The Wound And The Bow

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The Wound and the Bow

Books by
EDMUND WILSON

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THE WOUND AND 'IIIL Bow

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SEVEN STUDIES IN LITERATURE
BY

Edmund Wilson

HOUGHTON MIFFJLIN C:OMPANY

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Foreword

A,

. LARGE part of the material in this book has appeared
in a different form in The Atlantic Monthly and The New
Republic

CONTENTS

PAGE ONE

Dickens: The Two Scrooges

PAGE ONL HUNDRED AND HVK

The Kipling that Nobody Read

PAGE ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY -TWO

Uncomfortable Casanova

PAGE ONE HUNDRED AND N1NI-TY HVE

justice to Edith Wharton

PAGE TWO HUNDRED AND I'OURTEEN

Hemingway: Gauge of Morale

PAGE TWO HUNDRED AND I-ORTY THREE

The Dream of H. C. Earwiclcer

PAGE TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY TWO

Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow

DicJcera: The Two Scrooges

To the Students of English m,

University of Chicago, Summer,

a

"p ALL THE great English writers, Charles
Dickens has received in his own country the scantiest
serious attention from either biographers, scholars,
or critics. He has become for the English middle class
so much one of the articles of their creed a familiar
joke, a favorite dish, a Christmas ritual that it is
difficult for British pundits to see in him the great
artist and social critic that he was. Dickens had no
university education, and the literary men from
Oxford and Cambridge, who have lately been sifting
fastidiously so much of the English heritage, have
rather snubbingly let him alone. The Bloomsbury
that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky's
master, Dickens. What happens when the London
of Lytton Strachey does take Dickens up is shown in
Hugh Kingsmill's book, The Sentimental Journey, in
which the man who was called by Taine ' the master
of all hearts' is made into one of those Victorian

2. THE WOUND AND THE BOW

scarecrows with ludicrous Freudian flaws so in-
fantile, pretentious, and hypocritical as to deserve
only a perfunctory sneer.

Since Forster's elaborate memoir, which even in
the supplemented edition of Ley has never been a real
biography, no authoritative book about Dickens has
been published. Some of the main facts about his
life have till recently been kept from the public, and
now that they have finally come out they have usually
been presented cither by doddering Dickens-fanciers
or through the medium of garrulous memoirs. Mr.
Ralph Straus and Mr. T. A. Jackson have recently
published studies of Dickens the one from the
psychological, the other from the Marxist, point of
view which attempt a more searching treatment;
but though they contain some valuable insights,
neither is really first-rate, for neither handles surely
enough or carries to fundamental findings the line
which it undertakes. The typical Dickens expert is
an old duffer who, as Mr. Straus has said, is primarily
interested in proving that Mr. Pickwick stopped at a
certain inn and slept in a certain bed.

As for criticism, there has been in English one ad-
mirable critic of Dickens, George Gissing, whose
prefaces and whose book on Dickens not only arc the
best thing on Dickens in English but stand out as
one of the few really first-rate pieces of literary criti-
cism produced by an Englishman of the end of the
century. For the rest, you have mainly G. K. Chester-
ton, who turned out in his books on Dickens some of
the best work of which he was capable and who said

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 3

some excellent things, but whose writing here as
elsewhere is always melting away into that peculiar
pseudo-poetic booziness which verbalizes with large
conceptions and ignores the most obtrusive actualities.
Chesterton celebrated the jolly Dickens; and Bernard
Shaw offset this picture by praising the later and
gloomier Dickens and insisting on his own debt to
the author of Little Dorrit at a time when it was
taken for granted that he must derive from such for-
eigners as Ibsen and Nietzsche.

Chesterton asserted that time would show that
Dickens was not merely one of the Victorians, but
incomparably the greatest English writer of his time;
and Shaw coupled his name with that of Shakespeare.
It is the conviction of the present writer that both
these judgments were justified. Dickens though
he cannot of course pretend to the rank where Shake-
speare has few companions was nevertheless the
greatest dramatic writer that the English had had
since Shakespeare, and he created the largest and most
varied world. It is the purpose of this essay to show
that we may find in Dickens 1 work today a com-
plexity and a depth to which even Gissing and Shaw
have hardly, it seems to me, done justice an in-
tellectual and artistic interest which makes Dickens
loom very large in the whole perspective of the
literature of the West.

The father of Charles Dickens' father was head
butler in the house of John Crewe (later Lord Crewe)

4 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

of Crewe Hall, Member of Parliament for Chester;
and the mother of his father was a servant in the
house of Marquess Blandford of Grosvenor Square,
who was Lord Chamberlain to the Household of
George III. This grandmother, after her marriage,
became housekeeper at Crewc Hall, and it is assumed
that it was through the patronage of her employer
that her son John Dickens was given a clerkship in
the Navy Pay Office.

John Dickens began at 70 a year and was in time
increased to 350. But he had always had the tastes
of a gentleman. He was an amiable fellow, with an
elegant manner and a flowery vein of talk, who liked
to entertain his friends and who could not help creat-
ing the impression of a way of life beyond his means.
He was always in trouble over bills.

When Charles, who had been born (February 7,
1812.) at Portsmouth and had spent most of his child-
hood out of London at Portsmouth, Portsca and
Chatham, who had had a chance to go to the theater
and to read the Arabian Nights and the eighteenth-
century novelists, and had been taught by a tutor
from Oxford, came up to London at the age of nine to
join his parents, who had been obliged to return there,
he was terribly shocked to find them, as a consequence
of his father's debts, now living in a little back garret
in one of the poorest streets of Camden Town. On
February 10, 182.4, when Charles was twelve, John
Dickens was arrested for debt and taken to the Mar-
shalsea Prison, announcing, as he left the house:
'The sun has set upon me forever!' At home the food

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 5

began to run low; and they had to pawn the household
belongings till all but two rooms were bare. Charles
even had to carry his books, one by one, to the pawn-
shop. It was presently decided that the boy should
go to work at six shillings a week for a cousin who
manufactured blacking; and through six months, in
a rickety old house by the river, full of dirt and in-
fested with rats, he pasted labels on blacking bottles,
in the company of riverside boys who called him
'the little gentleman/ He wanted terribly to go on
with his schooling, and couldn't grasp what had
happened to him. The whole of the rest of the family
moved into the Marshalsea with his father; and
Charles, who had a lodging near them, went to the
jail after work every evening and ate breakfast with
them every morning. He was so ashamed of the
situation that he would never allow his companion
at the blacking warehouse, whose name was Bob
Fagin, to go with him to the door of the prison, but
would take leave of him and walk up the steps of a
strange house and pretend to be going in He had had
a kind of nervous tits in his earlier childhood, and
now these began to recur. One day at work he was
seized with such an acute spasm that he had to lie
down on some straw on the floor, and the boys who
worked with him spent half the day applying blacking
bottles of hot water to his side.

John Dickens inherited a legacy in May and got
out of jail the twenty-eighth; but he let Charles keep
on working in the warehouse. The little boys did
their pasting next to the window in order to get the

6 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

light, and people used to stop to look in at them
because they had become so quick and skilful at it.
This was an added humiliation for Charles; and one
day when John Dickens came there, he wondered how
his father could bear it. At last perhaps, Dickens
thought, as a result of what he had seen on this visit
John quarreled with Charles's employer, and took
the boy out of the warehouse and sent him to school.
These experiences produced in Charles Dickens a
trauma from which he suffered all his life. It has
been charged by some of Dickens' critics that he in-
dulged himself excessively in self-pity in connection
with these hardships of his childhood; it has been
pointed out that, after all, he had only worked in the
blacking warehouse six months. But one must realize
that during those months he was in a state of complete
despair. For the adult in desperate straits, it is almost
always possible to imagine, if not to contrive, some
way out; for the child, from whom love and freedom
have inexplicably been taken away, no relief or release
can be projected. Dickens' seizures in his blacking-
bottle days were obviously neurotic symptoms; and
the psychologists have lately been telling us that
lasting depressions and terrors may be caused by such
cuttings-short of the natural development of child-
hood. For an imaginative and active boy of twelve,
six months of despair arc quite enough. 'No words
can express,' Dickens wrote of his first introduction
to the warehouse, in a document he gave to Forster,
1 the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this com-
panionship; compared these every day associates with

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 7

those of my happier childhood; and felt my early
hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished
man crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of
the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless;
of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it
was to my young heart to believe that, day by day,
what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in,
and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was
passing away from me, never to be brought back any
more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so
penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such
considerations, that even now, famous and caressed
and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have
a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and
wander desolately back to that time of my life. 1

He never understood how his father could have
abandoned him to such a situation. 'I know my
father,' he once told Forster, to be as kind-hearted
and generous a man as ever lived in the world. Every-
thing that I can remember of his conduct to his wife,
or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction is be-
yond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he has watched
night and day, unweariedly and patiently, many
nights and days. He never undertook any business,
charge or trust that he did not zealously, conscien-
tiously, punctually, honorably discharge. His in-
dustry has always been untiring. He was proud of
me, in his way, and had a great admiration of [my]
comic singing. But, in the case of his temper, and the
straitness of his means, he appeared to have lost
utterly at this time the idea of educating me at all,

8 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

and to have utterly put from him the notion that I
had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever/
And Charles never forgave his mother for having
wanted to keep him working in the warehouse even
after his father had decided to take him out. * I never
afterwards forgot/ he wrote of her attitude at this
time. 'I never shall forget, I never can forget/

Of those months he had never been able to bring
himself to speak till, just before conceiving David
Cofperfield y he wrote the fragment of autobiography
he sent to Forster; and, even after he had incorporated
this material in an altered form in the novel, even his
wife and children were never to learn about the reali-
ties of his childhood till they read about it after his
death in Forster 's Life. But the work of Dickens'
whole career was an attempt to digest these early
shocks and hardships, to explain them to himself, to
justify himself in relation to them, to give an intel-
ligible and tolerable picture of a world in which such
things could occur.

Behind the misfortune which had humiliated
Charles was the misfortune which had humiliated
his father. John Dickens was a good and affectionate
man, who had done the best he was able within the
limits of his personality and who had not deserved
to be broken. But behind these undeserved misfor-
tunes were sources of humiliation perhaps more dis-
turbing still. The father of Charles Dickens' mother,
also a 35o-a-year clerk in the Navy Pay Office, with
the title of Conductor of Money, had systematically,
by returning false balances, embezzled funds to the

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 9

amount of 5689 3^. 3^. over a period of seven yeafs;
and when the fraud was discovered, had fled. And
the background of domestic service was for an English-
man of the nineteenth century probably felt as more
disgraceful than embezzlement. Certainly the facts
about Dickens' ancestry were kept hidden by Dickens
himself and have, so far as I know, only been fully
revealed in the memoir by Miss Gladys Storey, based
on interviews with Mrs. Perugini, Dickens' last sur-
viving daughter, which was published in England
in the summer of 1939.

But all these circumstances are worth knowing and
bearing in mind, because they help us to understand
what Dickens was trying to say. He was less given to
false moral attitudes or to fear of respectable opinion
than most of the great Victorians; but just as through
the offices of his friends and admirers his personal life
has been screened from the public even up to our own
day, in a way that would have been thought unjusti-
fied in the case of a Keats or a Byron of the earlier
nineteenth century, so the meaning of Dickens' work
has been obscured by that element of the conventional
which Dickens himself never quite outgrew. It is
necessary to see him as a man in order to appreciate
him as an artist to exorcise the spell which has
bewitched him into a stuffy piece of household furni-
ture and to give him his proper rank as the poet of
that portiered and upholstered world who saw clearest
through the coverings and the curtains.

10 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

II

If one approaches his first novel, Pickwick Papers,
with these facts of Dickens' biography in mind, one
is struck by certain features of the book which one
may not have noticed before.

Here the subject has been set for Dickens. He was
supposed to provide some sort of text for a series of
comic sporting plates by Seymour something in
the vein of Surtees' Jorrocks. As soon, however, as
Dickens' scheme gives him a chance to get away from
the sporting plates and to indulge his own preoccupa-
tions, the work takes a different turn.

There arc in Pickwick Papers, especially in the early
part, a whole set of interpolated short stories which
make a contrast with the narrative proper. These
stories are mostly pretty bad and deserve from the
literary point of view no more attention than they
usually get; but,, even allowing here also for an ele-
ment of the conventional and popular, of the still-
thriving school of Gothic horror, we arc surprised to
find rising to the surface already the themes which
were to dominate his later work.

The first of these interludes in Pickwick deals with
the death of a pantomime clown, reduced through
drink to the direst misery, who, in the delirium of
his fever, imagines that he is about to be murdered
by the wife whom he has been beating. In the second
story, a worthless husband also beats his wife and
sets an example of bad conduct to his son; the boy
commits a robbery, gets caught and convicted in

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES n

prison remains obdurate to his mother's attempts to
soften his sullen heart; she dies, he repents, it is too
late; he is transported, returns after seventeen years
and finds no one to love or greet him; he stumbles at
last upon his father, now a sodden old man in the
workhouse; a scene of hatred and violence ensues:
the father, filled with terror, strikes the son across
the face with a stick, the son seizes the father by the
throat, and the old man bursts a blood-vessel and falls
dead. The third story is a document by a madman,
which, like the delirium of the dying clown, gives
Dickens an opportunity to exploit that vein of hysteri-
cal fancy which was to find fuller scope in Barnaby
Rudge and which was there to figure for him the life
of the imagination itself. The narrator has lived in
the knowledge that he is to be the victim of heredi-
tary insanity. At last he feels that he is going mad,
but at the same moment he inherits money: men fawn
upon him and praise him now, but he secretly rejoices
in the sense that he is not one of them, that he is
fooling them. He marries a girl, who loves another
but who has been sold to him by her father and
brothers; seeing his wife languish away and coming
to understand the situation, fearing also lest she may
hand on the family curse, he tries to kill her in her
sleep with a razor; she wakes up but dies of the shock.
When one of her brothers comes to reproach him, the
madman throws him down and chokes him; runs
a&uck and is finally caught.

But it is in The Old Mans Tale About the Queer Client
(Chapter XXI) that Dickens' obsessions appear most

IX THE WOUND AND THE BOW

plainly. Here at the threshold of Dickens' work we
are confronted with the Marshalsea Prison. A pris-
oner for debt, a 'healthy, strong-made man, who
could have borne almost any fatigue of active exer-
tion/ wastes away in his confinement and sees his wife
and child die of grief and want. He swears to revenge
their deaths on the man who has put him there. We
have another long passage of delirium, at the end of
which the prisoner comes to, to learn that he has in-
herited his father's money. At a seaside resort where
he has been living, he sees a man drowning one eve-
ning: the father of the drowning man stands by and
begs the ex-prisoner to save his son. But when the
wronged man recognizes his father-in-law, the scoun-
drel who sent him to prison and who allowed his
own daughter and grandson to die, he retaliates by
letting the boy drown; then, not content with this,
he buys up, at 'treble and quadruple their nominal
value,' a number of loans which have been made to
the old man. These loans have been arranged on the
understanding that they arc renewable up to a certain
date; but the wronged man, taking advantage of the
fact that the agreement has never been put on paper,
proceeds to call them in at a time when his father-in-
law has 'sustained many losses.' The old man is dis-
possessed of all his property and finally runs away in
order to escape prison; but his persecutor tracks him
down to a 'wretched lodging' note well: 'in
Camden Town' and there finally reveals himself
and announces his implacable intention of sending his
persecutor to jail. The old man falls dead from shock,
and the revenger disappears.

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 13

In the meantime, the same theme has been getting
under way in the main current of the comic novel.
Mr. Pickwick has been framed by Dodson and Fogg,
and very soon another wronged man he will
land in the debtors' prison, where a good many of
the other characters will join him and where the whole
book will deepen with a new dimension of seriousness.
The hilarity of the scene in court, in which Mr. Pick-
wick is convicted of trifling with Mrs. Bardell's
affections a scene openly borrowed from Jorrocks
but wonderfully transformed by Dickens, and as bril-
liant as the story of the fiendish revenge on the fiendish
father-in-law is bathetic may disguise from the
reader the significance which this episode had for
Dickens. Here Dickens is one of the greatest of
humorists: it is a laughter which is never vulgar but
which discloses the vulgarity of the revered a
laughter of human ecstasy that rises like the phoenix
from the cinders to which the dismal denizens of the
tribunals have attempted to reduce decent human
beings. It represents, like the laughter of Aristoph-
anes, a real escape from institutions.

I shall make no attempt to discuss at length the
humor of the early Dickens. This is the aspect of his
work that is best known, the only aspect that some
people know. In praise of Dickens' humor, there is
hardly anything new to say. The only point I want
to make is that the humor of Dickens does differ
frdm such humor as that of Aristophanes in being
unable forever to inhabit an empyrean of blithe in-
tellectual play, of charming fancies and biting good

14 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

sense. Dickens' laughter is an exhilaration which
already shows a trace of the hysterical. It leaps free
of the prison of life; but gloom and soreness must
always drag it back. Before he has finished Pickwick
and even while he is getting him out of jail and pre-
paring to unite the lovers, the prison will close in
again on Dickens. While he is still on the last instal-
ments of Pickwick, he will begin writing Oliver Twist
the story of a disinherited boy, consigned to a work-
house which is virtually a jail and getting away only
to fall into the hands of a gang of burglars, pick-
pockets and prostitutes.

And now we must identify the attitudes with which
Dickens' origins and his early experiences had caused
him to meet mankind. The ideal of Pickwick Papers
is a kindly retired business man, piloted through a
tough and treacherous world by a shrewd servant of
watchful fidelity, who perfectly knows his place:
Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. But this picture,
though real enough to its creator, soon gives way to
the figure of a parentless and helpless child a figure
of which the pathos will itself be eclipsed by the
horror of the last night in the condemned cell of a
betrayer of others to the gallows, and by the head-
long descent into hell of a brute who clubs his girl
to death and who, treed like a cat by the pursuing
mob, hangs himself in trying to escape.

in

Edmund Yates described Dickens' expression as
'blunt' and 'pleasant,' but 'rather defiant/

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 15

For the man of spirit whose childhood has been
crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of
two attitudes is natural: that of the criminal or that
of the rebel. Charles Dickens, in imagination, was to
play the r61es of both, and to continue up to his death
to put into them all that was most passionate in his
feeling.

His interest in prisons and prisoners is evident from
the very beginning. In his first book, Sketches by Bo%,
he tells how he used to gaze at Newgate with 4 mingled
feelings of awe and respect' ; and he sketches an imagi-
nary picture of a condemned man's last night alive,
which he is soon to elaborate in Oliver Twist. Almost
the only passage in American Notes which shows any
real readiness on Dickens' part to enter into the minds
and feelings of the people among whom he is traveling
is the fantasy in which he imagines the effects of a
sentence of solitary confinement in a Philadelphia jail.
He visited prisons wherever he went, and he later
found this cruel system imitated in the jail at Lau-
sanne. Dickens was very much gratified when the
system was finally abandoned as the result of the
prisoners' going mad just as he had predicted they
would. He also wrote a great deal about executions.
One of the vividest things in Pictures from Italy is a
description of a guillotining; and one of the most
impressive episodes in Barnaby Rudge is the narration
developed on a formidable scale of the hanging
of the leaders of the riots. In 1846, Dickens wrote
letters to the press in protest against capital punish-
ment for murderers, on the ground among other

l6 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

grounds that this created sympathy for the culprits;
in 1849, a ^ ter attending some executions in London
with Forster, he started by writing to The Times an
agitation which had the effect of getting public
hangings abolished. Even in 1867, in the course of
his second visit to America, 'I have been tempted
out,' Dickens wrote Forster, 'at three in the morning
to visit one of the large police station-houses, and
was so fascinated by the study of a horrible photo-
graph-book of thieves' portraits that I couldn't put
it down. 1

His interest in the fate of prisoners thus went a
good deal farther than simple memories of the debtors'
prison or notes of a court reporter. He identified
himself readily with the thief, and even more readily
with the murderer. The man of powerful will who
finds himself opposed to society must, if he cannot
upset it or if his impulse to do so is blocked, feel a
compulsion to commit what society regards as one of
the capital crimes against itself. With the antisocial
heroes of Dostoevsky, this crime is usually murder
or rape; with Dickens, it is usually murder. His obses-
sion with murderers is attested by his topical pieces
for Household Words; by his remarkable letter to Forster
on the performance of the French actor Lemaltrc in
a play in which he impersonated a murderer; by his
expedition, on his second visit to America, to the
Cambridge Medical School for the purpose of going
over the ground where Professor Webster had com-
mitted a murder in his laboratory and had continued
to meet his courses with parts of the body under the

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 17

lid of his lecture-table. In Dickens' novels, this theme
recurs with a probing of the psychology of the mur-
derer which becomes ever more convincing and inti-
mate. Leaving the murderers of the later Dickens till
we come to his later books, we may, however, point
out here that the crime and flight of Jonas Chuzzlewit
already show a striking development beyond the
cruder crime and flight of Sikes. The fantasies and
fears of Jonas are really, as Taine remarked, the picture
of a mind on the edge of insanity. What is valid and
impressive in this episode is the insight into the con-
sciousness of a man who has put himself outside
human fellowship the moment, for example, after
the murder when Jonas is ' not only fearful for himself
but of himself and half-expects, when he returns to
his bedroom, to find himself asleep in the bed.

At times the two themes the criminal and the
rebel are combined in a peculiar way. Barnaby
Trudge which from the point of view of Dickens'
comedy and character-drawing is the least satisfactory
of his early books is, up to Martin Chu^lewit, the
most interesting from the point of view of his deeper
artistic intentions. It is the only one of these earlier
novels which is not more or less picaresque and, corre-
spondingly, more or less of an improvisation (though
there is a certain amount of organization discernible
in that other somber book, Oliver Twisi); it was the
only novel up to that time which Dickens had been
planning and reflecting on for a long time before he
wrote it: it is first mentioned in 1837, but was not
written till 1841. Its immediate predecessor, The Old

l8 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Curiosity Stop, had been simply an impromptu yarn,
spun out when Dickens discovered that the original
scheme of Master Humphrey's Clock was not going
over with his readers from what was to have been
merely a short story; but Barnaby l&dge was a deliber-
ate attempt to find expression for the emotions and
ideas that possessed him.

The ostensible subject of the novel is the anti-
Catholic insurrection known as the 'Gordon riots'
which took place in London in 1780. But what is
obviously in Dickens' mind is the Chartist agitation
for universal suffrage and working-class representation
in Parliament which, as a result of the industrial
depression of those years, came to a crisis in 1840.
In Manchester the cotton mills were idle, and the
streets were full of threatening jobless men. In the
summer of 1840 there was a strike of the whole North
of England, which the authorities found it possible
to put down only by firing into the working-class
crowds; this was followed the next year by a brick-
makers' strike, which ended in bloody riots. Now
the immediate occasion for the Gordon riots had been
a protest against a bill which was to remove from the
English Catholics such penalties and disabilities as
the sentence of life imprisonment for priests who
should educate children as Catholics and the disquali-
fications of Catholics from inheriting property; but
the real causes behind the demonstration have always
remained rather obscure. It seems to indicate an in-
dignation more violent than it is possible to account
for by mere anti-Catholic feeling that churches and

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 19

houses should have been burnt wholesale, all the
prisons of London broken open, and even the Bank of
England attacked, and that the authorities should for
several days have done so little to restrain the rioters;
and it has been supposed that public impatience at
the prolongation of the American War, with a general
desire to get rid of George III, if not of the monarchy
itself, must have contributed to the fury behind the
uprising.

This obscurity, at any rate, allowed Dickens to
handle the whole episode in an equivocal way. On
the surface he reprobates Lord George Gordon and the
rioters for their fanatical or brutal intolerance; but
implicitly he is exploiting to the limit certain legiti-
mate grievances of the people: the neglect of the
lower classes by a cynical eighteenth-century aristo-
cracy, and especially the penal laws which made in-
numerable minor offenses punishable by death. The
really important theme of the book as Dickens
shows in his preface, when he is discussing one of the
actual occurrences on which the story is based is
the hanging under the Shop-lifting Act of a woman
who has been dropped by her aristocratic lover and
who has forged notes to provide for her child. This
theme lies concealed, but it makes itself felt from be-
ginning to end of the book. And as Pickwick, from
the moment it gets really under way, heads by instinct
and, as it were, unconsciously straight for the Fleet
prison, so Barnaby R#dge is deliberately directed to-
ward Newgate, where, as in Pickwick again, a group
of characters will be brought together; and the princi-

ZO THE WOUND AND THB BOW

pal climax of the story will be the orgiastic burning
of the prison. This incident not only has nothing to
do with the climax of the plot, it goes in spirit quite
against the attitude which Dickens has begun by
announcing. The satisfaction he obviously feels in
demolishing the sinister old prison, which, rebuilt,
had oppressed him in childhood, completely obliter-
ates the effect of his right-minded references in his
preface to 'those shameful tumults,' which 'reflect
indelible disgrace upon the time in which they oc-
curred, and all who had act or part in them/ In the
end, the rioters are shot down and their supposed in-
stigators hanged; but here Dickens' parti pris emerges
plainly : ' Those who suffered as rioters were, for the
most part, the weakest, meanest and most miserable
among them/ The son of the woman hanged for
stealing, who has been one of the most violent of the
mob and whose fashionable father will do nothing to
save him, goes to the scaffold with courage and dig-
nity, cursing his father and ' that black tree, of which
I am the ripened fruit/

Dickens has here, under the stimulus of the Chartist
agitation, tried to give his own emotions an outlet
through an historical novel of insurrection; but the
historical episode, the contemporary moral, and the
author's emotional pattern do not always coincide
very well. Indeed, perhaps the best thing in the book
is the creation that most runs away with the general
scheme that Dickens has attempted. Dennis the
hangman, although too macabre to be one of Dickens'
most popular characters, is really one of his best

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES zi

comic inventions, and has more interesting symbolic
implications than Barnaby Rudge himself. Dennis is
a professional executioner, who has taken an active
part in the revolt, apparently from simple motives of
sadism. Knowing the unpopularity of the hangman,
he makes an effort to keep his identity a secret; but
he has found this rather difficult to do, because he
sincerely loves his profession and cannot restrain
himself from talking about it. When the mob invades
Newgate, which Dennis knows so well, he directs the
liberation of the prisoners; but in the end he slips away
to the condemned cells, locks them against the mob
and stands guard over the clamoring inmates, crack-
ing them harshly over the knuckles when they reach
their hands out over the doors. The condemned are
his vested interest, which he cannot allow the rebels
to touch. But the momentum of the mob forces the
issue, breaks through and turns the criminals loose.
When we next encounter Dennis, he is a stool pigeon,
turning his former companions in to the police. But
he is unable to buy immunity in this way; and he is
finally hanged himself. Thus this hangman has a
complex value: he is primarily a sadist who likes to
kill. Yet he figures as a violator as well as a protector
of prisons. In his r61e of insurgent, he attacks au-
thority; in his r61e of hangman, makes it odious.
Either way he represents on Dickens' part a blow at
those institutions which the writer is pretending to
ftidorse. There is not, except in a minor way, any
other symbol of authority in the book.
The formula of Barnaby Rudgc is more or less rcpro-

11 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

duccd in the other two novels of Dickens that deal
with revolutionary subjects which, though they
belong to later periods of Dickens' work, it is appro-
priate to consider here. In Hard Times (1854), he
manages in much the same way to deal sympathetically
with the working-class protest against intolerable
industrial conditions at the same time that he lets
himself out from supporting the trade-union move-
ment. In order to be able to do this, he is obliged to
resort to a special and rather implausible device.
Stephen Blackpool, the honest old textile worker,
who is made to argue the cause of the workers before
the vulgar manufacturer Bounderby, refuses to join
the union because he has promised the woman h
loves that he will do nothing to get himself into
trouble. He thus finds himself in the singular position
of being both a victim of the blacklist and a scab.
The trade-union leadership is represented only
although with a comic fidelity, recognizable even
today, to a certain type of labor organizer by an
unscrupulous spell-binder whose single aim is to get
hold of the workers' pennies. Old Stephen, wandering
away to look for a job somewhere else, falls into a
disused coal-pit which has already cost the lives of
many miners, and thus becomes a martyr simultane-
ously to the employers and to the trade-union move-
ment. In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the moral of
history is not juggled as it is in Barnaby RuJgt, but
the conflict is made to seem of less immediate reality
by locating it out of England. The French people, in
Dickens' picture, have been given ample provocation

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 13

for breaking loose in the French Revolution; but once
in revolt, they are fiends and vandals. The vengeful
Madame Defarge is a creature whom as Dickens
implies one would not find in England, and she is
worsted by an Englishwoman. The immediate motive
behind A Tale of Two Cities is no doubt, as has been
suggested and as is intimated at the beginning of the
last chapter, the English fear of the Second Empire
after Napoleon Ill's Italian campaign of 1859: Dick-
ens' impulse to write the book closely followed the
attempt by Orsini to assassinate Napoleon III in the
January of '58. But there is in this book as in the
other two though less angrily expressed a threat.
If the British upper classes, Dickens seems to say,
will not deal with the problem of providing for the
health and education of the people, they will fall
victims to the brutal mob. This mob Dickens both
sympathizes with and fears.

Through the whole of his early period, Dickens
appears to have regarded himself as a respectable
middle-class man. If Sam Wcller, for all his out-
spokenness, never oversteps his r61e of valet, Kit in
The Old Curiosity Shop is a model of deference toward
his betters who becomes even a little disgusting.

When Dickens first visited America, in 1841, he
seems to have had hopes of finding here something in
the nature of that classless society which the foreign
'fellow travelers' of yesterday went to seek in the
Soviet Union; but, for reasons both bad and good,
Dickens was driven back by what he did find into the

14 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

attitude of an English gentleman, who resented the
American lack of ceremony, was annoyed by the
American publicity, and was pretty well put to rout
by the discomfort, the poverty and the tobacco-juice
which he had braved on his trip to the West. Mal-
adjusted to the hierarchy at home, he did not fit in
in the United States even so well as he did in England:
some of the Americans patronized him, and others
were much too familiar. The mixed attitude here
seen at its most favorable to us which was pro-
duced when his British ideas intervened to rein in the
sympathy which he tended to feel for American in-
novations, is well indicated by the passage in American
Notes in which he discusses the factory-girls of Lowell.
These girls have pianos in their boarding-houses and
subscribe to circulating libraries, and they publish a
periodical. 'How very preposterous!' the writer
imagines an English reader exclaiming. ' These things
are above their station/ But what is their station?
asks Dickens. 'It is their station to work/ he an-
swers. 'And they do work. . . . For myself, I know
no station in which, the occupation of today cheer-
fully done and the occupation of tomorrow cheerfully
looked to, any one of these pursuits is not most hu-
manizing and laudable. I know no station which is
rendered more endurable to the person in it, or more
safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for
its associate. I know no station which has a right to
monopolize the means of mutual instruction, improve-
ment and rational entertainment; or which has even
continued to be a station very long after seeking to do

DICKENS : THE TWO SCROOGES 15

so.' But he remarks that 'it is pleasant to find that
many of [the] Tales [in the library] are of the Mills,
and of those who work in them; that they inculcate
habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good
doctrines of enlarged benevolence/ The main theme
of Nicholas Nickleby is the efforts of Nicholas and his
sister to vindicate their position as gentlefolk.

But there is also another reason why these political
novels of Dickens are unclear and unsatisfactory.
Fundamentally, he was not interested in politics.
As a reporter, he had seen a good deal of Parliament,
and he had formed a contemptuous opinion of it which
was never to change to the end of his life. The Eatans-
will elections in Pickwick remain the type of political
activity for Dickens; the seating of Mr. Veneering in
Parliament in the last of his finished novels is hardly
different. The point of view is stated satirically in
Chapter XII of Bleak House, in which a governing-
class group at a country house are made to discuss the
fate of the country in terms of the political activities
of Lord Goodie, Sir Thomas Doodle, the Duke of
Foodie, the Right Honorable William Buffy, M.P.,
with his associates and opponents Cuffy, Duffy, Fuffy,
etc., while their constituents are taken for granted as
' a certain large number of supernumeraries, who are
to be occasionally addressed, and relied upon for
shouts and choruses, as on the theatrical stage/ A
little later (September 30, 1855), he expresses himself
explicitly in the course of a letter to Forstcr: 'I really
am serious in thinking and I have given as painful
consideration to the subject as a man with children to

l6 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

live and suffer after him can honestly give to it
that representative government is become altogether
a failure with us, that the English gentilities and
subserviences render the people unfit for it, and that
the whole thing has broken down since that great
seventeenth-century time, and has no hope in it.'

In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is
making the same point always: that to the English
governing classes the people they govern are not real.
It is one of the great purposes of Dickens to show you
these human actualities who figure for Parliament as
strategical counters and for Political Economy as
statistics; who can as a rule appear only even in his-
tories in a generalized or idealized form. What does
a workhouse under the Poor Laws look like? What
does it feel like, taste like, smell like? How does the
holder of a post in the government look? How does
he talk? what does he talk about? how will he treat
you? What is the aspect of the British middle class at
each of the various stages of its progress? What are
the good ones like and what are the bad ones like?
How do they affect you, not merely to meet at dinner,
but to travel with, to work under, to live with? All
these things Dickens can tell us. It has been one of the
principal functions of the modern novel and drama to
establish this kind of record; but few writers have
been able to do it with any range at all extensive.
None has surpassed Dickens.

No doubt this concrete way of looking at society
may have serious limitations. Dickens was some-
times actually stupid about politics. His lack of in-

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 17

tcrcst in political tactics led him, it has sometimes
been claimed, to mistake the actual significance of the
legislation he was so prompt to criticize. Mr. T. A.
Jackson has pointed out a characteristic example of
Dickens' inattention to politics in his report of his
first trip to America. Visiting Washington in 1841,
he registers an impression of Congress very similar to
his impressions of Parliament ('I may be of a cold
and insensible temperament, amounting in iciness, in
such matters'); and he indulges in one of his gushings
of sentiment over 'an aged, gray-haired man, a last-
ing honor to the land that gave him birth, who has
done good service to his country, as his forefathers
did, and who will be remembered scores upon scores
of years after the worms bred in its corruption are so
many grains of dust it was but a week since this
old man had stood for days upon his trial before this
very body, charged with having dared to assert the
infamy of that traffic which has for its accursed mer-
chandise men and women, and their unborn children/
Now this aged gray-haired man, Mr. Jackson reminds
us, was none other than John Quincy Adams, who, far
from being on his trial, was actually on the verge of
winning in his long fight against a House resolution
which had excluded petitions against slavery, and who
was deliberately provoking his adversaries for pur-
poses of propaganda. Dickens did not know that the
antislavery cause, far from being hopeless, was
achieving its first step toward victory. (So on his
second visit to America when, however, he was ill
and exhausted his interest in the impeachment of

X8 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Andrew Johnson seems to have been limited to 'a
misgiving lest the great excitement . . . will damage
our receipts' from his readings.) Yet his picture of the
United States in 1841, at a period of brave boastings
and often squalid or meager realities, has a unique
and permanent value. Macaulay complained that
Dickens did not understand the Manchester school of
utilitarian economics which he criticized in Hard
Times. But Dickens' criticism does not pretend to be
theoretical: all he is undertaking to do is to tell us
how practising believers in Manchester utilitarianism
behave and how their families are likely to fare with
them. His picture is strikingly collaborated by the
autobiography of John Stuart Mill, who was brought
up at the fountainhead of the school, in the shadow of
Bentham himself. In Mill, choked with learning
from his childhood, overtrained on the logical side
of the mind, and collapsing into illogical despair when
the lack began to make itself felt of the elements
his education had neglected, the tragic moral of the
system of Gradgrind is pointed with a sensational
obviousness which would be regarded as exaggeration
in Dickens.

This very distrust of politics, however, is a part of
the rebellious aspect of Dickens. Dickens is almost
invariably against institutions: in spite of his alle-
giance to Church and State, in spite of the lip-service
he occasionally pays them, whenever he comes to deal
with Parliament and its laws, the courts and the pub-
lic officials, the creeds of Protestant dissenters and of
Church of England alike, he makes them either ridicu-
lous or cruel, or both at the same time,

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 19

IV

In the work of Dickens' middle period after the
murder in Martin Cbus&lewt the rebel bulks larger
than the criminal.

Of all the great Victorian writers, he was probably
the most antagonistic to the Victorian Age itself. He
had grown up under the Regency and George IV; had
been twenty-five at the accession of Victoria. His
early -novels are freshened by breezes from an England
of coaching and village taverns, where the country-
side lay just outside London; of an England where
jokes and songs and hot brandy were always in order,
where every city clerk aimed to dress finely and
drink freely, to give an impression of open-handedness
and gallantry. The young Dickens of the earliest
preserved letters, who invites his friends to partake
of 'the rosy,' sounds not unlike Dick Swiveller.
When Little Nell and her grandfather on their wan-
derings spend a night in an iron foundry, it only has
the effect of a sort of Nibelungen interlude, rather
like one of those surprise grottoes that you float
through when you take the little boat that threads
the tunnel of the 'Old Mill' in an amusement park
a luridly lighted glimpse on the same level, in Dickens'
novel, with the waxworks, the performing dogs, the
dwarfs and giants, the village church. From this
point it is impossible, as it was impossible for Dickens,
to foresee the full-length industrial town depicted in
Hard Times. In that age the industrial-commercial
civilization had not yet got to be the norm; it seemed

30 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

a disease which had broken out in spots but which a
sincere and cheerful treatment would cure. The typi-
cal reformers of the period had been Shelley and Robert
Owen, the latter so logical a crank, a philanthropist
so much all of a piece, that he seems to have been in-
vented by Dickens who insisted that his Cheeryblc
brothers, the philanthropic merchants of Nicholas
Nickleby, had been taken from living originals.

But when Dickens begins to write novels again
after his return from his American trip, a new kind of
character appears in them, who, starting as an amusing
buffoon, grows steadily more unpleasant and more
formidable. On the threshold of Martin Chu^lewit
(1843-45: the dates of its appearance in monthly
numbers), you find Pecksniff, the provincial architect;
on the threshold of Dombey and Son (1846-48), you
find Dombey, the big London merchant; and before
you have got very far with the idyllic David Coffer-
field (1849-50), you find Murdstone, of Murdstone
and Grimby, wine merchants. All these figures stand
for the same thing. Dickens had at first imagined
that he was pillorying abstract faults in the manner
of the comedy of humors: Selfishness in Chu^lewit,
Pride in Dombey. But the truth was that he had al-
ready begun an indictment against a specific society:
the self-important and moralizing middle class who
had been making such rapid progress in England and
coming down like a damper on the bright fires of Eng-
lish life that is, on the spontaneity ati4 gaiety, the
frankness and independence, the instinctive human
virtues, which Dickens admired and trusted. The

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 31

new age had brought a new kind of virtues to cover
up the flourishing vices of cold avarice and harsh ex-
ploitation; and Dickens detested these virtues.

The curmudgeons of the early Dickens Ralph
Nickleby and Arthur Gride, Anthony and Jonas Chufc-
fclcwit (for Martin Chu^lewit just marks the transition
from the early to the middle Dickens) arc old^
fashioned moneylenders and misers of a type that must
have been serving for decades in the melodramas of
the English stage. In Dickens their whole-hearted
and outspoken meanness gives them a certain cynical
charm. They are the bad uncles in the Christmas
pantomime who set off the jolly clowns and the good
fairy, and who, as everybody knows from the begin-
ning, are doomed to be exposed and extinguished.
But Mr. Pecksniff, in the same novel with the Chus-
zlewits, already represents something different. It
is to be characteristic of Pecksniff, as it is of Dombcy
and Murdstone, that he does evil while pretending to
do good. As intent on the main chance as Jonas him-
self, he pretends to be a kindly father, an affectionate
relative, a pious churchgoer; he is the pillar of a
cathedral town. Yet Pecksniff is still something of a
pantomime comic whom it will be easy enough to un-
mask. Mr. Dombey is a more difficult problem. His
virtues, as far as they go, are real: though he is stupid
enough to let his business get into the hands of Carker,
he docs lead an exemplary life of a kind in the interests
of the tradition of his house. He makes his wife and
his children miserable in his devotion to his mercan-
tile ideal, but that ideal is at least for him serious.

32. THE WOUND AND THE BOW

With Murdstone the ideal has turned sour: the re-
spectable London merchant now represents some-
thing sinister. Murdstone is not funny like Pecksniff;
he is not merely a buffoon who masquerades: he is a
hypocrite who believes in himself. And where Dom-
bey is made to recognize his error and turn kindly and
humble in the end, Mr. Murdstone and his grim sister
arc allowed to persist in their course of working mis-
chief as a matter of duty.

In such a world of mercenary ruthlessness, always
justified by rigorous morality, it is natural that the
exploiter of others should wish to dissociate himself
from the exploited, and to delegate the face-to-face
encounters to someone else who is paid to take the
odium. Karl Marx, at that time living in London,
was demonstrating through these middle years of the
century that this system, with its falsifying of human
relations and its wholesale encouragement of cant,
was an inherent and irremediable feature of the eco-
nomic structure itself. In Dickens, the Mr. Spenlow of
David Copperfield, who is always blaming his mean
exactions on his supposedly implacable partner, Mr.
Jorkins, develops into the Casby of Little Dorrit, the
benignant and white-haired patriarch who turns over
the rackrenting of Bleeding Heart Yard to his bull-
terrier of an agent, Pancks, while he basks in the ad-
miration of his tenants; and in Our Mutual Friend, into
Fledgeby, the moneylender who makes his way into
society while the harmless old Jew Rfch is compelled
to play the cruel creditor.

With Dickens' mounting dislike and distrust of the

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 33

top layers of that middle-class society with which he
had begun by identifying himself, his ideal of middle-
class virtue was driven down to the lower layers.
In his earlier novels, this ideal had been embodied in
such patrons and benefactors as Mr. Pickwick, the
retired business man; the substantial and warm-
hearted Mr. Brownlow, who rescued Oliver Twist;
and the charming old gentleman, Mr. Garland, who
took Kit Nubbles into his service. In David Copper-
field the lawyer Wickfield, who plays a r61e in relation
to the hero somewhat similar to those of Brownlow
and Garland, becomes demoralized by too much port
and falls a victim to Uriah Heep, the upstart Peck-
sniff of a lower social level. The ideal the do-
mestic unit which preserves the sound values of
England is located by Dickens through this period
in the small middle-class household: Ruth Pinch and
her brother in Martin Chu^lewit\ the bright hearths
and holiday dinners of the Christmas Books; the modest
home to which Florence Dombey descends from the
great house near Portland Place, in happy wedlock
with the nephew of Sol Gills, the ships'-instrument-
maker.

It is at the end of Dombey and Son, when the house
of Dombey goes bankrupt, that Dickens for the first
time expresses himself explicitly on the age that has
come to remain:

'The world was very busy now, in sooth, and had a
deal to say. It was an innocently credulous and a
much ill-used world. It was a world in which there
was no other sort of bankruptcy whatever. There

34 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

were no conspicuous people in it, trading far and wide
on rotten banks of religion, patriotism, virtue, honor.
There was no amount worth mentioning of mere
paper in circulation, on which anybody lived pretty
handsomely, promising to pay great sums of goodness
with no effects. There were no shortcomings any-
where, in anything but money. The world was very
angry indeed; and the people especially who, in a
worse world, might have been supposed to be bank-
rupt traders themselves in shows and pretences, were
observed to be mightily indignant.'

And now working always through the observed
interrelations between highly individualized human
beings rather than through political or economic
analysis Dickens sets out to trace an anatomy of
that society. Dombey has been the first attempt;
Bleak House (1851-53) is to realize this intention to
perfection; Hard Times, on a smaller scale, is to con-
duct the same kind of inquiry.

For this purpose Dickens invents a new literary
genre (unless the whole mass of Balzac is to be taken
as something of the' sort): the novel of the social
group. The young Dickens had summed up, de-
veloped and finally outgrown the two traditions in
English fiction he had found : the picaresque tradition
of Defoe, Fielding and Smollett, and the sentimental
tradition of Goldsmith and Sterne. People like George
Henry Lewes have complained of Dickens' little
reading; but no artist has ever absorbed his predeces-
sors he had read most of them in his early boyhood

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 35

more completely than Dickens did. There is some-
thing of all these writers in Dickens and, using them,
he has gone beyond them all. In the historical novel
Barnaby Rudge a detour in Dickens' fiction he
had got out of Scott all that Scott had to give him.
He was to profit in Hard Times by Mrs. Gaskell's in-
dustrial studies. But in the meantime it was Dickens'
business to create a new tradition himself.

His novels even through Martin Chu^lewit had had
a good deal of the looseness of the picaresque school
of Gil Bias, where the episodes get their only unity
from being hung on the same hero, as well as the mul-
tiple parallel plots, purely mechanical combinations,
that he had acquired from the old plays though
he seems to have been trying more intensively for a
unity of atmosphere and feeling. But now he is to
organize his stories as wholes, to plan all the charac-
ters as symbols, and to invest all the details with
significance. Dombey and Son derives a new kind of
coherence from the fact that the whole novel is made
to center around the big London business house: you
have the family of the man who owns it, the manager
and his family, the clerks, the men dependent on the
ships that export its goods, down to Sol Gills and
Captain Cuttle (so Hard Times is to get its coherence
from the organism of an industrial town).

In Bleak House, the masterpiece of this middle
period, Dickens discovers a new use of plot, which
makes possible a tighter organization. (And we
must remember that he is always working against
the difficulties, of which he often complains, of writ-

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

ing for monthly instalments, where everything has
to be planned beforehand and it is impossible, as he
says, to ' try back* and change anything, once it has
been printed.) He creates the detective story which
is also a social fable. It is a genre which has lapsed
since Dickens. The detective story though Dickens'
friend Wilkie Collins preserved a certain amount of
social satire has dropped out the Dickensian social
content; and the continuators of the social novel have
dropped the detective story. These continuators
Shaw, Galsworthy, Wells have of course gone
further than Dickens in the realistic presentation of
emotion; but from the point of view of dramatizing
social issues, they have hardly improved upon Bleak
House. In Shaw's case, the Marxist analysis, with
which Dickens was not equipped, has helped him to
the tighter organization which Dickens got from his
complex plot. But in the meantime it is one of Dick-
ens' victories in his rapid development as an artist
that he should succeed in transforming his melo-
dramatic intrigues of stolen inheritances, lost heirs
and ruined maidens with their denunciatory con-
frontations that always evoke the sound oJ; 'fiddling
in the orchestra into devices of artistic dignity.
Henceforth the solution of the mystery is to be also
the moral of the story and the last word of Dickens'
social 'message.'

Bleak House begins in the London fog, and the whole
book is permeated with fog and rain. In Dombey the
railway locomotive first when Mr. Dombey takes
his trip to Leamington, and later when it pulls into

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 37

the station just at the moment of Dombcy's arrival
and runs over the fugitive Carker as he steps back to
avoid his master figures as a symbol of that progress
of commerce which Dombey himself represents; in
Hard Times the uncovered coal-pit into which Stephen
Blackpool falls is a symbol for the abyss of the indus-
trial system, which swallows up lives in its darkness.
In Bleak House the fog stands for Chancery, and Chan-
cery stands for the whole web of clotted antiquated
institutions in which England stifles and decays.
All the principal elements in the story the young
people, the proud Lady Dedlock, the philanthropic
gentleman John Jarndyce, and Tom-all- Alone' s, the
rotting London slum are involved in the exasper-
ating Chancery suit, which, with the fog-bank of
precedent looming behind it like the Great Boyg in
Peer Gynt, obscures and impedes at every point the
attempts of men and women to live natural lives.
Old Krook, with his legal junkshop, is Dickens'
symbol for the Lord Chancellor himself; the cat that
sits on his shoulder watches like the Chancery law-
yers the caged birds in Miss Elite's lodging; Krook 's
death by spontaneous combustion is Dickens' prophecy
of the fate of Chancery and all that it represents.

