Commonplace 120 George & Heroism PART TWO The Romantic Hero
In Commonplace 119 we looked at a definition of Classical Heroism, as practiced by the Greeks and Romans, and applied that to what we know about George. Classical heroism didn't seem to fit the 'heroism' given to George in the title of one of the biographies. Perhaps he might fit with the concept of the 'Romantic' hero - as in the likes of Byron and Thomas Paine. Again, from here click we find a guide to what constitutes The Romantic Hero:
Characteristics of a Romantic Hero:
Let's run through these and see if George can be classified as a 'Romantic' hero:
2)Did George ever win this battle? I don't think so. He was never happy with his situation, circumstances or opportunities and right up to the end, wanted to move back to the UK from France - which would mean leaving Gabrielle behind to nurse her mother. In fact, this bout of 'itchy feet' probably started from the time he found out his second wife, Edith, had been locked up in a psychiatric hospital in January 1902, and therefore, removed from the streets and from access to annoying him. He would not have made a clean break with Gabrielle - he tried to make it when he entered the Nylands Sanatorium and allowed the Wells' to take the blame for insisting he stay in England a little while longer than planned. He would have told Gabrielle a relocation was for the sake of his health (and his Art!); that he would wait for her there and she could join him when her mother died; that he had no choice to do it.... but, of course, he would have been delighted to have given her the slip and then moved back to Blighty where he could roam free of any female - even the minions, Collet and Orme. Miss Collet would be clearly aware he was unavailable on the mating front because he was still spoken for, but she would have been kept on the back burner in case Gabrielle ever refused to cross the Channel. As he didn't really have the inner resources to be 'free' in this Fromm sense, he would have continued being miserable and blaming the world for his predicament, fussed over by well-wishers with masses of 'sympathy'.
3)George probably did believe this, that 'genius' makes up its own rules. (As this might also be a definition of a psychopath...!) He was wrong to think the quality of his own genius was robust enough or deep enough to mark him out as exceptional as a writer. George was a follower, not a leader, in the style of his writing, and the weirdness of Henry Ryecroft and the peculiarity of the short stories cannot save him from that. Of course, the term 'genius' means something different nowadays - in George's days, it meant something less grandiose and pretentious and referred more to a unique perspective in creative imagination, and not a mind-blowing ability to think out of the box (- what box? they ask) that transcends normal human abilities.
4)Passion, in George, was a secretive thing, and a force of threat. He claimed to value 'reasonableness'. When he though Edith wasn't being so, he tightened the screws on her, often refusing to answer her in discussions and intentionally winding her up with brute dumb insolence. This is not the behaviour of one who finds expression of any emotion easy or acceptable; it is the action of one determined to close down another's right to communication. What makes it so sinister is that he knew how much it upset her and he used it freely to undermine her mental health and give her opportunities to act like a madwoman. Miss Orme shared this cruelty - writing to him about Edith being upset over festivities at Christmas not going her way. The triumvirate of Gissing, Orme and Collet have much on their conscience where Edith is concerned.
George's was not an expansive, generous nature (though he was giving with small amounts of money when it suited him - usually with people who might judge him for his generosity or lack of it); even what he wrote is not zestfully spontaneous or giving. Some of his early novels contain longer descriptive pieces that seem to use bile as their fuel, with a less than impartial sense he is decrying, rather than describing, what he wants the reader to see. We are sometimes aware he is disgusted by his own work; and this suggests he wrote the kind of books he would have hated to read.
5)George did have a lot to deal with in his physical health, but you could never say he bore this with grace or suffered in silence. We know as much as we do about his parlous health because he moaned about it all the time in his Diaries and Letters. That might sound harsh - he must have been frightened of the prognosis of his more serious complaints; syphilis, for example, generally ended very badly. It's impossible to gauge what personal enlightenment he achieved because his self-pity makes trivial things seem enormous and huge things he lays at the feet of fate or the 'accursed' order of things that really have no metaphysical cause but are always man-made. Such as Marianne aka Nell starving to death on his alimony of 15/- a week.
