imply a lack of adequate reading or adequate appreciation of the significance of what he read. Many – perhaps most – of these people have been less concerned about doing justice to Burns than about fine writing, the launching of ingenious theories, or the showing off of their own faculty of moralising, often quite perverse and purblind. As for the people of the Henley type – and Henley is one of the latest of our Daniels come to judgement upon Burns – they are more concerned to air their malevolent, myopic, and one-sided theories than to arrive at a just and truthful estimate of the man and his work. The man who is wanted as the ideal biographer and critic of Burns is some fine, sympathetic doctor man; a man with an understanding of the bearings of physiology upon psychology; a man of literary tastes, with an understanding of social questions, a wide outlook upon life, and no concern about fine writing; a man who, while he writes, is thinking primarily about his subject, and only very secondarily about himself and what the public will think about his book; a man who regards it as his business neither to praise nor to blame, but to explain. It may seem a small matter to some people whether we thoroughly understand and appreciate Burns or not. A maker of love songs for young people and foolish old people to sing! A satirist who lampooned all that was respectable in his day, and whose poetry is often not fit to be read in a miscellaneous company. A fellow who ended his days at the age of six-and-thirty by debauchery! Where is the necessity for understanding and appreciating him, unless, indeed, it be to take warning from his follies, his failures, and his sad and evil end. This, I make bold to say, is the reasoning of many people about Burns. To such reasoning I answer that few of us are likely to be subject to the same temptations as Burns from the same causes. It was that part of Burns’s nature which made him a poet that led him, not indeed into debauchery, for a debauchee Burns never was, but that led him into frequent convivial bouts which his delicate through strong organisation could not sustain. Burns was an essentially sociable, social, altruistic man; a man who,, though full of defensive pride, yet fell upon the necks of his fellows and lauded men inferior to himself out of pure generosity and the enthusiasm of humanity; a man who had ambitions, but whose ambitions had reference to what he could do for Scotland’s sake rather than what he could do for the sake of Robert Burns. The average man stands in no great need of taking warning by the defects of Burns’s character: he mostly has the self-regarding virtues quite sufficiently developed to avoid convivial habits and the penalties attaching to them. To be fond of merry company and witty and spirited conversation is no vice, but, if it can be kept in its place, a virtue rather; and that many men contrive to avoid conviviality and its penalties reflects no particular credit on them. It may only mean that they have no great love of their fellows, and that their fellows, doubtless for reason good, have just as little love for them. What one is concerned for is that we should understand as much as possible of Burns the man, of the conditions of his poetic inspiration, and, above all, of his poems themselves. To realise Robert Burns the ploughman, scorning the literary traditions of his country and the critical canons of an artificial, ‘elegant’ insincere century, rising from out the ruck of Popes and Hayleys and other versifying triflers of less and lesser note, revolutionising the whole conception of poetry, and taking his place at a bound among the great poets of all time – to realise something of the import of all this is surely to enhance our appreciation of the work of Burns itself. I do not think the work of Burns is as well known as it ought to be; but I am satisfied that we know his work better than we knew the man himself in spite of all that has been written about him. And so far are we from understanding the meaning of his life that were another such poet to come among us, he would not be treated even as well as Burns was; for Burns had gifts that commanded instantaneous popularity, and that comparatively few poets possess. I am not of those who would lament, as so many have lamented, over the fact that Burns was allowed to live for a number of years as a gauger and to die in no better or more profitable walk of life than that. Burns himself elected to be a gauger, probably because he felt that any calling which made an exacting demand upon his attention would unfit him for what was in his case the higher vocation of a poet. That vocation he undoubtedly wished to follow. What I complain of in connection with the treatment of Burns was the comparative neglect of his poetry. I do not mean to say that he and his poetry were not talked about and the latter to a certain extent read. We know that he was lionised in Ayrshire, in Edinburgh, in Nithsdale and, later, in the town of Dumfries. But in spite of all the talk and the lionising, Burns’s poetry was not bought. Of the first edition of his poems, published at Kilmarnock, only 600 copies were printed. Of these only 350 were disposed of to subscribers; and the remainder must have been rather stiff to sell; for Burns could not induce Wilson the printer to bring out a second edition. The Kilmarnock edition was published in 1786; the Edinburgh edition in the following year. The later consisted of 2800 copies, which were taken up by 1500 subscribers. A third edition was suggested while the poet was in slight and temporary difficulties in Dumfries; but the suggestions came to nothing. The first edition, as I say, was printed in 1786; and the poet died in 1696. (1796?) So that in ten years all the copies of Burns’s collected works that the public wanted was 3400. The truth is, the public will entertain an author; will present him with the freedom of cities; will buzz around him to stare and criticise his looks, and dress, and speech; but the last think it will think of doing is to buy and read his writings, which is at once the greatest favour it can confer upon him and the greatest compliment it can pay him. Says poor Robert Heron, the poet’s unfortunate friend; ‘Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, were alike delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, and I can well remember how even ploughboys and maidservants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned the most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might but procure the works of Burns.’ My answer to that is that a maid-servant or a ploughman may here and there have wared some part of their ‘sair-won’ penny fee’ on a copy of Burns; but the fact remains that in ten years only 3400 of these books were sold over the country as a whole, the majority of these being subscribed for and secured by well-to-do people. A number of copies often went to the same person, one Kilmarnock wine merchant putting down his name for 35 copies of the first edition. Making all due allowance for the smaller population, the less diffused taste for reading, the higher price of books, and the comparative poverty of Scotland in those days, it is egregious that in ten years not more than 3400 copies should have been sold of the greatest writings Scotland has produced. Burns was writing poetry for a score of years. Hundreds of thousands of pounds must have been made by the sale of his writings during his lifetime and since his death. Yet all that he ever earned by those writings was an aggregate sum of something like £900. It is clear, then, that the public did not do its duty by Burns in the matter of buying his books. Were such books being published nowadays they would run through as many editions in a year as they did in a decade in Burns’s time, and the publishers would produce by the ten thousand instead of by the single thousand. I do not believe that a poet should attempt to live by the making of verse; but I do contend that Robert Burns ought to have received more money for his writing than he did. Of course, the only way in which he could have done so would have been by an enhanced sale of the poems. Walter Scott perversely speaks of ‘the efforts made for his relief’ having been trifling. Relief! As if Burns were a pauper, or what is called in Scotland an ‘object.’ Burns would have welcomed honest work, with fair remuneration for it. As a journalist he should have been able even in his day to earn more money than as a gauger, for he wrote at least good prose, and wrote, as I believe, with some degree of fluency. Newspaper work occurs to one as the kind of work at which Burns could probably have earned a livelihood most readily and with most pleasure in the work, for he had the mental readiness and the universality of sympathy and interests that go to the making of the best type of newspaper man. But I grant that it would not be easy to provide suitable employment for one so independent as was Burns. If he wished to be a gauger that was clearly what he ought to have been allowed to be. I have no sympathy with the denunciation of Pitt because he refused to do anything for the ‘relief’ of Burns. Pitt could hardly be expected to enjoy the best of the poet’s work – his Scots poems and songs; but he was not without appreciation of Burns’s poetry as a whole. At the table of Lord Liverpool the great minister said; ‘I can think of no verse since Shakespeare’s that has so much the appearance of coming so sweetly from Nature.’ I detest the name of patronage, and when Pitt said that literature could be left to look after itself, he was, or should have been, quite right. There are, of course, circumstances in which it is right to give pensions. If a man spend a lifetime in some out-of-the-way field of research, securing valuable results for which there can be no direct recompense by the public, it is pre-eminently the duty of the State to redress the defect of circumstances. But a writer of popular poetry might reasonably expect to have his mere money reward in the shape of kudos for the sale of his books. My complain, then, is I repeat, not that nothing was done for the ‘relief’ of Burns; not that he was allowed to remain a gauger; not that he was not made a college professor, as somebody suggested; but that his books were not bought. Not only did the public of Burns’s own day fail to buy his books. It also robbed him of his time and substance. While he farmed at Ellisland his house was almost daily besieged by tuft hunters who came to eat and drink and keep him from his work, going away to afterwards speak slightingly of the entertainment they had received, as his biographers tell us. Now, the average man, seeing there was little profit in the making of verse, would have turned his attention to some form of business in which there was at least a prospect of making money. But it was part of the mental make-up of Burns that to be true to the highest he knew meant in his case that he had to obey the call of the muses. A douce, worldly-wise man like Walter Scott would have sent the muses packing, and, finding himself at Ellisland, as Burns did, a married man with a family, would have given his best attention to farming. He would have worked hard, lived frugally, and would probably have made Ellisland pay. From the ordinary point of view it would have been right to do so. But while Nithsdale would thus have had one more moderately prosperous and decorous farmer, Scotland would have lost her great legacy of song, for the ascendancy of the farmer would have doubtless meant the crushing of the poet, and the gain of Burns and his family would have been the loss of Scotland and the world. I have hardly any doubt but that Burns was mainly to ‘blame’ for his failure as a farmer. When he entered Ellisland he was not without mean. He had just received the money for the Edinburgh edition, and his biographers say that the land was good, markets were rising, and the rent was low. It is not until he is clearly failing to make the farm pay that they cast about for excuses. As if these were necessary to account for business failure in the case of a poet! The father of Allan Cunningham said of Ellisland that in renting it Burns had made a poet’s choice rather than a farmer’s but at the same time it is admitted that Burns could have done better with the farm such as it was. He kept a comparatively large staff of servants, who ate much and worked little, and he did little regular work himself, although he was found of ploughing and excelled as a ploughman, and although he donned the sower’s apron in seedtime, and as a worker could put all around him to shame. He had not been long in the farm before he added the duties of exciseman to those of farmer, and his work in the former capacity not only took him much from home, but led him into temptation. Although as a farmer Burns failed both at Mossgiel and Ellisland, it is clear that he did not fail from fecklessness of character. Farming may not require a high order of mind, but it at least requires attention, forethought and energy. To succeed in farming, as in any other business, a man must give his best thoughts to his business, and Burn’s best thoughts had, in accordance with the bent of his mind, to be given to poetry. What is more – and doubtless this is still news to many – Burns was afflicted, as Johnson was, with hereditary hypochondria, constitutional melancholy, what we nowadays call pessimism; and this would naturally predispose him to meet failure half-way. He confessed himself that he had no turn for business; and this distrust, probably well grounded – for Burns knew himself thoroughly – would render it difficult for him to succeed unless the conditions were naturally very favourable. It strikes one with surprise to learn that Burns was a hypochondriac, a man cursed with a temperament of invincible melancholy. It is not difficult to believe that the man who could conceive and give matchless expression to the wild revelry of ‘The Jolly Beggars,’ the grim fan of ‘Death and Dr Hornbook’ and the grotesque diablerie of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ might have been a pessimist, for it is well known that melancholics are often the most successful professional humourists, seeking refuge from their gloomy thoughts in the opposite extreme of Titanic laughter. But it is not so easy to realise that a pessimist could write ‘The Cottars Saturday Night’ and the radiantly optimistic ‘Epistle to Davie.’ The testimony of all his biographers is clear upon this point, however,; and it is the less difficult to receive when we remember poems such as ‘Man was made to mourn,’ the stanza in the ‘Address to a Daisy’ beginning ‘E’en thou who mourns the daisy’s fate,’ ‘Winter, a dirge,’ ‘Despondency,’ ‘A Winter’s Night’ and ‘The Lament,’ and the frequent recurrence , even in his songs, of magnificent descriptions of the phenomenon of storms. In the song of ‘Menie’ we have the conclusion ‘Come, Winter, with thing angry howl, And, raging, bend the naked tree.’ And the forlorn lover in ‘My Nannie’s Awa’,’ seeks the same consolation in the ‘dark, dreary winter and wild-driving snaw.’ Burns had a fierce delight in the war of the elements, and it will be remembered that ‘Scots wha hae’ was composed while he rode across a moor in a storm of wind and rain. I have a theory that this delight in the tempest was the outcome of the same physical characteristics that made him a pessimist. With all his muscular strength – admitedly great – and the spirit and wit which made him the life of whatever company he was in, Burns inherited the taint of consumption from his father. This, combined with the excessively hard work done by Burns as a young man on the farm of Mossgiel, the exhausting excitements of an intensely emotional and imaginative nature, and the effects of drinking matches, after which, as he said, he sometimes felt as if he had parted with a slice of his constitution – these allied causes not only greatly hastened his end, but must have engendered a physical feverishness to which the blast and pelt of wind and rain would be a welcome antidote. I think it will be found that high-strung people, when in good health, are always most fit and comfortable in cold weather. Henry David Thoreau, a man of a strange, shy genius, who also, despite his asceticism and outdoor life, died a comparatively young man, speaks of longing to sit in a wet sea cave through three weeks’ storm, to give a tone to his system. The experiment would more likely have killed him; still one can sympathise with the feeling, which expresses the instinctive hankering of the hectic ‘decadent’ man for health and for getting close to the forces and elements of Nature as a means of recovering health. As bearing on this point, I must not omit to mention a story, though it is not well vouched, of the means alleged to have been taken by Burns to overcome the attacks of ‘palpitation and suffocation’ from which he suffered. It is stated by Lockhart and Chambers, on the authority, apparently of one John Blane, who was a farm servant at Mossgiel, that at one period these attacks came upon the poet almost nightly, and that it was his custom to have a great tub of cold water by his bedside, into which he would plunger oftener than once in the course of a night as a means of procuring temporary relief. I have called Burns a portent; and is not the name warranted? The son of an irritable, consumptive, yet high-minded father – a Puritan of the Puritans, who was so much concerned about the religious training of his sons that he drew up a kind of Unitarian Catechism for them; and who, while proud of the genius of his eldest son, fretted his heart out over the youth’s hankering after country dancing assemblies. On the father’s side there is the stern Puritanism, the liberal ideas, the taste for literature, the debilitated frame, and the irascible temper. In the mother, again, we have a strong, couthie woman, full of passion and the love of song, with a great repertoire of Scottish songs and traditional tales, which she would make the more of when she saw how much they held and delighted her eldest born. Her nature seems to me revealed in the love and pride with which she welcomed her son back to Mossgiel after his triumphs in Edinburgh: ‘Oh,Robbie!’ was all the articulate ovation she could give him as he appeared in the door to her, and we are left to import a world of meaning into the words. As if such a farmer and such a mother were not enough to complete the poet’s equipment, there was in the house of William Burnes an ancient dame full of superstition and endless tales of witches, warlocks, brownies, water kelpies, and other eerie lore. Here was have our man, then, with the Puritan intellect of his father, the strong sensuous emotions of his mother, and the training which they and the credulous crone would give him. Add to this the excellent elementary schooling, the miscellaneous reading, and the habits of disputation and comparatively high converse held in the cottage of the Puritan peasant. Add to these, again, a celestial something in the lad himself, a strenuous spirit, very largely out of touch with the whole intellectual life of his century, an animalism which led him in one way, a Puritan severity on the rational side of his mind which led him in another way, and which, combined with the low spirits borne of his functional disorder, would make him his own most remorseless judge and censor! Have we not here obviously the elements that go to make up a prodigy – a bundle of seeming contradictions – divided from actual insanity, as many great minds are, by only the thinnest and frailest partition. Burns combined the greater virtues of the Puritan with the greater virtues of the Bohemian. Independent and conscientious, scrupulously punctilious as to the meeting of financial obligations, he was nevertheless conspicuously generous. He kept open house both at Ellisland and at Dumfries. His first act on getting the money for the Edinburgh edition of his poems was to erect a monument upon the neglected grave of Fergusson, his elder brother of the muse; and the advance he made to Gilbert of £200 to assist him in the farming of Mossgiel appears to have been made without a moment’s hesitation; although the prospect of its repayment was by no means of the nearest. Fond of company as he was, he had the domestic virtues too, and we have abundant testimony as to the uncommon interest he took in the education of his children. Part Two will be on this site next month – hopefully you won’t have forgotten all about Burns by the middle of February – but if you can’t wait, you can read the whole of this article, and a range of others in ‘On Burns – to see oursel’s as others see us’ Download the free ebook from www.unco.scot
