Bertha is nonetheless released from her imprisonment in a monotonous marriage by Edward’s accidental death. When she is told that he has been killed, she has only one thought, one that horrifies her but is so important that it is italicized: “She was free!” She nevertheless has one more dangerous snare to avoid: the danger of being caught in an illusion for the rest of her life. As she thinks of Edward, she remembers him not as the husband she came to despise in marriage, but as the attractive young man she thought him in the beginning. To avoid being thus entrapped forever, Bertha conducts a soul-shattering purge of all reminders of the young Edward and, in a final gesture, she studies his corpse and exorcizes her recollection of him as a young man. She will leave Court Leys and its memories and return to Italy, “for now she had no ties on earth, and at last, she was free.”
Though D. H. Lawrence and Maugham both became well-known authors, their paths crossed only once, at the home of a mutual friend in Mexico City in 1924. Following a tense lunch at which neither man was comfortable, Lawrence pronounced Maugham “a narrow-gutted ‘artist.’” There is no evidence that Lawrence ever read Mrs Craddock but, had he done so, he would surely have found that it confirmed his judgment of its author. The opening line of the novel states that it “might be called also The Triumph of Love,” but, considering that Bertha is drawn into marriage to Edward by her attraction to his physical being, it might really be called The Triumph of Sex. The comment is, of course, ironic, since the “triumph” is the entrapping of the woman in an unsatisfactory marriage to her masculine sex object, an entrapment from which she is eventually happily released. As the novel ends, Bertha ceases thinking about her dead husband, returns to her books, and begins “reading quietly.” Lawrence would have been repelled by this triumph of cerebration over passion.
Mrs Craddock is nonetheless the best novel Maugham was to write until Of Human Bondage. It is one of a long line of his works in which emotion is shown to overwhelm reason and lead the characters to self-destructive behavior. Bertha, says Laurence Brander, “is Maugham’s first experiment in psychological analysis,” an experiment that is more than usually interesting because “Maugham’s special gift has always been for creating woman characters.” Her conclusion at the end that “all ties were irksome, all earthly attachments unnecessary”—in other words, that as a free woman she can be wholly self-contained and self-sustaining—will dismay many readers. It makes her, though, a woman looking ahead to the twentieth century rather than back to the Victorian period.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Calder, Robert. Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Heinemann, 1989.
Curtis, Anthony. The Pattern of Maugham. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
Galsworthy, John. The Country House. London: William Heinemann, 1907.
Heywood, C. “Somerset Maugham’s Debt to Madame Bovary and Miss Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife,” Etudes anglaises 19 (January–March 1966): 64–69.
———. “Two Printed Texts of Somerset Maugham’s Mrs Craddock,” English Language Notes 5 (September 1967): 39–46.
Hunter, Jefferson. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Kermode, Frank. “The English Novel, circa 1907,” in The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Whitehead, John. Maugham: A Reappraisal. Totowa, N. J.: Barnes and Noble, 1978.
PREFACE
This novel was written in 1900. It was thought extremely daring, and was refused by publisher after publisher, among others by William Heinemann; but it was at last read by Robertson Nicoll, a partner in the firm of Hodder and Stoughton, and he, though of opinion that it was not the sort of book his own firm should publish, thought well enough of it to urge William Heinemann to reconsider his decision. Heinemann read it himself and, on the condition that I took out passages that he found shocking, agreed to publish it. This was in 1902. It must have had something of a success, since it was reissued the following year, and again in 1908. Thirty years later it was republished. The new edition was printed from the original manuscript with the offensive parts left in, for I could not for the life of me imagine what they were, and I had not the patience to compare the manuscript with the printed copy. On the contrary, the propriety of the book seemed to me almost painful. I made, however, certain corrections.
