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Literature, Music
and Cosmopolitanism
Culture As Migration

ROBERT FRASER
Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism
 Robert Fraser

Literature, Music and

Cosmopolitanism
Culture as Migration
Robert Fraser
Open University
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-68479-6    ISBN 978-3-319-68480-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959345

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Fotosearch / Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
IN EUROPE, AND FOR EUROPE
 Contents

1 Culture as Migration   1

2 Is There a Gibbon in the House? Migration,

Post-­nationality and the Fall and Rise of Europe  17

3 Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads and Myth  31

4 Of Sirens, Science and Oyster Shells: Hypatia

the Philosopher from Gibbon to Black Athena  51

5 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (1) British

Listeners in Italy  65

6 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (2) Milton,

Ruskin and Religious Longing  79

7 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (3) Purcell,

the Popish Plot and the Politics of Latin  85

8 Migrant Consciences in the Age of Empire: Charles

Kingsley, Governor Eyre and the Morant Bay Rising  97

vii
viii CONTENTS

9 Beyond the National Stereotype: Benedict Anderson

and the Bengal Emergency of 1905–06 125

10 Migrating Stories: How Textbooks Fired a Canon 161

11 Towards a New World Order: Literacy, Democracy

and Literature in India and Africa, 1930–1965 173

12 World Music: Listening to Steve Reich Listening

to Africa; Listening to György Ligeti Listening to Reich 185

13 A Cultural Cosmopolis 195

Acknowledgements 205

Index 207
...alas, alas, say now the King...
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus us’d? This is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

 rom the play The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act II, Scene iv, believed to
F
be by William Shakespeare, and in his own handwriting
British Library Harley Manuscript 7368

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 “Queen Europa” from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia

(2nd ed., Basel, 1588), B.L.Ac.3838/45 34
Fig. 7.1 “Jehova, Quam Multi Sunt Hostes Mei”. Henry Purcell’s
fair copy holograph from B.L.Add.Ms, 30930, The Works of
Henry Purcell (Dom, 1680) 90
Fig. 10.1 John Constable, “Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s
Grounds”, 1823 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 162
Fig. 12.1 Ewe Nyayito Dance. Robert Fraser, West African Poetry:
A Critical History (Cambridge University Press, 1986),
11, reproducing Jones (1959), Volume Two, 32–33 188
Fig. 12.2 Ewe Agbaza Dance, Steve Reich, Writings on Music
1965–2000. Edited with an introduction by Paul Hillier
(Oxford University Press, 2002), 62 189

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Culture as Migration

The theme of this book is a response to that of a far more famous one,
published in 1869 by the English poet, educator and visionary, Matthew
Arnold. Until comparatively recently Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy was
read by students of British society as among the most trenchant—certainly
the most influential—of those high-minded works of exhortation and
prophecy to which mid-to-late Victorian authors liked to treat their read-
ers. For much of the twentieth century it also fed into current social and
educational debate, influencing at a subliminal level generations of critics,
social commentators and teachers. Subtitled “An Essay in Political and
Social Criticism”, it portrays culture as a homogeneous and desirable qual-
ity. Culture for Arnold is “a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not
merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also
of the moral and social passion for doing good.”1 More straightforwardly,
in a later book, Literature and Dogma (1876), Arnold defined culture as
“the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in
the world”.2
“Mass culture”, “popular culture”, let alone “pop culture”, would have
been incomprehensible to Arnold. Indeed, though admirable in the
abstract, culture was not, he reluctantly conceded, very popular in
England. In reality the British people distrusted culture, since they associ-
ated it with intellectuality, which they hated in principle, and with what
Arnold called “curiosity”. Not merely did curiosity kill the cat; according
to Arnold it offended the average Briton’s sense of decency and ­moderation.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_1
2 ROBERT FRASER

“I have before now”, he wearily remarked in the first chapter of Culture

and Anarchy, “pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use
the word [curiosity] in a good sense as well as a bad sense. With us the
word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intel-
ligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner
when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain
notion of frivolous and unedifying activity.”
So culture had its enemies in Victorian England, typified for Arnold by
materialism, provinciality and middle-class self-satisfaction: everything, in
other words that in 1869 went along with British commercial and imperial
success. Forces such as these Arnold associated, paradoxically for his time,
with culture’s adversary and opposite: anarchy. Culture as such had little to
do with such homebred virtues or vices. The work ethic—or Hebraism—
owed little to the thought impulse or Hellenism. Despite this, with some and
intellectual effort, culture in Arnold’s sense of the word could be acquired by
an educated English person—by the whole country, did they but try. The
English of all classes, Arnold thought, could do with a lot more of it.
Despite—or more probably because of—its improving zeal, the twenty-­
first-­century reader is apt to find Arnold’s celebrated book stuffy and
smug. Anachronisms scream from every page. There is, for example, the
question of his self-identification with a group called “we”, denoting the
British alone. There is also his talk of “foreigners”, enviously though sus-
piciously viewed. What is more, Arnold seems to see “culture” as a quality
that can be detached from other aspects of a community. Schooled by
sociology, we are nowadays apprehensive of using the word in this strange,
if uplifting, sense. Arnold’s scenario, moreover, seems to us impossibly
value-laden. There is in him too much talk of moral improvement and of
“things in the mind”. Bodies, material artefacts, even money, seem to
enjoy no place in his picture at all.
Most glaringly, for citizens of the so-called multicultural society, there is
the fact that Arnold invariably uses “culture” as a singular noun. This is all
the odder because the Romans, from whom we derive the word, tended to
use it in the plural: culturae. It is tempting to think that Arnold saw culture
as a singular quality because he was only aware of one: that of the British or
English (in his book he uses the terms synonymously). Yet, as we have
already seen, this was very far from being his view. If anything, “culture” for
Arnold stemmed from overseas, though it might find a resting place in
Britain. One might perhaps broaden the accusation by claiming that the
“culture” he advocated was an exclusively European affair, that he saw
 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 3

Europe as a homogeneous unit with local variations that included “us” and
the “foreigners” (that is, other Europeans), whilst sidelining other conti-
nents. Yet Arnold, like his headmaster father Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was
steeped in the literature and history of the Near East; so he would have had
a hard job fitting in even to this expanded stereotype. Arnold’s “culture” is
universal, cosmopolitan, elitist. Are there bridges from his ideas to our own?

The Meanings of Culture

So habituated have twenty-first-century people become to travel and com-
parative generalisations about different “cultures” that it is difficult to reg-
ister how recent the word is as used in our sense. In Roman times Cicero
talks of two kinds of culturae: “agri culturae”, cultivations of the fields,
and “animi culturae”, cultivations of the spirit or mind. Accordingly, until
the 1860s its use in most European languages was confined to agriculture,
religion and by extension to education. The first English use as applied to
crops in the general sense of “cultivating the soil” is 1420. As applied to
religious worship it is 1483, though the derivation is not from Latin cul-
turae but from cultus, a cult or sect. Its extension to scholarship and train-
ing is a feature of the Renaissance. In 1510 Sir Thomas More talks of the
need to apply ourselves “to the culture and profit” of our minds, a sense
not a thousand miles from Arnold’s. By 1550 the word appears with this
meaning in French. By 1626 the agricultural application has been extended
to imply the cultivation of particular crops, from which we get the special-
ised uses “arboriculture”, “floriculture”, “horticulture” and in France
“viniculture”. Two years later the word embraced the athletic improve-
ment of the human body. By 1796, at the height of Britain’s Agricultural
Revolution, it is connected with the rearing of livestock.
Unsurprisingly, the shift to our modern analytical sense occurs in
German. In 1860, with a little-known Zurich publisher, the Swiss histo-
rian Jacob Burckhardt issued his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien; it had
little impact at first, though it was later to transform scholarly thinking
about the Quattrocento. That Renaissance Italy possessed a culture unique
to itself, however, was a fresh insight. With it we approach the relativistic
notion of one social, political and social organisation as distinct from oth-
ers; for Burckhardt the Renaissance Italian state had been an unrepeatable
“work of art”. To speak of a “culture” in this sense is close to talking of a
“civilisation”; accordingly, when Burckhardt’s book was finally translated
into English in 1878, it was as The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
4 ROBERT FRASER

