Kenelm Chillingly by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton

 Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions was published in 1873 and was the last of his works written in a very productive career which covered many different genres.  ‘Kenelm’ is in that unusual mode, the quest tale.  The clue to this characterisation of the novel is given in the choice of name for our hero.  The family are foregathered to decide on a name for the child whose birth has edged out of the running for the title to the lands and the nobility of the Chillingly another remote cousin whose expectations seemed secure.  This would be Chillingly Gordon and in the fullness of time  Sir Gordon.  It is that ‘Sir’ that is the problem.  It requires something of a more noble ring than Sir Peter the daddy of the child.  He has always felt overborne by the ordinariness of the name Peter even though the Chillinglys have done no more than survived and stuck to their lands from the time of the Heptarchy.

“All the disorders and revolutions that have occurred in England since the Heptarchy have left the Chillinglys the same race in the same place. Somehow or other the Norman Conquest did not despoil them; they held fiefs under Eudo Dapifer as peacefully as they had held them under King Harold; they took no part in the Crusades, nor the Wars of the Roses, nor the Civil Wars between Charles the First and the Parliament. As the dace sticks to the water and the water sticks by the dace, so the Chillinglys stuck to the land and the land stuck by the Chillinglys. Perhaps I am wrong to wish that the new Chillingly may be a little less like a dace.”

The dace by the way are the Three Fishes Argent on the Chillingly escutcheon.  There you have the mock heroic tone of the novel, its wit.

Consultation of the family tree brings forth the suggestion from the parson Chillingly who has the family living:

“I have it! I have it!” cried the Parson. “Here is a descent from Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley. Sir Kenelm Digby! No finer specimen of muscular Christianity. He fought as well as he wrote; eccentric, it is true, but always a gentleman. Call the boy Kenelm!”

That’s one noble Kenelm a swashbuckling hero of the 16th.century the man who among other thing had the recipe for the cure of wounds by sympathetic magic.  The aggravating sword must be treated by the application of a potion and thereby the wound itself was speedily healed.  In the 19th.century there is another Kenelm Digby a well known author not mentioned in the book who wrote a treatise on chivalry as the guide to the code of the modern gentleman.  This book was entitled  The Broad-Stone of Honour  published in 1823.  It sold massively and any young sprig of the aristocracy such as Bulwer-Lytton would have read it or have it thrust upon him.

There then is the clef, as it were, to the progress of the hero Kenelm Chillingly.  He will find his way in life by means of a quest.  Will he find joy and love this knight of the Sorrowful Countenance?   First he must be schooled in pugilism in order to subdue the bullying ways of Butt at school.  This training stands to him as he will later have to protect and defend maidens in distress.  Other forms of instruction in the best modern ways of cynicism and progress in the 19th.century will leave him a man without a true spiritual foundation and deficiency in joy.  Mivers Chillingly, a remote cousin/uncle has just the plan. Mivers is the editor of a very successful literary magazine called ‘The Londoner’ and one of his contributors is Welby:

 He is an elegant scholar, an effective writer, much courted by public men, a thorough gentleman, has a pleasant house, and receives the best society. Having been once taken in, he defies any one to take him in again. His experience was not bought too dearly. No more acute and accomplished man of the world. The three hundred a year or so that you would pay for Kenelm would suit him very well. His name is Welby, and he lives in Chester Square.”

What Welby teaches the young Kelelm is a refined gentlemanly sort of melioristic materialism but so far ahead of the general received enlightened opinion that when he goes to Cambridge he is bored by the stale opinions of his fellow students.  He takes a good degree, wins prizes for latin verses and precipitated into the world is at a loss.

 We now find him at 21 years of age a strapping lad about to set out on his journey in life.  But where to?  

It may here be said that Kenelm was not without great advantages of form and countenance. He was tall, and the youthful grace of his proportions concealed his physical strength, which was extraordinary rather from the iron texture than the bulk of his thews and sinews. His face, though it certainly lacked the roundness of youth, had a grave, sombre, haunting sort of beauty, not artistically regular, but picturesque, peculiar, with large dark expressive eyes, and a certain indescribable combination of sweetness and melancholy in his quiet smile.

