So we have forgotten, with our usual completeness, all about Max Havelaar and about Multatuli, its author. Even the pseudonym, Multatuli (Latin for: I suffered much, or: I endured much), is to us irritating as it was exciting to our grandfathers. We don’t care for poor but noble characters who are aware that they have suffered much. There is too much self-awareness.
On the surface, Max Havelaar is a tract or a pamphlet very much in the same line as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Instead of “pity the poor Negro slave” we have “pity the poor oppressed Javanese”; with the same urgent appeal for legislation, for the government to do something about it. Well, the government did something about Negro slaves, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin fell out of date. The Netherlands government is also said to have done something in Java for the poor Javanese, on the strength of Multatuli’s book. So that Max Havelaar became a back number.
So far so good. If by writing tract-novels you can move governments to improve matters, then write tract-novels by all means. If the government, however, plays up, and does its bit, then the tract- novel has served its purpose, and descends from the stage like a political orator who has made his point.
This is all in the course of nature. And because this is the course of nature, many educated Hollanders today become impatient when they hear educated Germans or English or Americans referring to Max Havelaar as “the one Dutch classic.” So Americans would feel if they heard Uncle Tom’s Cabin referred to as “the one American classic.” Uncle Tom is a back number in the English-speaking world, and Max Havelaar is, to the Dutch-speaking world, another.
If you ask a Hollander for a really good Dutch novelist he refers you to the man who wrote: Old People and the Things that Pass, (Louis Couperus) — or else to somebody you know nothing about.
As regards the Dutch somebody I know nothing about, I am speechless. But as regards Old People and the Things that Pass I still think Max Havelaar a far more real book. And since Old People etc. is quite a good contemporary novel, one needs to find out why Max Havelaar is better.
I have not tried to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin since I was a boy, and wept. I will try again, when 1 come across a copy. But I am afraid it will pall. I know I shan’t weep.
Then why doesn’t Max Havelaar pall? Why can one still read every word of it? As far as composition goes, it is the greatest mess possible. How the reviewers of today would tear it across and throw it in the w.p.b! But the reviewers of today, like the clergy, feel that they must justify God to man, and when they find they can’t do it, when the book or the Almighty seems really unjustifiable, in the sight of common men, they apply the w.p.b.
It is surely the mistake of modern criticism, to conceive the public, the man-in-the-street, as the real god, who must be served and flattered by every book that appears, even if it were the Bible. To my thinking, the critic, like a good beadle, should rap the public on the knuckles and make it attend during divine service. And any good book is divine service.
The critic, having dated Max Havelaar a back number, hits him on the head if he dares look up, and says: Down! Revere the awesome modernity of the holy public!
I say: Not at all! The thing in Max that the public once loved, the tract, is really a back number. But there is so very little of the tract, actually, and what there is, the author has retracted so comically, as he went, that the reader can grin as he goes.
It was a stroke of cunning journalism on Multatuli’s part (Dostoievsky also made such strokes of cunning journalism) to put his book through on its face value as a tract. What Multatuli really wanted was to get his book over. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to be read. I want to be heard. I will be heard! he vociferates on the last pages. He himself must have laughed in his sleeve as he vociferated. But the public gaped and fell for it.
He was the passionate missionary for the poor Javanese! Because he knew missionaries were, and are, listened to! And the Javanese were a good stick with which to beat the dog. The successful public being the dog. Which dog he longed to beat. To give it the trouncing of its life!
He did it, in missionary guise, in Max Havelaar. The book isn’t really a tract, it is a satire. Multatuli isn’t really a preacher, he’s a satirical humourist. Straight on in the life of Jean Paul Richter the same bitter, almost mad-dog aversion from humanity that appeared in Jean Paul, appears again in Multatuli, as it appears in the later Mark Twain. Dostoievsky was somewhat the same, but in him the missionary had swallowed the mad dog of revulsion, so that the howls of derision are all ventriloquistic undertone.
