Gotham Diary:
Still
4 September
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The house is emptying as I write. As I am emptying along with it (but only to the point to seeing people off at the ferry terminal), I can write no more at the moment. But I shall be back.
***
And now it is just Kathleen and I at the house. After a bleakly wet morning, the sky is patching blue, and the sun may appear before too long. More rain is promised for tomorrow, but Kathleen and I are not out here to get tan. We’re both thinking how different things are this year. Last year, after Megan, Ryan, and Will left on Labor Day, the joy went completely out of the house. (It didn’t help that we’d lost our propane — necessary at that house for cooking — in Hurricane Irene.) This year, the weather was just as melancholy, but we’re both huddled over our computers with quiet enthusiasm. On the whole, everything went better this summer. Partly, of course, we were lucky. There are thousands of ways in which a seaside holiday can be derailed. Partly, we knew what we were doing, and what to expect. I think that it’s also the case that Will has become familiar with saying goodbye to us — and by that very familiarity knowing that he will see us again soon, if not always in the same place.
Although the skies are clearing, the pressure remains low, and the humidity high. The air is far from breezy. I shan’t be very eloquent.
***
At dinner one night, someone who is not the clearest of thinkers insisted that everyone has the right to his own opinion. Regardless, that is, of the quality of that opinion. I meditated upon this, feeling that it must be wrong — that, indeed, there can be no hope for civil society if it be true, at least in the sense that the speaker intended. What is clear is that no one has the right to dictate anyone else’s opinion. No one and anyone are absolutes in that formula, to which no exceptions can be made. But it is no more true that anyone has the right to a stupid opinion than it is that anyone has the right to get drunk. It may be that no one has the right (in the ordinary course of things) to prevent a friend’s going on a bender, but to speak of a right to get drunk — it is, rather, a liberty. The quality of any modern, post-authoritarian society depends almost entirely upon the prudent exercise of liberties. We cannot all be getting drunk all the time. As Americans, we tend not to. But we also cannot all entertain stupid opinions — opinions that are self-serving in the short term rather than self-interested in the long. And that, unfortunately, we are indeed inclined to do. Every citizen has a hallowed right to vote, but no citizen has a right to exercise that right by electing demagogues who do not have the nation’s best interests at heart, or by throwing up his or her hands and failing to vote altogether.
As you can tell, I’ve been reading Trollope a lot.
I’m having no trouble keeping up with my daily allotment of Orley Farm chapters. The forgery case is handled with as much sensational trembling as Trollope’s good sense will allow. Samuel Dockwrath reminds me — I’d forgotten! — how central the question of being a gentleman is in Trollope’s fiction; Dockwrath is irredeemably not a gent, while the bashful, barely grown-up Peregrine Orme unmistakably is. Madeline Stavely is one of the most appealing (to me) of Trollope’s maidenly heroines, and that goes a long way toward mitigating the creepiness of his insistent philosophy about women, which, by the way, he sets forth in a concise paragraph while introducing Madeline.
Madeline Stavely was at this time about nineteen years of age. That she was perfect in her beauty I cannot ask the muses to say, but that she will some day become so, I think the goddesses may be requested to prophesy. At present she was very slight, and appeared to be almost too tall for her form. She was indeed above the average height of somen, and from her brother encountered some ridicule on this head; but not the less were all her movements soft, graceful, and fawnlike as should be those of a young girl. She was satill at this time a child in heart and spirit, and could have played as a child had not the instinct of a woman taught her the expediency of a staid demeanor. There is nothing among the wonders of womanhood more wonderful than this, that young mind and young heart — hearts and minds young as youth can make them, and in their natures as gay, — can assume the gravity and discretion of threescore years and maintain it successfully before all comers. And this is done, not as a lesson that has been taught, but as the result of an instinct implanted from the birth. Let us remember the mirth of our sisters in our homes, and their altered demeanors when those homes were opened to strangers, and remember also that this change had come from the inward working of their own feminine natures!
This is very romantic — at best. I cannot imagine Jane Austen saying anything so thick and general. It’s all there: the instinct, the automatic, almost unconscious surrender to propriety — and the very questionable notion that ladylike behavior is inborn. Trollope does not work through to reality; his theory can’t account for the numbers of very unpleasant young ladies who appear spontaneously in well-born homes. In Sophia Furnival, the clever barrister’s daughter whom that lady of ladies, Peregrine Orme’s widowed mother, regards as “not quite real,” we have everything that could be demanded of a lady, except heart, but this is no surprise, given her own mother’s background in the wild frontier between St Pancras and Bloomsbury! Trollope could be — is “snob” the word? Probably not. He shared a convinced belief, widespread among the genteel in Victorian England, in the virtue of birth and position. In Trollope’s cosmology, a Lady Diana Spencer — amiable but shallow — could not occur.