Mallock meets Carlyle

William Hurrell Mallock as I mentioned was the nephew of James Froude, the friend of Thomas Carlyle. In his memoirs he recounts his meeting with the great man.

My acquaintance with Mr. Bevan, however, and even that with Lord Houghton, were but minor experiences as compared with another meeting of a similar yet contrasted kind. At the time of which I speak there was one British author whose influence as a philosophic moralist eclipsed that of any of his contemporaries. This writer was Carlyle. His fame was then at its highest, and the moral consciousness of ultrapolite drawing rooms was being stirred to its well-dressed depths by his attack on "the dandies" in his book, Sartor Resartus, which many earnest and ornamental persons were accepting as a new revelation. I was myself sufficiently familiar with its pages, and, though some of them roused my antagonism, I could not deny their genius. One morning, during a brief visit to London, I received a note from Mr. Froude the historian, asking me to come to luncheon, and I duly arrived at his house, not knowing what awaited me. I presently learned that he was going to introduce me to Carlyle, and, as soon as luncheon was over, he walked me off to Chelsea. In a fitting state of awe I found myself at last in the great philosopher's presence. When we entered his drawing room he was stooping over a writing table in the window, and at first I saw nothing but his back, which was covered with a long, shapeless, and extravagantly dirty dressing gown. When he rose to meet us his manners were as rough as his integument. His welcome to myself was an inarticulate grunt, unmistakably Scotch in its intonation; and his first act was to move across the room to the fireplace and light a "churchwarden" pipe by sticking its head between the bars. As I watched him perform this rite, I noticed that close to the fender was a pair of very dirty slippers. To me these things and proceedings were so many separate shocks, the result of my reflections being this: If you represent fame, let me represent obscurity. But worse was still to come. It was presently proposed that we should all go out for a walk, and as soon as we were in the open air, the philosopher blew his nose in a pair of old woolen gloves. I here saw at once an illustration of the chapter in Sartor Resartus in which the author denounced what he christened "The Sect of the Dandies," as described and glorified by Bulwer Lytton in Pelham. Illustration could go no farther.

(from Memoirs)

The exquisite aesthetic shudder of those details - the gloves of Carlyle and the socks of Swinburne drying on the fender after his walk on the common. (cf. Dinner at the Pines )

Boon Friends fall out. Wells and James, it would seem, and in this.....

Wells in Boon had fun but lost a friend. Henry James was not amused. The chapter in which he ‘slags’ him has the Mallockian conceit of a number of literary gents foregathering in a country house for a state of literature congress. They do so under their own names. Orage of the New Age arrives too late and is locked out:

Mr. Orage, the gifted editor of the New Age, arriving last, is refused admission. The sounds of the conflict at the gates do but faintly perturb the conference within, which is now really getting to business, but afterwards Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by a dexterously plied rake and incurably embittered, makes his existence felt by a number of unpleasant missiles discharged from over the wall in the direction of any audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets into a point of vantage in a small pine-tree overlooking the seaward corner of the premises, and from this he contributes a number of comments that are rarely helpful, always unamiable, and frequently in the worst possible taste.

Boon (the purported author of the Boon papers) has George Moore and Henry James go for a walk. Can you identify the butt of this pastiche?

“Owing it as we do,” he said, “very, very largely to our friend Gosse, to that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times almost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot altogether—altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so extreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently, stand out; yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of distress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone, at all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro, in a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially going to and fro rather than in any of the completed senses of the word getting there, that does so largely constitute the aggregations and activities we are invited to traverse. My poor head, such as it is and as much as it can and upon such legs—save the mark!—as it can claim, must, I suppose, play its inconsiderable part among the wheels and the rearings and the toots and the whistles and all this uproar, this—Mm, Mm!—let us say, this infernal uproar, of the occasion; and if at times one has one’s doubts before plunging in, whether after all, after the plunging and the dodging and the close shaves and narrow squeaks, one does begin to feel that one is getting through, whether after all one will get through, and whether indeed there is any getting through, whether, to deepen and enlarge and display one’s doubt quite openly, there is in truth any sort of ostensible and recognizable other side attainable and definable at all, whether to put this thing with a lucidity that verges on the brutal, whether our amiable and in most respects our adorable Gosse isn’t indeed preparing here and now, not the gathering together of a conference but the assembling, the meet, so to speak, of a wild-goose chase of an entirely desperate and hopeless description.”

