chapman u e335 victorian literature spring 03

Home Page for E335

2003-05-08T19:01:00.000-07:00

Welcome to English 335, The Literature of Victorian England
Spring 2003 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.

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, Thomas Hardy

2003-05-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

Basic Theme in Hardy: Conforming to Conventions versus living in accordance with instinct. His framework is Darwinian and somewhat deterministic at times, thus accounting for his pessimism. What complicates things is that nature and culture aren’t exactly binary opposites—Phillotson correctly implies that culture is just as “red in tooth and claw” as the world of nature and instinct. Both nature and society are cruel, unforgiving, repressive. Trying to rise above them drains the energy from a person. There isn’t any room in this novel for the romantic and Rousseauistic notion that you can erase the corruptions wrought by civilization and get back to an original, purer self, one that will guide you through life. It is possible to fight against social constraints, but the cost is terrible—the world seems to be one big City Hall, even in the countryside: everywhere people form associations, conventionality rules, and the callous and the ignorant crush the life out of anyone who disagrees with them. As in Nietzsche, much of civilized life depends on “forgetting,” and those who unforget and denaturalize the operations of culture pay a heavy price for their rebellion. So Hardy isn’t a complete determinist, but he is a pessimist about the possibility of succeeding in one’s crusades against Mother Grundy, the Laws of Nature, or any other powerful shaping force in human life. In addition, not all of Jude’s rebellion is against “nature.” He is following his instinct for learning, which takes classical erudition as its object. He wants to reach a different place in his society, not to escape that society altogether.

Character Development: The characters are a mix, perhaps inconsistent. They’re not stereotypes generally, but often turn into short-order philosophers, mouthing Hardy’s own worst suspicions about the lot of us. Also, those who rebel sometimes end up conforming—witness Sue Bridehead, who goes back to Phillotson even though she doesn’t love him. She does this by adopting what she has come to see as an outmoded traditional notion: self-mortification, atonement—an idea that conflicts with her enlightened perspective on social arrangements and human nature.

Jude seems a mix from the beginning—look what a minefield his character is. He wants to escape from the rural constraints into which he has been born and to become a scholar, but then his body traps him into a marriage with a woman who possesses only animal cunning and healthy country-girl good looks. After being rejected as a scholar, he goes for the Anglican priesthood, and doesn’t get far with that either. Then he begins to lose his faith, and eventually sounds a great deal like the freethinker Sue, feeling that society has done him wrong and that he can’t abide by its harsh conventions, its cookie-cutter rules for human nature. Jude is a working-man who stands in symbolical relations to his age: he is riven by many of the same conflicts that made his era such a tumultuous one.

Gender Trouble: Arabella Donn (who takes on some conformist airs herself, by the way) knows that sex is a snare, and sets Jude up just like a rabbit. She has the low cunning of a country lass who has seen a couple of farm animals mating. One can use raw sexuality to secure a place in convention-bound social order. Once again, we find that nature and social convention are alike cruel, in their respective ways.

Prematurity: Little Father Time comes to symbolize everything that has gone wrong with Jude and Sue, and the whole group of adults, really. Unlike Wilde’s quip, to be premature is not to be perfect—see the point in the novel where Time commits suicide “because we are too meny.” He represents a type, the last man, perhaps—one whose imagination has been crushed by the weight of an unintelligible world. There is something of evolution in this character—civilization has got ahead of itself, producing such a pessimistic child who has skipped to the final stage of life before even having experienced the first ones. 355: “the coming universal wish not to live,” as the doctor terms it—sounds like Freud’s “Death Drive.” Hardy rejects the positive side of the evolutionist and sometimes vitalistic science of his day, which liked to talk about self-preservation, social instincts, and the life force.

Similarly, Jude and Sue’s revaluation of values is “premature,” and they suffer for it when the claws of a viciously conformist social system dig into them. At various points, they break away from and then partly return to the institutions that trouble them; they really can’t overcome them. In terms of character development, what defeats Hardy’s characters is their complexity, which is out of joint with the world’s imperatives. His characters are nothing like those of, say, Dickens, who are generally unitary in their makeup. Jude’s “heart” is complex; his identity and dreams are by no means simple or easy to achieve. (On page 22, he is characterized as a mixture of seasons, a description worth keeping in mind.) In the end, Hardy’s novel does not amount to an attempt to reflect or speak for the common classes of people. It is instead a disturbing attempt to show a system of values unraveling. Hardy’s plots don’t turn out well, and expectations of fulfillment are left frustrated. He shows people trapped by rigid social forms, but things are more complex than that because the oddness of his protagonists makes their lot all the more difficult.

