In Which I Declare with 100% Confidence the Direction of Literary History

Many times when I write a post, I think that I know the author well enough to comment confidently on his or her place in literature, in history, in philosophical view and purpose, and in my heart. But I don’t know Sir Walter Scott well enough to do any of that. I know that he was the most popular novelist in Britain in the early nineteenth century, and I know that I read two of his novels before I read Quentin Durward (Ivanhoe when I was about twenty, and The Bride of Lammermoor when I was about forty). But I don’t have a sense of a Scott style or of Scott’s message to the world or what it was about his books that captured the imagination of British readers before Victoria gave her name to an era.

So I’ll just comment briefly on my first, tentative thoughts about how Scott fits in with the stream of English-language fiction as seen in my mind. And Tentative Thought No. 1 is that his use of archaic language seems like the beginning of a trend. Words like cortege and tabard and dint elicit a complex depth of flavor in my mouth, and lines like these rain sweet showers on the desert that the age of politics in 280 characters has scorched into my brain:

Have I not crossed swords with Dunois, the best knight in France, and shall I fear a tribe of yonder vagabonds? Pshaw!—God and Saint Andrew to friend, they will find me both stout and wary.

Now this kind of language starts to sound a little silly in Hollywood swashbucklers of the 1930s. But all trends do begin to feel stale after a while. The point is, I don’t think it felt stale in 1823. Part of my willing suspension of disbelief in reading a novel like Quentin Durward is my attempt to put myself in the position of the reader of that time, in this case, to feel the old vocabulary as if it felt archaic for the first time – as if it were newly old. (Owen Barfield says this, oh, so much better in Poetic Diction, which I’m scheduled to reread next month.)

If I remember correctly, Robinson Crusoe and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield also speak this way a literary generation or two earlier. But, although the conversation of Boswell and Johnson and friends (friends including Oliver Goldsmith) proves that such language is no longer the London fashion in the late eighteenth century, I parse thee and thou and yonder as within the realm of possibility for devout down-country folk of the time like Crusoe and Vicar Primrose.

With Scott, though, I get the idea (partly because the characters are actually supposed to be speaking French) that the heirloom language is offered not as a stab at realism but as a conventional sign and reminder that the book is a work of historical fiction. And I can imagine that, as a nineteenth-century reader, I would want my fifteenth-century characters to speak in an antique way even if it weren’t precisely accurate. If I read a historical novel written this year, 2018, about, say, Lincoln, I wouldn’t demand that the language perfectly mimic the President’s manner of speech, but I would balk less at “These matters are weighty indeed” than at “This information is key.”

As I started rereading the Tarzan books last year, I was surprised at how often I encountered formal or archaic words and turns of phrase. I don’t remember any specific vocabulary at the moment, but a quick glance just now through the first two or three novels uncovered these quaint constructions:

What they are doing I know not.
They would but laugh in their sleeves.
The stern retribution which justice metes to the murderer.
“I am not married, Tarzan of the Apes,” she cried. “Nor am I longer promised in marriage.”

Now, again, I’m just hypothesizing a connection in the history of literature out of my own head. Maybe the world of literary scholarship has already noticed this pattern and either established or disproven it. I don’t know. I enjoy reading literary criticism from time to time, but ideas taste sweeter if, as George Washington would have said, I chew them myself. So here’s the hypothesis: what Scott did to signal past times began, over the course of a century of historical novels, to be taken as the lofty speech of the courageous heroes of those costume dramas. Burroughs, then, to make his point that a loincloth-clad man raised by an ape can act as nobly as an English lord, had him speak like an eighteenth-century lord.

Of course, Tarzan is in fact an English lord, and I don’t know what Tarzan’s creator meant by it all. Whether ape is nature and blue blood nurture or vice versa – whether civilization is merely clothing for evolved apes or the true biological standard from which criminal types have devolved – I’m not sure even Burroughs knew. But the point is that the archaic cadences represent nobility.

