csuf e335 victorian literature spring 08

E335 Home Page

2008-05-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

Welcome to English 335, The Literature of Victorian England
Spring 2008 at Chapman University in Orange, California

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. For some authors, it contains two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading. While the entries are not intended as exact replicas of my lecture notes (and in fact, they cannot include an important part of the class sessions since each student will offer a few in-class presentations), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors. They may also help you arrive at paper topics and prepare for the final exam. Aside from the separate texts assigned, the edition used for many of our selections is Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume E: The Victorian Age. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0393927214.

A dedicated menu at my Wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Week 15, Rudyard Kipling

2008-05-06T22:34:00.000-07:00

Please check back in future. I will be posting material on this author as soon as time permits. In general, I am doing a thorough upgrade of my notes on Victorian authors this semester, and will be posting this optional reading in a timely manner as we go through our syllabus.

Week 14, Daughters of Decadence

2008-04-29T22:34:00.000-07:00

Week 13, Oscar Wilde

2008-04-22T22:33:00.000-07:00

Notes on Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay Of Lying” (Edition: Etext)

35. “What art really reveals to us is nature’s lack of design…. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.” Nature is no model. Coleridge had written in “Dejection: an Ode” that “In our life alone does Nature live,” and Wilde gives us a decadent version of that statement. Nature is incomplete and gains completion only when we bring our interests and values to it. If, that is, we even find the project of completing nature worthwhile. Pater’s model of impressionistic success, as he sets it forth in his 1873 “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, counsels instead the endless enticements of suggestion over filling in the blank places of nature. It’s fair to say Wilde follows him in that regard. So in “The Decay Of Lying” as elsewhere, Wilde rejects nature (in any sense) as a saving category. His argument is modern in its insistent un-romanticism, its absence of sentimental attachment to nature as the source of what is best about humanity. To elaborate on Wilde’s view of nature: Wilde would probably argue that in terms of animal nature, we are unnatural because we are self-conscious. Human nature differs markedly from animal nature, so that in any but the most obvious things, we must discover and employ a language that responds to this distinction, be it a blessing or a curse. An author such as Dostoyevsky gives us a negative view of human eccentricity, but Wilde, following the Symbolists and Pater, offers a more optimistic assessment of human potential: it is our nature to be artificial, to construct our own identity and world, and continually transform them. Art is the central means whereby we may do such things.

36. “Nature hates mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world….” If it’s possible for a being to do things unnaturally, nothing that being does is simply “natural.” Beavers don’t hold conferences to argue about the merits of different kinds of dam-building. Or if this example seems too glib, we might say that human activity can only be dealt with in a language that accommodates human sensibilities and priorities. Mediation is required between the grand laws of physics and evolution and more properly human social conditions and aspirations. Social science tries to mediate in this way, but art is another means. We need a world we can control to some degree, lest we be overwhelmed.

36. “How different [is the politician] from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind!” Nietzsche would agree with this idea: in “On Truth and Lying in an Ultra-Moral Sense,” that author describes “truth” as a species of useful error. Lying is intuitive, multifarious, and liberating—something that rescues us from the prison-house of representation and from vulgar utilitarian notions about pleasure and reductive political demands for truth.

39. “I have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the rage of Caliban on seeing his own face in a glass.” Realism, in Wilde’s view, simply reflects European societies’ ugliness back to them, and reaffirms life as it is. Whatever is, will stay that way if realist art has any say.

39. “M. Zola’s characters . . . have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. . . . In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.” Wilde casts the French novelist Émile Zola’s naturalistic works as part of an uglification campaign, one that promotes satisfaction with a world made by and for brutes. Mere imitation of such a world doesn’t help us transform it; Zola’s kind of writing offers no vision of Utopia to guide our efforts. Wilde sees literature as a vehicle for self-transcendence, both individual and collective. Realism and naturalism, by contrast, as Wilde writes on page 38, both “find life crude, and leave it raw.” This may all sound rather elitist, and to some extent it probably is; but we might also suggest that Wilde distrusts artists who bring us the “east end” raw because they might just be suggesting that there’s no need to change anything there: that is, it might be argued that realism and naturalism confound ugly reality with authenticity: the way things are with the way they ought to be. (One may wonder what Wilde and his fellow aesthetes would say of certain kinds of modern expression, such as rap and hip-hop—I mean the kind that its adherents justify on account of its propensity to “tell it like it is” for people caught in violent, poor neighborhoods in the big city. Fundamentally, Wilde questions “telling it like it is” when the way it is shouldn’t be that way.)

40-41. “As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.” Wilde’s Balzac is more of an impressionist than a realist, so he earns praise.

39-40. [W]hat is interesting about people in good society . . . is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff…. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals…. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.” Wilde shows his disdain here for any theory or kind of art that would reduce us to our common humanity because that common humanity is what we need to transcend, not take satisfaction in.

41. “The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.” No doubt this eponymous “somebody” is none other than Immanuel Kant, who characterized aesthetic judgment as a matter of “dry liking” and as thoroughly “disinterested,” i.e. free of mere sensuous gratification or personal bias. Matthew Arnold borrowed the Kantian term “disinterestedness” and used it to carve out an autonomous sphere of operations for art and culture. Of course, as an artist and critic, Wilde does engage with commonly received ideas, if only to invert them or inflect them.

42. “Nature is always behind the age; and as for Life, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.” The modern world has left behind simple instinct, and modern life is destructive of art. So art must find its own way.

42. “If we take nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. If, on the other hand, we regard nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own.” Wilde declares outright that nature isn’t our source at all; mind is pre-eminent.

42-43. “Art begins with abstract decoration . . . . This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. . . . The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.” Realism and science, then, are decadent, so an art that holds the mirror up to nature can’t change anything. Realism is the demand of a decadent society, one with an imitative and basely materialistic model of human nature: market society and the vulgar, selfish politics based upon it.

43. “[T]he object of art is not simple truth but complex beauty. . . . Art herself is simply a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.” Art, then, is complex, and a matter of exaggeration; this formulation resembles Pater’s privileging of intensity.

43. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural utterance. He forgets that when art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything.” I think Vivian is wrong on this point—I don’t buy the argument that Shakespeare ever loses sight of his art’s demands, even when he’s using naturalistic dialect or dealing with “low” characters. There are legitimate criticisms to make of Shakespeare—his plots are sometimes loose, and he makes sloppy anachronistic references. These things may bother some play-goers, though on the whole they aren’t much trouble. But Vivian’s consideration isn’t apt, in my view, and it’s telling that Wilde offers no example of Shakespeare’s supposed shortcoming in the regard specified. What Vivian says about C19 drama makes more sense, I think: “The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it . . . they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage.” He is talking about English melodrama, of course. This sort of realism in drama, Vivian implies, tries to reproduce life itself or reduce it to stale fixities. The mind that demands this reduction from art is debased and might as well go directly to life itself. Still, it’s possible to credit the better kind of realism with making an effort to get people to see what they refuse to see in spite of its obviousness. Consider the modern example of photographic realism: taking pictures of war’s violence, or capturing on film the sufferings of poor Americans traveling west to escape the Dust Bowl during the 1930’s, might be said to do something more than “copy” human suffering: you’d think it would be ridiculously obvious that war causes terrible human suffering, but governments that wage war today seem determined to give us mostly tolerable images of it, lest the effort lose our support.

44. “[T]he proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.” Art, in Wilde’s view, is an autonomous undertaking and realm. But it’s also true that he has no trouble making the further case that its autonomy and integrity lead to effects beyond the realm of art; in this claim Wilde, for all his elitist posturing, is the true successor of the English and German Romantics. At its best, Wilde suggests, art a “disturbing and disintegrating force,” as the author calls individualism in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” It breaks up dull utilitarian and Tory ideology, while seemingly useless talk and behavior (as well as the inversion of social/sexual conventions) turn out to be highly charged with social and political implications.

45-46. “Who he was who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the wondering cave-men at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper cave . . . we cannot tell. . . . [H]e was certainly the true founder of social intercourse.” “Lying” or fiction-making is the province of “style,” which for Wilde is truth’s proper sphere: “truth is entirely . . . a matter of style.” Truth and Nature—especially in their meanings according to modern scientific usage—are enlisted to justify an aggressively hostile campaign to declare the status quo correct; they are tools of bourgeois ideology and economic interests. For example, we might refer to Herbert Spencer’s naturalization-cum-legitimization of class inequality in First Principles: Miners in a given locality follow “the law of the direction of motion” down into unhealthy, dangerous holes wherein they labor to produce what everyone else needs. Wilde’s mention of Spencer on page 46 is no accident.

46. “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.” Wilde is by no means the only Victorian to appeal to our need for the mysterious—it is a mainstay of Carlyle’s post-Romantic prescription for a workable society. Wilde’s direction is Paterian: concealment is a vehicle of self-development, and personalities are enhanced and diversified from “behind the veil.”

47. “Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” The function of art, in Vivian’s Wildean view (which enlists the Greeks’ concern for aesthetic experience), is to provide beautiful patterns for us to live by. If we insist on imitating life, we give up all hope of transforming it for the better. This belief is the source of Wilde’s overturning of Arnold’s great dictum about the critic’s task being “to see the object as in itself it really is.”

48. “The imagination is essentially creative and always seeks for a new form.” This remark is derived from philosophical idealism, which posits that the mind at least partly generates or participates in the making of what we call reality. Kant’s version of this claim is rather cautious, while the claims made by Fichte, Schelling, and other German Idealists are bolder. (Coleridge’s Idealism is of the latter sort.) Wilde’s Vivian says further in speaking of Hamlet that “The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.” That’s a grand claim, but it makes sense: no doubt art gives us some of our most memorable renderings of important attitudes, ideals, and events. The uses to which those renderings are put is another matter, of course, since artists can’t control how people will receive their creative work.

49. “In the year 1879 . . . I met . . . a lady who interested me very much. . . . She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the possibility of many types.” This emphasis on Protean capacity for change resembles Pater’s praise of a “quickened, multiplied consciousness” in his Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

50. “Scientifically speaking, the basis of life—the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it—is simply the desire for expression, and art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt.” Aristotle’s formulation towards the beginning of The Poetics was that “we learn our earliest lessons from imitation” and that “to learn gives the liveliest pleasure.” Wilde replaces “learning” with “expression” as humanity’s prime directive. His doctrine of forms implies that multiplication of the self is the goal of life. This emphasis on self-diversification differentiates Wilde’s (and Pater’s) concept of the individual from that of the English Romantics, who stress the integral quality of the self, its wholeness.

51. “Art never expresses anything but itself.” Art is entirely self-referential. That’s the source of its great power. It resists dilution at the source by other areas of life, and therefore retains the power to transform them. The question people understandably ask about aestheticist claims of any sort is whether they might lead to a more enlightened and tolerant community, more humane institutions, and so forth, or whether they justify an irresponsible withdrawal from the fray of ordinary existence. Wilde certainly advocated social progress of the sort that some realist authors would approve, but the remark Vivian has just made about art’s self-referentiality may actually be the strongest arrow in the quiver of pro-aesthetical arguments, and as we might expect it takes the form of a paradox: only by not reaching out to the ordinary is art of any value to the ordinary realm and its denizens. This is not unlike the argument Matthew Arnold had made in the 1860’s about criticism and its disinterested attempts to “see the object as in itself it really is.” Wilde, a sometime follower of Pater, may not be as heavily or consistently invested in dispassionate engagements as Arnold was, but the affinity of his dialogical character Vivian’s paradoxical claims to Arnold’s is nonetheless striking. Wilde’s Vivian talks about art here in a way that may remind us of John Keats’ Grecian urn, with its message that its own beauty is the only truth “ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” We can always go back to the urn, so to speak, and reconnect with a kind of purity that the rest of life probably can’t give us.

51. “The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols, her reflections, her echoes.” This is an extreme statement of aesthetic autonomy, and as such it derives from authors like Friedrich von Schiller, who counsels in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man that artists must withdraw from the immediate flow of life in order to preserve itself from corruption and mere political or social utility. In Vivian’s view, art rejects human burdens and is neither the bearer of ideology nor a vehicle for near-term social reform, or anything of the sort. It owes nothing to anybody. In this view he is affined with the Symbolist poets and theorists. Matthew Arnold is another inheritor of the post-Kantian notion of aesthetic autonomy, and we find many formulations of this interesting, if troubled, notion all through the nineteenth century and through the twentieth. Keats’ mysterious tease the Grecian Urn, with its assertion that beauty is the only reality we can really count on, is one, and Yeats’ early poetry as well as some of his mature efforts (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,” for example) play upon it.

53. “It is style that makes us believe in a thing—nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait painters never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.” As one of Wilde’s aphorisms has it, “Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.” He consistently derides the public’s judgment as utterly devoid of wisdom or even competence. The artist’s task is certainly not to please the public or flatter its tastes—that is a recipe for disaster. Of course, it became increasingly difficult to make this claim with hope of success as the nineteenth century wore on: the great middle class has long had its own ideas about what it wants, and generally feels no need to ask literary or cultural elites for their definitive pronouncement in matters of taste or, indeed, in any other matters at all. This smugness is what John Stuart Mill laments about the middle class in On Liberty—he calls its results a “hostile and dreaded censorship” that threatens to snuff out the vitality of English intellectual life.

54. “The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is . . . lying in Art.” Wilde’s Vivian has been promoting “Art for Art’s Sake,” and, like other proponents of this doctrine, he insists that only by preserving its integrity can art shelter its potential to transform us. Like Matthew Arnold, who was accused of promoting a religion of culture, Wilde’s Vivian says art’s independence is the most promising thing about it. Art should be an untainted storehouse of new forms for imagination to work with. Kant had said that in making aesthetic judgments about beautiful things (in art or nature), we experience our freedom in a most pleasing way. Aestheticism is a bold extrapolation of this basic postulate of Kantian aesthetics.

55. First doctrine summary: “Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.” Art does not accommodate itself to our petty desires and beliefs. To approach art on its own terms is to keep open a space for the transformation of the human spirit.

55. “The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them into ideals.” Some critics would call this claim reification or even see it as fetishistic. Why should we grant that art is an autonomous, apolitical thing? Well, I suppose Wilde would say that it takes a power we can posit as above ourselves to draw humanity beyond what it presently is. Blake’s God, Arnold’s Culture, and the Artifice of the Symbolists and Wilde seem designed to serve as this “something beyond us.” In a sense, the process we are describing here is fetishistic: in social science, that term applies to the making of objects by human beings who then invest those objects with a power transcending mere humanity. A totem pole comes to represent “the dead ancestors” and is no longer just a piece of nicely carved wood, and so forth. That is what the Symbolist claims about the poem’s sacred Words, and what the aesthete or art-for-art’s-sake proponent urges us to believe about all fine art. We make something with our own minds and our own hands, and then we come to think that it has slipped beyond our own limitations, biases, and desires. There are dangers lurking in this process, but it would be unwise to dismiss its value or condemn it out of hand in favor of “engagement” and “responsibility.” People who insist on the latter have sometimes done great harm in the world.

55. “The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” With regard to Wilde’s expressive theory, what is expressed isn’t simply emotion; it isn’t (for the most part) what Wordsworth would call the “essential passions of the heart.” Wilde is instead a Paterian in matters pertaining to the self: we create our own nature. Life is mostly a matter of style (or rather a multiplicity of styles), and by style we live. This concept, like that of the Symbol in Coleridgean criticism, goes far beyond its usual rather limited meaning. Coleridge’s symbolic utterance isn’t a mere literary device (such as metaphor); it’s a mode of language all its own. So too does “style” take on broad significance in Wilde’s critical vocabulary. Wilde’s Oxford professor, Walter Pater, seems to have derived his ideals about the value of aesthetic experience in part from Wilhelm von Humboldt, who praised “freedom and variety of situations” as essential to humanity. But there’s an important difference between this philosophical progenitor and Wilde and Pater: for the former, human nature is treated as organic, while for the latter, it is synthetic, more an effect than an integral cause or foundation to which we may return. There is no return to an originary self; there are only styles, ways of perceiving and feeling and registering things, and the point is to get through as many of them as possible in the time given us. That is what Pater advocates in his 1873 Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

Finally, both Pater and Wilde tend to describe their aesthetic doctrines with reference to the ancient Greeks, whose courage in facing up to a harsh cosmos they admire, and whose openness to experience impresses them. Kant had encapsulated the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment ideals in the phrase “dare to know.” Pater seems to urge upon his readers the phrase “dare to know your own impressions,” encouraging them to get clear about how they as individuals perceive worthwhile things, personalities, and events, and then to express that clarity as precisely as they can in their respective media, or in the way they live their lives as a whole. The questions that are bound to arise when we speak of aestheticism are simple to state but not so easy to answer satisfactorily: to whom, and to how many, were/are appeals to aesthetic experience made? To what extent can “art-for-art’s sake” resist modern life’s commodification and co-optation of its pure ideal? (We live in a society, after all, that turns yesterday’s revolutionary ideals into harmless Che Guevara tee-shirts.) To what extent does it amount to an all-but-permanent (and irresponsible) withdrawal from the rest of life? Wilde would probably insist in his defense that his ideas about the self-sufficiency of art and the permeable, malleable nature of human beings cannot ultimately be considered in isolation from his strong belief in individual and social progress.

What I have been doing in these notes is partly to place Wilde in the tradition of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics: art is a realm wherein we experience our freedom and are transformed into something better than what we were. Culture indirectly shapes and improves human beings, rather than simply telling them they are fine as they are. I have also emphasized that Wilde’s views (at least insofar as we may take Vivian’s statements as fair approximations of what Wilde himself believed) respond to the ascendancy of the middle class: his aestheticism, his praise of “lying” and Protean self-transformation, his bent for unsettling people’s most dearly held convictions and notions—all these strategies bespeak a conception of art as a “disturbing and disintegrating force” in English life. He is more of an artistic anarchist than a late Romantic who would have us return to the supposed bedrock of our simple passions or to the verities of physical nature.

Notes on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

Introduction to the Main Types of Comedy

Old Comedy: This is satirical comedy that “ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or else attacks deviations from the social order by making ridiculous the violators of its standards of morals or manners” (Abrams 29). The Greek playwright Aristophanes (circa 456-386 BCE) is the first great satiric comedian. If you’ve ever read or seen a comedy by Aristophanes (The Clouds, Lysistrata, The Birds, etc.), you know that it’s rough stuff—mainly topical satire about famous politicians and philosophers. The Clouds, for example, is about Socrates as proprietor of the Thinkery or Think-Shop, where all sorts of ridiculously improbable notions are propagated for the benefit of fools. Outrageous, bawdy, bubbly humor is the essence of such plays, and they can pack a genuine political wallop as well: Lysistrata sets forth a plot in which Greek women withhold sexual favors from men until they agree to put an end to the ruinous Peloponnesian War. On the whole, characters are ridiculous in Old Comedy—a main subject is the perennial nature of human folly, selfishness, and vice. Among the Elizabethans Ben Jonson is perhaps the greatest comic satirist. In his Volpone, things end badly for the play’s main character Volpone (i.e. “the fox”), but the play as a whole is still comic because Jonson (after some initial identification) makes us despise Volpone, not sympathize with him. So the aim in satiric comedy is mockery of a given society or of those who break its rules.

New Comedy: The Greek playwright Menander (circa 342-291 BCE), and his much later Roman followers Plautus (circa 254-184 BCE) and Terence (circa 190-158 BCE), offer a different brand of comic play that will later serve as the basis of Shakespeare’s comic plays and Restoration comedy of manners (Congreve’s The Way of the World, for example; Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labour’s Lost also make fine comedy of manners). The emphasis in New Comedy is on domestic matters rather than broad political issues. Love, or at least sexual desire treated sympathetically, is central to the action, and there’s also some concern for the relationship between the older generation and the younger, particularly between a father and his son, as well as some interest in relations between people of different status, such as masters and their clever slaves. Still, there’s plenty of fun at the expense of fools, dupes, lovers too old for the person they desire, etc. As M. H. Abrams explains in his A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 th edition, the Roman comedies “dealt with the vicissitudes of young lovers and included what became the stock types of much later comedy, such as the clever servant, old and stodgy parents, and the wealthy rival.” English comedies, by contrast, tend towards “the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society, relying for comic effect in large part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue—often in the form of repartee, a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match—and to a lesser degree, on the ridiculous violations of social conventions and decorum by stupid characters such as would-be-wits, jealous husbands, and foppish dandies” (Abrams 29).

Some major authors of English comedy of manners are Congreve, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Pinero. New Comedy and its developments are seldom rigorous in their morals: the characters who win out tend—surprise!—to be the ones the playwright reckons the audience will like. Sympathy trumps propriety. The popularity of comic mix-ups and disguises suggests that identities can be swapped at will, and because considerations such as wealth and social status are so important in structuring others’ perceptions of a given character, the new identity will be accepted long enough to get the job done.

The modern situation comedy—Seinfeld would be a sophisticated example—is remarkably like New Comedy: a number of silly but mostly sympathetic characters get themselves into and out of preposterous scrapes from one episode to the next in a competitive world, and through it all they don’t change much. They get insulted, taken advantage of, take advantage of others (though not mean-spiritedly), fall in and out of love, misunderstand one another at every turn, get jobs and get fired from jobs, obtain pleasure and ease and then throw it all away on a whim or through error, and they’re ready for the next absurdity life brings. Comedy reminds us that we seldom learn as much as we should from our mistakes, but it also gives us credit for being optimists and opportunists in spite of the misfortunes life throws our way. There’s a bit of Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner in many a comic character: that fur-bearing evildoer Wiley Coyote isn’t going to keep the “poor little Roadrunner” from its appointed rounds (BeepBeep!), nor is Elmer Fudd going to stop Bugs from doing whatever the wascally wabbit wants to do. In comedy, desire is subject to deferral and detour, but not to permanent frustration. The comic orientation towards time is a favorable one: time and chance (accident) are on our side, at least if we are amongst the likeable or generous. In comedy, life is rich and full of opportunities—la vita è bella, as the Italians say. This attitude contrasts markedly with that of tragedy, where the world is stark and unforgiving, and our attention is riveted upon the thoughts and actions of a superior character in confrontation with that stark world.

Structure. The general (Terentian) structure of New Comedy is as follows: A. First comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established. This stage corresponds roughly to the first act of a modern five-act play. B. Then comes the epitasis in which events and characters are interwoven and complicated. This stage corresponds roughly to the second and third acts of a five-act play. C. Next comes the catastasis, in which the plot reaches a false climax. For example, in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio marries Kate towards the end of Act 3, but that important event hardly concludes the story: Kate must still be “tamed.” D. Last comes the real climax, the catastrophe, which in comedy turns out to be a happy ending, often a marriage or even a set of marriages.

A Note on Shakespearian Comedy. According to Northrop Frye, the structure of Shakespearean comedy often involves the main characters leaving their corrupt city or realm and entering a magical “green world,” from whence they emerge renewed and ready to return to civilized life. As You Like It is a fine example since Rosalind, Orlando, and other characters betake themselves to the Forest of Arden. The Tempest offers a variation, with Prospero exiled from Milan and subsequently resident on a strange but wonderful island. In The Winter’s Tale, much of the action takes place in a pastoral setting where Leontes’ and Hermione’s daughter Perdita resides, while A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course, offers a remarkable nature-kingdom ruled by Oberon and Titania. In tragedy, the protagonist’s aim is to gain perspective on the disaster that has occurred and what brought it on; as Northrop Frye would say, a tragedy is oriented towards death and draws its meaning from that event. But in comedy, whose initial aim is to amuse the audience with tribulations giving way to a happy ending, the deeper aim is broadly social and oriented toward the renewal of life over generations. The kingdom or other city space may at first be badly ruled or in turmoil for some reason—perhaps the values and institutions of the citizens and/or rulers are in need of some re-examination. What is the basis of those values and institutions—can people live comfortably or at all within them?

Next, the main characters most often leave the city setting (willingly or otherwise) and end up in the countryside. This pastoral setting is often an enchanted space that allows for the necessary reexamination of values and social roles. Magical transformations of characters occur; they are put in situations that could not occur in the city or the kingdom, and the forest or countryside’s magic opens up new possibilities to them. As Meyer Abrams writes in A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 th edition (1993), in a romantic comedy, “the problems and injustices of the ordinary world are dissolved, enemies reconciled, and true lovers united” (29). After the necessary reappraisal and readjustment period has been completed, the main characters come together—the young by marriage, the foundational institution of the civil order and its only hope for regeneration. Finally, the characters return to the kingdom proper or are about to return when the play ends. The key to Shakespearean comic structure is political and social regeneration, continuity for the ruling order. The question to be explored is, “How does a given society preserve order and its values from one generation to the next?”

Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

This play is a fine comedy of manners that borrows something from Shakespeare’s emphasis on the relationship between the town and country in that the play begins with the characters in the city, moves them toward the countryside to straighten out the mess they’ve got themselves into, and points them toward city life again by the play’s end. As usual in comedy, events turn upon the attempts of the play’s lovers (there are two main couples in this one) to get together and on the many obstacles they must first overcome. So the structure of Wilde’s play is traditional. As for the play’s subject matter and dialogue, they certainly meet Abrams’ criteria for comedies of manners: IBE takes for its most basic subject “the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society”—indeed, Lady Bracknell calls the late Victorian Era “an age of surfaces.” The dialogue also largely fits the bill: the play is full of “wit and sparkle,” and it has its fair share of what Abrams would call repartee: “a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match.” Many of the characters box their way through the play with quick linguistic jabs, some of them much like the kind of sharp, opportunistically intelligent remarks that made Wilde himself London’s social lion until his downfall in 1895.

Structurally, the play is traditional in yet another sense: it follows the basic Terentian drama: a) first comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established: in IBE, we meet Jack and Algernon, Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell. b) then comes the epitasis in which events and characters are interwoven and complicated: in IBE, the characters’ competing erotic and class interests involve them in a tangle of deceptions and schemes. c) next comes the catastasis, in which the plot reaches a false climax. In IBE, all seems to have been resolved amongst Jack and Gwendolen, Algernon and Cecily, but then Lady Bracknell arrives in the countryside and new difficulties arise. d) last comes the real climax, the catastrophe: in IBE, Jack discovers that he was always “Ernest/Earnest” after all, and the marriages may proceed.

Act One Synopsis: Jack Worthing, a young Justice of the Peace in rural Woolton, is an upper-class character of no background. When he wants to go out on the town, he uses his alternate self, brother Ernest, as a dodge. Algernon and all the big-city folk, therefore, know him as Ernest Worthing. This Jack/Ernest is in love with the Honorable Gwendolen Fairfax, daughter of Lady Bracknell. Gwendolen, a perfect product of the best fashion magazines, is just as much in love with the name “Ernest” as Jack is with her. If Jack wants to embody the Victorian “age of ideals” for Gwendolen, however, he must overcome a few obstacles. Firstly, his name is not Ernest, at least so far as he knows—which isn’t much. His second problem in Act One is Lady Bracknell and her strict requirements for any man who will marry her daughter: Does he smoke? Is he sufficiently ignorant? Is he sufficiently rich? Does he have a townhouse in the fashionable quarter of London? These are formidable demands, but Jack meets them all; he smokes and is indeed ignorant and rich. As for the townhouse in the fashionable quarter, either the townhouse or the quarter, or both, can be altered to suit Lady Bracknell’s liking. In spite of all these qualifications, however, Jack suffers from one flaw that keeps him off Lady Bracknell’s list of eligible bachelors: he was discovered, and for all intents born, in an ordinary handbag, stashed in the cloakroom, Brighton railroad line. This is inexcusable. If Jack has no better origin than this, he had better go out and find one, says Lady Bracknell. Compared to this hostility, the mild razzing Jack undergoes from Algernon is pleasant chatter. Algernon has apparently found his friend’s cigarette case, inscribed with a message from Cecily Cardew to “Uncle Jack.” Jack tries to lie his way out of the embarrassing situation by evoking the picture of a nice plump aunt, but Algernon easily infers that Aunt Cecily is some attractive young woman in the countryside. In a sense, that is true—since Jack was discovered by Mr. Thomas Cardew, it was only proper that the old man should make him the guardian over his granddaughter’s morals. The need to escape from this heavy responsibility was instrumental in Jack’s invention of the great escape hatch, Ernest. The first act ends with Algernon scheming to visit the country address he has copied from the cigarette case.

Act Two Synopsis: The second act opens with Miss Prism instructing Cecily on sentimental novels (one of which, ominously, she mislaid a long time ago), German, Geography, and political economy. She also engages in flirtatious metaphor-slinging with Canon Chasuble. Cecily soon grows tired of her lessons, but the servant Merriman enters with notice of “Ernest’s” arrival. One might call Algernon the impostor responsible for this intrusion on Jack’s country retreat, but then, “Ernest” never existed in the first place. Whatever Algernon’s status, Cecily decides that in spite of his alleged wickedness, the man looks like any other of his class. Soon, Jack makes his entrance in deep mourning clothes, if not spirit, only to be confronted by the all-too-living Algernon/Ernest. Jack wants him to leave at once, but Algernon, who has taken a fancy to Cecily, has no intention of leaving soon. This intransigence is only confirmed when he finds out that unbeknownst to him, he and Cecily have been courting each other for some time: all the action has taken place in her diary. Cecily’s one stipulation for a husband is the same as Gwendolen’s—she will marry no one but an Ernest. As luck would have it, this talk of marriage is followed by the unexpected arrival of Gwendolen, and the fireworks begin. When Cecily declares that she plans to wed “Ernest” (Algernon), Gwendolen is infuriated—she mistakes this Ernest for her own, the man we know as Jack Worthing in the country, Ernest in town. When Jack returns and is cornered into admitting his real name, the mix-up is cleared, but now the two men have a problem: neither of them is named Ernest. Gwendolen and Cecily march off together in a huff. The only thing the men can do for the remainder of the act is struggle over muffins and rechristening rights. Algernon wins the muffin contest and refuses to leave.

Act Three Synopsis: Cecily and Gwendolen take Jack and Algernon’s muffin binge as a sign of repentance, and are willing to be reconciled to their prospective mates so long as they are suitably rechristened. Just when it looks as if everything will go swimmingly, Lady Bracknell bursts onto the scene with all the force of Queen Victoria and Mother Grundy combined. Upon hearing that her nephew Algernon wants to marry the unknown Cecily, Lady Bracknell puts her qualifications to the test. Even though satisfied that the girl’s social status is not so “mobile” as Jack’s Brighton line, she balks at Cecily’s “incident”-crowded life and is about to depart when the phrase “hundred and thirty thousand pounds in the funds” strikes her ears. That is a presentable sum in this “age of surfaces,” so Lady Bracknell bestows her blessing on the newly charming Cecily. Unfortunately for Lady Bracknell, however, Jack won’t allow his ward to marry Algernon unless he gets permission to marry Gwendolen. Jack explains that according to the terms of her grandfather’s will, Cecily will not come of legal age until she is thirty-five, but Lady Bracknell will make no concessions and seems prepared to wait seventeen years for such a profitable match. The Lady’s wrath is even visited upon Algernon, who is forbidden to get himself rechristened “Ernest.” Just when things have reached a standstill, in rushes Miss Prism, who is promptly recognized as the very nurse who lost an infant attached to Lord Bracknell’s house some twenty-eight years ago. “Prism! Where is that baby?” demands Lady Bracknell. Miss Prism’s answer is that she accidentally placed her three-volume novel in the perambulator meant to accommodate the baby, and the baby itself, logically enough, wound up in the handbag that should have been used to hold the manuscript. This gives Jack an idea; he hurries out and comes back in with the handbag, which Miss Prism identifies as the same one she lost at the railroad station all those years ago. She has missed it bitterly. Even more importantly, though, Miss Prism’s recognition of the handbag leads Jack to his true origin as the son of Lady Bracknell’s own sister, Mrs. Moncrieff. It turns out, then, that old Jack has had a younger brother all along: Algernon Moncrieff. Only the name Jack now stands in Jack’s way, but that is cleared up when the Army Lists reveal that General Moncrieff’s first name was Ernest. Jack was always Ernest after all, and now realizes “the vital Importance of Being Earnest.” Algernon will doubtless overcome Lady Bracknell’s thin scruples about rechristening and cash in on beautiful Cecily’s fortune.

Week 12, G. M. Hopkins and Walter Pater

2008-04-15T22:33:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the anthology I used as a beginning student of Victorian literature (Victorian Poetry and Prose), Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling suggest that Hopkins is a late-romantic poet, a practitioner of the poetics of grand failure. They suggest that he regrets the loss of a strong Christian world view and that he is an isolated aesthete trying to reappropriate the ancient religion’s framework. But even in the so-called terrible sonnets, which, if I recall correctly, Bloom and Trilling describe as stormy Byronism, Hopkins is not necessarily a self-divided romantic. Instead, it might be better to see him as working through his isolation within the much larger theological framework available to him—he is dramatizing a spiritual problem, not complaining about it to himself. Ultimately, the differences between Hopkins and Keats or Byron or Wordsworth seem more important than the similarities.

As a nature poet with great regard for the particularity of things, Hopkins follows Keats to some extent, but the medieval author Duns Scotus provides Hopkins with the theological support for his interaction with nature. Humility in the presence of nature is important to Hopkins, but this humility is of a Christian sort and does not amount to Carlylean self-annihilation. Rather, this Christian poet aims to experience and to convey an experience of being as grounded in God. We can experience our existence in this manner when we observe the natural world, although that is only one way it can be experienced.

Hopkins may follow Keats and Tennyson, but he rejects sensuous simplicity and smooth rhetoric. His poetry is memorable but can be difficult going. It reflects a complexity of language and mental process chosen to honor the particularity of each natural thing and made appropriate to the difficulty of salvation. The act of seeing is redemptive, and redemption is not easy.

Hopkins’s journals show his concern to clarify and refine his impression-taking powers. “Cleansing the doors of perception” is a romantic formula that applies well to Hopkins—the world of objects is dynamic without being unstable, but Hopkins often dramatizes the way the human mind fails to appreciate nature’s energy. We simply do not see what is really there.

Hopkins tasks words with marking, catching, and celebrating the particularity of things, most especially the particularity of classes of things. He often speaks of nature in the plural—dappled things, brinded cows, dragonflies, and so forth. The goal is not to dominate natural things or annihilate them, not to assert our raw power over the creation. Doing that would be impious—the Bible explains that humanity long since tried to do it in the most disrespectful manner, with disastrous consequences, and we might infer the lesson that our failure to cherish the natural world is part of the pattern of our sinfulness. Hopkins apparently considers precise impressions of things respectful towards God; imprecision of speech testifies to the roughness of the eye that perceives. To see something correctly is at least partly redemptive—Hopkins does not aim to describe abstractions, and does not give us a vague sense of mystery—“a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” Rather, each thing, to borrow a phrase from Martin Heidegger, “stands into the lighting of Being.” It catches God’s energy as it goes about its business, a phenomenon Hopkins calls “selving.” The beauty of God exceeds change, but he has suited the human mind to the minute apprehension of particularities.

The Norton editors provide an excellent gloss on Hopkins’s terms inscape and instress:

Drawing on the theology of Duns Scotus, a medieval philosopher, he felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe ‘selves,’ that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize its specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. In the act of instress, therefore, the human being becomes a celebrant of the divine, at once recognizing God’s creation and enacting his or her own God-given identity within it.

Hopkins’s terminology allows him to move beyond a romantic emphasis on the isolated individual. He is a Christian nature poet who turns Romantic particularity back towards God’s language, the “syllables” of God, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge. Since Hopkins is writing from a theological perspective, it helps to include the Catholic Catechism’s statement on humanity’s relationship with nature:

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part One Chapter 1/IV.40-43

IV. HOW CAN WE SPEAK ABOUT GOD?

40. Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

41. All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures—their truth, their goodness, their beauty—all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point, “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.”