By 1867, two years before Arnold’s diatribe, the term “culture” was first
used in a related sense in English. Significantly, the context is a description
of that particular kind of cross-channel migration known as an “invasion”.
After the Battle of Hastings, wrote Freeman in his history of The Norman
Conquest, the Anglo-Saxons were confronted by “a language and a culture
which was wholly alien to them”.
From there it is but a short step to using the word in a scientific, quasi-­
objective sense, first attributed to that grandad of modern anthropology,
Edward Burnett Tylor. Tylor was a wealthy Quaker denied a university
education because of his religious affiliation. Afflicted with tuberculosis,
he instead travelled to Mexico, where he became fascinated by the parallels
he could perceive between the customs, myths and rituals of the ordinary
people he encountered in his progress and those of the European peas-
antry. Gradually the notion of culture as something multiform and spread
out began to take shape in his mind. The result was a series of works trac-
ing the deep affinities between people and times, the most famous of
which, Primitive Culture of 1871, bore a title that seemingly engages
with, and challenges, the exclusivity implied by Arnold’s book, published
a mere two years before.
On the first page Tylor hazards a new definition. “Culture or civilisa-
tion taken in its wide ethnographic sense”, he opines, “is that complex
whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
Like Arnold, Tylor always used “culture” as a—frequently capitalised—
singular noun, synonymous with its sister substantive “civilization”. For
Tylor, unlike Arnold, however, both culture and civilisation were diffused
across the world, and across history. Each different society in different
ages possessed a character of its own; yet beneath these apparent differ-
ences, certain constants were apparent. There was thus both a variety and
a certain uniformity. Tylor goes on to dilate about this seeming paradox:

The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, so far as it

is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the
study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the unifor-
mity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great mea-
sure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while on the other hand its
various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each
the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping
the history of the future.3
 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 5

The “laws of human thought” that Tylor identifies in this passage are
those of social evolution cross-pollinated from Darwin’s biological theo-
ries with the study of society by later Victorians such as Herbert Spencer.
For Tylor all societies had evolved, and were continually evolving, from
stage to stage. Because all societies were on the same evolutionary journey,
which they covered at different speeds, it was possible to compare them.
The result was a method of analysis called the “comparative method”, and
a science that came to be known as Social Anthropology, the first chair of
which in the University of Oxford Tylor came eventually to hold.
Yet Tylor says nothing about migration, for two very good reasons. The
first is that, like most of the first few generations of anthropologists, he was
interested in studying individual societies in situ so that he could observe
the interplay in each case between social arrangements and their environ-
ment. It was therefore in his interests that each society appeared to stay
still, just as a zoological specimen beneath the microscope ideally stays
still. The second was that he was anxious to argue that the similarities he
discerned between various societies in various places were the products of
separate but parallel development, rather than of influence. If it could be
proved that they had borrowed from one another, his argument was com-
promised, if not ruined.
By the mid-1870s, therefore, two contrasting senses of the term “cul-
ture” were available, both of which we have inherited: Arnold’s, which
stressed culture as an ideal that we might or might not attain; and Tylor’s,
according to which all people possess a culture, albeit of different kinds.
From Tylor’s comparative use of the singular noun, it was a fairly short
step to pluralising it. By the turn of the century, the practice was common-
place. The modern cosmopolitan man, declared The Spectator on 27 June
1891, is one who prides himself on “speaking all languages, knowing all
cultures, living amongst all races”.

The Crux of Cosmopolitanism

The notion of cosmopolitanism features prominently in our title and is
clearly going to be central to our discussion; again, it is a term whose
application has shifted across time. Quite recently it has featured in the
title of a stimulating book by the Ghanaian and British-born philosopher
(currently resident in New York), Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah is the
son of a marriage between an Ashanti noble, onetime Ghana nationalist
politician, with a British author and artist, daughter of a former Socialist
6 ROBERT FRASER

Chancellor of the Exchequer. I will be taking a closer look at his back-

ground in the conclusion to the present book, but wish to start by citing
what he has to say in his work Cosmopolitism (2010) on the complex ques-
tion of the meaning of culture. One of his chapters is headed “Whose
culture is it anyway?” and it begins by addressing the fraught issues of
“cultural patrimony” and “intellectual copyright”, both of which take
their cue from conceptions of local, or else personal, belonging. In 1874,
at the conclusion of the second British-Ashanti war, the state capital
Kumasi was burned to the ground on the orders of the British commander,
Garnet Wolseley, and the palace looted of its contents. A century later, in
Mali, thousands of intricate terracotta figures depicting humans and ani-
mals were unearthed about three kilometres from the modern city of
Djenné by an international team of archaeologists: in contravention of a
UNESCO resolution, they were sold to collectors and museums around
the world, which are reluctant to return them. Cultural nationalists have
urged that they be sent back. It does not need the better-known example
of the Elgin Marbles removed from the Parthenon in Athens between
1801 and 1805, and still in the British Museum in London, to underline
the issues raised by these episodes. In all such instances, the campaign of
retrieval is based on a feasible, if to Appiah questionable, proposition,
which he summarises thus: “It is that, in simplest terms, cultural property
be regarded as the property of its culture. If you belong to that culture,
such work is, in the suggestive shorthand, your cultural patrimony. If not,
not.”4
The case is comparatively straightforward when it comes to physical
objects, the fact of whose removal is simply ascertained, even if the rights
and wrongs of the matter, and the question of ownership, are more diffi-
cult to resolve. When it comes to the less tangible products of culture—
poems and pieces of music, for example—the relevant questions are far
harder to sort out. Most nineteenth- and some twentieth-century com-
mentators have assumed that English poetry and English music are the
expression of the English nation and its people: they breathe its soul, as it
were. In 1937 the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams published a book of
essays entitled National Music dedicated to this proposition. Yet nobody
for that reason would claim that the works of Edward Elgar should not be
performed in Germany (where, indeed, his early reputation was made).
And nobody in their right mind would assert that the symphonies of
Joseph Haydn should not be performed in England where, in old age, he
spent a couple of happy and productive years. To which nation does the
 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 7

music of George Frideric Handel belong: to Germany, in whose principal-

ity of Hanover he was born; to Italy, where he learned his trade as an opera
composer between 1706 and 1712, and in whose language the libretti of
all his operas (but not his oratorios) are couched; or to Britain, where he
settled for the remaining forty-seven years of his life? Put like this, the
question reduces itself to absurdity. Few would dare raise the question as
to whether the mathematical discoveries of Srinivasa Ramanujan—born in
1887 in Tamil Nadu, whence in 1914 he moved to Cambridge where
some of his best work was achieved—constitute a legacy of India or of
England. At one level they belong to Ramanujan alone, and are part of his
legitimate intellectual property. At the highest and most realistic level,
they belong to humanity. Most fundamentally and triumphantly, they are
ground-breaking mathematics.
It is Appiah’s contention that all cultural masterpieces, be they sculp-
tural, architectural, scientific, literary or musical, belong to humanity in
this way. We owe it to one another to be curious about our various tradi-
tions, and such curiosity entails rights over them. This is part of what he
means by cosmopolitanism. Besides, people move constantly, and culture
and its outputs move with them. In support of this view Appiah quotes the
verdict of Salman Rushdie, whose instinct in writing fiction has always
been to stir the cultural melting pot. In 1988, the year in which his novel
The Satanic Verses was subjected to an Iranian fatwa, Rushdie declared
that this work “rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the
Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness
enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the
world, and I am determined to embrace it.”5 All of that is true though,
pace Rushdie, perhaps it is not so new.

