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Lolita

and what can and can’t be done by style

All page references are to the Penguin Classics edition, 2000

What are we to think of Humbert Humbert and his relations with
Lolita? Humbert Humbert himself wants it to be thought a case—
despite everything—of love: “I loved her. It was love at first sight, at
last sight, at ever and ever sight.” And while “everything” includes
some pretty awful things—like driving aimlessly around America for
a year just to have her always available—it does also include
expressions of remorse and shame which we could take at face
value.
All the most obvious ways a writer might use to condemn him,
Nabokov (I presume) deliberately avoids: Lolita isn’t a virgin and is
far from innocent when Humbert Humbert starts with her; no
“grooming” is needed; she’s the one who, when it comes to it, takes
the initiative (“Okay, here is where we start”); he doesn’t throw her
over when he’s done with her; she runs away from him but not to
escape “abuse”—she runs off with another middle-aged man, his
rival, Quilty, who doesn’t have any illusions about “love”; and then,
when we see her a few years later, married and pregnant, she doesn’t
seem to have come to any harm. Anyone less traumatized or in need
of counselling it would be hard to imagine. Humbert Humbert has
been been much more affected by it all. Pregnant or not, “nymphet”
or not (and, by now, it’s definitely not) he wants her to come back to
him, for “happily ever after”.
But Nabokov, it seems to me, doesn’t pass over the obvious
means of condemning Humbert Humbert in order to justify him and
his understanding of himself. It seems to me more a matter of self-
denial on Nabokov’s part, more like a display of virtuosity: he’ll
present him for our interest and judgement, without recourse to such
obvious means, through his style. Nabokov is less interested in what
Humbert Humbert does than the sense he tries to convince us we
ought to make of what he does. Nabokov’s novel is literary criticsm,
and it’s Humbert Humbert’s autobiography it’s criticism of.
So the question, the problem of style—what you can and cannot
do by it—what Humbert Humbert is trying to do with it, what
Nabokov is doing with it at the back of him and what the reader can
find to do with what they’re both doing—is raised right at the start of
the book and never put down. Nabokov, you might say, rubs our
noses in it—but not in what you might expect, child abuse and
murder: it’s Humbert Humbert’s style he rubs our noses in:

Ah, Electra, what did it matter with such grace? I
remember at the very first game I watched being drenched
with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilation.
My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the

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ample and springy start of the service cycle when there
would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital
web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit,
burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up
with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high
in the zenith of the powerul and graceful cosmos she had
created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a
clean resounding crack of her golden whip. (p. 231)

That this is someone who knows about mock heroic and has
probably read The Rape of the Lock doesn’t make it any better. It’s
that that makes it so bad. And it’s certainly not any better when he’s
describing, near the start, how, with her in his lap, he works himself
up and gets himself off without her knowing. And I don’t think his
self-criticism or remorse is any better either. It’s all touched—
touched? it’s saturated—with literariness.
In the Afterword to the Penguin edition (a very literary
Afterword) Craig Raine—though for the most part breathless with
admiration (“That truck. That Mattress.”)—does quote a passage he
doesn’t admire, a piece, he says, of “fashion writer’s pastel prose ...
wine-writer’s winsome ‘precision’ ”:

Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would
be a slow infusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a
platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading
the upper-edge of a two-dimensional, dove-grey cloud
fusing with the distant amorous mist. (p. 152)

But that isn’t so different from most of the rest of the book. It would
be better called a “poetic“ than fashion- or wine-writer’s prose. After
all, the fashion-writers didn’t invent it, they got it, like Humbert
Humbert, off the poets. It’s “fine writing”, advertising itself as such,
Humbert Humbert’s (or, as Raine has it, Nabokov’s) usual stuff,
pressed a bit further towards self-parody. If it’s straight fashion-
writer’s prose, offered for our admiration, then how much else in the
book is fashion-writer’s prose too? The whole book comes to bits, so
much writerly-writerly, artsy-fartsy stuff that wants ... stuffing ...
somewhere, especially when, as you might guess, the material this
self-conscious writerliness is devoted to is the writer’s own feelings,
“the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful,
maddening world—nymphet love”. And if all those beautiful
descriptions (mostly) beautifying the effects on the writer of
nymphet beauty are not just Humbert Humbert’s but Nabokov’s too,
then reading the book is being locked up in Humbert Humbert’s
head. Bad enough that it’s the head of a pervert but ... one this
literary?
If we’re not meant to recognise the fashion-writer in Humbert
Humbert, even when it’s not as obtrusive as it is above, the book’s
sunk. Either Humbert Humbert is constantly being judged by his
style, through the power of Nabokov’s style, or else he isn’t being

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judged at all, simply isn’t seen, is just Nabokov himself, barely—just
for form’s sake—disguised, and unintelligent, mightily unintelligent
about nothing so much as—guess what?—writing.
There’s, obviously, a real contradiction between the subject or
action of Lolita and the style in which Humbert Humbert tells the
story—not a contradiction, more a collision. The action of Lolita—
“child abuse” and the murder by one abuser of another—could
hardly be … well … uglier; the style more elaborately and self-
consciously literary, even beautiful (or perhaps mock-beautiful). The
main character in the book—the abuser and murderer—is not just
narrating the story but writing it down, as a book. But he doesn’t just
happen to be putting it into a book, like some amateur. He is a writer
and his style is a writer’s style but not just that of any practised or
professional writer; it’s a very literary style, a writerly style drawing
attention to its own writerliness. And what is his rival as a lover but a
rival writer too (author of The Little Nymph and Fatherly Love)?
Someone he wants to outlive long enough to be the one who
immortalizes the loved-one in art (which seems to be a secondary
reason for shooting him, eight or nine times).
“You can always count on a murderer,” Humbert Humbert says
of himself, right at the start, “for a fancy prose style.” But the style in
which he describes himself murdering Quilty isn’t as fancy as all
that. Mostly, it’s matter of fact, touched by the fanciful:

“Get out, get out of here,” he said coughing and
spitting; and in a nightmare of wonder, I saw this blood-
spattered but still buoyant person get into his bed and
wrap himself up in the chaotic bedclothes. I hit him at
very close range through the blankets, and then he lay
back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations
formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and
vanished. (p. 304)

But that’s not so fancy. This is fancy:

Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood;
And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature
For ruin’s wasteful entrance (II.i)

Now, that is fancy; and just the sort, I should think, you can count on
a murderer for, the sort that makes—as the witches say—fair foul,
and foul fair: fancy as self-justifying, dressing up.
Humbert Humbert does have a fancy style of course, and—like
Macbeth’s—it belongs to what he is. But whereas Macbeth is a
murderer and it’s murder he dresses up, Humbert Humbert is a
paedophile; murder is merely something he happens to do, as a
jealous paedophile; “murderer”, in him, is only a sort of secondary
characteristic. And what his fancy style dresses up is not what he
does to Quilty (which he doesn’t seem to think needs it) but what he

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has done to Lolita, which, he recognises, does. What he wants to
obtain, it seems, is justification by style:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue, taking a trip of three steps
down the palate, to tap at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four feet
ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at
school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my
arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In
point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I
not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a
princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years
before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You
can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose
style. (p. 9)

Yes, except that, unlike Macbeth, it’s not as a murderer that he tries
to make the worse seem the better but as a pervert, child abuser and
paedophile. He dresses up his perversion as love, and dresses up his
record of it as art. That he can make art out of it, after all, is, he
claims, what distinguishes him from Quilty, who is his rival as both
lover and artist. His book ends:

And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between and H.
H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of
months longer, so as to have him make you live in the
minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and
angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets,
the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and
I may share, my Lolita. (p. 309)

“Style, in Macbeth, casts a stroboscopic light on the action,” a
friend (who had been a motor-mechanic) memorably said in the first
week at university. In Lolita, it seems to me, it’s the action that casts
the stroboscopic light on the style:

I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug,
and had not abandoned hope that the first might still
consolidate her sleep. I started to move toward her, ready
for any disappointment, knowing I had better wait but
incapable of waiting. My pillow smelled of her hair. I
moved toward my glimmering darling, stopping or
retreating every time I thought she stirred or was about to
stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my
thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the
surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of
that breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the

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wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of
sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught
myself drifting into a melancholy snore. Mists of
tenderness enfolded mountains of longing. (p. 131)

And so on. And it’s not surprising if, in the next paragraph,
Humbert Humbert should say:

If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings
of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that
I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a
brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through
which I crept were the patrimonies of poets—not crime’s
prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy
would have been all softness, a case of internal
combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat,
even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might
gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that
would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. And
so, in between tentative approximations, with a confusion
of perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of
moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush, I would dream I
regained consciousness, dream I lay in wait. (p. 131)

It isn’t moonlight, though, he’s tried to drug or a bush he’s lying
in wait for, and, as he himself says, it’s not a glimmer he wants to
taste. Either he’s been reading the wrong poets or (like those Nazis
reputed to listen to Mozart and read Goethe) he’s been reading the
right ones in the wrong way. In the Survival of English, Ian
Robinson speculates about the possibility of someone being so
responsive to certain things in Macbeth that he’s inspired to commit
murder. Couldn’t we say of Humbert Humbert that it’s certain things
in nineteenth century poetry that have inspired him to be a
paedophile? Could he do what he does without this “poetic” style of
his to describe it in? If he’s not just a brutal scoundrel, then hardly. I
think, myself, he is a brutal scoundrel (that that’s how Nabokov is
showing him to us) but that he has turned himself into one by the
magical power of style—that same power that hides from him (and
many readers) what he is.
Humbert Humbert can mimic the way other people talk about
children but he doesn’t take himself very seriously when he does.
The effect is somewhere between, or some mixture of, self-deception
and cynicism:

I did everything in my power to give my Lolita a really
good time. How charming it was to see her, a child
herself, showing another child some of her
accomplishments, such as for example a special way of
jumping rope. (p.163)

