Lady DeCourcey

There were two windows in the drawing-room wide open for the countess to pass through; but she saw that there was a woman on the sofa, at the third window, and that that woman had, as it were, a following attached to her. Her ladyship therefore determined to investigate the woman. The De Courcys were hereditarily short sighted, and had been so for thirty centuries at least. So Lady De Courcy, who, when she entered the family had adopted the family habits, did as her son had done before her, and taking her glass to investigate the Signora Neroni, pressed in among the gentlemen who surrounded the couch, and bowed slightly to those whom she chose to honour by her acquaintance.

In order to get to the window she had to pass close to the front of the couch, and as she did so she stared hard at the occupant. The occupant in return stared hard at the countess. The countess who since her countess-ship commenced had been accustomed to see all eyes, not royal, ducal, or marquesal, fall down before her own, paused as she went on, raised her eyebrows, and stared even harder than before. But she had now to do with one who cared little for countesses. It was, one may say, impossible for mortal man or woman to abash Madeline Neroni. She opened her large bright lustrous eyes wider and wider, till she seemed to be all eyes.

She gazed up into the lady's face, not as though she did it with an effort, but as if she delighted in doing it. She used no glass to assist her effrontery, and needed none. The faintest possible smile of derision played round her mouth, and her nostrils were slightly dilated, as if in sure anticipation of her triumph. And it was sure. The Countess De Courcy, in spite of her thirty centuries and De Courcy castle, and the fact that Lord De Courcy was grand master of the ponies to the Prince of Wales, had not a chance with her.

At first the little circlet of gold wavered in the countess's hand, then the hand shook, then the circlet fell, the countess's head tossed itself into the air, and the countess's feet shambled out to the lawn. She did not however go so fast but what she heard the signora's voice, asking--

***

'Who on earth is that woman, Mr Slope?'

'That is Lady De Courcy.'

'Oh, ah. I might have supposed so. Ha, ha, ha. Well, that's as good as a play.'

It was as good as a play to any there who had eyes to observe it, and wit to comment on what they observed.

But the Lady De Courcy soon found a congenial spirit on the lawn. There she encountered Mrs Proudie, and as Mrs Proudie was not only the wife of a bishop, but was also the cousin of an earl, Lady De Courcy considered her to be the fittest companion she was likely to meet in that assemblage. They were accordingly delighted to see each other. Mrs Proudie by no means despised a countess, and as this countess lived in the county and within a sort of extensive visiting distance of Barchester, she was glad to have this opportunity of ingratiating herself.

'My dear Lady De Courcy, I am so delighted,' said she, looking as little grim as it was in her nature to do so. 'I hardly expected to see you here. It is such a distance, and then you know, such a crowd.'

'And such roads, Mrs Proudie! I really wonder how the people ever get about. But I don't suppose they ever do.'

'Well, I really don't know; but I suppose not. The Thorne don't, I know,' said Mrs Proudie. 'Very nice person, Miss Thorne, isn't she?'

'Oh, delightful and so queer; I've known her these twenty years. A great pet of mine is dear Miss Thorne. She is so very strange, you know. She always makes me think of the Esquimaux and the Indians. Isn't her dress quite delightful?'

'Delightful,' said Mrs Proudie; 'I wonder now whether she paints. Did you ever see such colour?'

'Oh, of course,' said Lady De Courcy; 'that is, I have no doubt she does. But, Mrs Proudie, who is that woman on the sofa by the window? just step this way and you'll see her, there--' and the countess led her to a spot where she could plainly see the signora's well-remembered face and figure.

She did not however do so without being equally well seen by the signora. 'Look, look,' said that lady to Mr Slope, who was still standing near to her; 'see the high spiritualities and temporalities of the land in league together, and all against poor me. I'll wager my bracelet, Mr Slope against your next sermon, that they've taken up their position there on purpose to pull me to pieces. Well, I can't rush to the combat, but I know how to protect myself if the enemy come near me.'

But the enemy knew better. They could gain nothing be contact with the signora Neroni, and they could abuse her as they pleased at a distance from her on the lawn.

'She's that horrid Italian woman, Lady De Courcy; you must have heard of her.'

'What Italian woman?' said her ladyship, quite alive to the coming story; 'I don't think I've heard of any Italian woman coming into the country. She doesn't look Italian either.'

'Oh, you must have heard of her,' said Mrs Proudie. 'No, she's not absolutely Italian. She is Dr Stanhope's daughter--Dr Stanhope the prebendary; and she calls herself the Signora Neroni.'

'Oh--h--h--h!' exclaimed the countess.

'I was sure you had heard of her,' continued Mrs Proudie. 'I don't know anything about her husband. They do say that some man named Neroni is still alive. I believe she did marry such a man abroad, but I do not at all know who or what he was.'

'Ah--h--h--h!' said the countess, shaking her head with much intelligence, as every additional 'h' fell from her lips. 'I know all about it now. I have heard George mention her. George knows all about her. George heard about her in Rome.'

'She's an abominable woman at any rate,' said Mrs Proudie.

'Insufferable,' said the countess.

'She made her way into the palace once, before I knew anything about her; and I cannot tell you how dreadfully indecent her conduct was.'

'Was it?' said the delighted countess.

'Insufferable,' said the prelatess.

'But why does she lie on a sofa?' asked the Lady De Courcy.

'She has only one leg,' said Mrs Proudie.

'Only one leg!' said the Lady De Courcy, who felt to a certain degree dissatisfied that the signora was thus incapacitated. 'Was she born so?'

'Oh, no,' said Mrs Proudie,--and her ladyship felt somewhat recomforted by the assurance,--'she had two. But that Signor Neroni beat her, I believe, till she was obliged to have one amputated. At any rate she entirely lost the use of it.'

'Unfortunate creature!' said the countess, who herself knew something of matrimonial trials.

'Yes,' said Mrs Proudie; 'one would pity her, in spite of her past bad conduct, if she knew how to behave herself. But she does not. She is the most insolent creature I have ever put my eyes on.'

'Indeed she is,' said Lady De Courcy.

'And her conduct with men is abominable, that she is not fit to be admitted into any lady's drawing-room.'

'Dear me!' said the countess, becoming again excited, happy, and merciless.

'You saw that man standing near her,--the clergyman with the red hair?'

'Yes, yes.'

'She has absolutely ruined that man. The bishop, or I should rather take the blame on myself, for it was I,--I brought him down from London to Barchester. He is a tolerable preacher, an active young man, and I therefore introduced him to the bishop. That woman, Lady De Courcy, has got hold of him, and has so disgraced him, that I am forced to required that he shall leave the palace; and I doubt very much whether he won't lose his gown.'

'Why what an idiot the man must be!' said the countess.

'You don't know the intriguing villainy of that woman,' said Mrs Proudie, remembering her own torn flounces.

'But you say she has only got one leg!'

'She is as full of mischief as tho' she had ten. Look at her eyes, Lady De Courcy. Did you ever see such eyes in a decent woman's head?'

'Indeed I never did, Mrs Proudie.'

'And her effrontery, and her voice; I quite pity her poor father, who is really a good sort of man.'

'Dr Stanhope, isn't he?'

