Explanations of individual behaviour – the mitigations of psychology – were not for him: a villain was simply a villain. Nero was ‘the bestial Emperor of Rome’, who ‘murdered … his vile mother’. Tiberius ‘fell under the execrable influence of the incarnate fiend Sejanus’ and ‘spent his last years in gluttony and solitude on the island of Capreoe’. Judge Jeffreys, the notorious hanging judge of Devon and Cornwall, ‘died – where he ought to have lived – in the Tower of London’. The compiler’s position, broadly speaking, was on the side of the people against their rulers. When the Marquise de Pompadour, ‘the millionaire mistress of Louis XV’, died, it was ‘amidst the rejoicings of a downtrodden nation at a deliverance which anticipated their most ardent hopes’. He had a reluctant admiration for Napoleon, ‘the Man of Destiny’, but had little to say for the French kings, their wives, or their mistresses. His entry under ‘Louis’ reads: ‘Louis is the name of many of the French kings, of whom the most important are Louis IX (“the saint”), Louis XIV (by no means a saint) and Louis XVI.’ Louis XVI ‘was far too weak … and the queen gave herself up to gaiety, so that it is not surprising to find him arrested … tried … and guillotined.’
The English kings were scarcely more deserving of respect. Here is the entry for George III:
George III had the distinction of reigning for sixty years, of losing the American Colonies in 1775-83, of being a contemporary of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and of going mad several times during his long reign.
Richard III ‘was not hunch-backed, but he was a liar and a murderer’. Charles II was ‘indolent, extravagant and licentious’. Henry VII, however, did well: ‘His policy of depressing the feudal nobility and exalting the middle ranks was excellent.’ And Henry VIII ‘was very popular as a musician and an athlete, in spite of his tyranny’. The most he could say for Queen Victoria was that ‘Her Majesty is an authoress,’ and he didn’t think much of her ministers; he criticised Gladstone, for instance, for failing ‘from cowardice or procrastination’ to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, for splitting the Liberal Party, and for opposing women’s suffrage – ‘in itself a logical and just arrangement in any country where men have suffrage but … thwarted persistently in Britain by Mr and Mrs Gladstone’.
There were many other logical and just arrangements that were being thwarted, either by the obstinacy of individuals or by the self-interest of a class. The compiler felt this strongly. The distribution of land and the distribution of wealth are two obvious instances. In 1897, according to his figures, half of the land belonged to 7400 individuals and the other half to 312,500 individuals. The computation is curious, but the moral was simple: land, being ‘a source of natural wealth … ought not to be in the hands of a chosen few’. On the subject of wealth he preaches a small sermon:
It seems curious that so many people should make material wealth their ideal and goal in life, when they must know that it is limited in supply, and that, if they get it to excess, someone else must go without it. On the other hand, all the wealth which is ‘not made with hands’, is not limited; and the more each of us has – e.g. of knowledge, leisure, health etc – the more we can give to or share with our neighbours.
The cure was not revolution. In France, the disciples of Rousseau ‘began their “return to nature” by destroying everything – creeds, institutions, customs, lives; and on their ruins Napoleon constructed his own positive ambition.’ As for Bakunin and his disciples, what they proposed was simply rubbish – ‘illegitimate and absurd extravagances and inanities’. Nor was the goal, as he saw it, a dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘An educated democracy,’ he said, ‘is probably the most righteous form of government’ (and an un-educated democracy, he added, ‘one of the most pernicious forms’). The compiler’s sympathies are with the ‘Scientific Socialists’:
Scientific Socialists seem to really know what their ideal is, how they got it, and how they want to carry it out. They define it as a state of things in which every soul in the nation shall have an equal chance of realising such perfection as it is naturally capable of realising – as a pot-boy or a premier – without any reference to the lot into which, by fortune or by misfortune, it has been born; and they assert, often with too little regard for the feelings of the rich middle class, that at present society does not give the mass of men the ‘chance’ of realising such perfection; education does not give them the ‘will’, and natural inheritance of brain and body – due mainly to bad food – does not give them the power. Further, they consider that this feverish scramble for material wealth is both unseemly and unscientific, because what one man gets another has to go without.
Their proposals, he says, ‘may be inexpedient but they are perfectly legitimate’. Speaking of the Co-operative Movement, he is more confident: ‘It embodies a right principle, which must win eventually.’ Barratt and his fellow directors – if they ever read the Cyclopædia – showed surprising tolerance in allowing these opinions to go out under their name.
Neither the interests of A. & F. Pears, Ltd, nor anonymity nor the encyclopedia format acted as constraints on the compiler. He is most emphatic on behalf of trade unions, berating the ‘numerous rash ignoramuses who babble across dinner tables about strikes and Trade Unions’ when the unions have paid out very much more in ‘PROVIDENT BENEFIT’ than in ‘STRIKE PAY’ and have ‘secured and maintained the highest rate of wages, the shortest hours, and the best conditions of work’. He returns again and again to these issues. An entry on Worth, ‘the great ladies’ tailor’, is not about clothes but about working conditions: ‘His business … employs nearly a thousand workwomen, more than half of them on the premises – the only sanitary and economic system – for outside work lends itself to sweating and to the spread of disease.’ He begins an entry on machinery in a characteristically angry mood: ‘A good deal of plausible nonsense has been written and spoken in the attempt to prove that Machinery does not displace human labour.’ But he ends with a Wellsian vision of a better world: ‘One bright hope for the future of the race is in the wide development of Machinery … which will eventually free human labour from all unhealthy, disagreeable and degrading forms of work.’
