Ivy Compton-Burnett: Dolores

What Dolores lacks that George Eliot’s novels, even her first ones, pre-eminently have, is the richness of detail, the patient construction of effect blended with exploratory pause, the ample and leisurely pace so characteristic of the Victorians, who so frequently complained of the increased tempo of modern life. But Dolores was written in the twentieth century, and no matter how it leans backward to adopt the stances of an earlier fiction, its subject is too big for its length. Some chapters read like outlines for chapters. There are many undeveloped characters, truncated scenes, phrases which intimate issues that a paragraph should expound. The effect is that of a remarkable intelligence exercised perversely and uncomfortably. Dame Ivy’s imagination did not respond to the philosophical, the sociological, the theological; but her admiration for George Eliot led her to adopt just those biases, and she could flesh them out only meagerly.

There are other aspects of Dolores , besides its being so marked as influenced, that indicate its interesting immaturity. It seems that the author did not know what kind of novel she wanted to write, and the fact that, on her own evidence, her brother had some share in the composition of the work, may further have clouded her aim. Dolores is intermittently a Bildungsroman, a domestic drama, a comedy of manners, and, if one judged only by the first three chapters, a religious novel, of Church versus Chapel. It is a mélange of moods as well as of modes; passages of alert bright comedy are side by side with the meditative, the dour, the lugubrious. The character of Dolores is presented with morethan-Victorian sentimentality; she suffers, and suffers, and suffers. The young ComptonBurnett often describes where it would be more effective to dramatise, and she will talk a character out of existence where he should be talking himself into it. In Chapter I especially, there are excessively long descriptions of several quite minor characters. Surely the most bizarre element in the compound of Dolores is the Gothicism of the Claverhouse family, wizened ninety-year-old Janet Claverhouse and her deformed son, the genius Sigismund. Their macabre daily life, as described in Chapter V, makes them the oddest household in twenty novels devoted to the eccentricities of families.

What the beginning author has to find is his unique tone. Once he knows what he sounds like, the rest follows. To begin as a writer is to get in touch with one’s self, to learn what is one’s own most truthful and natural voice. The uncertainties listed in the last paragraph are peripheral matters compared with the uncertainties of tone. Several styles, in addition to the Eliot imitations already noted, jostle one another in the pages of Dolores— the jaunty, the glum, the intense, the urbane, the impressive. There are many bad sentences like the following:

But as the days passed, they carried with them that which was of them. (Note the five pronouns. Chapter IX.) … Dolores’ time was her own from dawn to dusk. Her purpose was not of the things to which Dolores was easily blind. (This means that Dolores knew her purpose. Chapter VII.) But there was no place in Dolores’ soul, for remorse for that which was wrought with pain for the sake of conscience. (Three ‘for’s’. Chapter XI)

He [the Very Revd. James Hutton] was yet in the prime of his pomposity and portliness, his fondness for kindly patronage, and his contentment with himself and his ecclesiastical condition. (Alliteration is used heavily throughout Dolores . Chapter VII.)

There are unconvincing verbal tics used to identify a character (Mr Blackwood, Mrs MertonVane, Soulsby). And there is much else one could say about the abstract, the pretentious, the wordy, the opaque. But what is curiously impressive, in fact the glory of these errors, is the determination, the energy, the psychic vigour they show.

In the long run, the sixty years’ run, she did not settle for any received style, any received notion. She found her own voice by abandoning the voices of the past, the revered dead masters of dead prose. In Dolores she tested them. Fourteen years later, in Pastors and Masters , she had fully attained her own, if still shaky, tone. In the nineteen novels subsequent to Dolores George Eliot is mentioned once; a ridiculous and self-loving lady, Gertrude Doubleday in Manservant and Maidservant , fancies and encourages a resemblance between herself and the great Victorian, and serves tea under her portrait.

Comedy is the purge for the pretences of Dolores , for the verbose and the quasi-philosophic; comedy is the mode adopted for the later nineteen. It has already asserted itself in Dolores (and this may be what, in Dolores , finally interests us most): no novel with a character named Perdita Claverhouse can be entirely glum. In the satire of high-minded gentlemen like Mr Blackwood and Dr Cassell; in the verbal wars between the two sisters Mrs Hutton and Mrs Blackwood, acid antagonists; in the aggressive witty candour of Elsa Blackwood or the smoother more absurd wit of Felicia Murray — in these the comedy of the future is predicted. Mr Blackwood is a first run-through of the ninny type, like Peter Bateman in Brothers and Sisters ; Sigismund Claverhouse is the first of countless writers, culminating in Hereward Egerton in the nineteenth novel, A God and his Gifts ; Elsa and Felicia are prototypes of the truth-speaking sophisticates who will offer their witty opposition to family tyrants in every subsequent work.

There are other minor foreshadowings, situational devices that will be used dozens of times, such as servants listening at keyholes (Julia, the serving woman of the Claverhouses) or fateful discovered documents (Perdita’s tragic diary of her marriage, read after her death by her husband). But it is the comedy that counts. The proportion of melodrama to comedy in Dolores is, perhaps, three to one; in the later novels, this proportion is reversed and increased — for one page of heavy drama bristling with rhetoric there are ten or twenty where wit dominates. Not that the two elements are so sharply demarcated as this would sound: nonetheless the supreme moments in the novels are those when everything stops and pure comedy reigns.

It begins in Dolores , markedly with the chorus of schoolmistresses, whose wit must surely be Dame Ivy’s own, unaided by her brother or anyone else. One cannot claim for the schoolmistresses the comic quality of, for example, the exchanges between Mortimer Lamb and the butler Bullivant in Manservant and Maidservant or the luncheon party in Elders and Betters . But one can claim a good deal. Here is the end of Dolores:

“You are experienced in people’s manners of offering their hands, then, Miss Cliff?” said Miss Greenlow, in tones of polite comment.

“Ah! The cat is out of the bag,” said Miss Dorington.

“No,” said Miss Cliff, with easy laughter. “I have no right to speak as one having authority.”

“Ah! That is all very well now,” said Miss Dorington. “You certainly spoke in an unguarded moment with no uncertain sound.”

“How many of us have that right, I wonder,” said Miss Lemaître.

“I suspect Miss Adam,” said Miss Greenlow, shaking her head.

“Miss Adam, you are a marked character,” said Miss Cliff.”

“Clearly we are right, Miss Lemaître,” said Miss Greenlow; as Miss Adam yielded without great unwillingness to the impulse to look conscious.

“Anyhow we are rude,” said Miss Dorrington genially.

“Oh, we can surely talk to young people, as old women may,” said Miss Cliff.

“If youth is the qualification, Miss Hutton is the fittest mark for our elderly interest,” said Miss Lemaître.