“The Strangers’ Case”

Whatever way you look at it, notions of culture and cosmopolitanism are
ineluctably tied in with the fact of widespread international migration. It
for this very reason that the emergence over the last few decades of an
academic discourse stressing the centrality of migration to human cultural
formation has proved such a refreshing and revealing change. Increasingly,
culture has come to be viewed less as an expression of place than a product
of interaction and demographic shift. A recurrent difficulty, however, has
been to classify, and to distinguish between, various kinds of human mass
movement. If culture is notoriously difficult to pin down, migration and
8 ROBERT FRASER

its analogues are just as elusive. Fifty years ago, the travel writer Bruce
Chatwin proposed to his London publisher a grand work to be entitled
The Nomadic Alternative, universalising his own temperamental condition
of itchy feet. His proposal landed on the desk of the publisher’s reader,
Desmond Morris, author of the ethnographic-cum-zoological classic The
Naked Ape, who reported back in some puzzlement: “What is a nomad? It
gets a little confusing sometimes when I read his chapter headings.” For
Morris there was a fundamental difference between wandering away from
and back to a fixed base, on the one hand, and wandering from place to
place without a fixed base, on the other. He concluded, “As I said in The
Naked Ape, the moment man became a hunter he had to have somewhere
to come back to after the hunt was over. So a fixed base became natural for
the species and we lost our old ape-like nomadism.”6
In the half-century since then, the literature concerning human move-
ment has grown exponentially, but the task of classification has proved no
easier. Nomadism, exploration, asylum, adventure, tourism, crusading, all
constitute varieties of human movement between territories and, as several
recent commentators have observed, very often the motivations have
been— and remain—mixed. The United Nations reductively defines a
migrant as one who has stayed outside his or her country of origin for
more than twelve months,7 but such a description encompasses long-term
overseas military personnel, diplomats, students on extended gap years,
expatriates on long contracts, some international consultants and, histori-
cally, practically everyone (notably the pieds noirs of Algeria, or the sahibs
and memsahibs of the erstwhile British Raj) who once staffed the various
European empires. Useful as it is as a yardstick, the definition also begs the
very question of personal and social identity, since it assumes that all of us
possess a point of origin and ultimate belonging, which is far from univer-
sally true, even in the meanest bureaucratic or legal sense.
One matter is certain: the phenomenon is both exceedingly old and
pressingly new. The first humans were certainly nomads. In terms of our
history, in fact, it is movement that has constituted the rule, and settle-
ment and belonging that have been the exceptions. In his influential book
Migration: A World History, Michael H. Fisher traces the ramifying itiner-
aries of our ancestral wanderings from East Africa outwards towards
Eurasia, then by branching lines across to Australasia and the Americas,
aided by land bridges exposed during the last ice age and subsequently
engulfed. He further recounts tides of movement within the documented
past resulting from Alexander the Great’s predations, the Emperor
 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 9

Constantine’s expansion of the Roman Empire and the proselytising

spread of Islam. The picture is then complicated by the slave trade, the
growth of European empires in Asia and Africa, and economic migration
since.8 In their strongly argued Exceptional People: How Migrants Shaped
Our World and Will Define Our Future, Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron
and Meera Balarajan have charted the impact of these historical perambu-
lations on the sending and receiving countries, on families, communities
and individuals. They conclude with a plea for migration to be viewed as a
normative aspect of human history, and the principal hope for an inte-
grated and prosperous global future: “So long as nationalism can legiti-
mately trump the more universal claims of international co-operation,
world development will be stalled. However, our national myths are grad-
ually deconstructed as historical revision lays bare the truth about the cen-
tral role of cross-cultural contact in the creation of new societies. When we
ask ourselves the perennial question ‘Who are we?’ answering exclusively
with nationalism is less and less convincing in the twenty-first century.”9
The controversies surrounding this topic over the last few years have had
a tendency to encourage writers on both sides of the debate to frame their
arguments in terms of undiluted absolutes. Opponents of migration habitu-
ally and drastically exaggerate its detrimental effects, and underplay its con-
siderable benefits. Correspondingly, in the face of such bald opposition,
those committed to defending and promoting migration have sometimes
portrayed it as an uncomplicated good that has invariably benefitted every-
body everywhere. A further effect has been to cause historians to project this
panacea both backwards and forwards, portraying the whole of human his-
tory in the process as one seething and ebullient panorama of restless motion
and interchange. In Fisher’s words, “We are all the descendants of migrants
and we virtually all migrate during the course of our lives. From the origin
of our Homo sapiens species about 200,000 BC until today, we have
expanded our range over the entire planet. We have emigrated to seek new
opportunities, often driven out by deteriorating social or physical environ-
ments. As the earth’s climate has changed and our societies have developed,
migration has enabled us to better our lives and those of our children.”10
This is both richly true, and richly untrue. What we observe in reality in
the human past is a rhythmic alternation. On the one hand, there have
been periods of vigorous population shift, such as the Völkerwandering or
migratio gentium of which German historians of late antiquity used to
speak when referring to alien incursions into the crumbling Roman
Empire.11 For historians such as Fisher, we are living through a second
10 ROBERT FRASER

such age, in which an equivalent scenario is being played out on a global

scale. On the other hand, there have always been comparatively static times
during which the cultural demography of individual territories has tended
to settle down. Were this not so, it would be impossible for any of us mean-
ingfully to speak of national or regional characteristics. Nor would any-
body ever experience homesickness, or indeed its opposite, wanderlust.
The rhythm is productive. There is a directive towards movement and
penetration; there is also a directive towards, and a need for, retention. In
order properly to convey and to share customs, attitudes, varieties of spiri-
tuality, art forms and idioms, every inward- or outward-bound community
needs to possess something to share in the first place. Languages fuse and
borrow from one another, but we can still properly speak of Bengali or
French, compile separate dictionaries of these tongues, and consider the
literatures couched in each, even if we subsequently compare them. The
short story form, for example, originated in Bengal and migrated to France.
In such circumstances, acquisition and consolidation become twin
aspects of an ongoing and fruitful process. Imaginatively viewed, a nation
may be conceived of both as an entity and as a conglomeration; a botanical
genus, but simultaneously hybrid. Both visions can be found in English
literature, for example in Shakespeare. As an epigraph to this book, I quote
a scene from the collaboratively authored play The Book of Sir Thomas
More, unpublished until 1832 but first drafted between 1601 and 1604
by, it is believed, Anthony Munday (1560–1633) and Henry Chettle, then
revised by a number of hands, almost certainly including Shakespeare’s.
Written at a time of escalating tension caused by the arrival of a wave of
Huguenots (French Protestants) in England, the drama takes as one of its
persistent themes hysterical xenophobia. In the scene from which the
quoted speech is taken, the manuscript of which survives in Shakespeare’s
hand, More is reprimanding a mob of London apprentices bent on burn-
ing to the ground the homes of some economic migrants recently arrived
from Lombardy. He asks them to imagine themselves as immigrants to
another country—“to France or Flanders/To any German province, Spain
or Portugal”—and to treat the arrivals with the sort of courtesy that they
would then request and require. The point is taken, and the crowd dis-
perse. We are all more or less natives (even if of more than one country),
and we are all potential migrants.
However, Shakespeare also realised, and drew on, a marked and settled
sense of national belonging. Twenty years previously, in evoking the roots
of the Wars of the Roses which, little more than a century before, had
 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 11

precariously been resolved in the Tudor Settlement, he had written a piv-

otal scene in Richard the Second, and placed in the mouth of John of
Gaunt (whose mother, let it be said, hailed from Ghent) perhaps the clas-
sic expression of English patriotism:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…12

It was during the time of the English Renaissance, and more especially
following the English Reformation with its repudiation of papal scope and
power, that the tension between territorial sovereignty and continental
affinities most dramatically played itself out in English life, and for this
very reason I have focused in on the period in three of the chapters that
follow. (I am not the first to imply historical parallels between the
Reformation and Brexit, and the putative cultural ramifications of both.13)
In the Renaissance period, English exceptionalism came to an end with
the union between the English and Scottish crowns in 1603.
A century later, England had been ruled over successively by Scottish
and Dutch monarchs. Such royal migration was not universally popular. In
1700 the Whig journalist and poetaster John Hutchin (1660–1707), who
had initially welcomed the arrival of King William III from Holland with
his English wife Mary as rescuing the country from popery, published a
polemic entitled The Foreigners attacking the regal interlopers. The novel-
ist Daniel Defoe read the poem (if such it was) “with a kind of rage”,
considering it to be a “vile abhor’d pamphlet, in very ill verse”. He
responded with a much better poem of his own, The True-Born Englishman:
A Satyr, questioning the very notion of essential Englishness. Who are we
English folk anyway if not the products of infiltration and miscegenation?