Page-by-Page Notes on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

To be practical, Jude will become a stonemason, a trade John Ruskin would be proud of. Jude’s dream is to get a classical education in the religious city of Christminster, so he apprentices himself in Alfredston.

35. Just when he is forming his plans, the girls hit him with animal sexuality, as symbolized by that pig’s weenie they taunt him with. Arabella Donn is told that offering sex will win her a husband, and this advice turns out to be true, if disastrous. Jude is out of sync with his surroundings. Even his body pulls him down. He relives the body/soul dichotomy in his own person, and is riven by forces he doesn’t fully understand, trapped by circumstances and conventions. He tries to idealize the supposedly pregnant Arabella, but he knows this is only a ruse on his part.

60-70. Jude isn’t sure his seeking of knowledge isn’t conventional, and himself a type of what (following Antonio Gramsci) we might call the “organic intellectual.” The pig-killing episode is a transformative moment since Arabella is callous. She later tells Jude the Fawleys aren’t cut out for marriage.

85. Gothic Ruskin themes are apparent here, but Jude doesn’t yet see that neo-medievalism’s day has passed. Also in Christminster, we are reminded that Jude’s ideals are a mixture of Newman’s “life of the mind” and more practical preparation for the clergy. But of course social class is a hindrance in Jude’s case.

89-91. Sue Bridehead, Jude’s cousin, is an Anglican shop-tender. There are three reasons not to fall in love with her: they are cousins, there’s something of a family curse going, and he is already married. But Jude is an idealist and always wants to turn prose into poetry, so to speak.

110-20. Phillotson takes up with Sue in this section, and Jude is rejected by the Biblioll College (a fictional name) and told, more or less, to stay in his place. Jude is erudite, but he’s treated like Thomas Carlyle’s shoeblack in Sartor Resartus: he must reduce the denominator of his desires to zero if he wants to catch a hint of infinity. (As part of his rhetorical war on vanity, Carlyle’s Diogenes Teufelsdröckh says, “Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.”) Jude decides to become a minister, and sets off for Melchester to catch the train.

150-60. Sue Bridehead is a free, pagan or classical thinker, and a doubter when it comes to religion. She rejects the medievalism of Christminster. This aspect of her is troubling to Jude.

223-27. Arabella has returned by now. Jude kisses Sue after Aunt Drusilla dies. He realizes that his religious ambitions will have to go because they contradict his passion.

233. Sue speaks to Phillotson of her “theoretic unconventionality.” This is significant—she had made a promise and could not bring herself to break it.

236. Sue says that diversity is better than respectability.

240. Phillotson makes Hardy’s case, but the transformation isn’t handled realistically. Jude and Sue have not done him justice. It may be that instinct (as opposed to custom) is at work, just as Phillotson says.

253-70. Phillotson rejects custom still, and his supporters get in a scuffle with Mother Grundy (i.e. the force of custom and social expectations). Right thinking and generosity are not going to set everything to rights, given this pressure.

290. Jude sees futurity in little “Father Time.” Instead of a tie to the world, the boy is an abstraction. This whole section illustrates Ruskin’s principle that “there is no wealth but life.” Father Time succumbs to the dreary ideology of political economy, the so-called “dismal science.”

296. Family history is thwarted, overcome by circumstance.

Weeks 13-14, Oscar Wilde

2003-04-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

Notes on “The Decay Of Lying.”