The author had been dead for many years, and I used the manuscript as I would that of a departed friend whose book, unrevised by him, had been entrusted to me for publication. I left it as it was, with all its faults, and contented myself with minor emendations. The author’s punctuation was haphazard, and I did my best to put some method into it. I replaced the dashes which he used, I fear from ignorance of a complicated art, with colons, semi-colons and commas; I omitted the rows of dots with which he sought to draw the reader’s attention to the elegance of a sentiment or the subtlety of an observation, and I replaced with a full stop the marks of exclamation that stood all over the page, like telegraph poles, apparently to emphasize the author’s astonishment at his own acumen. I cannot imagine why he had the affectation of treating the letter H as a vowel, and wrote of an horse, an house and an home; I struck out all I could find of these otiose Ns; but if any still remain, the reader is besought to pardon an aberration of youth and the carelessness of the editor. It is not an easy matter to decide how you should treat this particular letter and, searching for guidance, I have consulted a number of grammars. So far as I can make out, whether you treat H as a vowel or a consonant depends on the stress you naturally lay on the syllable it accompanies. So, it would be absurd to tell a friend, who wanted to write still another war novel, to have an heart; but not unreasonable to suggest that, if he must write, he would be better advised to write an historical romance.
A pleasant story is told about Alfred de Musset. He was sitting down one day at George Sand’s to wait for her, and he took up one of her novels that lay on a table. He thought it uncommonly verbose. When she came in, she found him, pencil in hand, crossing out all the unnecessary adjectives; and they say that she did not take it very well. I sympathize with his impatience and with her irritation. But in this matter I used moderation. Some of the author’s favourite words have now a strangely old-fashioned air, but I saw no reason to change them, since there is nothing to show that the modern ones which I might have put in their stead will not in a few years be just as dated. An epithet has its vogue and is forgotten, and the amusing of the moment will doubtless in a little ring as false as the horrid of the eighteen nineties. But I crossed out a great many somes, certains and rathers, for the author of this book had an unhappy disinclination to make an unqualified statement. I was ruthless with the adverbs. When he used five words to say what could have been said in one, I replaced them with the one; and when it seemed to me that he had not said what he wanted to, I ventured to change what he said for what I could not but think he meant. English is a very difficult language, and the author, with whose work I was taking the liberties I have described, had never been taught it. The little he knew he had picked up here and there. No one had ever explained to him the difficulties of composition or the mysteries of style. He began to write as a child begins to walk. He took pains to study good models, but, with none to guide him, he did not always choose his models wisely, and he devoted much care to writers who now seem to most of us affected and jejune.
Some months ago, a gallery in Cork Street had an exhibition of small French pictures painted early in the present century. Since I was often in Paris at that time and used to wander in and out of the shops in the Rue de la Boëtie or on the other side of the Seine where pictures were on view, I must have seen them, or others like them; but if I did, I would have dismissed them with a shrug of the shoulders as Salon pictures, and commonplace, for I had recently discovered Manet, Monet and Pissarro; and these little pictures of Paris, the quais, the boulevar
ds, the shabby streets, the Champs-Élysées, said nothing to me; but when, after this long lapse of time I saw them again, I found them enchanting. The fiacres, the horse-drawn buses, the victorias with their pair of “spanking” horses in which drove women, femmes du monde or celebrated cocottes, dressed in the height of fashion, on their way to the Bois, the queer uniforms of the little soldiers, the nounous with long satin streamers to their caps, pushing prams in the gardens of the Luxembourg—one had taken it all for granted; one had no idea that life was so gay and colourful. Whether these pictures were well painted or not, and most of them showed the competence of a sound training at the Beaux Arts, was no matter; the years had given them a nostalgic charm that one had no wish to resist. They were genre. And now that for this new edition of Mrs Craddock I have re-read it, it is as a genre picture that I regard it. I smile and blush at its absurdities, but leave them because they belong to the period; and if the novel has any merit (and that the reader must decide for himself), it is because it is a picture, faithful, I believe, of life in a corner of England during the last years of the nineteenth century.
