Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (52 page)

Hobson’s choice
: proverbial for having no real choice. Derived from the business practices of Thomas Hobson (
c
.1544–1630), a carrier and renter of horses in Cambridge, England, who offered his customers only the next horse in line or no horse at all.

Panthéon
: a neoclassical building in the Latin Quarter originally built as a church dedicated to St Geneviève, but primarily known as the burial place of many of France’s greatest men.

Rue Lhomond
: a street in Paris in the 5th arrondissement, not far from the Panthéon.

Rowlandson … the epoch
: Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), English satiric artist and illustrator. Rowlandson’s career lasted well beyond the major period of eighteenth-century satire into the Georgian period. Lewis endorsed Rowlandson as a model for contemporary English satire in his journal
The Tyro
(1921).

‘Carrion-Crow’
: an allusion to the lines ‘Old Adam, the carrion crow, | The old crow of Cairo; | He sat in the shower, and let it flow | Under his tail and over his crest’, from a song in Act V, Scene iv, of the play
Death’s Jest-Book
by English poet and dramatist Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–49) (
The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 184).

cantab
: short for ‘Cantabrigian’, a student of Cambridge University. The adjective ‘Cairo’ continues the allusion to Beddoes’s
Death’s Jest-Book
.

philogermanic
: adj., ‘loving German culture’.

panurgic
: ‘skilled in all kinds of work’, also, ‘meddling’, from the Gr.
panoyrgiko
, ‘knavish’. Also echoes the name of the character Panurge, a crafty libertine and coward in
La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel
by François Rabelais (
c
.1494–1553), whose name derives from the same root.

Flaubert … Bouvard et Pécuchet
: an unfinished novel by French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1842–80), published posthumously in 1881, a satire about two hapless Parisian copy-clerks and their quest for erudition. Flaubert’s
Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues
(
The Dictionary of Received Ideas
), a kind of pendant to the novel, was published in France in 1911–13. This collection of platitudes, based on notes that Flaubert gathered in the 1870s, holds the mirror up to the middle-class French ‘squalor and idiocy’ of which Tarr speaks.

Rembrandt … old Jews
: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), Dutch painter and etcher, frequently used his elderly neighbours in the Jewish district of Amsterdam as models for his paintings of Old Testament themes.

Falstaff
: Sir John Falstaff, one of William Shakespeare’s greatest comic characters, a fat and boastful knight who appears in
Henry IV, Part I,
Henry IV, Part II
, and
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, where he is associated with images of grease throughout: he is called in this last play ‘this whale (with so many tuns of oil in his belly)’(
II
. i. 64–5) and ‘this greasy knight’ (
II
. i. 107–8).

Socrates … shrew
: Xanthippe, the wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399
BC
), the proverbial model of a shrewish wife. In Xenophon’s
Symposium
Antisthenes describes her as ‘beyond dispute, the most insupportable woman that is, has been, or ever will be’ (
The Complete Works of Xenophon
, trans. Ashley, Spelman, et al. (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo & Co., 1881), 605).

picture post cards
: by the first decades of the twentieth century, collecting picture postcards had become a worldwide hobby of unprecedented proportions, but Tarr particularly alludes to the beautiful, and likely vapid, women who modelled for the erotic Parisian photographs that became known throughout the English speaking world as ‘French postcards’.

Tadema
: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), Dutch-born late-Victorian English painter. Admired in his time for his superb draftsmanship and depictions of classical antiquity, by the early twentieth century progressive artists viewed him as hopelessly academic and out-of-date.

Raphael
: Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520), Italian Renaissance painter and architect, known for his technical perfection and ennobling treatment of the human form.

cubism
: avant-garde art movement that revolutionized modern painting and sculpture, pioneered in Paris between 1907 and 1914 by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963).

eugenist
: one who advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through planned social and scientific intervention. Eugenics had many prominent supporters among writers and thinkers in the early twentieth century, but lost its scientific reputation in the 1930s when eugenic rhetoric entered into the racial policies of Nazi Germany.