42. God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God—“the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable”—with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

43. Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude”; and that “concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.”

Hopkins’ favorable view of Duns Scotus is often mentioned, so I will include here a summation of that theologian’s differences with the even more influential Saint Thomas Aquinas. I draw from David Walhout’s fine essay “Scotism in the Poetry of Hopkins” (113-132 in Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, edited by Michael E. Allsopp and David Anthony Downes. New York and London: Garland, 1994.) Walhout identifies nine areas in which Scotus differs substantially from Aquinian thought, but here are the ones that seem the most significant, along with my paraphrases of his explanations:

1. The priority of singulars as objects of knowledge (Thomism = universals, not singulars)

Scotus says that sensory experience gives us not simply raw data but “genuine objects of cognition.” Thomism says we do indeed begin with particulars, but we need to make abstractions or general concepts to think. We cannot grasp particulars directly as objects of understanding and knowing.

2. The priority of intuition in cognition (Thomism = abstraction, not intuition)

The second doctrine is that Scotus says we know singulars by intuition not abstraction. Knowing is not necessarily mediated through universals or concepts. First we know things by intuition and then we make abstractions and concepts, judge and reason about things.

3. The reality of the individual essence (haecceitas) (Thomism = general essence)

The third doctrine involves haecceitas, which refers to the idea that the individual essence is just as real as the generic essence in things. The individual essence is not one property among many in the object but rather the overall uniqueness or individuality of the thing.

6. The primacy of the will (Thomism = intellect as primary)

The primacy of the will is the sixth doctrine and it means that divine will is the supreme executive attribute in God, with reason knowing its prescriptions and being its repository of truth. The notion is that the will guides and reason assists—the same would be true for humans. Moreover, without the assistance of the will, the intellect cannot conceive the infinite. But we are made for the infinite, so the will expresses the whole man: first because it is free and secondly because its proper object is the infinite.

7. The unconditional freedom of the will (Thomism = qualified freedom)

The seventh doctrine concerns freedom of the will: St. Thomas says that when the highest good is presented clearly the will chooses and loves it necessarily. Scotus would deny this. See Hopkins’s letter to Robert Bridges of 4 January, 1883. He says that while the intellect may see necessity, the will remains free to acknowledge or apply a truth.

9. Incarnation as cosmological directing power (Thomism = … as a response to sin)

The ninth doctrine involves the incarnation of Christ. Scotus treats this cosmological doctrine as implying that Christ wasn’t just incarnated into a body but into the whole of the creation. Evidently God had meant to redeem the world even before the contingent historical event known as the Fall. For Hopkins this means there’s a “cosmic energy center” that activates other “centers of energy” impelling creatures to realize the individuality of their being.

To sum up this introduction to Hopkins as a nature poet, I should add that Hopkins’ nature poetry, in which his subjectivity is so finely attuned to the world’s particularities and so sensitive to beauty, is not so much idealist as realist—nature is there, and what the mind does is use its god-given powers to actively catch or instress the inscapes, the dynamic “thisness” of the natural world. There’s no need, in his view, to replace God or to say that the mind spins reality from itself. Hopkins’ patron saint Ignatius, the 16th-century Spanish founder of the Jesuit order or “Society of Jesus” (see his biography at http://www.luc.edu/jesuit/ignatius.bio.html), writes at the outset of his Spiritual Exercises,

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created.

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.

http://www.ccel.org/i/ignatius/exercises/exercises.html

By implication, nature is worthwhile so long as it is useful to the soul’s salvation and the greater glory of God, but otherwise it is to be dismissed. It is a means to an end, and one must dismiss it brusquely if some other means would serve the end better. This imperative is softened somewhat by Hopkins’ favorable reading of Duns Scotus, as discussed above, but the poet’s late work shows that it was not forgotten. And it is to that later work that we turn to conclude this introduction. Hopkins is among those Victorians (like John Henry Newman) who responded to Victorian doubt by affirming their belief in traditional Catholicism. Hopkins was subject to periods of deep depression and was most likely afflicted with the cyclical illness now called “manic depressive disorder” (see Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Free Press, 1996). As his depressive episodes worsened, Hopkins seems to have found that his first priority was no longer the bond with external nature but rather his own spiritual state, his inner being in its relation to God. There is no need to suppose that he felt any disappointment in the beauty of the natural world or even that he lost the ability to respond to it—though severe depression can surely have that “anhedonic” effect on a person. Neither need it be thought that Hopkins is in a state of despair that causes him to defy the universe in Byronic fashion.

Instead, in the dark depressive sonnets, what sounds to many modern readers like suicidal despair follows the well-scripted lines of St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Christian meditative practice is quite familiar with depressive episodes, and knows how to embrace them and work through them. Christ’s life ends on the Cross, after all, with the scriptural echo from a Psalm of David, “why hast thou forsaken me?” One would have to presume that the expression was both genuinely human and at the same time an acting-out of human anguish for the edification of sinners who need a pattern to follow. Hopkins’ darkest poetry imitates this final utterance, at least to some extent. So it isn’t prideful isolation, mere hopelessness, or even doubt that we find in his poetry. Hopkins never seems to have doubted God’s existence or benevolence, as so many of his contemporaries did, and his career as a poet might be construed in strictly theological terms as his particular “way of the cross,” his imitatio Christi.

Notes on Hopkins’ Poems

“God’s Grandeur”

The poem’s first verse is perhaps the key to much of Hopkins’ nature poetry: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” This poem shows nature energized, crackling with directionality from God’s primal love, or what Dante calls “il primo amore.” Nature does not need the human mind to animate it. It is already charged like a battery, and Hopkins’ sonnet sets forth images of gathering force pulsing through the world, the Holy Spirit as creative power rising with the dawn. The problem is that individual human beings in their repetitive, self-isolating actions do not perceive nature’s variety and therefore fail to celebrate God. Human beings set up a dull, self-regarding rival order that contrasts with divine particularity, with the diversity and fullness of creation. In Hopkins, spiritual error and perceptual error are closely intertwined, as are their healthy opposite states.

“The Starlight Night”

Usually, astronomy is an attempt to derive intelligibility from the stars. But there is perhaps a different motive in this poem, with its concentration on the far recesses of sky, distant points of light. The poem celebrates the power of God’s energy to excite wonder. The point doesn’t seem to be logical consistency or the reduction of things to order. Instead, it represents a person’s excited mind patterning the stars and appreciating the grandeur of God.

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

When the sun glints upon the wings of a dragonfly or a bird, the animal catches divine energy simply by acting out its “thisness.” Each animate thing as an individual follows the pattern of its species and is validated as an individual thereby. The purpose of each living thing is to be what God intended it to be, whether it knows that or not. Human beings are at the top of the hierarchy because they have been given the gift of choosing to celebrate and worship God. They do so in many ways, and the expressive act we call poetry is one of those ways. Hopkins put away his poetry writing for about seven years after he went into the priesthood, but the relative approval of the church made him go back to it, and I suppose the relation of humanity to nature alluded to in the present poem must have been sustaining as well.

“Spring”

The regenerative power of nature strikes the soul; the poem tries to capture the energy, the movement, the “juice” or overflow from Paradise to earth. In the second stanza, the implication is that nature offers us a glimpse of Paradise; children experience a brief time of innocence, and should grasp the significance of such times and scenes. Victorians generally treated children as if they were little adults. This poem cuts both ways: children are invoked and asked to understand something we might think most appropriate to adults, yet at the same time the freshness of perception evoked belongs to children in the fine tradition of Blake and Wordsworth.

“The Windhover”

The material world provides an analogy for spiritual splendor. Compare this poem to Tennyson’s “Eagle” or George Herbert’s “Affliction.” In the context of the poem, “to catch” means to instress the bird’s inscape. The bird is not turned into a direct emblem of Christ (Hopkins does not write allegorical or emblematic poetry; he is inclined to respect nature enough not to subsume it too easily into his symbolic system), but Christ is obviously in the background as the chevalier, the hero-king and sacrificial sufferer whose splendor flashes after his redemptive deed. The speaker “catches” the bird, and then it catches him up in its amazing plunge. The plunge may allude to Christ’s incarnation and consequent heroic suffering; as the next-to-last stanza suggests, Christ himself is “a billion / Times told lovelier,” like the fire that breaks from the bird during its lightning-fast approach to earth.

Christ is often depicted in terms of light, as when he sets out in his flaming chariot in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 5. There is also in this poem something of John Donne’s way of describing God’s effect upon the human spirit in violent terms, as something that brings hearts “out of hiding.” How does the final sestet complete the poem’s meaning? I would suggest that the references to the well-worn plough and the ashes falling upon the ground point to the idea that a thing is most worthy of apprehension, is most itself, just when it is about to pass away or just when its fundamental task is achieved.

“Pied Beauty”

This is another poem that underscores the ability to appreciate nature’s “thisness,” and it seems important to the speaker that we not superimpose a domineering or romantic self-consciousness upon nature, saturating it with ourselves and tamping it down with our problems. Refraining from such impositions is in part an atonement for causing the fall that alienated us from nature.

Nature is not simply our expressive vehicle; instead, we should appreciate it as God’s free expression. We should appreciate nature’s sheer diversity as a kind of joyful excess. God creates because he wants to create, not because he must—the central concept here is Christian charity, generosity. Understanding nature this way turns it into a door that opens to Christ, not a mirror that reflects back to us our own self-division, alienation from others, and alienation from God. The grammar in the final line—whether it be set down as a “:” or a “;”—implies that all of the dappled things lead up to the simple statement “Praise him.” This is all the explanation that is necessary for nature’s diversity. And the term “dappled,” of course, has Impressionist overtones.

“Hurrahing in Harvest”

The line, “These things, these things were here and but the beholder / Wanting” emphasizes Hopkins’ tact: again, nature is already alive and does not need us to make it come alive. Our task is to appreciate; Hopkins would probably say that is our way of helping to complete God’s continual acts of creation, as he allows us to do.

“Binsey Poplars”

The failure of those who have cut the trees down to “instress” the stand of trees denies God’s creative power, his stamping of a thing with its own living individuality. The final stanza sets forth contrasting repetitions—the strokes of the saw and the speaker’s own laments over what has been done. The felling of trees in this manner is yet another effect of the Fall, and something has been permanently taken away even from the speaker who actually appreciates nature as he should.

“Duns Scotus’ Oxford”

The ugly buildings put up around Oxford seem to have instilled in Hopkins much the same agony as the Italians’ treatment of their cultural heritage created in John Ruskin. Once upon a time, the natural environment and the college town made up a unit of mutually reinforcing or complementary inscapes. But modernity confounds our ability to instress this land-and-cityscape, and, by implication, it keeps us from understanding Duns Scotus’ insight into the individual vitality of natural things as a kind of energy that praises and returns to God. Hopkins casts Duns Scotus as a bygone hero. To a limited extent, this gesture links Hopkins to Thomas Carlyle, the greatest Victorian proponent of hero-worship. As for architecture, Hopkins’ notion is similar to that of John Ruskin—buildings express the spiritual state and aspirations of an entire people.

“Felix Randal”

This poem is a meditation on the brevity of life and the need to “look to end things”—not something that would have been easy to do for an active man like Felix Randal the blacksmith. The priest-speaker reflects on his relation to this former parishioner, now that he is gone and there is time to do so. One seldom thinks in this way when in the thick of life.

“Spring and Fall”

Hopkins wrote this poem when he was in Liverpool; the observations probably express his own feeling that the place was “museless.” The speaker addresses Margaret’s eventual fall into adulthood, when she will experience the dark side of symbolic meaning. As Margaret will see herself in the decay of nature, the speaker expresses grief at his own mortality. We will come to correlate death in the natural cycle with our own demise.

“Carrion Comfort”

This is a sonnet of desolation because of its near assent to spiritual death. The poem flows from Hopkins’ propensity to blame himself for his depressive states—we have far less control over our “affective will” than our “sheer will,” but still bear some responsibility in both cases. Here, the speaker seems to have just emerged from a severe depression, and begins to will his assent to God’s plan for him, however feebly. He has at least taken on the burden of ceasing to struggle against Christ—the blame gives way to bleak affirmation in hopes of regaining his energy, that “primal love” sent by God.

“No Worst, There Is None”

The speaker is in a hell of his own making, and his grief brings on still intenser grief, with no catharsis in sight. What serves as comfort “in a whirlwind”? Only the statement that “all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” This “comfort” is as grim as the comfort King Lear derives while exposed to the storm, or Swinburne’s pagan speaker derives from the sentiment that “There is no god found stronger than death, / And death is a sleep.” But this isn’t a view to which Hopkins could subscribe. The point seems to be that there really is no ordinary comfort in the face of death—nothing in nature, anyway; only Christ will serve that end, and at present the speaker isn’t able to feel the connection to him that he should.

“I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day”

This poem works from the traditional exploration of “The Dark Night of the Soul,” as in Saint John of the Cross. Hopkins certainly understood the psychology of profound depression. The speaker addresses his own emotions, which have a life all their own and which therefore generate inner discord. He is in a hellish state of his own making, or at least that’s the way he interprets the problem. The third stanza implies a threat that the speaker’s body has become worse than nothing—it has become a “sign” leading nowhere, and the same might be said of his words, which only turn back in upon his anguish and do not help him reconnect with Christ. In the final stanza, the speaker compares his state to a Dantean Inferno, wherein God’s primal love is experienced in ever-more perfect degree as pain and anguish appropriate to the sinner. The speaker experiences this energy as profound alienation, and suffers the intensification of his “self-taste,” the taste of his own unhappy inner self. This is not mere apathy he’s describing; it is suicidal near-despair. To experience despair is perhaps not to lose the desire for salvation, but rather to lose all hope of it and to believe that relief will never come. In this situation, the spirit turns back upon itself, isolating itself from God in destructive fury. The speaker apparently feels trapped in himself, and since suicide is against God’s will, he may be angry with God, too. It isn’t possible for him to say, as I recall Cesare Pavese wrote just before he died, “No more words—an act.” What is the point of writing a poem like this? Does it bring relief? Clarity?

“That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”

Light and shadow, earth, air, fire, and water, are all in play here. The Resurrection of the Dead will put an end to natural history and human history, swallowing up everything that is suffering and mortal in one grand “wildfire” that will “leave but ash” of materiality’s dead clay. The energy flowing through nature in the poem’s first half is thereafter described as flowing through the soul, and the speaker’s aim seems to be to align his desires with this “being-towards-destruction” of fallen nature. He can do so because he trusts that God’s will is being done. The pressure of suffering, the constant “imitation of Christ,” will at last turn the soul to “immortal diamond,” just as carbon turns to this gem under great pressure over vast stretches of time. This is a very Augustinian poem—there’s no point here in trying to salvage nature or anything earthly; it must all be burned in the end time to make way for the grand spiritual consummation. That this should be the case with “manshape” seems contradictory to the speaker, but he knows he must embrace contradictions in order to transcend them.

“Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”

This poem was written in Ireland, where Hopkins felt out of sorts. This isn’t so much pure lyric expression as performance, a dramatized expression that lends the speaker some perspective on his state of mind. The quotation from the Latin or Vulgate bible suggests as much, as I’ve found in the criticism on Hopkins’ poetry—the speaker in Jeremiah’s prophetic book is foolish to question God, and by implication so is the speaker in Hopkins’ poem. But the final triplet seems intimate and in its way legitimate—I don’t read it as merely the acting-out of a wrong-headed speaker.

“The Wreck of the Deutschland”

What lesson is the speaker trying to learn from the tragedy he recounts? The first part of the poem concerns the manner in which he was called to the Catholic faith, while the second part deals with the shipwreck itself. Five Franciscan nuns were among the passengers aboard the Deutschland; they were leaving the persecution of Catholics in Germany and heading to America, but the ship sank in the Thames River during an awful storm.

In the midst of his reflection on such a disaster, the speaker turns to an imaginative projection of one who suffered and died in it to answer his own question, “How do we know God—or do we know him at all?” See Stanza 24, where the Nun invites Christ to “come quickly.” She heroically sees the shipwreck as hastening her union with God. Imitatio Christi is the traditional pattern: life as preparatory suffering. The speaker, too, is trying to come to grips with the event and unite in sentiment with the nuns against the storm’s terrible destructive power. Hopkins hadn’t written any poetry for seven years, thinking it not right considering his vocation as a Jesuit priest. But a superior told him he should write it after he heard about the wreck from a newspaper account. Traditional Christian theology describes nature as a hostile, alien element, though Hopkins usually doesn’t treat it that way. In this poem, nature is full of fury and confusion that might make it seem pre-eminent, but at the center of the storm is the wonderful clarity of the Nun who sees it for what it is.

Page-by-Page Notes on Walter Pater

“Preface” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1507. “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative . . . .” Pater embraces the relative and scientific spirit rather than trying vainly to oppose it in the name of humanist inquiry. This doesn’t mean that he banishes emotion-based responses from criticism—the rejection is an initial conciliatory gesture, a rhetorical maneuver on the way to a fully impressionistic definition of criticism. In the following passage, Pater appropriates Matthew Arnold’s widely accepted mid-Victorian standard of criticism: “To see the object as in itself it really is,’ has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is . . . .” The critic’s goal is no longer to register the qualities of an external object or to point to a literary “touchstone” (a favorite Arnoldian term), but rather to obtain a clear impression from whatever he or she regards (an art object, a personality, whatever), and to fix it, discerning its qualities distinctly and then conveying our findings to others. “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?” asks Pater. The object, therefore, is our own impression of an external object or artistic phenomenon of whatever sort, and that impression is not thereafter to be brought into line with some abstract definition of beauty or literary value. How does Pater describe the external objects that facilitate our impressions? He describes them as follows: “The aesthetic critic . . . regards all objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. . . .” Objects, then, seem to emanate a kind of aesthetic energy; they put out “forces” that must be registered clearly and steadily.

1508. “Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to those impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure . . . . His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others . . . .” In this description of the purpose for engaging with aesthetic objects, Pater employs the language of scientific methodology: things are to be broken down into their elements, separated out so that they may be understood clearly. Of course, the virtues to be disengaged have to do with beauty and the passions; Pater’s perceptual terminology is almost always suffused with emotive quality. He portrays critics as “chemists of the emotions,” so to speak. The special virtue of Wordsworth’s poetry, as Pater characterizes it on page 837, is “that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of man’s life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences . . . .” That is the “active principle” always at work, suggests Pater, in Wordsworth’s poetry, however different many of the poems may be from one another. One last point about Pater’s scientific terminology: he openly rejects the notion that the critic should rank aesthetic objects or experiences and thereby set up a well-delineated hierarchy for others to memorize and accept. That would strip not only the critic, but anyone interested in experiencing art and living life as a work of art, of all individuality: it would be a prohibition against immediate experience and close, genuine attention to each object of experience. Scientism aside, Pater is not interested in categorizing art works in the traditional way, and it’s easy to see from the disparate objects he describes that in his view, aesthetic perception is by no means limited to the things we would ordinarily classify as art. To suggest that “a fair personality” is as good an object as a landscape painting is un-Kantian (and un-Arnoldian) in its rejection of disinterestedness. In a forthright way, his Conclusion to The Renaissance encourages readers to apply what they have reflected upon to life itself.

1509. In keeping with the general aim described above, Pater’s book aims to fix and convey what was most valuable and distinctive about the Renaissance—a term he treats with the broadness of an impressionist rather than the categorical exactness of the historian. He finds the active virtue of the Renaissance at work as far back as the middle ages and as late as the work of German Hellenist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He characterizes the Renaissance as “an outbreak of the human spirit” that encompasses “the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination” (837). And on 838, he ascribes to this lengthened period as a time in which those who partake of culture “breathe a common air.” Winckelmann in particular, he believes, showed in his life and in his 1764 masterpiece Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Ancient Art) a Renaissance-worthy “enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake” (838). So it is not so much a definable period Pater is writing about in his most famous volume as a set of interrelated tendencies. His view of intellectual history is inclined to credit the recurrence of certain qualities and circumstances, so that we might apply terms such as romantic and classical to particular authors and works at any point in literary history.

“Leonardo da Vinci” (including “La Gioconda”) from Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1510-11. I will refer to the broader selection from the chapter, “Leonardo da Vinci,” though these comments apply also to the passage on La Gioconda in the Norton Anthology.

Pater refers to Leonardo’s illegitimate birth in a positive light, saying that he had “the keen puissant nature such children often have.” The boy was from the first a free spirit, a Renaissance man in the making. We are told also that his father, Piero Antonio, “took him to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence.” The young man soon began to show abilities his master lacked, something that first became apparent, as Pater recounts, when Leonardo was allowed to paint an angel in Verrocchio’s painting The Baptism of Christ: “the pupil had surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one stunned.” The youth’s angel is animated, realistic, engaged, detailed, while Verrocchio’s is conventional. (See http://www.lairweb.org.nz/leonardo/baptism.html for an interesting discussion of The Baptism of Christ.)

But Pater suggests also that Leonardo learned something from Verrocchio. In particular, he was taken with “the perfection of the older Florentine style of miniature painting,” which “awoke in Leonardo some seed of discontent” and spurred him to realize his insight that the world “must be weighted with more of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity.” What Pater calls “a series of disgusts” with the limitations of what had gone before would lead Leonardo to throw himself into an intense study of the natural world and living creatures, a study that made it appear to those around him “as one listening to a voice silent for other men.” His understanding of nature posits that it is full of “hidden virtues” and “correspondences.” For this study there was a cost and a great reward; we are told that Leonardo “learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of intimate presence in the things he handled.” The cost was that he had to abandon the old “cheerful objective” style of painting, and once committed to the new enterprise, he came under the sway of “the extremes of beauty and terror” in nature and humanity. The beauty he pursued through Florentine avenues was of a “curious” sort, not the kind that would lend itself to conventional representation; and his concentration on nature’s grotesque dimension began to take hold. Pater’s reference to Leonardo’s fascination with “the smiling of women and the motion of great waters” I take to be a way of alluding to his need for mystery, ultimate knowledge, and dynamism.

Leonardo’s interest in the grotesque, says Pater, shows most compellingly in the Medusa of the Uffizii. It has since been disputed whether or not this painting is, as the Renaissance art critic Giorgio Vasari claims in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), actually Leonardo’s work, but we might as well leave that controversy aside in the interest of exploring Pater’s commentary. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa_(Leonardo_da_Vinci) as well as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasari.) In Pater’s view, Leonardo’s interpretation of the ancient myth is perfection itself: “The subject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death.” In this representation, says Pater, we find a deep understanding of the “fascination with corruption,” with the death and decay of mortal flesh and the strange horror it provokes in us.

Pater writes of Leonardo as well that the painter “was smitten with a love of the impossible” and, later, that his work is consonant with the spirit of Renaissance scientific inquiry: “The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to concentrate a thousand experiences.” There is always a link to alchemy in such science, he implies, and that quality is to be found in Leonardo’s works of art. Leonardo, explains Pater, was a seeker of “short cuts and odd byways to knowledge,” and a visionary who sought “the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things . . . .” It is in this context that we may see the famous “Mona Lisa” (http://www.lairweb.org.nz/leonardo/mona.html; a good copy is available at http://www.rossettiarchive.org/img/op76.jpg) portrait as the perfect expression of Leonardo’s gifts, and the perfect object for Pater’s impressionist mode of criticism: the painting itself is pure, concentrated suggestiveness. Pater suggests that the smile on La Gioconda’s face had been long in the making and that it was no doubt a product of Leonardo’s childhood; the resulting portrait, he writes, is “expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire.” She is a summation or embodiment of female beauty, goes the idea, that loses none of its power for its being a “sweeping together” of many experiences over a long period of time.

Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa is fanciful, most of us would say, in that strange allusions abound: the lady in the portrait is called a “vampire,” a deep-sea diver, a seeker after “strange webs” (woven fabrics), as well as Leda (Helen of Sparta’s mother) and Saint Anne (the mother of Mary, Jesus’ mother), and in her face is etched “All the thoughts and experience of the world . . .,” thoughts expressive of “the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.” La Gioconda’s beauty is nonetheless distinctly modern; it is imbued with a soulfulness, Pater suggests, not known to the artists who made those calm classical statues of maidens and goddesses. What are we to make of all these allusions and grand claims about a portrait of a woman with a puzzling smile? Well, certainly Pater isn’t claiming that any of what he says represents Leonardo’s conscious intentions: perhaps the artist simply concentrated on his task of painting an excellent portrait. Pater’s aim is instead to register accurately the thoughts and sensations that the suggestive portrait has provoked in him: what we are reading is Pater’s own impression of the painting, his attempt to render the portrait’s strong effects on his own consciousness. In effect, we are encouraged to see Mona Lisa as Pater sees her, just as we are encouraged to see parts of Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) beautiful gardens at Giverny as that French impressionist painter saw them at a particular moment. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet.)

But this is not to say that Pater’s word-portraiture is merely self-absorbed or solipsistic. His chapter on Leonardo casts the Florentine as a man alive to influences of all kinds but reducible to none of them. His impressionist model of the individual strives for that kind of strong, dynamic openness to aesthetic and other kinds of experience. Leonardo’s enigmatic “Lady Lisa” is the best possible expression of the painter’s finest qualities. Leonardo has endowed her with the influences of many ages and many styles, but somehow they don’t define her, any more than characterizing Leonardo da Vinci as a “Florentine Renaissance painter” would render for us his remarkable spirit and abilities. Pater’s allusive prose pays tribute to that remarkable quality in Leonardo rather than trying to convey “the painter’s intention” or trying to reproduce a sense of the painting’s appearance, as a descriptive critic would. Pater characterizes Mona Lisa instead as a symbol that only Leonardo could paint so compellingly: “The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.” She embodies an idea of human beauty and perfection, but retains an aura of mystery and undefinability. The “modern thought” seems to be an allusion to Hegel’s philosophy, in which past developments are said to be “sublated” into the present reality, at once canceled and preserved without being simply negated. So in this sense la Gioconda is the modern ideal of beauty and humanity, subsuming and yet subtly preserving what went before.

“Conclusion” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1511-12. “To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.” Today’s scientific tendency is only a variation of a thought available to the ancients—Heraclitus, for example, one of whose fragmentary sayings Pater quotes as a prefix to his Conclusion to The Renaissance. And there is a way to deal with this tendency towards relativism: as Oscar Wilde, Pater’s onetime student at Oxford, might say, the only way to conquer a temptation is to give in to it. That is what Pater’s rhetoric in the Conclusion to The Renaissance does. Pater embraces the modern sense of impermanence, and tries to turn it into a healthy force rather than an excuse for paralysis or apathy. Pater’s impressionism has some affinity with the quick eye and hand of Baudelaire’s Constantine Guys, whose goal is to capture what is truly beautiful from the passing shows of things. As for Pater’s analysis of the “inward world of thought and feeling” (1511) until we can hardly resist his claim that each person’s thoughts and feelings are permanently walled off from those of all others (absolute solipsism), this isn’t necessarily a call to egotism or selfishness.

Instead, Pater grinds down our sense of personal identity until what remains is a process, which he describes as “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (1512). In thus promoting a kind of modernity that begins to sound like praise for the Heraclitean flux, the aim isn’t intellectual or emotional comfort. Neither is there an injunction to collective solidarity and enterprise (no Carlylean moral blathering here, and no capitalist paeans to material progress) nor to Matthew Arnold’s quest for calm and repose.

1512-13. “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.” We need not worry about the past or the future because the fleeting present-becoming-past is all we have. (I recall reading a while back that our sense of “now” lasts about five seconds, and then whatever we are or were experiencing slips into the past. That sounds about right to me.) The aim is to distill the purity of the moment in the moment and to experience that purity as intensely as possible. This intensity is perfection; it is what makes us come alive, and Pater might even say nothing else really matters. Solidity and permanence are the vain delusions of most individuals and of mankind generally. To use a Baconian phrase, they are the “idols” of the entire species. Pater writes that “our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike” (1512). Denaturalization (as in Romantic theory that would have us “cleanse the doors of perception” and “strip away the film of familiarity”) and concentration (as in Zen meditation) are Pater’s watchwords: he counsels an emptying of the self until the mind’s “narrow chamber” can register a multitude of impressions without the barriers erected by personal habit and cultural conventionality, thereby achieving maximum intensity of experience. Paterian hedonism isn’t so much about pleasure in the vulgar sense as about purity, clarity of perception, intensity, aliveness. His use of the term hedonism is genuinely Greek, not Utilitarian (as in Bentham’s famous remark about “pushpin being as good as poetry”). Pater says that art is the best thing to engage with, but he also says that any register of experience may serve the purpose. He advocates a certain temperament and orientation towards life.

On 1513, Pater’s invocation of Rousseau’s Confessions (with its call to “intellectual excitement”) rejects morality of either the Utilitarian or the religious strain, replacing it with a passionate regard for pure art: “Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.” It isn’t difficult to understand why some Victorians found the Conclusion subversive: how could a great many young people fail to translate Pater’s suggestions into their own less refined program of active experience? Is it possible for a modern person to follow Pater’s Greek prescription for “success in life”? That is what Dorian Gray tries to do, and those of us who have read Wilde’s novel know how badly that experiment turns out. This is not to condemn Pater in the manner of a Victorian moralist; it is to point out that the Paterian doctrine is dependent upon its audience’s capacities for refined perception and sensibilities and that such qualities are not always to be found in the cultural environment within which Pater is writing his books.

From “Style” in Appreciations (Note in Norton 8 th Edition but included in 7 th Edition)

1645-48. Pater’s argument regarding the prosaic excellence of some poetry and the poetic qualities in fine prose, as well as his remarks about historiography, partially anticipate very modern notions. With the advent of structuralism and so-called post-structuralism from the 1960’s onward, it has become difficult for critics simply to assert that this or that literary genre should be rigidly defined and that individual works should then be judged on how well (or badly) they adhere to generic conventions. Neither would most 21 st-century historians claim too boldly that they are “simply telling us how things actually happened.” That sort of objectivism has gone out of style, and has come to seem presumptuous: history, as Pater suggests with his mention of Livy, Tacitus, Gibbon, and Michelet, is as least as much a “story” or narrative as it is a recounting of actual events. In this sense, the historian’s task resembles that of a fiction-writer—he or she must arrange a set of incidents and thereby tell a credible and compelling story about certain events and characters. Hayden White makes that point very well in his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

Pater’s point, however, is hardly what some take to be the lesson of postmodern literary theory— he isn’t offering us an almost nihilistic pronouncement on the impossibility of making judgments about literary works or historical events. (That view of contemporary literary theory is not very perceptive since, after all, the best work in the field doesn’t so much celebrate “indeterminacy” as explore the potential for harm by those who boast of a premature and unearned self-certainty in matters of literature, historical discourse, or politics. Humans have been destroying themselves and others for millennia, it might be argued, in part because they have a perpetual and almost infinite capacity to dupe themselves and then to act upon their false suppositions.) Instead, Pater offers us a sophisticated model of the impressionist critic—his critic is someone whose temperament and sensibilities are finely attuned to making relevant distinctions and discovering the various excellences in any medium of art, or in any kind of non-fiction work, for that matter. The “aesthetic critic” he favors is sometimes considered rather an elitist and rarefied purveyor of literary comments—a person who sees art as something far removed from ordinary life. Pater himself was, of course, a quiet Oxford Don whose secluded and relatively uneventful life exemplified that quintessential British quality, “reserve.” Even so, we might make a case for a kinder reading of Pater’s critical emphasis—his insistence that prose and verse, fiction and real life, are not so far apart as some would make them can be read as a call to extend a sensitive, yet critical glance across the full spectrum of human experience. The sharp perceptual abilities and refined powers of discernment of the art critic, that is, might serve us well in matters extending beyond art.

Week 11, Elizabeth Gaskell

2008-04-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

Notes on Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

1. Our Society

The narrator (later named as Mary Smith) says that Cranford is in possession of the Amazons. It might appear, then, that men are generally insignificant and inconvenient in Cranford society, to some extent times that seems to be the case. But it would also perhaps be an overstatement since the novel's male characters at times play meaningful roles, though they never overshadow the "spinsters" and widows who are the mainstays of the genteel town. Captain Brown appears on the scene in this first chapter, for instance, and seems to have a positive effect on Cranford, advising Miss Betty Barker to clothe her injured cow in a flannel waistcoat, which she promptly does. He seems to be a very decent fellow, even if (much to Miss Deborah Jenkyns' consternation) he prefers Dickens' novels to the neoclassical, moralistic poetry of Dr. Johnson.

From the outset, the narrator describes Cranford as a town whose residents are concerned to keep up aristocratic appearances even as they mostly keep money worries off limits for discussion. This is not so much a matter of dishonesty as of polite discretion amongst a group of fairly closely knit women of property and good birth, but few of whom have much by way of "liquid assets." One gets that sense of a genuine community that is structured along intra-class lines and that doesn't turn entirely, or even mainly, around financial matters. This is Cranford, not the big industrial town of Drumble, to which the narrator moves with her father not long after the events she describes in the first chapter—specifically after the literary disagreement between Captain Brown and Miss (Deborah) Jenkyns.

2. The Captain

Captain Brown's eldest daughter is quite ill, which means that he and the youngest daughter Jessie must play the role of caretaker. Miss Deborah Jenkyns, Captain Brown's literary opponent, is quite the eighteenth-century-style upholder of propriety and social decorum, but this doesn't seem to trouble the Captain in the least.

The narrator returns to Cranford for a summer visit, and finds that nothing has changed. That is apt because, in a sense, Cranford is a novella about nothing—even when things happen, it almost seems as if nothing much has happened after all. The narrator tells us that she has noticed how "fragments and small opportunities" have long been attended to in Cranford: things that others would pay no mind elsewhere are attended to here, and everything turns upon the twin concerns of understated economy and genteel manners and connections.

Well, in this chapter, a few dramatic things do in fact occur: Captain Brown's eldest daughter grows ever more ill of some wasting illness, and we are treated to an idyllic portrait of patient care-giving on the part of the Captain and Jessie Brown. (He is evidently of the heroic stamp, having saved the life of one Captain Mauleverer years ago.) But apparently Gaskell has made enough use of Captain Brown, and he is suddenly killed off in a properly Dickensian fashion: while reading a serial edition of The Pickwick Papers, the good Captain is killed by a train when he rushes in to save an unwary child from the same fate. The ladies have to lie to the dying Miss Brown, and she goes to her maker not knowing of her father's tragic fate. It would appear that the women of Cranford were right to resist the coming of the railroads to their town. But we notice that while they have resisted change from a modernizing outside world, they respond well to the burdens placed upon them by the tribulations of the Captain and his family. Miss Jessie Brown receives a a gentleman caller named Captain Gordon, who has come into an estate in Scotland. Deborah is enough of a practical woman to see that this is a fine development, and it culminates in Jessie's marriage to the man. The years pass, and Miss Deborah Jenkyns passes away in old age, leaving behind her beloved sister Matilda or "Matty."

3. A Love Affair of Long Ago

The narrator didn't think she would keep up such close contact with Cranford now that she is a denizen of Drumble; she had thought Cranford would become a faded memory (like dried flowers compared to the real thing). But things don't turn out that way, and she stays in touch with the yarn-spinner Miss Pole and the rather "inert" social gatekeeper Mrs. Jamieson. On page 24, we hear that there's always been a problem with the maids (such as Jenny) mixing too easily with Cranford's numerous handsome young fellows below the ranks of the gentility. Miss Deborah Jenkyns had been the enforcer of Cranford's social rules, while Matty is much more confused about such things and doesn't seem to know quite what to do now that her sister is gone. She is flustered when Capain Gordon sends word that he would like to visit from the East. How should Matty prepare the home for the coming of this member of the male persuasion?

