Incoming

 

Sunbeams were still melting through his window-curtain,

or were thrown  with late lustre

on the chamber-wall.

--  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851)

 

 

Afternoon sunlight   fell full on the hill

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

At Drop of Dusk

twilight fell     silently

 

and sadly

 

out of the sky

 

.

.

.

 

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852)

 

[For further glimpses of the twilight time, try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/07/nightfall.html ]

Doffing the Robe of Winter

grown men, weary with cares; 

old men, burthened with winters; --

they had mused, and slumbered, and departed

to a yet profounder sleep.

--  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851)

The Mystery of the Analytical Chemist (further updated)

Among the unpublished manuscripts of my late friend Dr. Watson … no, just kidding.

Our Mutual Friend, the last finished novel of Charles Dickens, does not lie at the center of most readers’ affections;  yet connoisseurs there are, who wóuld award the palm to that late work.   And one of the most memorable minor characters therein -- as minor as might be, since (if memory serves) he utters not a word at any time -- is the discreetly appearing and vanishing figure of the Analytical Chemist.  His denomination is never explained, and he is given no other name.  His ostensible function is to wait on the Veneering’s table, at that elegant or elegantesque or simili-elegant supper party which is to seal the coming-out of these arrivistes or nouvel-arrivés; his deeper purpose is … well, it must be guessed-at.   But whatever it was, Dickens was evidently quite satisfied with the results.

What does he mean, then -- and especially, why ever is he called that?

The proper approach, I now believe, is not to be overly … analytical about it (as I tried to be, upon first encountering the character, with wonder).  The phrase simply wandered into Dickens’ mind,  without any nicety of correspondence to the Dalton or Lavoisier theory of the day, and serves perfectly to suggest what needs suggesting:  neither fawning nor class resentment  on the part of the table-attendent, but cool detachment, and unwavering observation.  In this he is a forerunner of that other supranatural butler, Jeeves.

(There are differences, but these are subtle, and must await another time  for treatment, when Jeeves himself shall consent to appear at the center of our lens.  -- Compare further another Wodehouse character, Lord Emsworth's secretary, The Efficient Baxter.)

Compare:

If Hawthorne had not been a story-teller, he might have been a famous chemist, for he was a mental chemist in his method of handling emotions and passions.

-- Van Wyck Brooks,  New England:  Indian Summer (1940), p. 297

This what-if re Hawthorne is implausible;  but the citation has merit in displaying the contemporary connotations of chemist.

Bonus quote:

Hungarian goulash, always a dish to be avoided unless you had had the forethought to have it analysed by a competent analytical chemist.

-- P.G. Wodehouse, Ice in the Bedroom (1961)

Note: in a British context, the modifier analytical is necessary to distinguish what Americans call a chemist from what Americans call a pharmacist.


For further Dickensiana:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Charles%20Dickens

[Postscript May 2016] A foretaste of the denomination may be found in chapter 8 of Barnaby Rudge (1841).  Describing the farcical Tubby’s-Clubhouse-style subterranean meeting of the ‘Prentice Knights:

One of the conductors of this novice held a rusty blunderbuss pointed towards his ear, and the other, a very ancient sabre, with which he carved imaginary offenders as he came along  in a sanguinary and anatomical manner.

Savor the semantics of that “anatomical manner”, and you will be well on the way towards the Analytical Chemist.

A Locked-Room Mystery -- Inside-Out!

Reading here and there, in America’s literary incunabula,  I happened upon an excellent tale by Mr Washington Irving:  “The Stout Gentleman:  a stage-coach romance” (1822).

The story, set at an inn, concerns a scant multiplicity (they are nothing so coherent as a group) of travellers, trapped by a day of rain.  It opens with abundant atmospherics: 

It was a rainy Sunday in the gloomy month of November. … The rain pattered against the casements …

That will put the modern cynic  immediately in mind of the “Bulwer-Lytton” awards for bad beginnings, after the classic “It was a dark and stormy night.”  That, however, for anyone who knows how to tell a tale, or to thrill to one, rather than to patronize, was an excellent beginning, worthy of imitation and expatiation.

A dark and dreary night; people nestling in their beds, or circling late about the fire….

-- Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), beginning of Ch. 15

It was a wild night.  The wind was howling outside, and the rain was beating and splashing against the windows.
-- Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (part-way through)

At any event, “The Stout Gentleman” ultimately advances but little upon its promising opening.  It proves to be a writerly exercise, to show how many bricks  may be made, with how little straw.   It is an early, but inverted version, of a Locked Room mystery  -- yet in spirit, more like Paul Auster than like John Dickson Carr.