'Yes, Dr Stanhope. He is one of our prebendaries,--a good quiet sort of man himself. But I am surprised that he should let his daughter conduct herself as he does.'

'I suppose he can't help it,' said the countess.

'But a clergyman, you know, Lady De Courcy! He should at any rate prevent her from exhibiting in public, if he cannot induce her to behave at home. But he is to be pitied. I believe he has a desperate life of it with the lot of them. That apish-looking man there, with the long beard and the loose trousers,--he is the woman's brother. He is nearly as bad as she is. They are both of them infidels.'

'Infidels!' said Lady De Courcy, 'and their father a prebendary!'

'Yes, and likely to be the new dean too,' said Mrs Proudie.

'Oh, yes, poor dear Dr Trefoil!' said the countess, who had once in her life spoken to that gentleman; 'I was so distressed to hear it, Mrs Proudie. And so Dr Stanhope is to be the new dean! He comes of an excellent family, and I wish him success in spite of his daughter. Perhaps, Mrs Proudie, when he is dean, they'll be better able to see the error of their ways.'

To this Mrs Proudie said nothing. Her dislike of the Signora Neroni was too deep to admit of her even hoping that that lady should see the error of her ways. Mrs Proudie looked on the signora as one of the lost,--one of those beyond the reach of Christian charity, and was therefore able to enjoy the luxury of hating her, without the drawback of wishing her eventually well out of her sins.

"Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right..."

Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned. Lady De Courcy was a wise woman; and therefore, having treated Miss Thorne very badly by staying away till three o'clock, she assumed the offensive and attacked Mr Thorne's roads. Her daughter, not less wise, attacked Miss Thorne's early hours. The art of doing this is among the most precious of those usually cultivated by persons who know how to live. There is no withstanding it. Who can go systematically to work, and having done battle with the primary accusation and settled that, then bring forward a counter-charge and support that also? Life is not long enough for such labours. A man in the right relies easily on his rectitude, and therefore goes about unarmed. His very strength is his weakness; his very weakness is his strength. The one is never prepared for combat, the other is always ready. Therefore it is that in this world the man that is in the wrong almost invariably conquers the man that is in the right, and invariably despises him.

A man must be an idiot or else an angel, who, after the age of forty shall attempt to be just to his neighbours. Many like the Lady Margaretta have learnt their lesson at a much earlier age. But this of course depends on the school in which they have been taught.

Poor Miss Thorne was altogether overcome. She knew very well that she had been ill-treated, and yet she found herself making apologies to Lady De Courcy. To do her ladyship justice, she received them very graciously, and allowed herself with her train of daughters to be led towards the lawn.

Barchester Towers again

 Thus in this matter of the hospital poor Mr. Quiverful had his trials, and he had also his consolations. On the whole the consolations were the more vivid of the two. The stern draper heard of the coming promotion, and the wealth of his warehouse was at Mr. Quiverful's disposal. Coming events cast their shadows before, and the coming event of Mr. Quiverful's transference to Barchester produced a delicious shadow in the shape of a new outfit for Mrs. Quiverful and her three elder daughters. Such consolations come home to the heart of a man, and quite home to the heart of a woman. Whatever the husband might feel, the wife cared nothing for frowns of dean, archdeacon, or prebendary. To her the outsides and insides of her husband and fourteen children were everything. In her bosom every other ambition had been swallowed up in that maternal ambition of seeing them and him and herself duly clad and properly fed. It had come to that with her that life had now no other purpose. She recked nothing of the imaginary rights of others. She had no patience with her husband when he declared to her that he could not accept the hospital unless he knew that Mr. Harding had refused it. Her husband had no right to be quixotic at the expense of fourteen children. The narrow escape of throwing away his good fortune which her lord had had, almost paralysed her.
*
 Thus, while the outer world was accusing Mr. Quiverful of rapacity for promotion and of disregard to his honour, the inner world of his own household was falling foul of him, with equal vehemence, for his willingness to sacrifice their interests to a false feeling of sentimental pride. It is astonishing how much difference the point of view makes in the aspect of all that we look at!
    Such were the feelings of the different members of the family at Puddingdale on the occasion of Mr. Slope's second visit. Mrs. Quiverful, as soon as she saw his horse coming up the avenue from the vicarage gate, hastily packed up her huge basket of needlework and hurried herself and her daughter out of the room in which she was sitting with her husband. "It's Mr. Slope," she said. "He's come to settle with you about the hospital. I do hope we shall now be able to move at once." And she hastened to bid the maid of all work go to the door, so that the welcome great man might not be kept waiting.
    Mr. Slope thus found Mr. Quiverful alone. Mrs. Quiverful went off to her kitchen and back settlements with anxious beating heart, almost dreading that there might be some slip between the cup of her happiness and the lip of her fruition, but yet comforting herself with the reflexion that after what had taken place, any such slip could hardly be possible.

and

 "But why did you think about it, Bishop? How could you think of making such a creature as that Dean of Barchester? Dean of Barchester! I suppose he'll be looking for a bishopric some of these days — a man that hardly knows who his own father was; a man that I found without bread to his mouth or a coat to his back. Dean of Barchester, indeed! I'll dean him."
    Mrs. Proudie considered herself to be in politics a pure Whig; all her family belonged to the Whig party. Now, among all ranks of Englishmen and Englishwomen (Mrs. Proudie should, I think, be ranked among the former on the score of her great strength of mind), no one is so hostile to lowly born pretenders to high station as the pure Whig.
    The bishop thought it necessary to exculpate himself. "Why, my dear," said he, "it appeared to me that you and Mr. Slope did not get on quite so well as you used to do!"
    "Get on!" said Mrs. Proudie, moving her foot uneasily on the hearth-rug and compressing her lips in a manner that betokened much danger to the subject of their discourse.
    "I began to find that he was objectionable to you" — Mrs. Proudie's foot worked on the hearth-rug with great rapidity — "and that you would be more comfortable if he was out of the palace" — Mrs. Proudie smiled, as a hyena may probably smile before he begins his laugh — "and therefore I thought that if he got this place, and so ceased to be my chaplain, you might be pleased at such an arrangement."
    And then the hyena laughed out. Pleased at such an arrangement! Pleased at having her enemy converted into a dean with twelve hundred a year! Medea, when she describes the customs of her native country (I am quoting from Robson's edition), assures her astonished auditor that in her land captives, when taken, are eaten.
    "You pardon them?" says Medea.
    "We do indeed," says the mild Grecian.
    "We eat them!" says she of Colchis, with terrific energy.
    Mrs. Proudie was the Medea of Barchester; she had no idea of not eating Mr. Slope. Pardon him! Merely get rid of him! Make a dean of him! It was not so they did with their captives in her country, among people of her sort! Mr. Slope had no such mercy to expect; she would pick him to the very last bone.