At last the chapter brings us to the matter of its title: the love affair proper: Thomas Holbrook (a cousin of Miss Pole, apparently) wasn't a very ambitious man and cared little for the title of Esquire. The narrator says that he didn't care for refinements not rooted "deep down in humanity" (29). When this odd individual proposed to Matty long ago, sister Deborah and their father the Rector thought him an insufficient match for Matty. Now, decades later, they meet by accident in a shop, but only in the next chapter will anything come of it.

4. A Visit to an Old Bachelor

This chapter continues the story of Matty and Mr. Holbrook. But before it gets to that, there's much commentary about Miss Matty's being "at sea" about the subject of men generally—an expansive patch characteristic of Gaskell's style in the novel. Mr. Holbrook is rather uncouth in his manners—he eats with a knife and reads poets such as Byron and Goethe, whose names he mispronounces. Perhaps he is a bit off-putting and eccentric, and he startles the narrator with his romantic-poet-style imperious demand if she knows the color of ash-buds in March. But on the whole, he is a good sort of person. Matty was frustrated at not being able to marry him long ago. Now he decides to go to Paris, which proves too much for his frail health, and he dies. Matty seems almost like a mourning widow for a time, and afterwards, says the narrator, she always betrayed a "tremulous motion of head and hands" (39). At the chapter's end, Matty softens regarding Martha's interest in suitors, and says the maid might as well invite a gentlemen—which she promptly does, in the person of Jem Hearn, a joiner.

5. Old Letters

This chapter begins with a recounting of people's foolish obsessions about little things. Never mind "don't sweat the small stuff"—people in Cranford always sweat the small stuff, such as leaves of paper one mustn't waste, or candlelight one mustn't overuse, which is Matty's obsession. (The narrator's is collecting string.) Matty decides to look over her family letters, including love letters between her parents from before their wedding in July 1774, when the Rector was 27 and her mother a young woman of eighteen with a fancy for fine clothing. Why does Matty want to go through these old letters? On page 44, she suggests that nobody will care for the old letters properly, or really appreciate them, when Matty is gone. It is time to look them over one last time and then commit them to the flames, thereby sparing them the fate of becoming merely "dead letters." The letters themselves are varied—the mother's upbeat aspirations for her children, the Rector's stern sermon, and Deborah's edifying formal productions (of which last-mentioned the narrator soon tires). Some of the letters take us back to 1805's fears about the Bonapartist French, and we hear that Peter Jenkyns, the girls' brother, was a joker and a ne'er-do-well.

6. Poor Peter

One of the tales we hear in the letters is the story of Matty and Deborah's brother, Peter. It seems that the young man (who was more sympatico with Matty than with the erudite, proper Deborah) enjoyed playing jokes on the women of Cranford. Once he dressed up as Deborah and pretended a pillow was a baby. Flogged by the Rector, he ran away after saying goodbye to his mother. Both parents showed a great deal of regret afterwards, even dragging the local pond out of fear that he might have committed suicide or drowned. Peter went off to Liverpool, and the Captain of a ship wrote to the parents. But before they made it to Liverpool, the ship had sailed off to the Mediterranean and thence to India. Mother never really recovered from the shock of this episode, and died some months later. Deborah consequently vowed never to marry, determined to tend to her father, while Matty decided to do everything she could to facilitate this bond between them. That was to be her role in life. Peter came home once for a visit, now a military man who apparently served in the First Burmese War of 1824-26, but after that nothing was heard from him and the family supposed he was dead. The Rector is an interesting male authority figure—he is at first rather a stern figure, but the loss of Peter saddens and softens him. The chapter has taught us much about Matty, Deborah, and their family history.

7. Visiting

Miss Betty Barker invites everyone to her home, and things go well. The Barker family owned a profitable shop, and now she is retired, one of the finer dressers in this provincial town. Mrs. Jamieson will attend, as will Mrs. Forrester and others, but not Mrs. Mary Fitz-Adam, the widowed sister of Cranford's surgeon, Mr. Hoggins. Mrs. Fitz-Adam has bought a house thought to confer a patent of gentility (63), but Mrs. Jamieson studiously ignores her as beneath her station. When Miss Deborah Jenkyns passed away, the strict code of gentility was no longer understood or maintained so clearly as it had been when Deborah was "in charge" of such matters. Miss Barker serves dinner, which is rather unusual (and a bit of an affront) in this town where so much understated economy is practiced. Mrs. Jamieson says that her sister-in-law Lady Glenmire is coming to visit, which is an exciting development for the women.

8. "Your Ladyship "

At first Mrs. Jamieson snubs the other ladies, but in due time she changes her mind and decides that they may indeed visit Lady Glenmire. Like Chapter 7, this chapter is mostly about about manners, gentility, rank. The women concern themselves with protocol in preparing to visit Lady Glenmire, who manages to ingratiate herself with them by requesting additional servings of the originally sparse tea and sugar. The Lady isn't wealthy, and her husband never sat in the Scottish parliament, but her title is strikingly important here in Cranford. Mrs. Forrester tells a comical anecdote about how she recovered some fine lacework from her cat, who had swallowed it and only coughed it up after receiving a dose of currant jelly. Lace was expensive stuff, and not something to be given up for lost easily. We may wonder about the propriety of telling Lady Glenmire such a story, but that's no deterrence with Mrs. Forrester, and the story seems to go over well.

Mrs. Jamieson's pretentious, indolent butler is another noteworthy character in this chapter—ensconced in his considerable comfort and self-regard, he rather intimidates the ladies, who are by no means as warlike as the narrator's initial description of them as Amazons suggested.

9. Signor Brunoni

The narrator returns to Drumble to tend to her sick father. Matty writes her late in the year, apparently excited about the coming of one Signor Brunoni, a conjurer. This expectation gives the narrator a chance to talk about the ladies' general credulity. Miss Pole, however, is quite sure she knows all about conjuration, and reads an encyclopedia explanation of it. The Rector Hayter is among those present at the visitor's performance—the Rector is a shy man who seems almost afraid of the women. The narrator suspects that Miss Pole pursued him upon his arrival in Cranford, but evidently nothing came of it.

10. The Panic

This chapter mostly concerns wild stories about robbers and ghosts—a panic that has ensued from the appearance in town of the strange Signor Brunoni. At the chapter's end, the women must make their way through a dark patch of land around Cranford, which is daunting for them given the state they are in. But nothing much has really happened, either to Mr. Hoggins (whom everyone thinks was robbed) or to anyone else. They aren't in danger, and some men conveniently show up to help carry Matty along the road.

11. Samuel Brown

"Signor Brunoni's" real name is Samuel Brown, as it turns out, and the women have gotten over their superstitions from the previous chapter. Mr. Brown had been a soldier in India, and we hear from his wife the story of how she marched to Calcutta seeking safety, having lost six young children to illness in India. For once, we come across suffering that is scarcely softened by the narrative style: Mrs. Brown's story is full of danger and sadness. The other event is that Matty Jenkyns refuses to denounce marriage, as Miss Pole does. Part of this chapter is about the relative merits of childbirth and marriage.

12. Engaged to be Married

Lady Glenmire is going to marry Mr. Hoggins, which is somewhat scandalous because of her rank. She has been the best liked amongst the ladies. Will she now drop her title? The narrator wants to know if the "Aga Jenkyns" Mrs. Brown told her about is in fact Peter, her long-lost brother.

13. Stopped Payment

Matty's Town and County bank (a joint stock outfit that depends on the combined assets of the shareholders) is going broke, and she will have only about five shillings a week to live on. A shilling or "bob" is 1/20 th of a pound—not much when we consider that she has lost about 150 pounds in annual income from the bank. But Matty doesn't show her anxiety until the chapter's end. She exchanges five pounds for farmer Dobson's bad note in a shop, and shows remarkable generosity and selflessness. The narrator plans to get the other ladies to contribute to Matty's upkeep on the sly. Money worries often bring out the worst in people, but Matty reveals her genuinely stoical English quality here, which may be somewhat surprising given her superstitious and occasionally odd behavior earlier in the novel.

14. Friends in Need

Martha refuses to abandon Miss Matty, and the narrators reflect on what Matty can do to earn a living. Teaching is out since there isn't much by way of practical skills she has to teach the new generation; all she has is patience, humility, sweetness, and a firm understanding of her limitations (132). But selling tea sounds promising. Soon, Martha announces her impending marriage to Jem Hearn, who comically complains about the suddeness of it all, but goes along. The narrator gets others together to see what they can contribute to Matty's upkeep. Mrs. Forrester can only afford a little, but Mrs. Fitz-Adam privately tells the narrator that she can contribute quite a lot. The narrator's father helps out in his rather imposing way, settling Matty's affairs as well as they can be settled at this point. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jamieson is upset that Lady Glenmire is marrying such a commoner as Hoggins.

15. A Happy Return

Lady Glenmire returns to Cranford as Mrs. Hoggins, and seems inexcusably happy at the change. Matty is doing very well selling tea, and the arrangement with Martha and Jem is working out fine. Martha has a daughter whom she names "Matilda." So by proxy this birth gives Matty the daughter she herself never had. But the big "return" here is that of Peter from India. He has enough to live on comfortably, and is able to resolve Matty's financial troubles. The implied contrast throughout the novel has been between the ways of Drumble and the modern world as opposed to the gentility and generosity of Cranford, where money, when it's to be had at all, mainly serves to unite people rather than isolate them. This chapter certainly ratifies that contrast, though we shouldn't overstate it—the narrator's father is, after all, a sharp man of business, but he is isn't a capitalist villain or misguided utilitarian ideologue straight out of Dickens. The Gordons will be returning to Cranford as well, so it looks as if all will turn out well, with everyone comfortable and happy again.

16. Peace to Cranford

The Gordons return, and Peter deftly re-establishes friendly relations between Mrs. Jamieson and Lady Glenmire. There is some minor anxiety that perhaps he is striking up a romance with the widow Mrs. Jamieson, but that turns out to be nonsense. The novel ends with the notion that Matty has always been the genius loci of Cranford, someone everyone wants to be around. The characters' concerns about their genteel lineage seldom, if ever, get the better of the generous, genial spirit that reigns in this novel. Rank makes a difference, but community more so, and the final chapter promises continuity in this restored state of normalcy for Cranford.

Week 10, Rossettis, Morris, Swinburne

2008-04-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

Notes on Christina Rossetti

“Song—She sat and sang alway”

A lot of poetry places a great deal of stock in memory and hope, but in this poem, it’s suggested that they shouldn’t be given too much importance, or thought to contain or promise more than they do.

“Song—When I am dead, my dearest”

This is a wistful poem coming from a devout Anglican, but it’s appropriate in theological terms, I think. The speaker is perhaps just saying that there’s no point in becoming obsessive about states after death, especially is that obsession attaches to the departed person’s “final resting place.” The speaker will be elsewhere anyhow. Doctrinally, the point is that to mourn excessively is to show that one was attached to the most perishable component of a person (whether we mean the body or the personality), not the one that a Christian considers immortal.

“After Death”

Death lends perspective on relationships. Does the speaker gain release from what constrained her in life? She seems concerned still with the lover or husband’s thoughts about her. That isn’t always the case in Rossetti’s poems—see, for example, “Sleeping at Last.”

“In an Artist’s Studio”

The speaker finds Elizabeth Siddal and meditate on the difference between her and the one ideal (in many guises) of an aesthetic, sensuous medieval lady. Christina distances herself from the Brotherhood. She refers to the relationship between Siddal and Dante Gabriel. It may be that all erotic relations involve a degree of objectification of the other, but the Brotherhood carries this tendency much farther than necessary.

“Winter: My Secret”

As Isobel Armstrong writes in her book Victorian Poetry, the poem “turns on the refusal of expression. It is about and is itself a barrier” (357). The speaker refers to wraps and masks, coverings that are also representational. Rossetti plays with the image of a spinster with a secret of some sort, possibly one about love. Armstrong says that the poem is concerned with the way “the sexuality of the speaking subject is created and bound” (359), but I don’t think that need be the case—it seems more carefree than that kind of heavy framework suggests. It’s been said that a person with no secrets has no self, that a secret is the core around which personality is built.

“No, Thank You, John”

This witty poem makes fun of the stereotypical male “puppy dog” sensibility about relationships: obsessive, jealous, possession-oriented. I don’t suppose Christina Rossetti would have agreed with Stendhal’s dictum that “In love, possession is nothing; it’s enjoyment that makes all the difference” (En amour, posséder n’est rien; c’est jouir qui fait tout). Here, the offer is friendship of a rather businesslike sort—which of course the immature male addressee seems unlikely to consider worthwhile. Friendship requires reciprocity, whereas the kind of “love” this particular male wants is reductive, based on simple object relations.

“Sleeping at Last”

Compare this poem to earlier ones about death.

A Few Other Poems (Not Assigned):

“Up-Hill”

This poem is a mini-allegory of the sort we might find in John Bunyan or George Herbert. It stems from the traditional Christian theme of life as an arduous journey on the way to death. Is the path’s end death, or the life to come in heaven? The latter, ultimately; the voice promises hope and it answers all questions, but not in a facilely comforting way. The “beds” promised are graves—cold comfort, at least in the short run.

“Goblin Market”

This long poem has the ambience of a Grimm’s fairy tale—they often have to do with sex, violence, and death, as did a fair number of children’s tales in the nineteenth century. (See George McDonald’s novel At the Back of the North Wind.) Where are the parents here? How old are Lizzie and Laura? What is the season and the place? The poem’s context seems ambivalent—it’s a jumble of references that bewilder rather than clarify. The poem sounds like a “heard” tale, not a written one.

Laura buys fruit not with money but with a piece of herself—a lock of hair. She pines because her desires can find no object to satiate them. The fruit has been removed completely, and she can’t even express what the fruit looks like or tastes like.

What are the barriers to expression in this poem? It seems to be a feminine discourse of sacrifice, repressions, and denial. Laura and Lizzie are doubles. Expression seems to require barriers. Conventional ethics would require that Laura accept the constraints others place on her. She will grow up to be a proper Victorian matron. But notice how the cure takes place—she assents to the overwhelming power of the fruit. She enters a second innocence by accepting sexuality. But all it does is allow her to survive. From an adult perspective, what is celebrated here is also to be feared: temptation, and overflowing of sexual and expressive power.

“A Triad”

Love is cast as central to life, yet frustrating. Even married love falls short, but the other two alternatives—renunciation and shame—fall short as well.

“Echo”

Compare this poem to Ovid’s “Echo and Narcissus”; he scorned her and others, and then fell in love with his own image in a pool. He pined away and was transformed into a flower. Echo had already pined away into a voice. But this Echo can speak independently, even if she needs the lover to visit her in dreams, her “pool.” The question is whether even the physical contact the poem may suggest was a full meeting of spirits. The Echo and Narcissus story is about barriers keeping one human being from another—it’s about isolation and solipsism.

Below are some introductory remarks on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. There are a few references to material we haven’t studied because this was originally written for a Victorianist seminar at Chapman.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Introduction

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formally lasted only a few years around the beginning of the mid-Victorian Period and included painters such as D.G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones and John Everett Millais, is an early form of aestheticism or “art for art’s sake,” so it makes sense to connect the PRB to the 1880’s-90’s movement including Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, and others.

Both the precursor movement and the later flowering of aestheticism amount to a rejection of bourgeois sensibilities in art—a rejection of the facile demand that everything should “make sense” and be “realistic” in the contemporizing and vulgar sense of that term. The aesthete’s disgust at artists who copy mid-to-late Victorian “reality” and reflect back to the middle class what is already familiar to it may be seen in Wilde’s delightfully elitist comment that “in art we do not wish to be concerned with the doings of the lower orders” or his infamous quip about the public’s anger at certain caustically realistic works of art being no more than “the rage of Caliban seeing his face in a glass.”

This context should remind us that like its offshoot or revival later on, the PRB movement may be placed in the tradition of semi-romantic or “conservative” reactions against modernity. Consider the writings we have studied so far: Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin. Despite their differences, all are lovers of mystery and the realm of spirit, and all strongly oppose what they see as misguided modern demands for facile clarity and pointless precision, for vulgar materialism and soulless instrumentalism, for a world increasingly designed to fit a radical and artificial conception of human nature and not an organic one. They see all this as the breakdown of any true principle of authority by which ordinary people and their governors may be guided, and in reaction these “conservatives” attempt to reconstruct what they believe are more workable and truer principles by which to live. While the PRB does not voice such grand claims as the mid-Victorian sages, certainly their rejection of modernity stems from the same kind of discontent with the status quo.

The PRB rejected the Royal Academy’s conventionalism, which was allied with the rules (privileging “rationality, selective verisimilitude, simplicity, and balance”) proffered by High Renaissance painter Raphael (1483-1520). Ruskin-like, they see Raphael’s theory of painting as an indicator of spiritual and cultural decline, and want to turn back the literary and artistic clock. They adopt as their models the medieval painters who lived around the time of Dante Alighieri, and also draw sustenance from religion and literature—Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, and Arthurian romance. DGR in particular liked the richness of color, the vividness of imagination, and the intensely spiritual rendering of the human body one can find in these painters. It is as if Giotto and others of that time would agree with Wilde: “those who find any difference between spirit and body have neither.” (You can see some fine examples at the Getty Museum and online at Olga’s Gallery.) Here’s a good online definition of Pre-Raphaelite painting:

The Pre-Raphaelite painters insisted that a painter should paint whatever he sees, regardless of the formal or academic rules of painting. The effort at fidelity to nature and experience was manifested in clarity, brightness, and sharply realized details in their paintings. However, despite its use of naturalistic detail, Pre-Raphaelitism in both painting and poetry turned away from realism, the ugliness of modern life in the 19th-century industrial society in England . The Pre-Raphaelites took no account of the life of contemporary England ; instead, they turned to a heroic and decorative world of the Middle Ages, the art of which was destroyed by Raphael and the Renaissance. (http://www.music.indiana.edu/~u520/rossetti.html)

I think that Herbert Tucker and Dorothy Mermin are right in pointing out the tenuousness of the “transcendence” and mystery they want to see in nature, but let’s supplement this with something that shows the PRB exhibiting a bit more of the “courage of other people’s convictions.” I’ll refer to the aesthetic critic Walter Pater’s analysis of the poetry of DGR:
Walter Pater characterizes “The Blessed Damozel” as follows:

[I]n The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own. Common 205 APPRECIATIONS to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the quality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that earliest poem—a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be.[…]—an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man’s own proper speech; as that speech itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. That he had this gift of transparency in language—the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult 206 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI “early Italian poets”: such transparency being indeed the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see, deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew it.

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition of outline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family circumstances, he was ever a lover—a “servant and singer,” faithful as Dante, “of Florence and of Beatrice”—with some close inward conformities of genius also, independent of any mere circumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time, 207 APPRECIATIONS that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation.

As you can see from what I’ve quoted, Pater casts Rossetti as an impressionist, a painter and poet true to his own internal impressions.

Notes on William Morris

From “The Defense of Guenevere”

Guenevere is riveting and compelling in her self-defense, which is both passionate and wistful, an explanation more to herself than to the assembled knights who, at least in Morris’ version, are putting her on trial. This is by no means simply a modernization of Arthurian romance—there’s something genuinely “Arthurian” about Guenevere’s great strength, her loyalty to Sir Lancelot even in the face of danger. In Malory’s version, Guenevere was not so resourceful a speaker, as I recall, though she was a strong personality. There is little emphasis on sin and repentance here as a frame within which to place the Queen’s experience. Not that the concept of female virtue or chastity is altogether missing, but most striking is Guenevere’s legitimizing of her experience with Lancelot over a period of many years. Whatever happened between her and the bold knight, she feels entirely justified in uttering again and again to Gawain’s face that he is a liar for calling her an adulterer.

“How I Became a Socialist”

1491. “Well, what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor . . . in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH.” Morris holds an egalitarian ideal: a community should live rationally, without wasting what is produced or distributing it in an irrational, unfair manner. Capitalism generates profit by manufacturing a great excess of goods—something new since the ancients often had trouble just producing the necessities—but fails to solve the problem of distribution. Capitalist production, Morris agrees with Marx, turns workers into disposable tools; their humanity dwindles down to a demand for the minimum necessary to live, such as food and shelter. Even for those who manage to live comfortably, bourgeois atomism and alienation are the laws of life.

1492. “[I]n my position of a well-to-do man, not suffering from the disabilities which oppress a working man at every step, I feel that I might never have been drawn into the practical side of the question if an ideal had not forced me to seek towards it. . . . / Before the uprising of modern Socialism almost all intelligent people either were, or professed themselves to be, quite contented with the civilization of this century.” Morris cannot accept the status quo, with its satisfaction that many people must live in poverty and misery. He calls for radical changes in the social and economic structure of Great Britain—changes that would go far beyond anything imagined by Whig incrementalists, whose tepid reforms, he suggests, would never lead Britons to a just, egalitarian society. Whig reformism, he believes, is only the remnant of a bygone patriarchal, aristocratic ideal in which everyone has a place and ought to stay there.

1493. “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” It should be clear from this sentence that while Morris’ socialism is not reducible to the patriarchal socialism of Ruskin or Carlyle, neither is it to be simply conflated with Marx’s scientific socialism, even if the Socialist League he helped to found in 1885 had Friedrich Engels’ approval as genuinely Marxist. But Marxism proper shows little of Morris the artist’s interest in the production of “beautiful things,” at least in the near future: Marx’s point is that the working class, once sufficiently self-aware of its great value as the creator of the wealth accumulated by the capitalist owner-class, will take over the means of production and use them to build a truly egalitarian, classless society in which everyone works honorably and shares the benefits of work fairly. “From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs,” as the communist saying goes. Marx had nothing against modern industrial production, and by no means rejected modernity: he wanted to harness its power in a rational, humane way. But it’s true that he thought reorganizing the relations of production would allow work to become a constructive, community-building, humanizing activity—in fact, Marx’s views about the centrality of labor for life are adapted very closely from Hegel’s analysis of labor in The Phenomenology of Mind. Morris supported revolutionary socialism, but his interests as an artist and man of means inflects his own comments on the ideal towards which a socialist society should be working.

1494. Some will say, Morris admits, that “any one who professes to think that the question of art and cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork . . . does not understand what art means, or how that its roots must have a soil of a thriving and unanxious life.” However, he insists, we must bear in mind that “civilization has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread. . . .” In this sense, Morris argues, art actually leads the way, pointing ordinary people towards a higher ideal of life. Art, in Morris’ view, sets a more fully human vision of life before us, making us dissatisfied with the vulgar and spiritually impoverished present. There may be some elitism or vanguardism in Morris’ advocacy of crafts and craftsmanship as beautifying everyday life. But on the whole, he argues that healthy art can only come from a healthy society: we produce the kind of world we can imagine, and capitalism has long been making us imagine and reproduce an ugly world hostile to everything that is worthwhile in us as human beings. Modern people, Morris is suggesting, are in danger of becoming comfortable with a diminished understanding of their own capacities and purpose in life, and only a classless society in which art flourishes can turn things around.

Notes on Algernon Charles Swinburne

“Hymn to Proserpine”

Swinburne’s speaker is a late-pagan whose bitterness at the victory of the new religion (Christianity) is supreme. He takes comfort in the idea that the new religion will pass in time, just as his own is going the way of death, to be overcome, as all religions will, by what he calls “the wave of the world.” The deep sea, the power of nature, is greater than any god, in his view. What is collapsing around him isn’t only his religion—it’s an entire way of life built upon the ancient rites and sensibilities. A belief system that had once generated a feeling of community now renders the speaker isolated and weary. He is bitter and beleaguered, and in no condition to fight city hall, so to speak; it appears that the new religion has been both officially and unofficially accepted since we hear that “New gods are crowned in the city” (15). But at least his pagan creed leaves a person space really to die: there’s a place within the old order for the speaker’s natural desire to perish utterly: “I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so. . . . / For there is no god found stronger than death; and death is a sleep (106, 110). Persephone is, among other things, goddess of death and sleep, so paganism has a god devoted to his particular desire at this time of sorrow and loss.

By contrast, the “barbarous” new monotheistic religion, with its “ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted gods” (44), thinks our speaker, is out to conquer death itself, thereby taking away his final solace. Not for him is this worship of the compassionate “pale Galilean” (35) with his offer of salvation, and not for him immaculate Mother Mary, whom he considers hardly worth mentioning in the same breath as Venus, mother of Rome’s great progenitor Aeneas: “not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, / clothed round with the world’s desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam” (78-79). It’s better, the speaker insists, to keep faith with the ancient gods’ combination of beauty and pain, terror and calm. (As we know, the Greek and Roman gods could be generous or cruel as the mood struck them.) The Roman speaker prefers a religion that doesn’t try to make sense of the universe at the expense of its authenticity, whereas Christianity offers an all-embracing scheme of things in which, as Hamlet would say, “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” and absolute justice prevails. The speaker is not interested in the effects of the ineffable and transcendent; he prefers Aphrodite and her offspring Proserpina, key agents of a faith that embraces the necessity of death and remains close to the processes of the natural world. On the whole, Swinburne’s ancients aren’t the calm, dispassionate models for modern humanity that Matthew Arnold and some the German Enlightenment’s scholars make them out to be—his Greeks in particular are closer to the Dionysians of Nietzsche and Walter Pater.

As for Swinburne’s distinctive style, T. S. Eliot says rightly (though he hardly means it as a compliment) that this Victorian poet had a genius for making sound prevail over sense and for existing in a linguistic universe of his own making. Often Swinburne’s anapest-laced verse sweeps over one’s senses like an ocean wave, as if the poet doesn’t want us to pause and analyze what he says but wants us instead to experience the cumulative emotional effect of his long, classical-looking lines. (An anapestic foot runs -- -- /: unstressed unstressed stressed; it has a skipping quality and isn’t often used as the main unit in a line of English verse.) It’s also worth observing that Swinburne’s words seem strangely transposable—he tends to repeat certain images and sounds to an almost obsessive degree. (Oceanic imagery abounds—there are more waves and foam in his poetry, no doubt, than in anybody else’s.) That his style is perhaps an acquired taste for readers goes almost with saying, and Swinburne knew very well that his rebellious brand of verse-for-verse’s sake was easy to parody. In “Poeta Loquitur,” he offers this unforgettable description of his own output: “Mad mixtures of Frenchified offal / With insults to Christendom’s creed. / Blind blasphemy, schoolboylike scoff, all / These blazon me blockhead indeed.” But there’s more to Swinburne than a thicket of poetic lines in which “reason roves ruined by rhyme.” He is a genuine precursor of and then contributor to the English decadent movement of the later nineteenth century.

“Ave Atque Vale”

In this remarkable elegy to Baudelaire, the symboliste to whom Swinburne owes much of his inspiration, the English poet pays tribute to the decadent beauty of the Frenchman’s poetry, to its distinctive sensuousness and its preoccupation with sin, death, and whatever is heavy with desire, languid, mysterious, subterranean, transgressive, strange. The opening question shows Swinburne’s awareness of Baudelaire’s unique quality: “Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, / Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?” (1-2) These are conventional floral symbols, and so another and more personal option must be added: “Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before, / Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat / And full of bitter summer. . .” (7-8). Swinburne, with his aristocratic contempt of anything ordinary, found a brother in Baudelaire, whose poetry he apparently saw as the antithesis of the bourgeois concern for moral propriety in art. Neither will we find in this elegy traditional claims about the power of verse to immortalize the dead; as always, Swinburne’s poetry posits death as absolute, even luxuriating in the completeness of deprivation: “Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done; / There lies not any troublous thing before, / Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, / For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, / All waters as the shore” (194-98). This extreme annihilationism seems to be part of what he jokingly calls in “Poeta Loquitur” his “schoolboylike scoff” against Christian hopes for eternal salvation. Still, in spite of Swinburne’s insistence that all of humankind’s symbolic systems, its reductivist intelligibility-making schemes, will pass, we find him drawing much sustenance from the classical world and outlook in which his poetry is steeped: his tribute to Baudelaire is rife with allusions to Apollo, the latter-day Venus of Tannhäuser legend, and Sappho vexed by the currents off Leucas rock.

Week 09, Darwin, Huxley, Robert Browning

2008-03-25T22:31:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (Edition: E-Text)

Evolutionary Theory and the Moral Sense

My purpose in this guide is to set down some of the most basic among Charles Darwin’s concepts and to discuss some implications of these scientific concepts for “cultural criticism.” Darwin’s theory of evolution was important to British theory and culture. Evolutionism caused anxiety in many sensitive, intelligent people whose faith in Christianity had for some time been buckling under the weight of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, ecclesiastical infighting, and historicist biblical scholarship, among other things. Unfortunately, the doctrine of evolution also provided matter for the least responsible cultural theorists; it affected not only the T. H. Huxleys of England but the Herbert Spencers as well, the “social Darwinists” who stole the master’s ideas and used them to suggest that human poverty, misery, and vice were somehow “natural” and therefore necessary. What was the intellectual material that created such a storm? Darwin’s fundamental principle was that all life, including human life, evolved from some lower ancestral form or forms. Darwin’s own writings can best explain the basic scientific context necessary to an understanding of “Darwinism” for cultural theory.

How, according to Darwin, did higher life forms evolve? What are the basic principles of evolutionism? In the second of his two main treatises, The Descent of Man, Darwin’s answer is that variation, natural selection, and sexual selection are responsible for all life that now exists on our planet. By variation, Darwin refers to nine laws that he believes to be responsible for physical changes in living things:

1. The direct and definite action of changed [environmental] conditions
2. The effects of the long-continued use or disuse of parts
3. The cohesion of homologous parts
4. The variability of multiple parts
5. Compensation of growth
6. The effects of the mechanical pressure of one part on another
7. Arrests of development, leading to the diminution or suppression of parts
8. The reappearance of long-lost characters through reversion
9. Correlated variation

All of the above laws would, time permitting, deserve some attention, but the most important, if most “perplexing” (Darwin’s word) among them is the “direct and definite action of changed [environmental] conditions.” This law implies that a change in external living conditions affects the physical structure of a given set of organisms. The clearest examples Darwin provides of such environmental impact are variations in stature, weight, and hair or fur growth on the basis of geographical, climactic differences. Darwin’s next vehicle of evolution is “natural selection.” This concept implies that the better adapted a given organism (or group of organisms) is to a set of environmental conditions, the more likely it will be to survive and thrive. The creatures that can best cope with their environment—the best hunters, foragers, burrowers, camouflagers, and so on—will tend to propagate more of their kind and crowd out less well-adapted species, subspecies, and individuals.

Darwin’s point is not that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)—he does not believe that animals directly change their structure to suit a given environment; rather, Darwin means that certain animals possess characteristics that allow them to survive in their environment. Thus, such animals will tend to survive while animals born with less favorable characteristics will die and fail to propagate their kind. Variation and natural selection go together as agents of evolution. When certain variations occur (for whatever reasons) in an organism’s structure and behavior, the change either will or will not serve that organism well in its surroundings. (The surroundings, one might add, are also subject to change.) Here Darwin presents us with a dynamic model for evolutionary change, one in which very little can be taken for granted with respect to “survival value.” A creature may be finely adapted to its environment, and then suddenly find itself literally out in the cold or hunted when that environment and its other inhabitants change. Unlike Lamarckian theory, in which “improvements in the structure of animals took the form of the inheritance by offspring of some modified characteristic acquired by a parent as a result of some environmental circumstance faced by that parent” and in which evolution is propelled by “a natural drive towards perfection,” natural selection operates without teleological purpose. “Survival of the fittest” may be the phrase used to characterize natural selection, but this phrase does not imply that nature has any pre-established purpose in selecting individuals and species as it does. (“Herbert Spencer’s Liberalism” in Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, ed. R. Bellamy. London: Routledge, 1990, page 118. See also The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, page 453.)

Add “sexual selection” to these two principles of variation and natural selection, and we have a tolerably adequate model for Darwinian evolution. Sexual selection, according to Darwin, produces even more dramatic effects than the more general “natural selection.” Male and female animals, he says, often develop the most extraordinary means of charming one another and defeating rival lovers, and these physical characteristics and behaviors are far less limited in their power to induce beneficial changes in an animal’s structure and habits than are the more general demands of natural selection. For example, so long as a male’s courage and claws do not violate the dictates of natural selection—of getting by in the environment—that male is free to develop a great number of interesting, and perhaps useful, new “tricks” and structural differences.

Variation, natural selection, and sexual selection, then, work together to constitute the process of evolution. Now we must ask what kind of evolution evolution caused, however partially or indirectly, in British culture and cultural analysis. Darwin’s theory was not comforting to an era sometimes characterized as a time of religious doubt. It would be simplistic to claim that Darwin’s ideas caused such a crisis, but they certainly helped to shake some thoughtful Victorians’ belief in such basic concepts as god, a benevolent natural world, morality, and progress. If evolution is the law of the universe, how can human beings regard themselves as the center of that universe, or even as significant? In The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957), Walter Houghton writes perceptively on this problem:

In spite of some notable anticipations, in Hobbes, for example, nature had been thought of as the manifestation of a good and beneficent God. Natural theology, culminating in [William] Paley, had emphasized the order and design of a creative intelligence; the romantic sensibility had found the divine spirit rolling though all things, and had worshiped nature as the nurse and guide of life. But once Lyell’s Principles of Geology had appeared (1830-33), followed by Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation (1844) and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), nature became a battleground in which individuals and species fought for their lives and every acre of land was the scene of untold violence and suffering. If this nature was the creation of God, then God, as Tennyson put it, “is disease, murder, and rapine.” Or if not, then either there is no God and no immortality, but only Nature, indifferent to all moral values, impelling all things to a life of instinctive cruelty ending in death; or else God and Nature are locked in an incredible and inexplicable strife. These terrible alternatives are all present, directly or by implication, in the famous passage on evolution in In Memoriam:

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life,
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

(Houghton 68-69)

Although Tennyson finished In Memoriam in 1850—nearly a decade before Darwin published The Origin of Species—and thus expresses his concerns about pre-Darwinian developments in the natural sciences, his description of nature as “red in tooth and claw” reads forward to later Victorians’ anxiety about the implications of Darwinian evolution. Even Tennyson’s pre-Darwin nature is not the comforting handwriting of God. What can nature be, then, but some vast, heartless thing, clawing and screeching its way toward a doubtful end? After quoting Tennyson, Houghton references the fears of Thomas Carlyle (one of the best analysts of the Industrial Revolution), about the possibility that evolution might be true. What if it was true? What of ethics? What if, in Houghton’s paraphrase, “conscience and intellect were ‘but developments of the functions of animals’” and if “[f]ar from being the special gift of God, they . . . [were merely] natural mechanisms which all the higher animals had acquired, perhaps by ‘natural selection,’ and developed because of their enormous utility in the long struggle for existence”? (70) In short, Carlyle was afraid that Darwinian evolution would make it nearly impossible to counter the effects of an economic system that threatened to turn human beings into machines, into “stomachs” rather than “souls.” If humans are sophisticated animals that have evolved by natural processes, from what standpoint could one oppose the worst effects of the Industrial Age and capitalism? If men are animals, why should they not be tool-using, laboring machines just as we often say a shark or tiger is a “killing machine”? And why, indeed, shouldn’t the strongest—or richest—tiger thrive? If evolution is the regulatory law of the world, a sophisticated bundle of nerves and muscle like man can hardly invoke “ethics” as a weapon against what has proven to be successful in evolutionary terms. Perhaps, as Thomas Henry Huxley argued, “man is simply a human automaton” (Houghton 70). Perhaps, too, everything comes down to what Herbert Spencer grandly calls “the persistence of force.” Darwin’s theory, understood in a somewhat exaggerated fashion, did its part in unsettling cherished cultural values in nineteenth-century England.