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
12 ROBERT FRASER

In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,

Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.14

The English have continued to quarrel about their identity ever since.

“Whither Would You Go?”

In his informative and crisp International Migration: A Very Short
Introduction, Khalid Koser summarises the consequences of our age-old
patterns of migration thus: “Migration has been a critical and influential
feature of human history. It has supported the growth of the world econ-
omy, it has contributed to the evolution of states and societies and it has
enriched many cultures and civilisations.”15 It is with the third of these
consequences that the chapters comprising the present book are con-
cerned. In my conclusion I shall attempt to theorise it by drawing on the
related fields of philosophy and anthropology. In the meantime, I offer a
series of inter-related case studies exploring how migration has assisted
bodies of knowledge, schools of literature, art and music. The examples
are drawn from England, from mainland Europe, from Israel, Egypt, West
Africa, America, India and the Caribbean. In the light of recent events, I
return constantly to the matter of Britain, partly because it is best known
to me, and partly because Britain is a group of islands whose encircling sea
might be expected to have exempted it from some of the influences
described. Yet during the chequered course of the country’s history, no
portion of the earth’s surface has been more affected by the movement of
peoples, both inward and outward, than this “scepter’d isle”.
The object throughout is to assess three competing panaceas. The
first—long since discarded—is Arnold’s view that human culture repre-
sents a single refined entity at which all should aim. The second—call it
Burckhardt’s paradigm—is the version of cultural nationalism which has it
 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 13

that intellectual formations are inevitably and primarily an expression of

the places that produced them. The third is the much more recent idea
that globalisation has now diluted this understanding in the interests of an
inclusive and heterogeneous norm. By harking back to the classical period,
and by negotiating freely between that and the more recent past and pres-
ent, I demonstrate the partiality of all these beliefs, the first two being a
preoccupation of the nineteenth century, the third of the twentieth and
twenty-first.
Concentrating for the most part on the complementary arts of litera-
ture and music, I attempt to show how the constant movement of peoples
and ideas over many centuries has nourished and sustained human culture
in a diversity of ways. There are certain constants to this process, tenden-
cies that have spearheaded cultural diffusion and its effects. One is nomad-
ism, a challenging aspect of demography that I examine through a case
study of the Roma people as they have wandered across Europe. The sec-
ond is language, the divagating and yet unifying effects of which I examine
by focusing on some uses of Europe’s traditional lingua franca, Latin,
then on English which—even as the English themselves seem bent on
“leaving Europe”—appears to have become Latin’s modern equivalent.
The third is empire, analysed here in a number of different contexts,
including colonial administration and education. A fourth is religion,
whose disseminating ideological effects are illustrated though four case
studies, three from the early modern period and one from the nineteenth
century. A fifth is travel and tourism, and the ways in which these are
reported and in which they have influenced artistic styles: this I illustrate
via a study of the diffusion of Italian music beyond Italy, and another of an
American and a Hungarian composer as they witness, and draw on, African
drumming. The last is scholarship, and the tendency of academics to
group themselves in communities transcending location and language,
which I examine under a number of different headings, including the ways
in which classical scholarship has shaped our sense both of interdepen-
dence and of belonging.
Along the way, I examine certain iconic migrating individuals: the fifth-­
century Alexandrian mathematician and philosopher Hypatia; the Italian
Jewish-born Calvinist scholar Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580), whose
career straddled Italy, England and the Low Countries; the Apulia-born,
internationally feted castrato known as Farinelli (1705–1782); the
Hungarian-born composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt (1811–1886);
and the singularly cosmopolitan, and variously talented, writer Violet
14 ROBERT FRASER

Paget (1856–1935) a.k.a. Vernon Lee, each of whom can be seen to have
epitomised the cultural plasticity of an age. I end by taking a closer look at
Appiah.
All of these factors have combined historically to undermine the cen-
tripetal effects of place. And all of them call into question notions of the
purism of cultures. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to this
ongoing debate about collective cultural identity by placing it in a broad
and variegated historical perspective that will, it is hoped, inform discus-
sion across disciplines and fertilise an area of discourse too often confined
to the contemporary scene.
In contemporary Europe these issues are very much alive, even more so
in the light of the ongoing refugee crisis provoked by events in Syria and
Iraq. As I researched this chapter, a boatload of thirty-five refugees came
to grief while attempting to reach the Greek island of Kalolimnos from
Turkey. In Britain, concern about our long history of migration is very
much to the fore, and informs our literature at every point. In Helen
Macdonald’s 2014 memoir H Is for Hawk, the narrator, who is recovering
from the death of her father by training Matilda, a goshawk, travels from
Cambridge to her parental home in Surrey. With her goes Matilda. They
come across a tract of open country haunted by a lone hare and a pack of
deer, inhabitants of what to the untrained eye appears to be a changeless
and indigenous rural idyll, “the terra incognita of our mythical English
past”. In this dream of apparent eternal authenticity they are joined by an
elderly couple out for a walk. “Doesn’t it give you hope?” the husband
enquires with reference to the landscape that surrounds and seemingly
enfolds them. “Hope?” she demurs. “Yes,” he persists, “Isn’t it a relief
that there are still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left,
despite all these immigrants coming in.”
The stability thus serenaded is an illusion, the countryside as Macdonald
invokes it the product of unceasing disturbance and transition. “Ten years
ago, there were turtle-doves on this land. Thirty years ago there were corn
buntings and enormous flocks of lapwings. Seventy years ago there were
red-backed shrikes, wrynecks and skype. Two hundred years ago, ravens
and black grouse. All of them are gone.” She concludes:

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts,

films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people,
and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale.
The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change
 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 15

too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what
lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine
what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten,
and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and
we wipe the hills of history.16

The chapters that comprise this book represent a minor exercise in the
restoration of scale, of history cleansed of sentiment. I would like to open
with a scenario set in that ancient theatre of conflict and migration: the
Middle East, as ancient in the tale it has to tell as is the Talmud.

Notes
1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social
Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), 44–45.
2. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (London: Smith, Elder, 1876),
xiii.
3. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Culture (London: John Murray,
1871), vol. i, 1.
4. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(London: Penguin, 2006), 118.
5. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991
(London: Granta, 1991), 394, quoted by Appiah, 112.
6. Quoted in Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin: A Biography (London:
Vintage, 1999), 219, citing Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s
Study of the Human Animal (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 22 and 36.
7. Cited in Khalid Koser, International Migration: A Very Short Introduction,
Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 14.
8. Michael H. Fisher, Migration: A World History (Oxford University Press,
2014), passim.
9. Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan, Exceptional People:
How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future (London
and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 284. For an equivalent
vote of support for migration as a future paradigm for humanity, see Yuval
Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity (London: Harvil
Secker, 2014), 231. See also Theodore Zelkin, The Hidden Pleasures of
Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future
(London: MacLehose Press, Quercus, 2015), especially his intriguing sug-
gestion that, in future, each of us writes his or her own passport.
10. Fisher, xii.
16 ROBERT FRASER

11. For a summary and critique of this view, see Walter Goffart, Barbarian
Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006). On p. 14, Goffart sounds a warning note: “The
peoples of the north and east of the Roman frontier were no more ‘wan-
dering’ than the Celts or Greeks or Thracians. They were agrarian villagers
like the other sedentaries mentioned, and like them, and us, they moved
every now and then.”
12. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second (First Folio, 1626), page
28. Act Two, Scene One, ll 659–669.
13. Listen, for example, to the conductor David Hill in BBC Radio 3’s In
Tune, Friday, 19 August 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/
b07nmqgb
14. The True-Born Englishman (1700), in Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the
Supernatural by Daniel Defoe, vol. 1, The True-Born Englishman and Other
Poems, ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 94 (ll.
334–347).
15. Khalid, 2016, 9.
16. Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (London: Vintage, 2014), 265.
 CHAPTER 2

Is There a Gibbon in the House?