On round dinner tables

 "It would do very well for a round table," suggested the ex-warden.
    Now there was something peculiarly unorthodox, in the archdeacon's estimation, in the idea of a round table. He had always been accustomed to a goodly board of decent length, comfortably elongating itself according to the number of the guests, nearly black with perpetual rubbing, and as bright as a mirror. Now round dinner-tables are generally of oak, or else of such new construction as not to have acquired the peculiar hue which was so pleasing to him. He connected them with what he called the nasty newfangled method of leaving a cloth on the table, as though to warn people that they were not to sit long. In his eyes there was something democratic and parvenu in a round table. He imagined that dissenters and calico-printers chiefly used them, and perhaps a few literary lions more conspicuous for their wit than their gentility. He was a little flurried at the idea of such an article being introduced into the diocese by a protégé of his own, and at the instigation of his father-in-law.
    "A round dinner-table," said he with some heat, "is the most abominable article of furniture that ever was invented. I hope that Arabin has more taste than to allow such a thing in his house."
    Poor Mr. Harding felt himself completely snubbed, and of course said nothing further; but Mr. Arabin, who had yielded submissively in the small matters of the cellar and kitchen grate, found himself obliged to oppose reforms which might be of a nature too expensive for his pocket.
    "But it seems to me, Archdeacon, that I can't very well lengthen the room without pulling down the wall, and if I pull down the wall, I must build it up again; then if I throw out a bow on this side, I must do the same on the other, and if I do it for the ground floor, I must carry it up to the floor above. That will be putting a new front to the house and will cost, I suppose, a couple of hundred pounds. The ecclesiastical commissioners will hardly assist me when they hear that my grievance consists in having a dining-room only sixteen feet long."
    The archdeacon proceeded to explain that nothing would be easier than adding six feet to the front of the dining-room without touching any other room in the house. Such irregularities of construction in small country-houses were, he said, rather graceful than otherwise, and he offered to pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket if it cost more than forty pounds. Mr. Arabin, however, was firm, and, although the archdeacon fussed and fumed about it, would not give way. Forty pounds, he said, was a matter of serious moment to him, and his friends, if under such circumstances they would be good-natured enough to come to him at all, must put up with the misery of a square room. He was willing to compromise matters by disclaiming any intention of having a round table.

An understanding with the reader and more Barchester

But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realized? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?
    And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Ratcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.
    And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. "Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta; of course she accepts Gustavus in the end." "How very ill-natured you are, Susan," says Kitty with tears in her eyes: "I don't care a bit about it now." Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the third volume if you please — learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.
    Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.
    I would not for the value of this chapter have it believed by a single reader that my Eleanor could bring herself to marry Mr. Slope, or that she should be sacrificed to a Bertie Stanhope. But among the good folk of Barchester many believed both the one and the other.
*
  "Are you a Whewellite or a Brewsterite, or a t'othermanite, Mrs. Bold?" said Charlotte, who knew a little about everything, and had read about a third of each of the books to which she alluded.
    "Oh!" said Eleanor; "I have not read any of the books, but I feel sure that there is one man in the moon at least, if not more."
    "You don't believe in the pulpy gelatinous matter?" said Bertie.
    "I heard about that," said Eleanor, "and I really think it's almost wicked to talk in such a manner. How can we argue about God's power in the other stars from the laws which he has given for our rule in this one?"
    "How indeed!" said Bertie. "Why shouldn't there be a race of salamanders in Venus? And even if there be nothing but fish in Jupiter, why shouldn't the fish there be as wide awake as the men and women here?"
    "That would be saying very little for them," said Charlotte. "I am for Dr. Whewell myself, for I do not think that men and women are worth being repeated in such countless worlds. There may be souls in other stars, but I doubt their having any bodies attached to them. But come, Mrs. Bold, let us put our bonnets on and walk round the close. If we are to discuss sidereal questions, we shall do so much better under the towers of the cathedral than stuck in this narrow window."
*
 From Winchester he went to Oxford, and was entered as a commoner at Balliol. Here his special career very soon commenced. He utterly eschewed the society of fast men, gave no wine-parties, kept no horses, rowed no boats, joined no rows, and was the pride of his college tutor. Such at least was his career till he had taken his little go, and then he commenced a course of action which, though not less creditable to himself as a man, was hardly so much to the taste of the tutor. He became a member of a vigorous debating society, and rendered himself remarkable there for humorous energy. Though always in earnest, yet his earnestness was always droll. To be true in his ideas, unanswerable in his syllogisms, and just in his aspirations was not enough for him. He had failed, failed in his own opinion as well as that of others when others came to know him, if he could not reduce the arguments of his opponents to an absurdity and conquer both by wit and reason. To say that his object was ever to raise a laugh would be most untrue. He hated such common and unnecessary evidence of satisfaction on the part of his hearers. A joke that required to be laughed at was, with him, not worth uttering. He could appreciate by a keener sense than that of his ears the success of his wit, and would see in the eyes of his auditors whether or no he was understood and appreciated.
    He had been a religious lad before he left school. That is, he had addicted himself to a party in religion, and having done so had received that benefit which most men do who become partisans in such a cause. We are much too apt to look at schism in our church as an unmitigated evil. Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, at any rate calls attention to the subject, draws in supporters who would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches men to think upon religion. How great an amount of good of this description has followed that movement in the Church of England which commenced with the publication of Froude's Remains!
    As a boy young Arabin took up the cudgels on the side of the Tractarians, and at Oxford he sat for a while at the feet of the great Newman. To this cause he lent all his faculties. For it he concocted verses, for it he made speeches, for it he scintillated the brightest sparks of his quiet wit. For it he ate and drank and dressed and had his being. In due process of time he took his degree and wrote himself B.A., but he did not do so with any remarkable amount of academical éclat. He had occupied himself too much with High Church matters and the polemics, politics, and outward demonstrations usually concurrent with High Churchmanship to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first. He was not a double first, nor even a first class man, but he revenged himself on the university by putting firsts and double firsts out of fashion for the year and laughing down a species of pedantry which, at the age of twenty-three, leaves no room in a man's mind for graver subjects than conic sections or Greek accents.
    Greek accents, however, and conic sections were esteemed necessaries at Balliol, and there was no admittance there for Mr. Arabin within the list of its fellows. Lazarus, however, the richest and most comfortable abode of Oxford dons, opened its bosom to the young champion of a church militant. Mr. Arabin was ordained, and became a fellow soon after taking his degree, and shortly after that was chosen professor of poetry.
    And now came the moment of his great danger. After many mental struggles, and an agony of doubt which may be well surmised, the great prophet of the Tractarians confessed himself a Roman Catholic. Mr. Newman left the Church of England and with him carried many a waverer. He did not carry off Mr. Arabin, but the escape which that gentleman had was a very narrow one. He left Oxford for awhile that he might meditate in complete peace on the step which appeared to him to be all but unavoidable, and shut himself up in a little village on the sea-shore of one of our remotest counties, that he might learn by communing with his own soul whether or no he could with a safe conscience remain within the pale of his mother church.
    Things would have gone badly with him there had he been left entirely to himself. Everything was against him: all his worldly interests required him to remain a Protestant, and he looked on his worldly interests as a legion of foes, to get the better of whom was a point of extremest honour. In his then state of ecstatic agony such a conquest would have cost him little; he could easily have thrown away all his livelihood; but it cost him much to get over the idea that by choosing the Church of England he should be open in his own mind to the charge that he had been led to such a choice by unworthy motives. Then his heart was against him: he loved with a strong and eager love the man who had hitherto been his guide, and yearned to follow his footsteps. His tastes were against him: the ceremonies and pomps of the Church of Rome, their august feasts and solemn fasts, invited his imagination and pleased his eye. His flesh was against him: how great an aid would it be to a poor, weak, wavering man to be constrained to high moral duties, self-denial, obedience, and chastity by laws which were certain in their enactments, and not to be broken without loud, palpable, unmistakable sin! Then his faith was against him: he required to believe so much; panted so eagerly to give signs of his belief; deemed it so insufficient to wash himself simply in the waters of Jordan; that some great deed, such as that of forsaking everything for a true Church, had for him allurements almost past withstanding.