Personal morality interested the compiler much less: if society were organised on ‘scientific’ principles, people could be expected to behave better. Neither secular nor divine models were needed. Christ interests him so little that he gives no information about Him beyond reproducing a ‘text’ of the sentence passed by Pontius Pilate and allegedly engraved on a brass plate that had been found near Naples. Nothing in the religious cast of mind met with his sympathy; and although there is evidence in the Cyclopædia of religious prejudice, there is no suggestion of any kind of religious allegiance. The prejudice was not in any way unusual: like many Englishmen (and even more Scotsmen), the compiler disliked and distrusted the Catholic Church. He describes the Reformation as ‘the beginning of modern social life’ (‘it purified morals, multiplied the centres of spiritual life, and made men think for themselves’), and variously characterises the pre-Reformation Catholic Church as despotic, corrupt and depraved. (In an entry on religious architecture, he observes that ‘the set horizontal lines of a classical temple’ were ‘peculiarly appropriate to the depraved Italian Church of the Renaissance’.) Its later practices and ways of thought were no more to his liking. Even the expression ‘Roman Catholic’ offended him. ‘A “Roman Catholic,”’ he said, ‘is simply a gross contradiction in terms, for a person cannot be both Roman, i.e. a particular sect, and Catholic, i.e. universal.’ The epithet he uses is ‘Romish’, as in ‘Romish Church’. When a saint is mentioned, it is often in order to show how gullible or self-regarding religious people can be: the ‘mania’ for imitating Simeon Stylites was, for example, ‘a form of conceited asceticism’. The traffic in relics, an easy target, prompts these reflections:
Relics were declared, by the Romish Council of Trent in 1563, to be worthy of veneration, and the declaration elicited a
curious phenomenon in Economics – that things of which the supply was naturally ‘limited’ could be increased to meet demand. The number of crucifixes made of ‘the true Cross’ was large enough to have paved every street in London.
But Protestants could also go too far: the doctrine of predestination ‘has led many men into gross presumption, and more into utter despair’; the Quakers ‘neglect the common courtesies of society’; the Boers ‘are rigid Calvinists and very cruel’. Only Buddhism, because it encourages a mean in all things, escaped his strictures.
A tradition of freethinking was well established in the Lowlands of Scotland by the late 19th century; and if Bryce was indeed the compiler of the Cyclopædia, there is every reason to suppose that he belonged to that tradition. (Conversely, the attitude of the Cyclopædia towards religion and religious affairs encourages the view that Bryce put it together.) But whoever the compiler was it seems clear that the ideology that corresponded most closely to his own was secularism, ‘a philosophy of life, the gist of which consists in the advocacy of free thought’:
Secularists believe that the best means of arriving at the truth is to place perfect confidence in the operations of human reason. They do not consider that faculty to be infallible, but they think that reason should only be corrected by reason, and that no restraint, penal, moral, or social, should be placed upon holding, expressing, or acting up to an opinion intelligently formed, and sincerely held, however contrary that opinion may be to those generally held.
It doesn’t on the face of it seem likely that the management of A. & F. Pears wished to promulgate free thought or any other opinions contrary to those generally held – that, as we know, is not the advertiser’s way – but the compiler had presumably not been told to toe a party line. He was, it turns out, an agnostic and a socialist. He had no particular respect for Queen Victoria or for Gladstone, the embodiment of official Victorian morality. Was he at least a patriot?
One person out of every four that are alive upon the face of the earth is a subject of Queen Victoria. Of every 100 square miles in Europe she rules over 3, of every 100 in Asia 10, of every 100 in Africa 19, of every 100 in America 24, and of every 100 in Australasia 60. The proportion of her subjects is 6 per cent in America, 11 per cent in Europe … Compared with other empires of the earth [the British Empire] is 40 times as large as the Italian, 10 times as large as the German … The United Kingdom has colonies nearly 100 times its own area, while the French colonies are only a dozen times as large as France, the German only 5 times the size of Germany, the Russian only 3½ times the size of Russia, and the Italian only 2½ times the size of Italy; and during Queen Victoria’s reign the increase of empire has been a ‘Scotland-Ireland’ every year.
It sounds good, but here again the compiler’s sentiments are ambiguous, and any Englishman who, reading this, felt disposed to congratulate himself on his native genius would be making a mistake. In the next sentence, the compiler observes, ‘For this extraordinary result the geography of the country is mainly responsible.’ Geography, being a scientific subject, commanded his respect, and he was inclined to consider under that heading the rise and fall of empires and other events usually thought to belong to history. On the other hand, the British Empire, thus placed on a scientific footing, could simply be accepted as a fact. He did not praise it on patriotic grounds or condemn it on socialist grounds; he just admired its dimensions.
