I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living. Recognize your place; let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down into your heart. Embalm your soul in Him now, make within you a temple for the Holy Spirit, be diligent in good works, make others happier and better. Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.
The sexual and personal loneliness, and the career disappointments, of Amiel’s life were sharpened by the horrific suffering of his last seven years. He wrote the final entries in his journal slowly suffocating. Critics see it as a prime example of ‘pathographesis’ – writing inspired by illness. Amiel’s last entry, for 19 April 1881, reads:
A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart fail me. ‘Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué.’
Dying, too, was difficult. Few, however, have recorded it as sensitively as Amiel – something that evidently appealed to the creator of Ivan Ilyich.
21 April
Jane Carlyle’s dubious post-mortem
1866 Popular literary lore has it that Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s wedding night in 1826 was as total a debacle as that of John and Effie Ruskin in 1848. (Effie, in pursuance of annulment on grounds of non-consummation, recorded Ruskin saying ‘that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person [on] the first evening 10th April’. There are those who have questioned whether Ruskin was indeed affronted by pubic hair, whether he was impotent, or whether there were other factors. So too with the Carlyles’ wedding night.)
There are two main sources for the Carlyle wedding night. One was Jane’s confidante, the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury. The Carlyles’ honeymoon (so to call it) was spent in a small house on the edge of Edinburgh, 21 Comely Bank. It is not a beautiful quarter of that otherwise beautiful city. According to Jewsbury, on the first morning of marriage, as Jane later confided, Carlyle spent the morning furiously tearing up flowers in the garden. The symbolism was obvious.
The other source was the incorrigible literary rogue, Frank Harris. Harris claimed to have had an unbuttoned smoking-room conversation with the eminent physician, Sir Richard Quain, who had examined Jane in late life and having made an internal investigation of her was led to expostulate, in amazement: ‘Why! You’re virgo intacta.’ Thereafter Jane (the most modest of women, as Sir Richard was among the most discreet and respectable of doctors) reportedly confided that on the wedding night Thomas, beneath the sheets, ‘had done things to himself – jiggling like’.
Sir Richard (as Harris claimed) understood perfectly: ‘the poor devil in a blue funk was frigging himself.’ Quain’s alleged remarks were elaborated, in later years, in a version circulated by gossip that had Jane’s lifelong hymeneal intactness established when her corpse was taken to London’s St George’s Hospital, after her death on 21 April 1866, and subjected to a post-mortem.
One of Carlyle’s doughtiest defenders, Sir James Crichton-Browne, followed up these claims (Harris’s is, prima facie, preposterous) in 1903, with some enterprising legwork. 21 Comely Bank, he established, had no garden and since the wedding took place on 17 October, there would be no flowers to tear up. Case closed.
Sir Richard Quain was unavailable for interview. But Crichton- Browne discovered the attending house surgeon at St George’s Hospital on the date in question, a Dr Ridge-Jones, and established that there was no examination made, nor any coroner’s inquest on Mrs Carlyle’s body. Case closed.
22 April
In Household Words, the weekly periodical he ‘conducts’, Charles Dickens publishes ‘Ground in the Mill’ alongside the fourth number of Hard Times
1854 Between 1802 and 1961 the British Parliament passed no fewer than fourteen Acts aimed at the well-being of factory workers. By 1844 the fifth of these was still pretty permissive by today’s health and safety standards. Children as young as nine could work up to nine hours per day, so long as they had a lunch break. Machinery had to be fenced in. All accidents had to be reported to a surgeon – but only if fatal.
So why, ten years later, was Dickens able to write, in his article ‘Ground in the Mill’, of ‘a factory girl … immediately seized by the merciless machine that digs its shaft into her pinafore and hoists her up, tears out her left arm at the shoulder joint, breaks her right arm, and beats her on the head’? And of many other horrific accidents – doing for ‘one hundred and six lives, one hundred and forty-two hands or arms … [and] one thousand, three hundred and forty bones’ since the passing of the 1844 Factory Act?
Because deputations of mill-owners had petitioned the government to soften the fencing provisions – limiting them to seven feet high and leaving the overhead horizontal shafts exposed. So a boy tending a shaft belt could ‘be suddenly snapped up by it, whirled around a hundred and twenty times in a minute, and at each revolution knocked against the ceiling till his bones are almost reduced to powder’.
When the owners’ pleas for legislative mercy failed, they fell back on threats. In Hard Times, the owners claimed they were ‘ruined’ when factory inspectors ‘considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery’, and that rather than submit to regulation and inspection (like present-day investment bankers threatening to take their ‘expertise’ elsewhere) they would ‘sooner pitch [their] property into the Atlantic’.