I go over the old ground of the symbolism, up to
this point perfectly obvious, of a book which must be
still, by the general public, one of the most read of
Dickens' novels, because the people who like to talk
about the symbols of Kafka and Mann and Joyce have
been discouraged from looking for anything of the
kind in Dickens, and usually have not read him, at

3 8 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

least with mature minds. But even when we think we
do know Dickens, we may be surprised to return to
him and find in him a symbolism of a more compli-
cated reference and a deeper implication than these
metaphors that hang as emblems over the door. The
Russians themselves, in this respect, appear to have
learned from Dickens.

Thus it is not at first that we recognize all the mean-
ing of the people that thrive or survive in the dense
atmosphere of Bleak House an atmosphere so opaque
that the somnolent ease at the top cannot see down to
the filth at the bottom. And it is an atmosphere
where nobody sees clearly what kind of race of beings
is flourishing between the bottom and the top. Among
the middle ranks of this society we find persons who
appear with the pretension of representing Law or
Art, Social Elegance, Philanthropy, or Religion
Mr. Kenge and Mr. Vholes, Harold Skimpole, Mr.
Turveydrop, Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jelly by, and
Mr. and Mrs. Chadband side by side with such a
sordid nest of goblins as the family of the money-
lender Smallweed. But presently we see that all these
people are as single-mindedly intent on selfish interests
as Grandfather Smallweed himself. This gallery is
one of the best things in Dickens. The Smallweeds
themselves arc artistically an improvement on the
similar characters in the early Dickens: they represent,
not a theatrical convention, but a real study of the
stunted and degraded products of the underworld of
commercial London. And the two opposite types of
philanthropist: the moony Mrs. Jelly by, who mis-

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 39

crably neglects her children in order to dream of do-
ing good in Africa, and Mrs. Pardiggle, who bullies
both her children and the poor in order to give her-
self a feeling of power; Harold Skimpole, with the
graceful fancy and the talk about music and art that
ripples a shimmering veil over his systematic spong-
ing; and Turveydrop, the Master of Deportment, that
parody of the magnificence of the Regency, behind his
rouge and his padded coat and his gallantry as cold
and as inconsiderate as the Chadbands behind their
gaseous preachments. Friedrich Engels, visiting Lon-
don in the early forties, had written of the people in
the streets that they seemed to * crowd by one another
as if they had nothing in common, nothing to do with
one another, and as if their only agreement were the
tacit one that each shall keep to his own side of the
pavement, in order not to delay the opposing streams
of the crowd, while it never occurs to anyone to
honor his fellow with so much as a glance. The
brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in
his private interest, becomes the more repellent the
more these individuals are herded together within a
limited space/ This is the world that Dickens is
describing.

Here he makes but one important exception: Mr.
Rouncewell, the ironmaster. Mr. Rouncewell is an
ambitious son of the housekeeper at Chesney Wold,
Sir Leicester Dedlock's country house, who has made
himself a place in the world which Sir Leicester re-
gards as beyond his station. One of the remarkable
scenes of the novel is that in which Rouncewell comes

40 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

back, quietly compels Sir Leicester to receive him like
a gentleman and asks him to release one of the maids
from his service so that she may marry RounccwcH f s
son, a young man whom he has christened Watt.
When Lady Dedlock refuses to release the maid,
Rouncewell respectfully abandons the project, but
goes away and has the insolence to run against Sir
Leicester's candidate in the next parliamentary elec-
tion. (This theme of the intervention of the industrial
revolution in the relations between master and serv-
ant has already appeared in Dombey and Son in the ad-
mirable interview between Dombey and Polly Toodles,
whom he is employing as a wetnurse for his mother-
less child. Polly's husband, who is present, is a loco-
motive stoker and already represents something
anomalous in the hierarchy of British society. When
the Dombeys, who cannot accept her real name, sug-
gest calling Polly 'Richards,' she replies that if she
is to be called out of her name, she ought to be paid
extra. Later, when Dombey makes his railway jour-
ney, he runs into Polly's husband, who is working on
the engine. Toodles speaks to him and engages him
in conversation, and Dombey resents this, feeling that
Toodles is somehow intruding outside his own
class.)

But in general the magnanimous, the simple of
heart, the amiable, the loving and the honest are
frustrated, subdued, or destroyed. At the bottom of
the whole gloomy edifice is the body of Lady Ded-
lock *s lover and Esther Summerson's father, Captain
Hawdon, the reckless soldier, adored by his men,

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 41

beloved by women, the image of the old life-loving
England, whose epitaph Dickens is now writing.
Captain Hawdon has failed in that world, has perished
as a friendless and penniless man, and has been buried
in the pauper's graveyard in one of the foulest quarters
of London, but the loyalties felt for him by the living
will endure and prove so strong after his death that
they will pull that world apart. Esther Summcrson
has been frightened and made submissive by being
treated as the respectable middle class thought it
proper to treat an illegitimate child, by one of those
Puritanical females whom Dickens so roundly detests.
Richard Carstone has been demoralized and ruined;
Miss Flite has been driven insane. George Rounce-
well, the brother of the ironmaster, who has escaped
from Sir Leicester's service to become a soldier instead
of a manufacturer and who is treated by Dickens with
the sympathy which he usually feels for his military
and nautical characters, the men who are doing the
hard work of the Empire, is helpless in the hands of
moneylenders and lawyers. Caddy Jelly by and her
husband, young Turveydrop, who have struggled for
a decent life in a poverty partly imposed by the neces-
sity of keeping up old Turvey drop's pretenses, can
only produce, in that society where nature is so muti-
lated and thwarted, a sickly defective child. Mr.
Jarndyce himself, the wise and generous, who plays in
Bleak House a r61e very similar to that of Captain Shot-
over in Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House (which evi-
dently owes a good deal to Bleak House), is an ec-
centric at odds with his environment, who, in his cf-

4X THB WOUND AND THE BOW

forts to help the unfortunate, falls a prey to the har-
pies of philanthropy.

With this indifference and egoism of the middle
class, the social structure must buckle in the end.
The infection from the poverty of Tom-all-Alonc's
will ravage the mansions of country gentlemen.
Lady Dedlock will inevitably be dragged down from
her niche of aristocratic idleness to the graveyard in
the slum where her lover lies. The idea that the high-
est and the lowest in that English society of shocking
contrasts are inextricably tied together has already
appeared in the early Dickens in Ralph Nickleby
and Smike, for example, and in Sir John Chester and
Hugh as a sort of submerged motif which is never
given its full expression. Here it has been chosen
deliberately and is handled with immense skill so as
to provide the main moral of the fable. And bound up
with it is another motif which has already emerged
sharply in Dicikens . Dickens had evidently in the course
of his astonishing rise, found himself up against the
blank and chilling loftiness what the French call la
morgue anglaise of the English upper classes : as we
shall see, he developed a pride of his own, with which
he fought it to his dying day. Pride was to have been
the theme of Dombey: the pride of Edith Dombey out-
does the pride of Dombey and levels him to the ground.
But in Bleak House, the pride of Lady Dedlock, who
has married Sir Leicester Dedlock for position, ul-
timately rebounds on herself. Her behavior toward
the French maid Hortense is the cause of her own
debasement. For where it is a question of pride, a

DICKENS: THB TWO SCROOGES 43

high-tempered maid from the South of France can
outplay Lady Dedlock: Hortensc will not stop at the
murder which is the logical upshot of the course of
action dictated by her wounded feelings. Dickens is
criticizing here one of the most unassailable moral
props of the English hierarchical system.

Between Dombey and Son and Bleak House, Dickens
published David Copperfield. It is a departure from the
series of his social novels. Setting out to write the
autobiography of which the fragments appear in
Forster's Life, Dickens soon changed his mind and
transposed this material into fiction. In the first half
of David Copper field, at any rate, Dickens strikes an
enchanting vein which he had never quite found be-
fore and which he was never to find again. It is the
poem of an idealized version of the loves and fears and
wonders of childhood; and the confrontation of
Betsey Trotwood with the Murdstones is one of
Dickens' most successful stagings of the struggle be-
tween the human and the anti-human, because it
takes place on the plane of comedy rather than on that
of melodrama. But Copper field is not one of Dickens'
deepest books : it is something in the nature of a holi-
day. David is too candid and simple to represent
Dickens himself; and though the blacking warehouse
episode is utilized, all the other bitter circumstances
of Dickens' youth were dropped out when he aban-
doned the autobiography.

44 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

With Little Dorrit (1855-57), Dickens' next novel
after Bleak House and Hard Times, we enter a new phase
of his work. To understand it, we must go back to
his life.

Dickens at forty had won everything that a writer
could expect to obtain through his writings: his genius
was universally recognized; he was fSted wherever
he went; his books were immensely popular; and they
had made him sufficiently rich to have anything that
money can procure. He had partly made up for the
education he had missed by traveling and living on
the Continent and by learning to speak Italian and
French. (Dickens' commentary on the continental
countries is usually not remarkably penetrating; but
he did profit very much from his travels abroad in his
criticism of things in England. Perhaps no other of
the great Victorian writers had so much the con-
sciousness that the phenomena he was describing
were of a character distinctively English.) Yet from
the time of his first summer at Boulogne in 1853, he
had shown signs of profound discontent and unap-
peasable restlessness; he suffered severely from in-
somnia and, for the first time in his life, apparently,
worried seriously about his work. He began to fear
that his vein was drying up.

I believe that Forster's diagnosis though it may
not go to the root of the trouble must here be ac-
cepted as correct. There were, he intimates, two
things wrong with Dickens: a marriage which ex-

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 45

asperated and cramped him and from which he had
not been able to find relief, and a social maladjustment
which his success had never straightened out.

The opportunities of the young Dickens to meet
eligible young women had evidently been rather
limited. That he was impatient to get married,
nevertheless, is proved by his announcing his serious
intentions to three girls in close succession. The
second of these was Maria Beadnell, the original of
Dora in David Copjtrficld and, one supposes, of Dolly
Varden, too, with whom he fell furiously in love,
when he was eighteen and she nineteen. Her father
worked in a bank and regarded Charles Dickens, the
stenographer, as a young man of shabby background
and doubtful prospects; Maria, who seems to have
been rather frivolous and silly, was persuaded to drop
her suitor with the result for him which may be
read in the letters, painful in their wounded pride
and their backfiring of a thwarted will, which ke
wrote her after the break. This was one of the great
humiliations of Dickens' early life (he was at that
time twenty-one) and, even after he had liquidated
it in a sense by depicting the futilities of David's
marriage with Dora, the disappointment still seems
to have troubled him and Maria to have remained
at the back of his mind as the Ideal of which he had
been cheated.

He lost very little time, however, in getting himself
a wife. Two years after his rejection by Maria Bead-
nell, he was engaged to the daughter of George
Hogarth, a Scotchman, who, as the law agent of

46 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Walter Scott and from having been mentioned in the
Nodes Ambrosianae, was invested with the prestige of
having figured on the fringes of the Edinburgh literary
world. He asked Dickens to write for the newspaper
which he was editing at that time in London, and
invited the young man to his house. There Dickefllt
found two attractive daughters, and he 'married the
elder, Catherine, who was twenty. But the other
daughter, Mary, though too young for him to marry
she was only fifteen when he met her had a
strange hold on Dickens' emotions. When, after
living with the Dickenses for a year after their mar-
riage, she suddenly died in Dickens' arms, he was so
overcome by grief that he stopped writing Pickwick
for two months and insisted in an obsessed and morbid
way on his desire to be buried beside her: 'I can't

think there ever was love like I bear her I have

never had her ring off my finger day or night, except
for an instant at a time, to wash my hands, since she
died. I have never had her sweetness and excellence
absent from my mind so long.' In The Old Curiosity
Shop, he apotheosized her as Little Nell. What basis
this emotion may have had in the fashionable ro-
manticism of the period or in some peculiar psycho-
logical pattern of Dickens', it is impossible on the
evidence to say. But this passion for an innocent
young girl is to recur in Dickens' life; and in the
meantime his feeling for Mary Hogarth seems to
indicate pretty clearly that even during the early
years of his marriage he did not identify the Ideal
with Catherine.

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 47

Catherine had big blue cyes a rather receding chin
and a sleepy and languorous look. Beyond this, it is
rather difficult to get a definite impression of her.
Dickens' terrible gallery of shrews who browbeat
their amiable husbands suggests that she may have
been a scold; but surely Dickens himself was no Joe
Gargery or Gabriel Varden. We do not know much
about Dickens' marriage. We know that, with the
exception of his sister-in-law Georgina, Dickens grew
to loathe the Hogarths who evidently lived on him
to a considerable extent; and we must assume that
poor Catherine, in both intellect and energy, was a
good deal inferior to her husband. He lived with
her, however, twenty years, and, although it becomes
clear toward the end that they were no longer particu-
larly welcome, he gave her during that time ten
children.

And if Dickens was lonely in his household, he was
lonely in society, also. He had, as Forstcr indicates,
attained a pinnacle of affluence and fame which made
him one of the most admired and most sought-after
persons in Europe without his really ever having
created for himself a social position in England, that
society par excellence where everybody had to have a
definite one and where there was no rank reserved for
the artist. He had gone straight, at the very first
throw, from the poor tenement, the prison, the press
table, to a position of imperial supremacy over the
imaginations of practically the whole literate world;
but in his personal associations, he cultivated the
companionship of inferiors rather than save, per-

48 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

haps, for Carlylc of intellectual equals. His be-
havior toward Society, in the capitalized sense, was
rebarbative to the verge of truculence; he refused to
learn its patter and its manners; and his satire on the
fashionable world comes to figure more and more
prominently in his novels. Dickens is one of the very
small group of British intellectuals to whom the
opportunity has been offered to be taken up by the
governing class and who have actually declined that
honor.

His attitude which in the period we have been
discussing was still that of the middle-class 'Radical'
opposing feudal precedent and privilege: Mr. Rounce-
well, the ironmaster, backed against Sir Leicester
Dedlock is illustrated by the curious story of his
relations with Queen Victoria. In 1857, Dickens got
up a benefit for the family of Douglas Jerrold, in
which he and his daughters acted. The Queen was
asked to be one of the sponsors; and, since she was
obliged to refuse any such request for fear of being
obliged to grant them all, she invited Dickens to put
on the play at the palace. He replied that he 'did
not feel easy as to the social position of my daughters,
etc., at a Court under those circumstances,' and sug-
gested that the Queen might attend a performance
which should be given for her alone. She accepted,
and sent backstage between the acts asking Dickens
to come and speak to her. ' I replied that I was in my
Farce dress, and must beg to be excused. Whereupon
she sent again, saying that the dress "could not be
so ridiculous as that,'* and repeating the request.

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 49

I sent my duty in reply, but again hoped Her Majesty
would have the kindness to excuse my presenting my-
self in a costume and appearance that were not my
own. I was mighty glad to think, when I woke this
morning, that I had carried the point/ The next year
he was approached on behalf of the Queen, who
wanted to hear him read the Christmas Carol ; but he
expressed his 'hope that she would indulge me by
making one of some audience or other for I thought
an audience necessary to the effect/ It was only in the
last year of his life and then only on what seems
to have been the pretext on the Queen's part that she
wanted to look at some photographs of the battle-
fields of the Civil War which Dickens had brought
back from America that an interview was finally
arranged . Here the record of Dickens ' lecture manager,
George Dolby, supplements the account given by
Forster. Dickens told Dolby that ' Her Majesty had
received him most graciously, and that, as Court
etiquette requires that no one, in an ordinary inter-
view with the sovereign, should be seated, Her
Majesty had remained the whole time leaning over
the head of a sofa. There was a little shyness on both
sides at the commencement, but this wore away as the
conversation proceeded/ When Victoria regretted
that it had not been possible for her ever to hear
Dickens read, he replied that he had made his fare-
well to the platform; when she said that she under-
stood this, but intimated that it would be gracious on
Dickens' part so far to forget his resolve as to give
her the pleasure of hearing him, he insisted that this

50 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

would be impossible. Not impossible, perhaps, sai4
the Queen, but inconsistent, no doubt and she
knew that he was the most consistent of men. Yet
they parted on very good terms: she invited him to
her next levee and his daughter to the drawing-room
that followed. If there is some stickling for his
dignity on Dickens' part here, there is evidently also
some scruple on the Queen's.

To be caught between two social classes in a society
of strict stratifications like being caught between
two civilizations, as James was, or between two racial
groups, like Proust is an excellent thing for a
novelist from the point of view of his art, because it
enables him to dramatize contrasts and to study inter-
relations which the dweller in one world cannot
know. Perhaps something of the sort was true even of
Shakespeare, between the provincial bourgeoisie and
the Court. Dostoevsky, who had a good deal in com-
mon with Dickens and whose career somewhat paral-
lels his, is a conspicuous example of a writer who owes
his dramatic scope at least partly to a social mal-
adjustment. The elder Dostoevsky was a doctor and
his family origins were obscure, so that his social
position was poor in a Russia still predominantly
feudal; yet he bought a country estate and sent his
sons to a school for the children of the nobility. But
the family went to pieces after the mother's death:
the father took to drink and was murdered by his
serfs for his cruelty. Dostoevsky was left with almost
nothing, and he slipped down into that foul and stag-
nant underworld of the Rask61nikovs and Stavr6gins

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 51

of his novels. Dickens' case had been equally anoma-
lous: he had grown up in an uncomfortable position
between the upper and the lower middle classes, with
a dip into the proletariat and a glimpse of the aristoc-
racy through their trusted upper servants. But this
position, which had been useful to him as a writer,
was to leave him rather isolated in English society.
In a sense, there was no place for him to go and belong;
he had to have people come to him.

And in the long run all that he had achieved could
not make up for what he lacked. Little Dorrit and
Great Expectations (i 860-61), which follows it after
A Tale of Two Cities, arc full of the disillusion and dis-
comfort of this period of Dickens' life. The treatment
of social situations and the treatment of individual
psychology have both taken turns distinctly new.

Dickens now tackles the Marshalsca again, but on a
larger scale and in a more serious way. It is as if he
were determined once for all to get the prison out of
his system. The figure of his father hitherto has al-
ways haunted Dickens' novels, but he has never
known quite how to handle it. In Micawber, he
made him comic and lovable; in Skimpole, he made
him comic and unpleasant for, after all, the
vagaries of Micawber always left somebody out of
pocket, and there is another aspect of Micawber
the Skimpole aspect he presented to his creditors.
But what kind of person, really, had John Dickens
been in himself? How had the father of Charles
Dickens come to be what he was? Even after it had
become possible for Charles to provide for his father,

51 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

the old man continued to be a problem up to his death
in 1851. He got himself arrested again, as the result
of running up a wine bill; and he would try to get
money out of his son's publishers without the know-
ledge of Charles. Yet Dickens said to Forstcr, after his
father's death: 'The longer I live, the better man I
think him' ; and Little Dorrit is something in the nature
of a justification of John.

Mr. Dorrit is 'a very amiable and very helpless
middle-aged gentleman ... a shy, retiring man, well-
looking, though in an effeminate style, with a mild
voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands rings upon
the fingers in those days which nervously wandered
to his trembling lip a hundred times in the first half-
hour of his acquaintance with the jail.' The arrival
of the Dorrit family in prison and their gradual habit-
uation to it are done with a restraint and sobriety
never displayed by Dickens up to now. The incident
in which Mr. Dorrit, after getting used to accepting
tips in his r61e of the Father of the Marshalsea, sud-
denly becomes insulted when he is offered copper half-
pence by a workman, has a delicacy which makes up
in these later books for the ebb of Dickens' bursting
exuberance. If it is complained that the comic char-
acters in these novels, the specifically 'Dickens char-
acters,' are sometimes mechanical and boring, this is
partly, perhaps, for the reason that they stick out in an
unnatural relief from a surface that is more quietly
realistic. And there are moments when one feels that
Dickens might be willing to abandon the 'Dickens
character' altogether if it were not what the public

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 53

expected of him. In any case, the story of Dorrit is a
closer and more thoughtful study than any that has
gone before of what bad institutions make of men.

But there is also in Little Dorrit something different
from social criticism. Dickens is no longer satisfied
to anatomize the organism of society. The main
symbol here is the prison (in this connection, Mr.
Jackson's chapter is the best thing that has been
written on Little Dorrit) \ but this symbol is developed
in a way that takes it beyond the satirical application
of the symbol of the fog in Bleak House and gives it a
significance more subjective. In the opening chapter,
we are introduced, not to the debtors' prison, but to
an ordinary jail for criminals, which, in the case of
Rigaud and Cavalletto, will not make the bad man
any better or the good man any worse. A little later,
we are shown an English business man who has come
back from many years in China and who finds himself
in a London the shut-up London of Sunday evening
more frightening, because more oppressive, than
the thieves' London of Oliver Twist. '"Heaven for-
give me," said he, "and those who trained me. How
I have hated this day!" There was the dreary Sunday
of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before
him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which
commenced business with the poor child by asking
him, in its title, why he was going to Perdition?' At
last he gets himself to the point of going to see his
mother, whom he finds as lacking in affection and as
gloomy as he could have expected. She lives in a dark
and funereal house with the old offices on the bottom

54 THE WOUND AND THB BOW

floor, one of the strongholds of that harsh Calvinism
plus hard business which made one of the mainstays of
the Victorian Age; she lies paralyzed on 'a black bier-
like sofa/ punishing herself and everyone else for
some guilt of which he cannot discover the nature.
The Clennam house is a jail, and they arc in prison,
too. So arc the people in Bleeding Heart Yard, small
tenement-dwelling shopkeepers and artisans, rack-
rented by the patriarchal Casby; so is Merdle, the
great swindler-financier, imprisoned, like Kreuger or
Insull, in the vast scaffolding of fraud he has con-
trived, who wanders about in his expensive house
itself, for all its crimson and gold, as suffocating and
dark as the Clcnnams' afraid of his servants, un-
loved by his wife, almost unknown by his guests, till
on the eve of the collapse of the edifice he quietly
opens his veins in his bath.

At last, after twenty-five years of jail, Mr. Dorrit
inherits a fortune and is able to get out of the Marshal-
sea. He is rich enough to go into Society; but all the
Dorrits, with the exception of the youngest, known as
'Little Dorrit, 1 who has been born in the Marshalsea
itself and has never made any pretensions, have been
demoralized or distorted by the effort to remain gen-
teel while tied to the ignominy of the prison. They
cannot behave like the people outside. And yet that
outside world is itself insecure. It is dominated by Mr.
Merdle, who comes, as the story goes on, to be uni-
versally believed and admired is taken Up by the
governing class, sent to Parliament, courted by lords.
The Dorrits, accepted by Society, still find themselves

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 55

in prison. The moral is driven home when old Dorrit,
at a fashionable dinner, loses control of his wits and
slips back into his character at the Marshalsca:
'"Born here, he repeated, shedding tears. "Bred
here. Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter. Child of
an unfortunate father, but ha always a gentle-
man. Poor, no doubt, but hum proud/" He
asks the company for 'Testimonials/ which had been
what he had used to call his tips. (Dr. Manettc, in
A Tale of Two Cities, repeats this pattern with his
amnesic relapses into the shoemaking he has learned
in prison.) Arthur Clennam, ruined by the failure of
Merdle, finally goes to the Marshalsea himself; and
there at last he and Little Dorrit arrive at an under-
standing. The implication is that, prison for prison,
a simple incarceration is an excellent school of char-
acter compared to the dungeons of Puritan theology,
of modern business, of money-ruled Society, or of the
poor people of Bleeding Heart Yard who are swindled
and bled by all of these.

The whole book is much gloomier than Bleak House >
where the fog is external to the characters and repre-
sents something removable, the obfuscatory elements
of the past. The murk of Little Dorrit permeates the
souls of the people, and we see more of their souls than
in Bleak House. Arthur Clennam, with his breedings on
his unloving mother, who turns out not to be his real
mother (a poor doomed child of natural impulse, like
Lady Dedlock's lover), is both more real and more
depressing than Lady Dedlock. Old Dorrit has been
spoiled beyond repair: he can never be rehabilitated

56 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

like Micawber. There is not even a villain like Tulk-
inghorn to throw the odium on a predatory class: the
official villain Blandois has no organic connection
with the story save as a caricature of social pretense.
(Though the illustrations suggest that he may have
been intended as a sort of cartoon of Napoleon III,
whose regime Dickens loathed in which case the
tie-up between Blandois and the Clennams may figure
a close relationship between the shady financial in-
terests disguised by the flashy fagade of the Second
Empire and the respectable business interests of
British merchants, so inhuman behind their mask of
morality. Blandois is crushed in the end by the col-
lapse of the Clennams 1 house, as people were already
predicting that Napoleon would be by that of his
own.) The r61e of the Court of Chancery is more or
less played by the Circumlocution Office and the
governing-class family of Barnacles perhaps the
most brilliant thing of its kind in Dickens : that great
satire on all aristocratic bureaucracies, and indeed on
all bureaucracies, with its repertoire of the variations
possible within the bureaucratic type and its desolat-
ing picture of the emotions of a man being passed on
from one door to another. But the Circumlocution
Office, after all, only influences the action in a nega-
tive way.

The important thing to note in Little Dorrit
which was originally to have been called Nobody's
Fault is that the fable is here presented from the
point of view of imprisoning states of mind as much
as from that of oppressive institutions. This is il-

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 57

lustratcd in a startling way by The History of a Self-
Tormentor, which we find toward the end of the book.
Here Dickens, with a remarkable pre-Frcudian in-
sight, gives a sort of case history of a woman im-
prisoned in a neurosis which has condemned her to
the delusion that she can never be loved. There is
still, to be sure, the social implication that her
orphaned childhood and her sense of being slighted
have been imposed on her by the Victorian attitude
toward her illegitimate birth. But her handicap is
now simply a thought-pattern, and from that thought-
pattern she is never to be liberated.

Dickens' personal difficulties make themselves felt
like an ache at the back of Little Dorrit in which he
represents his hero as reflecting : ' Who has not thought
for a moment, sometimes? that it might be better
to flow away monotonously, like the river, and to
compound for its insensibility to happiness with its
insensibility to pain.' The strain of his situation with
his wife had become particularly acute the year that
the book was begun. Dickens had been very much
excited that February to get a letter from Maria
Beadnell, now married. The readiness and warmth
of his response shows how the old Ideal had lighted
up again. He was on the point of leaving for Paris,
and during his absence he looked forward eagerly to
seeing her: he arranged to meet her alone. The drop
in the tone of his letters after this meeting has taken
place is blighting to poor Mrs. Winter. He had found
her banal and silly, with the good looks of her girl-

58 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

hood gone. He put her into his new novel as Flora
Pinching, a sort of Dora Spenlow vulgarized and
transmogrified into a kind of Mrs. Nickleby that
is, into another version of Dickens' unforgivcn
mother. It seems clear that the type of woman that
Dickens is chiefly glorifying during the years from
Martin Cbw&lewit through Little Dorrit \ the devoted
and self-effacing little mouse, who hardly aspires to
be loved, derives from Georgina Hogarth, his sister-
in-law. Georgina, who had been eight when Dickens
was married, had come to womanhood in the Dickens
household. Dickens grew fond of her, explaining that
his affection was due partly to her resemblance to her
dead sister. She gradually took over the care of the
children, whom Dickens complained of their mother's
neglecting; and became the real head of the household
creating a situation which is reflected in these
heroines of the novels. The virtues of Ruth Pinch
are brought out mainly through her relation to her
brother Tom; Esther Summer son, who keeps house for
Mr. Jarndyce but does not suspect that he wants to
marry her, is suspended through most of Bleak House
in a relation to him that is semi-filial ; Little Dorrit is
shown throughout in a sisterly and filial relation, and
Arthur Clennam, before he figures as a lover, plays
simply, like Mr. Jarndyce, the r61e of a protective and
elderly friend. In the love of Little Dorrit and Clen-
nam, there seems to be little passion, but a sobriety of
resignation, almost a note of sadness: they 'went
down,' Dickens says at the end, 'into a modest life of
usefulness and happiness,' one of the objects of which

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 59

was to be * to give a mother's care ... to Fanny's [her
sister's] neglected children no less than to their own/
These children of Dickens' he now had nine
were evidently giving him anxiety. He used to
grumble about their lack of enterprise; and it would
appear from Mrs. Perugini's story, which trails off in
a depressing record of their failures and follies and
untimely deaths, that in general they did not turn out
well. The ill-bred daughter and worthless son of
Dorrit probably caricature Dickens' fears. Surely the
Dorrits* travels on the Continent caricature the pro-
gress of the Dickenses. Old Dorrit 's rise in the world
is no rescue at the end of a fairy tale, as it would have
been in one of the early novels. The point of the story
is that this rise can be only a mockery: the Dorrits will
always be what the Marshalsea has made them.

The theme of Little Dorrit is repeated in Great Ex-
pectations (1860-61). This second of Dickens' novels
in which the hero tells his own story is like an at-
tempt to fill in some of the things that have been left
out of David Copperfield. The story is the reverse of the
earlier one. David was a gentleman by birth, who by
accident became a wage slave. Pip is a boy out of the
blacksmith's shop, who by accident gets a chance to
become a gentleman. He straightway turns into a
mean little snob.

The formula of Bleak House is repeated, too. The
solution of the puzzle is again Dickens' moral, here
more bitterly, even hatefully, delivered. Pip owes his
mysterious income to the convict whom, in his child-

fo THE WOUND AND THE BOW

hood, he befriended on the marshes. Abel Magwitch
himself had been a wretched tinker's boy, who had
'first become aware of [himself] a-thieving turnips
for a living/ Later he had been exploited by a gentle-
manly rotter turned crook, who had left Magwitch
to take the rap when they had both fallen into the
hands of the law. The poor rascal had been impressed
by the advantage that his companion's social status
he had been to the public school had given him
in the eyes of the court; and when Magwitch later
prospered in New South Wales, he decided to make a
gentleman of Pip. Thus Pip finds himself in a position
very similar to Lady Dedlock's: the money that
chains him to Magwitch will not merely associate
him with a 'poverty and ignorance more abject than
that from which he has escaped, but will put him
under obligations to an individual who represents to
him the dregs of the underworld, a man with a price
on his head. Not only this; but the proud lady
here who has known Pip in his first phase and
scorns him because she thinks him a common village
boy turns out to be the daughter of Magwitch and
of a woman who has been tried for murder and who is
now employed in the humble capacity of housekeeper
by the lawyer who got her off.

The symbol here is the 'great expectations' which
both Pip and Estella entertain: they figure (Mr. T. A.
Jackson has here again put his finger on the point) the
Victorian mid-century optimism. Estella and Pip have
both believed that they could count upon a wealthy
patroness, the heiress of a now disused brewery, to

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 61

make them secure against vulgarity and hardship.
But the patroness vanishes like a phantom, and they
are left with their leisure-class habits and no incomes
to keep them up. They were originally to lose one
another, too: the tragedies in Dickens' novels arc
coming more and more to seem irremediable. Estella
was to marry for his money a brutal country squire,
and Pip was never to see her again except for one brief
meeting in London. Here is the last sentence of the
ending that Dickens first wrote: 'I was very glad
afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face,
and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the
assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss
Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to
understand what my heart used to be.'

This was to have been all, and it was perfect in tone
and touch. But Bulwer Lytton made Dickens change
it to the ending we now have, in which Estella 's
husband gets killed and Pip and she are united.
Dickens was still a public entertainer who felt that
he couldn't too far disappoint his audience.

In Little Dorr it and Great Expectations^ there is, there-
fore, a great deal more psychological interest than in
Dickens' previous books. We are told what the char-
acters think and feel, and even something about how
they change. And here we must enter into the central
question of the psychology of Dickens' characters.
The world of the early Dickens is organized accord-
ing to a dualism which is based in its artistic
derivation on the values of melodrama: there are

6l THE WOUND AND THE BOW

bad people and there are good people, there are comics
and there are characters played straight. The only
complexity of which Dickens is capable is to make one
of his noxious characters become wholesome, one of
his clowns turn into a serious person. The most con-
spicuous example of this process is the reform of Mr
Dombey, who, as Taine says, * turns into the best
of fathers and spoils a fine novel.' But the reform of
Scrooge in A Christmas Carol shows the phenomenon
in its purest form.

We have come to take Scrooge so much for granted
that he seems practically a piece of Christmas folk-
lore; we no more inquire seriously into the mechanics
of his transformation than we do into the transforma-
tion of the Beast in the fairy tale into the young prince
that marries Beauty. Yet Scrooge represents a prin-
ciple fundamental to the dynamics of Dickens' world
and derived from his own emotional constitution.
It was not merely that his passion for the theater had
given him a taste for melodramatic contrasts; it was
rather that the lack of balance between the opposite
impulses of his nature had stimulated an appetite for
melodrama. For emotionally Dickens was unstable.
Allowing for the English restraint, which masks what
the Russian expressiveness indulges and perhaps over-
expresses, and for the pretenses of English biographers,
he seems almost as unstable as Dostoevsky. He was
capable of great hardness and cruelty, and not merely
toward those whom he had cause to resent: people
who patronized or intruded on him. On one occasion,
in the presence of other guests, he ordered Forster out

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 63

of his house over some discussion that had arisen at
dinner; he was certainly not gentle with Maria
Winter; and his treatment of Catherine suggests, as
we shall see, the behavior of a Renaissance monarch
summarily consigning to a convent the wife who has
served her turn. There is more of emotional reality
behind Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop than there is
behind Little Nell. If Little Nell sounds bathetic
today, Quilp has lost none of his fascination. He is
ugly, malevolent, perverse; he delights in making
mischief for its own sake; yet he exercises over the
members of his household a power which is almost
an attraction and which resembles what was known in
Dickens' day as 'malicious animal magnetism/
Though Quilp is ceaselessly tormenting his wife and
browbeating the boy who works for him, they never
attempt to escape: they admire him; in a sense they
love him.

So Dickens' daughter, Kate Perugini, who had de-
stroyed a memoir of her father that she had written,
because it gave ' only half the truth/ told Miss Gladys
Storey, the author of Dickens and Daughter, that the
spell which "Dickens had been able to cast on his
daughters was so strong that, after he and their
mother had separated, they had refrained from going
to see her, though he never spoke to them about it,
because they knew that he did not like it, and would
even take music lessons in a house just opposite the
one where she was living without daring to pay her
a call. 'I loved my father/ said Mrs. Perugini,
* better than any man in the world in a different

64 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

way of course I loved him for his faults/ And she

added, as she rose and walked to the door: 'my father
was a wicked man a very wicked man/ But from
the memoirs of his other daughter Mamie, who also
adored her father and seems to have viewed him un-
critically, we hear of his colossal Christmas parties,
of the vitality, the imaginative exhilaration, which
swept all the guests along. It is Scrooge bursting in
on the Cratchits. Shall we ask what Scrooge would
actually be like if we were to follow him beyond the
frame of the story? Unquestionably he would relapse
when the merriment was over if not while it was
still going on into moroseness, vindictiveness, sus-
picion. He would, that is to say, reveal himself as
the victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very
uncomfortable person.

This dualism runs all through Dickens. There has
always to be a good and a bad of everything: each of
the books has its counterbalancing values, and pairs
of characters sometimes counterbalance each other
from the casts of different books. There has to be a
good manufacturer, Mr. Rouncewell, and a bad manu-
facturer, Mr. Bounderby; a bad old Jew, Fagin, and a
good old Jew, Riah; an affable lawyer who is really
unscrupulous, Vholes, and a kindly lawyer wlio pre-
tends to be unfeeling, Jaggers; a malicious dwarf,
Quilp, and a beneficent dwarf, Miss Mowcher (though
Dickens had originally intended her to be bad); an
embittered and perverse illegitimate daughter, Miss
Wade, the Self-Tormentor, and a sweet and submissive
illegitimate daughter, Esther Summerson. Another

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 65

example of this tendency is Dickens' habit, noted by
Mr. Kingsmill, of making the comic side of his novels
a kind of parody on the sentimental side. Pecksniff is
a satire on that domestic sentiment which wells up
so profusely in Dickens himself when it is a question
of a story for the Christmas trade; the performances
of the Vincent Crummleses provide a burlesque of the
stagy plot upon which Nicholas Nickleby is based.

Dickens' difficulty in his middle period, and indeed
more or less to the end, is to get good and bad together
in one character. He had intended in Dombey and Son
to make Walter Gay turn out badly, but hadn't been
able to bring himself to put it through. In Bleak
House, however, he had had Richard Carstone undergo
a progressive demoralization. But the real beginnings
of a psychological interest may be said to appear in
Hard Times, which, though parts of it have the cru-
dity of a cartoon, is the first novel in which Dickens
tries to trace with any degree of plausibility the
processes by which people become what they are.
We are given a certain sympathetic insight into what
has happened to the Gradgrind children; and the con-
version of Mr. Gradgrind is very much better prepared
for than that of Mr. Dombey. In Great Expectations we
see Pip pass through a whole psychological cycle.
At first, he is sympathetic, then by a more or less
natural process he turns into something unsympathetic,
then he becomes sympathetic again. Here the effects
<Si both poverty and riches arc seen from the inside in
one person. This is for Dickens a great advance; and it
is a development which, if carried far enough, would

66 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

end by eliminating the familiar Dickens of the lively
but limited stage characters, with their tag lines and
their unvarying make-ups.

The crisis of Dickens' later life had already come
before Great Expectations. That 'old unhappy loss or
want of something' which he makes David Copperfield
feel after his marriage to Dora had driven him into a
dream of retreating to the monastery of the Great
St. Bernard, where it had been his original idea to
have the whole of Little Dorrit take place. But he had
ended by resorting to another order which, in mimick-
ing the life of men, may remain almost as impenetrably
cut off from it as the monks of the St. Bernard them-
selves. Dickens embarked upon a series of theatricals,
which, though undertaken originally as benefits, took
on a semi-professional character and came to look
more and more like pretexts for Dickens to indulge his
appetite for acting.

He had written Forster of * the so happy and yet so
unhappy existence which seeks its realities in unreali-
ties, and finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual
escape from the disappointment of heart around it. 1
But now the pressure of this disappointment was to
drive him into a deeper addiction to that dangerous
comfort of unrealities. It was as if he had actually
to embody, to act out in his own person, the life of his
imagination. He had always loved acting: as a child,
he had projected himself with intensity into the char-
acters of the plays he had seen. He had always loved
amateur theatricals and charades. He used to say
that it relieved him, if only in a game, to throw him-

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 67

self into the personality of someone else. His whole
art had been a kind of impersonation, in which he had
exploited this or that of his impulses by incorporating
it in an imaginary person rather than up to this
point, at any rate exploring his own personality.
The endings of his early novels, in which the villain
was smashingly confounded and the young juvenile
got the leading woman, had been the conventional
d6nouements of Drury Lane. Whole scenes of Barnaby
Rudgt had been high-flown declamations in a blank
verse which connects Dickens almost as closely with
the dramatic tradition of Shakespeare as with the
fictional tradition of Fielding. Dickens admitted that
he found it difficult, whenever he became particularly
serious, to refrain from falling into blank verse; and
though his prose, like everything else in his art,
underwent a remarkable development, tightening up
and becoming cleaner, he never quite got rid of this
tendency. The scene in which Edith Dombey turns
upon and unmasks Mr. Carker, with its doors ar-
ranged for exits and entrances, its suspense engineered
through the presence of the servants, its set speeches,
its highfalutin language, its hair-raising reversal of
r61es, its interruption at the climactic moment by the
sudden sound of the bell that announces the outraged
husband this scene, which is one of the worst in
Dickens, must be one of the passages in fiction most
completely conceived in terms of the stage. In Bleak
House , he is still theatrical, but he has found out how
to make this instinct contribute to the effectiveness of
a novel: the theatrical present tense of the episodes

68 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

which alternate with Esther Summerson's diary does
heighten the excitement of the narrative, and the
theatrical Lady Dedlock is an improvement on Edith
Dombey. Yet in the novels that follow Bleak House,
this theatricalism recurs as something never cither
quite eliminated from or quite assimilated by Dickens'
more serious art, an element which remains unreal if it
is not precisely insincere and on which his stories
sometimes run aground. Later, when he was giving
his public readings, he wrote a whole series of stories
Somebody's Luggage, Mrs. Lirriper, Doctor lAarigold
which were primarily designed for public performance
and in which excellent character monologues lead up
to silly little episodes in the bad sentimental taste of
the period which Dickens had done so much to popu-
larize. Dickens had a strain of the ham in him, and,
in the desperation of his later life, he gave in to the
old ham and let him rip.

That this satisfied the deeper needs of Dickens as
little as it does those of his readers seems to be proved
by what followed. He met behind the scenes of the
theater sometime in '57 or '58 a young girl named
Ellen Ternan, the daughter of a well-known actress.
When Dickens first saw her, she was hiding behind
t>ne of the properties and crying because she had to
go on in a costume that offended her sense of modesty.
Dickens reassured her. She was eighteen, and she
evidently appealed to that compassionate interest in
young women which had made him apotheosize
Mary Hogarth. He saw her again and became infatu-
ated. He had been complaining to Forster that 4 a

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 69

sense comes always crashing on me now, when I fall
into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed
in life, and one friend and companion I have never
made'; and it must have seemed to him that now he
had found her.

He had made an agreement with Catherine in the
early days of their marriage that if either should fall
in love with anyone else, he should frankly explain to
the other. He now told her that he was in love with
Miss Ternan and compelled her to call on the girl.
Dickens conducted the whole affair with what ap-
pears to us the worst possible taste, though I shall
show in a moment that there were special reasons
why his behavior seemed natural to him. He ar-
ranged to have Ellen Ternan take part in his benefit
performances, and, whether by design or not, gave her
r61es which ran close enough to the real situation to
offend Mrs. Dickens. Mr. Wright, who first made this
whole episode public in 1934, believes, probably
rightly, that Sydney Carton is Dickens' dramatization
of the first hopeless phase of his love. In the spring of
'58, however, Dickens arranged a separation from
Catherine and left her with one of their sons in London
while he removed with the rest of the children and
Georgina to the new place he had bought at Gadshill.
He published a statement in Household Words and cir-
culated a singular letter which was not long in getting
into print, in which he explained that he and Cather-
ine had nothing whatever in common and should
never have got married; defended, without naming
her, Ellen Ternan; and denounced, without naming

70 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

them, as ' two wicked persons' his mother-in-law and
his sister-in-law Helen for having intimated that there
could be 'on this earth a more virtuous and spotless
creature* than Ellen. It was true that he and Ellen
had not been lovers; but he now induced Ellen to be
his mistress and set her up in an establishment of her
own. He wrote her name into his last three novels as
Estella Provis, Bella Wilfer, and finally Helena Land-
less her full name was Ellen Lawless Ternan.

In order to understand what is likely to seem to us
on Dickens' part a strange and disagreeable exhibition-
ism, we must remember his relation to his public.
Perhaps no other kind of writer depends so much on
his audience as the novelist. If the novelist is ex-
tremely popular, he may even substitute his relation
to his public for the ordinary human relations. And
for this reason he responds to his sales in a way which
may seem ridiculous to a writer in a different field; yet
to the novelist the rise or the drop in the number of the
people who buy his books may be felt in very much
the same way as the coolness or the passion of a loved
one. In Dickens' case, a falling-off in the popularity
of his monthly instalments would plunge him into
anxiety and depression. He had played up Sam Wcller
in Pickwick because he saw that the character was
going well, and he sent Martin Chuzzlewit to America
because he found that interest in the story was flag-
ging. And now it had come to be true in a sense that
his only companion in his fictional world was the
public who saw him act and read his novels. When he
began, as he did that same spring, to give regular pub-

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 71

lie readings which enabled him to live these novels,
as it were, in his own person, and to feel the direct
impact on his audience the relation became more
intimate still. For Dickens, the public he addressed in
this statement about his marriage was probably closer
than the wife by whom he had had ten children; and
now that he had fallen in love with Ellen, instead of
finding in her a real escape from the eternal masquerade
of his fiction, his first impulse was to transport her to
dwell with him in that imaginary world itself, to
make her a character in a novel or play, and to pay
court to her in the presence of his public.

But the old sense of 'loss or want* does not seem to
have been cured by all this. 4 My father was like a
madman/ says Mrs. Perugini, 'when my mother left
home. This affair brought out all that was worst
all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn
what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass
the misery and unhappiness of our home/ And this
misery still hung over the household, in spite of
Dickens' festive hospitality, even after the separation
had been arranged. Poor Mrs. Dickens in her exile was
wretched 'Do you think he is sorry for me?' she
asked Kate on one of the only two occasions when she
ever heard her mother mention her father and there
was always at the back of their consciousness this
sense of something deeply wrong. Kate Dickens, with
more independence than Mamie, does not seem much
to have liked having Miss Ternan come to Gadshill;
and she finally married a brother of Wilkie Collins,
without really caring about him, in order to get away

71 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

from home. After the wedding, which Mrs. Dickens
had not attended, Mamie found her father weeping in
Kate's bedroom, with his face in her wedding dress:
'But for me/ he said to her, 'Katy would not have
left home.'

This episode of Ellen Ternan has been hushed up so
systematically, and the information about it is still so
meager, that it is difficult to get an impression of Ellen.
We do, however, know something about what Dick-
ens thought of her from the heroines in his last books
who are derived from her. Estella is frigid and in-
different: it amuses her to torture Pip, who loves her
'against reason, against promise, against peace,
against hope, against happiness, against all discour-
agement that could be* ; she marries a man she does not
love for his money. Bella Wilfer up to her conversion
by Mr. Boffin is equally intent upon money which
was certainly one of the things that Ellen got out of
her liaison with Dickens. Both Estella and Bella are
petulant, spoiled and proud. They represent, as it
were, the qualities of the Edith Dombey-Lady Dedlock
great lady combined with the capriciousness of Dora
Spenlow the old elements of Dickens' women
simply mixed in a new way. And these novels of
Dickens in which Ellen figures show perhaps more real
desperation than Little Dorrit itself, with its closing
note of modest resignation. It seems to be the general
opinion that Ellen was neither so fascinating nor so
gifted as Dickens thought her. After his death, she
married a clergyman, and she confided to Canon
Benham that she had loathed her relationship with

DICKENS: THB TWO SCROOGES 73

Dickens and deeply regretted the whole affair. She
had borne Dickens a child, which did not live. It
may be though we have no date that Dickens'
short story, Doctor Marigold (1865), which became one
of his favorite readings, the monologue of a traveling
'cheap jack/ who keeps an audience entertained with
his patter while his child is dying in his arms, is a
reflection of this event.

In spite of the energy of a diable au corps which en-
abled him to put on his plays and to perform prodigies
of walking and mountain-climbing at the same time
that he was composing his complicated novels, the
creative strain of a lifetime was beginning to tell
heavily on Dickens. He had always felt under an ob-
ligation to maintain a standard of living conspicuously
lavish for a literary man: in his statement about his
separation from his wife, he boasts that he has pro-
vided for her as generously ' as if Mrs. Dickens were a
lady of distinction and I a man of fortune/ And now
he was compelled both by the demon that drove him
and by the necessity of earning money in order to keep
up the three establishments for which he had made
himself responsible and to launch his sons and
daughters on the world, to work frantically at his
public readings. His nervous disorders persisted: he
was troubled while he was writing Great Expectations
with acute pains in the face; and he developed a lame-
ness in his left foot, which, though he blamed it on
taking walks in heavy snowstorms, was also evi-
dently due to the burning-out of his nerves. He was
maimed by it all the rest of his life. * Twice last week, '

74 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

he writes in '66, 'I was seized in a most distressing
manner apparently in the heart; but, I am per-
suaded, only in the nervous system. 1

Three years had passed since Great Expectations before
Dickens began another novel; he worked at it with
what was for him extreme slowness, hesitation and
difficulty; and the book shows the weariness, the fears
and the definitive disappointments of this period.