The Names in the Novels
One great open secret of the classic stamp which is upon these fictions lies in the author’s happy choice of unforgettable names, both for places and for characters. We learn from Forster’s ‘Life’ – what we might have divined from experience of the range and peculiarity of actual English names – that the nomenclature in Dickens, when it was not obviously coined, as in Do-the-boys Hall, was taken down from signboards, nameplates, newspaper reports, and the everyday hearing of the ear. To Scotsmen, Welshmen, or Irishmen who have never lived away from their own country, the Dickens names often appear incredibly absurd. There are ugly names in the Celtic lands – McCulloch, MacFadyen, MacGurk, Auchinachie are not exactly verbal poems – but at least the Celtic names have a meaning: Mac is ‘the son of,’ and auch is ‘a field.’ But some English names would appear to have been affixed for their absurdity. No name is too grotesque, too jeering, to gross, or too ugly to be an actual name carried through life by some unfortunate English man or woman who must repeat it to strangers, be addressed by it in speech or writing, or hear it announced at a great public assembly. What are we to think of Hogben, Quirk, Titterington, Coffin, Bugg, Ragg, and Juggins? Passing along Chester Road, Manchester , one day with Robert Blatchford and William Palmer the artist, we sighted a brass plate bearing the legend: ‘Tipper, Contractor.’ My companions smiled when I called attention to its appropriateness; but hey had evidently seen without thinking of it before. A little later, in Stretford Road, we came upon the name ‘Godbehere’ over a Bible shop, and again it was the northern newcomer who was struck with the oddity rather than the English journalist and the English artist who passed the shop regularly. When in Dickens’s page we light upon place names like Chinks’s Basin, Millpond Bank, and the Old Green Copper Ropewalk we may be sure that the great writer has seen these names and joyfully jotted them down for use. They were almost certainly real names. In Hull to this day there is a Bowlalley Lane and a Land of Green Ginger. The surnames in these novels are forever identifies with typical human characteristics as adjectives and substantives. Coined names like Gradgrind and Bounderby carry their meaning in their face; but names less indicative of personal characteristics have nevertheless become generically descriptive. The groveller is Uriah Heep; the whole tribe of cracksmen are Bill Sikes; Sarah Gamp’s surname has provided a short synonym for umbrellas that have now little in common with the plethoric paraplui she carried; Chadband and Stiggins stand for the class of theologians - now mostly extinct, one would say - whose unction was in inverse ratio to their sincerity. Pairs The names seem to go in pairs, because they are chosen upon a principle, and we link them so much with pleasure in the mere enumeration. There is Jarley and Marley, and Lillyvick and Linkinwater. There are Podsnap and Snodgrass, Peg Sliderskew and Poll Sweedlepipe. We bracket Joe Gargery who had ‘sich larks’ with Barkiss who ‘was willin.’ When we think of two hard, hemit-like old hunks we couple Scrooge who was hard bitten by habit rather than nature with the diabolical Quilp who rioted in badness. If we think of lawyers it is impossible to remember Spenlow & Jorkins without recalling Dodson & Fogg. There are names that suggest the qualities of the characters who bear them, as they were, of course, intended to do – the Brothers Cheeryble as optimists, Murdstone, the hard man whose name is suggested by grindstone; Miss Flyte, whose estate took flight in litigation; Serjeant Buzfuz who was indeed all fuss and buzz; Trotty Veck, Silas Wegg, Newman Noggs, Mark Tapley (the very name for a man from a public house) ; Mrs Pipchin (what a name!) and Mrs Gummidge , who grumbled so long and then turned out a trump. What a galaxy of memories they call up, and how they have served the world with catchwords and similes, from Wilkins Micawber’s ‘Waiting for something to turn up,’ and Captain Cuttle’s ‘When found make a note of,’ to the proverbs and metaphors of the Wellers, father and son. To many a million the England of Charles Dickens and his people is the only England there is; and when we read that Germans in the trenches read the novels of Dickens in greater numbers than did our own Tommies, it seemed no wonder that they should have been so ready to fraternise with us at the first Christmas of the Great War, or that afterwards they should have mutinied against fighting the compatriots of an author in whose hands English humanity appears, on the whole, in such a delightful guise. Well, we may say that the foundation of Dickens’s style was the close attention with which he observed, the intense feeling with which he wrote, and the happy patience with which he unfolded the humours of character in humble individuals with whom both the queerest freakishnesses and the greatest tenderness are oftenest to be found. One thinks of all the art expended on the Aged Parent, deaf and past work, yet affectionately cherished and humoured by his son, who in the city was the hardest of legal nuts. But the secret of Dickens’s humour and wit and kindness is beyond us. The combination has a moral as well as an intellectual basis. Like Shakespeare, Dickens must have been a great lover of his fellow men. Exaggeration. It is often argued that Dickens was greatly given to exaggeration. For anyone who read the daily marvels of the press and keeps an open eye for the marvels of ordinary life it would be hard to say that the greatest wonders of the mere novelist can be exaggerated. One has met queerer people in life than any novelist dared to put in his books. There are many things that are impossible, but hardly any that are improbable. All fictitious presentation of character has by its concentration necessarily the effect of exaggeration. To set down actual occurrences and speeches in the order of their occurrence, with all the inconsequent, insignificant things said and done in between the events and conversations that are of moment, would not be worth while. The artist must exclude the unessential in word and act. We all have friends and acquaintances who do and say, at intervals, things which we call characteristic. But during most of the time their words and acts are quite ordinary, and of no literary significance. In plays or novels, however, characters must always speak in character, and acts must have dramatic significance. This means that the ordinary must be excluded, and thus exaggeration becomes inevitable. A play or novel, thus, cannot be natural. They can only approximate to nature. It is enough that Dickens in his exaggeration can always carry us along with him. The story marches as a story, and the oddity of the characters, their odd names, their odd surroundings, their unusual experiences, and the didactic (teaching) significance of the whole tale, give it its value, in Dickens’s case a supreme value. The Open-Eyed Sociologist. The sociologist in Dickens never sleeps. He cannot take Pip to Mr Pumblechook’s shop without giving a picture of the whole High Street which is of vast economic significance: Mr Pumblechook appeared to conduct his business by looking across the street at the saddler, who appeared to transact his business by keeping his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life by putting his hands in his pockets and contemplating the baker, who in his turn folded his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood at his door and yawned at the chemist. The watchmaker, always peering over a little desk with a magnifying glass at his eye, and always inspected by a group in smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of his shop-window, seemed to be about the only person in the High Street whose trade engaged his attention. That is competitive commerce – the small market town of wasteful hops and idle shopmen, with only one busy craftsman in the street. As to sentiment, Dickens was one of the earliest of early Victorians; and while his fund is as fresh as ever, the pathos, say, of Little Nell and the old man is tiring. But with all his sentiment, he was ahead of his age, even ahead of the present age, in his socioeconomic shrewdness. It is still the fashion to sympathise with the money-lender’s victims, and judges gain cheap popularity by denouncing the money-lender. The dishonesty of borrowers who do not mean to pay, and of idle extravagant people who live well upon credit, taking goods they have no intention of paying – of this we hear only as a joke, though it is no joke to billed tradesmen and to the honest folk who are charged to make good the losses incurred with the bilkers. On this Dickens eighty years ago was more sound than all the judges who give all their sympathy to the plunging borrower and their scorn to the men who risk their money in the most desperate of all ventures, spending their lives in coping with conscienceless impecuniosity. He makes Arthur Gride in ‘Nicholas Nickleby’) soliloquise: Ten thousand pounds! How many proud printed dames would have fawned and smiled, and how many spendthrift blockheads done me lip-service to my face and cursed me in their hearts, while I turned that ten thousand pounds into twenty! While I ground and pinched and used these needy borrowers for my pleasure and profit, what smooth-tongued speeches and courteous looks and civil letters would have given me! The cant of the lying world is, that men like me compass our riches by dissimulation and treachery; by fawning, cringing and stooping. Why, how many lies, what mean evasions, what humbled behaviour from upstarts who, but for my money, would spurn me aside as they do their betters every day, would that ten thousand pounds have brought me in! Grant that I had doubled it – made cent. per cent. – for every sovereign told another – there would not be one piece in all the heap which wouldn’t represent ten thousand man and paltry lies, told, not by the money-lender, oh, no, but by the money- borrowers, your liberal, thoughtless, generous, dashing folks, who wouldn’t be so mean as to save a sixpence for the world. That is not only good sense, but good drama. The money-lender is made to speak just as a money-lender would speak. It is the essence of drama to be able to put yourself in the place even of characters with whose sorry trade (as in this case) you have no sympathy. A Parable. I have quoted extensively from ‘Great Expectations,’ not only because of its ‘artistic’ merits as a tale, but because it seems to embody its author’s latest, wisest attitude to life. In its conclusion, Pip, who has lived upon the ex-convict’s bounty without knowing the source of his unearned income, from the moment the coarse but affectionate man turns up, revolts against accepting another penny of his money. The money has been lawfully earned abroad: it is the human channel through which it comes that Pip cannot abide. How many men and women of today would jib at the fortune that came through such hands? It is such men as Magwitch, coarse in speech, in feature, hands, and habit, who make most of the world’s wealth. Are we to believe that because the rents and dividends of the idle well-to-do come through the hands of lawyer or stockbroker the dependence of the well-groomed, well-schooled, travelled, expensively-turned-out people is any less dishonourable? If the upshot of Dickens’s tale counts for anything it is that every man and woman who does not work for a living is in precisely the same degrading position which Pip found so dishonourable when his patron turned up in person. Pip would not have the course Colonial’s money. He and his friend Herbert Pocket alike declared the idea intolerable. Is it tolerable for the well-to-do generally to live upon the labour and earnings of just such men, multiplied manifold, but keeping themselves mostly out of sight? The miner, the navvy, the slaves of the stokehold, the bloated men of the brewery, the anaemic factory hands, the wretched beings from soapworks and chemical works, one of whom declared to an R.A.M.C friend that the life in the trenches was a holiday by comparison with his ordinary occupation in civil life – these are, mutatits mutandis , men very like Abel Magwitch, gnarled hands, bristling hair, sidelong doglike chewing, rude speech and all. But it is from these conscripts of toil that the idle shareholder draws his (or her) dividends. The shareholder cannot help it, it may be said. But he could help to change entirely the system of production and of life. As it is he votes and subscribes to prevent the system being altered. Dickens does not thus drive home the general social significance of his story; but he must not only have known that it had no other significance, but intended it to carry that significance. Morally the whole story points to that. Nay, it must be because his well-to-do readers have seen such teaching running through a great part of his work that they discover he was ‘not a gentleman.’ If to be a ‘nice’ man, falling in with the tastes and outlook of the masters rather than the serfs, be the test, then Dickens certainly was not a gentleman. The point need not be laboured. To many of us it will be in such ways, for such teaching, that the real noblesse oblige of Charles Dickens – himself a hard worker all his life – most truly emerges. Conclusion. Thus we come back to the point from which we set out – the social purpose of these tales. The large industrious class of pointless writers of fiction are annoyed that we should look for any such. ‘The business of the novelist’ says one of them, is to tell a plain tale in which his characters should be left to express themselves in action.’ So that the tale is to be plain as well as meaningless. Why a plain tale? We used to say ‘a penny plain, tuppence coloured,’ the colours evidently doubling the value. We can get plain tales from the newspapers; but the significance of them is not shown, and the simple reader often finds them meaningless on the ‘plain’ presented elements. The Singh-Robinson case, or any cause celébre of the hour, is much more novel than any novel; but who shall say that the full significance of these plain tales is realised? For the rest, it is desirable that the characters who ‘express themselves in [recorded] action’ should be worth expressing. So many characters are not. Yet another best-seller says: ‘The novelist should before everything else be an entertainer, a teller of tales.’ The implication of this is that worth-while characters, great events, and spirited narrative are not entertaining. This is not only hard on the historian and the biographer, but it is hard on the novelists who have had a purpose to serve as well as an entertaining story to tell – Dickens, for one, among many. The author of a particularly sordid story of the East End of London says: ‘All this high falutin’ chatter about ideals! A playwrights’s and a missionary’s calling appear to me to be two distinct and separate callings which should not be permitted to overlat. The one aim of a novelist or dramatist is to amuse.’ Poor Shakespeare, the moralist and poet! Poor Shaw, the missionary! Poor Dickens, poor George Eliot, poor Charles Reade, poor Victor Hugo, poor Bellamy, poor Wells, hopeless hight falutin’ chattering idealists all, but also, somehow, great entertainers. Why did you not confine your attention to ladies of the type of ‘Liza of Lambeth,’ instead of introducing us to Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Imogen, Constance, Catherine Eliassoen and Joan of Arc? A lady novelist, whose interest lies in making out that Shakespeare and Dickens are back numbers, in reviewing the book of a brother-in-trade, says; The philosophy of any novel is negligible; what matters in it is style, atmosphere, imagination, the drama of events or of emotion, and character presentment. ‘These Barren Leaves’ is restful, refreshing, and entertaining. You feel at the end of it that you have been paying a leisurely visit to a gossiping and amusing house party, no more unintelligent or tiresome, though a good deal more affectionate, than the average set of people in real life. Do you want to read about ‘an average set of people in real life?’ Why should you? Is it not better to keep the very best company that you can? Average talk is neither wise nor interesting. Average people are very much opposed to learning anything, and mostly they are appallingly ignorant, even of the business out of which they make a living. This ‘average set of people,’ are the company at a country house. One has sat hour after hour in the smokeroom of a country house in the company of politicians, proconsuls, physicians, authors and divines, and their conversation ranged over topics the bare mention of which would raise a smile form ‘an average set of people.’ But their conversation was intensely absorbing, informative, and so stimulating that it impressed one afresh with a sense of one’s own limitations, and raised still higher the studious ambition. In addition to that, it was witty and entertaining as the talk of average people never is. Greville of the ‘Memoirs’ was a horsey man, keeping the company, often, of jockeys and stableboys. But he was, by virtue of his birth and family influence, Clerk to the Privy Council. He often met in company Macaulay, Sydney Smith, Lord Holland, Lord Melbourne, and the Duke of Wellington. After such a meeting he would enter in his journal remorseful lamentations over time mis-spent with average people, and make good resolutions for the future; and he was on the less wise because these resolutions were not kept. The best company should be good enough for anyone. If we cannot keep it in person we can do so in literature – the best man in a thousand years are better in their books than ever they were in personal contact. It is not arrogance or superior personism to want to associate with grown-up people. The average person has not quite grown up. The C3 people wallowing in gossip about the football or the billiards which they do play, and the sporting chances of politicians in whose politics they take no interest, are spectators at a show of whose antecedents, meaning, and possible course they have no idea. Why make books about the Grey Mass when there are outstanding people, events and things to write up? If we wish occasionally to read novels as a dissipated alternative and alternative to books about real people who matter, important events that did happen or are happening now, or the science and the story of the world and the universe in which we live, the masters of fiction are good enough; and the test of their quality is the extent to which they have used their tales, not merely for amusement, but in order to shed real light on the life of man the struggler, still so imperfectly known to us. Regarded as entertainers, it is not to the journeymen of the craft that these masters of craft will take a back seat. Addendum to the Second Edition. As criticism of the foregoing, it is said that the crusades of the didactic writers will destroy the value of their fictions when the propaganda has done its turn and the evils are exposed no more. But ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ is still a great seller because it is the most graphic exposure of the many evils of chattel slavery. ‘Don Quixote’ is not out of date because it satirises the absurdities of medieval chivalry. The grosser evils of the factory system have been removed, but ‘Mary Barton’ is still a classic because it illustrates them in detail; it has had a lease of life not extended to Mrs Gaskell’s less didactic novels, beating even the exquisite semi-autobiographical ‘Cranford’ which is the Cheshire home of her youth, Knutsford. The Bronte stories have always a serious background, probably all unnoted by the careless reader – the Napoleonic wars, high prices, and the Luddite firing of factories and smashing of machinery. Sir Walter Scott is not a back number because his tales have usually a purposeful historic setting: it is the non-historic ones such as ‘St Ronan’s Well,’ that are less successful. Thackeray’s ‘Esmond,’ and ‘The Virginians’ are among his more enduring writings because they revive the atmosphere of an age that is ‘dead’ only to those whose lack of imagination leaves them uninterested in history , which with Mr Henry Ford, they probably find to be ‘all bunk.’ To the thoughtless, ‘didactic’ means ‘of the nature of copybook maxims.’ Be it said in passing , the crystallised wisdom of the copybook maxim is better gear than ‘the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate,’ and much better than the full, true, and particular account of the dawn of Lady Ermytrude’s passion for the chauffeur. Didactic means teaching, and now that fiction has become the only reading of the largest class of those who look at a book at all, it is more than ever necessary that it should be informed with purposes. ‘The Jungle,’ ‘King Coal,’ ‘The Brass Cheek,’ ‘Looking Backwards,’ ‘Elmer Gantry,’ among the more modern American novels with a purpose –aren’t they all good enough tales as such? Of didactic the greatest entertainer of the time has written in the preface to ‘Man and Superman’: ‘When he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach and all the people who do not want to learn agree with him emphatically.’
Dickens part two (of three)
II. What makes the style of Charles Dickens so individual and recognisable? Shortly stated, it is surely its academic yet whimsical intensity, is it not? Absurdity set forth in graceful language is irresistible. Even his little boys are under all circumstances polite. David Copperfield taken in by the greedy waiter, and little Pip tilted upside down upon a table tombstone till he sees the church steeple under his feet, never forgot their company manners. Pip addresses as ‘Sir,’ the terrible convict who threatens him so fiercely and handles him so unceremoniously, and David is abashed in the presence of the cormorant waiter, and answers him with propitiatory courtesy. The contrast of their innocent helplessness, put upon as it is, with the unscrupulousness which abuses it, is enhance in its pathos by the gentle politeness of the little men. This urbanity is a distinguishing note of Dickens’s style. Attention. Dickens himself attributed the basis of his powers to Attention. He had, much in the manner of his own little Paul Dombey, observed closely an thought long analytical thoughts about everything that interested him. It is claimed for him, on the strength of a statement of his own, that his memory went back to things he had noticed in his cradle. One has heard this statement called in question: but to doubt it seems gratuitous scepticism. It would be interesting to compare notes with individuals as to when their conscious observation or observant consciousness began. Such an inquiry would be quite in keeping with the celebrated investigations into human faculty conducted by Francis Galton. It would be a pity to spoil such an inquiry by self-complacent exaggeration and there would be a tendency to do that; but, speaking for myself , I have a great many definite recollections of infantile activities, adventures, and speculations that must have begun not later than the age of three. My people removed from the house in which I was born when I was at the age of 4 ½ ; and I went to school very tearfully and rebelliously just after the removal; but vivid memories of summers, winters, exploits, and day-dreaming ante-date this period by what seem so long a stretch that it does not appear at all to be difficult to believe that so exceptional an observer as Dickens might begin his critical, speculative, analytical stocktaking even in his cradle. Baldly stated, attention as a recipe for mental achievement may not seem to take us far; but let us not rest satisfied with the bald statement of it; let us see in some detail what it means. The admonition of the French preceptor, Attendez vous – pay attention – is the most fruitful good advice that an instructor can give. One of the best technical pupils I have had was the daughter of a poor labourer who sometimes said, ‘Will you do that again, please?’ when she had not quite followed the manual trick of an operation. She seldom needed a third repetition, and the very look of her quiet grey eyes bespoke special attentiveness. A Hopeful Theory. That we may do more or less what we wish to do if we are only sufficiently in earnest to attend to the means of success if obviously a hopeful theory; and the more it is examined the more feasible it does seem. It appears to place achievement within the compass of all who can attain to the moral quality of sincerity, in art as in any other branch of human service. When we use the word ‘genius’ in ad captandum fashion as covering something not to be accounted for , something to be set apart as beyond explanation, we may be ignoring or ruling out a whole process of preparation in the mind, studies, and pursuits of a person whom we suppose to have achieved a certain result by some inexplicable tour de force, without preparation, and without the concentration which is itself a preparation. It is common to find men who excel in music, poetry, eloquence, painting , or sculpture defective to the extent of disorderliness on the side of business, figures, and general attention to the requisites of personal material prosperity. What does this mean except that the genius is so pre-occupied with his art that he has no thought for the small change of general social commerce? The artist can reproduce scenes or figures by the closeness with which he observes them. Attempts at drawing reveal in line and perspective the degree of notice which the draughtsman has taken of appearances. As the artist has an attentive eye for appearances, for form and colour, so has the actor for the sound of spoken words, the tone, gesture, and facial expression of the speaker. The musician has a closely-related attention for tune, time, and musical enunciation. But to reproduce form and colour by line and pain, to imitate sounds by other sounds, whether spoken words or notes of music – these are comparatively simple processes as contrasted with the reproduction of sounds, scenery, speeches, atmosphere by means of the totally different medium of words. Yet this last is what the author does. And as such art at its best is the most difficult of all, a corresponding degree of attentiveness is required for mastery in it. To say that musical, scenic or verbal artists produce their effects by having given specially close attention to the thing to be produced may not seem much of an explanation. The artist must, of course, feel that the thing to which he gives attention is supremely worthy of his attention, or he may just have a turn that way without having consciously theorised in justification of his state. Genius. Genius is the capacity and the will to give attention to trifles, an infinite patience for taking pains, and the more or less conscious belief that the trifles are worth taking pains with. This it is which marks him off from the average man, who is apt to let a job go with ‘It will do well enough.’ Simple people, savages, and children take the most marvellous work of the human hand and brain as a matter of course. They have little curiosity. Perhaps they despair of being able to understand. Those who know nothing of machinery give it up: in the case of women they have little attention for it. But a boy, and still more a man who already knows something of mechanics, is interested at once, and will try to master the principle of a machine. The man who reads is more or less interested in all books, and will glance over the titles of a row of volumes even if he has no time to look inside them. But the illiterate give books no thought. they are as incapable of giving them attention as the woman is with the machinery for which she has no use. I was surprised to find that a clever teacher, herself something of a draughtswoman, had never noticed that the stones or bricks out of which a wall was composed were not laid exactly on top of one another, but were set so that the middle of one stone fell on top of the joining of the two stones below it, one course thus locking another. People who tell a joke, but leave out the point of it, simply have not attended to the story properly. People who cannot tell one tune from another, have not listened properly, are perhaps incapable of listening properly, to musical sounds. That such people can nevertheless reproduce subtle shades of pronunciation would seem to show that they are not so much destitute of ‘ear’ as that they do not consider music worth listening to. We can note that in which we are interested. Dull men who forget important facts the moment after they have heard or read them can nevertheless remember small sums that are due to them, and men can often give a prolix account of all the minor circumstances in connection with a matter while forgetting the essential features of what happened. There is ordinary photographic perception, and there is the selective, didactic perception which we call art. Zola takes down everything. Dickens, or any other true artist, selects, transposes, shortens, heightens, and rejects. Zola was a literary photographer; Dickens a literary artist. Laughter-Makers. But farcical humour is a thing by itself – one of the rarest human gifts. The comedian is always popular, irrespective of the precise value of his talent, because his talent has what economists call a ‘scarcity value.’ That we take the humourist to our hearts, is because, for every thousand writers who can make us shudder, weep, or just follow a plain tale with mild interest, there is but one who can make us laugh. Mark Twain in America, Dickens and Shaw in England are not merely writers among thousands: there is no arithmetic to express uniqueness. In many readers and hearers the faculty of laughter is so much a minus quality that unless they are warned beforehand that they are expected to laugh, they fail to do so, in this reminding us of deaf people who laugh too soon or in the wrong place, because they have been told that So-and-so is ‘a funny man.’ The white face and red nose of the clown are part of the warning, a sign that jokes may be expected. A perception of the grotesque is so little to be counted upon with all individuals that if one wishes a jest to be taken it is safest to put the saying in the mouth of a some character, real or invented, with a change of voice to indicate that the remark is intended to amuse. Many worthy people need to know a joker for years ere they realise that his every remark is not to be taken seriously, and one has heard the drollest sayings accepted by those to whom they were addressed as if they were ordinary matters of fact. Attention to trifles makes the genius: but must one be a genius in order to consider the trifles worth attending to and working out? Often one has heard a laugh raised by the saying of something that had occurred to oneself and probably to others present, but that the joker alone had thought worth giving expression to. Even then, there are trifles that are essential and trifles that are not, and genius is required to distinguish the one from the other. Much of the success of Dickens as a humourist lies in the patience, born of keen personal enjoyment, with which he elaborates an absurdity some features of which had occurred to ourselves, though we had not dwelt on it long enough to get the full flavour of its farcical suggestion. This is not to say that Dickens’s humour has not mostly the charm of the perfectly unexpected. The Charm of the Unexpected. The following passage from ‘Great Expectations’ (which happens to be the latest of these novels I have re-read) takes one quite suddenly. It is not introduced by Dickens merely for the sake of fun, but is a necessary part of the narrative. Pip has to hide a portion of his bread for the benefit of the escaped convict, and this is how the humourist turn the necessity to account: - The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose, I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned freemasonry as fell0w-sufferers, and in his good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each other’s admiration now and then – which stimulated us to new exertions. Tonight Joe several times invited me by the display of his fast-diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my untouched bread-and-butter on the other. At last I desperately considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread-and-butter down my leg. Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw that my bread-and-butter was gone. The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold of his bite and stared at me, were to evident to escape my sister’s observation. ‘What’s the matter now?’ said she, smartly, as she put down her cup. ‘I say, you know!’ muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in a very serious remonstrance. ‘Pip, old chap! You’ll do yourself a mischief. It’ll stick somewhere. You can’t have chewed it, Pip.’ ‘What’s the matter now?’ repeated my sister , more sharply than before. ‘If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend you to do it,’ said Joe, all aghast. ‘Manners is manners, but still your ’elth’s your ’elth.’ By this time my sister was quite desperate so she pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while against the wall behind him; while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on. ‘Now perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,’ said my sister, out of breath, ‘you staring great stuck pig.’ Joe looked at her in a helpless way; then took a helpless bite, and looked at me again. ‘You know Pip,’ said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek, and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone, ‘you and me is always friends, and I’d be the last one to tell upon you, any time. But such a’ – he moved his chair, and looked about the floor between us and then again at me – ‘such an uncommon bolt as that!’ ‘Been bolting his food, has he?’ cried my sister. ‘You know old chap,’ said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs Joe, with his bite still in his cheek, ‘I Bolted, myself, when I was your age – frequent – and as a boy I’ve been among many a Bolter; but I never see your bolting equal yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you ain’t Bolted dead.’ My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair; saying nothing more than the awful words, ‘You come along and be dosed.’ Some medical beast has revived Tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence. On this particular evening, the urgency of my case demanded a pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater comfort, while Mrs Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot would be held in a boot-jack. Joe got off with half-a-pint; but was made to swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and meditating before the fire), ‘because he had had a turn.’ Judging from myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had none before. It was no wonder if Mrs Gargery was exasperated at her husband; and Pip had a grievance against him too. If we speak of the charm of the unexpected, what could be less expected than the suggestion in the conclusion of this passage? ‘You look very well, Mr Barkiss,’ I said, thinking he would like to know it. Mr Barkiss rubbed his cheek with his cuff, and then looked at his cuff as if he expected to find some of the bloom upon it. There is a remark that lingers in my mind from the first boyish reading of ‘Nicholas Nickelby’: these things will never hit us again with the original laughter-raising impact. Round the area door of Arthur Gride, notorious miser, there gathers the human flotsam of a city street, attracted by loud knocking to which there is no response. Some held that old Gride’s housekeeper had fallen asleep, some that she had burnt herself to death, some that she had got drunk. The atmosphere would be ominous of tragedy except that the life of the street relieves the gloom. At any rate, tragedy is effectually turned to comedy when a very fat man in the little crowd suggests that Peg Sliderskew, the miser’s old housekeeper, has seen something to eat, which has frightened here so much (not being used to it) that she has fallen into a fit! A General Characteristic. Dickens’s style is not simple. It is, for one thing, a Latinised style. We could not fancy him writing ‘cheap’ – he writes ‘inexpensive.’ When the ironmaster is announced to Sir Leicester Deadlock he asks that ‘the ferruginous gentleman’ be shown in. Mr Pumblechook’s shop is described as ‘peppercorny and farinaceous.’ The humourous effect is heightened by some of these rather stately locutions. Thus Joe Gargery’s reference to a certain sum as ‘a cool four thousand,’ gives rise to the comment : - ‘I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.’ The slight stateliness there – and it is but slight - was inseparable from the thought, and these reflective interludes, which are frequent in Dickens’s books, are the more effective when they follow the broad illiterate speech of humble characters out of whom the novelist secures his best comic effects. In this banter about the transferred epithet ‘cool’ as applied to money he reminds us of how he makes Mr Dick puncture a similar expression about there being no room to swing a cat in his apartment. ‘But I don’t want to swing a cat,’ says Mr Dick, with the wisdom of folly, which refuses to accept more or less inappropriate tags which pass current with the more sophisticated. ‘How old would you be?’ asked the lady. And the half-wit answered: ‘It’s not how old I would be, but how old am I?’ Perhaps someone will yet give a really effective flick to such overworked clichés as ‘exploring every avenue’ and ‘leaving no stone unturned.’ These whimsical analyses belong to a leisurely style which has gone out. The old-fashioned novel was much longer than the stories of today. There was more writing up, and less concern for getting ahead with the story. The fairly long-drawn preliminaries of ‘David Copperfield,’ in which the caul with which he was born, and the views of the old lady who bought it for five shillings, of which she was twopence-halfpenny short, are given at length, probably represented rhetorical sparring for an opening; though there, as always with Dickens, the rhetoric is not wasted, but sparkles and coruscates and gets charmingly and definitely somewhere. William de Morgan is the only latter-day writer of fiction who gambles with his pen in the same leisurely and sportive way. Even in the relatively short ‘Christmas Carol’ Dickens opens with a characteristic whimsical aside: Old Marley was dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know of my own knowledge what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it… You will therefore permit me to repeat emphatically that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. The Rhetoric of High Spirits. Besides illustrating his turn for whimsical reflective asides, the passage is also an example of that quickness of observation which lets nothing be taken for granted or held as read. In its continuation it also reflects that rhetoric of high spirits which is one of the chief marks of Dickens’s style. Scrooge knew he was dead. Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and mourner. This is the garrulous circumstantiality of one who is happy at his desk, who thoroughly enjoyed playing verbally with his theme. He is in no hurry to get on with the story. The preparation, the creation of the atmosphere, had to be complete. The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come from the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot – say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance – literally to astonish his son’s weak mind. The best styles are always Latinised, if regard be had, not merely to the music of language, but still more to its content. The English Bible is not at all Latin in style, and it is very beautiful, but not at all subtle. The Biblical writers did not argue, did not discuss. They announced. Shakespeare as a stylist is beautifully balanced and copious, and still, after fourscore years, the most delightfully humorous writer in English, both in sudden suggestion and sustained comic analysis. This would hardly seem worth mentioning if so many people did not find that they ‘can’t read him.’ Personifying the Impersonal. He has this in common with Shakespeare, that he is much given to personifying the impersonal. Indeed, he carries this further than the dramatist did. When Shakespeare makes the reeds ‘lackey the dull stream’ he is giving a human attribute to the mere rushes. But he does it in one word. Whereas Dickens resorts to personification of things more freely than Shakespeare does, and he stretches the personification to greater lengths. Thus of a dirty newspaper he says ‘It had taken the measles in a highly irregular form.’ And he says: ‘Occasionally the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out on such a cold night.’ And again; ‘The day came creeping on, halting and whimpering and shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of mist like a beggar.’ These examples are taken more or less at random from the nearest novel to hand. They will at once be recognised as examples of Dickens’s habitual trick, sometimes pursued at great length and with powerful imaginative ingenuity, of giving human attributes to insensate things. It is this breaking into sudden passionate soliloquy that caused Dickens to be classed as of the ‘spasmodic’ school. It is quite likely that matter-of-fact, donnish people will not follow him in fanciful speculations say over a dull and gusty morning. But such fancies are in the true line of imaginative writing if we are to accept as exemplars the Psalmist who makes the mountains dance, and the Dramatist who causes the sun to ‘flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,’ and that later poet who figured the torrents of Mont Blanc as ‘fiercely glad.’ These devices of personification are with Dickens dramatic pauses which immensely enhance the effectiveness of the situation that follows. Barrie, Conan Doyle and Buchan.
This month we look at the other half of our Edinburgh Boys, also blighted by their Bestsellers. J.M.Barrie is best known for – and totally blighted by – Peter Pan. His writing on ‘the boy who wouldn’t grow up’ has permeated all aspects of knowledge about him, and led to all manner of frankly ludicrous claims about his personal life and proclivities. If ever a writer was blighted by a character, never mind a book (and indeed in Barrie’s case a drama) it was Barrie. It seems that all discussion about Barrie and his work have to be mediated through the prism of Peter Pan. I think this is both unfair and inaccurate. The seeds of the character of Peter Pan are generally thought to have been found in The Little White Bird, (1902) and of course in Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys – credited jointly as the inspiration for Peter. Barrie wrote: ‘I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. I am sometimes asked who and what Peter is, but that is all he is, the spark I got from you.’ But Barrie’s underlying interest in the psychology of childhood is also seen in his more autobiographical works Sentimental Tommy and its sequel Tommy and Grizel. If you note that Sentimental Tommy was first published in 1895, two years before Barrie met the Llewelyn Davies’, the seeds of a more complex and different story emerge. The ‘Tommy’ stories challenge the Victorian view of ‘sentimentality’ and juxtapose fantasy with reality in a very interesting way. They also show that Barrie was already well along the path of considering the nature of childhood in general and ‘boys’ in particular before either the Llewelyn Davies boys or Peter Pan the character were ‘born.’ The often dragged out simplistic story which attributes a sort of macabre fascination on the part of Barrie with boys to the fact that his older brother David died in a drowning accident from which his mother never recovered, leaving Barrie like a puppet trying to fill his place – is developed through Tommy and through Peter to become something quite sophisticated. Obviously Barrie suffered some level of childhood trauma. But he was also well aware of and fascinated by the nature of childhood in all its conscience free state. He sets boys up as a kind of noble savage against the restrictions of ‘civilized’ Victorian/Edwardian society. His unique combination of socio-psychology meets socio-political commentary is, I believe, Barrie’s great legacy. Beyond the fiction, in his dramatic works he places his socio-pscyhological lens firmly at the mores of his own society and the class system (with ne’er a boy in sight). The Admirable Crichton, What Every Woman Knows, and even Dear Brutus and Mary Rose all show evidence of this. Barrie was not obsessed with boys and boyhood – but perhaps his audiences were. Childhood was undergoing a reappraisal in Barrie’s time as profound as that of the 1950’s/60s which saw the emergence of the teenager, and the more recent social phenomenon of kidulthood. It seems society is still obsessed with not growing up – and this is hardly a crime to be laid at Barrie’s door. He offers much in the discussion of this field but he is horribly blighted because of his candour. He still suffers under the mug slinging of ‘inappropriateness’ in his relationship with children, but for me, Barrie is only ‘inappropriate’ in the fact that – as he claims in The Admirable Crichton one may look at society and instead suggest that ‘what’s natural is right.’ Despite being knighted, he is not a fully paid up member of the establishment by any means. For me, the further you delve into Barrie and the further you depart from Peter Pan mania, the more you learn of what a singularly great writer he was. A Well Remembered Voice both as a play and a short story, is incredibly moving and delves into some very uncomfortable places. Even his first foray into fiction Better Dead offers something quite unusual and unique. Barrie is in the process of being reinvented or ‘claimed’ by modernists as a ‘fantasy’ writer – a modernist before modernism really came into being, but I think this is just another branding exercise and I think Barrie resists such confines. Yes it’s right to free him from the blight of Peter Pan – but not to simply pigeonhole him into another straightjacket. He deserves better. He deserves readers who set aside their prejudices and come to read him where he was, with an understanding of all that he has to say about society. It is time for us, the reader, to grow up in our attitude to J.M.Barrie. (Sir) Arthur Conan Doyle was as blighted by a character as Barrie. In his case, Sherlock Holmes was the bane of his life, the character and story no reader could get beyond. There is something else shared by Barrie and Conan Doyle and it is an interest which was broadly prevalent at the fin de siécle and which found increased public interest post First World War. This was spiritualism. In several of Barrie’s stories and plays you find an exploration of otherwise seemingly rational people ‘dealing’ with the supernatural elements. I think this can be reasonably well explained – at least in its latter stages – as a ‘shock’ response to the horrors of the First World War. But Conan Doyle took the baton and charged with it. His interest in Spiritualism had been sparked as early as 1886 but in 1916 he ‘came out’ as a Spiritualist. This rocked a world who had seen in Sherlock Holmes, the father of scientific rationalism as the way to be. But Conan Doyle felt (and was) eternally blighted by Sherlock Holmes. He created not just a character, but an entire genre and was unable to escape from it, however hard he tried. It is interesting, then, to speculate how far Doyle was aware (or cared) that his reputation as the creator of Sherlock Holmes was damaged by his later adoption of Spiritualism. Was it a determined and conscious effort to free himself from a blight he did not want? Most, if not all young writers (especially if they need money) dream of achieving greatness through their work – either through a style or a character. But it’s often a case of be careful what you wish for. Many writers discover that once they are ‘discovered’ they are then pigeon-holed and it becomes difficult to impossible to write outside of the box of fame. It is often claimed that writers only have one story and retell it time and again. I think this is unfair. I think that writers generally have a range of areas of interest which they play with time and again – twisting and turning and exploring all sides of the matter in their stories – but this is not the same thing as retelling the same plot endlessly (which is what market-driven publishing demands). Conan Doyle is a salutatory example (as is John Buchan after him) of a writer who could not escape from his bestseller blight. Sherlock Holmes first saw the light of day in the story A Study in Scarlet published in the 1887 edition of Beeton’s Christmas Annual. He next appeared in serial form in The Sign of the Four in 1890. And thence in short story/serial formats almost continuously from 1891-1893 by which time he had fully caught the imagination of the mass market. Trying to kill him off in The Final Problem in 1893 didn’t work and following The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901-1903, Conan Doyle offered more Sherlock Holmes stories in a steady stream from 1903 right through till 1927. Conan Doyle was like a rock star who kept disappearing from live touring only to return once he’d done his ‘studio albums.’ For extended periods he wrote other things – things that he would much rather be remembered by – but it was Sherlock Holmes who brought home the bacon. It is also important to note that, as with other of our Edinburgh Boys, the money to be made was primarily in serial fiction. Novels were spawned out of this but the ‘siller’ as S.R.Crockett called it, was in the serialisation. Barrie of course broke this mould with his dramatic works, but the serial form was lucrative for our ‘boys’ from the 188o’s onwards. Stevenson was less affected by this form and of course Scott died before it came into its own. To get a truer picture of Conan Doyle it’s worth reading some of his lesser known works – The Lost World, The White Company and The Crime of the Congo are just three which stand out – but there are plenty more to choose from. Whereas for ‘success’ it seems that an ability to create variations of the same thing infinitely is what gets one noticed, for me, it is in the breadth of skill that we should praise writers for – and if you want to relieve our Edinburgh Boys from the blight of the bestseller, the onus is on you to read around their other work. I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed. Last but not least this month, we come to John Buchan. His status as Edinburgh Boy is perhaps more tenuous than the others, given that he was not educated at Edinburgh University, but came to it as Rector in later life (once already successful.) However, like Conan Doyle before him, Buchan was blighted by his bestseller – The Thirty Nine Steps (1915) and the character it spawned Richard Hannay. Like Conan Doyle, Buchan produced a number of Hannay Novels –including Greenmantle, (1916), Mr Standfast (1919) The Three Hostages (1924) and The Island of Sheep (1936). Hannay, to my mind, stands as a kind of precursor of James Bond but his creation had at least as much to do with Buchan’s status as foremost propaganda writer during the first world war as anything else. Buchan was much more than a writer of fiction though. He was a lawyer, historian, politician and he wrote in all of these fields. Like Conan Doyle, Hannay was a foil who became a blight. Be careful what you wish for strikes again. It is well worth remembering that the young Buchan experimented (not entirely successfully) with historical fiction at a time when it was dominated by S.R.Crockett. A comparison of the Covenanting novels of Buchan and Crockett showed how much Buchan had to learn in the art of writing historical fiction in the 1890s. He was, of course, just a young man then - and when his ‘chance’ came he took it. He was hugely successful in the thriller/spy genre but it was certainly not his first love, nor his favourite topic to write about. He was as blighted by the rest. In conclusion, we should consider who is responsible for the continuing blight? The fact is that with all our Edinburgh boys, the blight continues only as long as readers act like sheep and succumb to the marketing hype. If readers develop a habit of reading around the bestsellers they can lift the curse. We do not need to ask if you believe in fairies – but simply to suggest that if you believe in writers you do them the best service you can by reading their work in its entirety, not being too captivated by the ‘bestseller’ claims. Because as we have seen in this series of posts, none of the writers would self-define by their bestsellers and all of them have a lot more to offer than first meets the eye. Happy reading. Next month I will consider the role of memorials in the lives of our Edinburgh Boys. Orraman