Max Havelaar isn’t a tract or a pamphlet, it is a satire. The satire on the Dutch bourgeois, in Drystubble, is final. The coffee- broker is reduced to his ultimate nothingness, in pure humour. It is the reduction of the prosperous business man in America and England today, just the same, essentially the same: and it is a death-stroke.
Similarly, the Java part of the book is a satire on colonial administration, and on government altogether. It is quite direct and straightforward satire, so it is wholesome. Multatuli never quite falls down the fathomless well of his own revulsion, as Dostoievsky did, to become a lily-mouthed missionary rumbling with ventral howls of derision and dementia. At his worst, Multatuli is irritat- ingly sentimental, harping on pity when he is inspired by hate. Maybe he deceives himself. But never for long.
His sympathy with the Javanese is also genuine enough; there was a man in him whose bowels of compassion were moved. Whereas a great nervous genius like Dostoievsky never felt a moment of real physical sympathy in his life. But with Multatuli, the sympathy for the Javanese is rather an excuse for hating the Dutch authorities still further. It is the sympathy of a man preoccupied with other feelings.
We see this in the famous idyll of Sai’dyah and Adinda, once the most beloved and most quoted part of the book. We see how it bored the author to write it, after the first few pages. He tells us it bored him. It bored him to write sympathetically. He was by nature a satirical humorist, and it was far more exciting for him to be attack- ing the Dutch officials than sympathizing with the Javanese.
This is again obvious in his partiality for the old Native Prince, the Regent. It is obvious that all the actual oppression of the poor Javanese came from the Javanese themselves, the native princes. It isn’t the Dutch officials who steal Sai’dyah’s buffalo: it is the princely Javanese. The oppression has been going on, Havelaar himself says it, since the beginning of time. Not since the coming of the Dutch. Indeed, it is the Oriental idea that the prince shall oppress his humble subjects. So why blame the Dutch officials so absolutely? Why not take the old native Regent by the beard?
But no! Multatuli, Max Havelaar, swims with pity for the poor and oppressed, but only because he hates the powers-that-be so intensely. He doesn’t hate the powers because he loves the oppressed. The boot is on the other leg. The chick of pity comes out of the egg of hate. It is perhaps always so, with pity. But here we have to distinguish compassion from pity.
Surely, when Sai’dyah sets off into the world, or is defended by the buffalo, it is compassion Multatuli feels for him, not pity. But the end is pity only.
The bird of hate hatches the chick of pity. The great dynamic force in Multatuli is as it was, really, in Jean Paul and in Swift and Gogol and in Mark Twain, hate, a passionate, honourable hate. It is honourable to hate Drystubble, and Multatuli hated him. It is honourable to hate cowardly officialdom, and Maltatuli hated that. Sometimes, it is even honourable, and necessary, to hate society, as Swift did, or to hate mankind altogether, as often Voltaire did.
For man tends to deteriorate into that which Drystubble was, and the Governor-General and Slimering, something hateful, which must be destroyed. Then in comes Maltatuli, like Jack and the Beanstalk, to fight the giant.
And when Jack fights the giant, he must have recourse to a trick. David thought of a sling and stone. Multatuli took a sort of missionary disguise. The gross public accepted the disguise, and David’s stone went home. A la guerre comme a la guerre.
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sp; When there are no more Drystubbles, no more Governor-Generals or Slimerings, then Max Havelaar will be out of date. The book is a pill rather than a comfit. The jam of pity was put on to get the pill down. Our fathers and grandfathers licked the jam off. We can still go on taking the pill, for the social constipation is as bad as ever.
Cavalleria Rusticana, by Giovanni Verga
Cavalleria Rusticana is in many ways the most interesting of the Verga books. The volume of short stories under this title appeared in 1880, when the author was forty years old, and when he had just “retired” from the world.
The Verga family owned land around Vizzini, a biggish village in southern Sicily; and here, in and around Vizzini, the tragedies of Turiddu and La Lupa and Jeli take place. But it was only in middle life that the drama of peasant passion really made an impression on Giovanni Verga. His earlier imagination, naturally, went out into the great world.
The family of the future author lived chiefly at Catania, the seaport of east Sicily, under Etna. And Catania was really Verga’s home town, just as Vizzini was his home village.
