After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  As far as his fiction was concerned, he made use of the Other, and the Ghostly, in completely original ways. One of his most accomplished stories, ‘The Jolly Corner’, describes a man very much like himself returning to the New York house of his childhood after thirty years of European absence. He intends to set his affairs in order. One of his properties is being converted into ‘a tall mass of flats’, from whose rental he intends to live. The other, however, the old brownstone house of his family memories, he intends to keep as a sort of shrine, looked after by the redoubtable Irish housekeeper Mrs Muldoon.

  New York appals Spencer Brydon, the hero of the tale:

  Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly – these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened under the charm; whereas the ‘swagger’ things, the modern, the monstrous the famous things, those he had most particularly, like thousands of ingenious enquirers every year come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay.

  On his last visit to the States, James himself complained of ‘the violence of the assault of this appalling country on almost every honourable sense’.

  Everything which Henry James stood for, as an artist, was summed up in the simple biographical fact that he was an American who chose to reside in Europe – in what he (unlike Mr Rumsfeld) would have been pleased to call old Europe. He was destined, so passionately attached was he to these values, which he saw Britain as defending in the Great War, to become a British subject in 1915. But what would have happened, had he not done so? That is really the theme of ‘The Jolly Corner’. The ghost whom he is tracking down in the deserted old house near Washington Square is none other than his own. In an interesting variation on two other tales of the uncanny, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, James is on the prowl for a self who never came into being – his American self.

  Readers of ghost stories, whatever they believe or ‘believe’ when they are not holding the volume in their hand, momentarily suppose that the spectre or haunting is real. It is quite an achievement on James’s part that he turns us to gooseflesh, as he undoubtedly does in ‘The Jolly Corner’, by this pursuit of a phantom.

  It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence. Rigid and conscious, spectral, yet human, a man of his own substance and stature, waited there to measure himself with his own power to dismay.

  Spencer Brydon goes to New York to meet his old self, but also to renew acquaintance with an old female friend with whom, perhaps, he might have enjoyed an intimacy which was closer. When she shows, at the end, that she understands his quest – which is more, wholly, than the reader does – the two draw together in an embrace. Such overcoming of emotional stiffness was never to be James’s in life. He lived in his imagination, and to a remarkable degree for a man so worldly-wise, in his boyhood, his prepubescent self.

  The dark, shadowy house is frightening, and yet reassuring at the same time – just like childhood memories themselves. James, therefore, in this story penned in his mid-sixties, managed to expand the capacities of the Uncanny Tale, identifying, in our sense of the ghostly, something else – namely our feelings about childhood, children and, one of his favourite themes, innocence. To this extent, ‘The Jolly Corner’ is a companion piece, and in part a commentary, on James’s most celebrated tale of the uncanny, The Turn of the Screw.

  But it was in his late masterpiece The Golden Bowl that we feel James meditating on things larger than its supposed theme of an adultery, meditating upon the place of his old country in the world, and on its relation to his adopted country.

  The Golden Bowl is a dense book, and there must have been many who have been repelled by its quite extraordinary style. The old joke was that Henry James’s career moved through three phases – James the First wrote such early triumphs as Washington Square, James the Second, deemed by most admirers to be the best, wrote the majestic and psychologically brilliant Portrait of a Lady. The next phase was that of The Old Pretender. It was H. G. Wells, a protégé of Henry James, who so unkindly but memorably captured what this last phase was like:

  He splits his infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And all for tales of nothingness … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but it can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness of mind, pick up that pea.13

  And yet, for all the absurd prolixity and circumlocution, The Golden Bowl is one of the great books of the world – arguably the greatest novel in the English language.

  There used to be a vogue for seeing it as some kind of religious allegory. I do not think it is an allegory at all, but the very title, and the cracked, flawed objet at the centre of the story, is suggestive – which is different. When Maggie’s friend Fanny Assingham smashes the bowl – Maggie has been tricked into buying it even though it is flawed, and tricked into ignorance of an affair between her best friend and her husband – we sense that more is at work than a melodrama. Asked once how he thought of his stories, James once replied: ‘It’s all “about”, it’s about – it’s in the air so to speak, it follows me and dogs me.’ The Golden Bowl is ‘about’ more than it seems to be about.

  Surely this extra ‘about’ is the special relationship between America and Britain. It is really the old theme of themes for James – it had been from the beginning, with such crystalline early masterpieces as Daisy Miller – the story of innocent Americans coming to dissipated ‘Old Europe’ and being ensnared. This is the central theme of The Portrait of a Lady, in which Isabel Archer is tricked by Madame Merle.

  In The Golden Bowl, however, there is a dramatic reversal of the usual pattern. Whereas in most of James’s stories the innocent Americans are duped and tricked by the Europeans, in this last masterpiece the simple, decent all-American girl beats the devious Italian Prince whom she has married.