Migration, Post-nationality and the Fall
and Rise of Europe

At the beginning of Linda Grant’s Orange Prize–winning novel When I

Lived in Modern Times, published on the crest of the millennium, Evelyn
Sert, a seventeen-year-old Jewish migrant from London, waits to disem-
bark at Haifa in the then British-mandated territory of Palestine. The
period is 1946, one year after the end of the Second World War, two
before the inception of the independent state of Israel, and the arrival in
Southampton, England of MV Empire Windrush bringing immigrants
from the West Indies. Evelyn is filled with a sense of an unprecedented
event, a tabula rasa on which her own embarkation will write an individ-
ual and generic story. “I was a daughter of the new Zion,” she recalls,
“and I felt the ship shudder as the gangplank crashed on the dock. I put
on my hat and white cotton gloves and, preparing my face, waited to go
ashore at the beginning of the decline and fall of the British Empire.”1
Several kinds of perspective cross in this carefully worded paragraph.
Evelyn’s adventure is both private, and part of a politically propelled
movement. She is one highly individualistic young Jewish woman, and yet
she is also all Jewish women, a member of a great and diasporic race.
Evelyn’s arrival is an act of homecoming that recalls ancient and tragic
departures: to Babylon, to Latvia, to England. Appropriately, beneath her
tentative celebration there surges a recall of the biblical Lamentations of
Jeremiah with its cadences of mourning: “And from the daughter of Zion
all her beauty is departed: her princes are become like harts that find no
pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.”2 Against

© The Author(s) 2018 17

R. Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_2
18 ROBERT FRASER

this backdrop of displacement and peregrination, in a gesture that is

­cosmetic and existential and political, Evelyn now “prepares” her face.
What face, we are moved to ask, confronting what dangers? Evelyn views
herself as an utterly modern, post-war person. Palestine is her opportunity,
where she will re-invent her destiny. Yet at the very moment when all links
with metropolitan and European culture seem deliberately to have been
severed, her testimony makes nodding acknowledgement of that master
text of Western deformation and reformation, Edward Gibbon’s History of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Grant’s references to the Bible and Gibbon are not mere stylistic flour-
ishes. If Lamentations epitomises her sense of displacement, Gibbon
relates importantly to her reading of culture. Published between 1776—
the year of the American Declaration of Independence—and 1789—the
year of the American Constitution and the official end of the first, transat-
lantic British Empire, Gibbon’s History foreshadowed amongst other
things the growth, fall from grace and collapse of Britain’s second, Asian
and African, colonial enterprise. It is at the culmination of this process that
Evelyn awaits her uncertain future. Her conjuring with Gibbon’s title is
itself in a long tradition. For 220 years Decline and Fall has been inter-
preted in the light of society’s changing circumstances. It has been seen as
an apologia or elegy for empire, even a concerted attack on the imperial
ideal. It has been understood to applaud heroic virtue or bemoan human
futility, as a reactionary or as a revolutionary text. In the mid-Victorian
period it became a cautionary tale of empire. Even when unread, its
leather-bound six volumes graced every gentleman’s bookshelves. The
case of Archdeacon Julius Hare may be extreme. A Broad Churchman and
patron of the Christian socialists, he treated Decline and Fall as a second
Bible. To avoid rising from the dinner table when entertaining guests, he
trained his house spaniel to run backwards and forwards from the library
to check references to Gibbon’s footnotes. In the late Victorian high noon
of empire, Gibbon was taken for a jingoist. The young cavalry officer
Winston Churchill read him between polo matches in India, imbibing the
ignorant lesson that the Romans submitted to decline only because they
were not English.
In the twenty-first century we are far more likely to agree with Evelyn’s
distillation of this classic text: that empires, continents and nations are
artificial compounds moulded from shifting sands, from peoples, lan-
guages and faiths. Gibbon’s theme, after all, is how Rome—at once a polis
and an empire—was swept away by successive tides of peoples flooding
 IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 19

from Asia and Africa across central and southern Europe. It is no accident
that, as generations of his readers have attested, Gibbon’s narrative
recounts no substantial decline, and that the “fall” in his title is difficult to
locate, in either time or place. Instead he shows how, as a direct result of
successive migrations, displacements and appropriations, there gradually
arose that cluster of interests he lauds in his third book as the “One Great
Republic” of Europe. Before we turn to address late twentieth-century
migrations and their consequences, it is as well therefore to recognise that
in the Age of Enlightenment, even as the foundations of the modern
world were being laid, there existed this sense of migration as the metal
out of which societies are forged. As Gibbon very well knew, and as
seventeen-­year-old Evelyn Sert obscurely suspects, empires are forever fall-
ing to make room for something unexpected. What is more, it is those
very factors that sometimes look as if they are about to undermine the
empires, nations or cultures that habitually build them up.
There is an additional twist, of course, since Evelyn in the passage
quoted is also ironically contrasting herself with that Gibbonian and clas-
sical figure: the barbarian at the gates. She is able to question this tradi-
tional trope since as a woman she is relatively powerless, and because her
purpose is personal discovery, not conquest. Her shifted perspective
uncovers what is one essential division between ancient and modern per-
ceptions of migration: the distinction between an invader and a refugee.
Compare two acts of migration at different historical periods but at a
common physical crossing point: the narrow stretch of sea between North
Africa and Spain. The ancients knew this place as the Pillars of Hercules—
the furthest point of the settled world—on the southern shore of which
were supposed to lie the Gardens of the Hesperides with their golden
apples. We know it, more prosaically, as the Straits of Gibraltar. This is
how, in his fifty-first chapter, Gibbon leads up to the invasion of Spain by
the Arabs in AD 709, across the straits to the coast of Andalusia:

In the progress of conquest from the north and south, the Goths and the
Saracens encountered each other on the confines of Europe and Africa. In
the opinion of the latter, the difference in religion is a reasonable ground of
enmity and warfare. As early as the time of Othman their piratical squadrons
had ravaged the coast of Andalusia, nor had they forgotten the relief of
Carthage by the Gothic succours. In that age, as well as in the present, the
kings of Spain were possessed of the fortress of Ceuta; one of the columns
of Hercules, which is divided by a narrow strait from the opposite pillar or
point of Europe.3
20 ROBERT FRASER

The questionable aspects of this passage lie on its surface. All meaning-
ful historical movement is seen as operating from north to south. Religious
intolerance is viewed as the prerogative of the Muslims, and this by a
Christian sceptic who a few chapters later will tell us about the Crusades.
Arab exploration along the southern coast of Spain is interpreted as the
work of “piratical squadrons”. These barbs are all the more piercing for
Gibbon’s belatedly expressed recognition that the Spain created by this
and other conquests was—and is—culturally part Arab.
Consider now a fragment from the modern fiction of migration. In his
short story “Once in the Garden of Plenty”, the contemporary Sudanese
writer Jamal Mahjoub describes how Majid, an unemployed labourer from
North Africa, buys his way to a dream by escaping in an open boat towards
the Spanish coast. The boat overturns, and Majid struggles up a beach in
Andalusia. He falls among a fellow group of migrant workers without
papers living thirty to a shack at the mercy of their Spanish employer. All
of these people, he notices, seem haunted by melancholy. At nightfall, he
approaches one of the older labourers and asks him why this is so. The
man answers that, like the others, he will soon learn how to be sad:

Majid shifted his weight on the cardboard matting. “But they made it. They
made the crossing. They are free. They are working. They are here.”
“Four hundred years ago we ruled all of these lands, from Granada to the
gates of Vienna. Now we come here as fugitives begging for a few crumbs.”
“I know nothing about all that. All I want is a chance to make a decent
living.”
“You have a wife and child, right? You are blessed. But you are also a fool
if you think anything is given away for nothing. You want to feed your family
then you have to take what you want. In this world, no one, not even the
birds are given something for nothing.”4

Majhoub’s title ironically refers us to the myth of the Hesperides, whose

paradisal garden he displaces before pointing us to its non-existence.
Majid’s reference to migrant birds, meanwhile, points us in another direc-
tion: to a categorical uncertainty hovering over the vocabulary of migra-
tion. When is a migrant an immigrant, and when is he or she a visitor? Are
economic migrants authentic immigrants or birds of passage? Ought we to
think of migrant workers as swallows, seasonally returning to a different
nesting? What is the exact status of the refugee? When is infiltration inves-
tigation, and when is it conquest? When may settlers consider themselves
settled? At what point can landowners from a different clime legitimately
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 "Are you sure there is no hope of recovering anything?"

