A House of Air Read online

  To Jane Austen, however, the contemporary of Byron, ‘that very dear part of Emma, her fancy,’ represents a danger of a specific kind. It is shown as the enemy not of reason, but of truth. It tempts Emma to see the blooming, commonplace Harriet as the heroine of a romance, and leads her on through absurd schemes—when she pretends, for instance, to lose the lace of her ‘half-boot’ so that Harriet and Mr Elton can walk on together—to the moment when, overcome with disappointments and disillusions, she cries out, ‘O God! that I had never seen her!’

  Jane Austen’s novels are constructed on a delicate system of losses and gains, or retreats and advances. She undertakes, I think, to show that Emma’s release of her creative imagination—in spite of her intervals of remorse and repentance—gradually becomes more and more dangerous, not only to others, but to her own nature. Undoubtedly she was worried about this new heroine ‘whom nobody but myself will much like.’ To Mr Clarke, the librarian of Canton House, with whom she was corresponding over the question of dedicating Emma to the Prince Regent, she wrote: ‘I am strongly haunted with the idea that to those readers who have preferred “Pride and Prejudice” it will appear inferior in wit, and to those who have preferred “Mansfield Park” inferior in good sense.’ ‘Haunted’ is a strong word, and she does not sound as though she is making a conventional disclaimer. Rather it is as if she knew she was taking a risk, the risk, that is, of letting Emma go too far. The great Harriet undertaking is, after all, intended for the benefit of Harriet. It has ‘the real good will of a mind delighted with its own ideas.’ Robert Martin, Harriet’s suitor, must be got rid of and ‘Mr Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet’s head.’ The very strength of ‘fixed’ and ‘driving’ seem to echo her determination to make the unreal real. But the fact remains that her object was to ‘better’ her unassuming friend and her regret—while it lasts—is very real, ‘with every resolution confirmed of repressing imagination all the rest of her life.’ By the time the second movement of the novel begins, her imagination—unrepressed—has taken a turn for the worse. She is paying a call on the talkative, poor-genteel Miss Bates. M iss Bates is expecting a long visit from her niece, Jane Fairfax, who is leaving her post as governess to the daughter of old friends. This daughter was recently married to a Mr Dixon. ‘At this moment, an ingenious and animating suspicion enter[ed] Emma’s brain with regard to Jane Fairfax [and] this charming Mr Dixon.’ It is the word ‘animating’ that betrays Emma here. The unkind, even heartless, and quite unfounded notion is like a breath of new life to her. How can she go so far as to share it, as an amusing confidence, with Frank Churchill? What has become of her greatest virtues, compassion and generosity? This, unlike her first fantasy, is not intended to benefit anyone. Indeed, it can only cause immeasurable harm, as Emma not only deceives herself but is in turn deceived by Frank, the gleefully mischievous intruder.

  Something is painfully wrong. We realize, certainly by the evening of the box-of-letters game at Hartwell, that Emma is hardly herself. This appears during the day’s outing to Box Hill, a harmless party of pleasure to which only Jane Austen could have given such chilling significance. When Emma makes her cutting remark, her openly rude put-down, to Miss Bates, it is as though the heavens—ironically clear and fine—might fall. Miss Bates ‘did not immediately catch her meaning; but when it burst on her, it could not anger, though a slight blush showed that it could pain her.’ Poor Miss Bates, always to be borne with, like some gentle natural force, is a moral test for the whole of Highbury, who are in a kind of neighbourly conspiracy to make her feel wanted. Emma, of all people, fails the test. ‘It was badly done, indeed!’ says Mr Knightley. And Emma, who has a great capacity for suffering, has to bear not only this reproach, but, later on, Miss Bates’s ‘dreadful gratitude.’ Her intrigues have led her farther and farther away from ‘everything that is decided and open.’ Not one of the heroines of Jane Austen’s other novels is so deluded. None of them is so obstinate. None of them, certainly, makes such a brutal remark. And yet Jane Austen is successful. We love Emma, and hate to see her humbled. The very structure of the book asks us to compare her with Jane Fairfax. Jane is faultless, delicate, unfortunate, and mysterious, but we do not, even for a moment, feel for her as we do for Emma. We have to watch her struggle. She has ‘two spirits,’ Mr Knightley reminds her, the vain and the serious. The two spirits are self-will and conscience, and Emma, in the last instance, has to battle it out for herself.