But does Darwin himself take such a gloomy view? Does he believe that human evolution is as bleak as the above scenario suggests? To answer this question requires an examination of Darwin’s scientific views on the vexed question of morality. Because so many of the worst effects of Darwinism had to do with its presumptuously general application in the new social sciences, it would be appropriate to deal first with Darwin’s sense of scientific procedure and fairness. Although certain passages in The Descent of Man may seem anything but impartial, it’s best to be fair to the text and take the good with the bad. When Darwin describes his landing with the Beagle on the shores of Tierra del Fuego, he is, true enough, anything but fair-sounding: “For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions” (634). The captain of the Beagle was more generous to the inhabitants of the land he came to catalogue for the British empire. Nonetheless, when he is not exaggerating the flaws of “the lowest savages” but is instead dealing with the basic procedures of empirical science, Darwin is far more careful than men such as Herbert Spencer. For example, in the debate between monogenists (those who believed that humans evolved from one common stock) and polygenists (those who claimed that the different races evolved separately and were, in fact, separate species altogether), Darwin is careful to establish his own monogenist, evolutionist stance through a close, inductive examination of his opponents’ position. In the course of working through the polygenist arguments, he makes this reasonable statement: “Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to undertake the description of a group of highly varying organisms, has encountered cases . . . precisely like that of man; and if of a cautious disposition, he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate into each other, under a single species; for he will say to himself that he has no right to give names to objects which he cannot define” (178). It is unfortunate that some other scientists were not so aware of their limitations when they set out to define, quantify, or otherwise rank complex human qualities and situations, usually in the name of the status quo. By the time Darwin concludes that “before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death” (184), he has dealt well enough with his opposition to give his own statements the ring of authority. And in this debate over the single or multiple origins of humankind, Darwin’s forceful words are all for the good, since anyone can see which way the polygenist school tends with respect to human relations; “separate but equal,” itself a racist doctrine, was not even in the Victorian vocabulary.

But what does Darwin’s theory say about the role of natural and sexual selection in the development of human morals? Reconstructing this theory allows one to make firm statements about the social outlook that evolutionism led its chief proponent to adopt. Darwin’s basic proposition about evolution is that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial instincts being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man” (Descent 99). Darwin posits, then, that very early in the evolution of any higher animal, natural selection would have led to the development of a social instinct. This instinct would have compelled the animal to feel affection and sympathy at least for members of its own immediate family or other unit. As Darwin says, “the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them” (99). Later, once the sociable animal’s mental faculties become highly enough developed, memory comes into play and reinforces its sympathetic bond to the group:

images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual: and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results . . . from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise, as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature, nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. (100)

It seems that once equipped with memory, this sociable creature is no longer able to obey its mere survival instincts in opposition to the wishes of the group, at least without unpleasant emotional consequences. When the human animal satisfies its individual needs in a way that harms the community, its suffers because the more enduring social instinct has been denied. To sympathy and memory, says Darwin, must be added linguistic comprehension of communal opinions and, lastly, habit. All of these acquisitions greatly enhance the power of the community over the single being’s wishes. Thanks to the complexity of the human animal, Darwin points out, the development of a fully moral sense is rather more complex than his “social animal” narrative implies. People are not the same as bees. Still, he goes on to insist strongly enough to disturb believers in divinely sanctioned ethics that the intellectual and emotional differences between one species and another are of degree rather than of kind. Men and the higher animals, proclaims Darwin, are “likewise in part impelled by mutual love and sympathy, assisted by some amount of reason” (111). There is one thing about humans, though, that separates them from their less sophisticated counterparts: conscience, a quality beyond mere discomfort at having done something reproachable. Darwin then poses the relevant question about conscience:

Although some instincts are more powerful than others, and thus lead to corresponding actions, yet it is untenable, that in man the social instincts (including the love of praise and fear of blame) possess greater strength, or have, through long habit, acquired greater strength than the instincts of self-preservation, hunger, lust, vengeance, etc. Why then does man regret, even though trying to banish such regret, that he has followed the one natural impulse rather than the other; and why does he further feel that he ought to regret his conduct? (113)

Humans, that is, not only become upset when they do wrong in the eyes of the community; individuals continue to feel remorse long after the deed and even say to themselves that they ought to feel bad about anti-social behavior. This imperious ought is a far cry from immediate sensation: it is a binding intellectual construct. Why should this ethical conviction take hold of man? Darwin explains that of all the animals, humans most demonstrably cannot escape the power of memory and reflection. Because of the desire for fellowship and approbation that has been instilled in them by the arduous process of natural selection, they cannot think of violating communal standards without feeling pain, and because of their powerful intellect and memory, they cannot help but think of their acts when they have once done them. These two factors, along with habit, mutually reinforce the social instincts and result in a moral sense so strong as to bring into existence conscience, the internal agent that reproves all infractions of the moral sense. (118)

Darwin believes so strongly in this account of the development of the moral sense and conscience that he is able to remove the “reproach . . . of laying the foundation of the noblest part of our nature in the base principle of selfishness; unless, indeed, the satisfaction which every animal feels, when it follows its proper instincts . . . be called selfish” (123). This is an important point in Darwin’s moral theory because he has just stated that even though the selfish instincts are very compelling, there is no need to make the utilitarian claim that civilization was and remains founded upon humankind’s mere self-interest. It is not, Darwin explains, the “greatest happiness principle” that has been the prime mover in human societies but rather the social instincts and sympathetic feelings that have been generated through ages of evolutionary success. The Benthamite precept about happiness may, he says, be the current standard for human conduct, but it is not and never really was the motive for it; that motive is far more closely connected to the greatest good and general wishes of the community than to the individual’s desire for happiness. (122-23) In fact, says Darwin, regard for the welfare of the group eventually becomes so great that it begins to prohibit even in thought the transgression of that group’s laws and opinions: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts, and ‘not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us’” (125). The quotation is from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King—an appropriate choice because of the poem’s chivalric emphasis on self-restraint and patience.

Darwin is at last able to make his peroration on the moral sense. In sum, he offers the social instincts, moral sense, and conscience as our best hope of keeping civilization on the advance. Even before the development of the deepest level of conscience, according to Darwin, changes for the better in men’s relations begin taking place:

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. (124)

Moreover, says Darwin, thanks to long our long experience of true conscience, there is all the more reason to feel confident about humanity’s chances of getting along in relative peace: “Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant.” (127) It makes sense to wonder what Darwin might have thought about such optimistic sentiments had he lived to see the twentieth century, with its global wars, genocidal barbarism, continued poverty, environmental degradation, and so forth. Even so, his central statement is that the moral sense and conscience are not excrescences on the framework of life; they are instead so deeply rooted in mankind by evolutionary natural selection that the human species is unlikely ever to dismiss them as insignificant.

Notes on T. H. Huxley’s “The Physical Basis of Life” (Edition: E-Text)

131. “[S]o widely spread is the conception of life as a something which works through matter, but is independent of it. . . .” Huxley’s argument to the contrary is that life is not independent of natural process and matter.

131. “What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different from one another . . . than the various kinds of living beings?” Much science in Huxley’s day was still done with the naked eye, but we see him here taking up a stance against the ubiquitous assumption that “common sense” must always be right. The inductive method often doesn’t give us results consonant with “common sense,” and in fact provides something much more substantial.

133. “[A] threefold unity–namely, a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition–does pervade the whole living world.” This kind of statement is probably why Huxley has sometimes been called “Darwin’s Bulldog”: Darwin himself often asserted the essential unity and continuity of life: creatures and their faculties may differ in degree, but not in kind.

133. “[A]ll the multifarious and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the continuance of the species.” So the goal of all activities comes down to maintenance, motility, and species-perpetuation, and a great deal of animal movement can be summed up by the terms “irritability and contractility.”

136-37. “[T]he wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dullness of our hearing; and could our ears [137] catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.” This passage is characteristic of Huxley’s rhetorical method, which aims to lend perspective on sometimes vast or dauntingly small phenomena, and make them accessible to contemplation.

137. “But the difference between the powers of the lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of degree, not of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards long ago so well pointed out, upon the extent to which the principle of the division of labour is carried out in the living economy.” Complex organisms make use of the principle enunciated in the realm of economics by Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776): the more specialized functions become, the more efficient the organism and the more noteworthy things it can accomplish. Simpler organisms function in a more generalized way, and are therefore more limited in what they can do.

142-43. “Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter. . . .” So protoplasm is the stuff of all life. What is this protoplasm? Well, it contains, says Huxley, “the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very complex union” (143), in which complex form we call protein. For those interested in the finer points of how the usage of this term differs from current scientific discussion of life’s ability to replicate itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplasm is worth visiting.

145. “And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the origin, of the matter of life?” Just as there are religious responses to the question, Huxley implies, so too does science offer a response of its own. He sums it up well in a phrase from Horace’s “Ars Poetica”: “Debemur morti nos nostraque” (line 63): We and all our works are dedicated to death. (Horace’s thought was connected to the birth, flourishing, and death of words, by the way.) The condition of life for the species, as evolution teaches, is the death of all individuals in due season.

146. “[T]he matter of life is a veritable peau de chagrin, and for every vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work of life results, directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm.” Everything we do involves the wastage of a certain amount of life’s substance—there’s what economists would call an “opportunity cost” to doing anything whatsoever. Except, of course, as Huxley points out, that living creatures are capable of repairing the loss that comes from living, at least for the time allotted to each of us. There is an ecosystem of living things that involves an interdependence between life and death, as he goes on to explain over the next several pages, with plants being the “accumulators of the power which animals distribute and disperse” (150).

153. “What better philosophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And why should "vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys" which have disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus accounted for the operation of the meat-jack by its inherent "meat-roasting quality," and scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of the spit by a certain mechanism worked by the draught of the chimney.” In other words, there’s no absolute need to posit an external, informing intelligence or power that somehow accounts for life; science can explain the life-process in material terms, and science, at least, should not try to go beyond that explanation. Says Huxley, “I can find no intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its molecules.” Again, those interested in current developments might want to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplasm.

153-54. “But I bid you beware that, in accepting these conclusions, you are placing your feet on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven.” Doesn’t science, then—just as many had feared from the time of Copernicus and Galileo onwards—reduce us to inconsequential specks of dust in a vast universe? Pascal captured the feeling well when he wrote, “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me” (Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie). Huxley has here made a rhetorical shift to the human consequences of the scientific ideas he has been explaining.

155. “I, individually, am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism to involve grave philosophical error.” Huxley is aware that he may be thought a thoroughgoing materialist “brute,” so he pointedly rejects the charge. But why is the term inappropriate? That is what he will explain in the essay’s final section.

158-59. “I take it to be demonstrable that it is utterly impossible to prove that anything whatever may not be the effect of a material and necessary cause. . . .” Huxley here engages with David Hume’s skeptical philosophy, according to which observing a long succession of similar events still would not prove that causality, and not chance, was behind those events. The point Huxley makes is different—he suggests that we cannot prove anything is not caused, not necessary, and that in fact scientific progress has always involved “the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity” (159). The more scientific research is done, he suggests, the less plausible it has become to assert that external spiritual or intelligential forces somehow account for the material processes we can observe around us.

159-60. Since such scientific investigation is no doubt going to continue this extension of “matter and law until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and with action” (159), says Huxley, many intelligent people “watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun” (160). But this is where he takes his leave of the materialists and fear-mongers alike. His explanation for the departure is that “matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups of natural phænomena.” In other words, the terms “matter” and “spirit” are only shell-concepts and do not refer to anything substantial; therefore, we need not think of our investment in “matter” as the basis of some terrible iron law of necessity that strips us of all free will.

161-62. “Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing? // But, if it is certain that we can have no knowledge of the nature of either matter or spirit, and that the notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate [162] conception of law, the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas.” This is the essence of Huxley’s argument against materialism and against those who would curtail scientific investigation because they fear its moral, philosophical consequences. We cannot posit absolute necessity in dogmatic fashion based on what we manage to learn about natural processes. We don’t and can’t know the nature of matter or spirit, so claiming we have reached a theological-level understanding based on our research into natural phenomena makes no sense. Science may not give us an absolute promise that we aren’t bound to necessity, but neither does it absolutely tell us there is any such absolute as necessity. What Huxley opposes here is dogmatic materialism, which is the obverse of dogmatic theology. We should, he writes, accept David Hume’s understanding of the situation, and realize that there are strict limits to the scope of scientific inquiry: it can’t give us access to the kind of absolute knowledge (paradoxically enough) that would allow us to say things like, “free will is utter nonsense.”

163-64. “We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to by to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of Nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events” (163). With these statements Huxley points us back to something like the Baconian statement of the scientific project: science, Bacon had said, was to be pursued for the sake of ameliorating the human condition and “for the greater glory of God.” Huxley certainly isn’t pushing the latter imperative, but he is promoting the first. His dual insistence is that human volition or will counts for something in the world and that our capacity to learn new things about the natural world is probably infinitely extensible. It so happens that scientists find it most convenient to pursue this extension of our understanding in materialist language because it “connects thought with the other phaenomena of the universe” and promises ever more control over the realm of thought and matter alike.

165. “But the man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry . . . seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems, for real entities–and with this further disadvantage . . . that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life.” The whole aim of Huxley’s essay has been to suggest emphatically that there’s really nothing to fear from scientific inquiry: it will not and cannot transform our notions about ourselves to the really catastrophic degree posited by the most anxious observers of modern intellectual progress. Evidently, Huxley believes that there’s plenty of “elbow room” for the concept of free humanity no matter how much material knowledge we may accumulate. Leaping up from the bounds of science and positing either some vitalistic “life force” or (alternately, and in league with the theologically-minded) claiming that a god-principle must be behind and above everything that happens only retards progress, in Huxley’s view. Progress comes only when people know how to delimit the boundaries within which they seek to learn. Immanuel Kant had made a rather similar point, after all, when he said we have no access to “things in themselves,” so we had better confine ourselves to what we can know—which for Kant was how the mind itself participates in the construction or disposition of what we term reality. Finally, Huxley’s rhetorical strategy isn’t the only one you might come across in nineteenth-century responses to the advance of scientific knowledge. Nietzsche’s exuberant, classical Greek-oriented embrace of the most destructive admissions about material nature and human life, for instance, differ markedly from the relatively calm approach Huxley takes towards the march of science.

Week 07, Matthew Arnold

2008-03-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

Notes on Matthew Arnold

“The Buried Life”

This poem brilliantly analyzes what Arnold posits as a universal need to look within, to trace the operations of our inner being and to express them in a language commensurate with that inner life. In other words, Arnold is writing about the very stuff of romantic expressivism. The first few stanzas make it clear that the poet is unable in the present instance to make the connection with another he later posits as being necessary to the insight he seeks. In spite of that, the poem is one of Arnold’s more optimistic efforts. A power he simply describes as “Fate” (30), has kept “The unregarded river of our life” from plain view to protect us from our own destructive frivolity, but this river of authentic being flows on nonetheless. The poet explains that no individual, looking only within, can truly gain access to the inner springs of life and thought. Acting on our own, we cannot know from whence we have come or where we are going; we cannot grasp the purpose of our lives. And we cannot, it almost goes without saying, express a purpose we are unable to apprehend. From lines 55-66, the speaker suggests that most of what we do is a kind of self-deception—what we do and say, that is, conceals far more than it reveals about what we really are inside. Society demands no less of a charade. Even so, the speaker is not downcast: there are those rare moments when the voice, the gaze, or the touch of a beloved person gives us access to our being in all its authenticity. Arnold casts the result of this rarity in Wordsworthian terms: “The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, / And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know” (86-87). So it is possible on rare occasion, and with the help of another, really to look within and to express what we see there. Especially for a gloomy poet like Arnold, that is a cheerful thought, and it bears comparison to Wordsworth’s lines from “Tintern Abbey,” “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (47-49). It is possible to achieve an epiphany of the self and to express the insight flowing from it. What is captured is not something static but rather dynamic and flowing, as the poem’s persistent river metaphor indicates. Some may find a note of hesitancy in the poem’s final lines, “And then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes” (96-98). But I don’t think the word “knows” connotes doubt in this case; the conjectural seeker may or may not know the last word about his origins or destination, but that seems less important than the knowledge of his present self the poem says can, in fact, be attained. We should not expect from Matthew Arnold a brash statement such as John Donne’s “She is all States, and all Princes, I; / Nothing else is.” What we get, instead, is a sort of quiet, wistful optimism in the midst of so many melancholy and contemplative utterances by this earnest mid-Victorian.

“ Dover Beach”

The poem opens with the description of a beautiful natural scene, a seascape. Apparently it is a clear night in patches because the speaker can see the nightlights of France across the English Channel . And he catches something eternal about humanity in the effects of natural process—Sophocles, the poet says, heard the same sound attentively long ago, the sound of pebbles tossing back and forth in the surf with the tide and the waves. (In the play referenced—Antigone—the Chorus speaks of something much harsher—the low moan that accompanies gale force winds as they beat against the seashore, a sound compared to the ruin and devastation of Thebes’s royal house thanks to the anger of the gods.) what our speaker hears is the melancholy retreat of simple religious faith, a retreat that leaves Western civilization all but naked. It is evident that Matthew Arnold does not draw the same sustenance from nature that Wordsworth, a poet he much admires, was able to draw. Both the natural and human world before him in prospect are described as beautiful illusions—sights that seem to promise certitude and intelligibility, a sense that there is meaning out there, that there is “a place for us.” But the speaker is unable to put his faith in anything he sees or hears. He remains disillusioned, I think, even though he tries to cheer himself and his lover with the injunction, “let us be true / To one another!” The world remains hostile, dreary, and violent. It makes no sense in itself, and the knowledge that we can at least temporarily make a genuine human connection with someone else, and thereby create the meaning we seek, does not satisfy the speaker. This poem might be described as what Meyer Abrams would call a Greater Romantic Lyric—it begins in meditation, goes on to analyze a spiritual problem, and attempts to offer an emotional resolution. The tenuousness of that resolution gives the poem its distinctive Arnoldian quality. The couple remain isolated from the world, withdrawn from the violence and confusion surrounding them. Religion no longer offers solace in such a situation, at least not for this particular Victorian couple.

“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”

As always, Matthew Arnold turns out to be a very poetical Eeyore. The young enthusiasts of science and progress that give the mid-Victorian period its characteristic feel are welcome to go about their cheerful way, and enter the bright world of striving and competition. They do not feel the death of Christianity, suggests the speaker, because they were not brought up deeply believing in the religion. Arnold’s melancholy is characteristic of many Victorian intellectuals with respect to the ancient religion that had shaped so many generations before them. I don’t suppose Arnold is addressing the scientific studies that proved devastating to the faith of many Victorians, although he writes at what we might call the “ground zero” of religious doubt—a time still before Charles Darwin’s fully developed evolutionary theory, but a time in which other scientists such as Sir Charles Lyell were confidently estimating the vast amounts of time necessary to the formation of the geological structures they examined and puzzling over the strangeness of the fossils they unearthed. I would put this point around the 1830s in the English context. No, Arnold’s “rigorous teachers” are the Enlightenment’s finest rationalists—philosophers who, as the Norton note says, subjected the tenets and texts of faith to the rigors of reason and historical inquiry. Arnold’s speaker can neither believe nor dismiss from his mind the desire to believe (or at least to find certitude and moral meaning). I think he feels special affinity with the monks who dwell in the monastery and cultivate their herb garden, faithfully and simply following the religion of beautiful sorrow, presumably oblivious to the unbelievers all around them in a changing world. All the same, he cannot enter the mindset that makes such a life possible. What is he doing at such a gloomy place (66)? he wants to know.

The romantic predecessors Byron and Shelley, as the speaker says, struck a defiant attitude towards what they considered the diminution of spirit in an increasingly “modern” world: they rejected traditional religious belief, but kept alive the passionate conviction that lies at the heart of faith. They believed in inspired utterance, in creative imagination, and in defying the oppressors who threatened to stamp out freedom of thought and action. They sought to remind us of what was truly enduring about us as human beings. But in the end they, too, passed, and the speaker, a true son of the romantics, is left wondering what good all that storming and stressing has done: after all, the people of the 1850’s are no less subject to the world’s cares as anyone in the romantics’ time. What good does describing and acting out our anguish in verse, no matter how fine it may be, do us? A latter-day Shelley would be no more apt to change the world than the original Shelley was. (A modern author, W. H. Auden, responds eloquently to this downcast notion when, in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of William Butler Yeats,” he writes, “ For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”

Well, Arnold’s speaker describes his own position as that of a man “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (85-86). Where others may see a confident world re-forming itself in ever-new and exciting patterns, our speaker sees confusion and disarray—steeped in his desire for the moral and spiritual certitude of the past, and in the strivings of the romantic poets who preceded him, he feels himself a member of a tragic generation that can neither simply embrace the past nor smugly accept the present. But it is with the past that the speaker will dwell, however uncomfortably and equivocally: his place is with the contemplative and the reclusive, not with the proponents of modernity. Indeed, the concluding stanzas of the poem are clever and somewhat Tennysonian in their conjuring of colorful, bright medieval soldiering and hunting parties to describe a world of action and reality whose proponents would characterize as radically new. (See, in particular, “The Lady of Shalott.”) I suppose that in this poem, Arnold isn’t exactly writing the “poetry of action” he prescribes in his “Preface” to the Poems of 1853: his art is the kind that treats of problems it admits must remain insoluble because they are linked to the eternal, deep-down strivings and sorrows of humanity. In this sense, art (or, more broadly, culture), for Arnold , partly replaces religion, as so many critics have said.

On a personal note, I find this poem’s analysis of the argument between old faiths and new convictions relevant today because I keep coming across modern versions of the argument. Take, for example, the confidence and even brazenness of today’s ultra-rationalists and militant atheists, authors such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens: they are quite certain that no deity need be considered, and dismiss religion as what Freud suggested it was: an adult fairy tale to stave off primal anxieties. I’m not a believer myself, at least not in any orthodox way—I suppose I’m closest to Buddhism because I like its respect for all forms of life, its refusal to indulge humans in their self-importance and disregard for their fellow creatures. But I don’t really go for the specific metaphysics of any religion, and I don’t attend a church. So why don’t I like the arguments set forth by the new atheists? Well, because I find their faith in reason naïve—reason is a fine thing, but we have often used it as a tool of injustice and rapaciousness. Some men of the Enlightenment thought we should worship reason, and in Arnold’s own century, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) promulgated a “religion of humanity.” Neither of these gestures seems to have worked out very well. Surely the realm of emotion is at least as important as that of reason and calculation. Deep passion can, of course, lead people to do dreadful things to one another, and religion can be used by the narrow-minded as a club with which to slaughter those who differ from them. But so can “reason” (which I ought to define for clarity’s sake as something like “intelligence in use”: applying the scientific method to a given problem, and so forth) which we all too often wield as an instrument more deadly than the tooth of a tiger or a shark. Bold confidence in the self-sufficiency of reason and science seems to me foolish. We have come uncomfortably close to ruining the planet with our much-vaunted intelligence; evidently, intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom. To say that you do not literally believe in any one metaphysical system is not necessarily to dismiss the aspirations towards which such a system points. I am unwilling to jettison or disrespect the quest for a kind of wisdom that reason and scientific inquiry seem incapable of addressing on their own, at least given our present circumstances.

General Notes on Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold actively resists what John Stuart Mill the Utilitarian philosopher had called the “hostile and dreaded censorship” of middle-class ascendancy: the smug self-satisfaction exhibited by average English citizens in their own unexamined views and values. Arnold insists that we need to promote culture and criticism as a means of combating such censorious mediocrity. He counsels intellectuals and thoughtful people generally to step away from politics and social controversy, wherein ideas are bought, sold, and bandied about with more concern for their effects on the balance of power than for their inherent truth. Ideas, Arnold says, should be examined in a “disinterested” manner—that is, in a calm and reasonably objective way, with no regard for one’s own personal biases or for the biases of the social and political groups that may claim one’s allegiance. Arnold’s emphasis is that of a man imbued with the “dare to know” ethos of the Enlightenment as well as with a classical drive towards self-development and self-perfection. Against the increasingly powerful middle-class utilitarian notion that life is all about chasing after pleasure and material comfort, Arnold asserts (as did J. S. Mill himself) that “doing as one likes” is hardly an adequate description of life’s goal; it is of great consequence what things give us pleasure, and the sources we should favor, he thinks, will come to us by way of sound education and self-cultivation, without which we are brutes. Many have pointed out Arnold’s flaws as a thinker—his fondness for repeating himself, his reliance on certain privileged cultural texts (often Greek classics) as irreducible “touchstones” of excellence, and even a certain strain of ivory-tower elitism. But Arnold surely deserves respect for his persistent support of Enlightenment integrity. We seldom seem to realize how fragile our humanity is—a quick scan of the daily papers, with their relentless recountings of twenty-first century brutality, ignorance, intolerance and persecution worthy of the Dark Ages, should convince any rational person that our best tendencies and highest potential must be constantly encouraged and guarded, not taken for granted and left at the mercy of “time and chance.” The Victorians were sometimes too willing to believe in facile assurances about the progress of humanity, but Arnold’s writings show him to be remarkably self-reflective about the pitfalls of such assumptions. At times, what Arnold calls “culture” seems little short of a miracle, given the conditions within which it must develop.

Finally, Arnold addresses some very modern problems—first, the status of art and culture in relation to economic and class arrangements. We find in him both a strong instance of what’s sometimes called the paradox of Anglo-American humanism: while he insists on the great value of humanistic study, he feels compelled to divorce that study from the immediate flow of worldly affairs. As Milton might say, “they also serve who only stand and wait”—and who only “read, study, and observe.” Or to state the dilemma more crudely, culture and criticism can only help us by not promising to help us, at least for the present. The paradox consists in defending the arts and criticism while simultaneously rejecting the suggestion that they should be immediately useful on a broad social scale. Second, Arnold offers a worthwhile examination of the relationship between art and criticism—a concern of much interest to theoreticians today.

Page-by-Page Notes on Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”

1385-86/807-08. Arnold admits that art is, as Wordsworth claims, higher than criticism in the vulgar sense of essays that explicate poetry and so forth. But on page 808, Arnold, who distrusts romantic pretensions to priestly status, insinuates that Wordsworth’s near-dismissal of the lower, critical activity amounts to something like “primitivist elitism.” It won’t do, he suggests, to exalt imagination and creativity at the expense of critical reflection as if there were no vital relationship between the two.

1386/808. The second thing to keep in mind here is Arnold’s “man and moment” argument: art expresses ideas taken from a given society’s critical reflection; art may arrange those ideas into a beautiful and memorable synthesis, but the critical power must provide or “discover” the material first. Art is not mere expression of fleeting emotions—it involves intellect and thought. This is a position one finds in notable future critics: Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, and others.) Art should not limit itself to the individual artist’s problems or spiritual struggles—the kind of genetic concern Arnold readily admits is too easily found in his own latter-day romantic poetry. Rather, it should work towards giving us universal models for action. It’s worth recalling that Arnold had long since condemned one of his most substantial poems (“Empedocles on Aetna”) because it failed in that regard. Artists should be inspired by the culture around them, not merely by their own existential desperation or emotional distress.

1386-87/808-09. To continue the above thoughts, if the necessary vital, freewheeling cultural conditions be lacking—if Shakespeare does not have his vibrant city of London, or Sophocles doesn’t have glorious Athens in its heyday (so that he can write about Apollonian calm and objectivity leading to action), then “the critical power” is required for the moment. “Make straight the way of the Lord!”—Arnold here plays the prophet or John the Baptist figure even as he accepts that the art of his own time is not organically related to the goings-on of English society. If that is the case in the 1800s, then Victorians need genuine criticism to help create the healthy environment that would make broadly appealing art possible. Sometimes you have to be an elitist of sorts to be a person of the people in the long run. Criticism should serve as a bridge to eventual practice. In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich von Schiller had already offered a statement about the artist’s need to make a strategic withdrawal from the fray of life that sounds much like the precursor of Arnold’s, so the English author is following the best tradition of German thought in this regard.

1387/810-11. Reading books is not a replacement for a vital national or international culture, but engagement with past authors at least makes such a culture imaginable for the critic or the artist. For Arnold , culture transcends the immediate social and political context. “True” ideas can be true forever, always out there as touchstones for us. But our times may make us unable to appreciate them—at least, most people will be out of touch. What is a touchstone? Well, here is Wikipedia’s short definition: “a small tablet of dark stone such as fieldstone, slate or lydite, used for assaying precious metal alloys. It has a finely grained surface on which soft metals leave a visible trace.”

1388-91/811-13. In his book Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke opposed the French radicals who made the Revolution of 1789. Arnold agrees with Burke that the revolutionaries tried to impose an extreme, artificial set of abstract universal ideals upon a people who were not yet mature enough to live by them. The French tried to go too far too fast, and did not respect the fact that social codes and institutions evolve slowly and organically, not overnight and as if my the imposition of a pattern from above. Therefore, the radicals’ glorious ideals led to an “epoch of concentration”—i.e. to a series of reactionary measures against anyone interested in liberty. Burke believed in slow growth leading to inevitable progress without loss of order, and Arnold apparently subscribes to that prescription for sustainable progress.

Well, if we cannot have revolution, what will be our agent of change? Certainly not radical politics or radical art in alliance with it. Instead, a shaping force is needed. That force would be criticism, which engages with a realm of culture not to be identified with “public opinion.” Karl Marx and Matthew Arnold would disagree on nearly everything, but not on the notion that ideology consists in treating as natural and eternal the hobby horses most beneficial to oneself and one’s political, economic, or social group. To borrow a line from Alexander Pope, “whatever is, is right.” Of course, Marx would say that Arnold’s promotion of disinterestedness amounts to ideology, to fiddling while Rome burns: disinterestedness, he would no doubt suggest, is even more saturated with ideological presumption than honest-to-goodness bias. Why should intellectuals not use their skills to improve the lot of the common man and woman? We might say that Burke and Arnold would be willing to sign off on decades of injustice and repression so long as their slow, organic, “inevitable” progress seems sure to result. Arnold thinks “force” can prepare the way for right—perhaps, if you take as your model enlightenment monarchy or bureaucracy. But force quickly becomes its own reason, doesn’t it? George Orwell’s 1984 and the nightmare bureaucracy-world of Franz Kafka make that point well.

1393-94/816-17. Critics must be willing to step back from politics and live by ideas, sifting the excellence of those ideas in their universal dimension. Failure to do so, says Arnold, has kept England back with regard to “its best spiritual work” (1393). Arnold holds a developmental, organic conception of humanity, like the German authors he has been reading—Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich von Schiller, and Goethe in particular. Our purpose is to develop as human beings, to develop our full individuality and not merely what pertains to our bourgeois desire to accumulate things and satisfy ourselves. (The moral condemnation implied here can be found much earlier—see Shakespeare’s sonnet line “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action”; we are capable of fine things, but are continually attracted to baser pleasures and crass materialism.) This development must take place within a vibrant society that encourages self-discovery. Criticism’s burden at present is to keep open a space for the free play of the mind, for the pure entertainment of ideas for the sake of ideas, until the right kind of social and political environment can become established. Some would say that bourgeois democracy promotes only property and pleasure, not self-improvement or excellence of achievement, for the most part. The mind needs what von Humboldt calls “freedom and variety of situations,” so if the disinterested critic can encourage that understanding, he or she is perhaps already serving the community. To steal a line from one of Milton’s sonnets, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” As Arnold sees the matter, a society capable of naming someone as unattractive and indistinct as “Wragg” and then writing “Wragg is in custody” (1394) when the person commits some atrocity isn’t where it needs to be, whatever the triumphalist Adderley and Roebuck might say.

1395-96/817-19. Arnold’s claim about “the mass of mankind” never really feeling the lack of adequate ideas may seem aloof and even elitist. Some would say he makes apolitical thinking too much of a virtue, and permanently divorces art and criticism, the realm of thought, from “the general practice of the world.” This would be a sad admission or concession to make for a man who takes as his ideal ancient Greece and Shakespeare’s England , where, supposedly, art and life were vitally connected. Ultimately, Arnold surely wants us to believe that thought, whether art or criticism in the broadest sense, must resist commodification and the vulgar interests of class and party politics. But the question is, does this non-political stance amount merely to a bourgeois liberal laissez-faire viewpoint on current affairs? Is it a virtue to consider one’s thought ideology-free, to think one has stepped outside the Plato-realm of worldly illusion in order to arrive at the truth? Arnold seems to agree with Friedrich von Schiller that the civilization-process alienates sophisticated thought from ordinary affairs and people, in which case the artist and the critic may for a long time be viewed as mandarins or distant philosopher kings.

Arnold recognizes that ideas are being used as brickbats for narrow, selfish, cynical political and economic interests. To be fair, he offers his own conception of the kind of state that would be better than either aristocracy-saturated Toryism or laissez-faire middle-class rule or working-class radical socialism. Arnold’s state would be like a big critic—free of all narrow interest. But his trickle-down or slow-spread theory of cultural improvement is not entirely satisfying as an answer if we are asking how to get there from here. The class system he opposes generates an overwhelming imperative for people not to think for themselves, so while removing oneself from the fray is a noble ideal, it may not produce the results Arnold hopes it will.

1396-97/823. Arnold’s defense of critical autonomy is that it will serve society by helping to create the conditions necessary for a healthy, vibrant intellectual life and a more just form of government, one free of petty class interests. Arnold links his free-thinking critic to a fair-minded, disinterested state. Ultimately, then, his cultural and literary theory lays claim to broader social significance. It would be worth considering the extent to which today’s “public intellectuals” are speaking and writing in the vein of Arnold’s higher critic, and to what extent they play against his prescription for disinterestedness: Consider, for example, the late Susan Sontag and Edward Said, or Stanley Fish, who writes a regular column for the New York Times. Jacques Derrida also seems to have partly played the role of an European public intellectual, at least towards the end of his life. Cultural Studies Professor Cornel West certainly qualifies as a public intellectual—like Fish and some of the others mentioned, he is an academic who writes erudite books and articles, but he also shows up regularly on television talk shows and engages with much broader, more or less non-academic audiences.

Editions: Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume E: The Victorian Age. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-0393927214. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Preface To Poems (1853)

Overview: Evidently, Matthew Arnold believes that the romantics, as some wag said about Thomas Carlyle, “led us into the wilderness and left us there.” Arnold seeks a balance between poetic form and expression; art should be oriented towards action, he believes, and it should not wallow in Hamlet-like, self-centered anguish or luxuriate in fine phrases and images. That kind of self-indulgence, he believes, has been the tendency since the early modern period. Shakespeare is wonderful, but Matthew Arnold doesn’t advocate taking him as your model if you want to be a writer. Modernity is a threat since it leads us away from what is permanent in us, and away from a unified sensibility and coherent outlook. The Greeks, according to Arnold, are the best artistic models because they can help us fight modernity’s worst aspects: its threat of incoherence and its predilection for the part over the whole, its penchant for selfishness over what benefits the individual most genuinely and serves the community as well. The Greeks offer clarity, rigor, simplicity, and a balanced perspective on life. Like so many Victorian sages and culture critics, Arnold reasserts humanity’s need for some principle of excellence by which to think and live.

