A fatal cheapness

Hilary Mantel has reconciled me to the idea of historical fiction, if not every expression of it, but I still find myself in sympathy with these cogent objections from Henry James. He was writing in 1901 to his friend Sarah Orne Jewett, who had sent him a copy of her latest work, a historical novel. 

The ‘historical novel’ is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the difficulty of the job is inordinate and that a mere escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the invention, the representation of the old CONSCIOUSNESS, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose mind half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent. You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman or rather fifty – whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force – and even then it’s all humbug.

I think the fiction of our own age, historical and otherwise, suffers greatly from just this preoccupation with little facts. Few writers capture the consciousness or mind of our modern world, let alone a past one. Most are content with a proliferation of objects. These are what seem 'real' in our age, whereas to James they were less real than the inner world of which they survived as relics. That's why his writing remains unapproachably rich, and ours seems condemned to cheapness.

Weep you no more, sad fountains

Here’s another poem from Sense and Sensibility. The words are of unknown origin, but John Dowland set them to lute music in the early 17th century. In the film, Marianne sings them to music written by Patrick Doyle.

Weep you no more, sad fountains;

What need you flow so fast?

Look how the snowy mountains

Heaven’s sun doth gently waste.

But my sun’s heavenly eyes

View not your weeping,

That now lies sleeping

Softly, now softly lies

Sleeping.

Sleep is a reconciling,

A rest that peace begets:

Doth not the sun rise smiling

When fair at even he sets?

Rest you then, rest, sad eyes,

Melt not in weeping,

While she lies sleeping

Softly, now softly lies

Sleeping.

There is nothing lost

Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility is full of poetry. Cowper, Shakespeare, Spenser: all the poets the Dashwood sisters would have read, and Marianne in particular would have relished. Towards the end, as she recovers from her great disappointment, she listens tranquilly as Colonel Brandon reads from a small brown volume the size of a hymn book. We only hear a few lines:

Nor is the earth the less, or loseth ought,
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.

I always liked them but never recognised them. They come from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book V Canto II), which, though unfinished, consisted of over 2000 ‘Spenserian’ stanzas of nine lines each. (Colonel Brandon, then, probably reads from an abridged edition, or perhaps a book of elegant extracts.) They are part of a dialogue between the heroic knight Artegall and a wicked Giant who wants to practice a kind of radical equality that would raze the mountains and hold back the sea from encroaching on the land. Artegall’s answer is a lovely embrace of mutability: though everything returns to dust or fades away, there is after all nothing lost.

Of things vnseene how canst thou deeme aright,
Then answered the righteous Artegall,
Sith thou misdeem’st so much of things in sight?
What though the sea with waues continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all:
Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought,
For whatsoeuer from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide vnto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.

Likewise the earth is not augmented more,
By all that dying into it doe fade.
For of the earth they formed were of yore;
How euer gay their blossome or their blade
Doe flourish now, they into dust shall vade.
What wrong then is it, if that when they die,
They turne to that, whereof they first were made?
All in the powre of their great Maker lie:
All creatures must obey the voice of the most hie.

An Unexpected Journey

Robert Fitzgerald's poem for Epiphany, which appeared in The New Yorker in January 1967, seems to place the biblical tale of the Magi in a realm Tolkein might have recognised. When Fitzgerald wrote his poem, The Fellowship of the Ring was in its 15th impression, and Rembrandt Films had just produced an animated adaptation of The Hobbit (whose liberties border on the Jacksonian). Middle-earth evoked as much fantastic longing in that turbulent time as it seems to do in ours. Fitzgerald's little poem suggests such longing, and its satisfaction, is never far from any one of us. 

Immortal brilliance of presage

In any dark day’s iron age

May come to lift the hair and bless

Even our tired earthliness

 

And sundown bring an age of gold,

Forged in faerie, far and old,

An elsewhere and an elfin light,

And kings rise eastward in the night.

Collect for the Sunday after Christmas

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin: Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.