Module One Lecture One Introduction to the Victorian Middle Class Society, Politics,

Mentality and Culture.

a) enduring historical, sociological and political labels and competing insider views
the Victorian age the age of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), who became Empress of India in 1876 after
previously changing the name of the Hanoverian British dynasty to that of the House of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha, when she married Prince Albert of the latter house) in Romanian, epoca victorian (small case)
the age of the British Empire (a geopolitical label) - the British monarch controlled one third of the
world in the British colonies which extended in Asia to Afghanistan and Tibet, covering the whole of
India ( thirty-four times the size of England), extending to New Zealand and Australia (where Magwitch
in Great Expectations or Hetty Sorrell in Adam Bede by George Eliot and many a real Victorian villain
got transported in a kind of surrogate of a criminals execution). The British Empire also extended to
Canada, 40 times the size of England. In Africa, the British Empire occupied Nigeria and Egypt to the
North, after the Purchase in 1875 of the Suez Canal, and went as far down as the tip of the continent
where it conquered South Africa after the Boer War, in the 1890s. (see G. M. Trevelyan. Illustrated
History of England, 1962, translated into Romanian in 1975 ; Book 6, 3rd Chapter).The union of Ireland
with Great Britain ( to create The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801) sanctioned and
brought to its climax the centuries-old domination of Ireland by the rich, powerful neighbour.

the country of the industrial revolution (an economic, social label). It is interesting to see what caused
the industrial revolution and what its historical consequence were. In the span of a single century the
history of science unites in Britain the names of James Watt, Michael Faraday, William Thomson, Lord
Kelvin, George Boole, James Clerk Maxwell. The technological advances include the invention of the
telegraph, the intercontinental cable, the generalisation of steam power (with the large scale
implementation of the steam hammer, the steam turbine, the steam loom and the steam plough) or the
universal milling machine; the communication industry was revolutionized by the invention and the
world-wide spreading of the telegraph, the intercontinental cable or photography and by the rotary
printing press; land transportation developed tremendously with the building in Britain of the first
successful railroad system in the world followed by the construction of the first underground railway
system, the Metropolitan, in 1860; the electric lamp increased the urbanization standards, too; the
commodity industry was changed by the introduction of the vacuum cleaners, and the war industry
thrived after the invention of the automatic guns, the shell gun and the Winchester gun (cf. 1991
Information Please Almanac, Houghton Mifflin, Boston).
an age of material progress (this label is the consequence of the former one) which constantly sought to
accommodate the demographic and environmental changes so as to allow other areas of life to keep
pace with material progress. Education, for example, was torn between the old and the new liberal
models as a tool for controlling, in a disciplined and benevolent/progressive way, the minds of people

and make them fit members of the new society. (See the lectures on the models in education in the
nineteenth century)
an age of considerable environmental change: the change of the countryside and the city alike. Quite
often, a plain would be spectacularly transformed into a canyon by the sprouting railways which cut
through meadows in depth or cut tunnels through the mountains: all these site changes amounted to a
special kind of environmental events thought worthy of being celebrated in work songs about the navies
(or railway workers) and their prowess in taming nature (as the theme park folklore demonstrates
today, in the most recent and fashionable kind of museographical exhibition in Britain, aimed at
recreating the commoners everyday life in the regional British near past). Urbanization became
overriding, with the displacement of the rural population in the mass. In literature, this was reflected by
the nostalgic rememberance of the rural past in quite a number of success, or simply representative,
Victorian novels, such as the majority of George Eliots novels or the rural gentry and family chronicles
that spawned into a picturesque Victorian genre.
the first mass age in history, the precursor, of the 20th century mass society (a sociological label)
an age of liberal reforms meant to strengthen the economically liberal state (a label that demonstrates
the connection between economy and politics) Liberal politics is middle class politics with little regard
for the lower classes (from a populist or social-democratic viewpoint this could be seen as a

cruel state: it did not bother to manage the interests of other than the capitalistic
entrepreneurs and did not interfere with the market. The label for the Victorian or liberal state
was a non-interventionist state, dominated by mercantile free market a regulations. It was
based on the political doctrine of laissez-faire that gave free reign to the private capitalistic
enterprise without regard to the public welfare. Thus, the liberal legislation was double-edged:
protectionist, for the capitalistic, entrepreneurial class and impoverishing when not simply
indifferent or even oppressive towards the working class
- laws which enfranchised the man of property, called Reform Bills, since they completely changed
the voting qualifications at the beginning from nominal to real property qualifications by eliminating the
old rotten boroughs and the appointment of constituencies by royal charter. The Reform Bill of 1832
enfranchised all the male owners of property worth at least 10 pounds in annual rent; the Reform Bill of
1867 doubled the number of voters; and the 1884 Bill brought about the universal male
enfranchisement. The parliamentary battle was fought throughout the 19th century between the
representatives of the two political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, with William Ewart
Gladstone, nicknamed The Old Man, at the head of the Liberal Party and four times at the head of the
executive as the British Prime Minister, between 1868-74, 1880-85, 1885-6 and 1892-3; the other
mandates were held for the Conservatives by Sir Robert Peel, first, then by Benjamin Disraeli, Queen
Victorias friend and British Prime Minister between 1874-1880. The two parties are also distinguished
by their foreign policy, in so far as the Tories advocated a big England, imperial policy, while the
Liberals were the little England party.
- property-strenghthening and free-trade measures required by a successful political machine meant to
sustain the kind of progress associated with the British power in control of a newly industrial economy
and a modern empire. Thus, in 1846, the old Corn laws were repealed, which had offered protectionist
tariffs for British agriculture. This was the pre-requisite for effectively securing free trade, by 1860.

- the 1830 Catholic Emancipation meant the modernization of the British polity now capable of making
allowance for other than its own Reformed, Anglican political formations . A similar modernization
embraced the British polity services and institutions, thanks to the measures passed by Gladstones
administration during the 1868-1874 mandate. (See the relevant chapter in G. M. Trevelyans
Illustrated History of England for a pertinent discussion of the Liberal modernization of the British
institutions, including the religious and military ones).
- reforms in education, reformism meant that essential education was generalised, so that the
1870 Education Act opened the way to generalised literacy in Britain. By 1871, the abolition of the
university tests virtually transformed the leading universities of Oxford and Cambridge into lay,
metropolitan, universalist universities.
- public administration and municipal management reforms, which created town councils instead of
rotten boroughs and heightened the quality of urban life As a result, what we know today as roughly
modern city life became a reality translated into higher living standards and the increased number of
commodities. The Victorian periodical, serialised pamphlets, the formal discourses, not to mention the
fiction and satirical documents of the age retain numerous traces of the eventful addition to cities of
public baths and laundries, museums, libraries (public reading rooms), parks, public gardens and later
trams, gas and electricity facilities or water networks.

an age of social unrest in the mass section of the society the poverty problem which represented the

reverse of the great imperial and colonial coin, included in the Victorian age the passing of a
number of poor laws, such as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment which created the workhouses or
prisons in disguise for containing what was considered to be, at the time, the social scum of the
street villains. The poor street population literally haunted the Dickensian imaginary in so many
of his youthful novels. The Chartist Movement of 18361854 proved that beyond the middleclass modern paradise there reigned supreme social chaos. For almost the entire first half of the
age, the Victorian masses demonstrated in the streets and sent petitions of rights (charts)
signed by ever-increasing numbers of people to the leaders of the nation but they were never
listened to (the 1840 Chart, for example, was signed by over three million three hundred
people who requested for the lower classes precisely what came to be granted to the middle
classes in the course of the century). This prolonged street demonstration reminds one of the
long demonstration for democracy in Bucharest, in the Piata Universitatii Square at the
beginning of the 1990s); under Chartist inspiration, there were organised strikes, such as the
first general strike of 1842 but all these got practically nowhere and had to continue their
fight by the better organised trade-unionist movement of the 1860s and 1870s (after the
repeal of the Combination Acts, which had forbidden gatherings of riotous people, in the wake
of the French Revolution between 1799, i.e., and 1824). This proved that there exisited
virtually two nations in Britain, as Benjamin Disraeli put it, the rich and the poor. The rich
passed and enacted quite a big number of consistent laws for the poor, but it appears that the
former were too busily engrossed in their business to devote enough attention or resources to
rescuing the poor. The Factory Acts of the period 18331878, however, eliminated child labour
and gross overworking in factories. Some support was granted also by the governments Public

Health Acts of 1871 1875 which granted some measure of medical assistance to the poor as
well. Still, for all the echoes of the social unrest and unhealthy living conditions of the poor in
the printed Victorian media, including the literature of the age, the 1880s saw the rise of more
radical social movements, such as the wide-spread socialism of the Fabian brand or the utopian
socialism of the intellectuals (cf. Martin Day: A History of English Literature. 1837 to the
Present, Doubleday, New York, 1964, the chapter on Victorian prose) and of Marxian
communism, some time after the publication of the Communist Party Manifesto by Karl Marx,
in 1859. By 1903, the Socialist Labour Party had also been formed as a potential opposition
force on the political stage.
***

Narrative introduction to the HISTORY OF IDEAS lecturing module (an informal, free or table talk essay,
which would have been delivered were your course instructor present for a first encounter)
Studying the strengths and weaknesses of the British Empire, the last great and visible modern empire,
means measuring the distance between the doctrine (the faith) in modern progress turned into an
ideology of the triumphant modern British nation the ruler of one third of the world and the more
concrete underpinnings of the imperial advance. The grandeur of the British Empire was achieved in
reality with wars caused by human greed, rather than being prompted by the ambition, or the noble
cause, of advancing Western civilization, as the imperial ideology declared. 1
A century without wars on British soil, the nineteenth is a progressive, nationalistic, democratic and
imperial modern age: it is called the Victorian age, from the reign of Queen Victoria (1937-1901);
Victoria was invested Empress of India in 1877 (this was not because she was a genuine colonial leader
herself, but because the leadership of the West India Company had become corrupt as proved by the
Indian Mutiny in the 1840s and its power had to be crushed, which is why the Crown became the
direct ruler of the Indian Sub-Continent.2
The British Empire increased in the wake of the pervasive modern ideology of progress, it was prompted
by imperial nationalism (NB: the termination of this word!), it was liberal in the three senses of the word
(cf. Zirra Contributions I, pp. 87 - 88), it was democratic. The polemic surrounding the democratic

An ideology is a useful doctrine/philosophy which furthers the interest of a particular class eager for power,
according to Marxism (NB the termination ism is for ideologies) and Neo-Marxism. Marxism was the radical
critique of nineteenth century capitalism just as Neo-Marxism is the critique of twentieth century Western
democracies. They also went under the name of Left wing Hegelianism, both being inspired by the Kantian critiques
of reason and the Hegelian idealistic doctrine of progress in history. It stands to reason that when compared to any
perfectly rational and ideal model, no actual human society will stand the test!
2
NB: For the British, the Continent designates Europe, just as, when used attributively, for example in the phrase
overseas students, the adverbial noun overseas (Rom. de peste mri) refers to everything that is not within the
perimeter of the British Isles (this is a proof of the insular mentality and the nationalist self-centeredness, or the
arrogance perhaps?, of the Brits.

society in the Victorian age shall be addressed in the next lecture, titled Victorian Democracy: Pros and
Cons.
The specifically English form of economic liberalism is the laissez faire doctrine, which reduces to a
minimum the role of the state in respect to the free market, giving free reign to the invisible hand of
the market(namely, competition); this makes the Victorian state be typically non-interventionist; the
capitalistic non-interventionist Victorian polity proved its limitations when popular unrest broke out and
continued in the early Victorian age (see the seminar topic: the Chartist movement), the rise of Trade
Unionism and the organization of the First General Strike (in 1854), and finally the appearance of
utopian and Fabian Socialism.
The English name for the modern practical (and liberal) philosophy of progress is utilitarianism
(translated into Romanian as UTILITARISM). Its connection with the new liberal paradigm in midVictorian learning and the differences between the old liberal and the new liberal paradigms are
important history of ideas issues.

SECOND LECTURE
Competing Insider Views on the Victorian Age: Upper Middle-Class Leisure and Pleasure (in
The Prologue to Alfred Tennysons The Princess versus Their Puritanical Challenge (in
Thomas Carlyles The Everlasting Yea, from Sartor Resartus Contributions I, 58-59; the
consequent doctrine of activism in Past and Present (1843) Labour); Carlyles further
challenges: his accusation to the laissez-faire society in Chartism (1841) and Past and

Present (1843): Gospel of Mammonism, Captains of Industry, the chapters on

LaissezFaire and Not Laissez Faire "Labour" Past and Present , chapter XI
(Contributions I, 2011, 60-62) (b)

I.

Upper Middle-Class Leisure and Pleasure (in The Prologue to Alfred Tennysons The
Princess

The Prologue
Sir Walter Vivian all a summers day
Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun
Up to the people: thither flocked at noon
His tenants, wife and child, and thither half

The neighbouring borough with their Institute

Of which he was the patron. I was there
From college, visiting the son, - the son
A Walter too,- with others of our set,
Five others: we were seven at Vivian-place.
And me that morning Walter showd the house,
Greek, set with busts: from vases in the hall
Flowers of all heavens, and lovelier than their names,
Grew side by side; and on the pavement lay
Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park,
Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time;
And on the tables every clime and age
Jumbled together; celts and calumets,
Claymore and snowshoe, toys in lava, fans
Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries,
Laborious orient ivory shphere in sphere,
The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-clubs
From the isles of palm: and higher on the walls,
Betwixt the monstruous horns of elk and deer,
His own forefathers arms and armour hung .
And this he said was Hughs at Agincourt;
And that was old Sir Ralphs at Ascalon:
A good knight he! We keep a chronicle
With all about him which he brought, and I
Dived in a hoard of tales that dealt with knights,

Half-legend, half-historic, counts and kings

Who laid about them at their wills and died.
.
.round the lake
A little clock-work steamer paddling plied
And shook the lilies: perchd about the knolls
A dozen angry models jetted steam:
A petty railway ran ; a fire balloon
Rose gem-like up before the dusky groves
And dropt a fairy parachute and past:
And there thro twenty posts of telegraph
They flashd a saucy message to and fro
Between the mimic stations; so that sport
Went hand in hand with Science;

II.Thomas Carlyles Puritanical Challenge of the Genteel Mentality and the Romantic Roots of
His Contestation
1.excerpts from Sartor Resartus (1833)
The Everlasting Yea (a handbook of metaphysical belief and vitalism)
See the internet pdf for the passage with Ophiuchus
So true it is, what I then said, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by
increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my algebra deceive
me, Unity itself divided by Zero will giveInfinity and, he continues, Make thy claim of wages a
zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write: It is only
with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin [ He is quoting
from Goethe who will also be invoked by Matthew Arnold, later as his inspirer] And, Carlyle
declares, on the same page 88: What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be
Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thout wert born and predestined
not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest

through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat : and shrieking dolefully because carrion
enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

2. Labour and the Doctrine of Activism

there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work ()the real desire to
get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments
and regulations, which are truth. The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work
and do it. ()Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an
unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a
Hercules! That will be thy better plan.( ) the whole soul of a man is composed
into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire,
Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering
the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free
valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off
into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not
as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is
made bright blessed flame!

3. Carlyles accusations to the liberal, laissez-faire state (Chapter VI: Laissez-faire, Supply-anddemand, Cash-payment for the sole nexus, and so forth, were not, are not, and will never be, a
practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men. That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing, cannot
long live together on any such Law of Union.) (Captains of Industry: Chapter IV, the 6th occurrence)
(Mammonism: The Modern Worker, Chapter IITrue, it must be owned, we for the present with our
Mammon Gospel.)

LECTURE TWO Democracy: Pros and Cons

I.Thomas Carlyles Denunciation of Democracy
Part Three of Thomas Carlyles Past and Present (1840) treats democracy as an annoying object of
derision (compare this passage with Sartor Resartus, The Everlasting Yea) and preaches instead the
authoritarian rule by the meritocracy
'You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce

itself: the very Tailor has become, if not properly Sansculottic,

which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor unconsciously symbolising,
and prophesying with his scissors, the reign of Equality. What now is
our fashionable coat?

Carlyle dismantles the notion of democracy with a critical eye, because he considers the revolutionary
desideratum of social liberty too narrow. Democracy is defined by utilitarians as 'the liberty of
not being oppressed by your fellow man.Carlyle considers it an indispensable, yet
one of the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty. Carlyle regards
man as a creature enthralled by his own brutal appetites3:
Thou art the thrall not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites
and this scoured dish of liquor4. And thou pratest of thy 'liberty'? Thou
entire blockhead!//Heavy-wet and gin: alas, these are not the only kinds of
thraldom.[] thou art_ as an 'enchanted Ape' under God's sky, where thou
mightest have been a man, had proper Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and
Constables with cat-o'-nine tails,been vouchsafed thee;
Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his
finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk
thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able
for; and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set
about doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honour,
'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if liberty be not that, I for one
have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to
leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and
keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices!
Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable
madman: his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every
wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper
way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him
to go a little righter. O, if thou really art my _Senior_, Seigneur,
my _Elder_, Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very deed my _Wiser_,
may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to
command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I
conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never
such brass collars, whips and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over
precipices! That I have been called, by all the Newspapers, a 'free
man' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and
wreck. O that the Newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or
what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not
death, but life!--Liberty requires new definitions.

II. John Stuart Mills Guide for the Achievement of Civic Liberty in a Modern Democracy
The opening paragraph of Mills treaty On Liberty (1859), Part II defines civic liberty in principle as
follows: there is no (legislative or executive) power in a modern state which may be justified in imposing
an official opinion on its people.
3

Carlyle regards man in a Biblical light, as a fallen/beastly creature who has to recover spiritual dignity. To be free,
means for Carlyle, to be free from beastly appetites which are the cause of human vices.
4
The lower classes drank cheap strong liquor (alcohol, gin) as could be seen in Hogarths caricatural engravings in
the eighteenth century.

-No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a

legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe
opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be
allowed to hear.
- Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people,
and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what
it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such
coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is
illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst.
Later, Mill demonstrates why it is wrong to suppress opinions:
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the
contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person,
than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Mill proceeded to explain what happened in two cases when a mans opinion was silenced:
the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the
human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from
the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are
deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what
is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth,
produced by its collision with error.
.
First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be
true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not
infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and
exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an
opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is
the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of
infallibility.
In the same chapter II of On Liberty, Mill gives the examples of the Athenian state which wrongly
assumed infallibility in judging, condemning and executing Socrates and the example of the Roman
Emperor Marcus Aurelius who wrongly assumed infallibility and persecuted the early Christians,
although the Stoic spirit resembled the Christian spirit in austerity.
The longer demonstration about the degrees of certainty available in accordance with the rules of reason
was made by Mill in his earlier essays dedicated to Bentham and Coleridge :

1. Truth is a socially defined function of several truths, pragmatic and synthetic. It is obtained as a combination
that results after harmonising several partial truths, as can be possessed by real people in concrete circumstances. In
his essay Coleridge, Mill shows that:
All students of man and society () are aware that the besetting danger is not so

much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the
whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading
controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in
what they affirmed, though in the wrong in what they denied; and that if either
could have been made to take the others views in addition to its own, little more
would have been needed to make its doctrine correct. (Proza eseistica Victoriana, in three
volumes, edited by Ana Cartianu and Stefan Stonescu -PEV I p. 458)
And the nuances Mill is capable of detaching in matters of partial turths have practically no endThus, it is in

regard to every important partial truth; there are always two conflicting modes of
thought, one tending to give to that truth too large, the other to give it too small a
place; and the history of opinion is generally an oscillation between these
extremes. (Ditto, p. 460)
It is possible to harmonize the conflicting modes, but only in the long run, and very gradually:
Thus, every excess in either direction determines a corresponding reaction;

improvement consisting only in this, that the oscillation, each time, departs rather
less widely from the centre, and an ever-increasing tendency is manifested to settle
finally in. (Ditto, p. 461)
There is a kind of physical, mathematical necesity shown to be at work in this extremely rational model of human
society, which proves the point made before, about the model of science underlying the clear, persuasive liberal
discourse.

Truth prevails over error (or as Mill calls error human fallibility), because it is
possible to correct past errors and to learn from them, so that all times there is
just enough truth for correct action (On Liberty, in PEV, p. 510). Here, Mills theory veers into
2.

the moral and ethical realm, and it seems inspired by one of Jesus Christs own reassuring teachings to the disciples.
There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for

the purposes of human life. () Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving

our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for
purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have
any rational assurance of being right. (Ditto)
3.
Public opinion, discussion, is the complement of thought and experience, which are of necessity limited, just
as the individual person is. Exchange of ideas and experience, however, if conducted according to the laws of justice
and rationality, or if conducted fairly enough can correct errors and make humanity asymptotically approach in
actionwhat it cannot hope to attain in principle.

He (man in general, our note) is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion

and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion to show how
experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact
and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must
be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without
comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value, then, of
human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is
wrong. (PEV I, p. 511)

Mill points to the connection between legitimately held opinions and free discussion as the basis
for approaching truth (rather than holding opinions dogmatically):
However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility
that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that
however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will
be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
In On Liberty , Part III Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being Mill presents the
conditions for developing personal experience and attaining maturity which represented a duty for every
member of a modern, democratic society
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. It is for him to find out
what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to his own circumstances
and character. And ()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. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best.
The mental and moral, like the muscular, powers are improved only by being
used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because
others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the persons
own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened by
adopting it. This is the pledge of Mills humanism in his views on general
education: to strengthen man rather than weaken him by the misuse of reason,
either because it is used in isolation or because it is not used at all. John Stuart
Mills argument continues He who lets the world, or his own portion of it,
choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like
one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties.
He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to
gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has
decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. () It is
possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harms

way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a
human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what
manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man which human life is
rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first importance surely is
man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles
fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said by machinery
by automatons in human form- it would be a considerable loss to exchange
for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more
civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens 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.

Module Two: The Victorian Novel (I): Early Victorian novelists - Dickens and Thackeray and
the fashionable kinds of fiction in the nineteenth century; Vanity Fair as the swan song of the
dominant genteel mentality and the literary force of Dickens's imagination; his sentimental and
satirical genteel mentality emblems presented through character definitions from Our Mutual
Friend (1854) and Bleak House (1852) [the Veneerings, Podsnappery, Boffins Bower] Bleak
House (1852) [Telescopic philanthropy; deportment] (Contributions I, Appendix, 137-140)

The list of titles/species published by the two authors is available in Contributions I, the bio-bibliography
Appendix, 137-140 and the discussion about Thackerays fateful hesitation between satire and
sentimentalism in the construction of stock characters5 make his realistic books readable today as
simple instances of genteel conversation.
The comparison of the fictional titles shows the development of the novel from the earlier picaresque
and romance6 species to increasingly mature species of panoramic, critical, analytic, historical and
artistic species.
After presenting the titles of Thackerays and Dickenss books and the Prologue to Vanity Fair only
(which is to be explained by this readers / your Readers dissatisfaction with the latter novel qua novel,
5

See the pairs of stock characters: the vixen, Rebecca Sharp (Becky, the protagonist of Thackerays novel without
a hero) VERSUS Amelia Sedley, the Victorian angel in the house in keeping with Coventry Patmores poem of
the same title, published in 1854, then revised in 1862; George Osborne, the object of Amelias unrequited love
VERSUS Captain Dobbin, in love with Amelia and devoted to her as two types of men, the dishonest/honest types;
rich, vicious, decadent upper middle-class barbarians, by Matthew Arnolds standards (the Crawleys and Osbornes)
VERSUS virtuous, decaying, empoverished middle-classes (the Sedleys).
6

though it is fair to confess its conversation is appealing as a sample of Victorian wit and cultivation and
though confessing that Vanity Fair can serve perfectly for understanding the blocks of middle class
characters in the structure of British society in the nineteenth century), this lecture will present the
complexity of Dickenss fiction by analyses deriving from the first years lectures in twentieth century
criticism and theory)

BEFORE THE CURTAIN

As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks
into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the
bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and
jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling;
there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets,
policemen on the look-out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!) bawling in
front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old
rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets
behind. Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one,
though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off
from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits
down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas. The
curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and crying,
"How are you?"
A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort,
will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people's hilarity. An episode of
humour or kindness touches and amuses him here and therea pretty child looking at
a gingerbread stall; a pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her and chooses her
fairing; poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the waggon, mumbling his bone with the
honest family which lives by his tumbling; but the general impression is one more
melancholy than mirthful. When you come home you sit down in a sober,
contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply yourself to your books or
your business.
I have no other moral than this to tag to the present story of "Vanity Fair." Some
people consider Fairs immoral altogether, and eschew such, with their servants and
families: very likely they are right. But persons who think otherwise, and are of a lazy,
or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in for half an hour, and
look at the performances. There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some
grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling
indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and some light comic business; the
whole accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated with the
Author's own candles.