This story, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), like all
these later books of Dickens, is more interesting to us
today than it was to Dickens' public. It is a next
number in the Dickens sequence quite worthy of its
predecessors, a development out of what has gone
before that is in certain ways quite different from the
others. It may be said Dickens never really repeats
himself: his thought makes a consistent progress, and
his art, through the whole thirty-five years of his
career, keeps going on to new materials and effects; so
that his work has an interest and a meaning as a whole.
The difficulty that Dickens found in writing Our
Mutual Friend does not make itself felt as anything in
the nature of an intellectual disintegration. On the
contrary, the book compensates for its shortcomings
by the display of an intellectual force which, though
present in Dickens* work from the first, here appears
in a phase of high tension and a condition of fine
muscular training. The Dickens of the old eccentric
'Dickens characters' has here, as has often been noted,
become pretty mechanical and sterile. It is a pity that
the creator of Quilp and of Mrs. Jarley's waxworks

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 75

should have felt himself under the necessity of fabri-
cating Silas Wegg and the stuffed animals of Mr.
Venus. Also, the complex Dickens plot has come to
seem rather tiresome and childish. But Dickens has
here distilled the mood of his later years, dramatized
the tragic discrepancies of his character, delivered his
final judgment on the whole Victorian exploit, in a
fashion so impressive that we realize how little the
distractions of this period had the power to direct
him from the prime purpose of his life: the serious
exercise of his art.

As the fog is the symbol for Bleak House and the
prison for Little Dorrit, so the dust-pile is the symbol
for Our Mutual Friend. It dominates even the land-
scape of London, which has already been presented
by Dickens under such a variety of aspects, but which
now appears though with Newgate looming over
it as it did in Barnaby Rudge under an aspect that is
new: 'A gray dusty withered evening in London city
has not a hopeful aspect,' he writes of the day when
Bradley Headstone goes to pay his hopeless court to
Lizzie Hexam. 'The closed warehouses and offices
have an air of death about them, and the national
dread of color has an air of mourning. The towers
and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches,
dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on
them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun-dial
on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black
shade, of having failed in its business enterprise and
stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and
strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy

76 THE WOUND AND THB BOW

waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels,
and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore
them, searching and stooping and poking for every-
thing to sell. The set of humanity outward from the
City is as a set of prisoners departing from gaol, and
dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for
the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state-dwelling/

The actual dust-pile in question has been amassed
by a dust-removal contractor, who has made out of
it a considerable fortune. The collection of refuse at
that time was still in private hands, and was profitable
because the bones, rags and cinders, and even the dust
itself, were valuable for various kinds of manufacture.
The plot of Our Mutual Friend has to do with the
struggle of a number of persons to get possession of
or some share in this money. (The other principal
industry which figures in Our Mutual Friend is the
robbing of the dead bodies in the Thames.)' But the
real meaning of the dust-pile is not in doubt: 'My
lords and gentlemen and honorable lords,' writes
Dickens, when the heap is being carted away, 'when
you in the course of your dust-shoveling and cinder-
raking have piled up a mountain of pretentious failure,
you must off with your honorable coats for the re-
moval of it, and fall to the work with the power of
all the queen's horses and all the queen's men, or it
will come rushing down and bury us alive/

Dickens' line in his criticism of society is very clear
in Our Mutual Friend, and it marks a new position on
Dickens' part, as it results from a later phase of the
century. Dickens has come at last to despair utterly

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 77

of the prospering middle class. We have seen how he
judged the morality of the merchants. In Bleak
House, the ironmaster is a progressive and self-sus-
taining figure who is played off against parasites of
various sorts; but in Hard Times, written immediately
afterward, the later development of Rouncewell is
dramatized in the exploiter Bounderby, a new kind
of Victorian hypocrite, who pretends to be a self-
made man. In Little Dorrit, the one set of characters
who are comparatively healthy and cheerful still
represent that middle-class home which has remained
Dickens' touchstone of virtue; but even here there is
a distinct change in Dickens' attitude. Mr. Meagles,
the retired banker, with his wife and his beloved
only daughter, become the prey of Henry Gowan, a
well-connected young man of no fortune who manages
to lead a futile life (the type has been well observed)
between the social and artistic worlds without ever
making anything of either. But the smugness and
insularity, even the vulgarity, of the Meagleses is
felt by Dickens as he has never felt it in connection
with such people before. After all, in taking in
Tattycoram, the foundling, the Meagleses could not
help making her feel her position of inferiority. A
little more emphasis in this direction by Dickens and
the Meagleses might seem to the reader as odious as
they recurrently do to her. Tattycoram herself, with
her painful alternations between the extremes of
affection and resentment, probably reflects the oscilla-
tions of Dickens himself at this period.
But the resentment is to get the upper hand. The

78 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Meaglcses turn up now as the Podsnaps, that horren-
dous middle-class family, exponents of all the sound-
est British virtues, who, however, are quite at home
In a social circle of sordid adventurers and phony
nouvcaux riches > and on whom Dickens visits a satire as
brutal as themselves. Gone are the high spirits that
made of Pecksniff an exhilarating figure of fun gone
with the Yoho ! of the stagecoach on which Tom Pinch
traveled to London. The Podsnaps, the Lammles, the
Vcnecrings, the Fledgebys, are unpleasant as are no
other characters in Dickens . It comes to us as a disturb-
ing realization that Dickens is now afraid of Podsnap
(who, with his talk about the paramount importance
of not bringing the blush to the young person's cheek,
would of course have been the loudest among those
who disapproved of Dickens' affair with Miss Ternan).
And Fledgeby, the young moneylender of the second
generation, with his peachy cheeks and slender ^figure,
who lives in the Albany and dines out Grandfather
Smallweed is a man beside him ! It is startling to find
that Dickens has here even hit upon a principle which
another group of commercial-patriotic rotters were
later to exploit on a large scale. One of the ugliest
scenes in Dickens is that in which Fledgeby ascribes
his own characteristics to the gentle old Jew Riah and
makes him the agent of his meanness and sharp-dealing.
And not content with making Fledgeby a cur, Dickens
himself shows a certain cruelty in having him ulti-
mately thrashed by Lammle under circumstances of
peculiar ignominy and then having the little dolls'
dressmaker apply plasters with pepper on them to his

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 79

wounds. This incident betrays a kind of sadism which
we never felt in Dickens' early work when Nicholas
Nickleby beat Squeers, for example but which breaks
out now and then in these later books in a disagreeable
fashion.

If the middle class has here become a monster, the
gentry have taken on an aspect more attractive than
we have ever known them to wear as a class in any
previous novel of Dickens. If an increase of satiric
emphasis turns the Meagleses into the Podsnaps, so a
shift from the satirical to the straight turns the frivo-
lous and idle young man of good family, who has
hitherto always been exhibited as more or less of a
scoundrel James Harthouse or Henry Gowan
into the sympathetic Eugene Wrayburn. Eugene and
his friend Mortimer Lightwood, the little old diner-
out named Twemlow, the only gentleman in the Ven-
eerings' circle, and the Reverend Frank Milvey, 'ex-
pensively educated and wretchedly paid/ the Chris-
tian turned social worker, are the only representatives
of the upper strata who are shown as having decent
values; and they are all the remnants of an impover-
ished gentry. Outside these, you find the decent values
or what Dickens intends to be such in an impov-
erished proletariat and lower middle class : the modest
clerk, the old Jew, the dolls 1 dressmaker, the dust-
contractor's foreman, the old woman who minds
children for a living. And the chief heroine is not
Bella Wilfer, who has to be cured of her middle-class
ideals, but Lizzie Hcxam, the illiterate daughter of a
Thames-side water-rat. Dickens has here, for the

8o THE WOUND AND THE BOW

first time in his novels, taken his leading woman from
the lowest class; and it will be the principal moral of
Our Mutual Friend that Wrayburn will have the cour-
age to marry Lizzie. The inevitable conjunction of
the high with the low is not here to result in a tragedy
but to figure as a fortunate affair. Nor does it involve
the whole structure of society in the same way as in
the earlier novels : the mechanics are somewhat differ-
ent. The point is made that the Podsnap- Veneering
upper scum of the successful middle class remain un-
affected by what has happened and do not seriously
affect anyone else. Such people, in Dickens' view,
have by this time become completely dissociated from
anything that is admirable in English life. Simply,
Eugene Wrayburn no longer appears at the Veneerings'
parties. When they sneer at the unseemliness of his
marriage, Mr. Twemlow suddenly flares up and de-
clares with an authority which makes everyone un-
comfortable that Eugene has behaved like a gentle-
man; and that is the end of the book.

Dickens has aligned himself in Our Mutual Friend
with a new combination of forces. Shrinking from
Podsnap and Veneering, he falls back on that aristoc-
racy he had so savagely attacked in his youth, but
to which, through his origins, he had always been
closer than he had to the commercial classes. After
all, Sir John Chester had had qualities of coolness,
grace and ease which, when they appear in an excel-
lent fellow like Eugene, are infinitely preferable to
Podsnap. The Chartist movement in England had
run into the sands in the fifties; but during the sixties

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 81

the trade-union movement had been making remark-
able progress; and in the fall of 1864, while Dickens
was writing Our Mutual Friend, the Workers' Inter-
national, under the guidance of Marx, was being or-
ganized in London. This may have had its influence
on Dickens (though he is careful to let us know that
the exemplary old Betty Higden had 'never begged
nor had a penny of the Union money in all her life')*
because the final implication of the story is to state
it in the Marxist language that the declassed repre-
sentatives of the old professional upper classes may
unite with the proletariat against the commercial
middle class.

There is, however, another element that plays an
important r61e in the story: the proletarian who has
educated himself to be a member of this middle class.
Lizzie Hexam has a brother, whom she has induced to
get an education and who, as soon as he has qualified
himself to teach, drops his family even more callously
than Pip did his; and the schoolmaster of Charley
Hexam's school, another poor man who has advanced
himself, is the villain of Our Mutual Friend. We are a
long way here from the days when the villains and
bad characters in Dickens, the Quilps and the Mrs.
Gamps, could be so fascinating through their resource-
fulness and vitality that, as G. K. Chesterton says,
the reader is sorry at the end when they are finally
banished from the scene and hopes that the discredited
scoundrel will still open the door and stick his head
in and make one more atrocious remark. Such figures
are so much all of a piece of evil that they have almost

8z THE WOUND AND THE BOW

a kind of innocence. But here Bradley Headstone has
no innocence: he is perverted, tormented, confused.
He represents a type which begins to appear in these
latest novels of Dickens and which originally derives
perhaps from those early theatrical villains, of the
type of the elder Rudge or Monks in Oliver Twist,
skulking figures with black looks and ravaged faces :
a literary convention of which one would suppose it
would be impossible to make anything plausible. Yet
Dickens does finally succeed in giving these dark fig-
ures reality.

In Bradley Headstone's case, it is his very aspirations
which have gone bad and turned the stiff and anxious
schoolmaster into a murderer. He wants to marry
Lizzie Hexam and he is wounded by her preference
for Eugene, whose nonchalance and grace infuriate
him because he knows he can never achieve them. In
order to make himself a place in society, he has had
rigorously to repress his passions; and now that they
finally break out, it is more horrible than Bill Sikes or
Jonas Chuzzlewit, because we understand Bradley as a
human being. Bradley is the first murderer in Dickens
who exhibits any complexity of character. And he is
the first to present himself as a member of respectable
Victorian society. There is a dreadful and convincing
picture of the double life led by Headstone as he goes
about his duties as a schoolmaster after he has decided
to murder Eugene. In Great Expectations, the Ellen Ter-
nan character, Estella, rejects the love of the hero.
In Our Mutual Friend, Bella Wilfer rejects Rokesmith
in much the same way though less cruelly, and

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 83

though she later marries him. But Rokesmith is a
colorless character, and the real agonies of frustrated
passion appear in Our Mutual Friend in the scene be-
tween Bradley and Lizzie. This is the kind of thing
the Carker and Edith Dombey kind of thing
that is likely to be bad in Dickens; but here it has a
certain reality and a certain unpleasant power. Who
can forget the tophatted schoolmaster striking his
fist against the stone wall of the church?

The inference is, of course, that Bradley, if he had
not been shipwrecked in this way, would have ap-
proximated as closely as possible to some sort of
Murdstone or Gradgrind. But his death has a tragic
symbolism which suggests a different kind of moral.
In order to escape detection, he has disguised himself
at the time of the murder as a disreputable waterside
character who is known to have a grievance against
Eugene. When the man finds out what has happened,
he makes capital of it by blackmailing Bradley.
Headstone finally tackles him on the edge of the deep
lock of a canal, drags him into the water, and holds
him under until he is drowned; but in doing so, he
drowns himself. It is as if the illiterate ruffian whom
he would now never be able to shake off has come to
represent the brutish part of Bradley 's own nature.
Having failed to destroy Eugene, he destroys himself
with the brute.

VI

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the motif of Bradley
Headstone is, with certain variations, repeated.

84 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

This novel, written five years later, Dickens never
lived to finish, and it is supposed to have been left an
enigma. We must first try to solve this enigma; and
to do so we must proceed with a consciousness of the
real meaning of Dickens' work. For though it is true
that Edwin Drood has been enormously written about,
it has been always from the point of view of trying
to find out what Dickens intended to do with the plot.
None of the more serious critics of Dickens has ever
been able to take the novel very seriously. They
persist in dismissing it as a detective story with good
touches and promising characters, but of no interest
in the development of Dickens' genius. Bernard Shaw,
who is interested in the social side of Dickens, declares
that it is ' only a gesture by a man three quarters dead* ;
and it is true, as Forster remarked, that The Mystery
of Edwin Drood seems quite free from the social criticism
which had grown more biting as Dickens grew older;
but what Forster and Shaw do not see is that the
psychological interest which had been a feature of
Dickens' later period is carried farther in Edwin
Drood. Like all the books that Dickens wrote under
the strain of his later years, it has behind it bitter
judgments and desperate emotions. Here as elsewhere
the solution of the mystery was to have said some
thing that Dickens wanted to say.

It did not, it is true, become possible to gauge the
full significance of the novel until certain key dis-
coveries had been made in regard to the plot itself;
but the creation of such a character as John Jasper at
this point in Dickens' development should have had

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 85

its significance for any student of Dickens and should
have led to a more careful consideration, in the light
of certain hints supplied by Forster, of the psycho-
logical possibilities of the character. It has remained
for two American scholars to hit upon the cardinal
secrets that explain the personality of Jasper. As both
these discoveries have been made since the publication
in 1912. of W. Robertson Nicoll's otherwise compre-
hensive book, The Problem of Edwin Drood, they have
not received attention there; they are not included by
Thomas Wright in the bibliography of Edwin Drood
in his Life of Charles Dickens, published in 1936; and
so far as I know, up to the present time, nobody who
has written about Dickens has been in a position to
combine these ideas. Yet what happens when one
puts them together is startling: the old novel acquires
a sudden new value. As one can revive invisible ink
by holding it over a lamp or bring out three dimen-
sions in a photograph by looking at it through certain
lenses, so it is possible to recall to life the character of
John Jasper as he must have been conceived by Dickens.
The most important revelation about Edwin Drood
has been made by Mr. Howard Duffield, who pub-
lished an article called John Jasper Strangler in The
American Bookman of February, 1930. Mr. Duffield has
here shown conclusively that Jasper is supposed to be
a member of the Indian sect of Thugs, who made a
profession of ingratiating themselves with travelers
and* then strangling them with a handkerchief and
robbing them. This brotherhood, which had been
operating for centuries pretty much all over India

86 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

and which had given the British government a great
deal of trouble before it succeeded in putting them
down during the thirties, had already attracted a
good deal of attention. Two of the British officers
who had been engaged in the suppression of the
Thugs had written books about them one of them
in the form of a story, Meadows Taylor's Confessions
of a Thug, supposed to be narrated by the Thug him-
self. Eugene Sue had introduced into The Wandering
Jew a Thug strangler practicing in Europe; and an
American novelist, James de Mille, was publishing a
novel called Cord and Creese, which dealt with an
Englishman affiliated with the Thugs, the same year,
1869, that Dickens began Edwin Drood. Dickens'
friend, Edward Bulwer Lytton, had already considered
using this theme. Dickens himself had mentioned
the Thugs in 1857 in connection with a garrotting
epidemic in London. The publication in 1868 of
Wilkie Collins* detective story, The Moonstone, in
which a band of Hindu devotees commit a secret
murder in England, seems to have inspired Dickens
with the idea of outdoing his friend the next year
with a story of a similar kind.

Now we know from the statement of Sir Luke
Fildes, Dickens' illustrator in Edwin Drood, that
Dickens intended to have Jasper strangle Drood with
the long scarf which he (Jasper) wears around his
neck; and we know from many circumstances and
certain hints that the story is to have its roots in the
East. Neville and Helena Landless are supposed to
come from Ceylon; and Mr. Jasper, who smokes

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 87

opium and sees elephants in his trances, is described
as having 'thick, lustrous, well-arranged black hair
and whiskers' and a voice that sometimes sounds
'womanish 1 in short, as something very much like
a Hindu. Furthermore, as Mr. Duffield has established,
John Jasper and this explains a good deal that has
never been understood has been trying to fulfill
the ritualistic requirements for a sanctified and success-
ful Thug murder. The Thugs were worshipers of
Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, and their
methods had been prescribed by the goddess. They
had to commit their crimes with the fold of cloth
which was a fragment of the gown of Kali. Kali's
gown was supposed to be black, and Jasper's scarf is
black. This cloth had to be worn, as Jasper's scarf
is. A secret burial place had to be selected, as
Jasper selects Mrs. Sapsea's tomb, before the murder
took place. The omens had to be observed, as is done
by Mr. Jasper when he makes his nocturnal trip to
the top of the cathedral tower; the call of a rook in
sight of a river was regarded as a favorable sign, the
approving word of the goddess, and that, one finds, is
precisely what Jasper hears. The significance of the
birds is planted plainly at the beginning of Chapter II,
when the Cloisterham rooks are first mentioned:
4 Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird,
the rook, may perhaps have noticed that when he
wings his way homeward toward nightfall, in a
sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly
detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their
flight for some distance, and will there poise and

88 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

linger; conveying to mere men the fancy that it is of
some occult importance to the body politic, that this
artful couple should pretend to have renounced con-
nection with it/ The Thug preys exclusively on
travelers: Edwin Drood is going on a journey; and
when Jaspefi* in his second opium dream, is heard
talking to himself about the murder, it is all in terms
of a journey and a fellow traveler. The Thug is to use
exaggerated words of endearment, as Jasper does with
Drood. He is to persuade his victim to leave his
lodging a little after midnight, as Jasper has done
with Drood, and to stupefy him with a drug in his
food or drink, as Jasper has obviously done, first with
Edwin and Neville, and afterwards with Durdles.

Since Jasper is eventually to be caught, he is evi-
dently to have slipped up in the ritual. Mr. Duffield
suggests that his mistake has been to commit the
murder without an assistant; but he has overlooked
the Thug superstition (recorded by Edward Thornton
in Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs,
published in 1837) that nothing but evil could come
of murdering a man with any gold in his possession.
Now Drood, unknown to Jasper, is carrying the gold
ring which Grewgious has given him for Rosa; and
we have it on Dickens' own testimony to Forster that
the body is to be identified by this ring, which has
survived the effects of the quicklime. True, Edwin
had also been wearing the stickpin and the gold
watch; but as Jasper knew about these and took care
to leave them in the weir, he may have removed them
before the murder when Edwin was drugged.

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 89

Supplementing this interesting discovery we find a
paper by Mr. Aubrey Boyd in the scries of Humanistic
Studies (Volume IX) published by Washington Uni-
versity, in which he shows that Jasper is also a
hypnotist. Dickens had always been interested in
hypnotism. Forster speaks of his first seriously study-
ing it in 1841. He even found that he himself, with
that extraordinarily magnetic personality which
made k possible for him so to fascinate his audiences
and which exerted, as Mrs. Perugini testifies, so ir-
resistible a power over his family, was able to hypno-
tize people. His first experiment was performed on
his wife in the course of his earlier trip to America.
He had, he wrote Forster, been ' holding forth upon
the subject rather luminously, and asserting that I
thought I could exercise the influence, but had never
tried/ 'Kate sat down, laughing, for me to try my
hand upon her. ... In six minutes, I magnetized her
into hysterics, and then into the magnetic sleep. I
tried again next night, and she fell into the slumber
in little more than two minutes. ... I can wake her
with perfect ease; but I confess (not being prepared
for anything so sudden and complete) I was on the
first occasion rather alarmed.' Later, we hear of his
hypnotizing John Leech in order to relieve his pain
during an illness.

In the meantime, he had a strange experience, re-
ported by Mrs. Perugini, with an Englishwoman he
had met in Genoa in 1844. This lady, who was mar-
ried to a Swiss printer, was afflicted with delusions
that ' took the form of a phantom which spoke to her,

90 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

and other illusionary figures of the most hideous
shapes and gory appearance, which came in a crowd,
chattering one to the other as they pursued her, and
after a time faded, veiling their loathsome faces as
they disappeared into space/ Dickens, who at the
time was suffering from a recurrence of the spasms of
pain in his side which had afflicted him as a child in
the blacking warehouse, hypnotized her once or twice
every day and found that he could control the delu-
sions. He seems to have become obsessed with the
case: the treatment went on for months. On one oc-
casion, ' he was in such a fever of anxiety to receive a
letter from his friend concerning the state of his wife
that he watched through a telescope the arrival of the
mailbags into port/ He mesmerized her 'in the open
country and at wayside inns where . . . they would
halt for refreshment or stay the night. He mesmerized
her in railway carriages anywhere, if the moment
was opportune. By degrees she became better and
more serene in her mind and body/ The delusions
were apparently dispelled.

It was obviously on the cards that Dickens would
do something with this subject in his novels; and it
should have given the Drood experts a lead when
they encountered a reference to it in the third chapter
of Edwin Drood. Robertson Nicoll, disregarding this
key passage, mentions the matter in another connec-
tion: he sees that Jasper has 'willed' Crisparkle to go
to the weir, where he will find the watch and stickpin
of Edwin; but he does not inquire farther. It remained
for Mr. Boyd, who has some special knowledge of

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 91

Mesmer and his writings, to recognize that Dickens
has introduced the whole repertory of the supposed
feats of mesmerism called also * animal magnetism'
at the time just as he has reproduced the practices
of the Thugs. Mr. Jasper is clearly exercising ' animal
magnetism,' in this case the kind known as 'mali-
cious,' on Rosa Budd in the scene where he accom-
panies her at the piano; he is exercising it on Edwin and
Neville when he causes them to quarrel in his rooms.
It was supposed in Dickens' time that this influence
could be projected through the agency of mere sound:
hence the insistent keynote in the piano scene and the
swelling note of the organ that frightens Rosa in the
garden. And it was also supposed to penetrate mat-
ter: hence Rosa's remark to Helena that she feels as if
Jasper could reach her through a wall. It could be
made to impregnate objects in such a way as to remain
effective after the master of the magnetic fluid was no
longer himself on the scene : Jasper has put a spell on
the water where Edwin's watch and stickpin are to be
found. And it is possible, though Mr. Boyd does not
suggest it, that the transmission of Jasper's influence
from a distance may also explain the behavior, of
which the implausible character has been noted, of
the men who pursue and waylay Landless.

The revealing hint here, however, is the passage in
the third chapter, of which Boyd has understood the
significance and which has led him to a brilliant con-
jecture: 'As, in some cases of drunkenness,' writes
Dickens, 'and in others of animal magnetism, there
are two states of consciousness that never clash, but

Jl THE WOUND AND THE BOW

each of which pursues its separate course as though
it were continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide
my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again
before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has
two distinct and separate phases of being/ Dickens
had told Forster that the originality of his idea for
Drood, 'a very strong one, though difficult to work'
(Dickens' words in a letter), was to consist (Forstcr's
words in recounting a conversation with Dickens)
'in the review of the murderer's career by himself at
the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt
upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man,
were the tempted. The last chapters were to be written
in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all
elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had
brought him/

John Jasper has then 'two states of consciousness';
he is, in short, what we have come to call a dual per-
sonality. On the principle that 'if I hide my watch
when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can
remember where,' it will be necessary, in order to
extort his confession, to find access to that state of
consciousness, evidently not the one with which he
meets the cathedral world, in which he has committed
the murder. The possibility of opium, suggested by
Robertson Nicoll, is excluded. Wilkie Collins had
just made use of precisely this device in The Moonstone:
the man who has taken the Moonstone under the in-
fluence of laudanum, which has been given him with-
out his being aware of it, is made to repeat his action
under the influence of a second dose, The drunkenness

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 93

in which Jasper will betray himself will not, then, be
produced by a drug. Dickens must go Collins one
better. Mr. Boyd has evidently solved the puzzle in
guessing that Helena Landless is eventually to hypno-
tize Jasper. In the scene at the piano, where he is
working on Rosa with the effect of making her hys-
terical, Helena maintains an attitude of defiance and
announces that she is not afraid of him. It had already
been established by Cuming Walters it was the
first of the important discoveries about Drood that
Datchery, the mysterious character who comes to
Cloisterham to spy on Jasper, is Helena in disguise.
We have been told that Helena used to masquerade
and pass herself off as a boy; and Dickens' alterations
in his text, both the amplifications of the written
copy and the later excisions from the proofs, indicate
very clearly that he was aiming in dealing with
such details as Helena's wig and her attempts to con-
ceal her feminine hands to insinuate evidences of
her real identity without allowing the reader to find
it out too soon. Helena is to get the goods on Jasper,
and in the end, having no doubt acquired in India the
same secret which he has been exploiting (there may
be also, as so often in Dickens, some question of a
family relationship), she will put him in a trance and
make him speak.

What Mr. Boyd, however, was not in a position to
do was combine this idea with the Thug theme. The
Thugs were all in a sense divided personalities. Colonel
James L. Sleeman, in his book on the subject, empha-
sizes what he calls this 'Jekyll-and-Hyde* aspect of

94 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

their activities. The Thugs were devoted husbands
and loving fathers; they made a point again like
Mr. Jasper of holding positions of honor in the
community. And in their own eyes they were virtuous
persons : they were serving the cult of the goddess. In
their case, the Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect of their careers
existed only for profane outsiders. They would
proudly confess, when they were caught, to the num-
ber of lives they had taken. But in the case of Mr.
Jasper, there is a respectable and cultivated Christian
gentleman living in the same soul and body with a
worshiper of the goddess Kali. The murder has been
rehearsed in his opium dreams : he has evidently gone
to the opium den for that purpose. He has kept him-
self under the influence of opium all the time he has
been plotting the murder. But those who are to put
him in prison will not be able to make him take
opium. Helena, with her will stronger than his, will
have to come to the rescue and hypnotize him.

And now what has all this to do with the Dickens
we already know? Why should he have occupied the
last years of his life in concocting this sinister detec-
tive story?

Let us return to his situation at this period. He is
still living between Gadshill and the house of Ellen
Lawless Ternan, who appears now in Edwin Drood
with the even closer identification of the name of
Helena Landless. The motif of the disagreeable scene
between Bradley Headstone and Lizzie Hexam is re-
peated in the even more unpleasant, though theatrical

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 95

and unconvincing, interview between Jasper and Rosa
Budd Jasper presenting, like Headstone, a grue-
some travesty of the respectable Victorian. The Ellen
Ternan heroine is here frankly made an actress:
Helena Landless is an impersonator so accomplished
that she can successfully play a male character in real
life; and she is even more formidable than Estella
because she is to stand up to and unmask Jasper.
Her strength is to be contrasted not only with the
fatal duplicity of Jasper, but with the weakness of
Drood and Neville. All of these three men are to
perish, and Helena is to marry Mr. Tartar, the four-
square young ex-Navy man, bursting with good
spirits, agility and a perhaps rather overdone good
health.

Dickens had just finished his public appearances and
had said his farewell to the platform. The great
feature of his last series of readings had been the
murder of Nancy by Sikcs, a performance which he
had previously tried on his friends and from which
Forster and others had tried to dissuade him. He was
warned by a woman's doctor of his acquaintance that
'if only one woman cries out when you murder the
girl, there will be a contagion of hysteria all over the
place.' But Dickens obviously derived from thus
horrifying his hearers some sort of satisfaction. The
scene was perhaps a symbolical representation of his
behavior in banishing his wife. Certainly the murder
df Nancy had taken on something of the nature of an
obsessive hallucination. Dickens' imagination had
always been subject to a tendency of this kind. It

96 THE WOUND AND THB BOW

had been pointed out by Taine that the fantasies and
monomanias of his lunatics only exaggerate charac-
teristics which are apparent in Dickens' whole work
the concentration on and reiteration of some
isolated aspect or detail of a person or a place, as
Mr. Dick in David Copperfield was haunted by King
Charles' head. In one of the sketches of The Uncom-
mercial Traveller, written during these later years,
Dickens tells of being obsessed by the image of a
drowned and bloated corpse that he had seen in the
Paris morgue, which for days kept popping up among
the people and things he encountered and sometimes
compelled him to leave public places, though it even-
tually drove him back to the morgue. In the case of
the woman in Italy whose delusions he attempted
to dispel, one gets the impression that these bloody
visions were almost as real to him as they were to her.
And now, at the time of these readings, he jokes about
his 'murderous instincts' and says that he goes about
the street feeling as if he were 'wanted* by the police.
He threw himself at any rate into the murder scene
with a passion that became quite hysterical, as if
reading it had become at this point in his life a real
means of self-expression. At Clifton, he wrote Forster,
'we had a contagion of fainting; and yet the place
was not hot. I should think we had from a dozen to
twenty ladies taken out stiff and rigid, at various
times!' At Leeds, whether to intensify the effect or
to avert the possible objections of the audience, he
hired a man to rise from the stalls and protest in the
middle of the murder scene against daring to read

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 97

such a thing before ladies with the result that the
people hissed him and put him out. It was the opin-
ion of Dickens' doctor that the excitement and strain
of acting this episode were the immediate cause of
Dickens' death. It took a long time for him to calm
himself after he had performed it, and the doctor,
who noted his pulse at the end of each selection, saw
that it invariably ran higher after Nancy and Sikcs
than after any of the other scenes. When Dolby, the
manager of Dickens' tours, tried to persuade him to
cut down on the murder, reserving it for the larger
towns, Dickens had a paroxysm of rage: 'Bounding
up from his chair, and throwing his knife and fork
on his plate (which he smashed to atoms), he ex-
claimed: "Dolby! your infernal caution will be your
ruin one of these days!"' Immediately afterwards,
he began to weep and told Dolby that he knew he
was right. The doctors eventually compelled him to
interrupt his tour and take a rest.

His son, Sir Henry Dickens, who speaks in his
memoir of his father of the latter's ' heavy moods of
deep depression, of intense nervous irritability, when
he was silent and oppressed,' tells of an incident that
occurred at a Christmas party the winter before
Dickens died: 'He had been ailing very much and
greatly troubled with his leg, which had been giving
him much pain; so he was lying on a sofa one evening
aftfcr dinner, while the rest of the family were playing
games.' Dickens participated in one of these games,
in which you had to remember long strings of words,

98 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

contributed by the players in rotation. When it came
around to Dickens, he gave a name which meant
nothing to anybody: 'Warren's Blacking, 30, Strand/
He did this, says his son, who knew nothing at that
time of this episode in his father's childhood, 'with
an odd twinkle and strange inflection in his voice
which at once forcibly arrested my attention and left
a vivid impression on my mind for some time after-
wards. Why, I could not, for the life of me, under-
stand At that time, when the stroke that killed

him was gradually overpowering him, his mind re-
verted to the struggles and degradation of his child-
hood, which had caused him such intense agony of
mind, and which he had never been able entirely to
cast from him.'

Two weeks before his death, he went to a dinner
arranged by Lord and Lady Houghton in order that
the Prince of Wales and the King of Belgium might
meet him. Lady Houghton was a granddaughter of
that Lord Crewe in whose house Dickens' grandfather
had been butler. She well remembered going as a child
to the housekeeper's room to hear his grandmother
tell wonderful stories. Dickens' neuritic foot was
giving him such trouble at this time that up till al-
most an hour before dinner he could not be sure of
going. He did finally decide to go; but when he got
to the Houghton house, he found that he could not
mount the stairs, and the Prince and the Belgian king
had to come down to meet him.

But now the Dickens who has been cut off from

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 99

society has discarded the theme of the rebel and is
carrying the theme of the criminal, which has haunted
him all his life, to its logical development in his
fiction. He is to explore the deep entanglement and
conflict of the bad and the good in one man. The
subject of Edwin Drood is the subject of Poe's William
Wilson, the subject of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the
subject of Dorian Gray. It is also the subject of that
greater work than any of these, Dostoevsky's Crime
and Punishment. Dostoevsky, who owed so much to
Dickens and who was probably influenced by the
murder in Chuytfewit, had produced in 1866 a master-
piece on the theme at which Dickens is only just
arriving in 1869. Rask61nikov rask6lnik means
dissenter combines in his single person the two
antisocial types of the deliberate criminal and the
rebel, which since Hugh in Barnaby Hudge have always
been kept distinct by Dickens. Dostoevsky, with the
courage of his insight, has studied the states of mind
which are the results of a secession from society: the
contemptuous will to spurn and to crush confused
with the impulse toward human brotherhood, the
desire to be loved twisted tragically with the desire
to destroy and to kill. But the English Dickens with
his middle-class audience would not be able to tell
such a story even if he dared to imagine it. In order
to stage the 4 war in the members/ he must contrive
a whole machinery of mystification: of drugs, of
telepathic powers, of remote oriental cults.

How far he has come and to how strange a goal we
recognize when we note that he has returned to that

100 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Rochester he had so loved in his boyhood the
Rochester where he had made Mr. Pickwick put up
at the Bull Inn and picnic on good wine and cold fowl
out of the hampers of the Wardles' barouche. Gadshill
was next door to Rochester, and the Cloisterham of
the novel is Rochester; but what Dickens finds in
Rochester today is the nightmare of John Jasper.
There is plenty of brightness in Edwin Drood and some-
thing of the good things of life: Mrs. Crisparkle's
spices, jams and jellies, Mr. Tartar's shipshape rooms;
but this brightness has a quality new and queer. The
vivid colors of Edwin Drood make an impression more
disturbing than the dustiness, the weariness, the
dreariness, which set the tone for Our Mutual Friend.
In this new novel, which is to be his last, Dickens has
found a new intensity. The descriptions of Cloister-
ham are among the best written in all his fiction: they
have a nervous (in the old sense) concentration and
economy rather different from anything one remembers
in the work of his previous phases. We are far from
the lavish improvisation of the poetical early Dickens :
here every descriptive phrase is loaded with implica-
tion. It is as if his art, which in Our Mutual Friend
had seemed to him so sorely fatigued, had rested and
found a revival. Dickens has dropped away here all
the burden of analyzing society British imperial-
ism in the East is evidently to play some part in the
story, but it is impossible to tell whether or not this
is to have any moral implications (though a writer
in The Nassau Literary Magazine of May, 1881, who
complains of the little interest that has been shown

DICKENS: THB TWO SCROOGES 101

in Edwin Drood, suggests that the opium traffic may
be the social issue here). Dickens, so far as we can
see, is exclusively concerned with a psychological
problem. The dualism of high and low, rich and poor,
has here completely given place to the dualism of good
and evil. The remarkable opening pages in which the
Victorian choirmaster, with his side whiskers and
tall hat, mixes in his opium-vision the picture of the
English cathedral with memories of the East and
comes to in the squalid den to stagger out, short of
breath, to his services, is perhaps the most complex
piece of writing from the psychological point of view
to be found in the whole of Dickens. But the char-
acters that are healthy, bright and good Rosa
Budd, with her silly name, for example seem almost
as two-dimensional as colored paper dolls. We have
got back to the fairy tale again. But this fairy tale
contains no Pickwick: its realest figure is Mr. Jasper;
and its most powerful artistic effect is procured by an
instillation into the greenery, the cathedral, the win-
ter sun, the sober and tranquil old town, of the sug-
gestion of moral uncertainty, of evil. Even the Eng-
lish rooks, which in The Old Curiosity Shop had figured
simply as a familiar feature of the pleasant old English
countryside in which Nell and her grandfather wan-
dered, are here the omens of an invisible terror that
comes from outside that English world. The Christ-
mas season itself, of which Dickens has been the
laureate, which he has celebrated so often with warm
charity, candid hopes and hearty cheer, is now the
appointed moment for the murder by an uncle of his
nephew.

101 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Mr. Jasper is, like Dickens, an artist: he is a musi-
cian, he has a beautiful voice* He smokes opium, and
so, like Dickens, leads a life of the imagination apart
from the life of men. Like Dickens, he is a skilful
magician, whose power over his fellows may be
dangerous. Like Dickens, he is an alien from another
world; yet, like Dickens, he has made himself re-
spected in the conventional English community. Is
he a villain? From the point of view of the cathedral
congregation of Cloisterham, who have admired his
ability as an artist, he will have been playing a
diabolic role. All that sentiment, all those edifying
high spirits, which Dickens has been dispensing so
long, which he is still making the effort to dispense
has all this now grown as false as those hymns to the
glory of the Christian God which are performed by
the worshiper of Kali? And yet in another land there
is another point of view from which Jasper is a good
and faithful servant. It is at the command of his
imaginative alter ego and acting in the name of his
goddess that Jasper has committed his crime.

None the less, he is a damned soul here and now.
All this bright and pious foreground of England is to
open or fade away, and to show a man condemned to
death. But it will not be the innocent Pickwick, the
innocent Micawber, the innocent Dorrit, whom we
are now to meet in jail: nor yet the wicked Fagin, the
wicked Dennis, the wicked elder Rudge. It will be a
man who is both innocent and wicked. The protest
against the age has turned into a protest against self.
In this last moment, the old hierarchy of England

DICKENS: THE TWO SCROOGES 103

does enjoy a sort of triumph over the weary and de-
bilitated Dickens, because it has made him accept its
ruling that he is a creature irretrievably tainted; and
the mercantile middle-class England has had its
triumph, too. For the Victorian hypocrite has
developed from Pecksniff, through Murdstonc,
through Headstone to his final transformation in
Jasper into an insoluble moral problem which is
identified with Dickens* own. As Headstone makes
his own knuckles bleed in striking them against the
church and drowns himself in order to drown Rider-
hood, so Jasper is eventually to destroy himself.
When he announces in the language of the Thugs
that he ' devotes' himself to the 'destruction' of the
murderer, he is preparing his own execution. (He is
evidently quite sincere in making this entry in his
diary, because he has now sobered up from the opium
and resumed his ecclesiastical personality. It is ex-
clusively of this personality that the diary is a record.)
So Dickens, in putting his nerves to the torture by
enacting the murder of Nancy, has been invoking his
own death.

In this last condemned cell of Dickens, one of the
halves of the divided John Jasper was to have con-
fronted the other half. But this confrontation
4 difficult to work,' as Dickens told Forster was
never, as it turned out, to take place. Dickens in his
moral confusion was never to dramatize himself com-
pletely, was never in this last phase of his art to suc-
ceed in coming quite clear. He was to leave Edwin
Drood half-finished, with Jasper's confession just

104 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

around the corner just about to come to life in
those final instalments which he was never to live to
write.

He had put in a long day on Drood when (June 9,
1870) he had a stroke while he was eating dinner. He
got up from the table in his stunned condition and said
he must go to London; then he fell to the floor and never
recovered consciousness. He died the next afternoon.

The Kipling that Nobody Read

AHE eclipse of the reputation of Kipling, which
began about 1910, twenty-five years before Kipling's
death and when he was still only forty-five, has been
of a peculiar kind. Through this period he has re-
mained, from the point of view of sales, an im-
mensely popular writer. The children still read his
children's books; the college students still read his
poetry; the men and women of his own generation
still reread his early work. But he has in a sense
been dropped out of modern literature. The more
serious-minded young people do not read him; the crit-
ics do not take him into account. During the later
years of his life and even at the time of his death, the
logic of his artistic development attracted no intelli-
gent attention. At a time when W. B. Yeats had
outgrown his romantic youth and was receiving the
reward of an augmented glory for his severer and more
concentrated work, Rudyard Kipling, Yeats' coeval,

106 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

who had also achieved a new concentration through
the efforts of a more exacting discipline, saw the glory
of his young-manhood fade away. And during the
period when the late work of Henry James, who had
passed into a similar eclipse, was being retrieved and
appreciated, when the integrity and interest of his
total achievement was finally being understood, no
attempt was made, so far as I know, to take stock of
Kipling's work as a whole. 1 The ordinary person said
simply that Kipling was 'written out'; the reviewer
rarely made any effort to trace the journey from the
breeziness of the early short stories to the bitterness
of the later ones. The thick, dark and surly little man
who had dug himself into Bateman's, Burwash, Sus-
sex, was left to his bristling privacy, and only oc-
casionally evoked a rebuke for the intolerant and
vindictive views which, emerging with the sudden-
ness of a snapping turtle, he sometimes gaye vent to
in public.

But who was Kipling? What did he express? What
was the history of that remarkable talent which gave
him a place, as a craftsman of English prose, among
the few genuine masters of his day? How was it that
the art of his short stories became continually more
skilful and intense, and yet that his career appears
broken?

1 Since this was written, Mr. Edward Shanks has published a book on Kipling.
Mr. Shanks addresses himself to the task, but does not make very much progress
with it.

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 107

The publication of Kipling's posthumous memoirs
Something of Myself for My Friends Knoum and Un-
known has enabled us to see more clearly the causes
for the anomalies of Kipling's career.

First of all, he was born in India, the son of an
English artist and scholar, who had gone out to teach
architectural sculpture at the Fine Arts School in
Bombay and who afterwards became curator of the
museum at Lahore. This fact is, of course, well
known; but its importance must be specially empha-
sized. It appears that up to the age of six Kipling
talked, thought and dreamed, as he says, in Hindu-
stani, and could hardly speak English correctly. A
drawing of him made by a schoolmate shows a
swarthy boy with lank straight hair, who might al-
most pass for a Hindu.

The second important influence in Kipling's early
life has not hitherto been generally known, though it
figures in the first chapter of The Light That Failed and
furnished the subject of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, one of
the most powerful things he ever wrote. This story
had always seemed rather unaccountably to stand
apart from the rest of Kipling's work by reason of its
sympathy with the victims rather than with the in-
flictors of a severely repressive discipline; and its
animus is now explained by a chapter in Kipling's
autobiography and by a memoir recently published
by his sister. When Rudyard Kipling was six and his
sister three and a half, they were farmed out for six

108 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

years in England with a relative of Kipling's father.
John Lockwood Kipling was the son of a Methodist
minister, and this woman was a religious domestic
tyrant in the worst English tradition of Dickens and
Samuel Butler. The boy, who had been petted and
deferred to by the native servants in India, was now
beaten, bullied with the Bible, pursued with constant
suspicions and broken down by cross-examinations.
If one of the children spilled a drop of gravy or wept
over a letter from their parents in Bombay, they were
forbidden to speak to one another for twenty-four
hours. Their guardian had a violent temper and en-
joyed making terrible scenes, and they had to learn
to propitiate her by fawning on her when they saw
that an outburst was imminent.

' Looking back/ says Mrs. Fleming, Kipling's sister,
' I think the real tragedy of our early days, apart from
Aunty's bad temper and unkindness to my- brother,
sprang from our inability to understand why our
parents had deserted us. We had had no preparation
or explanation; it was like a double death, or rather,
like an avalanche that had swept away everything
happy and familiar We felt that we had been de-
serted, "almost as much as on a doorstep," and what
was the reason? Of course, Aunty used to say it was
because we were so tiresome, and she had taken us out
of pity, but in a desperate moment Ruddy appealed to
Uncle Harrison, and he said it was only Aunty's fun,
and Papa had left us to be taken care of, because India
was too hot for little people. But we knew better
than that, because we had been to Nassick, so what

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 109

was the real reason? Mamma was not ill, like the
seepy-weepy Ellen Montgomery's mamma in The
Wide, Wide World. Papa had not had to go to a war.
They had not even lost their money; if they had, we
could have swept crossings or sold flowers, and it
would have been rather fun. But there was no excuse;
they had gone happily back to our own lovely home,
and had not taken us with them. There was no getting
out of that, as we often said.

'Harry (Aunty's son), who had all a crow's quick-
ness in finding a wound to pick at, discovered our
trouble and teased us unmercifully. He assured us we
had been taken in out of charity, and must do exactly
as he told us. ... We were just like workhouse brats,
and none of our toys really belonged to us.'

Rudyard had bad eyes, which began to give out
altogether, so that he was unable to do his work at
school. One month he destroyed his report so that
his guardians at home shouldn't see it; and for punish-
ment was made to walk to school with a placard be-
tween his shoulders reading 'Liar.' He had finally a
severe nervous breakdown, accompanied by partial
blindness, and was punished by isolation from his
sister. This breakdown, it is important to note, was
made horrible by hallucinations. As a mist, which
seemed to grow steadily thicker, shut him in from the
rest of the world, he would imagine that blowing
curtains were specters or that a coat on a nail was an
etformous black bird ready to swoop down upon him.

His mother came back at last, saw how bad things
were when she went up to kiss him good-night, he

110 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

instinctively put up his hand to ward off the expected
blow and took the children away. But the effects
of those years were lasting. Mrs. Fleming tells us
that her revulsion against Aunty's son Harry con-
ditioned her reactions toward people who resembled
him through all the rest of her life, and says that
when, thirty years later, she set out in Southsea one
day to see if the 'House of Desolation* were still
standing, her heart failed her, and she hurried back:
'I dared not face it/ Rudyard himself told her that
he had had a similar experience: 'I think we both
dreaded a kind of spiritual imprisonment that would
affect our dreams. Less than four years ago [she is
writing in 1939], I asked him whether he knew if the
house still stood. "I don't know, but if so, I should
like to burn it down and plough the place with salt/ ' '
Kipling asserts that this ordeal had ' drained me of
any capacity for real, personal hate for the rest of my
days' ; and his sister denies that it produced in him any
permanent injurious effects: 'According to their
gloomy theories [the theories of the psychoanalysts],
my brother should have grown up morbid and mis-
anthropic, narrow-minded, self-centered, shunning the
world, and bearing it, and all men, a burning grudge;
for certainly between the ages of six and eleven he was
thwarted at every turn by Aunty and the odious
Harry, and inhibitions were his daily bread/ Yet
here is the conclusion of the story which Kipling
made out of this experience : ' There ! ' ' Told you so, ' * '
says the boy to his sister. 'It's all different now, and
we see just as much of mother as if she had never

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ III

gone/ But, Kipling adds: 'Not altogether, O Punch,
for when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter
waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love
in the world will not wholly take away that know-
ledge; though it may turn darkened eyes for a while
to the light, and teach Faith where no Faith was/

And actually the whole work of Kipling's life is
to be shot through with hatred.

