Globusz^® Publishing 

Faith is like love: it cannot be forced
Arthur Schopenhauer

The Edwardian writers were a vociferous bunch. Keenly interested in the social and political issues of the day, they sought to be constructively critical in their work by denouncing and even satirising the shortcomings of English society. As instinctive psychologists — so creative writers were, according to Freud — they explored and represented, in a variety of ways and styles, the human dimension in the face of the post-war economic crisis, the fragmentation of the national identity and the impending collapse of old convictions.

England had given birth to the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, but she was then at odds with this offspring that grew imposing and uncontrollable. As an aristocratic mother, she felt distaste for the ostentation of wealth, feverish efficiency and fascination for machinery. The reaction was almost physical. The hustle and bustle of the industrial activity, with its obnoxious fumes and unpleasant noises, struck too sharp a contrast with the slow pace and thrifty self-sufficiency of the country life flowing in pleasant surroundings.

In an ideological sense, the landed aristocracy — which gave the imprint to the English character — had the countryside in their blood, not only because they had chosen it as their natural habitat for centuries, but also because they had never stopped to look at it as the receptacle for their fundamental values and long-lasting tradition. So, for them, the essence of Englishness was there, inexorably linked to their land and its focal points: the village and the parish.

Industrialism was seen as an established necessity, but its unacceptable side lay in conveying too many people to a busy town life that promoted greed. This, therefore, represented a menace to the core of the national cultural identity. These feelings were far from being confined to “society” circles. They had spread to politics, for the simple reason that the aristocracy was an integral part of it. Even as late as the thirties England was an oligarchy governed by an elite of aristocrats and upper middle class people who, despite having no titles, adopted aristocratic habits and values. And equally inspired to them was the upper middle class who occupied posts in the civil and colonial service, in the City and in the armed forces. That was why the country was, at the time, in the midst of an existential crisis.

Since the nineteenth century, the aristocracy had lived in two dimensions. They had been in contact with the industrial production through marriages with the industrial bourgeoisie (it was not so in continental Europe), but had also retained formal political weight because of dynastic privilege, as the lords by birth were part of the House of Lords — that branch of Parliament that, unlike the House of Commons, is not elected by the people.

After World War I the political scene changed rapidly. In 1924 Great Britain had the first Labour government — which lasted only a few months— with Ramsey MacDonald (1866—1937) as Prime Minister. From 1924—1929 the Conservatives came to power with Stanley Baldwin (1867—1947); that is when stability was disturbed by a period of strikes (also a general one in 31/1/1926) because of the demand for change by common people who had fought in the war. In 1929 Ramsay McDonald came back to power, but soon he allied with the Conservatives, who in fact were the leaders even if he was formally Prime Minister. However, it was the hegemony of aristocratic values — which persisted against this background — that had a substantial effect on an economy still influenced by John Stuart Mills (1773—1836), who had attached a low priority to the growth of production in view of excessive pursuit of material gain.

Inevitably, in the industrial bourgeoisie, who let itself be co-opted into aristocratic values (but not vice versa), the spirit of enterprise declined. Even more so because the British economy, which was based on profits and dividends from overseas investments and on an imperial market free from competition, worked smoothly enough without extra effort. Winston Churchill (1874—1965) himself, who was responsible for the economy under Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Government, adopted recessive economic measures that did not stimulate demand; hence, there was not economic growth.

The antimaterialistic creed was shared by upper class politicians such as Churchill as well as by bourgeois ones such as Baldwin, who, by the way, identified more with novelists than with businessmen. Both politicians were in fact inspired by a gentry ideal of the aims of politics: avoidance of inhuman industrialism in order to contain rural depopulation and preserve the national heritage and a certain kindness to the poor. On this point it was observed how Conservative and Labour thinking seemed to converge under Baldwin’s government. On top of that, there was an overall fear of extremism, which was prompted by Russia becoming communist and by Hitler coming to power in Germany in 1933.