  The essential ingredient in the story is old Mr Verver’s money. One says old, but he is forty-seven at the beginning of the story; such is the stately pace of the book that one thinks of all the characters as antique. As far as Prince Amerigo is aware, it is England which is the big, rich, powerful nation. He comes to London at the beginning of the book and finds ‘by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’. In the superb central chapter, when Amerigo and Charlotte consummate their adultery, it is at the appropriately named Matcham – a country house weekend where Lady Castledean and her ‘toy-boy’ Mr Blint preside over a ‘great house, full of people, of possible new combinations, of the quickened play of possible propinquity’. The Prince in his vulgar way sees that everything about the patterned day at Matcham – the walks, the billiards, the meals, ‘the nightly climax over the “bottigliera”, as he called it of the bristling tray’ – costs money. Everywhere he senses ‘a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns’. But what James has sensed, surely, in this book, is that the bag is no longer bottomless. The Yankees have more verve, more energy. It is the Verver fortune which can be quietly manipulated to save both marriages – his own to Charlotte, his daughter’s to the prince. Charlotte the adulteress is taken back to the United States by Mr Verver. Maggie sacrifices herself and stays in old Europe, but we sense in this strong moral choice of hers that she now remains, not as a pathetic exile – as so many previous Jamesian heroines had done – so much as an occupying power.

  * The lines come from a Eucharistic hymn by Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74).

  7

  Nationalisms<
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  On a wet June day in 1912, 13,000 Welshmen ‘of all ranks’1 assembled in Regent’s Park in London, marched down Regent’s Street and up Piccadilly to Hyde Park. The rain was so heavy by the time they reached their destination that the speeches were curtailed, but later in the day they repaired to the shelter of the Albert Hall, where the proceedings were chaired by the Archbishop of York, and speakers included the Duke of Devonshire and the Bishop of St Asaph. In spite of the ardour with which these speakers addressed an enthusiastic audience, we read that the general public remained ‘apathetic’2 to the subject which caused them so much concern, namely the possible disestablishment of the Welsh Church.

  At this date, the bishops of the Welsh Church, in common with those of England, were appointed by the Crown – in effect by the prime minister in London. Eventually, after decades of debating the matter, Parliament would pass Welsh Disestablishment into law on 18 September 1914, by which time politicians in Britain and Europe had more pressing affairs on their minds. It was agreed that the operation of the Act would be suspended until after the war. It was only with the passage of the Welsh Church Temporalities Act, 1919, that the new ecclesiastical province was formed, with Bishop A. G. Edwards of St Asaph being formally invested as the first Archbishop of Wales on 1 June 1920.3

  The issue is one of such esoteric obscurity that even today, many actual members of the Church in Wales, that is Anglicans, find it confusing. In the years before the Welsh Disestablishment Bill passed into law, however, feelings, or at any rate rhetoric, ran high. This was because like so many quarrels which seem obscure to outsiders, much more was at stake than the narrow issues in small print. It was a matter, in miniature, which reflected the great movements of events which would change the face of Europe, and which in other places would lead to violent conflict and Europe’s near self-destruction. It was, apart from other things, a class issue. The Church was perceived, with some justice, as being part of the old feudal order. The parson and the bishop were at one with the squire and the mine-owner. In many minds, the matters of Church and Education were intimately linked. Lloyd George had been (very well) educated at a church school in Llanystumdwy, but he had asserted his Baptist credentials by refusing to say the Creed when a boy there. ‘I hate a priest, Daniel, wherever I find him,’ he confided in a friend. He was not very conspicuous in his Christian observance, but his hammy attacks on attempts to force Church catechisms on Baptist, Methodist or Congregationalist Welsh children went down very well with his audiences in the valleys.

  There was once a time when the people of this country had mastered the Bible, and at the same time there arose a monarch who taxed the people without their consent for purposes to which they objected. There also arose a State priesthood who wanted to exalt over all their extravagant pretensions. There was a famous Scripture reader with Welsh blood in his veins, of the name of Oliver Cromwell. He had mastered all the revolutionary and explosive texts in that Book, and the result was destructive to that State priesthood. The bench of bishops was blown up, the House of Lords disappeared, and the aristocracy of this land rocked as though an earthquake had shaken them.4

  Even hammier, and even more memorable:*

  Give the children the Bible if you want to teach them the Christian faith. Let it be expounded to them by its Founder. Stop this brawling of priests in and around the schools, so that the children may hear Him speak to them in His own words. I appeal to the House of Commons now, at the eleventh hour, to use its great influence and lift its commanding voice and say, ‘Pray, silence for the Master’.5

  Those speeches refer not to disestablishment as such but to the influence of the Church in Welsh schools. They show, however, that, as in Ireland, the question of religion was deeply bound up with that of nationalism.

  There were some 550,280 practising Nonconformists in Wales in 1906, against 193,081 communicants in the established Church.6 The case for disestablishment could be seen, then, not only as a class-based, but as a nationalist issue. With some one and a half million people living in Wales,7 the overwhelming majority were worshippers at some non-Anglican chapel. Gladstone, in 1891, speaking in favour of disestablishment, had declared in Parliament that ‘the nonconformists of Wales were the people of Wales’.8 The compulsory payment of ‘tithes’, that is a proportion (originally a tenth) of rent to the Church, was understandably resented by the Baptist smallholder, the Calvinistic Methodist shepherd or the Congregationalist coal miner. Here was a case not merely of one class exploiting another, but of Welsh national identity discovering and focusing itself in this comparatively esoteric question.