"None, I'm afraid," said Captain Fortescue. "I wish I

could give you any hope, but I fear I cannot. It is hard for
you to hear, very, very hard, and oh! How hard for me to
tell!"

"I'm sure it is," said Marjorie. "I think it is worse for you
than for us."

"Mrs. Douglas, I am a poor man now. I cannot continue

in my regiment, and so far no path in life has been opened
to me; but I assure you of this—that I shall look upon the
four thousand pounds you have lost as a debt binding upon
me as long as I live, and that, if God prospers me in the
future, every single penny of it shall be repaid. I will not
wait, however, until I am able to restore the whole capital,
for that I fear will be the work of a lifetime; but I will send
you from time to time such money as I am able to save,
and I will not allow myself in a single indulgence of any kind
whatever until the full amount is in your hands."

"It is very good of you—very noble," she said; "but you

must not make such a resolve. You are not to blame for our
loss; you yourself have lost still more heavily. I cannot let
you sacrifice yourself in that way."

"God helping me, Mrs. Douglas," he answered, as he

rose to take leave, "my promise will be kept."

Mrs. Douglas pressed him to stay for supper, but he did

not accept her invitation; he felt that they would want to be
alone, that they might talk over what had happened. So he
said good-bye, and Marjorie went to open the door for him.
The wind rushed in with hurricane force as soon as it was
opened.
 "What an awful night, and how dark!" she said, closing
the door again. "I will light the lantern, and go with you to
the gate, or you will never find it in this darkness."

He begged her not to come, but she would not listen,

and, catching up a shawl from the hall table, wrapped it
round her, and went in front of him down the garden path
with the lantern in her hand. At the gate she stopped.

"How can I thank you, Miss Douglas?"

"Don't try!" she said, laughing. "Can you find your way
now, do you think?"

"Oh yes, quite well. Good-bye. I am off early to-morrow

morning."

"Then we shall not see you again?"

"No," he said sadly, "perhaps never again. Birds of ill

omen are never welcome—are they?"

"Oh! Don't call yourself that," she said. "Good-bye,

Captain Fortescue."

He had left her, and was going towards the bridge,

when he thought he heard her calling. He looked back, and
saw that she was still standing at the gate with the lantern
in her hand.

"Did you call, Miss Douglas?" he asked.

"Yes; I ought not to have brought you back, but I did

want to thank you."

"I don't know why you should thank me."

 "For being so good to mother," she said; and then she
turned round and went up the hill, and he watched the light
of her lantern until he saw it pass inside the door of the
house.

What a wild night that was! Kenneth Fortescue slept

very little, for the wind was howling in the chimneys of the
old inn, rattling the badly fitting windows, sweeping down
the narrow valley, and tearing with terrific force across the
open country beyond. He lay listening to the wind, and
thinking many troubled thoughts during the long hours of
that wakeful night.

He had ordered a carriage to take him to Keswick in

time for the early train, so he jumped out of bed as soon as
he was called, and went to the window of his room to look
out at the weather. The whole country was covered with
deep snow. Mountains, rocks, woods, houses, fields,
gardens, were alike arrayed in white robes, pure and
spotless, and sparkling in the morning sunshine as if
covered with countless diamonds.

When, a little later, he went down to the coffee-room,

the landlord came to speak to him.

"I'm afraid, sir, you won't be able to go to-day. There's

been a terrible snowstorm, and Borrowdale is blocked. It
will be impossible to drive through it."

"Surely it is not so deep as that!"

"Not here, sir, nor for about a mile down the valley; but
when you come to the turning in the road at the narrowest
part of the valley the snow has drifted there to a fearful
depth, and for about half a mile the snow is so deep it
would be impossible to get through it. We are shut off from
Keswick entirely."
 "Won't they clear the road?"

"Well, sir, they'll try to make a way through, but it will

be a long job. I'm afraid we shan't get through to-day."

"Then there is no help for it," said the Captain. "I must
stay."

"Yes, sir; I'm very sorry you should be so

inconvenienced, but I'll do my best to make you
comfortable; and it's a beautiful country. If you haven't
been here before, you might like to see a little of it, and it's
good walking round here and on towards Honister, if you
care to take a look round."

Yet Kenneth Fortescue was in no hurry to go out, or to

leave the great fire in the large grate. He sat beside it with
a paper in his hand, reading at times, and at other times
gazing at the blue smoke curling up the chimney. And then,
after a while, he stood at the window, gazing absently out
into the village street. He had much on his mind that
morning, and he felt that even the loveliest scenery failed to
beguile him from pursuing the troubled train of thought
which he felt impelled to follow. But presently he was
recalled from the future to the present by seeing Marjorie
Douglas pass the window with a covered basket in her
hand. Her face looked to him as bright and cheerful as it
had done before he had told her the sad news he had come
to disclose; the clouds seemed to have dispersed, and the
sunshine to have come back to it.

Kenneth wondered where she was going. He caught up

his cap and ran after her, to ask how her mother was, and
how she had borne the sad tidings he had brought her.

Marjorie heard him coming behind her, and turned

round in the greatest surprise.
 "Captain Fortescue, I thought you had gone!"

"No, Miss Douglas; I'm the bad penny, as well as the

bird of ill omen," he said. "The fact is, there is a snowdrift in
the valley, so I have to stay here till to-morrow."

"How tiresome for you!"

"Yes, it is rather; but I shall see a little more of the

country—it looks beautiful this morning. Where are you
going, Miss Douglas? Let me carry your basket for you."

"Not until you get your coat," she said. "It's far too cold
to stand talking without it."

He ran back for it, and soon rejoined her.

"I am going to Seatoller," she said.

"Who is Toller?"

She laughed very much at this question, and told him

that Seatoller was the name of the little hamlet where old
Mary lived.

"Do you mind my coming with you, Miss Douglas? It's

awfully slow going for a walk alone."

"Not at all. Only take care how you carry that basket,
because old Mary's pudding and beef-tea are in it."

"Who is old Mary?"

"She's a dear old woman who lives in one of the

cottages at Seatoller. Look across the valley, you can see
the white houses of the little place. There are only about
six, I think. They are just at the bottom of Honister Pass."
 "Do you often go to see her?"

"Whenever I can. We have quite a number of old

women here. I think it must be because it is so healthy.
They all live to be very old, and they are all friends of mine,
so they have to take their turn; but this is old Mary's day."

"How they must look forward to their turn!" he said.

"Yes, I think they do; but I'm afraid none of them will
get a turn soon. I'm going away, Captain Fortescue."

"Going away?"

"Yes, from home. We settled that last night. You see, we

had a little family council after you had gone, to talk things
over. Mother wanted to send Dorcas away—that's our old
servant—but I don't think that would do. She is very faithful
to mother, and though I think I could do most of her work,
still on the whole I think it would make more for mother to
do. Dorcas does the washing so well, and she's so useful in
every way, and we don't like to send her away, if we can
possibly help it, poor old soul!"

"Then what do you mean to do?"

"Well, I don't quite know yet. Go as companion or

mother's help, I suppose. I don't think I could get any
teaching, because I've never passed any exams. Every one
seems to require that now. Louis always brings us the
'Standard' when his father has read it, and we shall look in
the advertisements."

"It will be awfully hard for you to go away."

"Oh, I don't know! Yes, I suppose it will rather. But I

don't mind, if only they get on all right at home; but I think
they ought to, if only Phyllis will take care of mother. I think
she will. I believe she will; only, you see, she is the
youngest, and I'm afraid we've spoilt her a little. But she's
such a dear old girl, and I do think she will try."

"I'm terribly sorry that you should have to go."

"Oh, you mustn't be sorry for me," she said, laughing.

"I'm not going to be sorry for myself. I dare say I shall be
very happy soon, and if not—well, it really does not matter.
It will be all the nicer when I get home for the holidays.
Now here we are at old Mary's cottage. I must just run in
with her things."