* * * * *

Like his social minded literary contemporaries — among whom shone G.B. Shaw, A. Bennet, H.G. Wells, and E.M. Forster — John Galsworthy (1867-1933), an upper middle class barrister turned novelist and dramatist, examined many legal and ethical problems in his plays. Actually, his utterly critical portrait of prison life stirred so much passionate debate that even led to reform. But he is mainly remembered for the Forsyte Saga, a novel sequence that started in 1906. Here Galsworthy’s social viewpoint is expressed through the lives of three generations of an upper middle class family, who had married into the upper class since the nineteenth century and was fully assimilated into it. Central to the saga is the criticism of the Forsytes’s inexhaustible desire for wealth.

Flowering Wilderness, written in 1932 and published posthumously, is one of the last three books of the Forsyte chronicles, but one that has an outstanding life of its own. The novel is concerned with the Cherrels, an upper class family who is related to the younger Forsytes (here only mentioned in passing). A chain of emotional reactions within the extended family and their circle is triggered by the liaison between a Cherrell girl and the aristocratic Wilfrid Desert, who recanted Christianity and embraced Islam while he was forced to do so at pistol point by Arab fanatics. The event is put on trial by the conventional mentality and, by raising the main characters’ self-consciousness, will reveal their degrees of conformism. As early as the opening scene — one that could have been enacted on stage to great effect — Desert strikes us as an unusual person. His yellowish complexion, the result of a fading tan, makes him look out of place in the cold spring afternoon as he is admiring the statue of French Marshal Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929) on horseback in a London location. Dinny Cherrell, a pretty young woman, and Jack Muskham, a tall, elegant middle-aged man, are also there by the statue. Their demeanour and aesthetic propensity, evident from the interest they devote to the outline of the statue, tells us that we are dealing with upper class people whom chance has thrown together.

A remark about the military ability of Foch (who at the outbreak of World War I halted the German advance and later secured the Allied victory) gives Desert grounds to start a conversation with Dinny. But it is she who recollects that they had met at the wedding of her cousin Michael Mont, of whom Desert was best man. Muskham, who had not recognised the girl at once, introduces himself by saying that he too was at the wedding as a cousin of the bridegroom’s father. This is how the main characters of the novel come into contact with us, but it is from their following brief exchange that we can hint at their predisposition towards one another.

Dinny and Desert connect very easily. Their respective physical characteristics had clearly left a pleasant impression on them in the past. He claims to have recognised her by her Botticellian features; she, now twenty-six, feels the same stirrings that his expressive eyes gave her when she was sixteen. Both of them also agree about the artistic rendering of the horse, while Muskham holds a dissenting opinion about the likeness of the stone animal to a real life model. He sounds punctiliously knowledgeable about the equine world, thus revealing a passion for it.

The intercourse between the two men runs less smoothly. They share the same opinion about the valour of Foch, but their brief formal conversation ends rather abruptly. As Muskham claims that Foch had never let England down in the war and that soldiers like him are at present thin on the ground, Desert becomes touchy, as though the comment were directed to himself, and questions his interlocutor about the reason for the remark. The other, shrugging his shoulders as a sign of nonchalance, leaves the scene. The palpable tension between the two men in the presence of a woman is an omen for the conflict to come.

* * * * *

The follow-up to the conversation by the statue predictably marks the beginning of Dinny’s and Desert’s whirlwind romance; shortly, he proposes to her. Overjoyed and lost in love, she cannot yet foresee the wind that will shake up the solid roots of her life.

She is the beloved and educated daughter of an old upper class family of military and colonial tradition whom she, in turn, loves dearly. She enjoys freedom of action — she can travel alone from her family’s country house to London or have tête-a-tête lunches and teas at her fiancé’s place — which her Italian upper class counterparts, for instance, could only conquer twenty years or so later. She is also comfortable with the aristocratic values by which she has been brought up and with the country life that she has always said she would never give up.

Perhaps this intense attachment to her roots has made her so emotionally fulfilled that she has not engaged in actual sentimental experiences — despite her good looks, intelligence and wit — before coming across Desert again. In fact, she had been unable to progress from the adolescent crush she had on him after their fleeting encounter at a crowded wedding. And still now, as a young adult, her spiritual and sensual side cannot be split in pursuit of merely sexual liaisons, as it was possible for many young women of her era. Only in her love for Desert the harmony between her body and mind is achieved.

