Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  DOLORES

  BY

  IVY COMPTON-BURNETT

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Introduction

  The first and till now the only edition of Dolores was published by Blackwoods in 1911. It sold well, and was promptly forgotten; apparently even its author did not want to remember it, since she did not publish another novel until 1925, nor did she include Dolores, the first of her twenty novels, in later lists of her publications. But now that her career of sixty years is ended, and her long achievement more and more acclaimed, Dolores, standing at that remote beginning, is curiously reborn. When a writer is alive, his works tend to be regarded one by one, as they appear; when he is dead, they tend to be seen as the whole they have become. The genesis of genius attracts a natural speculation. If the author of Dolores preferred to forget it, her readers will not. When a writer dies, he loses his privacy, all but his essential, his irremediable privacy; and critics, disciples, the rare book dealer and the bibliographer would not leave him that, if they could help it.

  The first edition of Dolores (which is now virtually unobtainable) contains in its end pages, in the manner of volumes at that time, a thirty-two page Catalogue of Messrs Blackwood & Sons’ Publications. It is interesting reading. Black-woods was publishing Conrad and Forster; The Longest Journey was in its second impression. But its leading author by far was George Eliot, dead thirty years, one Victorian who still retained her eminence. Of her works Blackwoods offered a New Popular Edition, a Warwick Edition, a Standard Edition, a Cabinet Edition, a Popular Copyright Edition, and a Cheap Edition. There was even a new edition, at 3/6, of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse, selected from the Works of George Eliot. Among her great female predecessors in the English novel, I. Compton-Burnett is in a general way most like Jane Austen, least like Charlotte Brontë, but the dominant influence on Dolores is George Eliot, an influence so pervasive that it extends to characterisation and tone, subject, theme, and even diction.

  Perhaps it extends too far or not far enough, because Dolores seems both overdone and underdone Eliot. Its story concerns a young Victorian woman, Dolores Hutton, who sacrifices her chances for personal happiness to the larger interest of duty to her family. Its settings are the village of Millfield in Yorkshire, where Dolores’ father, the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, is rector, and Oxford, where Dolores attends a woman’s college; the twenty-one chapters of the novel are fairly evenly divided between Millfield and Oxford. Its characters are, in Millfield, the members of the middle-class households of that village (Hutton; Blackwood; Cassell; Merton-Vane), and, in Oxford, the women teachers at Dolores’ college, a don or two, two school companions and friends of Dolores, and a great but unrecognised dramatist (his name alone, Sigismund Claverhouse, might seem to have conferred a certain notoriety). Its structure is a series of Dolores’ dutiful sacrifices: to begin with, she must reject a position as teacher in her college upon her graduation from it to become instead the governess of a younger stepbrother and stepsisters. The favourite child of her father the rector, Dolores bears patiently the ill will of her stepmother. When an uncle provides for the education of her pupils, Dolores is free to return to Oxford and to Claverhouse, whom she loves and reveres. Unfortunately Claverhouse has fallen in love with Dolores’ shallow and pretty friend Perdita, and it becomes Dolores’ task to help bring about this marriage. It is brought about, but after nine months Perdita Claverhouse dies in childbirth, and Dolores returns to her role of spiritual companion and amanuensis to Sigismund, whose eyesight is failing, and who has begun to reciprocate her love. Frustration, however, is the rule: her stepmother dies, and Dolores must return to Millfield to preside over her lonely father’s house. She does so, for the next five years. She rejects an Oxford don (‘Soulsby’) who has long admired her when she discovers that her younger sister Sophia is in love with him. It is once again a question of their father the rector’s needs, and Dolores easily arranges that Soulsby marry Sophia instead of herself, herself continuing the martyr role of father companion. On a brief visit to Oxford, Dolores is re-united with Claverhouse, near-blind and near death. In a climax of self-abnegation Dolores comes back to her father, to find, ironically, that he is about to marry for the third time and no longer needs her. The irony is compounded in that Claverhouse, whom she is now free to join, dies during her brief absence from him. She ends as teacher in the women’s college.