He was next sent to a public school in England.
This school, the United Services College, at a place
called Westward Ho !, had been founded by Army and
Navy officers who could not afford to send their sons
to the more expensive schools. The four and a half
years that Kipling spent there gave him Stalky & Co. ;
and the relation of the experience to the book pro-
vides an interesting psychological study. The book
itself, of course, presents a hair-raising picture of the
sadism of the English public-school system. The older
boys have fags to wait on them, and they sometimes
torment these younger boys till they have reduced
them almost to imbecility; the masters are constantly
caning the boys in scenes that seem almost as bloody
as the floggings in old English sea stories; and the
boys revenge themselves on the masters with practical
jokes as catastrophic as the Whams and Zows of the
comic strip.

The originals of two of Kipling's characters
Major-General L. C. Dunsterville and Mr. G. C.
Beresford have published in their later years
(Stalky 's Reminiscences and Schooldays with Kipling)

Ill THE WOUND AND THE BOW

accounts rather discrepant with one another of life at
the United Services College. Mr. Beresford, who is a
highbrow in Stalky & Co. and reads Ruskin in the
midst of the m616e, turns out to be a Nationalist
Irishman, who is disgusted with his old friend's later
imperialism. He insists that the fagging system did
not exist at Westward Ho!; that the boys were never
caned on their bare shoulders; and that Kipling, so
far as he remembers, was never caned at all except by
a single exceptional master. Dunstcrville, on the
other hand, reports that the younger boys were bar-
barously bullied by the older: held out of high win-
dows by their ankles and dropped down a stair-well
in 'hangings' which in one case broke the victim's
leg; and that 'in addition to the blows and the kicks
that inevitably accompanied the bullying/ he 'suf-
fered a good deal from the canes of the masters, or the
ground-ash sticks of the prefects. I must have been
perpetually black and blue. That always sounds so

dreadful But the truth of the matter is, any slight

blow produces a bruise And with one or two

savage exceptions, I am sure that the blows I received
as a result of bullying or legitimate punishment were

harmless enough ' ' Kicks and blows, 1 he goes on,

'I minded little, but the moral effect was depressing.
Like a hunted animal I had to keep all my senses per-
petually on the alert to escape from the toils of the
hunter good training in a way, but likely to injure
permanently a not very robust temperament. I was
robust enough, I am glad to say, and possibly bene-
fited by the treatment/

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 113

Kipling was, of course, not tobust; and the school
evidently aggravated the injury which had been done
him during his captivity at Southsea. He admits, in
Something of Myself, that the fagging system was not
compulsory; but he asserts that the discipline was
brutal, that the students were wretchedly fed, and
that he himself, addicted to books and too blind to
participate in games, endured a good deal of baiting.
The important thing is that he suffered. If we com-
pare the three accounts of Westward Ho ! Stalky &
Co. with the reminiscences of the two others the
emphasis of Kipling's becomes plain. It is significant
that the single master whom Beresford mentions as
persecuting the boys should have been inquisitorial
and morbidly suspicious that is, that he should
have treated Kipling in the same way that he had al-
ready been treated by the Baa, Baa, Black Sheep people.
And it is also significant that this master docs not
figure in Stalky <&Co., but only appears later in one of
the more scrupulous stories which Kipling afterward
wrote about the school. The stimulus of unjust sus-
picion, which did not leave any lasting bitterness
with Beresford, had evidently the effect upon Kipling
of throwing him back into the state of mind which
had been created by the earlier relationship just
as the kickings and canings that Dunsterville non-
chalantly shook off sunk deep into the spirit of Kip-
ling. For a boy who has been habitually beaten during
thfe second six years of his life, any subsequent physi-
cal punishment, however occasional or light, may
result in the reawakening of the terror and hatred of

114 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

childhood. It thrust him back into the nightmare
again, and eventually made a delirium of the memory
of Westward Ho !. Stalky & Co. from the artistic
point of view, certainly the worst of Kipling's books:
crude in writing, trashy in feeling, implausible in a
scries of contrivances which resemble moving-picture
*g a g s ' is in the nature of an hysterical outpouring
of emotions kept over from sch6ol-days, and it prob-
ably owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it
provides the young with hilarious and violent fan-
tasies on the theme of what they would do to the
school bully and their masters if the laws of probabil-
ity were suspended.

We shall deal presently with the social significance
which Kipling, at a later period, was to read back into
Westward Ho!. In the meantime, we must follow his
adventures when he leaves it in July, 1881, not yet
quite seventeen, but remarkably mature for. his age
and with a set of grown-up whiskers. He went back
to his family in India, and there he remained for seven
years. The Hindu child, who had lain dormant in
England, came to life when he reached Bombay, and
he found himself reacting to the old stimuli by begin-
ning to talk Hindustani without understanding what
he was saying. Seven Years Hard is his heading for his
chapter on this phase of his life. His family as we
gather from his address on Independence were by
no means well-to-do; and he started right in on a
newspaper in Lahore as sole assistant to the editor,
and worked his head off for a chief he detested. It
was one of the duties of the English journalist in

THB KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 115

India to play down the periodical epidemics. Kipling
himself survived dysentery and fever, and kept on
working through his severest illnesses. One hot night
in 1886, when he felt, as he says, that he 'had come
to the edge of all endurance* and had gone home to
his empty house with the sensation that there was
nothing left in him but ' the horror of a great darkness,
that I must have been fighting for some days,' he
read a novel by Walter Besant about a young man
who had wanted to be a writer and who had even-
tually succeeded in his aim. Kipling decided he would
save some money and get away to London. He wrote
short stories called Plain Tales from the Hills, which
were run to fill up space in the paper, and he brought
out a book of verse. His superiors disapproved of his
flippancy, and when he finally succeeded in leaving
India, the managing director of the paper, who had
considered him overpaid, told the young man that
he could take it from him that he would never be
worth anything more than four hundred rupees a
month.

The Kipling of these early years is a lively and sym-
pathetic figure. A newspaper man who has access to
everything, the son of a scholar who has studied the
natives, he sees the community, like Asmodeus, with
all the roofs removed. He is interested in the British
of all classes and ranks the bored English ladies,
the vagabond adventurers, the officers and the soldiers
bdth. 'Having no position to consider/ he writes,
'and my trade enforcing it, I could move at will in
the fourth dimension. I came to realize the bare hor-

Il6 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

rors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments
he endured Lord Roberts, at that time Com-
mander-in-chief of India, who knew my people, was
interested in the men, and I had by then written
one or two stories about soldiers the proudest
moment of my young life was when I rode up Simla
Mall beside him on his usual explosive red Arab,
while he asked me what the men thought about their
accommodations, entertainment-rooms, and the like.
I told him, and he thanked me as gravely as though
I had been a full Colonel/ He is already tending to
think about people in terms of social and racial cate-
gories; but his interest in them at this time is also
personal: 'All the queer outside world would drop
into our workshop sooner or later say a Captain
just cashiered for horrible drunkenness, who reported
his fall with a wry, appealing face, and then dis-
appeared. Or a man old enough to be my father, on
the edge of tears because he had been overpassed for

Honors in the Gazette One met men going up and

down the ladder in every shape of misery and success/
And he gives us in his soldier stories, along with the
triumphs of discipline and the exploits of the native
wars, the hunger of Private Ortheris for London when
the horror of exile seizes him; the vanities and vices
of Mulvaney which prevent him from rising in the
service (The Courting of Dinah Shadd, admired by Henry
James, is one of the stories of Kipling which sticks
closest to unregenerate humanity); even the lunatic
obsessions and the crack-up of the rotter gentleman
ranker in Low-o* -Women.

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 117

The natives Kipling probably understood as few
Englishmen did in his time; certainly he presented
them in literature as nobody had ever done. That
Hindu other self of his childhood takes us through
into its other world. The voices of alien traditions
in the monologues of In Black and White talk an
English which translates their own idiom; and we
hear of great lovers and revengers who live by an
alien code; young men who have been educated in
England and, half-dissociated from native life, find
themselves impotent between two civilizations; fierce
Afghan tribesmen of the mountains, humble people
who have been broken to the mines; loyal Sikhs and
untamed mutineers. It is true that there is always the
implication that the British are bringing to India
modern improvements and sounder standards of be-
havior. But Kipling is obviously enjoying for its own
sake the presentation of the native point of view, and
the whole Anglo-Indian situation is studied with a
certain objectivity.

He is even able to handle without horror the mix-
ture of the black and the white. 'The "railway
folk," ' says Mr. E. Kay Robinson, who worked with
him on the paper in Lahore, 'that queer colony of
white, half white and three-quarters black, which
remains an uncared-for and discreditable excrescence
upon British rule in India, seemed to have unburdened
their souls to Kipling of all their grievances, their
poftr pride, and their hopes. Some of the best of Kip-
ling's work is drawn from the lives of these people;
although to the ordinary Anglo-Indian, whose social

Il8 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

caste restrictions are almost more inexorable than
those of the Hindu whom he affects to despise on that
account, they are as a sealed book/ And one of the
most sympathetic of these early stories the once
famous Without Benefit of Clergy is a picture of an
Anglo-Indian union: an English official who lives
with a Mahomedan girl. Though Kipling deals
rarely in fortunate lovers, these lovers enjoy their
happiness for a time. To their joy, the mother gives
birth to a son, who turns into 'a small gold-colored
little god/ and they like to sit on the roof and eat
almonds and watch the kites. But then the baby dies
of the fever, and the young wife dies of the cholera;
and the husband is called away to fight the famine and
the epidemic. Even the house where they have lived
is destroyed, and the husband is glad that no one else
will ever be able to live there. This idyl, unhallowed
and fleeting, is something that the artist ia Kipling
has felt, and put down for its sweetness and pathos.

Through all these years of school and of newspaper
work, with their warping and thwarting influences,
Kipling worked staunchly at mastering his craft. For
he had been subjected to yet another influence which
has not been mentioned yet. His father was a painter
and sculptor, and two of his mother's sisters were
married to artists one to Edward Poynter, the
Academician, and the other to the pre-Raphaelite,
Burnc-Jones. Besides India and the United Services
College, there had been the pre-Raphaelite movement.
In England, Kipling's vacation had always been spent
in London with the Burne-Jonescs. Mr. Beresford

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ

says that Kipling's attitude at school had been that
of the aesthete who disdains athletics and has no
aptitude for mechanical matters, that he was already
preoccupied with writing, and that his literary pro-
ficiency afcd cultivation were amazingly developed for
his age. He had had from his childhood the example
of men who loved the arts for their own sake and who
were particularly concerned about craftsmanship (it
is also of interest that his father's family had dis-
tinguished themselves in the eighteenth century as
founders of bronze bells). Kipling evidently owes his
superiority as a craftsman to most of even the ablest
English writers of fiction of the end of the century
and the early nineteen hundreds, to this inspiration
and training. Just as the ballad of Danny Deever de-
rives directly from the ballad of Sister Helen, so the
ideal of an artistic workmanship which shall revert
to earlier standards of soundness has the stamp of
William Morris and his circle. In 1878, when Rudyard
was twelve years old, his father had taken him to the
Paris Exhibition and insisted that he learn to read
French. The boy had then conceived an admiration
for the civilization of the French which evidently
contributed later to his interest in perfecting the short
story in English.

With all this, his earlier experience in the ' House of
Desolation' had equipped him, he says, with a train-
ing not unsuitable for a writer of fiction, in that it
had 'demanded constant wariness, the habit of ob-
servation, and attendance on moods and tempers; the
noting of discrepancies between speech and action;

I1O THE WOUND AND THE BOW

a certain reserve of demeanor; and automatic suspicion
of sudden favors/

With such a combination of elements, what might
one not expect? It is not surprising to learn that the
young Kipling contemplated, after his return to
England, writing a colonial Comidic Humaine. ' Bit by
bit, my original notion/ he writes, 'grew into a vast,
vague conspectus Army and Navy List, if you like
of the whole sweep and meaning of things and
efforts and origins throughout the Empire/ Henry
James, who wrote an appreciative preface for a col-
lection of Kipling's early stories, said afterwards that
he had thought at that time that it might perhaps be
true that Kipling ' contained the seeds of an English
Balzac/

ii

What became of this English Balzac? Why did the
author of the brilliant short stories never develop into
an important novelist?

Let us return to Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and the situa-
tion with which it deals. Kipling says that his
Burne-Jones aunt was never able to understand why
he had never told anyone in the family about how
badly he and his sister were being treated, and he tries
to explain this on the principle that 'children tell
little more than animals, for what comes to them they
accept as eternally established/ and says that 'badly-
treated children have a clear notion of what they are
likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ III

before they are clear of it.' But is this inevitably
true? Even young children do sometimes run away.
And, in any case, Kipling's reaction to this experience
seems an abnormally docile one. After all, Dickens
made David Copperfield bite Mr. Murds tone's hand
and escape; and he makes war on Mr. Murdstone
through the whole of his literary career. But though
the anguish of these years had given Kipling a certain
sympathy with the neglected and persecuted, and
caused him to write this one moving short story, it
left him whether as the result of the experience
itself or because he was already so conditioned with
a fundamental submissiveness to authority.

Let us examine the two books in which Kipling
deals, respectively, with his schooldays and with his
youth in India: Stalky & Co. and Kim. These works
are the products of the author's thirties, and Kim, at
any rate, represents Kipling's most serious attempt to
allow himself to grow to the stature of a first-rate
creative artist. Each of these books begins with an
antagonism which in the work of a greater writer
would have developed into a fundamental conflict;
but in neither Stalky nor Kim is the conflict ever per-
mitted to mount to a real crisis. Nor can it even be
said to be resolved: it simply ceases to figure as a
conflict. In Stalky, we are at first made to sympathize
with the baiting of the masters by the schoolboys as
their rebellion against a system which is an offense
against human dignity; but then we are immediately
shown that all the ragging and flogging are justified
by their usefulness as a training for the military caste

IH THE WOUND AND THE BOW

which is to govern the British Empire. The boys are
finally made to recognize that their headmaster not
only knows how to dish it out but is also able to
take it, and the book culminates in the ridiculous
scene which may perhaps have its foundation in
fact but is certainly flushed by a hectic imagination
in which the Head, in his inflexible justice, under-
takes personally to cane the whole school while the
boys stand by cheering him wildly.

There is a real subject in Stalky & Co., but Kipling
has not had the intelligence to deal with it. He can-
not see around his characters and criticize them, he is
not even able properly to dramatize; he simply allows
the emotions of the weaker side, the side that is
getting the worst of it, to go over to the side of the
stronger. You can watch the process all too clearly
in the episode in which Stalky and his companions
turn the tables on the cads from the crammers' school.
These cads have been maltreating a fag, and a clergy-
man who is represented by Kipling as one of the more
sensible and decent of the masters suggests to Stalky
& Co. that they teach the bullies a lesson. The former
proceed to clean up on the latter in a scene which goes
on for pages, to the reckless violation of proportion
and taste. The oppressors, true enough, are taught
a lesson, but the cruelty with which we have already
been made disgusted has now passed over to the casti-
gators* side, and there is a disagreeable implication
that, though it is caddish for the cads to be cruel, it
is all right for the sons of English gentlemen to be
cruel to the cads.

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 113

Kim is more ambitious and much better. It is Kip-
ling's only successful long story: an enchanting, air
most a first-rate book, the work in which more
perhaps than in any other he gave the sympathies of
the imagination free rein to remember and to explore,
and which has in consequence more complexity and
density than any of his other works. Yet the conflict
from which the interest arises, though it is very much
better presented, here also comes to nothing: the two
forces never really engage. Kim is the son of an Irish
soldier and an Irish nursemaid, who has grown up
as an orphan in India, immersed in and assimilated to
the native life, so that he thinks, like the young Kip-
ling, in Hindustani. The story deals with the gradual
dawning of his consciousness that he is really a Sahib.
As a child he has been in the habit of making a little
money by carrying messages for a native agent of the
British secret service, and the boy turns out to be so
bright and so adept at acting the r61e of a native that
the authorities decide to train him. He is sent to an
English school but does not willingly submit to the
English system. Every vacation he dresses as a native
and disappears into the sea of native life. The Ideal'
of this side of his existence is represented by a Thibetan
lama, a wandering Buddhist pilgrim, whom he accom-
panies in the character of a disciple.

Now what the reader tends to expect is that Kim
will come eventually to realize that he is delivering
into bondage to the British invaders those whom he
has always considered his own people, and that a
struggle between allegiances will result. Kipling has

114 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

established for the reader and established with con-
siderable dramatic effect the contrast between the
East, with its mysticism and its sensuality, its ex-
tremes of saintliness and roguery, and the English,
with their superior organization, their confidence in
modern method, their instinct to brush away like
cobwebs the native myths and beliefs. We have been
shown two entirely different worlds existing side by
side, with neither really understanding the other, and
we have watched the oscillations of Kim, as he passes
to and fro between them. But the parallel lines never
meet; the alternating attractions felt by Kim never
give rise to a genuine struggle. And the climax itself
is double: the adventures of the Lama and of Kim
simply arrive at different consummations, without
any final victory or synthesis ever being allowed to
take place. Instead, there are a pair of victories,
which occur on separate planes and do not influence
one another: the Lama attains to a condition of trance
which releases him from what the Buddhists call the
Wheel of Things at the same moment that the young
Anglo-Indian achieves promotion in the British secret
service.

The salvation of the Lama has been earned by peni-
tence for a moment of passion: he had been tempted to
kill a man who had torn his sacred chart and struck
him, a Russian agent working against the British. But
the pretenses of Kim to a spiritual vocation, whatever
spell has been exerted over him by the Lama, are dis-
pelled when the moment for action comes, when the
Irishman is challenged to a fight: Kim knocks the

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 115

Russian down and bangs his head against a boulder.
'I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?' his soul
repeats again and again, in his exhaustion and collapse
after this episode. He feels that his soul is ' out of gear
with its surroundings a cog-wheel unconnected
with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a
cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner/ But
he now gets this unattached soul to find a function in
the working of the crusher note the mechanical
metaphor: dissociating himself from the hierarchy
represented by the Abbot-Lama, he commits himself
to a r61e in the hierarchy of a practical organization.
(So the wolf-reared Mowgli of the Jungle Books, the
prototype of Kim, ends up rather flatly as a ranger in
the British Forestry Service.) Nor does Kipling allow
himself to doubt that his hero has chosen the better
part. Kim must now exploit his knowledge of native
life for the purpose of preventing and putting down
any native resistance to the British; but it never seems
to occur to his creator that this constitutes a betrayal
of the Lama. A sympathy with the weaker party in a
relationship based on force has again given way with-
out a qualm to a glorification of the stronger. As the
bullying masters of Stalky & Co. turn into beneficent
Chirons, so even the overbearing officer who figures
on his first appearance in Kim as a symbol of British
stupidity turns out to be none other than Strickland,
the wily police superintendent, who has here been
arting a part. (It should also be noted that the
question of whether or not Kim shall allow himself to
sleep with a native woman has here become very im-

Il6 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

portant, and that his final emergence as a Sahib is
partly determined by his decision in the negative.
This is no longer the Kipling of Without Benefit of
Clergy.*)

The Lama's victory is not of this world: the sacred
river for which he has been seeking, and which he
identifies in his final revelation with a brook near
which his trance has occurred, has no objective ex-
istence, it is not on the British maps. Yet the anguish
of the Lama's repentance a scene, so far as I remem-
ber, elsewhere unmatched in Kipling is one of the
most effective things in the book; and we are to meet
this Lama again in strange and unexpected forms still
haunting that practical world which Kipling, like
Kim, has chosen. The great eulogist of the builder
and the man of action was no more able to leave the
Lama behind than Kim had been able to reconcile
himself to playing the game of English life without
him.

in

The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatize any
fundamental conflict because Kipling would never
face one. This is probably one of the causes of his lack
of success with long novels . You can make an effective
short story, as Kipling so often does, about some-
body's scoring off somebody else; but this is not
enough for a great novelist, who must show us large
social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or
antagonistic impulses of the human spirit, struggling

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 117

with one another. With Kipling, the right and the
wrong of any opposition of forces is usually quite plain
at the start; and there is not even the suspense which
makes possible the excitement of melodrama. There is
never any doubt as to the outcome. The Wrong is
made a guy from the beginning, and the high point of
the story comes when the Right gives it a kick in the
pants. Where both sides arc sympathetically pre-
sented, the battle is not allowed to occur.

But this only drives us back on another question:
how was it that the early Kipling, with his sensitive
understanding of the mixed population of India,
became transformed into the later Kipling, who con-
solidated and codified his snobberies instead of pro-
gressively eliminating them as most good artists do,
and who, like Kim, elected as his lifework the defense
of the British Empire? The two books we have been
discussing indicate the end of a period in the course
of which Kipling had arrived at a decision. Stalky
came out in 1899, and Kim in 1901. The decade of the
nineties had been critical for Kipling; and in order to
understand the new phase of his work which had
begun by the beginning of the century, we must fol-
low his adventures in the United States, which he
visited in 1889, where he lived from 1891 to 1896,
and to which he tried to return in 1899. Kipling's
relations with America are certainly the most 'im-
portant factor in his experience during these years of
hif later twenties and early thirties; yet they are the
link which has been dropped out of his story in most
of the accounts of his life and which even his post-

IZ8 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

humous memoirs, revelatory in respect to his earlier
years, markedly fail to supply.

The young man who arrived in London in the fall of
1889 was very far from being the truculent British
patriot whom we knew in the nineteen hundreds. He
had not even gone straight back to England, but had
first taken a trip around the world, visiting Canada
and the United States. Nor did he remain long in the
mother-country when he got there. His whole atti-
tude was that of the colonial who has sweated and
suffered at the outposts of Empire, making the ac-
quaintance of more creeds and customs than the phi-
losophy of London dreamt of, and who feels a slight
touch of scorn toward the smugness of the people at
home, unaware of how big, varied and active the
world around them is. His 'original notion/ he says,
had been to try ' to tell the Empire something of the
world outside England not directly but by impli-
cation': 'What can they know of England who only
England know?' He rounded out his knowledge of the
colonies by traveling in New Zealand, Australia,
South Africa and Southern India. In the January of
1891, he married an American wife.

Kipling's experience of the United States was in
certain ways like that of Dickens. Neither of them
fitted very well into the English system at home, and
both seem to have been seeking in the new English-
speaking nation a place where they could be more at
ease. Both winced at the crudeness of the West; both
were contemptuously shocked by the boasting the

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ

Pacific Coast in Kipling's day was what the Missis-
sippi had been in Dickens'. Both, escaping from the
chilliness of England, resented the familiarity of the
States. Yet Kipling, on the occasion of his first visit,
which he records in From Sea to Sea, is obviously re-
joiced by the naturalness of social relations in America.
He tells of ' a very trim maiden' from New Hampshire,
with ' a delightful mother and an equally delightful
father, a heavy-eyed, slow- voiced man of finance,'
whom he met in the Yellowstone. 'Now an English
maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimed, lime-
washed, sun-peeled collarless wanderer- come from and
going to goodness knows where, would, her mother
inciting her and her father brandishing his umbrella,
have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer. Not so
those delightful people from New Hampshire. They
were good enough to treat me it sounds almost in-
credible as a human being, possibly respectable,
probably not in immediate need of financial assistance.
Papa talked pleasantly and to the point. The little
maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her birth
and that of her reading, and mamma smiled benignly
in the background. Balance this with a story of a
young English idiot I met knocking about inside his
high collars, attended by a valet. He condescended to
tell me that "you can't be too careful who you talk to
in these parts," and stalked on, fearing, I suppose,
every minute for his social chastity. Now that man
was a barbarian (I took occasion to tell him so), for
he comported himself after the manner of the head-
hunters of Assam, who arc at perpetual feud one with
another.'

130 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

He declares his faith in the Americans in a con-
versation with an Englishman 4 who laughed at them/
'"I admit everything," said I. "Their Govern-
ment's provisional; their law's the notion of the mo-
ment; their railways are made of hairpins and match-
sticks, and most of their good luck lives in their
woods and mines and rivers and not in their brains;
but, for all that, they be the biggest, finest, and best
people on the surface of the globe! Just you wait a
hundred years and see how they'll behave when
they've had the screw put on them and have forgotten
a few of the patriarchal teachings of the late Mr.
George Washington. Wait till the Anglo- American-
German-Jew the Man of the Future is properly
equipped. He'll have just the least little kink in his
hair now and again; he'll carry the English lungs
above the Teuton feet that can walk forever; and he
will wave long, thin, bony Yankee hands with the
big blue veins on the wrist, from one end of the earth
to the other. He'll be the finest writer, poet, and
dramatist, 'specially dramatist, that the world as it
recollects itself has ever seen. By virtue of his Jew
blood just a little, little drop he'll be a musi-
cian and a painter, too. At present there is too much
balcony and too little Romeo in the life-plays of his
fellow-citizens. Later on, when the proportion is
adjusted and he sees the possibilities of his land, he
will produce things that will make the effete East
stare. He will also be a complex and highly com-
posite administrator. There is nothing known to man
that he will not be, and his country will sway the
world with one foot as a man tilts a see-saw plank!"

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 131

* " But this is worse than the Eagle at its worst. Do
you seriously believe all that? said the Englishman.

4 "If I believe anything seriously, all this I most
firmly believe. You wait and see. Sixty million
people, chiefly of English instincts, who are trained
from youth to believe that nothing is impossible,
don't slink through the centuries like Russian peas-
antry. They are bound to leave their mark somewhere,
and don't you forget it." '

'I love this People../ he wrote. 'My heart has
gone out to them beyond all other peoples/ And he
reiterated his faith, in the poem called An American,
in which 'The American spirit speaks':

Enslaved, illogical, elate,

He greets th' embarrassed Gods, nor fears
To shake the iron hand of Fate

Or match with Destiny for beers.

So, imperturbable he rules,

Unkempt, disreputable, vast
And, in the teeth of all the schools,

I I shall save him at the last!

Kipling took his wife to America, and they lived
for a time on the estate of her family in Brattleboro,
Vermont; then Kipling built a large house: his books
were already making him rich. They lived in the
United States four years; two daughters were born to
them there. Kipling was ready to embrace America,
of those aspects of America which excited him; he
began using American subjects for his stories: the
railroads in .007, the Gloucester fishermen in Captains

I3X THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Courageous. He enormously admired Mark Twain,
whose acquaintance he had made on his first visit.
Yet the effect of contact with the United States was
eventually to drive Kipling, as it had Dickens, back
behind his British defenses. A disagreeable episode
occurred which, undignified and even comic though it
seems, is worth studying because it provided the real
test of Kipling's fitness to flourish in America, and not
merely the test of this, but, at a critical time in his
life, of the basic courage and humanity of his char-
acter.

The story has been told since Kipling's death in a
book called Rudyard Kipling s Vermont Feud by Mr.
Frederick F. Van de Water. A brother of Mrs. Kip-
ling's, Kipling's friend Wolcott Balestier, had been
in the publishing business with Heinemann in Lon-
don, and Mrs. Kipling had lived much in England and
was by way of being an Anglophile. Thus, the im-
pulse on Kipling's part to assimilate himself to the
Americans was neutralized in some degree by Mrs.
Kipling's desire to be English. Kipling, who was
accustomed to India, had his own instinctive rudeness.
In Vermont, he and Mrs. Kipling tended to stick to the
attitudes of the traditional governing-class English
maintaining their caste in the colonies: they drove a
tandem with a tophatted English coachman, dressed
every night for dinner, kept their New England neigh-
bors at a distance.

But Mrs. Kipling had a farmer brother who the
family were partly French was as Americanized as
possible. He was a drinker, a spendthrift and a great

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 133

local card, famous alike for 1m ribaldry, his sleigh-
racing and his gestures of generosity of a magnificence
almost feudal. Mr. Van de Water tells us that, at
the time he knew Beatty Balestier, he had the swagger
of Cyrano de Bergerac and a leathery face like 4 an ail-
ing eagle/ His farm and family suffered. The Kip-
lings lent him money, and he is said to have paid it
back; but they disapproved of his disorderly existence.
They seem to have persisted in treating him with some
lack of consideration or tact. Beatty was, in any case,
the kind of man unbalanced in character but inde-
pendent in spirit who is embittered by obligations
and furiously resents interference. Kipling went to
Beatty one day and offered to support his wife and
child for a year if Beatty would leave town and get a
job. He was surprised at the explosion he provoked.
This was followed by a dispute about some land across
the road from the Kiplings' house. The land belonged
to Beatty and he sold it for a dollar to the Kiplings,
who were afraid that someone would some day build
on it on the friendly understanding, as he claimed,
that he could continue to use it for mowing. When the
transfer had been effected, Mrs. Kipling set out to
landscape-garden it. The result was that Beatty
stopped speaking to them and refused to receive
Kipling when he came to call.

This went on for about a year, at the end of which
the climax came. Kipling was indiscreet enough to
rcrfark to one of the neighbors that he had had * to
carry Beatty for the last year to hold him up by
the seat of his breeches/ This soon reached his

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

brother-in-law's ears. One day Beatty, driving his
team and drunk, met Kipling riding his bicycle. He
blocked the road, making Kipling fall off, and shouted
angrily: 'Sec here! I want to talk to you 1 / Kipling
answered, ' If you have anything to say, say it to my
lawyers/ 'By Jesus, this is no case for lawyers! 1 re-
torted Beatty, loosing a tirade of profanity and abuse.
He threatened Kipling, according to Kipling, to kill
him; according to Beatty, merely to beat him up if he
did not make a public retraction.

Kipling had always deplored the lawlessness of
America; in his account of his first trip through the
West, his disgust and trepidation over the shootings
of the frontier are expressed in almost every chapter.
And he now became seriously alarmed. He proceeded
to have Beatty arrested on charges of ' assault with in-
decent and opprobrious names and epithets and threat-
ening to kill.' He did not realize that that . kind of
thing was not done in the United States, where such
quarrels were settled man to man, and he could not
foresee the consequences. Beatty, who loved scandal,
was delighted. He allowed the case to come into
court and watched Kipling, who hated publicity,
make himself ridiculous in public. The Kiplings at
last fled abroad it was August, 1896 before the
case could come before the Grand Jury.

'So far as I was concerned,' says Kipling of his re-
lations with Americans in general, 'I felt the atmo-
sphere was to some extent hostile. ' It was a moment of
antagonism toward England. In the summer of 1895,
Venezuela had appealed to the United States for pro-

THE KIPLING THAT tfOfiObY RfiAt) 13$

tcction against the English in a dispute over the
boundaries of British Guiana, and President Cleveland
had invoked the Monroe Doctrine and demanded in
strong language that England submit the question to
arbitration. The Jameson raid on the Transvaal Re-
public early in 1896, an unauthorized and defeated at-
tempt by an agent of the British South Africa Company
to provoke a rising against the Boers, had intensified
the feeling against England. Kipling was brought face
to face with the issue by an encounter with another
American who seemed almost as unrestrained as Beatty
Balestier. When Kipling met Theodore Roosevelt, then
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the latter * thanked
God in a loud voice that he had not one drop of
British blood in him/ that his ancestry was pure
Dutch, and declared that American fear of the British
would provide him with funds for a new navy. John
Hay had told Kipling that it was hatred of the Eng-
lish that held the United States together.

But during the years that immediately followed the
Kiplings' return to England, American relations with
England improved. The United States took over the
Philippines in 1898 as a result of the Spanish War, and
annexed the Hawaiian Islands; and the imperialistic
England of Joseph Chamberlain, in fear of Germany,
which had favored the Spanish, became extremely
sympathetic with the policy of the United States. At
the beginning of 1899, then, Rudyard Kipling set
forth on an attempt to retrieve his position in America,
where he had abandoned the big Brattleboro house.
He first composed the celebrated set of verses in which

136 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

he exhorted the United States to collaborate with the
British Empire in ' taking up the White Man's burden*
of 'your new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and
half-child, 1 who were to be benefited and disciplined
in spite of themselves, though at a bitter expense to
their captors; and had the poem published on both
sides of the Atlantic early in February, at the moment
of his sailing for America. But what confronted him
on his landing was an announcement in the New York
papers that Beatty Balcstier was bringing a $50,000
countersuit against him for 'malicious persecution,
false arrest and defamation of character* ; and the re-
port that Beatty himself either had arrived in New
York or was just about to arrive. It was simply an-
other of Beatty 's gestures: no suit was ever brought;
but it prevented the Kiplings from returning to Ver-
mont. Rudyard had caught cold on the boat, and he
now came down with double pneumonia and seemed
in danger of not pulling through. His two little girls
had pneumonia, too, and one of them died while he
was ill. When he recovered, he had to hear of her
death. He went back to England in June, as soon as
he was able to travel, and never tried to live in the
United States again.

'It will be long and long,' he wrote in a letter sup-
posed to date from 1900, ' before I could bring myself
to look at the land of which she [his daughter] was
so much a part.' And his cousin Angela Thirkell
writes that, 'Much of the beloved Cousin Ruddy of
our childhood died with Josephine and I feel that I
have never seen him as a real person since that year. '

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 137

The fear and hatred awakened in Kipling by those
fatal six years of his childhood had been revived by
the discipline of Westward Ho! The menaces of
Beatty Balestier, behind which must have loomed for
Kipling all that was wild, uncontrollable, brutal in
the life of the United States, seem to have prodded
again the old inflammation. The schoolboy, rendered
helpless in a fight by his bad eyes and his small stature,
was up against the bully again, and fear drove him to
appeal to the authorities. How else can we account for
the fact that the relations of Kipling with Beatty
were ever allowed to get to this point? The truth was,
as Beatty himself later confessed to Mr. Van de Water,
that Rudyard had become involved in a family quarrel
between himself and his sister; and one's impulse is to
say that Kipling ought to have been able to find some
way of extricating himself and making contact with
the rather childlike friendliness that seems to have
lurked behind the rodomontade of Beatty. But the
terrible seriousness of the issue which the incident had
raised for Kipling is shown by his statement at the
hearing that he 'would not retract a word under
threat of death from any living man/

IV

It was the fight he had fought at school, and he
would not capitulate to Beatty Balestier. But he sur-
renjlered at last to the 'Proosian Bates/ He invoked
the protection of the British system and at the same
time prostrated himself before the power of British

138 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

conquest, which was feared in the United States and
which even at that moment in South Africa the
Transvaal Republic declared war on Great Britain in
the October of the year of his return was chastising
truculent farmers.

It is at the time of his first flight from America and
during the years before his attempt to return 1897-
99 that Kipling goes back to his school-days and
depicts them in the peculiar colors that we find in
Stalky & Co. How little inevitable these colors were
we learn from Mr. Beresford's memoir. The head
master of Westward Ho!, it appears, though really
known as the 'Proosian Bates/ was by no means the
intent Spartan trainer for the bloody and risky work of
the Empire into which Kipling thought it proper to
transform him. The fact was that Mr. Cormell Price
had been literary rather than military, a friend of
Edward Burne-Jones and an earnest anti-Imperialist.
He and Burne-Jones had actually organized/ at the
time of the Russo-Turkish War, a Workers' Neutrality
Demonstration against British intervention. But
Kipling must now have a head master who will sym-
bolize all the authority of the British educational
system, and a school that will represent all that he
has heard or imagined see his highlighting of the
fagging system about the older and more official
public schools. The colonial who has criticized the
motherland now sets out systematically to glorify
her; and it is the proof of his timidity and weakness
that he should loudly overdo this glorification.

And now, having declared his allegiance, he is free

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 139

to hate the enemies of England. His whole point of
view has shifted. The bitter animus so deeply im-
planted by those six years of oppression of his child-
hood has now become almost entirely dissociated
from the objects by which it was originally aroused.
It has turned into a generalized hatred of those na-
tions, groups and tendencies, precisely, which stand
toward the dominating authority in the relationship
of challengers or victims.

The ideal of the * Anglo-American-German Jew,'
which at the time of Kipling's first trip to America
represented for him the future of civilization, now im-
mediately goes by the board. His whole tone toward
the Americans changes. In An Error in the Fourth
Dimension in The Day's Work, published in 1898
he makes a rich Anglicized American, the son of a
railroad king, deciding for no very good reason that
he must immediately go to London, flag and stop an
English express train. The railroad first brings
charges against him, then decides that he must be in-
sane. They cannot understand his temerity, and he
cannot understand their consternation at having the
British routine interrupted. Kipling no longer admires
the boldness of Americans : this story is a hateful cari-
cature, so one-sided that the real comedy is sacrificed.
The Captive followed in 1901. Here a man from Ohio
named Laughton O. Zigler sells to the Boers, during
their war with the British, a new explosive and a new
maohine-gun he has invented. He is captured by the
English, who grin at him and ask him why he ' wasn't
in the Filipeens suppressing our war!' Later he runs

140 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

into a man from Kentucky, who refuses to shake his
hand and tells him that 'he's gone back on the White
Man in six places at once two hemispheres and four
continents America, England, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and South Africa Go on and pros-
per . . . and you'll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as
the North did. ' As a result of these taunts, and of the
respect which has been inspired in him by the spectacle
of the splendid behavior of the British, Mr. Zigler
gives them the formula for his explosive, insists upon
remaining their prisoner, and resolves to settle per-
manently in South Africa. A still later story, An
Habitation Enforced, in a collection published in 1909,
tells of the victory of the English countryside over an
American business man and his wife, who have been
aimlessly traveling about Europe. The American wife
discovers that her own ancestors came originally from
the very locality where they have settled, ^nd they
are finally it is the climax of the story accepted
by the English : ' That wretched Sangres man has twice
our money. Can you see Marm Conant slapping him
between the shoulders? Not by a jugful! The poor
beast doesn't exist!' The Americans succumb, deeply
gratified. The husband had had a breakdown from
overwork, but his equanimity is quite re-established.
In short, Kipling's attitude toward Americans has
now been almost reversed since the day of his first
visit to the States when he had written, 'I love this
People.' He now approves of them only when they
arc prepared to pay their tribute to Mother England
and to identify her interests with theirs.

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 141

Later still, during the first years of the World War
when Americans were figuring as neutrals, his bitter-
ness became absolutely murderous as in Sea Con-
stables: A Tale of 'if. And so had his feeling against
the Germans even before the war had begun. In The
Edge of the Evening (1913), Laughton O. Zigler of Ohio
turns up again, this time in England, as occupant of a
Georgian mansion inherited by one of the British
officers who captured him in South Africa. ' Bein' rich
suits me. So does your country, sir. My own country?
You heard what that Detroit man said at dinner.
"A government of the alien, by the alien, for the
alien." Mother's right, too. Lincoln killed us.
From the highest motives but he killed us/
What his mother had said was that Lincoln had
4 wasted the heritage of his land by blood and fire, and
had surrendered the remnant to aliens': "'My
brother, suh," she said, "fell at Gettysburg in order
that Armenians should colonize New England to-
day." ' {Something of Myself confirms the assumption
that these were Kipling's own views.) One night a
foreign plane makes a forced landing on the estate.
Two men get out of the plane, and one of them shoots
at his lordship. Zigler lays him out with a golf-club
while another of the Englishmen present collars the
other man and breaks his neck (it is all right for an
American to be lawless, or even for the right sort of
Englishman, if he is merely laying low the alien who
is *he natural enemy of both). They put the dead
German spies in the plane and send it up and out over
the Channel.

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Kipling is now, in fact, implacably opposed to
every race and nation which has rebelled against or
competed with the Empire, and to every movement
and individual such as the liberals and Fabians
in England who has criticized the imperial policies.
His attitude toward the Irish, for example, illustrates
the same simple-minded principle as his attitude
toward the Americans. So long as the Irish are loyal
to England, Kipling shows the liveliest appreciation
of Irish recklessness and the Irish sense of mischief:
Mulvaney is Irish, McTurk is Irish, Kim is Irish.
But the moment they display these same qualities in
agitation against the English, they become infamous
assassins and traitors. Those peoples who have never
given trouble the Canadians, the New Zealanders,
the Australians though Kipling has never found
them interesting enough to write about on any con-
siderable scale, he credits with the most admirable
virtues.

And as a basis for all these exclusions, he has laid
down a more fundamental principle for the hatred and
fear of his fellows: the anti-democratic principle. We
are familiar with the case of the gifted man who has
found himself at a disadvantage in relation to his
social superiors and who makes himself the champion
of all who have suffered in a similar way. What is not
so familiar is the inverse of this : the case of the indi-
vidual who at the period when he has most needed
freedom to develop superior abilities has found him-
self cramped and tormented by the stupidity of social
inferiors, and who has in consequence acquired a dis-

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 143

trust of the whole idea of popular government.
Rudyard Kipling was probably an example of this.
The ferocious antagonism to democracy which finally
overtakes him must have been fed by the fear of that
household at Southsea which tried to choke his
genius at its birth. His sister says that through all
this period he was in the habit of keeping up their
spirit by reminding himself and her that their guardian
was * of such low caste as not to matter . . . She was a
Kuch-nay, a Nothing-at-all, and that secret name was
a great comfort to us, and useful, too, when Harry
practised his talent for eavesdropping/ Some very
unyielding resistance was evidently built up at this
time against the standards and opinions of people
whom he regarded as lower-class.

The volume called Traffics and Discoveries^ published
in 1904, marks the complete metamorphosis of Kip-
ling. The collection that preceded, The Day's Work,
though these tendencies had already begun to appear
in it, still preserves certain human values : the English
officials in the Indian stories The Tomb of His An-
cestors and William the Conqueror still display some
sympathetic interest in the natives. But the Kipling
of the South African stories is venomous, morbid, dis-
torted.

When the Boer War finally breaks, Kipling is at
once on the spot, with almost all the correct reactions.
He is now at the zenith of his reputation, and he re-
ceives every official courtesy. And though he may
criticize the handling of a campaign, he never ques-
tions the rightness of its object. He has the jmpulse

144 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

to get close to the troops, edits a paper for the soldiers;
but his attitude toward the Tommy has changed.
He had already been entertained and enlightened by
Lord Dufferin, the British Viceroy in India. Hitherto,
he tells us in his memoirs, he ' had seen the administra-
tive machinery from beneath, all stripped and over-
heated. This was the first time I had listened to one
who had handled it from above/ Another passage
from Something of Myself shows how his emphasis has
altered: 'I happened to fall unreservedly, in darkness,
over a man near the train, and filled my palms with
gravel. He explained in an even voice that he was
"fractured 'ip, sir. 'Ope you ain't 'urt yourself, sir?"
I never got at this unknown Philip Sidney's name. They
were wonderful even in the hour of death these
men and boys lodgekcepers and ex-butlers of the
Reserve and raw town-lads of twenty.' Here he is
trying to pay a tribute; yet it is obvious that the Kip-
ling who was proud to be questioned in India by Lord
Roberts as if he were a colonel has triumphed over
the Kipling who answered him as a spokesman for the
unfortunate soldiers, Today he is becoming primarily
a man whom a soldier addresses as * sir/ as a soldier is
becoming for Kipling a man whose capacity for hero-
ism is indicated by remaining respectful with a frac-
tured hip. The cockney Ortheris of Soldiers Three and
the officer who had insulted him at drill had waived
the Courts Martial manual and fought it out man to
man; but by the time of the Boer War the virtue of
Kipling's officers and soldiers consists primarily in
knowing their stations.

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 145

Kipling had written at the beginning of the war, a
poem called The Absent-Minded Beggar, which was an
appeal for contributions to a fund for the families of
the troops in South Africa; but this poem is essentially
a money-raising poem: it had nothing like the spon-
taneous feeling of,

I went into a public-'ousc to get a pint o' beer;

The publican 'e up an f scz, 'We serve no red-coats here.'

The Barrack-Room Ballads were good in their kind:
they gave the Tommy a voice, to which people stopped
and listened. Kipling was interested in the soldier for
his own sake, and made some effort to present his life
as it seemed to the soldier himself. The poem called
Loot, for example, which worries Mr. Edward Shanks
because it appears to celebrate a reprehensible practice,
is in reality perfectly legitimate because it simply de-
scribes one of the features of the soldier's experience
in India. There is no moral one way or the other.
The ballads of The Five Nations, on the other hand, the
fruits of Kipling's experience in South Africa, are
about ninety per cent mere rhymed journalism, deco-
rating the readymadc morality of a patriotic parti-
san. Compare one of the most successful of the earlier
series with one of the most ambitious of the later.

The Injian Ocean sets an* smiles

So sof, so bright, so bloomin* blue;
There aren't a wave for miles an* miles

Excep* the jiggle from the screw:
The ship is swcp', the day is done,

The bugle's gone for smoke and play;
An' black agin* the settin' sun

The Lascar sings, ' Hum deckty bat! 9

146 THE WOUNB AND THE BOW

For to admin an* for to set,

Far to Mold this world so wide
It never done no good to me.

But I can't drop it if I fried!

Contrast this with The Return (from South Africa).

Peace is declared, an* I return

To 'Ackncystadt, but not the same;
Things 'avc transpired which made me learn

The size and meanin' of the game.
I did no more than others did,

I don't know where the change began;
I started as an average kid,

I finished as a thinkin' man.

// England was what England seems

An not the England of our dreams ,
But only putty % brass an paint,

'Qw quick we'd drop *cr! But she ain't!

Before my gappin* mouth could speak

I 'card it in my comrade's tone;
I saw it on my neighbor's check

Before I felt it flush my own.
An f last it come to me not pride,

Nor yet conceit, but on the *olc
(If such a term may be applied),

The makin's of a bloomin* soul.

This is hollow, synthetic, sickening. 'Having no
position to consider and my trade enforcing it, I could move at
will in the fourth dimension. 9 He has a position to con-
sider today, he eats at the captain's table, travels in
special trains; and he is losing the freedom of that
fourth dimension. There is a significant glimpse of
the Kipling of the South African imperialist period in

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 147

the diary of Arnold Bennett: 'I was responding to
Pauline Smith's curiosity about the personalities of
authors when Mrs. Smith began to talk about Kipling.
She said he was greatly disliked in South Africa. Re-
garded as conceited and unapproachable. The officers
of the Union Castle ships dreaded him, and prayed not
to find themselves on the same ship as him. It seems
that on one ship he had got all the information pos-
sible out of the officers, and had then, at the end of
the voyage, reported them at headquarters for flirting
with passengers all except the chief engineer, an
old Scotchman with whom he had been friendly.
With this exception they were all called up to head-
quarters and reprimanded, and now they would have
nothing to do with passengers.'

As for the Indians, they are now to be judged rig-
orously on the basis of their loyalty to the English in
Africa. There are included in Traffics and Discoveries
two jingoistic Sunday School stories which are cer-
tainly among the falsest and most foolish of Kipling's
mature productions. In The Comprehension of Private
Copper, he vents his contempt on an Anglicized Indian,
the son of a settler in the Transvaal, who has sided
with the Boers against the English; A Sahibs' War, on
the other hand, presents an exemplary Sikh, who ac-
companies a British officer to South Africa, serves him
with the devotion of a dog, and continues to practice
after his leader's death the public-school principles of
sportsmanship he has learned from him, in the face of
the temptation to a cruel revenge against the treachery
of the Boers. As for the Boers themselves, Kipling

148 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

adopts toward them a systematic sneer. The assump-
tion appears to be that to ambush the British is not
cricket. Though the Dutch are unquestionably white
men, Kipling manages somehow to imply that they
have proved renegades to white solidarity by allying
themselves with the black natives.

One is surprised to learn from Something of Myself
that over a period of seven years after the war (1900-
07), Kipling spent almost half his time in South
Africa, going there for five or six months of every year.
He seems to have so little to show for it : a few short
stories, and most of these far from his best. He had
made the acquaintance of Cecil Rhodes, and must
simply have sat at his feet. The Kiplings lived in a
house just off the Rhodes estate; and Kipling devotes
long pages to the animals in Rhodes 's private zoo and
to architectural details of Rhodes f s houses. Even
writing in 1935, he sounds like nothing so much
as a high-paid publicity agent. It turns out that
the Polonius-precepts in the celebrated verses called

// were inspired by Kipling's conception of the

character of Dr. Jameson, the leader of the Jameson
raid.