Desert’s thirty-four years of life could not have been more different from hers. The second son of a lord, hardly significant in his life, and of a half-Italian mother who had run away with another man, he had never had good emotional parental support. His thin, highly strung constitution would hint at an oversensitive, morbidly self-absorbed, artistic type. Whatever the reason, in his adult life he had always been the object of scrutiny and ambiguous comments from men, who did not find him reliable or accessible; women, instead, more drawn to judge by their individual taste than by considerations of general importance, would find Desert’s rare smile and expressive eyes rather charming. Besides, he is a passionate man.

Only a passionate man would have fled to the East in order to fight back the improper sexual passion for his best man’s wife, Fleur. And Fleur herself, who had rejected Desert’s proposal to become his mistress, had been able to see how elusive and odd his behaviour could be. Even Michael Mont, Fleur’s husband, who was fond of Desert and thought highly of him and admired his poetic talent, had no doubt that his friend’s moral sense was of an unorthodox nature.

Desert, however, had been bound by his station in life to follow some orthodox routes, but his military career, including some distinctive actions in the war, had the effect of making him despise any kind of conflict; he saw how indistinctly all peoples fighting against one another are able to commit any sort of crimes and injustices. So, while Dinny accepts conventional consolidated values as part of the human heritage, he considers them as dogmas and the blind observance of them as a kind of superstition. He rejects not only blind faith, but also acritical patriotism. Only in poetry he feels free to create a world of his own with his dreams at its centre.

W. Somerset Maugham could not have put it more brilliantly when he claimed that “Poetry is baroque”, because “baroque is tragic, massive, and mystical”, because “it is elemental”. And indeed baroque, with its indulgence on the ornate, its use of curved and broken lines as a means to obtain complicated spatial effects, beautifully represents stories of saints, miracles and the crucifixion in seventeenth century Italy. So, through Maugham’s flight of fancy, we can easily see how poetry is in effect the written language’s version of baroque, the most appropriate to convey the intricacy of a troubled soul’s feelings. It is well known that poets are troubled souls whose verbal means can be varied no end to serve their purpose: to release fantasies that virtually are a “correction of unsatisfying reality”, as Freud put it. And Desert feels much to complain about in life, and in his attempt to remake it in words as he wished, he has become a good poet.

* * * * *

It sometimes happens that people who, in their characters, have a bohemian streak lying dormant under the surface of conformism become daring and unconventional while lit up by the fire of passion. This is true in Dinny’s case , when her love for Desert brings to light her unexplored impulses. First of all, he awakens her sexuality (she even broke the moral rule of her time by offering herself for sex before their marriage) and, under the influence of Desert’s unconventionality, she also starts to give vent to some critical views about reality. So much so that her new frame of mind escapes her verbal control.

This is just what happens when she talks to her paternal aunt and her husband, Sir Lawrence Mont. They are a square, old-fashioned aristocratic couple, and she dares to say to them that an excessive sense of duty may seriously limit people’s lives and make them dull. Her uncle is astonished. He has always regarded Dinny as a very conventional girl, and in the genuine voice of tradition, he starts singing the praises of the cornerstones of the Empire. Needless to say, they are the institutions that her family has always respected — the public schools, military and religious education, and the achievement of high positions in the Church and the State. Her aunt, smug in her patrician isolation from current affairs and speaking with her usual idiosyncratic inconsistency, even associates Dinny’s position to a revolutionary mentality (“Too depressin’. . . The Russian revolution and all that”).

Dinny’s and Desert’s love story, however, comes to a first turning point when he gives her his poems to read. Her attention is attracted by one in particular —The Leopard — in which a covertly unreligious monk, who recanted Christianity and became a Muslim when forced at pistol point by fanatics, cannot recover from a persistent sense of guilt. Dinny is favourably impressed by the extraordinary emotional charge contained in the poem and even sympathises with the fictional monk who found himself in the tragic situation. Only later Desert will confess to her that the story is his own story — he recanted because he did not want to die for something he did not believe in.