In “The Decay Of Lying” as elsewhere, Wilde rejects the natural 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. But then, Wilde is not a stuffy conservative–he favors personal expression and social change. His vehicle, however, is not nature; it is artifice, aestheticism in the Paterian sense in which art is a “disturbing and disintegrating force,” a phrase I borrow from Wilde himself. Art is a breaker-up of dull utilitarian and Tory ideology. Useless talk and behavior, and the inversion of social/sexual conventions, turn out to be highly charged in terms of their social and political implications. Wilde inflects Paterian aestheticism in that he tries to live this doctrine that promotes intense personal experience. Of course, brilliant though Wilde is and successful as he was in his social life and drama, the Paterian hurdle remains communication with others, or the lack thereof. How does aestheticism lead people to a more enlightened and tolerant community, more humane institutions, and so forth? Or is that charging art with too much to accomplish? Wilde popularizes his own elitist tastes, we might say, making a fashion of them, and he mocks the very people who laugh at his plays. The question is whether, as some contemporary critics assert, aestheticism merely encourages political apathy, or whether it could incite a desire for change.

As for the essay’s dialogue form, Vivian is the Socrates figure, even if Cyril isn’t exactly a yes-man whose role is to say, “why certainly, Socrates.”

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. I believe it’s fair to say Wilde follows him in that regard.

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 anything 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 (his comical man versus mouse argument in Notes from Underground is a good instance), 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 still say that human activity can only be dealt with in a language that accommodates human sensibilities and priorities. Needed is mediation between the grand laws of physics and evolution and social conditions. Social science tries to mediate in this way, but of course 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. At base, Wilde sees literature as a vehicle for self-transcendence, both individual and collective. Realism and naturalism, by contrast, as Wilde wrote 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 garners 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 is exactly what we need to go beyond, 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 just 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 rather 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 just “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.

45-6. “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 in 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 basic philosophical idealism, which posits that the mind helps generate (or at least actively participates in the perpetuation of) what we call “reality.” Kant’s version of this claim is rather cautious, while claims made by Fichte, Schelling, and other German Idealists are bolder. Coleridge’s Idealism is of this 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 quite a claim, but it makes sense: no doubt art gives us some of our most memorable renderings of important attitudes, ideals, and events. The use to which those renderings are put is another matter, of course.

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 the “quickened, multiplied consciousness” in his “Conclusion” to 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.

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 Wilde’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 poems (“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 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 preserve 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 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 of 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. I see the dangers in this process, but I also think we shouldn’t dismiss its value or condemn it out of hand.

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 exactly what Pater advocates in his rather scandalous 1873 “Conclusion” to The Renaissance.

Finally, both Pater and Wilde tend to describe their aesthetic doctrines in terms of 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,” 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 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.

Week 11, Gerard Manley Hopkins

2003-04-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Week 10, D. G. & Christina Rossetti

2003-04-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

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.

“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 and Cultural Context.

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.

Week 09, Matthew Arnold

2003-03-26T18:58:00.000-08:00

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 this 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 within only himself or herself, can truly gained 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 cannot even 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 by no means 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. This is, especially for a gloomy poet like Arnold, a cheerful thought, and it bears comparison to Wordsworth’s beautiful 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, 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, proceeds 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 figure. 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 so 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 on earth he is 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 responds eloquently to this downcast notion when, in his 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.

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 by no means advocates 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 Victorians sages and culture critics, Arnold reasserts humanity’s need for some principle of excellence by which to think and live.

1505. “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.

1506-07. 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.

1509.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 navelgazing 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.”

1510-11. 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 ingenius 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.

Week 08, Darwin, Lyell, Chambers

2003-03-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

Notes on Darwin, Lyell, and Chambers

Notes on Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man

My purpose here is to set down some of the most basic among Charles Darwin’s concepts and to discuss some implications of these scientific concepts for what we might call, in accordance with the general aims of this seminar, “cultural criticism.” Make no mistake about it, Darwin’s theory of evolution was important to the course of British theory and culture. Evolutionism had a profound impact on the Victorian Era’s more advanced thinkers—it caused a great deal of anxiety in 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 Huxleys and Tennysons of England but the Herbert Spencers as well, the “social Darwinists” who stole the master’s ideas and used them to prove, or so they thought, 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, we know, was simply that all life, including human life, evolved from some lower ancestral form or forms. In order to understand this idea in its basic scientific context, however, we must briefly consult Darwin’s own writings. After doing so, we shall review the implications 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 may 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 here I must limit myself to what Darwin seems to consider one of the most important, if most “perplexing” (30) among them: the “direct and definite action of changed [environmental] conditions.” At base, this law implies that a change in external living conditions somehow 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. Now let us move on to Darwin’s next vehicle of evolution, “natural selection.” This concept implies that the better adapted a given organism, or group of organisms, is to a certain set of environmental conditions, the more likely it will be to survive and thrive. Simply put, the creatures that can best cope with their environment—the best hunters, foragers, burrowers, hiders, 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 Lamarck—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 that given 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 seem to go together as agents of evolution; that is, 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, which 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. 118; The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 453.)