If that wasn’t enough to put a dent in his dickey, Boon in his own voice, and here he has the hearty support of many readers, declares:

“But James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn’t find things out. He doesn’t even seem to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to accept things—elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts etiquettes, precedences, associations, claims. That is his peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then—elaborates. He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type. Or else he would have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his wonderful brother…. But here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen—you know those insects?—kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown. It’s incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was reading him only yesterday ‘The Golden Bowl’; it’s dazzling how never for a moment does he go through.”

The bridge being blown and their being no hope of a cockleshell pontoon, Wells/Boon finishes:

“The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins…. His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is aboutis always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string…. Like his ‘Altar of the Dead,’ with nothing to the dead at all…. For if there was they couldn’t all be candles and the effect would vanish…. And the elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made endurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection has made Henry James erects palatial metaphors…. The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast metaphors….

One feels, how shall I put it a certain satisfaction that, what was probably James’s assessment of Wells as a common little man and a vulgar futurist, a rotter really, was borne out. Great fun, but.

The New Republic by William Hurrell Mallock (intro)

Dorothy Richardson could not bring herself to mention the name of the author of A Human Document evincing a mini spite that was the general strategy in dealing with William Hurrell Mallock. In the circles she moved in socialism would have been an established truth and sovereign remedy for the ills of society. Mallock opposed this and moreover proposed the reconstruction of religion as sanative. His Romish tendency came from his family connection with Tractarianism. His uncle was Hurrell Froude who died young but had together with John Keble begun the movement. Hurrell’s brother James Anthony the historian and ardent imperialist, pal of Thomas Carlyle and his biographer , was also the author of the controversial novel The Nemesis of Faith (1849),and the sort of Victorian who did in one lifetime what in these effete times would take three.

The New Republic which Mallock published at the age of 28 was an examination in dialogue form of the ideology of the great and good of the 19th.Century. The Dramatis Personae in transparent disguise are Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, William Kingdom Clifford, Violet Fane, William Money Hardinge, Professor Thomas Huxley, Benjamin Jowett, W.H. Mallock, Walter Pater, Edward Bouvarie Pusey, John Ruskin and John Tyndall. This book was instrumental in the scuppering of Walter Pater’s chance of the Oxford Professorship of Poetry as it intimated a connection between him and Hardinge aka ‘the Balliol bugger’.

I’m reading the book at the moment so I will reserve a fuller, in my languid definition of ‘fuller’, treatment, for later. As I mentioned Knox, also Balliol but not you know, considered it essential and continued the swingeing of Huxley fils in Broadcast Minds. It’s remarkable how those ideas that Mallock (Balliol) dramatises continue to thrive like perennial weeds.

Sample:

'Sin, Lord Allen,' said Mr. Storks,(Thomas Huxley) 'is a word that has helped to retard moral and social progress more than anything. Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so; and the superstitious and morbid way in which a number of entirely innocent things have been banned as sin, has caused more than half the tragedies of the world. Science will establish an entirely new basis of morality; and the sunlight of rational approbation will shine on many a thing, hitherto overshadowed by the curse of a hypothetical God.'
' Exactly so,' exclaimed Mr. Saunders (William Kingdom Clifford) eagerly. ' Now, I'm not at all that sort of man myself,' he went on, 'so don't think it because I say this.'
Everyone stared at Mr. Saunders In wonder as to what he could mean.
‘We think it, for Instance,' he said, ‘a very sad thing when a girl is as we call it ruined. But it is we really that make all the sadness. She is ruined only because w^e think she is so. And I have little doubt that that higher philosophy of the future that Mr. Storks speaks of will go far, some day, towards solving the great question of women's sphere of action, by its recognition of prostitution as an honourable and beneficent profession.'

