Miss Austen Regrets: The Life and Loves of Jane Austen

Miss Austen Regrets tries to tell the story of a human being who cannot find a counterpart but nevertheless, feels the need of one. Ironically, it is the story of one of Western Literature’s most formidable Romance novelists, Jane Austen.  It is a movie that asks questions but leaves the answers to you. Should a person marry a person they are three fifths in love with? Two fifths? Fifteen sixteenths? What does an unusually bright person do when they are capable of creating characters in a novel that they could fall in love with but are incapable of meeting someone in the real world that they can. Do they believe? Do they risk growing old believing? “The only way to get a man like Mr. Darcy” says Jane in the movie, “is to make him up.”

Jane Austen died fairly young. And the movie explores the characters in her life and their beliefs about Jane’s decision to pursue literature rather than family, the ideal rather than the present. “’Quite Happy’ is not the end I want to write for my story” she says. But ultimately, that is what she has to settle for. .

“What kind of man could have been worthy of Jane Austen?  That list of men had to have been very, very short.  So short, that Austen may have had to have created and crafted fictional men to fill that void.  Sometimes, when we cannot find what we seek, we create it in our imagination – to fill the void of something we feel and believe should exist.” HERE

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Victoria

The past few days have allowed me to watch two documentaries. One is from the Poetry Anthology series on the Victorian poets. The other is the PBS Empires series documentary on the Victorian Era. Like the other documentaries in this series (Napoleon, Egypt, Rome, Greece, The Kingdom of David, Peter and Paul and the Rise of Christianity, the Medicis) this documentary takes about four hours to pace its way through the key events of Victoria’s reign with a silent backdrop of costumed actors who never talk. It is not terribly exciting but one does get the basic outlines of the significant moments and influences in the reign of England’s Queen Victoria. Among the subjects covered are Industrialization, Prince Albert, the Crystal Palace, the Victorian Family, the Crimean War, the East India Company, the Indian Mutiny, the death of Albert, the journeys and work of David Livingston, the resurgence of interest in King Arthur, the conflicting ideologies of Gladstone and Disraeli, the Suez Canal, the Turkish-Russian War, Charles Gordon in Sudan (Khartoum)  and the Mahdis, Cecil Rhodes and East Africa, the Boer Warand death camps, and the turn of the century.

I suppose what I found most interesting was the ideological battle between Disraeli and Gladstone and the way that the same battle would be reflected in the contests between Theodore Roosevelt and later, William Jennings Bryan. There is a tremendously similar argument going on between pro and anti imperialists in America. I feel like I have a much better sense of chronology between the events that I have long known about but never quite placed.

The documentary on the Victorian era poets was somewhat underwhelming to me. For some reason, Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburn, and Gerard Manly Hopkins all fail to light my fire. Perhaps it has something to do with their seeming devotion to form. Maybe I need to go back further and look at the Romantic poets to find my kindred spirits.  

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The Mayor of Casterbridge

Hardy-mayor-of-casterbridge-bookcover

The first chapter of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge makes for compelling reading. A man arrives at a county fair. He drinks too much. He decides to auction off his wife and daughter to anyone who will pay his minimum price.

“For my part I don't see why men who have got wives and don't want 'em, shouldn't get rid of 'em as these gipsy fellows do their old horses," said the man in the tent. "Why shouldn't they put 'em up and sell 'em by auction to men who are in need of such articles? Hey? Why, begad, I'd sell mine this minute if anybody would buy her!”

A sailor takes the offer and she leaves, not to be seen until 19 years later when she comes back to town to discover that the villain swore off drinking the day after his disgraceful behavior and has become the mayor of Casterbridge.

Much of the story revolves around the making and hiding of secrets and one is left to wonder if the damage that is done by hidden things is ever less destructive than the damage we imagine happening if we tell them. The man’s wife determines not to tell her daughter about her real father.

“The risk of endangering a child's strong affection by disturbing ideas which had grown with her growth was to Mrs. Henchard too fearful a thing to contemplate. It had seemed, indeed folly to think of making Elizabeth-Jane wise.”

And when she returns to Casterbridge, her real father agrees with the policy.

“She cannot be told all—she would so despise us both that—I could not bear it!"

Throughout the story, Michael Henchard has to decide between telling secrets or hiding them and once he begins the policy of hiding them, the ethical ramifications and consequences only intensify. At the end of the book, Henchard dies, aware that in life, sometimes one mistake can mutate and destroy your whole life. His will indicates that he sees no value in the life he lived, despite all his efforts to rectify the error that he made.

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. "& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. "& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. "& that nobody is wished to see my dead body. "& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. "& that no flours be planted on my grave, "& that no man remember me. "To this I put my name.

His despair over the quality of his life is contrasted with that of his daughter who, despite all the hardships in her childhood, grew up to have an adult life full of happiness. I love the concluding paragraph.

 “Her position was, indeed, to a marked degree one that, in the common phrase, afforded much to be thankful for. That she was not demonstratively thankful was no fault of hers. Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honour of a brief transmit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”

Question for Comment: Do you see happiness as “an occasional episode in a drama of pain? Or is life somewhat the other way around for you?

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The Page Turner

I am presently engaged in a discussion with my Ethics class and a Literature class in Jordan about the theme of revenge and retaliation. My colleague in Jordan brought up a great passage in Wuthering Heights. It records a conversation between Nelly and Heathcliffe.

He [Heathcliff] went down: I [Nelly] set him a stool by the fire, and offered him a quantity of good things: but he was sick and could eat little, and my attempts to entertain him were thrown away. He leant his two elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands and remained rapt in dumb meditation.

On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely - 'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!'

'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.'

'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.'

(Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: chapter 7)

Tonight I watched a movie about a Heathcliffe like character placed in the soul of a ten year old girl.

This girl goes to a piano recital that will decide whether or not she gets into a prestigious music school. She has worked incredibly hard to get the piece she is to play down perfectly. She enters the room, sits down to play and starts without error. About a minute into it, someone comes in the door, walks over to one of the judges (a famous piano player) and asks for her autograph. The interruption breaks the little girl's concentration and she messes up and is unable to finish well.

Question for comment: If someone does something that deeply and negatively impacts our lives, but had no intention of doing so, or had no understanding of what they did, how are we to find restitution with them? What does justice mean when there is a wide gulf between what we have actually done and what we think we have done?

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“Who would have thought that behind them, within ten miles, London began—that London of the Forsytes, with its wealth, its misery; its dirt and noise; its jumbled stone isles of beauty, its grey sea of hideous brick and stucco? That London which had seen Irene's early tragedy, and Jolyon's own hard days; that web; that princely workhouse of the possessive instinct!” John Galsworthy, Indian Summer of a Forsyte

The Forsyte Saga 4-DVD Set [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Netherlands ]

Possession may be nine tenths of the law but the slightest tincture of it will kill a love affair it appears. I finished John Galsworthy's second Forsyte Saga novel, Indian Summer of a Forsyte, today and I cannot claim to have been unaffected by it emotionally. It furthers the themes begun in the first novel A Man of Possession beautifully capturing the impact of Victorian era assumptions, both conservative and liberal, through the romantic lives of the wealthy Forsyte family.

Indian Summer of a Forsyte takes us into the labyrinth of the mind of a possessive man, Soames Forsyte. The interesting thing about this villain is that he suffers and one cannot help but pity him (or at least I can't). There is a certain irony to the fact that I intensely dislike him and yet find myself feeling more empathy for him than any of the other characters. “'He really suffers,' says Jolyon Forsyte of his cousin Soames in words that resonated with me deeply, “I've no business to forget that, just because I don't like him.” I understand him and dislike him. I think, more than anything because he is a man who cannot understand himself. He is constantly asking why the woman that he so values rejected him, left him, despises him, and comes to hate him. Frankly, he cannot seem to understand how horrible it feels to be regarded as someone's possession. And yet he is convinced that his possessiveness is love.

To Soames Forsyte, the people he “loves” should act like his art. Once paid for, they should stay on his walls where he can look at them when he wants and show them off to people when they stop by.

I have pages of notes to illustrate how Soames Forsyte and his family view their domestic relations in ways not unlike a Lord might view their peasants in a feudal society.

“The third reason why Susan's burial made little stir was the most expansive of all. It was summed up daringly by Euphemia, the pale, the thin: "Well, I think people have a right to their own bodies, even when they're dead." Coming from a daughter of Nicholas, a Liberal of the old school and most tyrannical, it was a startling remark—showing in a flash what a lot of water had run under bridges since the death of Aunt Ann in '86, just when the proprietorship of Soames over his wife's body was acquiring the uncertainty which had led to such disaster. Euphemia, of course, spoke like a child, and had no experience; for though well over thirty by now, her name was still Forsyte. But, making all allowances, her remark did undoubtedly show expansion of the principle of liberty, decentralisation and shift in the central point of possession from others to oneself. When Nicholas heard his daughter's remark from Aunt Hester he had rapped out: "Wives and daughters! There's no end to their liberty in these days. I knew that 'Jackson' case would lead to things—lugging in Habeas Corpus like that!" He had, of course, never really forgiven the Married Woman's Property Act, which would so have interfered with him if he had not mercifully married before it was passed. But, in truth, there was no denying the revolt among the younger Forsytes against being owned by others; that, as it were, Colonial disposition to own oneself, which is the paradoxical forerunner of Imperialism, was making progress all the time.”

Indeed, Soames Forsyte is incapbale of letting go of his wife, Irene. He hangs on to her like Britain would later hang on to India. He regards her as property, and he deeply needs to have a son to pass his property down to.

“There had always been a strongly domestic, philoprogenitive side to Soames; baulked and frustrated, it had hidden itself away, but now had crept out again in this his 'prime of life.'”

“Whether Annette [Soames' new potential wife] had produced the revolution in his outlook, or that outlook had produced Annette, he knew no more than we know where a circle begins. It was intricate and deeply involved with the growing consciousness that property without anyone to leave it to is the negation of true Forsyteism. To have an heir, some continuance of self, who would begin where he left off—ensure, in fact, that he would not leave off—had quite obsessed him for the last year and more.”

In short, it is as though owning property is not enough for a man like Soams. He is not content if he is anxious about whether he will always own it, even after he is gone. Soames cannot understand why property, even human property, will not act like property. And if it won't, he can't understand why the law will not compel said property to comply with its nature and BE property – namely, to remain his wife.