Add “sexual selection” to these two principles of variation and natural selection, and you have the least inadequate model for Darwinian evolution I can provide here. 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 “good” 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 overall 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, all work together to make up what Darwin calls “evolution.” Now we must ask what kind of “evolution” evolution caused, however partially or indirectly, in British culture and cultural analysis. Darwin’s theory, as I mentioned above, was by no means comforting to an age that is with some justice called “the great age of doubt.” It would be inexcusably simplistic to claim that Darwin’s ideas caused a crisis of doubt, but they did help to shake some thoughtful Victorians’ belief in such basic concepts as god, a reasonably benevolent natural world, morality, and progress. If evolution is the governing 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, and I can do no better than quote extensively from his work:

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” inadvertently expresses later Victorians’ anxiety about the implications of Darwinian evolution. Even Tennyson’s pre-Darwin nature is not the cheering, if now rather illegible, 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 astutely allows sway to the fears of Carlyle, that best of English 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 render it nearly impossible to counter the effects of an economic system that threatened to turn human beings into no more than machines. After all, if humans are but animals exquisitely programmed by an amoral Nature, 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, should not only the “strongest”—or richest—tiger thrive? Grant that evolution is the only regulatory law in the universe, and you must admit that a mere sophisticated bundle of nerves and muscle like man can hardly invoke “ethics” as a weapon against what works; that is, 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.” In short, Darwin’s theory, understood in a raw and somewhat exaggerated fashion, did its part in unsettling many of the most cherished cultural values in nineteenth-century England.

But does Darwin himself take such a gloomy, godless view? Does he seem to believe that human evolution is as unpromising as the above scenario suggests? To answer this question, we must examine Darwin’s basic scientific stance and his views on the vexed question of human morality and its source. Because so many of the worst effects of Darwinism had to do with its presumptuous, overly general application in the newly-hatched social sciences, it would be most 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 or objective, at least to us today, we should try to be fair to this work 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, to my recollection, was somewhat 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 what he calls with great regularity “the lowest savages” but instead dealing with the basic procedures of empirical science, Darwin is far more careful than his less scrupulous admirers, men like Herbert Spencer. 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), for example, 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 “scientists” like Spencer and Lombroso were not so aware of their limitations when they set out to define, quantify, or otherwise rank complex human qualities and situations. But then, these two “scientists” must already have decided that when it came to human vice, misery, and poverty, let alone intelligence, Alexander Pope’s famous verse was good enough: “whatever is, is right.” In any case, 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 particular 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.

The last thing to be considered here is Darwin’s theory about the role of natural and sexual selection in the development of human morals. If we can reconstruct this theory, we should be able to make some firm statement about the outlook that “evolution” led its chief proponent to take. 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, our 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. The animal’s act of satisfying its individual needs in a way that harms the community, that is, creates a dim feeling that 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. Both of these acquisitions greatly enhance the power of the community over the single being’s wishes.

Thanks to the complexity of the human animal, of course, Darwin feels bound to concede that the development of a fully moral sense in mankind is rather more complex than his “social animal” narrative implies. Men, he confesses, are not the same as bees. Nonetheless, he goes on to insist strongly enough to disturb any diehard believers in divinely sanctioned ethics that the intellectual and emotional differences between the one species and the other are more of degree than of kind. Both 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 man from his less sophisticated counterparts; it has to do with what is commonly known as “conscience,” that something over and above mere discomfort at having done something reproachable. Darwin brings up this issue and asks the relevant question:

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, &c. 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)

The human animal, then, not only becomes upset when he does wrong in the eyes of the community; he continues to feel remorse long after the deed and even says to himself that he ought to feel bad about his anti-social behavior. This imperious ought is a far cry from mere 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 extreme 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 a very 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 entire community than to some individual concern like “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). Darwin’s quotation, fittingly enough, comes from the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a man not easily to be outdone in the virtue of self-restraint and patience.