6)At Last!! Signs George was a Romantic Hero emerge!! He WAS moody, isolated and introspective. Always. Is there any point to introspection unless it produces insight? It seems George might have reached this very late in life - The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is an attempt to blur the edges of his many, many mistakes, self-pity, misanthropy and misogyny - unconvincingly. He was incapable of setting the record straight, confessing his shortcomings or admitting he was often wrong, but that is an ego state - admitting it would have been too threatening to his self-image.
7)Loyalty...? There is evidence George found this concept moveable, Eduard Bertz, Morley Roberts, HG Wells - he wrote some quite unpleasant things about them in his Letters and Diaries, and had no real respect for their work or minds. Henry Hick seems to emerge unscathed, but that relationship was not very close and personal. George's clanship with his family members is based on fealty, rather than affection - if we are to believe the things he told Mrs Gaussen or wrote to Gabrielle Fleury in his letters. This very complicated situation was never resolved, and he spent a good deal of time reluctantly, resentfully, filling their needs. Again, this is a choice of lack of freedom which he fails to take, because he didn't have to spend so much time with them or have as much contact via letters, or allow them to exert as much influence as they did over his life. He dumped Frederic Harrison, despite all the help he received from him; he abandoned wives and children when it suited him. It doesn't get much more disloyal than that!
Class was where George allowed his capacity for loyalty to reside. Being thought of by the world as 'middle class' was of utmost importance to George. He could get away with his lack of social connections by assuming the mantle of 'artist', and from there, he could look down on the plebs and underline their shortcomings, whilst adopting middle class attitudes to reinforce the separateness, keeping his lower middle class son-of-a-shopkeeper roots a secret. He was way behind the times in many things, which is typical of the middle class love of all things past. Henry Ryecroft opines for a world that no longer exists and he can only survive by removing himself to a tiny world of his own in some godforsaken hole where he doesn't have to face reality. Like a coward. HOWEVER, George was loyal to one cause - Veranilda. But he had missed the boat of conquering the literary world via Classical History fiction; as others were looking to the future and all that it might be, George was rebuilding the sacking of the Roman Empire, and his history tale must have seemed out of synch with the times. If it had been finished, would it ever have found a publisher? It had a curiosity USP value after he died, because he had died - but would it have passed muster if he had been in the land of the living? Maybe George realised this book was going to bomb; which is why he couldn't get it finished.
So, does George deserve the epithet 'Heroic'? And was that the way he conducted his life? Was he admirable, courageous, chivalrous, honourable, and true? I wonder what Nell would say to that. Or Edith.
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| Ossian Receiving The Ghosts of The French Heroes by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussey-Trioson 1800-1802 |
Characteristics of a Romantic Hero:
1)Birth
and class are unimportant: the individual transcends society
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2)The
battle is internal: it is a psychological war won by the “courage to be me”.
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3)Moral
codes are eccentric–heroes make their own rules
|
|
4)Passions
are outside of individual control
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|
5)Self-knowledge
is valued more than physical strength or endurance
(physical courage is de-valued) |
|
6)The
hero is moody, isolated, and introspective
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|
7)Loyalty
is to a particular project and to a community of like-minded others
|
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| Self Portrait by Arnold Boecklin 1872 |
1) For starters, George was obsessed with class and social ranking, making him cripplingly conscious of what others thought of him, which is why he was such a control-freak, if not open dictator to his wives and children, in particular. It's worth spending some time thinking about what is meant by this term, and from whence it might originate in a personality.
There are many closely woven theories of what leads to control-freakery in a personality, but the basic concept comes from the notion (partly derived from the work of psychologists such Winnacott and Fromm) that there are antagonistic forces at work in a personality that vacillate between freedom and restraint, with freedom being the more threatening to the psyche. From what we know of George's early life, there is a fit. Between his behaviour at Owens College, his gap-year in the States, and the early days in London, George does seem to suffer from a 'Fear of Freedom' in the sense that he did not make the most of the oyster that was his world. He had been handed free of charge advantages that he should have capitalised on, but we find he ballsed them up. He appears to work hard to succeed in his studies, but his shenanigans during term-time and his lack of respect for the learning experience, display a reckless streak that risked everything that he had going for him.
