Tree by Tolkien (2 page)

There are a few more 'influences' to be noted. The period of Chesterton's early books was also the period of Belloc's
Path to Rome
(1902), the kind of travel book that can be enjoyed even by people who hate travel books. Belloc describes how he finished his military service at Toul, in Alsace, and decided to walk across Switzerland to Rome. There are sketches—by Belloc himself—of great misty views, and the front cover of the first edition (which I bought years ago for two shillings) has a coloured inset of a blue sky with white clouds and a road that goes through a forest on a mountainside. It is 'escape' literature in the best sense, and Belloc never again captured that same invigorating sense of freedom and great open vistas, although he tried hard in
Pour Men
and
The Cruise of the Nona.
I have no idea whether Tolkien ever read
The Path to Rome
(for although I wrote to him and asked him various questions at the time I wrote
The Strength to Dream
—and he answered patiently and kindly—I forgot to ask about 'influences'), but it seems to me that this book above all others could have triggered his lifelong obsession with journeys and heroes who set out to walk towards the mountains.

So, I think, could the work of another writer whose work is never mentioned by respectable critics: Jeffrey Farnol. His first book,
The Broad Highway
, came out in 1910, and brought him overnight fame, running into endless impressions. Farnol used the same plot again and again, always with a certain success, for it possesses a potent charm—the young man setting out on the open road with a few shillings in his pocket, in search of romance, adventure and fortune. The 'adventures'—with highwaymen, Bow Street runners, wicked squires (who have kidnapped fair ladies), bad-tempered pugilists, Regency bucks—may be absurd, and, after the first few books, repetitive, but the real power of the story springs from the poetry of freedom: the hero striding cheerfully along dark lanes in the starlight, watching the sky turn pale and hearing the first birds, then stopping to wash in a brook before he approaches the country inn with the smell of frying bacon floating through the windows... . Anyone who read Farnol in his teens will never forget him. He must have tempted many children to run away from home. Tolkien was eighteen when
The Broad Highway
appeared; I find it inconceivable that he did not read the book and find it absorbing. Another influence—of Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval poetry—is altogether more obvious, and, in my view, less important. Tolkien began as a philologist; his first publication was
A Middle English Vocabulary
in 1922, and his second, an edition of the mediaeval romance
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, (with E. V. Gordon, 1925). There was also an essay on
Chaucer as Philologist
(1934), an essay on
Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics
(1937) and an imitation Anglo-Saxon poem
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son
, (1953). Edmund Wilson quotes a statement prepared for his publishers in which Tolkien refers to
The Lord of the Rings
as a philological game. 'The "stories" were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.' This, it seems to me, is a red-herring, like James's description of
The Turn of the Screw
as 'a fairy-tale, pure and simple'. Tolkien may well have derived enormous pleasure from giving the book another dimension of realism with the invention of Elvish and other 'languages', but this modest statement of its aims is plainly an attempt to disarm hostile critics—as it partly disarmed Wilson.

The influence of Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval poetry on Tolkien is quite clear. To begin with, there is his strong tendency to a backward-looking nostalgia, derived in part from Chesterton and Belloc, and their 'two acres and a cow' Distributism. (One should remember that one of Chesterton's best books is on Chaucer.) Next there is the pleasure in the sensual quality of life in the Middle Ages, as portrayed in its poems—great sides of beef cooking over open fires, magnificent feasts, colourful festivities, and so on. (Mervyn Peake is also fascinated by this world in his
Titus Groan
trilogy.) Finally, there is the element of savagery and wildness: the great battles, the burning of Njal, the bleak open moorlands and the lakes that hold monsters like Grendel (perhaps the creepiest monster in literature outside Frankenstein). It is very much an idealised, Chestertonian mediaevalism, rather like that of T. H. White. From
The Lord of the Rings
, one would gather that Tolkien's interest in the Middle Ages is literary and idealistic, not precise and detailed, like that of G. G. Coulton and Huizinga. And it could be argued that the battle scenes of
The Lord of the Rings
spoil the total effect, that they seem to be part of a completely different book. They certainly interrupt the swift flow of the story. When I first read
The Lord of the Rings
I skipped the whole of the fifth book in order to find out what happens after Frodo is captured by the Orcs, and when I later read it aloud to my children, they again insisted on skipping it. On this occasion, I returned to the fifth book after I had got Frodo and Sam on their road to Mount Doom, but the children seemed to lose interest until we got back to Frodo and Sam.

Finally—in considering 'influences'—one should point out the relationship between Tolkien and T. S. Eliot.
The Waste Land
is an attack on the modern world, and Eliot turns to the past for his symbols of a superior order of reality—the Fisher King, the Rhine maidens, the Grail legend, 'inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold'.

'What does the world say, does the whole world stray in high-powered cars on a by-pass way? ...'

In the essay on fairy tales, Tolkien has some strong words defending the fairy story against charges of 'escapism'. He mentioned that he recently heard 'a clerk of Oxenford' declare that he welcomed 'the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic because it brought his university into "contact with real life" ... .' This view obviously makes Tolkien see red. 'He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression "real life" in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor cars are more "alive" than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more "real" than, say, horses is pathetically absurd.' One sentence has a positively Chestertonian ring: 'Fairy stories may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea'. He argues that talk about 'escapism' is a misuse of language: why shouldn't a man in gaol try to escape? What he is arguing here—although he does not put it in so many words—is that there is escape
from
reality and escape
to
reality, and that what interests him is the escape
to
reality. It is Yeats's argument with the 'socially conscious' writers of the thirties all over again (expressed most typically, perhaps, in
Lapis Lazuli
). Tolkien argues at some length about street lamps and their ugliness, speaking of his 'disgust for so typical a product of the robot age', and on the next page uses one of his favourite images of life, a tree: 'How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree; poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist.' It is amusing to remember the use Chesterton made of the lamp versus tree image in
The Man Who Was Thursday
, when the anarchist declares that the lamp is a symbol of order, ugly and barren when compared with the tree, 'anarchy, splendid in green and gold.' Gabriel Syme, Chesterton's mouthpiece, replies: 'All the same, just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.'