Mr. Slope

 "Impudent scoundrel!" he continued after a while. "To dare to cross-examine me about the Sunday-schools in the diocese, and Sunday travelling too: I never in my life met his equal for sheer impudence. Why, he must have thought we were two candidates for ordination!"
    "I declare I thought Mrs. Proudie was the worst of the two," said Mr. Harding.
    "When a woman is impertinent, one must only put up with it, and keep out of her way in future, but I am not inclined to put up with Mr. Slope. 'Sabbath travelling!'" and the doctor attempted to imitate the peculiar drawl of the man he so much disliked: "'Sabbath travelling!' Those are the sort of men who will ruin the Church of England and make the profession of a clergyman disreputable. It is not the dissenters or the papists that we should fear, but the set of canting, low-bred hypocrites who are wriggling their way in among us; men who have no fixed principle, no standard ideas of religion or doctrine, but who take up some popular cry, as this fellow has done about 'Sabbath travelling.'"
*
Hitherto Barchester had escaped the taint of any extreme rigour of church doctrine. The clergymen of the city and neighbourhood, though very well inclined to promote High Church principles, privileges, and prerogatives, had never committed themselves to tendencies which are somewhat too loosely called Puseyite practices. They all preached in their black gowns, as their fathers had done before them; they wore ordinary black cloth waistcoats; they had no candles on their altars, either lighted or unlighted; they made no private genuflexions, and were contented to confine themselves to such ceremonial observances as had been in vogue for the last hundred years. The services were decently and demurely read in their parish churches, chanting was confined to the cathedral, and the science of intoning was unknown. One young man who had come direct from Oxford as a curate to Plumstead had, after the lapse of two or three Sundays, made a faint attempt, much to the bewilderment of the poorer part of the congregation. Dr. Grantly had not been present on the occasion, but Mrs. Grantly, who had her own opinion on the subject, immediately after the service expressed a hope that the young gentleman had not been taken ill, and offered to send him all kinds of condiments supposed to be good for a sore throat. After that there had been no more intoning at Plumstead Episcopi.
    But now the archdeacon began to meditate on some strong measures of absolute opposition. Dr. Proudie and his crew were of the lowest possible order of Church of England clergymen, and therefore it behoved him, Dr. Grantly, to be of the very highest. Dr. Proudie would abolish all forms and ceremonies, and therefore Dr. Grantly felt the sudden necessity of multiplying them. Dr. Proudie would consent to deprive the church of all collective authority and rule, and therefore Dr. Grantly would stand up for the full power of convocation and the renewal of all its ancient privileges.
    It was true that he could not himself intone the service, but he could procure the co-operation of any number of gentlemanlike curates well trained in the mystery of doing so. He would not willingly alter his own fashion of dress, but he could people Barchester with young clergymen dressed in the longest frocks and in the highest-breasted silk waistcoats. He certainly was not prepared to cross himself, or to advocate the real presence, but without going this length there were various observances, by adopting which he could plainly show his antipathy to such men as Dr. Proudie and Mr. Slope.
*
 Mr. Slope, in commencing his sermon, showed no slight tact in his ambiguous manner of hinting that, humble as he was himself, he stood there as the mouth-piece of the illustrious divine who sat opposite to him; and having premised so much, he gave forth a very accurate definition of the conduct which that prelate would rejoice to see in the clergymen now brought under his jurisdiction. It is only necessary to say that the peculiar points insisted upon were exactly those which were most distasteful to the clergy of the diocese, and most averse to their practice and opinions, and that all those peculiar habits and privileges which have always been dear to High Church priests, to that party which is now scandalously called the "high and dry church," were ridiculed, abused, and anathematized. Now, the clergymen of the diocese of Barchester are all of the high and dry church.
    Having thus, according to his own opinion, explained how a clergyman should show himself approved unto God, as a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, he went on to explain how the word of truth should be divided; and here he took a rather narrow view of the question and fetched his arguments from afar. His object was to express his abomination of all ceremonious modes of utterance, to cry down any religious feeling which might be excited, not by the sense, but by the sound of words, and in fact to insult cathedral practices. Had St. Paul spoken of rightly pronouncing, instead of rightly dividing the word of truth, this part of his sermon would have been more to the purpose, but the preacher's immediate object was to preach Mr. Slope's doctrine, and not St. Paul's, and he contrived to give the necessary twist to the text with some skill.
    He could not exactly say, preaching from a cathedral pulpit, that chanting should be abandoned in cathedral services. By such an assertion he would have overshot his mark and rendered himself absurd, to the delight of his hearers. He could, however, and did, allude with heavy denunciations to the practice of intoning in parish churches, although the practice was all but unknown in the diocese; and from thence he came round to the undue preponderance which, he asserted, music had over meaning in the beautiful service which they had just heard. He was aware, he said, that the practices of our ancestors could not be abandoned at a moment's notice; the feelings of the aged would be outraged, and the minds of respectable men would be shocked. There were many, he was aware, of not sufficient calibre of thought to perceive, of not sufficient education to know, that a mode of service which was effective when outward ceremonies were of more moment than inward feelings, had become all but barbarous at a time when inward conviction was everything, when each word of the minister's lips should fall intelligibly into the listener's heart. Formerly the religion of the multitude had been an affair of the imagination: now, in these latter days, it had become necessary that a Christian should have a reason for his faith — should not only believe, but digest — not only hear, but understand. The words of our morning service, how beautiful, how apposite, how intelligible they were, when read with simple and distinct decorum! But how much of the meaning of the words was lost when they were produced with all the meretricious charms of melody! &c. &c.
There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips. Let a professor of law or physics find his place in a lecture-room, and there pour forth jejune words and useless empty phrases, and he will pour them forth to empty benches. Let a barrister attempt to talk without talking well, and he will talk but seldom. A judge's charge need be listened to perforce by none but the jury, prisoner, and gaoler. A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out. Town-councillors can be tabooed. But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sindbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday's rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes God's service distasteful. We are not forced into church! No: but we desire more than that. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship, but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God without that anxious longing for escape which is the common consequence of common sermons.
    With what complacency will a young parson deduce false conclusions from misunderstood texts, and then threaten us with all the penalties of Hades if we neglect to comply with the injunctions he has given us! Yes, my too self-confident juvenile friend, I do believe in those mysteries which are so common in your mouth; I do believe in the unadulterated word which you hold there in your hand; but you must pardon me if, in some things, I doubt your interpretation. The Bible is good, the prayer-book is good, nay, you yourself would be acceptable, if you would read to me some portion of those time-honoured discourses which our great divines have elaborated in the full maturity of their powers. But you must excuse me, my insufficient young lecturer, if I yawn over your imperfect sentences, your repeated phrases, your false pathos, your drawlings and denouncings, your humming and hawing, your oh-ing and ah-ing, your black gloves and your white handkerchief. To me, it all means nothing; and hours are too precious to be so wasted — if one could only avoid it.