  Dr John Clifford, a fiery bearded Baptist preacher, used the Welsh education bills and disestablishment bills to argue, not merely for a disestablished Bishop of Bangor, but for a different world, in which small nations and minorities within those nations had self-determination. On the other hand, the defenders of the status quo such as Lord Robert Cecil or the Duke of Devonshire knew that more was at stake than Welsh tithes. Lord Robert, ‘who believed Welsh Disestablishmentarianism was “individualism gone mad” or else … an unconscious conviction that religion is of no serious importance’,9 resigned from the government on principle when the Bill was passed. F. E. Smith, during the second reading of the Bill in the Commons, said it had ‘shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe’, prompting Chesterton’s ‘Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom, an Ode’:

  Russian peasants round their pope

  Huddled, Smith,

  Hear about it all, I hope,

  Don’t they, Smith?

  In the mountain hamlets clothing

  Peaks beyond Caucasian pales,

  Where Establishment means nothing

  And they never heard of Wales,

  Do they read it all in Hansard

  With a crib to read it with –

  ‘Welsh tithes: Dr Clifford Answered’

  Really, Smith?

  Chesterton’s reductio ad absurdum skewered F. E. Smith with brilliance, but, read nearly a century later, it reminds us that the various peoples and races evoked in the spoof – the Breton fishermen, the Turks – would all be encouraged by the dreams of nationalism and democracy. So would the Irish and the Serbs. The Jews, who had possessed no homeland since the Emperor Titus sacked Jerusalem in the year 70, would, such was the climate of the times, believe that the solution to their problems was the same as that for which many Irish and some Welsh, and most Balkan peoples, were yearning: Home Rule.

  The Bible played a central role in the way that the Protestant peoples of northern Europe saw themselves. Just as Luther’s Bible, as well as being the translation of Hebrew and Greek texts, is also a work of German literature; just as the Geneva, and to a smaller degree the Authorized Version of the Bible shaped the political self-consciousness of Milton and Bunyan’s Englishmen; so the Bible in Welsh became something much more than a version of Near Eastern culture transposed into a Celtic tongue. It became a template by which the Welsh read their own story, a beleaguered, proud, small, pious people maintaining their identity against the threats of powerful neighbours. If the Welsh Bible was important at the time of the Reformation, it became even more so at the time of the Nonconformist conversion of Wales in the eighteenth century and during the various Nonconformist revivals of the nineteenth century. Tens of thousands of Welsh bibles were in circulation. One eyewitness in July 1810 described the arrival in a remote rural spot of a new printing of the New Testament, selling for one shilling each:

  When the arrival of the cart was announced, which carried the first sacred load, the Welsh peasants went out in crowds to meet it; welcomed it as the Israelites did the ark of old; drew it into the town; and eagerly bore off every copy, as rapidly as they could be dispersed. The young people were to be seen consuming the whole night in reading it. Labourers carried it with them to the field, that they might enjoy it during the intervals of their labour, and lose no opportunities of becoming acquainted with its sacred truths.10


  At the beginning of the twentieth century it was ‘quite a common thing to find in cottages three, four or more Bibles’.11 Welsh identification with the Jews became, on an analogical level, all but complete. Their chapels – Bethel, Bethesda, Ephraim, Ebenezer – took their names from the Bible, as did many of their villages. (My English father liked to post his Christmas cards in the Carmarthenshire village of Bethlehem.) After the English effectively obliterated the right of the Welsh to possess family names, many Welsh families took Jewish names such as Aaron or Samuel. (By paradox, many Jewish immigrants took Welsh names such as Lewis or Davis as rationalizations of Levi or David.) The identification of Protestant Bible-readers with the People of God in the Bible was not uniquely Welsh. ‘I think it is good to be brought up a Protestant’, wrote D. H. Lawrence:

  and among Protestants, a Nonconformist, and among Nonconformists, a Congregationalist, which sounds pharisaic. But I should have missed bitterly a direct knowledge of the Bible, and a direct relation to Galilee and Canaan, Moab and Kedron, those places that never existed on earth … To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed imagination.12

  One of the most striking ways in which the British male of this date expressed a feeling of kinship with the Jews was in the popularity of circumcision. ‘It is a curious fact,’ wrote Ronald Hyam in his masterly Empire and Sexuality, ‘that outside the traditional circumcising communities [Jewish, Muslim, Melanesian, Amerindian and some African] the only Westerners to adopt it as a common practice were the English-speaking peoples.’13 The plot of George Eliot’s last great novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, had hinged upon the discovery by the central character that he was Jewish, a fact unknown until his mature years. An American critic of our own day remarked that ‘Deronda had only to look’.14 But not, in 1876, if he had been of Jewish origin, but brought up from birth as if gentile.