Was Dickens what is called a Gentleman? By Way of Preface The question with which this page is headed is more or less answered, incidentally, in the body of the essay. Accepting the etymology of the word ‘Gentleman,’ there can be no safer definition of it than that which is usually given last, though that, as we shall see, is not adequate. The first dictionary I open gives: ‘A man that is well born; one that is of good family; one that bears arms, but has no title’; and last and best of all, ‘One of gentle or refined manners.’ None of these definitions covers the ground. Men who have been cretins physically and blackguards morally have been both ‘well born’ and ‘of good family.’ There were Richard Crookback, the Dauphin who gave up Joan of Arc, and John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. The only safe ground is stated by Shakespeare when he says of Brutus, ‘His life was gentle.’ He was a giver, not a taker. He worked for his livelihood, and did not take money from the poor by force of arm, either legal or lethal. John Milton’s idea of a gentleman was to Defend the poor and desolate, And rescue from the hands Of wicked men the low estate Of him that help demands. And Dickens said: ‘I have systematically tried to turn fiction to the good account of showing the preventable wretchedness and misery in which the masses of the people dwell.’ That is a better title to gentlehood than ‘gentle and refined manners,’ which may be, and often are, quite compatible with the robbery of the poor and the intensification of their misery. One of the gentlest men I have known was an owner of rack-rented slum property. Dickens’s championship of the poor did not help him. It was not a stunt. And although Queen Victoria sent him her book as from ‘The Least to the Greatest of Authors,’ there were others besides Macaulay who thought they decried Dickens’s Humanity when they called it Socialism. The Dual Purpose of the Dickens Novels I I have just been asked if I proposed to attend a lecture by a professor of belles lettres on ‘The Art of Charles Dickens.’ Those in the confidence of the lecturer explained to me that it was ‘the art of Dickens, not his teaching,’ with which the lecturer proposed to deal. Now, I am very far from being uninterested in the art of Dickens, even as so delimited and narrowed. I should, indeed, say that I was interested in the craft of literary composition in all its minutiae beyond even most authors. I have been writing myself, and considering the writing of others, too long and too practically to be indifferent to ‘the form of sound words.’ As regards Dickens, I have had for many years a facsimile copy of the manuscript of his ‘Christmas Carol,’ which I sometimes show to young people as an example of how Dickens actually wrote English with his very hand. He was a very deliberate artist with as little as possible of the hasty improviser about his methods. His printed works shows that. His manuscript shows it. We know it from his correspondence. As a reporter he could and did write descriptive journalese very rapidly, and transcribed many columns of short-hand notes in coach journeys, in spite of the bad light, the jolting, and the distractions caused by his fellow passengers. But his early career as a reporter is not reflected in the mechanism of his style. There is no easy journalistic writing in his novels. In its animation and concentration, his style is, after that of Thomas Carlyle, the most individual and instantly recognisable of any prose in the language. He got the last scintilla of imaginative suggestion out of all situations, characters, appearances, and incidents. A Matter that Matters With these features I shall deal in detail later on. But before proceeding further I wish to say that to divorce Dickens’s style from the varying message by which it was always inspired and informed, to confine one’s attention to his manner and discount his matter, is as if we admired a carpenter’s dexterity in throwing off shavings or driving nails, with no thought of what he was actually engaged in making. There is a dull colourlessness of character which chooses neither good nor evil, neither truth nor error, but does not choose at all. It drifts, and is swept up by one current of movement after another, no matter how mutually exclusive and contradictory these tendencies may be, voting Tory at one election and Liberal or Labour at the next, according to what may appear to be the prevailing opinion in the constituency at the moment. There is a gaping gawkiness, by no means confined to yokels, which sits astonished at all manifestation of ability, while paying no noticeable heed to its value, if any – positive, comparative, or superlative. This cataleptic passivity has no standards of judgment, because it is without sincerity. On all settled questions there was a right and a wrong even before they were settled. But they never would have been settled if the men who settled them, instead of being men of strong and declared convictions, had been careless Gallios who could not make up their minds one way or the other on the moral merits. The ability to define, distinguish, and decide is the basis of all capacity whatever. The absence of it is a defect. In my hotly propagandist days, working from Manchester as a centre, I used to have the curiosity to ask what sort of speaker so-and-so was– meaning someone whom I frequently preceded or followed, but whom I had never heard. ‘A champion speaker!’ was, in the nineties, the most customary formula, with such indeterminate variants as ‘fine,’ ‘At,’ or ‘grand.’ Once in a while you met a person who had the moral sincerity to be dissatisfied with the descriptive adjectives that did not describe. Such an one would tell you that the object of your inquiry was ‘an analytical speaker,’ or ‘witty,’ or ‘emotional and powerful,’ or ‘homely and picturesque,’ or ‘very fond of statistics,’ or – best of all – he would give specific points or lines of argument or illustration used by the speaker. This was the descriptive method of persons interested in both the matter and the manner, and all the more interested in the one because interested in the other. ‘What are you reading my lord?’ asks Ophelia. ‘Words, ‘ answers Hamlet. That is intended for sarcasm: but to those for whom style is the great, almost the only, thing the sarcasm in its full impact must be lots. Ophelia naturally adds: ‘But I mean the matter?’ To Ophelia the matter seemed to be a matter that supremely mattered. And there we shall leave the matter for the present. Dictation. We read of successful novelists who dictate to a stenographer, the lady (it is usually a lady) taking down off the hand words in shorthand and then transcribing the notes into typescript. Making all due allowance for the superior readiness of the modern mind, as also for the extent to which practice in dictation perhaps makes for tense accuracy, it is difficult to believe that anything like the best results can be achieved by dictation. This facsimile of the MS of the ‘Christmas Carole’ shows that Dickens made many changes in his phrasing. The interlineations, substitutions, and erasures are carefully and thoroughly made, and all the alterations are improvements. Thus the first chapter had been headed ‘Old Marley’s Ghost’; but the ‘Old’ is struck out. The small improvement is undoubted. Marley’s partner is describes as ‘old Scrooge.’ They had both been old men; but apart from the fact that too much use of the word ‘old’ was to be deprecated, the ghost was not old. Marley had just died, so that his ghost would really be a new ghost. Then brevity is good in itself – ‘the soul of wit,’ said Pope; while Byron said, ‘brevity is good, whether you are or are not understood.’ Now, all these erasures and interlineations and substitutions represent not only second, but third or fourth thoughts. On the evidence of his highly-wrought manuscript, Dickens was the last man who could or would have cared to dictate to an amanuensis. Dictation may be good enough for the easy requirements or mere formulas of commercial correspondence; but literature is made of distilled words, and dictation and distillation are not very near relations. It was a defect of the old-fashioned typewriter that the writing was not visible to the typist at work; and the desirability of seeing one’s words while composing is so evident that inability to see them is one of the great drawbacks of dictating. The presence of a second party, too, prevents one from feeling alone with the idea and turning it over in one’s mind at leisure, and without the awkwardness involved in keeping the stenographer waiting. H.G.Wells tells of a novelist whose typist used to show by a scarce perceptible shrug and hesitation when she disapproved of what was dictated to her. Wells much have realised this from his own experience. Even the signs of approval from an amanuensis would be detraction from the intense, the more than intimate privacy and brooding, the hatching slowness, the tentative, tortuous, oft-abandoned attempts, with recastings of phrase, sentence and paragraph, that go to the best writing. We could not conceive of Shakespeare dictating. Stevenson and Gibbon wrote passages and chapters over and over again, and improved them, we may be sure, at each re-writing . The Hasty Improver. Scott and Dumas would probably represent the opposite method of composition – the method of hasty improvisation. Scott’s facility was so great that, at a time when he was suffering from prolonged and acute neuralgia, he was nevertheless able to dictate to his secretary, Willie Laidlaw, the whole of the powerful tale ‘The Bride of Lammermuir,’ with its fine and laughable portrayal of the shifts of Caleb Balderstone to cover the nakedness of the land at Ravenswood. Often Scott’s enunciation would be broken by an irrepressible groan; the devoted Laidlaw shed tears of sympathy while he wrote or waited; and when the finished story was put into its author’s hands it was almost as a new book to him. Dumas, again, was always writing against time, the printer’s messenger coming and taking away instalments of ‘copy,’ for which he sometimes had to wait. These instalments, moreover, would often be comparatively small; just enough to keep the compositors going and complete the sheet of ‘eights’ or ‘sixteens’ immediately in hand. Dumas, indeed, was so much the improver, bent on filling the sheets, that he is said to have been the first to adopt the practice of making every sentence a paragraph – a device which fills a sheet with many blanks, but certainly gets you down the page. Scott also, like Arnold Bennett today, had to do his daily stent. But even at his worst, Scott wrote from a mind so full as well as so fine and big that there is an appearance of inevitableness about his language and the development of his story such as do not belong to Dumas. The Frenchman’s heroes come out for adventures, and they have them in endless chain; but often one has the feeling that the story might take any one of a hundred courses; that Dumas does not in the least know what is to come next; that anything might have happened as readily as the thing that does happen. In Arnold Bennett, it must be confessed, in spite of his oft-quoted habit of matter-of-fact word-stringing, it is difficult to see that waiting for inspiration, or taking longer time over his work, would have made much difference. In his newspaper articles he is careless as to whether he finds a synonym or not, and works the same noun or adjective as hard as he would in ordinary slack conversation. Even this is better than stilted writing; but good writing has the charm of variety in the choice of synonyms, in addition to all its other charms. The Purpose, always the Purpose. But while Dickens was all the time an artist, his artistry is only an incidental in the value of his work. The merely literary critic, the belles lettristic commentator, professional or other, is almost from the nature of the case, not concerned about the essentials of Dickens’s art as a whole. Surely to discern the purpose as well to enjoy the art; to accept the teaching with what modifications may be necessary to our own standpoint, is to get vastly more out of these creations than is possible to the non-sociological reader. To read for the art’s sake, to regard the man of fiction as a complete identity – what Whitman calls ‘a simple, separate person’ without regard to the potent social circumstances which shape him, and which he ought to help to shape in turn, is to ignore the better part of even the ‘art’ that has created him. There are no simple, separate persons: we are all members of one another. There are millions of readers, however, who are so little impressed with an author’s purpose that they are not conscious of it. One has met Conservatives who were very much surprised to learn that Dickens was hotly Radical, and as such the first editor of the Daily News, which began as a Radical newspaper and has continued to be so during the whole course of its fourscore years’ existence. Not to recognise that Dickens was, in all he wrote, distinctly and strongly Socialistic in tendency is sheer mental blindness. It is quite true that charity, benevolence, and the Christmassy feeling are not politics – are not anything like so good as old age pensions, the ‘dole’ or even a humane Poor Law; but the humanity Dickens loved to propound had to come as preparation of the individual for these legislative changes. With most people the enlightened humanity has still to come. In Detail. Let us see, without too much of pedestrian summarising, something of what Charles Dickens did accomplish with those dual purposes always before him of writing a great story and at the same time aiming at the redress of social scandals. Even in his early ‘Sketches by Boz,’ Dickens showed himself as the High Priest of Humanism in Fiction. These sketches were actual pictures of London life, in which the seamstress and the poor street-singer arouse the pity of the young journalist, while the gas-bag of the public-house parlour – that enemy of real reform – equally comes in for realistic treatment. The very name of Boz suggests the source of Dickens’s inspiration. He admired so much the writings of Oliver Goldsmith – a social reformer in all he wrote – and the name of Moses, the son of the good Vicar of Wakefield, was so often on his lips, that his younger brother called him Boz as a child’s attempt at the name. And just as the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ was the first novel – indeed the first book of any kind – that advocated prison reform and a lightening of the penal code, so in the ‘Pickwick Papers’ the demoralising life of the debtor’s prison was depicted in striking colours derived from the novelist’s own experience while his father was an inmate of the Marshalsea prison. His own experience, gained in the blacking factory where he spent a miserable time with several London guttersnipes, is not less vividly reflected in ‘Oliver Twist,’ with its sketches of the young criminals Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger as trained by old Fagin the Jew. In the brutality and unhappiness of Bill Sikes and Nancy he shows the real misery of the crook’s life and its inevitable tragic end. Bumbledom, also, is so presented here that, on the whole, it can scarcely be said to have survived it, and the inmates of workhouses are now comparatively pampered. Similarly, the cruel magistrates of Dickens’s day, of whom he had not only the special knowledge derived from his experience as a reporter in the courts, but had studied afterwards in the true portrait of Justice Fang and in that alone; for the city stipendiary of today is wonderfully understanding and clement, and regularly acts as a buffer between the public and an officious police force, in which the promotion of individuals has a tendency to depend upon the number of convictions secured. The shabby genteel people of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ the warm-heartedness and open-handedness of ‘show folk,’ the mockery of education as carried on in places of the Dotheboys Hall type, the brainlessness of the aristocracy as exemplified in Lord Verisopht, and its occasional turpitude as in Sir Mulberry Hawk, are further indications of Dickens’s strong class feeling and the steadiness of his humanistic purpose. ‘Martin Chuzzlewhit,’ hits off Yankee vulgarity and embalms to immortality Mrs Gamp, the private-enterprise nurse, with her snuff-taking and tippling irresponsibility, and Pecksniff the pharisaicial fraud. ‘Domby and Son’ reproves the pride of wealth with unforgettable and pathetic realism. That it contains such characters as Mrs Pipchin and poor little Paul gilds the philosophic pill; but it seems necessary to point out that the pill is there, since its presence is not always observed apparently. I have known people who were ardent admirers of Dickens, yet continued to believe in the institutions and failings he satirised. ‘Bleak House’ illustrates the folly of those who busy themselves with foreign missions while neglecting domestic concerns. Among much else, it shows how wealth may be punished by the consequences of the poverty itself has made, epidemic disease from the hovel of Tom-All-Alone invading the homes of the wealthy. It reveals the mischief done by the law’s delay in the case of Arthur Jarndyce and poor Miss Flite; and it fastens the responsibility for the miserable life and premature death of Poor Jo upon society as a whole. Not Unerring. While Dickens’s social instinct was sound, his specific approach to a given problem was not always unerring. ‘Hard Times,’ based upon his experience of a strike in Preston, is wrong as to the place and value it accords to trade unionism, and unjust to trade union leaders as personified in Slackbridge the agitator. Stephen Blackpool is, say what Dickens will, an abetter of blacklegging. No workman can afford rightly to stand off from the union of his calling on the plea that he does not approve of its every act. Broadly, trades unionism has improved the status of all workers, and the benefits it has won cannot rightly be enjoyed while the agency itself is belittled and denied. But the characters of Gradgrind the man of facts, and Bounderby the bully of humility , with his boasting of how ‘I was brought up in the gutter, sir,’ are immortal; their names have become epithet; and the influence of the satire is a long way from being spent because unnecessary. There are still public men who are not ashamed to tell that their parents sent them to work at ten and twelve years of age. ‘Little Dorrit’ exposes the methods of the Barnacles and the Cirumlocution Office, evidently not in vain; for the Civil Service is now prompt and efficient, and is open to entrants by examination. The character of the financier Merdle, who makes such wholesale shipwreck of other people’s fortunes and his own, shows that Dickens realised a very long time ago the true inwardness of the methods of the class of Hooleys, Jabez Balrours, and Whittaker Wrights, who now more than ever prey upon the cupidity of the large class that seeks to secure something for nothing. Was Dickens a ‘Gentleman?’ But it matters not to which of the tales we turn. The social purpose is so obvious that critics who resent Dickens’s Humanist tendency long since discovered, first, that he had never portrayed a gentleman, and then that he was not a gentleman himself. It depends upon the definition. Etymologically the word means a man who is gentle, in speech, manner and action. ‘His life was gentle,’ says Mark Anthony of Brutus, in Shakespeare’s panegyric. If to be a gentleman means to be a useless person, one who has ‘never soiled his hand with trade,’ then Dickens had very obviously nothing but contempt for that character. This he shows again and again. It is the whole motif of the powerful tale ‘Great Expectations,’ in which the nominal hero, Pip, is corrupted from the very first hint of his great expectations, and passes from one failure to another till his expectations come to an end and he enters upon a career of self-supporting effort. The most loveable figure of the book is the honest blacksmith Joe Gargery, whose forbearance and kindness are inexhaustible, and whose good nature is not mere lumpish inertia, but has its basis of reason as stated by him when he points out that his own mother had suffered so much at the hands of a brutal husband that he is, as he says, ‘dead afeerd of going wrong in the way of not doing what’s right by a woman. I’d fur rather of the two go wrong the tother way and be a little ill-conwenienced myself.’ His wife is one of the great shrews of imaginative literature; but he, the powerful smith, has reasoned out his philosophy of forbearance as being the line of wisdom, even when Mrs Joe takes a handful of whiskers in one of her rampages. The Sir Leicester Deadlock of ‘Bleak House’ is the essence of pompous futility, and the character of the conventional ‘gentleman,’ lightly but significantly touched in Sir Leicester, has all the t’s crossed and all the I’s dotted in the full-length figure of Podsnap in ‘Our Mutual Friend.’ It is the manifest intention of this great creator of character in fiction that we should admire most the minor useful and kind people in his stories – Mark Tapley the optimist servant rather than Martin Chuzzlewit the selfish young master; Sam Weller, with his sense and fun, rather than the conventional and somewhat footling Pickwick. There is no more moving or graphic view of the causes that led to the French Revolution than the series of vignettes in ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ When the cinema producer wishes to show what the Bastille did to its prisoners, how the marquis’s coach ran down the poor in the streets, and how, at the breaking of a wine-cask, the starving poor chewed the very staves, after they had lapped up all they could of the escaping liquor, the cinema producer turns, not to Mignet, or Michelet, or even to Carlyle, but to Dickens. A Crusade within a Crusade. Each novel is a crusade, but there are even crusades within the crusades, as where in ‘Great Expectations’ Dickens pours scorn upon the severity of a penal code which would hang a man who has lived down his past because he dared to come back, a man of property, from the penal settlement to which he has been exiled. Dickens was immensely concerned about the housing of the people, about sanitation, education, the reform of the judicial procedure, the abolition of executions in public, the lightening of the penal code, the improvement of the conditions of servile labour, the improvement of prisons, the adjustment of copyright, and the abolition of American slavery, the blighting influence of which in the Southern States he powerfully described both in his private correspondence and his published writings. To emphasise the social and political aims of Dickens is the less superfluous because a race of novelists has arisen which discounts ‘missions’ and ‘messages’ and regards the novelist simply as the purveyor of entertaining pot-boilers. This is a departure from the whole motive of the novel as originally conceived and as carried out in practice by the masters of the art. From Cervantes down by way of Fielding, Smollett, Swift and Goldsmith, to Dickens, the Brontes, Mrs Beecher Stowe, Charles Reade, Mrs Gaskell, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, George Eliot, Bulwer Lytton, George MacDonald, Sir Walter Besant, H.G.Wells, and Biasco Ibanez, the outstanding writers of prose fiction have all been crusaders, more or less pronounced and declared. The Entertainers. One has nothing to say against the mere entertainers. That they are content to forego one-half of the raison d’être of their art, to fight with a single broadside, is their affair and the affair of their readers. Even Shakespeare and Scott are supreme historical expositors, of whom many a student can say, as the Duke of Marlborough did, that they owe more of their knowledge of, and interest in, history to the reading of Shakespeare’s plays and Scott’s novels than to direct study of the professed historians. Types that are Real Characters. Nobody can say that Squire Western is a less lifelike character because historians appropriately choose him as the type (as he was intended to be) of the rough, ignorant, fox-hunting squire of two centuries. The art of Tobias Smollett is not lessened by its true portraiture of the doddering Duke of Newcastle, long Prime Minister of Britain, or the figures of Commodore Trunnion and Bo’sun Pipes as drawn by the same satirical ex-navy surgeon. Bulwer Lytton’s admittedly best fiction, ‘My Novel,’ gains its merits from its didactic purpose as a view of the ‘Varieties of English Life,’ as its subtitle declares it to be. The varieties are types, not merely people to whom things happen – not merely ‘the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus,’ as Ruskin unflatteringly declared casual collections of ordinary people to be. All this is no mere gratuitous arrogance. In the increasing complexity and difficulty of life, there is so much necessary informative and educative reading to be done that one grudges the time wasted on books that are merely entertaining, since it is possible to have better entertainment along with the serious teaching, as the writings of Charles Dickens abundantly show. An ignorant and frivolous democracy is at its worst when international danger on an unprecedented scale, and at its best a sad drag upon sound social progress. It is possible to go to the public and circulating libraries for ‘best sellers’ during a whole lifetime, and yet be as ignorant as dirt on most of the things that really matter. The Dickens Spirit Not Out of Date. If Dickens can draw types that afford us unique enjoyment, it is a pure extra to the crusading. The crusading itself is not at all out of date – very far from that. There are still people who live idly upon great expectations and unearned incomes. The law still has its delays. Financiers still swindle the public. Honest industry is still despised. The law still musters the corporate force of society to break butterflies on the wheel, and to make the lives of those already miserable more miserable still. People still worship pedigrees and swell with family pride, the pride being always in inverse ratio to the achievements of the ancestry. Dickens was up against the established order at every turn; and it is a tribute to the efficacy of his assault that mere ornamental persons, and not much of that, should find that they cannot read him and that he was not a gentleman. PART TWO WILL BE AVAILABLE IN VOLUME 1 NUMBER 11 – NOVEMBER 2016
Syllables govern the world – Seldon Reading maketh a full man – Bacon. A Leeds teacher, in asking us to send him a copy of a catalogue of books, goes on, with delightful inconsistency, to say:- There is a matter which troubles me at times, and to which I have not yet found a satisfactory answer. Perhaps you, with your wider knowledge and experience, can answer the riddle. I really should write what I mean in well-thought-out essay form, but I will try to make my point clear in this letter. At times when I get a-thinking I wonder if one’s study of art, science, and literature is a curse instead of a benefit. What does literature do for one? It makes for wider knowledge, enables one to see the follies and operations of the great mass, the iniquities of the men in power, the ignorance of the vast majority of workers and fellow-men. But what good does this feeling of superiority do us? Literature and teachers have existed for hundreds of year, and here we are, still struggling in the mire. If I can see all this, why don’t my fellow-men see it, and strive for an alteration? The average man cares nothing for literature, and is apparently quite happy and content with a visit to a picture-house and a talk with his friends about football or horse-racing – in fact anything which does not matter. He, without reading or study, does not see the important things of life, but providing he has enough to eat and a roof over his head he is happy. If I had not read I should be the same, and the problems of life would not trouble me, so why should I bother to study and read the so-called classics? Why not give all up, and, apart from the working hours, spend my time in being entertained by paid professionals in the music halls? If I want to read, well, there is a class of literature or reading matter which is light and exciting, but of no value reckoned from any fair standard of value, but it passes the time on. Cui bono? First a word as to the general question: we shall come our correspondent’s specific points afterwards. Cui bono? – what is the good? – is a very ancient question. The Romans asked it with respect to many matters widely differing from the topic broached by our correspondent. The subject of books and reading is discussed at some length in ‘The Best of Friends’ printed in The Gateway of Nov 1913 (No 17, Vol II), and what is said here must be comparatively offhand and merely supplementary. I am bound to confess I have never had any of these misgivings or questionings, have never doubted the supreme value of books and reading. That a man should be able to sit down, and by looking at a series of outlines upon paper, be transported into another world – laughing, weeping, fiercely excited, or feverishly absorbed by the hour, insensible to heat and cold, impatient of interruption, regardless of the chances of making money, changing the settled conviction of years, differentiating himself from the non-reading ruck around him – seems to me the most wonderful of man’s ‘many inventions.’ The other night I lighted in to the household of a master tailor and found him telling stories to his eldest boy with some impatience. He could not understand why the boy, a bright lad, did not rather wish to read the stories for himself. I could not and cannot understand that either. To me the poorest print has a dignity that does not attach to the stateliest speech. I would always much rather read a play than see and hear it. The last time I saw ‘Hamlet,’ Forbes Robertson played the prince, and I came away, as always, disappointed. Sometimes he rollicked in the part, sometimes he stormed. But to me he was never Hamlet, but always Forbes Robertson, whereas when I read the tragedy, it is the veritable prince that speaks. There is no intrusion of an alien modern personality. Who is Forbes Robertson? What is any ordinary star actor but a patterer of words written by wiser men? I have seen many Hamlets but I know only one Prince of Denmark, and for him I have to go to the printed word of Shakespeare. Reality and Print. Reality is disappointing: print redresses the balance. The address which was marred by the personal defects of the orator has an effect when read next day that a mere speech to a mob of people could not command. Gladstone used to say ‘constitootion’; Chamberlain could not get rid of the superfluous r’s in such words as ‘law’ and ‘idea,’ which he rendered as ‘lor’ and ‘idear.’ But of course none of this banality appeared in the reports. There all was so finished that the speaker was known as ‘the Birmingham essayist.’ A famous declaration of his – ‘What I have said I have said’ – was spoken at a hotel table between the puffs of his pipe – quite unimpressively. Joseph Cowen, newspaper proprietor and wealthy merchant, a great Russophobe to whom no Russian refugee applied for succour in vain, was known to the initiated as a speaker of barbed and glancing periods; but he spoke with a thick Newcastle burr, and his puffy face and lank hair gave the lie to all that we read of the personal charm and magnetism of the great orator. It must have been unpleasant for a cultured person to listen to him; but you will find the volumes of his printed speeches on the tables of all knowing politicians who aim at effective platform work. Places. As it is with speakers, so it is with scenes. As a boy I knew an ex-soldier who had done sentry-go at 10 Downing Street. He was, when I knew him, a great slaughterer of cattle – was known in fact as Jamie Death. A silent man he was when sober; but I shall never forget the impression made on me when this butcher one night, in his cups, told me that Gladstone, coming down the steps, had said to him,’ Good morning, soldier!’ The whole sense I had of 10 Downing Street was spoiled when I first saw that shabby little house itself. A few years ago I travelled miles by rail and by road to see the farm of Ellisland, into which Burns took his newly-wedded wife Jean Armour. I knew that some of Robert’s best poems were written there and that some of his happiest years were spent there. Allan Cunningham’s father had said that in renting Ellisland burns had made a poet’s choice rather than a farmer’s. This might fairly be taken to mean that Ellisland was a a spot of great natural beauty. We found it so. The Nith flows close by the door as of old. ‘Burns’s Ballroom,’ as a certain tower-like building is called, still rises sheer from the river. The path under the trees where Jean found Burns trudging up and down on the river’s brink declaiming with tears of joy some of the just-composed lines of ‘Tam o’ Shanter,’ is still very much what it must have been in the poet’s day. Dalswinton Loch and the mansion-house of the Millers are still the lairds of Ellisland. John Grierson, the tenant of the farm, would have been a great favourite with Burns; for Grierson is a character. But the place, seen in its winter bareness especially, lost the pastoral and sylvan glamour that it had in the book. To see the little shell of Alloway Kirk, scene of the elaborately horrific phantasmagoria of ‘Tam o’Shanter,’ is to realise how much genius can make of the scantiest materials. The tiny church would hardly have held witches, coffins, piping Devil, and the rest of the awful paraphanalia, let alone affording room for the dance. And tramcars run to the place! So it must be always. Life is confused: but literature sorts it out. People we meet and incidents that transpire are casual, irrelevant. But the historian, biographer, critic, playwright, novelist, select, co-ordinate, exclude the unessential. We are now living in specially notable times; but we cannot see the wood for the trees. Small men make a big splash for the moment; but time will relegate them to their due level, and in history, and in history only, shall we see men and events in their proper perspective. Life is for time, but literature, the greatest of the arts, is for eternity. The Strongest Plea. The strongest plea for reading is that it is the only way of finding out remote and essential things. Calamitous mistakes are daily made because men did not read and do not know. The history of the world’s failures and disasters is the story of its ignorances, superstitions, and duties neglected from sheer lack of certainty that the task had to be performed. Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these – I did not know. The German people, when they allowed the military Frankenstein to grow up and wax all powerful in their midst did not know that he would cost them and Europe so much; but the lesson was plain enough in history that he would controls the army controls the people and that aggression is the life0blood of a military despotism. Had the advice of Lassalle and Bebel and old William Liebknecht been taken when it was tendered year after year long ago, not Armageddon but the Co-operative Commonwealth and the United States of Europe would have been the result. We have to read, not only in order to know, but that we may be trained to observe, to weigh evidence, and to estimate probabilities. Why bother? Why bother? Asks our correspondent. But it is no bother. The bother is, not to read, but to do without. There are railway journeys, periods of waiting, illnesses, spells of enforced idleness from one cause and another; and it would be pure punishment if one had to pass the time in vacancy. ‘Light’ Reading. But why not read ‘light’ and ‘exciting’ literature in preference to ‘the so-called classics’? he asks. Well, most people do. When the average person asks for a book it is usually a novel that is meant, and not even one of the best at that. But why ‘so-called classics’? A heedless orator referred scornfully to ‘the so-called nineteenth century.’ If any book is called a classic we may be pretty sure it has earned the title. It has stood the test of time, a test that is more captiously applied to writings than to any other work of man’s hands; for books are man’s refuge and resort in his worst moods, and woe betide the poor author if he fail to soothe, amuse or stimulate. The books that have weathered the fads, megrims, finical fastidiousness, and sheer stupidity of generations of readers fully deserve the title of ‘classics.’ If we are to talk of the ‘so-called’ we ought to apply the derogatory epithet to so-called ‘light’ literature. The first thing that strikes one about the so-called light literature is the extreme heaviness of it. It is full of people who do not matter figuring in incidents of no significance that never took place. The full, true, and particular account of how Ermytrude transferred her affections from her husband to her chauffeur – why should that be considered ‘light’ reading while Green’s History or Plutarch’s Lives are set down as serious reading, and therefore, I suppose, heavy reading? The Real Great and the Imaginary Small. Why should anyone have more interest in Sam Weller than in Alfred the Great or his wise Premier, Archbishop Dunstan? Who wants to keep the company of imaginary inferior people when he might consort with real great men? During one of the darkest periods of my life I read through ‘The Rise of the Dutch Republic,’ and found solace and stimulus in the noble constancy of William the Silent and the gradual emergence of the Netherlanders as a nation from under the heel of a terrorising Spaniard. We get help in our small matters from the great men and the great occasions. I was then striving to save an old-established newspaper from the wreckers, and I did save it, and prolonged its life for thirteen years, till incompetence once more got hold of it. I did not know of any ‘light’ literature that could have helped me, or that would have been anything except impossibly dull at such a time. What we remember. Real people, and what they said and did on momentous occasions, are surely more memorable and interesting and every way more important than ‘the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate.’ The things we remember are not the saying and ‘situations’ in fiction, but the dramatic incidents of history – Scaevola putting his right hand in the altar fire, the quacking of the geese in the Capitol that betrayed the approach of the barbarians, Canute on the sea-beach, King Alfred and the cakes, Bruce and the spider, Bruce and de Bohun, the noble advice of the Miller of St Albans to his fellow rebels in the Peasant’s Revolt, Catherine Douglas putting her white arm in the staple of the broken door-lock to withstand the murderers of her king, Joan of Arc’s replies to the miserable tribunal that sought her peerless life; the single saying of Kirkpatrick and of old Bell-the-Cat, the many picturesque sayings of Cromwell (‘Stop rolling that snowball’ – a lie; ‘Take away that bauble,’ ‘I beseech you gentlemen in the bowels of Christ, to believe it possible that you may be mistaken’) ; the characteristic declaration of George II – ‘I see no good in bainting and boatry’; the vastly significant foreboding of the first Reform Bill, ‘God forgive you this measure, I never can!’ and the similar but more resigned speech of Robert Lowe at the passing of the second Reform Bill, ‘We must now educate our masters.’ That we remember such incidents and sayings is the best proof that we are startled and entertained by them. If that be not ‘lightness’, I do not know the meaning of the word. On the other hand, what do we remember of the so-called ‘light’ literature? Some time ago I read, for want of anything better to do, a fearful but wonderful story called ‘The Gamblers,’ by (I believe) William de Queux. I do not recall a single incident, or a single character of it. It was the most absolute melodrama, not on, but between, the boards. This is the characteristic feature of ‘light’ reading – that one promptly forgets all about it, the memory becoming a complete tabula rasa six weeks after the event. During many years I attended the theatre as a dramatic critic. Of ‘Girls who took the wrong turning’ of ‘Worst Girls in London,’ of ‘Spans of Life’ and ‘Grips of Iron’ I have witnesses scores; and from not one of them does one carry away a single definite recollection, whereas from the classics – novels or plays that have stood the attrition of the years – the least attentive have tags of wisdom and poetry for the everyday need, recollections of whimsy from Falstaff and Dogberry, of poignant pathos from Lear: Pray do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man. Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less, And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you, and know this man; Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant What place this is; and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me, For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. You may read ‘The Speckled Bird,’ or ‘The Blue Lagoon,’ if you like. ‘No profit comes where is no pleasure ta’en.’ But I find the best good enough for me. It is no more merit to read what one likes than it was for Jack Horner to put in his thumb and pull out a plum. He said he was a good boy because he did what he wanted to do. That is where the humour of the rhyme lies. But if a man toils at the so-called classics when he would rather be reading Nat Gould’s latest, it is not quite so droll. I do not read Nat Gould because I do not care for Nat Gould. I read Shakespeare because I care for Shakespeare. But if it does not take all sorts of people to make a world, there are certainly all sorts of people in the world. When one night not long ago I heard Olivia at the theatre ask her Uncle Toby, who is drunk as usual, ‘How came you by this lethargy so early in the day?’ the delicate humour of it made me laugh aloud, but I felt a little shamefaced when I found myself alone in the enjoyment of the joke. And yet why should I? A man ought to be glad that he finds something good where others find nothing at all. Which brings me to another question. Are the Masses Happy? Our correspondent seems to rather pity himself that the masses are happy in their sloppy reading, their talk about nothing, and their music halls, enjoyed while he ‘bothers’ with the so-called classics. Good Lord! The boot is so entirely on the other leg. Who can honestly say that the masses are happy? Are the lower animals happy? How can they be? Last night I looked out of the window of a railway carriage and found a waggon-load of beeves opposite. There they stood, packed head and tail, standing in the cold and dark, jolted about with the lurches of the train, with probably little memory of the past, without comfort in body, with no resource of speech or song, with nothing to do but keep their feet and thole it out. We in the carriage had seats, light, company, speech, our pipes, and the freedom to get out at the next stopping-place if we cared to. Who has not seen pigeons humping themselves on the housetop by the hour, their heads in their feathers, looking, and we may be sure feeling, unutterably bored and without possibility of comfort or entertainment? That is certainly how I see the great mass of mankind. They perform the same dull tasks day after day, with no entertainment save occasional grumbling and swearing. Their rudeness to other people and even to each other is to me the proof that they are miserable. Let no one mistake for happiness the howl of the hooligans at race or football match, or the mirthless skirl of the hoyden in the streets. Those who need to be in a crowd before they can laugh do but make-believe to be happy. But he that laughs in a solitude over a book enjoys himself to a surety. Watch a crowd at a fire or riot or the baiting of an unpopular speaker. The passions that build up without real provocation on those instances are the ebullitions of misery. The Scotsman baited in London or Dublin, the Jew baited everywhere, know in their deepest consciousness that the stupidest men take the largest share in the persecution; the measure of the stupidity is the measure of the spleen. Many working men beat their wives, and the more ignorant and miserable they are the greater is their cruelty. The theory of Arcadian simplicity and accompanying good nature will not hold water. Kindness is a product of cultivation. Offer something to a poor man, and he will say ‘What, for nothing!’ Give a casually met out-of-work silver money, and he will exclaim in amazement ‘Well, I’ll go to hell!’ The well-bred person does kindnesses, and he understands them when he receives in kind. If the well-bred man is not always a well-read man he has learned from those who are. If he ‘has not been to school he has met the scholars.’ It is true that reading sensitises the student to the ills of life; but if it also enables him to help in the redress of those ills, the balance is more than adjusted, and he has done his duty, and pleased himself in addition. The plain way of wisdom is to reduce the pains and increase the lawful pleasures of life. It is not enough to be happy with cakes and ale. A pig is happy in its stye. Man has to fulfil the law of his being, and try to be happy in the best possible way. To the conscientious man who realises that the world is not to be bettered without effort the alternative to doing his duty is that he shall be miserable at the thought of opportunities neglected and of lions that have not been met in the path. Even then, there are consolations by the way, and one of these is the contemplation (in literature) of the great and glorious deeds of the illustrious dead who walked the way before us. The struggle does avail. We are not quite so much ‘in the mire’ as we were in comparatively recent days. The war is a temporary set-back to many of our hopes; but the war itself may well be the fruitful occasion of tremendous events in the direction of making democracy the real master in its own house. In our new series of articles 'The Blight of the Bestseller' Orraman explores the legacy of the Edinburgh Boys. You remember ‘The Edinburgh Boys’? In the following months I want to explore the relationship between the men and their work – specifically looking at the blight of the bestseller. But in case you’ve come late to this party I’ll give you a reminder of our ‘boys’ and their pedigree. Or at least the public face of them according to Wikipedia. Isn’t that the first port of call for everyone’s research these days? I should caution that an encylopedia is only as good as its editors. While Wikipedia is nominally open to all, if you don’t have the technical skills to add your knowledge then however much ‘real’ knowledge you have, it won’t find its way onto the site. A consequence of this democratisation can be that the most prominent information isn’t the most important, relevant (or even correct) and yet is sourced by people who just want a quick ‘google’ for ‘facts.’ One of my aims is to illustrate how much further you need to go to actually know anything about our ‘boys.’ The other is to read into the gaps. The places the average surfer perhaps doesn’t bother to go. The consequences of cheap/mis-information are both deep and broad. So while Wikipedia does offer a quick, cheap, snack – it’s not always good for you and it can’t replace a properly cooked meal – if you pardon my analogy. The first thing I’ve done is given you the unadulterated thumbnails of our boys as found on Wikipedia, complete with photos of our ‘boys’ in all their glory. Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. Scott's novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Old Mortality, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. A prominent member of the Tory establishment in Edinburgh, Scott was an active member of the Highland Society and served a long term as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–32). Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde andA Child's Garden of Verses. A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Cesare Pavese, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins." Samuel Rutherford Crockett (24 September 1859 – 16 April 1914), who published under the name "S. R. Crockett", was a Scottish novelist. [Crockett offers us a chicken/egg conundrum. As Scotland's Forgotten Bestseller we must ask - is there no information about him because he is not worth reading or is he not read because there is no information about him?] Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland but moved to London, where he wrote a number of successful novels and plays. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a "fairy play" about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland. Although he continued to write successfully, Peter Pan overshadowed his other work, and is credited with popularising the then-uncommon name Wendy.[1] Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Barrie was made a baronet by George V on 14 June 1913,[2] and a member of the Order of Merit in the 1922 New Year Honours.[3] Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, which continues to benefit from them. Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ, DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was an Irish-Scots writer and physician, most noted for creating the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and writing stories about him which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels. John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, GCMG, GCVO, CH, PC (/ˈbʌxən/; 26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was aScottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Buchan was in 1927 elected Member of Parliament for theCombined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction. In 1935 he was appointed Governor General of Canada by King George V, on the recommendation of Prime Minister of Canada R. B. Bennett, to replace the Earl of Bessborough. He occupied the post until his death in 1940. Buchan proved to be enthusiastic about literacy, as well as the evolution of Canadian culture, and he received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom. You may feel this is all you want to know about any of our authors. But it’s certainly not enough to make any kind of informed decision about what they write and why you might want to read it. Which is what I’m all about. To save you some work I’ve put together a quick table – an overview of some of what I think are the most relevant pieces of information (and filled in a couple of the more obvious gaps) Of course there is more information on each Wikipedia page, but there are also inconsistencies and poorly researched information. Everyone who does research privileges certain information and I am no different. But what I’m starting to do is read between the lines, and I encourage you to do this to – to find out what we are not being told. From this start point I will talk at greater length about each man in the coming months:
If you cannot read the table on the page, then please download the pdf version for reference.
With regard to the information above, I'm noting a few things of interest and which I will comment on further in specific articles: Dates – These pretty much speak for themselves. One thing to note is the age at which each man died (longevity can have a profound effect upon ‘success’ in publishing terms. Also the dates of the writers career. For how much of their lives were they making a living (or actively pursuing) literary pursuits? Scott (60s) Stevenson(40s) Crockett (50s) Barrie (70s) Conan Doyle (70s) Buchan (60s) Nationality Note that all bar Scott are titled Scottish. As any Scot will know you’ve really ‘made’ it when you are no longer Scottish but ‘British’. Also note that for literary purposes Scottish writers are often described as ‘English’ literature – this is certainly the case with Scott. It’s quite a can of worms. For another time. In the 19th century Scots tended to be referred to as North British. Luckily we’ve got over that now! Family The class the author starts off in and the class he marries into are important factors not clear from this table. Note that all of them have responsibility for at least 3 children during their lives (not always their own) Education Apart from Buchan all were educated at Edinburgh University. Their education prior to University is of course also important and ranges from home-schooling, to parish schools to public boarding school. Profession This is not a ‘self-defined’ category but rather a retrofitting from the point of the editor/s. Note that Crockett isn’t even listed as Novelist whereas Buchan’s political profession is rather ignored. Writing Style/Literary Movement Again, highly suspect because retrofitted. Periods and literary styles are mix-matched. Scott is claimed for Romanticism (but Stevenson and Crockett are not) Stevenson and Crockett are labelled Victorian/Edwardian (which is often the kiss of death for ‘literary’ types. Worse, Crockett and Barrie are labelled ‘Kailyard’ an increasingly discredited appellation and in both cases inappropriately applied. Buchan is simply listed as ‘Adventure Stories’ which would have infuriated him. Similarly Conan Doyle is crushed by the power of Sherlock Holmes. Put simply, there is MUCH more to this section than ever meets the eye and yet surely it is one of the most important to be accurate and clear about if you are trying to inform a new readership? Famous Works This of course will form the backbone of my future pieces. Again it is woefully inadequate reflecting either the superficiality or plain ignorance of those editing the sections. But of course these are how the men ARE remembered: Scott for the Waverley novels, Stevenson primarily for Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Crockett not at all (though The Raiders is the one anyone who has read Crockett is most likely to have read) Barrie for Peter Pan , Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes and Buchan for the Thirty Nine Steps. These are all fine books but my contention in the pieces that follow will be that they have done as much harm as good to the reputations of the writers who wrote them. Titles/Political leanings You’ll note that four of our men end up being ‘Sir.’ So they are definitely in the elite, as often from their political as their literary stances. But politics hardly gets a mention. Scott is noted as a Tory. Wikipedia is pretty quiet on the others. Again there’s a lot of ‘class’ to look at in the lives of our writers as this plays (I contend) quite an important role in how they are remembered. We still live, after all, in aspirational times. I hope this has given you something to ponder until next month. And maybe even encouraged you to either read some of the ‘famous’ works or explore into some of the lesser known aspects of our Edinburgh Boys.