Marjorie took the basket from him and went into the
house, and as Captain Fortescue watched her, he wondered
what the old woman would do when she missed the bright
face and cheerful voice of her friend.

When she came out, she took him up the steep pass,
that he might see Honister Crag in the distance, standing
out in all its majestic grandeur at the head of the pass. On
their left-hand side was the mountain torrent, dashing
madly over the rocks, coming down so fast that no frost
could stay its course; on their right was moorland, the dead
heather thickly covered with snow.

About a mile up the pass the snow became deeper, and

they had to turn back, and, passing Seatoller again, they
retraced their steps to Rosthwaite. Marjorie never alluded
again to her going away, or to the loss of the money; she
seemed anxious that he should forget everything painful,
that he might be able to carry back with him a happy
memory of her beautiful home.

When Kenneth left her at the garden gate, he went back

to the inn feeling more hopeful about the future. If she was
determined to face it so bravely and happily, surely he could
do the same. Perhaps, after all, there were brighter days in
store in that future which he had so much dreaded, and
which had seemed such a long vista of darkness opening
out before him.

After luncheon, he was sitting over the fire in the

coffee-room, looking at a paper two days old, and
wondering how he should get through the long solitary
evening, when the waiter came in and handed him a letter.
It was from Mrs. Douglas, inviting him to spend the evening
at Fernbank, and assuring him that he would be conferring
a favour upon them by doing so, as in winter they were so
shut out front the world beyond the valley that they seldom
had the pleasure of meeting any one outside their own little
circle of friends in Borrowdale. The invitation was so
gracefully worded, as if the obligation were entirely on his
side, that the Captain felt he could only send an affirmative
answer, nor, if the truth were told, did he desire to send any
other.

So at five o'clock, he once more crossed the bridge and

climbed the hill to Fernbank.

He was shown into a small drawing-room, plainly

furnished, but bearing unmistakable marks of taste and
care. A china bowl of fern-like moss stood on the table, in
which were snowdrops arranged singly, as if they were
growing in it. A flower-stand filled with hyacinths of various
colours stood in the window; in one corner of the room ivy
was growing in a large flower-pot, and was climbing over
the chimney-piece, and hanging in graceful festoons from
the over-mantle; whilst a vase filled with Pyrus japonica and
yellow jessamine stood on the shelf below, and was
reflected in the glass.
 They all gave him a welcome, and made him feel that
they were glad to see him. There was no allusion made
during the evening to what he had told them the day
before. The bird of ill omen was treated as if he had been
the harbinger of good news. Kenneth had been to many
costly entertainments of various kinds, but he thought that
the cosiness of that Cumberland tea eclipsed them all. The
snow-white cloth, the bright, well-trimmed lamp, the early
violets and snowdrops tastefully arranged on a pretty table-
centre, the freshly baked scones, the girdle-cakes—a
speciality of the Lake district—the crisp oat cake, the honey
from the hive in the garden, the new-laid eggs from their
own poultry yard—all these combined to make the meal an
inviting one, and long afterwards, and when in far different
surroundings, Kenneth Fortescue was wont to recall it with
pleasure, and to wonder if he would ever again see a like
picture of home comfort.

"You look sleepy, Phyllis," said Marjorie, as they sat

down to tea. "You ought to have come with me to Seatoller;
it was lovely out to-day."

"What's the good of going out when there's nowhere to

go? Besides, I was reading. I wanted to finish that book
Louis brought. I never can stop when I'm in the middle of a
story."

Mrs. Douglas laughed. "Phyllis is afflicted with deafness

at times, Captain Fortescue," she said; "if she is reading,
she is stone-deaf the whole time."

Leila had joined them at the table, and little Carl, a

pretty boy of three, with fair hair and blue eyes, was seated
on a high chair by her side. She looked ill and depressed
and spoke very little, but the child was full of life, and
amused them all with his baby talk.
 After tea they had games and music. Phyllis was very
clever at the latter and sang well. She was not at all like her
sister, very much prettier most people said, but it was
beauty of feature rather than of expression. Kenneth
thought she had rather a discontented face, and she moved
wearily, when she was asked to do anything by her mother,
as though every exertion, however small, cost her an effort.

It was Marjorie who was the life of the party, who saw
at a glance what every one wanted, who was ready to run
here and there for them all; it was Marjorie who carried Carl
up to bed; who picked up her mother's ball of wool when it
fell, and who kept her eyes open all the time to see what
she could do for others, and how she could help them all.
How they would miss her! What a blank there would be, if
she left them! What a sad change would come over that
bright little home when its chief sunbeam was removed
from it!

The pleasant evening came to an end at last, and

Kenneth rose to take leave. Then, for the first time, he
mentioned the object of his visit to Rosthwaite. As he shook
hands with Mrs. Douglas, and thanked her for her great
kindness to him, he said in a low voice—

"I shall not forget my promise."

She pressed his hand affectionately as she whispered—

"God bless you!" And he knew the words came from her
heart.

Then Marjorie ran for the lantern, for there was not a
star in the sky, and she insisted on lighting him to the gate.

"Now it really is good-bye," he said; "the road has been

cleared, and I am off early to-morrow—Miss Douglas—"
 "Yes, Captain Fortescue."

"I have kept my promise to my poor old father as well

as I could."

"You have indeed," she said.

"Now I want you to make me a promise."

"What is it?" she asked.

"I want you to let me know as soon as your plans are

settled where you are going and what you are going to do.
Will you?"

"Yes; I will."

"You won't forget your promise, I know. Good-bye."

History seemed to repeat itself, for, as on the night

before, he heard her calling him when he had gone a few
steps along the road.

"How can I let you know, when I don't know your

address?" she said.

"Of course, I quite forgot I was leaving Sheffield."

He took out a card, and by the light of her lantern, he

wrote on it the name and address of his father's lawyer.

"That will always find me," he said. "Once more good-

bye."

Again he stood at the gate as she climbed the hill, and

when once more, he watched her go into the lighted hall
and close the door behind her, he thought that the night
looked darker and more dreary than before.
 CHAPTER IX
A FINISHED CHAPTER

CAPTAIN FORTESCUE was up early the following

morning, and set off in good time for the morning train.

On his way to Keswick, he passed Louis Verner in

Borrowdale, and stopped the carriage to speak to him. Louis
told him that he had tried to get through the valley the day
before, but had found the road quite impassable. He said he
was on his way to Fernbank to take Mrs. Douglas the
"Standard."

The journey was a cold one, and the Captain was not
sorry to reach Sheffield. He had wired the time of his arrival
to Elkington, and he found a bright fire in the library, and
drawing his chair near it, he opened the pile of letters which
had arrived during his absence from home.

Most of these were bills of his father's, but he came to

one in a lady's handwriting and with a coronet on the
envelope. He opened it, and found that it was a very kind
note from Lady Earlswood, telling him that she had seen in
the "Times" the notice of his father's death, and that she
wished to express her deep sympathy with him in his
bereavement. She also wished to invite him to come to
Grantley Castle on his way back to Aldershot. The house-
party had broken up, but Evelyn was still at home, and they
would all be delighted to see him for as long as it was
possible for him to stay.

He sat down after dinner to write an answer to this

letter, in which he thanked Lady Earlswood for her kindness,
but at the same time politely declined her invitation.

He had finished this letter, and was putting it in the

envelope which he had addressed, when he suddenly
changed his mind, tore up what he had written, and wrote
another letter. He would go to see them, and would explain
his altered position; it would be better so, and if they chose
to drop his acquaintance after they knew all, they could do
so. Berington, he thought, would always remain his friend,
at least he hoped so; but he was not so sure what Lady
Earlswood's view of the subject might be. She was a
thorough woman of the world, and might not care to have
him at her house when she knew how greatly his prospects
had altered.

In a week's time, Kenneth had wound up his father's

affairs, as far as it was possible for him to do so, had
dismissed the servants and taken an affectionate farewell of
the old butler, and had started on his journey to Grantley
Castle. As he stepped that afternoon into the brougham
waiting for him at the station, he felt as if he were
beginning to read the very last page of the first volume of
his life.

