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| Photo courtesy of Devin Langham |
So suggesting a clarinet is probably a bit of a waste of time, since clarinets also require blowing. The word clarinet used to be spelt, if Charles Dickens is anything to go by, as 'clarionet'. I'm reading Little Dorrit at the moment, and finding it a bit slow. Dorrit is one of Dickens' unspeakably righteous people - the trouble is, we just don't believe in her. She's too goody-good for this world, or even the next. Maybe Dickens thought that giving her some scenes in which she expresses her sadness at the restrictions of her life might help; they don't. And her eventual husband, Arthur Clennam, is much the same. He seems almost without personality. There's one scene where he fancies that it might be nice to fall in love with the daughter of a friend. The girl is twenty years younger than him, and Clennam decides it probably isn't a good idea. I suppose all of us have had that kind of thought at some time in our lives: what it would be like to fall in love with someone different to the person we seem to be in love with (Clennam must know he's in love with Little Dorrit by this stage of the book, so it's odd that he speculates like this). But falling straight out of the thought again, as Clennam does, is a little too sudden. Most of us would give it a day's reflection, or two.
Straying from the topic a bit tonight: I started to talk about Dickens' using the word, clarionet. He has a character who plays clarionet in a pit (theatre) orchestra. His description of this man's life is wonderful, and makes up for all the soppy stuff about Little Dorrit and her forty-year-old lover boy. In this extract, Little Dorrit goes to find her sister at the theatre (her sister's a 'professional').
Little Dorrit, as her eyes became used to
the darkness, faintly made him [her uncle] out at the bottom of the well, in an obscure
corner by himself, with his instrument in its ragged case under his arm. The
old man looked as if the remote high gallery windows, with their little strip
of sky, might have been the point of his better fortunes, from which he had
descended, until he had gradually sunk down below there to the bottom. He had
been in that place six nights a week for many years, but had never been
observed to raise his eyes above his music-book, and was confidently believed to
have never seen a play. There were legends in the place that he did not so much
as know the popular heroes and heroines by sight, and that the low comedian had
'mugged' at him in his richest manner fifty nights for a wager, and he had
shown no trace of consciousness. The carpenters had a joke to the effect that
he was dead without being aware of it; and the frequenters of the pit supposed
him to pass his whole life, night and day, and Sunday and all, in the
orchestra. They had tried him a few times with pinches of snuff offered over
the rails, and he had always responded to this attention with a momentary
waking up of manner that had the pale phantom of a gentleman in it: beyond this
he never, on any occasion, had any other part in what was going on than the
part written out for the clarionet; in private life, where there was no part
for the clarionet, he had no part at all. Some said he was poor, some said he
was a wealthy miser; but he said nothing, never lifted up his bowed head, never
varied his shuffling gait by getting his springless foot from the ground.
Though expecting now to be summoned by his niece, he did not hear her until she
had spoken to him three or four times; nor was he at all surprised by the
presence of two nieces instead of one, but merely said in his tremulous voice,
'I am coming, I am coming!' and crept forth by some underground way which
emitted a cellarous smell. 'And so, Amy,' said her sister, when the three
together passed out at the door that had such a shame-faced consciousness of being
different from other doors...
And that mention of the door reminds me of a slightly earlier passage, when Dorrit turns up at the stage door...
Little Dorrit was almost as ignorant of the
ways of theatres as of the ways of gold mines, and when she was directed to a
furtive sort of door, with a curious up-all-night air about it, that appeared
to be ashamed of itself and to be hiding in an alley, she hesitated to approach
it; being further deterred by the sight of some half-dozen close-shaved
gentlemen with their hats very strangely on, who were lounging about the door,
looking not at all unlike Collegians. On her applying to them, reassured by
this resemblance, for a direction to Miss Dorrit, they made way for her to
enter a dark hall--it was more like a great grim lamp gone out than anything
else--where she could hear the distant playing of music and the sound of
dancing feet. A man so much in want of airing that he had a blue mould upon
him, sat watching this dark place from a hole in a corner, like a spider; and
he told her that he would send a message up to Miss Dorrit by the first lady or
gentleman who went through. The first lady who went through had a roll of
music, half in her muff and half out of it, and was in such a tumbled condition
altogether, that it seemed as if it would be an act of kindness to iron her.
But as she was very good-natured, and said, 'Come with me; I'll soon find Miss
Dorrit for you,' Miss Dorrit's sister went with her, drawing nearer and nearer
at every step she took in the darkness to the sound of music and the sound of
dancing feet.
The delightful incidental touches are what makes Dickens so great: 'a curious up-all-night air', 'more like a great grim lamp gone out', 'a man so much in want of airing that he had a blue mould upon him', 'in such a tumbled condition altogether, that it seemed as if it would be an act of kindness to iron her.' Who else has ever been able to write like this?