Napoleon … captivity
: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), French military and political leader. Imprisoned and exiled by the British to the island of St Helena in 1815, Napoleon lived there as recluse until his death.

voice-culture practitioner
: a follower of the vocal training methods of François Delsarte (1811–71) who believed that it offered aesthetic and social benefits for the singer, orator, and average speaker alike, and whose ideas were popularized in the late nineteenth century by such books as
Society Gymnastics and Voice Culture, Adapted from the Delsarte System
(1890, Genevieve Stebbins). Tarr’s use of the term as an insult suggests that ‘voice culture’ was the sort of effete late-Victorian trend typically embraced by Hobson’s coterie.

pierrotesque
: in the manner of Pierrot, a melancholy, silent, white-faced clown often portrayed as moonstruck, the French version of a stock character of the Italian
Commedia dell’arte
.

chimera
: an unreal creature or imaginary amalgam. From a beast of Greek mythology that was composed of parts of several different animals.

Turner … washerwoman at Gravesend
: J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, who lived for more than fifteen years at the end of his life with Sophia Caroline Booth. Booth was described as ‘good looking’ and ‘illiterate’ (A. J. Finberg,
The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R.A
. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 438), and had run a boarding house in Margate before becoming Turner’s housekeeper in Chelsea. She exemplifies a woman of low class and intelligence who provides romantic and sexual satisfaction to a man of genius, although Tarr misidentifies both Booth’s profession and the seaside town where she and Turner first met.

gallant
: a fashionable young man.

ego
: Latin for ‘I’. Less an allusion to Freud than to the idea of the ego propagated in
Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
(
The Ego and Its Own
), a work of pre-Nietzschean philosophy by Max Stirner (real name Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1806–56)). Stirner’s idea of a self that transcends the limitations of religion and politics also inspired the name of Dora Marsden’s journal
The Egoist
, and Lewis alludes prominently to Stirner and
The Ego and Its Own
in his play
Enemy of the Stars
.

old fruit-tin
: familiar British address of the period, comparable to ‘old bean’. Perhaps also playing upon another period usage of ‘fruit’ to mean ‘easy mark’ or ‘one who is easily deceived’.

Dr. Jekyll … Mr. Hyde
: the main character(s) in
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886), a short novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94). Subsequently a catchphrase for a person who manifests two irreconcilable sets of behaviours and personalities in different situations.

collages
: Fr., ‘gluing, sticking’, but also a work of visual art, strongly associated with Cubism, where an aesthetic whole is created from an assemblage of different forms and materials. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
the word ‘collage’ first appears in English in Lewis’s 1919 aesthetic treatise
The Caliph’s Design
.

Oh Sex! oh Montreal!
: a lampoon of the refrain ‘O God! O Montreal!’ from ‘A Psalm of Montreal’, a satirical poem by Samuel Butler (1835–1902). The poem pokes fun at the Victorian prudery of the Montreal Museum of Natural History, which has stored away two plaster casts of classical statuary. As the custodian explains to the visiting Butler, ‘The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar, | He has neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs.’ The poet responds, as Tarr might ask Hobson about Bloomsbury, ‘Preferrest thou the gospel of Montreal to the gospel of Hellas?’ (
The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler
, vol. xx (London and New York, 1926), 393).

bear-garden
: an arena designed for the baiting of bears, a popular spectacle in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Figurative for a place where riotous behaviour is common and permitted.

our emancipated Bohemia
: since the late 1840s a byword for a community of freethinking artists who live apart from middle-class convention, by association with the actual Bohemia, a region of Central Europe now part of the Czech Republic, thought to be the place of origin of the Roma people, who are popularly known as ‘gypsies’.

invert-spinsters
: ‘inversion’ was a period term for homosexuality, first used by the British sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), author of
Sexual Inversion
(1897). Given the propensity towards both bisexuality and homosexuality in the Bloomsbury group, these ‘invert-spinsters’ may be understood to be either unmarried lesbians or effeminate males.

