The Golden Fleece: Essays

by Muriel Spark

  Throughout, he was most unaffectedly gracious, kind and sweet – an absolute poppet. I had rather expected to find a denunciatory reactionary somewhat out of sorts with the world & soured by neglect. Not a bit of it. His interest in all varieties of life’s manifestations is still avid – much more so than mine or most of my generation’s will ever be. The inner life of the man has not swallowed up the outer life. He is a poet of outwardness – of the essence of reality, not the essence of illusion. A born story-teller (as Herbert Palmer writes) – and this is true of his conversation as well as his art.

  The car dropped me at Broad Street. It was just before 2.30. I dived into a basement tavern next door to Blackwell’s and knocked back a double rum. Even so, I have a cold from my day’s excursion.

  One of the things I found very charming about Masefield was his interest in my tartan dress, which led him to look up the colours in a book, Clans & Tartans of Scotland: it is that of the MacKenzies. The war-cry was given as ‘Tulach Ard’, which fascinated Masefield. He repeated it over and over.

  Dec. 9

  Masefield also remarked on the true greatness of Jude the Obscure. I have remembered, too, that Masefield said that the theme of Dauber was that the artist is compelled to obey the law of his own being, no matter if death or disaster ensues.

  Dec. 9 (evening)

  I have just remembered more things about my visit to Masefield.

  1) He began by asking me if I had a good journey, and had I much trouble getting from my home to Paddington.

  2) He admires Peacock’s poems, especially mentioning ‘The Three Wise Men’ and ‘War Song’.

  3) Re. ‘Dead Ned’ – he said he had a special interest in the Coast of Dead Ned, about which it is said,

  Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin,

  Few come out, though many go in

  4) He said that recently he had been reading some of Tom Moore’s poems, and found some of them surprisingly good, though, he said ‘We used to mock them.’

  5) He spoke about the suitability of the apron-stage to Elizabethan drama. He wondered why the Roman theatre at Verulamium had not been used for theatre purposes – for some open-air drama. Why not a circus – ‘Bertram Mills at the Roman Theatre,’ he said half-humorously.

  6) When I told him I sometimes take a part-time job he said, ‘All experience is good for an artist.’ I felt flattered – about the ‘artist’ bit.

  ***

  I wrote to thank the Masefields for their kindness. Masefield replied […] reiterating the effect of Rossetti and Swinburne on a young poet like himself. He ended the letter hoping that the cry of ‘Tulach Ard!’ would continue to echo up the Old Brompton Road.

  Masefield was born in 1878. He was 72 when I met him, at that time recovering from a serious illness. But he always found time to reply to my queries and to make helpful suggestions. When my book was finally completed I know he was pleased with it:

  Please let me thank you for the patient care with which you have worked at my things, & for the generous things you have written.

  Please forgive me, will you, if I add, after these thanks, (so well deserved by you), that I find a book about myself most difficult to read. ‘What a pity,’ I keep saying, ‘that this Lady had not a better subject.’

  I did not meet John Masefield again till the mid-sixties. He was now well over eighty and rather frail. He had attended a poetry reading and was sitting with some friends. I approached to greet him, begging him not to get up. But he stood up straight in his usual manner. He was brimming with pleasure about my successes, for by that time my early novels had been published. ‘Your name is all over the place!’ he said. We spoke for a while about those days, fifteen years before, when I wrote [his biography]: John Masefield.

  [1950 & 1991]

  Decorative Art

  ‘Professor’ George Burchett started his career as a tattooist in the 1880s, working his way from deck-hand in the Navy to a place of pre-eminence above all other professors of his trade. On his death in 1953 he left his life story in the form of miscellaneous papers which are edited and compiled by Peter Leighton under the title Memoirs of a Tattooist. Besides running his own prosperous ‘surgery’ in [London’s] Waterloo Road, Burchett was, from Edwardian days, a Society tattooist, when he tinted the cheeks and lips of Mayfair women. Most of his trade, however, was done during the two wars. There was always a boom, too, just after the wars when home-going servicemen desired the removal of ‘I love Mary’, etc.

  Royal weddings and coronations have always prompted loyal subjects to have their skins adorned with photographic emblems. We learn that tattooing was, for a while, fashionable amongst royalty and high-ranking Army officers. Edward VII was tattooed. So were Alfonso of Spain and Frederick of Sweden. George V bore a dragon on his forearm. Lord Montgomery’s right arm was adorned with a ‘rather frivolous little butterfly’. But these were small fry to Burchett, who liked to give full scope to his art. ‘Over the years I tattooed my wife elaborately … I think that some of my finest efforts were dedicated to my wife. I have covered nearly every inch of her body …’ The photographs are fearful in their revulsion-fascination.

  [1958]

  Poetry and Politics

  From the very earliest times political affairs have influenced the poet in his work and, paradoxically, poetry of a political nature has flourished in times when it has been most dangerous for the author to be guilty of utterance for or against political factions. It is easier to write ambiguously in poetry than in prose and possibly this explains why surreptitious and sly comments on various forms of government have been made in verse throughout the centuries; this applies to the oldest of the nursery rhymes (most of which had a political significance) as well as to the poetry of the French resistance in World War II.

