Collected Essays (25 page)

‘I disapprove of tin articles in puddings and pies. It is most undesirable – (especially when people swallow in lumps).’

She could draw a portrait in a sentence:

‘My name is Mrs Tiggy Winkle; oh yes if you please’m, I’m an excellent clear-starcher.’

And with what beautiful economy she sketched the first smiling villain of her gallery. Tom Kitten had dropped his clothes off the garden wall as the Puddle-Duck family passed:

‘Come! Mr Drake Puddle-Duck,’ said Moppet, ‘Come and help us to dress him! Come and button up Tom!’

Mr Drake Puddle-Duck advanced in a slow sideways manner, and picked up the various articles.

But he put them on himself. They fitted him even worse than Tom Kitten.

‘It’s a very fine morning,’ said Mr Drake Puddle-Duck.

Looking backward over the thirty years of Miss Potter’s literary career, we see that the creation of Mr Puddle-Duck marked the beginning of a new period. At some time between 1907 and 1909 Miss Potter must have passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the character of her genius. It would be impertinent to inquire into the nature of the ordeal. Her case is curiously similar to that of Henry James. Something happened which shook their faith in appearance. From
The Portrait of a Lady
onwards, innocence deceived, the treachery of friends, became the theme of James’s greatest stories. Mme Merle, Kate Croy, Mme de Vionnet, Charlotte Stant, these tortuous treacherous women are paralleled through the dark period of Miss Potter’s art. ‘A man can smile and smile and be a villain,’ that, a little altered, was her recurrent message, expressed by her gallery of scoundrels: Mr Drake Puddle-Duck, the first and slightest, Mr Jackson, the least harmful with his passion for honey and his reiterated. ‘No teeth. No teeth. No teeth’, Samuel Whiskers, gross and brutal, and the ‘gentleman with sandy whiskers’ who may be identified with Mr Tod. With the publication of
Mr Tod
in 1912, Miss Potter’s pessimism reached its climax. But for the nature of her audience
Mr Tod
would certainly have ended tragically. In
Jemima Puddle-Duck
the gentleman with sandy whiskers had at least a debonair impudence when he addressed his victim:

‘Before you commence your tedious sitting, I intend to give you a treat. Let us have a dinner party all to ourselves!

‘May I ask you to bring up some herbs from the farm garden to make a savoury omelette? Sage and thyme, and mint and two onions, and some parsley. I will provide lard for the stuff – lard for the omelette,’ said the hospitable gentleman with sandy whiskers.

But no charm softens the brutality of Mr Tod and his enemy, the repulsive Tommy Brock. In her comedies Miss Potter had gracefully eliminated the emotions of love and death; it is the measure of her genius that when, in
The Tale of Mr Tod
, they broke the barrier, the form of her book, her ironic style, remained unshattered. When she could not keep death out she stretched her technique to include it. Benjamin and Peter had grown up and married, and Benjamin’s babies were stolen by Brock; the immortal pair, one still neurotic, the other knowing and imperturbable, set off to the rescue, but the rescue, conducted in darkness, from a house, ‘something between a cave, a prison, and a tumbledown pig-sty’, compares grimly with an earlier rescue from Mr MacGregor’s sunny vegetable garden:

The sun had set; an owl began to hoot in the wood. There were many unpleasant things lying about, that had much better have been buried; rabbit bones and skulls and chicken’s legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place and very dark.

But
Mr Tod
, for all the horror of its atmosphere, is indispensable. There are few fights in literature which can compare in excitement with the duel between Mr Tod and Tommy Brock (it was echoed by H. G. Wells in
Mr Polly
):

Everything was upset except thekitchen table.

And everything was broken, except the mantelpiece and the kitchen fender. The crockery was smashed to atoms.

The chairs were broken, and the window, and the clock fell with a crash, and there were handfuls of Mr Tod’s sandy whiskers.

The vases fell off the mantelpiece, the canisters fell off the shelf; the kettle fell off the hob. Tommy Brock put his foot in a jar of raspberry jam.’