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Then follows a description of the scene, in which “the pavonine sun
was all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees … of that
oculate paradise” and the phrase “my pet” is (as applied to people)
given a genuinely original turn. Here is a poetry that is all Humbert
Humbert’s own, made from the clash between the fancy and the only
too plain:

flashing a smile to the shy, dark-haired page girl of my
princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers deep into Lo’s
hair from behind, and then gently but firmly clasping them
around the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet
to our small home for a quick connection before
dinner. (p. 164)

He gives another familiar phrase, “weeping in my arms”, a similar,
grim new turn. A paragraph of this:

One summer noon, just below timberline, where heavenly
hued blossoms that I would fain call larkspur crowded all
along a purly mountain brook, we did find, Lolita and I, a
secluded romantic spot … (p. 168)

is followed by: “the operation was over, all over, and she was
weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits
of moodiness that had become so frequent with her”. Just then they
are nearly caught. And Humbert Humbert is surprised how coolly
and courageously he deals with the situation:

With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweat-stained
distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of
plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast’s
flanks pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the
tamer!) I made Lo get up … (p. 169)

But as well as such peculiar shows of heartlessness, there are
Humbert Humbert’s, more conventional, expressions of pity for
Lolita and condemnation of himself to be taken into account: she is
an “orphan”, a “lone child”, an “absolute waif”; she has an
“expression of helplessness”, “sobs in the night—every night, every
night”, “has nothing”, suffers a “demoralizing idleness”; he is a
“brute”, “maniac”, “ignoble”, “despicable”, “brutal”, “turpid”,
“base”, a “monster” with a “monstrous appetite”, a “foul lust”; what
he has done is an “iniquity”, a “monstrous indulgence”; their lives
together are a “bestial cohabitation”, a “parody of incest”, a
“nightmare”, “total evil”; his heart ought to “rot”; he feels “shame”,
“remorse”, “guilt”, a “sense of sin”. All of which sounds very fine
indeed.
And all of which is very fine-sounding but nothing more. Firstly,
when she is with him, none of it, except in one regard, makes a blind

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bit of difference to anything he does or doesn't do. The exception is
that regularly pity becomes tenderness and tenderness becomes
appetite; and once his appetite is aroused he never fails to satisfy it if
he possibly can. Here he is exercising restraint:

And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and
two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if upon an
examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her
body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed
her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of
blood. She was shaking from head to foot. She
complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebrae—
and I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent
would. Giving up all hope of intercourse … (p. 240)

Secondly, in context—embedded in the Humbertian style—that
vocabulary of concern and judgement looks very different. It
becomes “just a way of talking”, when not of the common or garden
kind—“I am only a brute”—then of a peculiarly Humbertian kind:

Please, reader: … Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do
not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in
the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.
After all, there is no harm in smiling. (p. 129)

A couple of years before, under the guidance of an
intelligent, French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a
moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a
Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish
cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the
existence of a Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings
in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with
the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely
obliged to him and the great Institution he represented.
Alas … (p. 282)

This is a way of talking that has no other purpose, you might say,
than to take up words like “iniquity” and “sin” in order to empty
them of their meaning.It’s art (Humbert Humbert’s, I mean, not
Nabokov’s) as a sort of penicillin against the spread of morality and
religion: art that exists in order to permit.
In order to answer that question we began with—What are we to
think of Humbert Humbert?—what, crucially we have to consider is
not so much what he did and felt in the past as what he is doing now,
in the writing of his book. What are we to think of the sense he is
making now of what he did then? Take, for instance, the following
claim that he felt remorse for hitting Lolita. The immediate
provocation for the blow is his suspicion that she’s plotting to run
away from him (but perhaps we ought also to take into account that
when they are driving around, as they generally are, he is generally

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on the look out for places where they can stop and make a
connection):

I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the
morning had dumped its littler of light on an empty table;
Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a
word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught
her smack on her hot hard little cheek-bone.
And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of
sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of
sensual reconciliation. (p. 227)

Firstly, the remorse Humbert Humbert felt at the time isn’t just
anybody’s remorse, yours or mine say; it’s a remorse with a very
specialised and Humbertian character, one readily transformed into
sensual reconciliation via sweet atonement and groveling love, not
just painless but precedent to pleasure. (It gives you a buzz not a
sting.) And then, what is he doing in the last sentence of the previous
paragraph but reliving, with present satisfaction, the blow which
preceded the pleasure? No remorse then, the opposite of remorse
now. It’s the language of judgement turned against itself. Humbert
Humbert, like Macbeth, has got a sort of perverse creativity.
Even when wanting to be served from the applecart of common
(Anglo-saxon?) decency, Humbert Humbert can’t help trying to
upset it. Describing his last meeting with Lolita, towards the end of
the book, he claims that his love for her has now been purified of all
past impurities and become unselfish, but he makes the claim in the
following typically Humbertian style:

What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my
heart, mon grand pêché radieux, had dwindled to its
essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and
cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the
court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout
my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved
my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with
another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still
auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine;
Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part
où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? The wilds of
Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers
would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and
crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be
tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with
tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the
mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita. (p.
278)

“Yeah, right.” No wonder Humbert Humbert thinks the court might
jeer. Firstly, whenever Lolita has been available to him, as she now

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isn’t, he has proved himself incapable of behaving anything but
selfishly. Secondly, all his other moralizings having been so much
Humbertian humbug, why should we think this any different?
Thirdly, and finally, was any claim to virtue more blatantly self-
falsifying? It’s altogther too hammy; and it’s too much himself, not
Lolita, he’s interested in. He’s performing his own feelings,
admiringly. And those feelings: what, quite, are they feelings for, her
or her lovely young velvety delicate delta? And that mad tenderness,
when it’s aroused, where is it going to lead, if not towards what is
lovely and young and velvety and delicate and deltoid, even when
tainted and torn?
And there’s something very (could we say?) fishy about that
opening, especially the bit of French. First of all, Humbert Humbert
isn’t actually quite claiming that the pêché among his vines, all vice
subtracted, has dwindled to its essence now (in the present in which
the judge may threaten to clear the court), only that it had when he
last saw Lolita. So, who’s to say it mightn’t (given a bit of
pampering) flourish again as it used to? After all, the essence
remains. And then what grows among the vines of my heart—when
the only thing I can find wrong with them is that they’re tangled—
can’t, surely, (other things being equal) be so bad, can it? And what
was it again? Those adjectives, grand et radieux, make it sound, on
the whole, pretty damned fine, especially in French. And then there’s
that fishy noun: pêché. The only (common?) correct form which that
spelling corresponds to is the past participle of the verb to fish for
but (a) Humbert Humbert is plainly using it as a noun and (b)
fishing, however declined, doesn’t look as if it’s got a lot to do with
it. The only sense I can make, is that it’s a portmanteau word which
artificer Humbert has made by combining péché—sin—and pêche—
peach—a combination which, even if it doesn’t add up to a peach of
a sin, still looks both ways. And then it is in the present that he calls
the cancelling of its vice the dwindling of his pêché, which suggests
he’s maybe more attached to the vice than he likes to think, or wants
us to think, he is.
Whatever—I don’t think you could say he’s a very straight or
reliable witness.
But then, within a page or so of the end, comes this passage, in
which he says, in plain English, that what is most painful to him is
not that he has lost her but that she, through him, has lost her
childhood:

As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a
melodious unity of sounds rising like a vapor from a small
mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley.
One could make out the geometry of the streets between
the blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees,
and a serpentine stream, and the rich ore-like glitter of the
city dump, and beyond the town, roads criss-crossing the
crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great
timbered mountains. But even quieter than those quietly

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rejoicing colors—for there are colors and shades that seem
to enjoy themselves in good company—both brighter and
dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that
vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased
for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood
wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these
sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these
came from the streets of the transparent town, with the
women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard
was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that,
and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended
voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near,
frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and
then, as if released, an almost inarticulate spurt of vivid
laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy
wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to
distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I
stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty
slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of
demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the
hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from
my side but the absence of her voice from that concord.
(p. 169)

That seems to me a very wonderful bit of writing, to have Keats and
Tennyson in it but, now, as a strength, helping to make a vivid and
moving recreation of something stirred in the parent in any of us
approaching a school playground. I don’t think it really amounts to
the summing up of Humbert Humbert one might look for, not
directly anyway. What could? (His own attempt to judge himself
there—“my foul mouth”—is the one false note.) And even such
force as a judgement its last observation has, seems to me derivative
of or secondary to something else about the passage, which makes its
real force. Humbert Humbert has spoken very easily of his nymphet
paradise of little slave flowers and tiny entertainers; well, here, he is
given a glimpse of another paradise, one he is shut out of. The real
force of the passage does, after all, come from his sight of his own
loss, not of Lolita true, but of a paradise of ordinary, everyday
fatherhood. Such knowledge as he, and we, gain here of what he has
deprived Lolita of is a sort of inference from that other more vividly
created knowledge of what he himself is deprived of.
Craig Raine says (though not entirely confidently) that the
passage is “false and sentimental”. What he likes is the tricksy and
artificial, the Humbertian: “ ‘tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester
and the fadedly feminine Miss Fabian … ’ ” [His] applauding
italics”, followed by mine, barracking his.

