OPENING LINES:
(FOGGY) PASSAGES FOR ANALYSIS

Life in the Iron-Mills
by Rebecca Harding Davis

Bleak House
by Charles Dickens

The Chrysanthemums
by John Steinbeck

Life in the Iron-Mills (1860)
by Rebecca Harding Davis


"Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?"


A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?
The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air
is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It
stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely
see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd
of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their
pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells
ranging loose in the air.

The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in
slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and
settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke
on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,--
clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two
faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of
mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street,
have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside,
is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the
mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted
and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately
in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is
a very old dream,--almost worn out, I think.

From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down
to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river,
dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself
sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-
barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a
look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river
slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the
same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window
I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and
morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted
faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or
cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and
ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired
by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy
to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness
for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that,
amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing
to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--
horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My
fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a
life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that
beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens,
dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing
crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and mountains. The future
of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be
stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the
muddy graveyard, and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor
curious roses.

Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping
the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty
back-yard and the coalboats below, fragments of an old story
float up before me,--a story of this house into which I happened
to come to-day. You may think it a tiresome story enough, as
foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or
pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long
since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly
lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives,
like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-
butt.--Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my
friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a
moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to
do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean
clothes, and come right down with me,--here, into the thickest
of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this
story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that
has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to
you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making
straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it
clearly,--this terrible question which men here have gone mad
and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into
words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with
drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it
of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it.
There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great
hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that
this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the
sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of
its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known
of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but
will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul
and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with
death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no
perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that
shall surely come. . . .

(Complete story appears at Project Gutenberg site.)

Bleak House (1853)
by Charles Dickens


CHAPTER I

In Chancery

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As
much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired
from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to
meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from
chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of
soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into
mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed
to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one
another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper,
and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and
sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding
new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at
those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating
at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among
green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls
deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside
pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex
marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the
cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on
the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships;
fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners,
wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem
and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper,
down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching
the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice
boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the
parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round
them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the
misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the
streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields,
be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the
shops lighted two hours before their time--as the gas
seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is
densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that
leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for
the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple
Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High
Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there
come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and
floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery,
most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the
sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor
ought to be sitting her--as here he is--with a foggy glory
round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and
curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers,
a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly
directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof,
where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon
some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought
to be--as here they are--mistily engaged in one of the
ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one
another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in
technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded
heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity
with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon
the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of
whom have inherited it from their fathers, who
made a fortune by it, ought to be--as are they not?--ranged
in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain
for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red
table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers,
rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references
to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense,
piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting
candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it,
as if it would never get out; well may the
stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light
of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the
streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door,
be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the
drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais
where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that
has no light in it and where the attendant wigs
are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery,
which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in
every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every
madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its
ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress
borrowing and begging through the round of every man's
acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means
abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts
finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain
and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man
among its practitioners who would not give--who does not
often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done
you rather than come here!"

(Complete novel appears at Project Gutenberg site.)

The Chrysanthemums (1938)
by John Steinbeck

The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world.  On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made the great valley a closed pot.  On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shinning like metal where the shares had cut.  On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was not sunshine in the valley now in December.  The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves.

    It was a time of quiet and of waiting.  The air was cold and tender.  A light wind blew up from the southwest so that farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain do not go together.

    Across the river, on Henry Allen's foothill ranch there was little work to be done, for the hay was cut and stored and the orchards were plowed up to receive the rain deeply when it should come.  The cattle on the higher slopes were becoming shaggy and rough-coated.

    Elisa Allen, working in her flower garden, looked down across the yard and saw Henry, her husband, talking to two men in business suits.  The three of them stood by the tractor shed, each man with one foot on the side of the little Fordson.  They smoked cigarettes and studied the machine as they talked.

    Elisa watched them for a moment and then went back to her work.  She was thirty-five. Her face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water.  Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man's black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clod-hopper shoes, a figure print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, the seeds and the knife she worked with.  She wore heavy leather gloves to protect her hands while she worked.

    She was cutting down the old year's chrysanthemum stalks with a pair of short powerful scissors.  She looked down toward the men by the tractor shed now and then.  Her face was eager and mature and handsome; even her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful.  The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy.

   She brushed a cloud of hair out of her eyes with the back of her glove, and left a smudge of earth on her cheek in doing it.  Behind her stood the neat white farm house with red geraniums close-banked around it as high as the windows.  It was a hard-swept looking little house, with hard-polished windows, and a clean mud-mat on the front steps. . . .

(Complete story appears in The Portable Steinbeck.)

English 5730 is taught by Dr. Richard Nordquist.
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Savannah, Georgia 31419
912/921 5991

      

                                       

02 January 2005