A locked room mystery  is narratively locked as well -- like a constructed chess-problem, walled off from the unpredictable rough-and-tumble of actual play.  At the center is a sort of black box, in which some untoward thing is thought to have happened;  but you cannot penetrate it directly (nothing so puerile as an auxiliary door hidden behind the cheval-glass), nor does it let its guarded secrets out.  The detective must use deduction.  He is like the scientist, deducing what may be inside the black-box, from its fitful and ambiguous meter-readings.

Yet, oddly for so early a work (prior to Poe), the tale seems almost post the locked-room subgenre. For although the stout gentleman of the title, whose likely or imagined or projected characteristics form the slender nub of the tale, does keep to his room in the inn, he is not locked off;  inn staff go in and out, the narrator is at liberty to look in on him if he so desired:  yet the narrator is as though paralyzed in will, keeping to the dreary common-room on this rainy day, and attempting to deduce from the distant sounds, or bits of overheard conversations of the servants, just what kind of gentleman  this unseen stout gentleman might be.  The story is more about the process of detection -- or rather, induction -- itself, than about the ‘mystery’ of the stout gentleman, which never rises above something wherewith to beguile the idle hours of a rained-in day.

This (let us call it) sub-subgenre of the whodunit, in which it is the (amateur) detective who is “locked in”, and -- denied sight -- must judge by muffled sounds, is brought to the pitch of perfection, and indeed to spiritual depth, in G.K. Chesterton’s short story, “The Queer Feet” (1910; collected in The Innocence of Father Brown).  Here Father Brown is temporarily sequestered in a closed chamber off a back passageway;  and from this vantage, deduces all, both factual and spiritual, based simply upon the footfalls of an unnatural gait.  Indeed, the story is a kind of rhythmic pendant to the visual-geometrical masterpiece, "The Wrong Shape".

~

Hawthorne’s American notebooks from the mid-1840s  contain many brief notes for possible future stories, most of which he never got around to writing.  The following struck us, in connection with Irving’s (already published!) tale:

A story, the principal personage of which  shall seem always on the point of entering the scene; but shall never appear.

Such, indeed, is the dénoument of Irving’s finger-exercise.  Only at the very end, as the stout gentleman is climbing into a coach to leave the inn (his secret safe for ever) does the feckless narrator get a glimpse, but only of his broad back.   The author leaves us le miel sur les lèvres  -- it has been a snack, and not a meal.

Later, this motif of a title character being ever awaited, but never quite seen, became familiar:  En attendant Godot; l’Arlesienne.   The prophetic underpinning, to which those are a sort of fey parody:  the Mahdi; the Second Coming.

~

A brief but interesting essay offers some ruminative reflections, going so far as bringing in God to Moses in Exodus 33: “thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.”

http://www.aestheticrealism.net/essays/Known&Unknown_WashingtonIrvings_StoutGentleman.html

To recur to our Chestertonian approximations, we may mention that mere rear-view of Sunday, in GKC’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

The Proto-Buffy

WDJ’s Department of American Incunabula  reports:

Hawthorne’s American notebooks from the mid-1840s  contain many brief notes for possible future stories, most of which he never got around to writing.  One such item he handed over to Longfellow, who turned it into the epic poem “Evangeline”.  Another fragment had to wait longer for its eventual embodiment:

To contrive a story of a man building a house, and locating it over the pit of Acheron.  The breath of hell shall breathe up from the furnace that warms it, and over which Satan himself shall preside.  Devils and damned souls  shall continually be rising through the registers.  Possibly an angel may now and then peep through the ventilators.

And thus it came to pass, that in our own day and age, a prophet named Josh Whedon did chance upon that manuscript;  and thus was Sunnydale, and Buffy, born.

Höllenschlund

An hideous hole all vast, withouten shape,
Of endless depth, o'erwhelm'd with ragged stone,
With ugly mouth and grisly jaws doth gape,
And to our sight confounds itself in one.
Here enter'd we, and yeding forth, anon
An horrible loathly lake we might discern,
As black as pitch, that clepèd is Averne.

-- Th. Sackville, “Induction”

In search of “The Unpardonable Sin”

I’ve been delving into nineteenth-century English-language literature, in particular (at present) Hardy and Hawthorne;  and in the latter’s story “Ethan Brand” (original title: “The Unpardonable Sin”), happened upon this:

… Ethan Brand’s solitary and meditative life, before he began his search for the Unpardonable Sin.