More Barchester

His lordship was at home, and the two visitors were shown through the accustomed hall into the well-known room, where the good old bishop used to sit. The furniture had been bought at a valuation, and every chair and table, every bookshelf against the wall, and every square in the carpet, was as well known to each of them as their own bedrooms. Nevertheless they at once felt that they were strangers there. The furniture was for the most part the same, yet the place had been metamorphosed. A new sofa had been introduced, and horrid chintz affair, most unprelatical and almost irreligious; such a sofa as never yet stood in the study of any decent high church clergyman of the Church of England. The old curtains had also given away. They had, to be sure, become dingy, and that which had been originally a rich and goodly ruby had degenerated into a reddish brown. Mr Harding, however, thought the old reddish brown much preferable to the gaudy buff-coloured trumpery moreen which Mrs Proudie had deemed good enough for her husband's own room in the provincial city of Barchester.

Our friends found Dr Proudie sitting on the old bishop's chair, looking very nice in his new apron; they found, too, Mr Slope standing on the hearthrug, persuasive and eager, just as the archdeacon used to stand; but on the sofa they also found Mrs Proudie, an innovation for which a precedent might be in vain be sought in all the annals of the Barchester bishopric!

_

The archdeacon made his fifth bow: he had made one at each mention of the horses; and promised that Mrs Grantly would do herself the honour of calling at the palace on an early day. Mrs Proudie declared that she would be delighted: she hadn't liked to ask, not being quite sure whether Mrs Grantly had horses; besides, the distance might have been &c, &c.

Dr Grantly again bowed, but said nothing. He could have bought every single individual possession of the whole family of the Proudies, and have restored them as a gift, without much feeling the loss; and had kept a separate pair of horses for the exclusive use of his wife since the day of their marriage; whereas Mrs Proudie had been hitherto jobbed about the streets of London at so much a month during the season; and at other times had managed to walk, or hire a smart fly from the livery stables.

My beloved Trollope, from Barchester Towers

In doctrine, he, like his patron, is tolerant of dissent, if so strict a mind can be called tolerant of anything. With Wesleyan-Methodists he has something in common, but his soul trembles in agony at the iniquities of the Puseyites. His aversion is carried to things outward as well as inward. His gall rises at a new church with a high pitched roof; a full-breasted black silk waistcoat is with him a symbol of Satan; and a profane jest-book would not, in his view, more foully desecrate the church seat of a Christian, than a book of prayer printed with red letters, and ornamented with a cross on the back. Most active clergymen have their hobby, and Sunday observances are his. Sunday, however, is a word which never pollutes his mouth--it is always 'the Sabbath'. The 'desecration of the Sabbath' as he delights to call it, is to him meat and drink:--he thrives upon that as policemen do on the general evil habits of the community. It is the loved subject of all his evening discourses, the source of all his eloquence, the secret of his power over the female heart. To him, the revelation of God appears in that one law given for Jewish observance. To him the mercies of our Saviour speak in vain, to him in vain has been preached that sermon that fell from the divine lips on the mountain--'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth'--'Blessed are the merciful, for the they shall obtain mercy'. To him the New Testament is comparatively of little moment, for from it can he draw no fresh authority for that dominion which he loves to exercise over at least a seventh part of man's allotted time here below.

Mr Slope is tall, and not ill made. His feet and hands are large, as has ever been the case, with all his family, but he has a broad chest and wide shoulders to carry off these excrescences, and on the whole his figure is good. His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank, and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision, and cemented with much grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. He wears no whiskers, and is always punctiliously shaven. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef,--beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is capacious and high, but square and heavy, and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin and bloodless; and his big, prominent, pale brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is his redeeming feature: it is pronounced straight and well-formed; though I myself should have liked it better if it did not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red coloured cork.

I never could endure to shake hands with Mr Slope. A cold, clammy perspiration always exudes from him, the small drops are ever to be seen standing on his brow, and his friendly grasp is unpleasant.

Such is Mr Slope--such is the man who has suddenly fallen into the midst of Barchester Close, and is destined there to assume the station which has heretofore been filled by the son of the late bishop. Think, oh, my meditative reader, what an associate we have here for those comfortable prebendaries, those gentlemanlike clerical doctors, those happy well-used, well-fed minor canons, who have grown into existence at Barchester under the kindly wings of Bishop Grantly!

But not as a mere associate for those does Mr Slope travel down to Barchester with the bishop and his wife. He intends to be, if not their master, at least the chief among them. He intends to lead, and to have followers; he intends to hold the purse strings of the diocese, and draw round him an obedient herd of his poor and hungry brethren.

More Blond's Roman Emperors

 julius Caesar and Octavian: all pro-
fessed belief in republican principles as they murdered them
and each other. Sulla hounded Marius to death; Caesar fell
out with his fellow triumvir Pompey and caused his death;
Brutus, Caesar’s friend and former companion at arms, ‘the
noblest Roman of them all’, with Cassius, another friend,
assassinated Caesar; Octavian, in revenge, killed them both,
provoked Antony’s suicide and left Cleopatra to kill herself.
Only Sulla retired to die in his bed, and Augustus lived long
enough for his crimes to be forgotten and for him to become,
on the instant of his death, a god. Sulla, coming from
nowhere, was the most successful, Augustus was the most
effective, but ]ulius Caesar was the most famous.
Gaius, his first name (praenomen), Julius, his clan (gens),
Caesar, his nickname (cognomen), was the boldest man in
history. ‘Caesar’ simply meant head of hair, ironic because
both he and his great-nephew suffered from baldness —
Caesar treasuring the right to wear a laurel wreath on his and
Augustus wearing a sombrero-like straw hat to conceal his.
Caesar was a bald dandy, Augustus wore homespun from the
looms of his household women.
]ulius Caesar was blessed with a patrician mother,
Aurelia, who had enough money to set him up on the cursus
honorum — a political career — and lived long enough, till
seventy, to see her boy conquer Gaul. It is unlikely that he
was delivered by a ‘Caesarean’ because although that
operation sometimes saved the child, the mother ‘rarely
survived. Caesar was a graceful, courteous young man with
strong but delicate features and the eyes of an eagle.
Dodging Sulla’s long arm he joined the army and won a
medal for saving another soldier’s life at the siege of
Mytilene, then he went to Bithynia to serve under —
malicious tongues said literally — the client King Nicomedes.
A whiff of homosexuality lingered around Caesar through-
out his life.
^^^^^
Parthian shot: a horseman in real or pretended flight turns around in the
saddle and launches a shot. One such did for Crassus.