What more has the Manager of the Performance to say?To acknowledge the
kindness with which it has been received in all the principal towns of England through
which the Show has passed, and where it has been most favourably noticed by the
respected conductors of the public Press, and by the Nobility and Gentry. He is proud
to think that his Puppets have given satisfaction to the very best company in this
empire. The famous little Becky Puppet has been pronounced to be uncommonly
flexible in the joints, and lively on the wire; the Amelia Doll, though it has had a
smaller circle of admirers, has yet been carved and dressed with the greatest care by
the artist; the Dobbin Figure, though apparently clumsy, yet dances in a very amusing
and natural manner; the Little Boys' Dance has been liked by some; and please to
remark the richly dressed figure of the Wicked Nobleman, on which no expense has
been spared, and which Old Nick will fetch away at the end of this singular
performance.
And with this, and a profound bow to his patrons, the Manager retires, and the
curtain rises.
LONDON, June 28, 1848

The Complexity of Dickenss Fiction

It is possible to demonstrate the complexity of Dickenss imagination, as a source for sophisticated
psychoanalytical, archetypal and discourse studies [rhetoric of fiction texts] to date. It is amazing to see
the kind and number of Dickensian and other Victorian fiction analyses published late in the twentieth
century in America, which is a leader in critical and theory of criticism nowadays. David Shaws volume
Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation, published in Ithaca and London, by the Cornell
University Press in 1990, for example, explains, in its Part One, subtitled Mystery and the Unconscious:
Can Free Will Exist? and in the chapter We Know More Than We Know We Know: Repetition in
Dickens and Hardy how Great Expectations catches our subliminal attention by the density of
discourse details: when Jaggers, the lawyer, seeks out Pip, the legatee, in a pub of the village on the
marshes, to announce him that he has great expectations, Jaggers is handling a file, like the one which
Pip had procured for the convict; the file tells the whole story of who Pips benefactor is but this close
reading detail only becomes apparent on re-reading the book, so as to sense the repetitions on which the
poetics/politics of the text rests. To argue about the complexity of Dickenss discourse by invoking the
construction of characters and plots in psychoanalytical and archetypal terms means to praise the realistic
vein of his novels; and it also means to argue that Dickens did not only write novels which may easily
qualify as romances, by Northrop Fryes standard in the first Anatomy of Criticism essay. There is more
than suspense and sentimentality blooming in the typically Victorian world of Dickenss novels. Since

important writers texts will be complete literary documents, anyway, it is possible to analyze Dickenss
novels and illustrate practically all the schools of literary criticism and concepts of theory introduced in
the first academic year, the second semester.
The most complete studies of Dickenss imagination in the twentieth century were proposed, for
example, by Joseph Hillis Miller, in America. He began to write as a phenomenological critic, eager and
capable to characterize the structure of identity of writers who configure a literary universe (understood as
a literary phenomenon whose identity is unique and it can be rationally understood). The Form of
Victorian Fiction, published in Notre Dame and London in 1968, drew attention, in the chapter dedicated
to Dickens, to the powerful means employed by the author to comprise a whole society in the pages of
Our Mutual Friend ; he focused upon the books second chapter titled The Man from Somewhere and
its skilful gathering of practically all the characters of the book (and there is an amazing number of
characters in this novel): they are reflected in a mirror at the Veneerings dinner table that shows their
appearances and keeps them very near each other, without revealing the subtext of their co-existence from
behind the lustre of the occasion. This is, Hillis Miller says, a masterful way of concentrating what will be
understood at length, while the plot progresses, in terms of the social, moral and fictional deeper realities
underlying the deceitful/shiny appearances which keep people together in the world. Hillis Miller also
dedicated an entire book to Dickenss own cogito, as an author, or to the structure of his literary identity,
Charles Dickens: the World of His Novels, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1958.7
In earlier twentieth century decades and to the east of the Iron Curtain realistic nineteenth
century literature in Britain and Dickenss novels in particular were praised owing to their value as
empirical documents that gave substance to Marxist critiques of capitalism. There were numerous
ideological books of criticism produced in communist Moskow, translated into English by numerous
excellent translators (mostly Soviet Jews), and published with cultural propaganda money in Moskow and
Leningrade (the communist name of Sankt Petersburg) about the Victorian slums, vicious industrial town
life and towns. For example, A. Anixts History of English Literature (1956), focused on Dickenss
sombre sentimentalism in describing life in the workhouses of a poor parish boy (Oliver Twist) or the
kind of life to which an industrial, polluted city such as Coketown condemned its inmates to live (see
Hard Times, chapter V available on the internet). Slightly later, to the West of the Iron Curtain, Great
Expectations was praised from a Neo-Marxist perspective for its implicit exposure and convincing
critique of capitalist relations of production. Mammonism, as Thomas Carlyle would term it and
consumerism as we would deem it in the twentieth century, after being first instructed by Thorstein
Veblen about the conspicuous consumption of the leisure class, whose Theory he wrote in 1899, in
America, are the cause for many a Dickensian gluttons degradation (Pips, after he goes to live in
London, or the Jarndyce villains in Bleak House).
Since any and all literary texts will yield the rewarding secrets of their coherence when analysed
closely, by formalist means, and the structuralist demonstrations of literariness with narratology are more
likely to reveal the flaws in plausibility of the Dickensian plots the history of twentieth century literary
conceptualizations applicable to this great Victorians fiction had better be pursued from a
psychoanalytical and archetypal perspective. Esther Summersons case, in Bleak House, is one that
explains the complexity of personal identity formations under the pressure of external reality impositions.
The first thing to notice, in a Freudian perspective, is the complexity of this narrators identity, which
grows under the pressure of reality principle threats she is raised by her aunt who keeps mentioning the
7

Both Cornell and Johns Hopkins are Ivy League universities, i.e., top American universities, and the fact that
Victorian studies abounded in them shows the interest of Victoriana in the contemporary world.

curse of life, and shame, accompanying Esthers birth which fills the void left in the protagonists self by
the complete absence of family-romance figures; consequently, she fetishizes her doll. Dickenss great
achievement is that he is an apt narrator who doubles the readers participation in the Freudian
complexities of the characters with mystery (and often just sensational, ie too little credible) plots. The
doll as a feminine figure substitute prefigures Esthers encounter with her mother at the end of the novel.
In addition, what recommends the series of masterpieces of Dickenss later period of creation is
the symbolic depth of his novels: the symbolism of water and of the Thames as the hub of London life in
Our Mutual Friend (see all the scenes set on the waters of the Thames in the novel). The symbolism of
fire, slime and decay dominates Great Expectations (if you think of the tragic fire in Miss Havishams
decaying house) and that of fog/mist/haziness and pouring rain dominates Bleak House
It is worth analysing the apocalyptic imagery at the beginning of Bleak House, emblematic for the
entanglement of the national, English institutions of justice in the description of the High Court of
Chancery. But whereas the archetypal and symbolic element of Great Expectations was dictated by the
natural and moral entanglement of the marshes, and by the personal and social infection introduced into
the fictional world by Miss Havisham and the low light in her haunted and haunting bridal room, the
element of Bleak House is the wind. From the chilling London fog and the bleak November weather in
the opening scene, the book progresses towards the symbolically named country-house of the Lord and
Lady Deadlock and towards the Ghosts Walk promenade drenched in the sequel of the London fog:
damp rain. The characters themselves are threatened by windiness first the self-declared unreliable
narrator Esther Summerson, who imagines that she can never interpret correctly the things she describes,
and which she fears might lose their substance, as it were, gone with the wind; secondly, Mr Jarndyce,
the architect of the books encounters and the last in a line of people whom the system of the law turns
into inconsistent ghosts in nineteenth century Britain not very differently from the Romanian system of
the twenty-first century law. Mr Jarndyce explicitly complains of the wind in his head.
Progressing from one of his declared masterpieces to the next, Dickenss last finished novel, Our
Mutual Friend, reduces or enriches realism itself to such an extent as to put absence itself at its centre and
to become a very profound metatext. The text is more artistically conceived. This can be proved by
examining the complex significance of the syntagm our mutual friend itself. It becomes, from an empty
label of sociality in which everybody is everybody elses mutual friend (as in the beginning scene
already discussed in the Veneerings household) more and more involved in separating hypocritical or
maleficient mutual friends (such as the emblematically named Lammles, who are morally lame plotters
incapable of becoming genuine friends with anybody) from true the gallery of true friends spread in the
novel. At one extreme, the shallowest of mutual friends become plotters, such as the Lammles and the
couple of tramps, Mr Wegg and Mr Venus, at the other extreme, though they wear masks on their faces,
the good pairs of friends increase their virtuous powers in the course of the plot. As a realistic metatext,
the novel reflects though not on its own construction, as twentieth-century modernist and postmodernist literary works do on the whole range of mutual relations that society consists of: mutual
betrayal and mutual friendship alike. The wager of the book is to attract towards the positive pole of
genuine human love and friendship the casual mutual friends. The characters in the middle some of
them main characters of the book are attracted in patient ways, by intrinsic cause-effect movements of
the plot, by the morally whole characters. A statistic calculation can indicate that the number of villains
versus angels in this book is balanced and that the role of the low mimetic and very serious qui pro quos
is not sentimental but constructive. Dickens is more interested here in the coexistence of good and evil
side by side in society than in find solutions for defeating evil.

In his last finished book, there are more explicit indications about the books complex ironic
statements and, perhaps, less mystery. The sophistication of the titles, parts, subtitles and images is
greater in this book which wishes to indicate the ironies and complexities to be noticed in order to yield
its meaning. As a metatext, the book communicates with the readers over the heads of the characters and
their social masks. Dickenss art is more concentrated and systematic in this novel, for all its garrulous,
conversational spirit. The Cup and the Lip the books first part already indicates that the book is more
complex than it appears: theres many a slip between the cup and the lip (socoteala din ta^rg nu se
potriveste cu cea de acasa).
A twenty-first century reader, also, will go away from this book with a very great number of unforgettable
number of English identity emblems than are to be found in other novels by him. In the lecture put
together in more haste for the English Minor students, I made more of Dickenss memorable imagination
which fashioned the British nation. The comic types in Our Mutual Friend recall Dickenss humouristic
earlier fiction and they are the counterpart of the Bleak House national counterparts, which are, of course
primarily bleak. It is easy to remember the Veneerings as the types of Victorian upstarts brand new,
glossy, sticky and unfaithful, as in their relationship with Twemlow, remotely connected to a Lord (Lord
Snigsworth) who is always invited to their dinners but who does not manage to see if he is their older or
newest friend.

Chapter 2
THE MAN FROM SOMEWHERE
Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new
quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All
their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their
plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new,
their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as
was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a
great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon,
without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.
For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms,
to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape,
all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the
furniture, was observable in the Veneeringsthe surface smelt a little too much of the
workshop and was a trifle sticky.
There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors and
was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James's, when not in use, to
whom the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion. The name of this article was
Twemlow. Being first cousin to Lord Snigsworth, he was in frequent requisition, and
at many houses might be said to represent the dining-table in its normal state. Mr and
Mrs Veneering, for example, arranging a dinner, habitually started with Twemlow,

and then put leaves in him, or added guests to him. Sometimes, the table consisted of
Twemlow and half a dozen leaves; sometimes, of Twemlow and a dozen leaves;
sometimes, Twemlow was pulled out to his utmost extent of twenty leaves. Mr and
Mrs Veneering on occasions of ceremony faced each other in the centre of the board,
and thus the parallel still held; for, it always happened that the more Twemlow was
pulled out, the further he found himself from the center, and nearer to the sideboard at
one end of the room, or the window-curtains at the other.
But, it was not this which steeped the feeble soul of Twemlow in confusion. This he
was used to,and could take soundings of.The abyss to which he could find no bottom,
and from which st arted forth the engrossing and ever-swelling difficulty of his life,
was the insoluble question whether he was Veneering's oldest friend, or newest friend.

That the social is primarily a pragmatic relationship with the world of mutual friends, can also be seen in
the figure of Mr Podsnap, an embodiment of self-satisfied but vapid middle-class pater familias.

PODSNAPPERY (Chapter 11)

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap's opinion.
Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had
thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never
could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he
set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and,
above all other things, with himself.
Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled
that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified
conclusivenessnot to add a grand conveniencein this way of getting rid of
disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty
place in Mr Podsnap's satisfaction. 'I don't want to know about it; I don't choose to
discuss it; I don't admit it!' Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his
right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them
behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For
they affronted him.
Such mutual friends are perfect counterparts of Caragiales Amicul, though they are higher middle
class fops, by comparison with Caragiales petty middle class Mitica. Incidentally, however, Mr
Podsnaps habit of silencing everybody with his ponderous pods snapping presence, ruined his
daughters life in the book and made her be a prey of the Lammles scheming.

Our Mutual Friend also has a geuine pair of friends in the persons of the Boffin spouses, whose
environment testifies to their mutual tolerance and real affinities, as will be seen in the following
quotation.

'You don't understand it, Wegg, and I'll explain it. These arrangements is made by
mutual consent between Mrs Boffin and me. Mrs Boffin, as I've mentioned, is a
highflyer at Fashion; at present I'm not. I don't go higher than comfort, and comfort of
the sort that I'm equal to the enjoyment of. Well then. Where would be the good of
Mrs Boffin and me quarrelling over it? We never did quarrel, before we come into
Boffin's Bower as a property; why quarrel when we have come into Boffin's Bower as
a property? So Mrs Boffin, she keeps up her part of the room, in her way; I keep up
my part of the room in mine. In consequence of which we have at once, Sociability (I
should go melancholy mad without Mrs Boffin), Fashion, and Comfort. If I get by
degrees to be a higher-flyer at Fashion, then Mrs Boffin will by degrees come
for'arder. If Mrs Boffin should ever be less of a dab at Fashion than she is at the
present time, then Mrs Boffin's carpet would go back'arder. If we should both
continny as we are, why then here we are, and give us a kiss, old lady.'
Mrs Boffin who, perpetually smiling, had approached and drawn her plump arm
through her lord's, most willingly complied. Fashion, in the form of her black velvet
hat and feathers, tried to prevent it; but got deservedly crushed in the endeavour.
This whole passage follows after a strange question and a typically dishonest answer to it and it
represents what corrects the conventional exchanges between people in society at large. Mr Boffin puts
things right by going to the essence of things and overturning appearances in addition to contradicting
them. After presenting the following precinct to his visitor, Wegg, a man with a wooden leg and who can
read books, but otherwise a tramp off the streets, Mr Boffin asks:

'Do you like it, Wegg?' asked Mr Boffin, in his pouncing manner.
'I admire it greatly, sir,' said Wegg. 'Peculiar comfort at this fireside, sir.'
'Do you understand it, Wegg?'
'Why, in a general way, sir,' Mr Wegg was beginning slowly and knowingly, with
his head stuck on one side, as evasive people do begin, when the other cut him short.
Mr Boffins frankness is a sign of his trustworthiness in this book and the frankness and
fairness are mirrored by the interior of the house shared fairly with his wife who is also his
friend. Domestic bliss made of love, mutual respect and communication is the cause for calling
the Boffins home Boffins bower(of bliss):

Chapter 5
BOFFIN'S BOWER
It was the queerest of rooms, fitted and furnished more like a luxurious amateur taproom than anything else within the ken of Silas Wegg. There were two wooden settles

by the fire, one on either side of it, with a corresponding table before each. On one of
these tables, the eight volumes were ranged flat, in a row, like a galvanic battery; on
the other, certain squat case-bottles of inviting appearance seemed to stand on tiptoe
to exchange glances with Mr Wegg over a front row of tumblers and a basin of white
sugar. On the hob, a kettle steamed; on the hearth, a cat reposed. Facing the fire
between the settles, a sofa, a footstool, and a little table, formed a centrepiece devoted
to Mrs Boffin. They were garish in taste and colour, but were expensive articles of
drawing-room furniture that had a very odd look beside the settles and the flaring
gaslight pendent from the ceiling. There was a flowery carpet on the floor; but, instead
of reaching to the fireside, its glowing vegetation stopped short at Mrs Boffin's
footstool, and gave place to a region of sand and sawdust. Mr Wegg also noticed, with
admiring eyes, that, while the flowery land displayed such hollow ornamentation as
stuffed birds and waxen fruits under glass-shades, there were, in the territory where
vegetation ceased, compensatory shelves on which the best part of a large pie and
likewise of a cold joint were plainly discernible among other solids. The room itself
was large, though low; and the heavy frames of its old-fashioned windows, and the
heavy beams in its crooked ceiling, seemed to indicate that it had once been a house
of some mark standing alone in the country.
There is no room or time for transcribing the much surlier Victorian types of
deportment and imperial degeneracy of the nation which appear in Bleak House, but they
are there for the begging to be read if one gives a search for deportment or Mrs.
Jellyby in the pdf versions of the book.

Lecture 5: Module Three: Victorian Poetry (I) Lord Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold the

Paramount Early and Mid-Victorian Post-Romantic Voices (Contributions I, 40-50 and 54-55);
(Contributions II, 9-14 and 39-41)
I Introduction: predominant themes as the basis for grouping an early and a mid-Victorian poet together
II:Tennyson and Arnold compared as Paramount (Popular and Reverred) Poets
I Predominant Themes in Early and Mid-Victorian Poetryi: the Exemplary and the Elegiac Return to the
Past
After the early Victorian themes presented in Tennysons The Princess (see the Prologue), leisure,
pleasure and noble lineage can be seen developed in post-romantic idyllic poetry about the national
past, with several poems cast in the legendary Arthurian shape (The Lady of Shalott and the cycle
Idylls of the King nicknamed Idylls of the Prince, because they were composed to commemorate Prince

Albert, Victorias husband, after his death in 1869 and because by this time Tennyson had been lorded
and made Poet Laureate in 1850 and the Royal Pairs friend); Tennyson also revives classical Greek
heroes, motifs, examples to write dramatic monologues or fables: Ulysses (a dramatic monologue),
The Lotos Eaters (a fable which expresses, by an analogy, the modern self-indulging state of
prostration) Tithonus (a fable of human finitude).
Arnold laments or explains the predicament of the present by turning to the past, and writes elegies
meant to create deliverance (the comprehension of the present and the past, consequently the possession
of general ideas). 8 Arnold writes elegies, lyrical poems that convey the predicament of the present and
seek some consolation by the confrontation with the past (for example, in Dover Beach, he seeks
consolation in the lasting art and lessons of history produced in the age of Sophocles and Xenophon; in
The Scholar Gipsy, he seeks consolation in the exemplary escape from constraints that a man who loves
his soul more than his situation, as in the story included in the 1661 tract by Joseph Glanvil The Vanity of
Dogmatizing). Each of Arnolds poems moves towards some generic statement/lesson, which can be
irritating nowadays, after the twentieth century surrealistic collages and in general experimental poems
but it is the process and lyrical way in which his poems advance that matters in Arnolds poetry9.
Both writers search, in the past, for models to encourage the Bildung (spiritual and cultural edification)
of a heroic, enduring modern self - in an age of doubt and skepticism. 10Sceptical post-romantic poetry,
however, has absence, a sense of prostration and insufficiency at its heart; it tries to compensate for
absence by adopting a preachers voice ready to explain and extend consolations for the predicament of
the modern soul. This holds true for Tennysons In Memoriam (1850),, the elegy for the loss of a friend
and mentor, Arthur Henry Hallam, and for Arnolds The Buried Life, from the 1852 volume
Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems. Both Tennysons and Arnolds poems abound in instances of
translation/adaptation and (sentimental in the sense of later) assimilation of past models ( Empedocles,
of monuments, ages, texts and themes belonging to past classical ages (the Golden Age of ancient Greece,
the Elizabethan age.
II.Tennyson and Arnold compared as Paramount Poets
The oppressive landscape of Victorian poetry
The illustration of the elegiac vein in Tennysons and Arnolds poetry (a) AND (b) the lyrical rhythm
and devices of Tennysons meditation on death In Memoriam (1850):, whose curt meditative tableaux
are contrasted to Arnolds longer epics The Scholar Gipsy (1853) from the volume Poems: a New
Edition
(a)
8

Cf. On the Modern Element in Literature, 1857 (Arnolds inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry)
If one refers only to the lesson/general idea, the poems by Arnold are ruined for twentieth and twenty-first century
readers; if, on the contrary, the images and their progress are focused upon, the reading experience can be fully
rewarding.
10
Thomas Carlyle declared the modern age an age of skepticism in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in
History (1840 lectures, published in 1841) where he also singled out some modern saviours of humanity from
skepticism, acting as the heroes of old, the priests, kings and prophets: the poet and the man of letters. See lecture
five in Carlyles On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History:The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson,
Rousseau, Burns.
9

the elegiac vein in quotations from Tennyson and Arnold

* The early Tennyson: before In Memoriam
Compare Song, with the background of a poem about a dying swan in his first volume The dyin Swan,
Juvenilia (1830); notice the same elegiac vein in Tennysons later volumes whose titles contains the
ii
phrase other poems in the later collections The Lady of Shalott and Other Poems (1832) and English
Idylls and Other Poems (1840). It is worth noting that even in the twentieth century, you will get no lesser
a poet that T.S. Eliot titling his 1917 volume, by playing upon the Victorians manner in a manneristic and
also modernistic vein, Prufrock and Other Observations

Song
I
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave ithe earth so chilly:
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
II
The air is damp, and hushd and close,
As a sick mans room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the years last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave ithe earth so chilly:
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
(Song)
The wild swans death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow : at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full and clear;
..

And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,

And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marsh flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.
(The Dying Swan)
or, at the beginning of The Lotos-Eaters
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some thro wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below
From this atmosphere, Tennyson awakens into existence equally melancholy shadows of characters,
incarnations of sad, slothful dreams themselves:
The charmed sunset lingerd low adown
In the red West: thro mountain clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Borderd with palm, and many a winding vale

And meadow, set with slender gallingale;

A land where all things always seemd the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, wherof they gave
To each, but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep-asleep he seemd , yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.

The opening of the other Greek fable of Tithonus, the climactic outpour of similar imagery:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath.
And after many a summer dies the swan.

**The oppressive atmosphere of Arnolds elegiac verse in Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (the
Carthusian Monastery; from Poems: a New Edition, 1853.
The autumnal evening darkens round,
The wind is up, and drives the rain;
While, hark! far down, with strangled sound
Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain,
Where that wet smoke, among the woods,
Over his boiling cauldron broods.

A much earlier poem is explicit about what ailed Arnolds contemporary humanity longing for

DELIVERANCE from the shadow of itself11:

MATTHEW ARNOLD, FROM THE 1852 VOLUME EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA AND
OTHER POEMS

To Marguerite: Continued
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who order'd, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

The Buried Life

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,

Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
11

See Thomas Carlyles Sartor Resartus The Everlasting Yea, after the passage with the Infinite Shoeblack:
Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.

Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselvesand yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!
But we, my love!doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?must we too be dumb?
Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!
Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be
By what distractions he would be possess'd,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity

That it might keep from his capricious play

His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being's law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in usto know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is wellbut 't is not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour

Their stupefying power;

Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Onlybut this is rare
When a belovd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

(b)

*The lyrical rhythm and devices of Tennysons meditation on death In Memoriam (1850)
*The lyrical rhythm and devices of Tennysons meditation on death In Memoriam (1850)

IV
To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,

That thou shouldst fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
What is it makes me beat so low?

Something it is which thou hast lost,

Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross

All night below the darkend eyes:
With morning wakes the will, and cries,,
Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.
...................................................
III
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,

What whispers from thy lying lip?

The stars, she whispers, blindly run;

A web is wovn across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:

And all the phantom, Nature, standsWith all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,A hollow form with empty hands.

And shall I take a thing so blind,

Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blod,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
...................................................
XI
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

And on these dews that drench the furze,

And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

..............................................................
L
Be near me when my light is low
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is rackd with pangs that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

B.
III. Conclusions
The taste: elegiac. The paramount Victorian poetic voices were voices of epigones: they considered themselves
epigones of the grandiose, classical past but in fact they were post-romantic epigones, for which see quotations
from the Contributions I, p. 42, below
Post-romantic- from the point of view of Northrop Fryes Anatomy of Criticism, the First Essay, it is possible
to detach a number of features that the Romantics had added to poetry, features that were not lost in Victorian
verse12.
Regarding the poet, the Victorian poet, just like the Romantic, moves back in time and space, higher too and
beyond the conventional experience, into a more imaginative order of experience. But whereas the Romantic
remains lyrically elevated in/by that imaginative transport, the Victorian poet returns wiser and embittered, as a rule,
to his present-day audience for whose sole benefit, it appears, he has soared into the provisional infinite; hence the
shared elegiac tone associated to Victorian lyricism -the romantic love of (organic) metaphor and the Victorian
alternative love of allegory, simile and dramatic representation in general. It is not by accident that the Victorian
poets selected the form of the dramatic monologue as their favourite form of self-expression.
-Regarding the formal features shared by the Victorian with the Romantic poets, Frye mentions the tendency of the
Romantics to develop encyclopaedic, grand, long poems in the form of epics, which is retained in Victorian poetry.
The structures and motivations of these long epics can only be elucidated when relating the poetry to the poets own
design. The range of encyclopaedic epics includes:

12

This overall view of Victorian poetry is a synthesis from the Fryean text mentioned, the second part of the First
Essay, dedicated to thematic (non-fiction).

Victorian replicas of mythological, religious or heritage epics (respectively in Tennysons Arthurian Idylls
of the King, 1859, Gerard Manley Hopkinss The Wreck of the Deutschland, 1875 or Matthew Arnolds longer
verse narratives Empedocles on Etna, 1852 and The Scholar Gipsy, 1853 );
allegorical epics (such as Tennysons The Palace of Art (1832) or the feminist fable of The Princess
(1847));
psychological epics of all hues: extensive and comprehensive spiritual autobiographies in a major elegiac
key (e.g. Tennysons peerless In Memoriam or Matthew Arnolds Thyrsis); dramatised alienist confessions
(Tennysons monodrama Maud or Robert Brownings long psychological and philosophical thriller The Ring and
the Book 1868-9

The early and mid-Victorian themes are to be compared with slightly later Victorian themes: poems that exalted
domestic women or debated fashionable ideas in dramatic monologues. For the latter category, see Robert
Brownings Fra Lippo Lippi and Caliban Upon Setebos and for the former category, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Aurora Leigh(1864) and Coventry Patmores The Angel in the House (1854/1862), a paragon of desirable
femininity dedicated to your

gentle self, my Wife, And love, that grows from one to all.
Yet is it now my chosen task/ To sing her worth as Maid and Wife;. There follows a
long list of virtues derived from the fairest even in her fair heart ( So may my happy skill disclose/
New fairness even in her fair heart); that the angel in the house possessed: gentleness announced by a
smiling face; the pairing of love and duty, lacking pride, readiness to please (cf. the Preludes, to Part I, the third
one, titled Love and Duty: Anne

lived so truly from above,/ She was so gentle and so

good,/That duty bade me fall in love; and the third one titled A Distinction The lack of lovely
pride, in her/ Who strives to please, my pleasure numbs,/And still the maid I most
prefer/ Whose care to please with pleasing comes. eagerness for amity the womans
eagerness / For amity full-signd and seald ; benign and honourable, meaning womanly And
yet to see her so benign,/ So honourable and womanly,/In every maiden kindness
mine,/ And full of gayest courtesy,/Was pleasure so without alloy,/ Such
unreproved, sufficient bliss, ; co-equal in wisdom, woman and man: Amidst the presence of the
Lord/ Co-equal Wisdom laughs and plays. / Female and male God made the man;/
His image is the whole, not half;

Here is the beginning of Tennysons Arthurian fable about the poets fate in The Lady of Shalott:

The Lady of Shalott (1832)

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Part I
On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot;
The yellow-leaved waterlily
The green-sheathed daffodilly
Tremble in the water chilly
Round about Shalott.
Willows whiten, aspens shiver.
The sunbeam showers break and quiver
In the stream that runneth ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly,
O'er the stream of Camelot.
Piling the sheaves in furrows airy,
Beneath the moon, the reaper weary
Listening whispers, ' 'Tis the fairy,
Lady of Shalott.'

Lecture 6 Module Three: Oblique Victorian Poetry (II): the Dramatic Monologue Species:

Robert Browning the Scandal Monger - Irony and Idealism in his Inciting Verse (Contributions I,
81-87). The Comparison withTennysons Ulysses
1

The contrast between the indirect narrative and indirect dramatic discourse (of the dramatic
monologue): Brownings voice in By the Fire Side (1833) and in poems from the volumes
Romances (1845), Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personnae (1864) (Contributions I,

75 et seq.)
While in By the Fire Side the reader traverses several discourses embedded in one another as a
Chinese boxes game (in a frame narrative about a studious, meditative and poetic man seen from
outside by youngsters giggling at his activities, followed closely by another narrative that makes the man
advance into his past *to slope+ to Italy at last/And youth, by green degrees , only to get, finally, to the
core of the poem, which is love: domestic, mature, settled love longing to understand with the soul The
Great Word which makes all things new/When earth breaks up and Heaven expands and what change
will come when earth breaks up and Heaven expands for people who feel their one soul together.
II
I shall be found by the fire, suppose,

III
Till the young ones whisper, finger on
lip

Oer a great wise book as beseemeth

There he is at it, deep in Greek:
age
While the shutters flap as the crosswind
Now, then, or never, out we slip
blows
And I turn the page, and I turn the page, To cut from the hazels by the creek
Not verse now, only prose !
A mainmast for our ship!
IV
V
I shall be at it indeed, my friends!
The outside frame, like your hazel-treesGreek puts already on either side
But the inside-archway narrows fast,
Such a branch-work forth as soon
And a rarer sort succeeds to these,
extends
To a vista opening far and wide,
And we slope to Italy at last
And I pass out where it ends.
And youth, by green degrees.

Next, for most of its middle part, the poem remains in the region of what Mill called the state or states
of human sensibility observing itself and human emotion painted with scrupulous truth

XXXIX
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the bloods best play,
And life be a proof of this!

The poem connects its meditations (that resemble Tennysons In Memoriam stanzas) along
general lines because it amplifies its thoughts to embrace with the soul all the levels of nature
and hold them together in a complete picture of existence
XXVII
Think, when our one soul understands
The Great Word which makes all things new
When earth breaks up and Heaven expands
How will the change strike me and you
In the House not made with hands?

Notice in the final soliloquy (as a meditative discourse addressed to an audience, as we remember from
Mills What Is Poetry?) the shift of persons to the first person plural, to the plurality of togetherness,
to me and you from the predominant I ,at the beginning of the poem. The subject of this poem is
the integration of a single mans experience as recollected in tranquility by the mature soul when the
soul in its maturity, which has brought about plenitude and reconciliation
LI
I am named and known by that hours feat;
There took my station and degree:
So grew my own small life complete
As nature obtained her best of me.........................................................
LIII

So, the earth has gained by one man more,

And the gain of earth must be Heavens gain too,
And the whole is well worth thinking oer
When the autumn comes......................

The contrary is true for the souls presented in dramatic turmoil in dramatic indirect discourse, The
dramatic monologue is a species of introspective poetry, neither fully lyrical, nor just epic, because
intensely dramatic. The indirection of Brownings dramatic monologues comes from his presenting the
tensions of the soul in moments, situations or even characters (personages: spectacular individuals) that
discover themselves in speech in the action of speech (this is why the original lecture in Contributions I
was titled The Action of Robert Brownings Verse. Many of the characters in Brownings dramatic
monologues are surprising as scandal mongers confessions (in The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint
Praxeds Church, a bishop lays bare his inmost passionate soul , hankering for love and passionately
possessive even at the hour of his death so there is no sanctity to be found in his thoughts on the
death bed ; in Porphyrias Lover, the lover is a killer (like in My Last Duchess tormented): he wants to
make eternal the love for him discernible in his lovers eyes and so strangles her . Other poems by
Browning present cultural or literary ideas in striking ways, because their implied author is setting the
stage for scandal (though, as seen from By the Fireside, Browning believed in the sublime). This is the
case of Fra Lippo Lippi, which presents the ethos of the Renaissance in the guise of a confessive selfpresentation made by a religious painter who is caught in a by-street by guards late at night after a
Falstaffian night out. Another striking cultural and literary idea is entrusted to a garrulous Caliban
profiting from Prosperos and Mirandas afternoon sleep to communicate his ideas about God in the
poem Caliban upon Setebos (Setebos, the God of his dam, or mother, Sycorax). We gain insight about
a slave and witchs god in a poem titled Natural Theology on the Island natural theology being a way
of making deductions about God judging by natural standards (discovering a kind of grass-roots God
rather unlike the God of revelation).

The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxeds Church

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews -sons mine ... ah God, I know not! Well
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
Whats done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since;
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the worlds a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,

Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask

Do I live, am I dead? Peace, peace seems all.
St Praxeds ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South
He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o the epistle-side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,
And up into the aery dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeams sure to lurk:
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.
- Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
Put me where I may look at him! True peach,
Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!
Draw close: that conflagration of my church
- What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sinks,
And if ye find...ah God, I know not, I!...
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jews head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein oer the Madonnas breast...
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati villa with its bath,
So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Fathers globe on both his hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weavers shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripon, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
St Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymphs last garment off,
And Moses with the tables...but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp

Bricked oer with beggars mouldy travertine

Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me -all of jasper, then!
Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
Theres plenty jasper somewhere in the world And have I not St Praxeds ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
Thats if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tullys every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolfs second line Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes for a mort-cloth drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptors-work:
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
St Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marbles language, Latin pure, discreet,
- Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas: will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizards quick,
They glitter like your mothers for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
Do I live, am I dead? There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death -ye wish it -God, ye wish it! Stone Gritsone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,

But in a row: and, going, turn your backs

- Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

Read the sequence of the speech acts in swift succession, alternating clichs (Vanity, saith the preacher,
vanity! ), quite normal in the discourse of a priest *but they happen to be disproved by this Bishops own
rambling on the deathbed before those gathered in the state room around the dying Bishops bed+ . As
speech acts go, the poem consists of a set of injunctions , ie indications about how to set his tomb,
alternating with expressions of spite, intense investments of passion and expressions of possessiveness,
threats, promises, meditations about death and direct transcriptions of thoughts and sensations
experienced by a dying person although the person is realistically and sincerely portrayed as retaining
all the authentic notes of an outspoken self. The poem may well be a faithful presentation of the souls
floundering on the death bed.

Porphyria's Lover
BY ROBERT BROW NING

The rain set early in to-night,

The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,

And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,

Murmuring how she loved me she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!

Porphyria's love: she guessed not how

Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
Notice the ironic ending of this poem which has confined its reader to the sick love meditations of the
speaker only to record, at the end, the potential presence of God as a silent interlocutor and his
indirectly recorded disapproval. This is the way the dramatic monologue should be read: taking cum
grano salis its strong emotionally tinged statements. Also, it should be remembered that the dramatic
monologue always presupposes a silent interlocutor as the necessary coordinate for the dramatic
situation from which the monologue springs. But by contrast to the eloquence of soliloquies, the
eloquence of the dramatic monologue is not one directly addressing a public audience; rather, it is a
more complex, a second level eloquence: an individuals eloquence arranged for the benefit of a third
party, rather than that of his individual interlocutor. When applying Mills criteria, in What is Poetry?,
the dramatic monologue eloquence is like the broadcasting of impassioned overheard truth. The
readers task is to see the masks of truth in the heard-overheard monologue. This is what T.S. Eliot
complained about, rather than enjoying the implicit stratagem, in the essay The Three Voices of
Poetry where he analyses among others Brownings poetry.

***

Fra Lippo Lippi the special brand of idealism that springs from a grotesque encounter with a monk
who is caught in a by-street in the best of moods after a loving encounter with one of the sporting
ladies who leave their door ajar. The poem is an indirect declaration of hedonistic faith the
Renaissance mans faith.
(the beginning of the poem comes from the useful site www.victorianweb.org)
I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!
What, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley's end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?

The man is drunk and in the best of dispositions, singing a gay Renaissance ditty:
Flower o' the broom,
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
Flower o' the quince,

I let Lisa go, and what good is life since?

Flower o' the thyme> and so on. Round they went.

He narrates his whole life, telling the guards he had been picked from the streets where he was
starving and made a monk, though he had absolutely no apetite for ascetic life.
Lord, they'd have taught me Latin in pure waste!
Flower o' the clove,
All the Latin I construe is, "amo" I love!>
But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets
Eight years together, as my fortune was,
Watching folk's faces to know who will fling
The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires,

110

(and the continuation only comes after as many lines as the predicate of Fate which foresaw
in the poem by Arnold The Buried Life):
Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
He learns the look of things, and none the less
For admonition from the hunger-pinch.

On the contrary, while in the convent he was dawdling in the margin of the antiphonary (a hymn
book), just as Celtic Christian monks actually did in monastic centres of learning in the early
Middle Ages in Ireland.
I drew men's faces on my copy-books,
Scrawled them within the antiphonary's marge,
130
Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes,
Found eyes and nose and chin for A's and B's,
And made a string of pictures of the world
Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun,
On the wall, the bench, the door. The monks looked black.
"Nay," quoth the Prior, "turn him out, d' ye say?
In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark.
What if at last we get our man of parts,
We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese
And Preaching Friars, to do our church up fine
140
And put the front on it that ought to be!"

His talent was recognized by the abbot and he was commissioned with painting the walls of the
convent, to match other convents whose walls were decorated with frescoes. But instead of
painting saints on the walls, he drew all that he saw around the convent:
First, every sort of monk, the black and white,
I drew them, fat and lean : then, folk at church,
From good old gossips waiting to confess
Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends
To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim's son
Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,
Signing himself with the other because of Christ
(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this
After the passion of a thousand years)

150

Till some poor girl, her apron o'er her head,

(Which the intense eyes looked through) came at eve
On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,
160
Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers

Fra Lippo Lippis sensibility to flowers recalls the bow of cherries presented to the Duchess by
an officious fool, which, rather than who, made her blush (see My Last Duchess). He was, of
course chided for his Renaissance love of nature by the convent superiors who were still living in
the Middle Ages in the poems fable.
Give us no more of body than shows soul!
Here's Giotto, with his Saint a-praising God,
That sets us praising why not stop with him?
Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head
With wonder at lines, colors, and what not?
Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!

190

To them, the impassioned painter answers developing his fiery creed:

Cant I take breath and try to add lifes flash,
And then add soul and heighten them threefold?
Or say theres beauty with no soul at all
(I never saw it put the case the same-)
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents:
Thats somewhat: and youll find the soul you have missed,
Within yourself, when you return him thanks. (lines 213 219)

..
And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over,
The world and lifes too big to pass for a dream,
And I do these wild things in sheer despite,
And play the fooleries you catch me at,
In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass
After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,
Although the milller does not preach to him

The only good of grass is to make chaff.

What would men have? Do they like grass or no
May they or maynt they? All I wants the thing
Settled for ever one way. As it is,
You tell too many lies and hurt yourself:
You dont like what you only like too much,
You do like what, if given you at your word,
You find abundantly detestable.
For me, I think I speak as I was taught;
I always see the garden and God there
A-making mans wife: and, my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh,
I cant unlearn ten minutes afterwards. (lines 250 269)

Like in Carlyles Sartor Resartus, Brownings grotesque characters begin the same main subject of the
soul, albeit from the lowest level of the philosophy of appearances, i.e., of satire dressed up in the
burlesque, carnivalesque garb of satire or the philosophy of clothes. It can be stated that Browning
starts from the margin in order to talk of the centre, by faithfully cataloguing each, and every, and all
the material movements of this fabulous creature, the human soul

The most spectacular and somehow easiest to understand in its letter, is Caliban upon
Setebos, since it is based on familiar characters and cues from Shakespeares The Tempest .
After being presented as a kind of idiot with a rich soul (as Faulkners Benjy, in The Sound and
the Fury), at the beginning of the poem, Calibans meditations, interspersed with accents of
hatred will present a sadistic god, Setebos, who created suffering creatures in his own liking,
because he was a frustrated creature, just as Caliban himself. This is the God of the natural, i.e.
modern, theology, in the liking of the creatures in nature. But there is another stronger God than
Setebos, in the poem, The Quiet, whom Caliban cannot know, since he is a merely an inchoate,
inferior being, just as we know him from Shakespeare. iii

Tennysons dramatic monologues (Ulysses, Saint Simeon Stylites, Tithonus) are less dramatic,
closer to soliloquies in their direct address to the audience less dramatic, ironical and paradoxical,
which is why the create less tension. They are more orderly, less swift, paradoxical or ironical than the
outburst of Browning s speakers in the dramatic monologue species of grotesque, realistic and
impassioned, without being ultimately lyrical or narrative but only dramatic.

Ulysses
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: But every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachos,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isleWell-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have tol'd and wrought, and thought with meThat ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Caliban upon Setebos

BY ROBERT BROW NING

"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."

(David, Psalms 50.21)
['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
And while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,
He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
And talks to his own self, howe'er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
Because to talk about Him, vexesha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,

When talk is safer than in winter-time.

Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
In confidence he drudges at their task,
And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.]

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!

'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.

'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,

But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:

He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only, she ever sickened, found repulse

At the other kind of water, not her life,

(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,

Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their holeHe made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
He could not, Himself, make a second self
To be His mate; as well have made Himself:
He would not make what He mislikes or slights,
An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:

But did, in envy, listlessness or sport,

Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too,that is it.
Because, so brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if He begin to plague.
Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,
Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived,
Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,
Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,
Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain;
Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme,
And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.
Put case, unable to be what I wish,
I yet could make a live bird out of clay:
Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban
Able to fly?for, there, see, he hath wings,
And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire,
And there, a sting to do his foes offence,
There, and I will that he begin to live,
Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns
Of grigs high up that make the merry din,

Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.

In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,
And he lay stupid-like,why, I should laugh;
And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,
Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg
And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.
Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,
Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
Making and marring clay at will? So He.

'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,

Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;

'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,

And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.

Well then, 'supposeth He is good i' the main,

Placable if His mind and ways were guessed,
But rougher than His handiwork, be sure!
Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself,
And envieth that, so helped, such things do more
Than He who made them! What consoles but this?
That they, unless through Him, do nought at all,
And must submit: what other use in things?
'Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint
That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay
When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue:
Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay
Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt:
Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth
"I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,
I make the cry my maker cannot make
With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!'
Would not I smash it with my foot? So He.

But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease?

Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that,
What knows,the something over Setebos
That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought,
Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o'er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind:
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
But never spends much thought nor care that way.
It may look up, work up,the worse for those
It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos
The many-handed as a cuttle-fish,
Who, making Himself feared through what He does,
Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar
To what is quiet and hath happy life;
Next looks down here, and out of very spite
Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real,
These good things to match those as hips do grapes.
'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.

Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books

Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words;
Has peeled a wand and called it by a name;
Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe
The eyed skin of a supple oncelot;
And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole,
A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch,
Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,
And saith she is Miranda and my wife:
'Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane
He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge;
Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o' the rock and calls him Caliban;
A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.
'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way,
Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.
His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so.
Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.

Had He meant other, while His hand was in,

Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,
Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,
Or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint
Like an orc's armour? Ay,so spoil His sport!
He is the One now: only He doth all.

'Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him.

Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why?
'Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast
Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose,
But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate
Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes.
Also it pleaseth Setebos to work,
Use all His hands, and exercise much craft,
By no means for the love of what is worked.
'Tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world
When all goes right, in this safe summer-time,
And he wants little, hungers, aches not much,
Than trying what to do with wit and strength.
'Falls to make something: 'piled yon pile of turfs,
And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,
And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,

And set up endwise certain spikes of tree,

And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top,
Found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill.
No use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake;
'Shall some day knock it down again: so He.

'Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!

One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope.
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why?
So it is, all the same, as well I find.
'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm
With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises
Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave,
Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck,
Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue,
And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite.
'Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies)
Where, half an hour before, I slept i' the shade:
Often they scatter sparkles: there is force!
'Dug up a newt He may have envied once
And turned to stone, shut up Inside a stone.
Please Him and hinder this?What Prosper does?

Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!

There is the sport: discover how or die!
All need not die, for of the things o' the isle
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees;
Those at His mercy,why, they please Him most
When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice!
Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth.
You must not know His ways, and play Him off,
Sure of the issue. 'Doth the like himself:
'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears
But steals the nut from underneath my thumb,
And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence:
'Spareth an urchin that contrariwise,
Curls up into a ball, pretending death
For fright at my approach: the two ways please.
But what would move my choler more than this,
That either creature counted on its life
To-morrow and next day and all days to come,
Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart,
"Because he did so yesterday with me,
And otherwise with such another brute,
So must he do henceforth and always."Ay?
Would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means!

'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

'Conceiveth all things will continue thus,

And we shall have to live in fear of Him
So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change,
If He have done His best, make no new world
To please Him more, so leave off watching this,
If He surprise not even the Quiet's self
Some strange day,or, suppose, grow into it
As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we,
And there is He, and nowhere help at all.

'Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.

His dam held different, that after death
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
Idly! He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for worst,with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is, not to seem too happy. 'Sees, himself,
Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.
'Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball

On head and tail as if to save their lives:

Moves them the stick away they strive to clear.

Even so, 'would have Him misconceive, suppose

This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,
And always, above all else, envies Him;
Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights,
Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh,
And never speaks his mind save housed as now:
Outside, 'groans, curses. If He caught me here,
O'erheard this speech, and asked "What chucklest at?"
'Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off,
Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,
Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,
Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste:
While myself lit a fire, and made a song
And sung it, "What I hate, be consecrate
To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate
For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?"
Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He

Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.

[What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!

Crickets stop hissing: not a birdor, yes,
There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze
A tree's head snapsand there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!]