  Presumably, for the rest of her life, she will be a dutiful teacher. Duty is a keyword in George Eliot’s novels, and it is here; sometimes, as the preceding synopsis has shown, assuming the classical form of duty versus love. The sense of duty that inspires the highminded Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, is the same sort of obligation felt by Dolores Hutton. They are related in other ways. The young Dorothea’s marriage to the middle-aged pedant Casaubon, whose magnum opus is to be a Key to All Mythologies, resembles Dolores’ devotion to Claverhouse, who is much older than she, and whose dramas, as they are once or twice described, sound similarly vast. Unfortunately neither Dolores’ nobility nor Claverhouse’s dramas are questioned ironically as their counterparts in Middlemarch are. Dorothea’s sense of duty is presented as both noble and absurd. Dolores’ is only noble. And thus becomes, too insisted-upon as it is, absurd inadvertently. What ironies in Dolores there are, are amateur, discrete, and heavy observations of discrepancies, while those in Middle-march seem like the inevitable products of a grave, austere, and philosophic vision.

  There are in Dolores a range of social comment, an attention to class differences, and an emphasis on setting that will not be met with again in the following nineteen novels. They show that the author of Dolores was conversant with the typical scope and the areas of comment of Eliot and the other Victorians. Specifically Eliotean is an insistence upon the importance of ‘low’ or obscure destinies, on the heroism of the unheroic. Such ‘ideas’, the cast of intellectualism to Dolores, are rare or missing in the later nineteen.

  There are other Eliot echoes. The addresses to the reader, of which there are many, reproduce the tone of Eliot’s addresses, weightily humorous, portentous, finger-wagging. Didactic throughout, the author of Dolores tells us very early that ‘Dolores’ means ‘sorrows’ (for duty is sacrifice and suffering), reminds us much later that the heroine’s life has been sorrowful, and even supplies a happier-natured friend named Felicia to drive the point home. George Eliot almost never wrote a light or supple phrase, and, knowing Dame Ivy’s later style, one finds astonishing the sentences like polysyllabic puddings in Dolores. The following can serve as example for those Eliot-derived habits of style just mentioned:

  Now, as a person of observation, and knowledge of human nature in its subtler aspects, for example, as acted upon by difference in religious views and sameness of blood, are you disposed to dark surmise on the relations of the houses of Blackwood and Hutton; or wondering how long it had been since relations between them existed? In this thing you may take heart. Their ground of intercourse never presented clefts on its surface, though the ensuing stratum was at times volcanic. As far as the masters of the families went, the intercourse was so entirely on the surface, that this covered eruptiveness did n
ot affect it. (Chapter II.)

  What Dolores lacks that George Eliot’s novels, even her first ones, pre-eminently have, is the richness of detail, the patient construction of effect blended with exploratory pause, the ample and leisurely pace so characteristic of the Victorians, who so frequently complained of the increased tempo of modern life. But Dolores was written in the twentieth century, and no matter how it leans backward to adopt the stances of an earlier fiction, its subject is too big for its length. Some chapters read like outlines for chapters. There are many undeveloped characters, truncated scenes, phrases which intimate issues that a paragraph should expound. The effect is that of a remarkable intelligence exercised perversely and uncomfortably. Dame Ivy’s imagination did not respond to the philosophical, the sociological, the theological; but her admiration for George Eliot led her to adopt just those biases, and she could flesh them out only meagerly.

  There are other aspects of Dolores, besides its being so marked as influenced, that indicate its interesting immaturity. It seems that the author did not know what kind of novel she wanted to write, and the fact that, on her own evidence, her brother had some share in the composition of the work, may further have clouded her aim. Dolores is intermittently a Bildungsroman, a domestic drama, a comedy of manners, and, if one judged only by the first three chapters, a religious novel, of Church versus Chapel. It is a mélange of moods as well as of modes; passages of alert bright comedy are side by side with the meditative, the dour, the lugubrious. The character of Dolores is presented with morethan-Victorian sentimentality; she suffers, and suffers, and suffers. The young ComptonBurnett often describes where it would be more effective to dramatise, and she will talk a character out of existence where he should be talking himself into it. In Chapter I especially, there are excessively long descriptions of several quite minor characters. Surely the most bizarre element in the compound of Dolores is the Gothicism of the Claverhouse family, wizened ninety-year-old Janet Claverhouse and her deformed son, the genius Sigismund. Their macabre daily life, as described in Chapter V, makes them the oddest household in twenty novels devoted to the eccentricities of families.

