They held a wake for Morse on ITV the other night. It was a cheerful affair, but edged with sadness, nonetheless. As with all television series in the end, Inspector Morse will be terminated - tomorrow night. Colin Dexter, the creator of Morse, has decided to kill him off. Fortunately, some stations run repeats of Morse, and the spirit of Matthew Arnold still hangs like a greatcoat - a taglioni - about the Chief Inspector.
Episodes of Morse run for two hours - a great chunk of television time - yet time never hangs heavy when old Morse is around. The long stretch gives scope for engaging the viewer's mind, leaving room for pointed little sub-plots, and for the camera to roam the Oxfordshire countryside, where one expects to catch a glimpse of Arnold's Scholar Gipsy "crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe".
Regional man
Morse takes things at hiking pace; for he is a regional man, whose mental landscape is as featureful as the valley of the Upper Thames. He is a graduate of Oxford, but that happened a long time ago, and is now best forgotten: the memory of it follows him like an ill-focused shadow, and he speaks of it only in bleak hints and unfinished sentences, like someone remembering a lost child. His attitude recalls Belloc, who went through 84 years of life complaining that Oxford had refused him a fellowship - had not allowed him, as he puts it, "to linger in my rightful garden".
Everything about Morse is shabby-genteel, and he wears disappointment in his everyday working face. His sense of grievance suggests that the job he does is faintly beneath him and a little unsavoury. But the passion of this man, who lives alone, is opera. Because of this, viewers are treated to the finest soundtrack in all television. Where else will you hear the pure sound and sensual voice of Callas, while a policeman sniffs the bushes for clues to a murder? For the soundtrack alone, Morse is worth two hours of our time.
Apart from opera, the other forms of artistic expression which engage the mind of Morse are literature and painting - not preoccupations of your run-of-the mill copper. In any old episode, you are likely to find that his knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelites enables him to find the murderer, when minds less well stocked than his could not read the clues. For light mental exercise, he dabbles in crosswords - here, as in his work, chasing clues. In his private moments - especially with a congenial woman - he drinks wine, about which he is knowledgeable. When he is low, he drinks whiskey.
(Listen to the voice of Belloc again: "I drink champagne only when I need to be raised from the dead - which I frequently do.")
World-weary disdain
In the company of Sergeant Lewis - a light drinker, impatient of his boss's excess - Morse is inclined to let his ears back. Lewis, perfectly played by Kevin Whately, is Morse's side-kick and foil, a good detective in his way, but astray in that world of the mind which Morse inhabits. Lewis sometimes comes close to encountering an original thought, but always puts his foot on the brake before crashing into it. Morse is openly contemptuous of Lewis, and addresses him in language of world-weary disdain.
The more I think about Lewis, the more he strikes me as the sort of fellow chosen to play left-half-back on a scrappy GAA team. He is not reliable enough to man the full-back line, where the rough stuff happens, but he has flashes of capability, often gathering wild and flying balls that come along the sideline. Always behind him stands Morse, the man whose sure hands match the alertness of his mind.
Matthew Arnold was the first great English poet to know the kind of divided consciousness that is characteristic of modern experience. He felt profoundly dissatisfied with the conventional life of his time, the "multitudinousness", the mechanical uniformity, the deadness of the everyday world. Arnold was conscious of belonging to an age of questions and hesitations rather than of answers and actions. For consolation amid moral and intellectual perplexities he turned to nature and to art, which supplied in some measure the support more generally sought, and maybe found, in religion.
Cumner country
The Scholar Gipsy is the story of a student who, 200 years earlier, forsook Oxford. The poem, with its delicate echoes of traditional pastoral poetry, is a beautiful description of the young scholar's wanderings with the gipsies in the Cumner country near Oxford, that home of all the beloved causes that Arnold knew to be lost. Description is an important aspect of the poem, for that was Arnold's country of the mind, an image of freedom from the busy, futile world of power and profit with all its philistinism, its half-grasped dissatisfaction with the way we live now.
Colin Dexter - also an Oxford man - has built more than a hint of this divine discontent into the mind of Morse. In him, it is expressed in crankiness - rattiness, the American word. By the way, America "adores" Morse.
From all that discontent, the Scholar Gypsy is free. He wanders the Cumner country, his soul intact, waiting for "the spark from heaven", the living knowledge of the truth that would unite the divided consciousness and make it possible for men to live meaningful lives in the world, because they could be true to their innermost selves. Is it fanciful to wonder if, in our mechanical time, Morse hikes in his tracks?