The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
--Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
But if you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study . . .
--Leslie Stephen, Sketches from Cambridge (1865)
* * *
Sam's had not been the only dark face in Lyme that morning. Ernestina had woken in a mood that the brilliant promise of the day only aggravated. The ill was familiar; but it was out of the question that she should inflict its consequences upon Charles. And so, when he called dutifully at ten o'clock at Aunt Tranter's house, he found himself greeted only by that lady: Ernestina had passed a slightly disturbed night, and wished to rest. Might he not return that afternoon to take tea, when no doubt she would be recovered?
Charles's solicitous inquiries--should the doctor not be called?--being politely answered in the negative, he took his leave. And having commanded Sam to buy what flowers he could and to take them to the charming invalid's house, with the permission and advice to proffer a blossom or two of his own to the young lady so hostile to soot, for which light duty he might take the day as his reward (not all Victorian employers were directly responsible for communism), Charles faced his own free hours.
His choice was easy; he would of course have gone wherever Ernestina's health had required him to, but it must be confessed that the fact that it was Lyme Regis had made his pre-marital obligations delightfully easy to support. Stonebarrow, Black Ven, Ware Cliffs--these names may mean very little to you. But Lyme is situated in the center of one of the rare outcrops of a stone known as blue lias. To the mere landscape enthusiast this stone is not attractive. An exceedingly gloomy gray in color, a petrified mud in texture, it is a good deal more forbidding than it is picturesque. It is also treacherous, since its strata are brittle and have a tendency to slide, with the consequence that this little stretch of twelve miles or so of blue lias coast has lost more land to the sea in the course of history than almost any other in England. But its highly fossiliferous nature and its mobility make it a Mecca for the British paleontologist. These last hundred years or more the commonest animal on its shores has been man--wielding a geologist's hammer.
Charles had already visited what was perhaps the most famous shop in the Lyme of those days--the Old Fossil Shop, founded by the remarkable Mary Anning, a woman without formal education but with a genius for discovering good--and on many occasions then unclassified--specimens. She was the first person to see the bones of Ichthyosaurus platyodon; and one of the meanest disgraces of British paleontology is that although many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the specific anningii. To this distinguished local memory Charles had paid his homage--and his cash, for various ammonites and Isocrina he coveted for the cabinets that walled his study in London. However, he had one disappointment, for he was at that time specializing in a branch of which the Old Fossil Shop had few examples for sale.
This was the echinoderm, or petrified sea urchin. They are sometimes called tests (from the Latin testa, a tile or earthen pot); by Americans, sand dollars. Tests vary in shape, though they are always perfectly symmetrical; and they share a pattern of delicately burred striations. Quite apart from their scientific value (a vertical series taken from Beachy Head in the early 1860s was one of the first practical confirmations of the theory of evolution) they are very beautiful little objects; and they have the added charm that they are always difficult to find. You may search for days and not come on one; and a morning in which you find two or three is indeed a morning to remember. Perhaps, as a man with time to fill, a born amateur, this is unconsciously what attracted Charles to them; he had scientific reasons, of course, and with fellow hobbyists he would say indignantly that the Echinodermia had been "shamefully
neglected," a familiar justification for spending too much time in too small a field. But whatever his motives he had fixed his heart on tests.
Now tests do not come out of the blue lias, but out of the superimposed strata of flint; and the fossil-shop keeper had advised him that it was the area west of the town where he would do best to search, and not necessarily on the shore. Some half-hour after he had called on Aunt Tranter, Charles was once again at the Cobb.
The great mole was far from isolated that day. There were fishermen tarring, mending their nets, tinkering with crab and lobster pots. There were better-class people, early visitors, local residents, strolling beside the still swelling but now mild sea. Of the woman who stared, Charles noted, there was no sign. But he did not give her--or the Cobb--a second thought and set out, with a quick and elastic step very different from his usual languid town stroll, along the beach under Ware Cleeves for his destination. He would have made you smile, for he was carefully equipped for his role. He wore stout nailed boots and canvas gaiters that rose to encase Norfolk breeches of heavy flannel. There was a tight and absurdly long coat to match; a canvas wideawake hat of an indeterminate beige; a massive ash-plant, which he had bought on his way to the Cobb; and a voluminous rucksack, from which you might have shaken out an already heavy array of hammers, wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes, adzes and heaven knows what else. Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the Victorians; one sees it best (at its most ludicrous) in the advice so liberally handed out to travelers in the early editions of Baedeker. Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left? How, in the case of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed boots on a boulder-strewn beach are as suitable as ice skates?
