The French Lieutenant's Woman (7 page)

To be sure, Charles had
many generations of servant-handlers behind him; the new rich of his
time had none-- indeed, were very often the children of servants. He
could not have imagined a world without servants. The new rich could;
and this made them much more harshly exacting of their relative
status. Their servants they tried to turn into machines, while
Charles knew very well that his was also partly a companion--his
Sancho Panza, the low comedy that supported his spiritual worship of
Ernestina-Dorothea. He kept Sam, in short, because he was frequently
amused by him; not because there were not better "machines"
to be found.

But the difference
between Sam Weller and Sam Farrow (that is, between 1836 and 1867)
was this: the first was happy with his role, the second suffered it.
Weller would have answered the bag of soot, and with a verbal
vengeance. Sam had stiffened, "rose his hibrows" and turned
his back.
 

8

There
rolls the deep where grew the tree, 
O earth, what changes
hast thou seen! 
There where the long street roars, hath
been 
The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are
shadows, and they flow 
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 even came, I am happy to record, a thoroughly human moment in
which Charles looked cautiously round, assured his complete solitude
and then carefully removed his stout boots, gaiters and stockings. A
schoolboy moment, and he tried to remember a line from Homer that
would make it a classical moment, but was distracted by the necessity
of catching a small crab that scuttled where the gigantic subaqueous
shadow fell on its vigilant stalked eyes.

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.