The early and mid-Victorian themes are to be compared with slightly later Victorian themes: poems that exalted
domestic women or debated fashionable ideas in dramatic monologues. For the latter category, see Robert
Brownings Fra Lippo Lippi and Caliban Upon Setebos and for the former category, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning Aurora Leigh(1864) and Coventry Patmores The Angel in the House (1854/1862), a paragon of
desirable femininity dedicated to your gentle self, my Wife, And love, that grows from one

to all. Yet is it now my chosen task/ To sing her worth as Maid and Wife;. There
follows a long list of virtues derived from the fairest even in her fair heart ( So may my happy skill
disclose/ New fairness even in her fair heart); that the angel in the house possessed: gentleness
announced by a smiling face; the pairing of love and duty, lacking pride, readiness to please (cf. the Preludes, to Part
I, the third one, titled Love and Duty: Anne lived so truly from above,/ She was so gentle and

so good,/That duty bade me fall in love; and the third one titled A Distinction The lack of
lovely pride, in her/ Who strives to please, my pleasure numbs,/And still the maid I
most prefer/ Whose care to please with pleasing comes. eagerness for amity the
womans eagerness / For amity full-signd and seald ; benign and honourable, meaning
womanly And yet to see her so benign,/ So honourable and womanly,/In every
maiden kindness mine,/ And full of gayest courtesy,/Was pleasure so without
alloy,/ Such unreproved, sufficient bliss, ; co-equal in wisdom, woman and man: Amidst the
presence of the Lord/ Co-equal Wisdom laughs and plays. / Female and male God
made the man;/ His image is the whole, not half;
ii

Here is the beginning of Tennysons Arthurian fable about the poets fate in The Lady of Shalott:

The Lady of Shalott (1832)

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Part I
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot;
The yellow-leaved waterlily
The green-sheathed daffodilly
Tremble in the water chilly
Round about Shalott.
Willows whiten, aspens shiver.
The sunbeam showers break and quiver
In the stream that runneth ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly,
O'er the stream of Camelot.
Piling the sheaves in furrows airy,
Beneath the moon, the reaper weary
Listening whispers, ' 'Tis the fairy,
Lady of Shalott.'
iii

Caliban upon Setebos

BY ROBERT BROW NING

"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."

(David, Psalms 50.21)
['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
And while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,

Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,

And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,
He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
And talks to his own self, howe'er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
Because to talk about Him, vexesha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
When talk is safer than in winter-time.
Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
In confidence he drudges at their task,
And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.]

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!

'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.

'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,

But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,

And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:

He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only, she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,

Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue

That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm,

And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their holeHe made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
He could not, Himself, make a second self
To be His mate; as well have made Himself:
He would not make what He mislikes or slights,
An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:
But did, in envy, listlessness or sport,
Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too,that is it.
Because, so brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if He begin to plague.
Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,
Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived,
Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,
Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,
Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain;
Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme,

And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.

Put case, unable to be what I wish,
I yet could make a live bird out of clay:
Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban
Able to fly?for, there, see, he hath wings,
And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire,
And there, a sting to do his foes offence,
There, and I will that he begin to live,
Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns
Of grigs high up that make the merry din,
Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.
In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,
And he lay stupid-like,why, I should laugh;
And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,
Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg
And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.
Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,
Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,

Making and marring clay at will? So He.

'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,

Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.

Well then, 'supposeth He is good i' the main,

Placable if His mind and ways were guessed,
But rougher than His handiwork, be sure!
Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself,
And envieth that, so helped, such things do more
Than He who made them! What consoles but this?
That they, unless through Him, do nought at all,
And must submit: what other use in things?
'Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint

That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay
When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue:
Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay
Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt:
Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth
"I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,
I make the cry my maker cannot make
With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!'
Would not I smash it with my foot? So He.

But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease?

Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that,
What knows,the something over Setebos
That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought,
Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o'er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind:
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
But never spends much thought nor care that way.

It may look up, work up,the worse for those

It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos
The many-handed as a cuttle-fish,
Who, making Himself feared through what He does,
Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar
To what is quiet and hath happy life;
Next looks down here, and out of very spite
Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real,
These good things to match those as hips do grapes.
'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.
Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words;
Has peeled a wand and called it by a name;
Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe
The eyed skin of a supple oncelot;
And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole,
A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch,
Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,
And saith she is Miranda and my wife:
'Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane
He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge;

Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,

Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o' the rock and calls him Caliban;
A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.
'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way,
Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.
His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so.
Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.
Had He meant other, while His hand was in,
Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,
Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,
Or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint
Like an orc's armour? Ay,so spoil His sport!
He is the One now: only He doth all.

'Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him.

Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why?
'Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast
Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose,
But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate
Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes.

Also it pleaseth Setebos to work,

Use all His hands, and exercise much craft,
By no means for the love of what is worked.
'Tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world
When all goes right, in this safe summer-time,
And he wants little, hungers, aches not much,
Than trying what to do with wit and strength.
'Falls to make something: 'piled yon pile of turfs,
And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,
And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,
And set up endwise certain spikes of tree,
And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top,
Found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill.
No use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake;
'Shall some day knock it down again: so He.

'Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!

One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope.
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why?
So it is, all the same, as well I find.
'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm
With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises

Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave,

Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck,
Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue,
And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite.
'Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies)
Where, half an hour before, I slept i' the shade:
Often they scatter sparkles: there is force!
'Dug up a newt He may have envied once
And turned to stone, shut up Inside a stone.
Please Him and hinder this?What Prosper does?
Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!
There is the sport: discover how or die!
All need not die, for of the things o' the isle
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees;
Those at His mercy,why, they please Him most
When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice!
Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth.
You must not know His ways, and play Him off,
Sure of the issue. 'Doth the like himself:
'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears
But steals the nut from underneath my thumb,
And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence:
'Spareth an urchin that contrariwise,

Curls up into a ball, pretending death

For fright at my approach: the two ways please.
But what would move my choler more than this,
That either creature counted on its life
To-morrow and next day and all days to come,
Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart,
"Because he did so yesterday with me,
And otherwise with such another brute,
So must he do henceforth and always."Ay?
Would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means!
'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

'Conceiveth all things will continue thus,

And we shall have to live in fear of Him
So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change,
If He have done His best, make no new world
To please Him more, so leave off watching this,
If He surprise not even the Quiet's self
Some strange day,or, suppose, grow into it
As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we,
And there is He, and nowhere help at all.

'Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.

His dam held different, that after death

He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
Idly! He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for worst,with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is, not to seem too happy. 'Sees, himself,
Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.
'Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball
On head and tail as if to save their lives:
Moves them the stick away they strive to clear.

Even so, 'would have Him misconceive, suppose

This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,
And always, above all else, envies Him;
Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights,
Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh,
And never speaks his mind save housed as now:
Outside, 'groans, curses. If He caught me here,
O'erheard this speech, and asked "What chucklest at?"
'Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off,
Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,

Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,

Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste:
While myself lit a fire, and made a song
And sung it, "What I hate, be consecrate
To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate
For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?"
Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.

[What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!

Crickets stop hissing: not a birdor, yes,
There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze
A tree's head snapsand there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month

One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!]

Module Two: The Victorian Novel (II): The Art of Victorian Feminine Fiction in Jane
Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch (plus Silas Marner as a masterpiece in little
comparing the novels from various specialized points of view of twentieth century criticism
(narratological, myth-criticism, archetypal, psychoanalytical; the conditions for the construction
of sociality and identity in Victorian realism; proto-feminist inscriptions) (Contributions I, 6475)
Lecture plan topics:
1. Methodological observations preceding the direct reference to the novels: The
centre. From narratological analysis to myth-criticism archetypalpsychoanalytical interpretation. Gynocritical implications of the feminine authors
ambition.
2. Mixed analyses of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch as novels with
feminine centres
3. The Victorian construction of sociality and identity in Middlemarch and Silas
Marner

1
By the mid-Victorian age, the novel became an artistic vehicle capable to debate and develop a
thesis and to radiate meanings from a centre not only from a symbolical (imaginative), but
also from narratological (technical) centre. Narratology, this early branch of structuralism,
accounts for the method, the coherence and the intention of fiction when it is organized by
turning the story (a collection of incidents see John Stuart Mills WIP? that answer the
question: what comes next? see E.M. Forsters Aspects of the Novel) into a plot ( it is a plot
and not a story in so far as it organizes contextual correspondences between characters and
their actions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, between the fictional narrative that
advances inductively constructing meanings that add up into authoritative/self-imposed truths
and the narrative method/voice aided by the setting.)iii
In terms of autonomous twentieth century criticism,iii the womens novels stand out
through the fact that, in them, the plot is the meaning of a book as a whole and characters or
incidents are subordinated to them.As narratology analyses the angle (point of view, or
narrative method) from which the story is told as an important factor of the plot, and the
significance of the novels choices of settings/contexts for the narrative, in the Victorian
womens novels, the implied authors choices/intentions appear more clearly.iii

For the women writers of the Victorian age, it is amazing to see how clearly the
narratological centre of the books can be projected into monomythical or archetypal forms of
plot. There is a monomythical centre to Charlotte Bronts novel Jane Eyre, whose protagonist
may be seen as a heroic Eve who saves her Adam (Mr. Rochester) from the ancestral curse in a
re-constructed, romance Victorian paradise of love and marriage; on the contrary, there is a
woman who damns her twin soul and their whole world in Wuthering Heights in a novel whose
plot has a lot of psychoanalyzable energy in it, and an archetypal centre from which meanings
radiate in several cycles (of disaster) they radiate, that is, until the negations triggered by an
original mistake, the equivalent of the Biblical sin in the myth-criticism perspective, have
consumed themselves, as declared in the often quoted passage of novels final chapter (and the
novels final words):

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering
among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the
grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the
sleepers in that quiet earth. ,them refers to the three headstones on the slope
next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath[ Catherine
Earnshaws+ ; Edgar Lintons only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its
foot; Heathcliffs still bareAfter noting that these words are spoken from outside the actual story itself, we must
remark that the question of who speaks what and why and at what precise moment in
Wuthering Heights, namely the question of its narrative method is as interesting as its hidden
archetypal meanings. Archetypally, in Jungian psychoanalytical terms, the novels traumatic
events point to the way the already individuated soul (dominated by the archetype of the
divine couple)iii is crushed to smithereens by the archetypal woman of the novel, Catherine
Earnshaw with her soul enslaved to Victorian conventions and imprisoned in the weakness of
the flesh when measuring itself up to the spirit (see below for an extensive explanation of these
ideas also available in Contributions I, 64-75). The novels popularity comes, rather, from its
romantic aura and the (myth-)archetypal idea about the imprisoned titanic soul (Catherine
Earnshaws, first, enslaved to Victorian love of a comfortable life with the Lintons, and
Heathcliffs, secondly, in so far as Heathcliffs life is traumatized and therefore stuck in the
destructively violent thirst for revenge on the Lintons for losing his Cathy to them).
Moving even further in time with the concepts of the twentieth century schools of
literary criticism, it is possible to demonstrate the feminine (gynocritical) features of the
Victorian novels written by women. All of the novels in this bibliographical entry, except for the
shortest and least intrusive editorial omniscient novel Silas Marner by George Eliot, have
feminine centres, either because, as in Jane Eyre the novel is centered on the growing strength
of the feminine protagonist, or because they are centered on the feminine sensibility as the
stimulus for the plots idea.
Fiction became narratologically, rather than imaginatively and socially,
analyzable/pertinent (early Victorian fiction being unforgettable because of the characters,
emblems, allegories, wit, humour or conversation contained in the novel). The keyword for
todays lecture on the feminine ambitious fiction is construction and it will be systems of

fiction that this lecture will analyse. The point to make is that, in this phase of their writing
which Elaine Showalter dubbed the feminine phase (in A Literature of Their Own, 1976),
women had the ambition to write unforgettable books, just as male authors did.iii
2
Mixing the narratological with the feminist perspective, the first observation to make is
about the systematic construction of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch and Silas
Marner is seen here to transcend the fact that (apart from the last novel with a single male
protagonist) they are novels focused on sensibility, and the feminine sensibility, for that matter,
and its problems.
The feminine centre is clear in Jane Eyre: it is a first-person narrative about a womanas-writers self in little and the novel contrasts from the beginning a reading child, Jane Eyre,
with her cousins, who are nothing but Victorian spoilt children. In the first chapter (and scenes)
of the novel, the introspective child interiorizes world geography and all her readings then
come out transformed into correct, adult judgments about the offences in the external world,
the world of incident, according to Mill:

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a

bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one
stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat
cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I
was shrined in double retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear
panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At
intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter
afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn
and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.
I returned to my bookBewicks History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I
cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that,
child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the
haunts of sea-fowl; of the solitary rocks and promontories by them only inhabited;
of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness,
or Naze, to the North Cape
Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia,
Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with the vast sweep of the Arctic
Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,that reservoir of frost and snow,
where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine
heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of
extreme cold. Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy,
like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through childrens brains, but
strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves
with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a
sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold
and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed
headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its
newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.
(notice how the last paragraph resembles the beginning of Great Expectations with the
imaginative but shivering Pip confronted by the desirable ghosts of his parents and the
undesirable convict briskly, shockingly materializing from the thick air and the oppressive misty
element of the marshes)
Similarly, Jane Eyres daydreaming is violently interrupted by the insults coming towards her
from the real outside world in which she lives (she is sought out by Eliza John and Georgiana the
other children in the Reed household) :

She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.

And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the
said Jack.
What do you want? I asked, with awkward diffidence.
Say, What do you want, Master Reed? was the answer. I want you to come
here; and seating himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to
approach and stand before him.
()
Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in
thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew
he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and
ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion
in my face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I
tottered, and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair.
What matters is that she finally regained her composure with help from her books:

Wicked and cruel boy! I said. You are like a murdereryou are like a slavedriveryou are like the Roman emperors!
I had read Goldsmiths History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero,
Caligula, etc. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to
have declared aloud.
Focused on the personal but also moral growth of its protagonist, the form of the novels plot ,
as a plot of character, is that of the maturing plot, and as a plot of thought, it is an education
plot, which makes the novel be a Bildungsroman.iii Jane Eyre is systematic because of the way it
turns the story of Janes acquisitions in the various stations of her life into triumphs of her
anyway strong character over several adverse circumstances. The plot conveys the
transformation of inner strength into increasing exterior social strength and, finally, into
exemplary human character. It is possible to state what she gains after each of the changes in
her circumstances. Janes strength, asserted and punished bitterly at Gateshead is made mild at
Lowood (and Jane illustrates the way man *woman+ is sick of blood, as in Arnolds poem In
Harmony with Nature), her mild inner strength is exteriorized and lavished upon Adle and
Mrs. Fairfax, first, then upon Edward Rochester, at Thornfield hall, it is banished, retrieved and
tested at Moor House, and it is crowned and rewarded at Ferndean. Inspected more closely, it
is obvious that the plot form is initiatory. It is exemplary, an admiration plot (in Norman
Friedmans plots of fortune series), one where an attractive, responsible hero succeeds, which
wins the readers respect and admiration. In Northrop Fryes terms, with such a plot, the book
is a romance, since the protagonists of romances are subjected to hardships/tested before they
can triumph, in keeping with the archetypal form of the plot derived from romances and divine
literary stories (the plot is governed by what Frye calls, in Anatomy of Criticism, the fourth
essay, the mythos of summer or romance).iii The myth-criticism analysis of the plot-charactersetting first-person narrative demonstrates more than the efficiency of the protagonists
triumph over adverse circumstances it shows the culturally rich complexity of Charlotte
Bronts statement in Jane Eyre and proves how deep the levels at which Jane and the implied
author Charlotte Bront moves us are (see Contributions I, pp.67-70).
The structurality of Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights can be perceived after the careful
disorder of the narrative is interpreted in the light of some archetypes of the collective
unconscious and the deep psychology of human beings, which Carl Gustav Jung uncovered. The
archetypal oppositions between the Heights and Thruscross Grange, between Heathcliff (one of
the strong cliffs of the Heights, which remains strong, though altering the quality of its strength)
and Edgar Linton, Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Linton, the opposition between the early
Heathcliffs constructive and the late Heathcliffs damaging strength, or the damaging strength
of Hindley and the later Heathcliff, on the one hand, and the development of a healing and
beneficial strength in the pair of the last generation of the young Catherine Linton-EarnshawHeathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw in the later generation can only be plausibly connected when

interpreting the intensity and mystery of the book with the deep psychology scenarios which
unite the whole of mankind under a common blessing turned curse, with Jungs analytic
psychology and Maud Bodkins archetypes of the collective unconscious applied to literature.
Especially, the tragic story of Catherine and Heathcliff, which caused the fall of many another
character and generation beside their own, can be explained in Jungian terms (see
Contributions I, p. 71-2) and as a strong statement about the disturbance of the world with the
ARCHETYPE OF PARADISE-HADES, OR OF HEAVEN AND HELL Maud Bodkins Archetypal Patterns in
Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (OUP, 1967) (see the complication in Emily
Bronts novel of the emotional pattern of the mountain standing high in storm and sunlight,
the cavern unchanging, dark, below, waters whose movement only emphasizes these steadfast
relations of height and depth).
For Middlemarch, the feminine typology announced in the Prelude makes it a surprise to
discover that, beside Dorothea Brooke a second center will appear in the novel, in the person of
the doctor Tertius Lydgate, equally ruined by his own marriage, as Dorotheas life will be.
Compare not just the warning of the Prelude, about the adverse conditions for later Teresas
materializing in the history of the world, but also the notes of the narrator about what drew
Dorothea into an inadequate marriage with the elderly and scholarly Mr Casaubon:

For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to young ladies
which had made the chief part of her education, Mr. Casaubon's talk about his great
book was full of new vistas; and this sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer
introduction to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike
her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory
which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with that amazing
past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some bearing on her actions. That
more complete teaching would comeMr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was
looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage,
and blending her dim conceptions of both. (Book I, chapter X). Follow in the situation
outlined above in connection with Dorothea Brooke what Elaine Showalter termed the
ideological assumptions of literary phenomena which recycle images and stereotypes of women in
literature and the tendency to naturalise womens victimisation, by making it the inevitable and
obsessive topic of discussion (Reader, pp. 180, 181). Also compare the typical male prejudice that

drew Dr Lydgate into his own marriage

Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman strikingly

different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose that he had lost his
balance and fallen in love, but he had said of that particular woman, "She is grace

itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That is what a woman ought to be:
she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music." Plain women he regarded as he
did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by
science. But Rosamond Vincy seemed to have the true melodic charm; and when a
man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry
speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than
on his. Lydgate believed that he should not marry for several years: not marry until
he had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the broad road which
was quite ready made. He had seen Miss Vincy above his horizon almost as long as it
had taken Mr. Casaubon to become engaged and married: but this learned
gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had assembled his voluminous notes, and
had made that sort of reputation which precedes performance,often the larger
part of a man's fame. He took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining
quadrant of his course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable
perturbation. But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his half-century
before him instead of behind him, and he had come to Middlemarch bent on doing
many things that were not directly fitted to make his fortune or even secure him a
good income. To a man under such circumstances, taking a wife is something more
than a question of adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was
disposed to give it the first place among wifely functions. To his taste, guided by a
single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would be found
wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look at things from the
proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going
from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with
sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven. (Book I, chapter XI).
Because the flaws in the feminine construction of identity are presented either through
emulation of the male point of view about women as subaltern (the case of Mr Casaubon in
respect to Dorothea), or from the male point of view and made detrimental to it (as in Tertius
Lydgates case), we get in the Victorian feminine novels a clear illustration of the fact that The
feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, displaced, ironic and subversive; one has to read it
between the lines, in the missed possibilities of the text. The same symptoms as outlined by Elaine

Showalters Towards a Feminist Poetics (see p. 180 in the Surdulescu, Stefanescu Reader)
apply, in Wuthering Heights, to the stunted lives of Catherine Earnshaw and Cathy LintonHeathcliff, not to mention Isabella Linton, feminine creatures manhandled, manipulated,

maimed by the weaker men in their lives. Both main protagonists of the Bront sisters novels,
however, have comparably more strength than other Victorian feminine characters and come
closer to the subversive feminist rejection of the accommodating postures of femininity and to
using literature to dramatise the ordeals of wronged womanhood (as in the feminist phase of
gynocritics, the one justly situated by Elaine Showalter between 1880 and 1920).

However, the scope of George Eliots panoramic novel is wider than gynocritics would have it,
in so far as the novel launches a critique of provincial life for which see the subtitle: A Study of
Provincial Life. Victorian provincial life had been the topic of many an earlier novel by George
Eliot; she had idealized provincial life, regarding it nostalgically in Adam Bede (1859), and
critically in Silas Marner (1861).
3

George Eliots Silas Marner (1861) can be declared a masterpiece in little because it
concentrates the whole constellation of Victorian social problems (Mammonism, villainy as
satirized by Thackeray, religious hypocrisy, upper-class haughtiness and vice, corruption as a
replacement for vice as a rule in modern social relations between people) in its story of (see the
subtitle) The Weaver of Raveloe: a mysterious, taciturn man. The mechanisms of the books plot
consist in the combination of retrospection with silent commentary via symbolism, as in
Dickenss Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend,iii to create suspense before giving
performative, exemplary power to good over evil (it is only after evil is given enough time to
develop to its full scale that good is allowed to triumph over evil). As always with George Eliots
fiction, it is centered upon exemplary characters (Silas Marner is a virtuous though morose
artisan, just as Adam Bede, a luminous character in the homonymous novel of 1859).
His life, before he came to Raveloe, had been filled with the movement, the mental activity, and
the close fellowship, which, in that day as in this, marked the life of an artisan early
incorporated in a narrow religious sect, where the poorest layman has the chance of
distinguishing himself by gifts of speech, and has, at the very least, the weight of a silent voter in
the government of his community. Marner was highly thought of in that little hidden world,
known to itself as the church assembling in Lantern Yard; he was believed to be a young man of
exemplary life and ardent faith; and a peculiar interest had been centred in him ever since he
had fallen, at a prayer-meeting, into a mysterious rigidity and suspension of consciousness,
which, lasting for an hour or more, had been mistaken for death. (Chapt. I)
As a force in the plot, the romance strength of good which necessarily replaces evil in the lives
of characters is doubled, in Silas Marner, by the poetic symbolism of a child with golden hair

given to the protagonist in compensation for his loss of solid gold coins (guineas, worth 12
shillings, which are worth a twentieth of a pound) that he had become attached to:
READ THE FOLLOWING EXCERPTS IN TANDEM:
the money had come to mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only grew, but it
remained with him. He began to think it was conscious of him, as his loom was, and he would on
no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with
unknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the
satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his work was done, that he
drew them out to enjoy their companionship. He had taken up some bricks in his floor
underneath his loom, and here he had made a hole in which he set the iron pot that contained
his guineas and silver coins, covering the bricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not that
the idea of being robbed presented itself often or strongly to his mind: hoarding was common in
country districts in those days; there were old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were
known to have their savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds (Chapt.II)

Turning towards the hearth, where the two logs had fallen apart, and sent forth only a red
uncertain glimmer, he seated himself on his fireside chair, and was stooping to push his logs
together, when, to his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold on the floor in front of the
hearth. Gold!his own goldbrought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away!
He felt his heart begin to beat violently, and for a few moments he was unable to stretch out his
hand and grasp the restored treasure. The heap of gold seemed to glow and get larger beneath
his agitated gaze. He leaned forward at last, and stretched forth his hand; but instead of the
hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his fingers encountered soft warm curls. In
utter amazement, Silas fell on his knees and bent his head low to examine the marvel: it was a
sleeping childa round, fair thing, with soft yellow rings all over its head.(chapt. XII)
What makes Silas Marner a masterpiece in little, from a narratological/functional perspective is
the tightness of its plot which telescopes retrospection, suspense, social critique and the
ambition for spiritually reconstructing the world, which is typical for early and mid-Victorian
fiction; the richness of its characterizations, which carefully pair good with bad characters that,
otherwise, belong to the same class (brethren and brothers, alike: Silas Marner and William
Dane; Dunstan and Godfrey Cass); the power of concentrating social panorama in a very short
narrative space; the relevance and orderliness of the settings/situations and their symbolic
value; the performance of setting side by side degeneration and regeneration and to refine
mammonism into deep humanism in the fictional universe created.