  She has, of course, a safe guide in Mr Knightley. I once asked some students for an alternative title to the novel, and they suggested ‘Mr Rightly.’ He is ‘a sensible man about seven—or eight-and-thirty’ (much more convincing than if we knew exactly which). He has knowledge, experience, and the courage to speak out. He acts, while others talk. At the dinner party at the Westons’, when all are discussing the fallen snow and the impossibility of driving back, Mr Knightley goes out to have a look for himself, and is able to answer ‘for there not being the smallest difficulty in their getting home, whenever they liked it.’ Frank Churchill, the weak romantic hero, rescues Harriet from the gypsies, but it is Mr Knightley, when she has been grossly humiliated by the Eltons, who asks her to dance. And yet he too has something to learn. Even before Frank’s long-delayed arrival in Highbury, the sanely judging Mr Knightley has taken unreasonably against him, or rather against Emma’s interest in him. ‘“He is a person I never think of from one month’s end to another,” said Mr Knightley, with a degree of vexation, which made Emma immediately talk of something else, though she could not comprehend why he should be angry.’ Nor can he.

  Mr Knightley is pre-eminently the right man in the right place. Highbury, it is true, is less lively than it used to be—its ‘brilliant days’ are past, and the ballroom is used for a whist club—but the village lies in what seems unthreatened prosperity, surrounded by fields of wheat, oats, turnips, and beans and the parkland and strawberry beds of substantial houses. Jane Austen has been careful to make it a haven of only lightly disturbed peace. Since Mr Knightley himself is the local magistrate, there is nothing to fear. Emma, unlike the heroines of the other novels, makes no journeys, has never even seen the sea, but we come to realize that Donwell and Hartfield, ‘English verdure…English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive,’ won’t, after all, be restrictive to her soaring temperament. Indeed, she accepts it herself as she stands looking out of the door of Ford’s, Highbury’s one large draper’s shop:

  when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

  This passage lies at the very heart of the book, an interlude, not of idleness, but of busy tranquillity.

  In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen refers to the ‘rules of composition’ of ‘my fable.’ What were her rules of composition? It is sometimes said that in her later novels she shows contempt and even hatred for her wrongthinkers and wrongdoers. Certainly she was a writer in whom the comic spirit burned very strongly and who felt that some inhumanities are hard to forgive. But although she had the born satirist’s opportunity to punish, she surely used it very sparingly in Emma. Frank Churchill, in his negligent way, causes more pain than anyone else in the book. He misleads Emma, largely to safeguard himself, and teases the helpless Jane almost to breaking point. What is his reward? In Mr Knightley’s words, ‘His aunt is in the way.—His aunt dies.—He has only to speak.—His friends are eager to promote his happiness.—He has used every body ill—and they are all delighted to forgive him.—He is a fortunate man indeed!’ Miss Bates, on the other hand, the woman of ‘universal good-will,’ might, by any other writer, have been rew
arded, but nothing of the kind occurs. ‘She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if she live to old age, must probably sink more.’ Mr Elton, however, and his insufferable wife both flourish. Their satisfaction in themselves is not disturbed. They are the unreachables of classic comedy.

  Beneath the moral structure of Jane Austen’s novels lie, not hidden but taken for granted, her religious beliefs. In Emma they are openly expressed only once. After Mr Knightley declares himself Emma finds that ‘a very short parley with her own heart produced the most solemn resolution of never quitting her father.—She even wept over the idea of it, as a sin of thought.’ ‘Sin of thought’ is a phrase familiar from the Evangelical examination of the conscience, and the book here is at its most serious. Emma’s love for her father has been, from the first, the way of showing the true deep worth of her character.