  In the fourteenth century the political lyric was the favourite means by which gleemen and minstrels courted the people. These ballads are full of reference to the government of the day – usually in complaint against injustice. A political poem with a satirical flavour of the early fourteenth century denounces the violation of Magna Carta:

  For might is right, the land is lawless,

  for night is light, the land is loreless,

  for fight is flight, the land is nameless…

  Poetic drama was the principal vehicle for political poetry in the reign of Elizabeth. Tongue in cheek, dramatists expressed, through the lips of court fool, gravedigger or courtier, what they would not have been able conveniently to write in straightforward prose. Shakespeare, of course, was an agile practitioner of this form of subtlety.

  Political verse was popular, and reached its peak in the seventeenth century when it was a common thing for poets of genius such as Marvell (Member for Hull) and Milton (Foreign Secretary) to be active parliamentarians. Commonwealth supporters amongst the poets were responsible for eulogistic odes to Cromwell and his followers whilst the Royalists lay low, to emerge at the Restoration with elaborate panegyrics dedicated to the restored Monarch. Dryden, always adaptable, celebrated both Protector and King in their separate times with equally adulatory stanzas in the heroic measure. Pope, Dryden and Marvell were also keen satirists, the political satire being by far the best medium for the propagandist and pamphleteer; and a successful satire, published at an opportune moment, was often instrumental in influencing public opinion.

  With the Romantic revival towards the end of the eighteenth century and the relaxation of the laws of treason, politics became less a subject for poetry than for the essay or tract, although there have been many outstanding examples of poems on the subject of government and parliamentary figures from Goldsmith to the present day.*

  [1948]

  * Originally, a selection of political poetry compiled by Muriel Spark followed this essay.

  Emily Brontë

  A panegyric by Swinburne on Charlotte Brontë* devotes no minor attention to Emily, and a negotiation of some tortuous sentences will reward the reader with a statement so eleme
ntary that to draw attention to it might seem unnecessary, were it not that sometimes Emily Brontë’s creative genre seems in danger of being misdefined. Extensive references to Emily Brontë as mystic, as poet of Christianity, as heretic, as heathen, as intellectual thinker, as psychical hermaphrodite, as emotional writer, have all been made in this century, with some justification. It has also been suggested, without justification, that she was a lesbian, and that she was an intellectual writer. (This latter definition is here rejected since a distinction must be made between her intellect and her mode of writing.) But emphasis on any one of these aspects of her mind or nature, however diverting, may prove misleading, for none presents her as a creative writer in her integrity.

  Charlotte Brontë’s rhetorical and praiseworthy posthumous note on her sister notwithstanding, it was Swinburne possibly, who most exactly located the essence of Emily Brontë, and strangely enough, it was he who expressed it in the most concise terms: ‘There was a dark unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worship in the passionate great genius of Emily Brontë.’

  Swinburne here noted three of the most important factors in her work: her instinctiveness, of a ‘dark unconscious’ order; her pantheism and its particular type – that of primitive nature-worship; and her passion.

  Emily Brontë’s approach to life, to people, places and things, was manifest in her work in quite original, because in so instinctive a way. That is also true of her approach to the literature of her past, for though it must be apparent that she was indebted to her reading of many poets earlier than, and including, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron and Scott, she did not derive their various influences in any but an instinctive way. It would be surprising to find that she annotated, even mentally, the books she read; rather did she submit to the experience of her reading, allowing it to infiltrate, to become part of, her senses. Her instinct may be said to have acted as a filter, through which the varied modes and feelings of the past achieved that purification necessary to her own poetic genius.

  With the instinctive quality of her thought and expression, her pantheistic conception of life is closely associated. Her vision of nature was, as Swinburne wrote, a primitive one; her longing to become part of and one with the earth was not such that her intellect, more advanced, as is usually the case, than her instincts, could easily accede to.

  O thy bright eyes must answer now,

  When Reason, with a scornful brow,

  Is mocking at my overthrow;

  O thy sweet tongue must plead for me

  And tell why I have chosen thee!

  Stern Reason is to judgment come

  Arrayed in all her forms of gloom:

  Wilt thou my advocate be dumb?

  No, radiant angel, speak and say

  Why I did cast the world away;

  Speak, God of Visions, plead for me,

  And tell why I have chosen thee!

  Thus she invoked her ‘God of Visions’, the nature-image that welded her being into unity; to this interrogation by her intellect, the only answer lies in her own definition of the possessing spirit,

  Thee, ever-present, phantom thing –

  My slave, my comrade and my king.

  She did not find in nature, as did the Wordsworthians, a source merely of spiritual consolation or a philosophical springboard. Nor did she seek a moral lesson from nature, since her God of Visions represented a force which neither preached at nor indulged her, but simultaneously obeyed, befriended, challenged and enthralled. It was a conception of nature subject to no moral laws of the external world; it was a paradoxical, yet not chaotic concept, for the spirit of nature and its retinue, as conceived by her, observed their own peculiar mores operating on a transcendental plane. Her poetry was as much a product of the conflict between this and the outer world – of her sense of exile from her natural home, as was her obvious misanthropy.

