Sooner or later I too may passively take the print Of the golden age—why not? I have neither hope nor trust
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint
Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
tennyson, Maud
When Charles at last found himself on the broad steps of the Freeman town mansion, it was already dusk, gas-lamped and crisp. There was a faint mist, compounding the scent of the spring verdure from the Park across the street and the old familiar soot. Charles breathed it in, acrid and essential London, and decided to walk. The hansom that had been called for him was dismissed.
He walked with no very clear purpose, in the general direction of his club in St. James; at first beside the railings of Hyde Park, those heavy railings whose fall before a mob (and under the horrified eyes of his recent interlocutor) only three weeks later was to precipitate the passing of the great Reform Bill. He turned then down Park Lane. But the press of traffic there was disagreeable. Mid-Victorian traffic jams were quite as bad as modern ones—and a good deal noisier, since every carriage wheel had an iron tire to grate on the granite setts. So taking what he imagined would prove a shortcut, he plunged into the heart of Mayfair. The mist thickened, not so much as to obscure all, but sufficiently to give what he passed a slightly dreamlike quality; as if he was a visitor from another world, a Candide who could see nothing but obvious explanations, a man suddenly deprived of his sense of irony.
To be without such a fundamental aspect of his psyche was almost to be naked; and this perhaps best describes what Charles felt. He did not now really know what had driven him to Ernestina’s father; the whole matter could have been dealt with by letter. If his scrupulous-ness now seemed ab-surd, so did all this talk of poverty, of having to regulate one’s income. In those days, and especially on such a fog-threatening evening, the better-off traveled by carriage; pedestrians must be poor. Thus almost all those Charles met were of the humbler classes; servants from the great Mayfair houses, clerks, shop-people, beggars, street sweepers (a much commoner profession when the horse reigned), hucksters, urchins, a prostitute or two. To all of them, he knew, a hundred pounds a year would have been a fortune; and he had just been commiserated with for having to scrape by on twenty-five times that sum.
Charles was no early socialist. He did not feel the moral enormity of his privileged economic position, because he felt himself so far from privileged in other ways. The proof was all around him. By and large the passers and passed did not seem unhappy with their lots, unless it was the beggars, and they had to look miserable to succeed. But he was unhappy; alien and unhappy; he felt that the enormous apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian species. His step slowed at this image of a superseded monster. He actually stopped, poor living fossil, as the brisker and fitter forms of life jostled busily before him, like pond amoeba under a microscope, along a small row of shops that he had come upon.
Two barrel-organists competed with one another, and a banjo-man with both. Mashed-potato men, trotter-sellers (“Penny a trotter, you won’t find ‘otter”), hot chestnuts. An old woman hawking fusees; another with a basket of daffodils. Watermen, turncocks, dustmen with their backlap caps, mechanics in their square pillboxes; and a plague of small ragamuffins sitting on doorsteps, on curbs, leaning against the carriage posts, like small vultures. One such lad interrupted his warming jog—like most of the others, he was barefooted—to whistle shrill warning to an image-boy, who ran, brandishing his sheaf of colored prints, up to Charles as he stood in the wings of this animated stage.
Charles turned hastily away and sought a darker street. A harsh little voice sped after him, chanting derisive lines from a vulgar ballad of the year
Why don’cher come ‘ome, Lord Marmaduke, An’ ‘ave an ‘ot supper wiv me
An’ when we’ve bottomed a jug o’ good stout
We’ll riddle-dee-ro-di-dee, ooooh
We’ll riddle-dee-ro-di-ree.
Which reminded Charles, when at last he was safely es-caped from the voice and its accompanying jeers, of that other constituent of London air—not as physical, but as unmistakable as the soot—the perfume of sin. It was less the miserable streetwomen he saw now and then, women who watched him pass without soliciting him (he had too obvious-ly the air of a gentleman and they were after lesser prey) than the general anonymity of the great city; the sense that all could be hidden here, all go unobserved.
