Morning Read: Lawrence
Still gasping for time, I read no new Maxims or Letters, but I did remember a bit from one of Chesterfield’s letters to his son that really ought to be mentioned, because it’s one of those points that becomes more salient with age.
Certain forms, which all people comply with, and certain arts, which all people aim at, hide, in some degree, the truth, and give a general exterior resemblance to almost every body. Attention and sagacity must see though that veil, and discover the natural character.
¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Ramadan,” Melville’s heavy-handed term for the pagan Queequeg’s ritual fasting. Still more fustian, as Ishmael carries on because the door to his room is locked, and Queequeg may be lying dead of apoplexy behind it. Melville seems to be playing both for melodrama and for comedy here, and the result is a peculiarly American form of humorlessness. Hardy-har-har.
¶ Don Quixote’s bones have been bruised so incessantly in recent chapters — today’s is no exception — that I am thinking of petitioning the Epic Authors Society to insist on the disclaimer that “No Hero was mistreated in the writing of this Adventure.” The class-bound difference between the knight’s and the squire’s responses to the “balm of Fierabrás” leaves a bad taste in my mouth: I knew what to expect of Don Quixote, but Sancho Panza is turning out to be not quite the foil that I thought he’d be.
¶ In Squillions, the chapter entitled “Private Lives” begins with — what else but the short-lived correspondence between Coward and another Lawrence, the “of Arabia” one. The letters remind me almost uncomfortably of the mutually-encouraging exchanges that flare up occasionally when I discover a sympathetic blogger. (Some of these, it’s true, take root in friendship.) Although I can understand the charm that Coward and Lawrence would have had for one another (“However, it is usually opposites that fall in love,” Lawrence somewhat rashly writes), the men differed in one of those crucial essentials that all the good will in the world seldom trumps: one of them was a dreamer.
Interesting as the Coward-Lawrence letters might be (in their incidental way), their placement in this chapter intensifies my feeling that Barry Day is a Mad Hatter.
¶ A lengthy but engaging chapter in After the Edwardians that takes us from the National Government of Lloyd-George to the Conservative regime of Stanley Baldwin — about which A N Wilson is not keen.
The fear of communism, rather than the charm of the Conservative party, was what lay behind the election result. Benign Colonel Wedgwood’s rhetorical question backfired. “Those who will not believe that you can do away with exploitation — that is, those who do not want to do away with it — all those “in the interests of Society” will regulate, inspect and convert the working man into a machine that shall like its servitude.” That, precisely, is what the early years of Baldwin’s Second Government showed that the Conservative party wanted.
There is also an amusing gloss on the chapter’s title, “The Means of Grace and the Hope of Glory,” that hinges on the fact that poor Lord Curzon’s second wife’s Christian name was Grace. Plus a knowledge of the Book of Common Prayer.