  But Jane Austen gave her family (so her nephew says in his Memoir) ‘many little particulars about the subsequent careers of her people.’ She told them that ‘Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years.’ The story ends, then, with a quite unexpected irony: Mr Woodhouse was right, after all, to fancy that his health was in a dangerous state. It is hard to imagine Highbury without him, as Jane Austen evidently could. But it is a corresponding relief to think of Emma—the warmhearted, headstrong, even dangerous Emma—safe and in ‘perfect happiness’ at Donwell.

  Introduction to the Oxford University Press World

  Classics edition of Emma, 1999

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  The Unfading Vision

  Blake, by Peter Ackroyd

  Blake was one of those for whom, in William James’s definition, ‘religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.’ He spoke with his visions on equal terms, sat down with them and answered them back. They came as welcome visitors: Jesus Christ, the angel Gabriel, Socrates, Michelangelo, his own younger brother Robert, dead at the age of nineteen. What seemed external reality he called a cloud interposed between human beings and the spiritual world, which would otherwise be too bright to bear. He wanted us all to know this. At one point in his biography of Blake, Peter Ackroyd speaks of him as ‘keeping his own counsel,’ but, as the book shows, Blake didn’t. It was his mission to recall us from materialism to the freedom and joy of the imagination, and it was humanity’s duty to listen to his prophecies.

  The Blakes were a plain-living London tradesman’s family, pious, sober, dissenting and radical. William (1757—1827), the third child of James and Catherine Blake, was born on Broad Street, a little to the southeast of what is now Oxford Circus. A workhouse and a slaughterhouse were just around the corner, but so too, to the south, was Golden Square, where the gentry lived. William saw the face of God at the window when he was seven or eight years old, wrote poetry as a child, and was apprenticed at fourteen to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. A republican his whole life, he was involved (we don’t quite know how) in the riots of 1780, when the London crowds battled the militia and set fire to Newgate prison.

  Perhaps on this account, perhaps because of an illness and a disappointment in love, William was sent across the river to recuperate at the house of a market gardener in Battersea. A year or so later he married the gardener’s daughter, Catherine Boucher. He started well enough, opening his own print shop and developing what he called ‘W. Blake’s original stereotype.’ This was a method of relief printing on copper, each impression being hand-tinted, so that no two were alike. In this way the Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and the great series of prophetic books were offered (quite unsuccessfully) to the public. His work as a jobbing engraver began to run out, and he had to retreat to a cottage at Felpham, on the south coast. But although Felpham was a place of inspiration—it was the first time Blake had ever seen the sea—he was back three years later in the soot-and-dung-laden air of London that suited him and his wife so well.

  ‘In his later life,’ Mr Ackroyd writes, ‘he was known only as an engraver, a journeyman with wild notions and a propensity for writing unintelligible verse. He laboured for his bread, eccentric, dirty and obscure.’ It might be added that he was childless, and there is no way of calculating the pain that caused him. But Blake is also the poet of joy, and it could be argued that he was a fortunate man. Although he created the overwhelming tyrant figure Urizen, or old Nobodaddy, his own father seems to have been mild enough, never sending William to school because ‘he so hated a blow.’ Blake’s loyal wife, illiterate when they married, was, as he said, ‘an angel to me.’ (He had fallen in love with her because she pitied him, which seems to surprise Mr Ackroyd, but pity was the great eighteenth-century virtue that Blake most earnestly tells us to cherish.)

  Although his earnings ran out, he was never without a patron, and although he had always kept radical company, he never got into serious trouble. When he was living in Felpham he was arrested after a row with a drunken soldier who accused him of speaking seditiously against the King—and so he very well may have done—but at the quarter sessions, where poor Catherine deposed that yes, she would be ready to fight for Bonaparte, Blake was miraculously acquitted. And at the end of his life he acquired a new circle of much younger admirers, artists who called themselves Ancients and understood, partly at least, Blake’s transcendent view of history and eternity. One of them, George Richmond, closed Blake’s eyes when he died in 1827 in his two-room lodgings, and then kissed them ‘to keep the vision in.’ ‘Yet there was really no need to do so,’ says Mr Ackroyd, feeling perhaps he has earned the right to a fine phrase. ‘That vision had not faded in his pilgrimage of seventy years, and it has not faded yet.’

