Music and Metaphysics: 'The Trend' by William Arkwright

The protagonist in The Trend by William Arkwright (1914) is a young man of private means who is a composer. He has written a cantata on the life of Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance hermeticist. He cannot find the right singer for this: some are proficient enough, but lack soul and do not appreciate the work. Then one evening, walking home from his club, he hears a voice singing an old folk tune and hastens to find its source. It is a ragamuffin of 19 years old or so, from an obscure background. The youth agrees to be coached as a singer and the two go off together on a Derbyshire farm holiday.

The novel is in that rather overblown late-Victorian style where sentiment is never far away. The singer doesn’t quite say ‘Cor blimey guv you’re a gent and no mistake’, but that is the general effect of his everyday diction. The author cannot, in short, get away from the popular taste of his time. His interests and ideas, however, are much more unconventional. The figure of Bruno has gained in historical recognition ever since Frances Yates’ magisterial work Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), but at the time of Arkwright’s novel, some fifty years earlier, he would have been more remote. The author’s choice of him as a subject suggests a deep interest in the esoteric. This is also evident in his evocation of the uncanny power of the music.

Though there are differences in detail, it seems possible the author or his publisher may have had in view the great success of Shaw's Pygmalion (1913) the year before,  which has a similar gentleman-and-cockney pairing involved in mentor-and-learner roles. But, unlike the play, the novel is not at all blithe. After various vicissitudes, both in the relationship of the composer and his protégé, and in the quest to stage the cantata, there is a highly melodramatic, operatic and tragic ending.

And it would appear the main inspiration for the novel was more personal. There is a foreword to the novel, not part of the fiction: it seems to be the author in his proper person. In this he tells us that the story is true. But he clarifies this by explaining that the characters are true, whereas the setting has been changed. He also tells us he was in love with one of them, though he will not say which. The implication might be that the originals were either involved in a different sort of music, or perhaps a different art, such as painting, poetry, theatre.

William Arkwright (1857-1925) was the author of a book of essays, Knowledge and Life (1913); a prose fantasy, Utinam: A Glimmering of Goddesses (1917), notable for its illustrations by Glyn Philpot; and of His Own Soul (1920), aphorisms in verse and prose.  Rather oddly compared to these, he was also the author of a classic work on the Pointer breed of dogs. 

He was the heir of the fortune of Richard Arkwright, the inventor and cotton industrialist, as a cousin of the last of the direct line. The family owned a palatial Georgian residence, Sutton Scarsdale Hall, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire, which he sold in 1919, and for a long time it stood as an empty ruinous roofless shell, until purchased in 1946, for preservation as it stood, by Osbert Sitwell, who lived 8 miles away at Renishaw Hall. Sutton Scarsdale is now in public ownership.

The Trend (not a very good title) is a strange and stormy book with startling ideas that doesn’t quite outstrip its creaky vocabulary and clanking plot. But it has a certain volatile power and Dickensian vigour, and is of particular interest because of the Giordano Bruno theme and its esoteric dimensions.

(Mark Valentine)

Portrait: William Arkwright, c.1890. Picture: Sutton Scarsdale Hall.

 

The Centenary of 'The Dream' by H.G. Wells: A Guest Post by John Howard

The Sunray Estate in Camberwell, South London, was built just over one hundred years ago and noted at the time for the employment of direct labour and building guild principles. With its tree-lined roads and open spaces, the estate was intended to provide housing for the returned heroes of the Great War and their families. It is tempting to speculate that some memory of this still attractive district might have been in H.G. Wells’ mind when he chose the amusingly fashionable names of the characters who inhabit the future as depicted in his novel The Dream, which was published as a book in April 1924 following magazine serialisation the previous year.

In its opening pages The Dream seems yet another of Wells’ sunshine-filled Utopias, an unexciting world-state not very distinguishable from a garden housing estate. Sunray is the companion and lover of Sarnac, who after a prolonged period of hard work plans a leisurely boating and walking holiday for them both. They meet four others: brother and sister Radiant and Starlight, and their friends, the ‘fair girls’ Willow and Firefly, who work as electricians. They all decide to travel together.

But this pleasant vision is quickly left behind as the tourists make a detour to explore the newly excavated ruins of a town destroyed by bombing and gas warfare some two thousand years before. The shrivelled remains of many of the victims, with their belongings, are preserved in a museum. While exploring a railway tunnel, complete with a train that had been caught and entombed, Sarnac stumbles and cuts his hand, drawing blood. Later his sleep is disturbed by dreams of war. In the morning the group continues on its way, but Sarnac’s troubled night catches up with him. As they pause in a flower-filled meadow he goes to sleep, watched over by Sunray.

When the sleeper wakes again he is briefly disorientated and for a moment does not remember who he is or recognise Sunray. During the short time Sarnac lay asleep in the sunshine, he had lived another life. Sarnac proceeds to relate his dream: the story of Harry Smith, born in 1896 and who had lived, loved, and died during the ancient ‘Age of Confusion’ that came before the ‘Social Collapse’.

In The Dream Wells treads old ground – as he would again – but there is a difference. Wells often created a future to use in a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise with the contemporary world. Here he reverses that: the future dreams the past. Sarnac not only unfolds the life he had led during his dream; he comments on times through the questions asked by Sunray and the others, who luckily remember their history lessons.

Through Sarnac and Smith, Wells presents a widescreen prospect of society from his usual autobiographical viewpoint as a member of the lower middle-class, mired in respectability and genteel poverty, who yearns to escape it all. He vividly describes the grime and muddle, the shoddy clothing, adulterated food, and chronic illnesses. Harry Smith is the youngest child of caring but ineffectual parents. His father runs a small greengrocer’s shop but is unable to stem the inexorable decline of the business, while his mother is immured in the basement kitchen endlessly cooking and cleaning. Smith lives for the Sundays when he and his father walk the several miles through the Kent countryside to visit his uncle, the head gardener at Chessing Hanger. Encouraged by an older sister, Smith wishes to get an education and become a writer – but it is decided that he must go to work as a gardener. Smith’s constant reading and burning desire for education was Wells’ own.

After his father’s death Smith accompanies his mother and sister to Pimlico when they are given the opportunity to help run a lodging-house. He discovers London, revelling in its vastness and magic, its fogs and filth, its crowded streets of unplanned growth. With his other sister’s help and his own efforts, he gradually eases himself out of the hopeless situation that he had seemed predestined to by his birth.

Smith and Sarnac are representatives despite themselves. Through the accumulation of description and remembered experience, Wells rages at the constant insecurity and waste of human potential and natural resources that he saw as taken for granted. Through the sane and calm questions and reflection of our descendants, who have learned the misery and futility of war and competition and the distortions imposed by education and religion, Wells expects it to be obvious which of the two societies is to be preferred.

It was Wells’ misfortune that those with the power to effect change and transformation saw no reason to take the logical, radical steps to improvement. To that extent The Dream failed: yet again those he preached to would not listen, while the converted were given a well-written tale that merely confirmed their enlightened outlook. H.G. Wells never ceased to agitate for a ‘profound reconstruction of the methods of human living […]; a real, effective federation of mankind, a genuine attempt to realise that age of world-wide plenty and safety that we have every reason to suppose attainable…’ (The Rights of Man, 1940). The Sunray Estate and a future world: perhaps there was more than one reason for Wells entitling his novel The Dream. As Sarnac comments, at the time he was Harry Smith people were ‘only beginning to learn the art of being human.’

(John Howard)