But as a young man of twenty he already wanted to depart into the bigger world of “the Continent,” as the Sicilians called the mainland of Italy. It was the Italy of 1860, the Italy of Garibaldi, and the new era. Verga seems to have taken little interest in politics. He had no doubt the southern idea of himself as a gentleman and an aristocrat, beyond politics. And he had the ancient southern thirst for show, for lustre, for glory, a desire to figure grandly among the first society of the world. His nature was proud and unmixable. At the same time, he had the southern passionate yearning for tenderness and generosity. And so he ventured into the world, without much money; and, in true southern fashion, he was dazzled. To the end of his days he was dazzled by elegant ladies in elegant equipages: one sees it, amusingly, in all his books.
He was a handsome man, by instinct haughty and reserved: because, partly, he was passionate and emotional, and did not choose to give himself away. A true provincial, he had to try to enter the beau monde. He lived by journalism, more or less: certainly the Vizzini lands would not keep him in affluence. But still, in his comparative poverty, he must enter the beau monde.
He did so: and apparently with a certain success. And for nearly twenty years he lived in Milan, in Florence, in Naples, writing, and imagining he was fulfilling his thirst for glory by having love-affairs with elegant ladies: most elegant ladies, as he assures us.
To this period belong the curiously unequal novels of the city world: Eva, Tigre Reale, Eros. They are interesting, alive, bitter, somewhat unhealthy, smelling of the seventies and of the Paris of the Goncourts, and, in some curious way, abortive. The man had not found himself. He was in his wrong element, fooling himself and being fooled by show, in a true Italian fashion.
Then, towards the age of forty, came the recoil, and the Cavalleria Rusticana volume is the first book of the recoil. It was a recoil away from the beau monde and the “Continent,” back to Sicily, to Catania, to the peasants. Verga never married: but he was deeply attached to his own family. He lived in Catania, with his sister. His brother, or brother-in-law, who had looked after the Vizzini property, was ill. So for the first time in his life Giovanni Verga had to undertake the responsibility for the family estate and fortune. He had to go to Vizzini and more or less manage the farm work — at least keep an eye on it. He said he hated the job, that he had no capacity for business, and so on. But we may be sure he managed very well. And certainly from this experience he gained his real fortune, his genuine sympathy with peasant life, instead of his spurious sympathy with elegant ladies. His great books all followed Cavalleria Rusticana: and Mastro-don Gesualdo and the Novelle Rusticane (“Little Novels of Sicily”) and most of the sketches have their scenes laid in or around Vizzini.
So that Cavalleria Rusticana marks a turning-point in the man’s life. Verga still looks back to the city elegance, and makes such a sour face over it, it is really funny. The sketch he calls “Fantas- ticheria” (“Caprice”) and the last story in the book, “II Come, il Quando, et il Perche” (“The How, When, and Wherefore”) both deal with the elegant little lady herself. The sketch “Caprice” we may take as autobiographical — the story not entirely so. But we have enough data to go on.
The elegant little lady is the same, pretty, spoilt, impulsive emotional, but without passion. The lover, Polidori, is only half- sketched. But evidently he is a passionate man who thinks he can play at love and then is mortified to his very soul because he finds it is only a game. The tone of mortification is amusingly evident both in the sketch and in the story. Verga is profoundly and everlastingly offended with the little lady, with all little ladies, for not taking him absolutely seriously as an amorous male, when all the time he doesn’t quite take himself seriously, and doesn’t take the little lady seriously at all.
Nevertheless, the moment of sheer roused passion is serious in the man: and apparently not so in the woman. Each time the moment comes, it involves the whole nature of the man and does not involve the whole nature of the woman: she still clings to her social safeguards. It is the difference between a passionate nature and an emotional nature. But then the man goes out deliberately to make love to the emotional elegant woman who is truly social and not passionate. So he has only himself to blame if his passionate nose is out of joint.