Alice Stuckey

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Lear, Tolstoy, and Orwell (the fool)

or

“I came for an argument”

(Orwell page references are to his Essays, Penguin, 2000)

Aristotle argues that the action of a play is analogous to the
trajectory of an argument. If we reverse this idea, the argument of an
essay is analogous to the action of a story; the essayist is telling a
story about his or her critical response to a book, an event, or
whatever subject is at hand. I read stories like I read criticism, I read
criticism like I read stories.
And I have serious problems with the way Orwell reads stories.
The stories in his essays are all alike, hardly varying from topic to
topic, from author to author, or from subject to subject. Reading
Orwell’s essays is like being Bill Murray’s character in the movie
Groundhog Day who has to relive the same experiences over and
over. Why are all the stories of his essays so similar? Why does he
keep repeating the same arguments, regardless of what he is arguing
about? When the books or problems he is commenting on change,
shouldn’t his arguments show some change?
The problem Orwell’s essays present are summed up in a passage
from “Why I Write”:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936
has been written, directly or indirectly, against
totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I
understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like
our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such
subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another.
It is simply a question of what side one takes and what
approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of
one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting
politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and
intellectual integrity. (p. 5)

I agree with Orwell’s description of his purpose, and I agree that no
writer can avoid thinking and writing about the age in which they
live. The difficulties begin when I consider the idea of taking sides,
following approaches, and being conscious of one’s political bias.
The question is whether taking sides, following approaches, being
self-conscious, and always being aware of one’s political bias helps
or hinders. In his essay on “Obscenity and Pornography”, D. H.
Lawrence argues that extreme self-consciousness is a form of mental

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masturbation, which only results in “a vicious cycle of analysis and
impotent criticism”, and is a “sign of self-abuse”. He says, “the
outstanding feature of such consciousness is that there is no real
object, there is only subject … . The author never escapes from
himself … . It is self absorption made public”. [1] Orwell’s criticism
is plagued by self absorption, and the stories he reads reveal more
about him than the authors he is writing about. Orwell’s arguments
are not really arguments at all, but a form of self-exposure and a
strange form of exhibitionism.
In “Inside the Whale”, Orwell describes reading as an act of
identification. He argues that “When you read certain passages in
Ulysses you feel that Joyce’s mind and your mind are one,” which
provokes a feeling of “He knows all about me … he wrote this
especially for me” (p. 103). He emphasizes this in a later passage by
suggesting that Miller’s books provoke a “feeling that all [the
character’s] adventures have happened to yourself”, and “these
things are happening to you” (p. 104). The act of identification is
often quite complicated because it can take the form of a reaction
against, a revealing antipathy. The people we set up in opposition to
ourselves or the ideas we criticize in others often contain
characteristics we want to deny in ourselves. When Orwell writes,
“In a political and moral sense I am against [Swift, Dickens, Tolstoy,
or whatever author you want to insert here] so far as I can understand
him” (p. 383), he is showing me the places where I want to begin.
How many of the following observations do not apply to Orwell
himself: “one could infer from the rest of [Gulliver’s Travels] that,
like Tolstoy and like Blake, [Swift] hates the very idea of studying
the processes of nature” (p. 375); “The sexual unhappiness of [Swift
and Tolstoy] was not of the same kind, but there was this in
common, that in both of them a sincere loathing was mixed up with a
morbid fascination” (p. 380); “And the more you are in the right, the
more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking
likewise” (415)? But how much bullying does Orwell himself do?
He’s always saying—especially when he’s denouncing
totalitarianism and fascism—what “must", “ought” or “should” be
thought and done; and those who agree with him are “right thinking
men”, those who do not, “idiots”.
Orwell assert several times in his essays that there is “no kind of
evidence or argument by which one can show that [any] writer is
good” (p. 404). But he does praise and blame, so he must find some
things good and other things bad. And, in fact, the standards by
which he does so are very clear: they reflect his own writings;
Orwell praises according to how much or how little other people’s
writings are like his own. In effect, what he is looking for is himself,
and he objects when he does not find a mirror. What he most
obviously and repeatedly takes other writers to task for are: not
having constructive suggestions (pp. 37, 47, 75, 155), not having a
system to replace the current system (pp. 37, 47) and not writing
about current events (p. 115). This is an example from his essay on
Dickens:

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The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost
exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any
constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks
the law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what
he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily
the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make
constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens’s
attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear
sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or
that he believes it would make very much difference if it
were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much
society as ‘human nature’. (p. 37)

No, Dickens does not mean what he means. With the qualification
about the novelist’s business out of the way, all of Orwell’s remarks,
read upside down or backwards, relate directly to himself; it is his
business to make constructive suggestions, to destroy the existing
order and to have society as his target—to make a difference—and it
ought to be Dickens’s too. He is a “politician” who knows what is
wrong with society and makes the suggestions necessary to correct
it; Dickens is just a “moralist” who does not understand what he
attacks (p. 75).
Orwell recognizes that Dickens is not like him, and objects to the
difference. It does not seem to occur to him that what does not aim to
make particular concrete changes could ever be superior to or go
deeper than what does. He speaks on behalf of “democratic
Socialism” but without acknowledging that there might be dangers in
adhering to a system of any kind, whether socialism, fascism,
hedonism, liberalism, or otherwise. He does not seem to recognize
that Dickens’s hostility to utilitarianism in Hard Times is not limited
simply to that one system, but to “isms” and “ologies”’ as a whole.
He certainly does not feel the force of Mrs Gradgind’s last words:

You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother.
Ologies of all kinds, from morning to night. If there is any
Ology left, of any description, that has not been worn to
rags in this house, all I can say is, I hope I shall never hear
its name. [2]

Orwell’s implicit standard—not just in his criticism of Dickens
but throughout his writings—is: Does this make for a definite
improvement in the social system? It should be contrasted with what
Leavis says, about the same time, in “Literature and Society” (what
he says about Marxist theories might just as well apply to theories in
general). For Leavis, criticism

stresses not economic and material determinants, but
intellectual and spiritual, so implying a different

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

conception from the Marxist of the relation between the
present of society and the past, and a different conception
of society. It assumes that, enormously – no one will deny
it – as material conditions count, there is a certain measure
of spiritual autonomy in human affairs, and that human
intelligence, choice, and will do really effectively co-
operate, expressing an inherent human nature … . While
you are in intimate touch with literature, no amount of
dialectic, or of material interpretation, will obscure for
long the truth that human life lives only in individuals: I
might have said, the truth that it is only in individuals that
society lives. [3]

Along with Dickens, Leavis argues that it is in individuals that
changes must be made, and not just in the systems in which they
live. To tear down and replace systems is insufficient (or worse); the
individual must be taken into account as well.
Orwell’s notion that writers must write about current events is
flawed too. In “Inside the Whale”, he argues, “Of course, a novelist
is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history, but a
novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the
moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot” (p. 102). So, are
Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence
plain idiots (or just footlers) because they do not explicitly write
about the French Revolution, the Hyde Park riots, the Boer War, and
WWI? Are they writers about whom it is “noticeable” that

what ‘purpose’ they have is very much up in the air. There
is no attention to the urgent problems of the moment,
above all no politics in the narrower sense. Our eyes are
directed to … everything except the places where things
are actually happening. (p. 115)

Again, Orwell faults others for not being like himself: clear,
polemical, with the proper measure of current events and
constructive suggestions, practical. But is what is “actually
happening” limited to “the urgent problems of the moment” and
“politics in the narrower sense”? (Are, even, the urgent problems of
the moment limited to politics in the narrower sense?) Jane Austen
has often been criticized for ignoring the political debates of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but Marilyn Butler, in The
War of Ideas, points out that Austen’s novels dramatically enact,
within the domestic scenes for which she is famous, the very ideas
informing the debates that marked her age. Conrad’s novels are
dramatic criticisms of the philosophic and economic conditions of
his age. Lawrence’s picturing of love and sexuality is, as Leavis
shows, interrelated with the major changes in thought and
philosophy that marked the modernist age. Of course, these novelists
are concerned with the ideas that make the age in which they live. As
Ian Robinson says:

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But in the nineteenth century we do find for the first time
a dominant artistic tradition aiming at ‘the world is so,
isn’t it?’ The creative energy in George Eliot, Dickens,
Tolstoy, and Stendhal is concentrated on criticism of the
age … . How is our world changing? they ask, and their
novels answer the question in the way proper to fiction.
Criticism of life became an attempt to see, as well as be,
‘the age’; and this involved novelists in a new kind of
responsibility to language. [4]

Orwell’s arguments about making constructive suggestions,
reforming systems and paying attention to contemporary events are
really non-arguments, or to be more precise, merely a form of self-
absorption made public.
Orwell’s failings as a critic are best seen in his discussions of
King Lear, which appear in a condensed form in “Politics and
Literature” and more fully developed in “Lear, Tolstoy, and the
Fool”. Orwell’s readings of King Lear and Tolstoy provide the very
suggestions needed to read his own arguments aright. Orwell’s
criticism of Tolstoy applies to himself: “There is a general
resemblance [between critic and criticized] which one can hardly
avoid seeing” (p. 410). It is doubtful whether Orwell was aware of
the problem: “one cannot assume that [the critic] was aware of this
resemblance, or would have admitted it if it had been pointed out to
him” (p. 411). I would summarize “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool” as:
Orwell criticizing Tolstoy for his unconscious antipathy towards
Lear while being unconscious of his own antipathy towards Tolstoy.
Orwell’s charges against Tolstoy are just as true of himself. Orwell
himself “uses many weak or dishonest arguments” (p. 404). We
could say of him

Difficult to feel that [Orwell’s] criticisms are uttered in
good faith.... Certainly his dislike of [Tolstoy] is real
enough, but the reasons for it may be different, or partly
different, from what he avows; and therein lies the interest
of his [essay]. (p. 405)

Orwell’s dislike of Tolstoy results partly from an act of
identification. As an acquaintance pointed out to me yesterday, the
essays Tolstoy wrote in his old age became a form of “spiritual
bullying” (p. 408) in which Tolstoy thought that “the more you are in
the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into
thinking likewise” (p. 415). Orwell did not have to wait until old age.
He began denouncing opponents as idiots and bullying readers much
earlier.
Of course, Orwell does not like Tolstoy; he recognizes too much
of himself in him. He criticizes him for calling Shakespeare a kind of
“jingo patriot” (p. 403) but then himself says Shakespeare “liked to
stand with the rich and powerful, and was capable of flattering them
in the most servile way” (p. 413). He criticizes Tolstoy for finding in

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

Shakespeare merely a “certain technical skill” (p. 402), and then says
Shakespeare has a “mere skill in placing one syllable beside another”
(p. 414). He criticizes Tolstoy for saying King Lear is “verbose,
unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, tedious” and so on (p. 402), and
then himself says the play is “too drawn out and has too many sub
plots. One wicked daughter would have been quite enough, and
Edgar is a superfluous character” and so on (p. 406). If Tolstoy has
“misread” and “willfully misunderstood” Shakespeare’s play, so has
Orwell. And why does Orwell not like King Lear? I think it’s
because he does not like a rival, because he suspects that no political
theorist in the language, himself included, has as good a grasp of
politics (republican as well as monarchic) as has Shakespeare.
Orwell is absorbed in himself no matter what writer he’s writing
about: Dickens, Swift, Koestler, Miller, whoever. The practice of
criticism is not “fraudulent”, as Orwell says it is in “Writers and
Leviathan”, (p. 453) but some critics are frauds and Orwell himself
argues in bad faith. Not every literary judgement “consists in
trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference” (p.
453), but for Orwell “party solidarity demands a plain lie” (p. 453).
He might be excused for having “a guilt-stricken feeling that one
ought to be doing something” about the misery in the world; he
cannot be excused for making arguments that are really just stories
about himself. As the character in the Monty Python skit says, “I
came for an argument.” If this is the best he can do, I want my
money back.

