Imaginary Gods

In her Magnificat, the Virgin Mary thanks God for lifting her from her low estate. The God she has in mind will pull down the mighty and raise the meek, feed the hungry and dismiss the rich. His mother's son, Jesus tells a rich questioner that if he wants to get to heaven he must give his money to the poor. But the rich man, preferring the bird in hand, walks sorrowfully away.

A lesson for those who rely on the generosity or enlightened self-interest of the haves. There are two sides to our common humanity: give and take. A generous understanding bv the haves is part of the equation, but that must be at least matched by the enlightened self-interest of the have-nots. The have-nots have numbers as well as right on their side: in the mathematics of an unequal society, those with less than the average are in the majority.

Rereading that story in the gospel of St Luke, I wondered if Mary could have refused God’s generous offer, or whether He would have caught up with her somehow, like Hardy’s poor Tess in the woods. Could Cinders have turned her back on the prince, could Tolstoy’s peasant girls have said ‘No thank you, sir’? Leo believed in peasant simplicity, would pluck a wench between meals and note it in his diary.

Noblesse oblige shades so easily into droit de seigneur! A half-amiable lordling doesn’t have to get away with murder, or even rape, when seduction comes so easily. With wealth and power to speak for him, the slave driver may not have to raise his voice.

In the 1830s, Fanny Kemble, a leading young English actress, was on tour in the United States. She fell in love with a courteous American lawyer, they married and had two children before he inherited his family’s estate in Sea Island Georgia. On the slave plantation, she watched her husband revert to type and realised that she too was a chattel. As a young mother, she felt especially for slave women, who she found giving birth in filth and sent back to work. But she also found that she too was powerless: to teach reading was a crime, for instance, but it would be her husband, who disapproved, not her who answered for it in court.

Unusually for a woman, Fanny Kemble was prepared to go out alone. Perhaps she felt freer away from the house. When she entrusted herself to a slave crew, in an open boat on a stormy river, they registered their astonishment. In another passage, she described the undercurrent of fear she discerned beneath the airs and graces of Southern society, fear of the dark majority. Frances Kemble was not above racism herself. She compares a crippled black boy running across a field to the legs of the Isle of Man. But sympathy overrides conditioning and she defies convention again when she invites the slaves, plantation as well as household workers, to join a Sunday service in the house. This time it is she who seems amazed. She notes a transformation in her unfamiliar guests. For a moment, under one roof with a common intent, all are equal in the eyes of God. Scales of deference and pretence fall away, and they can speak naturally, look each other in the eye.

Ms Kemble left her husband, the plantation, and – I think – her children. Divorced and returned to England, she admired Dickens, gave magisterial readings from Shakespeare and was admired by Henry James. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-9 was published years later in support of the anti-slavery movement. Like Dickens, Fanny Kemble saw free enterprise as a creative, liberating force. Now, recognising capitalism as a driver of new inequalities, we can also note how inequality drives much of 19th century literature. Heathcliff’s implacable revenge in Wuthering Heights has strong elements of class war as well as unrequited love. Dorothea in Middlemarch confronts a combination of gender, age and academic superiority. Across the ocean from Mansfield Park, behind a benefactor’a wealth and the dissolution of his son, lies another slave plantation. And in Mansfield Park, as in Jane Eyre, we have a problem with gratitude. Poor relation and governess-companion might agree that it’s better to give than to receive, as they sink ever deeper in moral debt.

In Dickens Tale of Two cities, repayment is instantaneious. A carriage is caught up in the Paris crowd, something happens - a child run over perhaps - and the aristos in the carriage toss a handful of coins into the crowd. A moment’s pause, then ping as a coin comes back through the carriage window… In Paris 1968, the streets were taken over first by students and intellectuals, then by young people from the suburbs. Cars and busses made better barricades than cobble stones, and the young voyous were good at that. About ten years before, in the battle of Algiers, young criminals rose quickly through the ranks of the FLN, rebels who’d found a cause.

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*Happily or unhappily, sex, even rape, is a longterm leveller, genes oblivious to inequalities of wealth, rank or race. Otherwise apartheid might have worked; slaves, other races or classes might be for ever separate, subordinate, condemned to perpetual servitude or extermination.