Far from being a bohemian on the verge of a world of opportunity, he increasingly narrowed his options with bouts of self-destructive, if rather conservative, tame behaviour. He makes mention of this when he moaned about being let loose in Manchester as a youth with no supervision, and where some might revel in that freedom, George raced towards external restraints to feel safe - prison, being the most obvious manifestation of that. Poverty was another restraint he put on himself and choosing to write books few wanted to read was another. He knew a small readership would never make him money and he always equated money and freedom together, but he never adapted his snobbish tendencies to make a decent living from his work and reach a wider audience, which would have given him extra freedom. Marrying two women who were never going to live up to his expectations was one of the more destructive elements of this need to be restrained or constricted. Denying himself a social life by choosing what he considered to be socially inferior wives, whom he considered a social liability, which led to him keeping himself beyond the social pale, demonstrates how deeply-grained the process was in his make-up. It was only by focusing his drives on writing (where he had safe control over characters and events, by the means of a strict system - syntax and grammar) that he could emerge and feel free. And then there is class - he never felt middle class because he so closely paired that with income, but he would not have felt at all comfortable if he had been middle class in every way, because that would have freed him from restraints that being out of that class imposed.
Far from being a bohemian on the verge of a world of opportunity, he increasingly narrowed his options with bouts of self-destructive, if rather conservative, tame behaviour. He makes mention of this when he moaned about being let loose in Manchester as a youth with no supervision, and where some might revel in that freedom, George raced towards external restraints to feel safe - prison, being the most obvious manifestation of that. Poverty was another restraint he put on himself and choosing to write books few wanted to read was another. He knew a small readership would never make him money and he always equated money and freedom together, but he never adapted his snobbish tendencies to make a decent living from his work and reach a wider audience, which would have given him extra freedom. Marrying two women who were never going to live up to his expectations was one of the more destructive elements of this need to be restrained or constricted. Denying himself a social life by choosing what he considered to be socially inferior wives, whom he considered a social liability, which led to him keeping himself beyond the social pale, demonstrates how deeply-grained the process was in his make-up. It was only by focusing his drives on writing (where he had safe control over characters and events, by the means of a strict system - syntax and grammar) that he could emerge and feel free. And then there is class - he never felt middle class because he so closely paired that with income, but he would not have felt at all comfortable if he had been middle class in every way, because that would have freed him from restraints that being out of that class imposed.
In 'Fear of Freedom' (1941), Erich Fromm describes two states of freedom as 'positive' and negative'. This is paraphrased from the wiki page click:
Fromm distinguishes between 'freedom from' (negative freedom) and 'freedom to' (positive freedom). The former refers to emancipation from restrictions such as social conventions placed on individuals by other people or institutions. The second is to act spontaneously and with authenticity. In the process of becoming freed from authority, we are often left with feelings of hopelessness (he likens this process to the individuation of infants in the normal course of child development) that will not abate until we use our 'freedom to' and develop some form of replacement of the old order. However, a common substitute for exercising "freedom to" or authenticity is to submit to an authoritarian system that replaces the old order with another of different external appearance but identical function for the individual: to eliminate uncertainty by prescribing what to think and how to act. He characterises this as a dialectic historical process whereby the original situation is the thesis and the emancipation from it the antithesis. The synthesis is only reached when something has replaced the original order and provided humans with a new security. Fromm does not indicate that the new system will necessarily be an improvement.
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| The Battle of Trafalgar by JMW Turner 1823 |
3)George probably did believe this, that 'genius' makes up its own rules. (As this might also be a definition of a psychopath...!) He was wrong to think the quality of his own genius was robust enough or deep enough to mark him out as exceptional as a writer. George was a follower, not a leader, in the style of his writing, and the weirdness of Henry Ryecroft and the peculiarity of the short stories cannot save him from that. Of course, the term 'genius' means something different nowadays - in George's days, it meant something less grandiose and pretentious and referred more to a unique perspective in creative imagination, and not a mind-blowing ability to think out of the box (- what box? they ask) that transcends normal human abilities.
