[She considers him. He waits, confident.] HANNAH Septimus Hodge was the tutor. BERNARD [Quietly.] Attagirl. HANNAH His pupil was the Croom daughter. There was a son at Eton. Sep
timus lived in the house: the pay book specifies allowances for wine and
candles. So, not quite a guest but rather more than a steward.2 His letter of
self-recommendation is preserved among the papers. I'll dig it out for you.
As far as I remember he studied mathematics and natural philosophy at
Cambridge. A scientist, therefore, as much as anything. BERNARD I'm impressed. Thank you. And Chater? HANNAH Nothing. BERNARD Oh. Nothing at all? HANNAH I'm afraid not. BERNARD How about the library? HANNAH The catalogue was done in the 1880s. I've been through the lot. BERNARD Books or catalogue? HANNAH Catalogue. BERNARD Ah. Pity. HANNAH I'm sorry. BERNARD What about the letters? No mention? HANNAH I'm afraid not. I've been very thorough in your period because, of
course, it's my period too. BERNARD Is it? Actually, I don't quite know what it is you're . . . HANNAH The Sidley hermit. BERNARD Ah. Who's he? HANNAH He's my peg3 for the nervous breakdown of the Romantic Imagi
nation. I'm doing landscape and literature 1750 to 1834. BERNARD What happened in 1834? HANNAH My hermit died. BERNARD Of course. HANNAH What do you mean, of course? BERNARD Nothing. HANNAH Yes, you do.
BERNARD No, no . . . However, Coleridge4 also died in 1834. HANNAH So he did. What a stroke of luck. [Softening.] Thank you, Bernard. [She goes to the reading stand and opens Noakes's sketch hook.]
Look?there he is.
[BERNARD goes to look.] BERNARD Mmm.
HANNAH The only known likeness of the Sidley hermit. BERNARD Very biblical.5 HANNAH Drawn in by a later hand, of course. The hermitage didn't yet exist
when Noakes did the drawings.
2. Chief servant. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1722-1834), English 3. On which to hang the argument of a book about Romantic poet. the Romantic Imagination. 5. See p. 2763, n. 6.
.
ARCADIA II.5 / 2771
BERNARD Noakes . . . the painter?
HANNAH Landscape gardener. He'd do these books for his clients, as a sort of prospectus. [She demonstrates.] Before and after, you see. This is how it all looked until, say, 1810?smooth, undulating, serpentine?open water, clumps of trees, classical boat-house?
BERNARD Lovely. The real England.
HANNAH You can stop being silly now, Bernard. English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look?Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil.6 Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires. There's an account of my hermit in a letter by your illustrious namesake.
BERNARD Florence?7 HANNAH What? BERNARD No. You go On. HANNAH Thomas Love Peacock.8 BERNARD Ah yes.
HANNAH I found it in an essay on hermits and anchorites9 published in the Cornhill Magazine in the 1860s . . . [She fishes for the magazine itself among the books on the table, and finds it.] . . . 1862 . . . Peacock calls him [She quotes from memory'.] 'Not one of your village simpletons to frighten the ladies, but a savant1 among idiots, a sage of lunacy.'
BERNARD An oxy-moron,2 so to speak. HANNAH [Busy] Yes. What? BERNARD Nothing. HANNAH [Having found the place.] Here we are. 'A letter we have seen, writ
ten by the author of Heading Hall nearly thirty years ago, tells of a visit to
the Earl of Croom's estate, Sidley Park??' BERNARD Was the letter to Thackeray?3 HANNAH [Brought up short.] I don't know. Does it matter? BERNARD No. Sorry.
[But the gaps he leaves for her are false promises?and she is not quick
enough. That's how it goes.] Only, Thackeray edited the Cornhill until '63 when, as you know, he died. His father had been with the East India Company where Peacock, of course, had held the position of Examiner, so it's quite possible that if the essay were by Thackeray, the letter . . . Sorry. Go on.
Of course, the East India Library in Blackfriars has most of Peacock's letters, so it would be quite easy to . . . Sorry. Can I look? [Silently she hands him the Cornhill.]
6. Hannah sees Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1715?1783), England's most celebrated landscape designer, imitating ('doing') Claude Lorrain (1600?1682), French landscape painter, who was imitating Virgil's Georgics, poems celebrating the country/pastoral life of an idealized Arcadia. 7. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), English nurse considered the founder of modern nursing (Bernard has temporarily forgotten his alias). 8. English novelist and poet (1 785?1866), author of Headlong [not Heading] Hall (1816), and onetime 'Examiner' (investigator) with the British East India Company in India.
9. People who have withdrawn from the world, usually for religious reasons. 1. Learned man. 2. Phrase that seems to contradict itself ('sage of lunacy'), here prompting Bernard's pun on 'moron' (meaning 'idiot'). 3. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), English novelist and poet.
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277 2 / TOM STOPPARD
Yes, it's been topped and tailed, of course. It might be worth . . . Go on. I'm listening . . . [Leafing through