‘However … [they] were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it.’
23 April
Death of Poets Day
1616, 1695, 1740, 1850, 1889, 1915, 1936 etc. Two of the few surviving facts about Shakespeare’s life are that he was born and died on the same day of the year – 23 April 1564 and 23 April 1616. And since Shakespeare was also the greatest English writer – in the country as in the language – it’s even more satisfying (if a bit spooky) to recall that 23 April is also the day when England’s patron saint, St George, is commemorated.
So is some great literary historian in the sky controlling the births and deaths of creative writers? Sometimes it seems so. Take Shakespeare’s death day. On the same day in the same year, Spain’s greatest poet and novelist, Miguel Cervantes, also breathed his last. And (although he was no poet, but instead a gifted historian) so did El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a conquistador and an Inca princess, whose La Florida del Inca (1605) and Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) did so much to advance European understanding of the Native Americans.
It doesn’t stop there. Henry Vaughan, the Welsh metaphysical poet, also died on Death of Poets Day, 1695. So did Thomas Tickell in 1740, Joseph Addison’s protégé, who wrote reams of heroic couplets on such topics as ‘On the Prospects of Peace’ and ‘To a Lady Before Marriage’. And, more notably, William Wordsworth, in 1850. Not to mention Rupert Brooke in 1915, on board ship with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on his way to fight at Gallipoli – dead of an infected mosquito bite.
That’s not the end of it. Brooke’s fateful year was bracketed by Jules Barbary d’Aurevilly’s (1889) and Teresa de la Parra’s (1936). He was an innovative novelist of hidden motives and complex social contradictions, an inspiration to Henry James, as well as the practical supporter of Stendhal, Flaubert and Baudelaire. She was the Venezuelan novelist, author of the frankly titled Iphigenia: Diary of a young lady who wrote becau
se she was bored (1924).
So struck were UNESCO on the Shakespeare–Cervantes connection that they proclaimed 23 April as ‘The International Day of the Book’. Unfortunately, that’s one parallel death scene that doesn’t hold up. Shakespeare didn’t die in Stratford at the moment Cervantes expired in Madrid – or even close to it. Cervantes (and Garcilaso) died in the old Julian calendar, Shakespeare by the reformed Gregorian, in which 23 April came ten days later. Same date, different days.
24 April
A terrible beauty is born
1916 Ezra Pound came into W.B. Yeats’s life in 1913, in London. For the next three years they were constantly in each other’s company – Pound always the mentor, Yeats the pupil. The influence of Pound drastically revised Yeats’s view of Ireland, which swivelled over these years from Romantic to anti-Romantic. The shift is aggressively proclaimed in his poem ‘September 1913’, with its refrain:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Politics replaced Schwärmerei. There would be no more ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Yeats was now an ‘engaged’ poet. But what, in the maelstrom of world war and the 1916 Easter Uprising (‘Revolution’ some called it), did ‘engagement’ mean?
The Uprising was the more difficult of the two crises. While England was preoccupied with fighting the Germans in France, a band of Irish Nationalists decided that this would be the moment at which to mount a coup and seize independence for their country. The symbolism (Easter being the moment of spiritual rebirth in the Christian calendar) and the quixotic heroism would resound through Irish history eternally. But as a coup, it was a disastrous flop.
The Uprising began on the morning of Easter Monday, 24 April, with a street demonstration by some 1,000 Dubliners. At their head, a commando of rebels set out to capture and take over the major buildings in the capital: principally the Dublin General Post Office.
It was pure romanticism. And it failed, utterly. The rebels had rifles, the British occupiers had much heavier armament – and knew, having been at war for two years, how to use it. The British garrison quickly mustered and moved in massive strength against the rebels (‘criminals’, as they were proclaimed). Ruthlessness was ordered: the government, in London, regarded it as a stab in the back while the British Isles (which included Ireland) were in a desperate fight to the death with Germany.
No quarter was given. Martial law was declared and the counterattack began. Artillery was used, mercilessly. A gunboat was floated along the Liffey river. The collateral damage was huge. But in a couple of days, the rebellion was effectively squashed. The leaders of the rebellion were shown no mercy. They were tried in secret by a military court and sentenced to death, the executions announced only after they had been summarily carried out.
Militarily, it was a blinding success for the British. But the huge civilian casualties (over 1,000 non-combatants were killed), the wanton destruction of some of the most beautiful parts of the city, and the cruelty of the punishment did what the rebels themselves had been unable to do. The Irish independence movement was, hereafter, historically unstoppable. It would happen five years later.