It is most obviously out of joint. His little picture of the elegant little lady jingling her scent-bottle and gazing in nervous anxiety for the train from Catania which will carry her away from Aci- Trezza and her too-intense lover, back to her light, gay, secure world on the mainland is one of the most amusingly biting things in the literature of love. How glad she must have been to get away from him! And how bored she must have been by his preaching the virtues of the humble poor, holding them up before her to make her feel small. We may be sure she doesn’t feel small, only nervous and irritable. For apparently she had no deep warmth or generosity of nature.
So Verga recoiled to the humble poor, as we see in his “Caprice” sketch. Like a southerner, what he did he did wholesale. Floods of savage and tragic pity he poured upon the humble fisher-folk of Aci-Trezza, whether they asked for it or not — partly to spite the elegant little lady. And this particular flood spreads over the whole of his long novel concerning the fisher-folk of Aci-Trezza: I Ma- lavoglia. It is a great novel, in spite of the pity: but always in spite of it.
In Cavalleria Rusticana, however, Verga had not yet come to the point of letting loose his pity. He is still too much and too profoundly offended, as a passionate male. He recoils savagely away from the sophistications of the city life of elegant little ladies, to the peasants in their most crude and simple, almost brute-like aspect.
When one reads, one after the other, the stories of Turiddu, La Lupa, Jeli, Brothpot, Rosso Malpelo, one after the other, stories of crude killing, it seems almost too much, too crude, too violent, too much a question of mere brutes.
As a matter of fact, the judgment is unjust. Turiddu is not a brute: neither is Alfio. Both are men of sensitive and even honourable nature. Turiddu knows he is wrong, and would even let himself be killed, he says, but for the thought of his old mother. The elegant Maria and her Erminia are never so sensitive and direct in expressing themselves; not so frankly warm-hearted.
As for Jeli, who could call him a brute? or Nanni? or Brothpot? They are perhaps not brutal enough. They are too gentle and forbearing, too delicately naive. And so grosser natures trespass on them unpardonably; and the revenge flashes out.
His contemporaries abused Verga for being a realist of the Zola school. The charge is unjust. The base of the charge against Zola is that he made his people too often merely physical-functional arrangements, physically and materially functioning without any “higher” nature. The charge against Zola is often justifiable. It is completely justifiable against the earlier d’Annunzio. In fact, the Italian tends on the one hand to be this creature of physical- functional activity and noth
ing else, spasmodically sensual and materialist; hence the violent Italian outcry against the portrayal of such creatures, and d’Annunzio’s speedy transition to neurotic Virgins of the Rocks and ultra-refinements.
But Verga’s people are always people in the purest sense of the word. They are not intellectual, but then neither was Hector nor Ulysses intellectual. Verga, in his recoil, mistrusted everything that smelled of sophistication. He had a passion for the most naive, the most unsophisticated manifestation of human nature. He was not seeking the brute, the animal man, the so-called cave-man. Far from it. He knew already too well that the brute and the cave-man lie quite near under the skin of the ordinary successful man of the world. There you have the predatory cave-man of vulgar imagination, thinly hidden under expensive cloth.
What Verga’s soul yearned for was the purely naive human being, in contrast to the sophisticated. It seems as if Sicily, in some way, under all her amazing forms of sophistication and corruption, still preserves some flower of pure human candour: the same thing that fascinated Theocritus. Theocritus was an Alexandrine courtier, singing from all his “musk and insolence” of the pure idyllic Sicilian shepherds. Verga is the Theocritus of the nineteenth century, born among the Sicilian shepherds, and speaking of them in prose more sadly than Theocritus, yet with some of the same eternal Sicilian dawn-freshness in his vision. It is almost bitter to think that Rosso Malpelo must often have looked along the coast and seen the rocks that the Cyclops flung at Ulysses; and that Jeli must some time or other have looked to the yellow temple-ruins of Girgenti.
Verga was fascinated, after his mortification in the beau monde, by pure naivete and by the spontaneous passion of life, that spurts beyond all convention or even law. Yet as we read, one after the other, of these betrayed husbands killing the co-respondents, it seems a little mechanical. Alfio, Jeli, Brothpot, Gramigna ending their life in prison: it seems a bit futile and hopeless, mechanical again.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1020