With the classic example of Aurelius as his springboard, Darwin is 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 truly Aurelian 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)

One wonders what Darwin would have thought about this optimistic passage had he lived to see the horrors of the Twentieth Century. His prime statement, nonetheless, and for what it may be worth to us, is that the moral sense and conscience are no mere excrescences on the framework of life; they are instead so deeply rooted in mankind by evolution, by “natural selection,” that the human species need not fear that it will one day be able to dismiss them. At least, we might add, not without dire consequence.

Week 07, John Ruskin

2003-03-12T18:56:00.000-08:00

Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, “The Nature of Gothic.”

The Renaissance in Venice should serve as a warning to the British Empire: just as that sea empire fell because of its debased pursuit of wealth and soulless perfection, so will England if it continues on its current path. Ruskin is a prophetic Sage-writer who alternately threatens damnation and promises redemption. Gothic architecture expresses the workers’ mental tendencies. “Fallen” but humble laborers built cathedrals. The products of their labor served as expressive offerings to god and dwelling places for him as well as gathering places for the faithful who are the invisible Church, spiritual community. So this is labor directed towards the achievement of spiritual community. Renaissance authors and critics such as Vasari condemned the Gothic as naïve and crude, stern and contemptible. But wildness is to be honored if it expresses spiritual striving. The fool sees not the same Church as the wise man sees, we might say after the manner of Blake. The Renaissance critics couldn’t see spiritual ramifications of labor; they gave in to the lust and over-refinement of the eye, which is to become blind. Renaissance pride in perfection, then, is selfish—their buildings are not offerings to god but monuments to the architects’ and patrons’ egos. The Renaissance amounts to a Second Fall that tries to overcome by science and technological perfection the effects of the First Fall. Venice the sea-empire fell because of its pridefulness and greedy commercialism. England, too is promoting sensualism, mechanism, false individualism cut off from relation to God. It puts its hopes not in the New Jerusalem but in a false Capitalist Utopia.

Servile Ornament: worker is slave performing to low standards.

Constitutional Ornament: medieval worker free; imperfect striving in labor honors God.

Revolutionary Ornament: Pride reigns in Renaissance art: workers must all be experts in minor tasks. Modern version of this is industrial division of labor—bead-makers, etc. The English seek Greek perfection by means of machinery; this necessarily tends towards Renaissance revolutionary debasement. Important to say tends because there’s still time to repent. Christianity values the individual soul; imperfect labor is an admission of one’s fallen condition, and valuing it shows right-minded criticism and a pure eye for expressions of spiritual striving. It shows that one’s priorities are straight: spirit before material perfection. Perfect work is limited, and it indicates complacency. The flaws in a fine, imperfect thing link it to infinity. This is similar to romanticism and Christian theology: a fragment is greater than the limited, finite whole because fragment indicates striving and progress upward. Man is a fragment of the Divine. Ruskin as a Christian emphasizes not Byronic attempts at self-transcendence but humility. Acknowledge your imperfections and express yourself through the medium of that imperfection. This is humility towards God. The body and the works of the body are finite; art/architecture are of value only insofar as they express the soul’s striving to break free, while still accepting that it cannot entirely do so.

We should consider the Hegelian hierarchy of art, with music highest because most free of matter. Clouds: reference to Turner. Clouds at once veil and bear the sun’s divine radiance. The worker’s failure, his limits (clouds), show his spiritual value. Clouds of any sort must be read, understood as semi-translucent markers of boundary between finite and infinite. Class and hierarchy are not, for Ruskin, the cause of chaos and Mammonism. Neither even is distribution of wealth. The problem is lack of satisfaction in grossly material work in the service of a grossly materialistic society. Similar to Marx on alienation, dehumanization. Ruskin says division of labor is division of human beings. He is not interested in accumulation or scientific progress; he largely rejects the whole Baconian empirical view of science as a handmaiden to humble amelioration of the human condition. Social solution is to encourage invention, not finish or imitation. Our attitude towards consumption must change; supply will adapt itself to more spiritualized demands on the part of consumers. Example: glass bead manufacture is slavery / opposed to imperfect Venetian glass. Work is the main human activity and source of value. Work must acknowledge imperfection; allow for expression of worker’s spirit, striving to please God.