Well, we laugh. But perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation between what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here, once again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is duty* to drive us, or not? If we take this obsession with dressing the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think, a grave--or rather a frivolous--mistake about our ancestors; because it was men not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science. Their folly in that direction was no more than a symptom of their seriousness in a much more important one. They sensed that current accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their windows on reality to become smeared by convention, religion, social stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of man. We think (unless we live in a research laboratory) that we have nothing to discover, and the only things of the utmost importance to us concern the present of man. So much the better for us? Perhaps. But we are not the ones who will finally judge.
[* I had better here, as a reminder that mid-Victorian (unlike modern) agnosticism and atheism were related strictly to theological dogma, quote George Eliot's famous epigram: "God is inconceivable, immortality is unbelievable, but duty is peremptory and absolute." And all the more peremptory, one might add, in the presence of such a terrible dual lapse of faith.]
So I should not have been too inclined to laugh that day when Charles, as he hammered and bent and examined his way along the shore, tried for the tenth time to span too wide a gap between boulders and slipped ignominiously on his back. Not that Charles much minded slipping, for the day was beautiful, the liassic fossils were plentiful and he soon found himself completely alone.
The sea sparkled, curlews cried. A flock of oyster catchers, black and white and coral-red, flew on ahead of him, harbingers of his passage. Here there came seductive rock pools, and dreadful heresies drifted across the poor fellow's brain-- would it not be more fun, no, no, more scientifically valuable, to take up marine biology? Perhaps to give up London, to live in Lyme ... but Ernestina would never allow that. There ev
Just as you may despise Charles for his overburden of apparatus, you perhaps despise him for his lack of specialization. But you must remember that natural history had not then the pejorative sense it has today of a flight from reality-- and only too often into sentiment. Charles was a quite competent ornithologist and botanist into the bargain. It might perhaps have been better had he shut his eyes to all but the fossil sea urchins or devoted his life to the distribution of algae, if scientific progress is what we are talking about; but think of Darwin, of The Voyage of the Beagle. The Origin of Species is a triumph of generalization, not specialization; and even if you could prove to me that the latter would have been better for Charles the ungifted scientist, I should still maintain the former was better for Charles the human being. It is not that amateurs can afford to dabble everywhere; they ought to dabble everywhere, and damn the scientific prigs who try to shut them up in some narrow oubliette.
Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself. What that genius had upset was the Linnaean Scala Naturae, the ladder of nature, whose great keystone, as essential to it as the divinity of Christ to theology, was nulla species nova: a new species cannot enter the world. This principle explains the Linnaean obsession with classifying and naming, with fossilizing the existent. We can see it now as a foredoomed attempt to stabilize and fix what is in reality a continuous flux, and it seems highly appropriate that Linnaeus himself finally went mad; he knew he was in a labyrinth, but not that it was one whose walls and passages were eternally changing. Even Darwin never quite shook off the Swedish fetters, and Charles can hardly be blamed for the thoughts that went through his mind as he gazed up at the lias strata in the cliffs above him. He knew that nulla species nova was rubbish; yet he saw in the strata an immensely reassuring orderliness in existence. He might perhaps have seen a very contemporary social symbolism in the way these gray-blue ledges were crumbling; but what he did see was a kind of edificiality of time, in which inexorable laws (therefore beneficently divine, for who could argue that order was not the highest human good?) very conveniently arranged themselves for the survival of the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson, this fine spring day, alone, eager and inquiring, understanding, accepting, noting and grateful. What was lacking, of course, was the corollary of the collapse of the ladder of nature: that if new species can come into being, old species very often have to make way for them. Personal extinction Charles was aware of--no Victorian could not be. But general extinction was as absent a concept from his mind that day as the smallest cloud from the sky above him; and even though, when he finally resumed his stockings and gaiters and boots, he soon held a very concrete example of it in his hand. It was a very fine fragment of lias with ammonite impressions, exquisitely clear, microcosms of macrocosms, whirled galaxies that Catherine-wheeled their way across ten inches of rock. Having duly inscribed a label with the date and place of finding, he once again hopscotched out of science--this time, into love. He determined to give it to Ernestina when he returned. It was pretty enough for her to like; and after all, very soon it would come back to him, with her. Even better, the increased weight on his back made it a labor, as well as a gift. Duty, agreeable conformity to the epoch's current, raised its stern head.