Lectures 8, 9, 10 Module Four Modern Creeds and their Sources

The Old Liberal Creed as Upheld by Thomas Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
and by John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University (a)(Contributions I, 92-94);

Lecture plan:

I.The origin of the OLD LIBERAL label and its connection with education:
-the connection/subordination of learning to theology
-the connection of learning to character
-the difference between Carlyles prescriptive and Newmans deliberative
(argumentative) style (we prescribe by setting examples, we deliberate if we look for
definitions, rules and principles and if we set targets/aims to be achieved rather than
following examples)
II.Thomas Carlyle - the first champion of cultural heroism in the old liberal sense in On
Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840-41): The Hero as Man of Letters:
Goethe, Rousseau, Dr. Johnson.
III.John Henry Newmans academic idealism: The Idea of a University (1854).
-The attributes of education for attaining KNOWLEDGE and DISINTERESTEDNESS.
- The contrast between education and instruction

I
The old liberal paradigm had been set up in the first universities of the Middle Ages, where liberal
education was another name for classical humanism (humanism inspired by the classics), as distinct
from the other and main subject taught in the universities of the Middle Ages, theology. Whereas
theology regarded man in his relationship to the God-created universe, humanism was meant to
develop mans inherent capacities in a liberal, free manner, by practicing the seven liberal arts
(grammar, rhetoric, and logic, which represented the Trivium, a sine qua non core of knowledge, on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which included the
study of astrology, too (the so called Quadrivium ). The old liberal paradigm is responsible for regarding
culture (learning, education) as an aid of man for approaching God, and in the nineteenth century one
can recognize the connection of learning to theology in Thomas Carlyles and John Henry Newmans
lectures on education. Both Carlyle (in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History a series of
lectures published in 1840-41) and John Henry Newman (who, as the leader of the Oxford Movement

and after the conversion to Catholicism, was a modern promoter of fervent Christian belief) connected
learning to character as the hub of human cultural, educated existence. The difference between
Carlyles and Newmans transmission of the old liberal creed in/to the nineteenth century comes from
Carlyles prescriptive, versus Newmans deliberative, approach to education. For Carlyle, it was
important to find examples (which he calls heroes) of perfect liberal humanists (in the past) and to
create a canon of modern cultural heroism, whereas for Newman, it was important to direct
young/modern students, in the spirit of the old liberal learning, towards the best sources of, and paths
to, knowledge by circumscribing knowledge as an ideal target in the modern world.
II.
Carlyle expounds his ideas about men of letters and poets as ideal cultural leaders for modern times .
Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their appearance
in the remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show
themselves in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is
altogether a product of these new ages; and so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which
we call Printing, subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future
ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon..
- this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as
he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make.
a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspiration that was in
him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing
that. ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would,
or would not, give him bread while living
Examples of Men of Letters: Goethe, Rousseau, Dr. Johnson men of the eighteenth century
The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries.
Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual
paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more
difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith, an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had
been, as it were, formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and
Commonplace were come forever.
Doctor Samuel Johnsons portrait:
Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the
favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful one. (he lived in a
garret and had worn-out shoes)
A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest
livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He
does not "engrave Truth on his watch-seal;" no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it.
The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: "in a world where much is to
be done, and little is to be known," see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. "A world where much

is to be done, and little is to be known:" do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of
wretched god-forgetting Unbelief; you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you do or work at
all?

After noting the way Carlyle rehearses (even preaches!) Biblical ideas from the Gospels finding in Dr
Johnson an embodiment of virtue in/through learning, it is interesting to see how the same ideas were
taken up in America by Allan Tate, an important Southerner poet of America in his address to a Phi
Betta Kappa audience in 1952:iii
To the question, What should the man of letters be in our time, we should have to find the answer in what we need him to do. He
must do first what he has always done: he must recreate for his age the image of man, and he must propagate
standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true. But at our own critical moment, when
all languages are being debased by the techniques of mass control, the man of letters might do well to conceive his responsibility
more narrowly. He has an immediate responsibility, to other men no less than to himself, for the vitality of language. He must
distinguish the difference between mere communication . . . and the rediscovery of the human condition in the living arts. . . . By
these arts, one means the arts without which men can live, but without which they cannot live well, or live as men. To keep alive
the knowledge of ourselves with which the literary arts continue to enlighten the more ignorant portion of mankind (among
whom one includes oneself), to separate them from other indispensable modes of knowledge, and to define their limits, is the
intellectual and thus the social function of the writer. Here the man of letters is the critic. (34)

III.
There are two main concepts (keywords) to be remembered from Newmans discourses: one is
KNOWLEDGE, the other is DISINTERESTEDNESS.
KNOWLEDGE
Because both Newman and Mill were liberal thinkers, for Newman knowledge was synthetic, just as
truth in John Stuart Mills thought . Newman says- All Knowledge is a whole and the separate
Sciences parts of one. There is no science but tells a different tale, when viewed as a portion
of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may
call it of others. (PEV I pp. 335 6 ).
In addition, for Newman knowledge had something sacred in it, being still related to theology whose
subordinate neighbour liberal knowledge had been in the first universities of the Middle Ages. This is
why Newman invests a university with the power of transforming, in the sense of enriching, mans
entire life.
. For Newman a university is A seat of learning, considered as a place of education. An
assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are
brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace to adjust together the
claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. Thus is created a pure and
clear atmosphere of thought, which each student also breathes, though in his own case he can
only pursue a few sciences out of the multitude. He profits by an intellectual tradition, which is
independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects. () He
apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its
parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little as he otherwise cannot apprehend

them. Hence it is that his education is called liberal. A habit of mind is formed which lasts
throughout life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and
wisdom. (PEV I, p. 337).
Because both Newman and Mill were liberal thinkers, they attached utmost importance to the liberty of
individuals, called upon to choose from the reservoir of tradition what responds to their individual
needs.
He profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides
him in his choice of subjects. () He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles
on which it r rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little as
he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called liberal.iii
Newman adds that liberal education has the spiritual role of enriching/ennobling the person:
A habit of mind is formed which lasts throughout life, of which the attributes are, freedom,
equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.
For all the similarity of freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom which are the
features of an educated man of character with the liberal faculties of man invoked in John Stuart Mills
chapter III (see He [liberal man] must use observation to see, reasoning and
judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to
decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate
decision)
DISINTERESTEDNESS
There exists a major difference between Newman and Mills views on education which comes from the
distinction between mere instruction (conditioning of the mind) and the noble, disinterested or pure
knowledge
Pure knowledge is capable of being its own end, not a preliminary of certain arts
() because that alone is liberal knowledge which stands on its own pretensions, which is
independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by
an end, or absorbed into any end, or in order to present itself to our contemplation. The
most ordinary pursuits have this specific character, if they are self-sufficient and
complete; the highest lose it, when they minister to something beyond them ()
See below the example of the supreme course of human study , theology , which changes when it
becomes mere instruction (also, see todays distinction between research and the didactic pursuit of
knowledge in faculties):
Theology, instead of being cultivated as a contemplation, be*ing+ limited to the purposes of the pulpit or
be[ing] represented by the catechism, it loses, - not its usefulness, not its divine character, not its
meritoriousness, - but it does lose the particular attribute which I am illustrating; just as a face worn by
tears and fasting loses its beauty, or a labourers hand loses its delicateness; - for Theology thus
exercised is not simple knowledge, but rather is an art or busines making use of Theology (our

underlining). And in like manner the Baconian Philosophy, by using its physical sciences in the service of
man, does thereby transfer them from the order of Liberal Pursuits to, I do not say inferior, but the
distinct class of the Useful. (PEV I pp)
Instruction is the name given to such useful, as opposed to the liberal (superior) pursuits by Newman:
We are instructed, for instance, in manual exercises, in the fine and useful arts, in trades, and in
ways of business; for these are methods, which have little or no effect upon the mind itself, are
confined in rules committed to memory, to tradition or to use, and bear upon an end external to
themselves. But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the
formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of
in connection with religion and virtue

Ninth Lecture: Old Liberal Humanism Transmitted and Turned into a Modern Conception
in Matthew Arnolds Culture and Anarchy and Essays in Criticism, the First and Second
Series
This is, in fact, a lecture about criticism before it specialized and branched out, in the twentieth
century, into schools whose concepts were internalized and applied in the second semester of
your first academic year.
To see the prehistory of twentieth century literary criticism and theory, we are going to talk
-first about the premises of Arnoldian literary criticism to be found in his cultural criticism. The
first pronouncements about cultural criticism concerned the virtues and aspirations of THE
MODERN AGE - in On the Modern Element in Literature (1857); they were turned into a
systematic conception about cultural classes and virtues in Culture and Anarchy (1869);
according to Arnolds conception in the latter text, the cultural classes are divided between
BARBARIANS (i.e. decadent, old-fashioned aristocrats) iii and PHILISTINES (the bearers of
progress in the modern age), while the uneducated POPULACE did not matter for cultural
reasons; the virtues to be aimed at in the modern age were named by Arnold SWEETNESS and
LIGHT (an educated susceptibility to beauty, and an enlightened mind, respectively); sweetness
and light were to be attained by enlarging HEBRAISM (the main virtue of the PHILISTINES ,
i.e. the actual middle classes of the Victorian age, very proud because they had aptly
changed/perfected the world through diligence, discipline and other puritanical virtues).
According to Arnold, it was important to merge HEBRAISM with HELENISM, expanding
HEBRAISM in the direction of HELLENISM (defined as the classical, i.e., Greek and Roman
recipes of perfection;
-next we shall follow the growth of some ground-breaking (or simply typically Victorian and
post-romantic) Arnoldian literary ideas into a critical conception. In a critical conception ideas
have specific functions and create a overall rational configuration as described in principle on
p.124 and in more detail in the following pages of Contributions I , proving how separated ideas

are articulated into general statements about literature . Arnolds critical thinking is ethical, in
that it argues in favour of growth of perfection through the practice and study of culture the
study of culture and its components is called criticism by Arnold. We shall follow the progress of
Arnolds thinking from statements about what poetry should not do in Preface to the First
Edition of Poems (1853), to more ambitions statements about The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time (in Essays in Criticism the First Series) and to the final investiture of poetry, in
Essays in Criticism, the Second Series with the function of cultures guardian both in
principle and concretely, in detail (see The Study of Poetry). Thus, in the Preface, Arnold
considered that poetry should not probe into mens soul in morbid ways (as late Romantic poetry
had tended to do), because its mission is to educate men by making contact with greatness; in
The Function of Criticism he considered that criticism should prepare the materials for poetry
and which poets can use to educate their fellow-men, and in The Study of Poetry he theorized
about the historically model ages that the moderns should draw their inspiration from as from a
canon of greatness. Because he focused on the greatness of the past as a guide for the present,
Arnold was an old liberal; in addition, because he prophesied about the future of poetry as
immense for the modern age, which he conceived of as an ideal perfectly fit for the present time,
he was utopian.
These ideas will be followed in excerpts from the essays mentioned. The aim of this lecture is to
single out the way Arnold clung to humanism (the old liberal paradigm) in such a way as to turn
it into a creed and a conception, at the same time. There is something sacred in cultural pursuits
this is an idea inherited from Carlyle and akin to Newmans; Arnold declared culture, criticism
and poetry to be forces of salvation, playing the same role as religion in earlier societies/ages. On
the other hand, Arnolds insistence on criteria for analysis and discriminations, together with his
systematic approach to culture, criticism and poetry show that he adapted old liberal humanism
to the needs and trends of a progressive and, in fact for Arnold nearly utopian - modern age (as
will be seen immediately)
IA
CULTURAL CRITICISM IN ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
Arnold began this essay with a parable, just as in the bible or in the monastic model communities
invoked by Carlyle (in a text of 1843, Past and Present)iii
It is related in one of those legends which illustrate the history of Buddhism, that a certain
disciple once presented himself before his master, Buddha, with the desire to be permitted to
undertake a mission of peculiar difficulty. The compassionate teacher represented to him the
obstacles to be surmounted and the risks to be run. Pournaso the disciple was called
insisted, and replied, with equal humility and adroitness, to the successive objections of his
adviser. Satisfied at last by his answers of the fitness of his disciple, Buddha accorded to him the
desired permission; and dismissed him to his task with these remarkable words, nearly identical
with those in which he himself is said to have been admonished by a divinityiii at the outset of his
own career:Go then, O Pourna, are his words; having been delivered,deliver; having been
consoled, console; being arrived thyself at the farther bank, enable othersto arrive there also.

It was a moral deliverance, eminently, of which the great Oriental reformer spoke; it was a
deliverance from the pride, the sloth, the anger, the selfishness, which impair the moral activity
of mana deliverance which is demanded of all individuals and in all ages.
WITH THIS MODEL IN MIND, ARNOLD PROCEEDS TO STRESS THE MODERN
BRAND OF DELIVERANCE, WHICH IS INTELLECTUAL
But there is another deliverance for the human race, hardly less important, indeed, than the
firstfor in the enjoyment of both united consists mans true freedomHERE HE SPEAKS
LIKE A MODERN EXALTING INDIVIDUALITY AS AN ELEMENT/ or A CONDITION
FOR WELL-BEING (see the title of Mills On Liberty, III) (. . . ) An intellectual deliverance is
the peculiar demand of those ages which are called modern; and those nations are said to be
imbued with the modern spirit most eminently in which the demand for such a deliverance has
been made with most zeal, and satisfied with most completeness.
COMPREHENSION OF THE ACTUAL PRESENT TOGETHER WITH THE PAST,
GAINING ACCESS TO GENERALITY AND THE BENEFITS OF SUCH ACQUISITIONS
The deliverance consists in mans comprehension of this present and past. It begins when our
mind begins to enter into possession of the general ideas which are the law of this vast multitude
of facts. It is perfect when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we
feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost that impatient
irritation of mind iiiwhich we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which,
while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension.
the literature of ancient Greece is, even for modern times, a mighty agent of intellectual
deliverance; even for modern times, therefore, an object of indestructible interest.

THE SAME TRUST IN MERITOCRATIC LEADERS OF MEN, AS IN CARLYLES

CONTESTATION OF A DEMOCRACY EMPOWERING MADMEN INSTEAD OF
TRUSTING THE AUTHORITY/LEADERSHIP OF ENLIGHTENED SPIRITS
He who has found that point of view, he who adequately comprehends this spectacle, has risen to
the comprehension of his age: he who communicates that point of view to his age, he who
interprets to it that spectacle, is one of his agesintellectual deliverers.
JUST AS IN NEWMANS K N O W L E D G E IN THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY, AND IN
MILLS S Y N T H E T I C VIEW OF T R U T H, SEE ARNOLDS BELIEF IN THE
EXHAUSTIVE CHARACTER OF C O M P R E H E N S I O N
everywhere there is connexion, everywhere there is illustration: no single event, no single
literature, is adequately comprehended except in its relation to other events, to other literatures.
The literature of ancient Greece, the literature of the Christian Middle Age, so long as they are
regarded as two isolated literatures, two isolated growths of the human spirit, are not adequately
comprehended; and it is adequate comprehension which is the demand of the present age.

NOTICE THE SEARCH FOR CRITERIA AND DISCRIMINATIONS TO OBSERVE IN THE

CHOICES MADE FOR STUDY IN ARNOLDS CONCEPTION, WHICH IS LIBERAL BY
THE STANDARDS OF THE NEW LIBERAL PARADIGM (see the lecture next time in more
detail)
But all facts, all the elements of the spectacle before us, have not an equal valuedo not merit a
like attention: and it is well that they do not, for no man would be adequate to the task of
thoroughly mastering them all.
what past literature will naturally be most interesting to such an age as our own? Evidently, the
literatures which have most successfully solved for
their ages the problem which occupies ours: the literatures which in their day and for their own
nation have adequately comprehended, have adequately represented, the spectacle before them.
A significant, a highly-developed, a culminating epoch, on the one hand,a comprehensive, a
commensurate, an adequate literature, on the other,these will naturally be the objects
of deepest interest to our modern age. Such an epoch and such a literature are, in fact, modern , in
the same sense in which our own age and literature are modern;iii
It may, however, happen that a great epoch is without a perfectly adequate literature; it may
happen that a great age, a great nation, has attained a remarkable fullness of political and social
development, without intellectually taking the complete measure of itself, without adequately
representing that development in its literature. In this case, the epoch, the nation itself, will still
be an object of the greatest interest to us; but the
Literature will be an object of less interest to us: the facts, the material spectacle, are there; but the
contemporary view of the facts, the intellectual interpretation, are inferior and inadequate
.It may happen, on the other hand, that great authors, that a powerful literature, are found in an
age and nation less great and powerful than themselves; it may happen that a literature, that a
man of genius, may arise adequate to the representation of a greater, a more highly developed
age than that in which they appear; it may happen that a literature completely interprets its
epoch, and yet has something over; that it has a force, a richness, a geniality, a power of view
which the materials at its disposition are insufficient adequately to employ. In such a case, the
literature will be more interesting to us than the epoch. The interpreting power, the illuminating
and revealing intellect, are there; but the spectacle on which they throw their light is not fully
worthy of them.iii

What we seek, therefore, what will most enlighten us, most contribute to our intellectual
deliverance, is the union of two things; it is the coexistence, the simultaneous appearance, of a
great epoch and a great literature
ARNOLD TAKES THE GOLDEN AGE OF PERICLES AS HIS MODEL AND PROPOSES
THAT THE VICTORIANS EMULATE IT
Now the culminating age in the life of ancient Greece I call, beyond question, a great epoch;the
life of Athens in the fifth century before our era I call one of the highly developed, one of the
marking, one of the modern periods in the life of the whole human race. It has been said that the

Athens of Pericles was a vigorous man, at the summit of his bodily strength and mental
energy. There was the utmost energy of life there, public and private; the most entire freedom,
the most unprejudiced and intelligent observation of human affairs. Let us rapidlyexamine some
of the characteristics which distinguish modern epochs; let us see how far theculminating century
of ancient Greece exhibits them; let us compare it, in respect of them,with a much later, a
celebrated century; let us compare it with the age of Elizabeth in our owncountry.To begin with
what is exterior. One of the most characteristic outward features of a modern age, of an age of
advanced civilization, is the banishment of the ensigns of war and bloodshed from the
intercourse of civil life. Crime still exists, and wars are still carried on; but within the limits of
civil life a circle has been formed within which man can move securely, and develop the arts of
peace uninterruptedly. The private man does not go forth to his daily occupation prepared to
assail the life of his neighbour or to have to defend his own. With the disappearance of the
constant means of offence the occasions of offence diminish; society at last acquires repose,
confidence, and free activity. An important inward characteristic, again, is the growth of a
tolerant spirit; that spirit which is the offspring of an enlarged knowledge; a spirit patient of the
diversities of habits and opinions. Other characteristics are the multiplication of the conveniences
of life, the formation of taste, the capacity for refined pursuits. And this leads us to the supreme
characteristic of all: the intellectual maturity of man himself; the tendency to observe facts with a
critical spirit; to search for their law, not to wander among them at random; to judge by the rule
of reason, not by the impulse of prejudice or caprice.

IB
ARNOLDIAN CULTURAL CRITICISM IN CULTURE AND ANARCHY
It was in order to achieve such a perfect conjunction that Arnold militated for the cultural
improvement of the English PHILISTINES by directing their mind toward the classical
education that went beyond the narrow minded concentration on the self of both individuals and
the philistine EPOCH OF CONCENTRATION. This is why Arnold prescribed in Culture and
Anarchy the pursuit of SWEETNESS and LIGHT, for adding HELLENISM to the narrowminded spirit of HEBRAISM.

I have been trying to show that culture is, or ought to be, the study and pursuit of
perfection; and that of perfection as pursued by culture, beauty and intelligence, or, in
other words, sweetness and light, are the main characters.Only it must be real thought
and real beauty; real sweetness and reallight.()
Generations will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works far more
perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet
the names of these two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such
as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. And why? Because
they humanised knowledge; because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence;
because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, to make reason and
the will of God prevail.

in our idea of perfection the characters of beauty and intelligence are both of them
present, and sweetness and light, the two noblest of things, are united. Allowing,
therefore, with Mr. Carlyle, the aristocratic class to possess sweetness, culture insists
on the necessity of light also, and shows us that aristocracies, being by the very nature
of things inaccessible to ideas, unapt to see how the world is going, must be somewhat
wanting in light, and must therefore be, at a moment when light is our great requisite,
inadequate to our needs. Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are for
epochs of concentration. In epochs of expansion, epochs such as that in which we now
live, epochs when always the warning voice is again heard: Now is the judgment of
this word,--in such epochs aristocracies with their natural clinging to the established
fact, their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable transitoriness of all
human institutions, are bewildered and helpless.
IT IS INTERESTING THAT ARNOLD CARRIED FURTHER CARLYLES VIEWS ABOUT
THE INADEQUACY OF THE ARTISTOCRATIC CLASS IN AGES OF PROGRESS,
TURNING THE ARISTOCRACY INTO BARBARIANS

all this culture (to call it by that name) of the Barbarians was an exterior culture
mainly. It consisted principally in outward gifts and graces, in looks, manners,
accomplishments, prowess. The chief inward gifts which had part in it were the most
exterior, so to speak, of inward gifts, those which come nearest to outward ones; they
were courage, a high spirit, self-confidence.
The graver self of the Barbarian likes honours and consideration; his more relaxed
self, field-sports and pleasure. The graver self of one kind of Philistine likes
fanaticism, business, and money-making; his more relaxed self, comfort and teameetings.

HEBRAISM Hebraism,--and here is the source of its wonderful strength,--has always

been severely pre-occupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in
Zion;
HEBRAISM VERSUS HELLENISM As Hellenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing

things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so
Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a
feat of this kind. It is obvious to what wide divergence these differing tendencies,
actively followed, must lead. As one passes and repasses from Hellenism to
Hebraism, from Plato to St. Paul, one feels inclined to rub one's eyes and ask oneself

whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and
divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be
uttered to free himself from the body of this death.
by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a man's intellectual and moral
impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by
self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its
appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule. As the great movement of
Christianity was a triumph of Hebraism and man's moral impulses, so the great
movement which goes by the name of the Renascence2 was an uprising and reinstatement of man's intellectual impulses and of Hellenism. We in England, the
devoted children of Protestantism, chiefly know the Renascence by its subordinate
and secondary side of the Reformation. The Reformation has been often called a
Hebraising revival, a return to the ardour and sincereness of primitive Christianity.
ARNOLD THOUGHT THAT BY TILTING THE BALANCE TOWARDS HELLENISM
,VICTORIAN HEBRAISM COULD APPROACH PERFECTION, COMPLETING ITS OWN
WITH TIME-HONOURED VIRTUES OF THE CLASSICAL AGES

II
ARNOLDS LITERARY CRITICISM
In the best paternalistic tradition, Arnolds literary criticism is prescriptive,iii since he uses
literature and the critic as a source for discovering models and guidance for the confusion of the
present. He makes this clear in the Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853):
The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices counselling different things
bewildering, the number of existing works capable of attracting a young writers attention and
becoming his models immense. What he wants is a hand to guide him through this confusion, a
voice to prescribe to him the aim that he should keep in view....

In the new liberal tradition, however, he provides standards and criteria to be observed in judging
poetry, i.e. he recommends and dismisses attributes of poetic creation (by classical rhetoric
standards, this represents an example of CEREMONIAL, rather than
DELIBERATIVE/JUDICIOUS, discourse)

We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in any imitation or representation

whatever: this is the basis of our love of Poetry: and we take pleasure in them, he
adds, because all knowledge is naturally agreeable to us; not to the philosopher only,
but to mankind at large. Every representation therefore which is consistently drawn
may be supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it gratifies this natural interest in
knowledge of all kinds. What is not interesting, is that which does not add to our

knowledge of any kind; that which is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a
representation which is general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of being particular,
precise, and firm.