1375. “The dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced,” says Arnold . This dialogue cannot be wished away, but he is concerned about its negative effects on consciousness. Complexity is part of modern life, and the question is how to deal with it. Arnold declares himself against any representation that is, as he says, “vaguely conceived and loosely drawn.” We demand accuracy and precision in art; we demand that it should “add to our knowledge.” Or at least, that is what Arnold says we should demand of it; only if this is done, he implies, will it do what it really ought: “inspirit and rejoice the reader.” As always, Arnold draws much from German enlightenment and romantic authors—his descriptions, as he makes clear, are derived from Friedrich von Schiller, a great disciple of Immanuel Kant. The passage he cites is followed by The claim that the best art facilitates the free play of all the mind’s powers: “Der höchste Genuß aber ist die Freiheit des Gemüthes in dem lebendigen Spiel aller seiner Kräfte.”

Unfortunately, in his view, this sort of spirit-expanding free play is exactly what much modern art does not encourage. Instead, modern poetry gives us representations “in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” This sort of artistic representation is not tragic in the high classical sense; it is not uplifting but is, he says, merely “painful.” The bottom line is that art should not give in to or merely reflect a particular era’s worst tendencies; it should challenge them, and generate a counter-balancing effect.

1376-77. Arnold insists that “The date of an action… signifies nothing.” There is no reason why we cannot derive as much pleasure and enlightenment from ancient works of art as from modern ones. This is no different from what many critics have said in their own way. Samuel Johnson, after all, wrote that the best art consists in “just representations of general nature” that have been highly esteemed for long periods of time, and he insisted that a painter should not “streak the leaves of the tulip” but should rather provide us with a general, universally recognizable representation. And Percy Bysshe Shelley, of course, writes in his “Defense Of Poetry” that poets write from a perspective beyond particular places or historical epochs. So the claim that art should deliver to us something of universal and eternal significance is nothing new. Arnold is asserting his neoclassical bent here: he derives from Aristotle’s Poetics the notion that literary art should be about “action,” about the construction of plot and story. Emotional expression is secondary to this imperative. As usual, Arnold is in dialogue with William Wordsworth, whose poetry he much admires but whose poetics he does not always agree with. We recall that Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, said that expression was the prime consideration and that action should simply be made to suit the expression. For Wordsworth, poetry is mainly an expressive vehicle; for Arnold , such a prescription is liable to result in morbid, unbalanced poetry. Somewhat like Thomas Carlyle, Arnold is telling us, “Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe.” As for the moderns in comparison with the ancients, Arnold writes that “with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action.” It is action, not expression, that delivers to us a sense of an intelligible cosmos. Arnold is therefore very interested in the formal qualities and integrity of a given poem; he emphasizes craftsmanship over intensity of expression.

1378-79. At this point in his argument, Arnold offers some rather harsh words about his fellow critics. He says that they not only allow unhealthy practices, they promote “false aims.” Such critics, he says, are mostly interested in “detached expressions,” and are quite an interested in demanding a sense of the whole in any particular poem. They treat poetry like what we would call “sound bites.” But to treat words and indeed entire works of art this way is to divorce language or whatever medium we are dealing with from the realm of action. While Matthew Arnold is a great believer in the integrity and autonomy of art, he does not promote the idea that the composition of a literary work should amount to navel-gazing on the part of the artist. We do not, he insists, or rather we should not, favor a kind of art that amounts to “A true allegory of the state of one’s own mind.”

Also on this page, Arnold returns to the idea that a young writer must find suitable models. This advice obviously rejects the romantic idea that we can more or less dismiss our predecessors if we find them uncongenial and create something almost from nothing. What Arnold describes is not so much “the anxiety of influence” that, as Harold Bloom would say, caused romantic poets to struggle mightily against the overwhelming influence of John Milton. Rather, Arnold is pointing out that the sheer “multitude of voices counseling different things” threatens modern authors with a profound sense of incoherence when they most need clarity and balance. This is a prominent strain in Arnold’s thinking on art and culture more generally, and even on politics. I think we can understand him without too much trouble because we live in a time with an even larger “marketplace of ideas” from which we may choose. So many ideas, many of them utterly incompatible—how is one to choose amongst them? To use a contemporary phrase, Arnold suggests that modern humanity is beset by “information overload.”

1380-81. But what about Shakespeare as a model? Why not make the greatest of English literary artists our model? Well, Shakespeare’s gift of “abundant… and ingenious expression” may be remarkable, but it is not what we need. In Arnold’s view, Shakespeare was a bit too much in love with beautiful language and fine expression, so much so that it sometimes leads him away from sound construction and concentration on the actions with which his plays are concerned. Criticism on Shakespeare is punctuated by such gentle barbs—Ben Jonson essentially said he wished Shakespeare had had a good editor, that the man had “blotted out” more lines than he did. And Samuel Johnson lamented that the Bard was too fond of silly quibbles, too willing to let semi-obscene puns and the like mar the dignity and moral tenor of his dramas. I think what Arnold is getting at is that Shakespeare was a man of unparalleled artistry and genius who could give us both a complete action and fineness and intensity of expression, but when the other artists attempt to imitate his methods, the results fall short of the original’s mark. (By way of example, he mentions John Keats’s “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” It is a poem full of beautiful lines, Arnold suggests, but what is it really about?) Even so, I wouldn’t deny that Arnold is offering a pointed criticism: he says explicitly that Shakespeare’s “gift of expression… rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression….” If this fondness proceeds too far, by implication, we will end up with a work of art that is more eccentric than universal in its appeal. He caps this argument with Guizot’s delicious quip that “Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of simplicity.” If we admire and emulate what is least worthy of such attention in Shakespeare, his art may please us, but it may not improve us or give us a holistic view of life; it may not contribute to our development as whole human beings.

1382-83. Most of all, Arnold recommends the classics, for their “unity and profoundness of moral impression.” Furthermore, he writes of the “steadying and composing effect upon . . . [the] judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general” (1382) that stems from reading classical literature. Perhaps that’s partly why Alexander Pope said Virgil found that “to study Homer was to study Nature.” Arnold’s argument isn’t a diatribe against the modern world; he admits that “The present age makes great claims upon us” and that his classicists “wish neither to applaud nor to revile their age; they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and whether this is what they want.” He concludes with the thought that progress is a threat mainly if it ignores what is best and most permanent about humanity; the “touchstone” of human nature must be retained amidst the Heraclitean flux of the modern world. His exhortation to fellow poets and readers is that they ought to “transmit to [future generations] the practice of poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws,” even if his own generation is comprised mainly of dilettanti who find themselves unable to equal the ancients in their artistic brilliance or their power of thought and feeling. The argument he makes is paradoxical in that what he describes as permanent and natural in us seems to be threatened with extinction by the forces of modernity. As so often, we find a cultural critic dealing with the dilemma posed by the disjunction between broad social imperatives and individual needs and aspirations, and not finding any easy answers. But in his view, ancient art at least gives us some sense of the tranquility, nobility, and excellence of which we are capable.

General Notes on Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy

Like Carlyle, Matthew Arnold argues against what he sees as social chaos and disunity, but while Carlyle’s solution has to do with practical economics, Arnold’s has more to do with the intellectual sphere and with large matters of statecraft. While Carlyle decries the anarchic, brutal relation between alienated workers and their capitalist employers, Arnold is upset over the corollary of this economic struggle, the struggle for control of the state. Arnold pushes an aloof, classless state that will encourage the development of “the best self.” Freed from the passionate narrow-mindedness of the three great classes—the Barbarians (the aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle class—the capitalists), and the Populace (the working class)—Arnold’s State will serve as a grand clearing house for his favorite critical operations: “to propagate he best that has been known and thought in the world” and “to see the object as in itself it really is.” Arnold puts little faith in either “democracy” or the reforms suggested by his liberal acquaintances. His chapter title “Doing as One Likes” loudly bespeaks his disdain for England’s contented boastings about its intellectual and economic freedom. England , suggests Arnold , must choose between “Anarchy” and “Culture”; it can no ways have both. The country’s best hope, he says, lies in the disinterested “reading,” ‘studying,” and “observing” that his new State will encourage as a regimen for the best minds and future governors of England . In essence, Arnold seems to be calling for a strong central state run by an efficient, independent, well-educated bureaucracy. Culture—the disinterested (i.e. “objective”) pursuit of perfection—is Arnold’s answer to industrial chaos. The State, striving in accordance with “right reason” toward the full and balanced development of its citizenry, will at last allow Britain to take control of its affairs.

Arnold’s work fits within the broad scheme of liberal reformism and emphasis on education, and to that extent, Arnold is a philosopher of the “middle class.” (After all, theory is hardly the province of the nobility.) One might also say that Arnold is a representative of another separated field or class—the intelligentsia. The main question is whether or not Arnold’s commentary is practical. A good case can be made for him if we point out that his commentary deals with the effects of economic relations and the class system, even if it seems rather elitist in tone. But can there be such a thing as a “state above class”? Arnold is wary of raw democracy, and does not necessarily want to do away with the class system altogether. He remains aloof from Mill’s emphasis on liberty, perhaps suspecting that utilitarianism is always a philosophy of the middle class. He might say that Mill’s praise of liberty lacks the authority principle needed to carry the day, that Mill’s thought lacks direction and so fails to offer a way out of anarchy. But at the same time, Arnold doesn’t look to Carlyle’s “Captains of Industry” to solve England’s problems, so he keeps his distance from both lines of thought.

Week 06, John Ruskin and J.H. Newman

2008-03-04T22:28:00.000-08:00

Notes on John Ruskin and John Henry Newman

Notes on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters

1320. “Painting . . . is nothing but a noble and expressive language….” And “It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is to be finally determined.” Ruskin demands accuracy in a painter, but merely technical ability is not enough. Painting is an expressive art, and it’s the quality and intensity of the expression that matters above all else. Ruskin is a belated Romantic in this regard.

1321. The best art, according to Ruskin, is that which “conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” He continues, “I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received.” The “ideas” referenced here are not logical constructions; they are more like a species of the sublime, another Romantic affinity of Ruskin’s. With regard to Turner’s 1840 painting “The Slave Ship,” Ruskin’s description aims to give us his own impression of the painting, which involves a sense of the sublimity evoked by the scene’s eerie use of color and light and its apocalyptic overtones. This isn’t to say that Ruskin advocates mere “impressionism”—I think he believes that Turner’s painting has special qualities that positively demand the attention of a trained eye and a refined spirit. Critics must be “accurate” in this sense, just as the painter must in some fashion paint the subject truly. Turner’s painting itself isn’t merely mimetic or didactic but is instead profoundly imaginative. Turner’s painting is an instance of sublimity, and Ruskin does his best to honor it on its own terms. So what does the painting convey? Well, Ruskin doesn’t talk about the painting’s “thesis” or “argument” insofar as a painting constitutes an argument (i.e. slavery is a moral evil, etc); he describes light, color, and the relations between one part of the painting and another, and tries to catch the emotive effects generated by these things. I would suggest that “the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable Sea” is the main “idea” to be conveyed: a power linked to the infinite horror of what the slavers have done since their actions reveal the depths of human depravity.

Notes on John Ruskin’s “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”

“It is a malignant quality of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all. . . . It always blows tremulously, making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens . . . .” The wind Ruskin describes is eerie—one can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going; it is chaotic. This is not the powerful, inspiriting wind of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” This breeze is correspondent with something, but not with imagination.

“And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind and the plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they blanch the sun instead of reddening it. And here I must not briefly to you the uselessness of observation by instruments, or machines, instead of eyes.” Ruskin sums up his argument: “Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man. . . .” The Sun here seems to resemble Blake’s “Guinea Sun” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Modern sensibilities can’t explain it—as Blake would say, we need to look “through the eye and not with it.” We need a moral framework from Christian history and theology to interpret such a wind. We are deaf and blind to it because it is our own morally debased element now. As a latter-day prophet, Ruskin employs a Christian framework in a Romantic way: he wants to revitalize human perception and thereby help people regain moral intelligibility. One function of a prophet is to confront people with the fact that they don’t live according to their own stated ethics; i.e. that they are morally dead and hypocritical in their professed virtues. The overall point of the current essay is that we are fast creating a world that we are powerless to understand or interpret. So Ruskin gives us fragmented impressions of the weather, suffusing those fragments with moral significance and challenging us to make a spiritualized reading that alone can put them together.

On the practicality or efficacy of the argument he makes, we may well have mixed feelings. To be fair, what probably seemed at the time an indication of near madness on Ruskin’s part now sounds a lot less irrational, given the danger posed by a rapidly heating world. It’s common today, when conversations about global warming take place on the Internet or in print, for progressive advocates to adopt something like Ruskin’s tone and offer prophetic warnings against the evils of excessive or misguided consumption. We are sometimes told, that is, that the only thing we can do is drastically reduce our consumption rates, buying only what we really need. But such rhetoric ignores the brute fact that capitalist societies are all about excess: the market is sustained not be need but by desire, and would no doubt collapse if we scaled our purchases back to the level of need. Conservative politicians have been guilty of more or less ignoring the problem or paying only lip service to it, while more progressive politicians insist that “greening” the economy will in fact be profitable, once it catches on. That may be so, but up to the present the progress on this front seems painfully slow. I suspect that if we manage to get ourselves out of the mess we have made, or at least make it less disastrous than it might have been, it won’t be because we drastically curtailed consumption but rather because we dealt with a technology-induced mess by means of still more technology, this time wisely applied rather than pell-mell. One thing is certain: the old nineteenth-century and earlier view that nature is a an endless supply of “resources” is not tenable and hasn’t been for quite some time. There are too many people on the planet doing too many destructive things for that view to prevail with anything less than horrible consequences.

Notes on John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice

Ruskin, a mid-Victorian sage-writer, says that England’s current course in economics and empire parallels the fall of Venice when that city entered its decadent Renaissance phase during the Quattrocento: soulless perfection in architecture and art, lewdness in morals, shamelessness in pursuit of monetary wealth. At base, pride goes before a fall: we are fallen enough already, and there’s no need to keep repeating our arrogant rebelliousness and claim autonomy from God, argues Ruskin. He is a disciple of Carlyle, another conservative prophet raging in the wilderness, offering at one time threats, at another salvation. He is a moralist who interprets architectural history and technique as an embodiment of a given culture’s moral status. He treats paintings and social forms in much the same way, reading them as expressions of a society’s spiritual health or morbidity.

In Stones, Ruskin demonstrates that Gothic feudalism encouraged workers to express their individual spirit in a way that did honor to the Church. Labor is central to fallen human beings. The way back to a right appreciation of God is mediation, accommodation, humility, and striving that doesn’t try to rival God as our creator and source. So the critic and consumer must interpret the products of labor with their expressive quality in mind. Critics and consumers must grasp the need for striving worthy of redemption, labor directed heavenward. Why does Ruskin favor architecture in particular? Buildings are works of art that we experience, live in, gather in. And Gothic workers were building cathedrals, which are communal expressions of humility before God, so they resist the urge to rebuild the Tower of Babel of Genesis, for which God confounded the builders’ speech.

The “moral elements” of Gothic are as follows: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance. With regard to the builders, these categories translate to savageness, love of change, love of nature, disturbed imagination, obstinacy, and generosity. Gothic architecture expresses the workers’ mental tendencies, and the result of their work—often cathedrals—was intended to be a dwelling-place for and offering to God. A church (the visible or assembled body of the faithful) is, after all, an expression of human aspirations to connect with the divine, and a locus of spiritual community.

1324. “And when that fallen roman, in the utmost importance of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation of civilized europe, at the close of the so-called Dark ages, the word Gothic became a term of unmitigated contempt. . . .” A consumer is an interpreter, a critic (on this point, see also Unto This Last), but the insolent, prideful, complacent Renaissance patron, insists Ruskin, wanted and saw only soulless perfection, and what had been a serious kind of grotesqueness became merely obscene because that’s what the corrupt patrons wanted. Genuine grotesque art flows from the labor of a spirit in tension, confronting the shocks and extreme contradictions in life—death and terror, the fantastic, the ludicrous. Mere obscenity is cynical and materialistic, by contrast.

1326-27. Ruskin elaborates on servile, constitutional, and revolutionary forms of art. Of the first, the principal types are “the Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian.” Greek architectural style achieves a balance, calm, rest, and self-sufficiency, but with respect to the workers who made the buildings, says Ruskin, “The Greek gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute.” But with constitutional ornament, he writes, things are otherwise: in the “Christian system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul” (1327). The essence of it is striving. As for revolutionary ornament, its makers and consumers are selfish, fixated on trivial things done to material perfection. An eye fixed on this kind of ornament is debased—as Blake would say, “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” Priorities here are turned upside down, and buildings are not offerings to God but monuments to the artist’s or patron’s ego. In this sense, Ruskin construes the Renaissance as a second fall in which people deployed mere technical skill and science to try to overcome the effects of the original fall in Eden, and of course he sees England going down the same path, in search of a false capitalist utopia.

1327. “[I]t is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds, and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.” But neither Renaissance patrons nor modern English consumers can accept this scheme, says Ruskin, and they can’t appreciate the fact that “the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form” or that “the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it.”

1328. As always in Ruskin, there’s a stark moral decision to make regarding the status of labor, that activity so central to human life and value: “you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” There is no happy medium, no easy accommodation to make, when it comes to honoring the spiritual well-being of laborers or getting the most materially “perfect” work from them. What is imperfect, flawed, incomplete, is exactly what links the thing made to infinity. In both Romantic poetics and Christian theology, the fragment is greater than the limited whole because it indicates striving, progress, aspiration to a higher and even infinite state of spirituality. But Ruskin’s Christian framework is hardly Byronic—it emphasizes not an autonomous attempt at self-transcendence but instead promotes a kind of aspiration that begins with the frank acknowledgement of the individual’s own limitations and imperfections. The body and its material works are finite; art and architecture are of value only insofar as they express the soul’s attempt to break free of materiality while still accepting that it cannot entirely do so. When Ruskin mentions clouds in connection with labor, as he does when he writes of the worker’s efforts, “we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him” (1328), we should remember that in his analysis of Turner’s atmospheric paintings, clouds at once veil and bear the sun’s radiance. Clouds need to be read as semi-translucent markers of the boundary between the finite and infinity.

1329. “[E]xamine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters . . . but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman, who struck the stone . . . .” With respect to the present day, he says, “It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread.” The dignity of labor is as central to Ruskin as labor in general was to his predecessor Carlyle. And like Carlyle, Ruskin is no great promoter of democratic change: in characterizing liberty, he makes much the same point that Carlyle did, only in a gentler fashion: one day, he says, “men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty.” Ruskin advocates a rank-based yet egalitarian society, one that (like the Christian Church) values the strivings and aspirations of each imperfect believer, one that acknowledges the gap between the human and the divine but treats it in a hopeful way.

1330. “We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labor, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men.” The division of labor, of course, is a central tenet of capitalist production, one enunciated by Adam Smith in his 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations. Smith explains this principle in a positive manner that suggests how it has the potential to end millennia of human misery: humanity has never found it easy to keep body and soul together; the ancient problem was that of production: many people simply didn’t get enough to eat, or have enough possessions to make life more or less tolerable, never mind pleasant and full of opportunities for upward mobility. But the vast increases in production made possible by trade and increased volume of production made it possible to conceive of a time when poverty and want would be no more—this is a vital point to understand about Adam Smith’s argument in favor of capitalism; he was not a soulless proponent of material accumulation but a moral philosopher who wanted the new mode and means of production to help people harness selfish individual desires for the good of the wider community. And when the market works, I suppose that’s exactly what it does: the capitalist earns a good profit, and gives us the things we need and want.

But Ruskin is dealing with the phenomenon that Marx calls “alienated labor”: the undeniable fact that under nineteenth-century production methods, many workers found little meaning in their work but instead experienced it as essentially dehumanizing and isolating. They were producing a world of riches in which they themselves had miserably little share, and which cost them any chance to become something more than they already were or to make meaningful connections with their fellow laborers. Marx’s term “the fetishism of the commodity” (whereby it is things that matter and have vital relations, not the people who make them with their own minds and hands—the worker is reduced to a thing, while the thing is treated as if it were a living being), applies to virtually everything done in a consumer society. Smith himself points out that we might one day pay people to do specialized kinds of thinking for us, just as we would pay someone to repair our shoes or furniture. So in this way alienation and fragmentation is the law of life under capitalism. Ruskin opposes the entire system for that reason, though of course his solution is radically different from Marx’s, which puts its faith in the revolutionary potential of the industrial proletariat or working class.

1331-32. “The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it” (1332). What is Ruskin’s answer to the inherent problem of capitalist production? Well, he offers a moral prescription, a consumer’s list of things to consider before buying anything: imitation and exact finish are not to be sought for their own sake, while “invention” is to be rewarded at every turn, wherever possible. His main example is that of Venetian glass, which is of course both strikingly beautiful, all the more so because of its imperfections. Mass-manufactured glass can’t compete with it for quality or beauty. One must accept the simultaneous existence of both poorly executed and well executed Venetian glass; if we want the best of it, we have to accept that quality will vary from one piece to the next. We could name a variety of similar products—indeed, the whole “Crafts” movement in England and America is premised on this model of the moral consumer who has the welfare of the worker in view: things made by hand and produced with care are favored, while merely utilitarian items are generally discouraged because they not only dishonor laborers but also lead to a world that is ugly and unpleasant to live in. And today’s advocates of buying organic produce make a similar argument: fair trade organic coffees, locally grown organic produce, and other such goods are becoming more popular, at least for those who can afford them.

There’s reason to be sympathetic towards Ruskin’s insistence that buying something can be a moral or an immoral act. Proponents of the market philosophy are always insisting that capitalist economics is the appropriate system for lovers of liberty and individual autonomy, yet at times one hears them insisting also that the model of the rational consumer is absolute: people will always follow the law of competition, buying what they need and want on the basis of a certain cost/quality ratio: i.e. they will do what nets them the most good stuff at the lowest possible price. But that is a kind of determinism: what if I want to buy a zero-emissions car even though it costs more, because I think it’s simply the right thing to do and I have sufficient funds to do so? Am I an automaton who can’t make such choices, or am I a free agent who might just make a financial sacrifice to derive both tangible and intangible benefits from my ethical purchase? Or what if I choose not to buy products tested on animals even if they cost more or it takes a bit of effort to find out which products are “cruelty free”? And so forth. It is possible to make such choices, at least some of the time. So Ruskin’s idea is not so far out of the practical orbit that we should discount it as absurd. But at the same time, it’s possible to level a serious criticism: it’s hard to see how to get an entire society to make such choices so frequently as to make more than a token difference in what gets produced. Most people probably don’t have enough money to buy organic avocados or a car that costs an extra 5,000 dollars but runs clean. Perhaps the best solution here is some measure of governmental incentive, mixed with market initiative: on their own, huge companies that benefit from the status quo aren’t likely to make changes in production that threaten to undercut their profits.

1333-34. Ruskin says that there are two reasons why the demand for perfection in art is wrong. The first is “that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure,” and the second is that “imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change.” His emblem for the latter point is the foxglove blossom (digitalis purpurea, a beautiful flowering plant used today in the making of an important drug for heart attack victims). This blossom, writes Ruskin, is “a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom” and is, therefore, “a type of the life of this world.” We are always passing from one state to another. The law of fallen life is change, imperfection, striving. Christian teleology implies a purposeful movement from decay (the fallen past) to a redemptive future (the foxglove’s “bud”). To sum up in Ruskin’s words, “All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”

Additional Notes on John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice

In The Stones of Venice (1851-53), Ruskin makes an historical parallel between the British and Venetian Empires: as the Italian city-state fell, so will England, if it does not heed the warning set before it. Ruskin goes on to set forth the conditions for what he sees as the biblically proportioned fall of the great city. In this narrative, the Italian Renaissance plays the role of Satan to an earlier, organically and spiritually sound period of feudal society and Gothic architecture.

Ruskin’s spiritualized view of architecture demands that we consider Gothic religious structures with regard to their common function: that of serving as material gathering places for the faithful. A church is a place for spiritual communion and propitiation of an offended god, and the labor that brings it into being must comply with these purposes. In Ruskin’s Christian and romanticist tradition, building a church is an expressive act. The humility that characterizes the medieval workman’s and foreman’s manner of expression, Ruskin, always the amateur naturalist, illustrates by way of the foxglove blossom, digitalis purpurea. This plant is always in transition, and therein lies its emblematic value:

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world. 1

In contrast to Gothic architecture’s recognition of the Fall and the divine plan for redemption, Ruskin sets the devilish pride of the Continental Renaissance and the dead perfection of modern industrial Europe. Gothic building, based upon the system of “Constitutional Ornament,” liberated the workman’s powers. In this system, says Ruskin, “the executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers” (Stones,Works 10, 188).By contrast, modern scientific building, the accomplice of liberal capitalism, devotes itself to stamping out any last spark of Gothic spirituality and individualism. Both the Renaissance and the modern era, explains Ruskin, are to be condemned for their adherence to the system of “Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all” (Stones,Works 10, 189). The Renaissance provides the paradigm for the modern fall, but we must examine the latter first because Ruskin himself ultimately leaves it behind, choosing instead to locate the solution to England’s problems largely in the feudal past.

We might, of course, go directly to the later works on political economy for a full discussion concerning the problems of modern economics and industrialism. Yet, Ruskin states his basic moral position on these matters so forcefully in The Stones of Venice that there is no need to abandon that work. When Ruskin characterizes the Renaissance method of ornament in architecture as “Revolutionary,” he means to castigate a chaotic, prideful system of production. He denounces modern architecture and the relation it enjoins between worker and employer. Nineteenth-century building, he believes, mimics an already deceitful, corrupt Renaissance imitation of classical integrity. The modern architect is even more apt to make a slave of his workmen than were the overseers of Assyria or the Greeks, the latter of which “gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute” (Stones,Works 10, 189). The source of the modern system’s intense brutality, again, lies in the nineteenth century’s base, auto-referential, anti-expressive pursuit of machine perfection. Ruskin’s is perhaps the grandest of Victorian broadsides aimed at the Industrial Era’s notion of progress.

The Christian-tinged romanticism of Ruskin’s work as a whole shows in his constant emphasis upon the dignity of imperfection. The body and its works are finite, but the spirit is not. Architecture, though it may appear to the undiscerning eye to be a finished thing, is valuable to Ruskin only in so far as it expresses the soul’s poignant striving to break free of the material limitations that hem it in. The perfection that is achieved by the conjoining of human labor and machine indicates no more than spiritual complacency. The fragmentary or imperfect production is greater than the whole, for it indicates the progress of spirit, not matter. Ruskin’s vision is Romantic, expressive, though the desire for self-transcendence is here tempered by Christian humility. As in art the favored Turner’s clouds at once veil and reveal the sun’s divine radiance, so in manufacture the glass of Venice, “muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut” (Stones,Works 10, 199), reveals the more strikingly the inventive, expressive power of the one who shaped it. But the well-turned steel and wood of the modern house or church, according to Ruskin, expresses only the vicious class divisions that make its production possible.

The choice Ruskin forces upon those whom Carlyle called England’s Captains of Industry is a harsh one. The working-class artisan cannot be two things at once: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both” (Stones,Works 10, 192).The target of such criticisms, evidently, is political economy’s most winning argument—division of labor. For this diabolically correct theory, Ruskin reserves his deepest eloquence and contempt:

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,—we should think there might be some loss in it also (Stones,Works 10, 196).

There is no need to dishonor Ruskin’s moralizing to see its limitations. Perhaps no author, short of Carlyle and the sublimely sarcastic Marx, has written so finely about the inhumanity of capitalist production. The image Ruskin creates of the modern answer to the Venetian glass-worker, with his “hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads [of glass] dropping beneath their vibration like hail,” is unforgettable (Stones,Works 10, 197). 2 Still, his attempt to trace in stone the faults of empire and industry amount to a call for reversion to nearly feudal social and economic relations. The partial nature of Ruskin’s ideas about improving Britain may be gauged from the caustic reaction of more thoroughgoing radicals, chiefly Marx. Though Ruskin shares with Marx (and Hegel) the belief that labor is an essential source of human value and dignity, the revolutionary scorns English cultural criticism’s brand of reform along with the anti-industrialist efforts of fellow Continentals. Here is the way Marx analyses the historical causality of “socialist” yearnings in the tradition of which the middle-class, wealthy Ruskin belongs. The text is The Communist Manifesto, 1848, published just half a decade or so before The Stones of Venice:

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. . . .

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took its revenge by singing lampoons against its new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose Feudal Socialism: Half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty, and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core, but always ludicrous in its effect through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. 3

In Ruskin’s case, the way to ahistoricism lies in his rhetorically effective displacement of modern English sins onto corrupt Italian practices. We may see the guilty narrative in Ruskin’s sections of The Stones of Venice, “The Ducal Palace” (Vol. 2, Ch. 8) and “Grotesque Renaissance” (Vol. 3, Ch. 3). Having explained earlier that “the two principal causes of natural decline in any school are over-luxuriance and over-refinement” (Stones,Works 11, 6), Ruskin goes on to trace with perhaps too much precision the date of the first corrupting influences upon Venice’s Gothic style. The trained eye, he writes, need only look for the date on “the steps of the choir of the Church of St. John and Paul.” On the left the viewer will see the tomb of Doge Marco Cornaro, dated 1367, while on the right will appear the sepulchre of Doge Michele Morosini, dated 1382. By the latter year, the corruption has become unmistakable: Morosini’s tomb is “voluptuous, and over-wrought” (Stones,Works 11, 13-14). What is the cause of such decadence, and what lesson will Ruskin draw for England from the fall of Venice?

To answer these questions, we must examine Ruskin’s commentary in “Grotesque Renaissance” on the role of play and jesting in architecture and, more generally, in the life of a people. The central element in the Gothic that flowered in medieval Venice and even more abundantly elsewhere in Italy, says Ruskin, is a noble form of the grotesque. “The true grotesque,” he explains, is “the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind,” and the false consists in “the full exertion of a frivolous one” (Stones,Works 11, 170). The true grotesque commands our attention in the best of Gothic architecture—its energetically redundant foliage, its gargoyles and other ornamentation full of appreciation of the two passions Ruskin says govern humanity: “love of God, and the fear of sin, and of its companion—Death” (Stones,Works 11, 163).The false type is the effect in art of the fourth era of the Renaissance, and confronts us with nothing but the “sneering mockery” that comes from “delight in the contemplation of bestial vice” (Stones,Works 11, 145).

This latter form of the grotesque, argues Ruskin, glowers at spectators from the sole Renaissance landmark reminding them of the once populous Piazza of Santa Maria Formosa, site of the medieval Feast of the Maries. This landmark, consisting of “A head,—huge, inhuman, and monstrous,—leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described,” typifies the “evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline” (Stones,Works 11, 145). There are those who play wisely, necessarily, inordinately, and not at all, according to Ruskin, and the foul landmark was surely made by workmen who labored during the reign of the third in this company.

The healthier grotesque ornamentation of the Gothic period was made by workers who, lacking the refinement and leisure to repose wisely, yet played in a sufficiently healthy manner to return to their architectural labor. Even while they toiled, these “inferior workmen” were allowed to some extent to employ their creative energies and fancy, stamping thereby their “character” and “satire” upon the work they did (Stones,Works 11, 157). The later, unhealthy form of grotesque ornament comes of labor designed to express mechanically nothing but the self-indulgence and pleasure-seeking of the great citizens who commissioned the building. This labor is done at the behest of those who are idle, who neither think nor work but who, thanks to circumstances, are able “to make amusement the object of their existence” (Stones,Works 11, 154). A special subcategory of such types in Ruskin’s almost Dantean scheme consists in those who treat sacred and vital things irreverently.

These latter categories—idleness and irreverence—Ruskin takes as typical faults of Venice in its final Renaissance decline. Base workers can make nothing but base things, expressing by them the baseness of those who have set them on. It was a long, painful process, this decline of Venice into labyrinthine sensualism. Ruskin traces the beginning of the end not only to the tomb of Doge Michele Morosini, 1382, but, as he reminds us at the end of “Grotesque Renaissance,” in more fully historical terms to the passing of Doge Tomaso Mocenigo in 1423. This is made plain in the first volume of Stones:

I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8 th May 1418; the visible commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio (Stones,Works 9, 21).

Venice’s fall, beginning with the death of the noble Mocenigo and the rise of Francesco Foscari, Ruskin traces in the changes to the Ducal Palace adjoining St. Mark’s. The city’s general intention to remodel its Gothic architectural treasure survived Mocenigo, but for once the patriot was wrong. Ruskin laments of the Doge that “in his zeal for the honour of future Venice, he had forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago” (Stones,Works 10, 352).With great precision, Ruskin describes the first sign of moral and architectural decay:

I said that the new Council Chamber, at the time when Mocenigo brought forward his measure, had never yet been used. It was in the year 1422 that the decree passed to rebuild the palace: Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari was elected in his room. The Great Council Chamber was used for the first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate as Doge,—the 3 rd of April, 1423, according to the Caroldo Chronicle; the 23 rd, which is probably correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum;—and, the following year, on the 27 th of March, the first hammer was lifted up against the old palace of Ziani.

That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly called the “Renaissance.” It was the knell of the architecture of Venice,—and of Venice herself (Stones,Works 10, 351-52).

The moral for England appears strongly in the peroration to “Grotesque Renaissance.” When Mocenigo died in 1423 and Foscari took his place as ruler, Ruskin points out, “Sifesteggio dalla citta uno anno intero,” or “the city kept festival for a whole year” (Stones,Works 11, 195).From thence, the way to moral perdition and defeat at the hands of the Turks was straight:

Venice had in her childhood sown, in tears, the harvest she was to reap in rejoicing. She now sowed in laughter the seeds of death.

Thenceforward, year after year, the nation drank with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and dug for springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the earth. In the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom, as of old she had surpassed them in fortitude and devotion; and as once the powers of Europe stood before her judgment-seat, to receive the decisions of her justice, so now the youth of Europe assembled in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of delight (Stones,Works 11, 195).

The author’s adherence to Christian teleology shines through this and every other page of The Stones of Venice, and in this early masterwork, Ruskin seems still to have kept firmly to the evangelical faith of his parents. Even when he lost that faith and turned from criticism of art to chastisement of politicians and factory owners, the same Christian framework governs his writing. The moral earnestness that informs Ruskin’s ability to hear in a Renaissance laborer’s hammer the knell of Venetian piety, we shall find informing as well the schemes Ruskin later proposes to solve modern England’s social problems. The prophet’s indignation and the art critic’s lament modulate into the feudalist’s call for a stratified society based upon recognition of the dignity of labor. In Unto This Last (1860), Ruskin proposes to set England back on the right road by dividing its classes into the medieval functions of Soldier, Pastor, Physician, Lawyer, and Merchant, for which latter officer the workmen will employ their skills and imagination. In essence, Ruskin’s scheme for reform is every bit as hierarchical as that of Carlyle, except that the latter does not propose to do away with the Industrial Revolution altogether.

Ruskin’s entire narrative about the Good Gothic and the Bad Renaissance exempts the author and his readers from confronting what Marx would call the entirely new status and potential of the industrial proletariat. This new class faces the bourgeoisie with the fundamental contradictions of its own system of production and social organization, but Ruskin would put away the workmen’s anger with patriarchal supervision. In Ruskin, then, what seems to be material history is fancy made visible and audible by the great writer’s skill. The hammer blows against the Ducal Palace, the hideousness of the late-Renaissance gargoyle, and the image of the year-long celebration of Foscari’s ascension to power articulate a moral abstraction.

Ruskin’s twin battery of aesthetics and paternal socialism, further analysis would only underscore, are designed to invest perception and work, respectively, with purposive order in the face of social and moral chaos. Ruskin displaces the reification, mechanization, and desacramentalization going on with Tayloresque efficiency in Britain to Renaissance Italy and its increasingly corrupt artists, the fall of which then becomes a cautionary tale for the present. The specific program for reform that follows The Stones of Venice in Unto This Last and other such works, displacing present woes to an immoral past, sets forth as savior the anachronistic vision of a happily stratified England.

1. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10, eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1851-53; London: George Allen, 1904), 203-04.

2. Ruskin, Stones,Works Volume 10, 197.

3. Karl Marx and Frederick (Friedrich) Engels, The Communist Manifesto, English translation (1848; 1949; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1983), 32.

Notes on John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University

1035. “Knowledge is called by the name of Science or Philosophy, when it is acted upon, informed, or if I may use a strong figure, impregnated by Reason. Reason is the principle of that intrinsic fecundity of Knowledge, which, to those who possess it, is its especial value, and which dispenses with the necessity of their looking abroad for any end to rest upon external to itself.” Scientia is the Latin term for wisdom, and that is the way Newman uses the word. In any genuine pursuit of knowledge, part of the process consists in the mind reflecting on its own operations, trying to account for its relationship to the object of study, its influence on the constitution of that object, its powers, and its biases. It is not the subject that is primary in this pursuit (important though the subject may be), it is the workings of the mind itself.

1036. “When I speak of Knowledge, I mean something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea.” Education, then, is both an active and a reflective process, one that delivers us from passive reliance on sensory perception without necessarily denying “the evidence of the senses.” And this process is liberational—Newman’s concern for intellectual freedom shows in his statement, “Not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves or children. . . .” Newman says that “education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue.” This is an excellent formulation: what education really does is form a person’s character. Learning isn’t about accumulating facts or passing tests. It is part of the life experience that makes you who you eventually become, and it makes you capable of becoming something even better in the future: you develop the “habit” of wanting to learn, and develop the disposition to see learning as fundamental to life, not incidental to the completion of the moment’s task.

1036-37. “Truth of whatever kind is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state . . . does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation. . . .” This is the theological core of Newman’s argument: God made the human mind to seek truth and thereby arrive at a greater appreciation of him. Since the effects of the Fall dictate that we recover fragments of truth only by long, sometimes painful effort, the educator must take this limitation into account, and yet not simply accept the isolation of one kind of study from another to the point where it seems right to leave them disconnected.

1037. “This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education. . . .” Liberal education, then, refuses to make the exclusionary sacrifice that more immediately practical kinds of learning do: if you study book-keeping or even medicine or law, certain subjects need not concern you in your quest for the specific knowledge that will make you a good book-keeper, lawyer, or doctor. Whatever liberal arts study touches must be studied for the sake of general intellectual cultivation. (Traditionally, the seven sister arts of the medieval university are the quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy and the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. But the more general usage of the term “liberal arts” embraces the humanities and some scientific studies.) The subject deserves great respect, but the true purpose of such study is to train and sharpen the mind, to focus it on its own powers and the augmentation thereof, and not to master the body of facts accruing to the particular subject. This self-cultivation of the mind for its own sake is the “final cause” or telos or learning, to borrow Aristotle’s term from his fourfold theory of causality: formal (idea), efficient (maker or doer), material (material to be worked with), and final (purpose).

1038. “Good is not only good, but reproductive of good; this is one of its attributes; nothing is excellent, beautiful, perfect, desirable for its own sake, but it overflows, and spreads the likeness of itself all around it. Good is prolific. . . . ” Another word for the quality Newman indicates might be generative: good organically generates still more good. Further, Newman writes, “If then the intellect is so excellent a portion of us, and its cultivation so excellent, it is not only beautiful, perfect, admirable, and noble in itself, but in a true and high sense it must be useful to the possessor and to all around him. . . .” This statement sounds like Renaissance humanism, as when Hamlet makes his famous speech beginning, “What a piece of work is a man,” in which he describes human intellect as being just a little less than that of the angels. Newman’s “parallel of bodily health” is a perfect illustration of how a refined intellect might be considered generally useful: “Health is a good in itself, though nothing came of it, and is especially worth seeking and cherishing; yet, after all, the blessings which attend its presence are so great, while they are so close to it and so redound [165] back upon it and encircle it, that we never think of it except as useful as well as good. . . .” It is pleasant in itself to be healthy, but in addition, a healthy person can do many things that a sick or unfit person can’t. The same goes for a person who is educated as opposed to someone who isn’t.

1039. “[G]eneral culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study,” insists Ruskin. Further, he explains, “I do not mean to imply that the University does not teach Law or Medicine. . . . I do but say that there will be this distinction as regards a Professor of Law, or of Medicine, or of Geology, or of Political Economy, in a University and out of it, that out of a University he is in danger of being absorbed and narrowed by his pursuit. . . .” Some subjects are inherently oriented towards practical deployment, so there’s always strong pressure to step beyond what Newman would consider the properly intellectual, speculative boundaries of the subject itself, and to make its more practical, material dimension the main concern. If you go to a technical college, you will learn mostly those things pertinent to a trade of some sort; everything else will be left aside or touched upon very lightly.

1040. “There is a duty we owe to human society as such, to the state to which we belong, to the sphere in which we move . . . and that philosophical or liberal education, as I have called it, which is the proper function of a University, if it refuses the foremost place to professional interests, does but postpone them to the formation of the citizen. . . .” This is a major part of Newman’s argument: properly studying the liberal arts makes people better individuals and better citizens; it makes them more capable of functioning in the unselfish, generous, helpful way they should as members of the larger community. Most catalogs for liberal arts colleges (and indeed for most schools of any type) make a similar claim: they insist that broad, integrative study of various subjects is vital to a democratic society. To be sure, the intense pressures of modern life make it difficult if not impossible to live up to such a high ideal. Many students lead busy lives (commuting on crowded freeways to school, caring for children or elderly parents, considering the needs of spouses, holding part-time or even full-time jobs, etc.), and teachers themselves (a good number of whom are subject to corporate-style “temp-labor” conditions) often find it difficult to give their undivided attention to the subject or to their students. We aren’t exactly standing around a stately oak discoursing of Milton and Michael Angelo just for the excellence of the thing. Most of us would probably agree that doing so would be wonderful, but we just don’t have the time or the energy. And the schools we attend seem understandably preoccupied with concerns that in the corporate world would go by the names “branding” and “the bottom line.”

But I don’t mean to sound too pessimistic about education: perhaps we can make some peace with the “Newmanesque” conception in that what he’s talking about is fundamentally an attitude towards learning. Simply knowing that there is such an ideal and that it would, if followed to any reasonable extent, be beneficial to us is worth a great deal. I would suggest that a modern student’s basic mode should be resistance. Not hostility to anyone in the system, but simply a determination to think of the subject one is studying as something more than a discrete body of facts (kept in isolation from other, equally discrete, bodies of facts) to be mastered for a test. Deep down, we know that great works of art, literary texts, or any excellent things whatsoever were in no way created for the pedestrian purposes to which we may reduce them for the sake of getting by in college. If education is a commodity—and it is—it is also, at its best, something more than that if you are determined enough (or perverse enough) to make it so.

And as the bumper stickers say, “Why be normal?” An old friend of mine from my UC Irvine days was a great example of the “productive perversity” I mean: he was never much on efficiency, but somehow always seemed to have one of the most sophisticated views on whatever he studied. One morning he showed up to a Medieval literature session happy as can be on the day a paper was due, and when I asked him why he was happy, he said, “Well, I was up until three in the morning drinking coffee after coffee, and then it all came together for me. I wrote the paper in a flash of insight!” A few weeks later, he got the paper back, and the teacher’s comment was, “Your essay begins on page four.” Not a good sign in terms of the grade, especially when the paper is only five pages long. But he just laughed. My friend’s java-fueled inspiration didn’t often translate into fine grades, and I don’t recommend the three-in-the-morning method for writing an essay. The point is that he was in fact a sharp reader who took learning seriously enough not to be worried primarily about assignments and grades. I prided myself on being contemptuous of grades, though I must not have been as contemptuous as my friend since I graduated at the top of the Class of ‘89, thank you. But he probably got just as good an education as I did. He may well be a pizza deliveryman today, but no doubt he’s the smartest pizza deliveryman on the globe—somebody who’s not dependent on the newspapers or television talking heads to tell him what to think. The main thing is to think independently, intelligently, rationally, and insightfully. If you can do that, you’re well educated. A fair amount of people with degrees, power, and influence are evidently capable of no such thing. When pressed about the value of the humanities, I think it’s sufficient to ask the questioner whether he or she would rather be a parrot and puppet of other people’s ideas (i.e. a dupe)—or a reasonably independent person who can see things from more than one angle when it’s necessary.

1041. “[A] University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations.” Indeed—Shakespeare wasn’t a college man, as everybody knows; he was just a brilliant, witty, observant bloke bent upon making a living as a playwright. Still, continues Newman, “a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. . . .” Newman’s view of the educated person reminds me of what Confucius says in the Analects about the qualities of the gentleman and his effect upon his society. At base, such a person sets a good example that one may at least hope will start a trend. But Confucius surely understood that it isn’t easy to say how great that effect is likely to be, or how long it might take to see it come to pass. Where “the Way does not prevail,” the gentleman may have a difficult time of it. It’s an interesting question as to whether we have anything like the Confucian gentleman or the Newmanite “generally educated person” to look to today, or whether we even find the idea of having such people around an attractive proposition. Newman’s argument about the virtues of liberal education, we should recall, was set forth against the semi-Lockean, utilitarian, middle-class view that was already becoming prevalent in his time. Many Victorians argued against the reign of the old elitist universities (“Oxbridge”) and for a much more practical kind of education—one that would efficiently turn out useful tradespeople, engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, and so forth. Our own increasingly online-based public discourse is ambivalent on the issue of who sets the standards for intellectual excellence, moral rectitude, manners, and so forth: no doubt we still have a desire to settle such matters or at least to find some temporary clarity, but there are so many potential arbiters, so many voices, that it seems ridiculous to suggest that any small group of highly educated people should have a lock on what or how to think. But it’s fair to say that Newman isn’t claiming his “educated gentlemen” are supposed to be authoritarian givers of the social and political law: he is suggesting, I believe, that they should be voices of moderation and calm even in the midst of friction, competition, or crisis. They are supposed to be able to take the needs and opinions of others into account rather than simply condemning them. In this capacity, Newman’s claims for the gentleman, the student of Victorian social criticism will find, is rather like Matthew Arnold’s advocacy of a “Best Self” not easily reduced to class, economic, religious, or other kinds of narrow identity concerns. Many have questioned whether advocating such trans-personal, trans-situational identities is more than an elitist (and essentially reactionary) gesture, but it’s hard to deny at least the nobility of the ideal.

1041. Newman says that the gentleman’s “great concern [is] . . . to make every one at their ease and at home.” And further, “Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be no large philosophy.” The author himself was Roman Catholic and deeply pious, so he is hardly an unambiguous proponent of secular humanism. But he is honest enough to admit that a truly liberal education may be pursued by people who don’t share his deep religious convictions, and that it would be beneficial.

Week 05, E. Bulwer-Lytton and Dion Boucicault

2008-02-26T22:27:00.000-08:00

Notes on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Money

Act 1, Scene 1

Sir John Vesey expects that his daughter Georgina will be the main heir of the extremely wealthy Mr. Mordaunt (who made his money in India), her maternal uncle. Vesey is himself an admitted “humbug” who has parlayed a clever habit of seeming to be what he is not into a successful life. The opposite of Othello’s rule holds here—the noble Moor of Venice had said that people should be what they seem. But since Vesey’s life is a selfish one and he has nothing to leave behind, his daughter Georgina must marry well or inherit, as she now seems likely to do. Sir Frederick Blount, a dandy with a comic lisp, was the chosen object once, but now he seems too middling. Vesey is the sort of character Oscar Wilde would later describe with so much aplomb: the man who is always conscious that he lives “in an age of surfaces,” that it’s only appearances that count because after all, there are only appearances. Of course, Sir John lacks the genuine charm of, say, Mr. Ernest Worthing or Algernon Moncrieff from The Importance of Being Earnest since the venality of Bulwer-Lytton’s character is apparent, whereas Wilde’s rascals and frivolitarians remain almost innocent even when at their most calculating in pursuit of love, good birth, and the appearance of moral propriety.

Alfred Evelyn, Georgina’s impoverished but Cambridge-educated cousin, is employed by Sir John as a private secretary. As for Clara, another cousin, Sir John didn’t want the expense of caring for her as guardian, so he palmed her off on his half-sister Lady Franklin, who is able to sum up the character of others admirably, as she does Blount’s.

Evelyn soon gives Sir John an opportunity to show some charity, which of course he fails to do. Georgina promises to take care of Evelyn’s nurse’s rent, but we’re told that Clara, too, has peeked at the nurse’s address, and she and Lady Franklin conspire to pay the debt.

Evelyn, who is a bit of a moralist, laments his straitened circumstances, against which his talent and learning can avail nothing, and denounces the insolence of others in their contempt for virtue. When he proposes to Clara in his high-flown way, she rejects him with the excuse that neither of them have enough to make their way in the world. Obviously, he feels that she is rejecting him as unworthy of her simply because he is poor.

Stout the fervent political economist enters and is treated to a sardonic recitation of his own heartless principles by Evelyn. Stout, of course, doesn’t get the joke, and Glossmore’s alleged charitable feelings amount to nothing more than forcing the poor on the parish. Stout’s grinch-like brand of opinion is a fine example of the laissez-faire worship that authors such as Thomas Carlyle (not to mention England’s radical leftist or egalitarian groups) denounced as abstractionist “enchantment” that would posit so-called universal laws (competition, supply and demand, etc.) and then insist that humanity conform itself to them or else.

Graves, supposedly a melancholy worshiper of his dearly departed wife, “the sainted Maria,” enters to read Mr. Mordaunt’s will. Mordaunt has left a pittance to Stout, 500£ to Blount, a butterfly collection to Glossmore along with a pedigree list, and to Sir John Vesey, nothing but the empty bottles that used to contain the restorative Cheltenham waters Vesey sent him every year. To Graves he leaves 5,000£ in government stocks, and to Georgina, 10,000£ in India stock. Most of the old man’s wealth is left to Alfred Evelyn, our poor Cambridge scholar, whom of course everyone now befriends. Evelyn bemoans the gulf between himself and Clara, from whom he’s now separated by his wealth rather than his poverty. The reading of the will is often said to be the best part of the play since it stages for us the frustration of expectations—and consequent incivility—on the part of so many silly and unworthy characters.

What is set before us in this first act is that common Victorian theme: transformation (sometimes sudden) from poverty to wealth, status, and independence. This theme can be dealt with in a satirical manner, a sentimental manner, or with traces of both attitudes. That is, those who don’t deserve any of these things may get them anyway, with absurd results, or those who do deserve them may get them but only after much adversity and testing. Think of Dickens’ 1861 novel Great Expectations, in which young Pip, who at first appears to be a penniless urchin, turns out always to have been a gentleman-in-the-making, thanks to the watchfulness of his disreputable but kind benefactor Abel Magwich.

Evelyn attains his fortune, which is satisfying to us, but of course the comic plot is just getting under way, and comic plots turn upon the setting-up and overcoming of obstacles. The obstacle in this case is Evelyn’s own scruples about true love: he can’t bring himself to consider that he and Clara might just get married, and is “stuck on stupid,” we might say, wallowing in his own tragic sense of loss and stiff pride. The problem of this comedy is not altogether unlike the one we can find handled with more subtlety in Jane Austen’s Regency novel Persuasion (1816). In that work, Anne Elliot and captain Frederick Wentworth must overcome their mutual hesitation after Wentworth’s previous unsuccessful suit to her. (He had proposed before making his mark as an officer in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and Anne allowed herself to be dissuaded from accepting him.) But since this is a semi-satirical comedy, we should expect the breakthrough to come not through deep introspection and sensitive dialog but rather through clever contrivance and happy accident.

Act 2, Scene 1

Artisans of various kinds surround Evelyn like polite vultures, and he lets them have their way as adorners of his new status just to get rid of them. Glossmore and Stout, still having their aristocrat versus capitalist upstart argument, urge their respective candidates for parliament upon Evelyn, who has just bought a property named Groginhole, the honorable MP of which (Hopkins) is about to pass away. Stout is passionate for Popkins, while Glossmore favors the aptly named Cipher to support aristocratic interests.

Evelyn converses with his lawyer, Sharp, and with Graves, expatiating to the former about the evils of the mammon-worshiping world and explaining the situation with Clara to Graves. It seems that Evelyn has bribed Sharp to say a codicil in Mordaunt’s will had left 20,000£ to Clara. But in truth, Mordaunt had mentioned Clara in another respect, asking Evelyn to choose either her or Georgina as his wife. At this point, Evelyn’s one hope is that Clara is the one who paid his nurse’s rent, but he’s much more inclined to believe it was Georgina, and says that a marriage with such a woman might not be such a bad thing after all. He and Graves exit bantering over who is more “through” with romance.

Act 2, Scene 2

Lady Franklin explains Mr. Graves’ curious character traits to Clara, and wants to inform Evelyn that it was Clara who paid the nurse’s rent, not Georgina, but Clara makes her promise not to. Meanwhile, it’s clear that a romance is brewing between Lady Franklin and Mr. Graves. Next, Mr. Dudley Smooth enters the scene, a mortal danger to the financial health of moneyed young men. On the occasion of looking over some drawings Georgina has made, Evelyn pays court to Georgina to spite Clara, while Clara puts up with Blount to spite Evelyn. Sir John Vesey tries, apparently with success, to trick Evelyn into an assurance that it was indeed Georgina who acted charitably towards the poor nurse. Within earshot of Clara, Evelyn proposes to Georgina. Clara passes out, but awakens with Evelyn’s happiness on her lips. Essentially, this scene shows the wall of misunderstanding between Evelyn and Clara growing thicker, though of course the final moment in it shows that they are quite passionate about each other. The flirtation—if we can call it that—between Lady Franklin and Mr. Graves is hopeful since it underscores the inconstancy of men’s resolutions in matters of love. Mr. Graves wears his mourning like a fashion, and his pose, we can see, will easily give way.

Act 3, Scene 1

Sir John contrives to get Clara out of the house and away from Evelyn so she won’t spoil the match with Georgina. Sir John tells Clara that he had “innocently” tried to spare her the embarrassment of Evelyn’s finding out about her payment of the nurse’s rent, and she declares that she doesn’t want it known anyway. Evelyn and Clara engage in a conversation over their respective positions about the recent past. Evelyn is convinced that she spurned him for the worst reason, while she offers friendship at a distance since she plans to leave the country. Evelyn at least momentarily doubts his resolve, but the obstacle they face is perhaps at its greatest. Evelyn soon learns from Graves, however, that Sir John is after his money and that Georgina is paying court to the fop Sir Frederick Blount. Evelyn is determined to deceive these deceivers, and gets his opportunity when Graves tells him that Sir John is upset at reports of his gambling with Dudley Smooth, and worried that he may have put money in a failing bank. (Banks could and did sometimes fail disastrously in Victorian times—there was nothing like the FDIC protection to guarantee the solvency of banks in America since Franklin Roosevelt’s time.) Evelyn plots to increase Sir John’s alarm tenfold. Graves and Lady Franklin continue their odd courtship, she making what would pass for an advance in Victorian times and he still dissembling his interest in her with references to the sainted Maria. But the colorful scarf he wears gives his true intentions away.

Act 3, Scene 2

Lady Franklin dances Graves into a trap, and Sir John and others catch them dancing, much to Graves’ discomfiture. It seems that Lady Franklin, based on her prior acquaintance with Graves and his wife, is able to inhabit the memory of the “Sainted Maria,” and succeeds in getting the widower to enjoy himself by imitating moments from their past marital happiness.

Act 3, Scene 3

Evelyn conspires with Dudley Smooth to stage a disastrous gambling session, taking in Sir John altogether and alarming him at the prospect of a future son-in-law blowing his fortune without thinking twice. Sir John’s alarm probably isn’t unrealistic since it was fairly common, I believe, for young men to gamble or otherwise fritter their inherited wealth and estates away: it has been the ruin of many a well-to-do house, and a popular subject in art. Hogarth the eighteenth-century visual artist made it a study in his famous engravings entitled “A Rake’s Progress.”

Act 4, Scene 1

Smooth hoodwinks the tradesmen in whose credit Evelyn stands, while Evelyn plays Glossmore and Blount against each other—they realize that he has deviously borrowed from them both.

Act 4, Scene 2

Evelyn drives home his plot by making it plain to Georgina and Sir John just how hard up for ready cash he is, and all for gambling debts. He wants Georgina to “lend” him her 10,000£ settlement to pay off those debts, and speaks of retrenchment or resettling in the countryside so they can live more cheaply. Glossmore and Stout are still arguing over Popkins and Cipher for parliament at Groginhole, but now they learn that Evelyn is supposedly trying to get himself elected there. Smooth talks of taking possession of Evelyn’s estate, and Evelyn floats the possibility that his money is invested with an unsound bank. Graves, surprisingly, volunteers to pay a tradesman’s bill that threatens to land Evelyn in prison, and thereby wins Lady Franklin’s affections all the more. After all have gone, Evelyn and Smooth have a good laugh together.

Act 5, Scene 1

Stout finally informs Sir John that Evelyn is shamming them all, and Sir John abruptly drops his friendliness with Sir Frederick Blount, whom he had begun to think might make a good match with Georgina. Blount is insulted and schemes to get even—he still has designs on Georgina. Apparently, Evelyn has also managed to get himself elected to parliament for Groginhole, dashing the hopes of Popkins and Cipher.

Act 5, Scene 2

Graves makes it plain to Clara that it was Evelyn who had actually given her the money she thought was from the will. Clara is determined to help Evelyn, whom she still believes to be in financial distress, and she and Lady Franklin set off to find him.

Act 5, Scene 3

Evelyn and Graves cement their friendship still more, and at this point it appears from a letter that Georgina has been willing to cast her lot with Evelyn, who would be honor-bound to marry her. Clara enters with Lady Franklin and lets Evelyn know she’s aware that he is the one who awarded her the money from the will. They have an anguished discussion about the recent past, with Clara fully explaining her rationale for rejecting his suit: she would have been unable to assist him in the struggle to survive, and all the responsibility would fall on his shoulders, leading to humiliating failure. But these revelations seem to come too late since the match with Georgina is imminent.

Sir John enters and tries to gull Evelyn into thinking he doesn’t know the young man is still as rich as the day he inherited his money. But when Georgina makes her entrance and fails to catch on, the match is off. Evelyn learns that she isn’t willing to help him and that she wasn’t even responsible for the gift to help the impoverished nurse, either—that was Clara’s doing, as was the more recent 10,000£ credited to his account from Drummond’s Bank. Georgina and Blount are just the ticket for each other, and Evelyn good-naturedly steps in to double the promise to Blount of 10,000£ since Sir John is horrified at actually having to turn over that kind of money, his word notwithstanding. Graves proposes to Lady Franklin and is accepted, Evelyn learns that he has been elected to parliament, and he and Clara are free to marry. The play ends with everybody satisfied (except perhaps Glossmore and Stout, who are worried about Evelyn’s studiously non-partisan political affiliations), and a final pronouncement on the vital importance of having—”plenty of Money!”

Week 04, Alfred Tennyson

2008-02-19T22:26:00.000-08:00

Notes on Lord Alfred Tennyson

“The Lady of Shalott”

This poem shows Tennyson to be self-consciously late-Romantic. The first several stanzas play with temporal and spatial references, but it is clear that “down” is the way to Camelot, the world of medieval romance and violence, of immersion in time as symbolized by the flowing river. The Lady will experience this immersion as a rupture. Everyone else’s life is her death once she tries to make the passage from the island to the mainland. The poem raises the question of art’s relation to other areas of life, an issue of much concern to Tennyson himself. If poetry is a vocation, to what social end does one honorably pursue it?

Parts 1-2. Poetic devices involve us in the aesthetic way of perceiving. Early on, the plot is enveloped by form; we are entranced by the Lady’s image-weaving, even though we “see” her images spun. The Lady weaves a magic web—is the text another such web? In the fifth stanza of Part 2, the Lady shows little regard for anything but her weaving, and is not yet troubled by desire, it seems. The metaphors of mirror and loom may refer first to the barrier between life and art, and second to the imaginative process. What is woven may represent the real world, but remains distinct from it. But Tennyson seems to be referring also to Plato’s Parable of the Cave, when he writes “Shadows of the world appear.” The Lady does not see the world outside directly—she sees shadows, just like Plato’s cave-dwellers.

The final stanza of Part 2 says the Lady “still delights / To weave the mirror’s magic sights….” Refer to Freud’s essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” where he argues that art is mainly wish-fulfillment. Here the Lady weaves what appears in the mirror, so her web represents representations. What exactly are the “shadows” of which she is “half-sick”? Well, she is tired of seeing things at one remove, and wants direct access to life, to the world of experience.

Part 3. Here the Lady gets her wish when Lancelot punctures the barrier, breaks the magic spell, with a riot of color and sound. The two young lovers in particular (of the final stanza in Part 2) have readied her for this intrusion. Towards the end of the third part, the magic stops, representation ends and experience begins. Lancelot’s phrase “tirra lirra” has as one prominent possible source a song of Autolycus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale 4.3:

Act 4.3 of The Winter’s Tale: the rascal Autolycus sings:

When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.
The lark, that tirra-lyra chants,
With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay,
Are summer songs for me and my aunts,
While we lie tumbling in the hay.

Part 4. Is that “publish or perish,” or “publish and perish”? The Lady writes her one poem on the prow of the boat that will carry her to her death; the poem is her name. The villagers hear her singing, and she dies “in her song” (this means that within the context of the poem, she really dies, but the phrase is slippery—what does it mean to “die in your song”? Doesn’t that mean you never existed outside of it since you lived in it too?) This leads to another reading of the poem as being about the wall between consciousness and the outside world—a more directly philosophical interpretation that might be taken as going against Romantic self-expression. Is it that self-expression can’t succeed because the self dies in the act of speaking, singing, writing, in the course of the poem? That isn’t a new idea, but the third part sets it forth strongly. On the whole, I’m inclined to read the poem in light of Walter Pater’s later comments about “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The value of expression becomes central in that case—what good does it do? The Lady dwells in her own interiority and can neither remain satisfied with spinning her own world nor enter the world of time and experience.

The townspeople try to interpret the poem, but feel only dread. That’s one possible response to art; the other is Sir Lancelot’s more favorable one—he blesses her beauty and asks God to lend her grace for its sake. He does not, like the villagers, try to ward off the Lady’s effect on him as if she were a vampire—he welcomes her power even if he doesn’t fully understand where it comes from, the story behind the pretty but dead face.

“The Lotos-Eaters”

In Memoriam Lyric 5 says that “A use in measured language lies / …Like dull narcotics, numbing pain,” a thought that seems apt when connected with the present poem. Odysseus joins his crew after only one line—they all “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” as Timothy Leary the 1960’s LSD guru would say. He upsets the principle of rank and falls away from heroism into apathetic song. There will be no more heroism, no more need to remain obedient to the gods. The verse form brings home this worst possible peril for a Greek hero who is, after all, responsible for standing up to his fate even though he can’t alter it.

Tennyson’s borrowings from Keats’ sensualism lend the poem its languidness: “A land where all things always seemed the same.” In Keats, we find autumn stillness, but here that stillness becomes a trance-inducing stasis. Odysseus had sent scouts in Homer’s version, but here it seems that the Lotos-Eaters themselves just show up with their magic plant.

Choric Song: What lesson do the Mariners learn from nature? Character isn’t set off from or challenged by nature, as it should be. Where are the gods? Words lose their proper orientation towards action, and the Mariners surrender to mellow nature. We find no striving, no wandering, no strength—only rhetoric that justifies inaction. The Mariners have become irresponsible poets, and Odysseus is one of them—in Homer, of course, the captain’s men served in part as foils for his heroic survival. By the sixth stanza, we can say, “so much for the homecoming.” Wandering has lost its purposive edge, and expression has become divorced from action.

The eighth stanza of the Choric Song shows a change in form—this part is deceptively translation-like since the lines are long enough to look like Homer’s dactylic hexameter. Homer kept Odysseus from spending much time on the Lotos-Eaters episode—he surely wanted to emphasize the danger that Odysseus might have given in, and makes Odysseus conscious of that—he’s retelling the story as long past for his Phaeacian host Alcinous. When the Mariners refer to the “Gods together, careless of mankind (155), the line reflects Tennyson’s interest in the Epicurean notion of the gods set forth by Lucretius—they are said to be distant, not particularly active (they didn’t even create the Cosmos—random movement of the atoms did), and unconcerned with human affairs. The eighth stanza draws out into song the dangerous spiritual error that this dilatory poem has been exploring. Lucretian materialism is meant to bring comfort to humanity, taking away their fear of death and the gods. But Tennyson (who liked Lucretius) finds this un-Greek or unheroic. Perhaps the entire poem is psychological realism on Tennyson’s part—an admission that strong desires beget or are linked to strong counter-desires: authentic heroism is twinned with strong nihilism and the desire to forget.

“Ulysses”

Tiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave Ithaca one last time to propitiate the gods, so Tennyson’s idea comes from Homer. Here we find a modern mind confronting Greek striving. In Homer, all the wandering was for the sake of getting home and re-establishing order on Ithaca. But here the point seems to be that adventurism is its own purpose. Mixed in is a sad tone, an almost Hamlet-like musing on the sum total of it all—I’ve done all these things, but what’s the point of it if they become only memories? Ulysses laments that he has “become a name”; his words are no longer oriented towards action, and he has to cheer himself and others up to find that sense of direction again. What he says about experience is almost Paterian—Ulysses, too, wants “to burn with that hard, gem-like flame,” to expand life into a continual moment of great intensity, blotting out the ordinary or transforming it. The second, more public, part of the poem—”This is my son, mine own Telemachus…” implies a rejection of the task Homer set for his hero. Tennyson isn’t interested, I suppose, in the historical element of Odyssean lore—the “task” of the Odyssey was to revitalize a more domesticated land with its former heroic values.

But in Tennyson’s recasting, revitalization evidently means rejecting the domestic life and setting out again as a wanderer towards death. Ulysses stands apart from his son, to whom he would gladly cede the task of ruling over the human herd animals of Ithaca. When Ulysses addresses his old comrades, he sounds like Satan in Paradise Lost—his will is “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This is a very general directive, not a call to strive towards some specific goal.

If you want to get beneath this poem’s Victorian call to heroism, focus on the subtler side of it—as with Walter Pater, desire for beauty and experience is the obverse of the gods’ absence and fear of death. Tennyson’s is an aesthetic sensibility inclined to escape from or transfigure the ordinary things in life, but not in a way that implies commitment to impending social change. He often comes up against the possibility that his poetry is bound to be received as a compartmentalized, special kind of labor. Does Ulysses’ heroic language differ from his internal dialogue? Is he a false counselor to others, as Dante labels him in one of the later cantos of Inferno? The relationship between art and other areas of life becomes a problem to be explored, not something to be resolved presently. Exploring psychological states is one of Tennyson’s main enterprises, and one might say the same of Browning and some other Victorian poets. Isobel Armstrong’s thesis about Victorian poetry is partly that it constituted an alternative realm where more nuance could be developed regarding the issues that prose authors were writing about

In Memoriam A.H.H.

Structure

I. Drawing upon Tennyson’s remark that he had organized the poem by means of the three celebrations of Christmas it records, A. C. Bradley (“The Structure of In Memoriam,” in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) and E. D. H. Johnson (“In Memoriam: The Way of the Poet,” in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) suggests the following structure:

1. (1-27) Despair: ungoverned sense (subjective)

2. (28-77) Doubt: mind governing sense, i.e., despair (objective)

3. (78-102) Hope: spirit governing mind, i.e. doubt (subjective)

4. (103-31) Faith: spirit harmonizing with sense (objective)

The four-part division in relation to Tennyson’s theory of poetry:

1. Poetry as release from emotion

2. Poetry as release from thought

3. Poetry as self-realization

4. Poetry as mission (or prophecy)

II. The poet also explained to a friend (Knowles) that the poem had nine natural groups of sections: 1-8, 9-20, 21-27, 28-44, 45-58, 59-71, 72-93, 94-103, 104-131. Can you sum up or characterize the organizing principle of each group?

III. Structure of motifs created by paired sections, such as 2 and 39, 7 and 119, and so on, and by repetition of images, metaphors, and paradigms, including hand, door, ship, time, and dream.

IV. Patterns of conversion, turning points, and climaxes: 95, one of the longer sections of IM, contains its most famous climax and moment of conversion, but it is only one of several, for those sections concerning poetry and the role of poetry, the fate of Tennyson’s sister, and the conflict of science and religion all have their contributory climactic structures.

V. Patterns provided by types, biblical and biological (see sections 1, 12, 33, 53-56, 82, 85, 103, 118, 123, 131). Playing upon two competing meanings of the term type, Tennyson parallels and contrasts the biological and the religious. Although he admits that man as a type (species) may well disappear like the dinosaur, a fossil in the iron hills, he finds in Hallam a type (prefiguration) of both the reappearance of Christ and of the higher form (species, type) of humanity—a reassurance that time, evolution, and human life have meaning.

The Poet’s Three Main Areas of Concern:

1. The need to find an appropriate way to express sorrow and hope—a way that will not trap the speaker in those states, but that will not deny their necessity, either. In Memoriam deals with Romantic themes—grief, isolation, the poet’s anxiety over the expressive capacity of language. But Tennyson’s elegiac poem is highly structured and formal, too—a working-out of his emotions. Formal elegy (poetic ritual) helps him establish distance from the recurrent rawness of his grief and affords him an opportunity to express and explore painful interior states. Wordsworth, too, saw meter and poetic devices as ways of establishing meditative distance, ways of blanketing otherwise too-intense events and feelings with a layer of unreality. (This insight is as old as Aristotle—he says we can contemplate things with pleasure in art that would cause us unbearable grief or horror if they really happened.) In Tennyson’s cycle, Sorrow will be personified, negotiated with, listened to, and overcome. But grief is not an easy thing to leave behind; its persistence is signaled in Freud’s phrase “the work of mourning.”

2. The need to wrestle with religious doubt, whether this doubt comes from the pain occasioned by the loss of a dear friend, or from what John Ruskin would later call “the dreadful clink of the hammer” in one’s brain—i.e. the chipping away of faith caused by the advancing sciences of geology (Lyell), biology, chemistry, etc. These sciences were at work even before Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution intensified “Victorian doubt.” Many Victorian intellectuals also had problems with the more severe formulations of Christian theology—Calvinist pre-election or damnation, and so forth.

3. The need to reconsider the “Romantic” regard for nature’s value as a source of moral intelligibility and comfort. But the concept of nature is itself undergoing change—even Lyell’s uniformitarianism (the forces that shape the earth today have been shaping it the same way for millions of years) leads to a sense of “deep time” or “geological time.” The death of Hallam shocks Tennyson, but this long sense of time threatens to overwhelm any sense of human significance—see the fine set of lyrics 54-56 on this issue.

The Prologue

George Herbert’s poetry is an influence on Tennyson. Herbert, like Milton and others, felt the need to justify his habit of writing poetry—is it a genuine calling, or self-indulgence? Refer to 1 John 4:21: “And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.” The remark implies that it if poetry is to be an authentic use of one’s time, it should perform some social function—not just amount to private expression, venting, or some other selfish thing. Herbert also wrestled with movements of spirit that may be less than accepting of God’s will. This is not a matter of doubt, however, as it is with Tennyson—with Herbert, the issue has to do with the mind’s attempt to order contrary passions and align self and will with the will of God. In this sense, poetic language might serve to mediate between one’s better self and unruly thoughts and desires.

