Vol. 39 No. 2 1972 - page 166

166
STEPHEN SPENDER
chambers in the Temple, in the city of London. Melville, carousing
with these jovial lawyers, recalls that the Templars are descendants of
the Knights-Templars. Here they are reduced from "carving out
immortal fame in glorious battle for the Holy Land," to the "carving
of roast mutton at a dinner board." Melville moralizes about
this
decline and sees it as symptomatic. For what place is there for the
Templars today? How could they be expected to survive into the
twentieth century? He visualizes: "Templars crowded in a railway
train, till, stacked with steel helmet, spear and shield, the whole train
looks like one elongated locomotive!"
There follows a description of the sumptuous dinner of several
courses served in dishes which Melville imagines moving like artillery
across the heavily furnished dining-room table. These paradisal bache–
lors, the nineteenth-century descendants of the Knights of old, with no
wives or children to give anxious thought to, no cares or responsibilities
of any kind, have,
it
seems, shut out from their lives "the thing called
pain, the bugbear styled trouble" - those two legends seemed pre–
posterous to their bachelor imaginations. How couid men of liberal
sense, ripe scholarship in the world, and spacious philosophical and
convivial understanding - how could they suffer themselves to be
imposed upon by such monkish fables? Pain! Trouble!
As
well
talk
of Catholic miracles. No such thing. - "Pass the sherry, sir. - Pooh,
pooh! Can't be!"
This fable shows nineteenth-century England as rich, sterile, com–
placent, hospitable: stuffed with rich foods and surrounded with thick
walls and heavy furnishings which shut out all human miseries and
stifle the need for Christian charity.
In contrast to this picture of English steak-and-claret complacent
self-congratulation, there follows, in "The Tartarus of Maids," a
scene set in a part of New England becoming industrialized. No two
things could be more different than the New England and the Lon–
don shown here, and yet they are conspiratorially and darkly related.
There is a sinister gorge among mountains with features malignly
named: the Black Notch, Devil's Dungeon, the Mad Maid's Bellow
Pipe, Blood River, etc. The sexuality is of the taunting kind which
challenges the middle-class reader to admit his own dirty-mindedness
if
he thinks evil when reading these names. Near the bottom of the
valley there is a large, white-washed building, a paper
mill.
The
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