“Of a misty January evening, just before the board was taken down, Soames had gone there once more, and stood against the Square railings, looking at its unlighted windows, chewing the cud of possessive memories which had turned so bitter in the mouth. Why had she never loved him? Why? She had been given all she had wanted, and in return had given him, for three long years, all he had wanted—except, indeed, her heart.”

Soames finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. His wife, Irene has been gone for almost 12 years. She remains single and alone and refuses to divorce him. He understands that his precious Forsyte name would lose 20% of its value if he were to bring scandal to it by divorcing her. In the family courts of England, such a divorce can only be obtained for good reason, and neither of them having committed adultery in any provable way, it would be impossible anyway. Soames considers proposing to a fetching young French woman named Annette, understanding that his substantial fortune may well compensate for the fact that she cannot love him.

“It was not as if Annette could have a real passion for him; one could not expect that at his age. If her mother wished, if the worldly advantage were manifestly great—perhaps! If not, refusal would be certain.”

"We never part with things you know,” says Jolyon Forsyte of his cousin's fixation on getting his wife back, “unless we want something in their place; and not always then." Cousins, Jolyon Forsyte and Soames Forsyte could not be the more diametrically opposed. One loves and feels loved or one doesn't according to Jolyon. There is no purchasing it, either with money or with guilt. Jolyon cannot deny that Soames has a case in law against Irene. Legally, she did sign herself away. But for him, the law of nature cannot be countermanded by the law of society.

“Again Jolyon's reason nodded; again his instinct shook its head. 'What is it?' he thought; 'there must be something wrong in me. Yet if there is, I'd rather be wrong than right.'

"After all," said Soames with a sort of glum fierceness, "she was my wife."

In a flash the thought went through his listener: 'There it is! Ownerships! Well, we all own things. But—human beings! Pah!'

It almost seems as though Soames' money has deluded him. He can purchase anything he wants. He does so every day of his life. It is as though he simply cannot resist the application of the metaphor of buying and owning to his human relationships.

“Memory, flown back to the first years of his marriage, played him torturing tricks. She had not deserved to keep her beauty—the beauty he had owned and known so well. And a kind of bitterness at the tenacity of his own admiration welled up in him. Most men would have hated the sight of her, as she had deserved. She had spoiled his life, wounded his pride to death, defrauded him of a son. And yet the mere sight of her, cold and resisting as ever, had this power to upset him utterly! It was some damned magnetism she had!”

“Nearing his Club at last he stopped to buy a paper. A headline ran: 'Boers reported to repudiate suzerainty!' Suzerainty! 'Just like her!' he thought: 'she always did. Suzerainty! I still have it by rights. She must be awfully lonely in that wretched little flat!'”

And thus Soames gives up his “Annette plan” for a “reclamation of Irene with the promise of money plan” oblivious to the fact that the plan itself is the problem.

“"You went to see her yesterday yourself, I understand" said Jolyon.

"I did," said Soames; "she's my wife, you know."

The tone, the half-lifted sneering lip, roused sudden anger in Jolyon; but he subdued it.

"You ought to know best," he said, "but if you want a divorce it's not very wise to go seeing her, is it? One can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?"

"You're very good to warn me," said Soames, "but I have not made up my mind."

"She has," said Jolyon, looking straight before him; "you can't take things up, you know, as they were twelve years ago."

"That remains to be seen."

"Look here!" said Jolyon, "she's in a damnable position, and I am the only person with any legal say in her affairs." [Jolyon is the executor of trust that his father has set up for Irene]

"Except myself," retorted Soames, "who am also in a damnable position. Hers is what she made for herself; mine what she made for me. I am not at all sure that in her own interests I shan't require her to return to me."

"What!" exclaimed Jolyon; and a shiver went through his whole body.

"I don't know what you may mean by 'what,'" answered Soames coldly; "your say in her affairs is confined to paying out her income; please bear that in mind. In choosing not to disgrace her by a divorce, I retained my rights, and, as I say, I am not at all sure that I shan't require to exercise them."

"My God!" ejaculated Jolyon, and he uttered a short laugh.

"Yes," said Soames, and there was a deadly quality in his voice. "I've not forgotten the nickname your father gave me, 'The man of property'! I'm not called names for nothing."

"This is fantastic," murmured Jolyon. Well, the fellow couldn't force his wife to live with him. Those days were past, anyway! And he looked around at Soames with the thought: 'Is he real, this man?' But Soames looked very real, sitting square yet almost elegant with the clipped moustache on his pale face, and a tooth showing where a lip was lifted in a fixed smile. There was a long silence, while Jolyon thought: 'Instead of helping her, I've made things worse.' Suddenly Soames said:

"It would be the best thing that could happen to her in many ways."

At those words such a turmoil began taking place in Jolyon that he could barely sit still in the cab. It was as if he were boxed up with hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, boxed up with that something in the national character which had always been to him revolting, something which he knew to be extremely natural and yet which seemed to him inexplicable—their intense belief in contracts and vested rights, their complacent sense of virtue in the exaction of those rights. Here beside him in the cab was the very embodiment, the corporeal sum as it were, of the possessive instinct—his own kinsman, too! It was uncanny and intolerable! 'But there's something more in it than that!' he thought with a sick feeling. 'The dog, they say, returns to his vomit! The sight of her has reawakened something. Beauty! The devil's in it!'

"As I say," said Soames, "I have not made up my mind. I shall be obliged if you will kindly leave her quite alone."

Jolyon bit his lips; he who had always hated rows almost welcomed the thought of one now.

"I can give you no such promise," he said shortly.

"Very well," said Soames, "then we know where we are. I'll get down here." And stopping the cab he got out without word or sign of farewell. Jolyon travelled on to his Club.

It is almost as though I can hear the sound of Gollum in Lord of the Rings, fawningly whispering “my precious. My precious” as Soames plots his reconquista.

“One woman's much the same as another, after all.' But as he walked he shook his head. No! One woman was not the same as another. Many a time had he tried to think that in the old days of his thwarted married life; and he had always failed. He was failing now. He was trying to think Annette the same as that other. But she was not, she had not the lure of that old passion. 'And Irene's my wife,' he thought, 'my legal wife. I have done nothing to put her away from me. Why shouldn't she come back to me? It's the right thing, the lawful thing. It makes no scandal, no disturbance. If it's disagreeable to her—but why should it be? I'm not a leper, and she—she's no longer in love!' Why should he be put to the shifts and the sordid disgraces and the lurking defeats of the Divorce Court, when there she was like an empty house only waiting to be retaken into use and possession by him who legally owned her? To one so secretive as Soames the thought of reentry into quiet possession of his own property with nothing given away to the world was intensely alluring.”

He tracks Irene down and proposes. He will do anything. Agree to any terms. She may even live separately. He simply wants a son he says.

“"I am not going till you've answered me. I am offering what few men would bring themselves to offer, I want a—a reasonable answer." And almost with surprise he heard her say:

"You can't have a reasonable answer. Reason has nothing to do with it. You can only have the brutal truth: I would rather die. . . . "

“He turned away to the door. But he could not go out. Something within him—that most deep and secret Forsyte quality, the impossibility of letting go, the impossibility of seeing the fantastic and forlorn nature of his own tenacity—prevented him.”

“Soames gritted his teeth. "God knows what it was. I've never understood you; I shall never understand you. You had everything you wanted; and you can have it again, and more. What's the matter with me? I ask you a plain question: What is it?" Unconscious of the pathos in that enquiry, he went on passionately: "I'm not lame, I'm not loathsome, I'm not a boor, I'm not a fool. What is it? What's the mystery about me?"

Her answer was a long sigh.”

The reader is left to fill in the meaning of the sigh but clearly, it has something to do with Irine's wish to never again place herself on the auction block of matrimonial enslavement. And thus are they both trapped by the law.

It is interesting at this point to contrast Jolyon and Soames in the way that they are affected by Irene. Both men regard her as beautiful. Captivatingly beautiful. And charming. Irene is probably what someone without discretion might refer to as an “alpha female” in her Victorian society. Perhaps because of her looks. Perhaps because of her nature. There is something that can only be referred to as quality in her and every Forsyte man in the family can see it. But Jolyon Forsyte was raised by a father who could appreciate quality in women without confusing them with property to be purchased. Soames Forsyte was raised by Jolyon's uncle who had very different views.

Here is Galsworthy's description of the way that Jolyon feels about Irene.

“It was like watching a starved plant draw up water, to see her drink in his companionship. So far as they could tell, no one knew her address except himself; she was unknown in Paris, and he but little known, so that discretion seemed unnecessary in those walks, talks, visits to concerts, picture-galleries, theatres, little dinners, expeditions to Versailles, St. Cloud, even Fontainebleau. And time fled—one of those full months without past to it or future. What in his youth would certainly have been headlong passion, was now perhaps as deep a feeling, but far gentler, tempered to protective companionship by admiration, hopelessness, and a sense of chivalry—arrested in his veins at least so long as she was there, smiling and happy in their friendship, and always to him more beautiful and spiritually responsive: for her philosophy of life seemed to march in admirable step with his own, conditioned by emotion more than by reason, ironically mistrustful, susceptible to beauty, almost passionately humane and tolerant, yet subject to instinctive rigidities of which as a mere man he was less capable. And during all this companionable month he never quite lost that feeling with which he had set out on the first day as if to visit an adored work of art, a well-nigh impersonal desire.”

When next Jolyon and Soames meet, the way that Jolyon is able to moderate his possessive instincts and Soames is not is made amply clear.

“"I don't know what makes you think I have any influence," said Jolyon; "but if I have I'm bound to use it in the direction of what I think is her happiness. I am what they call a 'feminist,' I believe."

"Feminist!" repeated Soames, as if seeking to gain time. "Does that mean that you're against me?"

"Bluntly," said Jolyon, "I'm against any woman living with any man whom she definitely dislikes. It appears to me rotten."

"And I suppose each time you see her you put your opinions into her mind."

"I am not likely to be seeing her."

"Not going back to Paris?"

"Not so far as I know," said Jolyon, conscious of the intent watchfulness in Soames' face.

"Well, that's all I had to say. Anyone who comes between man and wife, you know, incurs heavy responsibility."