Dinny, far from rejecting him, becomes even more drawn to him. Trusting her balanced personality, she thinks she will be able to bear all the weight of the impact that Desert’s reputation may have on their surrounding world. As for herself, on reflection, she can now see clearly how she does not have defined religious feelings. Rather, she is critical of how society makes use of religion; for instance, by imposing it on children when they are too young to choose for themselves. But, most of all, she empathises with Desert refusing to die for a belief in the Christian faith he has never had. On his part, he is glad to have found an ally who is determined to stand by him against all the odds. He treats Dinny as an equal and she rejoices in that. Soon, though, two people going against the grain of society proves a very hard endeavour.

* * * * *

The news of Desert’s recantation has gone a long way, from the bazaars in Arabia to the London Englishmen’s clubs via a colonial connection. The male members of Dinny’s family —her uncles as well as her father — have a much less lenient perception about an English soldier’s act of recantation than she has. Independently of their own religious beliefs (for example, Sir Lawrence Mont is not a believer) and personal judgement on Desert, they are sure that Dinny’s marriage to him would cause her to be ostracised by society. They believe that for the Englishman in the East — be it a soldier, an official, a doctor or a missionary — sticking by Christianity assumes a particularly deep meaning. At issue is not so much the strength of his individual faith, as his duty to conform to a set of unquestionable values of which religion is one. In his homeland, therefore, the Englishman who is known to have ratted on these principle becomes an outcast.

Desert himself — in spite of his “spiritual pride”, as his friends call it — cannot get rid of a gnawing sense of guilt imposed on him by an overwhelming superego. So, wishing to show that he is not a coward, he decides to publish the infamous poem as an act of expiation. At the same time, he tells Dinny that it would be better for her if they broke their engagement, as it can only disgrace her. She not only dismisses the idea, but insists on being escorted by him to fashionable events, where he, also because of his introverted temperament, feels ill at ease.

Predictably, in London Englishmen’s clubs talks about Desert’s poem that is hot off the press add to the already spreading gossip about the incident in Arabia. Mixed feelings are stirred in the intellectually sleepy upper class. Michael Mont is the only one who, sensitively, tries to put himself in his friend’s shoes. After an intimate conversation with Desert, he now knows that the recantation had also a humanitarian aspect: the executioner, a person who was known to Desert and who was under a vow to convert an infidel, had begged his victim not to make him shoot. Anyway, Mont does not feel like condemning his friend, since he is not even sure that he would have been ready to die as a matter of principle in Desert’s situation. Yet, he strongly doubts that other people would use the same criteria in judging Desert; even less that they would consider the humanitarian aspect of the recantation as a mitigating factor. But, most of all, being familiar with his friend’s pride, Mont bets that Desert would not even try to justify himself for fear of being laughed at. Mont’s speculations will prove right.

* * * * *

In fact, Jack Muskham is moved by far less sympathetic considerations. He is a member of the same club as Desert’s, and sets to play the leader of a pack of apathetic members by fomenting them to ostracise him. The main reason would be that the publication of The Leopard is nothing but a way of making a profit out of a vile act of apostasy that brings the nation as well as the club itself into disrepute. To make things worse, Desert is also a man who does not refrain from compromising a young woman by escorting her to public events.

Muskham’s motivations have deep roots. He is a well-known formalist who regards his era as one of endangered traditional values. Now a mature man who has learnt to repress any sentiment toward women after a disappointing experience, he has taken refuge in the horse racing world. And, in keeping with his idealism, he is set to breed the perfect thoroughbred — a flawless creature of his own making.

Such extreme personalities, feeling constantly frustrated by the surrounding world failing to comply with their strict standards, are often inflexible, very conservative and intolerant of diversity. That is why to Muskham Desert represents, with his disrespect of consolidated values, the modern sceptic, a fallen angel who shamelessly preys on the weaker sex of which Dinny is the ideal model.

The contradiction between Muskham’s well known misogyny and his passionate concern for a woman is only apparent. The explanation could be found in an idealistic tendency already present in him at a very early stage of his life. Freud explains misogyny as the consequence of a little boy’s unusually intense attachment to a female figure (usually his mother) who becomes his unconscious object of love. But his later disappointment at discovering that little girls are genitally different from himself (and all the other boys for that matter) generates in him the fear of becoming like them — individuals with “something” missing or lost by castration. In particular cases this may be the cause of permanent disgust for the female body. However, the early fixation on the feminine ideal can still persist and may find expression in the attraction to particular female figures somehow reminiscent of the original model. If we adopt this view, we can say that in Muskham’s mind Dinny may be the embodiment of an original model whom, in the present circumstances, he sees badly in need to be saved from disgrace.