Mr Tod
marked the distance which Miss Potter had travelled since the ingenuous romanticism of
The Tailor of Gloucester.
The next year with
The Tale of Pigling Bland
, the period of the great near-tragedies came to an end. There was something of the same squalor, and the villain, Mr Thomas Piperson, was not less terrible than Mr Tod, but the book ended on a lyric note, as Pigling Bland escaped with Pig-Wig:

They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill, and across a short cut on level green turf at the bottom, between pebble-beds and rushes. They came to the river, they came to the bridge – they crossed it hand in hand –

It was the nearest Miss Potter had approached to a conventional love story. The last sentence seemed a promise that the cloud had lifted, that there was to be a return to the style of the earlier comedies. But
Pigling Bland
was published in 1913. Through the years of war the author was silent, and for many years after it was over, only a few books of rhyme appeared. These showed that Miss Potter had lost none of her skill as an artist, but left the great question of whither her genius was tending unanswered. Then, after seventeen years, at the end of 1930,
Little Pig Robinson
was published.

The scene was no longer Cumberland but Devonshire and the sea. The story, more than twice as long as
Mr Tod
, was diffuse and undramatic. The smooth smiling villain had disappeared and taken with him the pungent dialogue, the sharp detail, the light of common day. Miss Potter had not returned to the great comedies. She had gone on beyond the great near-tragedies to her
Tempest.
No tortured Lear nor strutting Antony could live on Prospero’s island, among the sounds and sweet airs and cloudcapt towers. Miss Potter too had reached her island, the escape from tragedy, the final surrender of imagination to safe serene fancy:

A stream of boiling water flowed down the silvery strand. The shore was covered with oysters. Acid-drops and sweets grew upon the trees. Yams, which are a sort of sweet potato, abounded ready cooked. The breadfruit tree grew iced cakes and muffins ready baked.

It was all very satisfying for a pig Robinson, but in that rarefied air no bawdy Tommy Brock could creep to burrow, no Benjamin pursue his feud between the vegetable-frames, no Puddle-Duck could search in wide-eyed innocence for a ‘convenient dry nesting-place’.

Note.
On the publication of this essay I received a somewhat acid letter from Miss Potter correcting certain details.
Little Pig Robinson
, although the last published of her books, was in fact the first written. She denied that there had been any emotional disturbance at the time she was writing
Mr Tod
: she was suffering however from the after-effects of flu. In conclusion she deprecated sharply ‘the Freudian school’ of criticism.

1933

HARKAWAY’S OXFORD

M
Y
father used to have hanging on his bathroom wall a photographic group of young men in evening dress with bright blue waistcoats. They were, I think, the officials of an Oxford undergraduate wining club, but with their side-whiskers and heavy moustaches they had more the appearance of Liberal Ministers. Earnest and well-informed, they hardly seemed to be members of the same world as Jack Harkaway, whose adventures at Oxford were published in twopenny numbers – or bound together in two volumes at
6d.
apiece – by the ‘Boys of England’ office some time in the early eighties. They seemed, sitting there on dining-room chairs, squarely facing the camera to hark back more naturally to that much earlier Oxford described by Newman, when
Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian
was a book to make the blood boil – ‘One of our common friends told me, that, after reading it, he could not keep still, but went on walking up and down in his room.’ But unless we are to disbelieve the literary evidence of
Jack Harkaway at Oxford
, the earnest moustache is deceptive: it is the bright blue waistcoat which is the operative image, and I like to imagine that my father’s photograph contained the whole galaxy – Tom Carden, Sir Sydney Dawson, Fabian Hall, Harvey, and the Duke of Woodstock – of what must have been known universally as a Harkaway year, for in 188— Harkaway succeeded in the then unprecedented feat of winning his Blue for rowing, cricket, and football and ending the academic year with a double-first. All this too in spite of the many attempts upon his life and honour engineered by Davis of Singapore whom he had baffled while still a schoolboy in the East. Their reunion at Sir Sydney Dawson’s ‘wine’ is an impressive scene – impressive too in its setting:

A variety of wines were upon the table with all sorts of biscuits and preserved fruits. Olives, however, seemed to be the most popular. A box of cigars, which cost four guineas, invited the attention of smokers. . . . Jack walked over to a tall, effeminate looking young man, with a pale complexion, and having his hair parted in the middle.

‘How do, Kemp?’ he said.

‘Ah, how do?’ replied Kemp, with a peculiar smile. ‘Allow me to introduce you to my friend, Mr Frank Davis of Singapore.’

Jack stared in amazement. Before him was his sworn and determined enemy. Davis had told him that he was going to England to complete his education at a University. He had added that wherever Jack was, he would still hate him, and seek for his revenge. . . . That it was Davis of Singapore he had no doubt. He had lost one ear.

Making a cold and distant bow, Davis replied – ‘Mr Harkaway and I have met before.’

‘Really?’ exclaimed Kemp. ‘I’m glad of that. It’s such a nuisance helping fellows to talk. Davis is not in our college. He’s a Merton man.’

It was unwise of Harkaway towards the end of this same ‘wine’ to transfix Kemp’s hand to the table with a fork when he detected him cheating at cards. The incident led directly to the corruption of Sir Sydney with drink so that he could not ride in the steeplechase against the Duke of Woodstock’s horse, Kemp up; to Jack’s imprisonment for debt on the eve of the Boat Race (but the Jew’s beautiful daughter Hilda, whom he had saved from drowning in the Cher, foiled
that
plot); to the kidnapping of Hilda and Emily, Jack’s betrothed, by Davis and the Duke of Woodstock (‘“Let’s have – aw – one kiss before we part,” said the Duke, with an amorous glance in Hilda’s direction. “Dash my – aw – buttons, but one kiss.” ’); to the foul attempt on Jack’s life in a railway train, and to Kemp setting Emily alight – a rather bizarre episode:

He approached Emily, who was standing with her back to him in her muslin ball dress, looking very gauzy and fairylike.

Drawing a wax match from his pocket, he struck it gently, and held it under her skirt lighting the inflammable material in three places.

Then he retired with the same snakelike, gliding manner.

The story is, of course, a sensational one (it isn’t often that an undergraduate arrives in Oxford with so teeming a past, and with a private tutor – Mr Mole – who had been secretly married to a black woman in the east), but its chief value, I think, lies in its incidentals: the still-life of an Oxford breakfast – ‘At ten o’clock a very decent breakfast stood on the table, consisting of cold game, hot fish, Strasbourg patties, honey in the comb, tea and coffee, with other trifles’; in the delightful turns of phrase:

‘Do you dine in Hall?’

‘No, we have ordered our mutton at the Mitre,’

and the local manners:

‘What shall we do?’

‘Go and screw Scraper up,’ said an undergraduate in his second year.

‘Splendid!’ replied Sir Sydney Dawson. ‘Get a hammer and gimlet and some screws.’

Mr Scraper was an unpopular tutor, and they did not care for consequences. . . . The Dean heard the noise, and summoning two tutors, went with the porter carrying a lantern to the scene of the disturbance.

‘What is the matter, Mr Scraper?’ said the Dean.

‘I am screwed up, sir,’ said Mr Scraper.

One notices in this wild scene outside Mr Scraper’s window an odd change in the character of one college: ‘A friend of Dawson’s who was a Brasenose man sank on his knees overcome by wine, and began to recite a portion of Demosthenes’ oration on the crown.’

But above all I value the book for its picture of Sir Sydney Dawson, imprudent, good-hearted, arrogant, the apotheosis of the wining club. With his aristocratic brutality and his spendthrift kindliness, he must have been every inch a blue waistcoat. Take, for example, the incident of the explosive cigars in Sir Sydney’s room: ‘“I keep them for my tradesmen. The fellows come here worrying for orders and I give them a cigar, which soon starts them,” replied the baronet laughing’, but when he had blown up Mr Mole, scorched his face, and tumbled him in a bowl of goldfish, he feels for the tutor – ‘“By Jove, this is not right. I must write a letter of apology.”’ In the theatre ‘as if to show his contempt for Oxford society, Sir Sydney Dawson took out his handsome cigar-case, and lighted up, though he knew it was against the rules’, but his treatment of Franklin who does lines for commoners in return for a consideration (‘“I am one of the servitors of the college. Perhaps you do not know what that is,” he added with a sad smile’) shows he has a kind heart. ‘“I wonder what a poor man at Oxford is like. I should like to see him. Perhaps an hour or two with a poor man would do me good, always supposing he’s a gentleman. I can’t stand a cad.”’

It may be argued, of course, that, because the author, Edwin J. Brett, had never been to Oxford, this whole setting is imaginary, an Oxford of the heart, but I do not see why the well-known argument in favour of immortality should not apply here too – that ‘an instinct does not exist unless there is a possibility of its being satisfied’, and certainly the instinct exists in this confused uncertain age – a will to return to Sir Sydney’s reckless self-assurance and his breakfasts, to ‘mutton at the Mitre’, a dogcart ‘spanking along the Iffley Road’, to screwing Scraper up.