This is Yeats’s poetic meditation on that bloody event, offered in his poem ‘Easter 1916’ – a meditation as simple in its expression, and complex in its resonance, as its title. It opens:
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
What is Yeats saying here? That his inactivity – as an intellectual, artist observer of the scene – is culpable, or the proper response of a commonsensical ideologue to these head-in-the-air ‘clownish’ (motleyed) idealists? Is he, like Stephen Daedalus’s God (in Joyce’s 1916 novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), above it all, like a superior being paring his fingernails while below him frogs and mice go at their little wars?
Were these men fools, or patriotic heroes? If the latter, what did that make William Butler Yeats? The poem (completed in September 1916, while the events were still white hot, but in military perspective) continues, reviewing the actions of the rebels, and the inaction of men and women of Yeats’s kind. It ends with a salute to the heroes of the uprising, a chilling refrain, and an unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, question:
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died? […]
[All] Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Things were simpler on the Lake Isle than in Dublin in Easter 1916.
25 April
The novel is invented, but its inventor has no name for it
1719 There are a number of candidates for the title of ‘first novel in English’. Most convincing is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published on this day.
Defoe’s life was extraordinarily full of event and of literary achievement. He was a great pamphleteer, a government spy, and the father of English journalism. Born around 1660 (the year of the Restoration), he lived in turbulent and dangerous times. More so as he was a dissenter and had a foreign-sounding name (never a good thing in England: Crusoe’s father prudently changed his name from ‘Kreutzer’). As chronicled below (see 31 July), Defoe on one occasion found himself in the stocks for things he had written that were, alas, too clever for the dolts who misread them.
He lived a long life, dying in his early seventies in 1731. He was never well off, and downright impoverished by creditors in his last years. And it was in these last years, aged nearly 60 (a fact that the authors of this volume find very cheering), that he can be said to have invented the English novel – or, at the very least, to have helped establish it as the dominant literary form it would become.
The word ‘novel’ literally means ‘new thing’, and it is the one dominant literary form whose genesis, and progenitor, we can plausibly claim to know and date. Literary evolution is as fascinating as the evolution of any other species. Why, then, did the novel come into existence at this particular point in historical time, and why in this particular place – England (London, specifically) at the beginning of the 18th century?
A number of answers have been suggested, in addition to Defoe’s pre-eminent genius and originality of mind. The rise of the novel coincides, it has been noted, with the rise of capitalism in its modern form. Robinson Crusoe, colonising his island, is Homo economicus – the epitome of mercantilism (he even sells Man Friday). The novel – the ‘bourgeois epic’ as it has been called – coincides with a related event, the rise of the middle class (along with parliamentary democracy).
These are very much after-the-historical-event explanations. It is clear that although Defoe knew what he was doing, neither he nor the booksellers who produced Robinson Crusoe could put a name to their fascinating ‘novelty’. So extra copies of the title page would be run off, and pinned, or pegged, up on rope-lines as advertisements – hence the intrusion of what we would call a ‘blurb’:
THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRIZING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of YORK, MARINER:
Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of the Great River of OROONOQUE;
Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men perished but himself.
WITH
An Account how he was
at last as strangely deliver’d by PYRATES.
Written by Himself.
LONDON:
Printed for W. TAYLOR at the Ship in Pater-Noster-Row.
MDCCXIX.
Any prospective purchaser idly casting an eye over this in the yard outside St Paul’s Cathedral (i.e. the ‘Row’, where booksellers congregated) would assume he was being offered something on the lines of Alexander Selkirk’s authentic memoir of being shipwrecked on a desert island (Selkirk’s experiences were later published as the ‘Life and Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe’).
There is nothing on the Defoe–Taylor title page to indicate that this is fiction – and the ascription ‘Written by Himself’ is downright misleading. There was, happily for literature, no Trades Description Act to prosecute the vendor in 1719.
For all its misleadingness, the title page goes to the essence of what Defoe is doing, and what the novel is: ‘Lies like truth’ – as Leslie Stephen called Robinson Crusoe. Many contemporaries were taken in, and assumed Robinson Crusoe to be ‘genuine’. That, one might fancify, is the ultimate sales test for a novel. So good a fiction that the unknowing will take it as fact.
26 April
George Herbert is inducted as rector of the parish of Fugglestone-cum-Bemerton, near Salisbury
1630 It doesn’t sound very exciting, but this date marks the point at which one of the best lyricists in the English language turned his back on the secular rewards of politics and high academia in search of his true calling: religion and poetry. In Herbert’s case the two vocations were inseparable.
Herbert had it all: brains, money, an influential family. His education took him through Westminster School, through Trinity College, Cambridge, to a university readership in rhetoric and the post of University Orator. This didn’t just mean going around giving speeches, but writing official letters to dignitaries, as well as greeting them when they visited Cambridge – always in Latin.
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