Through the months of labor over the new edition Marett had pleased Tylor immensely with his ready knowledge of languages and his exacting care over word and phrase. PC was the intellectual equivalent of a proud peacock’s fan: blind to the passion of his literary vanity, with the motley phantasms of primitive belief Tylor shamelessly displayed his true colors, by rights, the man should have been a Swinburne. With PC he had insensibly become captivated by the pleasures of collection and manufacture, fashioning a machine for stamping out error in all its forms and all the while so devilishly clever in projecting those forms before the reader, as if his real purpose were to offer the world a zootrope carnival of clownish antics. He had lost the sense of discovery and free speculation on the ways of man, all the tentative searching that had made his first two books worthy the labor. And Tylor, he imagined, with a glimmer of just how wrong he had gone. ![]() PC-a neat pile of MS on a side table, tied with a black ribbon as if it were a sacred codex or a sheaf of bank notes. Maybe the creature he would come to know as Robert Ranulph Marett, weird elongated man with a Jersey drawl and rounded shoulders, a Jack in the Beanstalk who would be giant or at least the giant killer. His own idea, or idea that owned him-some latest animism, a shapeless phantom that hovered among the spirits and made them move and live. And there must be, too, a shadowy figure hovering there, reflex of Tylor’s consciousness or the vague stalking nemesis from which it composed itself. Or among the moving flames the words of PC floated in broken ribbons and spurs, the stuff wanting to precipitate into lurid figures in the air, fire the reagent that would resurrect spirits from dead letters. The least word would be infinitely precious: ““Margaret!” “Remember Father” “Love your Savior.” A dark-haired young man of solemn face signaling for hands to be joined and silence to be observed as his mistress prepared to divine, to speak, to pass on sentences from the dead. At the head, a woman with pale mottled skin who assumed a saint-like, matronly dignity. A gentleman of scientific inclinations, setting up a photographic apparatus. Around a table, a widow in her weeds, a man retired from business, a young lady of apparent distinction. There would be hoof-clatter and steel wheels and the driver’s calls as the omnibus from Paddington sped through the street amidst jingling bells and a sliding of shadow and light, in a hurry to meet the trains. ![]() It was evening by now, the fire lit, and he turned to gaze on the dancing flames. Tylor had been gazing from the window or contemplating the small mountain-range of correspondence, missionary narratives, colonial reports, and copied-out quotations gathered under his latest rubric and wondering whether construing yet another heading for a book already damnably Hydra-like he might in some fashion be losing his own, himself insensibly become spirit-haunted as a savage, and in spite of his demystifying intentions no more than a medium of phantasms like some Bayswater spiritualist performing for the bereaved and the credulous. Marett pictured Tylor in a phase of fatigue when the forward progress of PC was faltering, as, given the monstrous bulk of the thing, it must have done, and Tylor probably feeling as much latter-day Augustine engaged upon a De Civitas Dei of universal error and reproof as a modern man of science engaged upon a positive argument. The hungry tongue of the beard-licking flame still lingering: Primitive Culture must be the product of Tylor’s own fire gazing, some mental fever like those traced by Charles Dickens in a man wronged or a man who had done wrong, an Arthur Clenham or a Bradley Headstone.
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