Then why does our man hold it?
‘Devil’s Ballroom’ and ‘Devil’s Ravine’
Naming the vastnesses! What does he mean?
‘Shambles’, the dogs explain that name
Where they lie butchered – exhausted and lame
With bringing him up! …
Over the tent and into the tent
Floats the wonderful Cup
Hovers and touches those that lie prone
And then to the Master – who sits alone
Fire – Blood – or Wine?
He sees right into the Thing Divine
For he sits up
Into his hands – the Holy Grail
Into his body – cease of pain
Into his heart – a voice says ‘Hail’
And he knows he has won that Cup.
Amundsen says he won the Cup
Then why does our man hold it?
If ever a man needed saving from the enthusiasm of his admirers, in fact, it was Scott. During the course of his life the impassioned support of Sir Clements Markham would invariably be as much a liability as a help, and in death the jingoistic and imperialist uses to which his name and story were pressed guaranteed that when the reaction came it would be bitter and violent. ‘I found an essentially little man,’ Trevor Griffiths, the dramatist and influential populariser of the hostile modern ‘Scott myth’, wrote in 1985, ‘of deeply ordinary talent: light, conventional, fearful, uncertain, manipulative, ill-tempered, irrational, secretive, driven, at times touching in his misery, trapped inside a particular class-specific Englishness, unequipped, uncharismatic.’
Were the sentiments expressed in E. Clacy’s poem the only ones heard at Scott’s death, the backlash that has seen his reputation plummet over the last years might be understandable; but his tragedy touched the popular imagination in ways that had nothing to do with imperial destiny, ‘class-specifics’ or ‘Englishness’. The race for the Poles in the Heroic Age of Exploration had certainly excited intense national rivalries, but as the telegrams, donations and letters of condolence poured in from Toronto and Lyttelton, and from Tempico and Christiania, all that was forgotten in a sympathy that predicates a shared – and almost proprietorial – pride in his end.
This picture of universal sorrow is not the whole story, of course – even in these first days the doubts and questions were there – but when Dean Inge declared Scott’s triumph over the grave, it was not just an expression of Christian hope but an absolute conviction that Death had no sting to wound a man who had lived and died as Scott. When he was interviewed in New York, Shackleton might publicly wonder how Scott’s party could have succumbed to a mere blizzard, but not in even his most sanguine moments could he have seen what would happen, or anticipate his own posthumous metamorphosis from Edwardian freebooter into middle-management guru while the beau ideal of English chivalry became a byword for bungling incompetence.
There are few things that more poignantly signal the remoteness of Dean Inge’s age from our own, because while nothing is more inevitable or healthier than historical revisionism, what has happened to Scott’s reputation requires some other label. It might seem odd from this distance that neo-Georgian England should find in a Darwin-carrying agnostic of Scott’s cast the type of Christian sacrifice, but the historical process that has shrunk the rich, complex and deeply human set of associations that once clustered round his story into an allegory of arrogance, selfishness and moral stupidity is every bit as extraordinary. How has a life that was once seen as a long struggle of duty been transformed into the embodiment of self-interested calculation? How has the name of the meticulous and ‘cautious explorer’ his men followed become synonymous with reckless waste? How has the son and husband his mother and wife described become the type of English emotional inadequacy? By what process does a tenderness for animal life become a pathological disorder that belongs to the psychology of military incompetence? What is it that stops a whole age hearing in the cadences, the measure and the sentiment of Scott’s last harrowing appeal to the public, the words of the dying Hamlet?
The most tempting answer is suggested by the cultural and political overtones implicit in Trevor Griffiths’ use of the word ‘Englishness’, because if Scott was once celebrated as the incarnation of everything an Englishman should be, he is now damned as the sad embodiment of everything he actually was. It is very hard to imagine that Scott’s reputation would have taken the battering it has if he had been Irish or Australian, but in his real and perceived ‘Englishness’ the hero of St Paul’s has answered the revisionist needs of a post-colonial age as perfectly as General Gordon once did those of Bloomsbury.
But if the historiography of the Heroic Age has always been as political as the expeditions themselves – polar archives bear witness to that – it would be too easy to take this as the full answer. From the early 1960s historians and biographers were constantly exploiting one or other partisan line, yet buried beneath their different cultural or partisan agenda lies a more fundamental lack of sympathy for Scott’s age that has nothing to do with nationality or bias.
In many ways, of course, the simple truth is that we know more about Scott’s weaknesses and the failures of his leadership than did the congregation at St Paul’s, but it is not that we see him differently from the way they did, but that that we see him the same, and instinctively do not like it. As an age we no longer hear what A.C. Bradley called the ‘Othello Music’ of high eloquence, no longer, mercifully, believe it. At the time of Scott’s death men and women clutched at the proof he offered that the qualities that had once made Britain great were not extinct, but with the knowledge of what lay only two years ahead – the hidebound failure of Jutland, the hopeless heroism and obscene waste of the Western Front – the ideals of duty, self-sacrifice, discipline, patriotism and hierarchy associated with his tragedy take on a different and more sinister colouring. This is too seminal and too valid an insight to give up, but somewhere between the Scott of St Paul’s and the Scott of modern myth lies a profoundly more complex and interesting figure. Of all the explorers of the Heroic Age he is the most interesting, and if Scott had never gone to the Pole, and we had never heard of him, his life, with its alternating rhythms of obscurity and fame, of duty and ambition, of success and failure and the corrosive temptations of them both, would still be the stuff of the English novel from George Eliot to George Gissing.
It was Scott’s fate, however, to be plucked from the pages of a domestic novel and placed, quite literally, between the covers of an A.E.W. Mason tale of heroic adventure. It is the moral of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in reverse: a life destined for Stoke Poges rerouted to St Paul’s. This is its fascination. It would be moving enough in any context, but set it against its Antarctic background, against a world where every hairline crack becomes a fissure, every inadequacy is ruthlessly exposed, every motive publicly interrogated and every resource of moral and physical courage challenged, and one has the unique appeal of Scott’s story.
‘To me, and perhaps to you,’ wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the party who found the frozen bodies of Scott and his companions, ‘the interest in this story is the men, and it is the spirit of the men.’ Of no one is this more true than of Scott himself. It is this that makes a rounded sense of his whole life and personality so crucial to any understanding of the successes and failures of his two great expeditions. History can take one so far; science can answer so many questions. But those ultimate questions that still swirl about Scott’s last tent can be resolved by neither. They belong to a sense of Scott the man and to the imagination in a way that lifts his story out of the esoterica of polar history and places it in the mainstream of human experience.
There was a time, and