It may be worth mentioning here in connection
with Kipling's submission to official authority that he
has been described by a close friend, Viscount Castle-
rosse, as having abdicated his authority also in other
important relations. 'They [the Kiplings],' he says,
were among the few happy pairs I have ever met;
but as far as Kipling was concerned, his married life
was one of complete surrender. To him Carrie, as he

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 149

called her, was more than a wife. She was a mistress
in the literal sense, a governess and a matron. In a
lesser woman I should have used the term "nurse."
Kipling handed himself over bodily, financially and
spiritually to his spouse. He had no banking account.
All the money which he earned was handed over to
her, and she, in turn, would dole him out so much
pocket money. He could not call his time or even his
stomach his own

' Sometimes in the evening, enlivened by wine and
company, he would take a glass more than he was
accustomed to, and then those great big eyes of his
would shine brightly behind his strong spectacles, and
Rud would take to talking faster and his views would
become even more emphatic. If Mrs. Kipling was with
him, she would quickly note the change and, sure
enough, in a decisive voice she would issue the word
of command: "Rud, it is time you went to bed/' and
Rud always discovered that it was about time he went
to bed.

' 1 myself during the long years never once saw any
signs of murmuring or of even incipient mutiny/

In any case, Kipling has committed one of the most
serious sins against his calling which are possible for
an imaginative writer. He has resisted his own sense
of life and discarded his own moral intelligence in
favor of the point of view of a dominant political
pafty. To Lord Roberts and Joseph Chamberlain he
has sacrificed the living world of his own earlier artis-
tic creations and of the heterogeneous human beings

150 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

for whom they were offered as symbols. Here the con-
straint of making the correct pro-imperialist point is
squeezing out all the kind of interest which is proper
to a work of fiction. Compare a story of the middle
Kipling with a story by Stephen Crane or Joseph Con-
rad, who were dealing with somewhat similar sub-
jects. Both Conrad and Crane are pursuing their in-
dependent researches into the moral life of man.
Where the spy who is the hero of Under Western Eyes is
a tormented and touching figure, confused in his al-
legiances by the circumstances of his birth, a secret
agent in Kipling must invariably be either a stout fel-
low, because his ruses are to the advantage of the
British, or a sinister lying dog, because he is serving
the enemy. Where the killing of The Blue Hotel is
made to implicate everybody connected with it in a
common human guilt, a killing in a story by Kipling
must absolutely be shown to be either a dastardly or
a virtuous act.

To contrast Kipling with Conrad or Crane is to en-
able us to get down at last to what is probably the
basic explanation of the failure of Kipling's nerve. He
lacked faith in the artist's vocation. We have heard a
good deal in modern literature about the artist in con-
flict with the bourgeois world. Flaubert made war
on the bourgeois; Rimbaud abandoned poetry as
piffling in order to realize the adventure of commerce;
Thomas Mann took as his theme the emotions of
weakness and defeat of the artist overshadowed by
the business man. But Kipling neither faced the fight
like Flaubert, nor faced the problem in his life like

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 151

Rimbaud, nor faced the problem in his art like Mann.
Something in him, something vulgar in the middle-
class British way, something perhaps connected with
the Methodist ministers who were his grandfathers on
both sides, a tradition which understood preaching
and could understand craftsmanship, but had a good
deal of respect for the powers that governed the
material world and never thought of putting the
artist on a par with them something of this sort at
a given point prevented Kipling from playing through
his part, and betrayed him into dedicating his talents
to the praise of the practical man. Instead of becoming
a man of action like Rimbaud, a course which shows a
boldness of logic, he fell into the ignominious r61e of
the artist who prostrates his art before the achieve-
ments of soldiers and merchants, and who is always
declaring the supremacy of the * doer* over the man of
ideas.

The results of this are very curious and well worth
studying from the artistic point of view because
Kipling, it must always be remembered, was a man
of really remarkable abilities. Certain of the symp-
toms of his case have been indicated by George Moore
and Dixon Scott, whose discussions of him in Avowals
and Men of Letters are among the few first-rate pieces of
criticism that I remember to have seen on the subject.
George Moore quotes a passage from Kim, a descrip-
tion of evening in India, and praises it for ' the perfec-
tiofl of the writing, of the strong masculine rhythm of
every sentence, and of the accuracy of every observa-
tion'; but then goes on to point out that 'Mr. Kipling

151 THE WOUND AND THB BOW

has seen much more than he has felt/ that 'when we
come to analyze the lines we find a touch of local color
not only in every sentence, but in each part between
each semicolon/ So Scott diagnoses admirably the
mechanical ingenuity of plot that distinguishes the
middle Kipling. ' Switch,' he says, ' this imperatively
map-making, pattern-making method upon . . . the
element of human nature, and what is the inevitable
result? Inevitably, there is the same sudden stiffening
and formulation. The characters spring to attention
like soldiers on parade; they respond briskly to a sud-
den description; they wear a fixed set of idiosyncrasies
like a uniform. A mind like this must use types and
set counters; it feels dissatisfied, ineffective, unsafe, un-
less it can reduce the fluid waverings of character, its
flitting caprices and twilit desires, to some tangible
system. The characters of such a man will not only
be definite; they will be definitions.' And he goes on
to show how Kipling's use of dialect makes 'a screen
for his relinquishmcnt of his grip on the real organism
of human personality: 'For dialect, in spite of all its
air of ragged lawlessness, is wholly impersonal, typi-
cal, fixed, the code of a caste, not the voice of an in-
dividual. It is when the novelist sets his characters
talking the King's English that he really puts his
capacity for reproducing the unconventional and
capricious on its trial. Mr. Kipling's plain conversa-
tions are markedly unreal. But honest craftsmanship
and an ear for strong rhythms have provided him with
many suits of dialects. And with these he dresses the
talk till it seems to surge with character.'

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY RBAD 153

The packed detail, the automatic plot, the surfaces
lacquered with dialect, the ever-tightening tension of
form, are all a part of Kipling's effort to impose his
scheme by main force. The strangest result of this
effort is to be seen in a change in the subject matter it-
self. Kipling actually tends at this time to abandon
human beings altogether. In that letter of Henry
James in which he speaks of his former hope that
Kipling might grow into an English Balzac, he goes
on: ' But I have given that up in proportion as he has
come steadily from the less simple in subject to the
more simple from the Anglo-Indians to the natives,
from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies
to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish,
and from the fish to the engines and screws.' This in-
creasing addiction of Kipling to animals, insects and
machines is evidently to be explained by his need
to find characters which will yield themselves unre-
sistingly to being presented as parts of a system. In the
Jungle Books, the animal characters are each one all of
a piece, though in their ensemble they still provide a
variety, and they are dominated by a 'Law of the
Jungle/ which lays down their duties and rights. The
animals have organized the Jungle, and the Jungle is
presided over by Mowgli in his function of forest
ranger, so that it falls into its subsidiary place in the
larger organization of the Empire.

Yet the Jungle Books (written in Vermont) are not
artistically off the track; the element of obvious
allegory is not out of place in such fairy tales. It is
when Kipling takes to contriving these animal alle-

154 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

gorics for grown-ups that he brings up the reader's
gorge. What is proved in regard to human beings by
the fable called A Walking Delegate, in which a pasturc-
ful of self-respecting horses turn and rend a yellow
loafer from Kansas, who is attempting to incite them
to rebellion against their master, Man? A labor leader
and the men he is trying to organize are, after all, not
horses but men. Does Kipling mean to imply that the
ordinary workingman stands in the same relation to
the employing and governing classes as that in which
the horse stands to its owner? And what is proved by
The Mother Hive, in which an invasion of wax-moths
that ruin the stock of the swarm represents the infil-
tration of socialism? (Compare these with that more
humane fable of 1893, The Children of the Zodiac ', which
deals with gods become men.) And, though the dis-
cipline of a military unit or of the crew of a ship or a
plane may provide a certain human interest, it makes
us a little uncomfortable to find Kipling taking up
locomotives and representing ' .007' instead of the
engineer who drives it as the hero of the American
railroad; and descending even to the mechanical parts,
the rivets and planks of a ship, whose drama consists
solely of being knocked into place by the elements so
that it may function as a co-ordinated whole.

We may lose interest, like Henry James, in the ani-
mal or mechanical characters of Kipling's middle
period; but we must admit that these novel produc-
tions have their own peculiar merit. It is the paradox
of Kipling's career that he should have extended the

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 155

conquests of his craftsmanship in proportion to the
shrinking of the range of his dramatic imagination.
As his responses to human beings became duller, his
sensitivity to his medium increased.

In both tendencies he was, of course, quite faithful
to certain aspects of the life of his age. It was a period,
those early nineteen hundreds, of brilliant techno-
logical improvement and of generally stunted intelli-
gence. And Kipling now appeared as the poet both of
the new mechanical methods and of the ideals of the
people who spread them. To re-read these stories
today is to feel again a little of the thrill of the plushy
transcontinental Pullmans and the spic-and-span trans-
atlantic liners that carried us around in our youth, and
to meet again the bright and bustling people, talking
about the polo field and the stock market, smart Paris
and lovely California, the latest musical comedy and
Kipling, in the smoking-rooms or among the steamer-
chairs.

Kipling reflected this mechanical progress by evolv-
ing a new prose technique. We have often since
Kipling's day been harangued by the Futurists and
others about the need for artistic innovations appro-
priate to the life of the machine age; but it is doubtful
whether any rhapsodist of motor-cars or photographer
of dynamos and valves has been so successful at this as
Kipling was at the time he wrote The Day's Work.
These stories of his get their effects with the energy
and accuracy of engines, by means of words that,
hard, short and close-fitting, give the impression of
ball-bearings and cogs. Beside them, the spoutings of

156 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

the machine fans look like the old-fashioned rhetoric
they are. For these latter could merely whoop and
roar in a manner essentially romantic over the bigness,
the power, the speed of the machines, whereas Kip-
ling exemplified in his form itself the mechanical
efficiency and discipline, and he managed to convey
with precision both the grimncss and the exhilaration
which characterized the triumph of the machine.

He also brought to perfection the literary use of the
language of the specialized industrial world. He must
have been the principal artisan in the creation of that
peculiar modern genre in which we are made to see
some comedy or tragedy through the cheapening or
obscuring medium of technical vocabulary or profes-
sional slang. He did not, of course, invent the dialect
monologue; but it is improbable that we should have
had, for example, either the baseball stories of Ring
Lardner or the Cyclops episode in Ulysses if Kipling
had never written.

This is partly no doubt pure virtuosity. Mr. Beres-
ford says that Kipling was by nature as unmechanical
as possible, could do nothing with his hands except
write; and I have heard an amusing story of his aston-
ishment and admiration at the mechanical proficiency
of an American friend who had simply put a castor
back on a chair. He had never worked at any of the
processes he described, had had to get them all up
through the methods of the attentive reporter. But
it is virtuosity on a much higher level than that of
the imitation literature so often admired in that era.
Where Stevenson turns out paler pastiches of veins which

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 157

have already been exploited, Kipling really finds new
rhythms, new colors and textures of words, for things
that have not yet been brought into literature. For
the most part a second-rate writer of verse, because
though he can imitate the language of poetry as he
can imitate all the other languages, he cannot com-
pensate for the falsity of his feeling by his sharp ob-
servation and his expert technique, he is extraordinary
as a worker in prose. It is impossible still for a
writer to read, for example, the first part of The
Bridge-Builders without marveling at the author's
mastery. How he has caught the very look and feel
of the materials that go to make bridges and of the
various aspects of the waters they have to dominate !
And the maneuvers of modern armies against the
dusty South African landscapes, and the tempo of
American trains, and the relation of the Scotch engi-
neer to the patched-up machines of his ship. The
Kipling who put on record all these things was an
original and accomplished artist.

For the rest, he writes stories for children. One is
surprised in going back over Kipling's work to find
that, dating from the time of his settling with his
family in Vermont, he published no less than nine
children's books: the two Jungle Books, Captains Cou-
rageous, Just So Stories, Stalky & Co., Puck of Pook's Hill,
Rewards and Fairies, A History of England, Land and Sea
Ttlesfor Scouts and Scouts Masters. It is as if the natural
human feelings progressively forced out of his work by
the rigors of organization for its own sake were seek-

158 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

ing relief in a reversion to childhood, when one has not
yet become responsible for the way that the world is
run, where it is enough to enjoy and to wonder at
what we do not yet understand. And, on the other
hand, the simplified morality to which Kipling has
now committed himself is easier to make acceptable
to one's readers and oneself if one approaches it from
the point of view of the child. (The truth is that much
of his work of this period which aims at the intelli-
gence of grown people might almost equally well be
subtitled For Scouts and Scouts Masters.} These stories,
excellent at their best, are most successful when they
are most irresponsible as in the Just So Stories, least
so, as in Captains Courageous, when they lean most
heavily on the schoolboy morality.

The most ambitious of them the two series about
Puck of Pook's Hill (1906 and 1910) have, I know,
been much admired by certain critics, including the
sensitive Dixon Scott; but my own taste rejects them
on re-reading them as it did when I read them first at
the age for which they were presumably intended.
Kipling tells us that the stories in Rewards and Fairies
were designed to carry a meaning for adults as well
as to interest children. But their technical sophistica-
tion puts them slightly above the heads of children
at the same time that their sugared exploitation of
Kipling's Anglo-Spartan code of conduct makes them
slightly repugnant to grown-ups.

They are, to be sure, the most embroidered produc-
tions of Kipling's most elaborate period. The recovery
of obsolete arts and crafts, the re-creation of obsolete

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 159

idioms, are new pretexts for virtuosity. Kipling's
genius for words has been stimulated by the discovery
of the English earth and sea; he spreads on the rich
grassiness of the English country, the dense fogginess
of the English coast, the layers upon layers of tradition
that cause the English character to seem to him deep-
rooted, deep-colored, deep-meaning. He has applied
all his delicacy and strength to this effort to get the
mother-country into prose; but his England is never so
real as was his India; and the effect, for all the sinewy
writing, is somehow fundamentally decadent. The
Normans and the Saxons and the Elizabethans, the
great cathedral-builders and sailors and divines, per-
petrating impossible 'gags,' striking postures that
verge on the 'ham/ seem almost to anticipate Holly-
wood. The theme of the r61e and the ordeal of the
artist which figures in Rewards and Fairies suffers from
being treated in the vein of Stalky & Co. In the story
called The Wrong Thing, he embarks on a promising
subject: the discrepancy between the aim of the artist
who is straining to top the standards of his craft, and
the quite irrelevant kinds of interest that the powers
that employ him may take in him; but he turns it into
a farce and ruins it.

Kipling's England is perhaps the most synthetic of
all his creations of this period, when he depends so
much on tools and materials as distinguished from
sympathy and insight. Scott says that these stories
aft opalescent; and this is true, but they show the
defects of opals that have been artificially made and
whose variegated glimmerings and shiftings do not
seem to convey anything mysterious.

ifo THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Yet, in locating the Ideal in the Empire, Kipling
was not without his moments of uneasiness. // the
Empire is really founded on self-discipline, the fear
of God, the code of noblesse oblige, if it really involves
a moral system, then we are justified in identifying
it with 'the Law'; but suppose that it is not really
so dedicated.

If England was what England seems,
An' not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass an* paint,
*Ow quick we'd drop *cr! But she ain't!

Yet Recessional, perhaps the best set of verses that
Kipling ever wrote, is a warning that springs from a
doubt; and the story called The Man Who Would Be
King is surely a parable of what might happen to the
English if they should forfeit their moral authority.
Two low-class English adventurers put themselves
over on the natives of a remote region beyond Afghan-
istan, organize under a single rule a whole set of
mountain tribes; but the man who has made himself
king is destroyed by the natives that have adored him
the instant they come to realize that he is not a god, as
they had supposed, but a man. The Wesley an preacher
in Kipling knows that the valiant dust of man can
build only on dust if it builds not in the name of God;
and he is prepared to pound the pulpit and call down
the Almighty's anger when parliamentarians or
ministers or generals debauch their office or hold it
light. Kipling always refused official honors in order

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ l6l

to keep himself free; and his truculence had its valu-
able aspect in that it aided him to resist the briberies
of his period of glory and fortune. In the volume of
his collected addresses, which he calls A Book of
Words, there are some sincere and inspiriting sermons.
' Now I do not ask you not to be carried away by the
first rush of the great game of life. That is expecting
you to be more than human/ he told the students at
McGill University in the fall of 1907, when the height
of his popularity was past. 'But I do ask you, after
the first heat of the game, that you draw breath and
watch your fellows for a while. Sooner or later, you
will see some man to whom the idea of wealth as
mere wealth does not appeal, whom the methods of
amassing that wealth do not interest, and who will
not accept money if you offer it to him at a certain
price. At first you will be inclined to laugh at this
man and to think that he is not "smart" in his ideas.
I suggest that you watch him closely, for he will
presently demonstrate to you that money dominates
everybody except the man who does not want money.
You may meet that man on your farm, in your village,
or in your legislature. But be sure that, whenever or
wherever you meet him, as soon as it comes to a direct
issue between you, his little finger will be thicker
than your loins. You will go in fear of him: he will
not go in fear of you. You will do what he wants:
he will not do what you want. You will find that
you have no weapon in your armoury with which
you can attack him; no argument with which you can
appeal to him. Whatever you gain, he will gain
more/

l6l THE WOUND AND THE BOW

If Kipling bad taken a bribe, it was not that of
reputation or cash; it was rather the big moral bribe
that a political system can offer: the promise of mental
security. And even here a peculiar integrity as it
were, an integrity of temperament that came to exist
in dissociation from the intellect survived the
collapse of the system and saved Kipling in the end
from his pretenses. How this happened is the last
chapter of his story.

There was, as I say, a Wesleyan preacher in Kipling.
The Old Testament served him as an armory of grim
instances and menacing visions to drive home the
imperial code; or, on occasions when the imperial
masters failed to live up to this code, of scorching
rhetorical language (though with more of malignancy
than of grandeur) for the chastisement of a generation
of vipers. But Kipling had no real religion.. He ex-
ploited, in his poems and his fiction, the mythology
of a number of religions.

We may be inclined to feel, in reading Kipling
and to some extent we shall be right that the
various symbols and gods which figure in his stories
and poems are mere properties which the writer finds
useful for his purposes of rhetoric or romance. Yet
we cannot but suspect in Kim and in the stories of
metempsychosis that Kipling has been seriously in-
fluenced by the Buddhism which he had imbibed with
his first language in his boyhood. Mr. Beresford
corroborates this: he says that the Kipling of West-
ward Ho! talked Buddhism and reincarnation. And

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 163

it is certainly with Buddhism that we first find associ-
ated a mystical side of Kipling's mind which, in this
last phase, is to emerge into the foreground.

We left the Lama of Kim attaining the Buddhist
ecstasy and escaping from the Wheel of Things at the
same moment that Kim gets promotion and finally
becomes a spoke in the wheel of British administra-
tion. But the world-beyond of the Lama is to seep
back into Kipling's work in queer and incongruous
forms. Among the strained political fables of the
collection called Traffics and Discoveries, which is the
beginning of the more somber later Kipling, there is
a story of a wireless operator who is possessed by
the soul of Keats. It may be that Kipling's Southsea
experience, in driving him back into his imagination
for defense against the horror of reality, had had the
effect both of intensifying his fancies and of dissociat-
ing them from ordinary life so that the ascent out
of the Wheel of Things and the visitations of an alien
soul became ways of representing this. The effort
of the grown-up Kipling to embrace by the imagina-
tion, to master by a disciplined art, what he regarded
as the practical realities is to be subject to sudden
recoils. In the Kipling of the middle period, there is
a suppressed but vital element which thrusts periodi-
cally a lunatic head out of a window of the well-
bricked fagade.

This element is connected with the Lama, but it is
alstf connected with something else more familiar to
the Western world: the visitations and alienations of
what is now known as neurotic personality. Here

164 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

again Kipling was true to his age. While the locomo-
tives and airplanes and steamers were beating records
and binding continents, the human engine was going
wrong. The age of mechanical technique was also
the age of the nerve sanitarium. In the stories of the
early Kipling, the intervention of the supernatural
has, as a rule, within the frame of the story itself,
very little psychological interest; but already in
'They' and The Brushwood Boy the dream and the
hallucination are taking on a more emphatic signifi-
cance. With The House Surgeon and In the Same Boat,
they are in process of emerging from the fairy tale:
they become recognizable as psychiatric symptoms.
The depression described in The House Surgeon has been
transferred, by the artifice of the story, to persons
unconcerned in the tragedy through the influence
from a distance of someone else; but the woman with
whom the terror originates is suffering morbidly from
feelings of guilt, and the sensations are evidently
based on the first-hand experience of the author.

' And it was just then that I was aware of a little
gray shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen
against the light, floating at an immense distance in
the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I
shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain tele-
graphed that it was the forerunner of a swift-striding
gloom which there was yet time to escape if I would
force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping
for life forces his body forward and away from the
fall of a wall. But the gloom overtook me before I
could take in the meaning of the message. I moved

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY RBAD 165

toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the
foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and
sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped,
gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness which
is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as the auctioneers
say, must be experienced to be appreciated.

'Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear
after fear, each causing their distinct and separate
woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded length of
time, until at last they blurred together, and I heard
a click in my brain like the click in the ear when one
descends in a diving bell, and I knew that the pres-
sures were equalized within and without, and that,
for the moment, the worst was at an end. But I knew
also that at any moment the darkness might come
down anew; and while I dwelt on this speculation
precisely as a man torments a raging tooth with his
tongue, it ebbed away into the little gray shadow on
the brain of its first coming, and once more I heard
my brain, which knew what would recur, telegraph
to every quarter for help, release or diversion/

And although the periodical irrational panics of
the couple of In the Same Boat are explained as the
result of pre-natal shocks, the description of the man
and woman themselves, with their 'nerve doctors,'
their desperate drug-taking, their shaky and futile
journeys in flight from their neurotic fears, their
peculiar neurotic relationship, constitutes an accurate
account of a phenomenon of contemporary life which,
at the time that Kipling was writing, had hardly
been described in fiction.

l66 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Observe that in both these stories, as in the stories
of war neurosis that will follow, the people who
suffer thus are quite innocent, their agony is entirely
unearned. I believe that the only cases in which the
obsessive horror is connected with any kind of guilt
are those in which a man is hounded to death by the
vision of a woman he has wronged. This theme re-
curs regularly with Kipling from the time of The
Phantom Rickshaw, one of the very first of his short
stories, through the remarkable Mrs. Bathurst of his
middle period, and up to the strange and poisoned
Dayspring Mishandled, which was one of the last
things he wrote. We cannot speculate with very much
assurance on the relation of this theme of betrayal to
the other recurring themes of Kipling's work. We do
not know enough about his life to be able to assign it
to an assumption on the part of the six-year-old
Kipling that he must somehow have sinned against
the mother who had abandoned him so inexplicably
at Southsea; or to relate it to the strange situation of
Dick Heldar in The Light That Failed, who vainly
adores, and goes blind in adoring, the inexplicably
obdurate Maisie. All we can say is that the theme of
the anguish which is suffered without being deserved
has the appearance of having been derived from a
morbid permanent feeling of injury inflicted by his
experience at Southsea.

Certainly the fear of darkness passing into the fear
of blindness which runs all through his work from
The Light That Failed to ' They 9 is traceable directly
to his breakdown and to the frightening failure of his

THB KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 167

eyes. This was a pattern he seems to have repeated.
Illnesses were critical for Kipling. It was after his
illness in India that he set out to contend with a
society which must have seemed to him indifferent
and brutal by making himself a writer; and it was
after his illness in New York that he decided to turn
his back on America and to accept all the values that
that retreat implied. It was after the breakdown in
which Kim had brooded on his true identity that he
emerged as a fullblown British agent. From the
darkness and the physical weakness, the Kipling of
the middle period has come forth with tightened
nerves, resolved to meet a state of things in which
horses are always being whipped or having their
heads blown off, in which schoolboys are bullied and
flogged, in which soldiers are imprisoned in barracks
and fed to the bayonets and guns, by identifying him-
self with horses as in the story called A Walking
Delegate that gang together to kick and maul
another horse, with schoolboys as in The Moral
Reformers of Stalky that gloat in torturing other
schoolboys, with soldiers that get the sharpest satis-
faction from stabbing and pot-shotting other soldiers.
He has set himself with all the stiff ribs of a metal-
armatured art to stand up to this world outside that
gets its authority from its power to crush and kill:
the world of the Southsea house that has turned into
the world of the Empire; to compete with it on its
own terms. And yet the darkness and the illness
return. It is a key to the whole work of Kipling that
the great celebrant of physical courage should prove

l68 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

in the long run to convey his most moving and con-
vincing effects in describing moral panic. Kipling's
bullyings and killings are contemptible: they are the
fantasies of the physically helpless. The only au-
thentic heroism to be found in the fiction of Kipling
is the heroism of moral fortitude on the edge of a
nervous collapse.

And in the later decades of Kipling's life the black-
ness and the panic close down; the abyss becomes
more menacing. It is the Crab, both devil and destiny,
which in the story called The Children of the Zodiac
lies always in wait for the poet and finally comes to
devour him. The nurse-like watchfulness of Mrs.
Kipling and Kipling's fear of stepping out of her
r6gime, which appeared to his friend an impediment
to the development of his genius, were no doubt, on
the contrary, in his extreme instability, a condition
of his being able to function at all just as the
violence of his determination to find the answer to
the problems of society and a defense against the forces
that plagued him in the program of an imperialist
government was evidently directly related to the
violence of desperation of his need*

But now both of these shelters he had built himself
the roof of his family life, the confidence of his
political idealism were suddenly to be broken
down.

In 1914-18, the British Empire collided with a
competitor. All England went to war, including
Kipling's only son. The boy, not yet out of his teens,

THB KIPLING THAT NOBODY RBAD 169

was killed in an attack before Loos in September,
1915, and his body was never found. John Kipling
had at first been reported missing, and his father
waited for months in the hope of getting a letter
from Germany announcing that he had been taken
prisoner.

These war years left Kipling defenseless. It had
been easy to be grimly romantic on the subject of the
warfare in India when Kipling had never seen fighting;
it had even been possible, as a reporter at the front,
to Meissonier the campaign in South Africa in the
bright colors of the new nineteenth century. But
the long systematic waste of the trench warfare of
the struggle against Germany discouraged the artistic
exploitation of the cruelties and gallantries of battle.
The strain of the suspense and the horror taxed in-
tolerably those attitudes of Kipling's which had
been in the first instance provoked by a strain and
which had only at the cost of a strain been kept up.

From even before the war, the conduct of British
policy had been far from pleasing to Kipling. He saw
clearly the careerism and the Ycnality of the modern
politician; and he was bitterly opposed on principle
to the proposals of the radicals and liberals. In May,
1914, when civil war with Ulster was threatening,
he delivered at Tunbridge Wells and allowed to be
circulated as a penny leaflet a speech against the
Home Rule Bill of a virulence almost hysterical. The
attempt to free Ireland he excoriates as on a level with
the Marconi scandals. 'The Home Rule Bill,' he
declares, 'broke the pledged faith of generations; it

170 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

officially recognized sedition, privy conspiracy and
rebellion; it subsidized the secret forces of boycott,
intimidation and murder; and it created an independ-
ent stronghold in which all these forces could work
together, as they have always and openly boasted
that they would, for the destruction of Great Britain. f
This was to remain Kipling's temper in public
questions. The victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia
of course made the picture blacker: one sixth of the
area of the globe, he said, had * passed bodily out of
civilization/

Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o'crthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone I

he wrote when the war began. And when Kipling
was sickened and broken with steel and fire and stone,
there was little for his spirit to lean on.

Little but the practice of his craft, which now re-
flects only the twisted fragments of Kipling's ex-
ploded cosmos.

These latest stories of Kipling's have attracted
meager attention for reasons that are easily compre-
hensible. The disappearance in the middle Kipling
of the interest in human beings for their own sake
and the deliberate cultivation of the excommunicatory
imperialist hatreds had already had the effect of dis-
couraging the appetite of the general public; and
when the human element reappeared in a new tor-
mented form in Kipling's later stories, the elliptical

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 17!

and complex technique which the writer had by that
time developed put the general reader off. On the
other hand, the highbrows ignored him, because, in
the era of Lawrence and Joyce, when the world was
disgusted with soldiering and when the imperialisms
were apparently deflated, they could take no interest
in the point of view. In their conviction that Kipling
could never hold water, they had not even enough
curiosity to wonder what had happened to an author
who must have enchanted them in their childhood.
And in a sense they were, of course, correct. Kipling
had terribly shrunk; he seemed a man who had had
a stroke and was only half himself whereas Yeats
was playing out superbly the last act of a personal
drama which he had sustained unembarrassed by
public events, and Henry James was now seen in
retrospect to have accomplished, in his long career,
a prodigy of disinterested devotion to an art and a
criticism of life. Where there was so much wreckage
around, political, social and moral, the figure of the
disinterested artist commanded especial respect.

Yet the Kipling who limped out of the wreckage,
shrunken and wry though he looks, has in a sense
had his development as an artist. Some of these stories
are the most intense in feeling as they are among the
most concentrated in form that Kipling ever wrote;
to a writer, they are perhaps the most interesting.
The subjects are sometimes hard to swallow, and the
stfcries themselves through a tasteless device which
unfortunately grew on Kipling as he got older are
each preceded and followed by poems which elaborate

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

or elucidate their themes in the author's synthetic
verse and which dull the effect of the excellent prose.
But here Kipling's peculiar method, trained with
deadly intention, scores some of its cleanest hits.

Let us, however, first consider the subjects of these
final collections of stories (A Diversity of Creatures,
Debits and Credits, and Limits and Renewals). The
fragments of the disintegrated Kipling fall roughly
into five classes: tales of hatred, farces based on practi-
cal jokes, studies of neurotic cases, tales of fellowship
in religion, and tales of personal bereavement.

The tales of hatred hatred of Americans and the
Germans : Sea Constables and Mary Postdate become
murderous at the time of the war (though they give
place to other kinds of themes later). The hatred of
democracy in the satire called As Easy as A.B.C.
(which appeared in 191 x) is carried to lengths that
would be Swiftian if Kipling had subjected the whole
human race to the death ray of his abstract contempt,
but which as Edward Shanks points out is
rendered rather suspect by the exemption from the
annihilating irony of a group of disciplined officials.
The morals of these stories are odious and the plots
mostly contrived and preposterous; yet they acquire
a certain dignity from the desperation of bitterness
that animates them.

Then there are the practical jokes a category
which includes the comic accidents: practical jokes
engineered by the author. These have always been
a feature of Kipling. His addiction to this form of
humor seems to have derived originally from the

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 173

booby traps and baitings of Westward Ho!; later,
changing sides, he identified them rather with the
lickings-into-shape inflicted by regimental raggings.
The victims of these pulverizing hoaxes fall into two
classes: petty tyrants, who humiliate and bully, and
who always have to be cads; and political idealists
and godless intellectuals, who have to be nincompoops.
Kipling likes nothing better than to hurl one of these
latter into a hive of bees or, as in one of his early
stories, to silence his opinions by a sunstroke. A
first principle of Kipling's world is revenge: the
humiliated must become the humiliator. One might
expect this kind of thing to disappear in the work of
the latest Kipling; but the formula becomes instead
much more frequent, and it comes to play a special r61e.
The practical joke with its extravagant laughter is
a violent if hollow explosion for the relief of nervous
strain; and the severity of this strain may be gauged
by the prodigious dimensions of the hoaxes in which
Kipling now labors to concentrate the complex calcu-
lation of an Ibsen and the methodical ferocity of a
Chinese executioner.

In some of these stories, the comic disaster is ex-
ploited as a therapeutic device. There are six stories
of war neurosis in Kipling's last two collections.
The situation of the shattered veteran provided him
with an opportunity for studying further a subject
which had haunted him all his life: the condition of
people who seem to themselves on the borderline of
madness. Here the sufferers are still perfectly guilt-
less. In one case, an appearance of guilt, in another i a

174 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

conviction of guilt, turn out to be actually unjustified.
But the picture is now more realistically filled out
than it was by the pre-natal occurrences which were
the best Kipling could do for motivation for the
neurotics of In the Same Boat. The war supplies real
causes for derangement; and Kipling sees that such
short-circuits may be mended by going back to the
occasion that gave rise to the obsession and disen-
tangling the crossed wires. But his principal pre-
scriptions for saving people from the effects of the
horror and the strain of the war are such apropos
comic accidents and well-aimed benevolent frauds as,
in reality, are rarely possible and which would be of
doubtful efficacity if they were. In one story, the
fantasy of the sick man turns out to be based on a
reading in hospital of a novel by Mrs. Ewing (as the
soldiers in The Janeites find solace in the novels of
Jane Austen) which also gives the veteran, when
he recovers, a beneficent interest in life: that of plant-
ing wayside gardens. Another ex-soldier is saved by
a dog.

Kipling's homeless religious sense resorts to strange
fellowships and faiths to bolster up his broken men.
He had been made a Freemason in India, and Free-
masonry had figured in Kim and had seemed to crop
up in the guise of Mithraism in the Roman stories of
Puck of PooKs Hill. Now he invents, for a new series
of stories, a circle of philanthropic Masons who meet
in the back room of a tobacconist's and who try to
help men that have been wrecked by the war. A new
ideal but a new ideal conceived by a tired and

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 175

humbled man of a brotherhood which shall not
be delimited by the exclusions of a fighting unit or
caste begins to appear in these stories. Mithraism
figures again in The Church That Was at Antioch: the
young Roman officer turned Mithraist says of his
mother, 'She follows the old school, of course the

home- worships and the strict Latin Trinity But

one wants more than that'; and he ends by getting
murdered by the Jews in revenge for his protection
of the Apostle Paul. In another story, The Manner of
Men, Saint Paul appears again and rescues a neurotic
sea-captain: * Serve Caesar/ says Paul. 'You are not
canvas I can cut to advantage at present. But if you
serve Caesar you will be obeying at least some sort of
law. ... If you take refuge under Caesar at sea, you
may have time to think. Then I may meet you again,
and we can go on with our talks. But that is as the
God wills. What concerns you now,' he concludes,
in a tone that recalls at the same time the Buchmanite
and the psychoanalyst, 'is that, by taking service,
you will be free from the fear that has ridden you
all your life/

The Paul of these final stories, so different from his
early heroes, may evidently tell us something about
Kipling's changed conception of himself. Paul had
preached the Word to the Gentiles as Kipling had
preached the Law to the colonials and the Americans;
Paul, like Kipling, is ill-favored and undersized, 'a
little shrimp of a man,' who has 'the woman's trick
of taking the tone and color of whoever he talked to*
and who is scarred from old floggings and from his

176 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

encounters with the beasts of the arena. Paul, like
Kipling, is brash and tense; he is dedicated to a mis-
sion which has saved him from fear. But observe
that, though he advises the shaky captain to take
service with Caesar for a time, he has himself gone
on to something higher.

This, then, is quite another Kipling. His prophets
have an altered message: Kipling is losing his hatred.
His captains have been afraid all their lives. His
soldiers are no longer so cocky, so keen to kill inferior
peoples, so intent on the purposes of the Empire.
And officers and soldiers are now closer, as they were
in the earliest stories: they are now simply civilians
back in mufti, between whom the bond of having
been in the war is stronger than the class differences
of peace-time. And they are the remnants of a colossal
disaster. I shall quote one of the pieces in verse with
which Kipling supplements these stories, because,
indifferent though it is as poetry, it strikingly illus-
trates this change:

I have a dream a dreadful dream

A dream that is never done,
I watch a man go out of his mind,

And he is My Mother's Son.

They pushed him into a Mental Home,

And that is like the grave:
For they do not let you sleep upstairs,

And you're not allowed to shave.

And it was not disease or crime
Which got him landed there,

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 177

But because they laid on My Mother's Son
More than a man could bear.

What with noise, and fear of death,

Waking, and wounds and cold,
They filled the Cup for My Mother's Son

Fuller than it could hold.

They broke his body and his mind

And yet they made him live,
And they asked more of My Mother's Son

Than any man could give.

For, just because he had not died

Nor been discharged nor sick:
They dragged it out with My Mother's Son

Longer than he could stick

And no one knows when he'll get well

So, there he'll have to be:
And, 'spite of the beard in the looking-glass,

I know that man is me!

The theme of inescapable illness dominates the
whole later Kipling. In some Cases, the diseases are
physical, but there is always the implication of a
psychological aspect. In A Madonna of the Trenches
and The Wish House gruesome ghost stories of love
and death that make The End of the Passage and The
Mark of the Beast look like harmless bogey talcs for
children cancer serves as a symbol for rejected or
frustrated love. And it is not clear in Dayspring
Mishandled whether the detestable literary man
Castorley is being poisoned by his wife and the doctor

178 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

or by the consciousness of the wrong he has com-
mitted. The strangest of all these stories is Unprofes-
sional, in which cancer, spasms of insanity, the after-
math of the war, and the influence of the something
beyond human life combine in a clinical fantasy on
the beneficent possibilities of science. Here the white
mice and the London woman convulsed with suicidal
seizures, sets toward death periodically imparted by
mysterious cosmic tides, are Kipling's uncannicst
image for the workings of nervous disorders.

The old great man is back again in the 4 House of
Desolation* at Southsea, tormented unjustly, ill,
deserted by those he loves, and with the haunted
darkness descending on that world which his de-
termined effort had once enabled him to see so dis-
tinctly. In one of the latest of his stories, Proofs of
Holy Writ, he makes Shakespeare speak to Ben Jonson
of a man whom Shakespeare describes as ' going down
darkling to his tomb 'twixt cliffs of ice and iron 1
phrases hardly characteristic of Shakespeare but ex-
tremely appropriate to Kipling.

It is striking that some of the most authentic of
Kipling's early stories should deal with children for-
saken by their parents and the most poignant of his
later ones with parents bereaved of their children.
The theme of the abandoned parent seems to reflect
in reversal the theme of the abandoned child. The
former theme has already appeared in ' They' (written
after the death of Kipling's daughter), associated
with the themes of blindness and the deprivation of
love; and even before that, in Without Benefit of Clergy.

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ 179

Certainly two of these last stories of Kipling's are
among the most moving he wrote. There is a pas-
sage in Mary Postgate like the plucking of a tight-
ened string that is just about to break. The plain and
dull English female 'companion 1 is to burn up the
belongings of a young soldier like most of Kipling's
children, an orphan to whom she has stood in a
maternal r61e and who has just been killed in a plane.
Kipling tells in one of his typical inventories of the
items, mainly relics of boyhood sports, that Mary
has to destroy; and then: 'The shrubbery was filling
with twilight by the time she had completed her ar-
rangements and sprinkled the sacrificial oil. As she
lit the match that would burn her heart to ashes, she
heard a groan or a grunt behind the dense Portugal
laurels/ The match that would burn her heart to ashes:
they are the first words that we have yet encountered,
the only words that we shall have encountered, that
are not matter-of-fact; and here the observation of
Kipling, of which George Moore complained that it
was too systematic and too technical, making it
Portugal laurels where another writer would have
simply written shrubbery here this hardness of con-
crete detail is suddenly given new value by a phrase
on another plane.

So in that other remarkable story, The Gardener,
Kipling's method of preparing a finale by concealing
essential information in an apparently casual narrative
prdduces an effect of tremendous power. This method,
which Kipling has developed with so much ingenuity
and precision, serves in some of his stories to spring

l8o THE WOUND AND THE BOW

surprises that are merely mechanical; but it has al-
ways had its special appropriateness to those aspects
of the English character with which Kipling has been
particularly concerned in that it masks emotion and
purpose under a pretense of coldness and indifference;
and here it is handled in a masterly fashion to drama-
tize another example of the impassive Englishwoman.
The implications of Mary Postgatc prevent us from
accepting it fully: we know too well that the revenge-
ful cruelty which impels the heroine of the story to
let the shattered German aviator die is shared by the
author himself. But The Gardener may conquer us
completely. I am not sure that it is not really the
best story that Kipling ever wrote. Like the rest of
even the best of Kipling, it is not quite on the highest
level. He must still have his fairy-tale properties;
and we may be disposed to protest at his taste when
we find that the Puck of Pook's Hill element is sup-
plied by the apparition of Jesus. But if we have been
following Kipling's development, we recognize that
this fact is significant. The r61e that Christ has
formerly played in Kipling as in the poem called
Cold Iron has been that of a pukka Sahib who knows
how to take his punishment. This is the first time,
so far as I remember, that Kipling's Christ has shown
pity as Kipling pities now rather than boasts
about the self-disciplined and much-enduring British.
And the symbol at once bares the secret and liberates
the locked-up emotion with a sudden and shocking
force. The self-repression and the hopeless grief of
the unmarried mother in The Gardener speak for the

THE KIPLING THAT NOBODY READ l8l

real Kipling. Here he has found for them intense ex-
pression in the concentrated forms of his art.

The big talk of the work of the world, of the mis-
sion to command of the British, even the hateful-
ness of fear and disappointment, have largely faded
away for Kipling. He composes as a memorial to his
son and to the system in devotion to which the half-
American boy has died a history of the Irish Guards
in the war, in which Lieutenant John Kipling is
hardly mentioned. But, meticulously assembling, by
the method by which he once seemed to build so
solidly, the scattered memories of his son's battalion,
he seems merely to be striving, by wisps and scraps,
to re-create the terrible days that preceded the death
of his child. Even the victory over the Germans can
never make that right.

Uncomfortable Casanova

has Jacques Casanova attracted so little at-
tention in English? So far as I know there is no-
thing very serious except Havelock Ellis 's essay, and
that does not go far into the subject. Mr. S. Guy
Endore's book, though a good piece of work in its
way, is only a popular biography. Yet the Chevalier
de Seingalt was a most remarkable man, who had
some of the qualities of greatness. The Prince de
Ligne listed his name with those of Louis XV, Fred-
crick the Great, Beaumarchais, d'Alembert and Hume
as among the most interesting men he had known,
and the great sharper really belongs in that company.

When we begin reading Casanova's Memoirs, we
think him amusing but cheap. Yet we end by being
genuinely impressed by him.

He was a type who was very familiar in the America
of the boom of the twenties. In our time he might
have had the career of a Rothstein or a Nicky Arnstein

UNCOMFORTABLE CASANOVA 183

or a Dapper Don Tourbillon, but he would have far
transcended the sphere of such men and he would have
felt for them the uneasy scorn that he felt for St.
Germain and Cagliostro. For Casanova was only half
of the underworld he lived half in darkness, half in
light. But the sound and superior part of him was
always insecure because it was based on knavery:
hence his succession of misadventures and the final
unsatisfactoriness of his life. Casanova was an uncom-
fortable man he could never make his life come
right. And it makes us uncomfortable to read about
him.

There is a sound kind of coarseness, which is not
incompatible with the finest work or the most scrupu-
lously ordered life: the coarseness of animality or of
the hand-to-hand struggle with existence, which may
nourish such work and such a life. And there is a
bad kind of coarseness which spoils everything, even
where a man is equipped with genuinely superior gifts.
The coarseness of Casanova was the bad kind. He
came out of the Venetian actors' world, and was never
sure whether his mother, a shoemaker's daughter,
had had him by a down-at-heels nobleman who had
gone on the stage and married her or by the manager
of the theater where she acted. From some heritage
of moral squalor Casanova could never emerge, and he
was ravaged by it all his life more vitally than by any
of the diseases that were his mere superficial exaspera-
tions.

But the superior qualities of such a man have con-
tinually to keep themselves sharp against the dangers

184 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

that always confront him, the dangers that he can
never get away from because they are part of himself.
The drama of Casanova's career creates a tension
which is both exciting and trying because his highly
developed intelligence, his genius as an actor on the
stage of life, are always poised on the brink of a pit
where taste, morals, the social order, the order of the
world of the intellect, may all be lost in the slime.
Yet even when he has slipped to the bottom, he keeps
his faculties clear; and so he commands our respect.

We have had an immense amount of controversy as
to whether Casanova told the truth in connection with
this or that incident, and a good many inaccuracies
have been proved on him. But whether he falsified
the facts unconsciously or deliberately makes very
little difference. In his own way Casanova was truth-
ful; it may even be said that one of his most admirable
traits not as a man but as a writer was precisely
a fidelity to truth. He may have invented some of the
adventures in the Memoirs, but his story follows reality
for all that. Someone has said that if the Memoirs is a
novel, Casanova is the greatest novelist who ever
lived. Though he was personally extremely vain, he
certainly spares himself as little as any autobiographer
on record. It is not true, as the popular legend seems
to have it, that he represents himself as triumphing
easily over innumerable complacent women. On the
contrary, he will sometimes devote the better part of
a volume to a detailed description of some siege in
which he ignominiously failed. The ultimate aim of

UNCOMFORTABLE CASANOVA 185

Casanova is not so much to glorify himself as to tell
us an astonishing story that illustrates how people
behave, the way in which life works out.

When other writers borrow from Casanova, they
are likely to sentimentalize or romanticize him where
Casanova's great virtue is his mcrcilessncss with ro-
mantic and sentimental conventions. I remember an
attempt at a popular play based on the Henriettc epi-
sode. Henriette in the Memoirs is a young French girl
who has run away from home in men's clothes and
whom the youthful Casanova meets in his travels.
She is the first French girl he has known, the first
jeune fille spirituellc; and his love affair with her has a
freshness and seriousness, almost a kind of ecstasy,
that none has ever had for him before and that none is
ever to have again. He happens to have money at the
time and is able to buy her a whole wardrobe of pretty
clothes. They go to Parma together, and there they
live in style. Casanova buys a box at the opera; they
take the air in the public gardens with the royalties
till she is recognized by one of the courtiers and is
compelled to go back to her family. Casanova's ac-
count of this episode is one of the most attractive love
affairs in literature. When he and Henriette have
finally had to part, at Geneva, he finds that she has
written with her diamond on the window of their
room at the inn: 'You will forget Henriette, too/
Now the contemporary play I speak of exploited this
chSrming story and then followed it with a conven-
tional sequel made up out of the whole cloth, in which
Casanova many years later was made to come back to

l86 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

the inn to find Henricttc grown old and with a son
who turns out to be his.

But what happens in the Memoirs is quite different.
Casanova does come back to the inn, middle-aged,
down on his luck and with a depressing venereal
disease. He has forgotten about staying there with
Henriette, and he does not even recognize their room
till he notices the writing on the window : ' Remember-
ing in a flash the moment when Henriette had written
those words thirteen years before, I felt the hair

stand up on my head Overcome, I dropped into a

chair Comparing the self I was now with the self

I had been then, I had to recognize that I was less
worthy to possess her. I still knew how to love, but
I realized I had no longer the delicacy that I had had
in those earlier days, nor the feelings which really
justify the transports of the senses, nor the same tender
ways, nor finally a certain probity which extends itself
even to one's weaknesses; but what frightened me was
to have to acknowledge that I no longer possessed the
same vigor/

Years afterwards, while he is traveling in Provence,
his coach breaks down in the middle of the night and
some people who live near the road take him in. The
mistress of the house hides her face in the hood she
has worn out-of-doors then as soon as they have
got into the house, she announces that she has
sprained her ankle and is obliged to take to her bed,
so that Casanova is only permitted to wait upon her
in her room and talk to her through the bed-curtains.
He does not find out till after he has left that the

UNCOMFORTABLE CASANOVA 187

countess is Hcnrictte, who has by this time grown so
fat that she cannot bear to have him see her. But he
has been traveling with a tough little Venetian girl
of bisexual capabilities, and the countess carries on a
flirtation with her and finally makes her sleep with
her. This is all life has left of their romance.