  What the beginning author has to find is his unique tone. Once he knows what he sounds like, the rest follows. To begin as a writer is to get in touch with one’s self, to learn what is one’s own most truthful and natural voice. The uncertainties listed in the last paragraph are peripheral matters compared with the uncertainties of tone. Several styles, in addition to the Eliot imitations already noted, jostle one another in the pages of Dolores— the jaunty, the glum, the intense, the urbane, the impressive. There are many bad sentences like the following:

  But as the days passed, they carried with them that which was of them. (Note the five pronouns. Chapter IX.) … Dolores’ time was her own from dawn to dusk. Her purpose was not of the things to which Dolores was easily blind. (This means that Dolores knew her purpose. Chapter VII.) But there was no place in Dolores’ soul, for remorse for that which was wrought with pain for the sake of conscience. (Three ‘for’s’. Chapter XI)

  He [the Very Revd. James Hutton] was yet in the prime of his pomposity and portliness, his fondness for kindly patronage, and his contentment with himself and his ecclesiastical condition. (Alliteration is used heavily throughout Dolores. Chapter VII.)

  There are unconvincing verbal tics used to identify a character (Mr Blackwood, Mrs MertonVane, Soulsby). And there is much else one could say about the abstract, the pretentious, the wordy, the opaque. But what is curiously impressive, in fact the glory of these errors, is the determination, the energy, the psychic vigour they show.

  In the long run, the sixty years’ run, she did not settle for any received style, any received notion. She found her own voice by abandoning the voices of the past, the revered dead masters of dead prose. In Dolores she tested them. Fourteen years later, in Pastors and Masters, she had fully attained her own, if still shaky, tone. In the nineteen novels subsequent to Dolores George Eliot is mentioned once; a ridiculous and self-loving lady, Gertrude Doubleday in Manservant and Maidservant, fancies and encourages a resemblance between herself and the great Victorian, and serves tea under her portrait.

  Comedy is the purge for the pretences of Dolores, for the verbose and the quasi-philosophic; comedy is the mode adopted for the later nineteen. It has already asserted itself in Dolores (and this may be what, in Dolores, finally interests us most): no novel with a character named Perdita Claverhouse can be entirely glum. In the satire of high-minded gentlemen like Mr Blackwood and Dr Cassell; in the verbal wars between the two sisters Mrs Hutton and Mrs Blackwood, acid antagonists; in the aggressive witty candour of Elsa Blackwood or the smoother more absurd wit of Felicia Murray—in these the comedy of the future is predicted. Mr Blackwood is a first run-through of the ninny type, like Peter Bateman in Brothers and Sisters; Sigismund Claverhouse is the first of countless writers, culminating in Hereward Egerton in the nineteenth novel, A God and his Gifts; Elsa and Felicia are prototypes of the truth-speaking sophisticates who will offer their witty opposition to family tyrants in every subsequent work.

  There are other minor foreshadowings, situational devices that will be used dozens of times, such as servants listening at keyholes (Julia, the serving woman of the Claverhouses) or fateful discovered documents (Perdita’s tragic diary of her marriage, read after her death by her husband). But it is the comedy that counts. The proportion of melodrama to comedy in Dolores is, perhaps, three to one; in the later novels, this proportion is reversed and increased—for one page of heavy drama bristling with rhetoric there are ten or twenty where wit dominates. Not that the two elements are so sharply demarcated as this would sound: nonetheless the supreme moments in the novels are those when everything stops and pure comedy reigns.

  It begins in Dolores, markedly with the chorus of schoolmistresses, whose wit must surely be Dame Ivy’s own, unaided by her brother or anyone else. One cannot claim for the schoolmistresses the comic quality of, for example, the exchanges between Mortimer Lamb and the butler Bullivant in Manservant and Maidservant or the luncheon party in Elders and Betters. But one can claim a good deal. Here is the end of Dolores:

  “You are experienced in people’s manners of offering their hands, then, Miss Cliff?” said Miss Greenlow, in tones of polite comment.