^^^^^^
Basically Rome was built out of concrete (opus mement-
icum), poured into wooden slats as it is today, travertine, a
creamy white stone, laid horizontally (laid vertically it
collapsed) and tufa, which could not stand fire. Roads were
paved with silex, a dark grey volcanic rock from the Alban
Hills. For fine buildings these materials were coated with
stucco and nine different marbles — yellow, orange and pink
from Libya and Euboea, blood red, brilliant green, onyx and
porphyry from the Nile. Like all conquerors - they were the
first - Romans decorated their capital with artefacts from
the defeated; bought and looted. They worshipped, some-
times literally, statues from fifth-century-BC Athens and
there is a catalogue of seventy-four great works of this
period by sculptors of genius like Praxiteles. (Rome was full
of antiques and fakes. The reproduction of famous statues by
Greek artisans was an industry and the genuine article had to
have been made ‘without wax’, hence our word ‘sincere'.)

Blond's Roman Emperors

 At first one of the magistrates,
called a praetor, interpreted the tables of the law in Rome;
after the conquest of Sicily there were four, with Spain six;
Sulla the Dictator made eight and Caesar, sixteen; they
began to create case law with their decisions, which were
posted on a white board (album) displayed in the Forum.
,More through the influence of Seneca than of Christianity,
Roman Law softened with time, until even slaves gained
certain rights. A creditor could no longer seize the son of a
debtor and put him in irons. Debt, and the means of its
recovery, often by a patrician from a small farmer, had been
the cause of the greatest riots in early Rome. At that time it
was not only legal, but a religious duty to revenge murder of
a kinsman with another death. This law is now only observed
by the Mafia. However, a citizen could still kill a thief if he
came by night or, in the daylight, carried arms.
:::::::::
He gave the legions their eagles, gave the soldiers
their laundry allowance and burial funds with something
over for the regimental dinner.
Healso weighed them down with equipment so that they
were known as ‘Marius’ mules’. The ‘whole armour of God’,
to use the expression used by St Paul, consisted, apart from
‘the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield
of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit’,
of a pike and a dagger which together with the rest of his kit
weighed about forty-five pounds, today’s standard baggage-
allowance for air travel. The Roman soldier ‘messed’ in
groups of six or ten (the sources differ) and lived on wheat
(which was turned into porridge or bread), salt and some not
very nice wine. He might add some vegetables but rarely
meat, except for the occasional bacon. The original of St
George, it will be remembered, was a wholesale pork
butcher in Cappadocia, whose Christianity was irrelevant
until he was lynched by the Roman soldiers for supplying
rotten meat. ‘The profession was mean,’ says Gibbon in one
of his best footnotes, ‘he rendered it infamous.’ A soldier’s
first step on the ladder of promotion would be to become the
head man of his mess, or an orderly; then he would become
the centurion’s second-in-command, then a centurion. His
only route to officer status was to move up the centuriate to
the first cohort. Then he would be made a knight and would
retire, as it were, with directorships. Centurions literally
directed the traffic of the Empire; an indication of the
busyness of Antinous’ home town Bithynion (now Boli in
north—west Turkey and buried under the main road to
Ankara) was that it needed two centurions to control the
traffic. Retired centurions were in demand for decorative
positions (today members of the Royal Corps of Commission-
aires tend to be retired company sergeant-majors) or to be in
charge of security in a large household. The Roman army
trained some soldiers as questionarii — torturers — someone had
to do it.
A centurion in full rig, with a crest on his helmet, greaves
on his shins, his scale armour clanking with medallions from
campaigns all over the known world, and carrying in‘ his
right hand the vine rod of authority with a nasty little switch
at the end, was, for most people, the visible symbol of Roman
power and, as we know from the New Testament, the
nearest to them. An officer and gentleman would never pass
through the rank of centurion, and indeed the distinction
between him and the other ranks has been emulated in all
modern armies except the Israeli, which functions more like
that of one of the early states of Greece. Under the Republic,
twenty-four young men were elected annually by the Comitia
(the Assembly of the Plebs) to serve in the legions of the
consuls, also elected, so the link between the army and
politics was strong. Too strong thought Augustus, so he
added to each legion 120 horses for the young gentlemen to
ride — not very effectively because they had no saddles or
stirrups - and allocated six tribunes to each legion to serve
as aides-de-camp rather than as commanders. A well-
connected young officer — and only exceptional men like
Marius got anywhere if they were not - would be taken up by
the general, perhaps an old boyfriend of his aunt, and mess
with him and then be appointed colonel of a regiment of
auxiliaries. These were the third prong in the Roman
military system — the Praetorian Guard and the legions being
the first two — and were equal in number, but not prestige, to
the legions.
Auxiliaries were what we might call ‘colonial’ troops,
recruited in the provinces, sent elsewhere,‘ less well paid,
longer serving, but ending up with citizenship and a vote for
themselves and their family, a more generous dispensation
than that afforded to, say, the Gurkhas, who fought for the
British in two world wars. (In 1991 when so many English
and Scottish regiments were reduced or abolished it was
suggested that the Foreign Office compensate these fierce
little fellows, who had had to be restrained from presenting
their British commanding officers with the genitalia of their
enemies in the trenches of the Somme).
Mobility within the Empire was one of its greatest achievements.
The Roman roads were so good that harald was able to march from
Yorkshire to Hastings in 3 days.

Graham Greene

Read A Sort of Life and began The Comedians, from a tattered Penguin copy.
An absolutely terrifying story, menace and squalor permeating every page.
After the nephew of the suicide Dr. Philipott develops a monomania for getting his hands on a "Bren":
"Perhaps I had not taken him seriously enough. I had thought of the Bren as a new poetic symbol of his, like the pylons in the poems of my youth: after all those poets never joined the Electricity Board."
Greene was, as was brilliantly

noted in The Nation  "A stranger with no shortage of calling cards: devout Catholic, lifelong adulterer, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitterly cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; civilised to a stuffy fault and louche to a drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and post-colonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing to name just a few. "
Also picked up Shirley Hazzard's beautifully written "Greene on Capri" which contains as finely balanced a picture of friendship as has ever been so succinctly captured. Greene is by turns quarrelsome and gregarious, prickly and welcoming. Though their encounters with one another were mostly limited to sharing meals and occasional hikes in one of the most stunningly beautiful places in the world she noted that Greene had no eye for landscapes, visual art or any sort of beauty other than a greedy appreciation of a pretty girl, which rankles.
In the photos, he is rakish- his eyes magnetic, but he seems a lanky, frail creature- a cad with women far heartier than he. Conversely, Hazzard and her husband Francis Steegmuller look like a perfectly matched pair of standard poodles.
From the book:
Graham had many pleasures and, perhaps, even in later years,
some euphoric moments. But enjoyment was transitory and not, to
him, a necessity: a disposition, deeply attributable to temperament,
which should also be referred to his background and generation. As
with other Englishmen of his age—who had become adolescent
during the slaughter of the 1914-18 war, and adult with the Great
Depression-—pleasure could not be an assumption and was not
a goal; whereas suffering was a constant, and almost a code of

honour. Suffering was the attestable key to imaginative existence.

“Happiness” had an element of inanity, verified by Greene in life

and in his fiction: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you

out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.”