Alfred Applegate

1. Phoenix, New York, 1968, p. 180
2. Penguin, 1995, p. 201
3. The Common Pursuit, Penguin, 1993, p. 184
4. The Survival of English, p. 230: originally Cambridge, 1973;
reprinted Denton, 2004

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Style and Character in Mansfield Park

(Page references to the Penguin edition, 1966; none for Chapter 47)

About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon,
with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to
captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the
county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the
rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and
consequences of an handsome house and large income.
All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match,
and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at
least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim
to it.

It’s no wonder there are “Janeites”. We’re all Janeites, more or less.
With what other writer do you so much feel you’re being admitted
into a kind of personal intimacy? It’s not just that she seems present
to us in her books but that we seem to be present to her as she’s
writing them. She seems, peculiarly, to be writing for us, her style
peculiarly to presuppose our attention and co-operation. She is
playful but not as Joyce is—playing with his material, for our
amazement, like a juggler at the circus; she seems to be inviting us to
join in, flatteringly, as a kind of partner in the game. The style of her
narration isn’t so much a style as a play of styles, this style, more or
less hers, playing off against that, more or less not hers. As she
reports on her characters so she invites us to follow the ironic and
teasing comings-and-goings of her voice in theirs, theirs in hers, to
make out where the boundaries between the two form and where
dissolve, where this blends with and where it separates from that and
where one lies on top of the other, as if one but distinctly two; and to
make out the upshot as a form of judgement. And to follow the play,
without missing anything, follow it home, is like being, for the
moment, while the game lasts, as clever as she is herself. Here’s
what it is to think and to judge then. So this is what language might
be? This is what it is to know? It’s like flying, on her wings. No
wonder there are Janeites.
The opening of Mansfield Park is characteristic. The first phrase
could hardly be more perfectly factual or neutral, toneless, anyone’s
or no-one’s. The phrase that succeeds it momentarily seems so too;
though, in retrospect, we might feel there had been a certain passing
flicker of something in that “Miss … of Huntingdon”, especially
when we find it echoing a little later, but more grandly of course, in
the multiple and mutually reinforcing (but nevertheless still factually
truthful) dignities of “Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the
county of Northampton”, where “Sir Thomas” lends at least as much

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

dignity to the county as the county does to him and where the
phrasing would not need so much pressing in the direction of Sir
Leicester Dedlock and Lincolnshire [1] to get there.
But the girl could hardly have “only” seven thousand pounds to
the perception of just anyone or no-one. She has that for what must
be quite a small set of definite someones, those able to recognise the
circumstance in which the sum might or might not count as “only”,
the same small (as the world goes) set of people for whom pretty
young girls do, or not not, have the “good luck” to “captivate”
baronets with fortunes to match their rank, the same small, very
small set of people on familiar enough terms with the parties
concerned—or plausibly capable of claiming to be so—to speak of
the the girl’s uncle, the lawyer, as “himself”, the set, that is, that
comprises “All Huntingdon”, large enough in its own eyes and
amongst whom the cash value of a girl’s good looks can in any given
case be (in retrospect at least) reckoned pretty exactly.
Jane Austen—it seems plain enough—doesn’t judge as
Huntingdon judges, doesn’t share Huntingdon’s worldliness; and she
uses Huntingdon’s voice to say so. But that she can, is a sign that the
relation between her voice and her judgement and those of
Huntingdon at large isn’t a simple one. She isn’t quoting Huntingdon
sarcastically after all, as someone who herself despises “the
comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large
income”. On the contrary, she speaks as someone fully able to value
such things. She and Huntingdon, in large measure, “speak the same
language”. It’s in Huntingdon, and from Huntingdon, after all, that
she found her own voice. Its voice is sufficiently hers for her to use
for her purpose, which isn’t quite that of Huntingdon at large but is
that of Huntingdon at its best. So if we suppose that “All
Huntingdon” must be in the author’s eyes contemptibly small and its
scale of values simply false, we suppose wrong. Rank and income
may not be everything but that doesn’t mean they’re nothing. If we
live in a world in which they exist and matter, it can’t be right to live
as if they don’t. That it’s wrong to marry for the sake of rank and
income (or looks) doesn’t make it right to marry with “imprudent”
indifference to “education, fortune, or connections”. Five or so
sentences after the opening quoted above, we find Jane Austen and
Huntingdon speaking simply as one:

But Miss Frances married, in the common phrase, to
disoblige her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of
Marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did it
very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more
untoward choice. Sir Thomas Bertram had interest, which,
from principle as well as pride, from a general wish of
doing right, and a desire of seeing all that were connected
with him in situations of respectability, he would have
been glad to exert for the advantage of Lady Bertram’s
sister; but her husband’s profession was such as no
interest could reach; and before he had time to devise any

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

other method of assisting them, an absolute breach
between the sisters had taken place. It was the natural
result of the conduct of each party, and such as a very
imprudent marriage almost always produces.

Jane Austen now speaks, and judges, without irony, just as
Huntingdon does: as if education, fortune, connections, interest,
respectability, advantage all matter and as if it does count against a
course of action that it might be called untoward or imprudent. And
if she needs a phrase to denote the opposite of marrying for money
what she’ll choose is not marrying for love but marrying, “in the
common phrase”, to disoblige one’s family. She sides with
Huntingdon.
On the other hand, of course, there is prudence and prudence; one
man’s isn’t necessarily another’s. And as the earlier quotation
suggests, Jane Austen’s own idea of what’s prudent might be
perfectly compatible with thinking that to marry a Mr Collins or a
Mr Rushworth, or not to marry a Captain Wentworth, is—house or
no house, rank and income notwithstanding—not prudent at all.

*

But whatever there might be of difficulty in keeping up with her in
the narrative parts of her novel—in following her changes of tone
and reconciling one judgement with another—it’s nothing compared
with the difficulties that can face us when she abandons narrative for
dialogue. Then we may feel that we’ve been pretty thoroughly
grounded, dumped. How, for instance, are we to read that scene in
Chapter 47 in which Edmund recounts to Fanny his last meeting with
Mary Crawford? Jane Austen gives us not the slightest bit of help.
She leaves us, brutally, to get airborne, if we can, on our own.
Patricia Menon, in her book reviewed in the fifth issue of this
magazine, says that Edmund’s reactions to Mary “are not just a
simple victory of right over wrong” [2] and that the chief wrong in
them is the distrust of Mary’s sexual attraction which shows in his
belief that she tries to use it on him, as a last resort, to overcome his
better judgement:

“Mr Bertram,”said she, I looked back. “Mr Bertram,” said
she, with a smile – but it was a smile ill-suited to the
conversation that had passed, a saucy playful smile,
seeming to invite, in order to subdue me; at least it
appeared so to me. I resisted … .

As Patricia Menon says, it’s impossible to know whether Edmund is
right or not; he himself is unsure. But what we can know, I think, is
that Patricia Menon would be glad to think him wrong (as, I admit, I
would myself). The reviewer saw the scene differently and as less in
doubt:

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

When love and judgement go together let’s hope that both
are reinforced. But people do fall in love sometimes with
someone it would be quite wrong or inappropriate or
bloody hopeless to marry. Isn’t this one of the things that
art shows us? … Both Edmund and Jane Austen are
wholly right. Edmund resists the [smile]—a smile surely
in the character so vividly created in the novel? To put it
baldly, Mary Crawford’s indulgence in her brother’s
playing with fire, leading to her seeing his absconding
with Mrs Rushworth as only folly, makes her an
unsuitable marriage partner for a clergyman, especially
one she has “subdued”. Edmund overcomes his being in
love with her to make this right judgement.