The orotundity of expression is not mere fustian to clothe banal observation but a deliberate dignity due a story of quest. How shall he begin?  In the best way, by happenstance.  He encounter a wandering minstrel on the high road composing a verse as he ambles:

“Black Karl looked forth from his cottage door, 

   He looked on the forest green; 

  And down the path, with his dogs before, 

   Came the Ritter of Neirestein: 

  Singing, singing, lustily singing, 

   Down the path with his dogs before, 

  Came the Ritter of Neirestein.”

After his conversation with the minstrel Kenelm decides to walk away from home and ramble on the country roads for a while and discover whether there be anything to this thing called love which the singer of the Germanic ballad proposes as an aim in life.  He must do it in disguise so as not to attract attention though his mien and manner are a key to his rank.  The letter he writes to his father:

 My dear father, I go in quest of adventure like Amadis of Gaul, like Don Quixote, like Gil Blas, like Roderick Random; like, in short, the only people seeking real life, the people who never existed except in books. I go on foot; I go alone. I have provided myself with a larger amount of money than I ought to spend, because every man must buy experience, and the first fees are heavy.

What follows is so charming, witty, ironic withal, that a mere itemisation would be bathetic.  There are maidens to rescue, observations on the fatuity of the worldly, gentlemanly virtue that stays within the bourne of possibility, and a lady fair indeed a Fairy Queen.  I do believe that it is one of those fabulous books called an undiscovered classic.  Please read it.  

Novels by Edward Bulwer-Lytton - general note.

 

So I’ve read two novels by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton,LucretiaandA Strange Story.My bottom line, a significant metaphor when considering the Victorian three volume novel, would be that the form exacerbated what would normally be a positive: Lytton’s facility.  He would have been a better writer if he had found it more difficult to write.  His prolixity would have been checked and the disappointing habit of creating interesting characters and then leaving them marooned in volume one might have been avoided.  Had he hoarded his darlings like Trollope fully expanding their intricate motivations the novels would have been the better for it.  In ‘Strange’ for instance the ruler of her exclusive neighbourhood Mrs. Colonel Poyntz gave a promise which Lytton didn’t keep. Was she in love with Dr. Allen the protagonist and narrator.  Dr. Allen is too much of a gentleman to speculate, he couldn’t possibly comment.  Easily a Trollope novel there with elaborate humiliation, exquisite comeuppance, and extra added cringe.

I readLucretiafirst and that novel with an omniscient author gave Lytton too much scope for moral commentary.  The tell and show ratio was unwieldy and crippling.  However there is a pleasant level of reality in the depiction of a vengeful woman and was again a pleasant counter to the usual Victorian treatment of the female of the species.  The triumvirate of evil Lucretia, Dalibard and Verney his son are superb.  How evil originates in pride and domination and manifesting in psychopathic cruelty, and murder, leads in the end to a grisly fate is the story in brief.  There is ample room in the three volume format for filler unrestrained by authorial ignorance but along with that are many good descriptions and ruminations.

The usual criticism of Lytton’s novels is that he is euphuistic and prone to fustian and that is true judged from the perspective of a taste formed by modern literature  that values the simple declarative sentence.  I consider the novels to bear the same relation to the realistic novel as the opera does to drama. Their language has a more expansive, ample scope than the normal narrative.  Right off in‘Lucretia’Dalibard brings his son by the actress mother who has betrayed him to her execution by guillotine.