(Flaubert, in a letter of I846, also felt that “to be stupid, selfish,

and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though

if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” Acknowledging the possibility of a

higher form of happiness, achieved incidentally in the exercise of

deeper capacities, Flaubert felt that, in his own case, that, too,

would remain phantasmal.)

One of Graham’s rare contemporary admirations, Padre Pio—a

south Italian village priest said to be afflicted with the stigmata——

asserted that “suffering is the test and testimony of love.” In Greene,

however, I think that suffering was a requirement of consciousness

itself: an agitation of spirit providing some defence against the

dreaded accidie. “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive”—-—so writes

the exhausted protagonist of Graham’s A Burnt-Oat Case in the

opening sentence of that novel. '

The elation of sexual passion itself is repeatedly portrayed, by

Graham, as frantic or despairing. Here is the narrator of The

Comedians making love: “I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide

on to a pavement.”

In Mario Soldati’s novel The Capri Letters, the central character

observes that human beings need unhappiness at least as much as

they need happiness. (Almeno is mistrans1ated—surprisingly, by

Archibald Colquhoun—in the English language edition of that

book as “almost as much,” as if shirking the issue.) Soldati assigns

this thoroughly European view to his American protagonist. I

would say that Graham Greene needed disquiet in many forms,

not least in his pleasures. 

Graham’s hostility to the American “way of life” was exacer-

bated by what he considered a contemptible national quest for

the Grail of happiness—the pursuit itself, as he felt, unworthily

enshrined as an ideal in the nation’s founding Declaration, with

the goal soon defined as materialism and indulgence. When we

once spoke of Thomas Hardy’s lines explaining the poet’s refusal,

on grounds of his own fateful view of existence, of an invitation to

visit the United States-—

....

—Graham said that he had no doubt that tears in plenty were shed

in America; but that, without the shared pathos of acknowledged

pain, they were shed in bafflement and felt as failure. Bringing to

mind a theme of The QuietAmerican, he held that a policy of good

cheer was often a repudiation of feeling: a licence for indifference

or ruthlessness.

I agreed. “Pollyanna is a cruel goddess.”

Francis said, “An inartistic one, too.”

#####
The anxiety of men, women, and children living close to
the bone and the abyss is a climate of the early fiction, which
frequently takes place in wet, cold, sunless settings; in which even
the astute can expect little advancement and no quarter, and the
rich exist in privileged unconcern. Greene’s own bleak experiences
in Depression years are noted in his two volumes of autobiogra-
phy, and his biographer Norman Sherry records the keen relief of
Graham and his young wife over a gift of ten shillings from an
aunt who was herself in pinched circumstances. Vivien Greene
told Sherry that, in those years at the brink, “we were very fright-
fully poor. . . much poorer than anyone of our own social qual-
ity.” With his knowledge of that wretchedness and reduction,
Graham, like others, long sought to keep faith.
Reflected in the early writings, an innermost sense of helpless-
ness under fate and unfairness contributed to an imprudent belief,
among readers, in Graham’s unconditional solidarity with the
underdog and the working class. Graham’s sympathies—innately
mercurial and unbiddable, and ever more dispassionate with
age~—1ay far less with categories than with the peculiarities and
torments of all manner of unquiet spirits in their disillusion,
equivocation, culpability, self-doubt, and self-disgust. Singularity
engaged him. He was disinclined to solidarity or to any sustained
“position.” In his books, there is culmination in the narrative, but
he does‘ not seek to “resolve

####

He had
learned to give “Capri” its correct emphasis, on the first syllable.
(The mispronunciation “Capree” presumably derives from the once
popular song about “The Isle of Capree,” whose tune still brays forth
from souvenir stalls around the bay.) If he had ever learnt of the old
dialect name, “Crapa,” by which the island was once known to its
inhabitants, I think we would have heard about it.
Cyril Connolly, a contemporary of Graham’s youthful literary
life in London, sought to distinguish j
i between the flight of the expatriate which is an essential
desire for simplification . . . and the brisker trajectory of the
travel addict, trying not to find but to lose himself in the
intoxication of motion.
I think that Graham had at one time been impelled by both those
urges, and, more darkly, by his wish to test the dangerous margins of
his world; but that addiction and intoxication had, with age, been
diluted by indifference. The round-trip ticket of the jet era, in mak-
ing the travel trajectory dramatically brisker, had eroded those ele-
ments of risk and rigour that once sent Graham on lonely journeys
to enigmatic places. What had previously gone unperceived and
unreported was becoming the shared province of group travel.
Graham’s trips—to Central and Latin America, to central and South
Africa, to Russia—grew systematic, prompted in the 1950s by a need
to exchange one kind of unhappiness for another; and, later, by the
lure of political ferment and of themes for a new book. All was inter-
spersed with the odd yet unfailing return to Capri.