Stanza 1. The first stanza introduces a big issue—what is the relationship between faith and knowledge? Another eminent Victorian, John Henry Newman, captured this issue well when he wrote that there is “certitude,” and there is logical proof. In matters of faith, he suggests, the idea isn’t to look for scientific or logical proof—the right attitude has more to do with a deep feeling of certainty in the truth of Christian doctrine.

Stanzas 2-4. The speaker asserts that Providence (God’s plan) encompasses everyone and everything. He says that man “thinks he was not made to die,” and claims that he draws certitude from that. If we have such a strong feeling that something of us survives, well then, something must—why else would we have such a feeling? God made us, and must have given us the capacity for that feeling, so he will have the thing so. The third and fourth stanzas insist that despair—something IM explores—must be cast away along with sorrow.

Stanza 5. The speaker says, Carlyle-like, that “Our little systems have their day.” They are only “broken lights” of God’s divine and radiant Truth, so human knowledge will never replace God.

Stanza 6. The poem will make a search for the true ground of being and faith. The “beam” of light in the darkness could refer to any number of biblical passages, but Christ’s “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” would be a good candidate. (John 8:12)

Stanzas 7-8. Knowledge will grow until mind and soul, knowledge and faith, unite again.

Stanzas 9-11. The speaker apologizes for the torturous Romantic path of self-exploration and doubt that makes up the lyric progression of IM. He accuses himself of an excessive grief that might imply lack of trust in God’s plan. As Claudius says to Hamlet concerning his father’s death, “why stands it so particular with thee?” The speaker’s “wild and wandering cries” are, however, rhetorical and dramatic utterances. They explore, vent, contain and direct “powerful feelings.” Tennyson’s craft as a poet helps him arrange his emotions and gain perspective on them.

Lyric 1 (Stage 1 = 1-27, Near-Despair, ungoverned sense, subjective)

Loss should lead to growth, but perspective is an acquisition of time—a slow, sorrowful process. The speaker begins his exploration of sorrow’s psychology—grief is necessary and human. He rejects stoic indifference to grief—he is not yet ready for “calm of mind, all passion spent” (a line from Milton’s Samson Agonistes).

Lyric 2

Over time, the tree obliterates the names of the dead, effacing our attempt to memorialize them. Nature envelops the person’s dust, and shadow envelops our entire lives. The speaker betrays a strong desire to put an end to answer-seeking and self-consciousness. Carlyle’s sense of mystery hovers over this poem, but provides no comfort. The tree itself is rooted in eternity, ultimate perspective. In the final stanza, the speaker wants to lose consciousness and merge with the tree’s mysterious presence. We might also say that the tree is one of Wordsworth’s “beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

Lyric 3

The poem objectifies sorrow to gain perspective on it, but this tactic does not always work. In the first sent stanza, the speaker tries to gain perspective on his grief—towards what path of thought will Sorrow lead the speaker? In the second stanza, Sorrow says that we inhabit a blind universe—Carlyle’s steam-engine universe—and that there is, therefore, no divine providence and no purpose to life. In the third stanza, she says that Nature is void of meaning or hope; there is no source or ground for being, no anchor for the expression of emotions. In the fourth stanza the speaker raises the possibility of rejecting the Wordsworthian religion of nature, but does not do so.

Lyric 4

This poem shows that the speaker suffers from a divided consciousness, as in Lyric 2.

Lyric 5

The speaker questions the expressive transparency of language, its ability to convey feeling. He questions Romantic optimism about the vital role of language as mediator from one soul to another. But the lyric’s rhythmic language helps to still the speaker’s pain. It distances him from his own emotions—but is a narcotic effect the same as perspective or therapeutic value?

Lyric 7

This poem explores the psychological state of disbelief, mourning.

Lyric 11

The speaker is out of joint with natural calm; his perspective does not match that of nature personified. Are we to understand calm here as the peace that passes understanding? The speaker also confronts in his imagination the still body of his friend. He is preparing to reckon with the body’s silence and its transformation into a thing of dead nature.

Lyric 14

In the final stanza, the speaker is again preparing himself to let go of Arthur Hallam’s life-image. Viewing the body is necessary if we are to accept death.

Lyric 15

In the third stanza, the speaker refers to the ship’s motion—the apparition is the ship bearing his friend’s body. See Job 37:18. For the final stanza, see Revelations 15:2. Will the speaker’s interior state lead him to ultimate vision, to the meaning of Arthur’s passing?

Lyric 28

This poem, written early, marks the beginning of the second stage that runs through Lyric 77: doubt, mind governing sense, objective. The speaker is wrestling with doubt—that eminently Victorian problem. In the second stanza, he hears the bells, symbols of religious faith at its simplest and finest, implying harmony among mankind. In stanza five, the bells recall him to a former state of simple faith, a sense that the world is morally intelligible. As in Wordsworth’s poetry, past feelings rekindle new emotions of a similar kind. But bells are not words. The last two lines reverse Shelley’s formula in “We are as Clouds”—the bells bring “sorrow touched with joy.”

Lyric 30

In stanza seven, the speaker says that there is a spirit moving through the universe. The imagery here is similar to Dante’s, or to Shelley’s in his elegy for Keats, “Adonais.” Is Arthur Hallam moved now by the divine or primal love, il primo amore? Lucretius’s references in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe) to the soul wandering into infinity may also be relevant here.

Lyric 34

The speaker describes an alternate poetics—expression without the need for progress or arrangement of the passions to serve moral ends. But he does not embrace this alternate poetics, as we can tell from the conditional mood of the final two stanzas.

Lyric 39

This poem should be compared with Lyric 2. In the first stanza, the speaker sees the tree as truly animate—it is part of nature’s regenerative cycle. But then Sorrow takes away the speaker’s believe in the regenerative power of nature, implying that the comfort we take is imported, a function of anthropomorphism.

Lyric 54

In the final stanza, the carefully ordered rhetoric of faith is described as a dream, and the poet’s language as a cry. But a cry does not give us the moral understanding we crave; we want to assert that purpose governs the universe.

Lyric 55

In the second stanza, the speaker asks if God and nature are at war with each other. He may be thinking of Sir Charles Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism, which says that consistent forces operating over vast periods of time have shaped the earth. If the species or type is all that matters, what consolation is that fact for individuals? Can science offer us satisfying knowledge? Or even bearable knowledge? In the final two stanzas, the speaker sounds like Shelley in “O World, O Life, O Time.” Life is cast as an arduous path, with the speaker groping for purpose and meaning. Science has been destructive of faith, disintegrating the individual psyche and the sense of community.

Lyric 56

In the first stanza, Nature says she cares not even for the type—geological strata convey in cold stone the passing even of the species. Evidently, Nature can betray the heart that loves her. In the fourth stanza, the speaker says we trusted that love was God’s primal impulse and ordering principle—Aristotle’s final cause (purpose) and first cause (God) conjoined. In the sixth stanza, the speaker raises the problem of self-consciousness. We “look before and after and pine for what is not,” as Shelley says. We try to establish a hierarchy of beings, but geological time does not respond to our efforts in a comforting manner. I recall Pascal’s remark that “the silence of these infinite spaces” terrifies him. Tennyson’s speaker says we cannot be satisfied thinking of ourselves in purely material terms—it crushes our sense of worth and even humanity. The final stanza brings in a Carlylean sense of history again—put on the veil and stop asking questions.

Lyric 75

In this poem, we find the Shakespearean theme of immortality through verse. This conventional sentiment leads us to the fuller transition of Lyric 78. The third stage through Lyric 102 is marked by hope, with spirit governing intellect and doubt. It is a subjective stage, as was the darker stage one. With Lyric 103, the fourth stage arrives—that of faith, with spirit harmonizing sense and intellect and feeling. It is an objective part of the poem.

Lyric 108

The speaker will seek solace in social interaction—not in religious speculation. He has begun to pull back from Arthur Hallam, and there is a hint of a feeling of abandonment in the final stanza.

Lyric 118

In the second stanza, I’ve read, there is probably a reference to Jean LaPlace’s idea of the earth as a fiery discharge from the Sun. The rest of the lyric sets forth the idea of inner evolution—the animal in us is chaos that must be overcome and left behind. Human nature is satyr-like, and requires acts of will, self-overcoming.

Lyric 123

These are very rhetorical poems with conventional themes coming to the forefront, along with a reassertion of the Carlylean sense of mystery. The theme is something like “life is a dream,” but the ordering power of the language works against that notion. In the final stanza, the speaker implies that to affirm the inconstancy of all things human, the delusional state in which we dwell, does not satisfy or convince. It is only the initial move on the way towards faith. God lies at the end of the path of doubt and faith alike.

Lyric 124

The speaker, in stanza 2, says that he does not find God in arguments about “intelligent design.” This is the sort of thing that abstract reasoning cooks up. In the final stanza, a sense of mystery puts an end to the speaker’s searching—the light comes from darkness.

Lyric 126

This poem may be looking back to George Herbert, who sometimes portrays Christ as a great lord in a court. The “faithful guard” is the Church. The speaker begins to feel protected, encompassed by Anglican ceremony and faith.

Week 03, John Stuart Mill

2008-02-12T22:26:00.000-08:00

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s “What is Poetry?”

1045. Mill starts with the standard view that “the object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions,” as an initial statement to be refined into a more supple, accurate explanation. That, he says, is the way genuine philosophy deals with the categories of popular thought.

1046-47. Mill is careful to distinguish sharply between narrative or “story” and poetry. The former, he says, is essentially descriptive; it gives “a true picture of life” when it’s done well, and appeals most strongly to children and primitive people. Poetry, by contrast, aims “to paint the human soul truly.” This is true, he writes on 1047, even of descriptive poetry, which gives us landscapes and so forth “seen through the medium and arrayed in the colors of the imagination set in action by the feelings.” The language Mill employs is mimetic—poetry represents something, but it represents something inward: the movements of the human mind, or the play of deep emotions.

1048-49. But more refinement is needed in defining the nature of poetry, and Mill achieves it by distinguishing poetry from oratorical eloquence. It’s well and good for Ebenezer Elliott to says that poetry is “impassioned truth” or for the Blackwood’s writer to characterize it as “man’s thoughts tinged by his feelings” (1048), but that only goes so far. Why might not a great speech be described in exactly the same way? Mill’s point is that a speech is designed first and foremost to be heard, while poetry is overheard. Poets are talking to themselves: “What we have said to ourselves we may tell to others afterwards . . . . But no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself” (1048). This way of talking about poetry resembles Wordsworth’s theory in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, 1802, where he describes poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility.” That is, poetic composition is a species of meditation, with its primary subject being the emotions of the person doing the meditating. Mill is so taken with his distinction between oratory and poetry that he applies it to music: there is the outward-tending, “garrulous passion” of a Gioacchino Rossini, and there is the brooding, sometimes stormy, introspective “poetry” of the romantic composer Beethoven. (Mill mentions Mozart in the same sentence as Beethoven, but I would describe the effect of Mozart’s music rather differently than he does.) In contrast with his distinction between story and poetry, however, Mill’s differentiation between poetry and eloquence is hardly a slight to either mode. After all, some of Rossini’s work is supremely beautiful: “grief, taking the form of a prayer or of a complaint, becomes oratorical” (1049), and in this light he mentions some of that composer’s best work.

1050-51. Sculpture, too, says Mill, has its oratory (sculptures made “for the purpose of voluntary communication”) and its poetry, wherein the maker works as if “unconscious of being seen.” Finally, Mill employs this distinction to make a value judgment, at least with respect to historical painting, a popular variety of painting in England in Mill’s time: “Who would not prefer one ‘Virgin and Child’ of Raphael to all the pictures which Rubens, with his fat, frouzy Dutch Venuses, ever painted? (1051) Why so? Because, says Mill, Raphael the Renaissance artist’s single figures are intensely poetical and therefore worth looking at in their own right, while Rubens’ individuals are made to subserve the needs of the particular grouping in which they are found. When it comes to historical painting proper, the problem is more pronounced, says Mill, and in some cases the enterprise degenerates into “corrupted eloquence.”

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty

In On Liberty, Mill asks the fundamental questions of social and political science: 1) what is human nature? 2) how can we best educate and develop it? 3) what is the ideal society? 4) who can lead us towards this ideal state of affairs? He proposes a model of development, so he must specify the agent that will change things as they now stand. What forces are repressing liberty and impeding progress today? That’s the question of the hour.

1051-52. Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature: “the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole....” This is a reformulation or modification of Greek and Renaissance ideals about self-development. It is not a formulation that Dickens’ rigid utilitarian Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times would understand. Mill continues, “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.” Mill of course favors education, but insists upon specificity with regard to the goal towards which the educator should strive. Ultimately, he wants balance in all things, and education is a central way to achieve that goal.

1052. Mill seems to agree with John Milton’s claim in “Areopagitica” that “reason is but choosing.” He says, “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Custom is the enemy of genuine individualism. Again, “He who lets the world... choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.” To what extent, we might ask, would Mill countenance the consumer model of bourgeois liberalism? It seems clear that he challenges this model, whereby we link our sense of self to material objects, and mistake the accumulation of owned objects for true progress, and reduce originality to mere imitation and “fashion.” (On the paradox of all things and places fashionable, it’s hard to beat Yogi Berra’s comment about some gathering place, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”)

1053. Mill insists that “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” As he said just above, a perfect society built by automatons would not be a good thing. Humanity is constituted by potential that requires experience to realize and actualize itself. This basic romantic principle cuts against liberal economics, and certainly opposes the atomistic and mechanical conception of human nature we find in Jeremy Bentham.

1053-54. As for our emotional side, Mill writes as follows: “Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced... It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.” Mill demands the same freedom and exercise for impulses and desires that William Blake does. He is all in favor of “energy,” but with the addition of a need for balance. Mill defines the word character as belonging to a “person whose desires and impulses are his own.” He refers—probably consciously—to Thomas Carlyle’s phrase “steam engine universe.” Then he goes on to criticize Carlyle rather directly, if politely: “In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess... To overcome this difficulty, law and discipline... asserted a power over the whole man... But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” Therefore, Carlyle’s feudalism is anachronistic and cannot supply the needed pattern for contemporary life—it proposes to deal with inauthenticity by imposing an anachronism on everyone.

1054. “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer?... They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of the station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” Middle-class conformity is the enemy—the same bourgeois attitude against which Carlyle takes aim. But the idea is that this middle-class has come by a much more radical and effective means of control—not violent repression but the persistent and forced internalization of socially acceptable thoughts, until it is no longer necessary to think at all. So much for romantic interiority. Mill continues with his critique of Carlyle, saying that such conformism is only acceptable on the “Calvinistic theory.” In that theology, “the one great offense of man is self-will.” So Calvin stands in for Carlyle here—Mill’s criticism is largely against Carlyle’s social vision in Past and Present.

1055. According to Mill, “‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development.” This kind of statement seems to flow from Mill’s understanding of Goethe—a modern kinsman of the classical humanists. Pericles is the ideal—full development of all the person’s faculties, all human potential. Mill says that “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.” His social theory argues that richer “units” will lead to a richer mass of people. This brand of individualism takes account of larger social needs, so while Mill is not a collectivist like Carlyle, he by no means ignores “the many.” Furthermore, writes Mill, “To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint.” Mill opposes the excess of restraint for social conformity, though he recognizes that such restraint is a powerful force to be reckoned with. The need to resist unnecessary constraints, Mill would agree with Sigmund Freud, accounts for a lot of misdirected individual and social energy. Of course, it’s true that since Mill promotes self-culture in England’s capitalist economic and social milieu, his theory is more or less bound to be taken as one idea among others in the marketplace of ideas. That is a very difficult problem to resolve, and one that Oscar Wilde summed up brilliantly in his quip, “A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.” The quest for genuine originality and authenticity is rather easily commodified and broken into an endless series of poses.

1056-58. Custom, insists Mill, turns us into machines: “Persons of genius…are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom” (1056). Genius is something that Mill insists upon “emphatically”; it requires freedom and variety as its atmosphere, while the middle-class’ public sphere thrives on middling intellects, on comfortable mediocrity (1057). This is hardly an argument invoking the potential of “mass culture,” and it differentiates Mill strongly from Carlyle, who shows little interest in the concept of genius—his heroic ideal isn’t about genius but about the worship of force and personal charisma or energy. On 1058, Mill says that he will have none of Carlyle’s hero-worship; all the eminent thinker may claim is “freedom to point out the way.” Mill is more genuinely indebted to the romantic authors he has been reading. Well, fashion is one major challenge to this organic model of genius and development. Fashion links individual expression to an ever-recyclable system of objects—generating a sense of self that stems from endless repetition and consumption. We identify with an image of ourselves, and take all necessary (economic) steps to conform to that image, but the image keeps giving way to another one. This model of the self mechanizes and harnesses the old romantic “problem of desire,” stripping it of its link to organic theory, to three-dimensional humanistic conceptions of human nature. Mill is concerned about the broad social forces bearing down upon us all—public opinion is like fashion, only in ideas. There is much inventiveness in fashion, inventiveness in “retailoring” what is out to make it in again. Carlyle responds against flunkeyist “fashionism” on its own terms, and thinks that his Clothes Philosophy provides a “recycling” alternative to flunkeyism, but how accurate is that faith?

1059-60. “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement…The progressive principle, however, in either shape…is antagonistic to the sway of Custom. . .” (1059). Mill doesn’t see liberty and improvement as necessarily opposed. The enlightened person should always be aiming to improve. The important thing is to oppose complacency. In his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, C. B. MacPherson points out that there is nothing inherently developmental about bourgeois liberal democracy. The accumulation of objects is not development, and so liberal democracy all too easily betrays its foundations in Whig gentility, whereby society is something like a gentlemen’s agreement to let progress take its slow course towards the spiritual and intellectual betterment of all. Materialist capitalism annuls this kind of “slow time” in favor of perpetual immediacy. Mill’s borrowings from the romantics may commit him to the infinite deferral of improvement, and to a tacit cultural elitism. I should end by mentioning once more the system of self-object identification inherent in fashion-based consumer culture, and suggest that perhaps we need not stress Mill’s concept of “genius” and “character” (admirable though they are) so much as insist that we must think our own thoughts even as we are subjected to others’. This is something like Greek strength as a model of resistance and progress, and I would have to admit that it largely cedes the possibility of rapid and massive changes in the social order. But that seems unlikely anytime soon. My point is that rejection of consumer culture may not be very convincing or effective. Probably the best you can achieve is inflection with a balanced sense of self as the goal. But it’s fair to say that Mill sees democracy as something people need to work at, not as an already perfect system. That is a point in his favor.

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women

1063-64. In general, Mill’s position agrees with that of George Eliot and other notable feminist authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft before him and, say, Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan long after him. Mill decries the hypocrisy involved in a progressive age’s ignoring the “woman question.” Why have there been so many reforms, and yet women are still treated as second-class citizens? We see the same emphasis on the bad faith and selfishness men show when they educate women, or rather fail to educate them. As Mill writes, because men have long wanted more than mere obedience from women, the latter have been “brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others” (1063). In a few words, they are expected to live not for themselves but for men. That’s the way men have schooled or conditioned women to regard themselves: the best way to get people to conform is not by physical brutality; it’s much easier for the masters if their servants internalize the most convenient definition of themselves and the rules they’re supposed to obey. But as Mill points out, modern times run against this kind of conformism: “human beings are no longer born to their place in life . . . but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable” (1064).

1065-67. With so much social and economic mobility in Victoria’s England, why are women still chained within an archaic notion of marriage? Marriage should imply mental equality, not servitude. Let competition decide what the future status of females will be. Mill rejects outright the notion that the alleged “nature of women” is anything but an artificial construction of men’s making: “I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another” (1065). Furthermore, he writes, “Of all the difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character” (1066). The whole affair of defining the qualities of gender takes on the cast of a badly conducted scientific experiment, with the observers’ biases, desires, and expectations contaminating the results from the outset, and no hope at all for an objective assessment of any differences there may be between men and women. Mill deserves full credit for making such a bold assertion nearly 150 years ago, when it must have been an affront to the sensibilities of a great many men. He points out, by way of elaboration on 1067, that the only woman with whom most men have any real acquaintance is their own wives: hardly a large enough “statistical sample” from which to make generalizations about women in general.

1069. As a utilitarian philosopher, Mill is (in most of his writing, at least) partial to the ideology of the market, with its law of competition working to satisfy human needs and desires, and he puts this terminology to good use in favor of women’s freedom of opportunity: “What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter. Whatever women’s services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake.” So are women most suited to be wives and mothers? Well, says Mill, you’d certainly think so, to hear men talk. But how should they know? Like Wollstonecraft, Eliot, and Fuller, Mill believes that marriage should be a reciprocal undertaking governed by genuine conversation; he argues that submission and false gender-definitions deprive both partners any chance to achieve this. All in all, Mill believes he has history on his side, and he is willing to challenge a powerful mid-Victorian consensus about the nature, limitations, and value of women. His wife Harriet Taylor surely had much to do with the strength of his stance: by all accounts, he treated his wife with tremendous regard, not as a servant or a sheltered “angel of the house,” to borrow a phrase from the famous poem by Coventry Patmore.

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography

1071. “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” In the beginning, Mill pursued a vague, general object—reform, the happiness of others. In the midst of his depression, the following question occurs to him: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And of course the answer is no. The negation here is similar to the effect of Carlyle’s steam-engine universe rolling through Dr. Teufelsdröckh’s inner being. Mill says that he had nothing left to live for when he heard his own version of the “Everlasting No,” and he must have felt that he had lived as an automaton. His foundation for personal happiness was only an abstraction; it was what Francis Bacon would call a philosophical cobweb, and what anyone not in the thrall of Benthamism might well consider a utopian vision based on a mechanical view of human nature.

1072. “My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another... through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” James Mill had taught his son that the goal of education was “to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” James Mill followed a scientific model of the individual, and utilitarian education presupposes that character develops along the lines of mechanical association. If you identify your personal happiness with the general good, the idea goes, so long as you are working towards the general good you will be happy. But this plan leads to nothing better than middle-class conformity. It is not the way lasting human connections are made, and instead requires a shallow, flattened notion of human happiness and individuality.

1073. “Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling.” It was not so much what Mill read but how he was taught to read it. The word “analysis” can mean “freeing up” the object of study, but that is not usually how we understand the term. The ordinary understanding is closer to the one Wordsworth condemns—”We murder to dissect.” The young John Stuart Mill seems to have been a victim of what T. S. Eliot (in an essay on the metaphysical poets) calls “dissociation of sensibility.” Helping others is not a bad object, but you must first determine the grounds of human connection—they are organic, not mechanical. You cannot superimpose upon the natural passions a scientific utopian scheme and expect anything but misery to result.

1074. “I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them....” Spontaneous emotion proves to be the key to Mill’s recovery. He describes a Wordsworthian moment in the form of an accidental encounter with a literary text, an autobiographical text written by Marmontel. This accidental encounter escapes Bentham’s and James Mill’s scheme concerning the formation of salutary associations. So the example is a rebuke of straightforward Benthamite utilitarianism—the young Marmontel made a key emotional bond with others, forgetting himself for the moment. What we find described is not a mechanical “I ought” but a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Mill says that after reading this passage, he never again reached the depths of depression he formerly experienced.

1074-75. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it...” happiness is still important here, but it is not to be directly pursued. The point is to stop analyzing happiness and start working on something you find meaningful for its own sake. It is best not to think of everything you say and do in light of ultimate purposes or end-states of consciousness. Mill has learned to ask Walter Pater’s question—”what is this activity or thing or person to me?” It is not good enough to pursue some abstract notion of the general good and to claim that you are achieving an equally abstract kind of happiness by doing so; the activity must be meaningful to you personally prior to the attachment of any such abstract notion. Mill has not rejected the idea that happiness flows from activity, but it makes all the difference in the world whether that activity is do-gooding or intrinsically and intimately valuable to the individual pursuing it. For example, if I have an inclination to tinker with computers, building them from scratch and solving whatever problems come up as I do so, I may by such means become happy, at least for a while. The same goes for things like reading a Jane Austen novel—you don’t sit down to read thinking, “my goal in reading this book is to be happy.” If you did, you would become morbidly prone to checking your emotional state every other sentence to register your level of happiness or unhappiness. This kind of obsession resembles both heavy Puritan examination of the state of one’s soul and the associational theory of happiness promoted by Mill’s father and his tutor Jeremy Bentham. It is best to allow your consciousness to be directed towards an object other than your own interior states.

This is profoundly good advice, but if we want to criticize it, we might say that it is an evasion of romantic troubles concerning the problem of desire. It is this problem that caused Carlyle to reject happiness altogether in favor of self-annihilation leading to meaningfulness, awe, and collective belonging. Don’t we invariably reflect back upon our states of consciousness, whether we mean to or not? And if we cannot avoid doing so, the kind of happiness Mill describes will not satisfy us for long—human beings even get tired of being happy after a while. In any case, on the same page Mill emphasizes the need for balancing the sway of our faculties. Feelings and intellection are both important: “I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities... The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance.” A many-sided personality needs many-sided experiences to develop and be free. Feeling is not mechanical, not associational. The self is not an isolated atom but rather an organic construct. Happiness comes from pursuing intrinsically meaningful activities and from allowing “passive susceptibilities” to operate freely. By this term, I believe Mill means self-culture, the patient development of our individual potential until we achieve a balanced, harmonious sense of who we are and what we are about.

Further reflection: Mill is right to say that if you have to ask whether you’re happy, you won’t be happy for long or perhaps even at all. But saying this doesn’t mean we won’t do it: isn’t it almost impossible not to assess your experiences even as you undergo them? Ideally, I suppose, we would be able to shut off the flow of annoying self-consciousness-tending thoughts. That’s what most meditative techniques seem to be designed to help us do. Imagine walking along a beautiful, deserted beach—the ideal would be just to let nature draw you outside of yourself, all your self-consciousness evaporating with the salt spray and disappearing into the wet sand, the sound of the ocean replacing your thoughts. But something always brings us back to ourselves: that’s the romantic dilemma, and I don’t see that there’s anything but the briefest respite from it. Even so, Mill is surely right that obsessing about your own happiness right here and now is destructive and counter-productive. Happiness isn’t a permanent condition, and it evaporates when you try to treat it as a solid. “Meaningfulness” is perhaps less fleeting, but even that isn’t exactly guaranteed. Buddhists seem wise in their praise of self-surrender: shut down the self to the extent of time and the degree possible, and the world opens up to you: they’re after clarity, sharp awareness without the constant burden of self-referentiality and personal concern. As the Hindu god Krishna would say, redefine the little-s self to embrace the big-s Self, and quit trying to own the consequences of your actions. I think Mill the reformer has come round to that very insight: he still thinks it’s good to help other people, but not simply to make himself a happier man while he’s doing it. That kind of philanthropy is essentially selfish: as Jesus says, “whosoever will save his life shall lose it” (Luke 9:24, King James Bible).

1076. Mill reiterates the point he made earlier about basic utilitarianism’s unbalanced, mechanical view of human nature—simply rendering people “free and in a state of physical comfort” and removing all hardships from life really would not make a community happy. Then he goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s significance for him: “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life.”

1077. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.” Wordsworth teaches John Stuart Mill the true sources of happiness, and shows him the value of contemplation, of “wise passiveness” as a corrective for the analytic habit, which in modern times has reached the level of an obsession. And since Mill supposes there are a great many people out there like him, Wordsworth need not be considered the greatest of all England’s poets to be the poet modern English readers stand most in need of reading. Mill says that without having yet read Carlyle, he adopted the anti-self-consciousness philosophy. And of course he literally “closes his Byron” and opens his Wordsworth. So Wordsworth is his Goethe, the man who makes it possible to see that intellect and emotion can co-exist in a balanced individual, one capable of both self-cultivation and genuine desire to reform the world. Wordsworth’s view of human nature is holistic, not at all one-sided as later authors sometimes claim: he has nothing against action, but understands that unless it’s carried out by full human beings, it won’t achieve what it should. At least, that’s how the practical Mill reads him.

Week 02, Thomas Carlyle

2008-02-07T22:23:00.000-08:00

Notes on Thomas Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times”

Please check back soon; I am updating my notes for this text.

General Notes on Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

Carlyle, who often serves as a survey course’s bridge between the romantic and Victorian periods, is a difficult writer, but his insights into literature, history, and politics make his eccentric books worth considerable patience. His style is designed to forge a relationship with an increasing, and increasingly skeptical, post-romantic-era public that is not easily satisfied by time-tested formulations about anything. But Carlyle himself was a complex man who wouldn’t fit comfortably in any era—for one thing, he was raised as a strict Calvinist and kept something of the Old Testament prophet about him even after rejecting the metaphysical tenets of this austere faith. Moreover, born in the same year as John Keats, he was by nature a moody and “romantic” individual, which means that he found it necessary in arriving at his mature prose style and authorial stance to work through his own “storm and stress” tendencies before he could find out what lay on the far side of them. It seems he had to pass through Byron to arrive at the calm classicist humanism of his hero Goethe. (But Goethe, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, had to do something like that, too.) His German Idealist Professor Teufelsdröckh is not Carlyle, of course, but at the same time, Sartor Resartus is part of Carlyle’s 1830’s project of working out a new and viable way to set himself forth as a writer and social critic. Carlyle is characteristically, if explosively, “Victorian” in his admission that art must re-establish its value anew in modern society—and, most particularly, that it cannot do so by reverting to a programmatically “romantic” set of claims about art and social cohesion. In sum, Carlyle faces a task not unlike that of the Anglo-American modernists who will write nearly a century after his time: how to take past ideas (literary forms, social philosophies, political ideals, etc.) and “make them new” to suit the present time.

In Sartor Resartus, that is what Carlyle, in creating his fictional Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, is doing with regard to the “romantic” tradition to which Carlyle himself has strong intellectual and emotional ties. He cannot (and probably would not want to) play the romantic philosopher in his own person. “Dr. T” is Carlyle’s eccentric spokesman for the Idealism of the Continent and, to some extent, for the recent and increasingly defunct British Romantic movement. As you can see from reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Scott and Byron (along with the Lake Poets Wordsworth and Coleridge) had already come to be regarded as a “school.” And to belong to a school, of course, is to become subject to the inevitable sway of fashion and changed circumstances. Carlyle’s ironic but nonetheless respectful presentation of Dr. Teufelsdröckh’s romantic notions about self and society, then, amount to the author’s way of keeping the best in that tradition open for English consideration while admitting that he, as a modern writer, cannot return to the nineteenth century’s first few decades.

What does Carlyle think is worth preserving about the romantic tradition of thought? Well, he is not a precise philosopher like Kant or Hegel; I think it will do here to say that he finds a couple of things worth maintaining: first, the sense that what binds people together is not so much intellect as passion. But perhaps even more important to Carlyle is that romanticism, in its way religion-like, asserts the primacy of spirit over materiality and brute fact. I don’t suppose Carlyle ever truly reconciled the Weimar or “Goethean” humanist promoter of self-cultivation in himself with what has sometimes been called the “prophet of self-annihilation” and, later in life, the “worshiper of force.” But perhaps that is asking too much of him—he is most consistent in fighting by any and all means the advent of a fully materialist, and materialistic, culture in the British Isles. And Carlyle’s “romanticism,’ as he makes Teufelsdröckh illustrate dramatically in Sartor Resartus, was a necessary phase through which he had to pass if he was ever to establish an authentic new voice for his contemporaries. Romantic poses and premises were an essential part of his makeup as a writer and as a social critic.

With the phrase “social critic,” we move on to Carlyle’s mature social philosophy and stance as an historian as they appear in the 1843 text Past and Present. Writing during the Hungry 40’s, when economic instability and discontent were a powerful and threatening combination in Britain, Carlyle decries the alienation capitalism has created amongst workers and employers and, in fact, everyone in Great Britain . In an analysis of labor relations that Marx and Engels would later praise, Carlyle argues that while labor should knit humans together into a social whole, work in industrial Britain is wage-slavery, and the ideology that supports it has the people “enchanted” by its abstract and mechanical conception of human nature and society. The factory hands perform their daily labor for the capitalist, but at day’s end, they have little to show for it in either pecuniary or spiritual terms. The products of the worker’s labor (called “commodities”) enrich the capitalist at the expense of any fair distribution of what has been produced.

This state of affairs, says Carlyle, is even worse than the situation in Europe during medieval times. Back then, at least, the relationship between peasant farmers, their landowning Lords, and the Church, however oppressive and hierarchy-bound, was at least an authentic relationship. That accounts for Carlyle’s praise of feudal society—notice his references to Gurth the Swineherd and his master Cedric the Saxon (characters from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), who is himself an underling to the Norman Conquerors. Feudal labor relations, the idea goes, provided both lord and serf with a reciprocal sense of duty toward one another and with some sense of belonging to a stable world order. But in nineteenth-century Britain , no such responsible relationship between the classes prevails, and nothing makes a dent in the Iron Law of the Marketplace. Everywhere, Carlyle explains, one hears only the sentence, “impossible” in answer to the cries of impoverished workers, the unemployed, and those people’s dependents. The false god of riches Mammon, aided by idle aristocrats (“Game-Preserving Dukes”), greedy factory owners, machine-like workers with their demands for the cash that enslaves them, and political economy’s cant about “free trade” and “laissez-faire,” stops cold every attempt to end Britain ’s chaos.

In our chapters, “Democracy” and “Captains of Industry,” Carlyle tries to redefine what is meant by key concepts such as “freedom” and “aristocracy,” in effect recycling them so that they will turn into solutions and not perpetuate the agony of the masses as well as the rule of the ne’er-do-wells. I call Carlyle a recycler of outworn concepts and systems because it seems that his advice isn’t to do away with the flawed, yet dynamic, capitalist order and return to an earlier time. His agrarian “feudalism” is an ideal construction, not something he sets forth as a viable way of life for the present. Rather, Carlyle wants to retain the basic form of capitalist production and even to hold on to the hierarchical relationship between the working and capital-owning classes. If all goes according to plan, there will be no need for another French Revolution—the big industrialists, properly spiritualized by the remnants of Carlyle’s Calvinist belief in the saving power of order, work, and duty, will become “Captains of Industry” and take control of a threatening situation. They will become the new Norman Lords. What the workers need, thinks Carlyle, is not the vulgar, anarchic democracy for which they presently clamor; it is work under the supervision of the newly responsible employer-class. Freshly recycled and spiritualized capitalists will take on the duties of a true aristocracy. Like the original conquerors who came over with William of Normandy in 1066, they will set to work with the materials at hand and build a stable order. They will organize (not reject) production and distribution in the machine age for the benefit of workers and themselves. In sum, they will lead Britain as no other class presently in it can, and thereby provide an answer to the ‘sphinx riddle” of just relations between human beings. That is Carlyle’s answer to what we generally call the Condition of England Question.

Finally, it might be argued with justice (and was so argued by Marx and Engels) that this solution requires the great capitalists to do something that isn’t in their interest: why should they do anything but what fills their coffers with more capital to invest? In sum, it might be said that what Carlyle advocates goes against the operation of a market economy, wherein employers takes on workers for as little as they can pay them, and gets them to do as much “surplus labor” as possible to generate capital. The system itself is the most powerful disincentive to change—it benefits those who are already poised to benefit. What Carlyle is arguing against is, quite simply, the brutal fact that a “system” (economic, social, micro or macro) can function robustly for a long time even though the mass of people who make it work don’t benefit from its continuance. And there is nothing within the system itself that tells they winners they should care about this ugly fact—the will towards a moral “fix” has to come from beyond the system, at least initially.