In the same volume as the essay on fairy stories (
Tree and Leaf
) Tolkien includes a short fable, 'Leaf by Niggle', written shortly after publication of
The Hobbit
(1937). This is an odd little work, almost Kafka-esque. It begins typically 'There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make'. But this is not another story of man's search for fairy land. Niggle is a painter who is engaged on a picture that sounds like an illustration for
Lord of the Rings
—mountains, forests, lakes, with an enormous tree in the foreground, a kind of Tree of Life. Niggle is often interrupted by a tiresome neighbour, Parish, a lame man with a sick wife. Parish's only interest is in digging his garden, and he finds Niggle's neglect of his own garden annoying. When he calls on Niggle, he does not even glance at the picture of the tree and fairy landscape. So far, the symbolism is clear enough: Niggle, the visionary artist, but nevertheless a modest little man, working away quietly, minding his own business, trying to capture his vision of fairy land, the 'world of meaning', and Parish, the man-in-the-street, interested only in 'practical' things and always obstructing the artist.

Parish interrupts Niggle as he is trying to finish the picture, and asks him to go and get a doctor for his sick wife. Niggle goes, gets caught in a storm, and catches a cold that confines him to his bed for weeks, destroying his chance of finishing the picture before he sets out on his journey. While he is in bed, a strange Kafka-esque official calls on him and tells him that his neighbour's house is not satisfactory—the implication being that it is Niggle's duty to take care of his neighbour. Niggle's picture would be just the right size to mend a hole in Parish's roof. When Niggle protests 'It's
my
Picture', the Inspector replies 'I dare say it is. But houses come first. That is the law'. The bewildered artist is ordered to start on his journey, and he sets out quite unprepared. The journey is pure Kafka; he is pushed on to a train, gets out at a station where the porter yells 'Niggle', collapses, and is taken to a workhouse infirmary. This turns out to be a kind of prison where he is made to do boring manual tasks (it sounds like a Soviet labour camp) and spends hours locked in his room in the dark. Then some mysterious 'judges' talk about him so he can overhear them. 'His heart was in the right place.' 'Yes, but it did not function properly. And his head was not screwed on tight enough: he hardly ever thought at all ... He never got ready for his journey. He was moderately well off, and yet he arrived here almost destitute ... .' Niggle, it seems, is at fault; but the judges finally agree that he is a good sort and deserves a second chance. 'He took a great deal of pain with leaves.' So Niggle is let out, and sent on another train journey. This time he finds himself in a kind of Happy Land where his tree is an actuality, and behind it is the visionary country of his picture. His old neighbour Parish—who has also been confined in the workhouse for negligence—joins him, and they now work together to build a cottage with a garden. When this is finished—by this time Niggle has become the practical man and Parish something of a dreamer and slacker—Niggle finally goes off towards his goal in the mountains, leaving Parish to live in the cottage with his wife.

Back in Niggle's old house, only a corner of his canvas remains, a single leaf, and this is put into the museum (hence the title of the story). The place that has been created by Niggle and Parish in cooperation becomes known as 'Niggle's Parish'.

It is an odd little story, most disappointing to children. The 'journey' is quite plainly death—in fact, Tolkien makes something say so at the end of the story, where a councilor remarks that Niggle was worthless to society, and ought to have been sent on his journey much earlier, and consigned to the great Rubbish Heap. Like Yeats, Tolkien is continuing his argument with the socially conscious writers of the thirties. But what precisely is he saying? Niggle is an artist and something of a visionary, but all in a rather bumbling, incompetent manner. This incompetence seems to be the root of his trouble. If he were more ruthless, he would tell Parish to go to hell, and finish his picture. But this, Tolkien implies, is the wrong solution. The Niggle-Parish conflict is not really necessary; they
can
collaborate fruitfully, and when they do, it becomes clear that Niggle is Parish's superior.

The final judgement, then, is unexpectedly complex. In the conflict between the artist and society, Tolkien comes down on the artist's side—as is to be expected—but he also blames the artist, implying that if he were less vague and incompetent, he could become something more like a leader of society—without, however, compromising his own basic vision. He does not have to become a servant of the State and paint pictures of tractors ... . But what precisely he is supposed to do is left to the imagination.

(I may point out, in parenthesis, that Tolkien's view agrees, unexpectedly, with Bernard Shaw's—as outlined, for example, in
Major Barbara
, where Shaw declares that the artist must come out of his ivory tower and try to become a dominant figure in the society. The question is of particular concern to me; it was at the core of my first book
The Outsider
(1956)—the problem of the relation between the artist and society. The romantics of the 19th century thought that the artist is at war with society, and must be destroyed by it eventually; this is the theme of all Hoffmann's stories. I suggested—in
The Outsider
and the subsequent five books of the 'cycle'—that the fault lies partly with the artist, for preferring pessimism and self-pity to serious thought, and that the 'outsider' must eventually learn to accept his position as a spiritual leader of society. The church once provided the link between 'outsiders' and society, standing for the world of values, of 'meanings' beyond the present. The artists of the 19th century found themselves without this visible symbol of nonmaterial values, and were, as Hoffmann says, frequently destroyed by society, or by their own destiny of standing outside it. I concluded that they must learn to stand alone, to be twice as strong, for half the problems of our civilisation are due to 'the treason of the intellectual', their tendency to opt out and collapse in self-pity.)