The action takes place between 1890 and 1900. The world was very different from what it is today. The telephone and the gramophone had been invented, but they were not till many years later necessities of life to be found in every house. The radio, of course, was unknown. The motor-car was still in the future, and it was not till 1903 that the Wrights produced the first flying machine. The safety bicycle was all the rage and parties were made to ride it in Battersea Park or in country lanes. Women wore their hair long, piled up on their heads, and if they hadn’t enough, added a long switch made out of their combings. Perched up atop of these imposing erections, they wore large hats covered with flowers, fruit and feathers. They wore high collars and full skirts that reached the ground; corsets stiffened with whalebone and pulled as tight as they could bear it. Girls boasted of their eighteen-inch waists. For some years leg of mutton sleeves were vastly fashionable. Towards the end of the decade, in England at least, the hair was no longer brushed up on the top of the head, but done in a “bun” on the nape of the neck, and every woman wore an elaborate (and often false) fringe. Maids wore caps and neat aprons, and a mistress would have looked upon it as an impertinence if one of hers appeared before her bareheaded.
Men wore top hats and frock coats to pay calls and to go to their clubs and offices. A few bold fellows wore morning coats with, of course, a silk hat. Bowlers were worn by bus conductors, drivers of hansom cabs, clerks and bounders. At night men wore full evening dress with black waistcoats and white ties. It was only the heavy swells who sported white waistcoats. The dinner jacket was unknown. Even in the country, when they were in tweeds and knickerbockers, not yet known as plus fours, men wore high, stiff collars and starched shirts.
It was the end of an era, but the landed gentry, who were soon to lose the power they had so long enjoyed, were the last to have a suspicion of it. Owing to the agricultural depression, land was no longer a source of profit, but, except for that, they were quite satisfied that things should go on as they had in the past. They had only disdain for the moneyed class that was already beginning to take their place. They were gentlefolk. It is true that for the most part they were narrow, stupid and intolerant; prudish, formal and punctilious. But they had their points, and I do not think the author was quite fair to them. They did their duty according to their lights. That some should be born to possess a fine estate, and others to work upon it at a miserable wage, was in the nature of things; and it was not for them to cavil at the decrees of inscrutable Providence. The landed gentry were on the whole decent, honourable and upright. They were devoid of envy. They had good manners and were kindly and hospitable. But they had outworn their use, and perhaps it was inevitable that the course of events should sweep them away. Their houses now lie derelict or are schools or homes for the aged, and on the broad acres which they have sold, enterprising builders have built houses, pubs and cinemas.
As is the common practice with novelists, the author of Mrs Craddock, with one exception, took as his models for the persons who play their parts in it persons he knew. The exception is Miss Ley. She was founded on the portrait-statue of Agrippina in the museum at Naples. This sounds improbable, yet happens to be a fact. But on re-reading this book it is the character of the author, manifest throughout, that has chiefly attracted my attention. He was evidently not a very nice young man. He had absurd prejudices. I cannot imagine why he despised Georgian architecture. I should have thought that nowhere has domestic architecture reached such a pitch of excellence as in England under the Georges. Its houses were dignified, elegant and commodious. Yet he never mentions the house in which his heroine lived without a sneer. He called it a blot on the landscape. I have an uneasy feeling that he greatly admired the red brick villas with casement windows and dormered roofs which architects were erecting all over the country. But this is merely a question of taste and, as we know, a man may have an indifferent character and exquisite taste. I do not know why, unless he had learnt it from Matthew Arnold, he was of opinion that the English were philistines; and that for wit, brilliance and culture you must go to the French. He never missed a chance to have a fling at his own countrymen. With a certain naïveté he took the French at their own estimate of themselves, and never doubted that Paris was the centre of civilization. He was better acquainted with the contemporary literature of France than with that of his own country. It was through the influence it had on him that he adopted some of the mannerisms, such as the rows of dots to which I have already referred, which the French writers of the time made excessive use of. The only excuse I can make for his attitude, besides his youth, is that for him England signified constraint and convention, whereas France signified freedom and adventure. I highly disapprove of a way he had now and then of stepping out of his novel and in sarcastic terms directly addressing the reader. Where he learnt this bad practice I cannot tell.