Capitalism isn’t so much immoral as purely economic and amoral. It is entirely capable of solving the ancient problem of production, but when you assail it for not solving the equally ancient problem of distribution, it has nothing to say—that is no concern, properly speaking, of the economic system. Those who have money (congealed, abstract labor power, to borrow from Marx’s terminology) can buy all the things they want; those who have no money can starve unless someone (for religious or other extraneous moral reasons) decides to help them. That is what we call “private charity.” So long as capital keeps getting generated and commodities keep getting themselves produced and sold, the economy rolls along cheerfully—it doesn’t matter much whether one person buys 100 shirts or 100 people buy one shirt; in theory and to some extent in practice, the profits will be there for the taking. Those who are excluded from the magic circle of production, buying, and selling simply don’t count. But of course Carlyle understands that people usually do what is in their own selfish interests—especially when their utilitarian/market “philosophy” proclaims that they ought to do just that very thing. So how do you suppose he would respond to all this criticism of his suggestions? Do you find him anticipating such criticism in the chapters we may have read from Past and Present?

Page-by-Page Notes on Sartor Resartus

“The Everlasting No”

1006. “Have we not seen him disappointed…?” Such references point to the storm and stress movement in German literature, and in particular to Goethe’s book the sorrows of young Werther.immediately below, the author refers to Teufelsdröckh’s loss of faith, and then Deism comes in for criticism.

1007. “Foolish Word-monger….” Materialism and logic churn out false belief and offer false happiness. Carlyle and Teufelsdröckh oppose Jeremy Bentham’s radical utilitarian movement. Towards the bottom of the page, the narrator says that even doubt leads to God.

1008. “His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.” Quack muttering from a quack prophet—this will be a consistent theme. “Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments.” Know what you can work at, says Teufelsdröckh. Work is of course a key concept in Continental philosophy, especially in Hegel and Marx. Perhaps Carlyle would agree with Oscar Wilde at least in saying that only shallow people know themselves, although Oscar Wilde would never posit work as the answer to this problem. “A feeble unit in the middle of the threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness.” Teufelsdröckh is spinning his wheels on speculation not directed towards any object. He is an alienated intellectual. The steam engine universe threatens to run him down.

1009. “To me the Universe was all void of Life… it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” This is a key passage. Materialism and logic lead to atheism, and Teufelsdröckh wrestles with spirituality and the meaning of spiritual language. He dramatizes the problem of materialism for us, providing distance from the raw emotion of his encounter with it somewhat as Wordsworth distances us from raw emotion by means of metrical verse. As for Carlyle’s style generally, he puts us in absurd situations, confronting us with the ugliness and cynicism wrought by unbelief and by the need to survive and render intelligible new environments.

1010. Teufelsdröckh is said to confront freedom and the casting out of Byron-Devils. Notice the mockery of Parliament as well. “Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee?” Where does defiance come from? Teufelsdröckh asserts free will to defy death; he takes up a stance against death. “The Everlasting No… pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being….” At this point, Teufelsdröckh confronts the threat of unintelligibility and the possibility that he has no true source. He will arrive at his spiritual rebirth by casting out “legion,” to do which requires experience, the great spiritual doctor. And this is where we come to the center of indifference. “For the fire-baptized soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom….” The doctor needs an object, he needs direction. He must cast away his romantic vagueness and stop reveling in his own isolation and alienation. He must work through, in both senses, this romantic defiance of his. Carlyle acknowledges the need to adopt a romantic pose to go beyond romanticism. The impulse must be redirected. His spiritual labor’s object is the casting out of Byronic devils. They must be made to depart into everlasting fire, as the gospel would say. His feeling of freedom is what he calls a Baphometic fire-baptism. Romanticism will be construed as a movement and a moment in a much larger historical and philosophical context. But at this point standing puzzled between us and Teufelsdröckh and his romantics is the editor, who is just trying to make sense of it all.

“Centre of Indifference”

1011. So Teufelsdröckh will seek experience—he will go to see the visible products of the past. But already the reader is being led to the necessary Mystery that will make life supportable. At the bottom of the page, Teufelsdröckh questions government and laws. But his point here is allied to the doctrine of natural supernaturalism—even such mundane things as governmental practice and legal codification have their source in mystery. The goal is to recover a sense of the eternal in the temporal and ephemeral, to spiritualize ordinary things.

1012. “Books. In which third truly, the last invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others.” Books last and can continue to generate values. They offer us organic ties to the past. They are things woven, and retain the power to produce new thoughts, new suits of idea-clothes. Refer to John Milton’s claim that “a book is a living thing.” Then Teufelsdröckh moves on to discuss the significance of the battlefield, war.

1013-14. War, “from the very carcass of the Killer, [can] bring Life for the Living!” Teufelsdröckh offers a meditation on war and on the folly of passions about it. This page shows the influence of Hamlet’s ideas about the same subject. “Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows….” At least he can look beyond himself now, can turn his gaze outward.

1015. “All kindreds of peoples and nations dashed together….” Teufelsdröckh wanders through the landscape, and recovers a sense of mystery in historical process by meditating on the revolution. He moves on to discuss the significance of history’s great men, Napoleon in particular. This page also shows the author coming to terms with the great upheaval stylistically.

1015-16. “Of Napoleon himself….” Napoleon is here described as an enthusiast of the very sort he criticizes Teufelsdröckh for being. Next the professor is off to the North Cape where he confronts a Russian smuggler. This passage is important for its style—Carlyle combines the sublime and the ridiculous in his representation of the northern landscape. It is a romantic symbol for regression into self-consciousness, with the ice reflecting itself to itself. But Teufelsdröckh is not allowed to remain in this place for long. The Russian smuggler brings him back to earth again, and in doing so he typifies Carlyle’s method.

1017. “How prospered the inner man of Teufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting?” It is time to cast out legion, or the Satanic school of romanticism. This will bring the professor to the Centre of Indifference. He muses much like Hamlet about humanity’s pretensions. “[W]hat is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth….? The professor is still isolated and apathetic; he has merely passed through his objects of exploration. It is time to apply himself directly to an object—labor is central to Carlyle as it was to Hegel and will later be to Marx. We produce ourselves and find freedom and meaning in work.

“The Everlasting Yea”

1017-18. “Temptations in the Wilderness!” And “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force….” These pages prepare the way to the everlasting yea with preliminary definitions and injunctions. Here the injunction is to work in well doing. Once asserted, free will must turn itself towards work. For Carlyle, that seems to be what replaces God. But the basic point is one made by moral conservatives in many ages. Here is what Pope John Paul II said in 1979—”Nowadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies,” he wrote in 1979. “In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good.” (Redemptor Hominis, March 4, 1979.)

1018-19. “So that, for Teufelsdröckh also, there has been a ‘glorious revolution’.” The narrator or editor breaks in to end the professor’s over-reaching. Self-annihilation is announced as the first necessary accomplishment. The Professor has now achieved it.

1019-20. The editor says that in Teufelsdröckh, “there is always the strangest Dualism….” That is a good description of Carlyle’s prose style. First the professor responds to nature, and then to his fellow human beings. “Nature!—or what is Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou for ‘Living Garment of God’?” Here the editor describes Teufelsdröckh applying the metaphor of clothing to nature. And then comes an important moment: “The Universe is not dead and demoniacal….” This universe is Teufelsdröckh’s source and connection to others. Everyone is a wanderer like him, so he serves as a model.

1021. “Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness....” Carlyle uses the example of the common shoe black to illustrate the problem of desire: and the problem is that desire is infinite; it is based upon perpetual lack. I like the sentence “Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.”

1021-22. “The Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.” If you set the denominator to zero, anything will yield infinity. On the same page, the doctor says “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” Do away with excess, and devote yourself to balance and calm. The key to life is not the pursuit of happiness—renunciation is the key. Carlyle dismisses the utilitarian happiness principle. Carlyle insists that there is something “godlike” in humanity—it is not something that the pursuit of happiness will bring out. The Everlasting Yea is “Love not Pleasure; love God.” The point is to walk and work in this kind of love.

1022. What does Dr. Teufelsdröckh need to do? The answer lies in his own statement, “Wilt thou help us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live?” This will be his task as a philosopher and writer. The metaphor of clothing appears in this formulation—words spin new systems of thought and institutions.

1023-24. “ America is here or nowhere.” The ideal resides within yourself. The doctor must produce a world from his own inner chaos. Carlyle reshapes the romantic conception of self so that the point is not infinite removal into isolated, alienated self-consciousness but instead to realize one’s divinity through work of whatever kind. Spirit must inform, give shape to, what the doctor calls the “condition” (by which he means material matter and circumstance). “Been no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce!” Extra: Carlyle is trying to align or balance the self-cultivating humanist side of himself with the one that is always thundering about the need for work. Carlyle’s gospel of work sounds like promotion of self-annihilation, but a lot of Sartor Resartus is about how his eccentric German Professor develops spiritually and intellectually. He comes to realize that “ America is here or nowhere,” meaning that the Ideal (freedom, self-perfection, progress) is inside our own spirit, and we first need to understand that before we can actualize the ideal. (Romantic premise: spirit must move through matter to realize itself fully; and as Hegel would say, you only realize your individuality fully in the context of society—you can’t do it “all by yourself.”) The Everlasting Yea is to love God rather than pleasure: first put an end to stormy posing (like Byron’s Manfred on the Jungfrau mountaintop, above everything and everyone else, sublimely alone, alienated, dissatisfied), realize that your ideal or “America” is right at home, and then direct your actions to the world so you can actualize your ideal, make it real. So the task is to get priorities straight and plan to make life worth something. Carlyle is a Scottish man of letters making his way into the world of English literature and hoping to make a living. He has to work, too—only as a writer. But write what? And what good will it do? What’s the point of foisting a strange autobiography/biography like Sartor Resartus on thousands of English “blockheads”? This page is capped by a call to order and production—work.

The Seinfeld Quotation in Full: “Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or soot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it: though he have been crowned seven times in the Capitol, or seventy-and-seven times, and Rumour have blown his praises to all the four winds, deafening every ear therewith,—it avails not; there was nothing universal, nothing eternal, in him; he must fade away, even as the Popinjay-gildings and Scarecrow-apparel, which he could not see through. The great man does, in good truth, belong to his own age; nay more so than any other man; being properly the synopsis and epitome of such an age with its interests and influences: but belongs likewise to all ages, otherwise he is not great.” Thomas Carlyle. “Biography” from Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 91. (Google Books) {George Costanza’s pretentious new girlfriend Patrice quotes only the first line or so, whether accurately or in adapted form I don’t recall. Season 3 (1991), Episode 2, “The Truth.”}

Notes on Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present

1111. In the selection from the chapter Democracy, Carlyle opposes the doctrine of laissez-faire. He says that the times are unprecedented, “that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us.” The Phalaris Bull anecdote is a metaphor of enchantment, externalizing the injustice of the times and reifying it into solid Law. But this kind of thing is bad if done unconsciously.

1112. The Irish widow who dies of typhoid fever shows that we are all linked together, all potential hosts for disease. This is a grotesque way of making a point that people will not accept in the ordinary way. The page offers grotesque contrasts between the savage and the civil, especially with the mention of Black Dahomey. Carlyle prefers feudal relationships over contemporary ones: Gurth the Swineherd “is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity....” Nonetheless, this bondsman’s master at least acknowledged a reciprocal human tie, and the relationship cannot be reduced to the cash nexus. What is liberty? “The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path....” True liberty, therefore, it is the compulsion to work at what you do best. If you don’t like Carlyle, you might say this passage compares uncomfortably with George Orwell’s 1984—slavery is freedom.

1113. Who are the genuine aristocrats? Carlyle speaks for the wage-slaves: “if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to ‘conquer’ me, to command me!” Carlyle aims to preserve the principle of aristocracy rather than the specific class that now claims English titles; he asserts that there is an unconscious link in people’s minds to divine justice. “A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly...dwells deep in some men....”

1114. William of Normandy contains both fire and light, but mostly light; “the essential element of him... is not scorching fire, but shining illuminative light.” Carlyle calls for a radical recycling of the aristocratic principle. His task is to perceive and make known the need and means for bringing order from chaos, productivity from idleness and anarchy. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand cannot do the kind of work William the Conqueror could. As for revolutions, “Nature’s poor world will very soon rush down again to Baseness...” Revolutions are a sign of progress, but only an initial stage on the way to finding our true superiors.

1115. Finding those true superiors “is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions....” In the section titled Captains of Industry, Carlyle addresses the significance of government: “Government, as the most conspicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of what shall be done; and, in many ways, to preside over further, and command the doing of it. But the Government cannot do, by all its signaling and commanding, what the Society is radically indisposed to do. In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom....” So the government gives signs and commands, but it is ultimately the symbol of the people. It is not the primary agent. Carlyle interprets raw capitalism as chaos, and says that “To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambition with some few....”

1116. On this page, Carlyle addresses the ancient problem of distribution. Capitalism solves the problem of production, but not just distribution. There can be a noble industrialism and “Government by the Wisest.” These are the captains of industry who will fight chaos and necessity, making progress possible. The task of Carlyle’s prose is to align us with divine forces such as Justice. He means to spiritualize the debased, ordinary concept of work and return it to a place of honor. I would say that in this he looks back to German idealists such as Hegel and forwards to Marx. The Captains of Industry are as yet the unconscious masters, and the aim is to make them believe in themselves and to make us believe in them and align our wills with theirs. Carlyle attacks capitalist accumulation by comparing thoughtless capitalists to pirates and Choctaw Indians. Capitalists clothe their lust for money in ideological garments, but it is nothing more than aggression masked by false value systems. Carlyle makes a contrast between the real and the apparent, and he wants to reconstruct audibly (in part visibly, to but primarily Carlyle builds a sense of voice) the reality to which his readers must adhere in future.

1118. This final page ends on a note of energy and vitalism. “It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man.” Carlyle has been trying all along to show how order can be brought from apparent chaos—chaos is in the last instance intolerable, and he trusts that there is order underlying it, if only we could perceive it. The call to order involves an assertion of neo-feudalism. Carlyle’s wild and apocalyptic language is designed to allow us to encompass chaos, to surround it with a principle of divine order and tame it thereby. The very wildness of his prose seems meant to show that he is not afraid of anarchy—”be not afraid,” as the Gospels say. Reducing social chaos to order, and re-spiritualizing the productive process will solve the problem of distribution—an ancient dream come true.

Week 01, Introduction to the Victorian Age

2008-01-29T22:22:00.000-08:00

Introduction to the Victorian Age (1837-1901)

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times? A sweeping statement about the Victorian Age as a whole might be that it was marked by change-induced crisis in politics, economics, religion, and social affairs as well as by faith in “progress” as almost a metaphysical imperative. People came to expect that things would continue to change more rapidly than even the most forward-looking person could account for. But it is best to keep such statements in perspective; after all, they cannot ultimately do the age justice, any more than our comments about our own times can make them fully intelligible to ourselves or those who come after us.

The Hanoverian Line. Victoria became Queen at the age of 18 in 1837 when her uncle, King William IV, passed away, and she died on January 22nd of 1901 after a reign of 63 years. She was a member of the Hanoverian line, which dates back to George I in 1714. The Hanoverians followed William and Mary (the rulers who established themselves in what has become known as the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which settled the throne on thoroughly Protestant rulers once and for all, and then Queen Anne. Among the many developments that made Victoria’s reign seem markedly different from earlier periods in British history, two are especially deserving of attention. The first is the French Revolution (1789-1815), and the second is the Industrial Revolution that began around 1780 and accelerated all through the Victorian Age.

The French Revolution. Victorians lived through momentous times - they had to face the world after a long and bitter struggle with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which had overthrown an ancient feudal aristocracy in the name of democratic ideals, only to export “liberty, equality, and fraternity” by military violence. In England there was much early enthusiasm on the part of poets and intellectuals for the Revolution’s claim that human institutions were improvable, not immutably natural or god-ordained. The revolutionaries toppled an undemocratic and corrupt system and meant to put in place more democratic institutions. But by late 1792, the Terror had begun. The French Jacobins were determined to purge their country and did so by means of the guillotine. By 1793, the French and British were at war - and the situation lasted on and off for 22 years. By the late 1790’s Napoleon Bonaparte had become First Consul, and he declared himself Emperor in 1804. It would be wrong to say that the political violence and war completely effaced revolutionary ideals, and in fact Napoleon was not only one of the greatest generals in history but also one of the most momentous reorganizers of government. Still, it would be correct to suppose that a great price in human suffering was paid when democratic ideals were exported at the point of the sword and cannon-Napoleon’s means did not do justice to his designs on the human spirit.

After Waterloo: the Conservative Reaction. After Napoleon’s defeat and final exile in 1815, the British Tories who had conducted the war, wanting no manifestations of French revolutionism in an economically depressed post-war Great Britain, enacted repressive legislation to tamp down dissent by “the lower orders.” Freedom of speech and assembly were curtailed, even though George III (insane since 1810) was not as disliked as Shelley’s label “an old, mad, blind, despised and dying king” would have us believe. The king remained popular, but serious socio-economic troubles were undeniably at hand. In fact, some historians put the beginnings of what we call “the Victorian Period” right back to 1815, the end of the War. That makes sense because there really was no going back to the stable old aristocratic order; new developments were in process, and not all of them were directly connected to the war. Post-war European governments, along with that of the British war hero turned Tory* Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, tried to suppress these values after defeating Napoleon, but ultimately they failed: there was to be no turning back to the ancient way of living and governance, and the expectation of change that gave birth to the French Revolution itself continued into the new century, becoming a constant of the Victorian Age.

The Industrial Revolution. Among the changes taking place and making it impossible to “turn back the clock”-especially in Great Britain-was a second great development: the Industrial Revolution, the beginnings of which we may trace back to the late eighteenth century, around 1780. Commerce had long been important in Europe, and the commercial classes had extracted from monarchs the right to control their own property. Aside from religious strife, that aim was part of what the Puritan “Roundheads” of the 1640’s achieved when they beheaded the pro-Catholic, absolutist Stuart monarch Charles I. These early “businessmen” required a broader market for their goods along with more and more raw materials with which to make them. That broader market came into being partly through foreign exploration and conquest in India, Africa, and the Americas. Population growth in Europe itself also made for an increase in the size of the market as well as more labor for the work force. So an increasingly important commercial class, bigger markets, and expanded population made the Industrial Revolution possible.

Why the Industrial Revolution in England First? The transformation occurred in Britain first since the British economy was strong - there was capital to invest, and at least some of the people already had a high standard of living compared to those on the Continent. The food supply was impressive thanks to large-scale farming, London was already a great commercial center, and the English didn’t seem to have the same snobbish attitude about money-making that, say, the French or Spanish aristocrats exhibited. John Bull was no Don Quixote. The men who had brought down an English King in the 1640’s were on the whole landed “gentlemen,” but they were also commonsensical Protestants with good business sense. Their descendants (especially the “Dissenters” who were excluded from the semi-Catholic Anglican Establishment* and from the higher reaches of civic life) had nothing against making a living, and were a substantial portion of England’s business class. So by 1780, England, with its huge naval power, its successive foreign expansions, and its clear-headed commercial class, was ready to revolutionize its means and modes of production to meet the greater demand for its goods that was to come with expanded markets.

Cotton, Iron and Coal. Cotton textiles were a key British export, and James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny (1770), Arkwright’s water frame, and Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule (1779) made it possible to produce vastly more cotton textiles for export - around 40% of British exports by 1815. Other developments made the revolution take off: coal power for iron production, and, above all, steam power (James Watt and Matthew Boulton, 1769). As steam power gradually replaced water as the source for industrial production, it became possible to locate large factories conveniently in large urban complexes in the north of England, and great industrial towns like Manchester begin to transform English life and landscape. Add to all this the coming of the railroads from the 1830’s-40’s, which networked commercial centers and greatly increased the speed of production and sale of commodities while at the same time amounting to a new investment and manufacturing opportunity, and the effect is stunning: people’s sensibilities and ways of living were changing at an exciting-but also anxiety-provoking-speed.

Post-War Slump and Industrialization Contribute to Need for Reforms. Industrial and economic transformation brought with them intensely felt social transformation, too: urbanization meant employment for some, unemployment for others-a heart-wrenching instance of this fact would be rural handloom weavers thrown out of work by the new cotton-working devices. These people had always struggled to keep body and soul together, and when the machines came into play, they lost the fight. And one must consider the human cost of urbanization: the early industrial city was no paradise-in its rawest form, industrial production was carried on at great risk to the workers (men, women, and children) and with great harm to their quality of life. Before the reformist wave in the 1830’s, there was little talk of “labor laws” to protect those whose toil made the augmentation of capital possible. Dickens’ mid-Victorian satires of factory conditions, as well as the scathing accounts written by Marx and Engels, ring true. Moreover, life was rather precarious in other ways since the kinds of sanitary knowledge and measures we take for granted in the twenty-first century simply did not exist through much of the Victorian Period. Outbreaks of typhus and cholera due to unsanitary water were a fact of life, even for those above the lowest levels of society, and the same was true of infant mortality. Medical care might be more deadly than the condition for which one sought relief. All in all, during the early and even the middle Victorian Era, many aspects of life that now seem safe and not worth remarking upon cried out-not often with immediate success-for systemic and sustained attention.

Class Consciousness. As a result of concentration and discontent, a sense of “class consciousness” began to infiltrate British life and discourse -poor people were no longer so inclined as formerly to respect their betters, while the new factory owners often saw their employees as little more than chattel or cogs in the profit-engendering machine. Those who fell behind in the race to survive swelled the ranks of the urban poor-a new concentration whose anonymous, yet intense and appalling, poverty simply could not be dealt with by the old-fashioned private application of charity. Carlyle wrote truly when he argued that in early Victorian England, little tied one human being to another except “the Cash Nexus.” An urbanizing population, a transforming society, requires a transformation in other areas too-most notably in the area of politics or “governance.” In post-Napoleonic England, the poor were seldom satisfied with their condition, the economy had many rough rides, and the middle class manufacturers had no real political representation, no say in England’s affairs. Politics had long been the province of the landed aristocracy. There were new groups to be represented, and new problems to be solved. The ways in which these matters got themselves discussed and dealt with (or not dealt with), as well as the dynamic people who did the discussing and dealing with, account for a lot of the interest historians and literary people continue to take in the Victorian Period.

Dividing the Victorian Period into Manageable Units.

It is customary to divide the Victorian Period into three manageable sections, easy to remember by the phrase “30/50/70.” Before the earliest Victorian date comes the Regency Period, which deserves a brief mention because of its connection to the romantic poets.

The Regency Period and Romanticism (1810-20)

The years from 1810-20, which encompass the transition from wartime to post-war Britain, are called the Regency Period, during which a rather dissolute Prince Regent filled in for his mad father George III. This is the period we associate most closely with the second wave of romantic poets Byron, Shelley, and Keats, the first two of whom held fast to democratic ideals and condemned George III’s regime as tyrannical. The very early 1790’s had seen the idealism of the first wave British romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, but that idealism gave way to disillusionment and patriotic sentiment, perhaps, as M.H. Abrams suggests, to an internalization or privatization of the revolutionary ideals liberty, equality, and fraternity. By the mid 1820’s the younger romantics had passed away, and only a conservative-tending Coleridge and Wordsworth clung to life, the latter living on to 1850 as poet laureate and conservative “Victorian.” Romanticism, which in Britain was more a literary movement than a political or historical one, had spent its most direct cultural force-though indirectly romantic ideals continued to exercise much influence during the Victorian Age, and as yet no new literary movement had come into play. George III died in 1820, and his regent son ruled for ten years as George IV.

The Early Victorian Period (1830-50).

Economic, political, social difficulties became increasingly evident during these two decades, and it was clear that “the spirit of the age” differed from anything that had gone before. Industrial development and urbanization, as discussed above, were key factors, along with increasing class consciousness and strife. The two most important political events during this period are the Whig Prime Minister Earl Gray’s First Reform Bill of 1832, which gave limited representation to the prosperous middle class sections of Britain, and Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s repeal of the protectionist Corn (i.e. Wheat) Laws in 1846.

The First Reform Bill (1832). By 1830, when William IV became king, England had already seen the makings not so much of French-style revolutionism as of the kind of agitation for change that would come to characterize the Victorian “Age of Improvement,” as historian Asa Briggs calls it. There was some violence by and against laborers - most notably the violent repression of working people at a gathering in Manchester’s Saint Peter’s Fields, 1819, but with the coming into power of the Whig Party in 1830, the political system passed into the hands of men willing to make concessions if not to the unskilled working people, then at least to the capitalists of Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham-men responsible for Britain’s new and remarkable urban and industrial development and for augmenting its economic power at home and abroad. Following the prime ministership of the Tory war hero Wellington, Whig Earl Grey and his cabinet saw that Britain had serious problems, and they made a decision to adapt the system sufficiently to stave off disaster. When the Reform Bill finally made it past the conservative House of Lords in 1832, the vote was extended to men of much less wealth than before; further, some of the most absurd abuses in parliamentary districting were removed. The Whig reformers saw their decision not as a great revolution but as a final, moderate settlement. Still, what they did influenced Britain’s future development, setting the stage in future decades for further democratization that would keep pace with changing demographics and expectations.

Repeal of the Corn Laws (1846). The Corn Laws were a protectionist measure from the Napoleonic Period that had served the landed aristocracy well by keeping their wheat sales safe from cheap foreign competition. But the working people disliked such protectionism because it increased food prices, and industrial capitalists disliked it because they had to pay those workers higher wages. And in more philosophical terms, protectionism offended the manufacturers and men of commerce whose dissent went into the making of the first modern “interest group,” the Anti-Corn Law League (founded 1839) under the leadership of Richard Cobden and John Bright. Such men favored the laissez-faire principles of Political Economy as laid out by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and others. The removal of the wheat tariff was a triumph, then, for middle-class economic aspirations.

The Hungry Forties and Chartism. While amounting to a momentous show of good sense on the part of England’s rulers, the 1832 Reform Bill and the Corn Law Repeal didn’t solve all of the country’s problems-economic troubles continued to generate working-class unrest, and the manufacturing class still didn’t have the control they wanted over the political system. The 1840’s were particularly tough times, railroad-building and investment aside-they are sometimes called the “Hungry Forties” because of famine in Ireland and intense misery in Britain. Many people feared a continental-style socialist revolution (Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, a year of revolution on the Continent.) The 1830’s-40’s are the era of Chartism, or working-class radicalism; though this loosely organized movement failed to transform the system, it certainly made a deep impact on the consciousness of the well-to-do and the middle classes alike. (The People’s Charter that gave the movement its name is included in the Tucker-Mermin anthology.)

The Sage Writers. In literature, the first Victorian sage-writers made their appearance during the early part of the period: John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle were among those debating the “Condition of England Question” and trying to find a new principle of moral authority and intelligibility for a country undergoing deep political unrest and religious doubt. John Henry Newman (later a catholic convert and Cardinal) was primarily concerned with religion-not so much with religious doubt as with what he perceived as an Anglican failure to assume its proper spiritual role in English life. He and other members of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement (1833-41) railed away at the holdover attitude of Deist rationalism into which the Church of England had fallen during the eighteenth century. But other early and mid-Victorians were concerned with the problem of outright doubt, thanks to the “Higher Critics” (textual scholars) and to precursors of Darwin like the geologist Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell’s 1833 volume Principles of Geology asserted the doctrine of uniformitarianism, implying that the same forces that shaped the earth had operated consistently over vast periods of time and thereby contradicting the Bible’s temporal scheme. The more readerly of the early Victorians began to feel the impact of what historian Robin Gilmour calls “deep time,” and as the century wears on, science more and more takes on the role of history. While this scientific view generally came with an embedded concept of “progress” or “teleology,” that embedded concept could not make up entirely for the promise offered by older, more humanistic notions of history.

Evangelical Religion. This focus on the persistence of doubt is not to say that the Victorian Age “killed god,” as Nietzsche’s madman says modern humans had. In fact, along with the sage-writers we should place Britain’s dissenting Protestants and the more evangelical among the Anglicans: they generally comprised the middle-class commercial and manufacturing element, and were very much in favor of social reform: much of the impetus behind the era’s great reforms in labor conditions and political process came from evangelical Christians who felt that improvement of the human condition was their moral duty. They tended to emphasize private or individual philanthropy over government action, but the impulse to reform was widespread.

Benthamites. Another element tending to reform was the influence of the early Utilitarians, whose leading author was Jeremy Bentham. While Benthamites supported the basic tenets of Political Economy or laissez-faire capitalism-free markets and minimal government interference in people’s affairs, they also believed along with the earlier empiricist philosopher John Locke that humans come into the world as “blank slates” and that, therefore, education and government are central to the possibility of achieving human happiness. On the whole, they wanted to rearrange human affairs to suit the “greatest happiness for the greatest number,” and their desire to accomplish that goal in a scientific, rational manner is responsible for the kinds of “blue-book” studies that inaugurated some of the major Victorian reforms. It is easy to criticize the cruder formulations of the thinkers that Carlyle scornfully labeled “Benthamee radicals,” but the essence of their philosophy is that the goal of humanity is happiness and that society ought to be so arranged as to allow free people to seek that happiness. At its best, Utilitarian thought-especially in the formulations of John Stuart Mill, responds in a refreshingly democratic-spirited, systematic way to Aristotle’s ancient questions about what constitutes “the good life” and how each person might best attain it.

The Mid-Victorian Period (1851-70).

The Great Exhibition (1851) and the Second Reform Bill (1867). 1851 is a good year to choose as the start of this supposed reign of confidence and optimism since during that year the Great Exhibition at the specially built “Crystal Palace” showcased the latest and grandest scientific wonders for an admiring world. Parliamentary attempts to deal with the crisis atmosphere of the 30’s and the “Hungry 40’s” were to a large extent successful, at least insofar as there was no Continental-style radical revolution in Britain. While the aristocracy continued to hold the reigns of political and social power, it at least accorded the urban middle classes a say in British affairs. There was still much social inequality, but Britain’s increasing domestic productivity and foreign power made this period what historian W.L. Burn calls an “age of equipoise” presided over by the independent-minded Whig Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 (the Tory Derby/Disraeli ministership’s doing) extended the vote to still more of the middle class and even to some working-class householders, furthering Britain’s move towards greater democracy. The Forster Education Act of 1870 (education for children from 5-13) eventually had the same tendency in that it heralded the advent of a relatively educated, informed public that could perpetuate a democratic, adaptable, market-oriented society. Mid-Victorian England seemed to have got some sense of itself, one might say, and the necessary thing was progress-continual social, political, scientific, and economic progress. These were also the years of the Sepoy Indian mutiny, the Crimean War, and Governor Eyre’s brutal mishandling of an anti-colonial uprising in Jamaica, but on the whole the mid-Victorian years were prosperous and generated much hope for better things to come.

The Culture Critics. Still, if nothing succeeds like success, nothing except abject failure comes in for more concentrated critical fire. Among those who questioned the reigning evangelical and utilitarian self-satisfaction were a matured Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, all of whom we will study this semester. These authors were not great lovers of democracy in matters of culture or politics, but at times their critiques hit home and undercut the more sanctimonious attitudes and practices of mid-Victorian Britain. They still have much of value to say to us, provided that we read them in a truly historicist spirit. In particular, Arnold’s anxiety about a world changing so much and so rapidly as to become “multitudinous” or unintelligible is illuminating. Along with expectation of change and progress, apparently, came fear of its effects upon the human psyche, and much argument over what exactly ought to be meant by that ambiguous word “progress.”

The Late Victorian Period (1871-1901).

Empire and the State. The late Victorian Period saw economic uncertainties (agricultural depression) and an ominous lunge towards imperial conquest, which means tremendous opportunities but also puts one in mind of Acton’s Law about the corruptive effects of power on those who wield it. Events in India and Africa (The Boer War lasted from 1899-1902), among other places, were to show the dangers of imperial glory-seeking. Victoria was pro-Empire, as was Tory Prime Minister Disraeli, while Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone opposed it as best he could, not necessarily with the support of the average Briton. Militarist adventurism in foreign affairs contrasted with genuine progress in the areas of health, democratic participation, education, women’s rights, financial accountability for banks and corporations, and other areas. The advances came even though some of those who had the most zeal for reform in the mid-Victorian Period began to feel uncomfortable with the increasing role of the State in effecting that reform and administrating the country. And this period saw one last Reform Bill (Gladstone, 1884) that largely completed the decades-long project of expanding the male franchise. (In spite of suffragette campaigns, women did not get the vote in Britain until after World War I, 1918.)

Literary Decadence and Modernity. Increasingly as the century progressed, the U.S. and Prussia threatened British hegemony-Britain was not alone in seeking to play a large role on the world’s stage. By Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 (briefly captured on film!), it was clear to just about everyone that her era was over. From the late 1880’s through the mid-1890’s, a brilliant period of literary Decadence flourished, its most notable figure being Oscar Wilde, whose witty plays and self-commodifying celebrity mocked the earnestness and pretensions of the middle-class Victorian audiences who applauded him. A more thoroughly “modern” world awaited Great Britain in the twentieth century. Much attenuated were the earnest Evangelical moral tone, the straightforward acceptance of political economy’s prescription for social and economic progress, simple faith in the religion of one’s parents and comfort in time-honored social distinctions of rank and birth. “Progress” seemed to many people a much less comforting word than it did during the mid-Victorian period. The longstanding troubles between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland continued into the twentieth century, long after the establishment by Prime Minister David Lloyd George of the Irish Free State in 1922.

Notes

* Anglican Church or Church of England. Martin Luther had split from the Catholic Church in 1517, nailing to a church door in Wittenberg his famous Ninety-Five Theses against Catholic Indulgence-peddling. England’s Tudor King Henry VIII, frustrated in his attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry her assistant Anne Boleyn, broke from the Catholic Church in 1534. Henry’s decision had little to do with theology and a lot to do with his dynastic desire for a male heir as well as his wish to exercise political power without interference from the Pope. His daughter Elizabeth I settled the Anglican Church as a fixture in English life, though later on its royally backed semi-Catholic theological stances upset more deeply “Protestant” English citizens enough to lead to the Civil War of 1642-48 and the reign of Oliver Cromwell from 1653-58. The whole period from 1649-1659 is called the Interregnum (“time between the [Stuart] reigns”).

* Tory and Whig. Harold Schultz points out that the origin of the British political parties is rather colorful. The Tories were those who favored Charles II’s new Anglican and royalist strategy after his pro-Catholic maneuvering reminded everyone just how much they had disliked his father Charles I. This “Court Party” unwillingly took its name from a pejorative term for Irish cattle thieves. The Whigs, who received their appellation just as unwillingly from a term for murderous Scottish highway robbers, disliked Charles II’s heavy Anglicanism and his insistence on meddling in Parliamentary affairs. By and large, these men (some of them merchants) wanted to limit the King’s power and demanded that “Dissenters” from the Church of England be tolerated. As Schultz says, they were the heirs of the Puritans under Cromwell who had brought down Charles I in the 1640’s. The Whigs later got the name “Liberals” (the latter term seems especially appropriate for the mid-century, middle-class supporters of laissez-faire) while today we generally call the Tories “Conservatives.” The Labour Party now in power under Tony Blair’s and then Gordon Brown’s leadership didn’t come along until very early in the twentieth century.

Selected General Sources

Altick, Richard D. Victorian People and Ideas. New York: Norton, 1973.

Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement: 1783-1867. 2nd edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

Burn, W.L. The Age of Equipoise: a Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation. New York: Norton, 1965.

Burns, Edward M. et al. Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture. 10th edition, volumes 1-2. New York: Norton, 1984.

Gilmour, Robin. The Victorian Period: the Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-90. New York: Longman, 1993.

Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-70. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957.

Newsome, David. The Victorian World Picture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997.

Schultz, Harold J. History of England. 3rd edition. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1980.

Tucker, Herbert. Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture.