The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles Read Free

of himself as a scientific young man and would probably not have
been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of the airplane,
the jet engine, television, radar: what would have astounded him was the
changed attitude to time itself. The supposed great misery of our century
is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science,
and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the
ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things--as
if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity,
but to a perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his
contemporaries and social peers, the time signature over existence was
firmly adagio. The problem was not fitting in all that one wanted to do,
but spinning out what one did to occupy the vast colonnades of leisure
available.
 
 
    One of the commonest symptoms
of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it was tranquil
boredom. It is true that the wave of revolutions in 1848, the memory of
the now extinct Chartists, stood like a mountainous shadow behind the period;
but to many--and to Charles--the most significant thing about those distant
rumblings had been their failure to erupt. The 'sixties had been indisputably
prosperous; an affluence had come to the artisanate and even to the laboring
classes that made the possibility of revolution recede, at least in Great
Britain, almost out of mind. Needless to say, Charles knew nothing of the
beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon
in the British Museum library; and whose work in those somber walls was
to bear such bright red fruit. Had you described that fruit, or the subsequent
effects of its later indiscriminate consumption, Charles would
almost certainly not have
believed you--and even though, in only six months from this March of 1867,
the first volume of Kapital was to appear in Hamburg.
    There were, too, countless
personal reasons why Charles was unfitted for the agreeable role of pessimist.
His grandfather the baronet had fallen into the second of the two great
categories of English country squires: claret-swilling fox hunters and
scholarly collectors of everything under the sun. He had collected books
principally; but in his latter years had devoted a deal of his money and
much more of his family's patience to the excavation of the harmless hummocks
of earth that pimpled his three thousand Wiltshire acres.
    Cromlechs and menhirs, flint
implements and neolithic graves, he pursued them ruthlessly; and his elder
son pursued the portable trophies just as ruthlessly out of the house when
he came into his inheritance. But heaven had punished this son, or blessed
him, by seeing that he never married. The old man's younger son, Charles's
father, was left well provided for, both in land and money.
    His had been a life with
only one tragedy--the simultaneous death of his young wife and the stillborn
child who would have been a sister to the one-year-old Charles. But he
swallowed his grief. He lavished if not great affection, at least a series
of tutors and drill sergeants on his son, whom on the whole he liked only
slightly less than himself. He sold his portion of land, invested shrewdly
in railway stock and un-shrewdly at the gambling-tables (he went to Almack's
rather than to the Almighty for consolation), in short lived more as if
he had been born in 1702 than 1802, lived very largely for pleasure ...
and died very largely of it in 1856. Charles was thus his only heir; heir
not only to his father's diminished fortune--the baccarat had in the end
had its revenge on the railway boom--but eventually to his uncle's very
considerable one. It was true that in 1867 the uncle showed, in spite of
a comprehensive reversion to the
claret, no sign of dying.
    Charles liked him, and his
uncle liked Charles. But this was by no means always apparent in their
relationship. Though he