Cytherea and the Graces, what relentless fate has conducted thee to the shambles? Butterfly of the summer, why should a nation rise to break thee upon the wheel? A sense of the mockery of such an execution, of the horrible burlesque that would sacrifice to the necessities of a mighty people so slight an offering, made itself felt among the crowd. There was a low murmur of shame and indignation. The dangerous sympathy of the mob was perceived by the officer in attendance. Hastily he made the sign to the headsman, and as he did so, a child’s cry was heard in the English tongue,—“Mother! Mother!” The father’s hand grasped the child’s arm with an iron pressure; the crowd swam before the boy’s eyes; the air seemed to stifle him, and become blood-red; only through the hum and the tramp and the roll of the drums he heard a low voice hiss in his ear “Learn how they perish who betray me!”

Say what you will, not to descend into bathos after such a start is a triumph of characterisation.  Put aside that trifling tape measure enjoy the grotesquerie. I did. 

More anon on an author that is unduly neglected. 

Reality and Its Reflection/ The face in the Mirror

 

The reflection of a face in a mirror is different from face.  As it imitates the mirror.  The face which does not depend on the mirror (for its existence) is also different from its reflection.  Similarly, the reflection of the Self in the ego is alsoregarded (as different from the pure Self) like that of the face which is different from the face.  The pure Self is considered to be different (from Its reflection) like the face (which is different from its own (reflection)).  In fact, however, the Self and Its reflection  are free from (real) distinction (between each other  like the face and its reflection).

This is a master  analogy that in itself can become a bone of contention  and interpretation as though it were a real attempt at ontology and not a focus on a very  narrow aspect  of a difficult subject in an attempt to clarify it.  I call it a master analogy in that it is like a universal key that lays out the lineaments of a problem for its explication.

The key words therefore are regarded and considered.  These modifiers are what the last sentence refers to.  The mirror analogy on one level can give a sense of the distinction between Self and ego, the error of the  ego being regarded as the Self when it is merely a reflection of the Self.  On the other hand when we go past the level of analogies to ultimate,neti neti ,reality we adhere to the non-dual unity of being.

As I mentioned this analogy is used by the controvertor to deflect and distract.

(Objection).  Some say that the reflection in the ego (as distinct from the Self) is the individual soul. (But if one asks how the reflection which is not a reality can experience anything at all, the objector answers that) the reflectionisa reality as the shadows of things are known to be realities according to the Smriti.  Not only so, there is another reason also (why a shadow should be regarded as a reality).  For a man in a shadow feels refreshingly cool.

(Other Objections).  Some say that the individual soul is a part of Pure Consciousness.  Others hold that it is a modification of the same.  Still  others are of  opinion that the ego  together with the reflection of Pure Consciousness in it is the individual soul.  Others again think that it is the independent ego (neither a part nor a modification,) which is the experiencer of this mundane existence.

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Excuse this long citation which serves to demonstrate the error of taking a device for a description.  A device is useful as a way of clarifying the relationship of the parts of a faculty psychology; mind, ego, intellect etc.  Inneti neti, reality this ‘naming of parts’ is transcended.

To summarize: whereas we  can easily distinguish between the face in the mirror, a reflection, and our face which continues apart from the mirror, the reflection of the Self in the ego is not so distinguished.  We take the reflection as the primary  reality.  This is the natural thing to do or seems to be so.  We are in fact alienated from our true nature, the unity of being - sat cit ananda.  The mystical breaks that spell.  Our faith is that our real condition must break out as a natural irruption or as a permanent condition.  This shraddha or faith is described by Shri Aurobindo as:

"the soul's belief in the Divine's existence, wisdom, power, love, and grace"

Clearing the Ground for Theory: Sankara

 

Why do we accept that the world is directly knowable?  Because it is the natural thing to do.  It is the default position that obviates all the deeper mysteries that Idealism brings in its train.  Does the object that is not known blink out of existence, like the book in the cupboard, or the six penny bit dropped on the top of Mount Everest.  That red barn, is it a facade or does it have depth?

Yes real enough for government work, in this case the navigator in  the world.  What about that fellow, this pilgrim, this apparently continuous entity that plots and plans, feels remorse and hunger, and doubt?  On what do we base that sense of self-identity?  Hume’s question was a good one - How does a series of conscious states become conscious of itself as a series?  Is ‘it just does’ a good answer or can memory be applied as a binding, bundling force that integrates?  Seems unsatisfactory to hold that memory can create its own subject.