Because for his age the author of Mrs Craddock had travelled extensively in Europe and could speak quite adequately four foreign languages, because he had read much, not only in English and French, but also in German, Spanish and Italian, he had a very good opinion of himself. During his various sojourns on the Continent he came in contact with a number of men, some young, some not so young, who shared his prejudices. With private means adequate to those inexpensive days, they had come down from Oxford or Cambridge with a pass degree and led desultory lives in Paris, Florence, Rome and Capri. He was too ingenuous to see how ineffectual they were. They did not hesitate to call themselves aesthetes and liked to think that they burnt with a hard, gemlike flame. They looked upon Oscar Wilde as the greatest master of English prose in the nineteenth century. Though not insensible to the fact that they thought him immature, in fact a bit of a philistine, he did his best to meet their high standards. He dutifully admired the works of art they admired and despised those they despised. He was not only a foolish young man; he was supercilious, cocksure and often wrong-headed. If I met him now I should take an immediate dislike to him.
1955 W.S.M.
1
This book might be called also The Triumph of Love.
Bertha was looking out of the window at the bleakness of the day. The sky was grey and the clouds were heavy and low; the neglected drive leading to the gates was swept by the bitter wind, and the elm trees that bordered it were bare of leaf; their naked branches seemed to shiver with horror of the cold. It was the end of November and the day was cheerless. The dying year seemed to have cast over all nature the terror of death; the imagination would not bring to the wearied mind thoughts of the merciful sunshine, thoughts of the spring coming as a maiden to scatter from her baskets the flowers and the green leaves.
Bertha turned round and looked at her aunt cutting the leaves of a new Spectator. Wondering what book to get down from Mudie’s,1 Miss Ley read the autumn lists and the laudatory expressions that the adroitness of publishers extracts from unfavou
rable reviews.
“You’re very restless this afternoon, Bertha,” she remarked, in answer to her niece’s steady gaze.
“I think I shall walk down to the gate.”
“You’ve already done that twice in the last hour. Do you find in it something alarmingly novel?”
Bertha did not reply, but turned again to the window; the scene in the last two hours had fixed itself upon her mind with monotonous accuracy.
“What are you thinking about, Aunt Polly?” she asked, suddenly turning back to her aunt and catching the eyes fixed upon her.
“I was thinking that one must be very penetrative to discover a woman’s emotions from the view of her back hair.”
Bertha laughed: “I don’t think I have any emotions to discover. I feel—” she sought for some way of expressing the sensation. “I feel as if I should like to take my hair down.”
Miss Ley made no rejoinder, but looked down at her paper. She hardly wondered what her niece meant, having long ceased to be astonished at Bertha’s ways and doings; indeed, her only surprise was that they never sufficiently corroborated the common opinion that Bertha was an independent young woman from whom anything might be expected. In the three years they had spent together since the death of Bertha’s father, the two women had learned to tolerate one another extremely well. Their mutual affection was mild and perfectly respectable, in every way suitable to ladylike persons bound together by ties of convenience and decorum. Miss Ley, called to the death-bed of her brother in Italy, made Bertha’s acquaintance over the dead man’s grave, and she was then too old and of too independent character to accept a stranger’s authority; nor had Miss Ley the smallest desire to exert authority over anybody. She was a very indolent woman, who wished nothing more than to leave people alone and be left alone by them. But if it was obviously her duty to take charge of an orphan niece, it was also an advantage that Bertha was eighteen and but for conventions of decent society could very well take charge of herself. Miss Ley was not unthankful to a merciful providence on the discovery that her ward had every intention of going her own way and none whatever of hanging about the skirts of a maiden aunt who was passionately devoted to her liberty.
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