Without any guidance from a narrator, how we take the characters
in this scene must in part depend, as the reviewer suggested, on how
we take them in the novel at large. But that applies, of course, just as
much—or rather, as the one telling the story, perhaps even more—to
Edmund than to Mary. That there may be nothing out of character in
Mary’s smile as Edmund interprets it doesn’t necessarily mean we
are to think his interpretation right, and it doesn’t necessarily mean
that the scene vindicates him generally at her expense. I think we
have to accept that we don’t know what Mary means by her smile
and also that that we don’t is one of the things we do know. If
Edmund’s interpretation of the smile is capable of telling us
anything, it can only be something about him. It’s him in his telling,
I think, more than Mary that Jane Austen is interested in here, i.e. the
scene presented for our attention is as much or more the one between
him and Fanny that is taking place in the present as the one between
him and Mary that took place earlier.
I am sure the reviewer is right and it would be wrong or
inappropriate or bloody hopeless for him to marry her, that she is an
unsuitable wife for a clergyman (for this clergyman certainly and
perhaps any other clergyman too) and that, in so far as his judgement
is of her suitability or of the bloody hopelessness of a marriage
between them, he is right, wholly right and nothing but right. He
makes, that is, the right choice. But that leaves plenty of room for
thinking, like Patricia Menon, that he is, nevertheless, a good deal
wanting and that it shows in his reactions, and his account to Fanny
of his reactions, to Mary. I don’t believe Jane Austen is vindicating
Edmund in what he says here to Fanny as, say, she vindicates Darcy
in what he says in his letter to Elizabeth Bennet. Edmund’s decision
might be vindicated, he isn’t. On the other hand, it does not follow
that if Jane Austen isn’t vindicating him, she must be vindicating
Mary. She seems to me to be wonderfully even-handed in what she
shows us of them. I concentrate on Edmund’s failings only because
his are the ones we have to see for ourselves. Hers, in his account of
them, we can hardly miss.
Patricia Menon is good on Edmund’s failings (she showed me
things I hadn’t seen): “conventionality and emotional blindness”,

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

simplifying causes to fit “orthodox terms”, giving “conventional
reason[s]” for desires, “convenient allegiance to … principle”,
“insensitivity to the depth of another’s feelings”, “the theatricality of
his performance” (when he isn’t on stage) etc.
He is a clergyman, and Mary is hardly suitable as a clergyman’s
wife. But what sort, quite, of clergyman is he and, therefore, is she
unsuitable for? He is certainly serious-minded, conscientious, well-
intentioned, nothing of a Dr Grant. He takes his profession seriously
… as seriously as he can. But how seriously, as Jane Austen shows
it, is that? In defending the profession against Mary’s slights at
Sotherton, in Chapter 9, he says,

I cannot call that situation nothing, which has the charge
of all that is of the first importance to mankind,
individually or collectively considered, temporally and
eternally – which has the guardianship of religion and
morals, and consequently of the manners which result
from their influence. (p. 120)

Well, that certainly seems serious enough and inclusive enough,
except that, when he comes to develop the topic, the eternal and
religion are forgotten and “all that is of first importance to mankind”
shrinks to the manners that might be called the conduct that results
from good principles or is the effect of the doctrines it is the
clergyman’s duty to teach and recommend:

We do not look in great cities for our best morality. It is
not there, that respectable people of any denomination can
do most good; and it is certainly not there, that the
influence of the clergy can be most felt. A fine preacher is
followed and admired; but it is not in fine preaching only
that a clergyman will be useful in his parish and his
neighbourhood, where the parish and neighbourhood are
of a size capable of knowing his private character, and
observing his general conduct, which in London can
rarely be the case. The clergy are lost there in the crowds
of their parishioners. They are known to the largest part
only as preachers. And with regard to their influencing
public manners, Miss Crawford must not misunderstand
me, or suppose I mean to call them the arbiters of good
breeding, the regulators of refinement and courtesy, the
masters of the ceremonies of life. The manners I speak of,
might rather be called conduct perhaps, the result of good
principles; the effect, in short, of those doctrines which it
is their duty to teach and recommend; and it will, I
believe, be every where found, that as the clergy are, or
are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

Jane Austen isn’t—surely, she isn’t?—simply endorsing Edmund
here, as, say, Chaucer endorses his “poure persoun of a toun”?

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

Patricia Menon comments—in a way which suggests where her
sympathies lie—“The carefully constructed pronouncements
provoke flippancy from his newest pupil [Mary].”
“Pronouncements” seems to me the right word, and “provoking”
does too. Isn’t Edmund being just a bit too smugly and
irreproachably correct to bear? And whose reaction do you prefer,
his old pupil’s (“ ‘Certainly,’ said Fanny with gentle earnestness.”)
or his newest’s (“ ‘There,’ cried Miss Crawford, ‘you have quite
convinced Miss Price already.’ ”)? And then, for all its correctness,
Edmund’s conception of religion and his own profession, lacks
depth. He may raise “manners” up to “conduct” but he levels
“religion” down to it. If anyone wants an explanation of the rise of
Methodism or the Oxford Movement they need look no further than
this glimpse Jane Austen gives us of a serious-minded, conscientious
and well-intentioned Church of England clergyman of the Age of
Reason. No wonder she said in a letter that we all ought to be
evangelicals.
As he himself suggests, a clergyman is a teacher.Well, what sort
of teacher is he? And, therefore, again, what sort of clergyman too?
Don’t we see that, reflected in what his old pupil Fanny says to him,
in the following?

Fanny spoke her feelings. “Here’s harmony!” said she.
“Here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all
music behind, and what poetry alone can attempt to
describe. Here’s what may tranquillize every care, and lift
the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as
this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor
sorrow in the world; and there would certainly be less of
both if the sublimity of nature were more attended to, and
people were carried more out of themselves by such a
scene.” (p. 139)

The only thing that saves this from being a speech by Mary Bennet is
something that wasn’t in the lesson it was learned from. For it means
something quite different from what it says. Fanny isn’t a monster,
and what she means is, more or less, “Don’t go to her. Stay by me,
by me! I am yours.”—something Mary Bennet wouldn’t be capable
of meaning at all. But, unfortunately for Fanny, sentiments, however
right-minded, aren’t what young men want of young women, not
even (or perhaps especially) when they are their own coming back to
them. Edmund acknowledges Fanny’s right-mindedness, and that she
got it off him, then, helplessly, goes off to Mary Crawford at the
piano, leaving Fanny to be carried out of herself by attending to the
sublimity of nature seen through the window. Right-mindedness has
to be its own reward.
Edmund may be a good man but only doubtfully so; good but
only within certain conventional limits; tested beyond those limits he
becomes something else. His goodness is of that limited (or
doubtful) kind that has nothing of the creative about it. He can, as it

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

were, keep things going but not renew them, repeat but not discover.
He takes what he is given and hands it on unchanged, as something
to be handed on (or back) unchanged again. So Fanny, wanting to
keep him by her and away from Mary Crawford, gives back to him
unchanged what he has given her unchanged from the book he got it
from.

And it is with these limitations of Edmund’s in mind, as they
have been created in the book as a whole, that we need to read the
account he gives to Fanny of his last meeting with Mary Crawford.
That account contains a series of adverse judgements of Mary,
together with a sufficient glimpse of what provokes them, to suggest
their partiality or inadequacy. Edmund, it seems to me, ends up
being portrayed as more than a bit of a pharisee and Mary as
someone with more to her than he can see, someone he might have
helped to make—were he a better man than he is—a better woman
than she is, someone who might have helped to make him a better
man in turn. One of the questions Jane Austen’s portrayal of
Edmund seems to me to throw up is, “What sort of goodness can
someone possess who can’t judge rightly? Are there aspects or
reaches of moral goodness that depend on a capacity to know and
judge that seems itself not quite to fit comfortably in the sphere of
morality? That seems to belong more, say, to art and criticism?”
There is, of course, no quarrelling with Fanny’s judgement of
Henry and Maria, which Edmund fully shares and Mary hasn’t the
least glimmering of:

The event was so shocking, that there were moments even
when her heart revolted from it as impossible – when she
thought it could not be. A woman married only six months
ago, a man professing himself devoted, even engaged to
another – that other her near relation – the whole family,
both families connected as they were by tie upon tie, all
friends, all intimate together! – it was too horrible a
confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of evil, for
human nature, not in a state of utter barbarism, to be
capable of! His unsettled affections, wavering with his
vanity, Maria’s decided attachment, and no sufficient
principle on either side … (p. 429)

There is just nothing like this in Mary’s view of the matter. Had
there been, Edmund might, even at this stage, have ended up
marrying her, just as Fanny fears when he begins his account of their
meeting. What Mary sees in her brother and his sister is only “folly”;
and with that, one word, everything, instantly, is over between her
and Edmund. He is finished with her.
What are we to think of it, that Edmund places so much
importance on this word? The answer, it seems to me, must all
depend—on what Mary does and does not make of the word and on
what Edmund does and does not do to get her to see the limits of

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what can be made of it. For it is possible to imagine the conversation
going in such a way that she should convince him that folly can go
deep and he convince her that, in this case, it doesn’t go deep enough
in certain necessary directions. It’s possible to imagine their arriving,
through mutual education, at a mutual understanding, like Darcy and
Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice.
And there ought to be, if Edmund is quite what he thinks himself,
room for something like that to happen (without their needing to be
Darcy and Elizabeth) for he goes to meet Mary, he reports to Fanny,
for “the last, last interview of friendship … in such a state of mind,
so softened, so devoted, as made it for a few moments impossible to
Fanny’s fears, that it should be the last”. He may be expected to
listen to Mary, that is, as a man still in love with her.
And what Mary makes of “the folly of our two relations” seems
to me not so absolutely contemptible as he thinks it. For the question
for Edmund shouldn’t be—not if he feels anything like love for
her—“What does this woman not say?”—but “What am I to think of
what she does?” The question for him (and us) is not only whether
Mary’s judgement has anything essential missing from it but also
whether there is anything to respect in it—a sight of things hidden,
perhaps, from him, or Fanny. And it’s not Mary alone who is in
question here. As he says, it was “natural to her to treat the subject as
she did. She was speaking only, as she had been used to hear others
speak, as she imagined every body else would speak.” What Edmund
is judging is not Mary alone but the world she’s from. He is judging
the morality, as she expresses it, of the “great cities” he has spoken
of earlier in the book; and, of course, at the same time revealing his
own morality for our judgement. And just as the one is shown not to
be so bad as he thinks it, so the other is shown not to be so good.
He says he cannot recall all Mary’s words and would not dwell on
them if he could. He finds them “hardly fit to be repeated” to Fanny.
Then he repeats them:

She reprobated her brother’s folly in being drawn on by a
woman whom he had never cared for, to do what must
lose him the woman he adored; but still more the folly of
– poor Maria, in sacrificing such a situation, plunging into
such difficulties, under the idea of being really loved by a
man who long ago had made his indifference clear.