He disapproves of many British institutions for not being ‘scientific’, by which in that context he means socialist, and others he treats with a proper scepticism (secularists, he said, regard scepticism ‘as a moral duty’). Scattered entries reveal a pride in Scottish achievements – one of the longest in the entire ‘Compendium’ is devoted to ‘Scotch Railway Speeds’. But on the whole – and contrary to contemporary fashion – he sets little store by race or nationality, except where he singles out those who for reasons of exoticness had qualified for anthropological attention: the Bedouins, who ‘lead solitary, precarious lives, but … have violent passions and love robbery’; the Eskimos, who ‘are not deficient in intellect, and are kind and hospitable’; the Gypsies, whose ‘one merit seems to be their love of and talent for music’. Of the Jews he say that ‘in modern times … they have produced some of the greatest men in the arts and literature,’ and cites Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Heine – and Beethoven and Schubert. In an adjacent entry he specifies the prices for which various Jews sold their relatives and friends: ‘Joseph was sold by his brethren for about £2 7s. 0d.; Judas sold his Master for £3 10s. 8d.; Naaman offered Elisha more than £10,000; and the debtor who refused to forgive his fellow servant the 100 pence … had himself been forgiven a debt of £3,422,625.’
His assumptions would today be called Eurocentric. Chopsticks, for instance, are ‘the Chinese substitute for our knife, fork and spoon’ – and soy sauce, no doubt, their substitute for Gentleman’s Relish. The Russians are praised for saving Europe from the Asiatic horde: ‘It is fairly true to say that there is not a freeman between the Pruth and the Adriatic today who does not owe his freedom mainly to Russia’ … well, he does only say ‘fairly’. ‘The laziness of the negroes’ has been responsible for the decline in West Indian sugar production. But Europeans and Americans have defects, too. The French have been let down by their ‘lust for military glory’; the standards of American political life are not high: James A. Garfield, he says, was ‘elected president mainly because of his sterling honesty – an unusual claim to political advancement anywhere, and least of all in America’.
The soap hasn’t changed much, either.
The Language of Novel Reviewing
How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often:
Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys.
For the friends of the Piontek family, 31 August 1939 was a red-letter day.
All her life Jean Hawkins was obedient.
It looks as though the writers of these reviews have set out not to summarise the plot but to tell the story, with the drawback, from the novelist’s point of view, that readers may content themselves with the reviewer’s version. Other reviews begin with a different sort of story – the reviewer’s:
Halfway through Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel I found I was laughing until the tears ran down my cheeks.
Some start by characterising the novel:
An aura of death, despair, madness and futility hangs over the late James Jones’s posthumous novel.
Others by characterising the reviewer: ‘Count me among the Philistines,’ says Jerome Charyn, inauspiciously, at the start of a review in the New York Times. Some begin with a paragraph on the novel now; some begin by addressing the reader:
You might not think there would be much wit or lyricism to the story of a subnormal wall-eyed Balkan peasant who spends 13 years masturbating in a pigsty …
Some kick off at the end: ‘Final Payments is a well-made, realistic novel of refined sensibility and moral scruple’; and others at the beginning: ‘The five writers under review have been browsing …’
Different openings suggest different attitudes, both to the novel and to the practice of reviewing novels. There are ideologies of the novel and ideologies of the novel review, fictional conventions and reviewing conventions. They don’t necessarily overlap. A regular reviewer, confident of his own constituency, may describe a novel in terms of his own responses to it: he wouldn’t for that reason applaud a novelist for writing in a similarly personal vein. What reviews have in common is that they must all in some degree be re-creations: reshapings of what the novelist has already shaped. The writer’s fortunes depend on the reviews he gets but the reviewer depends on the book to see that his account of it – his ‘story’, to use the language of the newspaper composing room – is interesting. Dull novels don’t elicit interesting reviews: not unless a reviewer decides to be amusing at the novel’s expense or tactfully confines himself to some incidental aspect of it. A generous
reviewer may also invent for the novel the qualities it might have had but hasn’t got.
The most brusque reviews occur in the most marginal newspapers: ‘The new novel by Camden author Beryl Bainbridge,’ said the Camden Journal, ‘took just a few hours to read yet cost £3.95 … The story is fairly interesting, mildly amusing and a little sad.’ A hundred years ago the most brutal things were said about novelists and their works (cf. Henry James on Our Mutual Friend: ‘It is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion’). Today many literary editors, alert to the fact that the novel is under pressure, ask their reviewers to be kind and most of them are. Kind to the old novelist because he is old; kind to the young novelist because he is young; to the English writer because he is English (‘all quiet, wry precision about manners and oddities’) and not American or German; to others because they are black (or white) or women (or men) or refugees from the Soviet Union. Every liberal and illiberal orthodoxy has its champions. Failings are seen to be bound up with virtues (‘there are rough edges to his serious simplicity’); even turned into them (‘though inelegant and sometimes blurred, their heaviness and urgency create their own order of precision’); but seldom passionately denounced, and although every novelist has had bad reviews to complain of, it sometimes seems as if novel reviewing were a branch of the welfare state.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 5