#####
Some comments were made, far
from favourable, about Deconstruction, which had begun, then, to
cut its swath through the universities; and about the modern
obsession with explication and analysis that blighted the singular
experience of literature. Graham said that there had been phases of
the kind before, though never, probably, on such a scale or with
such implication of the larger vacancy.
Francis told him that Gibbon had identified the same phenom-
enon as a signal of Rome’s decline. (“The name of Poet was almost
forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of
critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learn-
ing, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption
of taste.”) He asked whether Graham wasn’t beleaguered by theo-
rists and dissectors of his work. l
“Well, they do get in touch. But Antibes is off the track, you
know. And I’m often abroad. \/Vhen I’m in London they sometimes
find me. They’re wounded people. I feel that one has to give them
special attention, because of their huge disappointment. One has
to be specially nice to them.” And suddenly, explicitly to me: “As
one is to Indians and women.” '
Later——l’esprit de l’escalier—I told Francis, “I might have asked,
‘And are you especially nice to Indians and women?’ ”
####
and finally on Harold Acton:
On the following evening, we dined with Harold alone. We spoke
of Naples, of friends, books, travels; and of France. Francis thanked
Harold for agreeing to write, at F.’s suggestion, an introduction for
the forthcoming book of a Neapolitan historian. Harold said that he
had accepted with pleasure: “I am always at it with introductions
these days. It’s the only way I can keep my hand in. As to reading, I
shall soon be able to say, with Valéry, ‘Ie ne lis que les livres dontjefais
les préfaces.’ ” He mentioned that he now received, from Italian pub-
lishers, many new books on Bourbon rule at Naples: “A veritable
outpouring.” Veritable was one of Haro1d’s words. Francis asked
whether, if he were writing his history now, he would be more sym-
pathetic to the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, in the wake of which
a generation of the young Neapolitan intelligentsia was brutally
destroyed. I
Harold: “An enduring tragedy, and obscure to the world.” He
could not share our belief that the revolution might have succeeded.
“Rash,” he thought, “and in vain.” As to his own view of the event,
expressed in his histories: “I was writing in the aftermath of war, and
rather had the bit between my teeth against the uniform Leftism
proclaimed by Italian intellectuals—a cloak in which many a former
fascist sought to cover himself. It was my revulsion against the spec-
tacle of-—say, the arch-fascist Malaparte in the arms of the arch-
Stalinist Togliatti. And then there was the artistic conformity, all
falling into line. Most disheartening.” Later, he said, “When I started
out, I was greeted as an iconoclast—inaccurately. Now I’m called and
anachronism—which I don’t mind.”
As we were parting that evening, Harold suddenly asked, “Does
Graham Greene still come to Capri?” It was a question, one felt,
that he had been intending to raise.
- ‘ '1.
_!\?
_
GREENE on CAPRI 37°14]
We told Harold that Graham was on the island now. “If you can
come over, we could lunch together.”
Harold, gravely: “I would not care to impose myself on some-
one who now takes so little pleasure in my society.”
We were quiet. Francis said, “What a pity this is.”
Harold nodded. “A long association. But his continual air of dis-
pleasure has become tiresome.”
It was unlike Graham, by then, to have hurt so old a friend.
Harold outlived Graham by three years. On a visit to Florence,
late in 1992, we saw him for the last time. He had invited us to
lunch. We had been told that he was steadily weakening; and we
came up to the house in November light and with the pang of
finality—-that consciousness, after familiar pleasures, of a leave-
taking. Harold, frail, greeted us as ever. I had brought an early,
signed copy of his first book of prose, Carnelian, to ask for his
inscription——-“My dear, puerility,” he said, taking it up. His signa-
ture, that day, at eighty-eight, was unchanged from sixty-four
years earlier.
At table, we were six: three elders, with younger companions. I
was the only woman. Those three elders——Harold, Francis, and
Iohn Pope-Hennessy—-have all departed now. During lunch,
Harold told me, “I shall never leave Florence again. A time is com-
ing when I may leave this house less and less. I don’t mind. I love
the house, and never tire of it.” He said, “The only regret is for
Naples. When I think that I’ll never see Naplesagain, it pains me.”
A little later, he turned to the others: “We’ve been speaking of
Naples, which I shan’t see again.” He then raised his head and
began to sing.
The song, in dialect, was an old Neapolitan favourite-—
He sang it through to the impassioned dying fall at the end. Harold
had a fine, firm singing voice and made the song his own; and I
have never heard it since without mentally adding, to those old
Neapolitan words, the Actonian lilt. The young men serving us
came, smiling, from behind their screen to listen; and, when the
song was over, added their applause to ours. Harold had again
seized the sombre moment and enlivened it.
Following his death, he became for a while something of a target
for the strictures of the righteous: a prey of the spectacle, recently
renascent, of virtue addressing error. Harold was now a card to
play. Ignoring his benefactions and his books, critics derided his
affections and pleasures and sifted his ancestry. This, though it
might have wounded him, would not, I think, have surprised:
throughout his life, some faction or other had sat in judgment over
him. If his shade revisits his beloved garden, it certainly does not
waste the moonlit evenings there in rancour; but will pass them
joyfully, re-experiencing the grand illusion of art in the company of
those who count the hours spent with him among the best.

The crisis at Antibes subsided, throbbing. Graham and Yvonne
returned to Capri. Although we had, perhaps, some of our best
times, these visits could hardly be a resumption. By then, the years
and the world gave context only for retrieval amid uncertainties.

E.M. Forster

Read Maurice and a new bio of Forster, A Great Unrecorded History which justifies the impact of his intimate life on his work with an understanding of the legitimacy of inquiry into those details.

Morgan came to Cambridge at a moment of transition for the university. Even

a generation before, a boy like him would probably not have been admitted

to King’s. At that time the college favored the kind of confident young man

who transformed the word university into the languid drawl of varsity. The

sort of “silly and idle” fellow who “takes pass-degrees, roars round football

fields,” the sort of young man who in drunken oblivion “sits down in the

middle of Hammersmith Broadway after the boat race . . .” At King’s, this

kind of chap breezed in, with no questions asked, directly and almost exclu-

sively from Eton.

For more than four hundred years Eton College had been the Wellspring

for King’s students. But the luster of the founder’s pious intentions had

dulled over the centuries. In I441 the king in question——Henry VI, the

young son of the victor of Agincourt——established a fund to educate young

men training for holy orders. The whole of the college comprised seventy

souls: the number of Jesus’ disciples, according to St. Luke. Like the kneel-

ing figures carved in stone in the college’s wondrous Gothic chapel, Henry’s

acolytes proceeded in a “steady pilgrimage” from Eton, the king’s charitable

school near Windsor palace, to King’s, where they remained until they mar-

ried or died, then presumably on to heaven above.

But by the mid-eighteenth century this design had devolved into a system

of “automatic and effortless advancement” for privileged young gentlemen.

Secular, wealthy, and well-connected Etonians began to swell the college.

There were no entrance exams; students had “the right to claim a degree

without sitting for an examination”; and the degree, once conferred, entitled

its holder to a life fellowship, so putatively all graduates, and all masters at

Eton, had lifelong refuge in King’s.

By the 1880s, the medieval structure of the university had begun to give

way to the social necessity of educating a crop of men to fill the needs of a

rapidly growing professional class. The imperial civil service in particular

had a hungry mouth. In Asia and Mesopotamia, India and Ceylon, Egypt and

southern Africa, and in London, too, now a world city, professional men were

needed, bright men, organized men, men with a head on their shoulders for

business, hearty, clubbable, oar-pulling men. Some Kingsmen still lived by

the public school ethos, with its reverence of “team work . . . and cricket”;

some still believed that “firmness, self-complacency and fatuity . . . between

them compose the whole armour of man.”

But within the university King’s began to earn a distinctive place, thread-

ing the needle between the demands of rigor and the call to modernity. In

"1869 King’s began to require that all undergraduates sit the Tripos, the uni-

versity examinations toward an honors degree, which had real intellectual

bite; and King’s students disproportionately took first-class honors in clas-

sics, which Morgan had chosen for his subject. The result was a crop of

graduates inclined to public service and intellectual pursuits. Kingsmen

became schoolmasters and parsons, professors and lawyers, doctors or

diplomats, but rarely stockbrokers or businessmen. Fewer Etonians were

admitted. The college began to make room for “oddities and the crudities—

people who had not enjoyed their public schools or had been to the wrong

school or even to none.”

&

 It was a testament to the success of

his carefully crafted public persona during these years that even so close a

friend as Virginia Woolf could thoroughly misread his situation. Writing to

her sister, Vanessa Bell, Woolf lamented that Lily, with her iron-willed love,

“is slowly dispatching him . . . he is limp and damp and milder than the

breath of a cow.” This was not so true as Virginia believed. Morgan’s adven-

tures would have shocked her. ‘

&

He mailed the letter to Karachi from West Hackhurst, “the frail house of

old women,” admonishing that both he and Lawrence had been wrong to

“hanker at all after a notion of escaping” such a world. It was far too resilient,

Morgan understood: “a twig from the elm tree would shatter it, yet it preserves

its relative strength internally. My mother still keeps the maids in order.”

&

The Sunday Express explicitly rejected Radclyffe Hall's cry for tolerance of inverts, arguing that the novel is a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading designed to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted on these outcasts by a cruel society.

&

In Germany it was illegal to listen to the wireless with the windows closed- the radio became the perfect instrument to foster national conformity