vegetable ideas
: perhaps in any of its obsolete senses of ‘organic’, ‘capable of growth’, or ‘of the soul’, as in the ‘vegetable love’ mentioned in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by poet Andrew Marvell (1621–78). However, Tarr likely means ‘vegetable’ in one of its modern senses, as featureless, monotonous, and dull, the mode in which Lewis curses ‘
VEGETABLE HUMANITY
’ in
Blast
(1, p. 15).

roses and Victorian lilies
: common subjects of Victorian painting and verse; the lily was a standard emblem of Victorian femininity, as in
Sesame and Lilies
(1865) by art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). The allusion insults both Hobson’s masculinity and his credentials as a Modernist.

Yellow Press
: unscrupulously sensationalist newspapers, which often featured scurrilous personal attacks on public figures. The name derived from an issue of the
New York World
in 1885 that featured a colour cartoon of a child in a yellow garment (‘The Yellow Kid’), as an eye-catching experiment to increase sales.

Chelsea artist
: an area of south-west London, home to the Chelsea School of Art, which was founded in 1895. Chelsea was known as London’s bohemian quarter from mid-Victorian times until roughly the First World War, and was associated with painters, writers, and political radicals.

Wilde
: Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright, novelist, and society wit. The ‘Wilde decade’ was the 1890s, a time associated with decadence, the art movement Aestheticism, and during which Wilde was imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’ with another man. Wilde attended Magdalen College (Oxford) from 1874 to 1878.

Liberalism
: a political philosophy that emphasized individual rights and property ownership, and limited central government, emerging from the Enlightenment and associated in the mid-nineteenth century with the party and governments of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). By the mid-1880s so-called ‘classical’ liberalism found itself under threat by the emergence of socialism, and the ‘death of liberalism’ became a subject for debate for some decades. See, for instance, the book
The Strange Death of Liberal England
(New York: H. Smith & R. Haas, 1935) by George Dangerfield (1904–86).

suburb of Carlyle and Whistler
: i.e. Chelsea, home to Thomas Carlyle and painter James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903).

barley-water
: a bland British soft drink, usually flavoured with lemon, popular in the 1890s.

lost generations described in Chekov
: a frequent subject of the plays of Russian playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904), particularly his last play
The Cherry Orchard
(1904). They were the fading landed aristocracy and ‘superfluous men’ of the mid-to late nineteenth century in Russia, who were soon to be swept away by the powerful forces of a rising middle class and by the political upheavals of the Russian Revolution.

communism
: a socioeconomic and political doctrine based on the theories of German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83), who desired the establishment of a classless society in which property and the means of production are owned communally. Tarr finds Hobson an ‘advanced-copy’ of Communism because Hobson has subordinated himself in thought and fashion to the ideas of a larger group, and because from the vantage point of 1928 he represents the kind of privileged ‘parlour socialist’ that Lewis criticized in 1927 in
Time and Western Man
(ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 124–6).

take water with it
: ‘moderate your ideas and rhetoric’, from the use of water to dilute strong whisky.

Baudelaire’s fable
: a description of the first part of the 1864 prose poem ‘Assommons les Pauvres!’ (‘Let’s Beat Up the Poor!’) by Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), number 49 of the collection of short prose poems published posthumously as
Le Spleen de Paris
in 1869. The parallel with Tarr and Hobson breaks down at the parable’s end, however, where the poet identifies the beggar as his equal, shares his purse with him, and urges him to treat other beggars in a similar manner according to the ‘
théorie que j’ai eu la
douleur
d’essayer sur votre dos
’ (‘theory I have had the
sorrow
of testing out on your back’;
Œuvres Complètes, Petit poëmes en prose
(Paris: Louis Conard, 1926), 172). The beggar agrees with the poet’s advice—an unlikely response from Hobson.