To Jolyon, Soames is little more than a matrimonial imperialist, treating women like England had treated Ireland and was in the process of subduing South Africa.

[Jolyon] could remember fuming over the bludgeoning of Ireland, or the matrimonial suits of women trying to be free of men they loathed. Parsons would have it that freedom of soul and body were quite different things! Pernicious doctrine! Body and soul could not thus be separated. Free will was the strength of any tie, and not its weakness. 'I ought to have told Soames,' he thought, 'that I think him comic. Ah! but he's tragic, too!' Was there anything, indeed, more tragic in the world than a man enslaved by his own possessive instinct, who couldn't see the sky for it, or even enter fully into what another person felt!”

Soames, incapable of seeing any other approach besides that of the legal argument, flings himself against the heavily barred gates of her will once again:

He could see, then, that she was struggling to preserve her composure.

"I didn't want to startle you; is this one of your haunts?"

"Yes."

"A little lonely." As he spoke, a lady, strolling by, paused to look at the fountain and passed on.

Irene's eyes followed her.

"No," she said, prodding the ground with her parasol, "never lonely. One has always one's shadow." [Soames has been paying to have Irene watched by a detective agency.]

Soames understood; and, looking at her hard, he exclaimed:

"Well, it's your own fault. You can be free of it at any moment. Irene, come back to me, and be free."

Irene laughed.

"Don't!" cried Soames, stamping his foot; "it's inhuman. Listen! Is there any condition I can make which will bring you back to me? If I promise you a separate house—and just a visit now and then?"

Irene rose, something wild suddenly in her face and figure.

"None! None! None! You may hunt me to the grave. I will not come."

"That's your last word, then," muttered Soames, clenching his hands; "you condemn us both."

Irene bent her head. "I can't come back. Good-bye!"

A feeling of monstrous injustice flared up in Soames.

"Stop!" he said, "and listen to me a moment. You gave me a sacred vow—you came to me without a penny. You had all I could give you. You broke that vow without cause, you made me a by-word; you refused me a child; you've left me in prison; you—you still move me so that I want you—I want you. Well, what do you think of yourself?"

Irene turned, her face was deadly pale, her eyes burning dark.

"God made me as I am," she said; "wicked if you like—but not so wicked that I'll give myself again to a man I hate."

Soames is trapped. He is a millionaire. But he is trapped. He is owned without owning. He can neither buy what he wills to possess or buy his freedom from she who possesses him.

“In irons! His whole life, with every natural instinct and every decent yearning gagged and fettered, and all because Fate had driven him seventeen years ago to set his heart upon this woman—so utterly, that even now he had no real heart to set on any other! Cursed was the day he had met her, and his eyes for seeing in her anything but the cruel Venus she was! And yet, still seeing her with the sunlight on the clinging China crepe of her gown, he uttered a little groan, so that a tourist who was passing, thought: 'Man in pain! Let's see! what did I have for lunch?'”

Why does Irene give herself to Jolyon rather than the far wealthier Soames. Ultimately it is because what both men offer is not so important to her as the difference between what the two men expect to take. One will have her. The other will have what she decides to give. The difference can be found in Jolyon's Stoic determination not to “be a Forsyte” which is to say that he will not use money and the law to acquire that which only free will and an ungovernable chemistry can give.

“And while they walked, Jolyon pondered those words: 'I hope you'll treat him as you treated me.' That would depend on himself. Could he trust himself? Did Nature permit a Forsyte not to make a slave of what he adored? Could beauty be confided to him? Or should she not be just a visitor, coming when she would, possessed for moments which passed, to return only at her own choosing? 'We are a breed of spoilers!' thought Jolyon, 'close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never-never her cage!'

Contrast that with the lamentations of Soames as he contemplates in shillings and coppers the reputational cost of his having to file for divorce:

“The matter was clear as daylight, and would be disposed of in half an hour or so; but during that half-hour he, Soames, would go down to hell; and after that half-hour all bearers of the Forsyte name would feel the bloom was off the rose. He had no illusions like Shakespeare that roses by any other name would smell as sweet. The name was a possession, a concrete, unstained piece of property, the value of which would be reduced some twenty per cent. at least.”

“He had asked no better than to live in spotless domesticity, and now he must go into the witness box, after all these futile, barren years, and proclaim his failure to keep his wife—incur the pity, the amusement, the contempt of his kind. It was all upside down. She and that fellow ought to be the sufferers, and they—were in Italy! In these weeks the Law he had served so faithfully, looked on so reverently as the guardian of all property, seemed to him quite pitiful. What could be more insane than to tell a man that he owned his wife, and punish him when someone unlawfully took her away from him? Did the Law not know that a man's name was to him the apple of his eye, that it was far harder to be regarded as cuckold than as seducer? He actually envied Jolyon the reputation of succeeding where he, Soames, had failed.”

This next passage, taken from a portion of the novel after Soames has obtained his divorce and married Annette is too good not to quote at length.

“The marriage of Soames with Annette took place in Paris on the last day of January, 1901, with such privacy that not even Emily was told until it was accomplished.

The day after the wedding he brought her to one of those quiet hotels in London where greater expense can be incurred for less result than anywhere else under heaven. Her beauty in the best Parisian frocks was giving him more satisfaction than if he had collected a perfect bit of china, or a jewel of a picture; he looked forward to the moment when he would exhibit her in Park Lane, in Green Street, and at Timothy's.

If some one had asked him in those days, "In confidence—are you in love with this girl?" he would have replied: "In love? What is love? If you mean do I feel to her as I did towards Irene in those old days when I first met her and she would not have me; when I sighed and starved after her and couldn't rest a minute until she yielded—no! If you mean do I admire her youth and prettiness, do my senses ache a little when I see her moving about—yes! Do I think she will keep me straight, make me a creditable wife and a good mother for my children?—again, yes!"

"What more do I need? and what more do three-quarters of the women who are married get from the men who marry them?" And if the enquirer had pursued his query, "And do you think it was fair to have tempted this girl to give herself to you for life unless you have really touched her heart?" he would have answered: "The French see these things differently from us. They look at marriage from the point of view of establishments and children; and, from my own experience, I am not at all sure that theirs is not the sensible view. I shall not expect this time more than I can get, or she can give. Years hence I shouldn't be surprised if I have trouble with her; but I shall be getting old, I shall have children by then. I shall shut my eyes. I have had my great passion; hers is perhaps to come—I don't suppose it will be for me. I offer her a great deal, and I don't expect much in return, except children, or at least a son. But one thing I am sure of—she has very good sense!"

And if, insatiate, the enquirer had gone on, "You do not look, then, for spiritual union in this marriage?" Soames would have lifted his sideway smile, and rejoined: "That's as it may be. If I get satisfaction for my senses, perpetuation of myself; good taste and good humour in the house; it is all I can expect at my age. I am not likely to be going out of my way towards any far-fetched sentimentalism." Whereon, the enquirer must in good taste have ceased enquiry.”

The novel closes with an apt description of how the cultural influence of Queen Victoria in the age of property and acquisition and ownership and imperialism had impacted the romantic lives of two men and two women. It is a poinient scene:

“The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey with unshed tears. Fur-coated and top-hatted, with Annette beside him in dark furs, Soames crossed Park Lane on the morning of the funeral procession, to the rails in Hyde Park. Little moved though he ever was by public matters, this event, supremely symbolical, this summing-up of a long rich period, impressed his fancy. In '37, when she came to the throne, 'Superior Dosset' was still building houses to make London hideous; and James, a stripling of twenty-six, just laying the foundations of his practice in the Law. Coaches still ran; men wore stocks, shaved their upper lips, ate oysters out of barrels; 'tigers' swung behind cabriolets; women said, 'La!' and owned no property; there were manners in the land, and pigsties for the poor; unhappy devils were hanged for little crimes, and Dickens had but just begun to write. Well-nigh two generations had slipped by—of steamboats, railways, telegraphs, bicycles, electric light, telephones, and now these motorcars—of such accumulated wealth, that eight per cent. had become three, and Forsytes were numbered by the thousand! Morals had changed, manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had become Mammon—Mammon so respectable as to deceive himself: Sixty-four years that favoured property, and had made the upper middle class; buttressed, chiselled, polished it, till it was almost indistinguishable in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the nobility. An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonised hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be. A great Age, whose transmuting influence nothing had escaped save the nature of man and the nature of the Universe.”

“. . . Out in the crowd against the railings, with his arm hooked in Annette's, Soames waited. Yes! the Age was passing! What with this Trade Unionism, and Labour fellows in the House of Commons, with continental fiction, and something in the general feel of everything, not to be expressed in words, things were very different; he recalled the crowd on Mafeking night, and George Forsyte saying: "They're all socialists, they want our goods." Like James, Soames didn't know, he couldn't tell—with Edward on the throne! Things would never be as safe again as under good old Viccy! Convulsively he pressed his young wife's arm. There, at any rate, was something substantially his own, domestically certain again at last; something which made property worth while—a real thing once more. Pressed close against her and trying to ward others off, Soames was content.

And, suddenly, a little behind them to the left, he saw a tallish man with a soft hat and short grizzling beard, and a tallish woman in a little round fur cap and veil. Jolyon and Irene talking, smiling at each other, close together like Annette and himself! They had not seen him; and stealthily, with a very queer feeling in his heart, Soames watched those two. They looked happy! What had they come here for—inherently illicit creatures, rebels from the Victorian ideal? What business had they in this crowd? Each of them twice exiled by morality—making a boast, as it were, of love and laxity! He watched them fascinated; admitting grudgingly even with his arm thrust through Annette's that—that she—Irene—No! he would not admit it; and he turned his eyes away. He would not see them, and let the old bitterness, the old longing rise up within him! And then Annette turned to him and said: "Those two people, Soames; they know you, I am sure. Who are they?"

“But while he stood, grasping her arm, seemingly intent on the head of the procession, he was quivering with the sense of always missing something, with instinctive regret that he had not got them both.”