The real theme of Casanova is the many things a life
may hold the many r61es a man may play and the
changes brought by time. I have never read a book
either autobiography or fiction which seems to give
you a life so completely. I know of no book which
shows so strikingly the rhythmic recurrences which
character produces in personal destiny. Casanova's
adventures are always different but always the same
thing. He arrives in some new place, he puts himself
over, he achieves brilliant social successes or performs
dashing deeds, his best qualities and gifts have full
scope, then he overplays his hand or misses his step
or something discreditable is discovered about him,
and he has to make his getaway. There was some-
thing about him, one supposes, that in the long run
made people find him intolerable. And his love affairs
have their pattern, too: when the responsibilities in-
volved in them become onerous, he marries the ladies
off if he can; if not, he gently lets the affair lapse.

The first part of the story is funny and gay it has
a Venetian carnival liveliness; the last part, although
it is told with the eighteenth-century rapidity and
dr)ftiess, is almost unbearably sad. It is probable that
Casanova was never able to bring himself to finish it.
The manuscript as we have it does not cover the whole

1 88 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

of the period indicated by Casanova in his title: it
stops just as he is returning to Venice, but gets him
no farther than Trieste. He had been banished by the
Inquisition and was allowed to return to his native
city only at the price of acting as a spy for them. It
was the most humiliating episode in his life; and he
has remarked by the way several times that he is not
sure he will have the courage to go through with his
original project of writing his life up to the year 1797.
He may also have been guilty of a Freudian oversight
in dropping out two chapters near the end. They were
missing in the Brockhaus manuscript, but were found
later by Arthur Symons at Dux; and they turn out to
contain the dismal climax of Casanova's adventure
with two girls upon whom he had been trying to work
by an old and well-tried technique of his. He had dis-
covered that you could go a long way with girls if you
took them to masquerades in pairs; but on this oc-
casion the girls did not fall, and Casanova before the
evening was over got mercilessly razzed by the
masqucraders.

Yet in his final asylum at Dux, where his patron
left him alone for long periods and where he was con-
stantly bedeyiled by the servants, where he sometimes
contemplated suicide, he did get down most of the
story; and it is one of the most remarkable presenta-
tions in literature of a man's individual life as it seems
to him in the living. All the appetites are there
fine dinners, attractive women, amusements; and the
exhilaration of travel, of fighting for one's personal
pride, of the winning of wealth and consideration, of

UNCOMFORTABLE CASANOVA 189

winning one's personal liberty. There is in Casanova's
account of his escape from the Leads prison in Venice,
whether he fabricated the story or not, something
more than a mere talc of adventure : he has made of it a
thrilling expression of the hatred of the human spirit
for jails, of the will to be free that breaks away in con-
tempt of the remonstrances of reason (in the person of
the appalled old count who refuses to join the others
and keeps telling them why they cannot succeed).

There is even the appetite of the intellect: the great
raconteur loved the conversation of men like d f Alem-
bert and Voltaire; and the master gambler was an
amateur mathematician. And when one can have no
more brilliant dinners and make love to no more
women, when one has no longer appreciative com-
panions to listen to one's stories and can no longer
travel and try one's luck one can at least summon
one's intellectual resources, work at problems, write
one's memoirs; one can still test one's nerve and
strength by setting down an account of life as one
has found it, with all its anticlimax and scandal, one's
own impossible character and all. The writing of the
Memoirs represented a real victory of the mind and the
spirit. Scoundrels like Casanova do not usually put
themselves on record, and when they do they are
usually at pains to profess the morality of respectable
people. There is a certain amount of this, as we shall
see in a moment, in Casanova's autobiography, too;
butfwhen all Casanova's obeisances to the established
authorities have been made, life itself in his story
turns out to be an outlaw like him. He confesses in his

190 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

preface that he considers it a creditable deed to fleece a
fool; and in reading him, we get to a point where we
ourselves almost feel impatience when Casanova's pro-
spective victims fail to succumb to his confidence
games. He said that he feared the Memoirs were 'par
trop cynique ever to be published. And he was appar-
ently partly right: the original manuscript still lies
locked up in Brockhaus's vaults in Leipzig, and no
one knows what the editors may have omitted.

The Memoirs, then, required the courage of an in-
dividual point of view and they required a capacity
for feeling. Has any novelist or poet ever rendered
better than Casanova the passing glory of the personal
life? the gaiety, the spontaneity, the generosity of
youth: the ups and downs of middle age when our
character begins to get us and we are forced to come
to terms with it; the dreadful blanks of later years,
when what is gone is gone. All that a life of this kind
can contain Casanova put into his story. And how
much of the world ! the eighteenth century as you
get it in no other book; society from top to bottom;
Europe from England to Russia; a more brilliant
variety of characters than you can find in any eight-
eenth-century novel.

But the interests of such a man are limited. Casa-
nova knew better than anyone how the world and
how one's personal vicissitudes went. But he had
very little imagination for the larger life of society.
He saw the corruption of the old regime in France and
commented on it after the Revolution, but he had

UNCOMFORTABLE CASANOVA 191

never been among those who wanted to see the old
r6gime go. On the contrary like a Rothstein he
was content with the world as he found it. Though
the Inquisition had nearly done for him, he never
ceased to treat it with respect and was willing in his
last bad days to turn informer and report to these
censors though rather inefficiently, it appears
on naked models in the Venetian art-schools and in-
decent and ungodly books in the libraries. Though he
had at other times called himself a 4 philosopher' and
in his speculative writings had vaguely foreshadowed
Darwinism, he had never criticized Church or State.
He accepted all the current worldly values the
hierarchies, institutions, dominations. He never ques-
tioned, never protested, defended his honor according
to the code, but never brought up in connection with
anything the principle of a larger issue. Casanova's
originality was largely confined to a sort of personal
effrontery which, having persisted all through his life
in spite of his repeated attempts to reform it, had
ended by acquiring in his Memoirs a certain intellectual
dignity when he had found finally that all his strug-
gles to make himself a place in society were vain and
that this was the only companion that was left him
in his solitude at Dux.

A man of superior intelligence as he knew himself
to be, he had always aimed at the good things of the
world as the rich and powerful judged good things.
What he really wanted, to be sure, was something
different from what they wanted. He does not seem
to have cared about social position or financial se-

THE WOUND AND THB BOW

curity for their own sakcs: what he enjoyed was the
adventure of playing a rdle, creating a situation;
whereas the powerful and the rich only wanted to
follow their routine. But his drama was usually con-
ceived in terms of their values. It was the cheap side
of him, the lackey in him, which did not look beyond
the habits of his masters.

And this is a part of the explanation of the fact that
Casanova has attracted comparatively so little serious
attention. In English of course it is his scandalous
reputation which has made him practically taboo
so that he has remained largely unknown to the Eng-
lish-reading public save for volumes of erotic excerpts
in libraries of classic pornography. But in general it
may be said that what is good in Casanova makes seri-
ous readers too uneasy and what is inferior disgusts
them too much for him to become an accepted classic.
There are a whole host of people on the Continent
studying Casanova; but Casanovists seem almost in
the category of stamp and coin collectors and people
who devote their lives to looking for buried Spanish
treasure. They are mostly preoccupied with verifying
dates and tracking down identities. Casanova, fasci-
nating though he is, does not lead to anything bigger
than himself.

Compare him with Rousseau, for example. Rous-
seau was a much less attractive man, and his Confessions
are infinitely less readable than Casanova's Memoirs.
At his best, to my taste at any rate, he is still pretty
flavorless and Swiss. Yet the Geneva clockmaker's
son in a situation not unlike Casanova's he, too,

UNCOMFORTABLE CASANOVA 193

had been a vagabond, a thief, a hanger-on of the great,
had suffered as a battered-about apprentice and a
servant in rich men's houses made an issue of his
maladjustment. Casanova could show considerable
strength of character in compelling the great to treat
him as an equal as when he forced Count Branicki
to fight a duel and afterwards became his friend; but it
never seems to have occurred to the actor's son to say,
after he had come one of his croppers masquerading as
a man of quality: 'I am better at being a great lord
than you people are yourselves for I have the per-
sonality and the imagination and the brains to create
such a gorgeous great lord as your silly conventional
society never dreamed of hence I am superior to
you and hence do not need to compete with you!'
Whereas Rousseau finally came to the conclusion that
the times must be out of joint when Rousseau found
himself out of place. From the moment of his sudden
revelation, on the way to see Diderot at Vinccnnes,
that man was by nature good and that it was institu-
tions alone which had corrupted him, that all his own
miseries had been due, not to his aberrations and short-
comings, but to the sins of the society that had bred
him from this moment he stuck to his point at the
price of resigning from society, of exiling himself
even from those circles in which the other eighteenth-
century philosophers had found so agreeable a wel-
come and so sympathetic a hearing.

You may say that it was Rousseau's neurotic char-
acter which prevented him from getting on with
people and that he took it out in scolding society;

194 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

and you may say that Casanova was at least as near
to an accurate account of the situation when he at-
tributed his own misfortunes to his faults. But the
fact was that Rousseau had been led to a general truth
by his individual case and, in spite of his ignominious
adventures, had the courage and dignity of one who
knew it. He belonged to the class of thinkers who,
in opposing the prevalent philosophy of their time,
find that they have behind them a great pressure of
unformulated general feeling and who themselves
prevail as the spokesmen of the age that follows theirs.

Casanova once came with a lady of quality to pay a
visit to Rousseau in his retirement. The callers found
him lacking in affability and failed to get very much
out of him, though Casanova admitted that Rousseau
had talked intelligently. Madame d'Urf6 thought
him boorish, and they laughed about him after they
had left.

Casanova, ignoring his many humiliations, was still
trying to crash the gate at a time when Rousseau, for
all his clumsiness, had got hold of the lever of the
Revolution.

Justice to Edith Wharton

B,

BEFORE Edith Wharton died, the more common-
place work of her later years had had the effect of
dulling the reputation of her earlier and more serious
work. It seemed to me that the notices elicited by
her death did her, in general, something less than jus-
tice; and I want to try to throw into relief the
achievements which did make her important during
a period say, 1905-1917 when there were few
American writers worth reading. This essay is there-
fore no very complete study, but rather in the nature
of an impression by a reader who was growing up at
that time.

Mrs. Wharton's earliest fiction I never found par-
ticularly attractive. The influences of Paul Bourget
and Henry James seem to have presided at the birth
of her talent; and I remember these books as dealing
with the artificial moral problems of Bourget and de-

196 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

vcloping them with the tenuity of analysis which is
what is least satisfactory in James. The stories tended
to take place cither in a social void or against a back-
ground of Italy or France which had somewhat the
character of expensive upholstery. It was only with
The House of Mirth, published in 1905, that Edith
Wharton emerged as an historian of the American
society of her time. For a period of fifteen years or
more, she produced work of considerable interest both
for its realism and its intensity.

One has heard various accounts of her literary be-
ginnings. She tells us in her autobiography that a
novel which she had composed at eleven and which
began, 4 Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown? ... If only
I had known you were going to call, I should have
tidied up the drawing room 1 had been returned by
her mother with the chilling comment, * Drawing-
rooms are always tidy/ And it is said that a book of
verse which she had written and had had secretly
printed was discovered and destroyed by her parents,
well-to-do New Yorkers of merchant stock, who
thought it unladylike for a young woman to write.
It seems to be an authentic fact, though Mrs. Wharton
does not mention it in her memoirs, that she first seri-
ously began to write fiction after her marriage during
the period of a nervous breakdown, at the suggestion
of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who himself combined the
practice of literature with his pioneer work in the
field of female neuroses. Thereafter she seems to have
depended 6n her writing to get her through some
difficult years, a situation that became more and more

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON 197

painful. Her husband, as she tells us, had some mental
disease which was steadily growing worse from the
very first years of their marriage, and he inhabited a
social world of the rich which was scaled tight to
intellectual interests. Through her writing, she came
gradually into relation with the international literary
world and made herself a partially independent career.

Her work was, then, the desperate product of a
pressure of maladjustments; and it very soon took a
direction totally different from that of Henry James,
as a lesser disciple of whom she is sometimes point-
lessly listed. James's interests were predominantly
esthetic: he is never a passionate social prophet; and
only rarely as in The Ivory Towr, which seems in
turn to have derived from Mrs. Wharton does he
satirize plutocratic America. But a passionate social
prophet is precisely what Edith Wharton became. At
her strongest and most characteristic, she is a brilliant
example of the writer who relieves an emotional strain
by denouncing his generation.

It is true that she combines with indignation against
a specific phase of American society a general sense of
inexorable doom for human beings. She was much
haunted by the myth of the Eumenides; and she had
developed her own deadly version of the working of
the Aeschylean necessity a version as automatic
and rapid, as decisive and as undimmed by sentiment,
as the mechanical and financial processes which during
hef* lifetime were transforming New York. In these
books, she was as pessimistic as Hardy or Maupassant.
You find the pure expression of her hopelessness in

198 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

her volume of poems, Artemis to Act aeon, published
in 1909, which, for all its hard accent and its ponder-
ous tone, its ' impenetrates ' and ' incommunicables*
and 'incommensurables,' its 'immemorial altitudes
august,' was not entirely without interest or merit.
'Death, can it be the years shall naught avail?' she
asks in one of the sonnets called Experience: '"Not
so, ' ' Death answered. 4 ' They shall purchase sleep. ' ' '
But in the poem called Moonrise over Tyringham, she
seems to be emerging from a period of strain into a
relatively tranquil stoicism. She is apostrophizing
the first hour of night:

Be thou the image of a thought that fares

Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead,

Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares,

To where our lives arc but the ages' tread,

And let this year be, not the last of youth,

But first like thcc! of some new train of hours,

If more remote from hope, yet nearer truth,

And kin to the unpctitionablc powers.

But the catastrophe in Edith Wharton's novels is
almost invariably the upshot of a conflict between the
individual and the social group. Her tragic heroines
and heroes are the victims of the group pressure of
convention; they are passionate or imaginative spirits,
hungry for emotional and intellectual experience, who
find themselves locked into a small closed system, and
either destroy themselves by beating their heads
against their prison or suffer a living death in resigning
themselves to it. Out of these themes she got a sharp
pathos all her own. The language and some of the

JUSTICE TO BDITH WHARTON 199

machinery of The House of Mirth seem old-fashioned
and rather melodramatic today; but the book had some
originality and power, with its chronicle of a social
parasite on the fringes of the very rich, dragging out a
stupefying routine of week-ends, yachting trips and
dinners, and finding a window open only twice, at the
beginning and at the end of the book, on a world
where all the values are not money values.

The Fruit of the Tree, which followed it in 1907,
although its characters are concerned with larger
issues, is less successful than The House of Mirth, be-
cause it is confused between two different kinds of
themes. There is a more or less trumped-up moral
problem & la Bourget about a * mercy killing* by a
high-minded trained nurse, who happened to have an
'affinity/ as they used to say at that period, with the
husband of the patient. But there is also the story
of an industrial reformer, which is on the whole quite
ably handled especially in the opening scenes, in
which the hero, assistant manager of a textile mill, is
aroused by an industrial accident to try to remove
the conditions which have caused it and finds himself
up against one of those tight family groups that often
dominate American factory towns, sitting ensconced
in their red-satin drawing-rooms on massively uphol-
stered sofas, amid heavy bronze chandeliers and man-
tels surmounted by obelisk clocks; and in its picture of
his marriage with the mill-owning widow and the
gradual drugging of his purpose under the influence of
a house on Long Island of a quality more gracious and
engaging but on an equally overpowering scale.

100 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Edith Wharton had come to have a great hand with
all kinds of American furnishings and with their con-
comitant landscape-gardening. Her first book had
been a work on interior decorating; and now in her
novels she adopts the practice of inventorying the con-
tents of her characters' homes. Only Clyde Fitch,
I think, in those early nineteen-hundreds made play
to the same degree with the miscellaneous material
objects with which Americans were surrounding
themselves, articles which had just been manufactured
and which people were being induced to buy. I sup-
pose that no other writer of comedies of any other
place or time has depended so much on stage sets and,
especially, on stage properties: the radiators that
bang in Girls, the artificial orange in The Truth, the
things that are dropped under the table by the ladies
in the second act of The Climbers. But in the case of
Edith Wharton, the decors become the agents of
tragedy. The characters of Clyde Fitch are embar-
rassed or tripped up by these articles; but the people
of Edith Wharton are pursued by them as by spirits of
doom and ultimately crushed by their accumulation.
These pieces have not been always made newly: some-
times they are objcts d'art, which have been expensively
imported from Europe. But the effect is very much
the same : they are something extraneous to the people
and, no matter how old they may be, they seem to
glitter and clank with the coin that has gone to buy
them. A great many of Mrs. Wharton 's descriptions
are, of course, satiric or caustic; but when she wants
to produce an impression of real magnificence, and

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON 1O1

even when she is writing about Europe, the thing
still seems rather inorganic. She was not only one
of the great pioneers, but also the poet, of interior
decoration.

In The Custom of the Country (1913), Mrs. Wharton's
next novel about the rich The Reef is a relapse into
'psychological problems' she piles up the new
luxury of the era to an altitude of ironic grandeur, like
the glass mountain in the Arabian Nights, which the
current of her imagination manages to make incan-
descent. The first scene sets the key for the whole
book: 'Mrs. Spragg and her visitor were enthroned in
two heavy gilt armchairs in one of the private draw-
ing-rooms of the Hotel Stentorian. The Spragg rooms
were known as one of the Looey suites, and the
drawing-room walls, above their wainscoting of
highly varnished mahogany, were hung with salmon-
pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie
Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe. In the center
of the florid carpet a gilt table with a top of Mexican
onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink
bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of The Hound
of the Baskervilles which lay beside it, the room showed
no traces of human use, and Mrs. Spragg herself wore
as complete an air of detachment as if she had been a
wax figure in a show-window/ In the last pages
it is an admirable passage Undine Spragg's little
boy is seen wandering alone amid the splendors of
th^ Paris hfael which has crowned his mother's pro-
gress from the Stentorian: 'the white fur rugs and
brocade chairs' which 'seemed maliciously on the

101 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

watch for smears and ink-spots/ 'his mother's won-
derful lacy bedroom, all pale silks and velvets, artful
mirrors and veiled lamps, and the boudoir as big as
a drawing-room, with pictures he would have liked
to know about, and tables and cabinets holding
things he was afraid to touch/ the library, with its
'rows and rows of books, bound in dim browns and
golds, and old faded reds as rich as velvet: they all
looked as if they might have had stories in them as
splendid as their bindings. But the bookcases were
closed with gilt trellising, and when Paul reached up
to open one, a servant told him that Mr. Moffatt's
secretary kept them locked because the books were
too valuable to be taken down.'

It is a vein which Sinclair Lewis has worked since
as in the opening pages of Babbitt, where Babbitt is
shown entangled with his gadgets; and in other re-
spects The Custom of the Country opens up the way for
Lewis, who dedicated Main Street to Edith Wharton.
Mrs. Wharton has already arrived at a method of
doing crude and harsh people with a draftsmanship
crude and harsh. Undine Spragg, the social-climbing
divorcee, though a good deal less humanly credible
than Lily Bart of The House of Mirth, is quite a success-
ful caricature of a type who was to go even farther.
She is the prototype in fiction of the ' gold-digger,' of
the international cocktail bitch. Here the pathos has
been largely subordinated to an implacable animosity
toward the heroine; but there is one episode both
bitter and poignant, in which a discarded husband of
Undine's, who has been driven by her demands to

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON

work in Wall Street and left by her up to his neck in
debt, goes home to Washington Square through * the
heat, the noise, the smells of disheveled midsummer*
New York, climbs to the room at the top of the house
where he has kept his books and other things from
college, and shoots himself there.

The other side of this world of wealth, which anni-
hilates every impulse toward excellence, is a poverty
which also annihilates. The writer of one of the
notices on Mrs. Wharton's death was mistaken in as-
suming that Ethan From* was a single uncharacter-
istic excursion outside the top social strata. It is true
that she knew the top strata better than she knew
anything else; but both in The House of Mirth and The
Fruit of the Tree, she is always aware of the pit of
misery which is implied by the wastefulness of the
plutocracy, and the horror or the fear of this pit is
one of the forces that determine the action. There is a
Puritan in Edith Wharton, and this Puritan is always
insisting that we must face the unpleasant and the
ugly. Not to do so is one of the worst sins in her
morality; sybarites like Mr. Langhope in The Fruit of
the Tree, amusing himself with a dilettante archaeol-
ogy on his income from a badly-managed factory,
like the fatuous mother of Twilight Sleep, who feels so
safe with her facial massage and her Yogi, while her
family goes to pieces under her nose, are among the
diameters whom she treats with most scorn. And the
three novels I have touched on above were paralleled
by another series Ethan Frome> Bunner Sisters and

104 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Summer which dealt with milieux of a different
kind.

Ethan Frome is still much read and well-known; but
Bunncr Sisters has been undeservedly neglected. It is
the last piece in the volume called Xingu (1916), a
short novel about the length of Ethan Frome. This
story of two small shopkeepers on Stuyvesant Square
and a drug-addict clockmaker from Hoboken, involved
in a relationship like a triple noose which will gradu-
ally choke them all, is one of the most terrible things
that Edith Wharton ever wrote; and the last page, in
which the surviving sister, her lifelong companion
gone and her poor little business lost, sets out to look
for a job, seems to mark the grimmest moment of
Edith Wharton 's darkest years. Here is not even the
grandeur of the heroic New England hills: '" Ain't
you going to leave the ^-dress?" the young woman
called out after her. Ann Eliza went out into the
thronged street. The great city, under the fair spring
sky, seemed to throb with the stir of innumerable
beginnings. She walked on, looking for another shop
window with a sign in it.'

Summer (1917), however, returns to the Massachu-
setts of Ethan Frome, and, though neither so harrowing
nor so vivid, is by no means an inferior work. Making
hats in a millinery shop was the abyss from which
Lily Bart recoiled; the heroine of Summer recoils from
the nethermost American social stratum, the degen-
erate 'mountain people/ Let down by the refined
young man who works in the public library and wants
to become an architect} in a way that anticipates the

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON XC>5

situation in Dreiser's American Tragedy, she finds that
she cannot go back to her own people and allows her-
self to be made an honest woman by the rather admira-
ble old failure of a lawyer who had brought her down
from the mountain in her childhood. It is the first
sign on Mrs. Wharton's part of a relenting in the cru-
elty of her endings. 'Come to my age/ says Charity
Royall's protector, 4 a man knows the things that
matter and the things that don't; that's about the only
good turn life does us.' Her blinding bitterness is al-
ready subsiding.

But in the meantime, before Summer was written,
she had escaped from the hopeless situation created by
her husband's insanity. The doctors had told her he
was hopeless; but she had had difficulty in inducing
his family to allow her to leave him with an attendant.
The tragedy of Bunner Sisters is probably a transposi-
tion of this; and the relief of the tension in Summer is
evidently the result of her new freedom. She was at
last finally detached from her marriage; and she took
up her permanent residence in France. The war came,
and she threw herself into its activities.

And now the intensity dies from her work as the
American background fades. One can see this already
in Summer, and The Age of Innocence (1930) is really
Edith Wharton's valedictory. The theme is closely
related to those of The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome:
the frustration of a potential pair of lovers by social
or domestic obstructions. But setting it back in the
generation of her parents, she is able to contemplate it

106 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

now without quite the same rancor, to soften it with
a poetic mist of distance. And yet even here the old
impulse of protest still makes itself felt as the main
motive. If we compare The Age of Innocence with
Henry James's Europeans, whose central situation it
reproduces, the pupil's divergence from the master is
seen in the most striking way. In both cases, a
Europeanized American woman Baroness Munster,
Countess Olenska returns to the United States to
intrude upon and disturb the existence of a conserva-
tive provincial society; in both cases, she attracts and
almost captivates an intelligent man of the community
who turns out, in the long run, to be unable to muster
the courage to take her, and who allows her to go
back to Europe. Henry James makes of this a balanced
comedy of the conflict between the Bostonian and the
cosmopolitan points of view (so he reproached her
with not having developed the theme of Undine
Spragg's marriage with a French nobleman in terms
of French and American manners, as he had done with
a similar one in The Reverberator) ;,but in Edith Whar-
ton's version one still feels an active resentment against
the pusillanimity of the provincial group and also,
as in other of her books, a special complaint against
the timid American male who has let the lady down.
Up through The Age of Innocence, and recurring at all
points of her range from The House of Mirth to Ethan
Frome, the typical masculine figure in Edith Wharton's
fiction is a man set apart from his neighbors by edu-
cation, intellect and feeling, but lacking the force or
the courage either to impose himself or to get away.

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON

She generalizes about this type in the form in which
she knew it best in her autobiographical volume:
'They combined a cultivated taste with marked social
gifts/ she says; but 'their weakness was that, save
in a few cases, they made so little use of their ability* :
they were content to 'live in dilettantish leisure/ ren-
dering none of 'the public services that a more en-
lightened social system would have exacted of them/
But she had described a very common phenomenon of
the America of after the Civil War. Lawrence Selden,
the city lawyer, who sits comfortably in his bachelor
apartment with his flowerbox of mignonette and his
first edition of La Bruyre and allows Lily Bart to
drown, is the same person as Lawyer Royall of Summer,
with his lofty orations and his drunken lapses. One
could have found him during the big-business era
in almost any American city or town: the man of
superior abilities who had the impulse toward self-
improvement and independence, but who had been
more or less rendered helpless by the surf of headlong
money-making and spending which carried him along
with its breakers or left him stranded on the New
England hills in either case thwarted and stunted
by the mediocre level of the community. In Edith
Wharton's novels these men are usually captured and
dominated by women of conventional morals and
middle-class ideals; when an exceptional woman
comes along who is thirsting for something different
and*better, the man is unable to give it to her. This
special situation Mrs. Wharton, with some conscious
historical criticism but chiefly impelled by a feminine

Z08 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

animus, has dramatized with much vividness and in-
telligence. There are no first-rate men in these novels.

The Age of Innocence is already rather faded. But now
a surprising lapse occurs. (It is true that she is nearly
sixty.)

When we look back on Mrs. Wharton's career, it
seems that everything that is valuable in her work lies
within a quite sharply delimited area between The
House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. It is sometimes
true of women writers less often, I believe, of men
that a manifestation of something like genius may
be stimulated by some exceptional emotional strain,
but will disappear when the stimulus has passed.
With a man, his professional, his artisan's life is
likely to persist and evolve as a partially independent
organism through the vicissitudes of his emotional
experience. Henry James in a virtual vacuum con-
tinued to possess and develop his metier up to his very
last years. But Mrs. Wharton had no mltier in this
sense. With her emergence from her life in the United
States, her settling down in the congenial society of
Paris, she seems at last to become comfortably ad-
justed; and with her adjustment, the real intellectual
force which she has exerted through a decade and a
half evaporates almost completely. She no longer
maims or massacres her characters. Her grimness
melts rapidly into benignity. She takes an interest in
young people's problems, in the solicitude of parents
for children; she smooths over the misunderstandings
of lovers; she sees how things may work out very

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON 109

well. She even loses the style she has mastered. Be-
ginning with a language rather ponderous and stiff,
the worst features of the style of Henry James and a
stream of cliches from old novels and plays, she finally
about the time of Ethan Frome worked out a
prose of flexible steel, bright as electric light and strik-
ing out sparks of wit and color, which has the quality
and pace of New York and is one of its distinctive
artistic products. But now not merely docs she cease
to be brilliant, she becomes almost commonplace.

The Glimpses of the Moon, which followed The Age
of Innocence, is, as someone has said, scarcely dis-
tinguishable from the ordinary serial in a women's
magazine; and indeed it is in the women's magazines
that Mrs. Wharton's novels now begin first to appear.
A Son at the Front is a little better, because it had been
begun in 1918 and had her war experience in it, with
some of her characteristic cutting satire at the expense
of the belligerents behind the lines. It is not bad as a
picture of the emotions of a middle-aged civilian
during the war though not so good as Arnold
Bennett's The Pretty Lady.

Old New York was a much feebler second boiling
from the tea-leaves of The Age of Innocence. I have read
only one of Mrs. Wharton's novels written since Old
New York: Twilight Sleep is not so bad as her worst, but
suffers seriously as a picture of New York during the
middle nineteen-twenties from the author's long
absence abroad. Mrs. Wharton is no longer up on
her American interior-decorating though there are
some characteristic passages of landscape-gardening:

ZIO THE WOUND AND THE BOW

1 "Seventy-five thousand bulbs this year!" she thought
as the motor swept by the sculptured gateway, just
giving and withdrawing a flash of turf sheeted with
amber and lilac, in a setting of twisted and scalloped
evergreens/

The two other books that I have read since then
The Writing of Fiction (which does, however, contain
an excellent essay on Proust) and the volume of me-
moirs called A Backward Glance I found rather dis-
appointing. The backward glance is an exceedingly
fleeting one which dwells very little on anything
except the figure of Henry James, of whom Mrs.
Wharton has left a portrait entertaining but slightly
catty and curiously superficial. About herself she
tells us nothing much of interest; and she makes
amends to her New York antecedents for her satire of
The Age of Innocence by presenting them in tinted mini-
atures, prettily remote and unreal. It is the last irony
of The Age of Innocence that Newland Archer should
become reconciled to ' old New York. ' * After all/ he
eventually came to tell himself, ' there was good in the
old ways/ Something like this seems to have hap-
pened to Edith Wharton. Even in A Backward Glance,
she confesses that ' the weakness of the social struc-
ture* of her parents' generation had been 'a blind
dread of innovation'; but her later works show a dis-
may and a shrinking before what seemed to her the
social and moral chaos of an age which was battering
down the old edifice that she herself had once depicted
as a prison. Perhaps, after all, the old mismated
couples who had stayed married in deference to the

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON 111

decencies were better than the new divorced who were
not aware of any duties at all.

The only thing that does survive in A Backward
Glance is some trace of the tremendous blue-stocking
that Mrs. Wharton was in her prime. The deep rever-
ence for the heroes of art and thought though she
always believed that Paul Bourget was one of them
of the woman who in earlier days had written a long
blank-verse poem about Vesalius still makes itself
felt in these memoirs. Her culture was rather heavy
and grand a preponderance of Goethe and Schiller,
Racine and La Bruyre but it was remarkably solid
for an American woman and intimately related to her
life. And she was one of the few Americans of her
day who cared enough about serious literature to take
the risks of trying to make some contribution to it.
Professor Charles Eliot Norton who had, as she
dryly remarks, so admirably translated Dante once
warned her that 'no great work of the imagination*
had 'ever been based on illicit passion/ Though she
herself in her later years was reduced to contemptuous
complaints that the writers of the new generations
had 'abandoned creative art for pathology,' she did
have the right to insist that she had 'fought hard*
in her earlier days ' to turn the wooden dolls' of con-
ventional fiction 'into struggling, suffering human
beings.' She had been one of the few such human
beings in the America of the early nineteen hundreds
who found an articulate voice and set down a durable
record.

XIX THE WOUND AND THE BOW

The above was written in 1937. An unfinished novel
by Edith Wharton was published in 1938. This story,
The Buccaneers y deserves a word of postscript. The
latter part of it, even allowing for the fact that it
was left in the form of a first draft, seems banal and
even a little trashy. Here as elsewhere the mellow-
ness of Mrs. Wharton 's last years has dulled the sharp
outlines of her fiction : there are passages in The Bucca-
neers which read like an old-fashioned story for girls.
But the first section has a certain brilliance. The fig-
ures of the children of the nouwaux riches at Saratoga
during the seventies, when the post-Civil-War for-
tunes were rolling up, come back rather diminished in
memory but in lively and charming colors, like the
slides of those old magic lanterns that are mentioned
as one of their forms of entertainment. And we learn
from Mrs. Wharton 's scenario for the unfinished part
of the tale that it was to have had rather an interest-
ing development. She has here more or less reversed
the values of the embittered Custom of the Country : in-
stead of playing off the culture and tradition of Europe
against the vulgar Americans who are insensible to
them, she dramatizes the climbing young ladies as an
air-clearing and revivifying force. In the last pages
she lived to write she made it plain that the hard-
boiled commercial elements on the rise in both civili-
zations were to come to understand one another per-
fectly. But there is also an Anglo-Italian woman, the
child of Italian revolutionaries and a cousin of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, who has been reduced to working
as a governess and who has helped to engineer the

JUSTICE TO EDITH WHARTON 113

success of the American girls in London. The best of
these girls has been married to a dreary English duke,
who represents everything least human in the English
aristocratic system. Laura Testvalley was to forfeit
her own hopes of capturing an amateur esthete of
the older generation of the nobility in order to allow
the young American to elope with an enterprising
young Englishman; and thus to have let herself in
for the fate of spending the rest of her days in the
poverty and dulness of her home, where the old revo-
lution had died. As the light of Edith Wharton's art
grows dim and at last goes out, she leaves us, to linger
on our retina, the large dark eyes of the clever spinster,
the sqrious and attentive governess, who trades in
worldly values but manages to rebuff these values;
who, in following a destiny of solitude and discipline,
contends for the rights of the heart; and who, child
of a political movement played out, yet passes on
something of its impetus to the emergence of the
society of the future.

Hemingway: Gauge of Moral*

JLJRNEST HEMINGWAY'S In Our Time was an odd
and original^book. It had the appearance of a miscel-
lany of stories and fragments; but Actually the parts
hung together and produced a definite effect. There
were two distinct series of pieces which alternated
with one another: one a set of brief and brutal sketches
of police shootings, bullfight crises, hangings of
criminals, and incidents of the war; and the other a set
of short stories dealing in its principal sequence with
the growing-up of an American boy against a land-
scape of idyllic Michigan, but interspersed also with
glimpses of American soldiers returning home. It
seems to have been Hemingway's intention ' In Our
Time that the war should set the key for the
whole. The cold-bloodedness of the battles and execu-
tions strikes a discord with the sensitiveness and can-
dor of the boy at home in the States; and presently the
boy turns up in Europe in one of the intermediate vi-

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 115

gncttcs as a soldier in the Italian army, hit in the spine
by machine-gun fire and trying to talk to a dying
Italian: * Scnta, Rinaldi. Senta* he says, 'you and me,
we've made a separate peace/

But there is a more fundamental relationship be-
tween the pieces of the two series. The shooting of
Nick in the war does not really connect two different
worlds: has he not found in the butchery abroad the
same world that he knew back in Michigan? Was not
life in the Michigan woods equally destructive and
cruel? He had gone once with his father, the doctor,
when he had performed a Caesarean operation on an
Indian squaw with a jackknife and no anaesthetic and
had sewed her up with fishing leaders, while the In-
dian hadn't been able to bear it and had cut his throat
in his bunk. Another time, when the doctor had
saved the life of a squaw, her Indian had picked a
quarrel with him rather than pay him in work. And
Nick himself had sent his girl about her business
when he had found out how terrible her mother was.
Even fishing in Big Two-Hearted River away and
free in the woods he had been conscious in a curious
way of the cruelty inflicted on the fish, even of the
silent agonies endured by the live bait, the grasshop-
pers kicking on the hook.

Not that life isn't enjoyable. Talking and drinking
with one's friends is great fun; fishing in Big Two-
Hearted River is a tranquil exhilaration. But the
brutality of life is always there, and it is somehow
bound up with the enjoyment. Bullfights arc espe-
cially enjoyable. It is even exhilarating to build a

II 6 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

simply priceless barricade and pot the enemy as they
are trying to get over it. The condition of life is pain;
and the joys of the most innocent surface arc somehow
tied to its stifled pangs.

The resolution of this dissonance in art made the
beauty of Hemingway's stories. He had in the process
tuned a marvelous prose. Out of the colloquial Ameri-
can speech, with its simple declarative sentences and
its strings of Nordic monosyllables, he got effects of
the utmost subtlety. F. M. Ford has found the perfect
simile for the impression produced by this writing:
4 Hemingway 's words strike you, .each one, as if they
were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and
shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the
effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down
through the flowing water. The words form a tesella-
tion, each in order beside the other/

Looking back, we can see how this style was already
being refined and developed at a time fifty years be-
fore when it was regarded in most literary quarters
as hopelessly non-literary and vulgar. Had there not
been the nineteenth chapter of Huckleberry Finnt
'Two or three nights went by; I reckon I might say
they swum by; they slid along so quick and smooth
and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was
a monstrous big river down there sometimes a mile
and a half wide/ and so forth. These pages, when we
happen to meet them in Carl Van Doren's anthology
of world literature, stand up in a striking way beside a
passage of description from Turgc0ev; and the pages
which Hemingway was later to write about American

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE

wood and water arc equivalents to the transcriptions
by Turgcncv the Sportsman's Notebook is much ad-
mired by Hemingway of Russian forests and fields.
Each has brought to an immense and wild country
the freshness of a new speech and a sensibility not yet
conventionalized by literary associations. Yet it is
the European sensibility which has come to Big Two-
Hearted River, where the Indians are now obsolescent;
in those solitudes it feels for the first time the cold cur-
rent, the hot morning sun, sees the pine stumps, smells
the sweet fern. And along with the mottled trout,
with its * clear water-over-gravel color,' the boy from
the American Middle West fishes up a nice little mas-
terpiece.

In the meantime there had been also Ring Lardner,
Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, using this Ameri-
can language for irony, lyric poetry or psychological
insight. Hemingway seems to have learned from
them all. But he is now able to charge this naive ac-
cent with a new complexity of emotion, a new shade
of emotion: a malaise. The wholesale shattering of
human beings in which he has taken part has given
the boy a touch of panic.

II

The next fishing trip is strikingly different. Perhaps
the first had been an idealization. Is it possible to
attain to such sensuous bliss merely through going
alone into the woods: smoking, fishing, and eating,
with no thought about anyone else or about anything

Il8 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

one has ever done or will ever be obliged to do? At any
rate, today, in The Sun Also Rises, all the things that
are wrong with human life are there on the holiday,
too though one tries to keep them back out of the
foreground and to occupy one's mind with the trout,
caught now in a stream of the Pyrenees, and with the
kidding of the friend from the States. The feeling of
insecurity has deepened. The young American now
appears in a seriously damaged condition: he has
somehow been incapacitated sexually through wounds
received in the war. He is in love with one of those
international sirens who flourished in the cafes of the
post-war period and whose ruthless and uncontrollable
infidelities, in such a circle as that depicted by Heming-
way, have made any sort of security impossible for
the relations between women and men. The lovers of
such a woman turn upon and rend one another because
they are powerless to make themselves felt by her.

The casualties of the bullfight at Pamplona, to
which these young people have gone for the fiesta, only
reflect the blows and betrayals of demoralized human
beings out of hand. What is the tiresome lover with
whom the lady has just been off on a casual escapade,
and who is unable to understand that he has been dis-
carded, but the man who, on his way to the bull ring,
lias been accidentally gored by the bull? The young
American who tells the story is the only character who
keeps up standards of conduct, and he is prevented by
his disability from dominating and directing the
woman, who otherwise, it is intimated, might love
him. Here the membrane of the style has been

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 119

stretched taut to convey the vibrations of these
qualms. The dry sunlight and the green summer land-
scapes have been invested with a sinister quality
which must be new in literature. One enjoys the sun
and the green as one enjoys suckling pigs and Spanish
wine, but the uneasiness and apprehension are undrug-
gable.

Yet one can catch hold of a code in all the drunken-
ness and the social chaos. ' Perhaps as you went along
you did learn something/ Jake, the hero, reflects at
one point. 'I did not care what it was all about. All I
wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you
found out how to live in it you learned from that what
it was all about/ 'Everybody behaves badly. Give
them the proper chance/ he says later to Lady Brett.

"You wouldn't behave badly." Brett looked at
me. 1 In the end, she sends for Jake, who finds her
alone in a hotel. She has left her regular lover for a
young bullfighter, and this boy has for the first time
inspired her with a respect which has restrained her
from 'ruining' him: 'You know it makes one feel
rather good deciding not to be a bitch. ' We suffer and
we make suffer, and everybody loses out in the long
run; but in the meantime we can lose with honor.

This code still markedly figures, still supplies a
dependable moral backbone, in Hemingway's next
book of short stories, Men Without Women. Here
Hemingway has mastered his method of economy in
apparent casualness and relevance in apparent indirec-
tion, and has turned his sense of what happens and
the way in which it happens into something as hard

110 THE WOUND AND THE 3OW

and clear as a crystal but as disturbing as a great lyric.
Yet it is usually some principle of courage, of honor, of
pity that is, some principle of sportsmanship in its
largest human sense upon which the drama hinges.
The old bullfighter in The Undefeated is defeated in
everything except the spirit which will not accept
defeat. You get the bull or he gets you: if you die,
you can die game; there are certain things you cannot
do. The burlesque show manager in A Pursuit Race re-
frains from waking his advance publicity agent when
he overtakes him and realizes that the man has just
lost a long struggle against whatever anguish it is
that has driven him to drink and dope. 'They got a
cure for that/ the manager had said to him before he
went to sleep; ' "No," William Campbell said, "the/
haven't got a cure for anything/" The burned major
in A Simple Enquiry that strange picture of the bed-
rock stoicism compatible with the abasement of war

has the decency not to dismiss the orderly who has
rejected his proposition. The brutalized Alpine peas-
ant who has been in the habit of hanging a lantern in
the jaws of the stiffened corpse of his wife, stood in
the corner of the woodshed till the spring will make
it possible to bury her, is ashamed to drink with the
sexton after the latter has found out what he has done.
And there is a little sketch of Roman soldiers just after
the Crucifixion : ' You see me slip the old spear into
him? You'll get into trouble doing that some day.

It was the least I could do for him. I'll tell you he
looked pretty good to me in there today/

This Hemingway of the middle twenties The Sun

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE izi

Also Rises came out in *z6 expressed the romantic
disillusion and set the favorite pose for the period. It
was the moment of gallantry in heartbreak, grim and
nonchalant banter, and heroic dissipation. The great
watchword was 'Have a drink'; and in the bars of
New York and Paris the young people were getting to
talk like Hemingway.

in

The novel, A Farewell to Arms, which followd Men
Without Women, is in a sense not so serious an affair.
Beautifully written and quite moving of course it is.
Probably no other book has caught so well the strange-
ness of life in the army for an American in Europe
during the war. The new places to which one was sent
of which one had never heard, and the things that
turned out to be in them; the ordinary people of for-
eign countries as one saw them when one was quar-
tered among them or obliged to perform some com-
mon work with them ; the pleasures of which one man-
aged to cheat the war, intensified by the uncertainty
and horror and the uncertainty, nevertheless, al-
most become a constant, the horror almost taken for
granted; the love affairs, always subject to being sud-
denly broken up and yet carried on while they lasted
in a spirit of irresponsible freedom which derived from
one's having forfeited control of all one's other ac-
tions this Hemingway got into his book, written
long enough after the events for them to present them-
selves under an aspect fully idyllic.

1X1 THE WOUND AND tHB BOW

But A Farewell to Arms is a tragedy, and the lovers
are shown as innocent victims with no relation to the
forces that torment them. They themselves are not
tormented within by that dissonance between personal
satisfaction and the suffering one shares with others
which it has been Hemingway's triumph to handle.
A Farewell to Arms, as the author once said, is a Romeo
and Juliet. And when Catherine and her lover emerge
from the stream of action the account of the Capo-
retto retreat is Hemingway's best sustained piece of
narrative when they escape from the alien necessi-
ties of which their romance has been merely an acci-
dent, which have been writing their story for them,
then we see that they are not in themselves convincing
as human personalities. And we are confronted with
the paradox that Hemingway, who possesses so re-
markable a mimetic gift in getting the tone of social
and national types and in making his people talk ap-
propriately, has not shown any very solid sense of
character, or, indeed, any real interest in it. The
people in his short stories are satisfactory because he
has only to hit them off: the point of the story does
not lie in personalities, but in the emotion to which a
situation gives rise. This is true even in The Sun Also
Rises, where the characters are sketched with wonder-
ful cleverness. But in A Farewell to Arms, as soon as we
are brought into real intimacy with the lovers, as soon
as the author is obliged to sec them through a search-
ing personal experience, we find merely an idealized
relationship, the abstractions of a lyric emotion.

With Death in the Afternoon, three years later, a new

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 113

development for Hemingway commences. He writes a
book not merely in the first person, but in the first per-
son in his own character as Hemingway, and the re-
sults are unexpected and disconcerting. Death in the
Afternoon has its value as an exposition of bullfighting;
and Hemingway is able to use the subject as a text for
an explicit statement of his conception of man eter-
nally pitting himself he thinks the bullfight a ritual
of this against animal force and the odds of death.
But the book is partly infected by a queer kind of
maudlin emotion, which sounds at once neurotic and
drunken. He overdoes his glorification of the bravery
and martyrdom of the bullfighter. No doubt the pro-
fessional expert at risking his life single-handed is im-
pressive in contrast to the flatness and unreality of
much of the business of the modern world; but this ad-
mirable miniaturist in prose has already made the
point perhaps more tellingly in the little prose poem
called Banal Story. Now he offsets the virility of the
bullfighters by anecdotes of the male homosexuals that
frequent the Paris cafes, at the same time that he puts
his chief celebration of the voluptuous excitement of
the spectacle into the mouth of an imaginary old lady.
The whole thing becomes a little hysterical.

The master of that precise and clean style now in-
dulges in purple patches which go on spreading for
pages. I am not one of those who admire the last
chapter of Death in the Afternoon, with its rich, all too
rich, unrollings of memories of good times in Spain,
and with its what seem to me irrelevant reminiscences
of the soliloquy of Mrs. Bloom in Ulysses. Also, there

124 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

arc interludes of kidding of a kind which Hemingway
handles with skill when he assigns them to characters
in his stories, but in connection with which he seems
to become incapable of exercising good sense or good
taste as soon as he undertakes them in his own person
(the burlesque Torrents of Spring was an early omen of
this). In short, we are compelled to recognize that,
as soon as Hemingway drops the burning-glass of the '
disciplined and objective art with which he has
learned to concentrate in a story the light of the emo-
tions that flood in on him, he straightway becomes be-
fuddled, slops over.

This befuddlement is later to go further, but in the
meantime he publishes another volume of stories
Winner Take Nothing which is almost up to its pre-
decessor. In this collection he deals much more effec-
tively than in Death in the Afternoon with that theme
of contemporary decadence which is implied in his
panegyric of the bullfighter. The first of these stories,
After the Storm, is another of his variations and one
of the finest on the theme of keeping up a code of
decency among the hazards and pains of life. A fisher-
man goes out to plunder a wreck: he dives down to
break in through a porthole, but inside he sees a
woman with rings on her hands and her hair floating
loose in the water, and he thinks about the passengers
and crew being suddenly plunged to their deaths (he
has almost been killed himself in a drunken fight the
night before). He sees the cloud of sea birds screaming
around, and he finds that he is unable to break the glass
with his wrench and that he loses the anchor grapple

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 115

with which he next tries to attack it. So he finally
goes away and leaves the job to the Greeks, who blow
the boat open and clean her out.