Muskham’s hatred for Desert eventually takes the form of openly provocative behaviour. The occasion arises during a visit to the Tate Gallery in London. Passing by Desert, who is in Dinny’s company, Muskham hisses, “That I consider the limit.” Desert detects that the message is evidently directed at him: he is involving a woman in his disreputable life. Desert replies with an open insult. In retaliation, Muskham lets Desert know, in writing, his intention to horsewhip him publicly as soon as he finds him unprotected by the presence of a woman. In the past this would have been followed by a challenge to a duel — a formal event that would have suited Muskham’s love of rules — but the custom had fallen into disuse almost a century earlier. So, the two men have to square things up with an informal fight.

By now Muskham’s feelings, correctly guessed by Michael Mont, become evident to Dinny, too. But she knows nothing about the mechanics of men’s sense of pride, and her lack of experience leads her to uncontrollably act in defence of her lover. She goes to the scene of the fight, which is taking place in a public venue. This is a fatal mistake. Muskham suddenly stops fighting, as going on with the struggle in the presence of a woman would have been considered unacceptable. The result is that Dinny involuntarily scars Desert’s already battered ego by making him feel, and appear to the onlookers, a man unable to fend his adversary off without the protection of a woman. So, after the event, a cold silence falls between the two lovers.

Tormented by anxiety, Dinny muddles things up even more in the attempt to prevent a new fight between the two adversaries. She sets out to meet Muskham at his place in order to assert that Desert has never tried to use her as a shield — it was she who did not restrain him from escorting her at public events. Unexpectedly, though, along the way to Muskham’s home, she finds herself before the very fight she wanted to prevent. It is too late. The two men, bruised and bleeding while already engaged in a violent brawl, once again break it as soon as they see her.

By now, in Desert’s mind an association has formed: the woman he is in love with has become the symbol of the impossibility of his showing to the world, and most of all to himself, that he is not a coward. The spiritual gratitude he felt for her — the only human being who had relieved him from his solitude after the recantation, a flower in the wilderness of his isolation — has turned into a thorn that painfully reminds him of his guilt. Eventually, he feels that by being part of her life he can only hurt her, and that he can also hurt himself.

* * * * *

The moribund love story is drawn to a close by the intrusive interference of Dinny’s family, who has gathered in a conclave to discuss Dinny’s future in view of Desert’s irrevocably compromised position after the fights. Sir Lawrence, who is chosen by the others to talk to Desert, during a brief meeting tells Desert what he already knew — that his confused feelings and bad reputation could only damage Dinny and that a radical decision had to be made. Actually, realising that England does not accept him, Desert has already planned to go back to the East. He wants Dinny and her family to know that, and asks Sir Lawrence to make intentions known to all the others.

Dinny is left emotionally hurt by Desert’s behaviour. Two opposite currents flow through her heart and mind: her trust in a golden vein running deep in Desert’s personality, and her growing discomfort at the idea of his having failed to be loyal to his country. At last, her father’s principles prevail in her evaluation of a man: an Englishman should be ready to die for the institutions of his native land. In addition, she has become aware of how “wilful, sudden, proud, self-centred, and deeply dual” Desert can be.

Yet, still driven by the flame of love that sometimes is reluctant to extinguish itself even in the presence of unworthy situations, Dinny runs to see Desert in order to hear from his own lips what place she has in his future plans. He is surprised by her visit and he is clearly laconic and ill at ease. Nonetheless, they agree to have a meal together. But Desert cannot face his confused feelings for her any more, and runs away as soon as she briefly leaves the room. Later she will receive a letter in which he confirms that he will quit England for good and that he has loved her. This message is found in one of Desert’s pockets by the people who have assisted him when he fell ill with a sudden malaria attack. Eventually he will recover and leave for the East.