OK, Tentative Thought No. 2 will actually fulfill my promise of brevity. I read Quentin Durward close to the time I listened to Galsworthy’s “Indian Summer of a Forsyte,” and a difference in the use of characters struck me that I believe might actually indicate a historical direction. Galsworthy presents characters as shaped by circumstance, genetics, and culture; they struggle with themselves. A Galsworthy character’s dialiog is sometimes a surprise even to himself. Scott, on the other hand, presents characters as set, not needing any explanation. They are chess pieces whose move types are given, known, and unchanging. Where Galsworthy has characters speak so he can reveal them, Scott’s characters speak to reveal something external. The two approaches seem emblematic of, respectively, a classical time when psychology categorized personalities and a modern age in which psychology explained the making of personalities. In the intervening time, the hero of a Victorian writer like Dickens is neither given nor shaped wholly by envorinment but must shape himself. David Copperfield must discipline his heart.

Yes, that was relatively brief. But I feel the need to conclude by going back to TT No. 1 for a moment. Whatever the elegant, eloquent, patinated language of Defoe, Goldsmith, Scott, Dickens, Galsworthy, and even Burroughs means, I need it – maybe not as much as I need sunshine, air, and water, but as much as I need companionship and confidence and mental stimulation. But I don’t find it in the news. I don’t hear it in church. I don’t see it in the classroom. I certainly don’t read it on internet message boards. I’m swimming in a fetid swamp of ineloquence, and I can only hold my breath so long before I come up to the surface to fill my lungs with the freshness that makes me “both stout and wary.”

Complete and Incomplete Systems

In Wilkie Collins’s seminal mystery, The Moonstone, a character named Gabriel Betteredge uses Robinson Crusoe as his guide to life. In looking up that character’s name just now, I found a source suggesting that Betteredge uses Defoe’s novel in a superstitious way, finding passages at random and taking them as oracles for his present situation. If he does this, I don’t remember it. I just remember Betteredge finding Robinson Crusoe a compendium of sage advice for every situation. The castaway has to learn how to live, eat, sleep, defend himself, build shelter, keep records, make friends, worship God, and stay sane, and his first-person narrative spells out his reasoning on all these topics. He also recalls and analyzes, from his earlier life, practices of commerce, industry, the military, and career searches. So it’s no surprise that a person could find in it a nearly complete guide to life.

This month, as I reread The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, it struck me as in very much the same line. Of course, it was the age of the Encyclopédie, and people were fond of thorough catalogs of knowledge and wisdom. And one could expect Goldsmith, a frequent dining companion of Dr. Johnson, to write a book of moralizing analyses of life in the form of a story. Here are some samples of the life lessons the Vicar offers:

Is your friend suffering a loss? Remember to weep with those who weep, and don’t be too quick to cheer up your friend, because “premature consolation is but the remembrancer of sorrow.”

Are you wondering why your recent accomplishment or fortune has you itching for more before you can enjoy resting on your laurels? Remember the joy of the hunt: “It has been a thousand times observed, and I must observe it once more, that the hours we pass with happy prospects in view, are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition. In the first case we cook the dish to our own appetite; in the latter nature cooks it for us.”

What should you do when you find that breaking a pledge of silence on an acquaintance’s dark secret could help someone else? “Even tho' it may benefit the public, you must not inform against him. In all human institutions a smaller evil is allowed to procure a greater good; as in politics, a province may be given away to secure a kingdom; in medicine, a limb may be lopt off, to preserve the body. But in religion the law is written, and inflexible, never to do evil. And this law, my child, is right: for otherwise, if we commit a smaller evil, to procure a greater good, certain guilt would be thus incurred, in expectation of contingent advantage.”