But, for me, there, Mary goes a good way towards justifying the
word “folly”, not only suggesting the loss or suffering Henry and
Maria have brought on themselves—and the greater suffering of the
woman—but bringing out what in their “folly” has the character of
depth: the perversity or wilfullness of the self-destructiveness
involved: “drawn on by a woman whom he had never cared for, to
do what must lose him the woman he adored”; “plunging into such
difficulties, under the idea of being really loved by a man who long
ago had made his indifference clear”. And Mary doesn’t distinguish
between Henry and Maria just on the grounds that the latter is sure to

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

suffer more; what she says about Maria’s folly implies Henry’s
greater culpability. It makes a very favourable contrast, it seems to
me, with Edmund’s own pompous and self-righteous refusal to
distinguish between the two (“with whom lay the greater seduction, I
pretended not to say”). Saving the words “situation” and “adored”,
these are remarks Jane Austen herself might make. They are so far
from being contemptible that I don’t think it is going too far to say
that Dr Johnson can be heard at the back of them.
Having introduced them as scarcely repeatable, Edmund
dismisses them with:

Guess what I must have felt. To hear the woman whom –
no harsher name than folly given! – So voluntarily, so
freely, so coolly to canvass it! – No reluctance, no horror,
no feminine – shall I say? no modest loathings! – This is
what the world does. For where, Fanny, shall we find a
woman whom nature had so richly endowed? – Spoilt,
spoilt! –

Knowing that Fanny shares his disgust, Edmund is free self-
consciously to perform it in front of her without needing to justify it.
He concludes his performance, virtuously, more in sorrow than in
anger. He’s a bad novelist, bad critic and a ham actor, all for an
audience he can be sure will applaud and encourage him. It doesn’t
seem to me—he doesn’t seem to me—at all nice (in any sense).
The most damning thing Edmund reports of Mary is:

She saw it only as folly, and that folly stamped only by
exposure. The want of common discretion, of caution –
his going down to Richmond for the whole time she was
at Twickenham – her putting herself in the power of a
servant; – it was the detection, not the offence which she
reprobated. It was the imprudence which had brought
things to extremity

But the judgement expressed in the first two and last three lines here
isn’t adequately justified either by what he reported of Mary’s words
earlier or the new evidence he supplies here in the middle two or
three lines. The latter certainly justify the word “imprudence” but
imprudence of a kind that might just as easily—or more easily—be
thought of as irresponsibility as carelessness of detection. My point
is not that Mary does think her brother irresponsible but that Edmund
fails to see her as Jane Austen presents her, that is, as someone who,
seen with the eyes of love, might be brought to think that.
There are other remarks of Mary’s which attract Edmund’s
adverse judgement—all belonging to what you might call a worldly
treatment of the subject—which I think a word might be put in for.
When she catches Edmund’s look of disapproval at her speaking of
“folly” she fails to recognise that what matters to him is her use of
that word itself; she thinks he thinks she is going to defend her

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

brother at his sister’s expense. That he is without any of that sort of
partiality doesn’t occur to her. But this detail seems to me a beautiful
instance of the even-handedness of Jane Austen’s treatment of the
two of them. For it’s a sharp little detail that cuts both ways. If on the
one hand it suggests that disinterestedness doesn’t take up much
room in her life, it also suggests that the common family partialities
that ordinary worldly judgement approves, and which both she and
Fanny possess, don’t take up much room in his. And if it is natural to
her that she should think as she does, given that she has been brought
up where and by whom she has, well, it is no less natural to him that
he should think as he does, given that he has been brought up where
and by whom he has. [3]
Then, there is the tone of the following, which betrays, in
Edmund’s eyes, an “alloy, a dash of evil” in her even when she is at
her best. Her best is (as he tells Fanny) to praise Fanny with warm
affection; the “evil” in it is that

yet, even here … she could exclaim “Why would she not
have him? It is all her fault. Simple girl! – I shall never
forgive her. Had she accepted him as she ought, they
might now have been on the point of marriage, and Henry
would have been too happy and too busy to want any
other object. He would have taken no pains to be on terms
with Mrs Rushworth again. It would have all ended in a
regular standing flirtation, in yearly meetings at Sotherton
and Everingham.”

Mary can’t help, it seems, like Mr Bennet (see below), seeing the
funny side, and developing it. And, on that, Fanny’s verdict is
“Cruel! … quite cruel! At such a moment … and to you! Absolute
cruelty.” But Mary has Edmund to stick up for her: “Cruelty, do you
call it? – We differ there. No, her’s is not a cruel nature I do not
consider her as meaning to wound my feelings.” Then he goes on to
say what he does consider her: “The evil lies yet deeper …
perversion of mind … faults of principle … of blunted delicacy and
a corrupt, vitiated mind.” And yet what strong objection of
principle—except to someone incapacitated by literal-mindedness—
can there be to Mary’s joke? “It is all her fault … I shall never
forgive her”? Is that an invitation to laugh a chap (in love) must in
decency refuse? No view of Henry there a decent chap could concur
in? Of course what Fanny and Edmund condemn is not so much the
particular joke Mary makes as the fact of her making a joke at all.
Her tone is not the appropriate, the correct one. But the flexibility of
mind Mary shows in seeing the possibility of a joke here is just what
Edmund lacks and needs. He would be a better man for having it.
Without it, there’s no doubt, he is a bit of a Mr Collins.
The last thing he reports her saying to him is:

“Well, she went on to say, that what remained now to be
done, was to bring about a marriage between them. She

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

spoke of it, Fanny, with a steadier voice than I can.” He
was obliged to pause more than once as he continued.
“We must persuade Henry to marry her,” said she, “and
what with honour, and the certainty of having shut himself
out for ever from Fanny, I do not despair of it. … I hope
we may find no insuperable difficulty. My influence,
which is not small, shall go all that way; and, when once
married, and properly supported by her own family,
people of respectability as they are, she may recover her
footing in society to some degree. … What I advise is,
that your father be quiet. Do not let him injure his own
cause by interference. Persuade him to let things take their
course. If by officious exertions of his, she is induced to
leave Henry’s protection, there will be much less chance
of his marrying her, than if she remains with him. I know
how he is likely to be influenced. Let Sir Thomas trust to
his honour and compassion, and it may all end well; but if
he get his daughter away, it will be destroying the chief
hold.”

Again, although Mary could hardly be more cynical or (even
when talking to a clergyman) take less seriously fornication, adultery
or the meaning of marriage vows, Edmund could, equally, hardly
show less interest in the welfare or interest of his sister, as ordinarily
understood, or be less disposed to give Mary any credit for the
interest she shows.
There’s an interesting parallel, and contrast, between Edmund’s
view here and that of the Bennets (of everybody) in Pride and
Prejudice, where the worthless Wickham and the hardly less
worthless Lydia Bennet run away together. Where Edmund’s view
of a marriage between Henry and his sister is that it is something
“which, thinking as I now thought of her [Mary’s] brother, should
rather be prevented than sought”, Mr Bennet’s only objection to the
marriage being brought about between his runaways, is that he
wished “the satisfaction of prevailing on one of the most worthless
young men in Great Britain to be her [Lydia’s] husband might …
have rested in its proper place“, i.e. upon himself. Elizabeth thinks
they must marry too, as the only thing that can be thought: “And
they must marry! Yet he is such a man.” To which Mr Bennet
replies, “Yes, yes, they must marry. There is nothing else to be
done.” And there is nothing else to be done. Not in the eyes of
Huntingdon, of whose view of things Jane Austen’s own is a
variation not a repudiation. It is natural to the Bennets to treat the
subject as they do, as it is natural to all the inhabitants of
Huntingdon, with families to bring up, and the best to make of all
sorts of bad jobs. And such a way of treating it isn’t foreign to Jane
Austen either. She shares Huntingdon’s (and London’s) ordinary,
rough-and-ready concern for practical outcomes and what is best to
be done.
Anyone listening to Mary—without loving her—merely wanting

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

to do her (and capable of doing her) justice would find something
there to respect. A man listening with the ears of love must hear
someone speaking he can talk to, he must hear possibility. But not
Edmund. The conversation between him and Mary is no
conversation at all. There is no to-and-fro of talk—no give-and-
take—in it whatsoever. From the moment Mary utters the word
“folly”, he merely listens, “like a man stunned”, he reports to Fanny,
unable to speak. Then when she has, in his eyes, thoroughly exposed
herself—her “perversion of mind”—he denounces her—reporting
his denunciation to Fanny for her approval. If anyone here is
incorrigible, because not conversible, it seems to me it is Edmund,
who would judge but without being a critic.
It is when Mary has finished saying what she thinks would be
best to do, that Edmund commences the denunciation he reports to
Fanny. Its first passage concludes with the following on his changed
opinion of Mary:

That, perhaps it was best for me; I had less to regret …
And yet, that I must and would confess that, could I have
restored her to what she had appeared to me before, I
would infinitely prefer any increase of the pain of parting,
for the sake of carrying with me the right of tenderness
and esteem. This is what I said … She was astonished,
exceedingly astonished – more than astonished. I saw her
change countenance. She turned extremely red.

I don’t know that the acting on stage that takes place earlier is quite
the terrible thing some of the characters think it but this—the man in
a triangle making himself available to one woman by reporting to her
how he has dished the other—is an abomination. Edmund’s been
reading too many bad novels; and now he’s writing one, with
himself as the sentimental hero, parading his virtue and puffing up
his feathers specially for Fanny. And he must particularly like the
lines he gives himself here, because it’s the second time he’s
delivered them:

Perhaps it is best for me – since it leaves me so little to
regret. Not so, however. Gladly would I submit to all the
increased pain of losing her, rather than have to think of
her as I do. I told her so.
Did you?
Yes, when I left her I told her so.

“I told her so.” “Did you?” “Yes, I told her so.”
Mary, in reply to Edmund’s denunciation, sneers at his
profession:

A pretty good lecture upon my word. Was it part of your
last sermon? At this rate, you will soon reform every body

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 8

at Mansfield and Thornton Lacey; and when I hear of you
next, it may be as celebrated preacher in some great
society of Methodists, or as a missionary into foreign
parts.

