14 March: Boreham on Mark Rutherford

A Literary Transparency
Today we mark the anniversary of the death of an English writer of such crystal purity that he stands with Bunyan in a class apart. For Mark Rutherford, like his illustrious predecessor, was the soul of simplicity. He hated fuss, formality, and fame. He concealed his personality behind a pen-name. In that picturesque Sussex countryside in which so much of his sheltered life was spent, there were scores of intelligent and educated people who had no idea that the Mr. William Hale White whom they met every day smoking his quiet pipe on the village green or along the lane, was the Mark Rutherford whose delightful contributions were the chief attractions of their magazines and whose books were rapidly rising to the rank of English classics.

Living in a dreamy, old-fashioned cottage at Groombridge, one of the most charming and idyllic spots in the south of England, he breathed every day the fragrance of the hops, the clover, the new mown hay, and the primrosed woods. He could seldom be enticed to social functions, and rarely, if ever appeared in public. Perfect felicity was his only so long as he was permitted to enjoy his seclusion undisturbed. When the prying world did contrive to catch a glimpse of him, it was startled. A ruddy, robust, almost sailor-like man, he contrasted so strikingly with the impression that he had given of himself in his books.

All History Incarnate In The Individual
As he lived, so he wrote. There is not a stilted or highfalutin' phrase in any of his volumes. He pruned each sentence with pitiless severity until it said, with diaphanous clarity, exactly what he wished it to say—nothing more and nothing less. He argued that, since the thing he was writing was true, he dared not hamper the truth by elaborate and ambiguous terminology. The path of a cannon-ball, he said, is straight in exact proportion to its velocity. His novels stand unique in literature. They are so guileless and so artlessly developed that you scarcely realise, as you lay one down, that you have been reading a novel at all. It is like a draught of cold water to a parched tongue. One whose palate is accustomed to highly effervescent beverages may miss the sparkle and the tang; but they will be surprised to find their new fancy so satisfying and refreshing. In Mark Rutherford the plot is never a roaring torrent, surging through narrow channels and tumbling over precipitous falls; it is like the gentle trout-streams of his own secluded countryside, smooth, winding, graceful, and flowing with consummate ease. The things of which he writes are simple things; the scenes simple scenes; the people simple people.

He exalted this idea to the level of a philosophy of life. In his "Revolution in Tanner's Lane" he argues that the inner experience of the most commonplace boy or girl is a cross-section of the history of the universe. In every village and hamlet, he maintains, you may find, if you have eyes to see it, the Garden of Eden, the murder of Cain, the Deluge, the salvation of Noah, the exodus from Egypt, the epic of David and Bathsheba with the murder of Uriah, the Assyrian invasion, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Resurrection, to say nothing of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Inquisition in Spain, the Revolt in the Netherlands and the French Revolution. To Mark Rutherford each separate human represents all humanity in a cameo.

Artificiality The Enemy Of Beauty
One of his earliest works is entitled "Births, Deaths,and Marriages." It is suggested by the fact that he was for some time a clerk at Somerset House. "And there, in Somerset House," he says, "lies the real history of the English people. My life's epochs are my birth, my marriage, and the memorable days when Tom and Jack, Susan and Jane came into the world and gathered around me. The history of the nation may be in Hume or Macaulay, but the history of the people is in the Registrar-General's vaults at Somerset House." In every one of his novels he strikes the same note. He pooh-poohs pomps and pageants: he glorifies men and women. In one of his books he tells of a little servant girl whose mistress had bought a new hat a day or two earlier. "Lor, miss," the girl exclaims, "you haven't looked at your hat today!" "No, Mary," the lady replies, "why should I? I didn't want to go out." "Oh, how can you, miss?" answers the maid, "why I get mine out and look at it every night!" Mary, Mark Rutherford explains, was happy for a whole fortnight with a happiness cheap at a very high price. Such innocent joys were the light of Mark Rutherford's eyes. Confronted by the glare of public life, he blinked like an owl dragged from the darkness of its hollow tree into the broad glare of noon. Parliamentary practices completely baffled him. He could never see how honest men could storm at each other across the floor of the House and then walk off to dinner arm in arm!

Everybody knows the lovely story of the way in which Theodore Watts-Dunton, the novelist and literary critic, pitied the frailties of Algernon Swinburne—lonely, deaf, miserable, and tormented by an incurable malady—and took him into his own home at Putney. The two little old men one day conceived a fancy to meet Mark Rutherford and invited him to "The Pines." "Do you read the new novels?" asked Watts-Dunton of his guest. "No," replied Mark Rutherford, "I am getting to be an old man: I read my Bible!" "Ah," responded Watts-Dunton, "that's exactly what I do!" In that temper he serenely ended his days. Just before he died he wrote to "The Times" to protest against the artificial ornamentation of the London parks. "We do not want Paris or Versailles," he insisted, "but a place of which we can say that it is just like being in the country." This was Mark Rutherford, delightfully natural, utterly unaffected, as genuine as a man could be. Literature and life are both the better for a few such men who, saying exactly what they think, think exactly what they say.

F W Boreham

Image: Mark Rutherford/William Hale White