  Mr Ackroyd’s Blake is much more reader-friendly than his Dickens. This time he doesn’t make what have been called his Hitchcock-like appearances in the text, but he is there at your elbow, a brilliant guide and interpreter. Blake, he says, ‘is a “difficult” poet only if we decide to make him so,’ and he fearlessly expounds the prophetic books and the technique of their illustrations, which conjure up in dazzling orange, green, violet, and crimson ‘a wholly original religious landscape.’

  Like all his predecessors, Mr Ackroyd is left with the (possibly not true) ‘familiar anecdotes.’ Did Thomas Butts (a respectable civil servant) really find the Blakes sitting naked, in imitation of Adam and Eve, in their back garden? Did Blake really encounter the Devil on his way down to the coal cellar? Mr Ackroyd tells the stories as they come. Blake, like Yeats, mythologized (but never falsified) himself, and the best thing is to accept the myth. More important to Mr Ackroyd is the re-creation of the poet as a great Londoner—part of his long-term biography of his home city. He invites us to accompany Blake, in his knee breeches and wide-brimmed hat, on one of his long walks through the streets. This is not in itself a new idea. Stanley Gardner, in 1968, was one of the first to study the county survey of late-eighteenth-century London inch by inch and to suggest (for example) that Blake’s Valley of Innocence must have been the green fields of Wimbledon, where orphans at that time were put out to nurse. Mr Gardner didn’t supply his readers with a map, nor does Mr Ackroyd, but he is immensely more detailed. ‘A woman filling her kettle at the neighbourhood pump, the washing hanging out from poles…the bird cages and pots of flowers on the windowsills, the shabby man standing on a corner with a sign in his hat saying “Out of Employ,” while another sells toy windmills, the dogs, the cripples, the boys with hoops.’ These things, of course, aren’t what William Blake saw: he saw walls reddened with soldiers’ blood or blackened with the soot that killed off young chimney sweeps, while a single bird cage was for him enough to set heaven in a rage.

  But this is emphatically not a political biography. Its object isn’t to enlist Blake as a primitive Marxist but to show him as an individual of genius, awkward to deal with, sometimes nervous, often contradictory, but incorruptible. Blake himself believed there were eternal ‘states’ of rage and desire,
even of selfhood, through which a man passes, keeping his soul intact. ‘He knew precisely what he saw,’ says Mr Ackroyd affectionately, ‘and with the sturdy obstinacy of his London stock he refused to be bullied or dissuaded.’

  Blake was unaccountably true, indeed, even to his strangest prophecies. He had promised his wife that he would never leave her, and after his death he came back, she said, for several hours a day, sat down in his usual chair, and talked to her.

  New York Times Book Review, 1996

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  Talking Through the Darkness

  Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804—1834, by Richard Holmes

  Ten years ago, in 1989, Richard Holmes left Coleridge under the stars on an April night in Portsmouth, starting out, in one of the many impulsive moves of his life, for Malta. He asked us to imagine how it would have been if the poet had died on the voyage, as he and all his friends clearly expected. He would then have been remembered as the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a brilliant young Romantic early extinguished. But he didn’t die, and the next three decades, Holmes told us, would be more fascinating than anything that had gone before. This second volume, he said, would be subtitled ‘Later Reflections,’ but it has turned out to be ‘Darker Reflections.’ Possibly he himself has changed a little in this time. In any case, ‘darker’ suggests the water imagery that haunted Coleridge even more closely as his life flowed to an end. Holmes hoped to make him ‘leap out of these pages—brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking—and invade your imagination (as he has done mine).’ Certainly, in his superb second volume, he has succeeded in this.