To which he replies by turning the other cheek, in victory:

I only said in reply, that from my heart I wished her well,
and earnestly hoped that she might soon learn to think
more justly, and not owe the most valuable knowledge we
any of us could acquire – the knowledge of ourselves and
of our duty, to the lessons of affliction – and immediately
left the room.

Which would be bad enough even if it weren’t being retailed to the
girl’s (soon to be) successful rival.
It’s then, as he is going, that she calls him back and gives him that
smile. Perhaps the smile is as he says but perhaps, equally, it isn’t.
As he imagined he saw in her, immediately before, “a mixture of
many feelings – a great, though short struggle – half a wish of
yielding to truths, half a sense of shame but habit, habit carried it.
She would have laughed if she could. It was a sort of laugh, as she
answered …”, and as he says “she tried to speak carelessly; but she
was not so careless as she wanted to appear”, the smile that follows
could have just about any character, and would perhaps be likeliest
to have one that was as mixed as the emotions that preceded it, so
much so that perhaps Mary Crawford herself would have been hard
pressed to say quite what it meant.
All we know for sure is what is taking place between him and
Fanny: that a man is telling a woman who would like to have him—
and who before long gets him—that another woman, her rival, tried
to get him but couldn’t. “So: maybe … but … maybe not.”
Edmund’s account of what took place between him and Mary needs
to be seen in the light of what is taking place between him and
Fanny, which is what if not mutual courtship or a necessary
preliminary to courtship, a clearing of the ground and burning of
dead wood? A burying of bodies even? A process Jane Austen isn’t
shy of introducing with a joke of her own:

Long, long would it be ere Miss Crawford’s name passed
his lips again or she [Fanny] could hope for a renewal of
such confidential intercourse as had been.
It was long. They reached Mansfield on Thursday, and
it was not till Sunday evening that Edmund began to talk
to her on the subject.

*

On the one hand, that sneer of Mary’s isn’t so wide of the mark. The
Edmund that Jane Austen shows us in this scene does, it seems to

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me, think, talk, judge, behave according to a professional standard,
according to what might be codified or prescribed as current best
clerical practice. He isn’t at all alive to the particularity of what’s in
front of him; his responses are all, to one degree or another, in this
way or that, only approximately equal to it. He seems not to have
any emotional or mental flexibility or agility. He behaves, that is,
sufficiently “according to type” for Mary’s jibe to have some
warrant.
On the other hand, it has to be said in his defence, that he behaves
so, at least in part, in reaction to what he has found in her, to the type
of unprincipled, fashionable woman she undoubtedly, in
considerable measure, is. What is her sneer, after all, but the sneer of
just such a woman, one for whom nothing could be more certain than
that a clergyman is good for nothing but a joke? What is she doing
but behaving according to type herself? If he, in reaction to her,
becomes one sort of dummy, what does she, in reaction to him,
become but another? They bring out the worst in one another. And, I
am not sure, myself, that, in them, Jane Austen isn’t showing us
something more than just two individuals, isn’t showing us
something gone wrong more generally in the relation between moral
seriousness on the one hand and wit and playfulness on the other.
Isn’t it perhaps her version of “dissociation of sensibility”?

Mick Saunders

1. See the fifth paragraph of Chapter 2 of Bleak House.
2. Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and the Mentor-Lover, p. 63; but
see pp. 58-64 generally.
3. Ibid., especially pp. 51-7

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Basically, Ducky . . .

English in Use, by Randolph Quirk and Gabriele Stein, Longman, 1990

An invitation to a rejoinder: The study of the English language in all
the universities in all the world may be judged by the work of
Professor Quirk. Professor Quirk may be judged by this book which
distils what he knows about language for the general reader.

He and Professor Stein think we take language—this wonderful
human faculty—too much for granted. We should stop to think about
it more and make ourselves more consciously aware—of language
itself, its nature, its structure, the distinct uses it has, the roles it
plays. If we did, we should be better educated and have a more
developed critical faculty, come to reject the slovenly and
impoverished—our own along with others’—and savour with
pleasure the delicately chiselled and the imaginatively chosen, the
glories to be treasured (such as Noel Annan’s).
If we thought about language more we might judge it and use it
better. We might—and we might not. Dr Johnson was a great critic
who, like Professor Quirk, compiled (or wrote) a dictionary but he
no more became a critic by studying lexicography than Charles Ives
became a composer by selling insurance (or Beethoven became one
by going deaf). The question is not: “Can thinking about language
develop the critical faculty?” (If it can’t, what can?) but, “Can
thinking about it like Professors Quirk and Stein do so?” For they
don’t just think about language; they think about it scientifically.
They are Professors of linguistics (a science even sadder than that of
economics). So they typically don’t do what you typically do do if
you’ve got a critical faculty, use it. What they do—when they aren’t
being lyrical—is observe and classify.
The kind of thing they know—which, if we knew it, would make
us as well educated and as good critics as they are—is that, basically
(as Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) postulated), there are six factors in
the wonderful faculty of human communication, and they fall into
(as I (l938-) postulate) two groups of three:

the speaker (or the one who says it)
the addressee (or the one he says it to)
the contact (or the relations between them)

and

the message (or what he says)
the context (or what he says it about)

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the code (or conventions (or words and grammar, etc) he says it
in).

And these six “factors” are related—directly related—to six
”functions”, also falling, of course, (as I postulate) into two groups
of three:

emotive (speaker-related): when the speaker expresses his
feelings, as when a young man says to a young woman, “Drop ’em”
conative (addressee-related): when the speaker wants to achieve a
goal, as when the young man says, “Drop ’em”
phatic (contact-related): when the speaker focuses on achieving a
relationship, as when the young man says “Drop ’em” or, in the
authors’ example, “One, two, three, testing … ”

and

poetic (message form-related): when the message is meant to
have aesthetic impact as in, “Omo washes whiter”
referential (context-related): when someone wants to tell us
something, as in, “So this is linguistics?”
metalingual: (code form-related): when what you’re speaking
about is speech itself, as in, “This is hoss-shit”

But, basically, what these six functions come down to is two
basic uses, the common or everyday sort, and the finer. The common
sort—also known as ordinary—is geared to the ordinary needs of
ordinary people, and is pretty basic and essential. It’s the sort we all
practise most, using it for pretty basic and elementary purposes in
pretty crude and elementary situations (see first group). And in this
sort we are all fairly equally competent. But the other sort—also
called the more refined and delicate (see second group)—only some
of us wish to cultivate, for “exotic” purposes like argument and
precise writing. This is when someone is using language subtly and
precisely—or with care—for the purpose of communicating ideas or
as an instrument of thought, like Professor Geoffrey Leech saying,
“we cannot really understand the nature of language itself unless we
understand pragmatics”, (where the thoughtfulness is most strongly
concentrated in the simple word, “itself”).
The relation between these two basic uses is complex. On the one
hand, the constant, unremitting pull of the ordinary interferes with
our ability to be subtle and precise (especially, I should think, when
combined with the flux and chaos of raw experience all around us).
On the other hand not even the finest language can be a totally
perfect and logical medium. We’ve got to keep the ordinary,
everyday uses of words going. We need them in ordinary, everyday
life. Without them we mightn’t have much use for language at all.
And not just that. They stimulate, rejuvenate, give life to, are the
roots for the finer uses of language like Geoffrey Leech’s—or
Randolph Quirk’s and Gabriele Stein’s own. We can’t just abandon
or eradicate the ordinary. When we talk airily of improving our

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language ability, it must be clear that what we mean is improving our
language range. We’ve got to learn to talk like Geoffrey, Randolph
and Gabriele as well as Tom, Dick and Harry. And then, alongside
functions, there are variations. And as there are factors in functions
so there are factors in variations too. One variation isn’t the same as
another but what are the factors that make it different? Quirk and
Stein provide us with a powerful framework of nodes for saying.
The differences between two variations may be determined either
by the use or by the user, that is, they are either use-elated or user-
related. If determined by the use, they must be either content-marked
or tone-marked, if by the user, either ethno-political or linguistic, if
linguistic, either non-native or native, if native, either non-
institutionalised or institutionalised. Thus, by locating a variation
within the framework of nodes, we are able to give a (in terms of the
framework) complete account of the factors that determine it. This
would permit us to say of the present book that it is written in a user-
related (linguistic [native {institutionalised}]) variation of English
(sub-set, British). But as the authors add, we should not, therefore,
let ourselves slip into thinking that such an institutionalised variation
is monolithic either. As the full impact of the framework entails,
each institutionalised variation is subject to the variation induced by
the “use-related” factors and also to “user-related” variation,
inasmuch as regional dialect colours the broad thrust of the over-
riding British variety of English. There’s plenty of scope for
expressing personal identity in language-use too. As Hopkins says,
“What I do is me: for that I came”. And as Wittgenstein almost
certainly said, “A style is a form of life (but in some cases, not
much).”
Language can—if you let it—draw you so deeply into itself that
you lose sight of it. But Randolph Quirk and Gabriele Stein don’t let
it. They notice, for example, the spread—under the influence of the
media and the worldwide freemasonry of the young—of an informal
style of language which includes such items as the pseudo-anaphoric
“this” (as in, “There was this chick … ”), of the disjunct adverb
“hopefully” (as in, “’Opefully. ’Arry”) and of the hyperbolic
negative “No way”; and they notice the notoriety of this style too, in
correspondence columns vibrating with dislike of it. But they
themselves contribute neither to its spread nor its notoriety. They
merely, and impartially, note both (though, perhaps, feeling a touch
superior to anything found vibrating). They observe the struggle
from very high up, and as having no part in it. They have the
historical sense. They look at it through the eyes of science. (Looked
at from outer space, the Los Angeles smog is really quite pretty.)
And, of course, they train their students—who wish to pass the
exams they set—to look at language through the eyes of science too:
“Find yourself a granny, and get her to talk to you about the Emperor
Hirohito. Don’t listen to what she says but note down all the words
she uses you’ve never met before. It can be very rewarding.” When
Professor Quirk was just in bud as a linguistician did he listen to his
own Gran like that? Now his blossom’s falling does he teach his
grandchildren to listen to him like it? “But it is indisputable,” said