But in general the emotions of insecurity here ob-
trude themselves and dominate the book. Two of the
stories deal with the hysteria of soldiers falling off the
brink of their nerves under the strain of the experi-
ences of the war, which here no longer presents an
idyllic aspect; another deals with a group of patients
in a hospital, at the same time crippled and hopeless;
still another (a five-page masterpiece) with an old man
who has tried to commit suicide although he is known
to have plenty of money, and who now creeps into a
cafe in search of ' a clean well-lighted place* : ' After
all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia.
Many must have it.' Another story, like The Sun Also
Rises , centers around a castration; and four of the four-
teen are concerned more or less with male or female
homosexuality. In the last story, Fathers and Sons,
Hemingway reverts to the Michigan woods, as if to
take the curse off the rest: young Nick had once en-
joyed a nice Indian girl with plump legs and hard little
breasts on the needles of the hemlock woods.

These stories and the interludes in Death in the After-
noon must have been written during the years that
followed the stock-market crash. They are full of the
apprehension of losing control of oneself which is
aroused by the getting out of hand of a social-eco-
nomic system, as well as of the fear of impotence which
seems to accompany the loss of social mastery. And
there is in such a storv as A Clean Well-Lighted Place

12.6 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

the feeling of having got to the end of everything, of
having given up heroic attitudes and wanting only the
illusion of peace.

IV

And now, in proportion as the characters in his
stories run out of fortitude and bravado, he passes into
a phase where he is occupied with building up his pub-
lic personality. He has already now become a legend,
as Mencken was in the twenties; he is the Hemingway
of the handsome photographs with the sportsmen's tan
and the outdoor grin, with the ominous resemblance
to Clark Gable, who poses with giant marlin which he
has just hauled in off Key West. And unluckily but
for an American inevitably the opportunity soon
presents itself to exploit this personality for profit: he
turns up delivering Hemingway monologues in well-
paying and trashy magazines; and the Hemingway of
these loose disquisitions, arrogant, belligerent and
boastful, is certainly the worst-invented character to
be found in the author's work. If he is obnox-
ious, the effect is somewhat mitigated by the fact that
he is intrinsically incredible.

There would be no point in mentioning this journal-
ism at all, if it did not seem somewhat to have con-
tributed to the writing of certain unsatisfactory books.
Green Hills of Africa (1935) owes its failure to falling
between the two genres of personal exhibitionism and
fiction. 4 The writer has attempted, ' says Hemingway,
' to write an absolutely true book to see whether the

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 12.7

shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action
can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the
imagination/ He does try to present his own r61e ob-
jectively, and there is a genuine Hemingway theme
the connection between success at big-game hunting
and sexual self-respect involved in his adventures as
he presents them. But the sophisticated technique of
the fiction writer comes to look artificial when it is
applied to a series of real happenings; and the necessity
of sticking to what really happened makes impossible
the typical characters and incidents which give point
to a work of fiction. The monologues by the false, the
publicity, Hemingway with which the narrative is
interspersed are almost as bad as the ones that he has
been writing for the magazines. He inveighs with
much scorn against the literary life and against the
professional literary man of the cities; and then man-
ages to give the impression that he himself is a pro-
fessional literary man of the touchiest and most self-
conscious kind. He delivers a self-confident lecture on
the high possibilities of prose writing; and then pro-
duces such a sentence as the following: ' Going down-
hill steeply made these Spanish shooting boots too
short in the toe and there was an old argument, about
this length of boot and whether the bootmaker, whose
part I had taken, unwittingly first, only as interpreter,
and finally embraced his theory patriotically as a
whole and, I believed, by logic, had overcome it by
adding onto the heel/ As soon as Hemingway begins
speaking in the first person, he seems to lose his bear-
ings, not merely as a critic of life, but even as a crafts-
man.

1X8 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

In another and significant way, Green Hills of Africa
is disappointing. Death in the Afternoon did provide a
lot of data on bullfighting and build up for us the bull-
fighting world; but its successor tells us little about
Africa. Hemingway keeps affirming as if in accents
of defiance against those who would engage his atten-
tion for social problems his passionate enthusiasm
for the African country and his perfect satisfaction
with the hunter's life; but he has produced what must
be one of the only books ever written which make
Africa and its animals seem dull. Almost the only
thing we learn about the animals is that Hemingway
wants to kill them. And as for the natives, though
there is one fine description of a tribe of marvelous
trained runners, the principal impression we get of
them is that they were simple and inferior people who
enormously admired Hemingway.

It is not only that, as his critics of the Left had been
complaining, he shows no interest in political issues,
but that his interest in his fellow beings seems actually
to be drying up. It is as if he were throwing himself on
African hunting as something to live for and believe
in, as something through which to realize himself;
and as if, expecting of it too much, he had got out of it
abnormally little, less than he is willing to admit.
The disquiet of the Hemingway of the twenties had
been, as I have said, undruggable that is, in his
books themselves, he had tried to express it, not drug
it, had given it an appeasement in art; but now there
sets in, in the Hemingway of the thirties, what seems
to be a deliberate self-drugging. The situation is in-

HEMINGWAY : GAUGE OF MORALE

dicatcd objectively in The Gambler, the Nun and the
Radio, one of the short stories of 1933, in which every-
thing from daily bread to ' a belief in any new form of
government* is characterized as 'the opium of the
people* by an empty-hearted cripple in a hospital.

But at last there did rush into this vacuum the blast
of the social issue, which had been roaring in the wind
like a forest fire.

Out of a series of short stories that Hemingway had
written about a Florida waterside character he decided
to make a little epic. The result was To Have and Have
Not, which seems to me the poorest of all his stories.
Certainly some deep agitation is working upon Hem-
ingway the artist. Craftsmanship and style, taste and
sense, have all alike gone by the board. The negative
attitude toward human beings has here become de-
finitely malignant: the hero is like a wooden-headed
Punch, always knocking people on the head (inferiors
Chinamen or Cubans); or, rather, he combines the
characteristics of Punch with those of Popeye the
Sailor in the animated cartoon in the movies. As the
climax to a series of prodigies, this stupendous pirate-
smuggler named Harry Morgan succeeds, alone, un-
armed, and with only a hook for one hand though
at the cost of a mortal wound in outwitting and
destroying with their own weapons four men carrying
revolvers and a machine gun, by whom he has been
shanghaied in a launch. The only way in which
Hemingway's outlaw suffers by comparison with
Popeye is that his creator has not tried to make him

130 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

plausible by explaining that he does it all on spinach.

The impotence of a decadent society has here been
exploited deliberately, but less successfully than in
the earlier short stories. Against a background of
homosexuality, impotence and masturbation among
the wealthy holiday-makers in Florida, Popeye-
Morgan is shown gratifying his wife with the same
indefatigable dexterity which he has displayed in his
other feats; and there is a choral refrain of praise of
his co jones y which wells up in the last pages of the book
when the abandoned Mrs. Popeye regurgitates Molly
Bloom's soliloquy.

To be a man in such a world of maggots is noble,
but it is not enough. Besides the maggots, there are
double-crossing rats, who will get you if they are
given the slightest chance. What is most valid in To
Have and Have Not is the idea conveyed better, per-
haps, in the first of the series of episodes than in the
final scenes of massacre and agony that in an atmos-
phere (here revolutionary Cuba) in which man has
been set against man, in which it is always a question
whether your companion is not preparing to cut your
throat, the most sturdy and straightforward American
will turn suspicious and cruel. Harry Morgan is made
to realize as he dies that to fight this bad world alone
is hopeless. Again Hemingway, with his barometric
accuracy, has rendered a moral atmosphere that was
prevalent at the moment he was writing a moment
when social relations were subjected to severe tensions,
when they seemed sometimes already disintegrating.
But the heroic Hemingway legend has at this point

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALS 131

invaded his fiction and, inflaming and inflating his
symbols, has produced an implausible hybrid, half
Hemingway character, half nature myth.

Hemingway had not himself particularly labored
this moral of individualism versus solidarity, but the
critics of the Left labored it for him and received his
least creditable piece of fiction as the delivery of a
new revelation. The progress of the Communist faith
among our writers since the beginning of the depres-
sion has followed a peculiar course^ That the aims
and beliefs of Marx and Lenin should have come
through to the minds of intellectuals who had been
educated in the bourgeois tradition as great awakcncrs
of conscience, a great light, was quite natural and
entirely desirable. But the conception of the dynamic
Marxist will, the exaltation of the Marxian religion,
seized the members of the professional classes like a
capricious contagion or hurricane, which shakes one
and leaves his neighbor standing, then returns to lay
hold on the second after the first has become quiet
again. In the moment of seizure, each one of them
saw a scroll unrolled from the heavens, on which Marx
and Lenin and Stalin, the Bolsheviks of 1917, the
Soviets of the Five- Year Plan, and the GPU of the
Moscow trials were all a part of the same great pur-
pose. Later the convert, if he were capable of it,
would get over his first phase of snow blindness and
learn to see real people and conditions, would study
the development of Marxism in terms of nations, peri-
ods, personalities, instead of logical deductions from
abstract propositions or as in the case of the more

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

naive or dishonest of simple incantatory slogans.
But for many there was at least a moment when the
key to all the mysteries of human history seemed sud-
denly to have been placed in their hands, when an
infallible guide to thought and behavior seemed to
have been given them in a few easy formulas.

Hemingway was hit pretty late. He was still in
Death in the Afternoon telling the 'world-savers/ sen-
sibly enough, that they should 'get to see* the world
'clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will
represent the whole, if it's made truly. The thing to
do is work and learn to make it. ' Later he jibed at the
literary radicals, who talked but couldn't take it; and
one finds even in To Have and Have Not a crack about a
'highly paid Hollywood director, whose brain is in
the process of outlasting his liver so that he will end
up calling himself a Communist, to save his soul/
Then the challenge of the fight itself Hemingway
never could resist a physical challenge the natural
impulse to dedicate oneself to something bigger than
big-game hunting and bullfighting, and the fact that
the class war had broken out in a country to which he
was romantically attached, seem to have combined to
make him align himself with the Communists as well
as the Spanish Loyalists at a time when the Marxist
philosophy had been pretty completely shelved by the
Kremlin, now reactionary as well as corrupt, and when
the Russians were lending the Loyalists only help
enough to preserve, as they imagined would be pos-
sible, the balance of power against Fascism while they
acted at the same time as a police force to beat down
the real social revolution.

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 133

Hemingway raised money for the Loyalists, reported
the battle fronts. He even went so far as to make a
speech at a congress of the League of American Writ-
ers, an organization rigged by the supporters of the
Stalinist regime in Russia and full of precisely the type
of literary revolutionists that he had been ridiculing
a little while before. Soon the Stalinists had taken
him in tow, and he was feverishly denouncing as
Fascists other writers who criticized the Kremlin. It
has been one of the expedients of the Stalin administra-
tion in maintaining its power and covering up its
crimes to condemn on trumped-up charges of Fascist
conspiracy, and even to kidnap and murder, its politi-
cal opponents of the Left; and, along with the food
and munitions, the Russians had brought to the war
in Spain what the Austrian journalist Willi Schlamm
called that diversion of doubtful value for the working
class: 4 Herr Vyshinsky's Grand Guignol.'

The result of this was a play, The Fifth Column,
which, though it is good reading for the way the
characters talk, is an exceedingly silly production.
The hero, though an Anglo-American, is an agent of
the Communist secret police, engaged in catching
Fascist spies in Spain; and his principal exploit in the
course of the play is clearing out, with the aid of a
single Communist, an artillery post manned by seven
Fascists. The scene is like a pushover and getaway
from one of the cruder Hollywood Westerns. It is in the
nature of a small boy's fantasy, and would probably
be considered extravagant by most writers of books
for boys.

Z34 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

The tendency on Hemingway's part to indulge him-
self in these boyish day-dreams seems to begin to get
the better of his realism at the end of A Farewell to
Arms, where the hero, after many adventures of fight-
ing, escaping, love-making and drinking, rows his
lady thirty-five kilometers on a cold and rainy night;
and we have seen what it could do for Harry Morgan.
Now, as if with the conviction that the cause and the
efficiency of the GPU have added several cubits to
his stature, he has let this tendency loose; and he has
also found in the CPU's grim duty a pretext to give
rein to the appetite for describing scenes of killing
which has always been a feature of his work. He has
progressed from grasshoppers and trout through bulls
and lions and kudus to Chinamen and Cubans, and
now to Fascists. Hitherto the act of destruction has
given rise for him to complex emotions: he has identi-
fied himself not merely with the injurer but also with
the injured; there has been a masochistic comple-
ment to the sadism. But now this paradox which
splits our natures, and which has instigated some of
Hemingway's best stories, need no longer present per-
plexities to his mind. The Fascists are dirty bastards,
and to kill them is a righteous act. He who had made
a separate peace, who had said farewell to arms, has
found a reason for taking them up again in a spirit of
rabietic fury unpleasantly reminiscent of the spy
mania and the sacred anti-German rage which took
possession of so many civilians and staff officers under
the stimulus of the last war.

Not that the compensatory trauma of the typical

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 135

Hemingway protagonist is totally absent even here.
The main episode is the hero's brief love affair and
voluntary breaking off with a beautiful and adoring
girl whose acquaintance he has made in Spain. As a
member of the Junior League and a graduate of Vassar,
she represents for him it seems a little hard on her
that leisure-class playworld from which he is
trying to get away. But in view of the fact that from
the very first scenes he treats her with more or less
open contempt, the action is rather lacking in suspense
as the sacrifice is rather feeble in moral value. One
takes no stock at all in the intimation that Mr. Philip
may later be sent to mortify himself in a camp for
training Young Pioneers. And in the meantime he
has fun killing Fascists.

In The Fifth Column, the drugging process has been
carried further still: the hero, who has become finally
indistinguishable from the false or publicity Heming-
way, has here dosed himself not only with whiskey,
but with a seductive and desirous woman, for whom
he has the most admirable reasons for not taking any
responsibility, with sacred rage, with the excitement
of a bombardment, and with indulgence in that head-
iest of sports, for which he has now the same excellent
reasons: the bagging of human beings.

You may fear, after reading The Fifth Column, that
Hemingway will never sober up; but as you go on

136 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

to his short stories of this period, you find that your
apprehensions were unfounded. Three of these stories
have a great deal more body they arc longer and
more complex than the comparatively meager
anecdotes collected in Winner Take Nothing. And here
are his real artistic successes with the material of his
adventures in Africa, which make up for the mis-
carried Green Hills: The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which disen-
gage, by dramatizing them objectively, the themes
he had attempted in the earlier book but that had
never really got themselves presented. And here is
at least a beginning of a real artistic utilization of
Hemingway's experience in Spain: an incident of the
war in two pages which outweighs the whole of The
Fifth Column and all his Spanish dispatches, a glimpse
of an old man, 'without politics/ who has so far
occupied his life in taking care of eight pigeons, two
goats and a cat, but who has now been dislodged and
separated from his pets by the advance of the Fascist
armies. It is a story which takes its place among the
war prints of Callot and Goya, artists whose union
of elegance with sharpness has already been recalled
by Hemingway in his earlier battle pieces: a story
which might have been written about almost any
war.

And here what is very remarkable is a story,
The Capital of the World, which finds an objective
symbol for, precisely, what is wrong with The Fifth
Column. A young boy who has come up from the
country and waits on table in a pension in Madrid gets

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE 137

accidentally stabbed with a meat knife while playing
at bullfighting with the dishwasher. This is the
simple anecdote, but Hemingway has built in behind
it all the life of the pension and the city: the priest-
hood, the working-class movement, the grown-up bull-
fighters who have broken down or missed out. 'The
boy Paco,' Hemingway concludes, 'had never known
about any of this nor about what all these people
would be doing on the next day and on other days to
come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how
they ended. He did not realize they ended. He died,
as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had
not had time in his life to lose any of them, or even,
at the end, to complete an act of contrition.' So he
registers in this very fine piece the discrepancy be-
tween the fantasies of boyhood and the realities of
the grown-up world. Hemingway the artist, who
feels things truly and cannot help recording what he
feels, has actually said good-bye to these fantasies
at a time when the war correspondent is making
himself ridiculous by attempting to hang on to them
still.

The emotion which principally comes through in
Francis Macomber and The Snows of Kilimanjaro as it
figures also in The Fifth Column is a growing an-
tagonism to women. Looking back, one can see at
this point that the tendency has been there all along.
In The Doctor and the Doctor s Wife, the boy Nick goes
out squirrel-hunting with his father instead of obeying
the summons of. his mother; in Cross Country Snow, he
regretfully says farewell to male companionship on a

138 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

skiing expedition in Switzerland, when he is obliged
to go back to the States so that his wife can have her
baby. The young man in Hills Like White Elephants
compels his girl to have an abortion contrary to her
wish; another story, A Canary for One, bites almost un-
bearably but exquisitely on the loneliness to be en-
dured by a wife after she and her husband shall have
separated; the peasant of An Alpine Idyll abuses the
corpse of his wife (these last three appear under the
general title Men Without Women). Brett in The Sun
Also Rises is an exclusively destructive force : she might
be a better woman if she were mated with Jake, the
American; but actually he is protected against her and
is in a sense revenging his own sex through being
unable to do anything for her sexually. Even the
hero of A Farewell to Arms eventually destroys Cath-
erine after enjoying her abject devotion by
giving her a baby, itself born dead. The only women
with whom Nick Adams' relations are perfectly satis-
factory are the little Indian girls of his boyhood who
are in a position of hopeless social disadvantage and
have no power over the behavior of the white male
so that he can get rid of them the moment he has done
with them. Thus in The Fifth Column Mr. Philip bru-
tally breaks off with Dorothy he has been res-
cued from her demoralizing influence by his enlistment
in the Communist crusade, just as the hero of The Sun
Also Rises has been saved by his physical disability
to revert to a little Moorish whore. Even Harry
Morgan, who is represented as satisfying his wife on
the scale of a Paul Bunyan, deserts her in the end by

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OF MORALE

dying and leaves her racked by the crudest desire. 1
And now this instinct to get the woman down
presents itself frankly as a fear that the woman will
get the man down. The men in both these African
stories are married to American bitches of the most
soul-destroying sort. The hero of The Snows of Kili-
manjaro loses his soul and dies of futility on a hunting
expedition in Africa, out of which he has failed to get
what he had hoped. The story is not quite stripped
clean of the trashy moral attitudes which have been
coming to disfigure the author's work: the hero, a
seriously intentioncd and apparently promising writer,
goes on a little sloppily over the dear early days in
Paris when he was earnest, happy and poor, and
blames a little hysterically the rich woman whom he
has married and who has debased him. Yet it is one
of Hemingway's remarkable stories. There is a won-
derful piece of writing at the end when the reader is
made to realize that what has seemed to be an escape
by plane, with the sick man looking down on Africa,
is only the dream of a dying man. The other story,
Francis Macombcr, perfectly realizes its purpose. Here

1 There would probably be a chapter to write on the relation between Heming-
way and Kipling^ and certain assumptions about society which they share. They
have much the same split attitude toward women. Kipling anticipates Hemingway
in his beliefs that ' he travels the fastest that travels alone* and that ' the female of
the species is more deadly than the male'; and Hemingway seems to reflect Kipling
in the submissive infra-Anglo-Saxon women that make his heroes such perfect
mistresses. The most striking example of this is the amoeba-like little Spanish
girl, Maria, in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the docile native ' wives' of English
officials in the early stories of Kipling, she lives only to serve her lord and to merge
her identity with his; and this love affair with a woman in a sleeping-bag, lacjcing
completely the kind of give and take that goes on between real men and women,
has the all-too-pcrfcct felicity of a youthful erotic dream. One suspects that
Without Benefit of Clergy was read very early by Hemingway and that it made on
him a lasting impression. The pathetic conclusion of this story of Kipling's seems
unmistakably to be echoed at the end of A Farewell to Arms.

140 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

the male saves his soul at the last minute, and then
is actually shot down by his woman, who does not
want him to have a soul. Here Hemingway has at
last got what Thurber calls the war between men and
women right out into the open and has written a
terrific fable of the impossible civilized woman who
despises the civilized man for his failure in initiative
and nerve and then jealously tries to break him down
as soon as he begins to exhibit any. (It ought to be
noted, also, that whereas in Green Hills of Africa the
descriptions tended to weigh down the narrative with
their excessive circumstantiality, the landscapes and
animals of Francis Macomber are alive and unfalteringly
proportioned.)

Going back over Hemingway's books today, we
can sec clearly what an error of the politicos it was
to accuse him of an indifference to society. His whole
work is a criticism of society: he has responded to
every pressure of the moral atmosphere of the time,
as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a
sensitivity almost unrivaled. Even his preoccupation
with licking the gang in the next block and being
known as the best basketball player in high school
has its meaning in the present epoch. After all, what-
ever is done in the world, political as well as athletic,
depends on personal courage and strength. With
Hemingway, courage and strength are always thought
of in physical terms, so that he tends to give the im-
pression that the bullfighter who can take it and dish
it out is more of a man than any other kind of man,

HEMINGWAY: GAUGE OP MORALE 141

and that the sole duty of the revolutionary socialist
is to get the counter-revolutionary gang before they
get him.

But ideas, however correct, will never prevail by
themselves: there must be people who arc prepared
to stand or fall with them, and the ability to act on
principle is still subject to the same competitive laws
which operate in sporting contests and sexual rela-
tions. Hemingway has expressed with genius the
terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing
control of his world, and he has also, within his scope,
provided his own kind of antidote. This antidote,
paradoxically, is almost entirely moral. Despite
Hemingway's preoccupation with physical contests,
his heroes are almost always defeated physically,
nervously, practically: their victories are moral ones.
He himself, when he trained himself stubbornly in
his unconventional unmarketable art in a Paris which
had other fashions, gave the prime example of such
a victory; and if he has sometimes, under the menace
of the general panic, seemed on the point of going to
pieces as an artist, he has always pulled himself to-
gether the next moment. The principle of the Bourdon
gauge, which is used to measure the pressure of liquids,
is that a tube which has been curved into a coil will
tend to straighten out in proportion as the liquid
inside it is subjected to an increasing pressure.

The appearance of For Whom the Bell Tolls since this
essay was written in 1939 carries the straightening pro-
cess further. Here Hemingway has largely sloughed

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

off his Stalinism and has reverted to seeing events in
terms of individuals pitted against specific odds. His
hero, an American teacher of Spanish who has enlisted
on the side of the Loyalists, gives his life to what he
regards as the cause of human liberation; but he is
frustrated in the task that has been assigned him by
the confusion of forces at cross-purposes that are throt-
tling the Loyalist campaign. By the time that he
comes to die, he has little to sustain him but the mem-
ory of his grandfather's record as a soldier in the
American Civil War. The psychology of this young
man is presented with a certain sobriety and detach-
ment in comparison with Hemingway's other full-
length heroes; and the author has here succeeded as in
none of his earlier books in externalizing in plausible
characters the elements of his own complex personal-
ity. With all this, there is an historical point of view
which he has learned from his political adventures : he
has aimed to reflect in this episode the whole course of
the Spanish War and the tangle of tendencies involved
in it.

The weaknesses of the book are its diffuscness a
shape that lacks the concision of his short stories, that
sometimes sags and sometimes bulges; and a sort of ex-
ploitation of the material, an infusion of the operatic,
that lends itself all too readily to the movies.

6

The Dream of H. C Earwcfcer

JAMES JOYCE'S Ulysses was an attempt to present
directly the thoughts and feelings of a group of Dub-
liners through the whole course of a summer day.
Finnegans Wake is a complementary attempt to render
the dream fantasies and the half-unconscious sensa-
tions experienced by a single person in the course of a
night's sleep.

This presents a more difficult problem to the reader
as well as to the writer. In Ulysses, the reader was
allowed to perceive the real objective world in which
the Blooms and Dedalus lived, and their situation and
relationships in that world, so that its distortions or
liquefactions under the stress of special psychological
states still usually remained intelligible. But in
Finnegans Wake we are not supplied with any objective
data until the next to the last chapter, when the hero
and then only rather dimly wakes up for a short
time toward morning; and we are dealing with states

144 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

of consciousness which, chough they sometimes have
something in common with the drunken imaginations
of the Night Town scene in Ulysses or the free asso-
ciations of Mrs. Bloom's insomniac reveries, arc even
more confused and fluid than these; so that it becomes
on a first reading the reader's prime preoccupation to
puzzle out who the dreamer is and what has been hap-
pening to him. And since Joyce has spent seventeen
years elaborating and complicating this puzzle, it is
hardly to be expected that one reading will suffice to
unravel it completely.

Let me try to establish, however, some of the most
important facts which provide the realistic foundation
for this immense poem of sleep. The hero of Finnegans
Wake is a man of Scandinavian blood, with what is
apparently an adapted Scandinavian name: Humphrey
Chimpden Earwicker, who keeps a pub called The
Bristol in Dublin. He is somewhere between fifty and
sixty, blond and ruddy, with a walrus mustache, very
strong but of late years pretty fat. When embarrassed,
he has a tendency to stutter. He has tried his hand
at a number of occupations; has run for office and has
gone through a bankruptcy. He is married to a
woman named Maggie, a former salesgirl, who is
more or less illiterate and whose maiden name seems
to have begun with Mac. They are both Protestants
in a community of Catholics, he an Episcopalian and
she a Presbyterian; and by reason both of his religion
and of his queer-sounding foreign name, he feels him-
self, like Bloom in Ulysses, something of an alien
among hit neighbors. The Earwickers have three

THE DREAM OF H. C. BARWICKER 145

children a girl named Isobel, who has evidently
passed adolescence, and two younger boys, twins:
Kevin and Jerry. There are also a maid-of-all-work
called Kate and a man about the place called Tom.

It is a Saturday night in summer, after a disorderly
evening in the pub. Somebody probably Earwicker
himself has been prevailed upon to sing a song:
later, when it was closing time, he had to put a man
outside, who abused him and threw stones at the
window. There has also been a thunderstorm. Ear-
wicker has been drinking off and on all day and has
perhaps gone to bed a little drunk. At any rate, his
night is troubled. At first he dreams about the day be-
fore, with a bad conscience and a sense of humiliation :
then, as the night darkens and he sinks more deeply
into sleep, he has to labor through a nightmare op-
pression.

He and his wife are sleeping together; but he has no
longer any interest in her as a woman. He is preoccu-
pied now with his children. His wife is apparently
much younger than he, was only a girl when he
married her; so that it is easy for him to confuse his
first feelings for her with something like an erotic
emotion which is now being aroused by his daughter.
And his affection for his favorite son is even acquiring
homosexual associations. Little Kevin is relatively
sedate: named after the ascetic St. Kevin, he may be
destined for the Catholic priesthood. Jerry (Shaun,
Jaun) is more volatile and has given evidences of a
taste for writing; and it is Jerry rather than Kevin
with whom the father has tended to identify himself

146 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

To tell the story in this way, however, is to present
it the wrong way around. It depends for its dramatic
effect on our not finding out till almost the end
pages 555-590, in which Earwickcr partially wakes
up that the flights of erotic fantasy and the horrors
of guilt of his dream have been inspired by his feelings
for his children. The pub is on the edge of the Phoenix
Park, between it and the River Liffey and not far from
the suburb of Chapelizod, which is said to have been
the birthplace of Iseult. At the very beginning of the
dream, we find Earwicker figuring as Tristram; and
through the whole night he is wooing Iseult; he carries
her off, he marries her. The Freudian censor has inter-
vened to change Isabel into Iseult la Belle as well
as to turn the ana (upper)-Liffey, which figures in the
dream as a woman, into Anna Livia Plurabelle. The
idea of incest between father and daughter is developed
on page 115; the transition from Isobel to Iseult is
indicated in the 4 Icy-la-Belle' of page 146; and the
sister of the twins is designated by her family nick-
name 'Izzy' on page 431. But, though the boys have
been given their real names and planted pretty clearly
on pages 16-17 it * s not unt ^ almost the end
on page 556 that a definite identification of Ear-
wicker's daughter with Iseult is made. In the same
way, it is not until the passage on pages 564-565 that
we are led to connect with Earwicker's son the homo-
sexual motif which has first broken into his dream
with the ominous incident of the father's accosting a
soldier in the park and subsequently being razzed by
the police, and which works free toward morning

THE DREAM OF H. C. BARWICKBR 147

page 474 to the idea, not related to actuality, of
4 some chubby boy-bold love of an angel.'

In the meantime, the incest taboo and the homo-
sexuality taboo have together as in the develop-
ment of Greek tragedy out of the old myths of canni-
balism and incest given rise, during Earwicker's
effortful night, to a whole mythology, a whole
morality. He is Tristram stealing Iseult, yes; but
at the suggestion of an Adam's mantelpiece in the
bedroom where he is sleeping he is also Adam, who
has forfeited by his sin the Paradise of the Phoenix
Park; at the suggestion of a copy of Raphael's picture
of Michael subduing Satan which hangs on the bed-
room wall, he is an archangel wrestling with the
Devil. And he has fallen not merely as Adam but also
as Humpty Dumpty (he is fat and his first name is
Humphrey); as the hero of the ballad of Finnegans
Wake, who fell off a scaffold while building a house
(but came to life again at the sound of the word
4 Whisky'); and as Napoleon (an obelisk dedicated to
Wellington is a feature of the Phoenix Park, and there
is apparently a Wellington Museum). Since the land-
marks of the life of Swift still keep their prestige in
Dublin, he is Swift, who loved Stella and Vanessa
with the obstructed love of a father and whose mind
was finally blotted by madness: Swift's cryptic name
for Stella, 'Ppt,' punctuates the whole book.

And Earwicker is also making up in sleep for an
habitual feeling of helplessness due to his belonging
to a racial and religious minority. He is sometimes
the first Danish conqueror of Ireland, who sailed up

148 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

that very Liffey; sometimes Oliver Cromwell, that
other hated heathen invader.

But it is Joyce's further aim to create, through Ear-
wicker's mythopoeic dream, a set of symbols even
more general and basic. He has had the idea of mak-
ing Earwicker, resolved into his elemental compo-
nents, include the whole of humanity. The river, with
its feminine personality, Anna Livia Plurabelle, comes
to represent the feminine principle itself. At one
time or another all the women who figure in Ear-
wicker's fantasy are merged into this stream of life
which, always renewed, never pausing, flows through
the world built by men. The daughter, still a little
girl, is early identified with a cloud, which will come
down to earth as rain and turn into the rapid young
river; the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter describes a
lively woman's coming-of-age; in the end, the mature
river, broader and slower now, will move toward her
father, the sea. The corresponding masculine prin-
ciple is symbolized by the Hill of Howth, which
rises at the mouth of the Liffey; and the idea of the
hill as a citadel and the idea of the city as a male con-
struction associate themselves with this: the man is a
hill that stands firm while the river runs away at his
feet; he is a fortress, he is Dublin, he is all the cities of
the world.

And if Earwicker is animated in sleep by the prin-
ciples of both the sexes, he has also a double existence
in the r61es of both Youth and Old Age. Canalizing
his youthful impulses in a vision of himself as his

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKBR 149

favorite son, he dreams himself endowed with a re-
silience to go out and try life again; exalted by a
purity of idealism which has not yet been tainted by
experience, and yet bubbling with roguish drolleries,
blithely beloved by the girls. On the other hand,
foreshadowing his own decline, he sees the vision of
a chorus of old men, who, drivelingly reminiscent, at
the same time gloat and scold at the thought of the
vigorous young Tristram kissing Iseult on the other
side of the bushes, and exclaim in admiration an
expansion of Earwicker *s feelings at the sight of his
own sleeping son over the form of the sleeping
Earwicker (Shaun-Jerry). The old men are named
Matthew Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey and
Johnny MacDougall; and they are identified variously
with the four apostles, the Four Masters (early sages
of Irish legend), the Four Waves of Irish mythology,
the four courts of Dublin, and the four provinces of
Ireland (Johnny MacDougall is evidently Ulster: he
always follows at some distance behind the others).
These fathers are always associated with a gray ass
and sycamore trees, and have perhaps been suggested
to Earwicker by four sycamore trees on the Liffcy,
among which a neighbor's donkey has been grazing.
All of these major motifs are woven in and out from
beginning to end of the book, and each at a given
point receives a complete development: the woman-
river in pages 196-116 the well-known Anna Livia
Plurabellc chapter; the male city-fortrcss-hill in pages
531-554 (already published separately as Havcth
Childers Every where) \ the Young Man in the chapters

150 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

about Shaun, pages 403-473 ; and the Old Men, pro-
viding a contrast, just before, in 383-399.

There are also a stone and an elm on opposite sides
of the Liffey, which represent the death principle and
the life principle (Ygdrasil). The tree has several
graciously rustling solos (a notable one at the end,
beginning on page 619), and in the Anna Livia Plura-
belle chapter she has a long conversation with the
stone, which blends with the gossip of two old wash-
erwomen drying clothes on the riverbank. This dia-
logue is only one of many dialogues which are really
always the same disputation, and in which one of the
parties, like the stone, is always hard-boiled, im-
mobile and prosaic, while the other is sensitive, alive,
rather light-mindedly chattering or chirping. The
tougher of the two parties in these interchanges is
always browbeating or bullying the other. Some-
times they are Satan and Saint Michael; sometimes
they are transmogrified antitheses derived from
Aesop's fables: the Mookse and the Gripes (the Fox
and the Grapes), the Ondt and the Gracehoper (the
Ant and the Grasshopper); but all these dualisms are
evidently connected with the diverse temperaments of
Earwicker's twins (who sometimes appear as Cain and
Abel), and represent the diverse elements in the char-
acter of Earwicker himself, as these struggle within
his own consciousness, the aggressive side sometimes
reflecting certain powers in the external world the
force of hostile opinion or the police which he now
fears, now feels he can stand up to. The various pairs,
however, shift their balance and melt into one another

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 15!

so readily that it is impossible to give any account of
them which will cover all the cases in the book.

Besides all this, just as Joyce in Ulysses laid the
Odyssey under requisition to help provide a structure
for his material material which, once it had begun
to gush from the rock of Joyce's sealed personality
at the blow of the Aaron's rod of free association,
threatened to rise and submerge the artist like the
flood which the sorcerer's apprentice let loose by his
bedeviled broom; so in the face of an even more
formidable danger, he has here brought in the histori-
cal theory of the eighteenth-century philosopher,.
Giambattista Vico, to help him to organize Finnegans
Wake. It was Vico's idea that civilizations always
pass through three definite phases: a phase when
people imagine gods, a phase when they make up
myths about heroes, and a phase when they see things
in terms of real men. It will be noted that the figures
mentioned above divide themselves among these three
categories of beings. Vico further believed that his-
tory moved in cycles and that it was always repeating
itself, which to the frequent exasperation of the
reader Finnegans Wake is also made to do. And
there is also a good deal more out of Vico, which you
can find out about in Our Exagmination* but which

1 Our Examination Round His Fortification for Incamination of Work in Progress,
published by New Directions at Norfolk, Connecticut. This is a collection of
papers from Transition, the Paris magazine in which Finnegans Wake first appeared.
The writers have taken their cues from Joyce himself, and he seems to have chosen
this way of providing the public with a key. It is, in fact, rather doubtful whether
without the work done by Transition it would be possible to get the hang of the
book at all. See also Mr. Max Eastman's account of an interview with Joyce on the
subject in Part III, Chapter III, of Tk* Literary Mind,

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

seems even more idle and forced than the most forced
and idle aspects of the Odysscyan parallel in Ulysses.
The fact that there is a Vico Road in the Dublin
suburb Dalkey ' The Vico Road goes round and
round to meet where terms begin* gives Joyce a
peg in actuality on which to hang all this theory.

There is one important respect in which Joyce may
seem to depart from Vico. Vico, so far as is known,
did not believe in progress: his cycles did not spiral
toward an earthly goal; his hope for salvation was
in heaven. But the cycles of Finnegans Wake do result
in a definite progression. As Earwicker lives through
from darkness to light, he does slough off his feeling
of guilt. By morning the Devil has been vanquished
by Michael; Youth has bounded free of Age; the
Phoenix of Vico and the Phoenix Park has risen from
its ashes to new flight; Tristram has built a castle
(Howth Castle) for his bride; and Iseult, once the
object of an outlawed love, now married and growing
older, turns naturally and comfortably at last into the
lawful wife in the bed beside him, whom Earwicker
is making an effort not to jab with his knees; the
tumult and turbidity of Saturday night run clear in
the peace of Sunday morning; the soul, which has
been buried in sleep, is resurrected, refreshed, to life.

Yet if one looks at the book as a whole, one finds
that the larger cycle docs return upon itself. This will
be seen when I discuss the last pages. In the mean-
time, let me merely point out that we do not find in
Finnegans Wake any climax of exaltation comparable
either to the scene where Stephen Dedalus realizes his

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 153

artist's vocation or to Molly Bloom's great affirma-
tive. The later book represents an aging phase in the
constant human subject with which the series of
Joyce's books has dealt. This subject which must
never be lost sight of, though in this case it is easy to
do so is the nexus of intimate relationships in-
volved in a family situation. We find it first in the
Portrait of an Artist in the attitude of Dedalus toward
his family, and in the delicate but vital displacement
in the relations of the young married couple who fig-
ure in the short story called The Dead. In Exiles, an-
other young married couple come back from abroad
with a son, and a more serious displacement takes
place when the wife meets an old lover. In Ulysses,
the relations of man and wife, by this time almost
middle-aged, have been affected by more serious read-
justments, and they arc related in a complex way to
the relations of the Blooms to their children, of Deda-
lus to his parents, and of both the Blooms to Dedalus.
Now, in Finnegans Wake, the husband and wife have
reached an age at which, from the emotional point of
view, they seem hardly important to one another, and
at which the chief source of interest is the attitude of
the father toward the children * the child we all
love to place our hope in,' as Earwicker thinks in the
last moments before the rising sun wakes him up. (We
have already had intimations of this relationship in
the adoptively paternal instincts of Bloom toward the
spiritually parentless Dedalus; in Joyce's little lyric
poems, poignant to the point of anguish, that deal
with his own children; and in the poem called Ecce
Puer, in which the family cycle appears.)

154 TilE WOUND AND THE BOW

Here this family situation has been explored more
profoundly by Joyce than in any of his previous books.
In sleep, the conventions and institutions with which
we discipline and give shape to our lives are allowed
partly to dissolve and evaporate, so as partly to set
free the impulses of the common human plasm out
of which human creatures are made; and then the
sexual instincts of the man and the woman, the child's
instinct and the parent's instinct, the masculine and
feminine principles themselves, come into play in
confusing ways, shadow forth disturbing relation-
ships, which yet spring from the prime processes of
life. Finnegans Wake carries even farther the kind
of insight into such human relations which was al-
ready carried far in Ulysses', and it advances with an
astounding stride the attempt to find the universally
human in ordinary specialized experience which was
implied in the earlier book by the Odysseyan parallel.
Joyce will now try to build up inductively the whole
of human history and myth from the impulses, con-
scious and dormant, the unrealized potentialities, of
a single human being, who is to be a man even more
obscure and even less well-endowed, even less civilized
and aspiring, than was Leopold Bloom in Ulysses,

Finnegans Wake, in conception as well as in execu-
tion, is one of the boldest books ever written.

ii

In order to get anything out of Finnegans Wake, you
must grasp a queer literary convention. It has been

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 155

said by T. S. Eliot that Joyce is the greatest master of
language in English since Milton. Eliot has also
pointed out that Milton is mainly a writer for the
car. Now Joyce through a large part of his adult life
has been almost as blind as Milton; and he has ended,
just as Milton did, by dealing principally in auditory
sensations. There is as little visualization in Finne-
gans Wake as in Samson Agonistes. Our first criticism,
therefore, is likely to be that nothing is seen in Ear-
wicker's dream. It is, after all, not uncommon in
dreams to have the illusion of seeing people and places
as clearly as when we are awake; and in the dream
literature with which we are already familiar
Alice in Wonderland, The Temptation of Saint Anthony
the dreamers are visited by plain apparitions, not
merely by invisible voices. But we must assume with
Finnegans Wake that Earwicker's imagination, like
Joyce's, is almost entirely auditory and verbal. We
have been partly prepared by Ulysses, in which we
listen to the thoughts of the characters but do not see
them very distinctly.

But there is another and more serious difficulty to
be got over. We are continually being distracted from
identifying and following Earwicker, the humble
proprietor of a public house, who is to encompass
the whole microcosm of the dream, by the intrusion
of all sorts of elements foreign languages, literary
allusions, historical information which could not
possibly have been in Earwicker 's mind. The principle
on which Joyce is operating may evidently be stated
as follows. If the artist is to render directly all the

156 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

feelings and fancies of a sleeper, primitive, inarticu-
late, infinitely imprecise as they are, he must create
a literary medium of unexampled richness and free-
dom. Now it is also Joyce's purpose in Finnegans
Wake to bring out in Earwicker's consciousness the
processes of universal history: the languages, the
cycles of society, the typical relationships of legend,
arc, he is trying to show us, all implicit in every
human being. He has, as I have indicated, been care-
ful to hook up his hero realistically with the main
themes of his universal fantasia: the Bible stories, the
Battle of Waterloo, Tristram and Iscult, and so forth.
But since Earwicker's implications are shown to be
universal, the author has the right to summon all the
resources of his superior knowledge in order to supply
a vehicle which will carry this experience of sleep.
He has the same sort of justification for making the
beings in Earwicker's dream speak Russian in fighting
the siege of Sebastopol (which has got in by way of
a picture hanging in Earwicker's house) as Thomas
Hardy has, for example, to describe in his own literary
vocabulary a landscape seen by an ignorant person.
If it is objected that in Finnegans Wake the author is
supposed to be not describing, but presenting the hero's
consciousness directly, Joyce might reply that his
procedure had precedent not only in poetry, but also
in prc-naturalistic fiction : even the characters of Dick-
ens were allowed to make speeches in blank verse,
even the characters of Meredith were allowed to
converse in apothegms. Why shouldn't H. C. Ear-
wicker be allowed to dream in a language which

THB DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 157

draws flexibility and variety from the author's enor-
mous reservoir of colloquial and literary speech, of
technical jargons and foreign tongues?

Yet here is where the reader's trouble begins, be-
cause here, in spite of the defense just suggested, a
convention that seems indispensable has been dis-
concertingly violated. What Joyce is trying to do is
to break out of the Flaubertian naturalism into some-
thing that moves more at ease and that commands a
wider horizon, something that is not narrowly tied
down to the data about a certain man living in a
certain year on a certain street of a certain city; and
the reaction is of course quite natural: it was inevita-
ble that the symbol and the myth, the traditional
material of poetry, should have asserted themselves
again against the formulas of scientific precision
which had begun to prove so cramping. But here the
act of escaping from them shocks, just as it sometimes
did in Proust. Proust argues in an impressive way, in
the final section of his novel, the case against nine-
teenth-century naturalism; yet who has not been
made uncomfortable at finding that Proust's personal
manias have been allowed to affect the structure of his
book: that a story which has been presented as hap-
pening to real people should not maintain a consistent
chronology, that it should never be clear whether the
narrator of the story is the same person as the author
of the book, and that the author, who ought to know
everything, should in some cases leave us in doubt as
to the facts about his hero? One had felt, in reading
Ulysses, a touch of the same uneasiness when the

158 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

phantasmagoria imagined by Bloom in the drunken
Night Town scene was enriched by learned fancies
which would seem to be more appropriate to Dedalus.
And now in Finmgans Wake the balloon of this new
kind of poetry pulls harder at its naturalistic anchor.
We are in the first place asked to believe that a man
like H. C. Earwicker would seize every possible pre-
text provided by his house and its location to include
in a single night's dream a large number of historical
and legendary characters. And is it not pretty far-
fetched to assume that Earwicker 's awareness of the
life of Swift or the Crimean War is really to be accu-
rately conveyed in terms of the awareness of Joyce, who
has acquired a special knowledge of these subjects?
Also, what about the references to the literary life in
Paris and to the book itself as Work in Progress,
which take us right out of the mind of Earwicker and
into the mind of Joyce?

There are not, to be sure, very many such winks
and nudges as this, though the shadow of Joyce at
his thankless task seems sometimes to fall between
Earwicker and us. Joyce has evidently set himself
limits as to how far he can go in this direction; and
he may urge that since Earwicker is universal man,
he must contain the implications of Joyce's destiny
as he does those of Swift's and Napoleon's, though
he has never heard of him as he has of them, and that
to give these implications a personal accent is only
to sign his canvas. Yet, even granting all this and
recognizing the difficulty of the task and accepting
without reservation the method Joyce has chosen

THE DREAM OF H. C. BARWICKER 159

for his purpose, the result still seems unsatisfactory,
the thing has not quite come out right. Instead of
the myths' growing out of Earwicker, Earwicker
seems swamped in the myths. His personality is
certainly created: we get to know him and feel sym-
pathy for him. But he is not so convincing as Bloom
was: there has been too much literature poured into
him. He has exfoliated into tpo many arabesques,
become hypertrophied by too many elements. And
not merely has he to carry this load of myths; he has
also been all wound round by what seems Joyce's
growing self-indulgence in an impulse to pure verbal
play.

Here another kind of difficulty confronts us. There
is actually a special kind of language which people
speak in dreams and in which they sometimes even
compose poetry. This language consists of words and
sentences which, though they seem to be gibberish
or nonsense from the rational point of view, betray
by their telescopings of words their combinations of
incongruous ideas, the involuntary preoccupations
of the sleeper. Lewis Carroll exploited this dream
language in Jabberwocky, and it has been studied by
Freud and his followers, from whom Joyce seems to
have got the idea of its literary possibilities. At any
rate, Finnegans Wake is almost entirely written in it.

The idea was brilliant in itself, and Joyce has in
many cases carried it out brilliantly. He has created
a whole new poetry, a whole new humor and pathos,
of sentences and words that go wrong. The special

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

kind of equivocal and prismatic effects aimed at by
the symbolist poets have here been achieved by a new
method and on psychological principles which give
them a new basis in humanity. But the trouble is,
it seems to me, that Joyce has somewhat overdone it.
His method of giving words multiple meanings allows
him to go on indefinitely introducing new ideas; and
he has spent no less than seventeen years embroidering
Finnegans Wake in this way.