The head of a great shipbuilding concern said the other day that the object of education was not merely to teach men how to earn a living, but how to live. This is very far from being a new idea; though as the declared opinion of a ‘captain of industry,’ it is distinctly novel – so novel, indeed, that the smaller sort of journalist turns it over as if it had never been heard before. It is a long time since Ruskin wrote ‘Industry without art is brutality.’ The Romans had a saying, ‘Vita sine literis mors est’ (Life without literature is death.) The French Academy was founded in the seventeenth century by Cardinal Richelieu ‘To keep the fine quality of the French spirit unimpaired.’ (maintenere la delicatessen de l’esprit francais.) Bacon said, still earlier, that ‘studies are for delight, for ornament, for ability’; and he also said: ‘Reading maketh a full man, converse a ready man, and writing an exact man.’ So that the doctrine that education is not intended merely or chiefly to make chemists, technicians, foreign correspondents, and ‘smart’ typists, but to enable people to make the most of life, is a very fairly old doctrine, even if we do not cite the declaration in the Shorter Catachism as to ‘man’s chief end.’ As to the interpretation of this last there would appear to be some doubt. One man defined it as ‘To Glorify God and enjoy him(self) for ever.’ Another said man’s chief end was to get ends to meet – an anxious-minded view with which one has much less sympathy than with the other rather epicurean reading. But what signs are there that the place of studies as a necessary equipment for civilised life is at all adequately realised? Exceedingly little. Today I have seen two catalogues of books which seem to have special significance here. The one is a long and closely-printed catalogue of an old-established Edinburgh bookseller, whose customers would mostly be professional men and well-to-do people generally. There are not a score of novels in its 28 double-columned pages of small print, and those that figure there are first editions of classics. This is typical of the proportion of fiction in such catalogues, of which I regularly see a number. The other catalogues I have seen today is the list of additions to a library supposed to be popular. The library is assumed to be an auxiliary of a society whose business is professedly educative. The proportion of fiction to general literature is six to one, and the general ‘literature’ is of the lightest. The experience of the ordinary bookseller dealing in new books is that fiction, and the lightest of fiction at that, makes up by far and away the major part of his trade. Much has been made of the success of certain popular series, such as the Everyman Library; but booksellers have pointed out that if Everyman is selling, it only means that other series are neglected in its favour. One bookseller has reminded us that there is nothing today to be compared, in value, interest, and real novelty, with the International Science Series of twenty to thirty years ago. All the volumes in that series were copyright books by the most distinguished authors then living, and they were published at prices from three to five times the price of the Everyman volumes, the latter being non-copyright books, from which the authors, mostly dead, derive no benefit, besides being old books from which latter-day science, theories, speculations, and current thought generally are excluded. In any popular series fiction holds by much the larger place. The buyers and readers of such books are doing nothing for literature, and in the trifling prices they pay for their mental fare they give no proof of any literature worth mentioning. To give ninepence for a fat novel that will keep the whole household reading, one member after another, for months, is a mere war economy of the most obvious kind. And the fashion of the sixpennies and sevenpennies (now raised to ninepence) had set in long before the outbreak of Armageddon. It is true that more single-volume books are issued at long prices than ever before; but that is the worst sign of all. When one could buy a substantial new book by Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, Darwin, or Bain, for five shillings, it was a sign that a liberal education as to numbers had been printed; but when a book of three or four hundred pages is priced at sixteen shillings it means that the publisher expects a limited sale and has to take his expenses out of a much increased price. There will probably be less for the author than there would have been out of the lower priced book. Does all this matter? Will doubtless be asked. It matters just all the world. It means that we are falling under suspicion of becoming a nation of light-minded ignoramuses, living butterfly lives in which we desire nothing more than to be vacuously amused, to pass the time with tosh that we forget as soon as read, for the excellent reason that there is nothing in it to remember worth the snuff of a candle. In the really great periods of history the nations that were doing things generally had a literary output in accordance with their achievements in other fields. The Golden Age of Greece, the era of the great naval victory of Salamis and the great military victory of Marathon, in which a mighty despotism was beaten by a small free State, was the age of Aeschylus and Aristophanes, the former commemorating the triumph of freedom by writing the drama of ‘The Persians’ with its magnificent choruses. The spacious and fruitful days of Elizabeth, that saw the formidable power of Spain broken in the Netherlands and on the seas, was the age of Shakespeare and a galaxy of other writers who are still read. The ‘days of good Queen Anne’ not only witnessed a succession of brilliant victories over the armies of despotic France, but it was a period of copious and classical output in literature. The long Victorian era, most glorious of all in achievement of every kind, was never without a host of poets, orators, historians, critics, playwrights, and novelists who created real characters, who never wrote without a genuinely useful social purpose, and who are still alive in their most immortal part, their writings. The person who does not read history does not know history, and there is no way of having sound views of present facts and tendencies or of gauging future probabilities without a knowledge of the past. Everything that exists or takes place has antecedents. The present war, for instance, is merely a fresh outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war after an interval of forty years, during which time France has never ceased to talk of the revanche and to make much of her army as the means of securing it. The alliance with Russia was made, not for defence but for offence. So soon as Karl Marx heard that Germany was to annex Alsace-Lorraine he had declared that France would form an alliance with Russia. And the forecast was speedily fulfilled. I recollect hearing an English Tory inveighing against Home Rule as being unheard of, impossible, unworkable, and absurd; and when it was pointed out that Ireland had a Parliament for centuries, and that at the time her last Parliament was taken from her the population was double its figure at the time he was speaking, he collapsed like a house of cards, murmuring that he ‘didn’t know that.’ No; but his ignorant vote would help to keep the desired and desirable change back in this as in other matters where all that is needed is a little liberalising knowledge. Economics, political science and philosophy, poetry, criticism, biography are all necessary ,not only to the performance of our civic duties, but to anything like adequate intelligent enjoyment of life. Let anyone listen to the talk of an average casual collection of workmen or middle-class men, and what a mass of prejudice, half-baked opinion, and timid shying off from first principles and essential fact it will be found to be! Listen, for example, to a discussion on women’s suffrage, and what sort of ‘arguments’ will be oftenest heard. Those in favour will have much to say of how women pay rates and taxes and manage businesses, and therefore they owught to have votes. Those against will doubtless rest content with nothing beyond jeers, cheap chaff, or the mere statement that they are not in favour; there is always a kind of honest man who thinks the mere statement of his hostility is enough. None of the disputants seems to think of appealing to facts, to the experience of how Votes for Women has worked. In every branch of local politics women have long had the vote, and have almost uniformly misused it in the most flagitious way. In some of our colonies women have all the franchises, and nobody can say anything more than that they have increased the labour and expense of elections. Women councillors initiate nothing. Woman is not an initiator. She does not even initiate her own hats. William Morris, a married man and a good cook, declared that no woman ever invented a new dish or failed to spoil an old one. Women have no pockets, and are constantly losing their handbags. They wear frocks that button up the back, and they need someone else to truss and untruss them. The case against Votes for Women might be allowed to rest upon the one physiological fact that the female animal, including women, converts the energy she stores to a different purpose from that to which a man devotes it. The energy which goes in man to the nourishment of brain and biceps, in woman goes largely to the nourishment of the generative and lacteal organs, whether she wishes it or not. The man-like woman who writes powerful books (like ‘George Eliot’) or who becomes a soldier (like Christian Davies) is an unsexed woman. Her female functions are starved in the interests of her masculinity. Tell this to the average suffragist, male or female, and there will not only be not reply, but you will probably be assured that they never heard of this aspect of the case. The fact is, the state of political intelligence is such that there are far too many uninformed voters in the country already; and so far from its being desirable to increase the number, a good case could be made of disfranchising many men, except that you can’t take a bone from a dog. The franchise in the hands of the ignorant or unreasoning is like a revolver in the hands of a child – a deadly weapon – and it was never meant to be that. To give women the vote because they have worked at munitions and conducted tramcars is an utterly irrelevant plea. Women’s most valuable and dangerous service to the State is not and always has been the bearing and rearing of children. If services rendered gave a claim, that would be the strongest claim presentable on her behalf. But the franchise is given for the good of the state, and there is no reason to believe that Votes for Women would be anything but a reactionary evil of the most dangerous kind, as the results of municipal elections have abundantly proved. To return from our overgrown illustration to the male thesis, I have no hesitation in saying that, be the causes what they may, the popular taste in literature is not only much lower than it was forty years ago, but it may be almost said to be non-existent. The grounds of this serious statement are so numerous that only a very few of them can be even mentioned here. Books that used to be read as a matter of eager delight, and that are still so read by those who know good literature, are now used in the schools as lesson-books, not at all to the satisfaction of the pupil. Forty years ago boys of the poorest class bougth and read the plays of Shakespeare in penny pamphlets, printed in small type. Now Shakespeare is much less read and much less played. The Waverley novels were issued in threepenny editions by the enterprising Dicks, and were bought and read by poor boys who raided their scanty pocket-money for them as a treat. So great was the demand for the better class of fiction 35 to 40 years ago that journals were produced consisting almost exclusively of standard novels run as serials. The authors represented included Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, Fielding, Smollet and Antony Trollope. The same class of literature has not become lessons! Imagine a youngster treating ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Old Mortality’ or ‘Kenilworth’ as a task to be conned and to be examined in! Forty years ago we read these books for pleasure after our home lessons were done, or, indeed, often and often before they were begun. A secondary school teacher was complaining the other night that he could not get his class to take the least interest in the exploits of Hannibal, even in war time; whereas forty years ago we read about the Punic wars as a matter of keen pleasure, finding money for ‘The Wars of the Carthaginians’ with small encouragement from our seniors. Thackeray tells of how, passing through a poor quarter of London, longer ago than forty years, a seamstress’s child recognised him and cried ‘There goes Becky Sharpe!’ Many of the tales of both Dickens and Thackeray appeared in fortnightly numbers, and into many a humble household they went as a matter of course. Some of us were familiar from infancy with these novels in the blue and the green covers in which they appeared in their serial form. The home which did not contain a set of the Waverley novels, the poems of Burns, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ Pollok’s ‘Course of Time,’ and Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ was poor indeed. The Sketch and the Mirror are a very wretched exchange for these books and for the widely circulated periodicals issued by the house of Chambers in those days. The modern writers who might most appropriately be compared, in point of merit and status, with Dickens and Thackeray, would be H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Arnold Bennet, and G.K.Chesterton. Could one fancy the child of a poor seamstress recognising any of these as they passed down a modern mean street? One knows households, whose head owns a motor car and has a bank balance of four or five figures, in which there are no books of general literature except such as have been got by the young people for school use. And ordinarily (I mean except in war time) we have to wait until these people, by God alone knows what process, make up what they are pleased to call their minds that something shall be done now which ought quite obviously to have been done fifty years ago. Our cities and the people in them might be made beautiful, the lease of life might be greatly extended, work might be made a pleasure, the man with the muck rake might be a gentleman t not too dainty for daily use, the wealth of the country might be increased at least tenfold, if – and what virtue in an if! – if prejudice could be dissipated by the dissipation of ignorance. But ignorance is hugged like a garment, and the heart of the reformer is broken and his unselfish life wasted by the neglect and the defeat, again and again, of proposals that would, in practice, beneficently transform the whole face of society. The man who knows what has been successfully done, and would enlarge the sum of human good, may well have the feeling of one who is kept out of a great estate by the mere dog-in-the-manger obstinacy of others who do not even want the estate for themselves. A people which does not read cannot reason. A people which does not read has no mental furniture; and the mind does not work in vacuo – it must have something to work with and upon. We reason by analogies, and the analogies of the non-reader must be few and curtailed. The amazing thing is the lack of a worthy curiosity. It seems only natural to want to know exactly what took place at a time of historic crisis; how exactly the thing happened, who were the actors, how an institution, say, like the ancient and powerful monarchy of the Bourbons at last toppled and fell. When you recommend Dickens’s ‘Tale of Two Cities’, and give an outline of the story, the hearer will say, ‘Oh, I have seen it at the pictures.’ It is something that one would imagine their curiosity would be aroused to know the whole story, say, as it is narrated by Thomas Carlyle in his graphic and witty history of the French Revolution. One result of the war has been to lead me to browse in the ten volumes of Carlyle’s ‘History of Frederick the Great’ in order to find out how the Prussians came to be so infatuated with their precious Hohenzollerns. This is the natural thing to do. The way in which everybody fell away from the last of the Jameses, and how the English Revolution was compassed by the king’s flight at last, is an intensely interesting story, with many memorable touches as it is told by Macaulay; and one simply cannot understand how any adult English-speaking person is not curious to know the full particulars of an event so interesting in itself and so momentous in its consequences. But there is no widespread curiosity about this epoch or about anything of the kind. We have left behind us for the time serious study and inquiry. A characteristic so human, so nobly human, as intellectual curiosity, must recur again to the nation; but there are no present signs of it. There are many improvements in taste – in furniture, clothes, domestic architecture, the production of books, the arrangement of newspapers, the services in church. But the taste in literature, music and the drama has steadily deteriorated; English is still the Cinderella of popular education; and rag-time, and the cinema, and the musical comedy oust the better class of music and the best class of play from most theatres. Will education become more narrowly ‘utilitaritan’ as a result of the war? Shall we beat the Germans in the field only to copy their ideas and methods in education and business? There is vast need for improvement certainly; but surely not in the direction of imitating the training that has produced the Hun, a slave to his taskmasters and a monster of aggressive cruelty to all against whom his wolfish ferocity is directed. |
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