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Alice, “that while you cannot possibly be genteel and pickle onions,
you can be as genteel as never was and pickle words. You see it
every day.”
All this collecting and arranging, through which Professors Quirk
and Stein develop the critical faculty in themselves and their
students, looks like the opposite of criticism, an alternative to
judgement. But it isn’t. Quirk and Stein aren’t, of course, (perish the
thought) “prescriptive” or “judgmental”, or even very critical (Lord
Annan’s prose is one of the glories they treasure), but they do have a
standard to judge by and, when they aren’t being lyrical, they use it:
“appropriateness”.
If what you do and for what you came is to classify—to arrange
pigeonholes within pigeonholes and put things in them (pigeons,
mummified), with labels attached—you will want to say whether the
right things are in the right places or not; and when you have said
that, you will have done what you came for. There are “right” things
to say and write just as there are “right” things to wear but not any
single right “right” to conform to. Not even standard English—
which used to be thought to have something to do with English
literature (when that used to be thought authoritative)—is a standard
anywhere but—well—where it is. One just has to be sensitive to
one’s environment. There is such a thing as linguistic etiquette, after
all, tact. There are expressions which may be used without hesitation
in familiar talk and writing but are hardly to be countenanced in an
article on literature or a court of law. You may, exceptionally, say, or
wear, something “wrong” but only for the purpose of humour and
only if humour is appropriate. If you are a prime minister, for
instance, to amuse your audience, you may, like Mrs Thatcher, risk
using the expression “frit” for “frightened”. But usually it is safest to
use the “accepted” forms of the environment you find yourself in. To
do otherwise risks embarrassment, for yourself and others. How, for
instance, can an American tell when he may safely use “lolly” for
“money”? (How, outside Dixon of Dock Green, can an Englishman?)
You have to choose your words, like your tie. The question is: “Is it
suitable, Ducky?”
This is a standard not just for speaking but for living by. And
Professors Quirk and Stein don’t just preach, they practise it. What
style could be, currently, more acceptable than this?

the great complexity of the English language, its
multiplicity of roles, unparalleled extent of use worldwide
as medium of international communication … formidable
task, mature and informed approach … use more
intelligently, respond more sensitively, recognise more
completely implications international use today …
pronounced concern to, respond need for, accurate and
sensitively appropriate communication ever increasingly
interdependent world

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Every language and every variation is as good as every other
because as suited to its users as every other. Chaucer’s English may
be different from that of Ted Hughes or Saul Bellow, it is in no sense
inferior (inferior?). And what more—or less—could be said of
Professor Quirk’s and Stein’s own English? Is it not as suited to
them as well as … it is? What could be more acceptable, in the
places where it is? What could be more sensitively appropriate to its
own environment, the corporate university, worldwide? But—all the
same—doesn’t it have the same effect on you as those voices have
on Prufrock when, in the middle of his dream of mermaids singing,
human voices wake him, and he drowns?
Is it plausible—this belief of Professors Quirk and Stein and
every linguistician in every university in the world—that if only we
knew what they know, we’d write better, speak better and judge
better? If only we made ourselves watchfully sensitive enough,
studied (them) hard enough, held the wheel carefully enough and
watched out for bumps (wore a condom) … Isn’t it plausible?
Well, actually (as every page and paragraph of this book testifies)
no, it isn’t—and won’t be until life itself becomes something to
manoeuvre through, scientifically. It is as plausible that we should
find the right words by choosing carefully as it is that we should find
the right wife—but not more so. We all want to find the right words,
for, after all, like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, we may need the
words to find the wife. But who wants to choose words or wife?
Who chooses words more carefully than Mr Collins or Mary
Bennet? In Middlemarch isn’t chosen what Lydgate unhappily is?
Isn’t choose what Mary Garth happily finds she can’t do? If we
really are to take care, we’d better take care it’s the right things we
care about. We’d better take care that “taking care” isn’t itself a
wrong thing. (It is for Othello, who’d have done better to be
careless). The right words, like wives, it seems, are found some other
way than by choosing. Seeing what choice and care and education
(on the most up-to-date scientific lines) have done for Professors
Quirk and Stein and every other linguistician in the world … I think
I’ll trust to luck.

Harry Daly

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Institutions that ought to be closed down

4. University of Wales, Swansea

A Correspondence

to
The Vice Chancellor
University of Wales, Swansea
Singleton Park, Swansea. SA2 8PP

copy to
Mrs Anne Edwards, Secretary
Dept of Philosophy

from
Edgeway Books
The Stonehouse
Bishopstone HR4 7JE

2.2.04

Dear Professor Davies,
I am told that the Swansea Philosophy Department is to be closed.
Philosophy is the heart of any university and how any institution can
call itself a university without philosophy I can hardly imagine. As it
happens, over the last half century or so the Swansea department has
been very distinguished, the only department in the Swansea arts
faculty to rise far above the ordinary provincial university level. I
report this not only as common knowledge but as a judgement I was
well placed to make for more than thirty years, having had numbers
of friends in that department from Rush Rhees and Peter Winch
onwards, and having for years worked in a department that had a
specially designed joint honours degree with Philosophy, which
numbers of graduates would say was a genuine university education.
The closure of the department cannot fail to signal that University
of Wales Swansea is, as the newspapers say, dumbing itself down;
and when the better sixth-form teachers realise what has happened
this cannot fail to have an adverse impact on the quality of student
applications to the surviving departments.

yours sincerely

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Ian Robinson

(Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the University College of Swansea
English Department 1961-1997)

to
Ian Robinson

from P. A. to the Vice-Chancellor

12.2.04

Dear Mr Robinson
The Vice-Chancellor thanks you for your letter of 2 February
2004 concerning the possible closure of the Philosophy Department
at Swansea University.
There has been extensive debate within the University since
October 2003 over plans to accelerate progress towards achieving
the University Council’s aspiration of world-class excellence. These
Strategic Directions proposals include strategic investment in strong
growth areas and disinvestment from a number of other academic
areas. The criteria to be used for selecting areas for investment and
disinvestment were included in these consultations.
The debate has now moved on to the precise academic areas of
the University for investment and disinvestment. Philosophy is one
of the departments recommended for phasing out as a result of this
review. A final decision is expected by the University Council in
March following a period of further debate.
This background is important because the proposal to phase out
Philosophy must be seen within this broader strategic context. The
University currently has a far larger number of academic areas than
competitors of a similar size. This results in some very small
departments, which are insufficiently robust to ensure a quality
educational experience for students and to ensure a strong and
vibrant research environment.
The Vice-Chancellor has emphasised that the specific
recommendations are not a criticism of individual staff in any
department. All departments,in Swansea are good but good is not
good enough; we have to focus on excellence.

Yours sincerely

Mrs Margaret Hill

to
P. A. to the Vice-Chancellor

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from
Ian Robinson

Dear Madam,
Thank you for your letter of 12 February 2004 which, if it
represents official thinking at University of Wales Swansea, proves
beyond reasonable doubt that it is not Philosophy at Swansea that
should be shut down but the whole university. The Council, you say,
has aspirations of “world class excellence”. “All departments in
Swansea are good but good is not good enough: we have to focus on
excellence.” In the Swansea Arts faculty there are two departments
with something of a national reputation, including the one to be shut.
The notion that the institution will by way of some reorganization
become “world-class” is so bizarre as to raise doubts not only about
the competence of its officers but about their sanity. Oxford, the
Sorbonne, Harvard, Swansea: pick the odd one out in this list. It is
similarly insane to suppose that a university can attain excellence as
a university by dumbing itself down. “Insufficiently robust to ensure
a quality educational experience … and to ensure a strong and
vibrant research environment”—one certain thing is that no student
in any department of an institution that uses such language will ever
be educated at all and no genuine research—which is a set of forms
of thinking—will ever get done. When sales-talk becomes the
official speech of a university what has happened to it? Anyone in
the Philosophy department could answer the question. Perhaps that is
why they are to be shut down: inconvenient survivals of the real
university.

yours faithfully,

Ian Robinson, formerly senior lecturer

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Misusages

1. Who were we fighting?

I don’t know exactly when it began, but for some time now I have
noticed the term “Nazi” substituted for “German”, not to imply that
all Germans were Nazis, but rather the reverse: to suggest that, in the
Second World War, Britain was facing only the Nazis, not the whole
German people. Of course, this diminishes the opprobrium with
which the British might otherwise view the nation which was at that
time their enemy—a useful development now that we are equal
partners in the European Union, founded (among other things) to
prevent the peoples of Europe from ever again waging war on one
another. But this substitution of “Nazi” for “German” is, in essence,
a lie, not because all Germans of that generation were necessarily
Nazis, in the strict sense of being paid-up members of the National
Socialist Party, but because the government of Germany was Nazi,
and it governed on behalf of the whole nation. And it committed
Germany to war. Britain was at war with Germany, not with “the
Nazis”. Even if the German nation had deplored (which there is little
evidence to show that it did) that fatal step, it would, I think, not alter
the simple political truth: Britain was at war with Germany. If
substituting “Nazi” for “German” seems to let the German nation off
the hook, so far as present-day relations between the two nations are
concerned, it is not a fate that seemingly we are anxious to contrive
for the Japanese. Never yet have I heard of our war with the
“Hirohito-Imperialists”, as though the Japanese masses looked on
helplessly and resentfully whilst their Emperor led them to war.

M.B.M.

(What saves the above from being in bad taste is, of course, not that
the usage objected to is untruthful but that it is racist. Ed.)

2. Concern

A concern is a complaint, criticism or accusation that it can never be
wrong to make. It is usually “raised”, like a point of information, but
virtuously.

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3. Perceived

As in “perceived fault or error”—very closely related to 2. above: a
fault or error that is so whether it is so or not (a derivative,
semantically speaking, of “image”).

4. World-class excellence

See under “Institutions that ought to be closed down” elsewhere in
this issue.

5. Quality educational experience

Ditto

6. Swansea University (or University of Wales Swansea or any
other synonymous word or phrase)

Ditto