  “Ah! The cat is out of the bag,” said Miss Dorington.

  “No,” said Miss Cliff, with easy laughter. “I have no right to speak as one having authority.”

  “Ah! That is all very well now,” said Miss Dorington. “You certainly spoke in an unguarded moment with no uncertain sound.”

  “How many of us have that right, I wonder,” said Miss Lemaître.

  “I suspect Miss Adam,” said Miss Greenlow, shaking her head.

  “Miss Adam, you are a marked character,” said Miss Cliff.”

  “Clearly we are right, Miss Lemaître,” said Miss Greenlow; as Miss Adam yielded without great unwillingness to the impulse to look conscious.

  “Anyhow we are rude,” said Miss Dorrington genially.

  “Oh, we can surely talk to young people, as old women may,” said Miss Cliff.

  “If youth is the qualification, Miss Hutton is the fittest mark for our elderly interest,” said Miss Lemaître.

  “Miss Hutton, can you meet our eyes? said Miss Adam, not without suggestion that this was beyond herself.

  “Oh, we will acquit Miss Hutton. She is the most sensible of us all,” said Miss Cliff.

  It is appropriate that this is the end of the novel. It is as if here, after the flounderings, the true voice has been found. It is this same voice which will be heard fourteen years later in Pastors and Masters and, developed, perfected, throughout the remarkable novels that follow.

  Charles Burkhart

  Chapter I.

  It is a daily thing: a silent, unvisited churchyard; bordering the garden of the parsonage; and holding a church whose age and interest spare our words; a few tombs fenced from their fell
ows, and marking generations of the family held as great; others naming primitive lives that grew and waned by the spot which harbours their silence; and at some moment of its lying in sight an open grave with its mourners.

  An open grave with its mourners. It is a daily thing, but not to be denied our heed. Let us mark the figure foremost in the sombre throng, that clerical figure of heavy build and with bent head. That is the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, the vicar of the parish.

  He is not very worthy of our words, the Reverend Cleveland Hutton. He is perhaps less worthy than his parish would have held, and his appearance tends to suggest. The heaviness of build, which was interpreted in the light of feminine fondness for the cloth as a sign of mental and moral profundity, was on other interpretations simply heaviness. The expanse of his brow was due in smaller measure to developement of the brain beneath, than recession of the hair above. The unusual length of his hinder locks, though a feature which, as he was aware, has been in some cases an attribute of genius, was in his own to be referred, simply, to his directions to his barber. Even his Christian name, though to the rustic portion of the village it was an illustration of his removal from things common amongst remaining mankind, had been given him for no better reason than that it was his mother’s maiden surname—a reason which even to his mother seemed to have appeared sufficient only in the case of a younger son, since his elder brother was known to his family as James. In his clerical character also he was one of many. He had discharged the duties of a curate till he was thirty-five; and his recent appointment to this country living, which he had himself been heard to allude to as his first step up the ladder of preferment, was likely to be his final one; and was due not less to the fact that his mother’s cousin was connected with its patron, than to the force of his personality, or the repute of the pamphlet he had published.

  No; there was nothing in the Rev. Cleveland Hutton to mark him a man apart. But it does not follow there was nothing about him to be written or read. Our deepest experience is not less deep, that it is common to our race; and the heart of the Rev. Cleveland Hutton was not less wrung, as he watched the ebbing of the life that was to him of price, and wrestled in remembrance of the forgotten wrongs of tone and word, which even the supreme agony of remorse could not make as if they had not been, that it was an ordinary human heart, which had beaten for thirty-eight years in obedience to ordinary human daily things. It was a strong still face, from which he tore his eyes, turning again that its picture might defy the years with different days. There had been a strong, woman’s heart to cleave to his own, through the struggles of the lingering unbeneficed time, the loss of his firstborn, and other things finding a place in his ordinary human lot. Standing by the open grave, dreading for the numbness of grief to pass, and leave him the facing of the future that was dark, he was as fitting a mark for compassion as if his name were to live.