In the best chapter, Goldsmith’s vicar defends the monarchy as the champion of freedom. As he explains it, society divides itself naturally into four strata: the poor, who spend all their time working to satisfy needs; the middle class, whose career success affords time for politics; the aristocracy, who have no need of work and can spend all their time seeking the gratification of their own desires; and the monarchy. The aristocracy, he says, is the enemy of freedom, not the king. The privileged class must closely guard the power they have wrested from the monarchy so they can continue to wield it over the middle and lower classes. The king and middle class, then, make natural allies against the usurpers of power.

Last month, my family visited Salisbury cathedral, and we were very happily surprised to find there an original copy of the Magna Carta. Both the explanatory plaques and the very kind retired gentleman who kept watch over the room told us the familiar story of the importance of the document in the history of human liberty. The barons, the story goes, stopped the tyrant, King John, at Runnymede and forced him to sign a document limiting his power over the people. John was indeed a tyrant, although there’s some doubt whether the Magna Carta actually succeeded in limiting his or any other king’s power. But the events of 1215 didn’t confer any power or liberty on “the people,” if by that phrase is meant the peasants, farmers, minor clerics, merchants, and artisans of England. John’s father, Henry II, empowered the people of the land more by granting the right to redress in a court of law. The king is the most likely defender of the rights of the people, not the barons. As Dr. Johnson would put it:

Anyone who thinks himself in servitude because subject to a prince errs egregiously; liberty nowhere extends itself more graciously than under a pious king.

The United States has its own class of barons. Rich people and lifetime politicians come to mind. But it seems to me the greatest power lies with the corporations, structures with the legal status, rights, and protections of “persons,” even though they have not been with born or naturalized in the United States. (Someone is confused about the Fourteenth Amendment. It could be the courts, but it’s more probably me.) The United States, of course, will never have a king. But who can play the role of the monarchy in allying with the people to protect us against the tyranny of the barons?

Things I Like about Goldsmith

Having a blog to write can do very strange things to my reading. Sometimes I read with the blog in mind, perhaps looking for something to write about. Sometimes three or four things to write about pop into my mind effortlessly within just a couple of days, and then I try to hang on to the thoughts long enough to write all the posts. Travel causes even more problems in the timing. We traveled to London near the end of our European sojourn, and now I’m dealing with jet lag after our return to the States. I started The Vicar of Wakefield several days ago, but I’m only today getting a chance to write about it. So now I’m the position of trying to remember what I was thinking six or seven exhausting days ago.

I’m reading Goldsmith’s classic novel for the second time. I didn’t remember much from the first expereince except it being surprisingly entertaining. As a man of his times, Goldsmith wrote in the matter-of-fact, prosy style typical of the eighteenth century. And yet he finds a way to draw smiles, tears, and laughter from his reader. Part of his formula for success, I think, is writing a story that the average person can relate to. Who needs romantic adventure when every day shows us the drama inherent in a mundane life? The story of Dr. Primrose deals with money, children, marriage, fame, art, shopping, swindlers, conversations on religion and politics, and personal disaster. True to the spirit of the Age of Reason, the characters, good and bad, talk their way through these scenarios and analyze the best ways to deal with them. As a result, the reader, who already identifies with the vicar because his familiar life, thinks through the reasoning not just to follow the plot, but from personal interest as well.

None of this review of life would work, though, if the vicar were self centered or cowardly or foolish. Fortunately, Dr. Primrose is the opposite: thoughtful, determined, and wise. Granted, for all his wisdom, he does seem to get duped  by a new con every other chapter. But he’s a lovable dupe whose readiness to hope for the best leads him to persevere, for instance, in preaching to his miserable fellow inmates in debtor’s prison, even when they don’t act as if they want to hear. Good advice, Dr. Primrose says, only bounces back from deaf ears and benefits the speaker, so speak anyway. (Aggh! Martina McBride’s in my head now!) But of course he does eventually earn the respect of his poor companions and finds in the end, like George Bailey, that no man is truly poor who has made friends, and that a life of open-hearted cheer really is a wonderful life.