Lyme was a town of sharp eyes; and this was a city of the blind. No one turned and looked at him. He was almost invisible, he did not exist, and this gave him a sense of freedom, but a terrible sense, for he had in reality lost it—it was like Winsyatt, in short. All in his life was lost; and all reminded him that it was lost.
A man and a woman who hurried past spoke French; were French. And then Charles found himself wishing he were in Paris—from that, that he were abroad ... traveling. Again! If I could only escape, if I could only escape ... he mur-mured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphori-cally shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.
He passed a mews, not then a fashionable row of bijou “maisonettes” but noisily in pursuit of its original function: horses being curried and groomed, equipages being drawn out, hooves clacking as they were backed between shafts, a coachman whistling noisily as he washed the sides of his carriage, all in preparation for the evening’s work. An as-tounding theory crossed Charles’s mind: the lower orders were secretly happier than the upper. They were not, as the radicals would have one believe, the suffering infrastructure groaning under the opulent follies of the rich; but much more like happy parasites. He remembered having come, a few months before, on a hedgehog in the gardens of Winsyatt. He had tapped it with his stick and made it roll up; and between its erect spines he had seen a swarm of disturbed fleas. He had been sufficiently the biologist to be more fascinated than revolted by this interrelation of worlds; as he was now sufficiently depressed to see who was the hedgehog: an ani-mal whose only means of defense was to lie as if dead and erect its prickles, its aristocratic sensibilities.
A little later he came to an ironmonger’s, and stood outside staring through the windows at the counter, at the ironmonger in his bowler and cotton apron, counting candles to a ten-year-old girl who stared up at him, her red fingers already holding high the penny to be taken.
Trade. Commerce. And he flushed, remembering what had been offered. He saw now it was an insult, a contempt for his class, that had prompted the suggestion. Freeman must know he could never go into business, play the shopkeeper. He should have rejected the suggestion icily at its very first mention; but how could he, when all his wealth was to come from that very source? And here we come near the real germ of Charles’s discontent: this feeling that he was now the bought husband, his in-law’s puppet. Never mind that such marriages were traditional in his class; the tradition had sprung from an age when polite marriage was a publicly accepted business contract that neither husband nor wife was expected to honor much beyond its terms: money for rank. But marriage now was a chaste and sacred union, a Christian ceremony for the creation of pure love, not pure convenience. Even if he had been cynic enough to attempt it, he knew Ernestina would never allow such love to become a secondary principle in their marriage. Her constant test would be that he loved her, and only her. From that would follow the other necessities: his gratitude for her money, this being morally blackmailed into a partnership ...
And as if by some fatal magic he came to a corner. Filling the end of a dark side street was a tall lit facade. He had thought by now to be near Piccadilly; but this golden palace at the end of a sepia chasm was to his north, and he realized that he had lost his sense of direction and come out upon Oxford Street .. . and yes, fatal coincidence, upon that pre-cise Oxford Street occupied by Mr. Freeman’s great store. As if magnetized he walked down the side street towards it, out into Oxford Street, so that he could see the whole length of the yellow-tiered giant (its windows had been lately changed to the new plate glass), with its crowded arrays of cottons, laces, gowns, rolls of cloths. Some of the cylinders and curlicues of new aniline color seemed almost to stain the air around them, so intense, so nouveau riche were they. On each article stood the white ticket that announced its price. The store was still open, and people passed through its doors. Charles tried to imagine himself passing through them, and failed totally. He would rather have been the beggar crouched in the doorway beside him.
It was not simply that the store no longer seemed what it had been before to him—a wry joke, a goldmine in Austral-ia, a place that hardly existed in reality. It now showed itself full of power; a great engine, a behemoth that stood waiting to suck in and grind all that came near it. To so many men, even then, to have stood and known that that huge building, and others like it, and its gold, its power, all lay easily in his grasp, must have seemed a heaven on earth. Yet Charles stood on the pavement opposite and closed his eyes, as if he hoped he might obliterate it forever.
To be sure there was something base in his rejection—a mere snobbism, a letting himself be judged and swayed by an audience of ancestors. There was something lazy in it; a fear of work, of routine, of concentration on detail. There was something cowardly in it, as well—for Charles, as you have probably noticed, was frightened by other human beings and especially by those below his own class. The idea of being in contact with all those silhouetted shadows he saw thronging before the windows and passing in and out of the doors across the street—it gave him a nausea. It was an impossibil-ity.
But there was one noble element in his rejection: a sense that the pursuit of money was an insufficient purpose in life. He would never be a Darwin or a Dickens, a great artist or scientist; he would at worst be a dilettante, a drone, a what-you-will that lets others work and contributes nothing. But he gained a queer sort of momentary self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to be nothing—to have nothing but prickles—was the last saving grace of a gentle-man; his last freedom, almost. It came to him very clearly: If I ever set foot in that place I am done for.
This dilemma may seem a very historical one to you; and I hold no particular brief for the Gentleman, in 1969 far more of a dying species than even Charles’s pessimistic imagination might have foreseen on that long-ago April evening. Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal. There runs through this succession of superseded forms we call existence a certain kind of afterlife. We can trace the Victorian gentle-man’s best qualities back to the parfit knights and preux chevaliers of the Middle Ages; and trace them forward into the modern gentleman, that breed we call scientists, since that is where the river has undoubtedly run. In other words, every culture, however undemocratic, or however egalitarian, needs a kind of self-questioning, ethical elite, and one that is bound by certain rules of conduct, some of which may be very unethical, and so account for the eventual death of the form, though their hidden purpose is good: to brace or act as structure for the better effects of their function in history.
Perhaps you see very little link between the Charles of 1267 with all his newfangled French notions of chastity and chasing after Holy Grails, the Charles of 1867 with his loathing of trade, and the Charles of today, a computer scientist deaf to the screams of the tender humanists who begin to discern their own redundancy. But there is a link: they all rejected or reject the notion of possession as the purpose of life, whether it be of a woman’s body, or of high profit at all costs, or of the right to dictate the speed of progress. The scientist is but one more form; and will be superseded.
Now all this is the great and timeless relevance of the New Testament myth of the Temptation in the Wilderness. All who have insight and education have automatically their own wilderness; and at some point in their life they will have their temptation. Their rejection may be foolish; but it is never evil. You have just turned down a tempting offer in commer-cial applied science in order to continue your academic teaching? Your last exhibition did not sell as well as the previous one, but you are determined to keep to your new style? You have just made some decision in which your personal benefit, your chance of possession, has not been allowed to interfere? Then do not dismiss Charles’s state of mind as a mere conditioning of futile snobbery. See him for what he is: a man struggling to overcome history. And even though he does not realize it.
There pressed on Charles more than the common human instinct to preserve personal identity; there lay behind him all those years of thought, speculation, self-knowledge. His whole past, the best of his past self, seemed the price he was asked to pay; he could not believe that all he had wanted to be was worthless, however much he might have failed to match reality to the dream. He had pursued the meaning of life, more than that, he believed—poor clown—that at times he had glimpsed it. Was it his fault that he lacked the talent to communicate those glimpses to other men? That to an outside observer he seemed a dilettante, a hopeless amateur? At least he had gamed the knowledge that the meaning of life was not to be found in Freeman’s store.
But underlying all, at least in Charles, was the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and most especially an aspect of it he had discussed—and it had been a discussion bathed in optimism—with Grogan that night in Lyme: that a human being cannot but see his power of self-analysis as a very special privilege in the struggle to adapt. Both men had seen proof there that man’s free will was not in danger. If one had to change to survive—as even the Freemans conceded—then at least one was granted a choice of methods. So much for the theory—the practice, it now flooded in on Charles, was something other.
He was trapped. He could not be, but he was.
He stood for a moment against the vast pressures of his age; then felt cold, chilled to his innermost marrow by an icy rage against Mr. Freeman and Freemanism.
He raised his stick to a passing hansom. Inside he sank back into the musty leather seat and closed his eyes; and in his mind there appeared a consoling image. Hope? Courage? Determination? I am afraid not. He saw a bowl of milk punch and a pint of champagne.