What then are we left with -  deeper mysteries, conundrums or the beginning of a necessary clearing of the ground?  Shankaracarya thought so.  He begins in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras with the aporia of perception.  How does that out there come to be in some sense in here and at the same time we are certain that the ‘inner’ account is a true one  within the technical boundaries of the capacity for error?

In the XVIII chapter of ‘Upadesa Sahasri’Sankara reviews the various theories of self-identity and agency.  Who is conscious, what is conscious?  Take the use of ‘I’ in sentences as a base line of reality.  Avoid the fata morgana of the Buddhist scholiasts of the void, the Sunyavadins.  Work with what you are given not as an apparently given.  Move from sensation to reason and get to the bottom of things.

Theory has as its etymology ‘theoros’ Gk. spectator.  Wittgenstein said if I remember correctly - ‘don’t think look and see’.  Start there with the ground cleared of engaging mysteries.

Faith and Belief

 Books fall down from the shelf, not really, but occasionally get plucked from where they have been hiding.  The Way of Transcendence by Alistair Kee left to me by a friend and never consciously opened was there lurking.  Kere (1937 - 2011) was a radical theologian  and in his Introduction promotes the idea that the modern man bereft of the beliefs which inform the NT might have faith in Jesus Christ as the Way but be without belief in the divinity.  His epistemological underpinning for this dichotomy seems to be belief requires evidence, justified true belief, Humean assurance and so forth.  To make Christianity more palatable it must be trimmed of such like fat as Virgin Birth, miracles, Son of God etc.  Of course this is absurd.  For instance is it intelligible to believe in the evidence of your senses?  Where does belief come into that?  George Moore was thought to have made a profound statement when he said “Its raining outside and I don’t believe it”.  That latter expression was the catch phrase of a sitcom grumpy old man when confronted by the anomalous that did not accord with expectation.  It does not cohere, it is incongruent,  

Anyway if belief is a world viewish stock that you are born into, are you stuck with it?  Can you achieve it?  Can you test it?  When Jesus said ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you’ was He offering a verbal placebo?  People have gotten down on their knees and tried it and lo they received an answer.  A personal belief has been established that is counter to rational scrutiny.   De profundis clamavi ad te domine is not the same as the knock on the door of the deserted mansion in Walter de la Mare’s poem:

The Listeners

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grass

Of the forest's ferny floor;

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

"Is there anybody there?" he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller's call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

'Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

"Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word," he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Cousinage in 'Lucretia' by Lord Bulwer-Lytton

 Well there it is again.  All this talk of Pakistanis and cousin marriage and the cost to the health service forgetting of course that it was a commonplace phenomenon in Victorian times.  Women were sheltered in the respectable upper classes and in the big families of that time brothers and sisters and their offspring mingled frequently considering it acceptable. After all Albert and Victoria were first cousins.  To blend the fortunes of the clan was considered prudent consolidation.

In the novel by Lord Bulwer-Lytton Lucretia set in the beginning of the 19th.century there is an extraordinary amount of cousinage dangereux voisinage.  Lytton spends chapter 1 unravelling it. Lucretia the presumptive heir is being suggested to Vernon by Sir Miles as a wife.  They are first cousins.

“There is many an earl with a less fortune than the conjoined estates of Vernon Grange and Laughton Hall.”

Vernon the exhausted rake, with only a few years of life left in him at the age of 40 is keen on another, a Mary.

Lucretia the proud and imperious beauty, has set her cap at Mainwaring, a talented man of the merchant class whom Sir Miles would dismiss as a spouse for the noble family.  He after all ejected his sister who married someone of a lower order after her first husband the father of Lucretia died.  That union produced a daughter called Susan, the half sister.  Staying with Susan in the house of a kindly parson is Ardworth the recently graduated with a plain degree from Oxford. He is the son of the sister of Susan’s father.  Another first cousin. 