A five miles' drive took him to the entrance to the

Castle, which stood on the side of a hill several hundred feet
above sea-level. He drove in at the great gates, which were
opened by the lodge-keeper as the carriage was heard
approaching. The drive was made through a beautiful
avenue of beech trees, and led steeply uphill. The house
stood on a plateau, from which was a glorious view of the
valley below and the wooded hills beyond. The door was
opened by a footman, and Kenneth entered a magnificent
marble hall, filled with palms and other hothouse plants,
tastefully grouped round the lovely statuary, which was of
pure white marble like the portico in which it stood. A flight
of marble steps led him to another door, where he was met
by the butler and, conducted to the library.

Lady Earlswood welcomed him kindly, and Lady Violet,

who was pouring out tea at a small table in the window, told
him how delighted Evelyn was that he could come to see
them. He had been obliged to make a distant call that
afternoon, but would be home in a short time. Then the
conversation turned on the Riviera and the happy month
they had spent together there the year before, and Lady
Violet went for her photo album, that she might show him
the prints of the negatives which he had helped her to take.
Captain Berington came in before they had looked through
them all, and they talked together of the many places which
the photos recalled, the different pleasant excursions during
which they had been taken, and the various amusing
incidents which had occurred whilst they were there.
Kenneth himself appeared in several of them, and as he
looked at these, he wished that he could feel once more the
gay light-heartedness which he had then enjoyed.

Then it was time to dress for dinner, and he went to his

room feeling as if he were in a dream, or rather, as if this
were reality, and the past three weeks had been a
distressing dream from which he had awaked.

He went down to the drawing-room, and found Lady

Violet there before him. She looked very lovely in her pale-
blue evening dress, and the magnificent diamond necklace
which had been her mother's present to her when she came
of age.
 "I'm awfully glad you were able to come," she said in a
low voice.

"Thank you, Lady Violet; I am glad too; I wanted to say

good-bye to you all."

"Why good-bye?"

"May I tell you in the morning some time, if you and

Lady Earlswood could spare me half an hour? I had rather
not talk about it to-night, if you don't mind. I think I should
like to tell you just before I go."

"But you're not going to-morrow; you must stay longer

than that."

"Impossible, Lady Violet! My leave has been extended

more than once, and I'm due in Aldershot to-morrow."

"Oh, what a pity! I thought—"

But what Lady Violet thought, she never told him, for at
that moment her brother and sister came into the room
together, and Lady Earlswood soon followed. And then
dinner was announced.

The dinner-table was covered with the rarest hothouse

flowers and ferns, amongst which were burning numbers of
tiny electric lamps, the brightness of which was reflected in
the shining silver and glass. As Kenneth Fortescue sat
talking to Captain Berington after the ladies had gone into
the drawing-room, he could not help wondering whether he
would ever again sit down at such a table.

The evening passed pleasantly and all too quickly. Lady

Earlswood had the happy gift of making all who came to her
house feel at home and thoroughly at their ease, and she
expressed great sorrow when Captain Fortescue announced
that he must be back in Aldershot the following day.

She looked somewhat surprised when he asked her if he

might speak to her on a personal matter before he started,
and she glanced at Lady Violet, as if she wondered if the
interview he had asked for had anything to do with her. If
so, she was inclined to listen favourably to what he had to
say, for Captain Fortescue was apparently the richest man
of her acquaintance, and certainly the most aristocratic in
appearance. He had no title, which was, of course, a serious
drawback, and she would have to make full inquiry about
his family and prospects before giving her consent. But if
Violet was fond of him, and if all turned out satisfactory,
now that he had inherited his father's money, an offer from
him would, at any rate, have her serious consideration.

Thus Lady Earlswood looked forward with anything but

dissatisfaction to the appointment that she had made with
Kenneth Fortescue, to come to her morning-room after
breakfast the following day.

"You would like to see me alone," she whispered, as

they rose from the breakfast-table and were leaving the
room.

"No, Lady Earlswood; if you do not mind, I should like

all of you to hear what I have to say."

Lady Earlswood was surprised. Surely his private

communication could not be what she had expected.
However, she at once fell in with his suggestion, and soon
the family party was gathered together in her pretty
boudoir.

Then he told them all; he laid before them the story of

his life; he spoke tenderly of his old father, dwelling on his
self-denying love in bringing him up, and educating him
regardless of expense, and in such a way as to make him
(he was ashamed to own it now) even feel out of place in
his own home, and out of touch with his own father. He said
that he had often wished to tell them of this, but a feeling
of loyalty to his father had held him back from doing so.

Then he went on to the cause of his father's death; he

told them of the telegram, and of the terrible news it
contained; and then he spoke of the consequence of that
news to himself; he said that he was on the point of
throwing up his commission, inasmuch as he could not
possibly live upon his captain's pay; that he must now turn
his attention to something which would be sufficient to
provide for him in a quiet and simple way, and which might
also enable him, by means of the greatest economy, to
repay an obligation incurred by his father some years ago,
and for which, as his son, he felt morally responsible.

They did not interrupt him as he was telling this story,

but listened attentively. Lady Violet, with heightened colour,
turned a little away from him as he was speaking, and as
soon as he had finished, she rose and left the room.
 THEN HE TOLD THEM ALL; HE LAID BEFORE THEM
THE STORY OF HIS LIFE.

Lady Earlswood thanked him for speaking as frankly as

he had done. Of course it was the only right thing to do, for,
in their position of life, there were obligations which they
owed to society, and her husband, the late Earl, being dead,
these obligations of course devolved upon herself. She was
very sorry that circumstances, over which of course he had
no control, had occurred to terminate what had been a very
pleasant acquaintanceship. She wished it could have been
otherwise, but she felt sure he would see with her that she
had no choice in the matter. At the same time she could
only repeat that she was exceedingly sorry, and that she
wished very much that it could have been otherwise.

It was just what Captain Fortescue had expected her to

say, and he was therefore neither surprised nor
disappointed. But he felt, with somewhat of a pang of
regret, that he had come to the last paragraph of that last
page of Volume I of his life, as he rose to take leave of her
and Lady Maude.

Captain Berington, who had not spoken once during the

interview, now told him that he was coming with him to the
station, and would join him in a few minutes. As Kenneth
passed through the inner hall on his way to the door where
the carriage was waiting for him, Lady Violet was just
crossing it. She was still very flushed, and he thought that
she had been crying. He went up to her to say good-bye.

"I think you might have told us all this before," she
said.

"I have only known it three weeks myself, Lady Violet."

"Oh! About the money—yes. But about your father—you

knew that. You see, it has put us in a very unpleasant
position."

"I think I explained to you why I did not tell you before;
it was for my poor old father's sake."

"It makes it awfully hard for us."

"It shall not be harder than I can help, Lady Violet; you
need not be afraid that I shall presume upon our former
acquaintance. I know my altered position, and I shall never
forget it, I hope. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Captain Fortescue."

She did not even shake hands with him as she said it,
but ran swiftly upstairs, and Kenneth passed on through the
marble hall to the carriage waiting at the door.

Captain Berington was most friendly during the drive,

but did not allude to the conversation that had taken place
in his mother's boudoir, until he was standing at the
carriage door just before the train started. Then he grasped
Kenneth's hand, and said—

"You and I can still be friends, Fortescue; of course the

mater has to be particular for the girls' sake, and my
brother, the Earl (you've never met him, I think), is more
particular still; he's obliged to be, I suppose. But I'm only a
younger son, so can do as I like. Good-bye."

The train moved off before Kenneth could answer, and

as it left the station behind, he felt that, in spite of Captain
Berington's friendly words, he had read the very last line of
the last page of Volume I of his life-story, and had come to
Finis.

But as the Captain journeyed on to Aldershot, and

recalled Lady Violet's words, "It makes it awfully hard for
us," he could not help contrasting them with other words,
spoken by another voice, only ten days before, "Please
don't think about us; it is quite hard enough for you."

And, as he thought of the difference between the two

remarks, he mourned less than he would otherwise have
done over the Finis which he had read at the bottom of that
last page.