  ‘Emily Brontë’s outlook is not immoral, but it is pre-moral’, writes Lord David Cecil.* ‘It concerns itself not with moral standards, but with those conditioning forces of life on which the naïve erections of the human mind that we call moral standards are built up.’ So that, while she, alike with nature, was moved by and was faithful to a strange and unique system of being, this was not entirely unrelated to external modes of behaviour. It was, in fact, their primitive basis: her originality of ideas and expression derived truly from origins.

  Emily Brontë’s occupation of a world existing in a transcendental dimension may lead to the conclusion that she was a mystic. But if she is so defined, it must be added that she was a mystic of passion, for passion informs the tempo and feeling of all her creative writing. Yet, once more, this was not the passion of the outward world, but was the vital and prevailing attribute of Emily Brontë’s exceptional view of life. In her can be seen, as Arthur Symons described it, ‘the paradox of passion without sensuousness’. To interpret this passion that drives and directs her work, as a reflection of her own or some other human being’s objective experience, would be to misjudge the whole disposition of her thought. Arthur Symons might have reconciled his paradox had he considered how pre-human is her passion and her sensuousness; for the feelings and susceptibilities of Emily Brontë’s creation are representative and archetypal rather than individual and specific as are human responses. It might be true to say that, had the events of her outward life evoked any great degree of emotional acknowledgment from her, the passion of her writings must have been of a much more chastened, less idealised, less emphasised order.

  Emily Brontë died in 1848 in the thirty-first year of her life. The most gifted of a talented family, daughter of a clergyman, she received a good education according to current standards, tried school-teaching without success, and attended a finishing school in Brussels for some months; she wrote a novel and a considerable number of poems, and caught a chill at her brother’s funeral which led to her death of consumption at Haworth Parsonage, where she had spent most of her days. That is the factual record of her existence of which little more is known.

  But what of the thoughts, the spirit and temperament, the fierce and radiant genius that she embodied? Charlotte Brontë tells us, ‘In Emily’s nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the imagination of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life…’

  Charlotte was often deceived by her own eloquence, yet, despite the fact that her letters often speak of Emily as being contentedly engaged in the ‘practical business of life’ – in housework, for example, Charlotte’s words describe most convincingly such a mind as created Wuthering Heights.

  Most readers of Brontë biography will know of the extraordinary imaginative activity of the Brontë family in childhood. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, deprived at an early age of their mother, governed by a competent, if somewhat chilly aunt, and by a father elsewhere preoccupied, were largely free to find amusement in their own populous imaginations. Thus they came first to invent a series of adventure tales in which all four participated, and then to commit these games to writing with such prolific industry, that to-day those of Charlotte and Branwell fill two large volumes of the Shakespeare Head Brontë. The two eldest children, Charlotte and Branwell, seem later to have formed a literary alliance, while Emily collaborated likewise with Anne. Though the legends, romances and poems of Angria – the fabulous territory conceived by Charlotte and Branwell – are fortunately extant, those of Gondal, the country of the two younger Brontës’ devising, remain to us only in the adult poems of Emily and Anne. For, long after the childhood partnership of Charlotte and Branwell had ceased, Emily and Anne continued to people their dream world with heroic, exotic figures, with whose loves, wars and destinies they became so closely involved that, in fact, they played the Gondal game all their lives; and this close association between Emily and Ann
e is one which many biographers have, in the present writer’s opinion, underestimated. As we know from the messages they wrote to each other every four years in the ritualistic form of ‘birthday papers’, a strong sympathy existed between the two sisters: Anne, to whose lesser (though not inconsiderable) talent Emily provided a rich and vital stimulus, appears as Emily’s confidante; Emily, as her younger sister’s spiritual partisan.

  Both Emily and Anne wrote poems that can be placed into the categories of ‘Gondal’ and ‘personal’; the former do not, of course, describe their actual experiences. The isolated parsonage, exposed to the Yorkshire moorland, provided no such exhilaration, no such energetic scene of action as their Gondal poems portray; rather did their home’s bare setting supply a negative contribution to their work, in failing to distract. Emily’s Gondal poems are among her finest. Derived, not from outward but from inner experience, they are as personal to her as are her ‘personal’ poems. The Gondal characters, Julius Brenzaida, Alexander of Elbë, Augusta Geraldine Almeda, Rosina and others, are caused to speak and act their parts, but Emily’s own convictions, her judgments and all her tragic intimations, are implicit in their words and actions.

  Throughout her poetry, the image of imprisonment and the vision of release by death prevail. Imprisonment she would equate with life; death represented her rehabilitation with nature. Death, for her, was not annihilation but a very positive force; not good, not evil, but at once the autonomous power whose victim she was, the submissive spirit whose victor.