Work is an offering, a sacrifice, the law of fallen life. It took a healthier society to make Venetian glass. The way glass is made shows how a society is functioning, what its priorities are. Venetian artisan infused his work with imagination; the modern worker is one tool among others. Thought and labor should not be separated, or else unhealthy class divisions become entrenched, antagonism rather than communal spirit animating noble hierarchy. Refer to Adam Smith on division of labor applying even to intellection. Foxglove / Human Nature: Always passing from one state to another. Read typologically: law of fallen life is change, imperfection, striving. Christian teleology of the figure: decay > bud > bloom. Humans are always oriented towards the spiritual future. One’s works are “blooms,” indicators of healthy spiritual progress. The foxglove is an imperfect-seeming, rude plant that nevertheless is prized for its beauty. No human work is perfect to god’s eyes. The effort, the attitude of the offering, elicits mercy. Recall the Cain/Abel story. Work must be imperfect to acknowledge that the human condition is imperfect. Ruskin’s stress on imperfection / incompleteness is a critique of capitalist utopia and Marxist utopia alike. He favors REDUNDANCY (a law of his style, too) against philosophies of production and material abundance. Not accumulation of money but accumulation of detail (organized or not) is the goal.

“There is no wealth but life.” Architecture is a romantic expressive poem for an entire people. The Gothic is the product of “the average power of man.” Gothic’s changefulness expresses one truth about humankind: desire of change; it’s what supposedly sets us beyond animal nature. Imperfection is the other truth. Humans are spiritual, restless, incomplete. Ruskin’s tradition is romantic expressivism—see Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and theory of poetic creation, which itself traces its notions back to biblical expressivism: work as expressive of spirit, an offering to god. R is almost utilitarian, oddly, in his emphasis on an economy of redundancy and richness: at least, the aim is pleasure.

Week 06, Eliz. Browning, Martineau, Nightingale

2003-03-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

Please check back in future. I did not get around to posting material on this author during the semester, but will post an entry when I have time to transcribe and edit my notes.

Week 05, Lord Alfred Tennyson

2003-02-26T18:44:00.000-08:00

Notes on Alfred Tennyson

“The Lady of Shalott”

This poem shows Tennyson as 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.

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.

Part 4. 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 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 it in light of Pater’s 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”

Refer to In Memoriam Lyric 5: “A use in measured language lies / …Like dull narcotics, numbing pain” (1234).

Odysseus joins his crew after only one line—they all “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” as Timothy Leary the 1960’s Professor of LSD Studies would say. He upsets 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 trance-inducing stasis. Odysseus had sent scouts in Homer, 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 really 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. But 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 wandering itself. Mixed in is a sad tone, 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. Refer to Isobel Armstrong’s thesis about poetry as 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) pointed out the presence of the following structures:

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 his 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 means 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 by 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 and “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.”

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 we inhabit a blind, purposeless universe—Carlyle’s steam-engine universe—there is no 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 has a divided consciousness.

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’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 Adonais. Is Arthur moved now by the divine or primal love? I should also check Lucretius’s references to the soul wandering into infinity.

Lyric 34

The speaker describes an alternate poetics—your 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 must 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 loved 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 Pope, 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, and there is a hint of a feeling of abandonment in the final stanza.

Lyric 118

In the second stanza, 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 looks 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 04, John Stuart Mill

2003-02-19T18:43:00.000-08:00

Notes on John Stuart Mill

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.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. E: The Victorian Age. Page numbers updated to 8th. edition.

Week 03, Carlyle and Newman

2003-02-12T18:42:00.001-08:00

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.”}

Week 02, Thomas Carlyle

2003-02-05T18:41:00.000-08:00

Week 01, Introduction to E335

2003-01-29T18:38:00.000-08:00

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, of course, 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, of course, 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 principals 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 of course 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 of course 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 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.