Regret that “he had not got them both.” John Galsworthy has chosen his words perfectly. For whenever Soames Forsyte says to someone “I love you” what he really means is “I got you.” Galsworthy could not have illustrated it more clearly than he does in his conclusion where we see Soames meeting for the first time his newborn daughter Fleur:

“Relief unspeakable, and yet—a daughter! It seemed to him unfair. To have taken that risk—to have been through this agony—and what agony!—for a daughter! He stood before the blazing fire of wood logs in the hall, touching it with his toe and trying to readjust himself. 'My father!' he thought. A bitter disappointment, no disguising it! One never got all one wanted in this life! And there was no other—at least, if there was, it was no use!”

“"Don't you want to see baby, Soames? She is asleep."

"Of course," said Soames, "very much."

He passed round the foot of the bed to the other side and stood staring. For the first moment what he saw was much what he had expected to see—a baby. But as he stared and the baby breathed and made little sleeping movements with its tiny features, it seemed to assume an individual shape, grew to be like a picture, a thing he would know again; not repulsive, strangely bud-like and touching. It had dark hair. He touched it with his finger, he wanted to see its eyes. They opened, they were dark—whether blue or brown he could not tell. The eyes winked, stared, they had a sort of sleepy depth in them. And suddenly his heart felt queer, warm, as if elated.

"Ma petite fleur!" Annette said softly.

"Fleur," repeated Soames: "Fleur! we'll call her that."

The sense of triumph and renewed possession swelled within him.

By God! this—this thing was his! By God! this—this thing was his!”

And so the novel ends. “By God! This thing was his!” the statement that fairly well guarantees … that she will never be.

Question for Comment: How does a person love without nurturing attachment that might eventually make a person feel that they were becoming an object of emotional possession?

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Far from the Madding Crowd (Penguin Classics)

Thomas Hardy

Far from the Maddening Crowd: Thomas Hardy

One woman. Three men. The woman, Bathsheba Everdene, Beautiful.

One man, Mr. Boldwood: Too old for her and riddled with insecurities but seriously OCD smitten.

One man, Frank Troy: A player but excessively handsome and charming.

One man, Gabriel Oak: An honest, hardworking, and decent sort with unremarkable looks and devoid of status.

Here is what Hardy says about Bathsheba Everdene:

“There was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be questioned.”p. 14

“Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the single one of her sex that the room contained. She was prettily and even daintily dressed. She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard after them as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among furnaces. It had required a little determination -- far more than she had at first imagined -- to take up a position here, for at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had ceased, nearly every face had been turned towards her, and those that were already turned rigidly fixed there.” p. 80

And here is what she has to say about marriage at the beginning of the novel:

"Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can't show off in that way by herself, I shan't marry -- at least yet." p. 27

"Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence," we can imagine her saying to her suitors. p. 68

Here is what Hardy has to say about Gabriel Oak:

“His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section, -- that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed,- and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon.” p. 1

“He had just reached the time of life at which "young" is ceasing to be the prefix of "man" in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated ...” p. 3

“Gabriel's features adhered throughout their form so exactly to the middle line between the beauty of St.John and the ugliness of Judas Iscariot, as represented in a window of the church he attended, that not a single lineament could be selected and called worthy either of distinction or notoriety.” p. 5

“Having for some time known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing void within him, his position moreover affording the widest scope for his fancy, he painted her [Bathsheba] a beauty.” p. 12

Here is what Gabriel feels about Bathsheba when she first meets her:

“Gabriel had reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated a short time before. He liked saying `Bathsheba' as a private enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small.” p. 21

Alas, his chances are not good.

“Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of honesty.” p. 28

“No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of skittishness. "Very well." said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. "Then I'll ask you no more." p. 28

Mr. Boldwood is some 16 years older than Bathsheba Everdene and he is clearly suffering (unknowingly) from some form of non-verbal learning disorder and a vulnerability to obsessiveness.

“Boldwood looked at her -- not slily, critically, or understandingly, but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train -- as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements -- comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty to consider.” p. 104

To the best of his judgement neither nature nor art could improve this perfect one of an imperfect many. His heart began to move within him. Boldwood, it must be remembered, though forty years of age, had never before inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his glance; they had struck upon all his senses at wide angles. Was she really beautiful? He could not assure himself that his opinion was true even now. He furtively said to a neighbour, "Is Miss Everdene considered handsome?" p. 105

“Bathsheba was far from dreaming that the dark and silent shape [Mr. Boldwood] upon which she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a hotbed of tropic intensity.” p. 108

Boldwood's affections for Bathsheba are the first affections he has ever felt for anyone. Indeed, she is the first woman he appears to have ever noticed. He is clearly out of his depth. One might think of his affections for Bathsheba as monomaniacal.

“Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.” p. 108

“A man's body is as the shell; or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained. There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defenses for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.”

“He passed by with an utter and overwhelming sensation of ignorance, shyness, and doubt. Perhaps in her manner there were signs that she wished to see him -- perhaps not -- he could not read a woman. The cabala of this erotic philosophy seemed to consist of the subtlest meanings expressed in misleading ways. Every turn, look, word, and accent contained a mystery quite distinct from its obvious import, and not one had ever been pondered by him until now.” p. 110

“The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her -- visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms.”p.110

Our third competitor for the hand of the lovely Bathsheba is Sargent Frank Troy. He is an inveterate liar and flatterer with half the integrity of either Gabriel and Boldwood and twice their talent for sweet talk combined.

“After all, how could a cheerful wearer of skirts be permanently offended with the man [Sargent Troy]? There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behavior. When they want to be praised, which is often, when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom. Just now the first feeling was in the ascendant with Bathsheba, with a dash of the second.” p. 148

“He [Troy] spoke fluently and unceasingly. He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at the wife, be eager to pay and intend to owe.” p.151

“I won't speak of morals or religion -- my own or anybody else's, he says,

“Though perhaps I should have been a very good Christian if you pretty women hadn't made me an idolater." p. 154

Ah." well, Miss Everdene, you are -- pardon my blunt way -- you are rather an injury to our race than otherwise.

"How -- indeed?" she said, opening her eyes.

"O, it is true enough. I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb (an old country saying, not of much account, but it will do for a rough soldier), and so I will speak my mind, regardless of your pleasure, and without hoping or intending to get your pardon. Why, Miss Everdene, it is in this manner that your good looks may do more. harm than good in the world."

The sergeant looked down the mead in critical abstraction. "Probably some one man on an average falls in love, with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet -- your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to. drown the bitterness of espised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more -- the susceptible person myself possibly among them -- will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race."

The handsome sergeant's features were during this speech as rigid and stern as John Knox's in addressing his gay young queen.” p. 156

Hardy seems to want us to like Miss Everdene but … she clearly has no defenses against this sort of high octain wooing.

“Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.” p. 170

By the time these men all play out their cards, we find a confused Bathsheba picking charm over wealth and wealth over character. Fortunately for her, Mr. Wealth kills Mr. Charm eventually, and she winds up with the man she comes to realize she should have picked first, a.k.a. Mr. Character, Gabriel Oak. To sum up their differences, you might say that Mr. Boldwood can think of nothing but Bathsheba, Mr. Troy can think of no one but himself, and Mr. Oak is capable of thinking about everyone's interests. He is niether overwhelmed by himself (as Mr. Troy is) not with the person he loves (as Mr. Boldwood is).

“That man's life is a total blank whenever he isn't hoping for you,” Oak says to Bathsheba of Boldwood.

“Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt, any more than she herself, the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave -- that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal wellbeing were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be.” p.266

At the conclusion of the novel, Hardy makes a case for couples taking more time in their courtship processes. Both Boldwood and Bathsheba fall in love with ideas not people and niether give the real people the time it takes to emerge out of the fog of the idea. And while Gabriel Oak does the same to some extent, he is far more patient and sober about the commitments he makes and the time he will take.

“It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba's disappearance though effectual with people of certain humours is apt to idealize the removed object with others -- notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be flows deep and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now that she was gone -- that was all.” p. 29

It is only years after his first rejected proposal that Hardy presents us with a couple capable of making an informed decision regarding one another.

“He accompanied her up the hill, explaining to her the details of his forthcoming tenure of the other farm. They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all)when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character,and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship -- CAMARADERIE -- usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death – that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.” p. 357

“The real sin, ma'am in my mind,” says Oak to Bathsheba, “lies in thinking of ever wedding wi' a man you don't love honest and true." p. 321

Gabriel Oak understands the value of alignment, of involving one's entire being in a process and not just one aspect. He understands the dangers of making such decisions on the basis of first impressions, feuding impressions, and easily fooled temporary impressions. Bathsheba scolds her maid, Liddy for still being single,

"You ought to be married by this time, and not here troubling me!"

Ay, mistress -- so I did.” says Liddy, “But what between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!" p. 68

And as Bathsheba Everdine concludes after a great deal of sorrow, tis better to be a Pelican in the wilderness as long as it takes to make decisions about partners with a clear eye.

“That she had never, by look, word, or sign, encouraged a man to approach her -- that she had felt herself sufficient to herself, and had in the independence of her girlish heart fancied there was a certain degradation in renouncing the simplicity of a maiden existence to become the humbler half of an indifferent matrimonial whole -- were facts now bitterly remembered. O, if she had never stooped to folly of this kind, respectable as it was, and could only stand again, as she had stood on the hill at Norcombe, and dare Troy or any other man to pollute a hair of her head by his interference!” p. 248

“Be careful not to awaken love until it pleases” the writer of the song of Songs writes to the daughters of Jerusalem. That seems to be the theme of Far From the Maddening Crowd.

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The Forsyte Saga: The Man of Property

John Galsworthy

[I have NO idea why VOX is creating these red fonted underlines! Drives me crazy. I can't get rid of them]

I wish I could figure out a way to combine the benefits of watching a movie based on a novel and reading the novel itself. I confess, I enjoyed the dramatized version of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: A Man of Property, and I found a good deal of the novel tedious when I read it. But there are some passages in the novel that don’t make it through into the film that are really well written. Galsworthy is one of the first writers of the Edwardian Era to begin to seriously challenge the “suffocating” morality of the Victorian Age (and I realize that one could also parse that sentence differently and say that John Galsworthy is one of the first writers to undermine the sanctity of the Victorian family.) Passion and social order are two trains and authors like Galsworthy insist that if you can only get on one, you should choose passion. He himself had an affair and later married his cousin’s wife.

In many respects, he can be placed in the same category as Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and E.M. Forster. He’s a Rousseau who will follow through with his principles, society be damned.

In many ways, the The Man of Property could be an effective tool for teaching Victorian moral sensibilities and values. The basic story involves a wealthy family (the Forsytes) that represent what, to Galsworthy, is the problem with the Victorian family and society. They have honed their capitalist skills and neglected to invest the time it takes to be emotionally and relationally wealthy. Two cousins, Jolyon and Soames Forsyte take opposing approaches to the way they value people, things, reputation, and happiness. Soames marries to possess a beautiful woman whose principle function in his life revolves around status. Jolyon leaves his wife and is excommunicated from the family in pursuit of a natural affection he has for a domestic servant. The novel traces the arc of wisdom and/or foolishness in these two men’s lives by focusing on the life and hearts of Soames’ wife Irene and Jolyon’s daughter, June.  Through these two characters, we are given to understand how painful the life of passion can be, and yet Galsworthy would seem to indicate that there can be no other alternative if one is to live.

Throughout the novel, Galsworthy keeps returning to the Victorian perception of marriage as a matter of contract and ownership and critiquing it. Soames instinct for “possessing” his wife exceeds his momentary and ephemeral feelings of love for her. Jolyon wishes to own and be owned by no one. His soul is in his feelings and passions and he will sell them for no amount. Irene must decide if she will or will not do the same.  June has her father, Jolyon’s predisposition to throw herself entirely into her love for her beau but she suffers the excruciating agony of having done so for a man who has his heart attached elsewhere.

“But this long tale is no scientific study of a period,” we read in the preface,

“it is rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men. . . . The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.”

One sees this even in Soames’ proposal to Irene: “Will you do me the honor of becoming mine.” He asks. Her financial situation leaves her desperate to say no but inclined to say yeas.

“I will marry you Mr. Forsyte” she replies. HE is not her lover. He is an insurance policy.  

But unlike a piece of property, a human being is not something you own just because you buy it. “Why do you never look at me like you look at him?” Soames asks his wife years later.  “Readers, as they wade on through the salt waters of the Saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames,” the preface explains,

“and to think that in doing so they are in revolt against the mood of his creator. Far from it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. . . . taking sides, they [the reader] loses perception of the simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact it never does.”

As one of the characters explains, “But it’s the spark. It’s the spark you need.”

Galsworthy characterizes the marriage between Irene and Soames in the following way:

“He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.

He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent; were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.

The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not love him, was obviously no reason.

He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife's not getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.

Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behavior under this attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those women--not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race--born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him. Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing! 'Then why did she marry me?' was his continual thought. He had, forgotten his courtship; that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her presents, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labors with success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her face- -strange, passive, appealing--when suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

The imagery is instructive. Irene is a castle besieged and taken. How dare she not then belong to he who breached her defenses to possess? Soames’ solution to his wife’s indifference to him is to isolate her. Essentially, to take away any other option to his company. To drive her to him by deprivation of all other sources of affection.

“To get Irene out of London, away from opportunities of going about and seeing people, away from her friends and those who put ideas into her head! That was the thing!”

In short, his goal is possession not love and for that reason, his chances of possession are doomed.

“Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.”

Galsworhty keeps returning to the theme, illustrating, by means of his ability to let us see into the mind of Soames and Irene why this marriage is not working.

“Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.”

“In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body--if indeed he could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If any one had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want, and the writing said he never would.”

“She was ever silent, passive, gracefully averse; as though terrified lest by word, motion, or sign she might lead him to believe that she was fond of him; and he asked himself: Must I always go on like this?”

“Like most novel readers of his generation (and Soames was a great novel reader), literature coloured his view of life; and he had imbibed the belief that it was only a question of time.”

“In the end the husband always gained the affection of his wife. Even in those cases--a class of book he was not very fond of-- which ended in tragedy, the wife always died with poignant regrets on her lips, or if it were the husband who died-- unpleasant thought--threw herself on his body in an agony of remorse.”

“In Montpellier Square Soames, who had come from the picture room, stood invisible at the top of the stairs, watching Irene sort the letters brought by the last post. She turned back into the drawing-room; but in a minute came out, and stood as if listening. Then she came stealing up the stairs, with a kitten in her arms. He could see her face bent over the little beast, which was purring against her neck. Why couldn't she look at him like that?”

Over and over again, he says to his wife “I love you” but acts in such a way as to convey to her in no uncertain terms that she is his possession and that he loves himself.

“The Buccaneer [the architect who is in love with Irene] asked after you more than once,” he [Soames] said suddenly. And moved by some inexplicable desire to assert his proprietorship, he rose from his chair and planted a kiss on his wife’s shoulder.”

Does he think that she cannot feel what he is saying? Why can’t she look at him with affection? He keeps asking the question but can never seem to answer it. The answer of course is that Soames has banished passion from his conscious life. And without it, he does not really exist. And without existing, he really can not hope to be noticed, much less loved or adored.

“Forsytes, as is generally admitted, have shells, like that extremely useful little animal which is made into Turkish delight, in other words, they are never seen, or if seen would not be recognized, without habitats, composed of circumstance, property, acquaintances, and wives, which seem to move along with them in their passage through a world composed of thousands of other Forsytes with their habitats. Without a habitat a Forsyte is inconceivable--he would be like a novel without a plot, which is well-known to be an anomaly.”

The long and the short of it was that Irene married Soames for all sort of excellent Victorian reasons. He was wealthy. She was destitute. Her beauty for his protection. The marriage was more a business deal than an affectation from the very beginning. I often wonder, when the Bible says “What God has joined together, let no man separate” is it also implying that what God has not joined together should not be joined in marriage? When God places an attachment between people, does it happen at the ceremony or long before?  In the case of Irene and Soames, Irene knows it is a mistake. But Victorian society gave her no skills, no means of independent sustenance. All she can do is enter the arrangement with a promise from him that he will let her out if she cannot make it work.  “Will you let me go?” she later pleads with Soames, “You promised you would let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?”

“Behave yourself and it would be.” He replies.

To which she can only say “Of course I won’t.”

One of my favorite passages in the novel expresses Galsworthy’s conviction that love has a will of its own. It cannot be bought or purchased in the market. It is not for sale and it is not the servant of anyone’s whim, whether they have money or not.

“The situation which at this stage might seem, and especially to Forsyte eyes, strange--not to say 'impossible'--was, in view of certain facts, not so strange after all. Some things had been lost sight of. And first, in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and color are always, wild! And further--the facts and figures of their own lives being against the perception of this truth--it was not generally recognized by Forsytes that, where, this wild plant springs, men and women are but moths around the pale, flame-like blossom.”

“There is a line in the world,” one of my mentors once told me. “Above the line are people. Below the line are things. People are to be loved. Things are to be used. One should never confuse the two.” There are few people who can live on a diet of being used as though it were a diet of being loved and Irene is not one of them.

Jolyon had paid dearly for his decision to “give all for love” but years later, the family members that cast him out for his refusal to follow out his duty in his loveless marriage slowly come to question the rightness of their decision. James Forsyte is a case in point.

“James had passed through the fire, but he had passed also through the river of years which washes out the fire; he had experienced the saddest experience of all--forgetfulness of what it was like to be in love. Forgotten! Forgotten so long, that he had forgotten even that he had forgotten.”

Again, Galsworthy lets us in on the Victorian mind of Soames Forsyte as he contemplates the possibility of divorce.

“A scandal! A possible scandal!

To repeat this word to himself thus was the only way in which he could focus or make it thinkable. He had forgotten the sensations necessary for understanding the progress, fate, or meaning of any such business; he simply could no longer grasp the possibilities of people running any risk for the sake of passion.

Amongst all those persons of his acquaintance, who went into the City day after day and did their business there, whatever it was, and in their leisure moments bought shares, and houses, and ate dinners, and played games, as he was told, it would have seemed to him ridiculous to suppose that there were any who would run risks for the sake of anything so recondite, so figurative, as passion.

Passion! He seemed, indeed, to have heard of it, and rules such as 'A young man and a young woman ought never to be trusted together' were fixed in his mind as the parallels of latitude are fixed on a map (for all Forsytes, when it comes to 'bed-rock' matters of fact, have quite a fine taste in realism); but as to anything else--well, he could only appreciate it at all through the catch-word 'scandal.'”

What is fascinating is that even as the pursuit of passion seems to destroy the lives of the people in the novel who pursue it, the author celebrates the pursuit even more. The musical score of the film is always celebratory when people live out their “real” [read, emotional] intentions. “There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods” writes Galsworthy,

“--violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.”

But Soames cannot see this. There is no place for this sort of chaos in his ordered universe.

“God forbid that he should know anything about the forces of Nature! God forbid that he should admit for a moment that there are such things! Once admit that, and where was he?”

Forsytes are deceived by their economic and class advantages into believing that they are a superior species to the “commoners” that live on the lower plane of human instinct and passion. They have “risen above all that”. They shrink from the notion that they are every bit the equal of the lower classes as a bat would shrink from noonday sun.  

“The look which June had seen [in the affection between Irene and the architect, Bossiney], which other Forsytes had seen, was like the sudden flashing of a candle through a hole in some imaginary canvas, behind which it was being moved--the sudden flaming-out of a vague, erratic glow, shadowy and enticing. It brought home to onlookers the consciousness that dangerous forces were at work. For a moment they noticed it with pleasure, with interest, then felt they must not notice it at all.”

To Jolyon, the order loving Forsytes are crucial to the functioning of society. Their virtues are precisely what leads to the money that funds the people who want to live their lives in more passionate pursuits. “At a low estimate, three-fourths of our Royal Academicians are Forsytes,” Jolyon tells Bosinney,

“seven- eighths of our novelists, a large proportion of the press. Of science I can't speak; they are magnificently represented in religion; in the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I'm not laughing. It is dangerous to go against the majority and what a majority!" He fixed his eyes on Bosinney: "It's dangerous to let anything carry you away--a house, a picture, a--woman!"

Dangerous. But perhaps not prohibitively so. As Jolyon knows, it is also dangerous NOT to go against the majority and the Forsyte ethic or self-protection and emotional restraint.

"My people," replied young Jolyon, "are not very extreme, and they have their own private peculiarities, like every other family, but they possess in a remarkable degree those two qualities which are the real tests of a Forsyte--the power of never being able to give yourself up to anything soul and body, and the 'sense of property'."

Once again, Galsworthy returns to the subject of marriage as ownership. Jolyon gets into a Tevya-like Fidder-on-the-Roof style “on-the-other-hand” argument with himself about what to advise Bosinney.

“Then, too, he distrusted his judgment. He had been through the experience himself, had tasted too the dregs the bitterness of an unhappy marriage, and how could he take the wide and dispassionate view of those who had never been within sound of the battle? His evidence was too first-hand--like the evidence on military matters of a soldier who has been through much active service, against that of civilians who have not suffered the disadvantage of seeing things too close. Most people would consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene quite fairly successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along, even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went their own ways a little so long as the decencies were observed--the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home, respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many pieces of property; there is no risk in the statu quo. To break up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into the bargain.

This was the case for the defense, and young Jolyon sighed.

'The core of it all,' he thought, 'is property, but there are many people who would not like it put that way. To them it is "the sanctity of the marriage tie"; but the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!

And again young Jolyon sighed.”

Property. Ownership. Can real relationships really thrive in the formaldehyde of this kind of social bondage? The relationship between Soames and Irene is Galsworthy’s answer.

“Soames was silent for some minutes; at last he said: "I don't know what your idea of a wife's duty is. I never have known!"

He had not expected her to reply, but she did.

"I have tried to do what you want; it's not my fault that I haven't been able to put my heart into it."

"Whose fault is it, then?" He watched her askance.

"Before we were married you promised to let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?"

Soames frowned.

"Success," he stammered--"it would be a success if you behaved yourself properly!"

"I have tried," said Irene. "Will you let me go?"

Soames turned away. Secretly alarmed, he took refuge in bluster.

"Let you go? You don't know what you're talking about. Let you go? How can I let you go? We're married, aren't we? Then, what are you talking about? For God's sake, don't let's have any of this sort of nonsense! Get your hat on, and come and sit in the Park."

"Then, you won't let me go?"

He felt her eyes resting on him with a strange, touching look.

"Let you go!" he said; "and what on earth would you do with yourself if I did? You've got no money!"

"I could manage somehow."

He took a swift turn up and down the room; then came and stood before her.

"Understand," he said, "once and for all, I won't have you say this sort of thing. Go and get your hat on!"

She did not move.

"I suppose," said Soames, "you don't want to miss Bosinney if he comes!"

Irene got up slowly and left the room. She came down with her hat on.

They went out.

Property. Contracts. Reason. Order. Duty. Listen to this description of Mrs. Baynes, Bosinney’s aunt:

“She believed, as she often said, in putting things on a commercial basis; the proper function of the Church, of charity, indeed, of everything, was to strengthen the fabric of 'Society.' Individual action, therefore, she considered immoral. Organization was the only thing, for by organization alone could you feel sure that you were getting a return for your money. Organization--and again, organization!

“The enterprises to which she lent her name were organized so admirably that by the time the takings were handed over, they were indeed skim milk divested of all cream of human kindness. But as she often justly remarked, sentiment was to be deprecated. She was, in fact, a little academic.

This great and good woman, so highly thought of in ecclesiastical circles, was one of the principal priestesses in the temple of Forsyteism, keeping alive day and night a sacred flame to the God of Property, whose altar is inscribed with those inspiring words: 'Nothing for nothing, and really remarkably little for sixpence.' . . . People who knew her felt her to be sound--a sound woman, who never gave herself away, nor anything else, if she could possibly help it.”

Property. Contracts. Expectations. Duty. Forsytes and their friends expect to pay something and get something. They do not enter into relationships on some tidal wave of passion that they cannot predict.

“Nothing in this world is more sure to upset a Forsyte than the discovery that something on which he has stipulated to spend a certain sum has cost more. And this is reasonable, for upon the accuracy of his estimates the whole policy of his life is ordered. If he cannot rely on definite values of property, his compass is amiss; he is adrift upon bitter waters without a helm.”

And for this reason, they cannot understand those whose hearts must have all of life and all of their lover’s love or nothing. James, a friend of the Forsytes, takes Irene out for a drive to see if he can talk some Victorian sense into her. The following conversation ensues.

“It was not before he had got her more than half way that [James] began: "Soames is very fond of you--he won't have anything said against you; why don't you show him more affection?"

Irene flushed, and said in a low voice: "I can't show what I haven't got."

James looked at her sharply; he felt that now he had her in his own carriage, with his own horses and servants, he was really in command of the situation. She could not put him off; nor would she make a scene in public.

"I can't think what you're about," he said. "He's a very good husband!"

Irene's answer was so low as to be almost inaudible among the sounds of traffic. He caught the words: "You are not married to him!"

"What's that got to do with it? He's given you everything you want. He's always ready to take you anywhere, and now he's built you this house in the country. It's not as if you had anything of your own."

"No."

Again James looked at her; he could not make out the expression on her face. She looked almost as if she were going to cry, and yet....

"I'm sure," he muttered hastily, "we've all tried to be kind to you."

Irene's lips quivered; to his dismay James saw a tear steal down her cheek. He felt a choke rise in his own throat.

"We're all fond of you," he said, "if you'd only"--he was going to say, "behave yourself," but changed it to--"if you'd only be more of a wife to him."

Irene did not answer, and James, too, ceased speaking. There was something in her silence which disconcerted him; it was not the silence of obstinacy, rather that of acquiescence in all that he could find to say. And yet he felt as if he had not had the last word. He could not understand this.”

It is only a matter of time before Soames begins to reveal the actual nature of his relationship with his wife -What Irene has known almost from the beginning. What the Forsyte family has been able to avoid seeing, in time, comes to the surface.

“Soames gripped her arm. "A good beating," he said, "is the only thing that would bring you to your senses," but turning on his heel, he left the room.”

When he thinks of the possibility of divorcing or being divorced, he again cannot seem to think of it in any other terms but that of a “loss of property.” To him, she is a painting that he should hate to have stolen from him. He likes to look at it. To have it.  

“A divorce! Thus close, the word was paralyzing, so utterly at variance with all the principles that had hitherto guided his life. Its lack of compromise appalled him; he felt--like the captain of a ship, going to the side of his vessel, and, with his own hands throwing over the most precious of his bales. This jettisoning of his property with his own hand seemed uncanny to Soames. It would injure him in his profession: He would have to get rid of the house at Robin Hill, on which he had spent so much money, so much anticipation--and at a sacrifice. And she! She would no longer belong to him, not even in name! She would pass out of his life, and he--he should never see her again!”

Soames Forsyte’s next step is critical. He opts to exert his “ownership rights.” She elects to respond by leaving. And in an act of unmistakable symbolic expression, she asserts her refusal to be owned by taking none of his resources with her.

“He stooped over the drawer where she kept her jewels; it was not locked, and came open as he pulled; the jewel box had the key in it. This surprised him until he remembered that it was sure to be empty. He opened it.

It was far from empty. Divided, in little green velvet compartments, were all the things he had given her, even her watch, and stuck into the recess that contained--the watch was a three-cornered note addressed 'Soames Forsyte,' in Irene's handwriting:

'I think I have taken nothing that you or your people have given me.' And that was all.

He looked at the clasps and bracelets of diamonds and pearls, at the little flat gold watch with a great diamond set in sapphires, at the chains and rings, each in its nest, and the tears rushed up in his eyes and dropped upon them.

Nothing that she could have done, nothing that she had done, brought home to him like this the inner significance of her act. For the moment, perhaps, he understood nearly all there was to understand--understood that she loathed him, that she had loathed him for years, that for all intents and purposes they were like people living in different worlds, that there was no hope for him, never had been; even, that she had suffered--that she was to be pitied.

In that moment of emotion he betrayed the Forsyte in him--forgot himself, his interests, his property--was capable of almost anything; was lifted into the pure ether of the selfless and unpractical.

Such moments pass quickly.”

A Man of Property ends with Soames trying to understand the relationship between his view of Irene and his pain.

“And Soames thought: 'Why is all this? Why should I suffer so? What have I done? It is not my fault!'

Soames thought: 'Suffering! when will it cease, my suffering?'

If only he could surrender to the thought: 'Let her go--she has suffered enough!'

If only he could surrender to the desire: 'Make a slave of her-- she is in your power!'

If only even he could surrender to the sudden vision: 'What does it all matter?' Forget himself for a minute, forget that it mattered what he did, forget that whatever he did he must sacrifice something.

If only he could act on an impulse!

He could forget nothing; surrender to no thought, vision, or desire; it was all too serious; too close around him, an unbreakable cage.”

And that, I suspect, is how John Galsworthy viewed Victorian society.

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“He is the Moses of race hatred in the United States.”
Gedalia Bublick, of Madison Grant

Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant

Jonathan Peter Spiro

Defending the Master Race by Jonathan Spiro is probably the most important work of History that I have or will read this year. Much like David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed last year, this book is one that will take some time to get through but will help a person to understand why a whole period of American history (and in some cases, world history) happened the way it did. Defending the Master Race is a biography of Madison Grant that serves as a primer in the origins, influence, application, and legacy of “scientific racism” in the United States and, in the last chapter, Germany. In one of the final chapters, Spiro makes the connection between Madison Grant's writings (particularly his highly influential book, The Passing of the Great Race) and National Socialism explicit.

“German Eugenicists eagerly established close ties with the Grantians in the 1920s. They were full of admiration for the success of their American counterparts in restricting immigration, passing anti-miscegenation laws, and implementing coercive sterilization ask. German journals provided timely updates on developments in US eugenics and regularly translated the articles of the Americans.” P. 356

“Adolf Hitler's closest scientific advisers were avid fans of Madison Grant and accepted all the major tenets of his scientific racism. Hitler himself, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ‘the highest aim of human existence is... the conservation of the race,’ sent Grant a letter thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and telling him that ‘the book is my Bible.’ Mein Kampf is riddled with passages that seem directly inspired by The Passing of the Great Race, in particular the chapters entitled ‘Race and People’ and ‘the State’, which encapsulate all the aspects of Grantian thought.” P. 357

“In 1936, when the Nazi party published its official recommendation for essential reading in the fields of human heredity, it mentioned only two books by non-German authors: Gobineau’s Inequality of Human Races and Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race.” P. 357

“Madison Grant warned Harry H. Laughlin in 1934 that while ‘most people of our type are in sympathy with the German eugenical measures,’ political considerations meant that ‘we will have to proceed cautiously and endorsing them.’” P. 365

I often tell my students that “ideas have consequences” and this is a classic case of that truth. Spiro makes it clear that the objective of Madison Grant's life was a mission of conservation. He wanted to protect animals, trees, landscapes, and gene pools. Growing up in New York City in the later 1800's, Madison Grant could see “his city” being “taken over” by immigration and insisted that his “people” were being buried in an avalanche of mediocre to poor genetic material. As someone once put it, “a snob is someone who acts like he begat his ancestors.”

“In 1892, Madison and his brother Deforest, who had just graduated from Yale, helped to found a slightly different type of club: The Society of Colonial Wars, a fraternal organization with membership restricted to ‘men of good moral character and reputation' whose ancestors had attained distinction in the wars of the colonial period.’”

One should note that Madison Grant was not alone. Indeed, U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt was a huge fan of Madison Grant and his writing.

“As a frustrated [Theodore] Roosevelt told his friend Owen Wister: “they [the public] seem unable to see that it is simply a question of the multiplication table. If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, and Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaum's and Rabinsky's have eight, or nine, or ten -- it is simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?’”

It is somewhat amazing to think that Theodore Roosevelt, a man who we have up on Mt. Rushmore as being one of our greatest Presidents, had this to say about Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race, a book that Adolf Hitler referred to as “his Bible”

“This book is a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize. It shows an extraordinary range of reading and a wide scholarship. It shows a habit of singular serious thoughts on the subjects of most commanding importance. It shows a fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentality and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail. It is the work of an American scholar and gentlemen; and all Americans should be sincerely grateful to you for writing it.” P. 158

It is not difficult to see why Theodore Roosevelt found such a kindred spirit in Madison Grant. Some 20 years before Grant wrote his treatise on scientific racism, Theodore Roosevelt had written in his book, The Winning of the West of the necessity of racial wars.

Necessity of the Conquest.

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership. It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of today. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, are the people who stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands; and they judge them by standards which would only be applicable to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain grudges to the Africander his conquest of Matabeleland; and so the home-staying American of the Atlantic States dislikes to see the western miners and cattlemen win for the use of their people the Sioux hunting-grounds. Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end
shape their own destinies.

Righteousness of the War.

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and
Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,--in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

Both men were deeply impacted by the theory of Darwinisn and by the men who so soon after Darwin carried his theories out to what they regarded as their logical conclusions. Darwin himself had not engaged in a great deal of policy speculation but he did see that his theory would soon be finding logical expression in human societies. “We civilized men build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick;” he wrote,

“we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment... thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” p. 122

Grant would later name a his association of anthropologists who believed in scientific racism after Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of the Eugenics movement. According to Spiro,

“Positive eugenics would encourage the fittest members of society to have more children, while negative eugenics would discourage the propagation of the unfit. Eugenicists of lesser refinement than Sir Francis [Galton] would later refer to the positive and negative aspects of their program as ‘breeding and weeding.’” P.120

“Grant never felt that his background in zoology disqualified him from taking up the study of man. To the contrary, he declared that man is an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe, not in kind but only in degree of development, and therefore an intelligent study of the human species must be preceded by an extended knowledge of other mammals.” p. 100

“The Aryanists who had the most influence on Grant where three of the most intriguing figures in the Western canon: Arthur Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Georges Vacher De Lapouge.” p. 103

The race wars that Theodore Roosevelt was praising and predicting in 1894 when he wrote volume three of the Winning of the West were being “scheduled” at least by 1899, the year that Ripley's Races of Europe, Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century, Lapouges L’Aryen and Haeckel's Riddles of the Universe were all being published. (Interestingly, 1899 was the year that Jack London began publishing novels as a means of popularizing the Darwinian ethos.)

Perhaps one of the most interesting and troubling themes that one sees throughout the discussion of Madison Grant and the eugenics movement is the merging of religious and scientific impulses. Many, if not most, of the scientific racists came from religious backgrounds and many from Puritan ancestries. One senses that same predilection to eradicate evil and bring about a millennial world, albeit with very different methods. Similarly, one finds in the key evolutionists and eugenicists a tendency to see their movement as a religious one. A few quotes suffice.

“Haeckel claimed that in the wake of the Origin of Species, evolution had replaced religious dogma to become ‘the sure foundation of our whole world system.’ “Allis ist Natur. Natur ist allis.” P. 123

“Since the inferior races are, he said, nearer to the mammals -- apes and dogs -- than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.” P.124

“Reformers who are serious about improving the human race, and not just about acquiring reputations as do-gooders, would do better to devote their efforts to eugenic programs that strove to eliminate defective germ plasm from the population.” P. 125

“Eugenics offered the post-millennial hope that, through good breeding, the victory of the righteous would be assured in the perfect kingdom could be established on earth. We sense this in the American Eugenics Society's proclamation that the discovery that man is able to guide his own evolution by means of eugenics 'is the most momentous of human achievements, ranking ahead of the discoveries of fire, speech, tools, and writing.'” P.135

“Eugenical truth, declared Grant's disciple Robert E. Wiggam, ‘is the highest truth men will ever know.’ He explicitly referred to the genetics laboratory as ‘the new Mount Sinai’ and announced that the findings of eugenics were ‘the 10 Commandments of science.’” P. 135

“The hero of this secular faith was Sir Francis Gaulton.”

Over and over, this idea that scientific racism was simply another expression of Puritanism and that what was going on was not so much a replacing of religion with science as much as a transformation from one religious world view to another. Consider the place that “preaching” and sacrificial atonement play in the following sentence:

“Grant preached that the fate of the race outweighed that of ‘only few particular humans who were of no value to the community’” p. 136

Indeed, the leaders of the Eugenics movement saw it as a cause worthy of tithing to and a means for wealthy people to bring about a “kingdom of God”.

“Eugenics was the supreme preventative medicine; it was the preeminent philanthropy. As Davenport insisted, ‘vastly more effective than $10 million to charity would be $10 million to eugenics. He who, by such a gift, should redeem mankind from vice, imbecility and suffering would be the world's wisest philanthropist.’” P. 137 (The leaders that Spiro mentions as being most influential are Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Benedict Davenport (Eugenics Center at Cold Springs, NY), and Henry Fairfield Osborn (American Museum of Natural History)

Jonathan Spiro argues that The Passing of the Great Race is an extraordinary overview of Western history as seen through the eyes of a scientific racist.” P. 145. Anyone who has ever read the speeches of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels or even excerpts from the biology textbooks that were being served up to children in Nazi schools will see the effects of Madison Grant's logic. “We can now see that the social workers and their ilk have done ‘more injury to the race than Black Death or smallpox.” says Grant,

“ . . . Scientists have long understood that nature cares not for the individual.... she is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type.”

“In clear, sober language that is indistinguishable from the official dogma of National Socialism,” writes Spiro, “the charming Park Avenue conservationist instructs us that the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.’” p. 151. “Anticipating the rise of fascism, he predicts that the spread of scientific literacy will enable us to see that ‘the basis of the government of man is now and always has been, and always will be, force and not sentiment.’” P. 156

Throughout the writing of Madison Grant and his contemporaries, one finds this celebration of the banishment of sentiment (and compassion). Even the patron saint of birth control, Margaret Sanger, participated in the frenzy of “objectivism” asserting that “sentimentalism was dysgenic”

“Sanger agreed with Madison Grant that sentimentalism was dysgenic, and denounced society’s misguided policy of ‘indiscriminate charity’ towards ‘the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated from the human stock.’” P. 192

Wars of the 20^th Century, here are your architects.

On page 185, Jonathan Spiro mentions the “Fitter Families competitions” that the Eugenicists inspired. Ironically, just last week, my dad was showing me a newspaper article from 1922 when my Uncle Paul was born that indicated that he was a winner of this contest in Vermont that particular year.

When the book returns to the subject of scientific racism and immigration policy, we are again returned to the days of early Puritan New England where the Puritan clergy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were banishing people to Rhode Island for not being theologically “pure” and attempting in any way possible to exclude the Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular.

“From the Society of Colonial Wars to the American Eugenics Society, Grant had sternly controlled admission to all his clubs, and now he was intent on doing the same with his nation. His unflinching and determined effort to preserve the Nordic character of the United States involved three legislative steps that progressively and severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe: the literacy test of 1917, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. It was an undertaking that one scholar has referred to as America's most ambitious program of biological engineering.’” P. 197

“Grant authoritatively explained to the president that ‘the old theological views in regard to the unity of the human race and its relatively recent origin some 6000 years ago is giving way to the knowledge that man as such dates back two or 300,000 years, and that consequently the line of cleavage between the so-called races of mankind is fundamental and cannot be modified by any change of environment in a life time of a nation.’ Therefore, speaking as a ‘scientist,’ Grant asked him [President Taft] to stand up to the steamship companies, the industrial interests, and the immigrant organizations and ‘preserve the Native American stock’ by taking a brave stand in favor of immigration restriction.” P. 200

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the way that Spiro analyzes why the idea of scientific racism gained such traction so quickly and why it lost it so quickly as well. He spends some time examining the “group think” tendencies of the Eugenics movement and notes how a small group of elitest individuals set up numerous different organizations that made them look like they were on the cutting edge of many different scientific movements when in fact it was realy the same set of Oz-like propagandists behind the scenes of each and every one. “Grant cited Laughlin who had based his analysis on Bringham’s statistics,” writes Spiro,

“which were in turn based on Grant's calculations of the racial composition of the European population. What seemed, in other words, to unaware observers, to be a plethora of independent studies by reputable scientists was actually a series of self-referential claims... that constantly fed upon itself.” P. 227

I was reminded of the conclusions of the Senate Investigation on Pre-Iraq War Intelligence as I was reading this.

Conclusion 3. (U) The Intelligence Community (IC) has long struggled with the need for analysts to overcome analytic biases, that is, to resist the tendency to see what they would expect to see in the intelligence reporting. In the case of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, the Committee found that intelligence analysts, in many cases, based their analysis more on their expectations than on an objective evaluation of the infomation in the intelligence reporting. Analysts expected to see evidence that Iraq had retained prohibited weapons and that Iraq would resume prohibited WMD activities once United Nations’ (W)inspections ended. This bias that pervaded both the IC’s analytic and collection communities represents “group think,” a term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in the 1970’sto describe a process in which a group can make bad or irrational decisions as each member of the group attempts to conform their opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. IC personnel involved in the Iraq WMD issue demonstrated several aspects of group think: examining few alternatives, selective gathering of information, pressure to conform within the group or withhold criticism, and collective rationalization.

The Committee found that the IC had a tendency to accept information which supported the presumption that Iraq had active and expanded WMD programs more readily than information which contradicted it.”

For example, the IQ tests that were taken during the enlistment of soldiers during WWI. “Karel C. Bringham’s Study of American Intelligence was a major achievement in the history of scientific racism.” says Spiro, explaining the way that eguenicists, anti-immigrationists, and scientific racists “cooked the books” to get the results they wanted.

‘Few works in the history of American psychology,’ writes Leon Kamin, ‘have had so significant an impact.’ Henry H. Goddard declared that the analysis of the Army mental tests was ‘probably the most valuable piece of information which mankind has ever required about itself.’” P. 219

But if you look at the questions that these tests were asking, you discover that they are really tests of the takers interest in white American “Nordic” culture.

And yet these tests became the evidence that was driving the epistemological conviction of Senators Congressmen, Presidents, doctors, and white racist everywhere. Even Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was taken in by the propaganda. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his Buck v. Bell decision, a case that determined the legality and morality of involuntary sterilization of “unfit” potential parents.

Eugenicists like Grant were ecstatic that they were winning the “commanding heights” of the culture to their views. “Continuous decimal elimination, should become a part of eugenics creative civilized people,” Henry Laughlin argued. His plan involved taking the bottom ten percent of the population (by some definition that I am sure made it unlikely that he would be in it) on a regular basis and sterilizing them. To the scientific racists, decisions like Buck v. Bell meant that they were on course to become the high priests of a new religious world view.

“Justice Holmes, in fact, explicitly viewed his decision as a blow against religious fundamentalism in the United States, and he proudly wrote to Harold Laski that ‘the religious are in a stir over Buck v. Bell. Replying a few days later, Laski encouraged Holmes to stay the course: ‘sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all the fundamentalists.’” P. 23

Perhaps he was joking but it is not unusual for jokes to become, in time, policies, and even doctrines. Spiro writes:

“It is difficult not to notice that the leaders of the American Eugenics Society, like high priests demanding ever bloodier sacrifices for their cults, were, as Mark Heller says, ‘possessed by a compelling urge to castrate the unfit.’ It is wondrous to witness the vehemence with which such childless figures as [these] set about attacking the genitals of the lower breeds.” P. 240

“The readers of The Passing of the Great Race were informed that ‘in the modern scientific study of race we have long since discarded the Adamic theory that man is descended from a single pair, created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden.’ According to Grant, whites and blacks evolved independently of each other, and only ‘old-fashioned’ thinkers still maintained that all human beings belong to the species Homo sapiens.”

Chapter 13, “The Decline of Scientific Racism” is an analysis of why the scientific racism of Madison Grant had such a short lifespan in the American consciousness. To summarize, it failed because it was so successful. After the 1924 immigration Act, Americans figured they had solved the problem and forgot about the theory that had defined it as one. Secondly, the war in Europe took so many white men overseas that millions of African Americans migrated north to work in the war industries and the improvements in their educational and occupational lives quickly led to test scores that made the white racist propaganda look ridiculous. Thirdly, Spiro also mentions that there were hundreds of Jewish (and other ethnic groups?) students graduating from American Colleges and demonstrating the lunacy of Grant's assertions to intellectual superiority and dominance. Fourthly, the field of Sociology began to publish numerous studies to show the ignorance of those who had argued that cultures were the result of genetics, not human initiative. Fifthly, the field of psychology began to critique the ridiculous notion that a test of American pop culture was an adequate means to test intelligence. Next, the science of genetics made tremendous advances detrimental to the racists cause, taking the science out of “scientific racism”. Seventh, the Great Depression of the 1930's served as a great equalizer. It hit the pocketbooks of old stock and new immigrant alike. And an ideology that said that suffering populations should be eliminated seemed a bit stupid in a society where everyone was suffering. Eighth, Spiro notes that the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920's cut American immigrants off from the populations and cultures they left, making it abundantly easy for their kids to assimilate into American culture with far more ease than the racists had thought possible. Additionally, the rise of Naziism and the reports of brutality and discrimination in Germany made the the whole idea of scientific racism stink foul in the nostrils of a people who still retained enough of their basic decency to know that something was “fishy in Denmark”. Lastly, scientific racism failed because so many of its leaders had never chosen to marry and have children. The list of those leaders of the movement who felt themselves too pure for mere mortals to marry and conceive children with is so long as to be bizarre. The cause of this self-imposed celibacy among so many of the movement's key leaders is worthy of investigation.

“Eugenics, concluded the New York Times at the end of the [last Eugenic Congress], ‘seems to have become a disguise for race prejudice, ancestor worship, and cast snobbery” P. 341 and “when copies of Madison Grant's new book, the Conquest of the Continent were stacked on the shelves at bookstores at the end of 1933, they remained there.” P.344

William Langer, of Foreign Affairs referred to the book as “Science submerged by opinion.”

Sadly, the movement that Americans were interested in casting off, was being heartily accepted in Germany, a place where Madison Grant and company were hailed as prophets of a new age. “A commonly heard slogan during the Third Reich was ‘National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.’” 378. I suspect that this was an accurate description of every idea Madison Grant ever had.

Spiro notes that there were Nazis who used portions of Madison Grant’s work in their trials at Nuremburg.

Question for Comment: Who do you think bears more responsibility for the damage done as a consequence of the adoption of a “dangerous idea”? The people who create them, popularize them, or implement them?

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“She only said, My life is dreary

He cometh not she said

She said I am aweary a weary,

I wish that I were dead.” Marianna, Tennyson

Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love

Miriam Cyr

I was talking with my Vermont History class today about 17^th Century Vermont History and one of my students was discussing the movie Last of the Mohicans in which there is a brief mention of Castleton, Vermont (a town near where I live). He asserted that while the movie might be useful to a high school history class for getting a feel of the historical setting of the French Indian War in Vermont, it was largely focused on a romance and not on history. It cause me to wonder if perhaps we have altogether eviscerated our high school history classes of romance and to wonder, if we were to interview the people involved in these events we study as history, if we would discover that much if not most of what they did had some root in their affectional lives. I went looking for examples of love letters from the 1600's and 1700's for some confirmation of my thesis and came across a collection of letters written by the Portugese nun, Marianna Alcoforado in the late 1660's.

Marianna Alcoforado was a Fransiscan nun who fell in love with a French officer during his posting in Portugal from 1663 to 1667. She was about 25 years old and this was her first and perhaps only love in life. From her letters, it seems clear that her “Romeo” had suffered from some serious case of cold feet and had beat it back to France as soon as an opportunity presented itself.

Her five letters to him, expressing the anguish of her broken heart, were later published and remain one of those classic texts of expressed attachment that give us reason to believe that love (or is it addiction?) felt pretty much the same in the 17^th century as it does in the 21rst. You can read the letters of Marianna Alcofrado HERE if you wish. I have selected a few quotes form them below to give you the general mood.

“I reject all the testimonies of your love that you can control.”

Could you ever content yourself with a love colder than mine? You will perhaps find more beauty elsewhere (yet you told me once that I was very beautiful) but you will never find so much love."

“I conjur you to tell me why you set yourself to bewitch me as you did when you well knew that you would have to forsake me?”

“How hard it is to make up one's mind to doubt for any time the sincerity of those one loves.”

“You kindled my passions with your transports. Your tenderness fascinated me. Your vows persuaded me, but it was the violence of my own love that led me away.”

“It is true that in loving you I enjoyed a pleasure unthought of before but this very pleasure is causing me a sorrow I knew nothing of. All the emotions you cause me run to the extremes.”

“You well knew that you would not stay in Portugal forever. Then why did you single me out to make me so unhappy?”

“Everyone is touched by my love and you alone remain indifferent.”

“You write me letters at once cold and full of repetitions. The paper is not half filled and you make it clear that you are dying to finish them.”

“I would wish all the women in France to find you agreeable but none to love you. None to please you.”

“Sometimes I think I could even submit to wait upon she whom you love. … I do not dare to be jealous of you for fear of displeasing you."

“The very length of my letter will frighten you and you will not read it.”

“This thought is killing me and I almost die of horror when I think that you were never really affected by all the bliss that we shared.”

“Deliberately and in cold blood you formed a design to kindle my love. You only regarded my passion as your triumph and your heart was never deeply touched.”

“I am torn asunder by a thousand contrary emotions.”

“Doubtless a tragic end would force you to think of me often.”

“How I wish that I had never seen you. Ah! I feel how false this phrase is. . . . promise me a few tender regrets if I die of grief.”

“I ought in those moments of supreme happiness to have called reason to my aid to moderate the deadly excess of my delight and to foretell to me all that I am now suffering.”

“I defy you to forget me entirely.”

“I have not been well for a single moment since you left and my only pleasure has been that of repeating your name a thousand times each day.”

“Your indifference is unsupportable to me.”

“I have found that all the feelings of such a heart are bound up with the idol it created for itself – that its first impressions – its first wounds – can niether be healed or effaced. That all the passions which offer their help and attempt to fill and content it, promise it but vainly an emotion which it never feels again. … Why have you made me feel the imperfection and bitterness of an attachment which cannot endure forever and all the evils that result from a violent love, when it is not mutual?”

“I shall be miserable all my life.”

“I have at last returned to myself from this enchantment.”

Marianna Alcoforado died in 1723 at the age of 87. “For thirty years, she did rigid pennance with much conformity” her obituary says.

The heartbreaker had the letters published in 1669 (though without names), no doubt to serve his vanity and it was only in the early 1800's that his identity and the identity of Marianna were discovered. Posterity has condemned this guy for forsaking this woman's love and “there seems to be no reason why we should reverse the verdict.”

Question for Comment: Do you think a person who causes someone else to form an attachment to them has some sort of moral obligation to them to maintain it? Why or why not?

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The Importance of Being Earnest

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