That brought me up short.  For I once published a novel -- generically, Detective Fiction -- whose undercurrent is that very theme:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/01/unpardonable-sin.html

Hawthorne describes such putative sin  to be such as is “beyond the scope of Heaven’s else infinite mercy”.   So far, so good.

He also states that “Ethan Brand … had conversed with Satan”.    Bad.  But then, detective Michael Murphy has (initially, unwittingly) several times had Satan (or one of that fallen angel’s emissaries) as a client in a case.

But then, this:

Ethan Brand became a fiend … he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!

“What more have I to seek?  what more to achieve?” said Ethan Brand to himself.  “My task is done, and well done!”

Pessimus! 

At that, Ethan Brand (Nicht gedacht  soll seiner werden) cast himself into the furnace (a perfect instance of how, in C.S.Lewis’ theory, the obstinate  do indeed  wind up in the Pit).

So, a motivation quite different from that, of the Christian sinner Murphy.

It is perhaps wise, not to inquire too nicely  into the meaning of Hawthorne’s tale.  I shut the book, and sain myself, and there’s an end to it.

~

Hawthorne’s American notebooks from the mid-1840s  contain many brief notes for possible future stories, most of which never got written.  Here are the germs of the story at hand:

The search of an investigator for the Unpardonable Sin -- he at last finds it in his own heart and practice.

The Unpardonable Sin might consist in a want of love and reverence for the human Soul;  in consequence of which  the investigator pried into its dark depths, not with a hope or purpose of making it better, but from a cold philosophical curiosity -- content that it should be wicked in whatever kind or degree, and only desiring to study it out.  Would not this, in other words, be the separation of the intellect from the heart?

~

[Personal footnote]  I once studied under a professor of linguistics  -- CJF, or informally “Chuck” -- a gentle man, in all ways inoffensive,  who, as an adult, to signal a conclusive break with his fundamentalist upbringing, did one day “curse the Holy Ghost”, by way of committing the Unpardonable Sin. 

So he confided to me, in his office.   I mention it now, for the first time, only because he has by now slipped off the mortal coil, awaiting his reward.   The which, I pray, and indeed believe, shall be that of those, who never did blaspheme.   It is not so easy as all that, Professor, to baffle God’s infinite mercy (and sense of proportion)!

Phrase of the Day: “skimmity ride”

I am currently taking-in an audiobook of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (18), expertly read by Mr. Simon Vance, whose mastery of various voices, and of the island dialects  (both Saxon and Scots)  adds much to the performance.

At one point in this densely plotted book, we learn of plans by the local lumpen, to subject a certain rather flighty/haughty  dame of the town (and her hardworking but enveigled husband) to what they call a “skimmity ride”. That turns out to be Dorset dialect (which, indeed, figures even as a plot-element in the book, when the ingénue professes herself ‘leery’ in the local sense, and is rated by her stepfather, who demands that she restrict herself to Hochenglisch) for this:

skimmington: one publicly impersonating and ridiculing a henpecked or cuckolded husband or his shrewish or unfaithful wife

-- Merriam-Webster

It is reminiscent of, but vastly milder than, the early American custom of tarring and feathering, and riding out of town on a rail (literary classics depicting this:  Huckleberry Finn; and Hawthorne’s haunting “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”)  since, here, the miscreants  are represented only in effigy.   Moreover, the practice enjoyed here no legal sanction, though the feckless local constables shrink from halting the procession.

As for what-all is involved in a skimmington, and the related charivari, you may top up the cup of your Wissbegierde  here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skimmington

In the matter of public shaming, devotees of literature (or high-school grads who had the book assigned) will recall Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.  But that stigma was imposed top-down; whereas (as Hardy makes clear) the skimmity-ride in Casterbridge  was instigated by a slyboots, and implemented by the dregs.

So much might put us in mind of a current practice, distantly related to the moral(istic) Tyranny of the Village:  anonymous online mobbing

-- public shaming by complete strangers -- capriciously, via the Twittering carrion-birds of the Erinyes.  Thus ratifying the paradoxical formulation of a “global village”.

Exercise for the student:  To develop this idea further, explore the traditional distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures.  The latter are specifically Judeo-Christian, and are generally reckoned an advance by those familiar with both.  Our own society is devolving toward that earlier standard:  not a sense of guilt, but of embarrassment;  not at having done wrong, but having offended anyone.