What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no
poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those 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. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of
them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not
tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also.
In The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864/5 the year of Essays
in Criticism the First Series), Arnold isolates criteria for ENGLISH/ NATIONAL
criticism in comparison to French criticism, which he considers more advanced
because of an already strong French Academy.
Notice, first, the repetition of Newmans criteria for knowledge the criteria of the
old liberal arts commitment to disinterestedness:
It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to
avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to pro duce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule
may be summed up in one word,disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By
keeping aloof from practice; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play
of the mind on all subjects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior,
political, practical considerations

Secondly, in the battle for priority between poetry and criticism, it is criticism that is
given precedence over the (Romantic and prophetic) gift of the genius capable to
discover new ideas; rather the poet should analyse and synthesize grand ideas.
Criticism gives access to THE ORDER OF IDEAS which fertilizes the poets mind
creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas; that is rather the
business of the philosopher; the grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of
analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and
spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with
these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations, making beautiful works
with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order
to work freely;

In The Study of Poetry (1888 - Essays in Criticism the Second Series), Arnold begins by
quoting his own previous opinion about the mission entrusted to poetry (very similar to religion)
and develops a canon to be followed if literature is to fulfil its mission. The criticss task, it
appears from this essay, is to evaluate literature critically, i.e., by stipulating criteria and
choosing models of literary grandeur by comparison (synthesis) of several patterns of excellence.
For achieving his goal and ESTABLISHING A SCHOOL OF ENGLISH CRITICISM, Arnold
enters the stream of English poetry andcharts the stream (i.e., he establishes a canon)iii. He
stipulated which the attributes of excellence were in the best earlier English poets (e.g., Chaucer)
and in the later critics who acknowledged the qualities of the great poets.

POETRY INTERPRETS LIFE FOR US it has interpretive power (see the systematic
presentation of this concept in Contributions I, 125-128)

Poetry is a criticism of life by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty

After identifying several fallacies in poetic judgment (the judgment about what poets/poem
matter, or rather, with Arnold, should matter to readers)iii the historical or personal fallacies,
the main goal of poetic judgment is stated: to develop the capacity of making distinctionsiii between poets that stand a chance of being classics, according to the patterns established by
classical literary ages

The canon Arnold establishes unites Greek and Latin authors, Dante and Petrarch with their
English posterity in the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth (but the English
Romantics are underrated by post-romantics like Arnold, in general, often, while foreign
Romantics did get their praise). Arnold was looking for a kind of golden ratio for literary
comparatism in reading the classics.
iii

And you can see here how prescriptive nineteenth century literary criticism is, in its concern with readers, at the
other extreme from twentieth century RRC (reader response criticism, which gave free reign and full authority to
readers engaging with texts),
iii

Remember Mills plea for discrimination

Civic, Individualistic, Agnostic and Hedonistic Liberal (= Modern) Education Recipes Compared. Staging
Post-Christian New Hedonism in Hymn to Proserpine by Algernon Charles Swinburne and in Marius
the Epicurean by (Contributions I, 90-91 and 95-96)
The obsession with progress of the Victorian nineteenth century was at the root of the new recipes for
Victorian education. The recipes in the title (some of them already discussed, others to be described
soon) indicate the orientation of the modern society towards civic (i.e. ,public) and individual growth to
maturity. Whereas in the new liberal paradigm the growth of societies to maturity and for the
achievement of peace was anchored in the rational/Enlightened /intellectual development of
responsible individuals in a democratic society seeking perfection and it was presented with clear
principles, premises and theorems regarding a good practical life in John Stuart Mills conception, with
its theoretical and practical ideas organically united into a memorable whole, iii we encountered in
Matthew Arnold, who was a follower of Thomas Carlyle, palingenesis . By merging the etymological Latin
and Greek morphemes of this word, which is also used by Arnold Toynbee/D.C. Somervell in the 1946
compendium titled A Study of History ( which summarizes the six volumes of the original book
published by Tonynbee between 1934-1961), palingenesis means regeneration by returning to the
exemplary past ; the rebirth or new genesis, happens with the help of the better/best past, joining
palaeo- in Latin, as in palaeography, palaeontolog, to the Greek palin-again. Matthew Arnold was seen
to advocate the return to model past ages (classical models of perfection, endowed with adequacy, for
the cultural rebirth of the Victorian Philistines society) Arnold was hoping to approach the modern ideal
by understanding the present in the perspective of the past cultures of perfection and invoked the
concept of deliverance (which may well be interpreted as deliverance of modern humanity from its
fallen condition, just as in Carlyles constant Biblical examples). In this, Arnold was situated at the
frontier between the old and the new liberal paradigms and recipes for modern education. Like a Janus

Bifrons, Arnold had, first, a palingenetic face, which was perfectly similar to the face turned towards the
past by Thomas Carlyle, who recommended the return to the Middle Ages search for the crucial virtue
of monastic life, the virtue of renunciation (Entsagen, see Sartor Resartus, The Everlasting Yea the
condition for achieving blessedness, rather than merely materialistic happiness) and by John Henry
Newman, with his conception about disinterested knowledge which can only be encountered/acquired
in a university. Arnolds other face was turned towards a utopian future, as seen in his understanding of
the modern age (Arnolds excessive use of the word great, and in conjunction with future at the
beginning of The Study of Poetry, demonstrates this ). His insistence on culture understood to be the
main contributor to the development of individuality ( as an element of well-being) was, on the other
hand, a typically modern aspiration, just as Mills in (the title of) On Liberty part III. So was Arnolds
systematic presentation of whatever ideas he had inherited from the old liberal paradigm ideas
articulated into a conception, as seen in Lecture 12 in Contributions I.
It is from this point of comparison that we can enter upon the subject of the next two recipes of
modern, i.e., liberal education: the agnostic and the new hedonistic ones to see how they part ways with
the old liberal paradigm in decisive ways. Both agnosticism and new hedonism were crucial terms for
understanding the late Victorian age and its revolt against inherited tradition, which is a radically
modern tendency (radical being synonymous with revolutionary).
The agnostic mentality insinuated itself in the wake of science as superior to humanism on the scale of
mankinds intellectual evolution, being introduced in 1869 by the Darwinist Thomas Henry Huxley
(Huxleys Bulldog). In his later presentation of the term (in the 1899 textAgnosticism and Christianity),
he insists that agnosticism is not a positive creed, but a negative/oppositional term, coined in opposition
to the metaphysical presuppositions of Christianity. These presuppositions are contested from the point
of view of positive science, which had turned into the creed and hope of men of science, as against men
of letters in the nineteenth century.
The people who call themselves "Agnostics" have been charged with doing so because they have not the
courage to declare themselves "Infidels." It has been insinuated that they have adopted a new name in
order to escape the unpleasantness which attaches to their proper denomination. To this wholly erroneous
imputation, I have replied by showing that the term "Agnostic" did, as a matter of fact, arise in a manner
which negatives it; and my statement has not been, and cannot be, refuted. Moreover, speaking for
myself, and without impugning the right of any other person to use the term in another sense, I further say
that Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except
in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as
intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a
man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence
which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that
is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary
doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence;
and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported
propositions. The justification of the Agnostic principle lies in the success which follows upon its
application, whether in the field of natural, or in that of civil, history; and in the fact that, so far as these
topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.
The (emotive) attachment to natural science is also proved by the following statements of Huxleys:

Education, Huxley says, is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I
include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections
and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws.(PEV II, 697).

What is education? Above all things, what is our ideal of thoroughly liberal education? of that
education which, if we could begin life again, we would give ourselves of that education which, if we
could mould the fates to our own will, we could give to our children? (PEV II, p. 696)

It is interesting to note that the answer given by Huxley tips the balance in favour of instruction,
which has ulterior or practical purposes, in the spirit of the modern liberal paradigm, but
dismissing, as will be seen, as obsolete and ridiculous the ideas of the old liberal paradigm :
The politicians tell us, You must educate the masses because they are going to be masters. The clergy
join in the cry for education, for they affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel into
the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus lustily. They declare that
ignorance makes bad workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam
engines, cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory will be departed from us. And
a few voices are lifted up in favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they are
men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering, that it is as true now, as it ever
was, that the people perish for lack of knowledge. (PEV II, 693)
In fact, there is a chorus of voices, almost distressing in their harmony, raised in favour of the doctrine
that education is the great panacea for human troubles, and that, if the country is not shortly to go to the
dogs, everybody must b e educated ().

Here is how Huxley dismisses the core of old liberal education, which had used Latin as the language of
education in the oldest Western universities
Classical history is a great section of the palaeontology of man; and I have the same double respect for it
as for other kinds of palaeontology that is to say, a respect for the facts which it establishes as for all
facts, and a still greater respect for it as a preparation for the discovery of a law of progress.
But if the classics were taught as they might be taught if boys and girls were instructed in Greek
and Latin, not merely as languages, but as illustrations of philological science; () if, lastly, the study of
the classical books were followed in such a manner as to impress boys with their beauties, and with the
grand simplicity of their statement of the everlasting problems of human life, instead of with their verbal
and grammatical peculiarities; I still think it as little proper that they should form the basis of a liberal
education for our contemporaries, as I should think it fitting to make that sort of palaeontology with which I
am familiar, the back-bone of modern education. (PEV II, pp. 706- 707)

Because the leading Victorian minds gradually abandoned the classical and the theological
core of aspiring education (which was capable of more than mere instruction), late Victorians
were bound to discover new creeds. New Hedonism called New Cyrenaicism was one of them.
It was made popular in fictional form in Walter Paters Marius the Epicurean (a kind of late
Victorian Sartor Resartus a fictionalized philosophical text written in 1885). It is interesting to

see how, in keeping with the admiration for historical science typical for the new liberal
paradigm, Walter Pater recommended the new creed as a historical (i.e., human) universal. He
declared that hedonism (or Epicureanism) was a human universal: Every age of European

thought has had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans, under many disguises: even under the
hood of the monk. Walter Pater next gave a scientific (i.e., historical foundation) to the creed
which he wished to make prestigious. Just here he [Marius, our note] joined company,
retracing in his individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of human thought, with
another wayfarer on the journey, another ancient Greek master, the founder of the
Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weighty traditional utterances (for he had left no writing)
served in turn to give effective outline to the contemplations of Marius. There was
something in the doctrine itself congruous with the place wherein it had its birth; and
for a time Marius lived much, mentally, in the brilliant Greek colony which had given
a dubious name to the philosophy of pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the
mountains and the sea, among richer than Italian gardens, on a certain breezy tableland projecting from the African coast, some hundreds of miles southward from
Greece. There, in a delightful climate, with something of transalpine temperance amid
its luxury, and withal in an inward atmosphere of temperance which did but further
enhance the brilliancy of human life, the school of Cyrene had maintained itself as
almost one with the family of its founder (Aristippus of Cyrene ).
.
In the school of Cyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness, logical and physical
speculation, theoretic interests generally, had been valued only so far as they served to
give a groundwork, an intellectual justification, to that exclusive concern with
practical ethics which was a note of the Cyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and
enthusiastic, how true to itself, under how many varieties of character, had been the
effort of the Greeks after TheoryTheriathat vision of a wholly reasonable world,
which, according to the greatest of them, literally makes man like God ()
Notice, in the above Paterite quotations the (residual) respect for Greek (classical/ancient)
culture (which is just like Arnolds) and the use of words devoid of any ethical undertones:
contemplation[s], and the intention of enhancing the brilliancy of human life. iii
Precisely the same ideas can be followed in action in the dramatic monologue Hymn to
Proserpine by Algernon Charles Swinburne, from the volume Poems and Ballads (1866).

Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of

the Christian Faith)
Vicisti, Galile.

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?
I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain
To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.
For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,
We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say.
New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.
Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the pan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.
All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.

Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.
Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;
Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,
Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.
Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wise that ye should not fall.
Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.
But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;
Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know

I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.

LECTURE ELEVEN Gerard Manley Hopkinss Devotional Poetry and His Poetics (ie, his
Systematic Theory of Literary Creation)
Devotional: about poetry, dedicated to God and drawing on a mans religious practice;
describing religious experiences; from the same family of words, devout (people who who
strive to dedicate their lives to God in practice). According to the bio-bibliographical entry
about Hopkins in Contributions I 155, Gerard Manley was the son of a devout mother and his
father was a poet, so he became a priest-poet, as in the title of this lecture in its original form.
That title also recommended him as archaically modern. He was archaic because his language
sounds archaic (he invents words that do not sound English and writes accentual verse, as in
the earliest Middle Ages and writes in the manner of ancient Celtic poets whose verse-patterns
are internal to the lines and resemble filigree words answer to each other in internal rhyming
a.s.o, see the illustrative analyses) and he struggled to imitate medieval scholastic rational
devotion; also, he practised religious contemplation and examined his conscience in mortifying,
scathing ways, like the Jesuit priest he was. Drawing upon his conversion to RomanCatholicism,
Hopkins went the whole hog and prepared to join the intellectual and ascetical elite of the Catholic
Church, namely the order of the Society of Jesus or the Jesuit Order, which he did in 1868, entering upon
his novitiate (a nine year period of asceticism and spiritual preparation. As regards the second part of
the phrase archaically modern, Hopkins had previously been converted, at Oxford, by Walter Pater to
the latest modern doctrine of lay contemplation through art (religious, devotional verse is also highly
contemplative). For Pater, as for Wilde, art served for contemplation that could return man to himself
because it helped him become detached from hopeless (because utopian, and also Christian)

idealism (as practiced by mainstream Victorian culture). According to Pater, contemplation

could save man from being a slave to custom; this was a way of extricating oneself from the
blind self-sufficiency of middle class conventions which turned societies into herds, herdsocieties, as the lay prophet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche disdainfully referred to them:
societies in which people congratulated themselves, people supported and imitated each other
all the time, growing more and more dishonest, hypocritical) NB this was the position of the
twentieth century modernist avant-gardes, too.
Consequently, according to Contributions II, one should focus on Presence and the Tradition of
Christian Mysticism in Hopkinss Verse (which is part of the third chapter in Contributions II). When
understood devotionally, Presence refers to the discovery of God in ones surrounding world.
Like all the great (Christian) mystics, Hopkinss emblems of contact with the other world of
perfectioniii is accompanied by awe which in modern terms can be translated as anguish and agony,
fear, together with inexhaustible admiration or love. Since awe disturbs the normal flow of perceptions
and the rationalizations of sentiments that ordered and civilized life consists in, among other tokens of
civilized life, Hopkinss poems must be understood to transcribe precisely the emotive and rational
transport of a man wrapped in contemplation between worlds: the familiar world and the unfamiliariii .
In later psychoanalytical, Lacanian, terms, mystics do their best to evoke the contact with the other.
Often, the language of the mystics transcribes musically, tooiii, what cannot only be transmitted
discursivelyiii.
We can thank the poet Hopkins for providing a rational conception (with an older, Gnostic and
Christian component and a newer, autonomous and aesthetic component) because the doctrine allows
one to accompany the poet very far in his contemplation.
The doctrine that informs Hopkins poetry comes from the Middle Ages and it is called the
(mystical) doctrine of individuation. Hopkins literally followed and, for us, he illustrated - in his poetry
the doctrine of Duns Scotus, an Oxford scholar of the later 13th century. This mediaeval thinker who
opposed the rationalistic Thomist learning, held a conviction which resembled in an amazing way that of
the Victorian followers of Walter Pater (who proclaimed the superiority of modern artistic
contemplation to traditional classifications of the trends/styles and the possibility to rationalize
contemplation critically as the path for attaining aesthetic perfectioniii). Moving, with Hopkins, between
the modern and the mediaeval traditions, we can return from the Victorian precursors of 20th century

British modernism (Pater and Wilde) to the scholastic doctrine of what we could jocosely call a Brit
avant la lettre, namely to Duns Scotus, who was Hopkinss master (over several centuries of Jesuitical
learning). Duns Scotus held that the universal manifests itself in particulars and that the awakened
(mystical) intellect can point to essences thanks to the doors that individual (mystical) perception opens
on the realm of Grand Nature. By his individual sensations processed at the level of the awakened
intellect, therefore, (mystical) man can participate in (mystical) moments to substantial existence in the
act of heightened (mystical) perception, which reveals essences in moments of vision or revelation.
Sensations refined in the intellect, therefore, explain the world and it is individual (mystical) experience
that gives substance to existence in keeping with the principle of individuation. The mystical principle of
individuationiii vallidates or reveals essences in the lives of individuals.
Returning to Hopkins, we must introduce some concrete facts needed for the interpretation of
Hopkinss mystical/Christian poetry and for the understanding of his acts of Christian individuation. The
devotional participation to the theological essence of the world, circumscribes carefully, rationally and
artistically, at the same time, the acts (or moments) of special individual perception and participation in
essences. And there are poems by Hopkins which discern Christ more clearly (The Windhover), others
in which the presence of God is made palpable, or the presence of the Holy Spirit (Binsey Poplars or
Spelt from Sibyls Leaves). Considering, in a didactic, introductory way, that Hopkinss poems are
articulated together by the presence of the Trinity also allows interpreting Hopkinss so called terrible
sonnets (curtal, foreshortened, odd sonnets that voice great anguish), as the torment of the soul afraid
of losing the gifts of the Holy Ghost (see the terrible sonnet No worst, there is none).

12. The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning mornings minion, kingdom of daylights dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skates heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

10

No wonder of it: sher pld makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

But it is worth asking in more particular terms: What does Hopkins catch in the poem
The Windhover and how does he do this, exactly? An exceptional moment rising in the
consciousness through the senses; this is why the word morning gets repeated as in a kind of
alliterative expression for the kind of beginning that the break of day represents, analogously to
the entry into the space of revelation. The more radical sound effect, the stopping of the line in
the middle of the word king- postponed until the beginning of the next verse mimetically
evoke the breath-taking surprise at the beginning of the vision, but, strengthened by the subtler
alliterations and assonances inaugurated by dom and continued in the sequence of the repeated
sounds d followed by the sonorous diphthongs and long vowels in daylight, dauphin, then
in the compound monosyllabic sequence of dapple-dawn-drawn gracefully ending in riding
it may equally strongly hit the ear and the conscience, thus breaking and transporting the reader
into the poetic beyond, i.e., the space within the frame delimited via the suddenly motivated
phonetic utterance. (The break at the end of the line may also serve for denoting two actually
similar things at one stroke, in the synaesthetic modality of visionary perception: the king and his
kingdom perceived together, as parts of the same inscape.) Next, the flow of associations
occasioned by the visionary momentum begins its unstaveable motion between the archetypal
levels of existence: Christ at the divine level, at the human, social level, the minion (a mediaeval

courtly page, servant, minstrel - as a lesser ministrant) becomes first a dauphin (the kingly
prince), then the noble Falcon (a more adult and sublime mediaeval emblem of orderly, skilled,
artful male power and grace, a way of proving mans control over nature, like in the noble
mediaeval art of falconry). The poem thus perfectly, mystically and artistically, unites the divine
with the human existence in the world . Next, the perfect flight of the bird is then made to
connote mastery several full lines before the word mastery is uttered; its brute beauty and
valour and act are then directly praised by the spectator I present through the comment of
My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird. At the climactic moment, the performative power of the
act is demonstrated to unite in a palpable cosmos air, (human) pride and (the animal order)
plume ( where? here) and to make an angelic, epiphanic fire burst from within the flesh of
the horizon which stands for the world but actually points towards the full sunrise - that seems, in
its turn, to have been brought about by the windhovers motion we have been following with the
poet. But this poetic action of the poem had begun since the title, where the windhover had been
equated with Christ. But the poem enacts what theology essentially declares: that there is no
creature but bespeaks of Gods glory. But the poem by Hopkins implements this truth as a
palpable gift of plenitude as here, for an extensive moment, life is shown to be exceptional,
improved in quality as it can only be when improved by the vicinity of man with Christ, thanks
to Christs sheer plod which makes the effort of living worthwhile (makes plough down
sillion shine). Thus, archetypally, all the levels of existence are shown to cooperate and coexist
in this moment of epiphany: God beyond the skies, Christ typified by the Windhover lording it
over the human I who worships him with the cry O my chevalier! . Man can only be, must
needs be like a vassal to the chevalier the mediaeval French jargon crops up insistently in this
poem by Hopkins whose English idiolect is not only peculiar because it is an extreme instance of
the mystic poets use of public language, but it is so also because it is Frenchified and archaic in
its use of the Middle Ages lingo. By the same archetypal token, there is synchronization (or
archetypal analogy) between the levels of natural and spiritual existence as they come together in
man: the windhover announces the sunrise and it therefore stands for the sun itself, for the
beginning of the day, with its colours, for light itself, in both the physical and the metaphysical
sense at the end of the poem, just as it stands for the heart of the human witness to the miracle
which suddenly stirred for a bird, is made to rise, it is raised, elevated. Similarly, the air levels

cooperate almost cosmogonically, in an orderly way, to make the presence of Christ manifest (
when not steady, they form a rolling level underneath him the windhowers acrobatics even
rebuff the big wind). So the figures involving the air make up a model in little, a replica of
the hierarchy just pointed at in several ways: theologically, phenomenally, socially as the
chevalier and the dauphin and the Falcon belong to the lordly class, anyway. But the restoration
of the worlds cosmic scale and just degree is due to the sacrificial efforts of the windhover to
come into the world by sheer plod, following the plough make sillion shine, to fall and
gall its light and to shed its blood-light or light-blood gash gold-vermillion.
What matters in this poem is not that it adds itself up to the New Testament parable of
salvation. To simply translate its parabolic images would mean to commit what the American New Critic
of the 20th century William Wimsatt has termed the heresy of paraphrase (this would transform the
poem merely into a priests sermon, threatening to lose contact with the poems body which is an auraloral event occurring in time). The development of the poem and its mystique is what arrests our
attention several times over before we get orcatch its theological meaning.iii
Concluding the interpretation critically rather than theologically, the poet Hopkins made us
participate in the birth of a verbal event occasioned by his sensory activity poetically and intellectually
managed and he made us remember that the purpose of a poem is not to transmit a meaning but to
enact it, to make it happen, as it were. Each of his poems raises for contemplation a stage, a plot of
sensibility made up of its own unrepeatable moments, it confines the readers for a space of time in a
labyrinth of words and rhythms that represent his own stream of consciousness, a stream occasioned by
and addressed to or simply tending towards God.
Otherwise the interpretation of Hopkinss verse should be helped by the technical words
bequeathed by Hopkins himself for the analysis of his poetic meanings. They are words fit for describing
apophatically numinous experiences. In simpler terms, accessible to a modern student of pragmatics,
these words are not concepts with a positive, palpable content, but merely empty slots or indices:
deictic words (words that contain an indication or, figuratively speaking, a peg marking the place where
individual, local, particular meanings can be hung in actual life). Hopkins coins the English
word thisness for Duns Scotus s haecceitas. It represents the impulse behind any individual and
momentary materialization of essential existence (we can call it revelation). (Essential individual

existence in time, as Heidegger would put it! is called by Duns Scotus in Latin, the Scholastic
Language, ultima realitas. Meaning, then, obtains as a result of tracing the roots of this ultimate reality
or individuality that man embodies. ) Hopkins also coins two theoretical literary terms meant to describe
the dynamic of meaning creation in poetry as a phenomenal we could even call it phenomenological
manifestation of the worlds substance: inscape and instress. As inseparable parts of epiphanic
meaning, the inscapes are sharply perceived actual or virtual landscapes which become
internalized, individual scapes and they are poetically predicated each by its own instress. In the
guise of the subject of a sentence, the inscape is essentially expressed in action by the predication of
the instress. Thus, a Hopkinsian poem is meant as a single great sentence or rather a single utterance
endowed with extraordinary contextual power, a forceful saying, like an outburst of energy poetically
voiced or traced. A Hopkins poem is, therefore, a moment of revelation, theologically speaking, a
moment when Gods actual existence is revealed; poetically speaking, it is a moment of pure
inspiration, when meaning is perceptually heightened, enriched so that it makes a difference. Each
poem by Hopkins is such a verbal act of inspiration caught in action. It is easy to recover the stages of
this inspiration, as Hopkinss individualism almost clinically aims at committing to paper the whole
moment, from its emergence, to its climactic momentum and through to its conclusion.

13. Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;
Landscape plotted and piecedfold, fallow, and plough;
And ll trdes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

10

In the poem Pied Beauty, the plurality of beauty as an essence of the world is
Hopkinss theme, which carries him through all the orders of existence, from the skies of

couple-colour as a brinded cow, to the rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim, to the
landscape plotted by the gears and trades of man, to the abstract notions denoted by the series of
adjectives; original, spare, strange, fickle, freckled, swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim. All
that is required in such poems is that the reader be mobile enough, playful or freely associative,
so as to participate in Hopkinss conscience-catching game of words.
Binsey Poplars is a mystical poem about the vitalist life sap that mounts in the veins of the trees and
the mystical fluid hovering down the river along the waters sores and the rivers flow alonside the row
of poplars and their shadows. In Binsey Poplars, thus, the airy cages of these trees felled and
slaughtered as innocent victims (or martyrs of modernity) are also simply the branch-houses which
captured and guarded the leaping sun, just as the poplars, addressed as aspens dear had been killed
and transported beyond the horizon of - in 1879. So, every adjective or lengthy predication can be
justified or explained through a train of analogies and associations by either contiguity or comparison
and substitution, which are motivated within the semiotic density of the complex sign that one
particular poem represents.

Binsey Poplars
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being s slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

In general, it is worth noting that Hopkins readers are left with so many impressive
definitions of unique perceptions of the mystical haecceitas of the world, that they have the sense
of naturally partaking in the worlds secrecy. See, for example, the definition of the night, of
memory, and the mind as a continuum or universal substance in Spelt from Sybils Leaves is
shown to build up from romantic contraries, which participate to the event shown in the poem
Spelt from Sibyls Leaves, a meditative poem, with an evocative, sibylline title.
..self in self steeped and pashed quite
Disremembering, dismembering all now..
Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms and will end us
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black
Ever so black on it. Our tale, O our oracle!......................
.
black, white; right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But these two; ware of a world where but these two tell, each of the other; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe-and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans
grind.

Hopkinss craving for the Holy Spirit is not only present through regret and nostalgia (as
in Binsey Poplars) or wistfulness (as in Spelt from Sibyls Leaves), but also through direct
anguish, in the terrible sonnets.
Gerard Manley Hopkinss confessions about the hardships encountered by Christian believer on his path
to faith (in the terrible sonnets No Worst, There Is None and Carrion Comfort), this believers
extraordinary declarations about the worlds and human lifes plenitude (in Pied Beauty) and the
poets commendation of Christ himself (in The Windhover and allegorical poem dedicated to Christ
Our Lord and providing a speakers intuition about Christs thisness/haecceitas (essence).

'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.'

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wrld-sorrow; on an ge-old anvil wince and sing
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No lingering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
In this poem, the terrible inscape (the landscape of a poets intuition) emits its instress (its predication of
the sentiment in movement, as triggered by the inscape) yields an extraordinary image of the anguished
soul, more pointed than the collective unconscious shadow archetype but it also provides this image in
movement, in the instress before the inscape is settled.
Another kind of preaching, the preaching not of the pale Galileans sorrow, but of the result of God the
Fathers Own presence is presented in Pied Beauty.

Carrion Comfort
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist slack they may be these last strands of man
In me r, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cher.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fot trd
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Appendix the continued interpretation of The Windhover

The second question in connection with The Windhover regarded the means by which
Hopkins achieved his own mastery of the visionary thing. This question is tantamount to wondering
about the instress of the poem, because, in Hopkinss theory, the inscape itself moves the perceiver
or arrests the contemplator by a kind of energy which it emits; so that the analytical task of the poet
which should be recoverable by the informed reader of Hopkinss poetry is to discover the most
performative linguistic devices capable of communicating the instress of the inscape.
After reading the poem closely, by the the vision-inaugurating effect of its opening lines, and
following its development towards a cosmic order ever more complete, explicable by Christ-the
Windhovers masterful flight from the beyond into the visible sky its overall, dialectical sonnet structure

becomes also manifest. In the approximate octave is presented the struggle of the vision and of the
windhover to appear, then the poem moves towards achievement in its second part, the sestet. This
movement towards order and harmony is mirrored by the more complicated, seeming disorderly fabric
of the octave more dramatic in effect - as compared to the elegantly indented, already ordered
tercets, which make up the sestet (whose two parts are only identically indented with a variation). (The
more indented lines which contain the harmonious, clearly manifested meanings predominate in the
last tercet, just as the non-indented lines had been predominant in the body of the octave and of the
first tercet).
By its aspect on the printed page, The Windhover clearly moves towards effective order and
elegance, being a poem about the effect of Christs saving, controlling, loving appearance and presence
in the world.
But when looking at the printing signs on paper and as the technical notes to the poem indicate,
there is more to this poem. There are some printed stresses and, in some editions, some nether loops
connecting the individual parts of words, as in musical scores and there are some strangely spelled:
strangely syllabicated or capitalised words, such as the AND spelled in capitals after Buckle! in the first
tercet. Also, there are words whose morphological class is ambivalent and open to as much commentary
as this or that connective element in Shakespeare. All these devices that pertain to what can be called
the synaesthetic stream-of-Hopkinsian-poetic-consciousness technique have been explained at length
in various editions of Hopkinss poems in the 20th century, when he was published (posthumously by
Robert Bridges, his Oxford friend, the Poet Laureate of 1914, the date of the publication) (We have used
here the Penguin Classics 1985 edition, first prepared by W. H. Gardner in 1953). Whether they point to
the sprung rhythm, in this case the sprung paeonic rhythm, with outriding feet usually indicated by the
loops and nether-written brackets, or to double rhythms in the same poem, in other instances, which
double rhythms Hopkins calls counterpointed rhythms one thing is sure, namely that he intends his
poems to be read as if they were musical scores, by professsional readers. And this is only one
difficulty or ingredient of Hopkinss complicated prosody. Actually, Hopkins is trying to imitate also the
rhythm of the early medieval, Old English prose conventionally cast into the mold of accentual rhythm
that made it function auditively as poetry (together with some internal rhymes and
assonance/alliteration patterns). Thus, Hopkins distributes a more or less regular number of stresses per
line over an entire poem, usually four or five stresses per line, five in the case of The Windhover.

These stresses are meant to correspond to the most meaningful words, the words that function as
heads of the poems local inspiration or head of the poetic phrase to continue the linguistic allegory
already introduced when the inscape was considered to function as a subject and the instress as a
predicate. In The Windhover, the word AND (spelt with capital letters) is like a switch from the
larger inscape of the eleven lines preceding it to the instress of the remaining verse-unit, which releases
the poems ultimate, widest meanings. In fact, the poem ends its revelation and mystique in a region of
the sky where half a century later airplanes could be discerned while gliding on the air in imitation of the
windhover ! The most important observation about Hopkinss complicated rhythms is probably that he
intends the poem to imitate the peaks of inspiration, its rises and falls in a kind of mimetic diagram, or
rather in an intended recording, as on a phonograph, of the instress emitted by an inscape. The practical
advice to the reader is to make sure s/he grasps the meaning of the words and their morphological roles
in a particular poem by Hopkins, the phrases and their function in the economy of the wider semiotic
units, and then to read out the poem by stressing the most meaningful words, so as to observe the rule
that they should amount to the same total number of stresses in each line. Also, the student is invited to
assume that in any poem by Hopkins, there is a skeleton of conventional meaning, a trace of ordinary
communication which should be used as a constant feed-back component of the entire complex .

Module Two : Finis (III) Late Victorian Fiction - the Demise of Realism under the
Pressure of New Ideas; Narratological Symptoms and Consequences; the late Victorian
novel as an ideological tool in Hardys Naturalistic/Nihilistic Novels and in the Fantasies
NB, Introduction
The secondary meaning of the word ideology in the Collins Dictionary of the
English Language is the set of beliefs by which a group or society orders reality so as to render
it intelligible. This meaning follows the basic, most widespread one, a body of ideas that
reflect the beliefs and interests of a nation, political system, etc. and underlies POLITICAL
ACTION (authors underlining). The next meaning of the word ideology is speculation that
is imaginary or visionary.
The observations about late Victorian fiction follow the literary effects (symptoms and
consequences) of ideology permeating fiction and causing the collapse of the realistic
narratological edifice, whether the latter presented itself in the guise of garrulously
(conversationally or sentimentally) documents about the Victorian world and outlook, as in
Dickens and Thackeray, or systematically analyzing representative Victorian individuals (as in
Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre or George Eliots Silas Marner, for example) . Thomas Hardys

novels, which are shown to illustrate the replacement of middle class trust in Victorian values by
mistrust and condemnation of these will be analyzed as an instance of the crumbling
narratological edifice, because we will discuss the narratological and eschatological implications
of this kind of fiction. What Hardys novels make intelligible is the crisis of faith of the late
Victorians, who intensely doubted themselves. Pessimistic eloquence (ingeniousness) replaces
realistic plausibility in Hardys fiction. His novels are artistically great for other than the reasons
which made earlier realistic fiction likeable, because they are pathetic, closer to tragedy, without
being tragedies, than the middle ground of human experience preferred by the average Victorian
man who wanted to recommend himself as exemplary. The novel ceases in being middle class
(or written for the literary taste which reflected the way [middle class people handled ideas] to
make their world intelligible and becomes a tool for the thoughts of emancipated intellectuals
who mistrusted their own world, being the equivalent of twentieth century political dissidents.
As such, Hardys novels are inexorable demonstrations of anti-Victorian sentiments and beliefs;
but they are, of course, not connected to the primary meaning of ideology, a tool for political
action; they neither encourage the establishment, nor aim at eroding it. What Hardys fiction
erodes is the realistic basis of fiction in so far as his literary invention as a whole, the fictional
fabric of his fiction, is unconvincingly speculative or flawed, as will be seen. His novel belong
to the pathetic species of fiction, because his plot construction and solutions are as pathetic
(sentimentally biased) as Dickenss. The effect of Hardys impeccable fictional causality which
wrecks whole worlds is such that it already inclines realism towards visionarism, as in the third
meaning of the word ideology: speculation that is imaginary or visionary. The latter sense is
made palpable by the series of Victorian fantasies which begin to appear after Lewis Carrolls
pioneering Alice books (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 and Through the Looking
Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871; they continue with Erewhon (1872) by the Samuel
Butler of the nineteenth centuryiii, Robert Lewis Stevensons novella The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Bram Stokers
Dracula (1896) and the series of science fiction novels by H.G. Wells, among which the
chronologically Victorian titles The Time Machine, (1895) The Invisible Man (1897),The War of
the Worlds (1898),The First Men in the Moon (1901).
1. Thomas Hardys novels as realistic vehicles for eschatologically biased thoughts and
naturalistic literary composition. (Contributions I, 101-106) (Contributions II, 67-69)
2. The species of Victorian fantasy:
1

Thomas Hardys Novels as Realistic Vehicles for Eschatologically Biased Thoughts and
as Naturalistic Literary Compositions
To demonstrate the demise of realism as it had been understood in the great early and mid-Victorian
novels already analyzed, what is needed is to interpret the instances of flawed plausibility in Thomas
Hardys pathetic tragedies: they are novels with weak plots (flawed by obvious determinism, abounding
in dire coincidences that defeat the convincing, very modern characters because they are placed in
unconvincing situations. Hardys novels are biased. From the point of view of Northrop Frye, in Anatomy

of Criticism, Essay One, they are instances of pathetic tragedy, tragedy fixated on pathos, as the tragic
punishment of the characters and lacking tragic, in the sense of cathartic meaning; also, they should not
be considered high mimetic mode literature, together with the noble genres of tragedy and the great
visionary romantic poem; rather, they belong in the ironic mode of fictional literature, for the following
reasons, outlined by Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, Essay Two :
1.
heroism has disappeared or it is doomed and it is the task of satirical literature to chastise the
human claims to heroism;
2.

intellectual dogmas are set against the life which they are supposed to explain;

3.
the world is disintegrating and ironic literature imitates the fact that there is no shared
commonplace in the world;
4.

tragic situations get reduced to mere comedies of the grotesque;

5.
nature is dominated by the wheel of fate whose steady, unbroken and merciless movement is
absolute;
6.

human life is presented as mere unalleviated human bondage.

These features have been obtained by selecting the general characteristics underlying the six phases
iii
of the mythos of winter (irony and satire) enumerated by Northrop Frye. By later Freudian standards, the
ones of Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) they illustrate the barbarization of civilization, namely the
domination of Thanatos. Hardys fiction continues with a vengeance, in the post-romantic vein, the
demonization by the late Romantics of the ordinary (and the would-be revolutionary) world. Hardys
novels demonize his contemporary Victorian exemplariness and progress.

From the point of view of our lecturing title, Hardys novels carry too far the actually correct
social/cultural/psychological diagnoses of the modern world they are biased. They are biased in
the eschatological (mythically symbolical) direction, in so far as they dramatize the apocalyptical
sense about the end of the modern world. This last point, which also casts Hardy as a late
medievalist in being a late Victorian, shall be made by employing the myth-criticism perspective
of Anatomy of Criticism, Essay Two. Mythical approaches to literary symbols involve a
reference to apocalyptic imagery which ranges from the divine level of the world, to the human,
the animal, the vegetable and mineral levels. In the apocalyptic vision, there exist systematic
correspondences with the divine world of all the levels of the hierarchy. The reversals of
providence illustrated by the six features above point, however, in the opposed direction and
represent insitances of demonic imagery, a completely nihilistic vision of the world, as in the
first part of the Book of Revelation ; they represent a truncated , frightening eschatology.
Applying Fryes table of archetypal meanings (cf. The Anatomy, Penguin, 1990, p.
141), the resulting imagery at the divine level offers representations of hell and
the villains who occupy the godly position are called Time, Fate, The President of
the Immortals; it is in this connection that the grotesquely radical gesture of the Little
Father Time troll in Jude the Obscure should be understood to annihilate children who
are not even his, like a mad Chronos. In The Return of the Native, Clym Yeobrights
Victorian aspiration of return to the sublime past, his dreamt return to his mythical native

place as a foundational or original space is nothing but a return to paradise for the
encounter with the serpent. This causes the illustration of the first feature above:
heroism has disappeared or it is doomed and it is the task of satirical literature to chastise the human
claims to heroism.

There is a medieval, scholastic construction of Hardys books] which work with the full range of
levels of existence which scholastic philosophy had so carefully organised by working out a
perfect system of formal or symbolic meanings. The archetypal orders of existence which Frye
reviews in his Anatomy of Criticism, the third essay, as: the divine, the human, the animal, the
vegetable, mineral and, although Frye does not call it so, by implication, the elemental these
are all present in Hardys fiction. In addition, in the most rigid scholastic manner, they are kept
separated and they are made to often work against each other. This is one instrument or
artifice of the Hardyesque tragic irony: the keeping apart of the various orders of existence,
even the maintaining of tensions among them. xxxAt the human level, the appearing supermen
or superwomen are desublimated because they are efficiently surrounded by beings whose
major efficiency in working against these supermen comes from their being different, from their
obstinate otherness. More often than not they are stock social effigies, like some sombre
caricatures, if this is possible. The human characters are engaged or rather locked in
relationships of mutual annihilation. Marriage, in particular, is a trap, a destructive machine, on
whose altar pure natural necessity crashes against social necessity in practically all the novels
written by Hardy. But all the social ideal or communal institutions invented by man vye with
each other in Hardys fiction for the destruction of man: the institution of learning in Jude the
Obscure; the Christian earthly church, in both Jude and Tess. [][The city is] seen to wage
a perfidious war on man and the countryside life in the majority of Hardys novels. Even more
importantly, people are made to belong to different phases in the history of ideas, and so to
different worlds. Jude and Sues natural sensibilities are fully compatible, they being both of
them Fawleys, but their intellectual aspirations pertain to different phases: Jude is a late
medievalist and admirer of antiquity, Sue is an enlightened free thinker, one of the modern
Victorian agnostic angels. In The Return of the Native, Eustacia Vye has an overpowering
sensuous charm, since she resembles an ancient goddess she could function as a feminine
character in full bloom, a follower of Proserpine in Swinburnes poem Hymn to Proserpine.
Here is what happens at the human level . Through their characters, Hardys novels aspire to the
condition of high-mimetic (noble) status tragedies: the protagonists stature exceeds the ordinary scale
but the same intensity which elevates the novels over the standards of ordinary fiction threatens the
narrative edifice from within and actually makes it crumble. The gradual and eventually complete
annihilation of Hardys noble protagonists is due to their being misplaced in hopeless circumstances,
surrounded by neurotic, irrational, psychoanalyzable creatures. The good characters, consequently, are
crushed by cruel circumstances and people, being always misunderstood and ill treated by others. In
Hardys universe, human beings fail to communicate and coexist their lives are confined in dark
tunnels, blind to each other because they inhabit a world which is in the dissolutions phase, as
explained by the mythos of winter or irony presented in Nortrhop Fryes Anatomy of Criticism, the Third

Essay. They illustrate the second feature of the mythos of winter/irony and satire: intellectual dogmas
are set against the life which they are supposed to explain By the standards of myth criticism, Hardys
novels are written to illustrate the implacable action of adverse fate (Anank in ancient Greek) which
wrecks human life but they stop short at vengeance. Man is imprisoned in the social fabric which
resembles a demonic clockwork mechanism and the novels illustrate the defeat of the human by the
inhuman forces. The supernatural strength of the forces of evil unleashed from within civilization cruelly
allows the defeat of both good and bad people in Hardys novels. People ruin each other because they
are driven by implacable forces which defeat their best aspirations. In the most famous pathetic tragedy
written by Hardy in 1891, Tess of the DUrbervilles, the heroine whose conscience stands out by its
exquisite lucidity, nearly sacrificial generosity and courage, is defeated by several immature people to
whom she is yoked in her family or whom she encounters in her life. Jude Fawleys life, in the last novel
published by Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1895, is similarly wrecked by practically all the people he
encounters from the beginning of his life to the end . He is doomed to remain obscure and decimated by
phantasms which he cannot grasp all his life. Interestingly, one of the phantasms in his life is that of
liberal learning (liberal by the old paradigm standard, as demonstrated by the mirage-like appearance of
Christminster, alias Oxford, the seat of the Oxford Movement. Judes Christminster aspirations will turn
him into the failed man of letters of Hardys fiction.
(ch 3 - the beginning and the end)He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the
men had designated, and perched himself on the highest rung, overlying the tiles. He might not
be able to come so far as this for many days. Perhaps if he prayed, the wish to see Christminster
might be forwarded. People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even though
they sometimes did not. He had read in a tract that a man who had begun to build a church, and
had no money to finish it, knelt down and prayed, and the money came in by the next post.
Another man tried the same experiment, and the money did not come; but he found afterwards
that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew. This was not discouraging, and turning
on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung, where, resting against those above it, he prayed that
the mist might rise.

He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or fifteen minutes the
thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere,
and about a quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted, the sun's
position being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out in visible lines between two bars
of slaty cloud. The boy immediately looked back in the old direction.
Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light like the topaz
gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed
themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the spires,
domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly revealed. It was Christminster,
unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.
The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their shine, going out almost
suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague city became veiled in mist. Turning to the west,

he saw that the sun had disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark, and
near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.
.
"It is a city of light," he said to himself.
"The tree of knowledge grows there," he added a few steps further on.
"It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to."
"It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship and religion."
After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added:
"It would just suit me."
Because the fall of the aspring man of letters into the mire of oblivion and personal failure shows him to
be in bondage to his lower instincts, to the fateful encounter with the wrong woman at the wrong time
in life, it is fair to say that there is no resuscitation from the evil unleashed in Hardys tragedies.

Moving from the human, to the vegetable world level in Hardys hermeneutic/medieval
system of interpretation, the beginning of Tess of the DUrbervilles suggests the
higher, divine, ceremonial levels of existence right in the middle of history in the
countryside. It is more suggestively symbolical of the modern hell for Hardy, as when, in
The Return of the Native, the vegetable world is practically lacking or it presents us
with the kind of vegetation in exile, with the harsh but genuine desert it leaves behind in
Egdon Heath. The paradisal, privileged region of the mind: Hardys primaeval Wessex,
is the garden of Eden after the fall of man into historical relativity, as it is intimated on
the first pages of Jude the Obscure. Eschatologically understood, it remains
unredeemable. Hardy builds his fiction with strong bricks: strong individuals with
untameable souls, manifestations of the strong forces of nature whom Hardy opposes
by strong social forces, the forces of history and human civilization; but in making these
solid bricks play against each other Hardy makes his own edifices threatened by
crumbling into nothingness. So he behaves just like Brownings Setebos or grotesque
Caliban genius, creating out of spite only to cruelly maim the creatures whose wings
he will pluck with joy on the second day and on the second thoughts of his creation.
This is in keeping with the definition given by Northrop Frye to tragic irony which in the
mythos of winter reduces tragic situations to mere comedies of the grotesque. The
universally negative relationship revealed by Hardy in his novels bears the philosophical
name of nihilism and it is responsible for what we would like to call in Hardys

literature inverted, decadent, late medievalism. Hardy seems to distribute his characters
in a Dantean fashion in their respective Bolgias to be pursued by their fate rather than
by their sins so strict is the immutability of their positions in the fictive universe.

Here is the description of Egdon Heath, the all-powerful black hole which engulfs life in The Return of
the Native (1878):

A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast
tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the
whole heath for its floor.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation,
their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the
appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour
was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky.
Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down,
he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of
the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of
the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard
the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the
opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
Egdon Heath
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular
glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not
been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete
effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and
only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night
showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the
scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in
pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the
obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards
which each advanced halfway. (continuation of Chapter 1)
(chapter 6 The Figure against the sky) Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November
winds that note bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the throat
of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and it brushed so distinctly across

the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as
by touch. It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither
stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.
They were the mummied heathbells of the past summer, originally tender and purple, now
washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead skins by October suns.

The enmity between civilization/the New and the enduring geological age on Egdon Heath
the demonization of progress
Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscapefar-reaching proofs productive of
genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had
been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn
the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation.
In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on
a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem
to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so
primitive.
To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as
now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of
heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything
around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead,
gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great
inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a
particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year,
in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the
people changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be
destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the
exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to
themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuanceeven the trifling
irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very fingertouches of the last geological change.

The dark synaesthesia of Egdon Heath, the unique aesthetic category constructed (the
intensity of the solemn) and the symbolic focus of Hardys pessimistic vision

The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right to wander on Egdon
he was keeping within the line of legitimate indulgence when he laid himself open to
influences such as these. Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of
all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of gaiety. Intensity
was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort
of intensity was often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon

was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then it
became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecognized
original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about
in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till
revived by scenes like this. (Chapter 1)

Part II of the lecture, on fantasies, next time

Fantasy offered a more decisive return from the prison of civilization at the end of the Victorian age. But
the return from innocence to experience was through the gate of the irrational whether the mythical
and Freudian irrational or not, at the price of the definitive deformation of both worlds (i.e., the world
of innocence and experience). This is most obvious in Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865) which
toys with nature and the medieval imaginary contaminating them with residues of Victorian genteel
strictures in the tantalizing dream a childs nightmare, rather that sustains Alices trip through the
Wonderland. Alices daylight mind is the beneficiary of Victorian education, learning and instruction,
these guardians of good-manners which approximate innocence in the genteel social universe. But Alice
is made a prisoner of her own childs imagination in the uncomfortable dream- world she inhabits,
populated by creatures from nursery rhymes, anecdotes and fairytales (for example the gryphon and the
Dodo bird).
The unusual and usual logic of fantasy is also and the dystopia Erewhon, by Samuel Butler, to Robert
Louis Stevensons novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and H.G. Wellss science fiction
Time Machine (1895), to Bram Stokers Dracula and to The Picture of Dorian Gray (Contributions I, 101106) (Contributions II, 68-70).