4)Passion, in George, was a secretive thing, and a force of threat. He claimed to value 'reasonableness'. When he though Edith wasn't being so, he tightened the screws on her, often refusing to answer her in discussions and intentionally winding her up with brute dumb insolence. This is not the behaviour of one who finds expression of any emotion easy or acceptable; it is the action of one determined to close down another's right to communication. What makes it so sinister is that he knew how much it upset her and he used it freely to undermine her mental health and give her opportunities to act like a madwoman. Miss Orme shared this cruelty - writing to him about Edith being upset over festivities at Christmas not going her way. The triumvirate of Gissing, Orme and Collet have much on their conscience where Edith is concerned.
George's was not an expansive, generous nature (though he was giving with small amounts of money when it suited him - usually with people who might judge him for his generosity or lack of it); even what he wrote is not zestfully spontaneous or giving. Some of his early novels contain longer descriptive pieces that seem to use bile as their fuel, with a less than impartial sense he is decrying, rather than describing, what he wants the reader to see. We are sometimes aware he is disgusted by his own work; and this suggests he wrote the kind of books he would have hated to read.
5)George did have a lot to deal with in his physical health, but you could never say he bore this with grace or suffered in silence. We know as much as we do about his parlous health because he moaned about it all the time in his Diaries and Letters. That might sound harsh - he must have been frightened of the prognosis of his more serious complaints; syphilis, for example, generally ended very badly. It's impossible to gauge what personal enlightenment he achieved because his self-pity makes trivial things seem enormous and huge things he lays at the feet of fate or the 'accursed' order of things that really have no metaphysical cause but are always man-made. Such as Marianne aka Nell starving to death on his alimony of 15/- a week.
 |
| Lord Byron in Albanian Costume by Thomas Phillips 1813 |
7)Loyalty...? There is evidence George found this concept moveable, Eduard Bertz, Morley Roberts, HG Wells - he wrote some quite unpleasant things about them in his Letters and Diaries, and had no real respect for their work or minds. Henry Hick seems to emerge unscathed, but that relationship was not very close and personal. George's clanship with his family members is based on fealty, rather than affection - if we are to believe the things he told Mrs Gaussen or wrote to Gabrielle Fleury in his letters. This very complicated situation was never resolved, and he spent a good deal of time reluctantly, resentfully, filling their needs. Again, this is a choice of lack of freedom which he fails to take, because he didn't have to spend so much time with them or have as much contact via letters, or allow them to exert as much influence as they did over his life. He dumped Frederic Harrison, despite all the help he received from him; he abandoned wives and children when it suited him. It doesn't get much more disloyal than that!
Class was where George allowed his capacity for loyalty to reside. Being thought of by the world as 'middle class' was of utmost importance to George. He could get away with his lack of social connections by assuming the mantle of 'artist', and from there, he could look down on the plebs and underline their shortcomings, whilst adopting middle class attitudes to reinforce the separateness, keeping his lower middle class son-of-a-shopkeeper roots a secret. He was way behind the times in many things, which is typical of the middle class love of all things past. Henry Ryecroft opines for a world that no longer exists and he can only survive by removing himself to a tiny world of his own in some godforsaken hole where he doesn't have to face reality. Like a coward. HOWEVER, George was loyal to one cause - Veranilda. But he had missed the boat of conquering the literary world via Classical History fiction; as others were looking to the future and all that it might be, George was rebuilding the sacking of the Roman Empire, and his history tale must have seemed out of synch with the times. If it had been finished, would it ever have found a publisher? It had a curiosity USP value after he died, because he had died - but would it have passed muster if he had been in the land of the living? Maybe George realised this book was going to bomb; which is why he couldn't get it finished.
So, does George deserve the epithet 'Heroic'? And was that the way he conducted his life? Was he admirable, courageous, chivalrous, honourable, and true? I wonder what Nell would say to that. Or Edith.
 |
| Thracian Girl Carrying The Head of Orpheus On His Lyre 1865 by Gustave Moreau |
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