What has happened may be shown by the following
examples. First, a relatively simple one from a pas-
sage about the Tree: ' Amcngst menlike trees walking
or trees like angels weeping nobirdy aviar soar any-
wing to eagle it! 1 It is quite clear in the last seven
words how an ornithological turn has been given to
'nobody ever saw anything to equal it/ Here is a
more complex one: Earwicker, picturing himself in
the chapter in which he partially wakes up, is made
to designate his hair with the phrase 'beer wig/
This has as its basis bar wig, which has rushed into
the breach as beer wig under the pressure of Earwicker f s
profession as a dispenser of drinks in his pub, of the
fact that his hair is yellow, and of his tendency to
imagine that his queer last name is being caricatured
by his neighbors as 4 Earwigger* a tendency which
has led to his dream being impishly haunted by ear-
wigs. There are thus four different ideas compressed
in these two words. But let us examine with the
aid of the hints provided by the Examination -r- an
even more complicated passage. Here is Earwicker-
Joycc's depiction of the madness and eclipse of Swift:

THB DREAM OF H. C. BARWICKBR l6l

'Unslow, malswift, pro mean, proh noblesse, Atra-
horc, melancolorcs, nears; whose glauque eyes glitt
bedimmed to imm; whose fingrings creep o'er skull:
till quench., asterr mist calls estarr and graw, honath
Jon raves homes glowcoma.' This passage, besides
the more or less obvious ones, contains apparently
the following ideas: Laracor, Swift's living in Ireland,
combined with the atta cur a, black cart, that rides
behind the horseman in the first poem of Book Three
of Horace's Odes; the Horatian idea that death comes
to the mean and the noble alike; proh, the Latin inter-
jection of regret, and pro, perhaps referring to Swift's
championship of the impoverished Irish; melancolorcs,
melancholy plus black-colored; glauque, French gray-blue,
plus Greek glaux, owl gray evening plus Swift's
blue eyes, which also had an owlish appearance; in
glitt bedimmed to imm, the doubled consonants evi-
dently represent a deadening of the senses; creep o'er
skull, French cripuscule, twilight; asterr, Greek aster,
star, Swift's Stella, whose real name was Esther;
Vanessa's real name was Hester so Stella calls Hes-
ter a (q)wench; perhaps German mist, dung, trash,
plays some part here, too as well as German starr,
rigid; graw evidently contains German grau, gray; hon-
ath Jon is honest John and Jonathan; glowcoma is glau-
coma, a kind of blindness, plus the idea of a pale glow
of life persisting in a coma. This passage has some
beauty and power; but isn't it overingenious? Would
anyone naturally think of Horace when he was con-
fronted with 'Atrahorc'? And, even admitting that
it may be appropriate to associate Latin with Swift,

l6l THE WOUND AND THE BOW

how does the German get in? Swift did not know
German nor had he any German associations. 1

In some cases, this overlaying of meanings has had
the result of rendering quite opaque passages which
at an earlier stage as we can see by comparing the
finished text with some of the sections as they first
appeared were no less convincingly dreamlike for
being more easily comprehensible. You will find
three versions of a passage in Anna Livia Plurabclle
on page 164 of the Exagmination\ and on page 113 of
the book you will see that Joyce has worked up still
a fourth. My feeling is that he ought to have stopped
somewhere between the second and the third. Here is
Version i of 19x5 : 'Look, look, the dusk is growing.
What time is it? It must be late. It's ages now since
I or anyone last saw Waterhouse's clock. They took
it asunder, I heard them say. When will they reas-
semble it?' And here is Version 4 of 1939 : ' Look, look,
the dusk is growing. My branches lofty are taking
root. And my cold cher's gone ashley. Fieluhr?
Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. Tis endless
now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse's
clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When
will they reassemble it?' There is a gain in poetry,
certainly; but in the meantime the question and the

1 1 chose this passage because a partial exposition of it, which I take to be more
or less authoritative, had appeared in the Examination (in the paper by Mr. Robert
McAlmon). I did not remember to have read it in its place in Fimugans Wake, and
was unable to find it when I looked for it. Since then I have been told by another
reader who has been over and over the book that this sentence about Swift is not
included. This is interesting because it indicates the operation of a principle of
selection. Joyce suffered himself from glaucoma, and it may be that he eliminated
the reference because he felt that it was too specifically personal.

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 163

answer have almost disappeared. Has it really made
Anna Livia any more riverlike to introduce the names
of several hundred rivers (saon is Saint doing duty as
soon, and cher is the Cher for French chair) as he also
introduces in other sections the names of cities, in-
sects, trees? And why drag in Erewhorit In the same
way, the talk of the Old Men, which, when it first
came out in Navire <T Argent, seemed almost equal in
beauty to the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter, has now
been so crammed with other things that the voices
of the actual speakers have in places been nearly oblit-
erated.

Joyce has always been rather deficient in dramatic
and narrative sense. Ulysses already dragged; one got
lost in it. The moments of critical importance were
so run in with the rest that one was likely to miss them
on first reading. One had to think about the book,
read chapters of it over, in order to see the pattern
and to realize how deep the insight went. And
Finnegans Wake is much worse in this respect. The
main outlines of the book are discernible, once we
have been tipped off as to what it is all about. It is a
help that, in forming our hypothesis, the principle of
Occam's razor applies; for it is Joyce's whole design
and point that the immense foaming-up of symbols
should be reducible to a few simple facts. And it must
also be conceded by a foreigner that a good deal which
may appear to him mysterious would be plain enough
to anyone who knew Dublin and something about
Irish history, and that what Joyce has done here is as
legitimate as it would be for an American writer to

164 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

lay the scene of a similar fantasy somewhere on River-
side Drive in New York and to assume that his readers
would be able to recognize Grant's Tomb, green buses,
Columbia University and the figure of Hendrik Hud-
son. A foreign reader of Finnegans Wake should con-
sult a map of Dublin, and look up the articles on
Dublin and Ireland in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Yet it seems to me a serious defect that we do not
really understand what is happening till we have al-
most finished the book. Then we can look back and
understand the significance of Eanvicker's stuttering
over the word father on page 45 ; we can sec that ' Peder
the Greste, altipaltar* on page 344 combines, along
with Peter the Great and agrestc, pederast and pater;
we can conclude that the allusion on page 373 about
4 begetting a wife which begame his niece by pouring
her young-things into skintighs* refers back to the
little story on pages 11-13, and that this whole theme
is a device of the 'dream- work 1 to get over the incest
barrier by disguising Earwicker's own children as the
children of a niece.

But in the meantime we have had to make our way
through five hundred and fifty-four pages; and there
is much that is evidently important that we still do
not understand. How, for example, is the story of the
'prankquean' just mentioned related to the motif of
the letter scratched up by the chicken from the dump
heap; and what is the point about this letter? The
theme is developed at prodigious length in the chap-
ter beginning on page 104; and it flickers all through
the book. It turns up near the eftd pages 613-614

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 165

with new emotional connotations. The idea of letters
and postmen plays a prominent part all through*
Little Kevin is represented as giving the postman's
knock; and Earwicker though he here seems to be
identifying himself with the other son, Jerry is
caught up into a long flight of fantasy in which he
imagines himself a postman. The letter comes from
Boston, Massachusetts, and seems to have been writ-
ten by some female relation, perhaps the niece men-
tioned above. One feels that there is a third woman
in the story, and that something important depends
on this. Yet a considerable amount of rereading has
failed, in the case of the present writer, to clear the
matter up.

Finncgans Wake, in the actual reading, seems to
me for two thirds of its length not really to bring off
what it attempts. Nor do I think it possible to defend
the procedure of Joyce on the basis of an analogy with
music. It is true that there is a good deal of the musi-
cian in Joyce: his phonograph record of Anna Livia is
as beautiful as a fine tenor solo. But nobody would
listen for half an hour to a composer of operas or
symphonic poems who went on and on in one mood
as monotonously as Joyce has done in parts of Finne-
gans Wake, who scrambled so many motifs in one
passage, or who returned to pick up a theme a couple
of hours after it had first been stated, when the listen-
ers would inevitably have forgotten it. 1

1 This essay was written in the summer of 1939, just after Finne&ans Wakt came
out, and I have reprinted it substantially as it first appeared. Since then an article
by M*. John Ifealc Bishop in Th Southern Htvitw of summer, 1939, and studies by
Mr. H#ty Levin in Tbt Ktnym Rtvtw of Autumn, 1939, and in New Dinctivtu of

Z66 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

I believe that the miscarriage of Finncgans Wake,
in so far as it does miscarry, is due primarily to two
tendencies of Joyce's which were already in evidence
in Ulysses: the impulse, in the absence of dramatic
power, to work up an epic impressiveness by multiply-
ing and complicating detail, by filling in abstract dia-
grams and laying on intellectual conceits, till the
organic effort at which he aims has been spoiled by too
much that is synthetic; and a curious shrinking solici-
tude to conceal from the reader his real subjects. These
subjects are always awkward and distressing: they

1939, have thrown further light on the subject; and I have also had the advantage
of discussions with Mr. Thornton Wilder, who has explored the book more
thoroughly than anyone else I have heard of. It is to be hoped that Mr. Wilder
will some day publish something about Finntgans Wake; and in the meantime those
interested in the book should consult the essays mentioned, upon which I have
sometimes drawn in revising the present study.

One suggestion of Mr. Bishop's should certainly be noted here. He believes that
the riddle of the letter is the riddle of life itself. This letter has been scratched up
from a dung-heap and yet it has come from another world; it includes in its very
brief length marriage, children and death, and things to eat and drink all the
primary features of life, beyond which the ideas of the illiterate writer evidently
do not extend; and Ear wicker can never really read it, though the text seems ex-
ceedingly simple and though he confronts it again and again.

I ought to amend what is said in this essay on the basis of a first reading by
adding that Finntgans Wake, like Ulyssts, gets better the more you go back to it.
I do not know of any other books of which it is true as it is of Joyce's that, though
parts of them may leave us blank or repel us when we try them the first time, they
gradually build themselves up for us as we return to them and think about them.
That this should be true is due probably to some special defect of rapport between
Joyce and the audience he is addressing, to some disease of his architectural faculty;
but he compensates us partly for this by giving us more in the long run than we
had realized at first was there, and he eventually produces the illusion that his
fiction has a reality like life's, because, behind all the antics, the pedantry, the
artificial patterns, something organic and independent of these is always revealing
itself; and we end by recomposing a world in our mind as we do from the phenomena
of experience. Mr. Max Eastman reports that Joyce once said to him, during a con-
versation on Finnegans Wakt, when Mr. Eastman had suggested to Joyce that the de-
mands made on the reader were too heavy and that he perhaps ought to provide a
key: 'The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life
to reading my works/ It is in any case probably true that they will last you a
whole lifetime.

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 167

have to do with the kind of feelings which people
themselves conceal and which it takes courage in the
artist to handle. And the more daring Joyce's sub-
jects become, the more he tends to swathe them about
with the fancywork of his literary virtuosity. It is
as if it were not merely Earwicker who was frightened
by the state of his emotions but as if Joyce were em-
barrassed, too.

Yet, with all this, Finnegans Wake has achieved
certain amazing successes. Joyce has caught the psy-
chology of sleep as no one else has ever caught it, lay-
ing hold on states of mind which it is difficult for the
waking intellect to re-create, and distinguishing with
marvelous delicacy between the different levels of
dormant consciousness. There are the relative vivid-
ness of events reflected from the day before; the night-
mare viscidity and stammering of the heavy slumbers
of midnight; the buoyance and self-assertive vitality
which gradually emerge from this; the half- waking of
the early morning, which lapses back into the rig-
maroles of dreams; the awareness, later, of the light
outside, with its effect as of the curtain of the eyelids
standing between the mind and the day. Through all
this, the falling of twilight, the striking of the hours
by the clock, the morning fog and its clearing, the
bell for early mass, and the rising sun at the window,
make themselves felt by the sleeper. With what bril-
liance they are rendered by Joyce! And the voices that
echo in Earwicker 's dream the beings that seize
upon him and speak through him: the Tree and the

3-68 THE WOUND AND THB BOW

River, the eloquence of Shaun, the mumbling and
running-on of the Old Men; the flutter/ girl sweet-
heart, the resigned elderly wife; the nagging and jeer-
ing gibberish close to madness and recalling the
apparition of Virag in the Walpurgisnacht scene of
Ulysses, but here identified with the Devil which
comes like an incubus with the darkness and through
which the thickened voices of the Earwicker house-
hold occasionally announce themselves startlingly:
'Mawmaw, luk, your beeftay's fizzin* over* or 'Now
a muss wash the little face/ Joyce has only to strike
the rhythm and the timbre, and we know which of
the spirits is with us.

Some of the episodes seem to me wholly successful :
the Anna Livia chapter, for example, and the end of
Haveth Childers Everywhere, which has a splendor and a
high-spirited movement of a kind not matched else-
where in Joyce. The passage in a minor key which
precedes this major crescendo and describes Earwicker's
real habitations ' most respectable . . . thoroughly
respectable . . . partly respectable/ and so forth is a
masterpiece of humorous sordidity (especially ' copi-
ous holes emitting mice*); and so is the inventory
on pages 183-184 of all the useless and rubbishy
objects in the house where Shem the Penman lives.
The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly (jterct-oreillc, earwig)
which blazons the shame of Earwicker is real
dream literature and terribly funny; as is also the reve-
lation pages 571-573 of the guilty and intricate
sex relationships supposed to prevail in the Earwicker
family, uad<8T the guise of one of those unintelligible

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 169

summaries of a saint's legend or a Latin play. The
waking-up chapter is charming in the passage page
565 in which the mother comforts the restless boy
and in the summing-up page 579 of the married
life of the Earwickers; and it is touchingly and thrill-
ingly effective in throwing back on all that has gone
before the shy impoverished family pathos which it
is Joyce's special destiny to express.

Where he is least happy, I think, is in such episodes
as the voyage, 311 ff., the football game, 373 ff., and
the siege of Sebastopol, 338 ff. (all in the dense night-
marish part of the book, which to me is, in general,
the dullest). Joyce is best when he is idyllic, nostal-
gic, or going insane in an introspective way; he is not
good at energetic action. There is never any direct
aggressive clash between the pairs of opponents in
Joyce, and there is consequently no real violence (ex-
cept Dedalus' smashing the chandelier in self-defense
against the reproach of his dead mother). All that
Joyce is able to do when he wants to represent a battle
is to concoct an uncouth gush of language. In general
one feels, also, in Finmgans Wake the narrow limita-
tions of Joyce's interests. He has tried to make it uni-
versal by having Earwicker take part in his dream in
as many human activities as possible: but Joyce him-
self has not the key either to politics, to sport or to
fighting. The departments of activity that come out
best arc such quiet ones as teaching and preaching.

The finest thing in the book, and one of the finest
things Joyce has done, is the passage at the end where
Maggie, the wife, is for the first time allowed to speak

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

with her full and mature voice. I have noted that
Joyce's fiction usually deals with the tacit readjust-
ment in the relationships between members of a fam-
ily, the almost imperceptible moment which marks
the beginning of a phase. In Finnegans Wake, the
turning-point fixed is the moment when the husband
and wife know definitely they will wake up know-
ing it that their own creative sexual partnership is
over. That current no longer holds them polarized
as man and woman toward one another; a new
polarization takes place: the father is pulled back
toward the children. 'Illas! I wisht I had better
glances,' he thinks he hears Maggie saying page
616 'to peer to you through this baylight's grow-
ing. But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing
from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I'm getting mixed.
Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you're
changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel
you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Im-
lamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hind-
moist. Divel taking on me tail. Just a whisk brisk sly
spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saul-
tering. Saltarella come to her own. I pity your old-
self I was used to. Now a younger's there.' It is the
' young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing, saunter-
ing by silvamoonlake' (page xox in the Anna Li via
Plurabelle section) that she herself used to be, who
now seems to her awkward and pert; and the wife her-
self is now the lower river running into the sea. The
water |s wider here; the pace of the stream is calmer:
broad day of experience has opened. 'I thought

THE DREAM OF H. C. EARWICKER 171

you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage.
You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all
things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny.
Home!' She sees him clearly now: he is neither Sir
Tristram nor Lucifer; and he is done with her and she
with him. Tm loothing them that's here and all I
lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I
am passing out. O bitter ending ! I'll slip away before
they're up. They'll never see me. Nor know. Nor
miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad
and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold
mad father, my cold mad feary father.' . . . The help-
less and heartbreaking voices of the Earwicker chil-
dren recur: 'Carry me along, taddy, like you done
through the toy fair' for now she is herself the
child entrusting herself to the sea, flowing out into
the daylight that is to be her annihilation . . . ' a way
a lone a last a loved a long the' . . .

The Viconian cycle of existence has come full circle
again. The unfinished sentence which ends the book
is to find its continuation in the sentence without a
beginning with which it opens. The river which runs
into the sea must commence as a cloud again; the wo-
man must give up life to the child. The Earwickcrs
will wake to another day, but the night has made
them older: the very release of the daylight brings a
weariness that looks back to life's source.

In these wonderful closing pages, Joyce has put over
all he means with poetry of an originality, a purity and
an emotional power, such as to raise Finnegans Wake,
for all its excesses, to the rank of a great work of liter-
ature.

PMoctetes: Tlte Wound
and the Bow

PhilocMss of Sophocles is far from being
his most popular play. The myth itself has not been
one of those which have excited the modern imagina-
tion. The idea of Philoctetcs' long illness and his
banishment to the bleak island is dreary or distasteful
to the young, who like to identify themselves with
men of action with Heracles or Perseus or Achilles;
and for adults the story told by Sophocles fails to set
off such emotional charges as arc liberated by the
crimes of the Atreidai and the tragedies of the siege of
Troy. Whatever may have been dashing in the legend
has been lost with the other plays and poems that dealt
with it. Philoctetes is hardly mentioned in Homer;
and we have only an incomplete account of the plays
by Aeschylus and Euripides, which hinged on a criti-
cal moment of the campaign of the Greeks at Troy
and which seem to have exploited the emotions of
Greek patriotism. We have only a few scattered lines

PHILOCTETBS: THE WOUND AND THE BOW 173

and phrases from that other play by Sophocles on the
subject, the Philoctetes at Troy, in which the humili-
ated hero was presumably to be cured of his ulcer and
to proceed to his victory over Paris.

There survives only this one curious drama which
presents Philoctetes in exile a drama which does
not supply us at all with what we ordinarily expect of
Greek tragedy, since it culminates in no catastrophe,
and which indeed resembles rather our modern idea
of a comedy (though the record of the lost plays of
Sophocles show that there must have been others like
it). Its interest depends almost as much on the latent
interplay of character, on a gradual psychological con-
flict, as that of Le Misanthrope. And it assigns itself,
also, to a category even more special and less generally
appealing through the fact (though this, again, was
a feature not uncommon with Sophocles) that the
conflict is not even allowed to take place between a
man and a woman. Nor does it even put before us the
spectacle which may be made exceedingly thrilling

of the individual in conflict with his social group,
which we get in such plays devoid of feminine interest
as Coriolanus and An Enemy of the People. Nor is the
conflict even a dual one, as most dramatic conflicts arc

so that our emotions seesaw up and down between
two opposed persons or groups: though Philoctetes
and Odysseus struggle for the loyalty of Neoptolemus,
he himself emerges more and more distinctly as repre-
senting an independent point of view, so that the
contrast becomes a triple affair which makes more
complicated demands on our sympathies.

174 THB WOUND AND THE BOW

A French dramatist of the seventeenth century,
Chatcaubrun, found the subject so inconceivable that,
in trying to concoct an adaptation which would be
acceptable to the taste of his time, he provided Philoc-
tctcs with a daughter named Sophie with whom Neop-
tolemus was to fall in love and thus bring the drama
back to the reliable and eternal formula of Romeo
and Juliet and the organizer who loves the factory-
owner's daughter. And if we look for the imprint of
the play on literature since the Renaissance, we shall
find a very meager record: a chapter of Fenelon's Tile-
machc, a discussion in Lessing's Laocoon, a sonnet of
Wordsworth's, a little play by Andre Gide, an adapta-
tion by John Jay Chapman this is all, so far as I
know, that has any claim to interest.

And yet the play itself is most interesting, as some
of these writers have felt; and it is certainly one of
Sophocles' masterpieces. If we come upon it in the
course of reading him, without having heard it praised,
we arc surprised to be so charmed, so moved to find
ourselves in the presence of something that is so much
less crude in its subtlety than either a three-cornered
modern comedy like Candida or La Parisicnnc or an
underplayed affair of male loyalty in a story by Ernest
Hemingway, to both of which it has some similarity.
It is as if having the three men on the lonely island
has enabled the highly sophisticated Sophocles to get
further away from the framework of the old myths on
which he has to depend and whose barbarities, anom-
alies and absurdities, tactfully and realistically though

PHILOCTETES: THB WOUND AND THE 3OW 175

he handles them, seem sometimes almost as much out
of place as they would in a dialogue by Plato. The
people of the Philoctetes seem to us more familiar than
they do in most of the other Greek tragedies; 1 and
they take on for us a more intimate meaning. Philoc-
tetes remains in our mind, and his incurable wound
and his invincible bow recur to us with a special in-
sistence. But what is it they mean? How is it possible
for Sophocles to make us accept them so naturally?
Why do we enter with scarcely a stumble into the
situation of people who are preoccupied with a snake-
bite that lasts forever and a weapon that cannot fail?

Let us first take account of the peculiar twist which
Sophocles seems to have given the legend, as it had
come to him from the old epics and the dramatists
who had used it before him.

The main outline of the story ran as follows: The
demigod Heracles had been given by Apollo a bow
that never missed its mark. When, poisoned by De-
ianeira's robe, he had had himself burned on Mount
Oeta, he had persuaded Philoctetes to light the pyre
and had rewarded him by bequeathing to him this
weapon. Philoctetes had thus been formidably
equipped when he had later set forth against Troy
with Agamemnon and Menelaus. But on the way they
had to stop off at the tiny island of Chryse to sacrifice
to the local deity. Philoctetes approached the shrine
first, and he was bitten in the foot by a snake. The

1 ' Apropos of the rare occasions when the ancients seem just like u$, it always has
seemed to me that a wonderful example was the repentance of the lad in the (Pkiloc-
Mttf) play of Sophocles over his deceit, and the restoration of the bow.' Mr.
Justice Holmes to Sir Frederick Pollock, October x, 1911.

176 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

infection became peculiarly virulent; and the groans
of Philoctetes made it impossible to perform the sacri-
fice, which would be spoiled by ill-omened sounds; the
bite began to suppurate with so horrible a smell that
his companions could not bear to have him near them.
They removed him to Lemnos, a neighboring island
which was much larger than Chrysi and inhabited,
and sailed away to Troy without him.

Philoctetes remained there ten years. The mysteri-
ous wound never healed. In the meantime, the
Greeks, hard put to it at Troy after the deaths of
Achilles and Ajax and baffled by the confession of their
soothsayer that he was unable to advise them further,
had kidnaped the soothsayer of the Trojans and had
forced him to reveal to them that they could never
win till they had sent for Neoptolemus, the son of
Achilles, and given him his father's armor, and till
they had brought Philoctetes and his bow.

Both these things were done. Philoctetes was
healed at Troy by the son of the physician Asclepius;
and he fought Paris in single combat and killed him.
Philoctetes and Neoptolemus became the heroes of the
taking of Troy.

Both Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays on this
subject long before Sophocles did; and we know some-
thing about them from a comparison of the treatments
by the three different dramatists which was written by
Dion Chrysostom, a rhetorician of the first century
A.D. Both these versions would seem to have been
mainly concerned with the relation of Philoctetes to
the success of the Greek campaign. All three of the

PHILOCTETES: THB WOUND AND THB BOW 'LJJ

plays dealt with the same episode: the visit of Odys-
seus to Lemnos for the purpose of getting the bow; and
all represented Odysseus as particularly hateful to
Philoctetes (because he had been one of those responsi-
ble for abandoning him on the island), and obliged to
resort to cunning. But the emphasis of Sophocles'
treatment appears fundamentally to have differed from
that of the other two. In the drama of Aeschylus, we
are told, Odysseus was not recognized by Philoctetes,
and he seems simply to have stolen the bow. In
Euripides, he was disguised by Athena in the likeness
of another person, and he pretended that he had been
wronged by the Greeks as Philoctetes had been. He
had to compete with a delegation of Trojans, who had
been sent to get the bow for their side and who arrived
at the same time as he; and we do not know precisely
what happened. But Dion Chrysostom regarded the
play as ' a masterpiece of declamation' and ' a model of
ingenious debate, 1 and Jebb thinks it probable that
Odysseus won the contest by an appeal to Philoctetes '
patriotism. Since Odysseus was pretending to have
been wronged by the Greeks, he could point to his own
behavior in suppressing his personal resentments in
the interests of saving Greek honor. The moral theme
thus established by Aeschylus and Euripides both
would have been simply, like the theme of the wrath
of Achilles, the conflict between the passions of an in-
dividual in this case, an individual suffering from
a genuine wrong and the demands of duty to a
common cause.
This conflict appears also in Sophocles; but it takes

178 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

on a peculiar aspect. Sophocles, in the plays of his we
have, shows himself particularly successful with
people whose natures have been poisoned by narrow
fanatical hatreds. Even allowing for the tendency of
Greek heroes, in legend and history both, to fly into
rather childish rages, we still feel on Sophocles' part
some sort of special point of view, some sort of special
sympathy, for these cases. Such people Electra and
the embittered old Oedipus suffer as much as they
hate: it is because they suffer they hate. They horrify,
but they waken pity. Philoctetes is such another: a
man obsessed by a grievance, which in his case he is to
be kept from forgetting by an agonizing physical ail-
ment; and for Sophocles his pain and hatred have a
dignity and an interest. Just as it is by no means plain
to Sophocles that in the affair of Antigone versus Cleon
it is the official point of view of Cleon, representing the
interests of his victorious faction, which should have
the last word against Antigone, infuriated by a per-
sonal wrong; so it is by no means plain to him that the
morality of Odysseus, who is lying and stealing for the
fatherland, necessarily deserves to prevail over the
animus of the stricken Philoctetes.

The contribution of Sophocles to the story is a third
person who will sympathize with Philoctetes. This
new character is Neoptolemus, the young son of
Achilles, who, along with Philoctetes, is indispensa-
ble to the victory of the Greeks and who has just been
summoned to Troy. Odysseus is made to bring him to
Lemnos for the purpose of deceiving Philoctetes and
shanghai-ing him aboard the ship.

PHILOCTETES: THE WOUND AND THE BOW 179

The play opens with a scale between Odysseus and
the boy, in which the former explains the purpose of
their trip. Odysseus will remain in hiding in order
not to be recognized by Philoctetes, and Ncoptolcmus
will go up to the cave in which Philoctetes lives and
win his confidence by pretending that the Greeks have
robbed him of his father's armor, so that he, too, has
a grievance against them. The youth in his innocence
and candor objects when he is told what his r61e is to
be, but Odysseus persuades him by reminding him
that they can only take Troy through his obedience
and that once they have taken Troy, he will be glori-
fied for his bravery and wisdom. * As soon as we have
won, 1 Odysseus assures him, 'we shall conduct our-
selves with perfect honesty. But for one short day of
dishonesty, allow me to direct you what to do and
then forever after you will be known as the most
righteous of men. 1 The line of argument adopted by
Odysseus is one with which the politics of our time
have made us very familiar. ' Isn't it base, then, to tell
falsehoods?' Neoptolemus asks. 'Not,' Odysseus re-
plies, 'when a falsehood will bring our salvation.'

Neoptolemus goes to talk to Philoctetes. He finds
him in the wretched cave described by Sophocles
with characteristic realism : the bed of leaves, the crude
wooden bowl, the filthy bandages drying in the sun
where he has been living in rags for ten years, limping
out from time to time to shoot wild birds or to get
himself wood and water. The boy hears the harrow-
ing story of Philoctetes' desertion by the Greeks and
listens to his indignation. The ruined captain begs

X8o THB WOUND AND THE BOW

Ncoptolcmus to take him back to his native land, and
the young man pretends to consent. (Here and else-
where I am telescoping the scenes and simplifying a
more complex development.) But just as they arc leav-
ing for the ship, the ulcer on Philoctetes' foot sets up
an ominous throbbing in preparation for one of its
periodical burstings: 'She returns from time to time/
says the invalid, ' as if she were sated with her wander-
ings.' In a moment he is stretched on the ground,
writhing in abject anguish and begging the young man
to cut off his foot. He gives Neoptolemus the bow,
telling him to take care of it till the seizure is over.
A second spasm, worse than the first, reduces him to
imploring the boy to throw him into the crater of the
Lcmnian volcano: so he himself, he says, had lit the
fire which consumed the tormented Heracles and had
got in return these arms, which he is now handing on
to Neoptolemus. The pain abates a little; 'It comes
and goes/ says Philoctetes; and he entreats the young
man not to leave him. 'Don't worry about that.
We'll stay. ' ' I shan't even make you swear it, my son. '
' It would not be right to leave you' (it would not be
right, of course, even from the Greeks' point of view).
They shake hands on it. A third paroxysm twists the
cripple; now he asks Neoptolemus to carry him to the
cave, but shrinks from his grasp and struggles. At
last the abscess bursts, the dark blood begins to flow.
Philoctetes, faint and sweating, falls asleep.

The sailors who have come with Neoptolemus urge
him to make off with the bow. ' No/ the young man
replies. ' He cannot hear us; but I am sure that it will

PHILOCTETES: THE WOUND AND THE BOW l8l

not be enough for us to recapture the bow without
him. It is he who is to have the glory it was he the
god told us to bring/

While they are arguing, Philoctetes awakes and
thanks the young man with emotion: 'Agamemnon
and Menelaus were not so patient and loyal. ' But now
they must get him to the ship, and the boy will have
to see him undeceived and endure his bitter re-
proaches. ' The men will carry you down, ' says Neop-
tolemus. 'Don't trouble them: just help me up/
Philoctetes replies. ' It would be too disagreeable for
them to take me all the way to the ship/ The smell of
the suppuration has been sickening. The young man
begins to hesitate. The other sees that he is in doubt
about something: 'You're not so overcome with dis-
gust at my disease that you don't think you can have
me on the ship with you?'

otf 5iJ <r dvaxtyeia TOV

The answer is one of the most effective of those swift
and brief speeches of Sophocles which for the first time
make a situation explicit (my attempts to render this
dialogue colloquially do no justice to the feeling and
point of the verse):

iiravTCt dvffxtpeia, T?)J> ottirov <pti<nv
&TCO> \iTf6iv rts Spq. rd M Trpocreudra.

4 Everything becomes disgusting when you are false to

your own nature and behave in an unbecoming way/

He confesses his real intentions; and a painful scene

occurs. Philoctetes denounces the boy in terms that

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

would be appropriate for Odysseus; he sees himself
robbed of his bow and left to starve on the island. The
young man is deeply worried: 'Why did I ever leave
Scyros?' he asks himself. * Comrades, what shall I do?'

At this moment, Odysseus, who has been listening,
pops out from his hiding place. With a lash of abuse at
Neoptolemus, he orders him to hand over the arms.
The young man's spirit flares up: when Odysseus in-
vokes the will of Zeus, he tells him that he is degrad-
ing the gods by lending them his own lies. Philoctetes
turns on Odysseus with an invective which cannot fail
to impress the generous Neoptolemus: Why have they
come for him now? he demands. Is he not still just as
ill-omened and loathsome as he had been when they
made him an outcast? They have only come back to
get him because the gods have told them they must.

The young man now defies his mentor and takes his
stand with Philoctetes. Odysseus threatens him: if he
persists, he will have the whole Greek army against
him, and they will see to it that he is punished for his
treason. Neoptolemus declares his intention of taking
Philoctetes home; he gives him back his bow. Odys-
seus tries to intervene; but Philoctetes has got the bow
and aims an arrow at him. Neoptolemus seizes his
hand and restrains him. Odysseus, always prudent,
beats a quiet retreat.

Now the boy tries to persuade the angry man that
he should, nevertheless, rescue the Greeks. 'I have
proved my good faith,' says Neoptolemus; ' you know
that I am not going to coerce you. Why be so wrong-
headed? When the gods afflict us, we are obliged to

PHILOCTBTES: THE WOUND AND THE BOW 183

bear our misfortunes; but must people pity a man who
suffers through his own choice. The snake that bit
you was an agent of the gods, it was the guardian of
the goddess's shrine, and I swear to you by Zeus that
the sons of Asclepius will cure you if you let us take
you to Troy.' Philoctetes is incredulous, refuses.
'Since you gave ,me your word/ he says, 'take me
home again/ 'The Greeks will attack me and ruin
me.' Til defend you.' 'How can you?' 'With my
bow.' Neoptolemus is forced to consent.

But now Heracles suddenly appears from the skies
and declares to Philoctetes that what the young man
says is true, and that it is right for him to go to Troy.
He and the son of Achilles shall stand together like
lions and shall gloriously carry the day. The deus ex
machina here may of course figure a change of heart
which has taken place in Philoctetes as the result of
his having found a man who recognizes the wrong that
has been done him and who is willing to champion his
cause in defiance of all the Greek forces. His patron,
the chivalrous Heracles, who had himself performed so
many generous exploits, asserts his influence over his
heir. The long hatred is finally exorcised.

In a fine lyric utterance which ends the play, Philoc-
tetes says farewell to the cavern, where he has lain
through so many nights listening to the deep-voiced
waves as they crashed against the headland, and
wetted by the rain and the spray blown in by the win-
ter gales. A favorable wind has sprung up; and he
sails away to Troy.

184 THE WOUND AND THB BOW

It is possible to guess at several motivations behind
the writing of the Philoctctcs. The play was produced
in 409, when if the tradition of his longevity be
true Sophocles would have been eighty-seven; and
it is supposed to have been followed by the Oedipus
Coloneus, which is assigned to 405 or 406. The latter
deals directly with old age; but it would appear that
the Philoctetes anticipates this theme in another form.
Philoctetes, like the outlawed Oedipus, is impover-
ished, humbled, abandoned by his people, exacerbated
by hardship and chagrin. He is accursed : Philoctetes'
ulcer is an equivalent for the abhorrent sins of Oedipus,
parricide and incest together, which have made of the
ruler a pariah. And yet somehow both are sacred per-
sons who have acquired superhuman powers, and who
arc destined to be purged of their guilt. One passage
from the earlier play is even strikingly repeated in the
later. The conception of the wave-beaten promontory
and the sick man lying in his cave assailed by the
wind and rain turns up in the Oedipus Coloneus (Colo-
ncus was Sophocles' native deme) with a figurative
moral value. So the ills of old age assail Oedipus.
Here are the lines, in A. E. Housman's translation:

This man, as me, even so,
Have the evil days overtaken;
And like as a cape sea-shaken
With tempest at earth's last verges
And shock of all winds that blow,
His head the seas of woe,
The thunders of awful surges
Ruining overflow;

PHILOCTETES: THB WOUND AND THB BOW 185

Blown from the fall of even,
Blown from the dayspring forth,

Blown from the noon in heaven,
Blown from night and the North.

But Oedipus has endured as Philoctetes has endured
in the teeth of all the cold and the darkness, the
screaming winds and the bellowing breakers: the
blind old man is here in his own person the headland
that stands against the storm.

We may remember a widely current story about the
creator of these two figures. It is said that one of
Sophocles' sons brought him into court in his ad-
vanced old age on the complaint that he was no longer
competent to manage his property. The old poet is
supposed to have recited a passage from the play
which he had been writing: the chorus in praise of
Coloneus, with its clear song of nightingales, its wine-
dark ivy, its crocus glowing golden and its narcissus
moist with dew, where the stainless stream of the
Cephisus wanders through the broad-swelling plain
and where the gray-leaved olive grows of itself be-
neath the gaze of the gray-eyed Athena shining
Colonus, breeder of horses and of oarsmen whom the
Nereids lead. The scene had been represented on the
stage and Sophocles had been made to declare: ' If I am
Sophocles, I am not mentally incapable; if I am men-
tally incapable, I am not Sophocles/ In any case, the
story was that the tribunal, composed of his fellow
clansmen, applauded and acquitted the poet and
censored the litigating son. The ruined and humili-
ated heroes of Sophocles' later plays are still persons

l86 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

of mysterious virtue, whom their fellows are forced to
respect.

There is also a possibility, even a strong probability,
that Sophocles intended Philoctetcs to be identified
with Alcibiades. This brilliant and unique individual,
one of the great military leaders of the Athenians, had
been accused by political opponents of damaging the
sacred statues of Hermes and burlesquing the Eleusin-
ian mysteries, and had been summoned to stand trial
at Athens while he was away on his campaign against
Sicily. He had at once gone over to the Spartans,
commencing that insolent career of shifting alle-
giances which ended with his returning to the Athe-
nian side. At a moment of extreme danger, he had
taken over a part of the Athenian fleet and had de-
feated the Spartans in two sensational battles in 411
and 410, thus sweeping them out of the Eastern
Aegean and enabling the Athenians to dominate the
Hellespont. The Philoctetes was produced in 409, when
the Athenians already wanted him back and were
ready to cancel the charges against him and to restore
him to citizenship. Alcibiades was a startling exam-
ple of a bad character who was indispensable. Plu-
tarch says that Aristophanes well describes the Athe-
nian feeling about Alcibiades when he writes: 'They
miss him and hate him and long to have him back/
And the malady of Philoctetes may have figured his
moral defects: the unruly and unscrupulous nature
which, even though he seems to have been innocent
of the charges brought against him, had given them a
certain plausibility. It must have looked to the Athe-

PHILOCTETES: THB WOUND AND THE BOW 187

mans, too, after the victories of Abydos and Cyzicus,
as if he possessed an invincible bow. Plutarch says
that the men who had served under him at the taking
of Cyzicus did actually come to regard themselves as
undefeatable and refused to share quarters with other
soldiers who had fought in less successful engage-
ments.

Yet behind both the picture of old age and the line
in regard to Alcibiadcs, one feels in the Philoctetes a
more general and fundamental idea: the conception of
superior strength as inseparable from disability.

For the superiority of Philoctetes does not reside
merely in the enchanted bow. When Lessing replied
to Winckclmann, who had referred to Sophocles'
cripple as if he were an example of the conventional
idea of impassive classical fortitude, he pointed out
that, far from exemplifying impassivity, Philoctetes
becomes completely demoralized every time he has one
of his seizures, and yet that this only heightens our
admiration for the pride which prevents him from
escaping at the expense of helping those who have
deserted him. 'We despise/ say the objectors, 'any
man from whom bodily pain extorts a shriek. Ay, but
not always; not for the first time, nor if we see that the
sufferer strains every nerve to stifle the expression of
his pain; not if we know him otherwise to be a man of
firmness; still less if we witness evidences of his firm-
ness in the very midst of his sufferings, and observe
that, although pain may have extorted a shriek, it has
extorted nothing else from him, but that on the con-

188 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

trary he submits to the prolongation of his pain rather
than renounce one iota of his resolutions, even where
such a concession would promise him the termination
of his misery.'

For Andr6 Gide, in his Philocrttc, the obstinacy of
the invalid hermit takes on a character almost mysti-
cal. By persisting in his bleak and lonely life, the
Philoctetes of Gide wins the love of a more childlike
Neoptolemus and even compels the respect of a less
hard-boiled Odysseus. He is practicing a kind of
virtue superior not only to the virtue of the latter,
with his code of obedience to the demands of the
group, but also to that of the former, who forgets his
patriotic obligations for those of a personal attach-
ment. There is something above the gods, says the
Philoctetes of Gide; and it is virtue to devote oneself
to this. But what is it? asks Neoptolemus. I do not
know, he answers; oneself! The misfortune of his
exile on the island has enabled him to perfect himself:
'I have learned to express myself better,' he tells
them, 'now that I am no longer with men. Between
hunting and sleeping, I occupy myself with thinking.
My ideas, since I have been alone so that nothing, not
even suffering, disturbs them, have taken a subtle
course which sometimes I can hardly follow. I have
come to know more of the secrets of life than my
masters had ever revealed to me. And I took to telling
the story of my sufferings, and if the phrase was very
beautiful, I was by so much consoled; I even some-
times forgot my sadness by uttering it. I came to
understand that words inevitably become more beauti-

PHILOCTETES: THB WOUND AND THE BOW 189

ful from the moment they aire no longer put together

in response to the demands of others ' The Phil-

octetes of Gide is, in fact, a literary man: at once a
moralist and an artist, whose genius becomes purer
and deeper in ratio to his isolation and outlawry.
In the end, he lets the intruders steal the bow after
satisfying himself that Neoptolemus can handle it, and
subsides into a blissful tranquillity, much relieved
that there is no longer any reason for people to seek
him out.

With Gide we come close to a further implication,
which even Gide does not fully develop but which
must occur to the modem reader: the idea that genius
and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be in-
extricably bound up together. It is significant that the
only two writers of our time who have especially in-
terested themselves in Philoctetes Andre Gide and
John Jay Chapman should both be persons who
have not only, like the hero of the play, stood at an
angle to the morality of society and defended their
position with stubbornness, but who have suffered
from psychological disorders which have made them,
in Gide's case, ill-regarded by his fellows; in Chap-
man's case, excessively difficult. Nor is it perhaps
accidental that Charles Lamb, with his experience of
his sister's insanity, should in his essay on The Conva-
lescent choose the figure of Philoctetes as a symbol for
his own 'nervous fever/

And we must even, I believe, grant Sophocles some
special insight into morbid psychology. The tragic
themes of all three of the great dramatists the

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

madnesses, the murders and the incests may seem
to us sufficiently morbid. The hero with an incurable
wound was even a stock subject of myth not confined
to the Philoctctes legend: there was also the story of
Telephus, also wounded and also indispensable, about
which both Sophocles and Euripides wrote plays.
But there is a difference between the treatment that
Sophocles gives to these conventional epic subjects and
the treatments of the other writers. Aeschylus is more
religious and philosophical; Euripides more romantic
and sentimental. Sophocles by comparison is clinical.
Arthur Platt, who had a special interest in the sci-
entific aspect of the classics, says that Sophocles was
scrupulously up-to-date in the physical science of his
time. He was himself closely associated by tradition
with the cult of the healer Asclcpius, whose son is to
cure Philoctetes: Lucian had read a poem which he
had dedicated to the doctor-god; and Plutarch reports
that Asclepius was supposed to have visited his
hearth. He is said also to have been actually a priest
of another of the medical cults, Platt speaks particu-
larly of his medical knowledge which is illustrated
by the naturalism and precision of his description of
Philoctetes' infected bite.

But there is also in Sophocles a cool observation of
the behavior of psychological derangements. The
madness of Ajax is a genuine madness, from which he
recovers to be horrified at the realization of what he
has done. And it was not without good reason that
Freud laid Sophocles under contribution for the nam-
ing of the Oedipus complex since Sophocles had

PHILOCTETES: THB WOUND AND THE BOW

not only dramatized the myth that dwelt with the
violation of the incest taboo, but had exhibited the
suppressed impulse behind it in the speech in which he
makes Jocasta attempt to reassure Oedipus by remind-
ing him that it was not uncommon for men to dream
about sleeping with their mothers 'and he who
thinks nothing of this gets through his life most
easily/ Those who do not get through life so easily
are presented by Sophocles with a very firm grasp on
the springs of their abnormal conduct. Elcctra is what
we should call nowadays schizophrenic: the woman
who weeps over the urn which is supposed to contain
her brother's ashes is not ' integrated/ as we say, with
the fury who prepares her mother's murder. And
certainly the fanaticism of Antigone 'fixated,'
like Electra, on her brother is intended to be ab-
normal, too. The banishment by Jebb from Sophocles'
text of the passage in which Antigone explains the
unique importance of a brother and his juggling of the
dialogue in the scene in which she betrays her indif-
ference to the feelings of the man she is supposed to
marry are certainly among the curiosities of Victorian
scholarship though he was taking his cue from the
complaint of Goethe that Antigone had been shown
by Sophocles as acting from trivial motives and Goe-
the's hope that her speech about her brother might
some day be shown to be spurious. Aristotle had cited
this speech of Antigone's as an outstanding example of
the principle that if anything peculiar occurs in a play
the cause must be shown by the dramatist. It was
admitted by Jcbb that his rewriting of these passages

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

had no real textual justification; and in one case he
violates glaringly the convention of the one-line dia-
logue. To accept his emendation would involve the
assumption that Aristotle did not know what the
original text had been and was incapable of criticizing
the corrupted version. No: Antigone forgets her
fianc and kills herself for her brother. Her timid
sister (like Electra's timid sister) represents the nor-
mal feminine point of view. Antigone's point of view
is peculiar, as Aristotle says. (The real motivation of
the Antigone has been retraced with unmistakable
accuracy by Professor Walter R. Agard in Classical
Philology of July, 1937-)

These insane or obsessed people of Sophocles all dis-
play a perverse kind of nobility. I have spoken of the
authority of expiation which emanates from the
blasted Oedipus. Even the virulence of Electra's re-
venge conditions the intensity of her tenderness for
Orestes. And so the maniacal fury which makes Ajax
run amok, the frenzy of Heracles in the Nessus robe,
terribly though they transform their victims, can
never destroy their virtue of heroes. The poor dis-
graced Ajax will receive his due of honor after his sui-
cide and will come to stand higher in our sympathies
than Menelaus and Agamemnon, those obtuse and
brutal captains, who here as in the Philoctetes are obvi-
ously no favorites of 'Sophocles'. Heracles in his final
moments bids his spirit curb his lips with steel to keep
him from crying out, and carry him through his self-
destructive duty as a thing that is to be desired.

Some of these maladies are physical in origin, others

PHILOCTBTBS: THE WOUND AND THB BOW 193

are psychological; but they link themselves with one
another. The case of Ajax connects psychological dis-
order as we get it in Elcctra, for example, with the
access of pain and rage that causes Heracles to kill the
herald Lichas; the case of Heracles connects a poison-
ing that produces a murderous fury with an infection
that, though it distorts the personality, does not actu-
ally render the victim demented: the wound of Philoc-
tetes, whose agony comes in spasms like that of Her-
acles. All these cases seem intimately related.

It has been the misfortune of Sophocles to figure in
academic tradition as the model of those qualities of
coolness and restraint which that tradition regards as
classical. Those who have never read him remem-
bering the familiar statue are likely to conceive
something hollow and marmoreal. Actually, as C. M.
Bowra says, Sophocles is 'passionate and profound/
Almost everything that we are told about him by the
tradition of the ancient world suggests equanimity
and amiability and the enjoyment of unusual good
fortune. But there is one important exception: the
anecdote in Plato's Republic in which Sophocles is re-
presented as saying that the release from amorous de-
sire which had come to him in his old age had been
like a liberation from an insane and cruel master.
He has balance and logic, of course: those qualities
that the classicists admire; but these qualities only
count because they master so much savagery and mad-
ness. Somewhere even in the fortunate Sophocles
there had been a sick and raving Philoctetes.

And now let us go back to the Pbiloctctcs as a parable

2.94 THE WOUND AND THE BOW

of human character. I should interpret the fable as
follows. The victim of a malodorous disease which
renders him abhorrent to society and periodically de-
grades him and makes him helpless is also the master
of a superhuman art which everybody has to respect
and which the normal man finds he needs. A practical
man like Odysseus, at the same time coarse-grained
and clever, imagines that he can somehow get the
bow without having Philoctietes on his hands or that
he can kidnap Philoctetes the bowman without regard
for Philoctetes the invalid. But the young son of
Achilles knows better. It is at the moment when his
sympathy for Philoctetes would naturally inhibit his
cheating him so the supernatural influences in So-
phocles are often made with infinite delicacy to shade
into subjective motivations it is at this moment of
his natural shrinking that it becomes clear to him that
the words of the seer had meant that the bow would
be useless without Philoctetes himself. It is in the
nature of things of this world where the divine and
the human fuse that they cannot have the irresisti-
ble weapon without its loathsome owner, who upsets
the processes of normal life by his curses and his cries,
and who in any case refuses to work for men who have
exiled him from their fellowship.

It is quite right that Philoctetes should refuse to
come to Troy. Yet it is also decreed that he shall be
cured when he shall have been able to forget his
grievance and to devote his divine gifts to the service
of his own people. It is right that he should refuse to
submit to the purposes of Odysseus, whose only idea is

PHILOCTBTBS: THE WOUND AND THE BOW 195

to exploit him. How then is the gulf to be got over
between the ineffective plight of the bowman and his
proper use of his bow, between his ignominy and his
destined glory? Only by the intervention of one who
is guileless enough and human enough to treat him,
not as a monster, nor yet as a mere magical property
which is wanted for accomplishing some end, but
simply as another man, whose sufferings elicit his
sympathy and whose courage and pride he admires.
When this human relation has been realized, it seems
at first that it is to have the consequence of frustrating
the purpose of the expedition and ruining the Greek
campaign. Instead of winning over the outlaw,
Ncoptolemus has outlawed himself as well, at a time
when both the boy and the cripple arc desperately
needed by the Greeks. Yet in taking the risk to his
cause which is involved in the recognition of his com-
mon humanity with the sick man, in refusing to
break his word, he dissolves Philoctetes' stubborn-
ness, and thus cures him and sets him free, and saves
the campaign as well.