Desert was not the only one who found in the colours, smells and lifestyle of the East a relief from the pains of maladjustment in their own country. It happened to others, especially when the old rural forms of life were in decline and it was felt that the new scientific and industrial world could not deliver on his promises.

A reaction of this sort, albeit in a very different kind of society, took place in the 1970s, when a worldwide protest aimed at the foundations of the social structure and the East, once more, provided many with a kind of spiritual route to follow. Perhaps the reason is to be found in the teaching of such oriental religions as Buddhism, since it means to free the individual from the hurtful and selfish urges to which he becomes enslaved. The individual is taught that the world is just an illusion tied up with human inadequacy and partial consciousness, that everybody can learn to build his own happiness by following a simple set of rules for making wise practical choices. Such a conception of life also frees the westerner from the strictures of faiths that, like Christianity, rest on a set of dogmatic propositions about the world.

Dinny picks up the pieces of her shattered life at the end of her romance in a different way. Still mourning the loss of her recent love, she finds solace in going back to the old one, the country, where she really belongs.

Once at home, though, she finds her family hard-up for money, with her father planning to sell his horses to pay “the bills, taxes and rates” that dry up fixed income. Selling the house is contemplated, but quickly dismissed. Dinny and her family, as landed gentry, are aware that all they own is part of their history. It would be unbearable for them to lose their house to some modern entrepreneur, who would probably rent it to “a boys’ school, a country club or an asylum”. As members of the aristocracy, they have a conflictual relationship with money. They badly need it, but know they cannot swap their precious past for it. To Dinny, then, self-help is the answer to the problem. She will relieve her father’s economic difficulties by giving him the money she got from the sale of her jewellery when running away with Desert was a possibility. She can play on familiar ground now, but with new awareness: she has learned to look deeply into herself and to grow out of childish illusions. Yet, although love has revealed all its uncertainty and pain to her, she still hopes, one day, to find it again.

* * * * *

It would be simplistic to regard Flowering Wilderness as just a bitter-sweet love story. Indeed, Galsworthy is a socially minded narrator who, in a microcosmic reality made of interesting upper class relationships, reflects various sentiments running deep in his contemporary society. At the core of the novel is virtually England herself, where the English ruling class struggles to keep its identity in the face of the economic and political flux of the 1930s. As it often enough happens in periods of transition, this group of people lingers on in a latent state of anxiety about the present, the outside and the alien.

We can glimpse at the perception of the present through Desert’s words, “What I object to is England’s belief she is still in ‘the goods.’” He seems to be aware that the imperial status quo is as impressive as it is a fragile structure built up on conflicts and greed. Instead, in his ideal — the ideal of a poet who transcends the materialistic world — England should be a young, pure woman as Dinny is: “Flattered and fair, but neither fat nor forty.”

The concern for the outside is well expressed in Dinny’s family preoccupation with the national honour. The Englishman abroad, where he has gone as a conqueror, has to show the world that he is ready to die for his principles, including a religion he does not necessarily practise in his homeland.

Actually, Galsworthy here makes us see some of the facets of faith. In the West it can be used as an emblem of national pride. In the East it is an integral part of life, and its resonance can also feed the westerner spiritually starved by a very materialistic society. Conversely, however, religion can also become a lethal weapon in the hands of fanatics — a view that we, in our time, cannot fail to share.

But what in the story is frowned upon above all is the behaviour of the alien. The upper class characters fear the non-conformist, the man who is critical of tradition and at the same time is fascinated by exotic realities. He is the man who seeks inner growth and is moved by intellectual interests rather than utilitarian ones. So, to the formalists, he represents an indefinite threat that must be pre-empted by social ostracism. Muskham’s treatment of Desert most eloquently illustrates the situation.

Also, we can detect a deeper level in Galsworthy’s analysis of human sentiments. He takes Desert — the anti-hero, the alienated wanderer and poet who is more concerned with his unfulfilled wishes than with patriotic pride — as the symbol of man’s universal, unconsciously rebellious state of mind against the impositions of society. On this point, we could argue that he is in agreement with Freud, who sees in the resilience of the superego — the guardian entity of consolidated values in our psyche — the guarantor of social cohesion at the expense of the ego’s absolute freedom of action.

Laura Maffey

Colchester, UK, Autumn 2004