And so did the awareness that he had wandered more slowly than he meant. He unbuttoned his coat and took out his silver half hunter. Two o'clock! He looked sharply back then, and saw the waves lapping the foot of a point a mile away. He was in no danger of being cut off, since he could see a steep but safe path just ahead of him which led up the cliff to the dense woods above. But he could not return along the shore. His destination had indeed been this path, but he had meant to walk quickly to it, and then up to the levels where the flint strata emerged. As a punishment to himself for his dilatoriness he took the path much too fast, and had to sit a minute to recover, sweating copiously under the abominable flannel. But he heard a little stream nearby and quenched his thirst; wetted his handkerchief and patted his face; and then he began to look around him.
9
. . . this heart, I know,
To be long lov'd was never fram'd;
But something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untamed.
--Matthew Arnold, "A Farewell" (1853)
* * *
I gave the two most obvious reasons why Sarah Woodruff presented herself for Mrs. Poulteney's inspection. But she was the last person to list reasons, however instinctively, and there were many others--indeed there must have been, since she was not unaware of Mrs. Poulteney's reputation in the less elevated milieux of Lyme. For a day she had been undecided; then she had gone to see Mrs. Talbot to seek her advice. Now Mrs. Talbot was an extremely kindhearted but a not very perspicacious young woman; and though she would have liked to take Sarah back--indeed, had earlier firmly offered to do so--she was aware that Sarah was now incapable of that sustained and daylong attention to her charges that a governess's duties require. And yet she still wanted very much to help her. She knew Sarah faced penury; and lay awake at nights imagining scenes from the more romantic literature of her adolescence, scenes in which starving heroines lay huddled on snow-covered doorsteps or fevered in some bare, leaking garret. But one image--an actual illustration from one of Mrs. Sherwood's edifying tales--summed up her worst fears. A pursued woman jumped from a cliff. Lightning flashed, revealing the cruel heads of her persecutors above; but worst of all was the shrieking horror on the doomed creature's pallid face and the way her cloak rippled upwards, vast, black, a falling raven's wing of terrible death.
So Mrs. Talbot concealed her doubts about Mrs. Poulteney and advised Sarah to take the post. The ex-governess kissed little Paul and Virginia goodbye, and walked back to Lyme a condemned woman. She trusted Mrs. Talbot's judgment; and no intelligent woman who trusts a stupid one, however kind-hearted, can expect else.
Sarah was intelligent, but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty. It was not in the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no doubt symptomatic that the one subject that had cost her agonies to master was mathematics. Nor did it manifest itself in the form of any particular vivacity or wit, even in her happier days. It was rather an uncanny--uncanny in one who had never been to London, never mixed in the world--ability to classify other people's worth: to understand them, in the fullest sense of that word.
She had some sort of psychological equivalent of the experienced horse dealer's skill--the ability to know almost at the first glance the good horse from the bad one; or as if, jumping a century, she was born with a computer in her heart. I say her heart, since the values she computed belong more there than in the mind. She could sense the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic when she came across them; but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being able to say how, any more than a computer can explain its own processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem. It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people. Her comprehension was broader than that, and if mere morality had been her touchstone she would not have behaved as she did--the simple fact of the matter being that she had not lodged with a female cousin at Weymouth. This instinctual profundity of insight was the first curse of her life; the second was her education. It was not a very great education, no better than could be got in a third-rate young ladies' seminary in Exeter, where she had learned during the day and paid for her learning during the evenin
This father, he the vicar of Lyme had described as "a man of excellent principles," was the very reverse, since he had a fine collection of all the wrong ones. It was not concern for his only daughter that made him send her to boarding school, but obsession with his own ancestry. Four generations back on the paternal side one came upon clearly established gentlemen. There was even a remote relationship with the Drake family, an irrelevant fact that had petrified gradually over the years into the assumption of a direct lineal descent from the great Sir Francis. The family had certainly once owned a manor of sorts in that cold green no-man's-land between Dartmoor and Exmoor. Sarah's father had three times seen it with his own eyes; and returned to the small farm he rented from the vast Meriton estate to brood, and plot, and dream.
Perhaps he was disappointed when his daughter came home from school at the age of eighteen--who knows what miracles he thought would rain on him?--and sat across the elm table from him and watched him when he boasted, watching with a quiet reserve that goaded him, goaded him like a piece of useless machinery (for he was born a Devon man and money means all to Devon men), goaded him finally into madness. He gave up his tenancy and bought a farm of his own; but he bought it too cheap, and what he thought was a cunning good bargain turned out to be a shocking bad one. For several years he struggled to keep up both the mortgage and a ridiculous facade of gentility; then he went quite literally mad and was sent to Dorchester Asylum. He died there a year later. By that time Sarah had been earning her own living for a year--at first with a family in Dorchester, to be near her father. Then when he died, she had taken her post with the Talbots.