Saturday, November 12, 2016

A ramble through Rafael’s views of history and current events

Rafael Sabatini put into the mind of Peter Blood a familiar quotation from the seventh epode of Horace, “quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?” It is most apt to the occasion. Blood is watching a rebellion in its early moments, and Horace was protesting against a civil war in Rome. Peter Blood carries a copy of Horace as a vade mecum, and this we learn from the several mentions in the stories of Captain Blood. André-Louis Moreau also reads Horace, but we learn of it only late in Scaramouche the Kingmaker: “She sat sadly dreaming, a book of Horace in her lap, a translation of the Odes. It was not a volume she would have chosen for her own entertainment. Yet it had been her constant companion in these last five months. It had been a favourite with André-Louis; and she read what he had so often read” (Ch. 36).

That does seem an opportunity missed – the chance to link the Roman poet who fought in Brutus’ army but ended under the patronage of Augustus, and André, whose story we know, to good effect. The latter, too, lives in turbulent times and survives dangers arising from his too lucid mind, his striving for balance, his acceptance of some degree of compromise in a situation beyond his control.

Rafael looks at the French Revolution without bias either way. That the ancien régime was unjust, immoral and inhuman is not glossed over. But the rushing of mad men to rend apart their fellow men (and women and children) is not treated with sentimentality. André desires change quite as much as  Philippe de Vilmorin, Isaac Le Chapelier and the unnamed others do, but not change through such violence and insanity, replacing one tyranny with another equally costly in human suffering.

Not every reader of Rafael Sabatini can accept his impartiality – or recognise it. There are always those who prefer to be contrary. One such is the critic who reviewed The Historical Nights’ Entertainment Series 2 in the issue of the
Sunday Times, Sydney, 15 February 1920, on page 19. This is his defence of Jean-Paul Marat and his attack on Rafael for his story The Tyrannicide:
A very much more serious inaccuracy is to be found in the Charlotte Corday story. Here the facts of history are very closely followed, but we have the dreadful bogey-man that in fact Jean Paul Marat never was. The heroic quality of Charlotte is conceded. She quite sincerely believed herself to be the agent of God's justice. But her knife still did away with the life of a great liberator of humanity [God defend humanity from more such liberators.]. For the French Revolution was no Bolshevist movement, even in its extremes. It was no question of a small minority of fierce and unscrupulous men driving a great population to the devil in its own despite.
In France the Revolution was a national movement with the will of the over-powering mass of the people behind it. There were such hideous things as must always befall [how consoling to the victims, who today would be labelled collateral damage] when among revolutionaries there is a certain number of malign and evil men. There was Carrier giving full vent to his horrible homicidal mania on the Loire. There were other such incidents [only incidents!]. But the Revolution as a whole was broad-based on justice and the people's right. It was a revolt against tyranny, class iniquity,
bigotry, superstition, and all that wars against democracy. [text missing in the newspaper] was one of its greatest protagonists. To represent him as a human beast unredeemed by honest quality, a Frankenstein [ignoramus; Frankenstein was the scientist who constructed the unnamed monster] in putrescence — how silly it is, and how unfair.
But your English novelist of the average must write as a good reactionary, or he will promptly lose the suffrages of the respectables. Mr. Sabatini tells a number of famous stories very well, and this sort of book helps many people to get an idea of the picturesque events of history — people who in some cases would be ignorant of history altogether. –
[comments in italics are mine]

Here are two quotations from the writings of Marat:
Five or six hundred [aristocrats’] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers. ~ L'Ami du peuple, vol. 2, p. 1121
I believe in the cutting off of heads. ~ Quoted in Archives parlementaires, vol. 52, p. 158
Surely no more justification is required for Rafael’s view?

Seated at his desk, out of harm’s way, that critic could defend Marat the murderous rabble-rouser. It is nothing new that a ‘man of blood’ should be supported even by those who are not rabble. Rafael himself admired Mussolini at one time, and did not acknowledge his flaws of character and conduct as he did with his other hero, Cesare Borgia. Rafael’s advocacy of the Borgia ruler possibly arose from a realisation - after reading whatever he read, and influenced as he was by William Prescott’s manner of presenting history – that here was a case of prejudiced views handed down unquestioned and even embellished. Rafael also brought to his re-presentation of Cesare Borgia some of the stubbornness which marks his belief in metempsychosis.

But Mussolini was a contemporary. He could be judged by his words and actions.

Ultimately Rafael did quietly cease to support the Italian tyrant – at least in public – yet it is a matter for regret that he had ever praised the man.

Why would a Rafael who wrote as he did about the French Revolution, and who invented an Andr
é-Louis Moreau with his long, nuanced view of history, take such a short-sighted, one-sided view of a dictator who was also a shameless sensualist? Might there be a reason? Perhaps.

Rafael would contribute to charities, but he was opposed to workers demanding a fair wage and just terms of employment by going on strike to press their demand on government. Here is what Jesse F. Knight posted on the Rafael Sabatini Mailing List:
In another place in the 1916 letter Sabatini writes: "Socialism will be rampant presently, and I dread it . . . . It will be like a wild burst[?], drowning and destroying all once it gets out of hand." 31/3/2002
and this:
I remember reading one letter where Sabatini soundly denounced all the strikes that were going on in England. You'll recollect that this was in the 30s, and the Labour movement was using strikes on a regular basis to paralyze the country--coal, rail, you name it. 9/4/2004

Rafael, whose paternal grandfather ran a tailoring establishment and his maternal grandfather a painting and decorating business, he himself beginning his career as a clerk in a mercantile office, was an employer of whom his servants made no complaint, but his letters to them clearly indicate one who believed himself to the manor born. (Clock Mill passed into the hands of a Viscount so Rafael was not so greatly in error!)

He could see the distant past with a fairly clear vision, but current events in a distorting mirror. This is a telling extract from a letter to Monsieur Pleis:
18 Jul 1948

"Nous vous envions vos vacances d’été n Suisse. C’était notre habitude d’aller chaque année à Istria en Août et Septembre pour les bains de mer. Mais à présent il n’y a pas moyen de sortir d’Angleterre en vacances plus d’une fois par an, et même ainsi pour un séjour prolongé à l’Étranger il faut avoir recoure à des subterfuges. Cela pourvu que d’ici là la guerre n’éclate pas de nouveau. Cette fois avec ces barbares muscovites. Mais si ce cataclysme doit venir il vaudrait mieux peut-être qu’il vienne au plus tôt. On affirme qu’il faudra encore trois ans à ces tristes messieurs pour perfectionner la bombe atomique; et je suis d’opinion qu’une fois perfectionnée leur mentalité bestiale n’hésitera pas à l’employer contre tous ceux qui ne partagent pas leur abominable idéologie. Vu cela il vaudrait mieux de prendre les devants."
In sum, the barbarous Russians will require three years to perfect an atomic bomb and with their bestial mentality, these miserable fellows will not hesitate to employ it on all those who do not share their abominable ideology. It would be better to be quicker on the draw.

This is sheer nonsense. Yet, was it Mussolini’s measures against socialists and communists and liberals (even Catholics) that Rafael approved, shutting his mind to the dictator’s xenophobia, his arrogance, his inability to comprehend the real needs of Italians, accepting the fascist and sensualist whom his ally Hitler despised as a clown?

This is a fact about Rafael which is disconcerting and even saddening, but it must be accepted with charitable forbearance as a flawed strand wound in with fine traits of character. Such is the case with most of humankind, and rare are the persons who consciously free themselves of prejudice.

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