Maiwaring likes Susan but without a fortune and a profession was unable to declare his love and therefore moved away from  her neighbourhood.  It was Lucretia who declared her readiness to be the bride of Mainwaring and she is suggesting that Sir Miles will in any case die soon having had several strokes already.  There is a suggestion of the Borgias in this lassie.

That’s the first chapter and Lytton sets it out in a genial, rambling, easy, brachiating through the family tree sort of way as an expert creator of scenes and settings.  Its not in the least painful to take in and the elements of enjoyable smooth melodrama which by degrees engage you in permutations of your own.   

I am going to read this book a chapter at a time and if I ever finish it I’ll let you know.  

Desmon Fennell: Heresy / About Being Normal

 

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey, than others, and detected faults and follies, which escape vulgar observation. And the pleasure of wantoning in common topicks is so tempting to a writer, that he cannot easily resign it; a train of sentiments generally received enables him to shine without labour, and to conquer without a contest. It is so easy to laugh at the folly of him who lives only in idea, refuses immediate ease for distant pleasures, and, instead of enjoying the blessings of life, lets life glide away in preparations to enjoy them; it affords such opportunities of triumphant exultation, to exemplify the uncertainty of the human state, to rouse mortals from their dream, and inform them of the silent celerity of time,  that we may believe authors willing rather to transmit than examine so advantageous a principle, and more inclined to pursue a track so smooth and so flowery, than attentively to consider whether it leads to truth.

(from The Rambler by Samuel Johnson no.2 March 2nd. 1749)

Heresy is a collection of articles nailed to the door of the Church of Reason which is located in the mythical domain of Dublin 4.  Fennell considers himself to have been cancelled avant la lettre by the minions and myrmidons of this statelet but if you check his Wikipedia page many a scribbler and intellectual manque would be pleased for such cancellation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Fennell

If you read the proem to that article you will see that the animus toward him still survives in the carrels of the liberal mind.  Fintan O’Toole the accepted public intellectual does not get an advisory.  Norms, normal normalling.  Anyway my point is that D.F. published a lot of book, taught in many institutions of higher learning, appeared on national television frequently and was generally a figure on the intellectual landscape.  The problem for him was that he wanted to be a public intellectual discussing the great ideas with his peers, if such there be, the great ideas that would revitalise the nation and help it find its soul.  The nation for him was a core concept, not just the citizens granted by paper fiat.D.F.  would probably not accept Bloom as part of the Irish nation being a second generation blow in.

“Do you know what a nation is”, says John Wyse.

“A nation is the same people living in the same place,” says Bloom. “Or also living in different places”

The present dilution of the concept and the practice of a sovereign independent nation is the salient feature of our modern European predicament.  Bizarrely opposing this has become the attribute of the right wing, nay the 'far right’. Fennell wrote about the collapse in morale of the white nations leading to extinction.  No one wants to breed into a senseless civilisation with norms cobbled together by liberals:

a dying breed

State sponsored abortion he saw as the massacre of the innocent by moral imbeciles...."simultaneously soaking millions of women and thousands of men in debilitating, personal guilt, so that they become incapable of resisting, or even protesting against, the use of their taxes and of the profits on their consumption to prepare the general massacre of mankind.”  Our present drifting into the serious danger of atomic warfare is indicative of the connection to the death wish.  Genocide, abortion, euthanasia are the commonplace phenomena of the 21st. century.  Fennell’s last book About Being Normal covers the whole range of his oeuvre with extracts from all his major publications with autobiographical notes.  It is available free to read on archive.org

About Being Normal

That book is a fine summation of his life’s work and the consistent swimming against the tide of liberal hegemony.  He could be wrongheaded too.  His diatribe against the ‘famous Seamus’ Heaney is excerpted.  A silly escapade.

Death has been good to Desmond.  His ideas that were stifled by virtual suppression are now current among thinking ‘au contraire’ people. Worth reading.