Novels become experimental vehicles for popularizing/preaching new ideas, they become enslaved to
ideas; fictional plausibility (the pride of realism) is replaced by eloquence in the service of a main idea:
the fictional mechanism is subordinated to a thematic intention (mythos, in the sense of plot, is divorced
from ethos- see Matthew Arnolds power of social life and manners and his power of conduct;
mythos/ethos are subordinated to topos.

Module III (Fiction) FINIS: The Demise of Victorian Realism the Rise of Fantasy
The title follows the chronology of Victorian fantasies, which began as forms of amusement for
the Victorian public only to grow darker and darker and to generalize as the dominant genre of
fiction in the last decade of the nineteenth century (as shown above in the chronological
presentation of the fantastic novel titles). Alices Adventures in Wonderland is a perfect

illustration of Tzvetan Todorovs definition of the fantastic, hovering on the limit between the
uncanny (the discomfiting extension/opening of the familiar towards the unusual).iii The uncanny
toys with natural and social laws, while the marvellous revives the medieval romance imaginary.
Carrolls first Alice book contaminates the residues of Victorian genteel strictures in the
tantalizing dream a childs nightmare, rather that sustains Alices trip through the would-be
Wonderland. Alices daylight mind is the beneficiary of Victorian education, learning and
instruction, these guardians of good-manners which approximate innocence in the genteel social
universe. But Alice is made a prisoner of her own childs imagination in the uncomfortable
dream- world she inhabits, populated by creatures from nursery rhymes, anecdotes and fairytales
(for example the gryphon and the Dodo bird). In the chapter titled A Caucus Race and a Long
Tale, the social (parliamentary) reminiscence of the closed meeting of one party in a legislative
chamber, coexists with talking (in fact, complaining) animals (with a long tail and short tale) in
this kind of dream that mixes punning with psychology and political satire or absurd humour
(since there is nothing more static and sorrier, perhaps, than a caucus/bloc of politicians talking
to improve the world and since turning this into a literal race is fun).
In the sixties and seventies, with the Alice novels, fantasy can be defined as endearing and a
form of mild absurdism, generated by extending to wider fictional forms nonsense verse and
childrens limericks. With the dystopian novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler Victorian fantasy
moves over the range, namely beyond the limit of the known, familiar world, and into
something that would qualify as the marvellous, by Tzvetan Todorovs standards if it were not
really disturbing. By the time of Robert Louis Stevensons novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde , Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stokers Dracula, fantasy
becomes frightening in so far as it spells death and threatens the civilized world with destruction.
The return from experience to innocence is effected in/through fantasy either by presenting a
disrupting image of the world of commonsense (as shown in the second phase of satire
enumerated by Frye and quoted previously), or by focusing on particular forms of evil which are
allowed to fictionally challenge, in novel or novella plots, the creeds of Victorian middle class
man and the masks of society with various dnouments, none of which follow the laws of
realistic plausibility, but the logic of ideas (the ideological set of beliefs by which a group or
society orders reality so as to render it intelligible). Science immorally used becomes an enemy
of man and threatens the world (this is the message of Stevensons novella); it becomes evil in
association with the dark forces of the human unconscious let loose. Lucy Westenras instinctual
potentials let loose (her unchecked sensuality and its enjoyment in the dream-state) welcome the
vampirical connection with the undead in Dracula. An extreme case of trespassing, away from
civilization or of encroaching the limit is encountered in dystopias, where a new community of
anti-Victorian readers is educated with philosophical (systematic) means. The ultimate argument
of dystopias is that humanity has reached the utmost evil limit and has turned into a mechanism
of (in)human self-defeat.
Samuel Butlers satire of 1872, Erewhon (an anagram from nowhere) criticized in each of its
chapters one of the institutions of modern Victorian society and culture. Being a dystopia (an
inverted utopia, a fantasy which develops only evil forces and allows the world to be entirely
subjugated by evil), it starts by transporting its nameless protagonist over the range, to a
country of the future where everything is a terrifying exaggeration of the historical Victorian

realities. In this country, which imagines itself to be perfect, all people are healthy and fit
products of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Because Darwin explained that present natural
species are the product of natural selection, which allows only the survival of the fittest, all the
people in Erewhon represent the fittest, perfect human species, being healthy and well formed
(men being brawny, tall and handsome, women beautiful and statuesque); consequently, sickness
is punished at law in Erewhon, crimes are treated as regrettable, shameful diseases. Machines are
forbidden in Erewhon, and the clock carried by the story-protagonist caused him to land in prison
first thing after arriving in the country. This is described in a scene of Chapter VII, where he is
examined by the first dark brawny Erewhonians that found him immediately after his arrival:
But by and by they came to my watch, which I had hidden away in the inmost pocket that I had,
and had forgotten when they began their search. They seemed concerned and uneasy as soon as
they got hold of it. They then made me open it and show the works; and when I had done so they
gave signs of very rave displeasure, which disturbed me all the more because I could not
conceive wherein it could have offended them. I soon discovered that I had misinterpreted the
expression on the magistrates face, and that it was one not of fear, but hatred. He spoke to me
solemnly and sternly for two or three minutes. Then, reflecting that this was of no use, he caused
me to be conducted through several passages into a large room, which I afterwards found was
the museum of the town, and wherein I beheld a sight which astonished me more than anything
that I had yet seen. It was filled with cases containing all manner of curiositiessuch as
skeletons, stuffed birds and animals, carvings in stone (whereof I saw several that were like
those on the saddle, only smaller), but the greater part of the room was occupied by broken
machinery of all descriptions. The larger specimens had a case to themselves, and tickets with
writing on them in a character which I could not understand. There were fragments of steam
engines, all broken and rusted; among them I saw a cylinder and piston, a broken fly-wheel, and
part of a crank, which was laid on the ground by their side. Again, there was a very old carriage
whose wheels in spite of rust and decay, I could see, had been designed originally for iron rails.
Indeed, there were fragments of a great many of our own most advanced inventions; but they
seemed all to be several hundred years old, and to be placed where they were, not for
instruction, but curiosity. As I said before, all were marred and broken.
The explanation of the museum was the fact that four hundred years beforehand the Erewhonians
had decided to dump machinery, which threatened human and natural vitality:
proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become
instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable
life.
The Book of the Machines, described in Chapter XXIII was written to explain their conception
:
There is no security () against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the
fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. the damages brought to human
consciousness by the discarded machines. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings
have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last
thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end
become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?
To improve the fate of humanity on earth by going against the grain of the best Victorian
liberal assumptions, Erewhonians set up Colleges of Unreason and adopted a new religion,
Ydgrunism, The Colleges of Unreason, described in Chapter XXI, resemble the public schools

for the British elite, which occupied the civil service, magistracy and bank positions, just as it did
in the Victorian age and it does today. Unreason is the denial of Victorian materialism as the
ultimate development of modern, liberal reason.
Among those who came to visit me were some who had received a liberal education at the
Colleges of Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal
study. These gentlemen had now settled down to various employments in the country, as
straighteners, managers and cashiers of the Musical Banks, priests of religion,
They argue thusthat to teach a boy merely the nature of the things which exist in the world
around him, and about which he will have to be conversant during his whole life, would be
giving him but a narrow and shallow conception of the universe. , which it is urged might
contain all manner of things which are not now to be found therein. To open his eyes to these
possibilities, and so to prepare him for all sorts of emergencies, is the object of this system of
hypothetics.
Apart from the invented word unreason, the nihilism and anti-Victorianism of the book is
indicated by the name of the family the protagonist lives with, Robinson, which appears as
Nosnibor, and by the name of their daughter, whom the protagonist fancies, Arowhena; this
name uses the Latin alpha privative (negative prefix a- before the medieval name Rowena). One
explicit condemnation of the Victorian age in Erewhon is to be found in their religion,
Ydrgunism, described in Chapter XVII. The Erewhonian name is an anagram of Mrs Grundy,
who stands for an extremely conventional or priggish person , being a personification of the
tyranny of conventional propriety. Yidgrunism is tantamount to utilitarianism:
she was a beneficent and useful deity, who did not care how much she was denied so long as she
was obeyed and feared, and who kept hundreds of thousands in those paths which make life
tolerably happy.
Erewhonian Musical Banks were a combination of musical and nearly religious gratification
connected to the market and combined Victorian Mammonism and tepid religiousness, two evils
already explained by Carlyle and Newman pass a harsh judgment on Victorian social life and
hypocritical institutions.
all mercantile transactions were accompanied with music, so that they were called Musical
Banks, though the music was hideous to a European ear. ()two distinct currencies, each under
the control of its own banks and mercantile codes. One of these (the one with the Musical Banks)
was supposed to be THE system, and to give out the currency in which all monetary transactions
should be carried on; and as far as I could see, all who wished to be considered respectable,
kept a larger or smaller balance at these banks.() I am sure that the managers and cashiers of
the Musical Banks were not paid in their own currency. Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these banks,
or rather to the great mother bank of the city, sometimes but not very often. He was a pillar of
one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to hold some minor office also in the musical
ones. The ladies generally went alone; as indeed was the case in most families, except on state
occasions.
The description of the bank proves that in fact it was a church:
If the outside had been impressive the inside was even more so. It was very lofty and divided into
several parts by walls which rested upon massive pillars; the windows were filled with stained
glass descriptive of the principal commercial incidents of the bank for many ages. In a remote
part of the building there were men and boys singing; this was the only disturbing feature, for as

the gamut was still unknown, there was no music in the country which could be agreeable to a
European ear
()And yet any one could see that the money given out at these banks was not that with which
people bought their bread, meat, and clothing. It was like it at a first glance, and was stamped
with designs that were often of great beauty; it was not, again, a spurious coinage, made with the
intention that it should be mistaken for the money in actual use; it was more like a toy money, or
the counters used for certain games at cards; for, notwithstanding the beauty of the designs, the
material on which they were stamped was as nearly valueless as possible. Some were covered
with tin foil, but the greater part were frankly of a cheap base metal the exact nature of which I
was not able to determine. Indeed they were made of a great variety of metals, or, perhaps more
accurately, alloys, some of which were hard, while others would bend easily and assume almost
any form which their possessor might desire at the moment..() Of course every one knew that
their commercial value was nil, but all those who wished to be considered respectable thought it
incumbent upon them to retain a few coins in their possession, and to let them be seen from time
to time in their hands and purses.
what happens with the fantastic genre from Alices Adventures in Wonderland and the
dystopia Erewhon, by Samuel Butler, to Robert Louis Stevensons novella The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and H.G. Wellss science fiction Time Machine (1895), to
Bram Stokers Dracula and to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The coexistence of entertainment absurdism (in Carrolls books) with existential or romantic,
anguished irony in Hardys novels demonstrates the loss of coherence and faith at the turn of the
nineteenth century. This shift is analogical with that of twentieth century modernism towards
existentialist absurdism as a a new addition to the Western canon with Beckett and his British
posterity in Harold Pinter and Peter Shaeffer after the Second World War . Also, diagnosing the
realistic mentality shift in the last decades of the nineteenth century the rise of fantasy was a
way of introducing the new in the late Victorian horizon of expectations ( the analogy with the
postmodern turn, at the end of the 20th c. when a change of paradigm occurred after accepting the
end of modernity as an overriding idea: see two American manifesto texts: Ihab Hassans 1987
book The Postmodern Turn and Francis Fukuyamas essay, then book, The End of History and
the Last Man (1992) .
As already shown, novels become experimental vehicles for popularizing/preaching new ideas,
they become enslaved to ideas; fictional plausibility (the pride of realism) is replaced by
eloquence in the service of a main idea: the fictional mechanism is subordinated to a thematic
intention (mythos, in the sense of plot, is divorced from ethos- see Matthew Arnolds power of
social life and manners and his power of conduct; mythos/ethos are subordinated to topos. One
understands which the new important intellectual themes topoi were at the end of the Victorian
world:
-

the pessimistic/nihilistic idea that modern society is a hell, it is evil, it is responsible for
the doom of individuals is at the root of pathetic tragedy/ naturalistic eschatology

(Thomas Hardys plots are re-enactments of the end of the world for the protagonists of
his novels; outstanding characters are increasingy at odds with their environment
PATHETIC FICTION (CLOSEST NEIGHBOUR OF REALISM)
the bitterly critical overall condemnation of the Victorian institutions and mentality in
dystopias and cautionary tales Erewhon and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) DYSTOPIAN FICTION IS AN INTELLECTUAL GENRE WHICH
COMBINES FANTASY WITH SAVAGE SATIRE;
the aestheticist escape from Victorian hypocrisy and stricture is effected by the
combination of the old vehicle of myth with aesthetic criticism in The Picture of Dorian
Gray. Wilde takes further his Oxford hedonistic formation in Walter Paters school
developing it into a counter-romantic fictional manifesto. The book is focused on
romance: reversing the romantic craving for deep spirituality and mystical presence;
confronting romantic aspirations with romance (eroding the myth of beauty and
perfection: replacing it by Dorians compulsive fixation on romance); sadistically, the
cult of romance is allowed to defeat/downgrade all noble aspirations. The Freudian lesson
about the excesses of the pleasure principle, which destroys man, , and sadistically the
seductive power of by and reversing it with a cult of romancereplacing mysticism rooted
in deep, mythical visionarismromance compete with romantic spirituality diluting
romanticism and inaugurating the cult of romance ideas about the soul by showing how
romance is the limitation illustrating in a savage/sadistic way
The outburst of sadism in fantasy which tells stories about repressed social and individual
energies (allegories of what Freud called the unconscious dynamo, Jung, the shadow, or
threshold archetype, Lacan, the other as a source of personal or social pathology:
compelling manifestations of dangerous forms of energy that infect/corrupt individuals
and threaten whole societies, as in Dracula, which would be dystopian and anti-colonial,
if it were not primarily a modern adaptation of ancient frightening romance IN
PSYCHOLOGICALLY ASTUTE FICTION.

Lecture 13 The Escape from Victorian Orthodoxy: Late Victorian Writing

Late Victorian writing is shocking and oblique while being highly critical of utilitarianism
and its self-assured dogmas. In addition to Thomas Hardys naturalistic condemnation
of Victorian institutions on his fictional days of doom [sic!], and beside the fantasies,
which either confronted the Victorian world with a disturbing view of itself in perturbed
mirrors, as in Alices Adventures in Wonderland, or again, confronted the Victorian
world with its threatening other in scientific, social or mythical dystopias, the escape

from Victorian Orthodoxy was effected along two more lines: the aesthetic critics and
the socialist critics lines.
After we review the ways in which the aesthetic critics conception was taken up in
practice in aestheticist / art for arts sake literary texts, we shall examine the gap
between the two brands of Victorian socialism, the utopian (or radical), and the Fabian
(or moderate) ones by referring to Oscar Wildes essay The Soul of Man Under
Socialism in contrast to a play by another great Irishman in the English canon: George
Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (written in 1905 and premiered in 1907)

1
The aesthetic critics conception
The aesthetic critics conception, presented in Walter Paters The Renaissance (whose full title
is Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1873) combined disinterested contemplation of
anything in nature or culture that could liberate the soul (irrespective of great ages, canons or
institutions) with the discipline of turning contemplation into a transcendent power of refining
experience to perfection. More importantly, aesthetic critics were individuals responsible for
their own well-being and creating it with their own means. Art was considered the best launching
pad for contemplation and for teaching the new, MODERN, discipline of SPIRITUAL
REFINEMENT. Just like the agnostics, Pater did not prescribe a new, positive creed, but a
method of contemplation with clear targets and sure effects. Here is the clear agenda of Paters
education of the young Oxford students, a systematic conception:
1.
The first step in aesthetic criticism (he does not indicate it by an abstract name, observation,
even empirical observation; rather he uses plain, descriptive words) : seeing ones object as it really is
(this is in keeping with Sainte-Beuve Causeries du Lundi, of 1849)
2.
The second step: educate your perceptions to obtain the right susceptibility (Is this not
something like a preliminary step for the phenomenologists bracketing of experience in view of better
concentrating upon the essential features to be observed?)
3.
The third step consists in the affirmation of faith in the power of the senses to maintain ecstasy
and grant success in life by the failure to form habits.

The ironical way that his disciple Oscar Wilde took up the mentors ideas in The Picture of
Dorian Gray is proved by the fact that Lord Henry Wottons own disciple, Dorian, complies
only partially with the third requirement of the method outlined above, in so far as he secures
success in life by forming habits (vices that overcome the freedom of his soul) (this being the
reverse of the failure to form habits) and becomes a slave of instincts rather than dominating
them to break free from custom, the greatest enemy of the aesthetic critic. For Walter Pater, as
for avant-garde writers/artists in general, custom, conventions are the greatest enemies of
reflection and the analytical power which can turn experience into uniqueness, the target of
human life (for which see the Conclusion to The Renaissance and Marius the Epicurean.

Aesthetic critics and aestheticist artists who either behave as dandies or create fictional dandies
(as in Oscar Wildes play of 1896, The Importance of Being Earnest, which abounds in both
masculine and feminine dandies who avoid conventions in charming ways) believe in the
individual in isolation as the source for everything that can defeat conventions.
The task of the aesthetic critic, as defined in Walter Paters Sartor Resartus of 1885, the pseudoessay and pseudo-Bildungsroman, Marius the Epicurean, is to achieve a special kind of agnostic
detachment: an impassibility to the sacredness of time, of life and its events and the
circumstances of family fellowship (i.e., remaining detached from whatever is sacred
for ordinary people and inventing a novel sacredness, such as the one of art for arts
sake. This was the only sacredness admitted by the impassible (and rather cynical
dandies such as Lord Henry Wottons, whose attachment to Dorian himself is
systematically a transient, although intense, one). Similarly, to maintain a safe distance
from perturbing conventions is the target of both the aesthetic critic individualist and of the
aestheticist individualist who is a dandy. Like Paters Marius the Epicurean, such writers have
awareness, they are endowed with great seriousness, whose other name could
be scepticism.

Oscar Wilde applied to literature and criticism the Paterite method and the speculative results can
be followed in his writings of the 1890s: the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Platonic
dialogues or essays The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist; in these texts he presents
literary criticism as a new art, completely different from the literary criticism theorized and
practiced by Matthew Arnold; this is why Wildes literary practice and criticism, both of them,
read as twentieth century modernist and post-modernist texts endowed with splendid irony,
paradox and ambiguity, as required by the American New Critics fifty-years later, and as
practiced by James Joyce or Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot in the twentieth century, for example.
In aesthetic critical texts and aestheticist, art for arts sake texts,
conscience becomes the subject or protagonist, but not formal and habitual
conscience, just as in stream of conscisousness novels and in the multiple dramatic monologue
The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot.

2
The Two Brands of Victorian Socialism

The first one is utopian socialism, which argued in favour of the complete abolition of property,
as in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891). For utopian socialists, property is at the root of
all evils, because it makes people live for others rather than for themselves, and the avant-garde,
anti-Victorian artists have been seen to defend individualism in absolutist ways in the name of
achieving beauty. William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement and workshops
was the other famous utopian socialist in addition to Wilde.
The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is,
undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of

living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon
almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate
the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral
and unfair.

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into
public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper
condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member
of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment.
Wilde envisaged Socialism as a switch from ugly to beautiful modern life:

Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens
and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible
and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on
the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work,
tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for
alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and
a nights unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and
happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.
Wilde also thought that it was necessary to work on the interiority of people so as to develop
individualism:
But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed.
What is needed is Individualism. [] it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will
develop itself.
His demonstration covered the following steps:
Showing that property hinders personal development, impairs pleasure in life
Showing that property downgrades mans life, making it materialistic in a society that
defends, at law, only material gains
Showing the promising changes brought about by the abolition of property
But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less dependent on
the existence of private property for its development, will benefit by the abolition of
such private property. []the recognition of private property has really harmed
Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he
possesses. []man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know
that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man
has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up
an Individualism that is false.[ For example] the English law has always treated
offences against a mans property with far more severity than offences against his

person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. [] Man will kill
himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the
enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. Ones regret is
that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a
groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and
delightful in him in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of
living. []With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful,
healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the
symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most
people exist, that is all.
When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no
demand for it; it will cease to exist.

Fabian socialism, by contrast, encouraged slow reforms in response to the lucid

awareness of the shortcomings of Victorian middle class democracy that they wished to
perfect from within, rather than overthrow. They managed to become the precursors of
twentieth century sociological studies for the improvement of the capitalistic society in
scientific ways and from within.
The common denominator of the two brands of socialism, however, was the need to
apply the critical faculty of thought to the high flying or simply naive Victorian idealism,
as proved by this last quotation from Oscar Wildes

it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have

sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected
intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of
remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they
merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive;
or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
One example of a Fabian socialist text which shared the same premise was the play by
George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara (first produced in 1905), which placed in
competition a middle-class remedy which do*es+ not cure the disease but merely
prolong*s+ it with a productive enterprise, a cannon factory, which created work-places
for people taken off the street, instead of forcing them to live on the charity of the
Salvation Army.iii To exacerbate the competition, the confrontation in Shaws play is one
among the members of a family where the daughter is a Salvation Army Major, Major

Barbara, who gives the name of the play, on the one hand, and the very rich father,
separated from the mother, son and daughter the heir and manager of a canon factory.
Major Barbara is the partisan of gathering the poor from the streets to make them saints
from tramps by being given food, shelter and the gospels to become converted members
of the Salvation Army (Gods own army of saved people). Andrew Undershaft, the father,
is a pragmatic entrepreneur who knows that people and the society as a whole will
progress if his factory prospers (in an age when so many wars were fought to keep the
British Empire going and enlarge it), being manned by poor people reclaimed from the
streets, trained and turned into decent members of society, earning their own wages and
capable to fend for themselves.

The following exchange of cues from Shaws play demonstrates that the battle between
what Oscar Wilde called sympathy with suffering and sympathy with thought (in the
passage highlighted above) is one between idealism and pragmatic industriousness.
Undershaft has sympathy with thought and Major Barbara has idealistic sympathy with
suffering.
UNDERSHAFT. Shall I contribute the odd twopence, Barbara? The millionaire's mite, eh? [He
takes a couple of pennies from his pocket.]
BARBARA. How did you make that twopence?
UNDERSHAFT. As usual. By selling cannons, torpedoes, submarines, and my new patent Grand
Duke hand grenade.
BARBARA. Put it back in your pocket. You can't buy your Salvation here for twopence: you must
work it out.
UNDERSHAFT. Is twopence not enough? I can afford a little more, if you press me.
BARBARA. Two million millions would not be enough. There is bad blood on your hands; and
nothing but good blood can cleanse them. Money is no use. Take it away. [She turns to
Cusins].
The more thoughtful than emotive Fabian socialist wins, in Shaws play, because he sees
life more realistically. Andrew Undershafts realism can be seen in the following
exchange:
UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. I had the strongest scruples about poverty and starvation. Your
moralists are quite unscrupulous about both: they make virtues of them. I had rather be a
thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I don't want to be either; but if
you force the alternative on me, then, by Heaven, I'll choose the braver and more moral one.

I hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crimes whatsoever. And let me tell you this.
Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they
will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't preach at them: don't reason with them. Kill
them.
BARBARA. Killing. Is that your remedy for everything?
UNDERSHAFT. It is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social
system, the only way of saying Must. Let six hundred and seventy fools loose in the street;
and three policemen can scatter them. But huddle them together in a certain house in
Westminster; and let them go through certain ceremonies and call themselves certain names
until at last they get the courage to kill; and your six hundred and seventy fools become a
government. Your pious mob fills up ballot papers and imagines it is governing its masters;
but the ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it.
CUSINS. That is perhaps why, like most intelligent people, I never vote.
UNDERSHAFT Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you
shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up
new.

Because the play ends with everybody being won over by Andrew Undershaft, it is
obvious which way Shaws sympathies turned: towards the pragmatic, rather than the
idealistic, changes anticipated by socialists. Shaw was a friend of Beatrice and Sidney
Webb, who were the leaders of Fabian socialism at its beginning.