Read Me/Write Me by Mallock and Richardson

Last night I read a bit of Mallock’s A Human Document: A Novel and I find that Richardson’s reference to it has depth as a primer on ‘How to read me’. The preamble is that a novelist has been given a packet of papers purporting to be the imaginary continuation of a current memoir by a Marie Bashkirtcheff. This packet, like a large scrapbook, came from Countess D. and it contains fragments of an ill-written novel that breaks down into convincing memoir, poetry, letters; fragments, as Yeats wrote, out of which we create a superhuman, mirror resembling dream. The novelist if he accepts this task must draw together all this flotsam and ullage into the shape of a novel that must not be recognisable as true to the life of its protagonist. He, Mallock imaginaire, is intrigued when told that a portrait that he has admired in the boudoir of a Hungarian castle is that of the lady who has assembled these papers which contain the truth of her life which is unsuspected by anyone around her.

How very Jamesian. Did he ever meet him at a country house party? No but he met the brother at Cambridge, Mass.

When the delivery of my addresses at Columbia University was completed I went from New York to Cambridge and remained there for ten days. Harvard in many ways reminded me of our own Cambridge. The professors, among whom I made many charming acquaintances, had not only the accent, but also the intonation of Englishmen. They had with them more, too, of the ways of the outer world than is commonly found in the university dons of England. Notable among these was Prof. William James, with whom I was already familiar through his singularly interesting book, Varieties of Religious Experience—to me very much more interesting than his brother's later novels.

(from Memoirs of Life and Letters)

Dorothy Richardson and William Hurrell Mallock

My intuition about the relative unimportance of the tracing of incident for a deep reading of Pilgrimage (key of Miriam) was borne out by a passage which I came across today. To set the scene: Miriam is in her room reading a book called A Human Document: A Novel no author mentioned. It is by William Hurrell Mallock and was published in 1892. There’s a copy of it on Internet Archive (all 3 Volumes) as well as his most famous book The New Republic which Ronald Knox considered essential reading. Interesting chap - Mallock
Anyway Miriam is reading:

She sat long that night over her fire dipping into the strange book, reading passages here and there ; feeling them come nearer to her than anything she had read before. She knew at once that she did not want to read the book through; that it was what people called a tragedy, that the author had deliberately made it a tragedy; something black and twisted and painful, painful came to her out of every page; but seriously to read it right through and be excited about the tragic story seemed silly and pitiful. The thought of Mrs. Corrie and Joey doing this annoyed her and impatiently she wanted to tell them that there was nothing in it, nothing in the things the author wanted to make them believe; that was fraud, humbug . . . they missed everything. They could not see through it, they read through to the happy ending or the sad ending and took it all seriously.
She struggled in thought to discover why it was she felt that these people did not read books and that she herself did. She felt that she could look at the end, and read here and there a little and know ; know something, something they did not know. People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all ? It was a sort of trick, a sell. Like a puzzle that was no more fun when you had found it out. There was something more in books than that . . . even Rosa Nouchette Carey and Mrs. Hungerford, something that came to you out of the book, any bit of it, a page, even a sentence—and the " stronger " the author was the more came. That was why Ouida put those others in the shade, not, not, not because her books were improper. It was her, herself somehow. Then you read books to find the author ! That was it. That was the difference . . . that was how one was different from most people. . .

(from Honeycomb )

She may be right. Personally I don’t want to know the ending before I know the ending but once known it does not affect my rereading. Honeycomb was published in 1917 and this passage was very likely a retort to the puzzlement of the general reader at the open-ended inconclusiveness of the novels. Note the irony of her approval of the transmission of personal energy by the popular novelists Carey and Hungerford. I haven’t read any of Ouida yet. Mallock seems readable:

It was a singular record, not only on account of its contents, but of the manner in which it seemed to have been composed. The greater part of the narrative was just what I had been led to expect—an imaginary Journal of Marie Bashkirtcheff, during an imaginary continuation of her life. This was written in French ; and there was an obvious effort, at first, at reproducing the tone and manner of the
original. It was an effort, however, which was not very successful; and the authoress soon abandoned it, or rather forgot to make it. As she did so, she became more and more interesting; until gradually, instead of reading the literary exercise of an amateur, I seemed to be listening to the voice of a living woman who was confessing to me. The very defects of her style, which, though generally clear and straightforward, yet often broke down with a sort of pathetic helplessness, contributed to this illusion. I felt each time this happened, that a woman's eyes were looking at me, and that her lips, as she spoke, had a deprecating smile on them, or that they trembled. Had she written far better the effect would have been far less vivid.

(from A Human Document: A Novel)
A Human Document